McConachie - Falsifiable Theories For Theatre and Performance Studies
McConachie - Falsifiable Theories For Theatre and Performance Studies
McConachie - Falsifiable Theories For Theatre and Performance Studies
Bruce A. McConachie
Theatre Journal, Volume 59, Number 4, December 2007, pp. 553-577 (Article)
Bruce McConachie is Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Some of his major publications include Melodramatic Formations (1992), American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War (2003), and Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (coedited with F. Elizabeth Hart, 2006). He is the coeditor of Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance for Palgrave Macmillan.
1 Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, eds., Critical Theory and Performance, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), xii.
Theatre Journal 59 (2007) 553577 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002). Gary Jay Williams, A Serious Joy: ASTR from 19812006, Theatre Survey 48 (2007): 2776, see esp. 4043. 4 Reinelt and Roach, Critical Theory and Performance, 135.
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To be fair, David Savrans essay in Critical Theory and Performance embraces a Brechtian version of scientific rationality, and Susan Leigh Foster writes about Adam Smiths notion of empathy. These versions of science, however, are safely historical and do not impinge on the major theoretical assumptions of the anthology. Contemporary scientists though, especially in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolution, and linguistics, have a lot to say about the realities of perception, memory, empathy, emotions, and cultureall necessary concerns of theatre and performance scholars. Critical Theory and Performance, however, ignores this significant body of knowledge. This is unfortunate though not surprising. Like nearly all theatre and performance scholars, most of the writers in this anthology apparently assume that science and its procedures can be safely bypassed because theatre and performance is not a scientific discipline. They would agree with most scholars in English departments who believe that questions about interpretation and causation regarding literature cannot be captured by scientific reason, in the words of Geoffrey Harpham.5 This may have been a defensible position in the past, when scientific and humanistic concerns shared little common ground. Humanistic scholars have long drawn on a-scientific theories from philosophy and other disciplines to prompt their investigations and bolster their arguments. As long as the ideas of past master theorists provided insights and terminologies that did not counter scientific understanding, this arrangement made a certain sense. What happens, though, when theories deriving from good science come into conflict with critical theories that have no basis in scientific evidence or logic? Which theories should we trust? Our lack of familiarity with scientific ideas probably derives as much from attitudinal as from epistemological differences. The theory revolution of the 1980s carried a political agendaor at least a political attitudewith it. Energized by the political struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s, most of the theoretical positions that came to dominate theatre and performance studies were self-consciously oppositional. None of our master theorists can be called conservatives and most occupy the far left of the political spectrum. I happily admit that in the 1980s I followed Brecht in wanting to work with theories that could not only assist me in understanding the world, but could also help me to change it. (I still do.) In this politicized context, many scientific approaches appeared frustratingly neutral at best or, at worst, in league with a military-industrial complex that was fast transforming our society in numerous nefarious ways. Further, the hard sciences were examining humankind as a part of nature, when we were all learning not to naturalize gender roles, racist cultures, and other configurations of power; these were supposedly social, not natural, constructions. If a scientific orientation brought such baggage with it, why trust it to deliver theories and ideas that could help us transform the political landscape? But what if this attitude is merely a caricature of good science? What if the notion that Homo sapiens is socially constructed is based on the false premise that the natural and the social are actually divisible? Worse yet, what if a scientific approach can lead to progressive politics? While my focus in this essay will be on cognitive science and its potential usefulness in our discipline, I will also address (though I cannot conclusively answer) the larger implications of what it might mean to shift theatre and performance studies from its reliance on generally a-scientific theories, to theories that have undergone the rigor5
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perfect statue, and the deathlike stillness that reigned over the crowded audience, every person seeming to hold their breath, was very striking. She stood the bloodless image of despair until the bell tolled again.6
Julia Walker uses this quotation to point to Quincys double consciousness of the theatrical event. Quincy, says Walker, is both imaginatively inside it, feeling what the character feels, while practically outside of it, appreciating Kembles technique as a discerning connoisseur. What Walker terms the oscillating dynamic of these inside/outside shifts pervades the quotation.7 As Quincy oscillates between her inside and outside engagements, the she and her referents in the quotation above move among three different positions. When Quincy stands outside of the flow of the scene, she refers both to Kemblethe actorand to Bianca, recognized by Quincy as a fictitious character in a drama. Quincys [s]he stood . . . five moments comments on Kembles technique, while she has just been imploring the jailer probably refers to the characters action in the dramatic fiction. Significantly, though, most of the uses of she and her in the quotation cannot be fitted into either an actor or a character category. When Quincy is swept up in the action, she is both the actor and the character togetherKemble/Bianca, an actor/character. She stood riveted to the spot and she is entirely insensible of it are moments when Quincy was clearly inside the flow of the action, feeling with the actor/character. Even in recollection, the Boston spectator was so rapt in the onstage moment of Kemble/Biancas insensibility to Fazios embrace that Quincy forces her past memory into present tense to better capture the continuing thrill of her engagement in the performance. The oscillating dynamic of Quincys conscious attentiveness moves between performer and fiction when she is on the outside, and fixes on the present actions of an actor/character when she is inside of the performance. Quincys experiences are typical of much theatrical spectatorship. Any viewer who knows the rules