Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of
Experience for Historians
Author(s): Bruce McConachie
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 569-594
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Doing Things with Image Schemas:
Turn in Theatre
Studies and
The Cognitive
of Experience
for Historians
the Problem
Bruce
Bad
as
itmay
sound,
McConachie
to admit
I have
that
the use
I cannot
of one
or
get along
two sciences
as an artist without
(Bertolt
Brecht).1
of people from the distant past?
Can historians know and explain the experiences
can we understand what Moli?re may have experienced
As performance
historians,
with
the bureaucrats
of Louis XIV over the production
of
during his wrangling
we
in
New
Can
what
have
York
may
spectators
Tartuffe?
working-class
comprehend
in the
the performance
of an apocalyptic melodrama
experiencing
enjoyed while
1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing for the London premiere of
A Doll's House in 1889? Or, to frame these questions as a historiographical
problem, is
there enough common ground linking the present experience of the historian to the
of people
from the past (as understood
experience
to arrive at some truths about these past experiences
probable
evidence)
ance
from
the available
sparked by perform
events?
answer to such
Before the "linguistic turn" in performance
studies, the conventional
would
likely have been a guarded "yes." Indeed, several forms of scholar
on a variety of epistemologies
have long validated
the ability of
ship drawing
to understand
and explain how particular people and groups of people
historians
thought, felt, desired, and acted in terms of human experience. At the turn of the last
questions
combined
the insights of German
idealism, historical
century, Wilhelm
Dilthey
to argue for the necessity of understanding
and phenomenology
the experi
method,
ences of historically
In the 1960s and 1970s, Raymond Williams,
situated individuals.
the notion of an experience-based
tradition, developed
working put of the Marxist
to
"structure of feeling"
theorize historical change. More recently, Eric Lott combined
to explain the desires and
Lacanian
theory with Fredric Jameson's historiography
Bruce McConachie
of Pittsburgh.
Interpreting
isDirector
He
has written
the Theatrical
American Theatre
Bertolt
Brecht,
Studies
in Theatre
of Graduate
on theatre
historiography
widely
Past
(1989),
with
and Society, 1820-1870
Brecht
on Theatre,
trans.
and Performance
and American
Tom Postlewait,
Studies
theatre
ana Melodramatic
at the
University
history,
including
Formations:
(1992).
John Willett
(New
York: Hill
and Wang,
1964),
73.
Theatre Journal53 (2001) 569-594 ? 2001 by The JohnsHopkins University Press
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
570
/
BruceMcConachie
feelings?the
experiences?of
spectators
at
minstrel
nineteenth-century
shows.2
on the assumption
these historians
build their explanations
that there
to
at
human
and
both
the
conscious
unconscious
universality
experience,
them to construct valid history.
All
of
is enough
levels, for
As historian Michael
"from the poststructuralist
view
Pickering notes, however,
is the bridge which only asses cross. It is a bridge which
is regarded
point, experience
as far too rickety to be worthy of
repair."3 Pickering singles out historian Joan Scott as
the chief poststructuralist
conventional
notions of "experi
proponent of repudiating
ence." In brief, Scott attacks experience-based
historical explanations
for na?ve episte
use
The
a
of
she
mology.
typical conceptual
"experience,"
alleges, presupposes
foundational mode of being which exists prior to language. Scott would keep the term
but redefine it as the product
of "discourse."
Like Pickering
(and
"experience,"
as "a test-case of the poststructuralist
others), Iwill use Scott's ideas on experience
take on the category."4 Compared
to some historians
such as Mark Poster and
Dominick LaCapra, Scott stakes out a version of poststructuralism
inmore opposition
to traditional empirical and hermeneutic methods
of doing history, but this position
also makes her critique of experience more challenging.5
some intellectual historians,
Several historians,
and
including other feminists,
several materialists,
have opposed Scott's undermining
of "normal" history.6 While
each of the three opponents
to Scott that Iwill examine offers important correctives to
none
her work,
of them puts forward a position
that fully meets
the epistemological
and empirical challenges of her assertions. Alternatively,
Iwill argue that the cognitive
2
On
see his Selected
Dilthey,
Writings
(Cambridge:
Consciousness
and Society: The Reorientation
of
Williams
first used
1958), 185-200. Raymond
Vintage,
book with Michael
Orrom,
Preface to Film (London: Film
Hughes,
of the term, see Drama from
deployment
book
is Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy
3
Michael
Experience,
Pickering,
History,
Univ.
