Malta Final Doingpp

Cull, Laura (2015) Doing Performance Philosophy: attention, collaboration and the missing &, keynote paper presented at Performance and Interdisciplinarity, University of Malta, 20-21 March 2015.

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Doing Performance Philosophy: attention, collaboration and the missing & Thanks to Stefan Aquilina and to the School of Performing Arts for inviting me to talk to you today at this conference on Performance and Interdisciplinarity. If I may begin on a personal note: As someone who began her training in painting, sculpture and then eventually performance at an art school; went on to study Cultural Studies at postgraduate level before joining a Drama department for my PhD I have always thought of myself as an interdisciplinary person. Like many others, I imagine, I have sometimes experienced this interdisciplinarity as a source of anxiety: the fear of being what we in the UK would call a jack of all trades and a master of none; the sense of fraudulence and self-doubt that accompanies stepping into other fields where one inevitably encounters those who have devoted their studies entirely to a single discipline. In my case, the fields in question are Philosophy particularly Deleuze Studies - and Theatre and Performance. In terms of Philosophy, my interdisciplinary status prompts me to ask: What can I, as an interdisciplinary scholar, possibly contribute to understandings of Deleuze that has not already been said or could not be better said by those proper philosophers who have spent their entire academic life studying Deleuze, based on a disciplinary training in Philosophy? How can my work possibly withstand the scrutiny of those Deleuze experts who will always seem to know Deleuzes work in more depth and detail than I? Over time, I have tried to tell myself what I tell my PhD students working on interdisciplinary projects: that our contribution and our expertise lies in the conjunction in the &, in the relation, in the between in my case, Deleuze and performance, specifically Deleuze and what we might call experimental performance: Deleuze and Artaud, Deleuze and Allan Kaprow, and the Living Theatre, and Goat Island and so forth. But I hope, increasingly, and this will be the focus of the first part of my talk today, that we are also experts on how to do or how to perform this conjunction in how we go about our studies, such that it is no longer a hierarchical one in which one discipline dominates the other: historically, philosophy over performance. Rather, I want to


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explore how being an interdisciplinary scholar specifically what I want to call a performance philosopher involves staging an equality of thought wherein theories and practices originating in the discipline of Performance (which is of course always already an inter-discipline from the beginning, as your call for papers acknowledges) can encounter those originating in Philosophy on an equal plane. For too long, Performance has allowed and conspired with the application of concepts deriving from Philosophy to itself: for instance, the controversial Routledge Theory for Performance Studies (2008) scandal is only one particularly prominent and ill-considered instance of a one size fits all approach to teaching theory to practitioners. Paradoxically perhaps, I will suggest that it is precisely by erasing the & between Performance and Philosophy that prompts a renewed attention to their relation particularly insofar as it allows for the possibility of seeing performance as philosophy: as equally capable, as traditional forms of philosophy, of doing philosophical work; and more radically still, perhaps, as the site of new kinds of thinking that present a challenge to Philosophys sense of itself as The discipline licensed to determine what counts as thought. In the latter part of the talk I want to briefly address 2 specific forms that this interdisciplinary practice of performance philosophy might take, namely: attention and collaboration. Of course, and this I hope is where the excitement and invitation of this new area of research might lie, these are only 2 potential instances of an indefinitely variable field of practice. I dont mean to raise them as somehow determining of performance philosophy which must, to my mind, remain productively undetermined; that is, ceaselessly open to re-definition. But before I get started on any of that, a conventional way to begin would be with a definition of terms.

Mapping the pre-history of Performance Philosophy

So, what is Performance Philosophy? The most important and appropriate response to this question is: I dont know.


