peripatetikos 2. Plato’s Phaedrus (2015-2016)
As represented in recent books like Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking (2009) or John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche(2019), the history of philosophy is populated with scenes of walking and thinking. Rousseau confessed to be helpless at his desk—thinking meant moving and to be moving through quite specific locations and environments.
One of the most famous scenes of walking and thinking opens Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue. The scene of Phaedrus is one of the best-known imaginary itineraries in the history of philosophy. Reputed to almost never leave the city, Socrates accompanies Phaedrus on a stroll outside the southern gates of Athens near the temple of Zeus and along the river Ilissos, discoursing on love and beauty in relation to perception, thought, and form. Plato’s dramatic setting is precise enough that commentators have produced maps of possible trajectories through modern Athens even though most of the Ilissus has been covered over with concrete for many years. Drawing freely on Plato’s dialogue, in my Plato’s Phaedrus I pull out several major threads of Plato’s “mythologies” as voiced by Socrates and reweave them into a new conceptual structure imagined as the passage from disordered perception towards ideal Forms; or perhaps, as the effort of earthbound vision to pass through and above the visual confusion of material life toward a purer, more conceptual sight. In this Plato’s Phaedrus loosely echoes the four-part scheme of the dialogue—the presentation of Lysias’ sophistic speech on the lover, Socrates’s “possessed” discourse on eros and divine madness, the palinode, and the discourse on writing—as well as Socrates’s description of four types of love.
Completed in 2016, Plato’s Phaedrus is the second iteration of this new series of works that I characterize as “philosopher walks,” or more formally, peripatetikos after the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. The peripatetikos explore formal processes of digital capture as performative gestures in response to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories, and durations—in this case, specific sites of walking and thinking evoked in the history of philosophy. The initial footage and images for these works has or will be shot at canonical locations of philosophical thinking and walking: the ruins of Wittgenstein’s cabin outside of Skjolden, Norway; the stone of eternal recurrence on the banks of the Silvaplanersee near the Nietzsche Haus in Switzerland; the area in the Black Forest surrounding Heidegger’s hut; and other sites associated with Thoreau, Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir, Søren Kierkegaard, and others, each one famously solitary walkers and thinkers.
At this point in time, I plan to make ten works in the series. Three have already been completed: peripatetikos 1. Agora, or things indifferent, peripatetikos 2. Plato’s Phaedrus, and peripatetikos 3. Seven Bridges (Kant). Although each of the works may end up looking very different, all ten will be organized and executed through a limited set of formal constraints. These conditions are not absolute and will be subject to improvisation and contingency.
My intention is to gather material on sites and environments associated historically with a philosopher and their thinking. Completed works may have running times ranging from ten minutes to an hour or more.
The works take advantage of different types of recording media—such as high-definition video, Super-8 film, or animated photographic stills—in order to explore relations between stillness and movement as well as different varieties of temporal experience inspired by given philosophers. While I may shoot some sequences in real-time using long takes, the more prominent temporal strategies in these works involve varieties of discontinuity, for example, shooting at different frame rates or working with individual frames to build up animated image clusters of various metrical lengths and combinations often according to mathematical protocols. (These procedures emulate some aspects of the “structural film” from the late 1960s and 1970s.)
I have also discovered that a creative advantage of the digital image and digital editing is that one can construct micro-intervals of time and assemble them into constellations that interact at scales both above and below the frame. I first used this kind of assembly in Agora. This internal time structure results from assembling “time pyramids” in which layers of a baseline video are superimposed, one on top of the other; each layer is then retimed systematically for shorter and shorter durations and thus more and more compressed speeds. Viewed as a static graphical picture within the editing program, the stacked layers appear geometrically in the form of a pyramid, thus giving this digital time-image its name. What one sees inside the work are internal cycles or repetitions of more and more compressed time that blur the image and cause it to vibrate internally with greater intensive rhythms.
Preference is also given to recording at times associated historically with a philosopher’s thinking: for example, recording at the stone of eternal recurrence in the month of August, when Nietzsche is thought to have formulated the concept on his walks around the Silvaplanersee in the Sils Maria; or shooting in Skjolden, Norway in mid-October, when Wittgenstein first arrives there, or in January when his cabin was first completed. Situational time is important because I wish to capture the qualities of environmental light and weather that might have been present to these past sites of thinking.
