Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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This Kinetic World: Rethinking the Grid (Neo-Baroque Calls)
Get PDFIn performance research today, as in the 1960s, the pressing question is: how to do things with systems. I return to the grid to attend both sites and modes of cultural practices and techniques (technologies) that so powerfully harness and transform the control society. My approach to the grid as dispositif seeks to open familiar dialogues, about variants of subjectivity and presence, to the materialities and devices of systems, structures, and bureaucratic operations. As seeing machine, the grid’s story includes linear perspective, geometricization, and fugitivity. Defined by consistency and contradition, by optics, haptics, and cybernetics, I identify grid logics with the neo-baroque. Exploring the grid through tiling, weaving, seafaring, and curating techniques that link the administrative and the algorithmic state, I discuss the arts of two architectural sites in the port cities of Cartagena, Colombia and Singapore
‘A work of art does not contain the least bit of information’: Deleuze and Guattari and Contemporary Art
Get PDFDeleuze 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
In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht
Get PDFThe following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider’s work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomises the operations of the “both/and”—a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye’s reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. Schneider’s ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response
Introduction: Philosophy On Stage: The Concept of Immanence in Contemporary Art and Philosophy
Get PDFThis 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
An Early Concept of the Theatre of Interplay: The Relevance of Branko Gavella’s Theory for the Development of Performance Philosophy
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to contribute to the shift in the perception of Branko Gavella’s theoretical work based on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, and to point to the relevance of his theory of acting for the autochthonous development of the European branch of the modern philosophy of performance, as an interdisciplinary filed of research different form the methods traditionally employed by aestheticians of theatre. This paper—based on several decades of work on the systematization and comparative contextualization of Gavella’s theoretical ouvre—makes an attempt at demonstrating the operability of Gavella’s concepts in the context of some recent interdisciplinary insights into the performance phenomenon. Gavella’s theory can clearly distinguish concepts that we bracket today under the rubric of meaning, as opposed to use, i.e. language-reference, as opposed to speaker’s reference. Already in the 1930s, he applied the relation of semantics to pragmatics, as it would eventually be understood in speech act theory from Austin on, to the problems peculiar to theatre. The core of this paper deals with Gavella’s “speech situations”, and the dynamism of exchange in the relational space of culture
A thought of performance
Get PDFIn this article I attempt to trace the path of my artistic research, which began from the application of schizoanalysis in performance and which now explores the possible limits of thought in order to regard how performance thinks in specifically different ways from discursive forms of thought, such as philosophy. The main argument starts from the notion – borrowed from French thinker, François Laruelle - that philosophical thought does not tell us more about the Real than any other gestures of thought. I begin from a speculative relationship between the apparatus of cognitive capitalism. I conclude by superpositioning the post-humanist thought of Laruelle and Karen Barad with the concept of ‘non-standard’ performance as fictioning. As a whole, the article aims to propose a performative approach to artistic research in these terms
Gilbert Simondon’s ‘Transduction’ as Radical Immanence in Performance
Get PDFTransduction is Gilbert Simondon’s key concept for understanding processes of differentiation and of individuation in a number of fields, including scientific disciplines, social and human sciences, technological devices, and artistic domains. Originating from the sciences and crucially developed in its philosophical implications by Simondon, transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities. This chapter appropriates this concept for musical practice, aiming at establishing a foundational conceptual layer for a broader research effort that crucially includes artistic practice—both composition and performance—as its starting and end points. After an introductory depiction of what transduction might mean for a music performer, this paper focuses on the presentation of different definitions of transduction, mainly stemming from Simondon himself, but including two further extensions: one to Deleuze’s concept of haecceity (and via Deleuze, to my own micro-haecceity), the other to Brian Massumi’s notion of corporeality. Keeping in mind the potential of these definitions for the making of music, this essay explores eight different, yet complementary ways of thinking transduction, which are presented in a growing scale of complexity from the incandescent light bulb (3.1.) to the intricacies of decision-making in living organisms (3.8.), passing by the question of time and temporality (3.2.), thermodynamics (3.3.), information theory (3.4.), a redesigned theory of haecceities (3.5.), Riemannian topology (3.6.), and corporeality (3.7.). All these topics are presented here in short, as opening gates to wider fields of inquiry, suggesting future avenues of research, rather than claiming to offer finished thought
