What is the relationship between performance and philosophy? What is it about the contemporary context that seems to make the question of this relationship so urgent, interesting or attractive to so many in the field of theatre and performance studies now? Why, in other words, might the question of philosophy appear in this issue of Theatre Research International concerned with ‘critical turning points’ in theatre and performance scholarship? Of course, in the space of this article, I will not be able to answer any of these questions in anything but a highly partial, incomplete and, no doubt, personal way. And yet a sense of the need to evaluate the current state and potential futures of the field of theatre and performance studies demands that they be asked and that an answer be attempted. In order to continue to cultivate the emerging subfield of performance and philosophy, I would argue that we need to ask ourselves what it is that we want from philosophy, and, furthermore, to examine what philosophy brings to those who engage with it in relation to performance.

By way of introduction, it is perhaps worth relating that my own engagement with philosophy did originate, somewhat reactively, in a kind of dissatisfaction with the available discourses for explaining how the arts worked and why they mattered. That is, I came to value philosophy as a discourse that allowed me, in turn, to value the seemingly ineffable or even superficial or ‘meaningless’ aspects of performance practice (from the point of view of linguistically, semiotically, representationally focused modes of analysis), insofar as these aspects could be understood differently, via philosophy, as art's affective presence and material force. As such, I might begin by suggesting that what we need to return to or revisit is less philosophy per se, but specific philosophies insofar as they allow us to rehabilitate the very categories that were so thoroughly deconstructed in the last ‘theory explosion’:Footnote ¹ ‘presence’, ‘the body’, ‘the voice’, ‘community’ and so forth. For instance, philosophies like those of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson seem to provide a sound conceptual basis from which to argue that the ephemeral, material work of performance does not need an interpreting, anthropocentric subject standing outside it in order for it to have ‘meaning’. Rather, we can activate these materialist philosophies in order to rethink ‘meaning’ itself, in terms of affect and becoming, or as a transformation of the audience that takes place on the level of the body through participation. Furthermore, as I will go on to discuss in what follows, these philosophies provide us with the resources to rethink performance itself as a kind of philosophy, and indeed to reconceive what counts as philosophy.Footnote ²

Before I develop and explore the stakes of this claim, I want to begin by addressing one of the main problems that seems to have troubled the relationship between performance and philosophy; that is, the tendency of both sides merely to apply philosophy to performance. Second, I will briefly compare two accounts of the experience of ‘waiting’ – one that comes from the French philosopher Henri Bergson and one that comes from the American artist Allan Kaprow – in order to suggest an alternative to application, but also to emphasize the indeterminate nature of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’. Finally, I return to this tentative proposition that the rare marriageFootnote ³ 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 subjects or minds) thinks. But first: application.

Problems in ‘a rare marriage’: on application

Although, etymologically, ‘apply’ comes from the Latin applicare, which simply means ‘bring things in contact with one another’, the notion of ‘application’ in terms of scholarship has come to connote a kind of methodological hylomorphism, in which a fixed idea is superimposed upon a pliant example, a predetermined theory over a passive practice. Application implies the subordination of the powers of one practice or process to the needs and goals of another, the instrumentalization of the example for the purposes of an argument which has little interest in the example itself beyond its value for that argument.

In the light of such connotations, interdisciplinary scholars in general (myself included) are often at pains to insist that what they are doing does not involve the ‘mere application’ of ideas taken from one discipline to another, or from theory into practice. Nevertheless, David Saltz argues that performance theorists

Even if we were to wish to temper Saltz's characterization of the parasitic nature of performance studies, it does seem fair to note the extent to which performance theorists’ encounters with philosophy tend to be coloured by the pursuit of ‘method’; we often look to philosophy for the next new method (to Deleuze, to Badiou, to Quentin Meillassoux) with which to analyse performance, as if all philosophy could be condensed to a singular and coherent methodology. And that is before we have even considered the problematic (as well as productive) implications of transplanting such a method from the philosophical environment in which it was cultivated into the unfamiliar territory of performance. Prominent scholars have warned against such an approach with regard to Deleuze. For instance, Claire Colebrook suggests,

