McConachie - Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies

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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

For additional information about this article

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Theatre Journal 59 (2007) 553–577 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Bruce McConachie is Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Some of his major pub-

lications 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.

Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and

Performance Studies

Bruce McConachie

In their short “Preface to the Second Edition” of Critical Theory and Performance , co-editors Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach raise an important question that has no easyanswers. They recognize that their “revised and enlarged edition” of 2007 consolidates ascholarly eld that has largely replaced theatre studies as it was practiced twenty yearsago. Back in 1987, the ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and other thinkers whomight generally be classied as poststructuralist, along with the traditions of Freudian-ism and Marxism, lay outside of the disciplinary norms of theatre studies. Followingthe “theory explosion” of the late 1980s, however, notions of discourse, otherness,performance, hegemony, and postcolonialism moved center stage in the discipline andnow constitute the new status quo. While Reinelt and Roach have added some essaysand reorganized others in new sections of their anthology to account for minor shiftsin the discipline since 1992—the date of the book’s rst edition—the major poststruc-turalist, Freudian, and neo-Marxist theorists undergirding the epistemological premisesof this book remain unchanged. (In the interest of full disclosure, I happily admit thatReinelt and Roach chose to reprint one of my essays for their second edition in thesection titled “After Marx.” My comments on Critical Theory and Performance thereforenecessarily 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 reafrm their commitment to theory’s transformative potential forthe discipline. Near the end of their prefatory remarks, they state that “[t]here is nogoing back and we have no doubt that a decade from now, the scholarly and artisticsituation will be somewhat different again, while having consolidated many of thetheoretical insights of this generation’s work.”1

Is their condence justied? To continue to rene the gains of this mode of scholarship,new consolidators in 2017 would need to build on the epistemological assumptions ofthe major theorists that have shaped both editions of Critical Theory and Performance.

1 Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, eds., Critical Theory and Performance , rev. ed. (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 2007), xii.



554 / Bruce McConachie

By counting the number of their index entries I have tracked the major thinkers whoseideas 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, Féral, Foucault, Freud, Gramsci, Habermas, Husserl,

Jameson, Lacan, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Saussure, and Raymond Williams. Plus or minusa few, these master theorists constitute the general range of theoretical approachesthat presently dominate the eld of theatre and performance studies. Mark Fortier’sTheory/Theatre—another text that introduces theatre and performance scholars to criti-cal theory for our discipline—includes most of these theorists.2 While there is wideagreement that these theorists provide a necessary foundation for knowledge in oureld, Reinelt, Roach, Fortier, and others recognize that the ideas and approaches ofthese masters do not cohere into a grand theory that is epistemologically consistent.Although there is no consensus among the theorists themselves, most practitionersof theory in our discipline have apparently reached a guarded consensus about the

validity of these poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, and neo-Marxist masters. Willthe next generation of scholars in our discipline, however, be able to stand upon theshoulders of these giants?

The prospect of new theatre and performance scholars building upon the insightsof these predecessors may be a happy one for many, but it ies in the face of historicalprecedent. As Gary Jay Williams’s history of controversies in the American Society forTheatre Research makes clear, the present generation (my own) of senior theatre andperformance scholars debunked the theoretical norms of the discipline’s immediatepast; we fought against what we took to be the prejudices of positivist historiographyand 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 denethe discipline. Reinelt and Roach know this, of course; as Williams points out, we wereall in the “vanguard” of the theory revolution. While we might all agree that theoryof some kind must continue to inform our work, why should the next generation oftheatre and performance scholars behave any better toward the theoretical status quothan we did?

Where might a new revolution come from? I have become disenchanted with someof the master theorists in recent years because of my readings in cognitive science. Thetheories and methods of contemporary science, however, rarely receive a hearing within

the echoing halls of critical theory. In the introductions to the subsections of CriticalTheory and Performance , science gets only a single mention, framed by scare quotes:“During the European Enlightenment, the problematic question of ‘race’ promptedspurious answers from ‘science,’ which in turn offered convenient rationalizations forthe world-historical projects of slaveholders, colonizers, nationalists and segregation-ists.”4 True, “science” has been invoked to justify many evils in the past; Roach mighthave added atomic-bomb droppers and Nazi death-camp commandants to his list. Butscientists have also crusaded against deadly superstitions, protected us from disease,and helped us to explain the universe.

2 Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002).3 Gary Jay Williams, “A Serious Joy: ASTR from 1981–2006,” Theatre Survey 48 (2007): 27–76, see

esp. 40–43.4 Reinelt and Roach, Critical Theory and Performance , 135.



FALSIFIABLE THEORIES FOR THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES / 555

To be fair, David Savran’s essay in Critical Theory and Performance embraces a Brechtianversion of scientic rationality, and Susan Leigh Foster writes about Adam Smith’snotion of empathy. These versions of science, however, are safely historical and do notimpinge on the major theoretical assumptions of the anthology. Contemporary scientists

though, especially in the elds of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolution, andlinguistics, have a lot to say about the realities of perception, memory, empathy, emo-tions, and culture—all necessary concerns of theatre and performance scholars. CriticalTheory and Performance , however, ignores this signicant body of knowledge.

This is unfortunate though not surprising. Like nearly all theatre and performancescholars, most of the writers in this anthology apparently assume that science and itsprocedures can be safely bypassed because theatre and performance is not a scienticdiscipline. They would agree with most scholars in English departments who believethat questions about interpretation and causation regarding literature “cannot be cap-tured by scientic reason,” in the words of Geoffrey Harpham.5 This may have been a

defensible position in the past, when scientic and humanistic concerns shared littlecommon ground. Humanistic scholars have long drawn on a-scientic theories fromphilosophy and other disciplines to prompt their investigations and bolster their argu-ments. As long as the ideas of past master theorists provided insights and terminolo-gies that did not counter scientic understanding, this arrangement made a certainsense. What happens, though, when theories deriving from good science come intoconict with critical theories that have no basis in scientic evidence or logic? Whichtheories should we trust?

Our lack of familiarity with scientic ideas probably derives as much from attitudinal

as from epistemological differences. The theory revolution of the 1980s carried a politicalagenda—or at least a political attitude—with it. Energized by the political struggles ofthe late 1960s and 1970s, most of the theoretical positions that came to dominate theatreand performance studies were self-consciously oppositional. None of our master theo-rists 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 theoriesthat could not only assist me in understanding the world, but could also help me tochange it. (I still do.) In this politicized context, many scientic approaches appearedfrustratingly neutral at best or, at worst, in league with a military-industrial complexthat 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 learningnot to naturalize gender roles, racist cultures, and other congurations of power; thesewere supposedly social, not natural, constructions. If a scientic orientation broughtsuch baggage with it, why trust it to deliver theories and ideas that could help ustransform the political landscape? But what if this attitude is merely a caricature ofgood science? What if the notion that Homo sapiens is socially constructed is based onthe false premise that the natural and the social are actually divisible? Worse yet, whatif a scientic approach can lead to progressive politics?