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And indeed, nobody knows. This is not a weakness or a problem; I dont say this out of modesty or to be awkward on the contrary, the continued practice of performance philosophy, as I see it and as Ill try to explain in this talk, depends upon this uncertainty. Is it a performative contradiction to to go as far as to say this: Not knowing what performance philosophy is, is the only valid starting point from which to do it? What can this experimental gesture do, how might it perform in this context? More prosaically, we can say that the current use of the term performance philosophy can, in part (and only in part), be traced back to the foundation of a research network of the same name, in the summer of 2012 by 11 core conveners, including myself. After much debate as to the name of the network, we settled on Performance Philosophy without an &, or a slash, or a hyphen with the intention not to pre-empt the nature of the relationship between the two terms, not to assume in advance the ability to keep these two terms separate at all. To some extent, our discussions were informed by the knowledge of existing organisations such as Film-Philosophy, which began as a journal and online discussion salon in 1996 and subsequently a host of conferences from 2008. And indeed, my own sense of what the stakes of the concept of performance philosophy might be are very much influenced by one of the core premises of film philosophy discourse: namely, that film can do philosophy. It need not be the mere object of philosophical study by philosophers, or rendered an illustration or example of existing philosophical concepts or debates by philosophically inclined film studies scholars. Rather film thinks philosophically in its own way and through its own devices: framing, editing, use of close-up, sound, post-production effects and so forth. But I will return to this key idea shortly. First, I need to note that there were, of course, prior uses of the term performance philosophy from ours and indeed, there are other terms in other languages that have their own histories that cannot be separated. To stick to the Anglophone history, the professed aim to keep the definition of performance philosophy open means that we cannot bracket out any other existing or previous uses of the term as simply irrelevant to our own, no matter how seemingly antithetical they might be. Companies and


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corporations, for instance, frequently speak of having a performance philosophy meaning something like a vision or policy for performance in the sense of the behaviour of individual employees and the organization. Performance here alludes to the achievement of goals and targets in effective and efficient ways; performance is something that is measured, managed and responded to as reward or punishment, from the extremes of bonuses to the devastating impact of an assessment of poor performance. As Jon McKenzies work shows, and as the experience of those of us in increasingly corporate Universities makes plain, this sense of the term performance philosophy cannot and should not be severed from the sense in which I am raising it here although one might hope that it would be so critically.

But there are also less troubling uses to which I might draw your attention. Scholars discussing the enactment of philosophy as a way of life, and particularly the acts of the Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope have also used the term performance philosophy (Bosman 2006; Papazian 2009). Though sometimes here the term retains traces of the anti-theatrical prejudice that philosophy has often shown, insofar as performance


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philosophy is equated with mere showmanship. Likewise in a 2002 collection on Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World, the idea of performance philosophy is briefly raised in relation to a culture shift in the second century when Roman emperors had stopped sneering at philosophy, and intellectuals were in high fashion; in particular, the editors suggest intellectuals who could give a good performance were admired and highly paid Philosophers who were (on principle) shabby and hairy had makeovers and presented themselves as the media starts they were (Clark and Rajak 2002: 7). So again, performance is placed on the side of the untrustworthy nature of appearance, the side of fashion rather than principle. Finally, the notion of performance philosophy is also alluded to in the work of David Wood: a Professor of Philosophy and author of numerous studies in phenomenology and post-Heideggean philosophy, but also the creator of actions and events such as The Chronopod Series in which the assemblage and burial of a time capsule is specifically construed by Wood as a performance philosophy. Here, Wood suggests there might be a need for philosophy to move outside of itself, beyond its own limitations, in order to achieve its own project, which he characterises as a desire to overcome the cluster of problems we call representation (Wood 1993: np). Whilst the term Performance Philosophy has only recently begun to be used in the sense I am outlining, clearly the potential practices to which it relates could be mapped back historically to the blurry origins if we believe there can be such a thing of both philosophy and theatre & performance. In this regard I could point you to, without claiming anything like a comprehensive knowledge of, a vast range of texts and practices, which is in itself, clearly only a very partial Anglophone-centric, predominantly Western perspective on what might be included in what David Kornhaber has described as the pre-history of Performance Philosophy (Kornhaber in Cull 2015). This pre-history must have blurry boundaries too to recall the Schechnerian term used in your CFP because there is no single definition of what presently constitutes Performance Philosophy and as such what belongs to its past must and should remain equally open to new propositions and contestations. In this respect, performance philosophy might be considered a new name for some old ways of thinking (Shusterman 2012: 5) recalling, for instance, the ancient idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life rather than a mere discursive field of abstract theory (3).


