Laura Cull Research Articles

The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds by Michael Y. Bennett

Reviewed by: The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds by Michael Y. Bennett Brice Ezell The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds. By Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge, 2021. Cloth: $160.00, eBook: $48.95. 150 pages. Michael Y. Bennett occupies a near-solitary place in what he rightly calls the "philosophical turn in theatre and performance studies in the new millennium" (3). This "turn" has to do with the philosophical tradition in which Bennett anchors his work: analytic philosophy. There are now numerous studies of other philosophical entanglements with drama and theatre that feature philosophers dating from the ancient tradition (Plato, in Martin Puchner's The Drama of Ideas) all the way up to twentieth-century thinkers like Hannah Arendt (in Minou Arjomand's Staged). But although analytic philosophy has been the dominant academic mode of philosophy in the United States and Great Britain for the bulk of the twentieth century and up to the present, it has received little engagement from the world of drama and theatre studies. In a 2018 special issue of Anglia on drama, theatre, and philosophy, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca goes so far as to argue against the legitimacy of an analytic approach to theatre. A recent uptick in literary interest in the analytic tradition, particularly in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, has not, it seems, encouraged drama and theatre scholars to look in that direction. Except, that is, for Bennett. His latest monograph, The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds, follows and builds upon his Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (2017). Where the latter offers a broad analytic approach to the events of a theatrical production, this new book applies a specific analytic subfield, epistemology, to a core theatrical "problem"—namely, the question of whether the experience of being in an audience is shared. As he does in World of the Play (where, for example, he argues that the events of a play occur in the past subjunctive rather than the present), Bennett advances some unorthodox positions. Chief among these is his claim that "viewing performance is not a shared experience," but is instead an "intersubjective" experience "often modified by other viewers" (3). To elucidate his position, Bennett brings together theatrical concerns with numerous philosophers and examples from analytic epistemology that will be familiar to philosophy undergraduates, such as Edmund Gettier's famous "Gettier cases." For many in theatre and performance studies without traditional philosophical training, however, this philosophy can be a useful new resource. The Problems of Viewing Performance initiates an intriguing conversation. [End Page 93] He is perhaps too quick to dismiss a good deal of scholarship on audience studies when he says that the "performer-audience model of theatrical production and reception is based on a largely unproblematized and simple conceptual structure of an audience at the theatre" (15); the aforementioned Staged is just one recent example of many monographs that theorize the nature of a theatrical audience. But Bennett wisely outlines the myriad ways that the questions raised by analytic epistemology bear upon our notions of audience, examined or unexamined. These questions include: "What is the nature of our own mind?" "What is the relationship between my mind and the minds of others?" The Problems of Viewing Performance utilizes a bipartite structure. These halves are neatly organized, as is the volume itself. Bennett writes clearly and precisely and is careful to define terms. Part I, spanning chapters 1–3, focuses on Bennett's analytic epistemological approach to the theatre, in which he troubles the commonsense notion that theatrical audiences have a "shared" experience. Part II, chapters 4-8, surveys a wide range of plays, including two medieval vernacular plays, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and some well-known works by contemporary playwrights such as Tony Kushner and Maria Irene Fornés. The topics explored in these stand-alone chapters frequently call back to The Problems of Viewing Performance's theoretical first half, yet at times the book drifts. The argument presented in chapter 5 about the medieval plays Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance highlights the traditionally drawn boundaries between stage and audience, which naturally impact how audiences gather knowledge...

Il caso di Jackie the Baboon

The performance Jackie the Baboon of the British company Brunskill & Grimes tells the true story of the baboon Jackie who was forced to participate in the First World War. The show is part of a project of the University of Surrey, coordinated by Laura Cull, philosopher of the performance, which combines philosophical reflection and performances, related to theory as well as the practice of Animal Performance Studies. This research path takes place in a field of studies not much frequented in Italy, that of Animal Performance Studies. In this context, performance is understood as a method of research aimed at finding answers to the animal question, through the same performance practice and to explore new relational modalities among different species. This field of research had already been opened by Richard Schechner who in the theory of performance included the activities of the primates in the broad spectrum of performing activities.

