Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin’s "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"
Get PDFThis essay is a close reading of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a methodological proposal. A comparative reading of the English translation with the German original reveals a sustained reflection on the gestural rhythm of interpretation that the translation obscures. The question of interpretation is an ethical question for Benjamin and for this reason the essay argues against Giorgio Agamben’s idea of gesture as “the communication of communicability,” an idea derived from a reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Hence, the larger issue at stake is how the interpretive gesture is to be defined with respect to violence and what role spatialization and choreography play in the Trauerspiel book’s chapters as extensions of the halting or intermittent gesture of the Prologue in a secularized vision of history
Laruelle, Immanenz und Performanz: Was tut die Non-Philosophie?
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François Laruelles „non-philosophische“ Praxis ist eng verbunden mit seiner performativen Sprache, beispielsweise wenn die Non-Philosophie die Frage „Was bedeutet Denken?“ damit beantwortet, dass zu denken nicht „Denken“ bedeutet, sondern Aufführen. Laruelle beschreibt die Non-Philosophie in gleicher Weise als eine „transzendentale Praxis“, als „immanente Pragmatik“ oder als „universale Pragmatik“, die sowohl „für die Sprache im Allgemeinen als auch für die Philosophie von Wert“ ist: Er besteht darauf, dass wir immer darauf schauen, „was-ich-beim-sprechen-tue und nicht nur auf das, was ich sage“ – denn Letzteres ist lediglich das was geschieht, wenn „die Philosophie wieder vom [Denken] Besitz ergreift“. Indem sie sich diesem Zugriff entzieht, liefert die Non-Philosophie Neu-Beschreibungen der Philosophie, welche wiederum die Art und Weise beeinflussen, in der philosophische Texte gesehen werden. In gleicher Weise ist es wert festgehalten zu werden, dass Laruelle sich gegen die Konzentration auf die Aktivität innerhalb des Konzeptes des Sprechakts ausspricht und stattdessen die „deskriptive Passivität“ betont, der eine immanente Pragmatik verpflichtet ist; Aussagen, die „durch ihre schiere Existenz“ das manifestieren, „was sie letztendlich beschreiben müssen – Aussagen, die gleichermaßen deskriptive und performativ sind.“ Was Laruelle als „Aufgeführt-ohne-Aufführung“ bezeichnet, wäre eine Aktion des Realen oder des „in-Einem“ – philosophische Sprache gesehen als etwas Aufgeführtes, ohne dass wir diese oder irgendeine andere Sprache verwenden. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz wird dieser komplexe Gedanke mit bestimmten Konzepten und Praktiken der Performance verglichen, die nicht explizit von der Philosophie kommen (Allan Kaprow, Richard Schechner und besonders Michael Kirby), aber sehr wohl einen Schlüssel zum Verständnis dieser passiven Aktion des Realen liefern können.
English:
François Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question \u27what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing. Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy:’ He insists that we look at ‘that-which-I-do-in-saying and not just what I say’ – for the latter is simply what happens when thought is ‘taken hold of again by philosophy.’ Resisting this hold, non-philosophy performs re-descriptions of philosophy that, in doing so, produce effects on how philosophical texts are seen. All the same, it is notable that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges; statements that manifest ‘by their very existence what they must describe in the last instance – statements identically descriptive and performative.’ What Laruelle calls a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ would be an action of the Real, or the ‘in-One’ – philosophical language seen as a performed without we using this or any language to perform. In this essay, this complex thought is compared with certain concepts and practices of performance that do not come from philosophy so explicitly (Allan Kaprow’s, Richard Schechner’s and Michael Kirby’s especially), but may well offer a key to understanding this passive action of the Real
Figurationen von Immanenz. Das Ereignis: Schreiben
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Im Licht von Deleuze’ und Guattaris Philosophie wird alles Seiende, menschliche Subjekte inklusive, unter der Perspektive dessen betrachtet, dass sie Teil der Natur sind. Daraus folgt eine Philosophie der radikalen Immanenz sowie der Ausgang für ein Denken körperlichen Mitseins. Der Körper wird in dieser Perspektive zu etwas, das nicht mit sich selbst ident, sondern offen ist. Körper werden somit zu Bewegungen oder Akten. Können Prozesse des Schreibens beschrieben werden als immanente Bewegungen von Körpern?