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Performance Thinks As I have indicated, I want to argue that, one of the major stakes in the deliberate absence of the & in the emerging field named Performance Philosophy is the proposal that performance can do philosophy not merely as example or illustration for an existing philosophical framework, but as its own distinctive philosophical practice. This statement, this claim that performance is capable of philosophical work can seem both banal and profoundly radical. Given the advances that the practice as research discourse has made into the academy and into the logic of research funding at least in some countries, including the UK saying that performance thinks philosophically could be seen as simply another way of saying what PaR has already said, already argued with a good degree of success. However, one limitation of PaR discourse at least in the UK is that it remains strongly linked to a very powerful, determining definition of research as the production of new knowledge: a definition that underpins how limited resources are distributed across institutions of higher education to support activity whether it is undertaken through performance practice or by more


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conventional scholarly means. In the strategic struggle for institutional recognition, to have the process of producing new performance work acknowledged as on a par, epistemologically, with the generation of new academic writing, what this discourse cannot permit (or perhaps simply does not have time for), is the exploration of the possibility that how performance thinks might not involve knowledge at all; or again, that precisely the philosophical value and interest of performance lies in its generation of models of relating to the world that are less concerned with knowing and all the associations with capture and mastery that that term connotes. Here, my thinking is informed in part by the discussion of the relation between music and philosophy in the work of Andrew Bowie. In an article for the inaugural issue of the Performance Philosophy journal, Bowie writes: the resistance to conceptual determination may sometimes be precisely what makes something aesthetically significant. Does this mean, then, that there is no value in conceptual reflection about issues in art? That would evidently be very mistaken, but conceptual clarification may fail to get to the heart of the philosophical import of art, because the sense characteristic of art is inseparable from its manifestation in the specificity of art itself. The question is what philosophical significance is to be attributed to such sense. Stanley Cavells contention that knowing things is not the only way to relate to them points in a different direction and to more productive possibilities for philosophical exploration (Bowie in Cull 2015). The claim that performance thinks or that performance does philosophy might also seem banal if we reduce it to the conscious activity of the humans it involves. That is, we may not encounter too many objections to the idea that the spectator of a new production of Sophocles Antigone is doing philosophical work as he or she grapples again, anew, with the tensions between the civic and the personal, the state and the individual in response to a war-time death. Or, to bring the example closer to my own area of interest, that a Goat Island work forces thought in its audience, in a Deleuzian mode, insofar as it resists recognition according to disciplinary distinctions, by creating rhizomatic rather than linear representations of a theme. Or again, as weve seen, the


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pre-history of Performance Philosophy has already produced a good deal of literature that renders relatively commonplace the idea that a playwright and it is tellingly, usually a playwright rather than a choreographer or performance artist - might also be called a philosopher because their texts deal with recognised philosophical themes or reflect on philosophical questions. But what if we were to suggest that it is performance itself that is doing the philosophy here, rather than those who watch or make it? That it is a matter of the nonhuman what within performance rather than who, that thinks and thinks in ways that do not merely reflect what philosophers do, but suggest new ways of doing philosophy? This is a difficult idea, and one that, again, I am transplanting from work in the area of film philosophy that may well demand reflection on the change of context. That is, it might be proposed and indeed there are traces of this idea in Deleuze - that there is something intrinsically nonhuman about the art of cinema that simply does not exist in the human all-too-human art of performance, with its dependency on the human body as its principal medium. In this respect, we might argue that What is Philosophy? retains something of a modernist edge as it encourages artists to work with the specific powers belonging to their art. And yet, recent practice in performance makes any firm distinction between theatre & performance and cinema increasingly hard to maintain. The interdisciplinary work of companies like imitatingthedog creates performances that produce, on stage, the kinds of nonhuman perspectives that we might previously have thought only possible through the inhuman eye of the camera. Secondly, both historical and contemporary performance has questioned any intrinsic relationship between performance and the appearance of a human performer whether we think back to the Futurist performance Detonation (1915), or to recent works such as Kris Verdoncks ACTOR #1 (2010) where the performers are a contained box of swirling, self-organizing mists, a projected image and a robot.


