Introduction
Viewing and understanding performance: in light of other minds
In the opening of his book, The Empty Space (1968), Peter Brook famously remarks, “I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”1 However, while theatre may occur with just a single person watching, what happens to understanding (of the performance) when an audience is composed of two (or more) people?
Thought to originate from the Indian subcontinent, the parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” was made most famous to the West by John Godfrey Saxe’s 1872 poem of the same name. The (generic-version of the) parable tells of a group of blind men who are all touching a different part of the same elephant at the same time: each blind man, then, understands what is meant by “elephant” in a different way. “The Blind Men and an Elephant” is similar to the “Rashomon Effect”—the phenomenon of multiple interpretations of the same event—as explored in Akira Kurosawa’s movie, Rashomon (1950). However, the long history of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”—with versions of this parable found in various texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism—it is quite appropriate because the very situation described and, more importantly, how that situation is viewed varies because of the circumstances surrounding the ethnic, religious, temporal, and geographical group writing the story. “The Blind Men and an Elephant” adds a (I think, needed) twist to Brook’s above formulation of theatre: an audience member trying to understand a “performance” is like how each one of these blind men views this “elephant.”
Since I am using the idea of “view,” not only related to vision and eyesight, but to the “Mental contemplation of something (sometimes combined with sight); attention; observation; notice,”2 we are discussing understanding. I am concerned with understanding something, specifically, with “performance” being our specific object of understanding. This book, then, will think about performance epistemologically.3 Importantly, though, in this book, we are not examining interpretation (i.e., meaning), per se; instead, we are investigating our knowledge of (or, justified beliefs about) performance. Performance provides instances where the audience confronts fictional things (i.e., fictional characters and/or fictional scenarios, sometimes viewed for the first time, or as new iterations, or fictionalized versions of actual objects and events).4 With fictional objects that we cannot be acquainted with, we understand via description by way of the unfolding of the performance. And these entities and scenarios that we have not been acquainted with and have not been a part of our individual experience, we come to understand through a public experience of viewing.
When an audience is composed of two or more people, the viewing of performance raises a fundamental epistemological question: what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience?5 Because viewers of performance have different prior knowledge and experiences, each viewer possesses a different “probability calculus” (or, more simply, would make a different bet) as to how the events before them will unfold. Further, because these viewers of performances have differing degrees of belief about the unfolding of these events (some which are constant and some are variable), due to this, they need to, each, collect different amounts, and types, of information from the performance, from other minds, and/or from themselves. In this counterintuitive way, and contrary to many presumptions, viewing performance is not a shared experience.
In his recent book, Incapacity (2014), Spencer Golub builds off Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior” to make the case that “performance behavior” is a shared experience that gives public expression to a private experience. Golub’s notion of “performance behavior” demonstrates how disability is articulated in theatre as an expression of incapacity.6 “Performance behavior,” to Golub, makes public what is usually experienced in private (i.e., as individual experience). In The Art of Theater (2007), James R. Hamilton suggests that by understanding precedence and projecting salient features of the performance—and by understanding that everyone else is doing the same thing—that the spectators all come to possess a rough common knowledge of the same events. However, to complicate Hamilton’s claim, I posit that (not all, but) much of what we view at a performance event is based upon, not only knowledge, but upon beliefs and, importantly, justified beliefs.
Because of the viewers' differing circumstances, each with differing justified beliefs, further, of varying degrees of belief about the performance event, there is a resulting error due to perspective (i.e., parallax). Triangulating the experiences of multiple viewers, then, yields a more accurate public understanding of the performance event. By extension, it yields a more accurate public understanding of the performance. In contrast to Golub’s study (which is just putting into words the implicit presumptions of the field), by thinking about issues of knowledge that arise from multiple viewers, I make the counterintuitive claim that being neither wholly public nor private, viewing performance is not a shared experience: viewing performance is a deeply-personal, highly-individualized experience that, paradoxically, relies on the experiences of other minds and is, as such, an experience privately constructed through public mediation.
