Philosophical Perspectives on Artistic Agency

What do artist's "do" when they make art?  In what sense is the production of art a creative action?  What are the political implications of an artwork and are these distinct from the endeavours of the artist? What is the connection between artistic creations and wider events?  The purpose of this workshop is to animate discussion between various philosophical perspectives and art, to consider the role of the artist, and the wider impacts their work can effect.  This is an in-person event, hosted by Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (PHI) at Deakin University, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, that draws theorists and practitioners together for a series of short presentations.  Each session below lasts approximately 45 minutes including questions. To attend, please register by emailing [email protected]. 

Program:

9:30 – 9:45am

Workshop Welcome

9.45 – 10.30am

Culture Collaboration and the Nonhuman

Phillipa Rothfield (University of Southern Denmark, La Trobe University)

10.30 – 11.15am

On Playing and Being Played: A Hermeneutic-Topological Perspective on Musicianship

Sam McAullife (Monash University)

11.15 – 11.30am

Break

11.30 – 12:15pm

Informatic Agency: Control, Thought, and Feedback in Wiener, Weaver, and Hendrix

Tim Deane-Freeman (Deakin University)

12:15 – 1.00pm

Actions Without Intentions: Agency as Immanence 

Meg McCamley (Deakin University)

1:00 – 1:45pm

Lunch

1:45 - 2:30pm

Badiou and the Oikonomia of the Trinity: the Subject of Faith in the Artistic Truth Procedure

Caitlyn Lesiuk (Deakin University)

2:30 - 3:15pm

Nihilism Through Film-Philosophy

Oscar Axel Thorberg (Deakin University)

3:15 – 3:30pm

Break

3:30 – 4:15pm

Colour as Force

Andrea Eckersley (RMIT University)

4:15 – 5:00pm

The Stratified Agent – Creativity and Habit in Improvisation

Alistair Macaulay (Deakin University)

Author Abstracts and Biographies: 

Culture Collaboration and the Nonhuman

Phillipa Rothfield (University of Southern Denmark, La Trobe University)

This paper is an engagement with Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, mediated through the dancing body. It is an attempt to rethink the agency and forces at work in the field of dance, beyond the usual sense of the dancer as an embodied agency and the choreographer as author. Bennett asks us to rethink the status of matter, to imbue it with some of the liveliness we attribute to human subjectivity. In the process, she draws upon Bruno Latour’s notion of the actant, a concept that offers a decentered, distributive sense of agency shared between the human and the nonhuman. Bennett argues for a fuller sense of the nonhuman powers that circulate around and within human bodies, by thinking of events as encounters between ontologically diverse actants.

I aim to do two things in response to Bennett’s work: one, explore the distinction between the human and the nonhuman within the figure of the dancing body, and dance culture, and two, think through the notion of multiple actants at work within collaborative art-making. The question of collaboration will be explored in relation to a dance-theatre work, The Chronicles of Durga, which was recently performed at Arts House, North Melbourne.

Philipa Rothfield is honorary Professor of Dance and Philosophy of the Body at the University of Southern Denmark, also Honorary Staff in Philosophy and Politics at La Trobe University, and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University. She is Creative Advisor at Dancehouse, Melbourne, Australia, and Co-Editor of the Dancehouse Diary. Recent publications include Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny, Philosophy in Motion (Routledge, 2021) and Practising with Deleuze (co-authored)(Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She is a dance reviewer with over 70 reviews to her name, is Chair of the Dance Panel of the Melbourne Green Room Awards and has served on a panel of judges for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. She has recently co-directed and co-choreographed The Durga Chronicles, which was performed at Arts House, September 2022.

On Playing and Being Played: A Hermeneutic-Topological Perspective on Musicianship

Sam McAullife (Monash University)

At least since the 1920s, the idea that the world being as it is structures one’s thinking and doing has been a recurrent theme in philosophy. It is a central, albeit largely implicit, element of philosophical hermeneutics and has been taken up explicitly by philosophers of place and those interested in embodied or enactive cognition. Building upon this growing body of work, this paper explores the way in which part of what is at issue in performing music is a certain pathos, where musicians surrender, as it were, to the situation in which they find themselves. That is, to the extent that players may be said to play their instruments, they are also played by their instruments and the broader place in which they are. Drawing primarily on the hermeneutic-topological philosophical tradition, as well as insights from embodied cognition, this paper interrogates the way in which musicians are played during performance.