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But these performers are still watched and made by people, it might be objected. Yes, but this is not to say that the thinking we are concerned with does not also reside in the things themselves as well as in the encounter between those things and human thinking. It is also to suggest that what we call human thinking might well be open to forms of becoming non-human, to transformative imitation in attempts to think like a robot, like a horse, like mist whatever our creative relation to performance: as audience or authors. Indeed, if we are open to the idea that performance itself thinks without us yet alongside us, independently of us yet not in a way that transcends us altogether then this thinking in fact demands the transformation of our thinking habits. If we are to generate less a philosophy of theatre & performance and more a philosophy from theatre & performance (as Bowie and McAuley have discussed with respect to Music, and Maoilearca with respect to film), then we must find new ways to open ourselves and our thinking to being transformed by the thinking that belongs to performance itself for which we cannot claim authorship. Staging how performance thinks need not be about theatre without humans then, but it may involve the acknowledgment that we do not know what the human means. Or again, foregrounding the thinking indigenous to performance need not be doing away with a who altogether, but might certainly involve the expansion of the who to include new conceptual personae beyond the author/auteur as philosopher. How Performance Thinks: Body, Attention, Collaboration On one level, this idea of thinking as having some kind of life of its own apart from us, will not seem that strange. We already know from Nietzsche, from Artaud as well as from Deleuze, that thinking is not grounded in an I, a unitary self that constitutes its ground and origin. Rather, they suggest that thought is something that somehow passes through or across us, that is forced upon us from the outside rather than being authored inside out, or again, that thought occurs in various forms, at various speeds and with varying degrees of consciousness. Richard Shusterman, for instance, amongst others engages in both text-based and practice-based research to expand upon the ways in which thinking takes place through the body as the sensory awareness of kinaesthesia, proprioception, muscle memory


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and so forth which cannot be dismissed as not proper thinking or as just doing, just because we have become habituated to ignore it. For Shusterman, muscle memory tends to convey a sense of mindless memory. However, he argues that such memory is mindless only if we identify mind with mindfulness in the sense of explicit, critically focussed consciousness or deliberate, reflective awareness (Shusterman 2012: 92). We need to expand the notion of intelligence to include bodily skills that may seem to be performed spontaneously or without thought but might actually be understood to involve a different level of consciousness, a skill acquired over time. Contra philosophys body-negating tradition (ix), Shusterman emphasizes the role of the body in nondiscursive forms of understanding that lie beneath our interpretive efforts (x). Indeed he goes as far as to suggest that philosophers might improve their functioning as thinkers by improving their awareness and regulation of their somatic instrument of thought (37).

Bodies learn what they can do through experimental encounters. Actions come to appear automatic or unthinking only to be exposed for all their unnaturalness or thoughtfulness again when we have to re-learn them through illness or injury or indeed when we attend to them differently, as Allan Kaprows Activities invite us to do.


