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Textbook Inter Views in Performance Philosophy Crossings and Conversations 1St Edition Anna Street Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Inter Views in Performance Philosophy Crossings and Conversations 1St Edition Anna Street Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Performance Philosophy
Series Editors
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, UK
Alice Lagaay
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Weimar, Germany
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, NC, USA
“Towards the end of this insightful, critical and caring collection of writings between and
beyond performance and philosophy an echo hangs in the air: And so the questions remain.
As well they might given the ground covered by a suite of startling essays that not only tend to
this dynamically developing field but, in the original spirit of broadcasting, cast seeds of
thought way beyond the ploughed furrow of disciplinary rectitude. If the fine contributors to
this invaluable volume could forgive me a category mistake: essential reading.”
—Alan Read, Professor of Theatre and Director Performance Foundation,
King’s College London
“Among the many insights contained within this volume, perhaps the most critical is also one of
the simplest: that the process of dialogue is integral to the practices of performance and philosophy
alike. The interlocutions collected here, which bring together some of the most important and
innovative thinkers of our moment, are necessary reading for anyone interested in the possibilities
of the field that has come to be known as Performance Philosophy. With urgency and vigor, these
essays and interviews invite us into a conversation that reaches far beyond the pages of this book.”
—David Kornhaber, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Birth of Theater from the
Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama
Performance Philosophy is an interdisciplinary and international field of
thought, creative practice and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy
book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the
relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of
philosophical traditions and performance practices, including drama, thea-
tre, performance arts, dance, art and music. It also includes studies of the
performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself. As such, the
series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-as-
philosophy and philosophy-as-performance.
http://www.performancephilosophy.org/books/
Inter Views in
Performance
Philosophy
Crossings and Conversations
Editors
Anna Street Julien Alliot
English Studies English Studies
University of Paris-Sorbonne University of Paris-Sorbonne
Paris, France Paris, France
Performance Philosophy
ISBN 978-1-349-95191-8 ISBN 978-1-349-95192-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951027
The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for the
intensely engaging discussions that animated this venture and transformed
it into a series of interactive conversations. Our collaboration with you has
been a true delight and one of the highlights of our academic experiences
to date. We are humbled by your confidence.
While the contributions herein have considerably evolved in being
adapted to the book project, the original encounter that brought these
discussions together was the Theater, Performance, Philosophy: Crossings
and Transfers in Contemporary Anglo-American Thought conference held
at the Sorbonne in June 2014. We are indebted to our fellow co-organi-
zers of that event, Flore Garcin-Marrou and Liza Kharoubi, for their vision
and commitment. Many thanks as well to our partners for their support,
and to the many participants who came from near and far to further these
investigations. Special thanks to Elisabeth Angel-Perez for her unfailing
encouragement, inspiration, and support every step of the way.
To the series editors – Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay, Will Daddario, and
former series editor Freddie Rokem – we avow our sincerest admiration
and gratitude. Thank you for your perseverance in forging ever-new
possibilities for research and your generosity in welcoming everyone to
the field.
Many thanks to Florence Giordano for creating our cover design and to
the folks at Palgrave for their kindness and assistance.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Scenes of Instruction 39
Martin Puchner
vii
viii CONTENTS
Performative Disruptions
and the Transformation of Writing 69
Martin Puchner and Anna Street
Index 339
LIST OF FIGURES
xi
PART I
Deterritorializing Philosophy:
Cross-Continental Transfers and
Transformations
Introduction: Genealogies of Performance
Philosophy
A. Street (*)
English Studies, University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Department of European Cultures and Languages, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK
e-mail: annastreet@hotmail.fr
M. Pauker
Critical and Cultural Studies, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada
e-mail: magnolia.m.pauker@gmail.com
J. Alliot
English Studies, University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
e-mail: julienalliot@yahoo.fr
idea of speech acts changed the way language was understood to operate. In
philosophy, post-structuralism considered the new-found performativity of
language to be both parasitical and playful, implicating language in a vast
network of collective creations and contexts. The initial schism between so-
called “genuine” uses of language and their artificial counterparts cham-
pioned by Austin and Searle began to break down, leading to the curious
phenomenon of simultaneous paradigm shifts in divergent and at times even
opposing directions. Combining the fields of Anthropology and Theater
Studies, Performance Studies emerged, encompassing within its fold all
forms of ritualized and repeated behavior. In this novel perspective, lan-
guage’s parasitical aspects are precisely what pushed the recognition of
performative acts beyond the walls of the theater. New forms of performance
art gained momentum, particularly remarkable for their independence from
the written text in their embrace of the body as the ultimate carrier of
meaning. Privileging improvisation and audience interaction, scripts were
left by the wayside or even violently rejected. At the same time, within
philosophy and in perfect counter-step, post-structuralists were proclaiming
that there was nothing outside the text. What was understood as the para-
sitical nature of the performativity of language led not to a rejection of the
text in favor of physical embodiment but, rather, to a recognition of the text
as the primary site for the free play of signifiers. Thus, far from reconciling
Performance Studies and Philosophy, the various ways in which each field
conceptualized the common term of “performance” only served to widen
the gap between the living body and the written word.
