Unpeeling Action: Critical Writing, Training and Process

For political philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is also that which inserts us into the world, makes possible our public appearance and our political participation. In performance, action is that which invites us in, marks or blurs the boundaries between public and private, theatrical gesture and its spectating. In writing about performance, I am confronted with action two-fold. In the instance in which I encounter it in the live moment, raw and incomplete; and in the textual gesture I extend in return. This paper considers the relationship between critical writing about performance and training practice, through an exploration of action. It draws on Arendt’s philosophy to examine the ways in which action operates in pedagogical approaches to critical writing. It does so by considering the plural modes of action and representation as found in a Jackson Pollock painting inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this manner a gentle confrontation is staged between the process of critical writing, marked by encounter, resistance, articulation, interpretation and dialogue, my own experience of training critical writers, and the politics of description that shape the critical text. The article considers how this confrontation might offer configurations of encounters with performance, allowing for change and specificity in the training process

Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy

This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt’s work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. Arendt’s relevance to our times is ubiquitous: from the near constant citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism in relation to the recent rise in strong-man politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism, to her diagnosis of the plight of refugees, denied even the rights belonging to those that have broken the law, but instead placed outside the law. Contemporary political philosophy also bears numerous influences, in the thinking of Mouffe, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Brown, Butler, and more. For performance philosophy, we might engage with Arendt’s performative notion of politics itself, as exemplified in her idea of ‘spaces of appearance’, but also the performativity of thought, as well as the implications of Arendt’s work for phenomenology, governmentality, rights, and ecology. Contributors to this special issue also think through the relevance of Arendt’s work for an anti-colonial and anti-racist political praxis, and for post and non-human political ethics, judgment, and thinking

Library of Unfinished Texts

The Library of Unfinished Texts is a digital library that gathers writing on and about performance, in collaboration with Something Other, a space for writing from, around and about performance. These are: texts that have not yet found their ending, forgotten paragraphs that drifted off, drafts never sent, and notebook scribbles with no home. The Library of Unfinished Texts draws a link between criticism as a mode of thinking, and the library as a site of investigation. In Against Interpretation (1964), writer and critic Susan Sontag argues for a rethinking of the project of interpretation that allows the appearance, rather than usurping, of a work of art. Appearance, to Sontag, means 'experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself' (1964: 10). Elsewhere, in The Life of the Mind (1971), philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks of thinking as an essential activity of criticism. Sontag and Arendt both offer reflections on two fundamental processes of criticism: thought and interpretation. Where Sontag acknowledges the aesthetic, subjective and material possibilities of interpretation, Arendt examines the blurred boundaries between public and private inherent in our articulation of thought. Library of Unfinished Texts stems from the proposition that, by exposing and unmasking critical writing in-process, we may better understand the relationship between criticism, subjectivity and publicness. In the same manner in which Sontag argues for an unmasking of the work of art within criticism, Library of Unfinished Texts seeks to expose the incomplete, the fractured and the disoriented nature of thought in critical process. The article positions these reflections alongside extracts and samples of unfinished drafts that led to its making, and from the project itself. The Institute has no home per se, but it is a London-based project

Unnamed autofictions, dissonant co-labouring : a preface

This preface to our keygroup conference contribution addresses the problem of collaboration and the autofictions that sustain co-labouring: working together in difficult conditions. It contains three registers of writing. Excerpts of autofictions reveal the slippery implications of contemporary collective labour in UK higher education. Questions punctuate the text to invite the reader into the problematics that sustain our working. Theory through narrative begins to articulate the ways that might enable the support and interest necessary for dignity to be possible at work

Tactics: Practical and Imagined

Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebecca Hayes Laughton, and Katherine Low) have been convening working sessions at various schools and conferences that address the questions and problems animating this issue of RiDE. In this final article, a handful of our respondents from ASTR 2018 in San Diego ruminate upon, list, and re-member tactics they have used, or dreamed of using, to make it through the neoliberal academic day-to-day. Their thoughts are accompanied here by a handful of photos that document the documentation we produced at our first symposium

Performance Philosophy 7(2): Imagining the Open

This is the editorial for Performance Philosophy 7(2) (2022