Press,
1976) and H. Stewart
Cambridge
1890-1930
(New York:
European Social Thought,
as an
"structure
of feeling"
term in hjs
analytic
Drama
of his
Press, 1954). For a better example
Ibsen to Brecht (London: Hogarth,
Eric Lott's
1987). Finally,
and The American Working
Class (New York: Oxford,
1993).
and Cultural
Studies
(New York:
St. Martin's
Press,
1997),
208.
4Ibid.,245,n.2.
5
For Scott's
use of
see "The Evidence
of Experience,"
Critical
"experience,"
Inquiry, Y7 (Summer
in Feminists
Theorize
the Political,
ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott
1991), 773-97;
(New
"Experience"
York: Routledge,
and Gender and the Politics
1992), 22-40;
(New York: Columbia/1988).
of History
in his "Intellectual
attacks
the position
After
the
"Experience"
put forth by John Toews
History
Turn: The Autonomy
and the Irreducibility
of Experience,"
of Meaning
American
Historical
Linguistic
and LaCapra's
to merge
and more
Review, 92 (1987), 879-907. On Poster's
attempts
poststructuralism
see Mark
conventional
and Postmodernity:
of history,
methods
Cultural History
Poster,
Disciplinary
and Challenges
Press,
(New York: Columbia
1997) and Dominick
Readings
University
LaCapra,
and Reading: Waiting
American Historical
for Crillon,"
100:3 (June 1995),
Review,
"History,
Language
in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University
and LaCapra,
799-828;
Press,
1989).
Soundings
6
In addition
to Pickering,
Lisa Duggan,
"Vive la difference:
see, for example,
Joan Scott's Historical
Voice Literary Supplement January-February
"Postmodernism,
1989), 37; Paula M.L. Moya,
Imperatives,"
and the Politics
in Reclaiming
of Identity,"
Realism,
Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament
of
and Michael
R. Hames-Garcia
ed. Paula M.L. Moya
of California
(Berkeley: University
into Discourse:
The Reification
Press, 2000), 67-101; Bryan D. Palmer, Descent
of Language and the Writing
and John H. Zammito,
Press,
1990), 78-86,172-186;
of Social History
(Philadelphia:
Temple University
in Intellectual
The Debate
in
and LaCapra,"
Scott, Toews,
among
"Experience:"
"Reading
History
Postmodernism,
Reclaiming
International
279-311.
Scott
identity,
Labor and Working-Class
replied
History,
to some
of her
32 (Fall 1987),
early
39-45.
critics
in "A Reply
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
to Criticism,"
DOING THINGS /
571
of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as presented
in the "embodied
psychology
realism" of their general approach to cognition, culture, and truth, provides
a better
foundation
for historians
interested in establishing
the usefulness
and legitimacy of
in their work. Further, Lakoff and Johnson's philosophical
realism, based in
experience
the empirical work of cognitive science, is consonant with the hermeneutic
empiricism
of much history writing.
It also counters
the validity
of many
of the working
of poststructuralist
the
history, including those of Joan Scott. Overall,
of
embodied
realism
extends
the
cognitive psychology
potential explanatory power of
sense
to
historians
make
of
situations.7
performance
past performance
assumptions
following essay is in three parts. First, Iwill outline Scott's poststructuralist
objections to "experience" and the attempts of several historians to rescue the term for
Iwill present a brief overview
historical use. Next,
of "embodied
realism" focused
on
in
as
the
which
the
Lakoff
and Johnson
unconscious,"
ways
primarily
"cognitive
term it, structures experience. This section culminates
in a discussion
of Lakoff and
The
Johnson's major challenge to theatre studies: the need to rethink conventional notions
of aesthetics and rhetoric. In the longest section of the essay, Imove
from largely
concerns
to
to
demonstrate
the
usefulness
of Lakoff
epistemological
methodological
and Johnson's cognitive science by deploying
their ideas about spatiality, projection,
a
and subjectivity to understand
situated stage production.