English:
If anything, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, makes all living beings, including the human subjects, very much ‘part of nature’. Calling for an embodied philosophy of radical immanence marks the start of a bodily philosophy of relations. The body in this perspective is a relation to what is not itself. It is basically a movement or an activity. Could certain processes of writing be described as immanent to such movements or activities
Dialektik der Rastlosigkeit
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In dem Abschnitt von „Aktive Passivität“ (2014), der „Ästhetik des Nichtwissens“ betitelt ist, folgt Martin Seel Adornos Formulierung einer „bestimmten Unbestimmtheit“, um eine „Feier des Ungewissen“ als das „Telos jeder ästhetischen Wahrnehmung“ zu proklamieren (Seel 2014, 102ff). Zweifellos trifft es zu, dass Unbestimmtheit und Nichtwissen, ebenso wie die ästhetische Reflexion, Anteil an der Erfahrung eines Kunstwerkes haben. Adornos Formulierung begrenzt die Dimensionen des Gewissen und des Ungewissen, des Gewussten und des Nichtwissens, des Bestimmten und des Unbestimmten. Alles hängt davon ab, den Charakter dieser Begrenzung zu erfassen. Es lässt sich von einer Dialektik sprechen, insofern als diese eine negative Dialektik bleibt, welche die finale Synthese verweigert – eine Dialektik der Rastlosigkeit.
English:
In the section of Aktive Passivität (2014) entitled “Ästhetik des Nichtwissens” (The Aesthetic of Unknowing) Martin Seel follows Adorno’s formulation of “determinate indeterminateness” in order to proclaim the “celebration of unknowing” as the “telos of all aesthetic perception” (Seel 2014, 102ff). He’s undoubtedly right that uncertainty and unknowing are part of experiencing a work of art as well as aesthetic reflection. Adorno’s formulation restricts the dimensions of the certain and the uncertain, the known and the unknown, the determinate and the indeterminate. Everything depends upon grasping the character of this restriction. You can speak of dialectic insofar as it remains a negative dialectic that denies itself a final synthesis—a dialectic of restlessness
Beuys’ Chair and the Violence of the Other: Toward a Theory of Aesth-ethics
Get PDFMost rare are those works of art that, in a simple visual gesture, succeed in formulating a dilemma that occupies culture as a whole. Such is the artwork of Joseph Beuys entitled Fat Chair. The work—viewed mainly from a phenomenological perspective—is comprised of two elements holding a tension: a chair on the one hand, and a lump of fat placed on top of it on the other. The tension between these elements, so the article argues, manifests the tension between two types of violence: following Benjamin, these are termed “the violence of the Father” and “the violence of the Other” (or in Hebrew, “the Violence of ha-Rav”). The violence of the Father refers mainly to the violence of culture: the violence of the concept and the category from the side of the object, and the violence of the law/name of the Father from the side of the subject. The violence of the Other, transgressing distinctions between good and evil and subject and object, is the violence of the pre-cultural and the primordial, before law and language. This primal violence cannot appear in its full presence, either in culture in general or in art in particular; it can only appear as a leftover and a spectre. Beuys\u27 artwork manifests this aporetic appearance in a paradigmatic manner, and in this sense, it could serve as a paradigm for the possibility of hospitality in art. In fact, the article opens the way for an argument of a larger scale, according to which art, and not the social sphere—as Levinas maintains—should be viewed as the sphere of the hospitality of the entirely Other. The study of such hospitality in art should therefore be termed “Aesth-ethics.
Laruelle, Immanence, and Performance: What Does Non-Philosophy Do?