Nevertheless, as these differing concepts of performance slowly over-
come their historical opposition, it appears that both ends of the polarized
spectrum are beginning to recognize their common ground and to dis-
avow presumptions of an intrinsic hostility between physicality and tex-
tuality. Interestingly, the “philosophical turn” within the field of Theater
and Performance Studies, as documented by Laura Cull, has found its
correlation in rising trends within philosophy, as the falling away of
transcendental metaphysics has led to performative articulations of ethical
stances, described by Simon Critchley as “the staking of a claim.”1 Jon
McKenzie goes so far as to say that the loss of grand narratives is affecting
not only specific disciplines, but the very architectonics of learning
1
Simon Critchley, “Tragedy as Philosophy” (Lecture, Tilburg Summer School, Tilburg, The
Netherlands, August 9, 2014).
INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY 5
2
Alain Badiou, Hélène Cixous, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière come to mind, among
others.
8 A. STREET ET AL.
3
Laura Cull, “Performance Philosophy—Staging a New Field,” in Encounters in
Performance Philosophy, eds. Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), 33.
INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY 9
transpositions, and forms, regretting that notions of the trace have led
to a reductive understanding of writing as abstract or non-plastic.
While acknowledging the historical complicity between writing and
power—extending even to sacred authority, Puchner recognizes writ-
ing’s democratizing and disruptive force. In discussing writing’s
complicated relations to orality, performance, pedagogy, philosophy,
and the body, he warns against one-sided perspectives that lean toward
characterizing these creative tensions as either simply normative or
exclusively subversive. Advocating a return to considerations of origin,
Puchner suggests that clay’s many uses in ancient cultures already
evoke the inexhaustible wealth of writing’s unrealized potential.
Part III, “Between Discipline and Performance,” proposes reflections
on the practical implications of the ongoing paradigm shift from a socio-
symbolic order based on disciplinary mechanisms to one based on perfor-
mance. Extending beyond theorizations of theater or performance art,
performance practices now infiltrate the workplace, the economy, politics,
the media, and basically all other forms of social organization via new
technologies, efficiency principles, and visual viability. Attempts to remedi-
ate knowledge practices must therefore take these trends into considera-
tion, especially considering that the emergence of Performance Philosophy
is itself enabled by the development of performance paradigms and their
applications. The chapters in this section thus ask, “How can one be
mindful of site-specificity in a global world?” “How can the human face
circulate past walls of social, political, and economic demarcations?” “How
can play be reclaimed as a liberating force of positive freedom?” This large-
scale depiction of how Performance Philosophy’s basic vision corresponds
to the current evolution of social structures across the board goes beyond
heretofore articulated claims about the field’s potential relevance. Much
more than another interdisciplinary experiment within the confines of the
humanities, Performance Philosophy presents a challenge to knowledge
practices that disrupts the very articulations, assumptions, and mediums of
what constitutes the act of thinking within any one discipline.
Comparing the global network of university institutions to a broadcasting
network or worldly theater, in “Ouisconsin Eidos, Wisconsin Idea, and the
Closure of Ideation,” Jon McKenzie points out that, regardless of their site-
specificity, these institutions share the same foundational assumption that
thinking happens by way of ideas, projecting the world as the object of
universal knowledge. Yet, McKenzie claims that due to institutional crises,
the gradual replacement of books, writing, and discipline with smart media,
12 A. STREET ET AL.
Life or Death,” Malabou advocates for a more plastic and energetic approach
to performance, foregrounded by such works as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo.