The Ethics of Interspecies Performance: Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep's Sheep Pig Goat

The Ethics of Interspecies Performance:Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep's Sheep Pig Goat Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sheep Pig Goat. (Photo: Ben Gilbert, courtesy of Wellcome Collection and Fevered Sleep.) [End Page E-1] Introduction How can humans change the way they perceive nonhuman animals? What would it take to see animals differently and what role might empathy have in this process? If humans could perceive the world from the animals' point of view, would this change how humans perceive animals and, in turn, how they behave towards them? What role might performance play in allowing humans to occupy the animal's world as produced by its specific embodiment—its powers to affect and be affected that both differ from and overlap with human worlds (that are themselves differential)? And what happens if performance itself is seen from the animal's perspective? I begin with these questions in an attempt to mark out the fundamentally ethico-political stakes of engaging animals in performance: the urgent question of how performance might contribute to addressing anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the violence toward animal bodies such perspectives enable. In my ongoing work, I am interested in the capacity of performance to produce reciprocally transformative encounters, in which the affective worlds of both human and nonhuman bodies can be un-made and re-made, and wherein "animals are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, and new ways to inhabit the human world and to force human beings to address them differently."1 These interests have led me to the project I will focus on here: Sheep Pig Goat (2017) by the UK-based performance company Fevered Sleep, a project in which I played the role of "research advisor" when it was first staged in March 2017. I am also collaborating with the company to develop a new iteration of this work which will be hosted at the Vet School at the University of Surrey in February 2020. In this essay, I consider Sheep Pig Goat alongside the work of foundational animal studies scholar and philosopher of science Vinciane Despret, whose important book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) was one text among many others that the company themselves read as part of the preparation for the project. In particular, I draw from Despret to explore multiple possible understandings of the notion of "interspecies empathy," noting that, for Fevered Sleep, a core aim of the project was to investigate how performance might "increase understanding of, and empathy towards nonhuman animals" (both their own as a company and those of the audiences who encounter their work).2 Here, however, the mode of empathy I am reaching toward is not one that operates through analogy or identification, but an "embodied empathy" that operates as a mode of affective thinking alongside rather than "about" the animal, and as a performative encounter between human and nonhuman animals that produces both parties anew. Both embodied empathy and attention have key roles to play in securing greater ethical consideration of nonhuman animals in relation to the production of knowledge. As Donna Haraway suggests, the etymology of seeing––from the Latin verb respecere, to look again––invites consideration of the relationship between attention and respect: to taking care in an ethical sense and the careful, iterative act of observation that does not judge on first impressions, but considers others as worthy of re-spect, or a second [End Page E-2] look.3 But this ethics of attention is not just about vision or sight, and this is why performance might play a leading role in its investigation. Rather, as Amanda Boetzkes has argued, if "the fundamental ethical question" concerns "how we might develop a complex sensibility of and for non-human animals"4 or if ethics is a matter of embodied behaviors improvised between actors within the uncertainty of specific contexts, then performance practices surely have much to contribute to the development of our understanding of what constitutes an interspecies ethics. Interspecies performance practice might be understood as a primary domain for the creation and investigation of what Traci Warkentin also describes as "an...

Opening the Circle

‘Opening the Circle: Performance Philosophy as an Animal Movement’ by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is a short text that uses the figure of the circle to diagram a set of relations between performance, philosophy and anthropocentrism. Bergson's notion of 'the open soul' as conceived in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Fevered Sleep's interspecies research project Sheep Pig Goat (2017) provide the counter-examples to what Una Chaudhuri calls 'the anthropocentric grammar of the normal'.

