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Gary Peters

York St John University, School of Performance and Media Production, Emeritus

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I am a musician composing and performing music in a wide range of genres, from jazz to country music, electronica to blues and virtually everything and anything in between: the common thread being improvisation. My main instruments are pedal steel guitar, guitar, mandolin and banjo. Most of my music can be heard here:

https://garypeters.bandcamp.com/

and some improvisations can be seen here:

@garypetersmusicchannel3379

My first book was published in 2005 by Routledge and is entitled: 'Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas.'

My second book published by Chicago University Press in 2009 is entitled: 'The Philosophy of Improvisation.'

My third book, published by Chicago University Press in 2017 is entitled: 'Improvising Improvisation: From Out of Philosophy, Music, Literature and Dance'.

I have also co-edited a book with my wife Fiona entitled Thoughts of Love,' published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2013.

I am Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Performance at York St John University, UK.

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Books by Gary Peters

Begin the Begin: Inaugural Lecture January 2018

My inaugural lecture at York St John University, ironic in a number of ways. Firstly, I had alrea... more My inaugural lecture at York St John University, ironic in a number of ways. Firstly, I had already been Professor there for 10 years when I delivered it, secondly, that it was the last thing I did there before departing later that year. It is also significant in my transition from academic to pedal steel guitarist: a happy move! Also, one last irony: I didn't actually deliver this lecture on the night as I was too sick to read it and play the music, etc, so I improvised something completely different. It kind of worked, as far as I remember (and I was so out of it I remember very little!)

John Cage and the 'Freshening' of Education

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2018

Review of Ansgar Allen's 'The Cynical Educator,' published in Sociological Review

Popular Music Review Tim Hodgkinson's 'Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm'

Improvising Improvisation: From Out Of Philosophy, Music, Literature and Dance. Chicago University Press, June 2017. Preface.

A taster for my last book.

Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas, Ashgate 2005. Preface.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 5. Dissymmetry and Height: Intersubjectivity and Pedagogy in Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 6/Afterword. Judgement, Critique and Ignorance.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 4. Hearing, Teaching, Seeing: Nietzsche, Rosenzweig and the University.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 3. Severity, Ideality and Pleasure: Hegel contra Irony.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate, 2005. Chapter 2. Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology? Schiller and de Man.

Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas, Ashgate, 2005. Chapter 1. Teacing the Unteachable: Method and Manner in Kant's Aesthetics.

Dissonant Man, in The Fate of the New Nietzsche ed, Caygill and Ansell Pearson, Ashgate 1994

The Death of a Friend: Some Themes in Jacques Derrida's 'The Work of Mourning', in, 'Dying and Death: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives', ed. Asa Kasher, Rodopi, 2007

Ignorant Artists/Ignorant Teachers, in, 'The Idea of Education,' eds. Claes and Peterson, Rodopi, 2010

Papers by Gary Peters

Drawing the Event: A Philosophical Response to the Live Jazz Drawings of Yann Bagot and Pieter Fannes. In a book entitled 'Live' published by Bries (Belgium) January 2018.

What is a Live Event? In, Matthew Reason and Anja Lindelof (eds.) Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge, 2016.

This chapter will start by assuming that there is something particular, often special, about a li... more This chapter will start by assuming that there is something particular, often special, about a live event, something that most people would acknowledge without necessarily knowing or understanding exactly what the essence of this particularity is. As such, the primary concern here will not be the nowness of the 'now' so frequently conceived as the central pillar of the live event but rather, the prehistory and post-history of the event as embodied in the regimes of practise and rehearsal necessary to preserve (re-originate) the live event. And in advance, the discussion of improvisation here functions only as one possible means of highlighting certain overlooked particularities (or peculiarities) of the event rather than offering any particular insights into improvisation itself. It is the oft-assumed tension or even contradiction between practising, rehearsing and improvisation that will be considered, as a means of shifting the emphasis away from the performative/existential nowness of the live experience (or the experience of liveness) towards what might be called the ontological absence/presence of the evental, understood and considered in the self-emergent terms of autopoiesis. It is this displacement that will suggest a reconceptualisation of the live event as a rehearsing rather than a happening space. Or, put another away, what makes what happens live a 'happening' is the preservation of the event—that has always already happened—as an essential moment of the 'now.' Thus, it is the implications of the Heideggerian term preservation of the event that will be one, if not the most important focus of the following refl ections. Much of what follows draws upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou; for all three the event is never present but has always already happened. If, to use Badiou's language, the 'site' of the event is never within the present 'situation,' then the sense of authenticity that is often sought in the perceived purity of the improvised live event—its 'truth'—can itself only attain authenticity if it is recognised that what is live is not the event itself but the repetition of the event as an act of being-true-to its legacy, an act of 'fi del-ity' (Badiou 2001, 67ff). This affi rmation not only keeps alive a memory of a