Ethos Formula: Liturgy and Rhetorics in the Work of Ted Shawn
Get PDFBeginning with Giorgio Agamben’s alignment of ethics and potentiality, this essay questions the ethical dimension of gesture in the field of dance as an eminently potentiality-bound art form. This draws on Daniel Sibony’s concept of law and dance, according to which the body simultaneously repels and longs for the law as a nexus of heteronomous structures. I frame this through a revision of Aby Warburg’s rhetorical concept, pathos formula, into the corollary term, ethos formula, as the encoded movement patterns of ethical attitudes or comportments which are motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content. Do gestures and their citation in dance bear an ethical dimension similar to the encoded transmission of emotions through movement?This new concept of ethos formula finds an excellent example in the work of the American choreographer Ted Shawn (1891–1972). His strikingly hybrid use of ethos formula from the 19th century Catholic theorist François Delsarte and his parallel practice of quoting liturgical gestures from Protestant church services, pursues the ambiguity and uncanniness of modernity itself. For Shawn—like many other protagonists of modernist dance—argues on the one hand for freeing the body from the boundaries of classical ballet in the name of individual expression, and on the other hand for an instrumentalized body that still clings to principles of taxonomy and normativity
Gilbert Simondons ‚Transduktion‘ als radikale Immanenz der Performanz
Get PDFDeutsch:
Transduktion ist Gilbert Simondons Schlüsselkonzept für das Verständnis von Prozessen der Differenzierung und Individuation in einer Reihe von Gebieten, einschließlich der naturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, der Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften, technischer Hilfsmittel sowie der Domänen des Künstlerischen. Beruhend auf den Naturwissenschaften und bezüglich seiner philosophischen Implikationen entscheidend weiterentwickelt durch Simondon, bezieht sich die Transduktion auf eine dynamische Operation, in deren Verlauf Energie aktualisiert wird, indem sie im Verlaufe eines Prozesses, der neue Materialitäten individuiert, von einem Zustand in einen anderen gebracht wird. Der vorliegende Text macht dieses Konzept auf die Musikpraxis anwendbar und zielt darauf ab, eine konzeptionelle Grundlage für umfangreichere Forschungsbemühungen zu schaffen, die entscheidend die künstlerische Praxis – sowohl Komposition als auch Performance – als ihren Ausgangs- und Endpunkt miteinschließt. Nach einer einleitenden Darstellung der Bedeutung, welche die Transduktion für Musiker_innen haben kann, konzentriert sich der vorliegende Text auf die Darlegung unterschiedlicher Definitionen der Transduktion, die hauptsächlich von Simondon selber stammen, aber auch zwei Erweiterungen betreffen: zum einen von Deleuze’ Konzept der Haecceïtas (bzw. ausgehend von Deleuze von meiner eigenen Mikro-Haecceïtas), zum anderen von Brian Massumis Begriff der Körperlichkeit. Vor dem Hintergrund des Potentials, welches diese Definitionen für die Herstellung von Musik entfalten können, untersucht der vorliegende Aufsatz acht unterschiedliche, aber komplementäre Möglichkeiten, die Transduktion zu denken, und dies in steigernder Komplexität, von der Glühbirne (3.1.) bis zu den Feinheiten der Entscheidungsfindung in lebenden Organismen (3.8.), wobei auch die Frage von Zeit und Temporalität (3.2.), die Thermodynamik (3.3.), die Informationstheorie (3.4.), eine überarbeitete Theorie der Haecceïtas (3.5), die Riemannsche Topologie (3.6.) sowie die Körperlichkeit angesprochen (3.7.) werden. All diese Themen werden nur kurz vorgestellt, als Eingangstore zu weiteren Untersuchungen, als Vorschläge für zukünftige Richtungen der Forschung, und ohne den Anspruch, abgeschlossene Gedankengänge darzustellen.
English:
Transduction is Gilbert Simondon’s key concept for understanding processes of differentiation and of individuation in a number of fields, including scientific disciplines, social and human sciences, technological devices, and artistic domains. Originating from the sciences and crucially developed in its philosophical implications by Simondon, transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities. This chapter appropriates this concept for musical practice, aiming at establishing a foundational conceptual layer for a broader research effort that crucially includes artistic practice—both composition and performance—as its starting and end points. After an introductory depiction of what transduction might mean for a music performer, this paper focuses on the presentation of different definitions of transduction, mainly stemming from Simondon himself, but including two further extensions: one to Deleuze’s concept of haecceity (and via Deleuze, to my own micro-haecceity), the other to Brian Massumi’s notion of corporeality. Keeping in mind the potential of these definitions for the making of music, this essay explores eight different, yet complementary ways of thinking transduction, which are presented in a growing scale of complexity from the incandescent light bulb (3.1.) to the intricacies of decision-making in living organisms (3.8.), passing by the question of time and temporality (3.2.), thermodynamics (3.3.), information theory (3.4.), a redesigned theory of haecceities (3.5.), Riemannian topology (3.6.), and corporeality (3.7.). All these topics are presented here in short, as opening gates to wider fields of inquiry, suggesting future avenues of research, rather than claiming to offer finished thought