However, as a matter of aesthetic commitment, these monumental sites of philosophy will almost never be shown directly. The site specificity of the works is important, but they are in no way documents. These often-fetishized sites of philosophical pilgrimage will never be visible as such. In principle they cannot be represented or reproduced, for they are lost to time. For example, the individual sections of Lichtung will record different approaches to Heidegger’s hut from varying compass points and scales. And while the hut itself may serve as a compositional anchor for different vectors of approach, it will always remain off-screen or obscured by the natural environment.
The shooting strategies and compositional plans for each work in the series will take as their point of departure specific works representative of a thinker’s work, such as the role played by Phaedrus in Plato’s Phaedrus. However, the videos are insistently not adaptations in any way, shape, or form, nor are they intended to be illustrations or representations of a philosopher’s concepts. The works are each meant to be unique conceptual conversations with important texts and sites in the history of thinking, and with the different philosophers’ ideas about time, space, and experience.
Many of the works will be framed or bracketed with citations from the philosophical texts that serve as their starting points. These textual elements are not placed to suggest “interpretations” of the visual elements in any direct or specific ways, but rather to direct a viewer to try to imagine novel connections linking up with other compositional elements of the works as well as a given philosopher’s thought about landscape, light, space, and time. Nor do I think that the text should function as a mirror, duplicate, or echo of the visual segments. Rather, they are accumulative elements in an ongoing weave that suggests compositional orders and an aesthetic comprehension that is both progressive and retrogressive. The text does not have any more obvious “philosophical” content than the image-segments; if it is to be found anywhere it would be in the whole of each works.
One may think that my resolute commitment to location shooting and site specificity is at odds with the formal qualities of the completed works, which are often conceptual and abstract. However, every philosophical concept is an abstraction from experience, yet it cannot be formulated and shared without retaining the examined worldly experience with a degree of phenomenological density. This is how I think about my various strategies for counter-balancing representation and abstraction.
My greatest ambition is that the peripatetikos will be received as instances of thinking in themselves, which nonetheless put into play through their own formal means different concepts of time, space, perception, memory, history, and duration. As noted above, three of these works have already been completed. The shooting plans, compositional structures, and even test reels for three other works are well advanced. Notes and sketches have been completed for the last four works in the series.
peripatetikos 1. Agora, or things indifferent (the Stoics) (2015-2016). HD video. Color. 5.1 Dolby. 11m 3s. [Completed]
“Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them,” Marcus Aurelius, Discourses, Book 2, 16.1
Site: The Agora, Middle Stoa, Athens, 2 July 2015.
peripatetikos 2. Plato’s Phaedrus (2015-2016). HD video. Color. 5.1 Dolby. 1 hr 8m. [Completed]
“Pure was the light that shone around us, and pure were we, without taint of that prison-house which now we are encompassed withal, and call a body, fast bound therein as an oyster in its shell / It is there that true Being dwells, Without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul's pilot, can behold it and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.”
Site: central Athens along the river Ilissos.
peripatetikos 3. Seven Bridges (Kant) (2019). HD video. B&W. Sound. 44m 29s. Loop or single channel projection.[Completed]
“. . . ne plus s’abandonner aux paniques des ténèbres.”
Material appropriated and reworked from Philippe Colin’s film, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant (1996).
peripatetikos 4. The Gateway (Nietzsche).
"Behold ... this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? . . . . And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore--itself too? For whatever can walk—in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more.
Site: The stone of eternal recurrence (Nietzsche stone) at the Silvaplanersee (Oberengadin, Switzerland).
peripatetikos 5. The Builder (Wittgenstein).
“3.1 In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses,” Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Site: Environs and site of Wittgenstein’s cabin outside Skjolden, Norway
peripatetikos 6. Lichtung (Heidegger).
“Building, Dwelling, Thinking”
Site: Environs of Heidegger’s “hut” in the Black Forest near Todtnauberg, Germany
peripatetikos 7. The Dreamer (Rousseau).
Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire
Site: Île_Saint-Pierre_(Berne), Switzerland
peripatetikos 8. The Naturalist (Thoreau).
“Walking”
Site: Walden Pond and the abandoned site of Thoreau’s cabin
peripatetikos 9. La belle voyeuse ambulante (Simone de Beauvoir).
Les mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée and The Second Sex
Sites: calanques and forests outside of Marseille
peripatetikos 10. The Moment (Søren Kierkegaard)
The Concept of Dread
Site: In the area of the Christians Brygge in central Copenhagen and the Frederiksberg