A researcher at the Centre for the Study of Aesthetics, Religion and Contemporary Culture (CERCCA) in the Department of Humanities at UPF, Elizabeth Sarah Coles is director of the program “Performing the Lecture” in collaboration with Amador Vega and Sergi Castellà Martínez, also at CERCCA. The program brings together artists, scholars and performers to explore the creative potential of the lecture.

The program is a result of the research project “The Other Postcriticism” (TOPCRIT), which Coles has undertaken with funding from the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program. It is held with support from several sources at UPF, and in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona (CCCB), and the Casa dels Clàssics. Two of the lectures will take place at the Dipòsit de les Aigües (Ciutadella Library, UPF) and two at the CCCB; one will feature in the Festival Clàssics program and another in Barcelona Pensa, the city’s Biennial of Thought. 

“Performing the Lecture” is a result of TOPCRIT, your Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project. Which of the project’s main conclusions can we see reflected in the program?

Let me try to set the scene a little, then I promise I’ll be brief. The project, which finished officially this summer, sought to bring attention to a series of practices on the contemporary literary avant-garde that I’d describe as "para-academic". This means their authors take the methods, apparatus, and conventions of speech we traditionally associate with the academy and repurpose or transform them, producing hybrid verse compositions, essays, or narrative fiction. I’ve worked mainly on Anglophone poets and essayists –Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Denise Riley– but we could just as easily talk about contemporary writing in other European languages: Julia Kristeva and Nathalie Léger in French, for example.

The lecture-performances we’re staging are a testament to the radical adaptability of the lecture, but also to ways in which the academy and the arts can adapt together

I’m not only interested in why the para-academic is so popular right now. I’m interested in how these authors, many of whom are trained scholars, manage to completely bypass some of the most pressing concerns in the humanities around what’s usually glossed as "critique" –a method of analysis and a disposition we might call hostile toward texts and readers. Scholars in crisis mode have proposed a new repertoire of methods, "postcritique", but my project sought to turn the postcritical paradigm on its head by approaching these methods where they occur in literature, which now "speaks back" to the academy. I’ve tried to show, too, that the pioneers of this brand of experimental critical writing are women.

Thinking about Performing the Lecture, I wanted to find as concrete a way as possible to showcase the degree of exchange in contemporary writing between the academic and the "creative", with a long-term view to crashing that distinction into a wall. The lecture is a great form for watching something like this crash happen in real time. The lecture-performances we’re staging are a testament to the radical adaptability of the lecture, but also to ways in which the academy and the arts can adapt together.

Do the lectures in your program go beyond the traditional academic activities of the university and the usual modes of knowledge transfer? What makes these lectures different?

What marks out these lecture-performances from traditional academic presentations is that elements that are normally absent from the classroom, or whose presence there is merely illustrative, are, as it were, doing the teaching: poetry recital, or choreographed dance, or live sound composition. The lecture –lectio in Latin– has always been a scenic form; it’s always been about live reading. I suppose what we see here turns up the volume on the performative element of lectures, so that whatever the lecturer is describing in his/her lectio also happens or evolves –visually, through sound, through movement– in the space and time of the lecture.

Internationally recognised artists, poets, dramaturgs and scholars pool their talent in these experimental lectures. What are their specific contributions to rethinking the idea of the academic lecture?

Two of our lectures can be said to challenge the contours of the academic lecture directly. One is the collaboration between German media theorist, Siegfried Zielinski, and the British scholar and experimental musician, Anthony Moore, producing what they call "Expanded Lectures". In their case, there’s a clear intention to expand the prevailing concept of philosophy as uniquely textual, and to articulate –as well as perform– the cognitive and philosophical power of rhythm, sound, and music.

Carson’s case is pretty clear too. The poems of her "Lecture on Pronouns" combine academic exposition and theoretical heft with the intimacy, gestures, and verse forms of the sonnet. The non-conceptual language of live dance –courtesy of the ODALIPO collective and Emma Villavecchia– brings the geometries of relation in the poems into sharper focus.

What unites these lectures is a confrontation with an idea at the heart of the contemporary university, but which goes largely unexamined –the idea of "knowledge transmission"

"Nunc Audite’" a lecture on the different modes of naming God, uses dance in similar ways. The Catalan dancer, Cesc Gelabert, makes movement a form of inquiry we see coalesce in real time. The lecture draws on traditions of liturgical performance in a recitative by the actress Laurence Mayor, based on a work by the French-Swiss dramaturg Valère Novarina. The recitative weaves in and out of improvised commentary by the philosopher, Amador Vega, who is also the director of CERCCA.

The performance from Perejaume challenges the lecture to be site-specific. Not just because his piece was written to be performed –as it will be– in the Dipòsit de les Aigües, but because it binds two sites indivisibly into one: a river called l’Escrita in the Catalan pre-Pyrenees, and the space and time of the lecture, where the river and its landscape happen again as sound and discursive texture.

What unites these lectures is a confrontation with an idea at the heart of the contemporary university, but which goes largely unexamined –the idea of "knowledge transmission". Is our job simply to transmit knowledge? Is the form of the transmission incidental? What is the relation of knowledge to thinking, thinking to saying, saying to doing, in the academic lecture? Not to speak of the fact that lectures can be boring. I think the kids would rather learn about pronouns with Anne Carson.  

What is the significance and role of the creative element of these lectures? Do literary and academic texts have a greater impact if we add on other creative features?    

