Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Photographing the End of the World: Capitalist Temporality, Crisis, and the Performativity of Visual Objects
Get PDFThe Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism
From North Korea With Love: Reviewing Pyongyang’s Arirang Mass Games
Get PDFThis review of North Korea’s Airirang Mass Games presents a primary account and analysis of a performance unlike anything and unseen anywhere else in the contemporary world. This review contributes to the beginning of a conversation about this performance that has been nearly inaccessible and unavailable to most people, including most other academic researchers or commentators, outside of North Korea. It is arranged into a first-hand descriptive account and then an analysis of the Arirang Mass Games.This review analyses the Arirang Mass Games through a discussion of the materialization, enactment, and embodiment of the regime’s ethnocentric Communist ideology and culture. This analysis draws upon the work of performance philosophers and the work of other scholars and journalists, who have either analyzed and/or also attended the games, to start connecting the ways in which this performance can be regarded as the material embodiment of North Korean culture, national identity, and ideology, or at least the regime’s construction and fantasy of these aspects of the country.This review does not aim to provide justifications for or intend to give support to the North Korean government. Its purpose instead is twofold: first, to help shed light on a spectacular performance that few people outside of North Korea have experienced in such a little known or little understood country; and second, to present a perspective on repetition established in such an isolated and mysterious place, at least compared to the relative openness of most other countries, that few other individuals have personally experienced.
‘Alive’ Performance: Toward an Immersive Activist Philosophy
Get PDFThis article proposes to reanalyse the artistic and critical practice of performance through the deconstruction and remediation of its ‘virtual,’ unsighted potentials. It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of an ontogenenic dimension of affective transmission and recreation. Such recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art.These arguments connect concepts from aesthetic and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and (dis)individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan as well as other theorists. The approach intersects methodologies and epistemologies from activist philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance as a ‘technology of aliveness’ (in)formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal (re)modulation of shared perception.Ultimately, these formulations propose to reimagine performance as a synaesthetic archive of perceptive experience marked by a representational impossibility; a failure to appear fully. This actual condition of recurrent abstraction enables however a processual state of becoming, becoming-other, and being-becoming in related mo(ve)ments of pure aliveness
Theatralische Immanenz: Der deus ex machina nach dem Tod Gottes
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Das Auftreten übernatürlicher Geschöpfe auf der Theaterbühne, die in den Verlauf der Handlung intervenieren – wie der deus ex machina – ist mit dem „Tod Gottes“ nicht zu einem Ende gekommen. Es kann von zwei Perspektiven betrachtet werden: zuerst als ein meta-theatralisches Instrument, durch welches das theatralische Medium selbstreflexiv, manchmal sogar spielerisch, seine eigenen Bedingungen und Grenzen erforscht, als integraler Aspekt des theatralischen Apparates, oder seines Dispositivs; und zweitens von einer philosophischen oder theologischen Perspektive, wobei es die Frage aufwirft, warum es weiterhin als eine machtvolle Metapher dient – nicht nur für eine offene Zukünftigkeit, durch die utopische Begriffe kritisch reflektiert und neu figuriert werden, sondern auch für ideologische, soziale und persönliche Konflikte, wobei es oftmals sogar starke Elemente von Exzess, Gewalt und Grausamkeit impliziert. Der Artikel diskutiert diese theoretischen Fragen und erläutert sie anhand von Beispielen aus der Dreigroschenoper von Bertolt Brecht und Elisabeth Hauptmann.
