To borrow Raymond Williams’s (1982) terminology, performance has become a residual cultural form over the last hundred years, displaced first by film and radio, then by sound recording and television, and now by digital technologies. In retrospect, the emergence of the hierarchy of high and low anticipated the eclipse of performance and the rise of media as dominant cultural forms. This shift cannot be disentangled from contemporary usage of the noun “performance” and the verb “perform.” The language of theatricality deployed by Burke, Goffman, Turner, and Hall in the 1950s and 1960s reflects the increasing mediatizing of culture evident during those decades, and the momentum has only intensified since then. Hence the seeming irony of our preoccupation with performance at precisely the cultural moment when encounters with live bodies bound in time and framed in space have become increasingly rare occurrences. Our fascination with physicality and embodiment reveals the underside of our mediatized age. Through its multiple intersections with American cultural studies, the interdisciplinary terrain of performance studies reflects an intellectual and institutional response to a larger shift toward media culture over the last century.

This is an excerpt from Susan Manning’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 180).