While my focus in this essay will be on cognitive science and its potential usefulnessin 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 itsreliance on generally a-scientic theories, to theories that have undergone the rigor-

5 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 currentmaster theorists have a lot to say about what spectators do while they enjoy perfor-mances—from “gazing” at bodies to interpreting “signs”—and audience engagement

must play a signicant role in any valid approach to theatre theory and criticism. Inthe rst section, I will use the basics of conceptual blending theory to open up a freshperspective 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 ourreliance on semiotics and phenomenology for insight into how audiences perceiveperformers in action. My point in the rst half of this essay is not to advance a com-plete theory about theatrical spectatorship nor even to give a full scientic account ofconceptual blending and visual intentionalism; such discussions are beyond my scopehere. Rather, I am interested in the explanatory and epistemological differences between

several of our usual approaches to understanding audiences and these two scientictheories. The phenomena to be explained—the perception of theatrical doubleness andof human action on stage—are much the same in both instances. How and why theseexplanations differ is my focus.

In the third section, I will return to both conceptual blending and visual intention-alism theories to point up their similarities to a theory about audience perceptionand processing that derives from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Finally, Iwill look at some of the larger implications of this discussion by focusing on a singlequestion: can most of our present master theorists provide a reliable foundation for

the consolidation and advance of knowledge about theatrical spectatorship? As wehave seen, Reinelt and Roach want to be sure that the theories we use will help usconsolidate our knowledge of theatre and performance. So also do I. I will argue inthis nal section that an important key to our future success as a discipline must bethe falsiability of the major theories we deploy. Although not all good theories arefalsiable, we ought to rely on such scientically validated theories when we can. Theexample of the Wittgenstein-based theory suggests a different option that indirectlyincorporates falsiability into our disciplinary protocols by deploying a-scientictheories that are in accord with good science when such theories enable us to extendthe explanatory range of our discussions and conclusions. To proceed without linking

our scholarship to falsiability undercuts the credibility of our discipline and disablesthe political possibilities of our scholarship.

The Doubleness of Performing Bodies

After enjoying Fanny Kemble perform Bianca in a play called Fazio in 1833, Bostonsocialite Anna Quincy recorded her response in her journal. Quincy was particularlymoved by the jail scene in which Bianca visits Fazio, her husband, who is soon to beexecuted 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 jailerto delay a few moments in the most passionate manner, when the bell tolls, the sound ofwhich seemed to turn her into marble. She stood riveted to the spot—her eyes xed, hercheek pale and ashen. Fazio embraces her, but she is entirely insensible of it, and he isled off the stage leaving her a solitary gure. She stood, I should think, ve moments, a




perfect statue, and the deathlike stillness that reigned over the crowded audience, everyperson seeming to hold their breath, was very striking. “She stood the bloodless image ofdespair” until the bell tolled again.6

Julia Walker uses this quotation to point to Quincy’s “double consciousness of the

theatrical event.” Quincy, says Walker, “is both imaginatively inside it, feeling whatthe character feels, while practically outside of it, appreciating Kemble’s techniqueas a discerning connoisseur.” What Walker terms the “oscillating dynamic” of theseinside/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. WhenQuincy stands outside of the ow of the scene, “she” refers both to Kemble—the ac -tor—and to Bianca, recognized by Quincy as a ctitious character in a drama. Quincy’s“[s]he stood . . . ve moments” comments on Kemble’s technique, while “she has just been imploring the jailer” probably refers to the character’s action in the dramaticction. Signicantly, though, most of the uses of “she” and “her” in the quotationcannot be tted into either an actor or a character category. When Quincy is swept upin the action, “she” is both the actor and the character together—Kemble/Bianca, anactor/character. “She stood riveted to the spot” and “she is entirely insensible of it”are moments when Quincy was clearly inside the ow of the action, feeling with theactor/character. Even in recollection, the Boston spectator was so rapt in the onstagemoment of Kemble/Bianca’s insensibility to Fazio’s embrace that Quincy forces her pastmemory into present tense to better capture the continuing thrill of her engagement inthe performance. The “oscillating dynamic” of Quincy’s conscious attentiveness moves between performer and ction when she is on the outside, and xes on the presentactions of an actor/character when she is inside of the performance.

Quincy’s experiences are typical of much theatrical spectatorship. Any viewer whoknows the rules of the theatregoing game can step back from an imaginative immer-sion in the onstage action to consider the relative skills of the players (and of thedesigners, the director, and so on) or to think about the ctional 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 amateurplaygoers. Most of the time, however, both connoisseurs and amateurs want to ex-perience 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 asit can be imagined from an objective analytical viewpoint and an experience of theworld as registered within our body’s viscera in the form of an affective engagementthat 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 toshift 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,” inStaging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy , ed. David Krasner and David Z.Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 36–37.

7 Ibid., 37.8 Ibid., 38–39.




world of action where player/positions (e.g., Joe Montana/quarterback) make realphysical contact. Even two children playing “house” often oscillate between brief im-mersions in their roles as “mommy” and “daddy” and their attempts to stage-managetheir 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 occursin the games of football and theatre.

How is this oscillation possible, from a cognitive point of view? According to GillesFauconnier and Mark Turner in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’sHidden Complexities , people often “blend” cognitive categories together and then “un- blend” them to get a more objective sense of what they are doing.9 Conceptual blendingtheory rests on an understanding of the mind, common among cognitive scientists ofmany 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 philosopher’sor logician’s truth table. Instead, we mean the ability to combine different perceptualcategorizations related to a scene or an object and to construct a “universal” reecting theabstraction of some common feature across a variety of percepts. For example, differentfaces have many different details, but the brain somehow manages to recognize that theyall have similar general features.10

Human beings begin categorizing percepts into concepts soon after they are born. Inaddition 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 throughour embodied interactions with the environment.

Through logic and empirical evidence, Fauconnier and Turner demonstrate thatpeople imaginatively play blending games with thousands of their mental conceptsall of the time—mostly below the level of consciousness. As they explain, one kindof “double-scope” blending that we call “theatre” encourages spectators to mergeactors and characters by mixing together three mental concepts—identity, actor, andcharacter—to create a fourth: an actor/character.11 Using the mental concept of iden-tity as a kind of base color on an artist’s palette, spectators blend in selective contentfrom 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 certainpast, faces specic situations in the present, and so on). The resulting blend adds newcolors, as it were, to the base color of identity on the mixing palette to create a newidentity: an actor/character. In the actor/character blend, according to Fauconnierand 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 compres-

9 See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s HiddenComplexities (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 , 266–67, for their specic comments on the double-

scope blending that underlies theatrical perception. On conceptual blending as the basis for theatricalmake-believe, see also Amy Cook, “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” SubStance 35,no. 2 (2006): 83–99.




sion of blending.12 When spectators “live in the blend” of a performance, they do notmix all of the colors available to them in their actor and character paint boxes; theytemporarily put aside their knowledge that the actors have other lives outside of theirimmediate 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 mentalconcepts that are blended.

