McConachie - Falsifiable Theories For Theatre and Performance Studies

Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies
Bruce A. McConachie
Theatre Journal, Volume 59, Number 4, December 2007, pp. 553-577 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tj.2008.0014
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Falsiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies

Bruce McConachie
In their short Preface to the Second Edition of Critical Theory and Performance, coeditors Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach raise an important question that has no easy answers. They recognize that their revised and enlarged edition of 2007 consolidates a scholarly field that has largely replaced theatre studies as it was practiced twenty years ago. Back in 1987, the ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and other thinkers who might generally be classified as poststructuralist, along with the traditions of Freudianism and Marxism, lay outside of the disciplinary norms of theatre studies. Following the theory explosion of the late 1980s, however, notions of discourse, otherness, performance, hegemony, and postcolonialism moved center stage in the discipline and now constitute the new status quo. While Reinelt and Roach have added some essays and reorganized others in new sections of their anthology to account for minor shifts in the discipline since 1992the date of the books first editionthe major poststructuralist, Freudian, and neo-Marxist theorists undergirding the epistemological premises of this book remain unchanged. (In the interest of full disclosure, I happily admit that Reinelt and Roach chose to reprint one of my essays for their second edition in the section titled After Marx. My comments on Critical Theory and Performance therefore necessarily apply to my own essay as well as to the book as a whole.) In their preface, Reinelt and Roach give the cold shoulder to those who think that the age of theory is over, and they reaffirm their commitment to theorys transformative potential for the discipline. Near the end of their prefatory remarks, they state that [t]here is no going back and we have no doubt that a decade from now, the scholarly and artistic situation will be somewhat different again, while having consolidated many of the theoretical insights of this generations work.1 Is their confidence justified? To continue to refine the gains of this mode of scholarship, new consolidators in 2017 would need to build on the epistemological assumptions of the major theorists that have shaped both editions of Critical Theory and Performance.
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
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By counting the number of their index entries I have tracked the major thinkers whose ideas seem to play a foundational role in this second edition. These theorists include: Appadurai, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bhabha, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Brecht, Case, Deleuze, De Marinis, Derrida, Dolan, Eco, Fral, Foucault, Freud, Gramsci, Habermas, Husserl, Jameson, Lacan, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Saussure, and Raymond Williams. Plus or minus a few, these master theorists constitute the general range of theoretical approaches that presently dominate the field of theatre and performance studies. Mark Fortiers Theory/Theatreanother text that introduces theatre and performance scholars to critical theory for our disciplineincludes most of these theorists.2 While there is wide agreement that these theorists provide a necessary foundation for knowledge in our field, Reinelt, Roach, Fortier, and others recognize that the ideas and approaches of these masters do not cohere into a grand theory that is epistemologically consistent. Although there is no consensus among the theorists themselves, most practitioners of theory in our discipline have apparently reached a guarded consensus about the validity of these poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, and neo-Marxist masters. Will the next generation of scholars in our discipline, however, be able to stand upon the shoulders of these giants? The prospect of new theatre and performance scholars building upon the insights of these predecessors may be a happy one for many, but it flies in the face of historical precedent. As Gary Jay Williamss history of controversies in the American Society for Theatre Research makes clear, the present generation (my own) of senior theatre and performance scholars debunked the theoretical norms of the disciplines immediate past; we fought against what we took to be the prejudices of positivist historiography and formalist criticism.3 Far from consolidating the ideas of the previous generation, we (rightly or wrongly) rejected many of them in favor of the theories that now define the discipline. Reinelt and Roach know this, of course; as Williams points out, we were all in the vanguard of the theory revolution. While we might all agree that theory of some kind must continue to inform our work, why should the next generation of theatre and performance scholars behave any better toward the theoretical status quo than we did? Where might a new revolution come from? I have become disenchanted with some of the master theorists in recent years because of my readings in cognitive science. The theories and methods of contemporary science, however, rarely receive a hearing within the echoing halls of critical theory. In the introductions to the subsections of Critical Theory and Performance, science gets only a single mention, framed by scare quotes: During the European Enlightenment, the problematic question of race prompted spurious answers from science, which in turn offered convenient rationalizations for the world-historical projects of slaveholders, colonizers, nationalists and segregationists.4 True, science has been invoked to justify many evils in the past; Roach might have added atomic-bomb droppers and Nazi death-camp commandants to his list. But scientists have also crusaded against deadly superstitions, protected us from disease, and helped us to explain the universe.
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
Geoffrey Harpham, Response, New Literary History 36 (2005): 105.