In particular, I
historically
will suggest how embodied
realism can help the historian to analyze how cold war
American
in New York may have constructed meanings
audiences
the
during
A
of
Rain
in
1955.
I
will
As
Lakoff
and
the
show,
Johnson open
Hatful of
production
to understand
the brain as the material
site where ecology and
way for historians
culture join to shape history and performance.
I
In Gender and the Politics
in Critical Inquiry (1991),
Political (1992), Joan Scott
ence as the foundation of
When
ofHistory (1988), "The Evidence of Experience," published
and "Experience,"
in Feminists Theorize the
anthologized
attacked historians
for relying on na?ve notions of experi
their historical explanations:
experience is taken as the origin of knowledge,
(the person
of evidence
experience,
one's vision
who
had
on which
about
how
or the historian
the experience
recounts
it) becomes
about
the constructed
Questions
as different
in the first
constituted
place,
is built.
explanation
subjects
is structured?about
the vision of the individual subject
who
are
language
or discourse
in
history?are
the bedrock
nature
about
of
how
left aside.8
Individual experience cannot be a "bedrock of evidence"
for historical writing,
says
Scott, because the raw stuff of human action and perception only becomes experience
of systems of representation,
such as visual signs and spoken
through the mediation
7
See Lakoff
and
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
to Western
and Its Challenge
Johnson's
Philosophy
Basic Books,
The Body in theMind:
The Bodily Basis of
1999). Also, Mark
Johnson,
and Reason
of Chicago
to the
relevant
Press,
Meaning,
Imagination,
1987). Also
(Chicago: University
are
cultural
functions
of cognitive
W. Gibbs,
The Poetics
metaphors
Raymond
of Mind:
Figurative
and Understanding
Press,
Thought, Language,
Steen,
1994); Gerald
(Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
in Literature: An Empirical
and New
York: Longman,
(London
Understanding
Metaphor
Approach
1994);
and Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors
We Live By (Chicago:
of Chicago
Press,
1980).
University
8
of Experience,"
777.
Scott, "The Evidence
Thought
(New
York:
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572
/
language.
Bruce McConachie
Because
"discourses
position
subjects
and
their
produce
it
experiences,"
but subjects who are constituted
have experiences,
through
to systems
in
of
is
and hence
subordinate
experience."9
Experience
grounded
as
can
If
be
subsumed
within
Scott
the
discourse,
claims,
experience
representation.
has
cognitive science of Lakoff and Johnson (and of all other cognitive psychologists)
little to offer theatre studies. At stake for theatre scholars in the arguments over Scott's
is "not individuals
who
is not just the usefulness
of cognitive
however,
in
the
field.
basis
all
truth
claims
for
epistemelogical
position,
psychology,
but
the
use of semiotics
Like many poststructuralists,
Scott turns to Derrida's deconstructive
to understand how discourse creates difference and meaning,
and, consequently, helps
to Gender and the Politics of History,
to shape historical
inequities. In her introduction
states:
she
or
on?contains?repressed
negated
conceal
the
of
oppositions
heterogeneity
as
are
interdependent.
presented
oppositional
of
the reversal
introduction
of new
oppositions,
concept
Any unitary
not unified_Fixed
which
involve
terms
the
rests
to challenge
the natural
terms,
expose
repressed
and their
and to expose
their interdependence
as "deconstruction,"
theorized
by Jacques Derrida
(though
never
definitively
or
totally)
status
of
and so is unstable,
material
to
the extent
either category,
. . .Contests
about meaning
to
the attempt
hierarchies,
dichotomous
pairs,
kind
of analysis,
instability.