Acknowledging that the sovereign power of life should not entail restricting
the self to preconceived and closed systems enables new, paradoxical mod-
alities of reading to emerge, as illustrated by Derrida’s observations on the
signature of a text being deferred to an addressee. In such a celebratory
rehabilitation of ambiguities and equivocalities, Malabou makes palpable
that the loop of life should be more centrifugal than centripetal, even as it
inaugurates a new type of philosophical critique and discourse that celebrates
contradictions and inconsistencies.
In his response to Malabou’s text—or rather “narrative”—John Ó
Maoilearca questions the exercise itself: the “game of positions,” of intel-
lectual postures and impostures. In “The Animal Way: On Malabou’s
Deconstructed Life,” he playfully entertains a series of possible responses
which would have corresponded to what has become the conventional
philosophical exercise, consisting of out-performing another thinker by
ferreting out his or her contradictions or failings. Yet, Ó Maoilearca
concludes that such a response would overlook the performative nature
of Malabou’s resistance to such posturing. Her demonstration already
follows a new approach to philosophy—one that privileges plasticity over
positioning. Malabou performs her thought in the between of positions, in
the spirit of “advocare,” “not to speak for the other, but to be called upon
to speak for the other.” This, Ó Maoilearca suggests, is the “animal way”
to which Malabou’s thought leads.
Such an “animal way” of philosophizing is explored further in Katie
Schaag’s chapter on neuroplasticity, “Biological Plasticity and
Performative Possibility in the Work of Catherine Malabou and
Curious.” Drawing on recent developments in neurosciences as well as
her own experience of “autobiology” workshops facilitated by the perfor-
mance company Curious, Schaag draws attention to some of the ways in
which neuroscience can both confirm and further nuance postmodern
theories of subjectivity as a process that is always in flux and unfolding.
By bringing together a scientific approach, political philosophy, and per-
formance studies, Schaag asks what these disciplines have to offer one
another, suggesting that they are, in fact, mutually enriching. So, while
the impact of neuroscience may already be perceived in philosophy—and
this is due in large part to Malabou’s work in the field—philosophical
inquiry has much to offer neuroscience in particular and scientific dis-
course more generally. In the wake of feminist science studies, Schaag
INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY 15
establishes the ways in which performance literally takes to the streets and
may be employed as a conceptual framework for thinking about identity
and behavior. Taking care to maintain distinctions between performance
studies and theater—also between performance and performativity—
Butler asks the reader to think about the ways in which these domains
overlap, offering critical methodologies for thinking about political
engagement in everyday life. Butler begins this work with a consideration
of gender performativity in order to think about the relationship between
linguistic and performance studies, locating the body as the interface for
both the speech act and embodied performance. Echoing her well-known
arguments that “performance” must replace “essence” as a way to under-
stand the development of gendered identities, Butler examines the role of
gesture in relation to language and performance by focusing on Walter
Benjamin’s reading of epic theater in Brecht. Establishing parallels in
terms of the consequential functions of gender performativity and gesture,
Butler suggests that the Benjaminian practice of stopping short in describ-
ing scenes of violence might be read as a productive loss, a decomposition
that may be potentially transformative, even producing a shift in relation
to tradition as her theory of gender performativity carries within it the
possibility of agency, which, though constricted, opens toward change.
In the section’s second chapter, Freddie Rokem’s “Framing Performance
through the Proscenium” investigates the transposition of the proscenium
onto what Butler refers to as the “surfaces of everyday life.” This shift,
Rokem explains, was effected by the disciplinary formation of Performance
Studies and its uptake of Austin’s provocative injunction deriding the poten-
tial impact of the staged performative utterance. Rokem supports Butler’s
strategic displacement of the proscenium and the ensuing political implica-
tions, acknowledging that much may have been gained through the disci-
plinary transposition of Performance Studies. However, Rokem contends
that, from the perspective of the theater, this movement brought about the
marginalization of crucial aspects—most notably, the suspension of belief—
offered by the theater, which the proscenium had created and safeguarded.
The third chapter in this section, “Subjects of Subversion: Rancière and
Butler on the Aesthetics of Politics,” returns to Butler’s work addressing the
relations among performance, performativity, and politics. Clare Woodford
considers Butler and Jacques Rancière as “theorists of subversion” by focus-
ing on the ways in which both philosophers remark upon the political power
of disruption that performance can effect. In Woodford’s estimation, while
Butler presents the conditions through which subversion may take place, her
INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY 17