Philosophy becoming Para-Textual: Plato’s Phaedrus, a memory pharmacy

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative method of philosophical practice that plays with the sites of a theoretical text’s encounter. By focusing not only on semantic content but also on place, time, duration, voice, style, repetition and modes of generating response, one can create text-specific structures (games) that attend to the contextual demands of a particular text and multiply the variety of encounters and reading methodologies that a given text can proliferate. This involves the following procedure: Step 1) Isolate a text’s implicit para-textuality—that is, the moments where it implicates a reader to act alongside or outside of the activity of reading. Step 2) Extend these moments by explicitly altering the text itself or by changing the environmental factors around the reading of the text such that the text more radically directs a reader. Step 3) Repeat Step 2 through various iterative cycles such that these acts of extension begin to cohere into a set of rules that structure the playful acts of extension thereby producing a game. This procedure is theoretically grounded and contextualized through Hadot’s analysis of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Gadamer’s ontology of play, Schechner’s account of theatre and games, the dramatic instructions of Ionesco and Beckett, Ancient Greek Philosophical exercises and para-textual passages from Zen Koans, Nietzsche and Rousseau. The second part of the essay provides an in-depth account of my creative and intellectual process whereby I selected Plato’s critique of writing in Phaedrus as a starting point for enacting the aforementioned para-textual procedure. This resulted in the creation of Plato’s Phaedrus: A memory pharmacy, a rhizomatic online game whereby players engage in a procedure of enacting verbal dialectics upon an interactive text that is spliced with both Platonic passages and transcriptions of contemporary interlocutor's dialectical analysis upon the Phaedrus.

Notes

1 My use of the term ‘para-textual’ plays off of Gérard Genette’s, however my usage is a significant departure. Genette defines a para-text as the ‘accompanying productions’ of a text such as ‘an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations’ (Genette 1997: 1). My use of para-textual retains Genette’s interest in textual boundaries, outsides and exteriors, but focuses on the moments inside and around a text that explicitly or materially implicate a reader to act alongside implicit discursive practices of reading.

2 Plato’s Phaedrus: A memory pharmacy is one example of a philosophy game whose creative process involves a particular para-textual procedure. Other examples of philosophy games that implicate different methods of textual play include a series of performative lectures I created whereby I use interactive performance coupled with textual exposition to lead a group of participants through a theoretical textual encounter. One of these was an exposition of Gadamer’s Ontology of Play performed at Elsewhere Residency Program in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2013. Another was of Hegel’s Master Slave Dialectic performed in 2010 at The School of the Future in Brooklyn. Additionally, recent research with my adviser, Sandeep Bhagwati, has produced a series of game-like Philosophical Conversation Scores. One of which is called Exegetical Reading Machine, a score based on a Fluxus piece by John White that guides performers down a cycle of nuanced repetitions of textual commentary on a philosophical text of their choice. Another of which is titled Question Animals, a work that takes a quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus and runs it through a multiplicity of performative dialogical enactments.