to
it
makes
study
systematically
possible
that
the conflictual
processes
meanings.10
produce
seemingly
This
internal
"in trying to
to use the methods
of poststructuralism
Scott advises historians
the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which
understand
interested in the
She is particularly
identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced-"n
on
women
its
and
material
effects
their
lives. Scott
discourse
of
through
othering
concludes her 1991 essay with the statement: "Subjects are constituted discursively,
Thus
and experience
is a linguistic
event-[Consequently,]
language
is the site of history's
enactment."12
For anyone familiar with the insights of Michel Foucault, Scott's pronouncements
are not surprising. Despite
the materialism
of some of his work, Foucault emphasized
the power that circulated through systems of rules and procedures and, consequently,
shaped whole areas of historical experience. Like Scott, Foucault may be criticized for
a kind of linguistic idealism inwhich
system
language itself becomes an autonomous
in the material
forces of history. And for Scott, as for Foucault, questions
ungrounded
are largely irrelevant
of discourse
outside the conventional workings
of experience
are
the primary organiz
and their epistemic shifts
because systems of representation
ers of history.13 On the other hand, practitioners
of Foucauldian
history need not
Joseph Roach, for
premises.
separate their work entirely from realist and materialist
trace
in Cities of the Dead
the discursive
of performance
example, whose genealogies
9
Ibid., 779.
10
7.
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History,
11
793.
of Experience,"
Scott, "The Evidence
12
Ibid.
13
1972-1977
ed. Colin
and Other Writings,
Selected Interviews
See Michel
Foucault,
Power/Knowledge:
see
221-230.
Scott
to
of
Harvester
Gordon
Foucault,
Also,
Press,
1980).
linking
Pickering's
(Brighton:
14
See Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic
1996). For a recent
(New York: Columbia,
Performance
for epistemological
and
in theatre studies of a history
that relies on Scott's poststructuralism
example
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DOING THINGS /
573
in
institutional
of racism over time, has been singularly
effective
practices
In
her
1988
discursive
and
materialist
Scott
recommends
book,
merging
approaches.14
a similar genealogical
historical constructions
of gender.
approach for understanding
Her 1991 essay, however, pushes the idealist side of Foucault to argue that language,
by itself, constitutes experience and hence makes history.
and
Not surprisingly, Marxists
and other materialists were among the first to challenge
in his
Scott's linguistic idealism. Their position had been prepared by N. Garnham
1983 article insisting on "the irreducible material determinants
of the social process of
took Scott to task for
symbolic
Bryan D. Palmer,
exchange."15 Another Marxist,
a
in
of
one-sided
reification
of language and
the
"following
logic
poststructuralism
of structurally embedded
historical
factors that,
stubborn refusal of the multitude
while related to discourse, are indeed separable."16 As Palmer points out, Scott, even as
she recognizes (with Derrida) that such Saussurian dualities as strong/weak,
rational/
that populate historical texts and shape definitions
emotional, and material/spiritual
of gender are inherently unstable and immaterial, nonetheless
gives them the caus
ative power of material
forces in her narratives. Although
Palmer utterly rejects this
of experience.
position, he has little to offer as an alternative to Scott's understanding
on
about
material
the
determinants
assumptions
non-experiential
Building primarily
that human experience plays a minor part in historical
of history, Palmer believes
dynamics.
John Zammito, on the other hand, sees experience as central in construct
to Scott's poststructuralist
historical
Zammito bases his opposition
ing
explanations.
on
is concerned that the
the
realism
of
project
Satya Mohanty.17 Mohanty
postpositivist
is annulling the possibility of finding common
relativism preached by postmodernism
and
ground on which genuine dialogue among scholars may occur. Contra Mohanty
is a dangerous mirage.
based on experience
Zammito, Scott asserts that commonality
to Scott, historians who
to know
look to their own experience
the
According
a
in
kind
to
of
of
that
historical
Others
them
claim
allows
engage
experience
solipsism
Historian
objectivity and rhetorical power. The concept of experience, she believes, "provides an
that can be known apart from their own role as meaning makers
object for historians
and it then guarantees not only the objectivity of their knowledge,
but their ability to
its
others
of
From
Scott's
Nietzschean
importance."18
point of view, the
persuade
consensus of a scholarly community
about the relative truth of an historical asser
consensus necessarily
tion?a
based on broadly shared experience?could
only come
about by repressing
conflicting
points
of view.
