Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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The Feeling of Thinking: Stories and Animations on the Experience of Reading Theory
Get PDFIn this set of stories I investigate in the experience of reading philosophical texts. Reading is one of the most central activities of engaging with philosophy. But how is it done? How is it perceived? Which aesthetic and emotional experiences take place?I conducted 50 confidential interviews with dedicated readers of theory / philosophy (students, professors, and others) on their personal reading practise and experience. Based on these interviews I am writing a series of stories. Some of the stories are true to their interviews, others take motifs of the interviews only as a starting point for investigating in reading.The stories explore in the embodied process of reading. They describe, why readers take on the task of reading philosophy, how they struggle to understand and how they deal with the authority of the authors. They also investigate in how reading influences the lives of the readers
Vocal Performance Through Electrical Flows: Making Current Kin
Get PDFWhat do we hear in a human voice that vibrates through electrical flows? In this paper I argue for listening (and vocalizing) beyond the human in performances with audio media. I propose understanding such performance practice as engaging with what I call plasmatic voice, a phenomenon distinct from the merely additive, prosthetic conception of voice + electricity. Instead, plasmatic voice functions as instances of queer assemblage stretching to reach the radically Other that constitutes ourselves—facilitating the sense of what Alaimo (2010) terms transcorporeality, an understanding of human embodiment as “intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2). The vibrations of plasmatic voice—as an example of Eidsheim’s (2015) intermaterial vibrational practice—loosen (post)human social constructs of race and gender and reverberate with nonhuman ecosystems, as I illustrate through analysis of musical examples
One Part Water, Two Parts Starch: Performing oobleck as political resistance
Get PDFOobleck is two things: a non-Newtonian fluid, a mixture of cornstarch and water showing properties of both a liquid and a solid; and an invention by Dr. Seuss, an odd green weather occurrence who’s fluid, adhesive, and elastic attributes manage to threaten the entire state apparatus of the “Kingdom of Didd.” Re-viewing the children’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and in light of its starch-and-water namesake, I argue that we can learn an insurrective strategy of political resistance from its performativity
Life, Movement, and Thought: Directions for Performance Philosophy and Practice as Research
Get PDFThis essay addresses the common goals of but also the practical differences between the emerging fields of Performance Philosophy (PP) and Practice as Research (PaR). It does so by describing them both as interposing effective and affective action into the process of thinking and knowing, thereby resisting what Gilles Deleuze calls the Dogmatic Image of Thought. The dogmatic image is described as a directional movement based on Plato’s allegory of the cave, where those who would learn turn away from phenomenal becoming and move upward and outward towards eternal Truth. This movement travels from a static unknowing to a static knowledge. Both PP and PaR resist such movement by employing techniques which forestall arriving at either stasis. Through their developments, PP and PaR have come to concentrate on resisting one of these points of stasis or the other – with PP concentrating on avoiding static knowing, and PaR concentrating on finding the proper expression to avoid static unknowing, even while presenting its findings in forms that may appear ephemeral.