of the theatregoing game can step back from an imaginative immersion in the onstage action to consider the relative skills of the players (and of the designers, the director, and so on) or to think about the fictional world of the script (and perhaps about the art of the playwright). Arguably, connoisseurs of the theatre, like Quincy, take more of their enjoyment from such considerations than do amateur playgoers. Most of the time, however, both connoisseurs and amateurs want to experience the performance from the inside. As Walker concludes: [The theatre] is an art form devoted to just this kind of oscillation, offering us a glimpse of the world as it can be imagined from an objective analytical viewpoint and an experience of the world as registered within our bodys viscera in the form of an affective engagement that is very much in the moment and real.8 This doubleness and oscillation does not seem to be unique to the theatre, however. Spectators at sports events can oscillate among the same cognitive categories. The breaks between the scrimmages in US professional football, in fact, encourage spectators to shift their attentions from the external world of strategies and rules to the affective
6 Quoted in Julia Walker, The Text/Performance Split across the Analytic/Continental Divide, in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 3637. 7 Ibid., 37. 8 Ibid., 3839.
Human beings begin categorizing percepts into concepts soon after they are born. In addition to the human face, cognitive concepts include such basics as the color red, a notion of forward, and the physical object for sitting that, among English speakers, is called a chair. Many cognitive scientists theorize that these mental concepts are not objectively given in the world, but gain neuronal structure in our minds through our embodied interactions with the environment. Through logic and empirical evidence, Fauconnier and Turner demonstrate that people imaginatively play blending games with thousands of their mental concepts all of the timemostly below the level of consciousness. As they explain, one kind of double-scope blending that we call theatre encourages spectators to merge actors and characters by mixing together three mental conceptsidentity, actor, and characterto create a fourth: an actor/character.11 Using the mental concept of identity as a kind of base color on an artists palette, spectators blend in selective content from their concept of actor (that he/she is alive, can move and speak, and so on), and some content from their mental knowledge of a character (that he/she has a certain past, faces specific situations in the present, and so on). The resulting blend adds new colors, as it were, to the base color of identity on the mixing palette to create a new identity: an actor/character. In the actor/character blend, according to Fauconnier and Turner, identity is a vital relation, a conceptual primitive (others include space, cause-effect, part-whole), that provides a kind of template for the mental compres9 See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 10 Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 104. 11 See Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 26667, for their specific comments on the doublescope blending that underlies theatrical perception. On conceptual blending as the basis for theatrical make-believe, see also Amy Cook, Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science, SubStance 35, no. 2 (2006): 8399.
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sion of blending.12 When spectators live in the blend of a performance, they do not mix all of the colors available to them in their actor and character paint boxes; they temporarily put aside their knowledge that the actors have other lives outside of their immediate role-playing and that the characters began initially as words on a page, for instance. All blends allow for imaginative selection among the content of the mental concepts that are blended. Conceptual blending may be a more accurate way to understand the doubleness of theatre for spectators than Samuel Taylor Coleridges dictum about suspending disbelief. The readers immersion in a good poem, asserts Coleridge, should involve that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.13 Coleridges telling us to momentarily suspend our skepticism that Edmund Kean or Kenneth Branagh cannot really be Hamlet, even though he is playing the role onstage, suggests that theatrical believability occurs when the spectator willingly surrenders an aspect of his/her agency. This leaves the impression that involvement in a good performance is akin to a religious experience touched by God: put aside unbelief, and belief (Coleridges poetic faith) will flood in. In effect, Coleridge is suggesting that spectators oscillate between the attitudes of faith and skepticismnot blended and unblended mental conceptswhile watching a performance. Pace Coleridges religiously charged metaphor, engaging with an actor/character onstage according to conceptual blending theory involves imaginative addition, not subtraction. Instead of suspending a cognitive attitude, spectators combine actors and characters into blended actor/characters. Nor is this an extraordinary ability involving some kind of leap of faith; as noted, children playing house with each other have the same capabilityand like them, at any moment, what the mind has blended together, the mind can take apart. Spectators can slip out of the blend of performance to adjust their bodies in their seats or to mentally note that an actors costume fits poorly; Coleridge emphasized the willing suspension of skepticism, but blending theory suggests that oscillating in and out of blends is mostly unconscious. Some willing may occur at the start of a performance and intermittently throughout, but it is clear that spectators do not need to make conscious decisions about blending and unblending. Cognitive science challenges Coleridges romantic notion of the willing suspension of disbelief at several levels. Fauconnier and Turners theory suggests that audiences can and do use blending with flexibility. When spectators blend actors with characters to create actor/characters, they can add more or less of each ingredient to whip up their theatrical recipes. If a star actor with a strong persona is playing a role, the spectator might mix in a cup full of actor with only a teaspoon of character to create a particular actor/character in their minds. When spectators today watch Marlon Brando as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, they probably add more of the actors filmic persona than Williamss character into their blends. (Hollywood, of course, continues to induce spectators to see and hear mostly star personas rather than dramatic characters when they watch a movie.) In a high school production of Streetcar, however, adult spectators may prefer to see much more of the Stanley of Williamss script than to focus on the untrained,
Fauconnier and Turner, 92102. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 314.