Conceptual blending may be a more accurate way to understand the doublenessof theatre for spectators than Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dictum about “suspendingdisbelief.” The reader’s immersion in a good poem, asserts Coleridge, should involve“that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”13 Coleridge’s telling us to momentarily suspend our skepticism that Edmund Kean orKenneth Branagh cannot really be Hamlet, even though he is playing the role onstage,suggests that theatrical believability occurs when the spectator willingly surrendersan 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 (Coleridge’s “poetic faith”) will ood in. In effect, Coleridge is suggesting thatspectators oscillate between the attitudes of faith and skepticism—not blended andunblended mental concepts—while watching a performance.

Pace Coleridge’s religiously charged metaphor, engaging with an actor/characteronstage according to conceptual blending theory involves imaginative addition, notsubtraction. Instead of suspending a cognitive attitude, spectators combine actors andcharacters into blended actor/characters. Nor is this an extraordinary ability involvingsome kind of leap of faith; as noted, children playing house with each other have the

same capability—and 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 actor’s costume ts poorly;Coleridge emphasized the “willing” suspension of skepticism, but blending theory sug-gests that oscillating in and out of blends is mostly unconscious. Some “willing” mayoccur at the start of a performance and intermittently throughout, but it is clear thatspectators do not need to make conscious decisions about blending and unblending.Cognitive science challenges Coleridge’s romantic notion of the “willing suspensionof disbelief” at several levels.

Fauconnier and Turner’s theory suggests that audiences can and do use blending

with exibility. 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 astar actor with a strong persona is playing a role, the spectator might mix in a cup fullof “actor” with only a teaspoon of “character” to create a particular actor/characterin their minds. When spectators today watch Marlon Brando as Stanley in A StreetcarNamed Desire, they probably add more of the actor’s lmic persona than Williams’scharacter into their blends. (Hollywood, of course, continues to induce spectators tosee and hear mostly star personas rather than dramatic characters when they watch amovie.) In a high school production of Streetcar , however, adult spectators may preferto see much more of the Stanley of Williams’s script than to focus on the untrained,

12 Fauconnier and Turner, 92–102.13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed.

H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 314.




unthreatening, and probably unsexy student actor playing the part. They will likelyadd 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 actu-ally easier than it might seem. The passion displayed by amateur sports enthusiasts,

especially parents, for the players/positions on their teams—particularly when lled bytheir own children—suggests the cognitive ease with which amateur actor/charactersmight gain believability if US culture valued theatre as highly as sports. That ghtsamong parents do not break out in high school auditoriums is one of the unnoticedside-benets of the culture’s 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 therole in the blend. As Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter relate, “Several explorativestudies on the relationship between actor/role and spectator have indicated that thespectator 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 toperceive any ctional content.”14 The cognitive reason for this response may be partlydue to the fact that the actor’s material body and voice are onstage and available forinspection and engagement right away, at the actor’s rst entrance, while disclosingthe nature of a dramatic character always takes time. Audiences probably need to feelthat actors are outgoing and eager to be engaged—qualities that usually translate ashaving a good “personality.” Even when a performer is playing a nasty, introvertedcharacter, spectators want to sense that the actor is willing to share that character withthem. We learned as children that we do not enjoy playing games of make-believewith 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 can’t say anythinggood about the piece itself. . . . But how that Sarah plays! After the rst words of herlovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have saidwould have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said.”15 Other spectatorswere 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 withsome 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 byyou, applauded, I wept.”16 Through her voice, costuming, and movement, Bernhardtmade it clear to the audience that, whatever else her character was doing, she—theactress—was onstage for each of them.

This returns us to conceptual blending and the doubleness of engaging theatre. Onthe 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 ofempirical experiments that may not be wholly valid in scientic terms, they are suggestive of cogni-

tive 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 Bernhardt’s acting are based on Sauter’schapter, 117–45.

16 Ibid., 117.




immersed in the affective ow of the performance. Audiences happily adjust theirperceptions to accommodate theatre artists who push the blend toward the actor orthe character end of the continuum. On the other hand, if spectators are consideringthe 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 momentarilyreversed the blend; its component parts fall into the separate cognitive concepts of ac-tor and character. Brecht, of course, found dramatic and theatrical ways to encouragetemporary un-blending. As spectators, however, we generally oscillate between theseinside and outside positions throughout all theatrical performances, not just whilewatching 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 approachesin our eld to answering this question. Arguably, an important turning point in theconstruction of our current theoretical consensus was the peaceful resolution of whathad been an ongoing battle between advocates of these two theories. During the late1970s and into the 1980s, semioticians and phenomenologists had crossed swordsabout the nature of audience perception. Did spectators read signs and consider theirpossible meanings when they watched a performance, or did they look at holistic im-ages that could not be separated into their component, semiotic parts? The primarypeacemaker among these factions was phenomenologist Bert O. States, whose GreatReckonings 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 semioticsas modes of seeing, we might say that they constitute a kind of binocular vision: oneeye enables us to see the world phenomenally; the other eye enables us to see it sig-nicatively.”18 Not surprisingly, Reinelt and Roach begin their anthology with essayson both semiotics and phenomenology and emphasize the compatibility of these twoapproaches for performance analysis.

But what if a signicant scientic theory challenges both “modes of seeing,” to useStates’s phrase? In Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition , Pierre Jacoband Marc Jeannerod elaborate on what they call their theory of “visual intentional-

ism.” Applied to spectatorship, their theory suggests that viewers come to the theatrewith two visual systems in place that are very different from semiotic and phenom-enological seeing.19 Jacob and Jeannerod synthesize much of the recent psychologicaland neuroscientic work on vision to put forward this dual model of human visualprocessing: on the one hand, humans attempting to think about the inanimate worlduse one visual system to generate “visual perceptions”; and on the other, humans in-tending to act upon the world or watching others act in intentional ways use a differentsystem to generate “visuomotor representations.”20 The rst system kicks in when we

17 On Brechtian theory and conceptual blending, see my “A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre,”Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 9–24.

18 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: Universityof 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), xii–xvi. The authors note that their dual-system approach “has noontological 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 personreach for one. Both systems rely on what I have been calling “mental concepts” to al-low 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 theexamination of patients with brain lesions to psychophysical experiments, supports theirdual-vision conclusion. Their theory suggests that spectators watching a performancecreate visual perceptions while looking at stage scenery, for example, and work withvisuomotor representations while focusing on actors’ playing intentions.