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Inspired by the pragmatist thought of John Dewey and the koans of a immanent mode of Zen Buddhism both of which are also key influences on Shusterman Kaprows Activities were written scores for actions to be performed by groups of volunteer participants, which Kaprow developed alongside his better known Happenings from the 1970s onwards. Already, Kaprows former teacher, John Cage had proposed that we redefine our very notions of art in terms of attention. Music, Cage suggested, is a way of paying attention to sounds and visual art is paying attention to looking or seeing (Cage in Bernstein and Hatch 2000: 270). Further, both Cage and Kaprow would go on to emphasise the powers of attention to enable us to see a richness in routine, to find interest in the apparently uninteresting or banal1. Attention exposes the artificiality and openness of what appears natural and given, Kaprow suggests, increases the perceptibility of those aspects of life that have become almost too familiar to grasp (Kaprow 2003: 190). For example, Kaprow discusses brushing his teeth as an act that had become routinized, nonconscious behaviour in comparison to his first efforts to do it as a child. Kaprow reports: I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed: that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored (221). To some extent of course, this blinkering of perception is merely the product of necessity, but we should still not mistake this for some hard-wiring or biological fact. As philosopher Henri Bergson argued An expansion of the faculties of perception is possible; we can perform an expanded attention de-ego-izes perception, removes the self (or is the removal of the self) that edits the world according to its interests. But ultimately, Kaprow did not put his faith in attention alone to challenge this habitual inattention to the ordinary, or at least, not in attention understood as an internal attitude that a subject might consciously choose to adopt. Rather, Kaprow specifically designed his Activities to be unrecognizable as either simply art or life in ways that he hoped would increase the likelihood of embodied attention rather than either detached spectatorship or distracted doing. For instance, Rates of Exchange takes the everyday gesture of the handshake and makes it strange again, through deceleration shake 1 Kaprow suggests that What happens when you pay close attention to anything, especially routine behaviour, is that it changes. Attention alters what is attended (Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 236. Likewise, in an interview, Cage was asked When do you think uninteresting things become interesting?; to which he replied: When and if you pay attention to them (Op. cit., Writings, 270).


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hands as slowly as possible in ways that are not just about making us conscious of the hitherto ignored movement, but to feel our bodies struggling to learn, to think through a new kind of greeting.

There is much talk at present of a crisis of attention an attention economy where attention is a scare resource in the face of information-overload, and is constantly interrupted and distracted by the attention-seeking tactics of competing social media. Attention constitutes a focusing or a narrowing of perception which reveals the nature of objects in greater profundity by shining a light upon them. The crisis of attention in this paradigm is the distraction of that gaze when it hops from one discrete thing to another, or the diffusion of that light over too many different things at once what the informational paradigm might call skimming and multi-tasking respectively. Various panaceas to this crisis are offered but in most cases it seems that attention remains conceived as a transcendent representation of an object such that to enhance attention to save it from its current degraded form - means to shine more light on a thing, to make a conscious decision to think harder about it, to look at it more closely. Whilst George Home-Cook (2015) explores this phenomenologically, I am interested in a paradigm of attention equally derived from Allan Kaprow and Henri Bergson paradigm in which the solution to the crisis of attentiveness is not a question of bringing more power of attention or perception (more consciousness, more representation) to


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the thing, but ironically less of these representationalist elements: less selection and more a kind of immersion in the object understood as a process, less conscious effort and more an immanent mode of thought forced upon us by the thing itself. Bergson defines the philosophical practice of intuition as a reversal of the direction of thought. Philosophy moving in the opposite direction from its usual trajectory. Concepts dont come from us and project themselves on to the object here, but move in the other direction from the object to us the attended is attending us, the object is thinking us. This is the nature of an expanded perception or an attention without the utilitarian blinders that restrict it in consciousness. Attention is not about a decision to think harder, look harder about x; rather attention occurs when an unexpected y forces us to think anew.

Secondly, the theme of collaboration as a mode of thought that affirms the irreducibility of thought to a self-same author, but also as one in which theatre & performance arguably have greater expertise than philosophy. Collaboratively authored philosophy remains relatively rare Deleuzes work with Guattari, or Adornos with Horkheimer being among the best-known exceptions. In contrast, theatre & performance has produced a plethora of strategies for how we might practically go about thinking together from the struggle to secure leaderless, self-organizing production in the collective creations of companies like the Living Theatre in the 60s and 70s, to contemporary companies, like Goat Island, who do not see the need to eliminate the director altogether to secure a more egalitarian approach to authorship but precisely use the director as an immanent, rather than an outside eye. In Goat Island, performance thinks as a collaborative thought that emerges through a complex