Introduction: Philosophy On Stage: The Concept of Immanence in Contemporary Art and Philosophy

This special issue of the Performance Philosophy journal—the first bilingual edition in German and English—is one output of the research project “Artist-Philosophers. Philosophy AS Arts-based Research”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR275-G21 in the context of the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK). A main question of the project was: “What happens to the traditional image of philosophy, once philosophers start to stage philosophy and implement arts-based practices into their discipline?” Starting from the philosophical assumption that meanings and possibilities are generated immanently out of the differential relations somebody shares with others within a concrete earthly milieu, we realised two main events in the course of the above-mentioned research project, on which this publication is based: The research festival Philosophy on Stage #4 „Artist-Philosophers. Nietzsche et cetera“ at Tanzquartier Wien in November 2015 and the conference “The Concept of Immanence in Philosophy and the Arts” at Angewandte Innovation Lab (AIL) Vienna. This issue of the Performance Philosophy Journal comprises texts by: Arno Böhler, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Paulo de Assis, Susanne Valerie Granzer, Alice Lagaay, Dieter Mersch, John Ó Maoilearca, Freddie Rokem, Elisabeth Schäfer, Andreas Urs Sommer, Marcus Steinweg, Tanja Traxler, Stephen Zepke.

Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens eds. by Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen

Reviewed by: Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens eds. by Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen Julia Moriarty Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens. Edited by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. ix + 247 pp. $95.00 cloth. Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens is a new addition to Palgrave MacMillan's Performance Philosophy series, edited by Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay, and Freddie Rokem. The series includes monographs and collections of essays that explore the relationship between performance and philosophy, allowing for a wide range of understanding within each of those terms. Its expansion of performative modes and philosophical studies allows the series to address not only the philosophy of performance but also performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance. This collection of essays is divided into four parts, and in this way, the collection is able to explore comprehensively its central argument: that time is "not a given, natural, objective phenomenon, but a condition and product of processes of human activity" (1). The book takes a necessarily interdisciplinary approach, including writings from not just the expected theatrical artists, dancers, and visual artists but also a variety of performance-makers (broadly construed), including architects, poets, and critics. The collection is intentionally wide in scope, allowing it to become a work of "performance philosophy" that addresses the many iterations of and approaches to both performance and philosophy, plus the many combinations thereof. Part I: World, Space, Place contains five essays that look at the ability of a physical place to affect the understanding of time. Jeff Malpas kicks the book off [End Page 336] with a deconstruction of the positionality of time and space in "Timing Space-Spacing Time." He breaks the philosophical argument into five major subarguments that peruse the points of layering and differentiation between temporality and spatiality and roots these explorations in philosophy and practical examples. "Situated Structures," by Amanda Yates and Gemma Loving-Hutchins, examines the performativity and temporality of architecture through the presentation of microarchitecture, as well as site- and time-specific pieces of architecture, as examples of how architecture can engage time and space. "Suspended Moments," by John Di Stefano and Dorita Hannah, works from Antonin Artaud's demand that theatre be a space of immediacy to investigate how real-life events can take the theatre from a place of artifice to a liminal space of change for the audience. In Ian Maxwell's "My Big Fat Greek Baptism," the reader is taken on an autoanthropological study of the transcendent quality of ritual in the Greek orthodox tradition, as different rituals lie on top of each other, creating a cultural palimpsest of community and meaning. And finally, "A Shared Meal," by Jeff Stewart, looks at meals as cross-sections of divinity within the everyday mundane. Part II: Self, Movement, Body includes five essays that evaluate the role of movement and body in the performance of time. "The Crannies of the Present," by Brian Massumi, plumbs the murky depths of the cognitive gap between sensation and action, finding that the potentiality of action is directly tied to time and the subjectivity of experience. Jack Reynolds's "Time Out of Joint" presents the converse argument to Massumi's chapter; Reynolds engages Heidegger's triple layering of the temporal to argue that a poststructuralist understanding of the cognitive gap is an insufficient means of viewing that phenomena. Erin Manning ping-pongs the argument back to the poststructuralist side in "Three Propositions for a Movement of Thought" by proposing that the body is not a subject that moves but a movement in itself: The body begins in movement, is more than itself, and does not depend on an a priori intentional subject. Conversely, Lanei Rodemeyer, in "The Body in Time/Time in the Body," uses non-visual bodily activities to consciously situate and gender bodies in a fundamental structure. Maeva Veerapen's "A Moment of Creation" lives in the "moment of waiting" between two dance partners in an improvised social dance, reflecting that dance reveals the performance of time. Part III: Image, Performance, Technology presents another five essays but moves more firmly into the realm of performance. Jodie McNeilly constructs her own method of analyzing the temporal...

