Samenvatting

Over the last five years, I have found myself circling around four key concepts: Performance. Philosophy. Animals. And Equality. And I have found myself thinking in and with circles.

It began with the various references to circles we can find in the philosophy of Henri Bergson - in his idea of the field of attention as the distance between the two points of a compass (Bergson 2014); in his imagining of an expansive centrifugal movement that might turn a closed society into an open one (Bergson 2002); and in the role he gives to embodied practice to ‘break the circle’ of the given in which rationality or only an intellectualised notion of what counts as thought traps us (Bergson 1911).

I found the circle again in the so-called ‘non-philosophy’ of Francois Laruelle (2011) – in his critique of the vicious circles and circular arguments of standard philosophies of art - including dance.

But I also found the circle of anthropocentrism. I found the circle at the circus - a circle that calls upon us to consider all that goes on behind the scenes in order to produce performing animals anthropocentrically. I began to consider what role performance could play in displacing the human from the centre of values through a process of animalisation.

Consider philosophy an expanding circle.
Consider performance an expanding circle.
The etymology of the English word centre (n.) – comes from the Latin centrum, originally the fixed point of the two points of a drafting compass, and from the Greek kentron meaning “sharp point, goad, sting of a wasp”.
The centre is a middle point of a circle: the point around which something revolves. But the centre is also pointed and sharp – that which goads moving bodies in a particular direction.
The goad is a traditional farming implement: a spiked stick used to spur or guide livestock; for instance, to round up cattle. The elephant goad or bullhook, is a tool employed in the training of elephants. It consists of a metal hook attached to a handle.
The Greeks, we are told, used the phrase “kicking against the goad” as a proverb to teach us of the foolishness of resistance against a powerful authority: those who place themselves at the centre.
The underlying ontology that informs all this work can be summed up in the words of Octavia Butler: All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. (To which we might add the footnote that truth itself changes) (Butler 1993: 3). How to think alongside dance or movement as change - understood via Bergson (amongst others) as alteration or qualitative becoming (rather than spatial transition); how to think alongside the world as movement, as change; how to dance the thought of change as a changing thought…? These are my recurring questions. The questions that keep circling back to me and through me.

In this text, I will rehearse a thinking that dances the relations between performance, philosophy, animals and equality according to the figure of the circle. To think with dance and dance with thought in relation to nonhuman animals and the question of equality – understood as an ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, political and ethical question.

Equality (and inequality) is a matter of how to think the fundamental nature of and relations between dance, thought, and interspecies being as our so-called ‘objects’ of enquiry. Especially within philosophies of immanence – there is an appeal to the equality of the Real, to an evenness or levelling of what is beyond hierarchized binaries between mind and body; matter and spirit; this world and some transcendent realm. Equality is a question for knowledge itself: the critique of authority and the pursuit of equality within knowledge-production; and to the hierarchies between ways of knowing. Equality is an issue for arts and more widely for aesthetic experience: who is making art for whom and from what point of view, whose aesthetic interests are taken into account and how is experience ordered to centre and give priority to some over others. Equality is linked to paying attention, to how attention is distributed and how it can be practiced in more or less exclusive and expansive ways. And of course, equality is a fundamental subject for politics and ethics.

Let’s do this dance together. Step by step. Step 1: from the application of philosophy to the Real, to the emergence of philosophy from it. Step 2: from the application of philosophy to performance, to the practice of a performance philosophy. Step 3: from the judgment of animal capabilities according to human standards for what counts as ‘proper’ performance and philosophy to ‘animal performance philosophy’ as the animalization of performance and philosophy. Step 4: from the application of a universalized notion of the standard human to denigrate both human and nonhuman animals to a solidarity based on attending to the shared logic of speciesism, racism and ableism. Step 5: Towards radical equality as a performative praxis of thought.

And yet, we cannot move towards equality ‘step by step’. We cannot move towards equality step by step because there can be no step-by-step guide to what it means to practice it in a given context. ‘Openness is a necessarily vague formulation that requires continual creativity to fill out its content in any one situation; one should see it as a moving position with no essence’ (Mullarkey 2012: 70). And we cannot move towards equality step by step, because it’s all or nothing. As Etienne Balibar says:

Equality in fact cannot be limited. Once some X’s (“men”) are not equal, the predicate of equality can no longer be applied to anyone, for all those to whom it is supposed to be applicable are in fact “superior”, “dominant”, “privileged”, etc. Enjoyment of the equality of rights cannot spread step by step, beginning with two individuals and gradually extending to all: it must immediately concern the universality of individuals…This explains… the antinomy of equality and society for, even when it is not defined in “cultural”. “national”, or “historical” terms, a society is necessarily a society, defined by some particularity, by some exclusion, if only by a name (Balibar 2016: np).

Equality will always remain exclusive if it moves step by step – expanding the circle of equality or ethical consideration to previously ostracized groups. Such a dance of thought also fails to understand the actuality of intersectional identities and interdependence. And for sure we will not reach radical equality with reasoning or intellectual exertion.

As John Mullarkey suggests: ‘We can only understand equality through a performative thought, a movement or vital action rather than an intellectualist representation of it’ (Mullarkey 2012: 63). To which I might add: We do not need a philosophy of radical equality, we need to practice radical equality as a performance philosophy. Or again, the only way we can develop our understanding of radical equality is through its performative praxis. This is not going to be easy or simple. We are going to make mistakes, we are going to fall flat on our faces. Perhaps, following choreographer Amanda Piña, we should not call this a performance but a rehearsal (Piña 2017)1).

So, there can be circles we want to dance as well as those we want to escape. But for the most part here our focus will be on the movements and practices that break or escape circles – whether in terms of methods that allow us to break out of the circularities of traditional philosophical analysis; or the practices that break open the circle of the “we” who are equal as always constituted through exclusion. In contrast, what we are speculatively choreographing – alongside Bergson and performance - is a movement of opening to openness (Mullarkey 2012: 69)2). In this particular rehearsal of work-in-progress thinking, my concern is with intersectional, interspecies performative praxis as a means to break out of the circularity of thought when it is reduced to a universalizing, anthropocentric and ableist intellectualism with the white, male, non-disabled subject of reason as the centre of values.

My larger project is concerned with how the relationships between performance and philosophy, humans and nonhuman animals are performatively enacted and with how we can move towards what we might describe as a ‘radical equality in thought’ rather than remaining trapped in the circularity of a philosophy of performance, an anthropocentric model of performance, and a universalizing approach to animal performance philosophy.

This text is in three parts.