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immersed in the affective flow of the performance. Audiences happily adjust their perceptions to accommodate theatre artists who push the blend toward the actor or the character end of the continuum. On the other hand, if spectators are considering the person onstage simply as an actor or are thinking about the character written by the playwright apart from the performer playing the role, they have momentarily reversed the blend; its component parts fall into the separate cognitive concepts of actor and character. Brecht, of course, found dramatic and theatrical ways to encourage temporary un-blending. As spectators, however, we generally oscillate between these inside and outside positions throughout all theatrical performances, not just while watching Brechtian theatre.17
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(or its synonym, empathy), they are describing these four mental operations and not some vague process of identification or generalized feeling. The four-part thesis that Niedenthal et al. offer and their summary of the evidence for their first claim, has obvious applications for understanding how audiences read the minds of actor/characters. In situations where empathy is encouraged (such as theatrical viewing), the authors note that imitation and embodiment tend to be heightened. Citing many studies that rely primarily on monitoring electro-myographic responses in perceivers of angry faces, of comedy routines on film, and of other stimulating experiences, the authors conclude that individuals partly or fully embody the emotional expressions of other people. Further, these studies also suggest that such embodiment is highly automatic in nature.24 Our muscular, chemical, and neurological responses to others emotions are often so small that they escape conscious recognition, but they can have a significant impact on our behavior. In other words, evolution has equipped us to attune our bodies to the emotions of other people; this basis for our sociality as a species is inherited and embodied. Embodying others emotions produces emotions in us, even if the situation is an imagined or fictitious one. Many psychological experiments have tested and affirmed these effects. Put two babies in a room together and if one of them begins crying, the second will cry as well in empathetic response to the first. The facial, postural, and vocal expression of anger or any other emotion, whether in earnest or in a game of pretend, is contagious. You can catch an emotion, just as you can catch a cold, without knowing whom you caught it from, says philosopher Robert Gordon, who writes about emotional contagion in the theatre as well as in everyday life.25 Along with other philosophers of cognition and emotion, Gordon has developed a simulation theory (ST), which demonstrates that humans come to know the world and themselves largely through simulation.26 The implication for those playing the make-believe game of theatre is that most spectators are virtual Typhoid Marys when it comes to catching emotions and passing them on to others. The final point made by Niedenthal et al. is that embodied emotions, whether generated by a response to the environment or socially transmitted by others, shape subsequent cognitive processing and generate meanings. As they explain:
When a persons body enters into a particular [emotional] state, this constitutes a retrieval cue of conceptual knowledge. . . . In turn, other cognitive processes, such as categorization, evaluation, and memory, are affected. As an embodied state triggers an emotion concept [i.e., a specific neural-network response] and as the emotion becomes active, it biases other cognitive operations toward states consistent with the emotion.27
Ibid., 25. Robert M. Gordon, Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator, in Mind and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and Ethics, ed. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 168. 26 See the Introduction and essays by Gordon, Georg Vielmetter, David Henderson, Terence Horgan, and Hans Herbert Kogler in Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, ed. Hans Herbert Kogler and Karsten R. Steuber (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) for the epistemological ramifications of simulation theory. See also Alison Gopnik, Theory of Mind, in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank Keil (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 83841. 27 Niedenthal et al., Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge, 40.
