Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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SPEECH/ACT
Full text linkAs a language play, SPEECH/ACT is a piece of performative writing (and writing for performance) exploring linguistic performativity. It personifies speech and action to stage a dialogue playfully testing the limits of J. L. Austin’s famous claim in How to Do Things with Words (1955) that performative utterances cannot be “felicitous” within the theatre. As the character ACT contentiously notes in a footnote to Act III: “Though Austin famously asserted that theatrical utterances are necessarily ‘hollow’ or ‘void’ as performatives, this notion has been vigorously contested by theatre and performance theorists for half a century.” My text’s humorous yet melancholic meditation on hollowness, emptiness, and the void—in relation to speech acts and linguistic performativity in particular, but also climate change and existential dread more broadly—moves across stylistic, tonal, affective, and structural registers to test the edges of narrative description and performative action. In the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods, my script grammatically and syntactically stages speech and action as ambivalently entwined amidst a backdrop of continuously shifting theatrical, poetic, and philosophical contexts. Ultimately, it invites the reader to contemplate the criteria for “felicitous” performative utterances within a dematerialized theatre of the mind
Grief as Radically Social
Full text linkThis essay emerges from the ongoing work of Inviting Abundance dedicated to facilitating and wit(h)nessing the paradigm shifts taking place in the field of griefwork. Specifically, we propose that we all (all of us) benefit from understanding grief as radically social, which is to say an affective domain birthed through the entanglement of living and dead beings. Against the pathologizing frameworks of dominant mental and medical health discourse, radically social grief denies the primacy of walled-off, internalized domains of so-called “individuals” and attends to, instead, porous bodies always already interconnected with the social and environmental worlds. To show this radically social grief in action, we turn to the artwork of Pedro Reyes. Transmuting firearms into shovels and musical instruments through multiple artistic projects, Reyes’s work renders visible and audible the often-ignored blight of gun violence and, by doing this, prepares a meditative space for active reflection on the afterlives of all those killed through gun violence. Grief practices such as this, we argue, invite people to reconnect with the creative dimension of grief en route to producing sustainable grief practices
The Afterlives of Terra Nullius: Unmarked Graves, Indigenous ‘Discoveries’, and Colonial After-Thoughts
Full text linkThe 2021 discovery of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia revealed the brutal genocide at the heart of Canadian colonial rule. Canadian governments and the Catholic Church had sought to leave this issue buried, literally and figuratively, by asserting a modern form of terra nullius in positing that these and other residential schools were ‘empty lands’ in the sense that they did not contain the remains of Indigenous children, even as Indigenous nations knew the truth. This essay argues that these gruesome discoveries are evidence of the after-lives of terra nullius of modern settler colonialism, where Indigenous peoples’ deaths are a colonial after-thought in settler society, which leads to settler denials and avoidance of responsibility for the damage done. This colonial after-thought can be traced right on up to Pope Francis’ apology for the Church’s role in the schools. In resistance to the settler effort to produce Indigenous peoples as ontological absences, as colonial after-thoughts, nations such as the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc demonstrate the power of Indigenous resurgence through their persistence in nation and movement building
Whale grief: Episodes I + II
Full text linkIn this piece, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca offers two stories that approach the experience of grief and loss from an interspecies perspective with a particular focus on whales. Whilst much mainstream debate and academic literature continues to frame grief as exclusively human, or to position human grief as the standard for grieving per se, Cull Ó Maoilearca follows the work of anthropologist Barbara King (2013) amongst others to attend to whales as both the subjects and objects of grief. Mapping entanglements of oppressions stemming from speciesism, colonialism, capitalism and racism, the first story mourns the loss of animals including two beluga whales in the 1865 fire at P. T. Barnum\u27s American Museum. The second story attends to the specific case of Tahlequah: the orca who in 2018 pushed the body of her newborn, which died shortly after birth, with her snout for 17 days, in what whale biologists called ‘a show of grief’
An Elongated Shrieking Song That Envisions Glimpses of Liberation Through Overwhelm
Full text linkIn “An Elongated Shrieking Song That Envisions Glimpses of Liberation through Overwhelm” I explore my artistic practice of moaning through the lens of “traumatophilia” and “overwhelm” as proposed by Avgi Saketopoulou, a Greek psycho-analyst practicing in New York. I am braiding into these reflections the question of Saidiya Hartman’s in “Venus in Two Acts” that has been delightfully haunting me, that is: “What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song?” This contemplation on the moan calls for a renewed relationship to cultural performances of loss and grief as forms of protest and disruption of public amnesia, in times of rising fascism, militarisation and ongoing genocides.
