Extending a Hand/Lending an Ear

This essay is a partial transcript of a public lecture by Rebecca Schneider, combined with a reflection on audition by a member of her audience, Paul Rae. Schneider's transcribed talk, ‘Extending a Hand,’ asks about the geologic time of climate change in relationship to the human time of racialization and other damaging by-products of the Capitalocene. If Schneider's talk performs a call, Rae's companion commentary performs a response that is, simultaneously, a reflection on the ways and means of academic labour on and as performance. In Schneider's talk, Paleolithic negative hand stencils are read beside contemporary protest acts and both are considered as ‘hails’, suggesting a reverberatory, ongoing, and even ‘live’ duration to gesture. Call and response is thus considered both in terms of geologic time and in terms of human time. ‘Extending a Hand’ was delivered as a keynote address to the 2016 Performance Studies international (PSi) conference in Melbourne, Australia, the theme of which was ‘climate c...