Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Immanenz lesen
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Der folgende Text eröffnete die Konferenz „Immanenz in zeitgenössischer Kunst und Philosophie“, die im Mai 2016 in Wien stattfand. Es handelt sich dabei um einen Reader mit Schlüsselaussagen zur Immanenz von Gilles Deleuze, Baruch de Spinoza, Giorgio Agamben, Henri Bergson, Francois Laruelle, Antonin Artaud und Friedrich Nietzsche. Dieser Reader wurde von Arno Böhler und Elisabeth Schäfer zusammengestellt. Susanne Valerie Granzer (S.V.G.) verarbeitete den Inhalt zu einer Kollage und trug Fragmente der Texte zum Beginn der Konferenz vor. Sie wurde dabei gelegentlich von Alice Lagaay (A.L.) unterbrochen, deren Einwürfe dazu dienten, Verbindungslinien zwischen den dichten theoretischen Texten und dem immanenten performativen Kontext zu ziehen, innerhalb dessen sie vorgetragen und aufgenommen wurden – d. h. dem Kontext der Konferenz. Der folgende Text bietet das Vorgetragene sowie die leichtherzigen – durchaus aber auch ernst gemeinten – Kommentare so dar, wie sie zur Aufführung kamen. Die Leser sind eingeladen, sich die Lebendigkeit (live-ness) des Ereignisses vorzustellen und sie nachzuerleben (re-enact), wobei ihre eigenen Kommentare, Fragen und Überlegungen die Lektüre unterbrechen.
English:
The 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
\u27Visibility brings with it responsibility\u27: Using a Pragmatic Performance Approach to Explore a Political Philosophy of Technology
Get PDFWith the emergence, suspicion and social acceptance of ubiquitous communications technology thoroughly plumbed and the digital age already wondering what it is going to rename itself in light of ever more fluid and complex technologies, this paper asks: what can theatre and performance provide to the production of a political philosophy of technology? Using the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and an analysis of a recent inter-cultural adaptation of Jean Genet\u27s The Maids, this study examines the politics of visible theatre technologies in performance and offers a pragmatic, or instrumentalist, approach to developing a political philosophy of technology
A ‘Paradox of Expression’: Merleau-Ponty and the Intertwining Nature of Brecht’s ‘not...but’ Procedure
Get PDFThis article seeks to investigate the practical applications of a performance process that Bertolt Brecht called the procedure of “fixing the ‘not…but’,” which produces a Verfremdungseffekt. The article also interrogates the philosophy that such a process inherently performs. In one of his last writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that to look at oneself through the eyes of another necessarily blends the divide between one body and another and, by applying one’s senses to another’s, one engages in a “paradox of expression.” I explore the process of working with actors to produce distancing effects in their acting by chronicling the results of a 2012 practice-as-research project titled The Galileo Experiment. I use Merleau-Ponty’s “paradox of expression” as a way of considering Brecht’s call for the co-presence of the actor and their character in a stage performance. I borrow Nick Crossley’s approach to phenomenological intersubjectivity and consider other theoretical implications of performing the ‘not...but’ procedure. I argue that in order for the actor to successfully perform Brecht’s ‘not...but’ procedure, the actor must play into their character while occasionally playing out of the character in an alternative attitude, using what I call the ‘reflective block’
Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués
Get PDFThis ReView of a series of therapy sessions that took place two years ago, over a period of seven months, takes the form of a theatrical text written for the stage. Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués is part monologue, part comedy, part detective story, and part history lesson and follows the story of theatre professor who makes an appointment with a therapist. What ensues is a sonic and surrealistic autobiographical tale of lost orientation, and of learning to turn an eye into an ear in order to hear the ways that our own darkness is looped with our grandest understanding of love. Oh, and there’s a tiger
\u27The Shadow of One’s Own Head\u27 or The Spectacle of Creativity
Get PDFWhen acting, the actor/actress experiences a complex regime of signs in his/her body, mind, mood and gender. These signs are both disturbing and promising. On the one hand, the act of creativity makes a wound obvious which has been incarnated within man. It tells him/her that he/she is not the sole actor of his/her actions. On the other hand, precisely this way acting on stage becomes an event. The act of this event reveals a way of be-coming in which one acts while at the same time being passive, in which the actor/actress is both agent and patient of his/her own performance. This complex artistic experience catapults actors/actresses into an open passage, into an in-between where they are liberated from the illusion of being the sole actors of their performances. One might even say that by this turn an actor/actress experiences a change, an “anthropological mutation” (Agamben). Or, to have it differently: the artist suffers a kind of “death of the subject”.It is remarkable that this loss of the predominance of subjectivity is a crucial aspect of acting which may affect the audience in a particularly intensive way. Why? Perhaps because it updates an extremely intimate connection between audience and actors/actresses which vicariously reflects the in-between of life and death. A passage by which life presents itself as itself? Life – by its plane of immanence
