With an autonomy of its own, performance spreads by deconstruction not only from theatre to other disciplines but across the binaries of art and life, picking up momentum from critical theory – obsessed as it is with the “overflows, leaks, shifts, slips” and eroticised staging of dispersion itself, which cancels aesthetic distance. As we may gather from the Image-repertoire of Roland Barthes, spectacle seems to have become, with the body as irreducible difference, “the universal category in whose aspect the world is seen.”
– Herbert Blau, The Audience (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), John Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 2