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Jacob and Jeannerods conclusions suggest that imitation must be retained as a component of performance. But notice what has happened here: the location of Aristotles imitation of an action has shifted. In The Poetics and in conventional mimetic theory, playwrights and actors do the imitating. These scientists, in contrast, have strong evidence that it is spectators who mirror the motor actions of those they watch on stage; cognitive imitation is a crucial part of spectatorship. Presumably, playwrights, actors, and others also engage their visuomotor representations when they write a script and put together a production, but this is a separate process, removed from the moment-to28 Vittorio Gallese, The Shared Manifold Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 57 (2001): 36. Researchers have also discovered other groups of neuronsso-called action-location and canonical neuronsthat assist mirror neurons in imitating the intentional actions of others. See also Antonio Damasios discussion of empathy and mirror neurons in his Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 11518. Damasio discusses mirror neurons as a part of what he terms the as-if-body-loop, wherein body and mind interact in response to an image of an actionan as-if situation similar to the theatre. 29 See Vittorio Gallese, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (2004): 18 (repr., http://www.sciencedirect.com). Like Damasio, the authors speak of empathy as an as-if performance: Side by side with the sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the state associated with these actions or emotions are evoked in the observer as if they were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion (5). 30 Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, 227.
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moment interaction that occurs between actors and audiences in performance. Mirror neurons do not invalidate Aristotelian mimesis, but if we are interested in audience response from a scientific point of view, the mode of imitation triggered by these neurons (and their consequences) should be part of our explanation. Distinguishing intentional human movement from other kinds of movement must occur before visuomotor representation is possible. In an experiment with theatrical repercussions, one scientist during the 1970s attached light sources to the moving joints of two people and a mechanized dummy, instructed one of the people to sit still and the other to move, then turned out the lights, brought in observers, and asked them what they saw. None of the observers had any difficulty distinguishing the moving human being from the movements of the mechanized dummy and the stationary person. In subsequent experiments, observers were able to identify the disparate actions of individuals in the dark with light sources at their joints who were jumping, dancing, boxing, ironing, and hammering. Under the same experimental circumstances, most observers could tell the difference between men and women walking across a room. Even three-month-old infants, as Jacob and Jeannerod explain, are visually sensitive to the difference between the biological motion of dots produced by a walking person and the random, artificially produced, non-biological motions of similar dots.31 Other experiments demonstrate that, when in doubt, we tend to identify random human motion as intentional movement. None of this is news to good actors and directors, of course. Theatre people have long known that even the smallest, unintended movement on stage can draw unwanted spectatorial attention. How might all of this evidence, and the theories that Gallese, Jacob, Jeannerod, and other scientists have generated to explain them, be compared to the claims of semiotics and phenomenology regarding spectators watching performers? Semiotics and phenomenology assume that subjects are looking at art objects when spectators look at the elements of a performance, including the actors; whether the actors are signs that correspond to something in the objective world or images that somehow relate to the subjective imagination of the perceiver, both semiotics and phenomenology divide the viewing experience between subjects and objects. This approach may be roughly appropriate for Jacob and Jeannerods visual perceptions, but it violates the cognitive foundations of their visuomotor representations. In contrast, the science noted above has discovered an interactional relationship that occurs prior to any cognitive distinctions between subjects and objects and that does not rely on signification. When they pay attention to intentional human action (in a performance or anywhere else), spectators unconsciously mirror the actions of social others and use this cognitive information directly to understand their intentions and emotions. Although audiences must also interpret spoken language and engage in other mental operations when they watch actors performing, interactional simulation seems to be primary. Put another way, the mind does not need to generate signs or holistic images and then manipulate these complex representations to understand human action on the stage; compared to the direct input we obtain from mirroring, semiotic and phenomenological mental operations are superfluous. As a recent article by linguist George Lakoff and Gallese suggests, the activation of mirror neuron networks provides a direct stimulus to the conceptual operations of the brain.32
Ibid., 221. Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, The Brains Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge, Cognitive Neuropsychology 21 (2005): 125.
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Embodied realism undercuts the premises of both semiotics and phenomenology. For the same reasons, Lakoff and Johnsons embodied realism contradicts the assumptions of poststructuralism: There is no poststructuralist person, they state, no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in.34 Embodied realism is radically at odds with the theories of Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, and other poststructuralist master theorists in our critical theory consensus.
