Summary: text on/in/around performance philosophy; Laura Cull ò. Maoilearca
Maoilearca, Laura Cull Ó. „Performance Philosophy: An Introduction“. Performance Philosophy 10, Nr. 1 (o. J.): 31.
Because of my interest in practicing performance and of my background, and different people pointed out its existence to me, I thought I should look into something called “performance philosophy”. At the outset I am not certain whether it will be for me. I am definitely not doing philosophy anymore, and I am not thinking about performance philosophically. I am (among other things I hope!) concerned with overcoming philosophy for me, and definitively not doing a kind of philosophy that would be performance philosophy.
In Laura Cull Maoilearca’s discussion, she addresses actually twice some anti-philosophical attitudes. She seems to think that performance philosophy has a place for these anti-philosophical attitudes. Possibly, this sets me at ease?
First, she says on p.3 that performance philosophy stands against a certain kind of philosophy that would place itself “outside” and thereby “risk a totalizing view from nowhere”. Her worry there is that she should not write philosophically about performance philosophy, because that would “performatively contradict the very immanence of the field by seeking to describe it”. This she resolves by claiming that cycles of provisional stagings of (self-)observations should be possible in articles such as the one she is writing. The second mention of an anti-philosophical attitude on p.12 where she says that in her (social) “context most people assume that philosophy is a dry, academic, desk-bound enterprise, something almost exclusively practiced by white Western men that reinforces a restricted canon of thinking produced almost exclusively by other white Western men (dead and alive)”. Then later, she discusses something called “non-philosophy” brought forward by François Laruelle: “For F. Laruelle, standard philosophy involves the gesture wherein thought withdraws from the world in order to occupy a position of authority or power in relation to it.” This conception of the philosophical type of thinking reminds Nietzsche and the theme of reification in Adorno and afterwards.
I am not exactly sure whether to agree with this extreme negative view of the “standard philosophical attitude/move”. I am not sure that the philosophical arguments I know, that I would say do have an element in it, that I would metaphorically (more neutrally) call a “standing back”, are always “outside” in this negative totalizing way, that it is practiced to reinforce a white Western male canon, or that it is inherently a move to obtain a hierarchical relationship on something. Some typical standard philosophical arguments rely not on looking from “further away”, but for example from looking into more detail, for example on the language used to express a thought, so the metaphor of “looking more closely” also sometimes applies (still, discussing the language used is somehow “above”…). But whereas I am not so sure about this “elevation/superiority” critique of philosophy, i do dislike a lot about “standard” academic philosophy. But my disliking stems less from a philosophical deep critique and it has more to do with dynamics and context, feelings of unease in that culture, how I felt many people had to contort, the extreme hierarchies in the institutions and so on. I am not sure it is so different in any other academic discipline. In short, the philosophical critique of philosophy is too much philosophy for my current taste.
But turning now to her characterization of performance philosophy, I retained the following points (in no particular order).
- Performance philosophy stands in contrast to philosophy about performance. She calls the latter an instance of the application paradigm in the relationship between philosophy and the arts. That paradigm gives philosophy the authority to explain the arts and therefore reproduces hierarchies between philosophy and the arts as modes of knowledge. So, performance philosophy seeks a methodology in the relation between philosophy and arts that goes “beyond” application.
- Performance philosophy understands philosophy and performance as already mutually implicated. Especially, as cited from Laruelle, thought is understood, as “a style, a posture”, a bodily “stance” and as a matter of “comportement” (the French word? It’s not English right?), in a manner that suggest a connection to the embodied arts of performance. So this performative understanding of thought could be taken to mean on the hand (this follows straightforwardly) that philosophy is a kind of performance and on the other hand (this does not follow, but becomes a possibility) that other kinds of performance are also thought.
- On the view of performance philosophy, thought is immanent to all other aspects of life in the sense that any separation is never profound, especially that no hierarchical placing above of philosophy or thought is possible, and … that there is a profound equality (or “democracy”) of aspects. In order not to be self-contradictory (by placing again a philosophical view of equality between on top of everything) it is suggested to take this view as a performative stance and not an ontological claim. So it is a “democratic attitude” to be performed by bodies when they think.
- Performance philosophy adheres to the critique of the subject (or “post-humanist” or “anti-humanist” views) of the subject as the self-conscious source of thought. In a way, thoughts are thought without you, it is your (bodies) position in a time and space, it’s participating in an epistemes (Foucault) that thinks, your subconscious and so on. This places thought nearer to performative practices such as dance.
From reading back this list to myself, it seems noticeable that the characterization often starts from a view on philosophy. It is clear in what sense it would overcome the problem with philosophy. But what would it bring to performative practice? That is not clear. So I would stick to my original assessment of performance philosophy being too much about philosophy for me.
Still, I am not critical of performance philosophy –especially point 2 seems very fruitful to me. I think it is worth paying attention while thinking philosophically to what emotional stance one takes (often a quarrelsome stance, I fear), how the body expresses itself during thinking, the aires one takes and so on. And I think it is worth experimenting with it, once an awareness is there. So I am all in favor of a practice of performance philosophy, as a reflective experimental practice on/about philosophical thinking. For example the “how to think” podcast of Performance Philosophy does let you participate in such experiments.
A last philosophical thought on this: If one takes up the idea here in performance philosophy –as I would– of philosophy as a stance and attitude. And one would –as I think one should– place this stance under the scrutiny for being or not being egalitarian, democratic, and so on, then I think one could object to many post-humanist analyses, the project of deconstruction, a not very egalitarian attitude. In Derrida’s reading of Descartes for example, he psychologizes Descartes hyperbolic doubt. He shows a paradoxical, unstable psychological process of a subject that invents and unstably self-assures itself to be at play in Descartes argumentation. Now, of course Descartes is taken as exemplary for the construction of the idea of the modern, autonomous subject that needs deconstruction. This is all good. But at the same time, I feel that it is not “meeting Descartes level”, but from a superior position. To “meet Descartes level”, would be to engage in Descartes argument in the methodology that he proposes. Maybe this is not so problematic, since Descartes’ text has indeed authority over western modern self-conception, it is after all read in many highschools and first years of University still. But if Descartes was a living person, I would feel a bit uneasy, in a political sense, about confronting someone with such an “outside view of what he is doing”. I don’t know if this amounts to a real objection, or if it is a kind of apolitical reflex of me, or even a kind of deluded moral sense that serves conservative interests… but I think it is worth thinking of other kinds of hierarchies in thought too, not just the one by standard conceptions of philosophy as the discipline of what there really profoundly is, or what lies at the bottom of thought and so on. There is also hierarchy in placing a knowing historical perspective, the knowledge of the episteme on someone’s thought. I think it is necessary, but there are some unresolved issues, maybe with elitism…of course in general modern philosophy does maybe right now not need to be defended, so it is maybe taking the wrong side…