Abstract
By proposing the “dramaturgy of caring” as a philosophical framework, this essay elaborates on how dramaturgy and care ethics mutually inform each other, especially in regards to Performance Philosophy and criticism. To speak of caring as a dramaturgical structure foregrounds how the consolidation of meaning depends as much upon particular sequences of experience and thought over time, as it does upon seemingly spontaneous moments of judgment. To speak of dramaturgy as a structure of caring highlights how the organization of aesthetic experience depends upon dynamic negotiations between knowing and not knowing that constitute recognition.
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Notes
- 1.
Lingis grounds his unique and wide-ranging phenomenological project in a Kantian metaphysical conception of “imperatives” and “ends.” See Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
- 2.
Lingis, “Irrevocable Loss,” in Anna Street, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker, Eds. Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 293.
- 3.
Shannon Jackson’s analysis of structures of maintenance and support grounding aesthetic social practices stands as a notable exception. See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 4.
I elaborate these and other arguments in further detail in my dissertation (in progress), “Coming to Care: Dramaturgical and Philosophical Reckonings with Contemporary Performance.”
- 5.
Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 92.
- 6.
See Nel Noddings, “Why Care About Caring,” in Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 7–29.
- 7.
Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 58.
- 8.
Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 16.
- 9.
Christine M. Korsgaard, “Christine M. Korsgaard: Internalism and the Sources of Normativity (Unpublished Corrected Version),” ed. Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CPR.CMK.Interview.pdf. 65.
- 10.
Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, 86.
- 11.
Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 17–19.
- 12.
Vrinda Dalmiya, “Why Should a Knower Care?,” Hypatia 17(1) (2002): 47.
- 13.
Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
- 14.
See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).
- 15.
See Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 16.
In metaphysical terms, the problem can be formulated thus: Is a particular work rightly counted as a kind of art? If so, how could it be said to be good of its kind?
- 17.
Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 188.
- 18.
Ibid., 189.
- 19.
Ibid., 197–198.
- 20.
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Theatre, trans. Andrew Bielski (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 6.
- 21.
Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” 267–353.
- 22.
Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 87–88.
- 23.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 136.
- 24.
Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Adorno, not surprisingly, has a much more pessimistic view, “Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Kentor-Hullot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136.
- 25.
Amongst a plethora of possible examples in recent performance history, Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On (2001) activates multiple temporalities simultaneously. The performance’s exceedingly literal stage action combined with its start-to-finish soundtrack of overly-familiar pop songs creates a perfectly primed aesthetic pump that draws personal memories of its spectators into the realm of the dramaturgy unfolding in real time.
- 26.
Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 31.
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Groves, R.M. (2017). On Performance and the Dramaturgy of Caring. In: Street, A., Alliot, J., Pauker, M. (eds) Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95192-5_25
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