Abstract
Whilst I have declared for a theatre-philosophy, it is the imperatives of performance and performativity per se which have provided the ground of a renewed encounter between philosophy and the thinking of the theatrical. Much of the work which places itself in proximity to performance stakes a great deal on its interrogation of knowledge-as-theory via practices or other forms of ‘know-how’ that are occluded within institutionalized forms of knowledge, including philosophy. Amongst these might be the plural arts of the everyday, of the colonized, oppressed or forgotten, or of the non-cognitive dimensions of human perception and communication. Despite this diversity, what has become ‘performance studies’ still constitutes itself as a body of writings, a loose community of inscriptions — however much this or that particular work gestures towards its own scriptural limitations.
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Notes
Herbert Blau, ‘Rehearsing the impossible: The insane root’, in Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear, eds, Psychoanalysis and Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 25.
Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 12.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge, 1993; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge, 1997; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
See Vikki Bell, ‘Mimesis as Cultural Survival’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 133–61; Jane Campbell and Janet Harbord, ‘Playing it Again: Citation, Reiteration or Circularity?’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 229–39.
See the interview between Bell and Butler in ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 163–74.
Ibid., p. 166.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 1.
Most insistently by Alan Read in his Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 13.
This tendency is apparent in a number of essays in Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini, eds, Practice-as-Research In Performance and Screen, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A robust and sceptical response is offered in John Freeman, Blood, Sweat and Theory: Research through Practice in Performance, Farringdon, Libri Publishing, 2010.
Simon Jones, ‘The Courage of Complementarity: Practice-as-Research as a Paradigm Shift in Performance Studies’, in Allegue et al., eds, Practice-as-Research In Performance and Screen, p. 49.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling & Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 131ff.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, both trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press, 1986.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990.
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’ in Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: a Critical Reader, Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, p. 110, emphasis added.
See Laura Cull’s astute introduction to Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 2. As Cull suggests, ‘One Manifesto Less’ is the central Deleuzian text for theatre and performance studies, although I am less persuaded by its rhetoric of the radical and transformative. The essay appears in English translation in Timothy Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, Mime: Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: Viking Press, 1977, p. 367.
Over and against his later assertion in ‘One Less Manifesto’ that the theatre of the future ‘will surge forward as something representing nothing but what presents and creates a minority consciousness as a universal-becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze, ‘One Manifesto Less’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 256), we should also note an earlier conclusion: ‘It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press, 1994, p. 56). A specifically representational theatre is perhaps as philosophically inconceivable and practically impossible as the utopian and phantasmic theatres that have informed the theatrical avant-garde’s own ‘impossible’ attempts to escape the gravitational force of representation and mimesis. See Martin Puchner, ‘The Theater in Modernist Thought’, New Literary History, 33 (3), Summer 2002, pp. 521–32.
Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
Ibid., p. 61.
The obvious landmarks here are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000; and their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin Putnam, 2004.
Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1985, p. 25.
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© 2011 Simon Bayly
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Bayly, S. (2011). Strains of Thought. In: A Pathognomy of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306936_2
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