Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the Problem of ‘Application’

Abstract

<jats:p>This article begins from the premise that a ‘critical turning point’ has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance ‘examples’. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.</jats:p>

Equalizing Theatre and Philosophy: Laruelle, Badiou, and gestures of authority in the philosophy of theatre

“…In this article, I try to perform a parallel operation on materials from recent work in the 'philosophy of theatre' in which I perceive such authoritarian or 'philosophical' gestures to be at work. Whilst the value of Laruelle's project for the emerging field of performance philosophy has already been noted by a number of colleagues (Fisher 2015, Daddario 2015, Ó Maoilearca 2015, as well as in some of my own earlier writing (Cull 2012(Cull , 2014, I hope that this article goes some way to further that conversation and extend our understanding of that value in relation to a specific body of literature.…”

Going Home: Mike Kelley, Mobile Rhetoric, and Detroit

“…Before we proceed to set up this conversation between Kelley, Foucault, Deleuze and Baldacchino, we would like to note, briefly, the kinds of problems that arise from the uncomfortable marriage between art practice and critical theory. As Laura Cull explains, a history of 'application', in which critical theory has been applied to the analysis of art or, alternately, art has been used as an illustrative tool for critical theory, has led to an asymmetrical power relation between the two kinds of practices (Cull, 2012). Cull suggests that rethinking art practice as a 'kind of philosophy', would lead to a revised conception of 'what counts as philosophy' and might produce more sustainable, efficacious and ethical outcomes that benefit both arts practice as well as philosophical practice (Cull, 2012: 21).…”

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy

“…There is an emerging consensus amongst researchers concerned with the relationship between philosophy and the arts that scholars must find alternatives to the mutual instrumentalization and disciplinary inequalities that arise from the application paradigm that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics and arts theory. Whether in relation to Theatre and Performance (Cull 2012, Fisher 2015, Hollinghaus and Daddario 2015, Music (Bowie 2007), Film (Mullarkey 2009;, Dance or interdisciplinary arts practices (Manning and Massumi 2014), contemporary philosophers and theorists are increasingly calling for a philosophy from rather than about the arts, insofar as the latter tends to reproduce the hierarchies between philosophy and the arts as modes of knowledge. At the heart of this call, for many, is the view that the arts themselves are philosophical, can do philosophy or can make an independent contribution to philosophy, above and beyond their capacity to serve as applications or illustrations of pre-existing philosophical ideas or examples used to justify ontological claims.…”