ous evaluative procedures of good science. I have divided this essay into four parts, all of which relate to understanding audience engagement in the theatre. Our current master theorists have a lot to say about what spectators do while they enjoy performancesfrom gazing at bodies to interpreting signsand audience engagement must play a significant role in any valid approach to theatre theory and criticism. In the first section, I will use the basics of conceptual blending theory to open up a fresh perspective on an age-old problem in audience studies: the doubleness of performing bodies that seem to become both actors and characters for spectators. Next, I will outline a theory known as visual intentionalism that challenges our reliance on semiotics and phenomenology for insight into how audiences perceive performers in action. My point in the first half of this essay is not to advance a complete theory about theatrical spectatorship nor even to give a full scientific account of conceptual blending and visual intentionalism; such discussions are beyond my scope here. Rather, I am interested in the explanatory and epistemological differences between several of our usual approaches to understanding audiences and these two scientific theories. The phenomena to be explainedthe perception of theatrical doubleness and of human action on stageare much the same in both instances. How and why these explanations differ is my focus. In the third section, I will return to both conceptual blending and visual intentionalism theories to point up their similarities to a theory about audience perception and processing that derives from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Finally, I will look at some of the larger implications of this discussion by focusing on a single question: can most of our present master theorists provide a reliable foundation for the consolidation and advance of knowledge about theatrical spectatorship? As we have seen, Reinelt and Roach want to be sure that the theories we use will help us consolidate our knowledge of theatre and performance. So also do I. I will argue in this final section that an important key to our future success as a discipline must be the falsifiability of the major theories we deploy. Although not all good theories are falsifiable, we ought to rely on such scientifically validated theories when we can. The example of the Wittgenstein-based theory suggests a different option that indirectly incorporates falsifiability into our disciplinary protocols by deploying a-scientific theories that are in accord with good science when such theories enable us to extend the explanatory range of our discussions and conclusions. To proceed without linking our scholarship to falsifiability undercuts the credibility of our discipline and disables the political possibilities of our scholarship.
The Doubleness of Performing Bodies

After enjoying Fanny Kemble perform Bianca in a play called Fazio in 1833, Boston socialite Anna Quincy recorded her response in her journal. Quincy was particularly moved by the jail scene in which Bianca visits Fazio, her husband, who is soon to be executed for a crime he did not commit:
The moment which I think produced the most effect on the house was at the moment when Fazio is to be led off to execution in the prison. She has just been imploring the jailer to delay a few moments in the most passionate manner, when the bell tolls, the sound of which seemed to turn her into marble. She stood riveted to the spother eyes fixed, her cheek pale and ashen. Fazio embraces her, but she is entirely insensible of it, and he is led off the stage leaving her a solitary figure. She stood, I should think, five moments, a
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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.