The authors emphasize that their theory “runs both against untutored intuition andagainst much philosophical tradition.”21 Because seeing occurs unconsciously and thedual systems reinforce each other in most respects, humans can gain little knowledgeof their visual duality through conscious introspection. Further, most philosophershave 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, phe-nomenology and semiotics can offer few insights that will bear the scrutiny of Jacoband Jeannerod’s scientic point of view. Heightened conscious awareness and the bracketing off of some perceptions to focus on others—the usual mode of phenomeno-logical understanding—will not lead to Jacob and Jeannerod’s complex theory. Whiletheir visual-perception system seems to operate with some of the attributes of semioticsigns, 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 abil-ity 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 reliesprimarily on our ability to embody others’ emotional states. In “Embodiment in theAcquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” Paula Niedenthal et al. demonstratefour major claims through their summary of this evidence: “(1) Individuals embodyother people’s emotional behavior; (2) embodied emotions produce correspondingsubjective emotional states in the individual; (3) imagining other people and eventsalso produces embodied emotions and corresponding feelings; and (4) embodied emo-tions mediate cognitive responses.”23 When most scientists use the term “simulation”

21 Ibid., 45.22 Social cognition, simulation, and empathy have also been called a “theory of mind” (ToM, for

short). D. Premack and G. Woodruff rst used the term in 1978, in their “Does the Chimpanzee Have aTheory of Mind?” Behavorial and Brain Sciences 21 (1978): 515–26. In 1988, Premack distinguished amongthree 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. Byrneand W. Whiten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 160–79. Premack hypothesized that animals(including humans) “reading the minds” of other animals might understand: (1) what the other isseeing (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 tomotivational 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, anoperation that involves all three of Premack’s classications; see Robert M. Gordon, “Folk Psychologyas Simulation,” Mind and Language 1 (1986): 158–71.

23 Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence W. Barsalou, François Ric, and Silvia Krauth-Gruber, “Embodimentin the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” in Emotion and Consciousness, ed. Lisa FeldmanBarrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 22.




(or its synonym, “empathy”), they are describing these four mental operations andnot some vague process of identication or generalized feeling.

The four-part thesis that Niedenthal et al. offer and their summary of the evidence fortheir rst claim, has obvious applications for understanding how audiences “read the

minds” of actor/characters. In situations where empathy is encouraged (such as theatri-cal viewing), the authors note that imitation and embodiment tend to be heightened.Citing many studies that rely primarily on monitoring electro-myographic responsesin perceivers of angry faces, of comedy routines on lm, and of other stimulating ex-periences, the authors conclude that “individuals partly or fully embody the emotionalexpressions of other people.” Further, these studies also suggest that such embodimentis “highly automatic in nature.”24 Our muscular, chemical, and neurological responsesto others’ emotions are often so small that they escape conscious recognition, but theycan have a signicant impact on our behavior. In other words, evolution has equippedus 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 animagined or ctitious one. Many psychological experiments have tested and afrmedthese effects. Put two babies in a room together and if one of them begins crying, thesecond will cry as well in empathetic response to the rst. The facial, postural, andvocal expression of anger or any other emotion, whether in earnest or in a game ofpretend, is contagious. “You can catch an emotion, just as you can catch a cold, withoutknowing whom you caught it from,” says philosopher Robert Gordon, who writesabout 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 largelythrough simulation.26 The implication for those playing the make-believe game oftheatre is that most spectators are virtual Typhoid Marys when it comes to catchingemotions and passing them on to others.

The nal point made by Niedenthal et al. is that embodied emotions, whethergenerated by a response to the environment or socially transmitted by others, shapesubsequent cognitive processing and generate meanings. As they explain:

When a person’s 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 specic neural-network response] and as the emotion becomes active, it biases othercognitive operations toward states consistent with the emotion.27

24 Ibid., 25.25 Robert M. Gordon, “Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator,” in Mind and Morals: Es-

says 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, TerenceHorgan, 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 theepistemological ramications 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: MITPress, 1999), 838–41.

27 Niedenthal et al., “Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” 40.




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 toform judgments about their honesty, fairness, reliability, and so on partly on the basisof our emotional response to them. Our common sense about social understanding in

this regard is conrmed by scientic evidence.Recent research on “mirror neurons” has revealed an important part of the neuro-

logical basis of simulation. In the early 1990s, some Italian researchers noticed that thesame groups of neurons in the brain of a monkey red when the monkey watched amale scientist bring a peanut to his mouth as when that same monkey brought a pea-nut 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 haswritten, the brain has “an action observation/execution matching system.”28 Neuro-scientists have discovered in subsequent experiments that similar networks of mirrorneurons 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 mirrorsystem than other animals, thus allowing them to access the emotions and intentionsof others by watching them move. On this basis, Gallese and his co-workers haveidentied the mirror system as “the basis of social cognition.”29

Gallese’s work is generally congruent with Jacob and Jeannerod’s visuomotor rep-resentations. As Jacob and Jeannerod state:

[T]he perception of biological motion automatically triggers, in the observer, the formationof a motor plan to perform the observed movement. . . . Thus, motor imagery lies at theinterface 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 ofskilled gestures by imitation.30

Jacob and Jeannerod’s conclusions suggest that “imitation” must be retained as a com-ponent of performance. But notice what has happened here: the location of Aristotle’s“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 evi-dence 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-to-

28 Vittorio Gallese, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journalof Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5–7 (2001): 36. Researchers have also discovered other groups of neu-rons—so-called action-location and canonical neurons—that assist mirror neurons in imitating theintentional actions of others. See also Antonio Damasio’s discussion of empathy and mirror neuronsin his Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 115–18. Damasiodiscusses mirror neurons as a part of what he terms the “as-if-body-loop,” wherein body and mindinteract in response to an image of an action—an “as-if” situation similar to the theatre.

29 See Vittorio Gallese, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “A Unifying View of the Basisof Social Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (2004): 1–8 (repr., http://www.sciencedirect.com).

Like Damasio, the authors speak of empathy as an “as-if” performance: “Side by side with the sen-sory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the state associated withthese actions or emotions are evoked in the observer ‘as if’ they were performing a similar action orexperiencing a similar emotion” (5).

30 Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing , 227.




moment interaction that occurs between actors and audiences in performance. Mirrorneurons do not invalidate Aristotelian mimesis, but if we are interested in audienceresponse from a scientic point of view, the mode of imitation triggered by theseneurons (and their consequences) should be part of our explanation.