Equalizing Theatre and Philosophy: Laruelle, Badiou, and gestures of authority in the philosophy of theatre
Get PDFIn this article I engage François Laruelle’s notion of ‘non-standard’ aesthetics to provide a critical perspective on Alain Badiou’s various pronouncements on the philosophy of theatre. Whilst in works such as In Praise of Theatre (2015), Badiou initially appears magnanimous in relation to theatre’s own thinking, and indeed to demote the function of philosophy in relation to an ontological privilege now accorded (by him) to set theory, I will argue that this very benevolence, from a Laruellian perspective, constitutes another form of philosophical authoritarianism. That is, whilst Badiou famously describes theatre as ‘an event of thought’ that ‘directly produces ideas’ (Badiou 2005a, 72), this article draws from Laruelle to suggest that he ultimately positions himself as the authority on what ‘counts as theatre properly speaking’ (Badiou 2013, 109); performatively positioning his own thought as normative exception and as the gatekeeper to that exception
Fabric Philosophy: The “Texture” of Theatricality and Performativity
Get PDFAs metaphors of human existence, the idioms of theatricality and performativity both fluctuate between values of novelty and normativity: theatricality, between the essence of an art form and a cultural value variously opposed or embraced, performativity, between doing and dissimulation. To revert from drawing too sharp boundaries, either between the two phenomena or between their cognate art forms and everyday life, the article pursues to analyse them in “textural” terms specifically inspired by Tim Ingold’s ecological anthropology and Stephen C. Pepper’s philosophical pragmatism from the 1940s. Where Ingold’s ecology of lines admits to “no insides or outsides,” “trailing loose ends in every direction,” Pepper’s “contextualistic world” of events admits “no top nor bottom” to its strands and textures. After introducing Ingold’s networks of connected objects and meshworks of interwoven lines as shorthand terms for specifically theatrical and performative textures, their various dynamics are considered in terms of absorption and abstraction: on a global scale – I briefly consider the Anthropos(c)ene as theatrum mundi – seeing all the world as a stage indeed depends on something of a theatrical inversion of its lines of becoming. From the tensions of novelty and normativity, noted above, what emerges is a fabric philosophy of weaving and zooming between overlapping textures: if the performative names a dramaturgy of becoming, then the theatrical provides an optic for its analysis
Ethics, Staged
Get PDFThis article stages a dialogue between Giorgio Agamben’s theory of gesture and the 2016 reconstruction of Merce Cunningham’s 1964 choreography, Winterbranch. This juxtaposition encourages a comparison between Agamben\u27s and Cunningham\u27s respective approaches to the semiotics of dance, the way that dance can generate meaning but also evade meaning in a way that Agamben deems "proper" to the "ethical sphere." For Agamben, dance is composed of what he calls "gestures" that have "nothing to express" other than expressivity itself as a "power" unique to humans who have language. For Cunningham, dance is composed of what he calls "actions," or at other times "facts"—discrete and repeatable movements sketched in the air that reveal the "passion," the raw or naked "energy" of human expressivity before that energy has been directed toward a specific expressive project. I will look more closely at what Cunningham means by "actions," and to what extent they can be considered "gestures" in Agamben\u27s terms; I will also explore the "ethical sphere" opened by the display of mediality, the "being-in-a-medium" of human beings. What, then, do dance gestures expose that ordinary gestures do not? Why would such an exposure be “ethical” in Agamben’s terms? And why would (his notion of) the ethical rely on a stage
Untimely Meditation: Nietzsche et cetera
Get PDFThe following lecture performance was a part of the research festival Philosophy On Stage#4 at Tanzquartier Wien, where new relations between philosophy and the arts were tested and put into practice. The lecture starts with the claim that philosophical thinking necessarily performs the temporality of the untimely as a mode of being-in-time, which realises a revolt of time against its times in favour of a time to come. Being neither part of the past nor of eternity, the temporality of the untimely calls future events into being.Insofar as philosophy shares the temporality of the untimely with the arts, the lecture-performance defines arts-based philosophy––the alliance of art and philosophy, by which philosophy has started to implement artistic practices into philosophy––as a field for the appearance of the untimely. As Jacques Derrida has shown in Politics of Friendship, the proposition “Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –”, characterises precisely the aporetic principle of a democracy of the future, grounded in the temporality of the untimely. The genitive ‘of’ thereby indicates a mode of democracy which does only exist as long as it keeps itself open towards its own changeability and eventfulness. Therefore it necessarily takes place as the prelude of a future one is able to affirm full heartedly in advance, that is to say, over and over again. A mode of being-in-time that touches the secret of Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought: the thought of the eternal return of the same, in which somebody has realized the never ending eternity loops of be-coming; a life of immanence; a recurring movement of eternity within itself