world of action where player/positions (e.g., Joe Montana/quarterback) make real physical contact. Even two children playing house often oscillate between brief immersions in their roles as mommy and daddy and their attempts to stage-manage their game when they step back from their play to arrange their props and costumes. A spectator watching the children could discern the same kind of oscillation that occurs in the games of football and theatre. How is this oscillation possible, from a cognitive point of view? According to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities, people often blend cognitive categories together and then unblend them to get a more objective sense of what they are doing.9 Conceptual blending theory rests on an understanding of the mind, common among cognitive scientists of many persuasions, in which concepts are necessary for many cognitive operations. By concept, say neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi,
we do not mean a sentence or proposition that is subject to the tests of the philosophers or logicians truth table. Instead, we mean the ability to combine different perceptual categorizations related to a scene or an object and to construct a universal reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of percepts. For example, different faces have many different details, but the brain somehow manages to recognize that they all have similar general features.10
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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unthreatening, and probably unsexy student actor playing the part. They will likely add a teaspoon of actor to a cup of character to create a believable actor/character blend for themselves for much of the performance. This cognitive adjustment is actually easier than it might seem. The passion displayed by amateur sports enthusiasts, especially parents, for the players/positions on their teamsparticularly when filled by their own childrensuggests the cognitive ease with which amateur actor/characters might gain believability if US culture valued theatre as highly as sports. That fights among parents do not break out in high school auditoriums is one of the unnoticed side-benefits of the cultures lower esteem for theatre. Parents tend to see their children as future athletic (or sometimes theatrical) stars because, like all spectators, they view the person as generally more important than the role in the blend. As Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter relate, Several explorative studies on the relationship between actor/role and spectator have indicated that the spectator basically reacts to [what she/he takes to be] the personality of the actor. Only when this reaction produces a positive communication is the spectator prepared to perceive any fictional content.14 The cognitive reason for this response may be partly due to the fact that the actors material body and voice are onstage and available for inspection and engagement right away, at the actors first entrance, while disclosing the nature of a dramatic character always takes time. Audiences probably need to feel that actors are outgoing and eager to be engagedqualities that usually translate as having a good personality. Even when a performer is playing a nasty, introverted character, spectators want to sense that the actor is willing to share that character with them. We learned as children that we do not enjoy playing games of make-believe with people who do not share. Great actors often seem to be sharing their inmost secrets with individual auditors, even when those individuals are only one in a thousand spectators at a performance. After Sigmund Freud saw Sarah Bernhardt perform, he wrote: I cant say anything good about the piece itself. . . . But how that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said.15 Other spectators were more rapturous about the Divine Sarah: I weep, I tremble, I grow mad, Sarah, I love you, gushed an eighteen-year-old. Even the aging Victor Hugo wrote with some surprise in 1877: Madame, you were great and charming; you moved me, me the old warrior, and, at a certain moment when the public, touched and enchanted by you, applauded, I wept.16 Through her voice, costuming, and movement, Bernhardt made it clear to the audience that, whatever else her character was doing, shethe actresswas onstage for each of them. This returns us to conceptual blending and the doubleness of engaging theatre. On the one hand, spectators collaborate with blended actor/characters when they are
14 Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter, Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 1995), 34. Although these results came out of empirical experiments that may not be wholly valid in scientific terms, they are suggestive of cognitive realities. 15 Freud, quoted in Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 118. My remarks on Bernhardts acting are based on Sauters chapter, 11745. 16 Ibid., 117.
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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
Spectators Perceiving Actions

Blending theory may tell us how audiences can put together actors and characters, but once inside the blend, how do spectators process what they see actor/characters doing and saying? Semiotics and phenomenology remain the two major approaches in our field to answering this question. Arguably, an important turning point in the construction of our current theoretical consensus was the peaceful resolution of what had been an ongoing battle between advocates of these two theories. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, semioticians and phenomenologists had crossed swords about the nature of audience perception. Did spectators read signs and consider their possible meanings when they watched a performance, or did they look at holistic images that could not be separated into their component, semiotic parts? The primary peacemaker among these factions was phenomenologist Bert O. States, whose Great Reckonings in Little Rooms brokered a compromise in 1985 that hinged on what he called the binocular vision of the spectator: If we think of phenomenology and semiotics as modes of seeing, we might say that they constitute a kind of binocular vision: one eye enables us to see the world phenomenally; the other eye enables us to see it significatively.18 Not surprisingly, Reinelt and Roach begin their anthology with essays on both semiotics and phenomenology and emphasize the compatibility of these two approaches for performance analysis. But what if a significant scientific theory challenges both modes of seeing, to use Statess phrase? In Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition, Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod elaborate on what they call their theory of visual intentionalism. Applied to spectatorship, their theory suggests that viewers come to the theatre with two visual systems in place that are very different from semiotic and phenomenological seeing.19 Jacob and Jeannerod synthesize much of the recent psychological and neuroscientific work on vision to put forward this dual model of human visual processing: on the one hand, humans attempting to think about the inanimate world use one visual system to generate visual perceptions; and on the other, humans intending to act upon the world or watching others act in intentional ways use a different system to generate visuomotor representations.20 The first system kicks in when we
17 On Brechtian theory and conceptual blending, see my A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre, Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 924. 18 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 8. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xiixvi. The authors note that their dual-system approach has no ontological implication whatever with respect to the mind-body problem (xii).

