Performance and Cognition

Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn

Bruce McConachie, F. Elizabeth Hart, Bruce McConachie, F. Elizabeth Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135989460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This anthology is the first of its kind. In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on theatre studies – with applications for dramatic criticism, performance analysis, acting practice, audience response, theatre history, and other important areas – the book sets the agenda for future work, helping to map the emergence of this new approach.

Following a comprehensive introduction, the contributors examine:

• the interfaces between cognitive studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology and communication theory
• different ideas from cognitive studies that open up the meanings of several plays
• the process of acting and the work of Antonio Damasio
• theatrical response: the dynamics of perception, and the riots that greeted the 1907 production of The Playboy of the Western World.

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This original and authoritative work will be attractive to scholars and graduate students of drama, theatre, and performance.

Section 1
Performance theory and cognition

1 Performance, phenomenology, and the cognitive turn

F. Elizabeth Hart

In an effort to counterbalance the abstracting effects of semiotics as an approach to performance – in an effort, that is, to reclaim the materiality of props, lighting, stage space, costumes, and of course the human body itself from a theory that would reduce such things to signs – theorists and practitioners of theatre have increasingly turned to phenomenology, hoping, if not actually to eliminate semiotics from the spectrum of approaches, then at least to find a perspective that may reconcile the varying materialities that comprise both things and signs. Mark Fortier has aptly articulated the growing frustration over the collapse of all things material in performance into language or – as many tend to reduce language – into semiotics: “To treat everything as language or as dominated by language seems a distortion of the nature of theatre as rooted in the physical and the sensual, as much as it is in words and ideas” (Fortier 1997: 3–4).

Two critics in particular, Bert O. States (1985, 1992) and Stanton Garner (1994), have offered especially compelling defenses of phenomenology as a tool for conceptualizing the full, lived experience of theatre, i.e., its usefulness as a descriptor of the perceptual dimension that constitutes theatre as much as, if not more than, the verbal.¹ The key study, in my view, is Garner’s Bodied Spaces (1994), which, in its focus on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has contributed to the growing sense of the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy across a range of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discourses. Building on both the late writings of Edmund Husserl and those of Merleau-Ponty’s contemporary and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty sought to resituate subjectivity not within Husserl’s transcendental essences but within the physical body of the human perceiver, in short, “returning the body to the field of subjectivity” (Garner 1994: 27). In his monumental Phenomenology of Perception (1961), Merleau-Ponty established the body as the ground of all rationality, stressing, in a radical departure from Husserl, the body’s dynamic interface with the world outside it. Perception arising from this interface establishes a pre-propositional or pre-reflective realm of consciousness, which in turn forms the basis of philosophical and scientific – i.e., abstract – thought. Of particular importance to Merleau-Ponty’s view was his understanding of consciousness as embodied, as itself a response to the lived-in body within a lived-in world. Such consciousness, embedded and interactive within a network of temporally dynamic connections, is obviously a far cry from Husserl’s sealed-off realm of idealized perception. “Whereas Husserl’s phenomenology suspends the materiality of an ‘outside’ that includes the body for the sake of ideal self-presence,” notes Garner, “Merleau-Ponty posited a consciousness caught up in the ambiguity of corporeality, directed toward a world of which it is inextricably and materially a part” (Garner 1994: 27).