Distinguishing intentional human movement from other kinds of movement mustoccur before visuomotor representation is possible. In an experiment with theatricalrepercussions, one scientist during the 1970s attached light sources to the moving jointsof two people and a mechanized dummy, instructed one of the people to sit still andthe other to move, then turned out the lights, brought in observers, and asked themwhat they saw. None of the observers had any difculty distinguishing the moving hu-man being from the movements of the mechanized dummy and the stationary person.In subsequent experiments, observers were able to identify the disparate actions ofindividuals 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 sensitiveto the difference between the ‘biological motion’ of dots produced by a walking personand the random, articially produced, non-biological motions of similar dots.”31 Otherexperiments demonstrate that, when in doubt, we tend to identify random humanmotion as intentional movement. None of this is news to good actors and directors, ofcourse. Theatre people have long known that even the smallest, unintended movementon 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 semiot-ics and phenomenology regarding spectators watching performers? Semiotics andphenomenology assume that subjects are looking at art objects when spectators lookat the elements of a performance, including the actors; whether the actors are signsthat correspond to something in the objective world or images that somehow relate tothe subjective imagination of the perceiver, both semiotics and phenomenology dividethe viewing experience between subjects and objects. This approach may be roughlyappropriate for Jacob and Jeannerod’s visual perceptions, but it violates the cognitivefoundations 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 doesnot rely on signication. When they pay attention to intentional human action (in aperformance or anywhere else), spectators unconsciously mirror the actions of socialothers and use this cognitive information directly to understand their intentions andemotions. Although audiences must also interpret spoken language and engage in othermental operations when they watch actors performing, interactional simulation seemsto be primary. Put another way, the mind does not need to generate signs or holisticimages and then manipulate these complex representations to understand human ac-tion on the stage; compared to the direct input we obtain from mirroring, semiotic andphenomenological mental operations are superuous. As a recent article by linguist

George Lakoff and Gallese suggests, the activation of mirror neuron networks providesa direct stimulus to the conceptual operations of the brain.32

31 Ibid., 221.32 Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System

in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 21 (2005): 1–25.




These scientic conclusions are consistent with Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson’s theory of “embodied realism.” As they point out, their conceptual systemdiffers from the orientation of much previous science and philosophy:

Embodied realism can work for science in part because it rejects a strict subject–object di-chotomy. Disembodied scientic realism creates an unbridgeable ontological chasm betweenobjects which are “out there,” and subjectivity, which is “in here.” Once the separationis 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 intersubjectivestructure 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 embodiedinteractions. . . . What disembodied realism misses . . . is that, as embodied, imaginativecreatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the rst place. 33

Embodied realism undercuts the premises of both semiotics and phenomenology.

For the same reasons, Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism contradicts the as-

sumptions 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 notmerely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems drawlargely 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 inthe same way that they use simulation to read the intentions and emotions of peoplein everyday life, what is the difference between a performance and “reality”? No onewould call a sports event an “illusion,” but theatre artists and the theatregoing publicsometimes 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 ctional world of the play; the actors and machinery of the production may bereal enough, but the ctional world onstage somehow trumps the fact of material ac -tors doing real things with other people and objects.

The evidence of an interactional relationship between audiences and actors con-

tradicts the common sense of mimesis, however. If people in the audience are takingpleasure from mirroring what other people on the stage are doing, the metaphoricalrelationship of the stage action to other actions in the world no longer seems to beat the center of their concern. The mimetic aspects of performances may be occasion-ally interesting, but will not likely be the primary focus of spectatorial attention. Thecognitive theories supporting audience simulation and conceptual blending pose amajor problem for spectatorial theories that emphasize the importance of readingrepresentational 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., 5–6.




performance and mirroring the actions of actor/characters or looking at the setting ofa production. Performance, it seems, mixes up our usual categories of actuality andmake-believe all of the time. The theory of conceptual blending that imaginatively linksactors 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 ofview outside the ow of the performance, the bottle of beer is both a material objectput onstage by a props assistant and an item noted in Williams’s script (or only in thepromptbook for the production—it doesn’t matter which). The spectator can think aboutthe beer in both of these ways if she or he wishes. In the blend, however, the materialobject/ctional item for spectators in 1947 became simply Brando/Stanley’s beer, withits actuality and ctionality merged together. The original production of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 featured painted backdrops that also shared actualand ctional properties for Moscow spectators. Muscovites at the production could gowith 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 canvasand/or as a necessary artistic indication put onstage by Chekhov and Victor Simov (thedesigner) to set the ctitious scene. Blending even applies to spoken dialogue. “Whatcountry, friends, is this?” said the actor/Viola in her (and his) rst line of dialogue inShakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1.2.1) in 1601. Auditors may have focused on the materialsound produced by the male actor’s musculature and the spatial-sound dynamics ofthe Globe Theatre, or they could have considered Shakespeare’s happy marriage ofverse and character in the stage ction. More likely, though, they blended both together because they also wanted to know where the action was set so that they could playthe game of theatre placed before them.

As these examples suggest, theatrical viewers do not parse the differences betweenactual and ctional props, scenery, and dialogue when living in the blend of a per-formance. Rather than considering the ctional part of a play performance unreal, itmakes more sense to acknowledge that it is make-believe—in contrast to the materialactuality of actors, props, scenery, sound, and so on—but to insist that this make-be-lieve can be a part of reality. When spectators blend together actuality and ction, the blended images they produce in their minds retain their reality for them.

In places other than playhouses, people often inject ction into their realities andcan 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 ofsome Britons during the 1980s who, according to social psychologists, suffered genuinedepression when they did not win a lottery, even though they knew that their chancesof winning were slim. The authors note that “[t]he interpretation given by the therapistswas that in the two weeks or so between the purchase of the ticket and the drawingfor the winner, these victims had fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, wittinglyor not, about what they would do upon winning the lottery. The actual lottery madethem lose everything they had acquired in the fantasy world. In that world, they didindeed 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 ction; after all, the lottery players realized “in another partof 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 conceptionssimultaneously, some of them conicting with each other, and it seems that the brainis very well designed to run such multiple and potentially conicting conceptions.”36 Following philosophical and psychological discourse, Fauconnier and Turner term such

half-fantasized blends “counterfactuals” and note that counterfactual thinking occursevery time people “pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, deceive, delude, consider alternatives,simulate, make models, and propose hypotheses”37—and, they would add, watch a play.In other words, our ability to engage in make-believe is evolutionarily adaptive, for ahundred 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 betweencounterfactual blends and perceptions of their actual, material circumstances.

While counterfactual blending may do lottery players some short-term psychologicalharm, the theatre provides a safe haven for the same mental activity. This is becausespectators attend the theatre knowing that for the “two hours’ trafc” of the perfor -

mance they can engage in collaborative play. Playtime frames the sometimes negativeemotions that a performance might arouse in audiences, assuring them from the startthat any psychological pain they might experience will be temporary and perhapseven purgative. Within theatrical play, humans can almost always distinguish betweena stimulus of fear or panic emanating from the actor/characters and a stimulus thatdirectly threatens their lives. Spectators may vicariously experience Blanche Dubois’spanic within the make-believe of Streetcar , but if the scenery catches on re and peopleare rushing for the exits, the perceived threat to life and limb will put an abrupt endto 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 cultures—from journeying toa separate site, to reading a program, or even to taking drugs or alcohol—generallyease the transition to playtime and thus encourage counterfactual blending. Manyspectators, of course, bring the attitude of play with them. Audience researcher JohnTulloch reports a conversation he had with a woman in Australia about what sheregarded as the magic of theatre:

The thing I love about going to the theatre is you’re never quite sure what’s going to hap-pen. . . . How are the performers going to connect with me? And even if it’s a fourth wall

type of production or there’s no direct address to the audience, just every now and thenthe actor’s eye looking out into the audience can seem to catch yours. You’re in the spacethere with them, when they’re making the magic happen, instead of having it recorded on

