Theron Schmidt, UNSW Sydney
This latest issue of Performance Philosophy is timed to coincide with the third biennial international conference for Performance Philosophy, hosted this year by the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. So it is in Prague that I put the finishing touches on this expansive volume; and even though the content we publish here has been in preparation for some time, and has no causal connection to the conference themes, it nevertheless resonates with the core question posed by the Prague organisers: ‘How does performance philosophy act?’ (http://web.flu.cas.cz/ppprague2017/ ). This is a question that can be (and is being) engaged, well, philosophically, in all the diverse understandings of that term—but it is also a practical question, one that applies as much to the structures and configurations of things calling themselves ‘Performance Philosophy’ (with big Ps) as to those myriad individual acts of ‘performance philosophy’ that constitute the field.
Alice Lagaay, one of the Prague conference organising team—and also, with me and several others, one of the conveners of the research network—underscored this point at the conference opening: Performance Philosophy, the network, has so far chosen not to pursue a legally binding organizational structure (with a director, etc.), nor permanent alliance with a particular institution, but has instead formed itself as a networked model of affiliation and voluntary initiative. This has its weaknesses as well as its strengths, and we are always wary of what Jo Freeman (1970) called ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’; and so it is an issue that is regularly re-visited in gatherings such as this one in Prague. But for the time being, what characterises ‘Performance Philosophy’ is the condition of being collaborative, in-process, and under negotiation. No one person speaks on behalf of the network.
The situation is somewhat different for ‘Performance Philosophy’, the journal, which depends on an editorial team, and the generous support of an international editorial board and expert peer-reviewers, to ensure a high quality of academic scholarship. But the journal also remains an experiment in working outside conventional structures—and therefore interrogating those conventions as conventions, as configurations to which we give our tacit consent when we work within them—in being open access, running on open source software, and not affiliated with a for-profit publisher or academic institution, so that authors retain full ownership of their work under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
However, one of the risks of networked, non-hierarchical structures is that the labour of individuals in maintaining them can become obscured and anonymised: so I want to acknowledge the work of my co-editors, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Eve Katsouraki, and Daniel Watt, in guiding the open submission articles we publish in this issue through the process of peer-review and editorial crafting—and to thank the authors for their patience during this process. In their diversity of both objects of study and forms of approach, these articles demonstrate something of the range of ethical, ontological, and epistemological endeavours that the naming of a field of ‘performance philosophy’ can make possible: from a speculative manifesto on the ‘aliveness’ (as opposed to liveness) of performance (Alifuoco), to a theorization of violence through the Hebrew neologism ‘ha-Rav’ (Pimentel); from two different considerations of performance as a site for exploring the political (D’Arcy) and onto-ecological (Dimitrova) implications of technology and the non-human, to a practice-based exploration of phenomenological intersubjectivity in Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (Montrose); and from an excavation of the performance philosophy of early 20th-century Croatian theatre director Branko Gavella (Petlevksi), to a search for Alain Badiou’s ethics of play in contemporary headphone performance (Dalmasso).
This issue also sees an expansion of the editorial team to include Will Daddario and Ioana Jucan, leading a new peer-reviewed section called ReView: an alternative to the conventional review structure, which emphasises the ‘re’ in review by calling for essays or creative responses to works/books/events that the author has already encountered at least once before. As with the [Margins] section (curated by Kélina Gotman) that is a recurring feature of the journal, ReViews can—and ideally will—utilize forms and modes of ideation that differ from the traditional essay or, in this case, book review. Not a review of a pre-existing work of scholarship or artistic expression, but, rather, a Re-viewing of an experience, the ReView puts forth the personality of the author who is winding his or her way through a particular repetition. Therapeutic encounter (Gough), Barthes’ personal voyage through the photograph (Wilson), neo-baroque grids (Nielsen): these are the epicentres of repetition one will encounter in this edition of the journal. (If you’re interested in submitting a future ReView, see www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/about/submissions#ReView for details on how to make a proposal.)
Finally, we are delighted that this issue also expands the collaborative nature of the journal by featuring a special section dedicated to a particular theme. Brilliantly conceived and guest-edited by Lucia Ruprecht, taking inspiration from a phrase from Mark Franko, this collection of articles thinks ‘Towards an Ethics of Gesture’, building on Giorgio Agamben’s Notes On Gesture (2000), but also diverse other sources, explored across a broad range of gestural forms (dance, film, protest, philosophical essay). Ruprecht’s introduction, which immediately follows this editorial, lays out the points of departure for this collection more fully.
This is the first of several forthcoming issues that will be dedicated to specific themes, including an issue on Philosophy On Stage: The Concept of Immanence in Contemporary Art and Philosophy that is in preparation for publication later this year, to be published simultaneously in English and German; and an issue on ‘Crisis’ next year, for which the call for papers is forthcoming. How does Performance Philosophy act? In an expanding and inclusive collaboration, we hope.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. ‘Notes on Gesture’. In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Freeman, Jo. 1970. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
© 2017 Theron Schmidt
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