and Zammito
the notion that systems of discourse
Mohanty
challenge
involving
create experience and subject positions
difference necessarily
that cannot be changed.
see Elizabeth
Reitz Mullenix,
the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum
guidance,
Wearing
York:
St.
of
on the
Martin's
review
the Breeches, which
focuses
Press,
2000). My
Stage (New
Wearing
of Scott's premises
is formcoming
in American Historical Review.
for historical
shortcomings
explanation,
a
"Towards
of Cultural Materialism,"
33:3 (1983).
15Garnham,
Journal of Communication
Theory
16
into Discourse,
179.
Palmer, Descent
17
See Satya P. Mohanty,
Press,
(Ithaca: Cornell
Literary Theory and the Claims of History
University
"The Epistemic
of Cultural
Status
On
Beloved and the Postcolonial
1997) and Mohanty,
Identity:
methodological
Condition,"
18
Scott,
in Reclaiming
"Experience,"
Identity,
32.
29-66.
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574
Bruce McConachie
/
to specify, is the Other?" asks Mohanty.19
"Just how other, we need to force ourselves
on
Kuhnian
rebuttal
of
Donald
Davidson's
elevates the
relativism,20 Mohanty
Drawing
to
to arrive
and
of
humans
evaluate
and
hence
actions,
purposes,
experiences
capacity
at contingent positions of cross-cultural
Human
in
other
words,
agency,
commonality.
new
create
old
and
the
distances
ones,
may modify
among
experiences
closing
and even facilitating a kind of objectivity
among scholars.
an
one?a
new
be
humanism
attractive
Mohanty's position may
beyond the essentialisms
is it credible? Perhaps human
and grand claims to objectivity of the old version?but
in discourse, but historians
will and reason can modify
embedded
subject positions
and others looking for empirical proof of such a claim have a right to be skeptical.
experiential
differences
and Zammito,
past to
Mohanty
Pickering draws on the historiographical
to discourse.
In addition to
reduction of experience
challenge Scott's poststructuralist
and empirical definitions
in the work of
of experience
outlining useful hermeneutic
and Anthony Giddens on the
and others, he invokes E.P. Thompson
Dilthey, Williams,
to Pickering,
of meaning. According
importance of historical context in the production
is individual and not "collec
Scott makes
the mistake
of assuming
that experience
of culture
tive,"21 as he asserts. States Pickering, "It is the socially organised production
Unlike
not the decoding of cultural texts. Any act of signification
that needs to be emphasized,
or representation
is always embedded
in the social fields in which
it is made and
in ways which
involve cultural practices at work upon as well as within
assimilated,
to
is willing
the social relations in which
they occur."22 From this position, Pickering
meet Scott halfway on the importance of language. He recognizes, he says, "that the
intersects pivotally with language, for how else can we
realisation of such experiences
have any mutual
of
them [i.e., experiences]?"23
recognition
are not ontologically
for
systems of representation
prior to experience
he
is
communi
"is
what
out'
the
into,
says,
experience
Pickering. Language,
'pressed
cative forms inwhich they attain cultural meanings."24 The notion that discourse gives
substance called experience, as a factory mold might shape
form to some amorphous
Nonetheless,
molten
plastic
or
steel,
is
an
intriguing
one
reverses
and
Scott's
assumption
that
that various
asserting
experience
only exists after discourse has shaped it. Despite
this primal, prelinguistic
forces of historical context constitute
experience, however,
can arrive at no clear understanding
of what
this amorphous
substance
Pickering
can
the
He
view
historian
consti
that
the
demonstrate
be.
cites
Wolff's
Janet
might
nature of experience
in the process
of its exploration"25
through normal
and
methods
enhanced
theoretical
hermeneutical
insights. This may
empirical
by
a
seem commonsensical
it
into
that
leaves
enough, except
"experience" as woolsack
about historical context she or he
the historian can stuff whatever
conclusions
which
tuted
might
arrive at. What
19
In Zammito,
20
See Donald
Interpretation
21
Pickering,
22
Ibid., 229.