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performance and mirroring the actions of actor/characters or looking at the setting of a production. Performance, it seems, mixes up our usual categories of actuality and make-believe all of the time. The theory of conceptual blending that imaginatively links actors to characters can be extended to other aspects of the theatre. Brando/Stanley picks up a beer during the initial performance of Streetcar in 1947; from a point of view outside the flow of the performance, the bottle of beer is both a material object put onstage by a props assistant and an item noted in Williamss script (or only in the promptbook for the productionit doesnt matter which). The spectator can think about the beer in both of these ways if she or he wishes. In the blend, however, the material object/fictional item for spectators in 1947 became simply Brando/Stanleys beer, with its actuality and fictionality merged together. The original production of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 featured painted backdrops that also shared actual and fictional properties for Moscow spectators. Muscovites at the production could go with the blend and view the backdrop for act 1 as the garden of a country estate, or pull apart the blend and consider the backdrop as a construction of paint and canvas and/or as a necessary artistic indication put onstage by Chekhov and Victor Simov (the designer) to set the fictitious scene. Blending even applies to spoken dialogue. What country, friends, is this? said the actor/Viola in her (and his) first line of dialogue in Shakespeares Twelfth Night (1.2.1) in 1601. Auditors may have focused on the material sound produced by the male actors musculature and the spatial-sound dynamics of the Globe Theatre, or they could have considered Shakespeares happy marriage of verse and character in the stage fiction. More likely, though, they blended both together because they also wanted to know where the action was set so that they could play the game of theatre placed before them. As these examples suggest, theatrical viewers do not parse the differences between actual and fictional props, scenery, and dialogue when living in the blend of a performance. Rather than considering the fictional part of a play performance unreal, it makes more sense to acknowledge that it is make-believein contrast to the material actuality of actors, props, scenery, sound, and so onbut to insist that this make-believe can be a part of reality. When spectators blend together actuality and fiction, the blended images they produce in their minds retain their reality for them. In places other than playhouses, people often inject fiction into their realities and can move in and out of these half-fantasized blends with little conscious thought. Fauconnier and Turner, the initiators of conceptual blending theory, discuss the case of some Britons during the 1980s who, according to social psychologists, suffered genuine depression when they did not win a lottery, even though they knew that their chances of winning were slim. The authors note that [t]he interpretation given by the therapists was that in the two weeks or so between the purchase of the ticket and the drawing for the winner, these victims had fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or not, about what they would do upon winning the lottery. The actual lottery made them lose everything they had acquired in the fantasy world. In that world, they did indeed suffer a severe loss.35 The point here is not to reduce spectators to delusional victims who are easily lost in the fantasies of stage fiction; after all, the lottery players realized in another part of their brains, as it were, that they would not likely win. Fauconnier and Turner
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film . . . where you know that theyve done seventy-five takes to get it right. And it can sometimes be as exciting when something goes wrong, to see how theyll deal with it. . . . You know that its real, you know that its there and then, that its live. Thats the special part of theatre.38
Tullochs theatregoer validates more than the inherent playfulness of performance; for her, its characteristics of play and liveness also make it real. In his recent essay, Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance, David Saltz helps to clarify what blending counterfactuals does for spectators.39 He relies on aesthetic theories based on the assumptions of Wittgenstein ian philosophy and not on theories of cognitive science. Nonetheless, because his conclusions are surprisingly close to the framework of conceptual blending that I have been applying to performance, his scholarship demonstrates that cognitive theories can work productively with other theories to extend and amplify some of the ideas of cognitive science. Saltz dismisses semiotics and phenomenology as productive ways of viewing spectatorial engagement, for example, because Wittgensteins notion of seeing as offers an alternative more in accord with most viewers experience. As Wittgenstein explained in his Philosophical Investigations, people do not try to figure out aesthetic objects as signs of something else; instead, they engage with paintings or watch plays by seeing them differently. Saltz cites a passage from E. R. Gombrichs famous essay, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, to illustrate his (and Wittgensteins) point: [I]f the child calls a stick a horse . . . [t]he stick is neither a sign signifying the concept horse nor is it a portrait of an individual horse. By its capacity of serving as a substitute the stick becomes a horse in its own right.40 Childhood games of lets pretend are ontological paradigms for theatrical performances. In cognitive terms, audiences do not usually look at and listen to the choices made by an actor like Marlon Brando nor step back to consider characters such as Stanley and others presented by Tennessee Williams; they simply see these two phenomena together as Brando/Stanley. Of course, spectators do not need to make this cognitive shift; they may un-blend their perception of the performance and think about its component parts if they wish; however, most spectators, most of the time, will choose to see the performance as a blend of factuals and counterfactuals, as well as occasionally shifting back to separate its facts from its fictions. As Saltz explains, spectators actually use fiction twice in a performance, first, as I have noted, to become engaged in the flow of the actiona deployment that Saltz terms infiction: Insofar as spectators use the narrative as an infiction, he says, the primary focus of their attention is the performance itself. . . . Our metaphorical redescription of these actions is what I am calling the outfiction. . . . The story of Hamlet as I read it off a performance of Hamlet is an outfiction.41 Secondly, spectators will engage in some metaphorical redescription during a performance, of course, to enable them to speculate
38 Quoted in John Tulloch, Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 295 (emphasis in original). 39 David Z. Saltz, Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Theatrical Fiction in Theatrical Performance in Staging Philosophy, 20343. 40 Ibid., 209. 41 Ibid., 214 (emphasis in original).
