Category: Theater

“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.

“Embodied Collective Reflexivity” draft available

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I’ve now completed a version of my article “Embodied Collective Reflexivity” {DELETED: see [Download not found]} which I’ve submitted to the Journal of Critical Realism. The link is to the “author’s original manuscript,” which has a few minor differences from the submitted version. Comments are welcome. This is the abstract:

Most work on reflexivity has focused on individuals exercising their reflexivity through discourse. However, agents have three major aspects (intentionality, causal efficacy, and embodiment) and they are fundamentally social. This article examines the possibility of collective reflexivity conducted not just by saying, but also by doing–that is, through their embodiment. By expanding the concept of “performatives” to encompass not just speech acts but also acts that speak (i.e., embodied activities as socially meaningful), and applying the work of Charles S. Peirce in order to develop an ontology of embodied reflexivity, it becomes possible to hypothesize what social practices meet the criteria of embodied collective reflexivity. At least one social practice does in fact meet those criteria and reveals additional aspects of what constitutes embodied collective reflexivity.

The social practice I have in mind is of course theater.

Embodied collective reflexivity: an update

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At long last, I have a full draft of an article in which I rethink the ontology of performance, in terms of embodied collective reflexivity, and I’ve sent the draft to a couple trusted readers.  The basic issues are the ones I outlined in my blog post of 13 July 2015.  They seemed straightforward enough, but I constantly ran into roadblocks or potential counterarguments, so threading the needle proved quite difficult.  And of course I could be barking up the wrong tree.

The basic points are these:

  • We (more or less) know what reflexivity consists of for individuals: it’s 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 curvilinear one of thought returning to thought, but one that involves all three of those modes of existence and reflects the relationship between them.  However, intentionality, causal efficacy, and embodiment do not stand in a linear relation: instead, they’re related through emergence, which the recursion must account for.  Peirce’s trichotomies achieve that.  Consequently embodied reflexivity must be constructed on a Peircean basis.
  • 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.”  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.” (Or perhaps I should say, “public Peircean performatives.”)
  • We can see where that leads!

There’s more than one Scylla and Charybdis along this path, most of them concerning how one distinguishes these activities from ordinary social interactions. Hopefully, however, this approach provides a more thorough and explanatory account of the ontology of performance that I developed previously.

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.