23
Ibid., 228.
if prelinguistic
experience
is not amorphous
303.
"Reading
'Experience',"
"On the Very
Idea of a Conceptual
Davidson,
Press,
1984), 183-98.
(Oxford: Clarendon
222.
History,
Scheme,"
in Inquiries
24Ibid.
^Ibid.,
at all, however?
242.
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Into Truth
and
DOING THINGS /
575
What if structures mostly hard-wired
in the mind shape experience before it emerges
as language? If these structures are
the same for all people in all historical
generally
can
the
historian
valid
reach
conclusions
about the experiences of humans in
periods,
the past.
Each of these objections to Scott's poststructuralism
raises important questions
for
the historian, but none adequately addresses the challenges posed by her understand
ing of discourse and experience. Following Palmer, the historian is right to ask about
the general significance
of experience, however
it might be defined,
in explaining
For some kinds of history?explorations
historical dynamics.
of demographic
shifts
and changing modes
of economic production
or, in performance
history, investiga
tions of box office receipts and attendance fluctuations?the
subjective side of human
to play an important role in the historian's
is unlikely
construction
of
experience
causation and explanation.
But how can the historian know when subjective experi
ence might be relatively unimportant
in crafting history? Zammito, following Mohanty,
raises the question of experience constituting
some common ground that all humans
If this were so, human experience might
might share, despite their lived differences.
shared, even "objective" knowledge
provide for the possibility of widely
(assuming an
realist
definition
of
would
ask
Zammito,
epistemologically
objectivity). Pickering
rightly
however, about the formative influence of historical context in shaping this collective
of common ground could survive it.
experience and whether Mohanty's
assumption
force
the
of how humans process
Finally, Pickering's
insights
ontological
question
their interactions with the world and come to understand
them as "experiences": does
or are there prelinguistic
discourse
in the mind
structures
that
shape experience
constitute
all experience,
including
discourse?
"There is no social experience apart from people's perception
most of her critics would agree.26 Apart from behaviorist models
history,
trying to explain what people
they were
thought
of it," states Scott and
of human action and
doing often plays a
their experiences. And it is especially
significant role in understanding
important for
narratives of performance
situated
history which seek to understand why historically
and audiences made
the choices they did. Perhaps
the
playwrights,
performers,
crucial initial question, then, is the nature of perception. Does the way inwhich
people
perceive themselves and the world allow for the common ground of experience hoped
for by Mohanty? Might
the workings
of perception
and the mind
facilitate enough
to
override
the fracturings of perceived
from
commonality
experiences
resulting
historical context? And how, finally, might perception and
cognition shape, even help
to constitute what historians and others may
to
logically and empirically understand
be human experience?
II
how human beings perceive
Understanding
ences is the
of
goal
cognitive science. A growing
26
Scott,
distinguish
conscious
we
shall
the world
number
40. The exceptions
to her position
"Experience,"
between
and behavior,
experience
perceived
If perception
were mostly
conscious,
perception.
see, it is not.
and construct their experi
of humanists have been using
are Palmer
and
which
them
Lakoff
for
and
other Marxist
is largely
Johnson would
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
critics who
unlighted
by
agree; but, as
576
BruceMcConachie
/
of cognitive
science to open up their disciplines
to new modes
of
and
In
film
Simons
narrative
studies, Jan
investigation
explanation.
deploys
theory
derived
to describe and analyze Dutch political
from Lakoff and Johnson's work
in the Cognitive Semiotics of Film, crafts a
campaign films. Similarly, Warren Buckland,
the
insights
of film to understand
"cognitive semantics"
hension.27 Buckland's
darkened auditorium
the normative processes of film compre
on
which
viewers' relation to the film screen in a
focuses
study,
as a projection of the cognitive
schema of "containment,"
has
for
relevance
in
historians
interested
the
effects
of
particular
performance
cognitive
the proscenium
arch in realistic and expressionistic
productions.
