The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Alice Lagaay, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Alice Lagaay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138495623, 9781138495623
• eBook ISBN: 9781000056914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field.

Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity –as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges –in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life.

The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.

PART I

Genealogies, contexts and traditions

1

PERFORMANCES OF PHILOSOPHY IN ANCIENT GREECE AND IN MODERNITY

Suddenly a philosopher enters the stage

Ira Avneri and Freddie Rokem

The context

The basic facts are well known: Ancient Greece was the ‘birthplace’ of the discursive practices of both theater and philosophy. The more or less simultaneous composition of a large body of dramatic works and the emergence (with Socrates and Plato) of mature philosophical thought is a unique phenomenon. Developing through an intense dialogue, the two discursive practices were, however, also frequently in competition, at times even regarding each other with scorn and suspicion, initiating what is famously known as the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and (dramatic) poetry’. Through their multi-leveled interactions, each discursive practice also integrated features of the other, either drawing attention to the philosophical aspects of dramatic writing and theater performances or to the dramaturgical and performative dimensions of philosophy.

We will begin with a brief presentation of two paradigmatic cases of such ‘transgressions’, with Oedipus as a philosophical dramatic character and Socrates as a performative philosopher. Then, we will examine in detail Socrates’ performative philosophizing as depicted in his delayed entrance to Agathon’s house in Plato’s Symposium. And in closing, we will briefly discuss how certain aspects of the Socratic/Platonic legacy of philosophical performativity have reappeared in the work and thinking of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht.

Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (dated around 429 BCE) plays a double role in this context. First, it features a dramatic character who triumphantly takes on the role of the philosopher when solving the riddle of the Sphinx to define what a human being is.¹ Second, around 335 BCE, almost a century after it was written, the play served as the bedrock for Aristotle’s Poetics. Composed at a time when the arts of playwriting and theatrical performances had deteriorated, the Poetics was the first philosophical text about drama/tragedy, rather than a philosophical drama of the kind that Plato had marvelously sketched in his dialogues.

It is important to note that Oedipus Tyrannus repeatedly emphasizes that Oedipus had solved the riddle of the Sphinx using his own intelligence, without any supernatural intervention. This riddle defines the human as a creature with many shifting legs (i.e. multiplicity and transformation) and a single voice (i.e. unity and sameness). In Platonic terms, this interaction between one and many is echoed in the dialectics between the eternal, pure Forms and their many transient manifestations. In Aristotelian terms, however, the riddle of the Sphinx seems to violate one of the basic principles of logical thinking, the Principle of Noncontradiction, which later became the basis for the Law of Identity. As Aristotle claims in his Metaphysics, “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect” (1005b; our emphasis. Aristotle, 1984, p. 1588). However, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, as Charles Segal has noted, “noncontradiction gives way to a fantastic, irrational ‘logic’ of paradoxes in which opposites can in fact be equal and ‘one’ can simultaneously be ‘many’” (Segal 1999, p. 216. See also Rokem 2010, 2016).

As a ‘prize’ for solving this paradoxical riddle, Oedipus marries the widow-queen, his mother, thus becoming the ruler of Thebes and unwittingly fulfilling the second part of the Delphic prophecy. This alone is not sufficient to abolish the plague in Thebes. The plague, it is said, will only cease when the person who killed King Laius is found. The murderer turns out to be Oedipus himself, who, whilst knowing the universal identity of humans, fails to know his own identity as a singular subject, the gnōthi seautón (‘know thyself’) commanded by the Oracle.

The second paradigmatic case is Socrates, whose manner of philosophizing was often seen as theatrical – even in the eyes of Plato, his most ardent pupil. Socrates’ philosophical mission was also directly related to the Delphic Oracle. As he himself argues in his defense-speech (in 399 BCE, as transmitted in Plato’s Apology), the Oracle had disclosed to his longtime friend Chaerephon that there was no man wiser than Socrates. Upon hearing of it from Chaerephon, the perplexed Socrates, who until then had believed that he possessed no wisdom, began wandering about Athens to check its veracity by seeking someone who is wiser than him – in order, finally, to confirm that the Oracle is irrefutable (22a), a ‘Popperian’-like logic of verification of a given assumption on the basis of unsuccessful attempts to refute it (Apology, 21e–22e).²

Socrates’ response to the ‘riddle’ of the Oracle (as he terms it; 21b)³ signaled his Oedipus-like insistence that the traditional methods of oracular interpretation must give way to rational inquiry, testing the veracity of divine pronouncements. But, as he began to question people who had made claims to wisdom, Socrates found out that he himself is indeed the wisest, for he is the only one who knows that he does not know (22d–23b), which – like the Cretan who claims that all Cretans are liars – is in itself paradoxical. As he tells it, he was unable to find even a single person who could grasp the notion of wisdom as knowledge of ignorance. While his interlocutors perceived themselves as knowledgeable when in fact they knew nothing, he himself was aware of his own ignorance and did not pretend to know anything apart from that (21c–d).