36 Ibid., 232.37 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), 53–116, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby present a different theory abouthow humans process ction. According to them, we understand all ctional narratives—from oral bed-time stories to complete novels, lms, and stage performances—as intentional representations, whichthey term “metarepresentations.” In metarepresentations, the content works within the context of an

intending source; only in the context of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , for example, can “Shylockis a Jew” be a true statement. For Cosmides and Tooby, the human mind always distinguishes betweenthe ctional and the real; they implicitly deny that the real and the ctional are blended together byreaders or spectators. Critic Lisa Zunshine adopts Cosmides and Tooby’s point of view in her Why WeRead Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).




lm . . . where you know that they’ve done seventy-ve takes to get it right. And it cansometimes be as exciting when something goes wrong, to see how they’ll deal with it. . . .You know that it’s real, you know that it’s there and then, that it’s live. That’s the specialpart of theatre.38

Tulloch’s theatregoer validates more than the inherent playfulness of performance; forher, its characteristics of play and liveness also make it “real.”

In his recent essay, “Inction and Outction: The Role of Fiction in TheatricalPerformance,” David Saltz helps to clarify what blending counterfactuals does forspectators.39 He relies on aesthetic theories based on the assumptions of Wittgenstein-ian philosophy and not on theories of cognitive science. Nonetheless, because hisconclusions are surprisingly close to the framework of conceptual blending that I have been applying to performance, his scholarship demonstrates that cognitive theoriescan work productively with other theories to extend and amplify some of the ideasof cognitive science.

Saltz dismisses semiotics and phenomenology as productive ways of viewingspectatorial engagement, for example, because Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as”offers an alternative more in accord with most viewers’ experience. As Wittgensteinexplained in his Philosophical Investigations , people do not try to gure out aestheticobjects as signs of something else; instead, they engage with paintings or watch plays by seeing them differently. Saltz cites a passage from E. R. Gombrich’s famous essay,“Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” to illustrate his (and Wittgenstein’s) point: “[I]f thechild calls a stick a horse . . . [t]he stick is neither a sign signifying the concept horsenor 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 “let’s pretend” areontological paradigms for theatrical performances. In cognitive terms, audiences donot usually look at and listen to the choices made by an actor like Marlon Brando norstep back to consider characters such as Stanley and others presented by TennesseeWilliams; they simply “see” these two phenomena together “as” Brando/Stanley. Ofcourse, spectators do not need to make this cognitive shift; they may un-blend theirperception of the performance and think about its component parts if they wish; how-ever, 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 separateits facts from its ctions.

As Saltz explains, spectators actually use ction twice in a performance, rst, as Ihave noted, to become engaged in the ow of the action—a deployment that Saltz terms“inction”: “Insofar as spectators use the narrative as an inction ,” he says, “the primaryfocus of their attention is the performance itself. . . . Our metaphorical redescription ofthese actions is what I am calling the outction. . . . The story of Hamlet as I read it offa performance of Hamlet is an outction.”41 Secondly, spectators will engage in somemetaphorical 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, “Inction and Outction: The Role of Theatrical Fiction in Theatrical Performance”

in Staging Philosophy , 203–43.40 Ibid., 209.41 Ibid., 214 (emphasis in original).




about possible meanings. Most viewers will hold off making full redescriptions of theaction, however, until playtime is over or at least until the rst intermission, especiallyif they have not read or seen the play before.42 (In this regard, interpretation-drivenacademics are not average theatregoers.) As Saltz notes, most of our present theories

of representation focus on how people extract meaning from artworks—”a tendencymost obvious in semiotic theories”—and ignore our moment-to-moment engagementwith art.43 Saltz acknowledges that theatre encourages spectators to view the real actionson stage as metaphors for other actions within reality; likewise, conceptual blendingtheory and visual intentionalism do not rule out spectatorial interest in representation.But before we can redescribe the “outction” of a performance, we must be able toprocess its “inction.” And processing “inction,” for Saltz, is closely akin to what Ihave been describing as conceptual blending.

What Kind of Theories?

My two primary cognitive theories above—Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual blending, and Jacob and Jeannerod’s visual intentionalism—have enjoyed wide ac-ceptance among other scientists with expertise in these areas. As we have seen, theycontradict important elements of Coleridge’s ideas and of the theories of semioticsand phenomenology regarding spectatorship in the theatre. Not all cognitive scientistsagree with conceptual blending and visual intentionalism, however. And what willwe 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 asnew 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 alterna-tive explanations, none of these scientists would claim that theirs is the last word, theobjective truth, about theatrical doubleness or watching intentional actions.

This lack of certainty is not a problem for good science, however. For most scientiststoday, Truth with a capital “T” is an impossible chimera. Popper’s concept of falsiability,which logically demonstrates that no set of experiments can ever deliver objective prooffor any scientic hypothesis, has been the guiding principle for most scientists overthe past fty years.44 Good science cannot give us absolute truth, but it can constructprovisional theories that are able to withstand the competition and scrutiny of other

scientic tests and ideas. All science is based on such theories. A heliocentric solarsystem, 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 whounderstand how science usually works will likely agree that these theories provide agood 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 theother way around) by repeating their observations, measuring the results, and work-ing up a theory that provided the simplest explanation possible that was consistentwith other reliable information and that raised important new questions. Reduced to

42 Edward Branigan’s cognitive approach to narrative understanding in lm is in accord with Saltzregarding spectators’ extraction of meaning; see Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (NewYork: Routledge, 1992).

43 Saltz, “Inction and Outction,” 215.44 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientic Discovery (1959; repr., New York: Routledge, 1992).




its essentials, good science continues to operate through observation, measurement,economy, consistency, and heuristics.45

An important key to this process is falsiability. By falsifying provisional theoriesand constructing alternatives that better account for the evidence, scientists gradually

forge new possibilities that offer more robust explanations. In their Ways of Seeing , forexample, Jacob and Jeannerod demonstrate that several competing ideas about humanvision cannot integrate the range of evidence and answer the kinds of questions thattheir visual intentionalism theory is able to accommodate. They also show that theirtheory is more consistent with other ndings and the most economical way of handlingthe difculties that the empirical data suggest. Scientists do not arrive at objective truth, but, through experimentation and argumentation, good science narrows the range ofpossible explanations and interpretations.

