Philosophy becoming Para-Textual: Plato’s Phaedrus, a memory pharmacy

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative method of philosophical practice that plays with the sites of a theoretical text’s encounter. By focusing not only on semantic content but also on place, time, duration, voice, style, repetition and modes of generating response, one can create text-specific structures (games) that attend to the contextual demands of a particular text and multiply the variety of encounters and reading methodologies that a given text can proliferate. This involves the following procedure: Step 1) Isolate a text’s implicit para-textuality—that is, the moments where it implicates a reader to act alongside or outside of the activity of reading. Step 2) Extend these moments by explicitly altering the text itself or by changing the environmental factors around the reading of the text such that the text more radically directs a reader. Step 3) Repeat Step 2 through various iterative cycles such that these acts of extension begin to cohere into a set of rules that structure the playful acts of extension thereby producing a game. This procedure is theoretically grounded and contextualized through Hadot’s analysis of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Gadamer’s ontology of play, Schechner’s account of theatre and games, the dramatic instructions of Ionesco and Beckett, Ancient Greek Philosophical exercises and para-textual passages from Zen Koans, Nietzsche and Rousseau. The second part of the essay provides an in-depth account of my creative and intellectual process whereby I selected Plato’s critique of writing in Phaedrus as a starting point for enacting the aforementioned para-textual procedure. This resulted in the creation of Plato’s Phaedrus: A memory pharmacy, a rhizomatic online game whereby players engage in a procedure of enacting verbal dialectics upon an interactive text that is spliced with both Platonic passages and transcriptions of contemporary interlocutor's dialectical analysis upon the Phaedrus.