Sam McAuliffe is a philosopher and musician. He is the author of Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury) and the editor of Gadamer, Music, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Springer), as well as numerous scholarly articles. His work has been published in leading journals such as The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Organised Sound, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Jazz Perspectives. Sam has worked as musical director for experimental theatre productions, composed music for short films, has performed at major Australian art festivals, and regularly plays guitar in a variety of ensembles.

Informatic Agency: Control, Thought, and Feedback in Wiener, Weaver, and Hendrix

Tim Deane-Freeman (Deakin University)

Work in the contemporary academy is increasingly regulated by “feedback” -in the form of a series of evaluations, satisfaction surveys and progress reviews which ostensibly serve to render the institutions of knowledge production more responsive and accountable to their various stakeholders. In this way, university managements have followed a broader cultural trend, applying concepts derived from information theory and cybernetics to contemporary forms of sociality, thought and labour. But as is often the case with such transpositions, there has been relatively little critical attention to the specific technical problems and epistemic commitments which inform cybernetic conceptualisation. In this paper, I turn to these commitments, and argue that a careful reading of cybernetic accounts of feedback equips us with critical tools we might use to question this concept’s role and applications, particularly in the context of projects to “marketize” social and subjective institutions. In disentangling positive and negative feedback -in the technical senses of these terms- and by mapping experiments with both in art, I propose a qualified concept of feedback, which might inform both contemporary accounts of agency and forms of resistant institutional praxis.

Timothy Deane-Freeman is a lecturer in philosophy and health ethics at Deakin University. His research is primarily dedicated to the intersection of politics and aesthetics. He is currently working on a monograph on the concept of information in the thought of Gilles Deleuze.

Actions Without Intentions: Agency as Immanence 

Meg McCamley (Deakin University)

This paper proposes a conception of action that enacts the Deleuzian metaphysical and ethical demand for an immanence immanent only to itself.  In so doing, I reject both voluntarist theories of action which attempt to explain actions as intentions doings that are caused by an agents prior mental states, but also expressive accounts that reformulate the notion of intentionality rather than jettisoning it entirely.  Against these accounts, I draw on Bennett's (2010) notion of agentic assemblages and the theory of autopoeisis (Maturana and Varela 1979) to suggest that agents are self-organising assemblages, subject to a unique kind of circular causality.  On this view, agents do not receive 'inputs' from the world, but are already coupled to it. 

Meg McCamley is a PhD candidate at Deakin University, Australia.  Her research focuses primarily on contemporary approaches to cognitive science and philosophy of mind. 

Nihilism Through Film-Philosophy

Oscar Axel Thorberg (Deakin University)

As a filmmaker studying philosophy, I have taken to examining the subject of nihilism through film-philosophy. I am currently six months into a Masters at Deakin University, where I have completed the first of three short films that explore the creation, negation and evaluation of meaning. Approaching the area of film-philosophy as a scholar-practitioner has given me a unique perspective on what not only the medium of film but the process of filmmaking can offer philosophy. Through research, creation and evaluation I am developing a methodology that allows philosophical premises to be considered and challenged throughout each stage of production, culminating in a work that is not only distinct from its written counterpart, on account of its aesthetic qualities, but also by the means in which it is created.

Oscar is a Swedish born, Australian raised filmmaker living in Naarm/Melbourne. While working as a freelance cinematographer and editor he undertook an Honours degree in Philosophy at Deakin University. After directing and writing several short films that continue to screen at festivals and win awards around the world, he joined the production company Guerilla Creative as a creative director.