English:
The appearance of supernatural creatures on the theatrical stage, like the deus ex machina, directly intervening in the flow of the events has not ceased with the “Death of God”. It can be viewed from two perspectives, first as a meta-theatrical device through which the theatrical medium self-reflexively, sometimes even playfully, examines its own conditions and limits, as an integral aspect of the theatrical apparatus, or its dispositive; and secondly from a philosophical or theological perspective, raising the question why it has continued to serve as a powerful metaphor not only for an open-ended futurity through which Utopian notions are critically reflected and refigured, but also for ideological, social and personal conflicts, frequently even involving strong components of excess, violence and cruelty. The article discusses these theoretical issues and exemplifies with The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann
Immanenz in der Physik
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In diesem Aufsatz wird die Geschichte der Raumkonzepte in der Physik im Kontext von transzendenten und immanenten Konzepten präsentiert. Kurz gesagt postulieren transzendente Konzepte Raum als umgebende Metastruktur, um materielle Objekte zu organisieren. Immanente Raumkonzepte existieren dagegen nicht unabhängig von den Objekten, sondern ergeben sich aus ihren Bezügen. In dieser Analyse wird sichtbar, dass transzendente Charakterisierungen des Raumes in den vergangenen Jahrhunderten in der Physik dominierend waren, während immanente Raumkonzepte erst seit der Entwicklung der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie aufgekommen sind. Die Bedeutung von Immanenz in der Physik abseits der Relativitätstheorie ist noch nicht hinreichend erschlossen. Im Gegensatz zum klassischen Framework von absoluten und relativen Beschreibungen des Raums, erlauben die Begriffe von Transzendenz und Immanenz eine komplementäre Raumkonzeption, die Elemente beider verbindet.
English:
In this article, the conceptual history of space in physics will be presented in the context of transcendent and immanent concepts. In short, transcendent concepts postulate space as an ambient super-structure to organize material objects, while in immanent concepts space does not exist apart from objects but emerges through their relations. In this analysis it becomes apparent that transcendent characterizations of space have been dominant in physics during the past centuries, while immanent conceptions of space have come to the fore only since the development of the general theory of relativity. The importance of immanence in physics besides relativity is still lacking. In contrast to the classical framework of absolute and relative accounts of space, the notions of transcendence and immanence allow for a complementary conception of space which combines elements of both
Einleitung. Philosophy On Stage. Immanenz in zeitgenössischer Kunst und Philosophie.
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Diese bi-linguale Sonderausgabe des Performance Philosophy Journals, die erste in deutscher und englischer Sprache, ist das Ergebnis des Forschungsprojekts „Artist-Philosophers. Philosophy AS Arts-based Research“, das vom Österreichischen Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF): AR275-G21 im Kontext des Programmes zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste (PEEK) gefördert wurde. Eine zentrale Fragestellung des PEEK-Projekts lautete: „Was geschieht mit dem traditionellen Bild der Philosophie, wenn Philosoph_innen beginnen, den Prozess des Philosophierens im öffentlichen Raum aufzuführen und kunst-basierte Praktiken in ihre Disziplin einzubeziehen?“ Ausgehend von unserer Annahme, dass Bedeutungen und Möglichkeiten aus differenziellen Beziehungen heraus generiert werden, die jemand mit anderen in einem konkreten weltlichen Milieu immanent teilt, haben wir im Verlauf des genannten Forschungsprojektes zwei Veranstaltungen realisiert, aus denen diese Publikation maßgeblich hervorgegangen ist: Das Forschungsfestival Philosophy On Stage #4 „Artist-Philosophers. Nietzsche et cetera“, das im November 2015 am Tanzquartier Wien stattfand, sowie die Konferenz „Immanenz in zeitgenössischer Kunst und Philosophie“ im Angewandte Innovation Lab (AIL) Wien. Diese Ausgabe des Performance Philosophy Journals umfasst Beiträge von: Arno Böhler, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Paulo de Assis, Susanne Valerie Granzer, Alice Lagaay, Dieter Mersch, John Ó Maoilearca, Freddie Rokem, Elisabeth Schäfer, Andreas Urs Sommer, Marcus Steinweg, Tanja Traxler, Stephen Zepke.