Can the master theorists in our critical theory consensus make the same claim? All

scientic assertions are potentially falsiable through the use of the scientic method, but what experiments or logics would the master theorists accept as a basis for thefalsiability of their ideas? Looking at the theorists featured in Critical Theory and Per- formance , one might say that they represent a range of approaches that admit of greateror lesser degrees of falsiability. At one end of the continuum, the theories of Bourdieu,Habermas, Gramsci, and Williams generally work within the falsiability protocols ofsocial science, which (though open to dispute) have been fairly well established forfty years. When Raymond Williams’s version of Gramsci’s hegemony theory wasgaining a curious audience among historians, its potential falsiability was widelydiscussed.46 While social scientists, including historians, cannot apply falsiability to

their work with the same rigor as scientists who work with nonhuman subjects, theirstandards concerning evidence, economy, and consistency are high.47

Somewhere in the middle of the continuum of falsiability, perhaps, are the psy-choanalytic theories of Freud, their synthesis with semiotics in Lacan, and the manytheorists who build their own ideas on some version of a psychoanalytic base. Theiradvocates often claim scientic validity for these theories. Most psychologists, however,have rejected psychoanalysis and its spin-offs as unfalsiable. In her Psychoanalysisand Cognitive Science , for example, Wilma Bucci concludes that Freud’s meta-psychol-ogy has not “been subject to the empirical evaluation and theory development that isnecessary for a scientic eld.” Specically,

the type of systematic inference that is applied in cognitive science and in all modern sci-ence requires explicit denitions that limit the meaning of the concepts, correspondencerules mapping hypothetical constructs and intervening variables onto observable events,and means of assessing reliability of observation. Each of the indicators that analysts relyon to make inferences about the conscious and unconscious states of other persons (as

45 For this overview of the scientic method, see E. O. Wilson, “Forward from the Scientic Side,”in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative , ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David SloanWilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), vii–xi.

46 See, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibili-ties,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567–93. In this essay, Lears demonstrates that a historiancould falsify a claim of cultural hegemony from another historian by showing that different, potentiallycompeting historical groups actually shared the same consensus values.

47 See, for example, Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–196.




about one’s own conscious states) must itself be independently validated as having theimplications that are assumed.48

In defense, Freudians and Lacanians often claim that their theories are consonant withgood science because their concepts have been scientically validated in therapeutic

sessions.49 But clinical success, however it is measured, is not the same as empiricalverication. Just because “the talking cure” has been effective in some cases does notmean that Freud’s or Lacan’s explanation for why it worked is valid. Humans havehad many explanations for re over the centuries, but understanding why and howcombustion really works must rely on recent physics and chemistry.

At the other end of the continuum are theorists such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Féral,and other poststructuralists, whose radical skepticism challenges the ability of scienceor any other discourse to provide a valid standard of falsiability. The relativism ofpoststructuralism, including its challenges to empirical verication, dees any protocols

that might stabilize knowledge based on the slippery signiers provided by language.Despite what they take to be the inherent contradictions of textual assertions, poststruc-turalists from Lyotard to Derrida rely chiey on logic and argumentation rather thanscientic or historical evidence. Within the assumptions of poststructuralism, Derrida’sgnomic remark, “There is nothing beyond the text,” is simply unfalsiable. The criticwho wishes to rely on what Derrida might have meant in that statement, however, willhave to ignore a great deal of good science in linguistics and evolutionary psychologyto be able to assess the probable truth of Derrida’s assertion.50

Brian Vickers challenges the weak scientic credentials of several of the master theo-rists that many humanist academics have embraced. As he points out with acerbity:

Freud’s work is notoriously speculative, a vast theoretical edice elaborated with a merepretense of corroboration, citing “clinical observations” which turn out to be false, withcontrary evidence suppressed, data manipulated, building up over a forty-year period aself-obscuring, self-protective mythology. The system of Derrida, although disavowingsystematicity, is based on several unproven theses about the nature of language which aresupported by a vast expanding web of idiosyncratic terminology. . . . Lacan’s system, evenmore vastly elaborated . . . is a series of devices for evading accountability. . . . Foucaultplaces himself above criticism.51

Whether all of Vickers’s 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 falsiability.

48 Wilma Bucci, Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: A Multiple Code Theory (New York: GuilfordPress, 1997), 9–10.

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. Theynote that four major claims of poststructuralism are “empirically incorrect”:

1. The complete arbitrariness of the sign; that is, the utter arbitrariness of the pairing betweensigniers (signs) and signieds (concepts).

2. The locus of meanings in systems of binary oppositions among free-oating signiers (dif -férance).

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 MindSo Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001), 252–300.

51 Brian Vickers, “Masters and Demons,” in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent , ed. D. Patai andW. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 249.




Are theatre and performance scholars aware of the substantial range of differences inthe falsiability of the ideas of the master theorists when they deploy one or another oftheir approaches to investigate problems in our discipline? There is little evidence forsuch 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 performancestudies, the critic and historian interested in discussing how audiences perceive andprocess performance has a choice to make—a choice among kinds of theories that isalready pressing and will become increasingly common in the future. This scholarshould know that the history of Western thought since Copernicus suggests howthis conict between kinds of theories will likely be resolved; in the long run, amongpeople who rely on reason instead of superstition, the theories of good science havetrumped unscientic philosophy every time—and, 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 humanisticscholarship from being foolishly wrong. As we know from the scandal concerning theSokel hoax in Social Text , the same cannot be said for advocates of the ideas of ourpresent master theorists.53

This returns me to the question that began my essay: how can scholars in our eldensure that their legacy will provide a rm basis for future work in our discipline?Reinelt and Roach use the word “consolidated” twice in their page-and-a-half-longpreface to suggest that ideas gained from applying present theoretical methods cancontinue to illuminate future investigations. This assumes, however, that all knowledge based on the ideas of master theorists is cumulative, even progressive. While we prob-

ably know more about theatre and performance than we did twenty years ago, wehave no agreed-upon standards as to what counts as valid knowledge, partly becauseour poststructuralist habits of skepticism have led us to distrust language as a modeof truth-telling. What Eugene Goodheart has said about the criticism of literature inEnglish departments could easily be assessed against critics in theatre and performancestudies: “Quarrels among critics have rarely, if ever, been adjudicated. Interpretationsand evaluations abound and are often different from or in conict with one another.The reputations of writers, determined by criticism, uctuate, sometimes as wildly asthe stock market in crisis.”54 In such circumstances, consolidating what we know andusing it as a foundation for the construction of future knowledge is very difcult.

52 The population’s general ignorance of scientic protocols has been the subject of much recentwriting; see, for example, Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (New York: Houghton, Mifin, 2007). One exception to our discipline’s lack of knowledge (and eveninterest) in science is Tobin Nellhaus, whose “Science, History, Theatre: Theorizing in Two Alterna-tives to Positivism,” Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 505–28, takes two theatre historians to task for theirmisperceptions about physics.

53 See Paul A. Boghossian, “What the Sokel Hoax Ought to Teach Us,” Times Literary Supplement 13

(1996): 14–15. The editors of Social Text accepted Alan Sokel’s parody of the “postmodern” implicationsof modern physics as a serious article and published it in their April 1996 issue; Sokel later revealedhis parody. See Alan Sokel, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca, May/June1996, 62–64.

