Academy of Theatre and Dance

We are witnessing a return to presence in performance theory. This paper both situates and differentiates itself in relation to this context, introducing its own concept of differential presence as a response to the non-representational, process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and a series of three different performance practices. There are also three facets to differential presence that I examine here, in the hope of providing an argument for the necessity of re-thinking the relation between difference and presence in performance, not as mutually exclusive but reciprocally determining. I begin by exploring the Deleuzian concept of affect as a facet of differential presence, registering the import of Spinoza for Deleuze’s project and the way in which Allan Kaprow’s work, understood as differential presence, shifts attention away from conventional notions of ‘meaning’, towards the idea of performance as a transformative encounter. Secondly, I address affirmation and creation as facets of differential presence, foregrounding the influence of Nietzsche’s thought on Deleuze and its value for understanding Artaud’s fury with ‘God’ as the name for any force that comes from without to organise or stratify creativity at the level of matter, including the performing voice. Finally, I examine the idea of differential presence as duration in relation to the work of Goat Island, attending to the role of Bergson’s philosophy in shaping Deleuze’s project and in a bid to re-think presence as a mode of temporal relation involving the multiplicity of presents – distinct from conventional appeals to being in a single ‘here and now’.

Like those who inspired him – Spinoza, Nietzsche & Artaud – Deleuze experienced a poor state of health during much of his working life: beginning in 1968 with the first major episode of the pulmonary illness that would dog the philosopher’s body until his fatal defenestration in 1995. But what was the relationship, for Deleuze, between philosophy and illness, between thought and the body in poor health? In his late interview with Claire Parnet, Deleuze proposes that ‘illness sharpens a kind of vision of life or a sense of life’. Rather than merely thinking about one’s illness, one might use a fragile state of health to develop a mode of thought that is more tuned-in to life, Deleuze suggests. Alternatively, in Pure Immanence, Deleuze argues that, for Nietzsche, ‘Illness is not a motive for a thinking subject, nor is it an object for thought: it constitutes, rather, a secret intersubjectivity at the heart of a single individual’. In these ways, and indeed in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze suggests that illness need not just separate us from our power to act; ‘the same physiological state may weaken some powers but open up new possibilities of feeling or bring about new capacities for acting and being acted upon’. However, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze also speaks of ‘philosophical diseases’; arguing that idealism, for instance ‘is the illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy’.

This paper will explore the value Deleuze attributes to illness in relation to thought as evidence of his embodied approach to philosophy. Contra Peter Hallward’s recent critique, I will argue against the idea of Deleuze’s thought as an ascetic philosophy that calls for a dissolution of the material self in order to become the adequate vessel for the passage of a dematerialised thought. Rather, I will suggest that the reason why Deleuze is interested in the thought that emerges from illness is because it involves a heightened awareness of our capacity to affect and be affected by other material bodies.

Like those who inspired him – Spinoza, Nietzsche & Artaud – Deleuze experienced a poor state of health during much of his working life: beginning in 1968 with the first major episode of the pulmonary illness that would dog the philosopher’s body until his fatal defenestration in 1995. But what was the relationship, for Deleuze, between philosophy and illness, between thought and the body in poor health? In his late interview with Claire Parnet, Deleuze proposes that ‘illness sharpens a kind of vision of life or a sense of life’. Rather than merely thinking about one’s illness, one might use a fragile state of health to develop a mode of thought that is more tuned-in to life, Deleuze suggests. Alternatively, in Pure Immanence, Deleuze argues that, for Nietzsche, ‘Illness is not a motive for a thinking subject, nor is it an object for thought: it constitutes, rather, a secret intersubjectivity at the heart of a single individual’. In these ways, and indeed in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze suggests that illness need not just separate us from our power to act; ‘the same physiological state may weaken some powers but open up new possibilities of feeling or bring about new capacities for acting and being acted upon’. However, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze also speaks of ‘philosophical diseases’; arguing that idealism, for instance ‘is the illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy’.