The key here is to throw out the idea of "adding on". What these lectures propose is to change the way we think about the lecture itself as a performance –or, better, as performative: as an action that makes thinking and knowledge happen in a given duration and space. If we commit to this change, then elements from other genres and practices naturally form part of the lecture’s restructuring. One-person, text-based, vertical delivery is clearly, then, a very definite choice rather than the default.

The four experimental lectures combine different artistic and academic disciplines such as music, dance, poetry, theatre and philosophy. What do you hope to achieve by bringing these disciplines into dialogue?

I think this kind of superposition is very much of our times, and also very much at home in the UPF Humanities department, where most of us are interdisciplinary almost by reflex. I originally planned to combine a performance of Carson’s "Lecture on Pronouns" with a traditional conference on experimental scholarly writing. This is where CERCCA came in. Amador Vega has a longstanding interest in performance philosophy, so we decided to join forces and stage lectures that draw on various discourses across the humanities.

I think this kind of superposition is very much of our times, and also very much at home in the UPF Humanities department, where most of us are interdisciplinary almost by reflex

Several of the lectures end with a conversation between artists and academics. Will you be talking about the different interdisciplinary features of the lectures?

Short answer: yes, but not exclusively. I think we’ll be talking mostly about the thinking work these lectures have done and where that work belongs in today’s cultural and university scenes. I also hope for some lightness and laughter with our guests. Can I say I’m a bit tired of academics taking ourselves too seriously?

Is the potential for collaboration and exchange between artists and scholars in contemporary critical culture something that’s yet to be explored? Why isn’t the combination more common?

From the point of view of the university, it’s still pretty niche, yes. On the one hand, when we look at the contemporary art museum –the MACBA or the MOMA, for instance– or forward-looking urban libraries like the New York Public Library, this kind of collaboration has a long and very interesting history. I’m from the UK, where cultural centres like the Barbican or Nottingham Contemporary host conversations and workshops with scholars and artists exploring hybrid and "creative-critical" methodologies. There’s a real buzz around these terms at the moment, though it would be wrong to think of hybridity as a phenomenon that’s strictly or exclusively ours and of our time. John Cage delivered his first hybrid lectures at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, where experiments in pedagogy were absolutely continuous with artistic inquiry. Crossings between creative art and academic science go back way earlier, of course, to Medieval and Classical philosophical poems and treatises in verse.

Arts and cultural centres are fairly comfortable with the idea of artists and academics collaborating, but the university still treads quite carefully

Arts and cultural centres are fairly comfortable with the idea of artists and academics collaborating, but the university still treads quite carefully. The model of the neoliberal university can accommodate one-off experimental presentations and celebrity visiting professors. The hybrid research and artistic outfit Forensic Architecture has made a name for Goldsmiths in London, for example, while other, lower-profile experimental research groups have fallen prey to cuts. Integrating artistic/academic collaboration into research training, and certainly into undergraduate teaching, is a more complex proposition, but it’s one I think we should consider now. CERCCA is a trailblazer in this regard, alongside a handful of other centres worldwide.  

Does the idea of transforming the lecture into an experimental performance reflect the fact that the university needs to be more flexible in its “academic contours” and to look further afield, drawing on other creative modes and disciplines?

I wouldn’t suggest a wholesale dismantling of the academic lecture, but certainly opening it up to other modes and languages of performance, and complementing traditional formats with more collaborative and creative ones. UPF has already begun to do this. Vega held a prize-winning Masters course on the medieval philosopher and polymath, Ramon Llull and invited Cesc Gelabert to collaborate. The students read and recited texts by Llull – individually and in chorus– and came up with a collaborative work of choreography under the guidance of Gelabert. There’s also the Rebellious Teaching project led by art historian, Nausikäa El-Mecky, which is a community of educators seeking to shake up and subvert the methods of teaching we know and don’t always love.

I wouldn’t suggest a wholesale dismantling of the academic lecture, but certainly opening it up to other modes and languages of performance

Is the collaboration between UPF and the CCCB or the Casa dels Clàssics, which includes presenting two of the sessions in the Biennal de Pensament and the Festival Clàssics, a testament to the interest and potential of these lecture-performances?

I think the collaborations we’ve managed to secure speak volumes. We’re very fortunate to be working with the CCCB and the Casa dels Clàssics. The Biennal de Pensament, which is hosting the Moore/Zielinski lecture, draws a very large and diverse public; we’ve been advised to expect attendance in the hundreds, which is so encouraging when you think of the drab overtones the word "lecture" often carries with it.

In organising this program, does the UPF’s Centre for the Study of Aesthetics, Religion and Contemporary Culture (CERCCA) go one step further toward its goal of exploring new modes of knowledge transmission in the humanities?

Emphatically yes. There’s been talk of establishing our program as a biannual event, which would be splendid. It’s time we stopped separating the academic from the “creative”, and CERCCA is committed to creative scholarship across the arc of the humanities.

Short bio:

Elizabeth Sarah Coles studied at the University of Cambridge (MA Cantab, MPhil) and at Queen Mary, University of London (PhD). She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra until Summer 2024, and is an active member of the UPF’s Centre for the Study of Aesthetics, Religion and Contemporary Culture (CERCCA).

Coles is co-editor of Wild Analysis (Routledge, 2022), which won a Gradiva Award in 2022. Her first book, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist (Oxford University Press, 2023), won the Poetry Foundation’s 2024 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.