Bauman’s Verbal Art and the Social Organization of Attention: The Role of Reflexivity in the Aesthetics of Performance

In Richard Bauman’s landmark study Verbal Art as Performance, reflexivity plays a small but important role. Combining ideas from Verbal Art with insights from phenomenology, this article uses the concept of reflexivity to re-examine basic facets of expressive interaction and explores the structure of intersubjectivity in performance. Field data on American heavy metal music and the promenade of central Italy are used to reveal the crucial role that reflexivity plays in the aesthetics of performance.