Disappearance, Distance, and the Hybrid: Rereading Peggy Phelan for a Networked Age

Thanks for reading. This post is based on an internal presentation I delivered at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as part of our PhD Reading Group, where we discussed Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked and the evolving politics of presence, disappearance, and hybridity. I am keen to document my research and findings, so I thought sharing a personal blogpost on my website is the road to go!

Hi, I’m Gaurav. I’m from India, and I work primarily in theatre. I now find myself navigating the world of research, which means trying to think through some of the questions that have always been underneath my practice.

For this session, I wanted to revisit a text I’ve been drawn to for a while — Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993). I’m particularly interested in how her ideas around performance, disappearance, and visibility can be read today, through the lens of my own research on distance, liveness, and hybrid performance.

Why Peggy Phelan, and Why Now

Unmarked was written at a moment when artists and scholars were grappling with digitality, media, feminism, and capitalism, and the changing conditions of what it means to perform and to be seen.

Peggy Phelan, an American scholar now at Stanford, wrote this book to question the very ontology (the being) of performance. What makes something a performance? What happens when we try to record, document, or reproduce it?

The chapter I focused on, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction,” responds to debates about liveness and documentation that were emerging in the early 1990s. This is when live performances were starting to be recorded, archived, and replayed.

Performance as Disappearance

Phelan begins with a sentence that has since become foundational in performance studies:

“Performance’s only life is in the present.”

She argues that performance cannot be saved, recorded, or reproduced. Once captured, it becomes something else: representation, not performance.

To her, performance is a temporary encounter that resists capture and commodification. Its value lies precisely in its disappearance. When it ends, it continues only as memory or as a trace in the body of the performer, as in the endurance-based works of artists like Marina Abramović, where the performer’s body carries the marks of what happened.

Phelan writes that this disappearing act gives performance both ethical and political power. Unlike products of capitalism, endlessly reproduced and circulated, performance appears and disappears. It cannot be bought, stored, or owned. It resists the logic of repetition that drives the capitalist economy. In her words:

“Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends.”

Visibility, Invisibility, and Feminist Politics

Phelan also frames visibility as a trap. Within patriarchy, to be “seen” often means to be objectified.

She proposes a politics of the unmarked... reclaiming invisibility as a form of resistance. Not being visible doesn’t mean erasure; it can also mean freedom from capture, a way to exist beyond the systems that define and commodify the visible.

This feels especially interesting today, when visibility (for instance, “representation” or “diversity”) is often equated with progress. Phelan challenges us to ask: what kinds of visibility are we actually producing, and at what cost?

Performance, Pain, and the Value of Loss

One of Phelan’s most powerful ideas is that performance teaches us to value loss.

In live performance, there’s always a moment when we become aware that it’s ending: that it will not return in the same form. That sense of loss, she suggests, is what gives performance its emotional charge and ethical weight.

“Performance teaches us to value what is lost: to learn not the meaning but the value of what cannot be reproduced.”

This line resonates deeply with me as an artist. The knowledge that something will vanish makes it more alive.

Extending Phelan into a Hybrid Context

My own research explores how these ideas translate into a hybrid, digital, and networked world: a world where we’re almost never offline, where performance exists across screens, data, and devices.

If, for Phelan, performance disappears into memory, today performance disappears into the network... into pixels, latency, recordings, and algorithms.

In my work, I’m experimenting with reframing disappearance as distance. Distance not as separation or loss, but as a new space of relation: the gap between performer, audience, and technology where connection actually happens.

From Disappearance to Distance

In Phelan’s ontology, performance moves from presence to disappearance. In mine, it might move from presence to distance to distributed presence.

Hybrid performance doesn’t resist reproduction; it metabolizes it. It lives in the tension between the live and the mediated, between the physical and the digital. It produces a new kind of liveness: one sustained by delay, mediation, and connection across distance.

You might say that performance still vanishes, but now it vanishes into connection: into signals, screens, and shared virtual spaces.

Rereading Phelan from the Global South

Coming from India, I also find myself reading Phelan against the grain. Many of the performances or arts practices she references belong to Western, Euro-American feminist traditions: already well-documented, already visible.

In the Global South, the question of documentation operates differently. Often, there isn’t enough documentation for artists to even risk refusing it. Visibility here is still a fight. So when Phelan warns against visibility, I hear that with a particular caution: because for some of us, visibility itself remains an act of resistance.

Why Phelan Still Matters

Even three decades later, Phelan’s ideas matter because they ask us to think about value.

Why do we continue to make performance in a world that prizes permanence, circulation, and capital?What does it mean to devote our energy to something that will inevitably vanish?

In a time when everything is archived, streamed, or captured, Phelan’s call to “value what is lost” still feels radical.But perhaps today, loss looks different.

Maybe disappearance has become distance: and maybe our task is to learn how to live, perform, and connect within that distance.

Questions I’m Still Carrying

• Can performance truly disappear in a world of constant documentation?

• Is invisibility still resistance, or is visibility necessary for marginalized voices?

• How does hybrid performance change what we mean by “presence”?

• What new ethics emerge when performance happens across distance?

If this post provoked any thoughts, ideas or conversations, I'd love to know more. Please get in touch with me at gauravnijjer@gmail.com