I’d like to announce the publication of “Big History,” my contribution to Theatre, Performance and Change, ed. Stephani Etheridge Woodson and Tamara Underiner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 261-69. The essay critiques the postmodernist opposition to taking the long view of historical development as “grand narratives.” Instead, we need large understandings of history, not just in terms of length of time but also in terms of the depth and complexity of social structures.
“Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre” now published
“Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre” has been published by New Theatre Quarterly (Vol. 33, issue 4, pp. 345-359). The abstract reads:
Online role-playing games are a form of entertainment in which players create characters and improvisationally perform scenes together within a digital virtual world. It has many theatre-like aspects, which raises the question of whether it is in fact a form of theatre. To answer that question, however, one must first have a definition of theatre – an issue with disciplinary consequences – and in this article Tobin Nellhaus develops a definition founded on social ontology, suggesting that theatrical performance, unlike other social practices, replicates society’s ontology. From that perspective, online role-playing meets the definition of theatre. But its digital environment raises another set of problems, since embodiment, space, and presence in online role-playing are necessarily unlike what we experience in traditional theatre. Here, Nellhaus brings these three aspects of performance together through the concept of embodied social presence, showing how they operate in both customary theatre and online role-playing.
If you have journal access, you can download the published version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X17000483. The article is currently available only in print; a PDF version will be released in a year. In the meantime you can download the original manuscript from the Publications and Drafts page. There are some small differences between the original manuscript and the published version.
“Online Role-playing Games” accepted
“Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre” has been accepted for publication by New Theatre Quarterly, and will appear in either November 2017 or May 2018. Cambridge University Press allows authors to post their original manuscripts on their personal websites, so it will remain available here.
Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre
I suppressed posts with links to drafts of my article “Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre” in order to avoid discovery and thus author identification while it was under review at Theatre Journal. However, the editors didn’t understand the idea of addressing online role-playing specifically (that is, as something distinct from other types of computer-based and/or online activities), that theater could and in my view should be distinguished from other things called “performance,” and that the purpose of the article was to use online role-playing as an intriguing activity that raises interesting questions about how to define theater. So for the time being I am making the version I submitted available through the link above.
“Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives” is now published
“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.