Anxiety Affect Aliens and Other Non-Paranoid Performances Against Capitalism
Get PDFIn 2014, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness published a number of propositions on the relationship between anxiety, precarity, and neoliberal capitalism. IPC argues that anxiety is the dominant affect of neoliberal capitalism and proposes consciousness-raising circles as a technique for combating anxiety, exposing anxiety as a “public secret,” and ushering in the new anxiety-fighting machine. Heeding the roots of consciousness-raising in feminist movements, this paper puts the IPC’s proposed approach in conversation with affect theory. What is the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and anxiety, and how can anxiety be brought, through performance, into a political phenomenology of the emotions in order to combat capitalism as the dominant ideology? Following Judith Butler’s use of Hannah Arendt’s view of action and simultaneous resistance to Arendt’s division of mind and body in her conception of public and private spheres, I ask: how can embodied techniques (in approaches such as Brechtian alienation and situational choreography) be used in conjunction with speech acts to address precarity’s effects on mind and body? Rather than seeking to subdue anxiety, I argue that breaking the cycle of affect production requires a praxis-based use of alienation, and the supplementation of paranoid approaches to criticism and activism with reparative approaches
I Breathe, You Breathe, We Breathe: How a daily habitual movement appears as an action and grows into a gesture through listening
Get PDFIn this article I wonder whether the non-breath in-between inhalation and exhalation and inherent to breathing equals what Hannah Arendt calls a space of appearance. Can the non-breath be considered as a place where human plurality and the self emerge (Arendt 2015, 160-163)? Or in other words, can a daily and habitual movement like breathing provide the space for action to appear? Can our breathing act? And if so, do we speak (up) through our breathing? Through listening to the breathing bodies in Grey (Kinga Jaczewska, 2018), Toute une nuit and Rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1982 & 1978) I search for answers to these questions
Get Messed Up: Intentionality, Butoh and Freedom in Plasma
Get PDFNature relative to subjectivity is an under theorized area of performance philosophy, one that we ignore at our peril. There is such a thing as nature. It encompasses all that humans are not, and suffuses all that we are and do. It is not merely a social or cultural construction, as we consider in this essay. In order to speak more definitively of nature and the body, we employ the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and reach back to the lifeworld (lebenswelt) philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Some read Husserl as an essentialist, but there are other readings, such as the one developed here. One of Ricoeur’s major works, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, concerns motives and values at the organic level, studying how habits inform individual habitus and become embodied as nature in flux. Accordingly, this essay explores subjectivity, intentionality and nature in performance using examples from butoh relative to metamorphosis, a ubiquitous process in the rhythms and multi-tiered rhizomes of nature. Through Sartre and Ricoeur, the text also considers lived values of freedom relative to intention. In this light, readers are invited to explore their own porousness and evaporations via Freedom in Plasma, a butoh to do at the end of the essay
The Artist as Facilitator: Being present with & loving the unknown
Get PDFObject-Oriented Ontology presents stark implications for the process of the artist. If all matter is alive, then all things are co-performers, and all art becomes performance. How does one work with the presence of the non-human, and what are the ethical implications of attempting to attune to its needs? Beginning with the object of a table, and considering it within both Graham Harman\u27s discussion of "The Third Table" and the thing as a performing object, Meghan Moe Beitiks analyzes the presence of the non-human in performance and asserts a need for awareness, consideration and love in the creative process
Repetition as the Performative Syndrome of Dying
Get PDFIn his Difference and Repetition Deleuze reveals an aporia: repetition is singular, solitary, it is torn away from any original or source; nevertheless it preserves a genetic tie with certain event to which it is a repetition. This solitariness of the repetition is not, however, confined to mere difference between the act of repetition and the repeated source that cancels the original just to differentiate two performative procedures. An act of repetition is solitary only when it evolves in specific time-regime, which even ontically diverges from the regular ontology of time. Deleuze calls such temporality “empty”, Nietzsche defines it as amor fati, Heidegger sees in it convergence of eternity and an instant. The stake in this case is a specific kind of repetitive regime which unfolds as the performative syndrome of ‘dying’ – a “repetition into death” (Deleuze) which paradoxically executes itself as performative plenitude. But who is the Subject undergoing such a syndrome and what should have happened to her/him so as to impose the regime of dying on any act of repetition
“Out, and under, and out, and out.” Self-(Dis-)Organisation and the Stories of Libertatia
Get PDFRecent socio-political developments in the experimental performing arts scenes from Europe have seen a strong commitment to the practices of self-organisation and their liberating impetus. Responding to the experimental nature of many such activities with a likewise experimental theoretical enquiry, this paper invests in an interpretation of self-organising principles from anarchism, cybernetics, and vitalist materialism through the fictional narrative of the pirate utopia Libertatia. The argument thus developed is that the liberating potentials of self-organisation can be located precisely in its inherent tendency toward self-dis-organisation