Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, University of Surrey
I am delighted to introduce this inaugural issue of Performance Philosophy – a new open access, online journal that aims to offer international researchers a stage for the performance of thought as to the myriad potential relationships that might be understood to exist between ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’. Are performance and philosophy two distinct disciplines, practices, and traditions whose essential qualities and fundamental projects differ from each other in important ways? To what extent do they overlap, coincide and/or contest one another? What insights might be gathered from the philosophy of performance – whether from analytic, continental, Western or non-Western traditions? And what philosophical insights might historical and contemporary performance be said to contain – across the broad(ening) spectrum that includes but is not limited to dance, drama, everyday life, live art, music, and theatre? Is it appropriate and productive to explore the idea that philosophy itself is a form of performance and/or operates performatively? And vice versa: in what ways and to what ends might we consider performance as a kind of philosophy? These are only some of the possible questions that the rest of the Editorial Team and I hope this journal will address; no doubt, you will have your own – including questions that we have not even considered – not to mention those unpredictable questions and provocative problems that the ceaselessly changing fields of performance and philosophy themselves will throw up in future. Like the emerging interdisciplinary field of Performance Philosophy itself, the scope and parameters of this journal are open to definition, drawings and re-drawings, by those who contribute to it.
In this respect, this first issue should not be read as ‘representative’ of Performance Philosophy – either the journal, or the field (which would be impossible and nonsensical given the openness and indeterminacy we have just attributed to them). It is not intended as a blueprint for future issues – or at least only insofar as it is an experimental gesture, which may be made again, differently, by each subsequent editor. For instance, whilst I have tried to make some initial steps towards the journal’s international ambitions – through commissioning the translation into English of texts from French (Garcin-Marrou et al) and German (Gauss and Totzke) – this is clearly only a very slight initiative that I hope future editors will want and be able to develop. There is no reason, that is, why the journal could not at some point become multi-lingual in ways that would acknowledge the absence of any pure equivalence between the terms of ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ and those related but crucially different terms belonging to other languages. Likewise, I hope that the domination of contributions by European and North American authors and those concerned with Western traditions of performance and philosophy in this issue, will only be taken as indicative of my current limitations as an editor rather than of the journal per se. For future issues, open calls will invite international researchers to be authors and editors, as well as soliciting contributions that address global practices of performance and philosophy. In this issue, we get a glimpse of this international potential in Ella Parry-Davies and Eliesh S.D.’s report from Beirut: Bodies in Public, drawing ‘attention to the provocations and opportunities presented by the specificities of place’ in relation to both the performance of thought and the thought of performance.
This inaugural issue, then, is but one partial perspective on, and one provisional performance of performance philosophy. It stages a particular concern with the nonhuman and/or posthuman dimensions of performance and philosophy. It enacts a curiosity with the ‘non-philosophical’ project of the contemporary French thinker Francois Laruelle. It performs some investigations into alternative forms and written styles for journal contributions: including, a transcript of a conversation (Garcin-Marrou et al), an email exchange (Böhler, Loughnane and Parkes), responses to an invitation to write a manifesto for performance philosophy (Daddario, Gotman, Gritzner, Kirkkopelto, Lagaay, Ó Maoilearca, Schmidt), as well as an event of writing for which I know of no suitable name (Will Daddario’s ‘To Grieve’). The issue begins to outline parts of a map of the interdisciplinary territory of performance philosophy – combining contributions from scholars based in Dance (Cvejić), Drama (Kornhaber), Literature (Corby) and Music (Bowie, McAuley) as well as Theatre and Performance. It starts to sketch a timeline of what David Kornhaber describes as the ‘pre-history’ of performance philosophy, its unstable origins in ancient Greek culture (Rokem) and in the work of those it identifies as performance philosophers avant la lettre (Lagaay).
As you can imagine, it has taken an enormous collaborative effort over a considerable period of time to bring this journal to this moment of launching. I would like to thank Alice Lagaay for her support with the copy-editing process, our designer Paul Jackel, and our translators Virginie Girel-Pietka (Garcin-Marrou et al) and Boris Wysseuk (Gauss and Totzke). I also want to thank my fellow Editorial Team members: Kélina Gotman, Eve Katsouraki and Dan Watt for their invaluable contributions to this process. But particular thanks must go to Theron Schmidt who has done a vast amount of ‘behind the scenes’ labour, amongst other things, doing brilliant work on setting up the architecture of the journal’s online platform but also providing invaluable feedback on the form and structure of this first issue. Since the journal is, for now at least, independent of any commercial publishing house and the kinds of administrative support such places can offer, it relies upon this kind of generosity from its supporters for its existence and ongoing survival. I am very grateful to all those who have supported the journal in this way thus far and sincerely hope we can continue to secure this support in future.
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is Head of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Surrey, UK. She is author of Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (Palgrave, 2012) and editor of Deleuze and Performance (Edinburgh, 2009). With Freddie Rokem and Alice Lagaay, she is co-editor of the Performance Philosophy book series and a founding, core convener of the Performance Philosophy research network. Other publications include the edited volumes Encounters in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave, 2014), co-edited with Alice Lagaay and Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (Intellect, 2013), co-edited with Will Daddario. She is currently working on a new monograph, with the working title Performance Thinks.
© 2015 Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
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