In short, when an audience is composed of two or more people, the viewing of performance raises a fundamental epistemological question: what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience? Turning to insights from Bayesian epistemology to explain differences in the viewing experience, contrary to many presumptions, I suggest that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Because of this, knowledge surrounding a performance is intersubjective; often modified by other viewers and often understood after the performance event, knowledge of a performance is made more accurate by triangulating (or superimposing) the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers.
⋆⋆⋆
Why is this book written and coming out now?
The first reason is scholarly in nature as the burgeoning explosion of the philosophy of theatre and/or performance philosophy shows no sign of slowing down, and, rather, it is still gaining momentum and speeding up. This first-inchoate to now-semi-self-recognized birth, or renaissance of the philosophy of theatre—as the latter term (re)members that the birth of theatre criticism starts with Plato and Aristotle—is finding roots around the world all across academia. Amie L. Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics (1999), a seminal book on the ontological status of fictional entities, sits on one side of le fin-de-millénaire; on the other side, sits the special section in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2001)—with contributions by philosophers in aesthetics, Noël Carroll and James R. Hamilton, and a theatre scholar, David Z. Saltz—debating the relationship between the dramatic playtext and theatrical performance.
To note, as I wrote elsewhere, the latter, however, is by no means the first foray of theatre scholars into the field of philosophy, as theatre theorist from the late-1970s to early-1990s engaged heavily with the field of semiotics, and the field of performance studies got much of its theoretical backbone from broadly defined philosophically influenced cultural studies.7 After the, we can call it, philosophical turn in theatre and performance studies in the new millennium. The studies in the field of performance philosophy have gained in speed and in number, not unilinear in the micro sense, but essentially the growth is exponential in the macro. Starting in 2006, five years after the above-mentioned special issue, which sees the publication of David Krasner and Saltz’s Staging Philosophy; in 2007, Hamilton publishes a book-length form of his short article that appeared six years earlier in that same special issue, The Art of Theater. And then essentially, every year thereafter, a pattern emerges of more books coming out in this field each subsequent year than came out the year before. One comes out in 2008 (Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theatre). Two years pass and then two books come out in 2010 (Freddie Rokem’s Philosopher and Thespians and Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas); two years pass, and then book-length studies start coming out every year, one in 2012 (my own, Words, Space, and the Audience); one in 2013 (R. Darren Gobert’s The Mind-Body Stage), then four in 2014 (Golub’s Incapacity; Pannill Camp’s The First Frame; Tzachi Zamir’s Acts; and Tom Stern’s Philosophy and Theatre) and then three more books were also published in the inaugural year of the “Performance Philosophy” book series published by Palgrave Macmillan (for a total of seven books in 2014). The journal, Performance Philosophy, starts in 2015, with one issue that year and then one issue in 2016. Three more books come out in the “Performance Philosophy” book series in 2016, along with David Kornhaber’s The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Philosophy. Four more books are then published in that series in 2017, which is the same year as my book, Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play. Furthermore, in 2017, the journal, Performance Philosophy, begins publishing three issues a year.
Second, we now are all too familiar with the simultaneously abstract and concrete reality of the Trump Effect. The political arena, if you will, has seemingly always been a battlefield of public figures waging a war of interpretation, or “spin.” But with the recent assault on fact—with the rise of “fake news”—questions of public and private interpretation of (objective) facts have become alarmingly important. The intersection and confluence of belief, justified belief, and fact has been playing out dangerously in the public sphere among public and private citizens, the latter of whom are now not just spectators, but with the power of the internet and social media, active participants in “spinning” truth. This Wild Wild West (www) poses an existential threat to truth/fact. Again, these abstract and concrete reasons are of vital importance now.
Faced with a counterfactual conditional situation (i.e., a situation with counter-to-fact constants and variables set up at the beginning of performance), viewers of performance, in order to project these constants and variables, project this situation through betting behaviors based upon their varying degrees of knowledge and belief. The liveness of performances matters precisely because one cannot go back and verify, as this private-public venture in truth making and truth verification builds social trust and social responsibility. Maybe even more importantly, this betting behavior rewards us not only for being right (in the feeling of, “I knew it!”), but also equally rewards us for being wrong (in the enjoyment of being surprised). Thus, coming into an agreement over an agreed-upon set of facts matters less, as an important social function, than learning both how to be wrong and how to disagree about beliefs.
