Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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A Putative (Private) Life of Hannah Arendt: Bio-portraiture as performance in the work of Miriam Shenitzer
Get PDFThe paper uses tropes culled from several of Hannah Arendt\u27s works, as well as Rebecca Schneider\u27s performance-theoretical considerations on "reenactment", to analyze the work of artist Miriam Shenitzer, specifically a show of drawings, captions, and objects called "A Putative Life of Hannah Arendt." The essay probes this "putative life" as construed from the artist\u27s own memory fragments (including the memories of others that have become the artist\u27s own), as well as from faux-artifacts that constitute a "collection" (à la Benjamin) without claim to representing an actual past. With access to history denied and a heritage claimed "without testament," the artist opens a space "between past and future," a moment of contemplation on the borders between private and public lives
The Performance of Time (or the time of musical performance)
Get PDFIn the twentieth century, time became a key-concept for music – maybe the art more dependent on time. Even so, a myriad of definitions did turn this idea not only into a rich element for musical discourse but also into a conceptual battlefield in discourses about music. Unfortunately, there was an issue for this struggle between theoretical ideas and musical composition that always insisted in striking the debate: the performance. Thus, this is the aim of this short reflection: to bring performers as protagonists in the debate, listening to their experience in time and of time in performance. For this, the Augustinian link between Time and Memory is taken as a bottom line for the discussion. In understanding music as a kind of discourse, another important conceptual device will be claimed for this reflection, that is Rhetoric. The first part of this reflection recollects concepts from the Aristotelian and Augustinian approaches on time and discourse, and concludes with a review of the main definitions of time by composers in the twentieth century. The second part reviews three theoretical approaches of musical form as process. A third section comprises the embodiment of those discussions into practice in the Cello Sonata, written by Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Situating Arendt’s Discourse Ethics: Speculative performances by a thinktank of “non-professional thinkers”
No full textPractically rooted in a report on the activities and inquiries of a year-long thinktank performance, this chapter discusses how Arendt’s notions of “withdrawal” into thought (1978), discursive formation of reasonabilities (1958), and use of personal moral heuristics (1968) can be reflexively situated to devise discourse praxes not only amongst “philosophers” but also amongst those of us who are seen and see ourselves as “laypersons” or “non-professional thinkers” (1971) nevertheless agentic in political and epistemic materializations. Through debate motivated by Arendt’s parsing of tensions between thinking and acting and her conflations of speaking and doing, this particular thinktank sought ways of performing mutual spectatorship that could foreground methodological, theatrical, and ethical modes of discourse. My arguments here are oriented around a diagram produced by this thinktank, conflicts between ways of seeing that arose during the thinktank, and one member of the thinktank’s choice to end their own life.
What\u27s Left of Rights? Arendt and political ontology in the anthropocene
Get PDFMy project in this paper is to make a perverse, post-human, and even queer return to Arendt’s thinking on the ontological foundation of rights, to ask: What is left of rights? Could the challenge of encompassing and representing non-human entities re-energize the political pursuits that have hinged on rights thinking? Post-humanist proponents of critical race theory, indigenous studies, disability and queer studies have thoroughly problematized the givenness of the liberal rights-bearing subject, and the attributes of sovereignty, autonomy, motility, reason, self-possession, intention, speech, and efficacy that have qualified it, defining the parameters of the human in the process by disqualifying bodies (the woman, the slave, the refugee, the disabled) deemed different. But they have, largely, stopped short of inquiring into a concept of rights that embraces a radically non-human subject, limiting themselves instead to arguing either for a continual expansion of the domain of the human beyond its foundational exclusions, or for an abandonment of rights altogether. But how might conceptualizing rights away from inherited presumptions about how a rights-bearing subject acts, manifests, or appears help us reclaim what was politically generative about the project of rights in the first place? Ultimately, do rights retain any validity if they do not also embrace the non-human? How might performance help us imagine non-human rights—help us figure, speak with and for, non-humans in the domain of the political? And what insight might we gain from revisiting Arendt in the light of post-humanist thought
Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy