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network of processes of 1) directives and responses: where the directors poetic and un-followable instructions Create a shivering homage generate unexpected responses from the performers, which in turn generate new unforeseen directives. 2) Invitations to create under spatial-temporal constraints prompt the deviation of habitual ways of working. And 3) The development of solo material through the imitation of found movement and speech makes clear that there can be no fixed separation between the solo and collaborative work. As Matthew Goulish recalls: What I think was always most important about the copying was the idea of making oneself anew from the outside, through an encounter with another (Goulish 2009: np). For their 2001 performance, Its an Earthquake in My Heart, Goulish makes himself anew by meticulously copying the movement of a French dancer in Pina Bauschs company - Dominique Mercy by watching a videotape over and over again. (Goulish 2000: 7). Goulish describes a feeling of the foreignness or wrongness of moving when one attempts to take on the speed, rhythm or way of being in time of another body. He suggests it is precisely when he can perform a movement that feels wrong that he is getting it right when he is entering into composition with Mercy, becoming-Mercy (ibid., 8).


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From intermedial and intrapersonal collaboration to interspecies collaboration, cut to the Finnish dancer, Sami Slpkivi who makes himself anew through encounters with horses. What matters here is the reciprocity of the becoming the mutuality of the processes of unlearning and learning. On the horses side, the giving and taking of weight exercises Slpkivi performs with them, go against both their seemingly innate responses and traditional horse training (to which most of the horses he works with have already been subjected). Whilst training began with simple food-based incentives, Slpkivi soon observed by listening to embodied expressions of consent that the horses enjoyed playing with their new movement skills and were capable of improvised combinations of normal horse vocabulary (bucking, running fast, standing on hind legs) and the new contact improvisation vocabulary. Slpkivi states In my opinion, theres no communication or respect in traditional horse acrobatics. In contrast, he concludes that horses can dance. And definitely the horse was sometimes leading the dance, because I let her do that and then I responded to her moving (Slpkivi 2013: np). But this is not only a matter of Slpkivi teaching horses how to dance in a new way,


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teaching them contact improvisation in a manner no less authoritarian than teaching them dressage or Horse Ballet as it is sometimes called. It is also, equally about Slpkivi learning contact improvisation from horses: teaching himself how to move like a horse, learning from horses how to move together with another body. Indeed according to animal studies scholars, the powers of nonverbal communication horses demonstrate in wild behaviours such as synchronous movement provides evidence of attunement to others, a form of empathetic intelligence apparently more pronounced in horses than in humans (Scott 2009: 58).

Sami Slpkivi and Bobi Girl in the first horse theatre in Finland, Hiano Mailma, which he created with his wife Anne in 2002 In this way, we are led to the conclusion that when performance itself thinks, it thinks itself performances crack open the concept of performance, including those produced by philosophy. And yet, here again, perhaps the objection will be raised that while there is no problem indeed, it is perfectly commonplace - to say that performance thinks, this is not the same as saying that it thinks philosophically. Why should we wish to erode the differences between how performance thinks and how philosophy thinks? Isnt it