Of course, the problem of application also pertains to philosophers, who are arguably not averse to being parasitic on the arts. For Martha Nussbaum, for instance, it is all too often that art is ‘simply being used as a primer for Philosophy 101’.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, in his 2006 book Filmosophy, Daniel Frampton notes the way in which philosophy might use film, particularly as part of its pedagogy, but only insofar as films are seen as containing ‘stories and characterisations that helpfully illustrate well-known philosophical ideas’, rather than looking to the presentation of ideas by the cinematic form itself.Footnote ⁷ This is what Frampton calls ‘film “plus” philosophy’, a mode of relation which he criticizes both for its condescending stance and for its failure to actually tell us something about film (as well as about philosophy).Footnote ⁸ Practitioners are positioned as needing to learn from philosophers here, rather than as equal contributors to a two-way flow of ideas, albeit they can also be backhandedly praised when they get a philosophical idea ‘right’ (that is, when they illustrate it effectively).

Likewise, philosophers have often framed theatre as in need of the philosopher in order for the ideas embedded within it to be fully articulated. This question of ‘need’ also figures strongly in both Derrida and Adorno's response to Beckett's work as that which both resists and demands philosophical interpretation; or further, it is the very resistance of Beckett's work to philosophy that seems to demand philosophizing. As Richard J. Lane has helpfully summarized,

To go beyond application, then, we might suggest, the philosopher or philosophically minded performance theorists’ study of a given play or performance must allow new ideas to be created, ideas that the thinker has not already developed on the basis of some other encounter. We have to be convinced that theatre and performance are doing something for the thinking and to the thinker; that it is through theatre, and indeed through this particular aspect of theatre alone, that this thought has emerged. Correlatively, performance practice might be seen to avoid application when it conceives itself as a way of thinking rather than as the mere demonstration of existing ideas. Allan Kaprow, for instance, saw little value in generating artworks that ‘remain only an illustration of a thought’ rather than providing participants with what he called an ‘experienced insight’Footnote ¹⁰: an event of embodied thinking by the participant in the act of doing, which is not the same as the recognition of some underlying metaphorical meaning of the work determined in advance by the artist. To make performances that stage what we already know is not a valuable activity, for Kaprow, in contrast to creating the conditions for experiments the results of which remain unknown.

If one of the problems of application is that the concept or theory applied remains rigidly unaltered or insensitively untouched by the singularity of that to which it is applied, then the aim of conjoining performance and philosophy might, by contrast, aspire to generate new ideas of both on the basis of a mutually transformative encounter, or what Isabelle Stengers calls ‘reciprocal capture’: ‘a dual process of identity construction’.Footnote ¹¹ We do not yet know what performance or philosophy can do. Therefore, perhaps, we cannot and should not try to answer the question ‘what is philosophy?’ or ‘what is performance?’ because to provide an answer ‘would presuppose the possibility of a judgment about what a philosopher . . . can become’, what a theatre-maker can become.Footnote ¹²

Bergson the artist, Kaprow the philosopher

Allow me to develop an example. In the collection of texts that make up Bergson's last published work, The Creative Mind, a provocative tension is set up between the powers of philosophy and the powers of art in relation to Bergson's overall project to bring perception closer to the reality of indivisible change. On the one hand, we might note that Bergson puts forward a metaphysically privileged idea of the artist – as one who sees the world in a direct, rather than utilitarian, fashion.Footnote ¹³ Ordinarily, Bergson suggests, the faculties of perception and action are attached to one another with the result that perception tends ‘to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing’.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘Life demands that we put on blinders’, Bergson argues, and, as such, philosophy should allow itself to be inspired by the artist, who can ‘lead us to a completer perception of reality by means of a certain displacement of our attention’ away from the merely useful.Footnote ¹⁵ On the other hand, though, despite this privileging of the artist, it is often philosophy rather than art that Bergson credits with the power to reveal the indivisibility of past and present; it is through philosophy that our perception is ultimately mobilized and revivified. Art merely ‘enriches our present’, Bergson argues in The Creative Mind, ‘but it scarcely enables us to go beyond it’ in order to witness the fundamental change that constitutes metaphysical reality.Footnote ¹⁶

In contrast, I would suggest that we challenge the very notion of philosophy and art as distinct activities, or, put differently, that we expand our understandings of the forms and kinds of activity that might count as philosophy or art. In part, the resources to do this come from Bergson himself, for instance in the famous example – cited by Deleuze in Bergsonism – of the one who must wait for the sugar to melt in a glass of water. Bergson says,

Philosophy here is equated with the perception of duration, as that which might take place through an embodied experience of waiting; that is, through what was then a relatively ordinary action, available to all.