Get PDFFrançois Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question \u27what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing. Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy:’ He insists that we look at ‘that-which-I-do-in-saying and not just what I say’ – for the latter is simply what happens when thought is ‘taken hold of again by philosophy.’ Resisting this hold, non-philosophy performs re-descriptions of philosophy that, in doing so, produce effects on how philosophical texts are seen. All the same, it is notable that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges; statements that manifest ‘by their very existence what they must describe in the last instance – statements identically descriptive and performative.’ What Laruelle calls a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ would be an action of the Real, or the ‘in-One’ – philosophical language seen as a performed without we using this or any language to perform. In this essay, this complex thought is compared with certain concepts and practices of performance that do not come from philosophy so explicitly (Allan Kaprow’s, Richard Schechner’s and Michael Kirby’s especially), but may well offer a key to understanding this passive action of the Real
Dialectic of Restlessness
Get PDFIn the section of Aktive Passivität (2014) entitled “Ästhetik des Nichtwissens” (The Aesthetic of Unknowing) Martin Seel follows Adorno’s formulation of “determinate indeterminateness” in order to proclaim the “celebration of unknowing” as the “telos of all aesthetic perception” (Seel 2014, 102ff). He’s undoubtedly right that uncertainty and unknowing are part of experiencing a work of art as well as aesthetic reflection. Adorno’s formulation restricts the dimensions of the certain and the uncertain, the known and the unknown, the determinate and the indeterminate. Everything depends upon grasping the character of this restriction. You can speak of dialectic insofar as it remains a negative dialectic that denies itself a final synthesis—a dialectic of restlessness
Reading Immanence
Get PDFThe following text opened the conference, “The Concept of Immanence in Philosophy and the Arts”, held in Vienna in May 2016. It is a reader consisting of key passages on immanence by Gilles Deleuze, Baruch de Spinoza, Giorgio Agamben, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle, Antonin Artaud and Friedrich Nietzsche. The reader was put together by Arno Böhler and Elisabeth Schäfer, and a collage of its content arranged by Susanne Valerie Granzer, who read out these text fragments at the start of the conference. Her reading was sporadically interrupted by Alice Lagaay, whose comments served to draw lines of connection between the dense theoretical texts and the performative immanent context in which they were being read and digested—the context of the conference. We present here the readings and their lighthearted—and at times deadly serious—commentary as performed. Readers are invited to imagine and re-enact the live-ness of this event, letting their own comments, questions and musings interrupt the proposed interruptions of reading
Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture
Get PDFThe introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture’s nexus with ethics. Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. Gestural acting-otherwise is illustrated in a number of ways: We might talk of a gestural ethics when gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where it is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen, in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. It interrupts or modifies operative continua that might be geared towards violence; it appears in situations that are suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play; and it emerges in the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings
„Ein Kunstwerk enthält nicht die geringste Information“. Deleuze, Guattari und die zeitgenössische Kunst
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Deleuzes und Guattaris Zurückweisung der Konzeptkunst ist allgemein bekannt und passt so garnicht zur derzeitigen Hegemonie der “post-konzeptionellen” Kunstpraktiken. Genauso unpassend erscheint Deleuzes ontologische und politische Abneigung gegen die Photographie, die „Schnappschüsse“ oder Repräsentationen des Werdens liefert, indem sie Klischeebilder unmittelbar in unserer Gehirne pflanzt, die dann unsere Handlungen und Reaktionen kontrollieren, indem sie uns der Fähigkeit zum kreativen Denken berauben. In Cinema 2 weitet Deleuze diese Argumentation auf das neue “elektronische Bild” aus das, wie auch die Konzeptkunst, die Ebene der Komposition in eine „Schneidetischebene“ oder einen „Bildschirm“ verwandelt, welche Informationen und mit ihnen unsere zu Schnittstellen gewordenen Gehirne einfach nur formatieren. Heutzutage werden Konzeptpraktiken, Photographie und digitale Technologien von der zeitgenössischen Kunst als selbstverständlich angesehen, die auch fröhlich „D&G“ anwendet. Doch verdienen Deleuzes und Guattaris Gedanken nicht eine kritischere Würdigung? Braucht es nicht eine kleinere Kriegsmaschine? Wie sähe die aus im Falle der zeitgenössischen Kunstpraktiken? Unter den diversen Möglichkeiten untersucht der vorliegende Text die sublimen Verzweigungen einer Deuleuzeschen Vorstellung des “Denkens” sowie dessen Position als des „immanent Äußeren“ der post-konzeptionellen Richtung der Kunst
English:
Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of Conceptual art is well known, and sits awkwardly with the current hegemony of ‘post-conceptual’ artistic practices. Equally awkward is Deleuze’s ontological and political dislike of photography, which produces a ‘snapshot’ or representation of becoming, placing cliched images directly into our brains, controlling our actions and reactions by denying us the power to think creatively. In Cinema 2 Deleuze will extend this argument to the new ‘electronic image’, which like Conceptual art turns the plane of composition into a ‘flatbed’ plane or ‘screen’ that simply formats information, and with it our interfaced brains. Today, conceptual practice, photography and digital technologies are all simply taken for granted by contemporary art, which is also happy to use “D&G” as well. But doesn’t Deleuze and Guattari’s thought require a more critical application? Doesn’t it demand a minor war-machine? What would this be in the case of contemporary artistic practice? Amongst various possibilities this paper will explore the sublime ramifications of a Deleuzean image of ‘thought’, and its position as the ‘immanent outside’ of art’s post-conceptual trajectory