Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Crisis and the Emotional Body: Towards (Another) Freedom
Get PDFIn his analysis of the recent European crisis, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2012) looks beyond its economic causes and implications and theorises the role played by poetry and the emotional body in rediscovering the relationship between language and desire and reopening the possibility of social solidarity. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s (1995) reflections on the correlation between singular refrain and universal chaos in the reinvention of subjectivity, Berardi conceptualises rhythm as a poetic feature which can contribute to restoring our ability to conjoin with other singularities and with our social and cosmic environment. This article considers how a close engagement with rhythmical, repetitive and cyclical performative practices in examples of recent European choreography may offer ways of responding to today’s crisis of social cohesion, reimagining channels of intensive communication. In particular, the article looks at works by the Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni (Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?, 2012 and Chroma_don’t be frightened of turning the page, 2017) and by the London-based duo Igor and Moreno (Idiot-Syncrasy, 2013) and discusses how, in revisiting elements of folk traditions, they mobilise their potential as formal, semantic and affective modalities that can sustain a reconfiguration of social freedom
What is Refugee?
Get PDFThis collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of questions) derived from a year-long collaboration focused on the figure of the refugee. Delivered through mixed-media, the responses cover a vast range of territory, from the relation between refugees and global capitalism to the reign of bio- and necro-politics, from analytical philosophies of naming to continental philosophies of territorialized flows, and from conceptual mappings of interstitial space to concrete mappings of “refugee” movements across the globe.While the article addresses many different questions, the authors are concerned primarily with the following: How can performance philosophy conceptualize “crisis” in its methods and subjects of study? How is crisis organized, delivered and received in thought and performance? The form our response has taken is one of arranged fragments that speak to the “trailing off” of thought that so frequently occurs when faced with “big ideas.” Meanwhile, the content delivers multiple theses on the ways performance philosophy scholarship might grapple with the figure of the refugee, a figure that will surely dominate ethical discussions for years to come.
ReView Bamboozled: Archival Affects
Get PDFThe first time the author watched Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), the film literally moved her body 3000 miles. In this video reView, Bamboozled moves the author again, this time to the very space that gives the film its continued, urgent relevance: the archive. In moving and being moved, the author surprisingly discovers a little-known archival collection in Buffalo, NY that directly relates to Lee’s film and its usage of black memorabilia. ReVIEW BAMBOOZLED: ARCHIVAL AFFECTS chronicles the author’s journey into this archive and her remarkable discussion with the archivist and her research assistant about the stakes of that collection, Spike Lee’s film, and the affects of both. It also reViews archival practice, showing the tensions of working with what the archivist acknowledges to be, in some ways, “the uncollectible.
Mel as Hyperobject
Get PDFThrough the words of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), the adapted practice of distant reading, the lens of current neuroscience, and the flavor of non-philosophy, artist Mel Keiser transmutes a text about object oriented ontology and ecological philosophy into a piece that describes what it is to be an identity becoming
The Essay in Times of Crisis
Get PDFThis contribution to Performance Philosophy 4.1 ‘Crisis/Krisis’ explores the breeding ground of the genre of the essay: a state of crisis and transition. This text was conceived and written in line with the editors’ open call for this thematic issue and its search to reassess and revaluate the notion of krisis. In the contribution, I will foreground the essay’s qualities and critical potential—which also can be detected in contemporary performing arts—to revaluate the notion of krisis. By exploring Montaigne, Adorno, and Lukács, I will try to claim that the nature and purpose of the essay offers a welcome counterweight to our swift and superficial way of judging dictated by mainstream media
Being in Crisis: Scenes of Blindness and Insight in Tragedy
Get PDFTragedy was considered ‘highly serious, political (in some sense)—and religious’, at its origin in Athens in 427 BCE (Winnington-Ingram, 1989: 5). In spite of its centuries-old existence the trope still troubles theatre and performance philosophy scholars. As Simon Critchley (2017) recently put it: ‘What kind of hedonism is the pleasure we take in tragedy, which depicts not just suffering and death, but the ghostly porosity of the frontier separating the living from the dead?’ (37). This paper makes use of, and critiques Critchley’s scholarship. It explores his notion of tragedy’s porous frontier in relation to the skene, the boundary that bisected the ancient stage and restricted audience vision at critical moments in the drama. The paper links the skene functionally to other such pivotal boundaries or ‘scenes’, to generate an interdisciplinary range of approaches to the precarious experience of having sight and hearing momentarily dislocated from each other. In the process the paper contests Critchley’s Platonic concerns about tragedy’s deceptive and sadistic inflections, to offer an entirely new take on the ancient art form; one which may shed fresh light on Performance Philosophy’s foundational debates concerning the use, or demolition, of boundaries