Such a model of the phenomenal body and consciousness seems clearly useful for performance theorists as they strive to conceptualize the thingness of theatre and of performance in general. But ironically the very notion of embodiment – the hinge upon which Merleau-Ponty’s revised understanding of subjectivity hangs – is also a key concept underlying Judith Butler’s popular theory of (gender) performativity. I call this ironic because Butler’s performativity, with its emphasis on the body’s realization of a material identity through the discourses of culture, is arguably but a thinly veiled version of the very semiotics that phenomenology contradicts. To compound the irony, it is well known that among Butler’s sources for her formation of performativity theory was Merleau-Ponty himself, albeit the later Merleau- Ponty of The Visible and the Invisible (1968). In fact, critics typically recognize performativity as a blend of phenomenology and J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, citing especially Butler’s debt to Merleau-Ponty for the all-important idea of the “performative embodiment”: the act by which the human body obediently expresses its assumption of the cultural restrictions that determine its materiality.² Butler’s view, bolstered by the linguistic claims of Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, and – hovering behind each of these theorists – Saussure, posits a body that has no inherent agency, no basis for self-assertion prior to its interpellation into subjectivity. Indeed, sometimes her writings hesitatingly and obliquely suggest that the body may possess no (and perhaps she means access to its) biological materiality prior to its discursive, i.e., linguistic, constitution (e.g., Butler 1990: 136–41). Embodiment, in Butler’s scenario, is thus something that happens to the body, is an imposition upon the body by culture; while the subject’s agency, if it exists, can only manifest from variations within iterations and reiterations of this imposition.

One must recognize the efficacy of Butler’s quasi-semiotics for gender, feminist, queer, and other identity-based critiques, both in literary/cultural studies and in theatre/performance studies. Her theories, because they have focused acute attention on the culturally dependent forms of the body’s selfexpression, have generated fresh and useful analyses of the mechanisms governing processes of cultural construction – all to the good. But what’s troubling is the fact that, at their deepest levels, Butler’s models of identityformation are predicated on an outmoded and untenable science of language, the Saussurean semiotics that undergirds each of her poststructuralist influences (as noted above). In its determination to locate meaning within the gap between sign and signifier and in the arbitrary connection between phoneme and semantic unit, Saussurean semiotics aggressively disembodies both meaning and language, leaving philosophers like Derrida and Foucault apparently no choice but to conjure a hoped-for materiality out of a hopelessly abstracted system. It is therefore intensely ironic that Butler should derive a theory of embodiment from Saussure’s legacy; and it is particularly striking how her theory opposes, as an etiology, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the embodied consciousness, the latter emerging from a – yes – biologically material body. Yet it seems to me that these opposing conceptions of what it means to be embodied have gone unnoticed within today’s culture studies, an oversight that I find curious given the centrality of “embodiment” as a concept within both critical frameworks and especially given Butler’s explicit deployment of Merleau-Ponty.

In this essay, my address to this contradiction will call for some shifting of the theoretical sands. I will argue that theatre and performance critics interested in reconciling phenomenological and semiotic approaches will never be able to achieve their goal so long as semiotics remains defined within a Saussurean framework or – perhaps more to the point – so long as the term “semiotics” continues to collapse all aspects of language into sign. (The alternative, taken as a disciplinary given by today’s linguists, configures the sign in its phonetic and graphic forms to be one relatively minor aspect of language as a whole.) I assert that Butler and her fellow poststructuralists are actually quite right to say that language and discourse contribute to the formation and even the material realization of human subjects; however, I contend that the language and discourse at issue in these processes are somewhat different from the way poststructuralism has typically defined them, and that the difference is crucial for understanding, first, how such subject- or identity-formation actually takes place, and second, to what extent we should credit discursively formulated subjectivity and identity with having such embodiment capabilities. The key theoretical difference, as I will elaborate here, is the claim that language and discourse are themselves embodied: They are cognitively embodied, arising from the embodied human minds that anchor Merleau-Ponty’s embodied consciousness and, from this embodied condition, acquiring the semantic and syntactic structures necessary to facilitate social construction, i.e., communication.³ Embodiment by and through the mechanisms of language and discourse therefore constitutes but one aspect of a circulating system of both cognitive and cultural embodiment, as I hope to show.