English:
This special issue of the Performance Philosophy journal—the first bilingual edition in German and English—is one output of the research project “Artist-Philosophers. Philosophy AS Arts-based Research”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR275-G21 in the context of the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK). A main question of the project was: “What happens to the traditional image of philosophy, once philosophers start to stage philosophy and implement arts-based practices into their discipline?” Starting from the philosophical assumption that meanings and possibilities are generated immanently out of the differential relations somebody shares with others within a concrete earthly milieu, we realised two main events in the course of the above-mentioned research project, on which this publication is based: The research festival Philosophy on Stage #4 „Artist-Philosophers. Nietzsche et cetera“ at Tanzquartier Wien in November 2015 and the conference “The Concept of Immanence in Philosophy and the Arts” at Angewandte Innovation Lab (AIL) Vienna. This issue of the Performance Philosophy Journal comprises texts by: Arno Böhler, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Paulo de Assis, Susanne Valerie Granzer, Alice Lagaay, Dieter Mersch, John Ó Maoilearca, Freddie Rokem, Elisabeth Schäfer, Andreas Urs Sommer, Marcus Steinweg, Tanja Traxler, Stephen Zepke
The Theatricality of the Punctum: Re-Viewing Camera Lucida
No full textI first encountered Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) in 2012 when I was developing a performance on falling and photography. Since then I have re-encountered Barthes’s book annually as part of my practice-as-research PhD project on the relationships between performance and photography. This research project seeks to make performance work in response to Barthes’s book – to practice with Barthes in an exploration of theatricality, materiality and affect. This photo-essay weaves critical discourse with performance documentation to explore my relationship to Barthes’s book. Responding to Michael Fried’s claim that Barthes’s Camera Lucida is an exercise in “antitheatrical critical thought” (Fried 2008, 98) the essay seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. Specifically, by exploring Barthes’s conceptualisation of the pose I discuss how performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes’s text. Additionally, I argue for Barthes’s book as an example of philosophy as performance and for my own work as an instance of performance philosophy
Returning to Jamais Vu: Uncanny Encounters in the Live Art Archive and in the Flesh
Get PDFThis paper explores returning to a performance, again and again, over an extended time frame, to re-imagine and re-view the piece. It focuses on a performance entitled Jamais Vu (2005–2007) by live artist Anne Seagrave. I analyse my personal encounter with the work over time, arguing for the significance of this durational approach, and of this artist/artwork for performance philosophy. I return to the work via writing/rewriting and performing/re-performing based on archival documents and embodied memory.
Theatrical Immanence: The Deus ex Machina after the Death of God
Get PDFThe appearance of supernatural creatures on the theatrical stage, like the deus ex machina, directly intervening in the flow of the events has not ceased with the “Death of God”. It can be viewed from two perspectives, first as a meta-theatrical device through which the theatrical medium self-reflexively, sometimes even playfully, examines its own conditions and limits, as an integral aspect of the theatrical apparatus, or its dispositive; and secondly from a philosophical or theological perspective, raising the question why it has continued to serve as a powerful metaphor not only for an open-ended futurity through which Utopian notions are critically reflected and refigured, but also for ideological, social and personal conflicts, frequently even involving strong components of excess, violence and cruelty. The article discusses these theoretical issues and exemplifies with The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann
The Paradox of a Gesture, Enlarged by the Distension of Time: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on a Slow-Motion Picture of Henri Matisse Painting
Get PDFIn his lecture series The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan refers to a “delightful example” that Merleau-Ponty gives in his Book Signes (1960). Lacan describes it as a “strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting.” This is a scene from the documentary entitled A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse, by director François Campaux, a 16mm black and white film shot in 1946. Merleau-Ponty points, as Lacan puts it, to “the paradox of that gesture which, enlarged by the distension of time, enables us to imagine the most perfect deliberation on each of these strokes.” In fact, Merleau-Ponty underscores that this is an illusion, due only to the technique of the slow motion picture. In this paper I will present the different ways in which Lacan and Merleau-Ponty refer to the slow motion picture of Matisse painting. I will do so in order to consider, comparatively, the ways in which Merleau-Ponty and Lacan define the gesture in reference to film technologies and to the process of subjectification. Both of them refer to the gesture in order to find a new balance in the relationship between subject, rationality and media technology. And it is exactly at this site where the question of an ethics of gesture appears