look at a landscape; the second when we reach for a coffee cup or see another person reach for one. Both systems rely on what I have been calling mental concepts to allow the brain to process these differing modes of perception. According to Jacob and Jeannerod, people switch easily and unconsciously from one system to the other in a matter of milliseconds; extensive evidence supplied by the authors, ranging from the examination of patients with brain lesions to psychophysical experiments, supports their dual-vision conclusion. Their theory suggests that spectators watching a performance create visual perceptions while looking at stage scenery, for example, and work with visuomotor representations while focusing on actors playing intentions. The authors emphasize that their theory runs both against untutored intuition and against much philosophical tradition.21 Because seeing occurs unconsciously and the dual systems reinforce each other in most respects, humans can gain little knowledge of their visual duality through conscious introspection. Further, most philosophers have emphasized the role of vision in gaining knowledge about the inanimate world and assumed that perceptions linked to human intentions were a part of that function, even though visual intentionalism suggests that they are not. Put another way, phenomenology and semiotics can offer few insights that will bear the scrutiny of Jacob and Jeannerods scientific point of view. Heightened conscious awareness and the bracketing off of some perceptions to focus on othersthe usual mode of phenomenological understandingwill not lead to Jacob and Jeannerods complex theory. While their visual-perception system seems to operate with some of the attributes of semiotic signs, visuomotor representations do not; semiotics makes no foundational distinctions between looking at the physical world and watching intentional human action. Jacob and Jeannerod link their concept of visuomotor representations to the ability of the mind to engage in what others have termed social cognition, also called simulation.22 Evidence has been mounting since the 1970s that simulation relies primarily on our ability to embody others emotional states. In Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge, Paula Niedenthal et al. demonstrate four major claims through their summary of this evidence: (1) Individuals embody other peoples emotional behavior; (2) embodied emotions produce corresponding subjective emotional states in the individual; (3) imagining other people and events also produces embodied emotions and corresponding feelings; and (4) embodied emotions mediate cognitive responses.23 When most scientists use the term simulation
Ibid., 45. Social cognition, simulation, and empathy have also been called a theory of mind (ToM, for short). D. Premack and G. Woodruff first used the term in 1978, in their Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Behavorial and Brain Sciences 21 (1978): 51526. In 1988, Premack distinguished among three classes of ToM in Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Revisited, in Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, ed. R. W. Byrne and W. Whiten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16079. Premack hypothesized that animals (including humans) reading the minds of other animals might understand: (1) what the other is seeing (perceptual); (2) what the other is intending (motivational); and (3) what the other is believing (informational). While some researchers limit empathy, simulation, and social cognition generally to motivational ToM, others understand it more broadly. Following philosopher of mind Robert Gordon and others, I use empathy to mean that mind-readers can simulate the mental processes of others, an operation that involves all three of Premacks classifications; see Robert M. Gordon, Folk Psychology as Simulation, Mind and Language 1 (1986): 15871. 23 Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Franois Ric, and Silvia Krauth-Gruber, Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge, in Emotion and Consciousness, ed. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 22.
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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.
24 25

In other words, emotions generated through simulation change how people think. While watching actor/characters onstage (or in other areas of real life), we will tend to form judgments about their honesty, fairness, reliability, and so on partly on the basis of our emotional response to them. Our common sense about social understanding in this regard is confirmed by scientific evidence. Recent research on mirror neurons has revealed an important part of the neurological basis of simulation. In the early 1990s, some Italian researchers noticed that the same groups of neurons in the brain of a monkey fired when the monkey watched a male scientist bring a peanut to his mouth as when that same monkey brought a peanut to its own mouth. Doing an action and watching someone else do the same action brought the same neurological response (at least in monkeys). As Vittorio Gallese has written, the brain has an action observation/execution matching system.28 Neuroscientists have discovered in subsequent experiments that similar networks of mirror neurons also exist in the frontal lobes of other mammals, including apes and probably elephants, dogs, and dolphins. Humans appear to have a more highly evolved mirror system than other animals, thus allowing them to access the emotions and intentions of others by watching them move. On this basis, Gallese and his co-workers have identified the mirror system as the basis of social cognition.29 Galleses work is generally congruent with Jacob and Jeannerods visuomotor representations. As Jacob and Jeannerod state:
[T]he perception of biological motion automatically triggers, in the observer, the formation of a motor plan to perform the observed movement. . . . Thus, motor imagery lies at the interface between the planning of movements and the observation of others movements. Arguably, in humans, the capacity for motor imagery may have unique adaptive value, since the observation of others bodily movements is a crucial source for the learning of skilled gestures by imitation.30
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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These scientific conclusions are consistent with Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnsons theory of embodied realism. As they point out, their conceptual system differs from the orientation of much previous science and philosophy:
Embodied realism can work for science in part because it rejects a strict subjectobject dichotomy. Disembodied scientific realism creates an unbridgeable ontological chasm between objects which are out there, and subjectivity, which is in here. Once the separation is made there are only two possible, and equally erroneous, conceptions of objectivity: Objectivity is either given by the things themselves (the objects) or by the intersubjective structure of consciousness shared by all people (the subjects). . . . The alternative we propose, embodied realism, relies on the fact that we are coupled to the world through our embodied interactions. . . . What disembodied realism misses . . . is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place.33
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.
The Reality of Play