Making such an argument requires an interdisciplinary leap outside the humanities into another domain in which embodiment now serves as a central concept: the domain of cognitive science. In recent years, cognitive studies have taken a noticeable turn toward the human body as the source of both information to and constraint upon the mind, the very entity that until recently was thought to be essentially transcendent in its relationship to the body. In disciplines embracing both the philosophy of mind and the sciences of the mind (including cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence studies, and others), the conceptual barriers separating the mind from the brain and the brain from the body have to some extent given way to imagery of a fluid interaction between the three, belying easy generalizations about cognitive cause-and-effect. Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that Merleau-Ponty’s embodied consciousness is a cannily accurate description of what the scientists now see as the material grounding of knowledge, of the mind-brain’s dependence on the body’s concrete situatedness within the physical and social worlds that encompass it.

In what follows, I will explore how this cognitive embodiment registers within one area that has been especially symptomatic of the cognitive turn, the field of cognitive linguistics. I hope to demonstrate how the insights of cognitive linguistics (and of related areas in cognitive science) may suggest a resolution to contradictory notions of embodiment within the humanities. What I intend to show with my analysis is that the Butlerian sense of embodiment, while it has been enabling for us as a critical tool, has also been misleading as an etiology of embodiment. The more likely scenario, taken from a cognitive-scientific orientation, is that embodiment is primarily a cognitive phenomenon, a phenomenon that creates the instruments of communication – language, discourse, sign, and gesture – through which a secondary order of constructivity becomes activated. While it is tempting to consider this secondary order of constructivity as “embodiment” (because its effects are more clearly evident to us), doing so turns out to be reductive since this secondary form of embodiment is simply not the same qualitatively as the primary order of embodiment through which the body’s basic materiality finds its conceptual and expressive forms. Nevertheless, this secondary order of constructivity does participate indirectly – that is, recursively – in processes of cognitive embodiment since social context helps determine what forms of cognitive embodiment are most viable and thus which ones become stabilized within a given culture.

I will develop these claims and their relevance to theatre/performance through a focus on a limited but important aspect of any theatre or performance event: the embodied conceptualization of the performance space. Specifically, I will look at intersections between language/discourse and cognitively embodied space in two examples, the text of the Chorus to Shakespeare’s Henry V and a recent London production of the play After Mrs. Rochester. With these analyses, I want to show that a reconciliation between things and language – including but, importantly, not exclusively linguistic signs – may indeed be possible but only within an analysis that uses cognitive embodiment as its starting point.

The role played by cognitive literary/cultural studies

In one sense, embodiment has defined performance since the origins of theatre in prehistoric ritual. Characters, whether of humans, animals, or gods, have always been represented in performance through the bodies of actors. This is true but for a few exceptions that include puppet theatre, which uses as proxy representations of bodies, and, as Marvin Carlson points out, performance art, which utilizes bodies but not always as representations of characters (Carlson 1996: 6). When talking about embodiment in the context of performance theory, however, it is easy to elide the element of intentionality in our eagerness to register the valences of physical features – facial expressions, gestures, gender, sexual attractiveness, etc. – assuming but not exploring the fact that behind every actor’s use of his or her body is a body of knowledge, and that out of that knowledge emerges a focused intentionality that participates along with the body in creating a performance. It may sound simplistic to say so, but surely such intentionality emerges from – or at least is mediated by – the actor’s brain. And while we may not be accustomed to thinking about the brain as a part of the body, we must recognize that indeed the brain is an organ like the heart or the kidneys, without which the body would cease to function unaided as a body. But even a critic like Butler, (who wants very much to understand the mechanics of embodiment, and whose investigations have taken her to psychoanalysis and to the poststructuralists who use psychoanalysis to understand subjectformation) does not acknowledge the direct role of the brain and thereby misses, as Mary Thomas Crane has remarked, “the material site where discourse enters the body, where entry into the symbolic occurs, and therefore where the subject is constructed” (Crane 2001: 7). What makes Butler’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty all the more interesting is the fact that at least Merleau-Ponty recognizes an embodied consciousness, assuming, as the word “consciousness” implies, a locus of psychic knowledge and awareness. And while his later works to which Butler appeals do expand on this epistemology by exploring the means – especially in language – through which the body interacts with and is acted upon by the world, there is no sense in which Merleau-Ponty himself ever abandons his original model of an embodied consciousness that participates in these exchanges.

