Performative Disruptions and the Transformation of Writing

Abstract

Fielding questions about writing’s essentiality to philosophy and performance, Puchner embarks upon a mesmerizing account of how storytelling is transformed by writing. He describes writing as encompassing a broad range of surfaces, transpositions, and forms, regretting that notions of the trace have led to a reductive understanding of writing as abstract or non-plastic. While acknowledging the historical complicity between writing and power—extending even to sacred authority, Puchner recognizes writing’s democratizing and disruptive force. In discussing writing’s complicated relations to orality, performance, pedagogy, philosophy, and the body, he warns against one-sided perspectives that lean toward characterizing these creative tensions as either simply normative or exclusively subversive. Advocating a return to considerations of origin, Puchner suggests that clay’s many uses in ancient cultures already evoke the inexhaustible wealth of writing’s unrealized potential.