This paper will explore the value Deleuze attributes to illness in relation to thought as evidence of his embodied approach to philosophy. Contra Peter Hallward’s recent critique, I will argue against the idea of Deleuze’s thought as an ascetic philosophy that calls for a dissolution of the material self in order to become the adequate vessel for the passage of a dematerialised thought. Rather, I will suggest that the reason why Deleuze is interested in the thought that emerges from illness is because it involves a heightened awareness of our capacity to affect and be affected by other material bodies.

Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The Pathognomy of Performance (2011) are only three recent publications that one could cite as evidence that the international field of Theatre and Performance Research is undergoing what we might call ‘a philosophical turn’: an intensification of its long-standing interest in and engagement with philosophy, as a source of diverse concepts, plural methods and multiple ontologies that can be productively explored in relation to performance.

But what is at stake in this turn? What relationship between performance and philosophy is being staged in this work? In this presentation, I will suggest that we need to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance, beyond an approach to philosophy determined by a pursuit of the next new and fashionable method of performance analysis. In particular, I will propose that our experiments with what I am calling ‘performance-philosophy’ need not begin with clear and distinct definitions of each term. We do not yet know what either performance or philosophy can do; it is precisely the indeterminacy of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ (as exposed in the ‘nonart’ of Allan Kaprow) that makes performance-philosophy an exciting prospect.

Ultimately, I will argue that the encounter between performance and philosophy is at its richest and most egalitarian if philosophy is willing to encounter performance as thinking, and as that which might extend what philosophy counts as thinking – a discussion that will also lead us to question the implications of the provocative idea that everything (not just the theatrical subject or philosophical mind) thinks. In this way, I hope to address not only the philosophical turn in performance, but also the non-philosophical turn in philosophy: the democratization of thought that has recently been called for by the French (non-) philosopher, François Laruelle. Non-philosophy will meet nonart, then – but as its equal, not as its illustration.

'Laura Cull breaks with the mutual distrust between theater and philosophy that has kept both disciplines from recognizing their myriad entanglements. The result is a creative approach to contemporary theater that also sheds new light on Gilles Deleuze.' - Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama, Harvard University, USA

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Engaging with a wide range of interdisciplinary practitioners including Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud, John Cage, the Living Theatre, Robert Wilson and Allan Kaprow, as well as with the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson and Spinoza, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking 'immanence': the open and endlessly creative whole of which all things are a part.

Theatres of Immanence builds upon Deleuze's emphasis on immanence, affect, change and movement to provide new approaches to five key topics in theatre and performance: 1) authorship and collaboration, 2) voice and language, 3) animals in performance, 4) audience participation and 5) time or duration. The book provides an accessible introduction to Deleuze's ideas and draws attention to the ethical dimensions of performance, asking: 'what good is theatre, and particularly immanent theatre, anyway?'

This paper will be in two parts. The first will start from the premise that the term ‘performance studies’ means different things in different contexts. Specifically, the paper will address the distinction between i) “Performance Studies” understood as a discipline that emerged largely as a challenge to Theatre Studies in the US in the 1980s and 90s – thanks in large part to the work of Richard Schechner, and ii) performance studies understood as ‘the scholarly study of musical performance’ (Rink 2005: x) which, again since the 1980s, has constituted a rapidly growing area of research within music and musicology. Having outlined the distinction, but also areas of shared concern, I will offer some preliminary observations as to what the value might be of greater levels of communication between these two versions of performance studies. The second part of the paper will introduce the emerging field of Performance Philosophy as one site in which precisely these kinds of interdisciplinary exchange might take place. Here, I will focus on the concept of music performance as philosophy – drawing from scholars such as Andrew Bowie to suggest that we need not think of philosophy as simply one more source of methodologies which might be applied to musical performance, but of music performance itself as the site of a kind of philosophical thinking in its own right.