If spectators use their mind-reading abilities to understand actor/characters in the same way that they use simulation to read the intentions and emotions of people in everyday life, what is the difference between a performance and reality? No one would call a sports event an illusion, but theatre artists and the theatregoing public sometimes refer to events onstage as illusory and even unreal. From this point of view, the ontological difference between a soccer match and a performance of Uncle Vanya is the fictional world of the play; the actors and machinery of the production may be real enough, but the fictional world onstage somehow trumps the fact of material actors doing real things with other people and objects. The evidence of an interactional relationship between audiences and actors contradicts the common sense of mimesis, however. If people in the audience are taking pleasure from mirroring what other people on the stage are doing, the metaphorical relationship of the stage action to other actions in the world no longer seems to be at the center of their concern. The mimetic aspects of performances may be occasionally interesting, but will not likely be the primary focus of spectatorial attention. The cognitive theories supporting audience simulation and conceptual blending pose a major problem for spectatorial theories that emphasize the importance of reading representational meanings. Both cognitive theories suggest that spectators understand the world onstage not as an illusion, but as a different kind of reality when they are living in the blend of
33 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 93 (emphasis in original). 34 Ibid., 56.
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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
35
Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 231.

conclude that the victims of lottery depression were running multiple conceptions simultaneously, some of them conflicting with each other, and it seems that the brain is very well designed to run such multiple and potentially conflicting conceptions.36 Following philosophical and psychological discourse, Fauconnier and Turner term such half-fantasized blends counterfactuals and note that counterfactual thinking occurs every time people pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, deceive, delude, consider alternatives, simulate, make models, and propose hypotheses37and, they would add, watch a play. In other words, our ability to engage in make-believe is evolutionarily adaptive, for a hundred reasons, even though it can also impair our ability to see the world clearly. Like the lottery players in the above example, theatre audiences oscillate between counterfactual blends and perceptions of their actual, material circumstances. While counterfactual blending may do lottery players some short-term psychological harm, the theatre provides a safe haven for the same mental activity. This is because spectators attend the theatre knowing that for the two hours traffic of the performance they can engage in collaborative play. Playtime frames the sometimes negative emotions that a performance might arouse in audiences, assuring them from the start that any psychological pain they might experience will be temporary and perhaps even purgative. Within theatrical play, humans can almost always distinguish between a stimulus of fear or panic emanating from the actor/characters and a stimulus that directly threatens their lives. Spectators may vicariously experience Blanche Duboiss panic within the make-believe of Streetcar, but if the scenery catches on fire and people are rushing for the exits, the perceived threat to life and limb will put an abrupt end to playtime. If a theatrical performance goes as expected, play continues throughout, usually encouraging the audience to let go of their mundane perceptions and engage in counterfactual blending. The conventions that initiate performances in many culturesfrom journeying to a separate site, to reading a program, or even to taking drugs or alcoholgenerally ease the transition to playtime and thus encourage counterfactual blending. Many spectators, of course, bring the attitude of play with them. Audience researcher John Tulloch reports a conversation he had with a woman in Australia about what she regarded as the magic of theatre:
The thing I love about going to the theatre is youre never quite sure whats going to happen. . . . How are the performers going to connect with me? And even if its a fourth wall type of production or theres no direct address to the audience, just every now and then the actors eye looking out into the audience can seem to catch yours. Youre in the space there with them, when theyre making the magic happen, instead of having it recorded on
Ibid., 232. Ibid., 217. In their article Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentations, in Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. Dan Sperber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53116, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby present a different theory about how humans process fiction. According to them, we understand all fictional narrativesfrom oral bedtime stories to complete novels, films, and stage performancesas intentional representations, which they term metarepresentations. In metarepresentations, the content works within the context of an intending source; only in the context of Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice, for example, can Shylock is a Jew be a true statement. For Cosmides and Tooby, the human mind always distinguishes between the fictional and the real; they implicitly deny that the real and the fictional are blended together by readers or spectators. Critic Lisa Zunshine adopts Cosmides and Toobys point of view in her Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
36 37
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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).