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its essentials, good science continues to operate through observation, measurement, economy, consistency, and heuristics.45 An important key to this process is falsifiability. By falsifying provisional theories and constructing alternatives that better account for the evidence, scientists gradually forge new possibilities that offer more robust explanations. In their Ways of Seeing, for example, Jacob and Jeannerod demonstrate that several competing ideas about human vision cannot integrate the range of evidence and answer the kinds of questions that their visual intentionalism theory is able to accommodate. They also show that their theory is more consistent with other findings and the most economical way of handling the difficulties that the empirical data suggest. Scientists do not arrive at objective truth, but, through experimentation and argumentation, good science narrows the range of possible explanations and interpretations. Can the master theorists in our critical theory consensus make the same claim? All scientific assertions are potentially falsifiable through the use of the scientific method, but what experiments or logics would the master theorists accept as a basis for the falsifiability of their ideas? Looking at the theorists featured in Critical Theory and Performance, one might say that they represent a range of approaches that admit of greater or lesser degrees of falsifiability. At one end of the continuum, the theories of Bourdieu, Habermas, Gramsci, and Williams generally work within the falsifiability protocols of social science, which (though open to dispute) have been fairly well established for fifty years. When Raymond Williamss version of Gramscis hegemony theory was gaining a curious audience among historians, its potential falsifiability was widely discussed.46 While social scientists, including historians, cannot apply falsifiability to their work with the same rigor as scientists who work with nonhuman subjects, their standards concerning evidence, economy, and consistency are high.47 Somewhere in the middle of the continuum of falsifiability, perhaps, are the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, their synthesis with semiotics in Lacan, and the many theorists who build their own ideas on some version of a psychoanalytic base. Their advocates often claim scientific validity for these theories. Most psychologists, however, have rejected psychoanalysis and its spin-offs as unfalsifiable. In her Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science, for example, Wilma Bucci concludes that Freuds meta-psychology has not been subject to the empirical evaluation and theory development that is necessary for a scientific field. Specifically,
the type of systematic inference that is applied in cognitive science and in all modern science requires explicit definitions that limit the meaning of the concepts, correspondence rules mapping hypothetical constructs and intervening variables onto observable events, and means of assessing reliability of observation. Each of the indicators that analysts rely on to make inferences about the conscious and unconscious states of other persons (as
45 For this overview of the scientific method, see E. O. Wilson, Forward from the Scientific Side, in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), viixi. 46 See, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears, The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 56793. In this essay, Lears demonstrates that a historian could falsify a claim of cultural hegemony from another historian by showing that different, potentially competing historical groups actually shared the same consensus values. 47 See, for example, Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51196.
In defense, Freudians and Lacanians often claim that their theories are consonant with good science because their concepts have been scientifically validated in therapeutic sessions.49 But clinical success, however it is measured, is not the same as empirical verification. Just because the talking cure has been effective in some cases does not mean that Freuds or Lacans explanation for why it worked is valid. Humans have had many explanations for fire over the centuries, but understanding why and how combustion really works must rely on recent physics and chemistry. At the other end of the continuum are theorists such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Fral, and other poststructuralists, whose radical skepticism challenges the ability of science or any other discourse to provide a valid standard of falsifiability. The relativism of poststructuralism, including its challenges to empirical verification, defies any protocols that might stabilize knowledge based on the slippery signifiers provided by language. Despite what they take to be the inherent contradictions of textual assertions, poststructuralists from Lyotard to Derrida rely chiefly on logic and argumentation rather than scientific or historical evidence. Within the assumptions of poststructuralism, Derridas gnomic remark, There is nothing beyond the text, is simply unfalsifiable. The critic who wishes to rely on what Derrida might have meant in that statement, however, will have to ignore a great deal of good science in linguistics and evolutionary psychology to be able to assess the probable truth of Derridas assertion.50 Brian Vickers challenges the weak scientific credentials of several of the master theorists that many humanist academics have embraced. As he points out with acerbity:
Freuds work is notoriously speculative, a vast theoretical edifice elaborated with a mere pretense of corroboration, citing clinical observations which turn out to be false, with contrary evidence suppressed, data manipulated, building up over a forty-year period a self-obscuring, self-protective mythology. The system of Derrida, although disavowing systematicity, is based on several unproven theses about the nature of language which are supported by a vast expanding web of idiosyncratic terminology. . . . Lacans system, even more vastly elaborated . . . is a series of devices for evading accountability. . . . Foucault places himself above criticism.51
Whether all of Vickerss charges are valid may be less important than his general point: he presents suggestive evidence that these master theorists tried to place their ideas beyond the protocols of falsifiability.