As such, viewing performance exposes the need for/inevitability of public mediation of personal experience, turning private intellectual pursuits into public discourse. In this, unfortunate, post-truth moment in world history, any activity (like viewing performance) that encourages private thought in public expression and piques intellectual curiosity and the desire for verification is of the utmost need in this age.
Overview of the book
In this book, I turn to specific instances of theatre, performance, and performance art to examine where and when these art forms present unique case studies to contemplate some epistemological questions: situations where/when the presence of other minds affects justified beliefs (and/or knowledge) about the object or the object being viewed. “Other minds” in relation to the simultaneously public-and-private experience of viewing performance gets to the heart of the idea of performance as a social phenomenon. Each of the body chapters explores specific ways (via specific performances) that demonstrate, however, that public experiences are often not public, and, at the same time, individual experiences rely on other minds for understanding. In this respect, each chapter looks at different aspects of performance—for example, time-space, context, language, and so on—and the performance as a social and a community phenomenon, and its effects on the individual in light of the individual being both a part of and separate from community.
This book is divided into two parts. Part I lays out the problems and the theses. Chapter 1, “A Public Experience: But Is It Shared?” explores some problems by poking some holes into presumptions regarding the public experience of viewing performances, suggesting that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Chapter 2, “Knowledge, (Dis)Agreement, and Other Minds,” lays out the theoretical frame, in which I endeavor to engage with epistemological questions surrounding other minds, justified belief, and issues surrounding projecting beliefs. Chapter 3, “A Public Reality of One’s Own,” then, attempts to offer solutions to the problems explored both in Sections I and II, by claiming that performance is not a shared experience and, thus, the path to a more accurate understanding of a performance is to triangulate the experiences of multiple viewers of the performance event. The overarching thesis laid out in Part I is that performance is not a shared experience and triangulation is needed to lessen the effects of the parallax due to each viewer’s unique position and circumstances.
In Part II, the book puts forth eight more theses over the book’s five subsequent chapters. The first five theses—(1), (2), (3), (4), and (5)—are meant to confront largely unquestioned presuppositions theatre and performance scholars and audience members from the (non-academic) public generally hold/make about the nature of performance and the nature of viewing performance. These five chapters, respectively, explore epistemological problems related to the viewing process, with special attention paid to the relationship between individual-private and public-shared knowledge related to viewing performance in light of other minds. However, these chapters are not applications of the claims developed in Part I, though Chapter 4, on Hamlet, does revisit almost all of the ideas developed in Part I. But unlike this single chapter, which does bring most of Part I full circle in a direct manner, instead, Part I and Part II largely sit side by side in exploring, respectively, general problems and then specific problems, both related, though, to multiple viewers viewing performance.
The five chapters of Part II explore specific problems related to viewing and epistemology in light of (1) knowledge, (2) time and space, (3) context, (4) language, (5) emotion and intellect. Each chapter presents a case study, or case studies, in which to test out the following theses to investigate some unexplored presumptions:
1Calling or referring to theatre and performance as “ephemeral” is an inaccurate description. Theatre and performance are “processes.” Viewing (a performance) is a part of the (much larger) process. Because of this, and due to this, the viewers become “witnesses,” and the more witnesses that view, paradoxically, more versions, counteract any narratorial biases both within, and external to, a text-based play to hone in on the truth.
2Different stage spaces do, of course, affect how a spectator interacts with the actors/performers during a performance. However, different stage spaces also affect how a spectator interacts with other spectators during a performance, and how this, in turn, further affects the spectator’s interaction with the performance. But this is also a contemporary view. Medieval vernacular plays demonstrate that these types of demarcations, such as the understanding of borders in relation to the self and others, are socio-cultural constructs.
3While often the most powerful linguists, minoritarian linguists, in certain contexts, cannot always powerfully perform their identity. The identity of a minoritarian linguist who is dependent upon translation is something both “bloody and beautiful,” yielding a question mark surrounding the performance of identity as a public and/or private experience.