Badiou and the Oikonomia of the Trinity: the Subject of Faith in the Artistic Truth Procedure

Caitlyn Lesiuk (Deakin University)

In Alain Badiou’s philosophical schema, a subject is constituted by its fidelity to an event, in which a truth procedure unfolds. To take a political example, a faithful subject of the Paris Commune might be a revolutionary who continues to explore what the world would look like if it were transformed according to the truth of the worker-led revolution, that is, communism. However, this conceptual framework is complicated in the context of artistic subjectivity. The subject is split: it is reducible neither to the artist—who Badiou describes as a ‘vanishing cause’—nor the audience member, but is rather a point which occupies the liminal space between them and a series of works.

In this paper, I will clarify Badiou’s theory of the subject in art, considering the publication of the final volume of his Being and Event trilogy, The Immanence of Truths, and apply it to a novel case study: the emergence of interfacial spaces between the Madonna and the baby Jesus in religious painting. Interrogating the shifting triangulation of the gaze in the Christ-Mary-spectator nexus will allow for an examination of the question of faith in Badiou’s philosophical writings, and his engagement with figures like St Paul and Pascal. Indeed, the relationship between the subject and the event is necessarily a faith-based one, as by its very nature, the event cannot be confirmed at the time of its disclosure.

Caitlyn Lesiuk teaches philosophy at Deakin University, Australia, where she is a PhD candidate. She is the Vice-Convener of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, and her work appears in Philosophy and Social Criticism and The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy (forthcoming).

Colour as Force

Andrea Eckersley (RMIT University)

In his discussion of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze introduces a distinction between optical vision and haptic vision, noting how Bacon relies on optical vision in his rendering of illusion through the use of dark and light values, and on haptic vision in his attempt to shape an object in paint using warm and cool colours. For Deleuze, colours are forces that create sensations through their relationships to each other, and through the ways they shape space. Adopting Bowden’s affective assemblage model of agency, this paper outlines how a painter’s affective state resonates with the intensities of colour. Colours express a materiality that generates sensations in the activation of surfaces by which a painting is produced. Of particular interest is the way artists work with colour in the production of affect and more specifically how different colours appear in relationship to one another as they generate spatial effects and produce intensities in an affective assemblage. I develop this argument with reference to the Renaissance colouring systems of Cennini and Alberti. In so doing, I will also draw on Alliez and Bonne who elaborate Deleuze’s discussion of the spatial dimensions of painting by outlining the interwoven, multidimensional possibilities of the extensive nature of paint. Discussing throughout the paintings by Helen Johnson, Dhambit Munuŋgurr, Tomma Abts, Amy Sillman, Henri Matisse, Lucian Freud and Leonardo Da Vinci, I will close by reflecting on the ways colours are caught in relations of force, which further inflect their generative sensations.

Andrea Eckersley is an artist, Senior Lecturer and HDR coordinator in the School of Fashion and Textiles, at RMIT University. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work treats surfaces, affects and materials as central to the realisation and experience of an artwork. Andrea recently co-authored the paper ‘Bodies of Fashion and the Fashioning of Subjectivity’ in the journal Body and Society, the book Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy, is the art editor at the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal and exhibits regularly in Australia.

The Stratified Agent – Creativity and Habit in Improvisation

Alistair Macaulay (Deakin University)

Improvised performance is distinguished from that of a composition by its openness to external factors.  While both improvisation and composition impact musical material, the practises are creative in different ways.  Improvisation embraces a tension between fixity and fluctuation, relying on existing, familiar patterns, both theoretical and embodied, to navigate the unforeseen and unexpected.  What remains to be explained is this openness relates to the creativity of an improvisation, and the sense in which an improvisor is authorially responsible for this innovation. 

I argue that an improvisor cultivates an improvisational space, a playing field of musical opportunities, nursing it along until the improvisation takes on a life of its own.  In this process, an improvisor learns about musical material, or about themselves.  Linking Deleuze’s notions of bare and creative repetition from Difference and Repetition, with that of territorialization from his collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, this paper investigates how the patterns and habits that underpin improvisation remain open to change to explain an improvisation’s creativity.  An improvisor is a stratified agent, composed of passively contracted habits.  An improvisation’s creativity is the result not just of what an improvisor is doing, but also the result of what is happening to the improvisor as they are destratified. 

Alistair Macaulay is a piano tuner and a PhD candidate at Deakin University.  His research focuses on the nexus between action and events and the imbrication  between philosophy and art.