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better for everybody to stick to what they are best at for philosophers to do their thinking through the creation of concepts and artists to do their thinking through the creation of affects, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest as long as we can all agree that no one kind of thinking is intrinsically better or more important than any other? Perhaps. But the risk of this view is that it implicitly leaves Philosophy (capital P) as the discipline that claims authority on the nature of thinking in general, beyond any specific instance as art or science for example. It seems to risk leaving Philosophy in its place as the discipline that claims to know what art is and how it thinks in the guise of philosophical aesthetics; as well as leaving Philosophy free to maintain its own sense of identity not matter which subject matter it attaches itself to from the philosophy of theatre & performance, to the philosophy of football or The Simpsons. Of course, our own position takes risks too not least, the risk that the claim that performance philosophizes appears entirely meaningless if we refuse to provide, in advance, a definition of philosophy (or a definition of performance, for that matter). Laruelle: performing thinking as part of the Real This brings us to debates within some parts of contemporary Continental philosophy, and specifically, within what we might call the philosophy of immanence where the primary matter of concern is the question of how to do philosophy when we no longer want to enact it as a philosophy of x where x is the object of philosophical analysis according to a pre-determined, transcendent, notion of what proper philosophy is in the first place. In particular, I am thinking of the work of the contemporary French thinker Franois Laruelle who has accused most, if not all, existing philosophy of engaging in a kind of tautological circularity which only engages with the Real in order to find examples of what it already knows it is looking for based on a prior decision about the nature of that Real. Even those philosophies of change and becoming such as Deleuzes are subject to this critique, according to Laruelle, insofar as they claim to have some privileged knowledge of the Real albeit as indeterminate becoming. Philosophers continue to position themselves as somehow outside the Real and therefore able to determine its nature as a whole. Even those philosophers of immanence, like Deleuze, who profess to consider their thought as part of and not transcendent to the processes


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they describe, are not sufficiently consistent in their approach: they still produce ontologies which claim, in any one instance, some kind of timeless truth, and dismiss other ontologies as wrong, in ways that contradict the apparent commitment of those ontologies to the idea of the Real as the ceaseless production of difference (which should include these very same accounts of difference that would thereby render them only provisional), to continue with the example of Deleuze. Laruelle professes deep admiration for Deleuze, and indeed Derrida, but he raises concerns about the way in which a paradoxically rigid definition of difference has come to secure the authority of philosophy to explain the Real. To clarify, what Laruelle critiques is not philosophy or individual philosophers per se; rather he uses the term philosophy for the position thought adopts when it becomes authoritarian, irrespective of its [disciplinary] source, when a field nominates itself as the site of supreme thought over all others ( Maoilearca 2015). And whilst I have by no means fully thought through my own position on Laruelles critique of Deleuze, there is something that intuitively rings true (ironically) about this idea that Deleuzes philosophy may talk the talk of immanence, but ultimately fails to do philosophy immanently. What I continue to find difficult, though, is the question of what to do with and after Laruelles view, summarized here by John Maoilearca, that: there is no explaining what the Real really is, because every thought, be it Deleuzian or not, be it philosophical or not, is as good or as bad an explanation as any other for they are all (non-summative) material parts ( Maoilearca in Cull 2015). The difficulty of course lies in our immediate perception of the lack of a basis for judgment; a fear of relativism faced with this complete equality. But is Laruelle really against all judgment or only against the judgment of thought according to representational categories of relative correspondence, accuracy, specificity and so forth? What of the alternative categories of judgment that Deleuze has already proposed: such as functionality does it work; or interest; or the Nietzschean criteria, rehearsed by Deleuze, of empowerment over ressentiment? Maoilearca suggests that Laruelle does indeed allow for the immanent evaluation of philosophies, but only as performative events that do what they say and say what they do - rather than as representations. And he suggests that this has something to do with the extent to which these performances tolerate or remain open to what he calls the non- of others: the so called non-thinking of philosophys objects


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such as nonhumans, or of other dissenting philosophies. Something like, then, an evaluation based on a preference for the unauthoritative, the unassuming, the non-judgmental (which brings us back to performance practices familiarity with and tolerance for not knowing, and my earlier questioning of PaR). I do not mean to suggest that a simply binary can be drawn between instances of mere application according to the philosophy of x approach versus a two-way approach where an equality and co-mutation is established between performance and philosophy. Tomas McAuley, for instance, has written of the way that the philosophy of music has taken a semi-scientific approach in which a given theory is tested against musical practice and then revised on the basis of its applicability in what could be construed as a two-way approach to application (McAuley in Cull 2015). Or again, any such binary must be inappropriate if we are willing to follow Laruelles demand for a genuine consistency to immanent thought. According to this demand, we surely cannot dismiss the philosophy of x approach as simply wrong which would be to use a representational logic of judgment; we must accept it as equally part of the Real as other thoughts by Bowie, Maoilearca and so forth which we have quoted more favourably. And yet, you will recall that Laruelle was not calling for a suspension of evaluation altogether; rather the idea was for the performance of thought to be valued on the basis of its openness to the plurality and equality of other thinking performances which still allows for a critique of the way in which the philosophy of x approach tends to foreclose the possibility that x itself thinks. Conclusions At the start of this talk, I ventured the hypothesis that Not knowing what performance philosophy is, is the only valid starting point from which to do it. To a great extent, this statement is inspired by Laruelle and his characterisation of his own project of non-philosophy as the manner of thinking that does not know a priori what it is to think (Laruelle 2012: 67). Even those seemingly non-methodological philosophies that claim to allow thought to be determined by its so-called object such as Deleuzes philosophy of encounter do not go far enough for Laruelle in practicing what they preach. And