Get PDFThis editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt’s work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. Arendt’s relevance to our times is ubiquitous: from the near constant citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism in relation to the recent rise in strong-man politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism, to her diagnosis of the plight of refugees, denied even the rights belonging to those that have broken the law, but instead placed outside the law. Contemporary political philosophy also bears numerous influences, in the thinking of Mouffe, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Brown, Butler, and more. For performance philosophy, we might engage with Arendt’s performative notion of politics itself, as exemplified in her idea of ‘spaces of appearance’, but also the performativity of thought, as well as the implications of Arendt’s work for phenomenology, governmentality, rights, and ecology. Contributors to this special issue also think through the relevance of Arendt’s work for an anti-colonial and anti-racist political praxis, and for post and non-human political ethics, judgment, and thinking
The Open Field of Performance Philosophy
Get PDFThis editorial introduces issue 4.2 of the Performance Philosophy journal. As a culmination of an "open call" for proposals, this edition prompts the reflection, "What is open?" The editorial pursues that question in order to map the open field of Performance Philosophy as it currently presents itself in this historical moment
Collaboration as Differentiation: Rethinking interaction intra-actively
Get PDFThis paper is a invitation to interaction designers across disciplines to rethink the shaping of interaction “intra-actively”. Whether in human-computer interaction design or interdisciplinary and interactive performance practices, we propose to shift the emphasis from interaction between things, towards the intra-active processes of differentiation by which such things are continually made and unmade. Expanding interaction design by engaging in processes intended to bring awareness to the value systems involved in the local production of “interaction” and “things that interact” offers an opportunity to treat these values, and likewise the designers (be it engineers or choreographers or composers), as objects themselves in the design process. In the traditions of feminist, new materialist, and process philosophy we weave a narrative of appropriated perspectives in order to dismantle hegemonic accounts of correlationism and representationalism in interaction design, while investigating the concepts of boundary objects, diffraction, and critical appropriation as potential approaches to intra-active design
Talking Back: What Dance might make of Badiou’s philosophical project
Get PDFThis paper approaches Badiou’s essay, ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,’ on its own terms, considering its stated approach and central claims. This is in order to avoid the indignant tone of some responses from the field that desire other approaches to philosophy’s engagement with dance. Badiou’s project in ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought’ is antithetical to my own current, advocatory research, thus offering an adversary of sorts. If it is the case that dance is ‘instrumental’ for the art-philosophy schema that Badiou is formulating, that is, being ‘incorporated’ into the strategies of a philosophy of art, what’s in it for dance? Can Badiou’s project be repurposed for our own disciplinary concerns? For instance, if his conception of dance (drawn from past philosophical accounts and for his own purposes) is seen as lacking from a disciplinary perspective, then what is the idea of dance that positions his as ‘wrong’
The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making
Get PDFFollowing bell hooks’ submission that theory making is “a location for healing” (2017, 59) “The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making” riffs upon the historically critical and widely circulated subject of the black body politic and Atlantic waters informing but non-exclusive to performance, art history, and visual cultural discourses. The theory making performed here alternatively frames the black Atlantic body in relation to humidity, illustrating what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “possibles” evoked through “a contraction of earth and humidity” (Deleuze 1994, 76–78). The theory is shaped upon a discussion of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899), included in Kara Walker’s cultural-political opus, Kara Walker: After The Deluge (2006), mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theory making confronts the painting’s adherence to the hegemonic tradition of rendering the black Atlantic body as a perennial form in peril, whose destiny in this instance is as matter consumed by the thermodynamic sublimity of the waters. Alternatively, the action of theory making here collapses space-time separations among black Atlantic flora, the healing processes of artists Lygia Clark and Wangechi Mutu, and modes of breath activation, to access states of limitlessness actualized through bodily openness to humidity’s grace.
Heiner Goebbels\u27s Stifters Dinge and the Arendtian Public Sphere
Get PDFHeiner Goebbels’s works are examples of “postdramatic” theatre works that engage with the political by seeking to challenge socially ingrained habits of perception rather than by presenting traditional, literary-based theatre of political didacticism or agitation. Goebbels claims to work toward a “non-hierarchical” theatre in the contexts of his arrangement of the various theatrical elements, in fostering collaborative working processes between the artists involved, and in the creation of audience-artist relationships. In offering a reading of Goebbels’s “no-man show” Stifters Dinge, this paper seeks to situate Goebbels’s practice within a theoretical tradition that also encompasses Hannah Arendt’s deployment of the theatre as a metaphor for the public sphere. Within this analysis, I suggest, theatre can be seen to offer the possibility of a participatory democracy through its attention to disappearance and absence