48 Wilma Bucci, Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: A Multiple Code Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), 910. 49 See, for example, Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 50 In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson take on poststructuralist philosophy directly. They note that four major claims of poststructuralism are empirically incorrect: 1. The complete arbitrariness of the sign; that is, the utter arbitrariness of the pairing between signifiers (signs) and signifieds (concepts). 2. The locus of meanings in systems of binary oppositions among free-floating signifiers (diffrance). 3. The purely historical contingency of meaning. 4. The strong relativity of concepts. (464) See also evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald on the likely evolution of language in his A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001), 252300. 51 Brian Vickers, Masters and Demons, in Theorys Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, ed. D. Patai and W. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 249.
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Are theatre and performance scholars aware of the substantial range of differences in the falsifiability of the ideas of the master theorists when they deploy one or another of their approaches to investigate problems in our discipline? There is little evidence for such discrimination. Like the general population of the United States, most humanistic scholars are genially uninformed about good science and its procedures.52 Once aware, however, what will they (and we) do about it? With regard to theatre and performance studies, the critic and historian interested in discussing how audiences perceive and process performance has a choice to makea choice among kinds of theories that is already pressing and will become increasingly common in the future. This scholar should know that the history of Western thought since Copernicus suggests how this conflict between kinds of theories will likely be resolved; in the long run, among people who rely on reason instead of superstition, the theories of good science have trumped unscientific philosophy every timeand, I would add, this is as it should be, not because good science is always right, but because conclusions based on its provisional theories narrow the likelihood of egregious error and prevent humanistic scholarship from being foolishly wrong. As we know from the scandal concerning the Sokel hoax in Social Text, the same cannot be said for advocates of the ideas of our present master theorists.53 This returns me to the question that began my essay: how can scholars in our field ensure that their legacy will provide a firm basis for future work in our discipline? Reinelt and Roach use the word consolidated twice in their page-and-a-half-long preface to suggest that ideas gained from applying present theoretical methods can continue to illuminate future investigations. This assumes, however, that all knowledge based on the ideas of master theorists is cumulative, even progressive. While we probably know more about theatre and performance than we did twenty years ago, we have no agreed-upon standards as to what counts as valid knowledge, partly because our poststructuralist habits of skepticism have led us to distrust language as a mode of truth-telling. What Eugene Goodheart has said about the criticism of literature in English departments could easily be assessed against critics in theatre and performance studies: Quarrels among critics have rarely, if ever, been adjudicated. Interpretations and evaluations abound and are often different from or in conflict with one another. The reputations of writers, determined by criticism, fluctuate, sometimes as wildly as the stock market in crisis.54 In such circumstances, consolidating what we know and using it as a foundation for the construction of future knowledge is very difficult.
52 The populations general ignorance of scientific protocols has been the subject of much recent writing; see, for example, Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 2007). One exception to our disciplines lack of knowledge (and even interest) in science is Tobin Nellhaus, whose Science, History, Theatre: Theorizing in Two Alternatives to Positivism, Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 50528, takes two theatre historians to task for their misperceptions about physics. 53 See Paul A. Boghossian, What the Sokel Hoax Ought to Teach Us, Times Literary Supplement 13 (1996): 1415. The editors of Social Text accepted Alan Sokels parody of the postmodern implications of modern physics as a serious article and published it in their April 1996 issue; Sokel later revealed his parody. See Alan Sokel, A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies, Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, 6264. 54 Eugene Goodheart, Casualties of the Culture Wars, in Theorys Empire (see note 51), 509.