4Performances of the self are not simply public performances of privately desired representations (intended for public, social consumption, and interpretation). Performances of the self demonstrate the need to address the indeterminacy of personal identity.
5Performances do not only elicit an either/or intellectual-or-emotional response, but emotion can be used to heighten the intellectual response.
These five theses will be addressed, respectively, in the five chapters that constitute Part II (i.e., Chapters 4–8).
The final three theses wade into debates in epistemology in light of other minds and debates over public-private language/experience. Each of these three observations is, in their own way, a response to the fundamental epistemological question this book raises (i.e., what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience?):
6Theatre furthers the conclusion that objective facts are more-fully revealed after a viewing by suggesting that the best approach to understanding an external reality is that the more contexts—personal and group—that can be overlaid on top of one another by triangulation, the smaller the error from personal and group parallax.
7Public experiences when viewing performance are rarely public experiences.
8When viewing performance, private experiences are generally interpreted by, and dependent upon, public experiences or other minds for justified beliefs and knowledge about private experiences.
The above three theses—that is, (7), (8), and (9)—will be addressed throughout the chapters, without any specific correspondence, as these observations will be littered throughout the book.
Thinking about these five specific problems in viewing in light of other minds, theatre and performance become necessarily communal events that pass well beyond the event itself (both before and after) but are also events that are communal only because of individual experience. The following is the narrative The Problems of Viewing Performance attempts to tell: because objective facts are revealed after a performance and because one cannot take in all of a performance, there is an uneasy relationship between self and other(s) and how this relationship affects the acquisition of knowledge.
But, how, then, are we to make sense of what we see? To build off J. L. Austin’s observation about observation, I suggest that because Austin argues that understanding or knowledge is based upon the circumstances from which we understand an object (very-broadly defined)—in turn, and extending off the work of Donald Davidson—I argue that the triangulation of knowledge and experiences from individual spectators and groups (e.g., from criticism, dialogues, reviews, future productions, cinematic adaptations, etc.) is beneficial to lessen the parallax created by the fact that objective facts are revealed after a performance and one cannot take in all of the performance. The fact that parallax persists regarding performance, no matter how many experiences are triangulated with one another, is not a problem, per se: this elusive quest for mastery and understanding, rather, is precisely what keeps its participants yearning to come back over and over.
Chapter 4, entitled “Epistemic Problems: Hamlet and Horatio’s ‘Hamlet’ … in Light of Other Minds,” suggests that Hamlet is a play that in all of the characters’ quests for gaining certainty and truth, we understand that each character, in a sense, has some narratorial bias, given the fact that Horatio is the only eyewitness of the events and only eyewitness to some of them. This chapter suggests that Horatio, like Nick in The Great Gatsby, is kind of the main character of the play, as it is his narrative/perspective that we are witnessing. Further, given that Hamlet, then, is more of an idea, based upon a single eyewitness, and one who has a lot of reasons to deliver an efficacious story, Hamlet allows differing participants to enter and exit. That, then, sums up how knowledge about a performance is rhizomal.
Chapter 5 is entitled “Temporal-Spatial Problems: Border Progressions and Locating the Self: Mobility and Immobility in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance” and examines two medieval vernacular plays to both demonstrate how what appears to be the natural demarcation between stage and audience, as recently discussed by R. Darren Gobert and Pannill Camp, this was a societally learned understanding. By looking before the advent of the Cartesian spectator, to pre-Elizabethan medieval drama and thinking about the “border” and crossing borders in these plays, we can not only see a difference between how we as contemporary audiences process a play, but how even medieval audiences, separated by two hundred plus years and the English Channel may have seen these Le Jeu du Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance from different vantage points. This chapter exposes the fact that some seemingly static points of view and vantage points of viewing performance are not constants, but reflect socio-cultural thoughts about self and others.