Digital Instruments: Extensions or Media?
Full text linkI argue that, from the performer’s perspective, there are significant differences between analogue and digital instruments. The unique nature of the relationship with digital instruments transforms the performer’s practice in ways that aesthetic discourse has yet to fully address. From a post-phenomenological perspective, I will demonstrate how this relationship differs from that with analogue instruments, prioritizing reading over bodily sensations. In contrast to post-phenomenological accounts, however, I will also argue that the concept of digital instruments as extensions of the human body remains ambiguous and is even further removed from traditional notions of skill and virtuosity. Although this analysis focuses on musical instruments, I emphasize that the argument applies to all artistic practices that engage with digital tools. In this respect, the article will be of interest to theorists of digital media, digital art practitioners, historians, and philosophers of technology
Genocide, Philosophical Fetishism, Mourning, and Testimony
Full text linkThis article engages with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in order to explore how Conrad’s novella arguably associates the dynamics of Hegelian dialectical appropriation with the enactments of genocidal usurpation. It proposes that philosophical fetishism entails a twofold movement of the internalisation of the other and the intended eradication of the other’s external existence. It demonstrates how this ploy manifests itself in settler colonial contexts from the Congo to Palestine. Treating Conrad’s text as a form of theatrical testimony, it distinguishes this theatricality from the literalising performativity of genocide
The Erotics of Grieves
Full text linkThe Erotics of Grieves explores grieving as a portal to liberation and social transformation. Written at the time of the ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the repression of solidarity movements in Berlin, this piece situates grieves in political, historical, and embodied contexts. Moving away from a singular, universalist concept of grief, this work conceptualizes grieves as plural, relational, and metabolically intimate processes that shape and unsettle bodies, communities, and social infrastructures. Drawing from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and Fred Moten’s Erotics of Fugitivity, it asks how grieving can resist hegemonic power structures and create generative spaces of solidarity, refusal, and world-making. Through autotheoretical reflection, cultural analyses, and embodied performance practices this article traces the visceral, affective, and sonic dimensions of grieves. Engaging with legacies of mourning rituals, racialized and planetary grief, and the vibratory intimacies of sound, it proposes an erotics of grieves as a mode of attunement to loss, connection, and futurity beyond the fantasy of separation. In a time of structural violence, erasure, and epistemicide, The Erotics of Grieves insists on grieving as a radical force of resistance, fugitivity, and transformative care
On Sense-making, Groove, and Choice in Experimental Improvised Music
Full text linkImprovising musicians—especially towards the “freer” or more “experimental” end of the spectrum—are often seen as having the space to do just about anything. But actual improvisations are (also) processes of what enactivist philosophers Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo call “participatory sense-making”; musicians’ active choices are both enabled and constrained by musical phenomena, or “autonomous organising principles”, that emerge between them. Here we explore one example of such phenomena: groove. We begin by theorizing groove more broadly as a “grid” and as “participatory discrepancies”, emphasizing how groove shows a form of agency in processes of sense-making. We then analyze sense-making at work in a case of emergent groove performed by the 21-piece experimental improvising ensemble Splitter Orchester. We conclude that collective sense-making is a dynamic process in which individual agents negotiate not only with each other, but also the shared norms and emergent other-than-human processes that they enact