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scientists around the imprecision of language in describing light, however, by providing an acceptable, provisional answer to this apparent conundrum. In psychology and neuroscience today, the term emotion has several definitions, depending on whose science you read. Definitions of this term (of obvious concern to theatre and performance scholars interested in spectatorship) will likely be narrowed in a few years, however, as different notions of emotion compete empirically and theoretically for more robust explanatory value.58 In similar ways, scientific definitions of atom and cell achieved provisional validity in the past. Eventually scientists may be able to state reliable facts about our emotional lives, according to the definition of a scientific fact provided by Stephen Jay Gould: a statement confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.59 When confronted by confusing information, scientists are initially no better than performance critics at naming significant attributes of the natural world. Experimentation, theorizing, and falsification, however, encourage the honing of provisionally acceptable terms and descriptions. Some philosophers now hold that there are no fundamental differences between humanistic hermeneutics and hermeneutic reasoning in the sciences.60 Relying on similar procedures, both humanists and scientists can aim at plausible, provisional, and falsifiable statements of truth. There are many such theories and facts in cognitive science for theatre and performance studies, if only we would remove the blinkers of unfalsifiable theories and decide to recognize them. Few scientists have chosen to address our concerns about spectatorship directly, but many of their insights are easily transferable to analyses about what happens to audiences in performance situations. As noted, Jacob and Jeannerod provide provisionally reliable insight into spectator vision and simulation. Gerald Edelman can tell us how audiences use their connectionist brains to remember what they hear from actors for later use in a performance and in responding to subsequent productions.61 In his Gesture and Thought, David McNeill can help us to explore how spectators understand the integration of gesturing and speaking by actors.62 Mark
58 According to a recent overview of emotion studies, four major approaches are competing for prominence. From a neuroscientific perspective, emotion is located in the brain, elicited by other brain activity as well as by external stimuli, and expressed through the release of chemicals, the activation of muscle systems, and the allocation of specific cognitive resources. Many cognitive psychologists begin with an appraisal theory of emotion, which links the expression of an emotion to the appraisal of an external situation such as a threat to the self. The prototype approach, favored by some cognitive sociologists, examines social interactions as scripts for nonverbal emotional expression and traces the elicitation of these behaviors to social causes. Finally, there are some social constructionists who discount neuroscientific explanations and hold that societies construct emotions through discursive norms; they look to the symbolic expression and negotiation of emotional definitions and roles in media as well as behavior as causal factors. See Anne Bartsch, Emotional Communicationa Theoretical Model, (paper, IGEL Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, August 2004, http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel). Scientists of emotion studies are currently disputing these definitions, but it may take several years before a consensus emerges. On the other hand, if emotion studies follows the path of consciousness studies, competing definitions may continue to proliferate for some time. 59 Stephen Jay Gould, Evolution as Fact and Theory, in Hens Teeth and Horses Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 254. 60 See C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics, trans. Darrell Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 61 A summary of Edelmans ideas about memory may be found in his book with Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness (see note 10), 10210. 62 David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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competitive social Darwinists, it may be that humans have a predisposition to act altruistically towards one another. In A Darwinian Left, Peter Singer imagines what a progressive movement based in Darwinian science (which includes all of the cognitive sciences) might propose and practice.67 There is nothing inherently contradictory that I can see about scholars in theatre and performance studies advocating for progressive change and consolidating and advancing our knowledge through falsifiable experiments and theories. In the short term, testing hypotheses about spectators and accumulating provisional, empirical truths about them can lead to some consolidation of knowledge. In this regard, it ought to be possible to set up experiments that can provide empirical information about the similarities and differences between the experiences of spectators when they watch live and mediatized performances. Such experiments would necessarily rest on common definitions of key terms and rely on provisional neuroscientific, linguistic, and psychological theories about spectator attention, simulation, memory, emotion, conceptual blending, and meaning-making. Experimental procedures might range from postperformance interviews to brain scanning. I can imagine a hypothesis that might propose that more oscillation between blended and unblended actor/characters occurs in live than in mediatized performances. Conclusions based on these and similar results could resolve some of the ongoing disputes in our discipline and lead to significant consolidation. (Such conclusions might have political implications as well; Phelans Unmarked, subtitled The Politics of Performance, which began the controversy, assumed that live performances could effect political change.) Even before we can conduct such experiments, however, it makes more sense to base our provisional ideas about spectatorship, when possible, on relevant theories that are falsifiable, rather than on unfalsifiable psychoanalytic and poststructuralist beliefs. In the long term, though, consolidation may be the wrong metaphor for falsifiable truths in theatre and performance studies. One obligation that a scientific orientation carries with it is to recognize that provisional conclusions will have to be scrapped if better science comes along and displaces the theories that have provided the initial basis of knowledge. Unlike scholars who draw on Lacan, Foucault, and most of our other master theorists, there are no foundational texts to which an investigator in performance and cognitive studies can return for first principles and primary definitions. Cognitive neuroscience, especially, has made rapid strides in recent years and continues to expand how and what we can know about the mind and brain. This pressure will make scholarly consistency and consolidation less important for the critic-historian in theatre and performance studies than a cutting-edge knowledge and a readiness to rethink recent approaches and conclusions.
67 Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).