Laura Cull, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, v + 321 pp., $95.00 (hardcover), $90.00 (PDF ebook).Broderick Chow, and Alex Mangold, eds. Žižek and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, v + 325 pp., $95.00 (hardcover), $90.00 (PDF ebook).

Laura Cull, and Alice Lagaay, eds. Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, v + 321 pp., $95.00 (hardcover), $90.00 (PDF ebook).Broderick Chow, and Alex Mangold, eds. Žižek and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, v + 325 pp., $95.00 (hardcover), $90.00 (PDF ebook).

Wittgenstein's Slapstick

In “Performance Philosophy — Staging a New Field,” Laura Cull approaches performance as a source of philosophical insight and philosophy as a species of performance (Cull 2014, 15). This calls for a radical transformation of philosophy and its practices. What form might this take? Wittgenstein’s later philosophy provides one example. The language games presented in the opening remarks of the Philosophical Investigations (PI, [1953] 2001) are meant to be played out. They involve improvisation based on general scenes, stock characters, and linguistic play. When enacted, they are slapstick. As such, they offer a method of philosophical investigation in which clarity and insight are inherent in the performance itself. Wittgenstein’s language games were directly influenced by the subversive practices of Austrian commedia dell’arte and slapstick (through the works of Johann Nestroy and Karl Kraus). By their very nature, they challenge the pretensions of philosophical explanation and theory. Unlike attempts to compare Wittgenstein’s philosophy to theatre, enacting language games is a form of philosophical performance. Andrew Lugg notes that recent attempts to compare Wittgenstein’s philosophy to theatre problematize the opening remarks of the Investigations. However, enacting language games as a form of philosophical performance makes what is hidden, in all of its simplicity and familiarity, obvious, striking, and engaging.

Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 336 pp.; illustrations. $90.00 cloth, e-book available. Adorno and Performance. Edited by Will Daddario and Karoline Gritzner. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 264 pp. $90.00 cloth, e-book available

<i>Encounters in Performance Philosophy</i>. Edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 336 pp.; illustrations. $90.00 cloth, e-book available. <i>Adorno and Performance</i>. Edited by Will Daddario and Karoline Gritzner. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 264 pp. $90.00 cloth, e-book available

Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics ed. by Laura Cull and Will Daddario