about possible meanings. Most viewers will hold off making full redescriptions of the action, however, until playtime is over or at least until the first intermission, especially if they have not read or seen the play before.42 (In this regard, interpretation-driven academics are not average theatregoers.) As Saltz notes, most of our present theories of representation focus on how people extract meaning from artworksa tendency most obvious in semiotic theoriesand ignore our moment-to-moment engagement with art.43 Saltz acknowledges that theatre encourages spectators to view the real actions on stage as metaphors for other actions within reality; likewise, conceptual blending theory and visual intentionalism do not rule out spectatorial interest in representation. But before we can redescribe the outfiction of a performance, we must be able to process its infiction. And processing infiction, for Saltz, is closely akin to what I have been describing as conceptual blending.
What Kind of Theories?

My two primary cognitive theories aboveFauconnier and Turners conceptual blending, and Jacob and Jeannerods visual intentionalismhave enjoyed wide acceptance among other scientists with expertise in these areas. As we have seen, they contradict important elements of Coleridges ideas and of the theories of semiotics and phenomenology regarding spectatorship in the theatre. Not all cognitive scientists agree with conceptual blending and visual intentionalism, however. And what will we think if many scientists discard or radically modify both theories in the future? Both, after all, are only theories that may be (and probably will be) supplanted as new experiments and better ideas alter the general conclusions of cognitive science. Although Jacob and Jeannerod and Fauconnier and Turner have based their theories on a rigorous reading of reliable empirical evidence and tested them against alternative explanations, none of these scientists would claim that theirs is the last word, the objective truth, about theatrical doubleness or watching intentional actions. This lack of certainty is not a problem for good science, however. For most scientists today, Truth with a capital T is an impossible chimera. Poppers concept of falsifiability, which logically demonstrates that no set of experiments can ever deliver objective proof for any scientific hypothesis, has been the guiding principle for most scientists over the past fifty years.44 Good science cannot give us absolute truth, but it can construct provisional theories that are able to withstand the competition and scrutiny of other scientific tests and ideas. All science is based on such theories. A heliocentric solar system, the circulation of blood, and the concept of evolution are also only theories (as some religious fundamentalists are quick to point out), but reasonable people who understand how science usually works will likely agree that these theories provide a good explanation for the wide array of natural phenomena they purport to encompass. Scientists reached the conclusion that the earth revolves around the sun (and not the other way around) by repeating their observations, measuring the results, and working up a theory that provided the simplest explanation possible that was consistent with other reliable information and that raised important new questions. Reduced to
42 Edward Branigans cognitive approach to narrative understanding in film is in accord with Saltz regarding spectators extraction of meaning; see Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992). 43 Saltz, Infiction and Outfiction, 215. 44 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; repr., New York: Routledge, 1992).
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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.

about ones own conscious states) must itself be independently validated as having the implications that are assumed.48
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.