54 Eugene Goodheart, “Casualties of the Culture Wars,” in Theory’s Empire (see note 51), 509.






scientists around the imprecision of language in describing light, however, by pro-viding an acceptable, provisional answer to this apparent conundrum. In psychologyand neuroscience today, the term “emotion” has several denitions, depending onwhose science you read. Denitions of this term (of obvious concern to theatre and

performance scholars interested in spectatorship) will likely be narrowed in a fewyears, however, as different notions of “emotion” compete empirically and theo-retically for more robust explanatory value.58 In similar ways, scientic denitions 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 denitionof a scientic fact provided by Stephen Jay Gould: a statement “conrmed to such adegree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.”59 When confronted by confusing information, scientists are initially no better than performance critics atnaming signicant attributes of the natural world. Experimentation, theorizing, andfalsication, 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 Relyingon similar procedures, both humanists and scientists can aim at plausible, provisional,and falsiable statements of truth.

There are many such theories and facts in cognitive science for theatre and per-formance studies, if only we would remove the blinkers of unfalsiable theories anddecide to recognize them. Few scientists have chosen to address our concerns aboutspectatorship directly, but many of their insights are easily transferable to analyses aboutwhat happens to audiences in performance situations. As noted, Jacob and Jeannerodprovide provisionally reliable insight into spectator vision and simulation. Gerald

Edelman can tell us how audiences use their connectionist brains to remember whatthey hear from actors for later use in a performance and in responding to subsequentproductions.61 In his Gesture and Thought , David McNeill can help us to explore howspectators 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 forprominence. From a neuroscientic perspective, emotion is located in the brain, elicited by other brainactivity as well as by external stimuli, and expressed through the release of chemicals, the activation ofmuscle systems, and the allocation of specic cognitive resources. Many cognitive psychologists beginwith 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 cognitivesociologists, examines social interactions as scripts for nonverbal emotional expression and tracesthe elicitation of these behaviors to social causes. Finally, there are some social constructionists whodiscount neuroscientic explanations and hold that societies construct emotions through discursivenorms; they look to the symbolic expression and negotiation of emotional denitions and roles in mediaas well as behavior as causal factors. See Anne Bartsch, “Emotional Communication—a TheoreticalModel,” (paper, IGEL Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, August 2004, http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel).Scientists of emotion studies are currently disputing these denitions, but it may take several years

before a consensus emerges. On the other hand, if emotion studies follows the path of consciousnessstudies, competing denitions may continue to proliferate for some time.

59 Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 254.

60 See C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics , trans. Darrell Arnold (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005).

61 A summary of Edelman’s ideas about memory may be found in his book with Giulio Tononi, AUniverse of Consciousness (see note 10), 102–10.

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 provideinsight into how audiences probably process the ethical and political challenges theyencounter in performances.63 There is a world of falsiable theories in cognitive sciencerelevant to all of the areas of our discipline. It is past time for us to check them out.

Not all good theories are falsiable according to the protocols of natural or socialscience, however. As we saw, Saltz bases his inction-outction theory on the philo -sophical speculations of Wittgenstein, and neither he nor Wittgenstein performedrepeatable experiments and measured the outcomes to generate their insights. BecauseSaltz’s inction-outction theory arrived at much the same conclusion as a theory thathas been provisionally falsied, it can be used to extend the ideas of conceptual blend-ing. In my work with cognitive science and spectatorship, I have found other theoriesderiving primarily from phenomenology and materialism that are consistent with thescience I am using.64 While I concluded that the subject-object dichotomy that semioticsand phenomenology rests upon is inconsistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied

realism, this does not mean that all of the content of these two broad theories is neces-sarily at odds with good science. From a scientic point of view more in accord withthe traditions of analytic philosophy, in fact, semiotics and phenomenology have someinsights to offer.65 In short, falsiability does not necessarily close the door on all ofthe master theorists in critical theory, but it does relegate many of them to secondarystatus. Unless their theories admit to protocols of falsiability in the natural or socialsciences or work with material that is beyond empirical verication, the theories ofour present masters can best serve to amplify and extend what we can already knowthrough scientically valid approaches.

Can falsiable theories advance progressive politics? First, let us be clear about theimplications of this question. Before worrying about the political possibilities of anytheory, we need to ask if it can deliver statements of truth that will withstand theexamination of scholars in many elds of investigation. To put right-thinking politics before an epistemology of provisional truth backs us into an ethical mineeld that hasmore 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 onlydegrade our human potential to reinvent ourselves through social means seems to bemisplaced. Few cognitive scientists support the idea that nature and nurture can bedivided 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

Signicantly,once genetics, culture, and cognition are examined as mutually reinforcing dynamics,proto-progressive questions about the roles of empathy, compassion, and cooperationin our past and present behavior begin to surface. Far from nature hardwiring us as

63 See the essays in Larry May et al., Mind and Morals.64 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: Universityof 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. Gordon’s objection to Fodor’s approach in his

“Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator,” in May et al., Mind and Morals , 165–80.66 See Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolu-

tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 237–57. David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolutionary SocialConstructivism,” in The Literary Animal (see note 45) 20–37, demonstrates that the seemingly antitheticalviews of evolutionary psychologists and social constructivists are not really very far apart.




competitive social Darwinists, it may be that humans have a predisposition to actaltruistically towards one another. In A Darwinian Left , Peter Singer imagines what aprogressive movement based in Darwinian science (which includes all of the cognitivesciences) might propose and practice.67 There is nothing inherently contradictory that I

can see about scholars in theatre and performance studies advocating for progressivechange and consolidating and advancing our knowledge through falsiable experi-ments 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 informationabout the similarities and differences between the experiences of spectators when theywatch “live” and “mediatized” performances. Such experiments would necessarily reston common denitions of key terms and rely on provisional neuroscientic, linguistic,and psychological theories about spectator attention, simulation, memory, emotion,

conceptual blending, and meaning-making. Experimental procedures might rangefrom postperformance interviews to brain scanning. I can imagine a hypothesis thatmight propose that more oscillation between blended and unblended actor/charactersoccurs in “live” than in “mediatized” performances. Conclusions based on these andsimilar results could resolve some of the ongoing disputes in our discipline and lead tosignicant consolidation. (Such conclusions might have political implications as well;Phelan’s Unmarked , subtitled The Politics of Performance , which began the controversy,assumed that “live” performances could effect political change.) Even before we canconduct such experiments, however, it makes more sense to base our provisional ideasabout spectatorship, when possible, on relevant theories that are falsiable, rather than

on unfalsiable psychoanalytic and poststructuralist beliefs.

In the long term, though, consolidation may be the wrong metaphor for falsiabletruths in theatre and performance studies. One obligation that a scientic orientationcarries 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 ourother master theorists, there are no foundational texts to which an investigator in per-formance and cognitive studies can return for rst principles and primary denitions.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 willmake scholarly consistency and consolidation less important for the critic-historianin theatre and performance studies than a cutting-edge knowledge and a readiness torethink recent approaches and conclusions.

67 Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1999).

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McConachie - Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies