Category: Theater Studies

“Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives” is now published

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“Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives” is now officially published by the Journal of Critical Realism. Taylor & Francis/Routledge allows me to offer the official version (the Version of Record) free to up to 50 people through this link.

I am also making the “accepted manuscript” version of available for downloading. This is the final version submitted to the Journal of Critical Realism, and has some minor differences from the published version. (Posting on my personal site is permitted by Taylor & Francis/Routledge.)

The basic points (again) are these:

  • Reflexivity for individuals is a recursive practice in which one’s thought reflects on one’s own thoughts and actions, assessing past ones and preparing for new ones.  But agents are not just thoughts — they are not just intentional beings, but also embodied and efficacious in the material world.  It should be possible for agents to be reflexive not just through thoughts but through their entire embodied being.
  • If so, however, the structure of the recursion underlying embodied reflexivity can’t be the spiral of thought returning to thought, but one that involves all three of aspects of agency.  However, intentionality, causal efficacy, and embodiment do not stand in a linear relation: instead, they’re related through emergence and stratification, which the recursion must account for.  Peirce’s trichotomies achieve that.  Consequently embodied reflexivity must have a Peircean structure.
  • Agents also don’t exist alone, they always have social relations with others.  One of their key everyday challenges is sussing out others’ intentions (involving Theory of Mind), which has to occur through perceptions of their speech and actions (including self presentation, e.g, clothing, as an action).  That must be a crucial part of a collective mode of reflexivity.
  • Speech and actions are ways of doing things in the social world.  The basic point is made by Austin’s concept of speech acts, which he calls performatives, but the latter should be expanded to include “acts that speak” because embodied actions are imbued with meanings.  Theory of Mind is predicated on assessing others’ and producing one’s own performatives; an embodied and collective practice of reflexivity is intrinsically one of performers and spectators.  Hence “Peircean performatives.”
  • One (and perhaps the only) collective practice that performs this activity is dramatic performance, which covers theater, film, TV, and online streaming forms. Theater, however, is paradigmatic. Applying the Peircean recursive structure of reflexivity to theater, we find that not only can we explain theater’s ontology, but also its use of fiction.

A version of this argument intended for a theater studies journal is now in its final drafts.

Theater ontology revisited

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The lack of a recent blog post is the result of a problem that arose as I was working on an article about online roleplaying games, and the solution soon led to an idea for another article which now has my attention, since the theory I’m developing there has to be pretty well shaped before I can return to the article on online roleplaying.

But briefly, I found that that the ontology I developed previously isn’t wholly satisfactory.  It’s unclear what creates the ontological doubling and the “ontological shift,” and why this ontology works the way it does.  Also, my introduction of what I called “metadiscourse” as a quasi-ontological level was something of a hedge and I’m no longer convinced it’s justified.  On the other hand, while I tend to emphasize the character of theater as a model of social agency (e.g., in my case study in the forthcoming edition of Theater Histories), I don’t think I sufficiently attended to its functional nature as societal reflexivity.  My underlying assumption was that just as theater as an institution is emergent from general social relations, so too does theatrical performance emerge out of the theater institution, and for that reason it possesses the same structure-agency-discourse ontology that society has.  But that doesn’t necessarily follow.  These weaknesses are, I believe, connected.

If, however, one considers the fact that by and large, institutions and practices emerge from society in order to serve some purpose, then one should consider theater’s purpose and how that might be reflected in its ontology: basically, form follows function.  So if theater’s primary function is to conduct societal reflexivity, then it’s likely that the ontological doubling and shift arise from that.   (Because of the level of discussion about social reflexivity, I plan to submit this new article to the Journal of Critical Realism.)

For a while, then, my focus will be on reconceptualizing theater’s ontology, since my argument that roleplaying games are form of theater hangs, first and foremost, on the definition of theater.

 

Do I need to defend defining — or just define?

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The article I’m currently writing argues that online role-playing games are a form of theater.  That involves providing a definition of theater.  But does such an action need to be defended?  At least in the past, some people have claimed that the act of defining theater is overly limiting; defining is limiting, of course, because that’s what definitions do — but overly?  Should one not define at all, lest one inadvertently leave something out?  Is (as some people think) defining the limits of theater necessarily an act of power and therefore inherently objectionable?  But who does one really help by not defining one’s terms?

Perhaps these worries are unwarranted: the “theory wars” have supposedly ended.  But at the 2015 ASTR conference in Baltimore, there were plenary papers that used the term “performance” so broadly that in one, rocks “performed,” and another never so much as mentioned performance (let alone theater).  I suppose these were considered appropriate for plenaries because “performance” now covers absolutely everything — i.e., the term has been emptied of any real meaning.

In short, I’m troubled by the “state of the profession.”  But maybe that has more to do with the fact that I’ve been semi-disconnected with “the profession” (academia) for 20 years, mainly because I had to switch to another profession, librarianship.

Be that as it may, the issue I’m wrestling with is whether it’s necessary to defend my act of definition — or just do it, and let the chips fall where they may?