And I want to suggest that this revelatory yet democratic nature of waiting for the sugar to melt resonates with the participatory works that Kaprow referred to as his ‘Activities’ rather than ‘Happenings’. That is, if Bergson wants to frame the event of waiting for the sugar to melt as a philosophical activity, Kaprow's practice provides us with the resources to understand it as an aesthetic activity (or, correlatively, for us to understand Bergson's example as art). For instance, here is the score or instructions for an Activity by Kaprow called Level from 1970:

While art historian Annette Leddy has interpreted this work biographically and metaphorically,Footnote ¹⁹ I would argue that what matters about Level is what happens to us as participants as we reduce the bale straw by straw, trying to match our own rhythm of action with that of the ice as it perceives the heat of the sun. Might such an example be considered performance as philosophy, or philosophy as performance, within an experiment where what distinguishes both terms from each other, and indeed from other terms such as ‘experience’ or simply ‘life’, remains creatively undetermined? Or, further, is it that all experience, all material encounters, are already thoughtful, and that the activities that we are accustomed to referring to as ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ simply allow us to attend to the kinds of thinking that matter enacts on its own terms?

Concluding thoughts

For some, though, to say that performance is philosophy (or experience is thinking) risks rendering ‘philosophy’ a term that means everything and nothing; it is to dissolve the identity of philosophy altogether. As John Mullarkey has described, although the ‘extension, or diffusion, of philosophy into other fields has always been there in the various “philosophies of” – “of history”, “of science”, “of art”, and so on, from its very beginning’,Footnote ²⁰ the contemporary acceleration of this phenomenon has begun to cause some anxiety:

But is there more at stake in such concerns than a kind of disciplinary territorialism on the one hand – the triggering of some self-protective mechanism in the face of an imaginary imperial takeover by the non-discipline of philosophy – and on the other a fear on the part of philosophers that ‘proper philosophy’ might become extinct in a generalized post-disciplinary academy? Surely, as François Laruelle has suggested, the project is not ‘to think without philosophy but to think without the authority of philosophy’, to challenge philosophy's right to determine who or what thinks or does not think, where and when thinking is going on and when it is not.Footnote ²² That is, it may well be the very engagement with (non-)philosophies like Laruelle's that encourages us to move away from the application of the theoretical models we already possess and towards an embodied encounter with the resistant materiality of performance's thinking: its embodied-thinking, participatory-thinking, or durational-thinking – encounters that generate new ideas of what thought is and where, when and how it occurs.

Existing discourse emerging from the field of practice-as-research has already gone some way to explore the nature of performance's kind of thinking, taking a particular and strategically necessary interest in how performance practice produces new knowledge. But the production of knowledge is arguably only one definition of thinking, or specifically of ‘research’, to which we might add many others; indeed, rather than applying this definition of thinking to practice (as if it were the same as text-based research), perhaps we might also look to performance itself to produce new ideas of what thinking is. As I noted at the start of this article, a limit point of the argument I am making might invite us to conclude that there are as many ways of thinking as there are different activities or processes, or, further, to conclude that everything thinks. That is, we might conclude that thinking is going on not only in performance (and certainly not only in performance because it tends to involve human bodies), but in all things (and therefore in all human, but also non-human, aspects of performance). Indeed Mullarkey has already proposed as much, arguing, ‘We should no longer think of thought as something representing passive things, but rather as something that things do themselves alongside us’.Footnote ²³ ‘My’ body, for example, is doing its own kind of thinking alongside ‘me’ as I work in the studio. The ice is thinking in its own way in response to the heat of the palm of my hand, of the sun. The stakes of this claim seem too great to try and unfold here. I can only conclude by proposing that they will involve the ethical: a demand to consider what new responsibilities we might have – as practitioners, academics, audience members, humans – in relation to all these thinking things.