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perhaps this is where philosophy might turn to performance as a rich source of techniques for embodying an unknowing openness to others, to the outside: whether as a relation to ones own bodily gestures, to the foreign movements of another body human, non-human. Of course, such techniques cannot be understood as guaranteed methods which would simply suggest a reversal in which performance assumes philosophys place as the discipline that knows what thinking is and how to do it virtuoso thinking bodies merely going on to replace authoritarian disembodied minds. Rather the vitality of performance, philosophy, and performance philosophy, lies in the degree to which they are open to that changing thing that appears to be their outside or other whatever counts as not performance, improper philosophy at a given point in time. For performance, this excluded other might go by many names: as merely automatic rather than self-conscious behaviour, for instance whether as the everyday life that was once excluded from theatre but then embraced by Schechners broad-spectrum definition of performance, or as the nonhuman forms of imitation and pretence that continue to be seen as somehow separate from performance proper even in todays animal-oriented Performance Studies. Whilst for philosophy, arguably, this other is precisely such objects as performance which philosophical aesthetics and philosophies of theatre continue to approach as if it were not a source of philosophical thought in its own right. In this way, performance philosophy is an invitation to both disciplines to affirm in practice that they know not what they do.


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Works Cited Bowie, Andrew (2015, forthcoming) The Philosophy of Performance and the Performance of Philosophy in Cull, Laura (ed.) Performance Philosophy, Vol. 1 (2015), np. Bernstein, David W. and Hatch, Christopher (2000) Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Clark, Gillian and Rajak, Tessa (2002) Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Goulish, Matthew (2000) 39 microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (London and New York: Routledge) Goulish, Matthew (2009) Unpublished email interview with the author. Home-Cook (2015) Kaprow, Allan (2003) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, (Berkeley: University of California Press) Kornhaber, David (2015, forthcoming) Every Text is a Performance: A Pre-History of Performance Philosophy, in Cull, Laura (ed.) Performance Philosophy, Vol. 1 (2015), np. Laruelle, Franois (2012) I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: Reply to Deleuze. In Laruelle, The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by Franois Laruelle, eds. Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos Press Publishing), pp.40-73. McAuley, Tomas (2015, forthcoming) Missing the Wrong Target: Andrew Bowies Rejection of the Philosophy of Music, in Cull, Laura (ed.) Performance Philosophy, Vol. 1 (2015), np. Maoilearca, John (2015, forthcoming) All Thoughts Are Equal (University of Minnesota Press) Maoilearca, John (2015, forthcoming) Laruelles Criminally Performative Thought: On Doing and Saying in Non-Philosophy in Cull, Laura (ed.) Performance Philosophy, Vol. 1 (2015), np. Slpkivi, Sami (2013) Unpublished email interview with the author. Scott, S. R. (2009) The Racehorse as Protagonist: Agency, Independence, and Improvisation. In S. E. McFarland and R. Hediger (eds), Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Leiden and Boston: Brill), pp. 4566. Shusterman, Richard (2012) Thinking through the Body Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Wood, David (1993) The Time Capsule as a Performance Philosophy, Philosophical Reflections on Chronopods, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/chronopod/timecapsule.pdf - accessed 22.3.15

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