Sphere of Accuracies, Zone of Truth: Art, Science and Neutrality

Thought of the neuter or the neutral is a threat and a scandal for thought 1 With a mission state... more Thought of the neuter or the neutral is a threat and a scandal for thought 1 With a mission statement that commits not just to getting 'in amongst the debates of media and culture, but in between the spaces of debates', Neutral 2 sets itself quite a task. Which media? Which culture? And what is the space between the spaces of debate? Are there spaces between spaces? Are we talking about the culture that still seems to find a way of maintaining itself upon the shifting sands of cultural history, cultural studies and visual culture, or the culture that C. P. Snow saw as its other: the domain of science of, and to whom, it cannot speak? This is a different space, filled not with the noise of debate but the silence of the unknown. Here (through lack of space) we are going to try to collapse these two spaces into one by heeding the advice of James Elkins 3 and interrupting the all-too-familiar textual and visual discourses of the literary and the aesthetic with the alterity of the scientific. Not, and here we part company with Elkins, in the name of an expanded 'visual literacy', but in pursuit of a radical illiteracy that, following Maurice Blanchot and his peculiar notion of 'research', will be associated with the neutral itself. The unknown is neutral, a neuter…let us propose that in research—where poetry and thought affirm themselves in the space that is proper to them, separable, inseparable—the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown… In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed—and under what aspect? —precisely in that which keeps it unknown. 4 Perhaps, then, the opening of art to science should not be conceived in epistemological terms as the introduction of knowledge into ignorance—a Socratic prejudice as old as Western thought—but as the inauguration of a neutral space of unknowing that can be indicated, 'even exhibited', but not inhabited by either. Indeed, perhaps the undeniable explanatory power of science (so proudly waved in the face of art) has no ontological legitimacy at all. This is certainly how Heidegger sees it. Propositions about " Science " 2. Accordingly, " science " itself is not a knowing, in the sense of grounding and preserving an essential truth. Science is a derived mechanism of knowing, i.e., it is the machinational opening of a sphere of accuracies within an otherwise hidden—and for science in no way question-worthy—zone of truth.

Eros-Art-Education. Keynote Lecture Notes, Aalto University, Helsinki, 2012.

Nietzsche on Decadence: A Short Provocation (Revised Version)