Reviewed by: Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics ed. by Laura Cull and Will Daddario Matthew Moore Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Laura Cull and Will Daddario. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2013. Cloth $57.00. 243 pages. An innovative and timely collection, Manifesto Now! queries the ongoing value of a potentially outdated literary form, the manifesto, by juxtaposing contemporary examples, critical responses, and theories of time and embodiment. The volume’s greatest strength lies in its desire to consider a wide range of performative acts (protests, performance art, artistic processes, and critical analyses) as manifestations of the possible futures they project. Although it does not quite add up to a set of “instructions,” Manifesto Now! does provide a rich panorama of the ways philosophy might be enacted in the politically charged present that performance calls into being, and is itself a kind of performative manifestation. Moving beyond the rhetorical tropes of their avant-garde predecessors, Cull, Daddario, and their contributors wager that “in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the manifesto functions as a performance score through which philosophical concepts express themselves through embodied participation in a field of political conditions” (3). Pursuing such conditions and our active involvement, each two-essay “Analogue” creates an architecture of experience whose defining feature is a requirement “that we take time to embody the subject positions conjured through its performativity and, through so doing, that we participate in a political discussion” (3). As such, the structure of the book, which ‘takes time’ to reveal its compelling logic, actively participates in its own aesthetic-philosophical project. Vacillating between so-called theory and practice, it performs the disintegration of binary logics that many of the contributors address. It also effectively develops associations across highly varied political terrain to suggest an emergent and inclusive community of activists whose work challenges hegemonic ways of knowing through a variety of embodied, con-textual encounters. The remarkable effect is that we, as readers, are included in a discussion that takes shape through our invited acts of associative meaning making. Ferrying meaning between ports, we supply the imaginative connections that give the work its alluring power. While such connections accumulate in hindsight, they also emerge organically in several of the astutely paired essays. For example, analyzing Freee Art Collective’s recent work, Ken Wilder proclaims a sphere of performance that incorporates spectators into a structured process of inscribing illocutionary force onto art events, specifically through reading and evaluating scripted political speech. He argues persuasively that the fictional/real “counter-public spheres” that such performances manifest lead to the critical activation of the subject, empowering individuals as both producers and consumers of political speech. Freee responds with their own manifesto for the gradual democratization of art based on the immediate creation of “a million [End Page 132] [such] temporary public spheres” (82). The generous reader will recognize the current volume as one of these polyvocal and inclusive sites for active dialogue. Elsewhere, contributors discuss how specific protest performances activate audiences inured to the utopian polemics of a bankrupt mode of political speech. Michael Shane Boyle theorizes UCMeP’s protests at UC Berkeley, including one in which prominent landmarks were auctioned off in support of the move to privatize (29), as “ironic manifesto[s]” whose inverted rhetoric erodes the impenetrable logic of late capitalism and neoliberalism through embodied disidentification (25). While Boyle posits persuasively the critical activation of the subject as the result of such “purposefully disingenuous” performances, Maurya Wickstrom and Stephanie Vella explore a different, but equally compelling kind of activation in part two. In their perspicacious view, OWS’s “embodied manifesto”/encampment in Zucotti Park “shattered the temporal narratives of neoliberalism” by performing the arrival and duration of a present that did not serve the intended future (39, 45). Dispensing with future-oriented linguistic truth claims (which they see as hopelessly attenuated by neoliberalism’s colonization of all possible future narratives) they describe a radical presenting (manifesting?) through performances of collective time. Departing entirely from the impediments of progressive temporal logic, and similarly moving beyond neoliberalist reform, Stuart McLean paints a vivid and convincing “dreamtime” picture of a...

Planes of Immanence: Deleuzian Assemblage as a Mode of Thought in the Theatre of Ricardo Monti