The Symposium – Plato’s only dialogue named after the occasion for its plot – is the earliest known record of a philosopher engaging with the practices of theater. It presents a detailed report of the private banquet held in honor of Agathon’s victory in the annual tragedy festival of Lênaea, presumably in 416 BCE. Arriving at the exclusive party with his admirer Aristodemus, Socrates eventually joins the group of prominent Athenian citizens, including the playwright Aristophanes whose comedy the Clouds (performed in 423 BCE; the earliest known text to mention Socrates) features a satiric, somewhat malicious depiction of Socrates’ philosophical performance, which, according to Plato, has nourished the charges against Socrates (Apology, 18c–d, 19c). Gathered in the intimate setting of Agathon’s house, they celebrate the playwright’s victory in the tragedy competition by staging another competition, a playful contest (agôn) of speeches in praise of Eros – the divine, mythological personification of the human erôs.

However, this competition begins only after Socrates finally makes his entrance, concluding a long standstill outside the house (Symposium, 174d–175c). Through the interruptions, first caused by his absence and the delay of his entrance and then by his presence and indoor actions, Socrates transforms the house of the dramatist into a stage (or ‘home’) for performing philosophy. When Alcibiades makes a sudden ‘drunken’ entrance, just after Socrates has completed his speech on Eros (based on Diotima’s teachings – a sophisticated way of defending his own claim of ignorance), the discussion takes on new forms of theatricality, turning into a fierce and much less playful agôn between these two ex-lovers (212c ff.). Finally, at dawn, before leaving Agathon’s house to spend the day in the baths and the market place, Socrates lectures the two playwrights – who are too tired to hear his arguments and fall asleep – that the same man could possess the knowledge required for composing both tragedies and comedies and that the man who can compose tragedies should be able to compose comedies as well (223c–d).

At a certain point, Aristodemus also falls asleep and misses most of the discussion epitomizing the agôn between the discursive practices of philosophy and dramatic poetry. As Aristodemus had realized in real-time and later told Apollodorus, the narrator of the dialogue, he had only heard the key points of Socrates’ argument but could not remember most of what was said (223c–d). One possible interpretation of Socrates’ early morning ‘lecture’ is that philosophy encompasses both dramatic genres, while the playwrights, who either compose tragedy or comedy but not both,⁴ are incomplete, like the split two-legged humans searching for their missing half, according to the myth presented in Aristophanes’ speech on Eros.

While Oedipus’ employment of logical reasoning (which Aristotle regarded as the foundation for philosophy as well as for dramatic narratives) leads to the destruction of himself and his family, Socrates’ performance of philosophy eventually serves as evidence in the trial that results in his death-sentence. Athens, Plato suggests, cannot be a home for Socratic philosophy. The philosophical performances of Oedipus and Socrates are thus the paradoxical expressions of a uniquely tragic spirit, combining triumph and downfall, which was cultivated during a short period in Classical Athens when the discursive practices of philosophy and performance were in competitive yet fruitful dialogue with each other.

Socrates’ standstill

In Plato’s works, Socrates’ odd behavior is often denoted by the word atopos, or atopia, and its variants. Formed by the combination of the Alpha privative and the Greek word topos (meaning ‘place’, ‘location’, and sometimes also ‘topic’), atopia is often translated as ‘outlandishness’ or ‘strangeness’; yet literally, it signifies a quality of ‘placelessness’, an absence of ‘normal’ location, something that eludes categorization or a specified context (cf. Schlosser 2014, pp. 12, 142).⁵ Socrates’ atopia implies his unique stance in Athens as an outsider inside: he is a stranger to the traditional patterns of thought and behavior as well as to the common manner of expression; yet, he is no foreigner. His presence embodies the dialectics of familiarity and strangeness discussed in the Allegory of the Cave. “It’s a strange image (atopon eikona) you’re describing, and strange prisoners (desmôtas atopous)”, Glaucon reacts to the account of the state of affairs inside the cave, to which Socrates replies: “They’re like us” (Republic, 515a. Plato 1997, pp. 1132–1133).

The term atopia can define almost any philosophical model, since philosophy is, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words, “never entirely within the world, yet never outside the world” (cf. Hadot 2002, p. 36). Still, there seems to be no philosopher more suitable to this term than Socrates. He is considered atopic not just in terms of his appearance and manners, but also in terms of his mode of thinking, his way of philosophizing, and his public practice of a private spatio-temporal logic that challenges the Athenian conventions of space and time.

The initial movement intrinsic to Socrates’ atopic philosophizing is his idle wanderings, systematically examining people while strolling around in search of someone wiser than him. As he interprets the Oracle’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Genealogies, contexts and traditions
• Part II Questions and debates
• Part III Methods, techniques, genres and forms
• Part IV Figures
• Part V Performance as Philosophy and Philosophy as Performance
• Index