Performance analysis is a case in point. As Reinelt points out in her introduction to the performance analysis section of Critical Theory and Performance: Perhaps what we do most in theatre and performance studies is analyze performances.55 Common sense tells us that some ideas about how performances affect audiences must be better than others, but typically the antagonists in battles about such matters draw on different theories to dress their arguments and, when conflict occurs, pack their separate theoretical bags for the trek to the next article or book. A few years ago, Philip Auslander and Peggy Phelan disagreed over the issue of human presence and mediatization in performancea conflict about whether and how actual performing bodies mattered to spectators, as opposed to watching images of performers on film or television. Apart from which scholar may have marshaled the better arguments, Auslander (representing a mostly materialist point of view) and Phelan (who drew on psychoanalysis and phenomenology) agreed on no body of relevant evidence that could serve to adjudicate their conflict.56 This important dispute remains unresolved and, more significantly, cannot be resolved within the usual protocols of our discipline. Tellingly, Reinelt and Roach discuss the conflict over liveness between Auslander and Phelan, but add more wrinkles to the discussion rather than attempting to iron out their differences by including a poststructuralist take on the problem by Herbert Blau in their anthology. Important scholarly battles with little hope of a resolution are a recipe not for the consolidation of knowledge, but for its fragmentation into sects of believers in this or that corner of theory. Good science, on the other hand, encourages the resolution of such differences and may lead to the accumulation of knowledge. Paradigm shifts in science often reinterpret traditional evidence, but that does not mean that the old experiments have no value. Einsteins General Theory of Relativity led to modifications in Galileos conclusions about gravity, but Einstein needed the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and others to enable him to construct his theory. On the basis of mounting evidence, irresolvable problems, and emerging theories, many cognitive scientists during the 1980s concluded that the computer was no longer an adequate metaphor to explain the operations of the brain. Computing still retains theoretical credibility as a description of some mental processes, but most cognitive scientists now understand the brain as a connectionist and/or embodied system. In the process of crafting a new paradigm, scientists continued to use much of the earlier experimental evidence. Apart from large paradigm shifts, scientific knowledge at the level of intermediate theories may change, but many of its empirical findings will remain constant. Thus, George Lakoff can both assert many new ideas about language and categorization in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and reassure his (and Johnsons) readers in Philosophy in the Flesh that much of what we have learned about the brain and the mind is now stable knowledge.57 Nor does the slippery slope of language drive scientists into the melancholy limbo of undecidability and postmodern relativism. Whether light is best described as a particle or a wave remains an ambiguity in modern physics that cannot be resolved through language alone. Experimentation and probability theory can get
Reinelt and Roach, Critical Theory and Performance, 7. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 57 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 87.
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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).

Johnson and others who approach ethics from a naturalistic point of view can provide insight into how audiences probably process the ethical and political challenges they encounter in performances.63 There is a world of falsifiable theories in cognitive science relevant to all of the areas of our discipline. It is past time for us to check them out. Not all good theories are falsifiable according to the protocols of natural or social science, however. As we saw, Saltz bases his infiction-outfiction theory on the philosophical speculations of Wittgenstein, and neither he nor Wittgenstein performed repeatable experiments and measured the outcomes to generate their insights. Because Saltzs infiction-outfiction theory arrived at much the same conclusion as a theory that has been provisionally falsified, it can be used to extend the ideas of conceptual blending. In my work with cognitive science and spectatorship, I have found other theories deriving primarily from phenomenology and materialism that are consistent with the science I am using.64 While I concluded that the subject-object dichotomy that semiotics and phenomenology rests upon is inconsistent with Lakoff and Johnsons embodied realism, this does not mean that all of the content of these two broad theories is necessarily at odds with good science. From a scientific point of view more in accord with the traditions of analytic philosophy, in fact, semiotics and phenomenology have some insights to offer.65 In short, falsifiability does not necessarily close the door on all of the master theorists in critical theory, but it does relegate many of them to secondary status. Unless their theories admit to protocols of falsifiability in the natural or social sciences or work with material that is beyond empirical verification, the theories of our present masters can best serve to amplify and extend what we can already know through scientifically valid approaches. Can falsifiable theories advance progressive politics? First, let us be clear about the implications of this question. Before worrying about the political possibilities of any theory, we need to ask if it can deliver statements of truth that will withstand the examination of scholars in many fields of investigation. To put right-thinking politics before an epistemology of provisional truth backs us into an ethical minefield that has more in common with the thinking of Stalin and Mao than Brecht and Boal. Second, the fear of social constructivists that naturalizing the human condition will only degrade our human potential to reinvent ourselves through social means seems to be misplaced. Few cognitive scientists support the idea that nature and nurture can be divided at all; genetic endowment and social learning must function together in the brains of all individuals in highly intertwined ways if they are to survive.66 Significantly, once genetics, culture, and cognition are examined as mutually reinforcing dynamics, proto-progressive questions about the roles of empathy, compassion, and cooperation in our past and present behavior begin to surface. Far from nature hardwiring us as
See the essays in Larry May et al., Mind and Morals. These books include J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 65 See, for example, Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); see also Robert M. Gordons objection to Fodors approach in his Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator, in May et al., Mind and Morals, 16580. 66 See Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23757. David Sloan Wilsons Evolutionary Social Constructivism, in The Literary Animal (see note 45) 2037, demonstrates that the seemingly antithetical views of evolutionary psychologists and social constructivists are not really very far apart.
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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).

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Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tj.2008.0014

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Falsiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies

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Geoffrey Harpham, Response, New Literary History 36 (2005): 105.

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The Doubleness of Performing Bodies

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Spectators Perceiving Actions

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The Reality of Play

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Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 231.

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