Planes of Immanence:Deleuzian Assemblage as a Mode of Thought in the Theatre of Ricardo Monti Milton Loayza (bio) It may be that to believe in this world, in this life, has become our most difficult task, the task of a mode of existence to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. —Gilles Deleuze1 Introduction: Performance and Immanence Argentine playwright Ricardo Monti belongs to a generation, which includes authors such as Eduardo Pavlovsky and Roberto Sosa, who experienced the revolutionary and utopian impulses of the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, in conflict with repressive forces that led to the dictatorship of 1976–1983. Since the return of democracy, Monti continues to write a politically and historically engaged theatre; he is considered a major reference for new generations of playwrights. Various scholarly studies of Monti’s theatre (by Monteleone, Pellettieri, and Graham-Jones, for example) are in agreement when establishing that theatrical dynamism, symbolic density, intertextuality, and experimentation with alternative structures are present in his work.2 Four main features characterize his work: the use of metatheatrical devices, the presence of various forms of parody, its reference to past history, and the ambiguity of its narrative resolutions. These highlight Monti’s search for alternative expressions of reality through theatre, as well as the eccentricity of his aesthetics. Nevertheless, identifying these characteristics falls short of pinpointing the source of the work’s impact, its unity, and its specific innovations. One reason for this shortcoming, I argue, is the treatment of the plays as representation, leading to hermeneutic impasses that, even as they are related to Argentina’s conflicted history, do not translate into a unified vision. A Deleuzian approach, where an author uses theatre for a project related to performance instead of representation, will be more efficacious in conveying continuity in Monti’s work. Rather than confronting us with aporias and/or indeterminacy, the plays are performances that draw paths of becoming. Monti believes that as an artist engaged in the bourgeois practice of theatre, he must commit to critique its thought immanently from the inside of that [End Page 79] practice.3 The plays, then, exploit theatre as an image of thought in the Deleuzian sense of “giv[ing] itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”4 The Deleuzian concept of immanence, specifically, as Laura Cull has suggested, allows us to “rethink performance itself as a kind of philosophy.”5 The aesthetics of Monti’s plays, the nature of their theatricality, and their ethical/political sense, come into prominence when his dramatic work is understood as a thought experiment that spans the playwright’s career. Like Gilles Deleuze’s theories, Monti’s work concerns contemporary frustration about our mode of investment in the world, whether it may be understood in personal, political, economic, or historical terms. Deleuze understood this crisis as one of the plane of immanence; that is, our capacity to engage our human desire and potentiality in pure becoming with no transcendental end or reference. For Deleuze, it is not an issue of believing in the world but “in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence.”6 The search for planes of immanence is a historical task because it is tied to a critique of global capitalism, and to a recognition of the openings and obstacles for revolutionary transformation that globalization offers. Immanence therefore defines practices that engage the state of things as a being in crisis, yet refuse to seek a transcendent path out of the crisis. Instead, this practice chooses to produce more immanence and freedom from the givens in the status quo. In relation to theatre, Deleuze translates the issue of immanence as a rejection of the fixity of representational theatre, which emphasizes perception, while searching for a theatre that takes root in the instability of becoming. This means that theatre must yield to the productivity of desire and thought. Similarly, the plays of Ricardo Monti insist on the theatrical condition of characters and actors, because theatre, unlike the illusions that inform our situation in the world, gives us a better...

Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Laura Cull and Will Daddario. Fishponds, Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2013. pp. xiii + 229, 24 illustrations. $57 cloth, $20 e-book.

Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Laura Cull and Will Daddario. Fishponds, Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2013. pp. xiii + 229, 24 illustrations. 20 e-book. - Volume 56 Issue 3

Thinking Without Authority: Performance Philosophy &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; the Democracy of Thought

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical ‘utopian’ hypothesis designed to ‘open up’ the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself.

Affect in Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates: The Politics of Becoming-Animal in Performance