In the decades since Merleau-Ponty’s death, a new generation of cognitive scientists, most notably Gerald Edelman (1992), Antonio Damasio (1999, 1994), and Daniel Dennett (1991), has stepped forward to challenge the long-held axioms of Cartesian rationalism, not least of which Descartes’ division between the mind and the body. The result has been an increasingly detailed map of the mechanisms by which the human cognitive apparatus is shaped by the body and thus the ways in which knowledge itself reflects mind-embodiment. And it is through this logic of mind-embodiment that cognitive researchers have pushed Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy past the point of speculation and into the realm of scientific inquiry. The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson, both innovators in the field of cognitive linguistics, write that “Cognitive science provides a new and important take on an age-old philosophical problem of what is real and how we can know it. . . . Our sense of what is real begins with and depends crucially upon our bodies, especially our sensorimotor apparatus, which enables us to perceive, move, and manipulate, and the detailed structures of our brains, which have been shaped by both evolution and experience” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 17).⁴ Here, what amounts to a radical assertion that all knowledge is in fact mediated by the body would seem to be yet another expression of Husserlian phenomenology – except that today’s cognitive science acknowledges that the body’s boundaries with the world are porous and unstable and that embodiment is contingent upon both physical and cultural determinants. (Importantly, from a phenomenological standpoint, not only does the dichotomy between mind and body break down, but that between subjectivity and objectivity is also dissolved.)

My own orientation to these developments is through a new field within the humanities called “cognitive approaches to literature,” whose practitioners have turned to the science of mind-embodiment in their efforts to formulate more human-friendly literary and cultural theories. To varying degrees, cognitive literary and cultural critics either reject poststructuralism wholesale; or they seek to revise poststructuralist insights by calling into question the Saussurean roots of deconstruction while simultaneously confirming the theorized effects of socially constructive discourse and ideology.⁵ The latter group, in which I count myself, appeals both to the cognitive-scientific study of physiological mind-embodiment and to the understanding of cultural theorists of embodiment as a form of cultural inscription, coming closer, perhaps, than any other set of critics to implementing a true fusion of phenomenology and semiotics. By “semiotics,” however, these critics mean language (and with it discourse) that emerges from embodied cognition and not the disembodied sign system of Saussure’s linguistics or its consequent deconstructions. According to the cognitive literary/cultural view, language includes a semiotic dimension to the extent that it depends on arbitrary signs to communicate embodied meaning; but meaning itself, far from being arbitrary, is motivated by complex networks of cognitive connections. Yet having thus rejected Saussure’s over-reduction of language to signs, cognitive literary/culture critics also offer limited endorsements of the Foucauldian or Butlerian assertion that language and discourse possess the power of social constructivity. This power might best be described as a kind of feedback system through which social context helps set the range of forms of cognitive embodiment that are most relevant to – and therefore most “natural” within – a given culture. In this way, cognitive literary/cultural theory actively merges the primary and secondary tiers of embodiment alluded to earlier in this essay.

This merger takes the form of a material continuum between the two forms of embodiment, one tapping into the primary cognitive materiality of mind and body, the other into the secondary materiality of language and discourse as the social manifestation of mind and body (c.f., the primary and secondary orders of constructivity, described earlier). Matter, in other words, flows in an interconnected stream between the embodied mind and its representations of embodied experience in language and discourse. Such a material continuum allows literary and cultural theorists to counterbalance the reductive tendencies of Saussurean semiotics, envisioning, as Crane puts it, “embodied and enacted materiality as co-existing on equal terms with discourse and representation, . . . go[ing] beyond phenomenology in offering an account of how embodied action shapes thought and language” (Crane 2001: 171).⁶ Moreover, Crane writes, this material continuum bears similar im...