In the introduction of "Performing Live", Richard Shusterman challenges the reader to decide of the book, "Do its diverse texts manifest an individual style, or at least a reasonably consistent one?" In reflecting on this question, Higgins answers, "Yes." For her, the essays in the book, although written over the course of a decade, do exhibit unity, and on more than one level. Most obviously, the book maintains a basic philosophical platform throughout the essays. In virtually all of them, he defends pragmatism and its experiential emphasis. But this is not the unity she finds most interesting. More intriguingly, the book is unified as a kind of autobiography. In being a "live performance," the book is like all autobiographies, in which the same consciousness recalls its experiences reflectively. The book also shares the paradox of all autobiographies. While being a part of the living it describes, it tries to draw conclusions, often obscuring the inherently provisional nature of conclusions formed in the context of a life in progress. In Richard Shusterman's latest collection of essays, "Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art", Haskins finds much to agree with in the early chapters' discussions of recent anglophone aesthetics, popular culture, and interpretation. But while she finds the account of somaesthetics one of the most interesting and original parts of the book, she is less sanguine than Shusterman about the implications of the somatic and self-aestheticizing turns in his account of the contemporary self. She elaborates on these responses in turn. In the third essay presented, Shusterman responds to the criticisms of Higgins and Haskins, focusing predominantly on somaesthetics and on the relation of self-improvement to concern for others in the dialectic of self and society. (Contains 33 notes.)