Affect in Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates: The Politics of Becoming-Animal in Performance Laura Cull (bio) Introduction This essay explores some of the implications for performance of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “affect,” which is not understood as emotion, but as a prepersonal process of “becoming,” change or variation caused by an encounter between bodies. In particular, I want to evaluate the politics of the affective process Deleuze calls “becoming-animal,” and to address the relationship between this process and the approach to the animal taken by Butoh cofounder, Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986) and UK-based contemporary artist, Marcus Coates (1968-). A good deal of text and practice based performance research has already engaged with Deleuzian affect and the notion of becoming-animal.1 However, one could argue that, in many of the texts at least, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought appears more as a passing reference than as a core resource, and in some cases, the notion of becoming-animal in particular, is defined in what I construe as misleading ways. Here, I attempt to provide a clear exposition of Deleuze’s account of affect before moving on to address the particular mode of affect that Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-animal.” I will then examine the ways in which Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates present the relationship between affect (or becoming) and imitation, followed by an outline of the political and ethical implications that the performance of becoming-animal might be understood to have. At the same time, I acknowledge that Deleuze and Guattari themselves by no means have a straightforward relationship to animals; indeed, there would certainly be a tension involved in any co-option of the concept of becoming-animal to what they would consider the “molar” project of animal rights. Deleuze and Guattari examine the suffering of animals—a dying rat and a horse being beaten in the street, for instance—less from the point of view of the nonhuman animal and more from that of the human who enters a becoming-animal through the encounter with suffering. But we shall return to this problem at a later stage.2 For now, let me briefly introduce Hijikata and Coates. As is well known, Hijikata (along with his lifelong collaborator, Ohno Kazuo) is the cofounder of Butoh—a form of dance-art that emerged in Japan following the Second World [End Page 189] War and strove to create an alternative movement vocabulary for Japanese dance in relation to a dominant context defined both by Western forms and by Noh. Although many of the features of Butoh have perhaps subsequently sedimented into a recognizable “style” (bodies painted white against a black background, out-turned feet, slowed gestures and so forth), we might suggest that, in its emergence, Butoh presented its audience with strangeness and uncertainty: flinching and flowing bodies barely visible as they appear out of and retreat back into darkness, limbs like part-objects seemingly operating independently of other parts of the body, and an absolutely precise yet unrecognizable articulation of movement. Hijikata’s dances, in particular, elude any fixed identification of the performing body in terms of age, health, gender, sexuality, “animation,” or as I will focus on here, species.3 From early examples such as the 1960 film Heso to genbaku (Navel and A-Bomb)4 to Hijikata’s final solo, Leprosy within the piece Summer Storm (1973), what Hijikata called “the body that becomes” remained at the center of his work.5 Coates, in contrast, first came to prominence in the commercial art world about ten years ago, becoming increasingly well known both for his video installations and live performances (and for the videos and photographs that re-present those performances). The vast majority of these deal with notions of “the animal” in one form or another—from relatively early video works such as Stoat (1999), which shows Coates “attempting to walk wearing a pair of six inch stilts loosely bound to his feet,”6 to Intelligent Design (2009), a video of two giant tortoises mating that Coates produced during a residency on the Galapagos Islands. Despite coming from and operating within very different contexts, Hijikata and Coates share an emphasis on becoming...

Deleuze and Performance. Edited by Laura Cull. Deleuze Connection Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009; pp. vi 282. $115 cloth, $37.50 paper.

Deleuze and Performance. Edited by Laura Cull. Deleuze Connection Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009; pp. vi 282. $115 cloth, $37.50 paper.

Parable to Paradigm to Ideology: Thinking through (the Jesuit) Theatre

Parable/Paradigm/Ideology With this essay, I would like to present and analyze a paradigm of thought that I refer to as thinking through theatre. This paradigm first appeared to me in Maaike Bleeker’s contribution to Laura Cull’s edited collection Deleuze and Performance (2009). There, the paradigm provided Bleeker with the opportunity to develop key themes in Ivana Muller’s 2004 performance How Heavy Are My Thoughts? through the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994). For Bleeker, Muller’s performance constituted an affective articulation of Deleuzio-Guattarian concepts and helped to elucidate the theatrical dimension of the French philosophers’ dispositif. By the end of her article, Bleeker argues, “How Heavy Are My Thoughts? shows thinking in Deleuzian terms as something that happens ‘in between’: between people, and between people and the things they find themselves confronted with,” while demonstrating that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy constitutes a unique performance in and of itself.1 In what follows, I want to add a peculiar form of dramatic literature to the assemblage of performances and ideas created by Bleeker. By inserting the Jesuit Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli’s Della Christiana Moderatione Del Theatro Libro (Florence, 1652) into that assemblage, I aim to construct a new analytic constellation consisting of Bleeker, Deleuze, Guattari, Muller, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, and, of course, myself.2 The addition of Ottonelli and his treatise opens the paradigm of thinking through theatre first surveyed by Bleeker onto a historical terrain where the “dramatic” component of the Jesuit’s writing emerged, not through a traditional staged performance, but in the spiritual conversion of all who had strayed from the Church’s embrace. As a Jesuit, Ottonelli concerned himself with helping each and every individual to perceive the path of salvation paved and preserved by the Jesuit Order, to practice a disciplined life of self-renunciation, and, ultimately, to see the world through the ideological aperture of the Catholic Faith enunciated by the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola. One parable, in particular, from Ottonelli’s treatise reveals his creation as a work of dramatic literature: “Si narra la notabile conversione di uno scenico