The Tragedy of the Greek Debt Crisis: To Be Done With Judgment
Get PDFSince the first memorandum “agreement” between Greece and its international creditors in 2010, the “tragedy of the Greek debt crisis” has become one of the most popular narratives that frame Greece’s condition of indebtedness. Highlighting the interplay between appearances of “debt crisis” and notions of tragedy as its point of departure, this essay builds on Nietzsche’s thought and introduces a philosophy of tragedy that understands what appears to be a “debt crisis” as, in fact, a crisis of the creditor’s capacity to reproduce the non-resolvable power relations between them and their debtor. For Nietzsche, in order for the creditor to experiment with their debtor’s appropriation, the creditor stages a series of acts of judgment (??????) that introduce masks and appearances of their debtor’s redemption. In the comments that follow I make the case that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw upon Nietzsche’s philosophy of tragedy in order to grasp the interdependencies between performances of evaluation, capitalistic modes of production and the production of infinite debt. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy of tragedy and Maurizio Lazzarato’s works on Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that what appears to be a “Greek debt crisis” is a crisis of credit’s capacity to extract profit from infinite debt. Connecting this theorization to the Greek situation, I look at the “YES” and “NO” demonstrations that occurred two days before the Greek bailout referendum of 2015. I contend that while the “YES” demonstration reenacted the infinitization of Greece’s indebtedness to its creditors the “NO” demonstration performed politics that exceed notions of judgment and debt
Anarchic Reflection and the Crisis of Krisis: Working with Artaud
Get PDFThis article begins by arguing that the ‘madness’ of Antonin Artaud is either fetishised or resisted, depending on the disciplinary angle from which one works. It proposes an alternative approach to the study of Artaud, which might avoid such pitfalls by reading Artaud’s work as performative philosophy or a philosophy of performance. The approach is defined by the principle of ‘working with’, rather than working on, a literary or philosophical figure. The second part of the article works, or philosophises, with Artaud, reading his work on the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ alongside Immanuel Kant’s work on judgment from the third Critique. It explores the Kantian distinction between determining and reflective judgment, extending reflective judgment into what I call anarchic reflection. To do so, the article elucidates the conceptual relation between actuality, entropy, an-archy, cruelty and sublimity, defining anarchic reflection as an unintentional and/or intentional crisis of the judgment or krisis (??????) of Form that opens the possibility of its transformation
During the Long Greek Crisis: Jan Fabre, The Greek Festival, and Metakénosis
Get PDFDuring the fiscal, political, and social disorder caused by the Greek crisis, Greek cultural production has turned to obscure moments of Greek history, such as the Ottoman period, in an attempt to reframe dominant narratives. For Greek cultural politics, rejecting, or at least questioning the ancient past -- that was until now seen as the only valuable past -- is a way for Greek artists to reject Western perspectives on Greek culture and claim their own set of criteria by which to experience their national past. This aspect of the crisis, which is in some ways a renewed principle of historiographic judgment, inevitably presents itself in comparison to the highly influential Enlightenment philosophy of metakénosis. A term coined by Adamantios Korais (1748-1833), metakénosis referred to the transfer of the ideas of European liberal humanism through translation into Modern Greek, while dismissing Eastern influences in Greek culture. European thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was assumed by Korais to be based on classic Greek ideals, and its re-translation into Greek was undertaken in earnest in order to inspire sentiments of national unity, confidence in Greek letters, and continuity with the classical past.For this proposed article, I examine Korais’s highly consequential principle and its legacy by looking at a recent scandal in the Greek theatre world, that of Jan Fabre’s short-lived appointment as artistic director of the Greek Festival in 2016. A large group of Greek theatre artists circulated a letter of protest in which they asked Fabre to resign. In their responses to Jan Fabre’s perceived appropriation of their festival, these artists seemed to be reversing the metakénosis model as they expressed their opposition to standards of cultural value imposed from abroad. The context of the crisis, as fiscal crisis, but also as a new paradigm of krisis as judgment, was instrumental in voicing this protest
Galaxies → eventually there will be nothing
Get PDFHistorically, a palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain; or by analogy, anything reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. Although this practice was most often done with little regard to the original, primarily serving a pragmatic purpose not to waste parchment, it can instead be utilized as methodology for a sort of physical sublation, as it both preserves and changes the original. Or put another way, critically doing a palimpsest allows the physical alteration to become the dialectic interplay between the original and some other term, concept, or object. If contextualized then as a review, this process retains the basic premise of analysis, but changes it from a form of external evaluation to one of synthesis