Disciplining performance philosophy : thinking, knowledge, truth

Abstract

In the field of Performance Studies in recent years there has been a considerable amount of attention directed at the emerging field or sub-discipline of Performance Philosophy.1 Not performance and philosophy, but Performance Philosophy – the paratactical momentum of the term apparently directed towards an artistic, intellectual, and disciplinary miscegenation where neither performance nor philosophy would remain distinct and intact, and neither would be subordinated to or conditioned by the unchanged disciplinary genealogy and underpinnings of the other. This is perhaps the promise of interdisciplinarity in its truest sense: the extension of knowledge and academic practices beyond their native territory, precisely by virtue of the interaction and mutual provocation of at least two academic disciplines. This new knowledge and transformed practice can then be assimilated into either discipline, modifying that discipline, or it can detach from its parent disciplines, forming a discrete discipline or, more modestly, sub-discipline in its own right. This, it has been claimed, could be what is in prospect for Performance Philosophy. While it is not yet entirely clear what Performance Philosophy is, or will become, there is a very strong sense of what it ought not to be. Principally, it ought not to be a proliferation of examples of how particular performances apply, illustrate or demonstrate preexisting philosophical ideas. That would be to reduce performance to a kind explicative handmaiden of philosophy—stained glass windows for the Gospels, as it were.