Chapter 6, “Contextual Problems: Witting and Unwitting Contexts: Translating Public and Private Experience in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul,” thinks about the ways in which there is always a question mark surrounding the performance of identity as a public and/or private experience. To this end, then, this chapter develops two further parallel lines of thought: (1) first, it examines Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul through the lens of Deleuze and Guattaris idea of the minoritarian linguist; and (2) then, just like the map in the play marked “Grave of Cain?” I argue that this play is about what it means to conceptualize the world with a question mark attached to it. Like translation, where everything is inaccurate because a true translation is impossible, Kushner posits a world (with a metaphoric question mark attached to it) where everything is utterly unknowable. Knowledge is gained only through translations—personal, literal, social, cultural. And thus, although much is lost in these translations, so much is gained in these hybrid moments. What I am arguing in this chapter is that Homebody is a minoritarian linguist whose own language is a forgotten language, but she speaks in English. What she creates is a minor language that is marked by its hybridity. Homebody’s own unique lingual position mimics the art of translation, with its possibilities and impossibilities. Translation becomes a metaphor for cultural hybridity. As a minoritarian linguist, performance yields power, but the inability to perform at Homebodys comfortable level turns out to have disastrous consequences. Because Homebody is imagined, I argue, as “Homebody?” in Afghanistan (similar to “Grave of Cain?”), Kushner’s play ultimately asks the question that Deleuze and Guattari never ask or answer themselves: what happens to a minoritarian linguist when read in translation? In a line from the play, Kushner suggests that the results of translating a minoritarian linguist are “bloody, beautiful.” Homebody becomes “Homebody?” when read in translation and is therefore susceptible to being “traumatically separated.”
Chapter 7, “Lingual Problems: (Private and Public) Performances of the Self: The Performance of Language (and the Self) in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns,” discusses Jahoda’s art installation piece, Flight Patterns, and problems over language. Flight Patterns functions as performance art that investigates what happens to language as it is exposed to the public and the private viewer/reader. Blurring the lines between public and private language by displaying a series of hand-written letters and envelopes sent through the mail, Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns questions if the demarcation between public and private language is ever really possible. As a matter of central importance to studies of performance and rhetoric, ultimately, Jahoda suggests that performances of the self are constructed by language that is unavoidably, and simultaneously, public and private. The act of addressing is a rhetorical performance, or a performance of rhetoric, for the ways in which language both demarcates and blurs the boundaries of self and other.
Chapter 8, “Emotional Problems: Breathing in Maria Irene Fornes’ ‘Sharper Air’ in Her “PAJ Plays,” examines the idea that theatre has to be either intellectual or emotional. This either/or binary has long plagued theatre theorists, commentators, and practitioners. Fornes’ plays, particularly her so-called “PAJ Plays,” are viscerally and palpably intense. This would suggest that her plays, too, side with an emotional response. However, with her “PAJ Plays,” because of what I call her use of “Fornesian pauses,” which are structural pauses at moments of tension, Fornes creates plays that are like “pressure cookers,” but ones where the steam is never released. The result is that there is no cathartic experience for the viewers so that the only way to ease the feelings of unease during the performance is to stream out of the aisles in a discussion.
I conclude this book with “Viewing … or, Turning Away: Upending the ‘Gaze,’ Upending the Subject.” In this short Conclusion, I think playfully about the “gaze” of the audience. To do this, constructed in the general vein of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, I suggest that Larry David’s Curb your Enthusiasm provides an alternative to the patriarchal male gaze that Mulvey described, as the viewers are so uncomfortable and experience such visceral and intellectual displeasure that they have no choice, but to squirm, and even simply look away.
Notes
1Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 9.
2“View,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. 2016.
3For an excellent book on the historical overlap between epistemological concerns and theatre, see David Kornhaber, Theatre & Knowledge (New York: Red Globe Press, 2020).
4Given that I am not investigating the concept of fictionality or fictional entities, I will leave this idea of “fictional” alone as an uninvestigated idea here, for fear of sidetracking my current lines of inquiry. However, I have discussed the nature of “fiction” at length in relation to what is a fictional entity and a fictional world, concluding that “fiction” or “fictional” is not an accurate description of the phenomena at hand. See my book, Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (London: Routledge, 2017).
5While The Problems of Viewing Performance does, to a degree, raise the question—do audience members receive the same common data?—this is a question that I will be addressing in detail in a separate book project, currently entitled, Between the Lines, a Philosophy of Theatre.
6Spencer Golub, Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 11.
7Bennett, World of the Play, 7–9.