Deleuze (one of my heroes) famously avoided conversations like the plague, believing that the tas... more Deleuze (one of my heroes) famously avoided conversations like the plague, believing that the task of the philosopher was not to 'talk about' issues or 'enter into' debates but, rather to 'invent concepts,' which is, for him, another way of saying the creation of space/times. Nietzsche (one of Deleuze's heroes) created many concepts: the will-to-power; the eternal recurrence; the death of God; Dionysianism; ressentiment…and so on: decadence is one of them…and is related to all of the above. His concept of decadence is by no means intended as a critique of culture (modern or otherwise), but is rather the creation of a conceptual space/time that, to use Walter Benjamin's stunning phrase, 'is blasted out of the continuum of history.' Far from being a commentary on the decline and/or end of history, Nietzsche's creation of a concept of decadence requires him to draw upon, put into play and actualise three of his other conceptual creations: the 'unhistorical', 'active forgetting' and 'untimeliness,' all to be found in his famous essay 'The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.' By claiming to stand outside of his time, indeed, outside of history, Nietzsche simultaneously places a question mark above three different 'ends' of history: 1. The Kantian teleological concept of a universal and purposive history progressing towards one 'cosmopolitan' end. 2. The Marxist dialectical concept of a resolution of all contradictions through an historical class struggle resulting in absolute synthesis: communism: the 'end of history' thesis. 3. The post-Fukuyama neo-liberal concept of a triumphant capitalism rendering all fundamental change or transcendence illusory: another counter 'end of history' thesis. By stepping outside of these culturally dominant conceptual space/times Nietzsche sets himself the task of thinking the end of the 'end of history.' Raising the question: is a history without end or ends history at all? And a secondary question: is it possible to create a concept of decadence that is uncoupled from history, from ascent and decline, progress and regress, cultivation and barbarity? Maybe not—but that is what Nietzsche attempts. To 'actively forget' decadence as an historical concept, and create it anew as a causal principle rather than as an effect or symptom of decline is Nietzsche's primary gesture. Repeatedly in his discussion of decadence he exposes the confusion of cause and effect (itself a symptom of decadence). Pleasure-seeking, excess, ruination are not the causes of decadence but its effect. Thinking, with Nietzsche, in terms of active and reactive forces, the decadent might, on the face of it, be seen as one who actively pursues a life of excess, of ever-increasing stimulation and indulgence but, in truth, such degenerate acts are determined by a plethora of reactive forces underpinning the rational, moral and religious prohibitions that make such acts meaningful and

Begin the Begin: Inaugural Lecture January 2018

My inaugural lecture at York St John University, ironic in a number of ways. Firstly, I had alrea... more My inaugural lecture at York St John University, ironic in a number of ways. Firstly, I had already been Professor there for 10 years when I delivered it, secondly, that it was the last thing I did there before departing later that year. It is also significant in my transition from academic to pedal steel guitarist: a happy move! Also, one last irony: I didn't actually deliver this lecture on the night as I was too sick to read it and play the music, etc, so I improvised something completely different. It kind of worked, as far as I remember (and I was so out of it I remember very little!)

John Cage and the 'Freshening' of Education

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2018

Review of Ansgar Allen's 'The Cynical Educator,' published in Sociological Review

Popular Music Review Tim Hodgkinson's 'Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm'

Improvising Improvisation: From Out Of Philosophy, Music, Literature and Dance. Chicago University Press, June 2017. Preface.

A taster for my last book.

Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas, Ashgate 2005. Preface.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 5. Dissymmetry and Height: Intersubjectivity and Pedagogy in Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 6/Afterword. Judgement, Critique and Ignorance.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 4. Hearing, Teaching, Seeing: Nietzsche, Rosenzweig and the University.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate 2005. Chapter 3. Severity, Ideality and Pleasure: Hegel contra Irony.

Irony and Singularity, Ashgate, 2005. Chapter 2. Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology? Schiller and de Man.

Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas, Ashgate, 2005. Chapter 1. Teacing the Unteachable: Method and Manner in Kant's Aesthetics.

Dissonant Man, in The Fate of the New Nietzsche ed, Caygill and Ansell Pearson, Ashgate 1994

The Death of a Friend: Some Themes in Jacques Derrida's 'The Work of Mourning', in, 'Dying and Death: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives', ed. Asa Kasher, Rodopi, 2007

Ignorant Artists/Ignorant Teachers, in, 'The Idea of Education,' eds. Claes and Peterson, Rodopi, 2010

Drawing the Event: A Philosophical Response to the Live Jazz Drawings of Yann Bagot and Pieter Fannes. In a book entitled 'Live' published by Bries (Belgium) January 2018.

What is a Live Event? In, Matthew Reason and Anja Lindelof (eds.) Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge, 2016.

This chapter will start by assuming that there is something particular, often special, about a li... more This chapter will start by assuming that there is something particular, often special, about a live event, something that most people would acknowledge without necessarily knowing or understanding exactly what the essence of this particularity is. As such, the primary concern here will not be the nowness of the 'now' so frequently conceived as the central pillar of the live event but rather, the prehistory and post-history of the event as embodied in the regimes of practise and rehearsal necessary to preserve (re-originate) the live event. And in advance, the discussion of improvisation here functions only as one possible means of highlighting certain overlooked particularities (or peculiarities) of the event rather than offering any particular insights into improvisation itself. It is the oft-assumed tension or even contradiction between practising, rehearsing and improvisation that will be considered, as a means of shifting the emphasis away from the performative/existential nowness of the live experience (or the experience of liveness) towards what might be called the ontological absence/presence of the evental, understood and considered in the self-emergent terms of autopoiesis. It is this displacement that will suggest a reconceptualisation of the live event as a rehearsing rather than a happening space. Or, put another away, what makes what happens live a 'happening' is the preservation of the event—that has always already happened—as an essential moment of the 'now.' Thus, it is the implications of the Heideggerian term preservation of the event that will be one, if not the most important focus of the following refl ections. Much of what follows draws upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou; for all three the event is never present but has always already happened. If, to use Badiou's language, the 'site' of the event is never within the present 'situation,' then the sense of authenticity that is often sought in the perceived purity of the improvised live event—its 'truth'—can itself only attain authenticity if it is recognised that what is live is not the event itself but the repetition of the event as an act of being-true-to its legacy, an act of 'fi del-ity' (Badiou 2001, 67ff). This affi rmation not only keeps alive a memory of a

Sphere of Accuracies, Zone of Truth: Art, Science and Neutrality

Thought of the neuter or the neutral is a threat and a scandal for thought 1 With a mission state... more Thought of the neuter or the neutral is a threat and a scandal for thought 1 With a mission statement that commits not just to getting 'in amongst the debates of media and culture, but in between the spaces of debates', Neutral 2 sets itself quite a task. Which media? Which culture? And what is the space between the spaces of debate? Are there spaces between spaces? Are we talking about the culture that still seems to find a way of maintaining itself upon the shifting sands of cultural history, cultural studies and visual culture, or the culture that C. P. Snow saw as its other: the domain of science of, and to whom, it cannot speak? This is a different space, filled not with the noise of debate but the silence of the unknown. Here (through lack of space) we are going to try to collapse these two spaces into one by heeding the advice of James Elkins 3 and interrupting the all-too-familiar textual and visual discourses of the literary and the aesthetic with the alterity of the scientific. Not, and here we part company with Elkins, in the name of an expanded 'visual literacy', but in pursuit of a radical illiteracy that, following Maurice Blanchot and his peculiar notion of 'research', will be associated with the neutral itself. The unknown is neutral, a neuter…let us propose that in research—where poetry and thought affirm themselves in the space that is proper to them, separable, inseparable—the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown… In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed—and under what aspect? —precisely in that which keeps it unknown. 4 Perhaps, then, the opening of art to science should not be conceived in epistemological terms as the introduction of knowledge into ignorance—a Socratic prejudice as old as Western thought—but as the inauguration of a neutral space of unknowing that can be indicated, 'even exhibited', but not inhabited by either. Indeed, perhaps the undeniable explanatory power of science (so proudly waved in the face of art) has no ontological legitimacy at all. This is certainly how Heidegger sees it. Propositions about " Science " 2. Accordingly, " science " itself is not a knowing, in the sense of grounding and preserving an essential truth. Science is a derived mechanism of knowing, i.e., it is the machinational opening of a sphere of accuracies within an otherwise hidden—and for science in no way question-worthy—zone of truth.

Eros-Art-Education. Keynote Lecture Notes, Aalto University, Helsinki, 2012.

Nietzsche on Decadence: A Short Provocation (Revised Version)

Deleuze (one of my heroes) famously avoided conversations like the plague, believing that the tas... more Deleuze (one of my heroes) famously avoided conversations like the plague, believing that the task of the philosopher was not to 'talk about' issues or 'enter into' debates but, rather to 'invent concepts,' which is, for him, another way of saying the creation of space/times. Nietzsche (one of Deleuze's heroes) created many concepts: the will-to-power; the eternal recurrence; the death of God; Dionysianism; ressentiment…and so on: decadence is one of them…and is related to all of the above. His concept of decadence is by no means intended as a critique of culture (modern or otherwise), but is rather the creation of a conceptual space/time that, to use Walter Benjamin's stunning phrase, 'is blasted out of the continuum of history.' Far from being a commentary on the decline and/or end of history, Nietzsche's creation of a concept of decadence requires him to draw upon, put into play and actualise three of his other conceptual creations: the 'unhistorical', 'active forgetting' and 'untimeliness,' all to be found in his famous essay 'The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.' By claiming to stand outside of his time, indeed, outside of history, Nietzsche simultaneously places a question mark above three different 'ends' of history: 1. The Kantian teleological concept of a universal and purposive history progressing towards one 'cosmopolitan' end. 2. The Marxist dialectical concept of a resolution of all contradictions through an historical class struggle resulting in absolute synthesis: communism: the 'end of history' thesis. 3. The post-Fukuyama neo-liberal concept of a triumphant capitalism rendering all fundamental change or transcendence illusory: another counter 'end of history' thesis. By stepping outside of these culturally dominant conceptual space/times Nietzsche sets himself the task of thinking the end of the 'end of history.' Raising the question: is a history without end or ends history at all? And a secondary question: is it possible to create a concept of decadence that is uncoupled from history, from ascent and decline, progress and regress, cultivation and barbarity? Maybe not—but that is what Nietzsche attempts. To 'actively forget' decadence as an historical concept, and create it anew as a causal principle rather than as an effect or symptom of decline is Nietzsche's primary gesture. Repeatedly in his discussion of decadence he exposes the confusion of cause and effect (itself a symptom of decadence). Pleasure-seeking, excess, ruination are not the causes of decadence but its effect. Thinking, with Nietzsche, in terms of active and reactive forces, the decadent might, on the face of it, be seen as one who actively pursues a life of excess, of ever-increasing stimulation and indulgence but, in truth, such degenerate acts are determined by a plethora of reactive forces underpinning the rational, moral and religious prohibitions that make such acts meaningful and

Report on an Enquiry-Based Learning Project Improvisation as Pedagogical Strategy

6 Myths or Half Truths About Research. Research Reflections Paper 2016.docx

Fragments of/on Memory, in Memory Connection Vol 2, no 1, 2016

Repetition and Rehearsal: Paper delivered at the Re/petition(s) conference, Ljubljana, Sept. 2016

Avant-Garde Pedagogies: John Cage: Paper delivered at Avant-Garde Pedagogies Conference, Westminster University, July 2016.

The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics. Radical Philosophy 82: 1997

Jimi Hendrix Remembered/Forgotten

A short memoir delivered at York St John University as part of 'Black History Month'. The event i... more A short memoir delivered at York St John University as part of 'Black History Month'. The event in October 2014, was on our black heroes. This brief talk was delivered while my version of Hey Joe (can be downloaded further down this list of 'papers') played. A more developed version of this paper can be found in my book 'Improvising Improvisation (2017).

Y is for Yes. Part of the Theatre Pages lexicon edition. York St John Press, 2013

The Double Stillness: Speech, Silence and Musicality in Nietzsche. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 2, Autumn 1991.

Derek Bailey: Case Study 2015

Chapter from my forthcoming book: Improvising Improvisation, Chicago University Press

The Obligation to Improvise: Schoenberg and Beckett 2014

Certainty, Contingency and Improvisation 2012

Paper in Critical Studies of Improvisation, 2012.

Tessellated Space 2010

Sleeve notes for Veryan Weston's 'Different Tessellations' (CD, Emanem, 2010)

A 'Provocation' delivered as part of the York St John University, Faculty of Arts 'Find the Magic... more

A short 'provocation' delivered at a York St John, Faculty of Arts Away Day.