A recent overview by Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson,
"Literary Studies
and Cognitive
Science: Toward a New
summarizes
the current
Interdisciplinarity,"
in the field of literature. As in film studies, most
influence of cognitive psychology
scholars applying
the insights of cognitive
science to texts have been theorists and
several of the literary studies discussed by Crane
critics, not historians. Nonetheless,
uses for performance
and Richards
have suggestive
in Oral
historians. Memory
Traditions by David Rubin (1995), for example, uses cognitive science to
analyze how
oral
new
His
the
for
historical
memory
poetry.
shapes
suggests
synthesis
potential
into
oral
meant
for
the
to
from
Eliot.
poetry
insights
stage,
Aeschylus
Cognitive
science helps Ellen Spolsky's Gaps inNature (1993) account for creative innovation and
in the uses of language. Her work, which suggests a biological basis
gender differences
for ?criture feminine, may help historians
to distinguish more carefully between male
and female actors as well as writers.
Several narratologists,
including Marie-Laure
and
Narrative
Worlds,
(Possible
Ryan
Artificial Intelligence,
Theory, 1991) and Raymond
Gibbs (The Poetics ofMind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding,
1994), have
used cognitive
science to challenge old assumptions
about narrative
structure and
about the ubiquity of narrative
open up new understanding
imagining. Historians
in rescuing narrative history for public use may find confirmation
interested
and
in
such
studies.
the
books
and
articles
of
Mark
who
has
Turner,
insight
Finally,
collaborated with cognitive scientist George Lakoff, delineate a "cognitive
rhetoric"
as literary experience
as well
relates modes
of historical
which
to foundational
sch?mas and metaphors
of cognition. Turner, who has called for the reconstitution
of
to
no
studies
to
would
doubt
invite
historians
science,
incorporate cognitive
literary
same
their
the
lines.28
reconfigure
discipline
along
27
See
Jan Simons,
Film,
and Conceptual
Language,
Academisch
Proefschrift,
(Amsterdam:
Semiotics
Cognitive
of Film (Cambridge:
28
Crane and Alan
See Mary Thomas
New
Mosaic
University
Cambridge
Richardson,
32:2
Structures:
Film in the Age of Cognitivism
Thinking
of Amsterdam,
The
Buckland,
1995) and Warren
Press, 2000), 39-51.
University
and Cognitive
Science:
"Literary Studies
summarize
123-40. Crane and Richardson
a
Toward
C.
David
(June 1999),
Interdisciplinarity,"
in Oral Tradition: The
Rubin, Memory
(New
Cognitive Psychology
of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out
Rhymes
York: Oxford
in Nature:
and the
Press,
1995); Ellen Spolsky,
University
Gaps
Literary
Interpretation
SUNY University
Modular Mind
Press,
1993); Marie-Laure
(Albany:
J?yan, Possible Worlds, Artificial
and Narrative
IN: Indiana University
Press,
1991); and about twenty
Intelligence,
Theory (Bloomington,
other
books
see More
1996),
Press,
1989), written
Gap: Where.
In addition
and articles.
Press,
Cognitive
toMark
The Literary Mind
(New York: Oxford
Poetic Metaphor
(Chicago: University
Science
and Literary
"Cognitive
Theory,"
Turner's
than Cool Reason: A Field Guideto
with
George
Science Meets
Lakoff,
Literary
and
Criticism,
special
issue
of Stanford
Humanities
University
of Chicago
Bridging
Review,
the
4:1
(1994), 110-12; and ReadingMinds: The Study of English in theAge of Cognitive Science (Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press,
1991).
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DOING THINGS /
577
I am not
to urge that all performance
reconstruct
historians
prepared
to give it a
within
of
I
the
want
do
performance
parameters
history
cognitive science,
a
in
that
direction.29
scientists
what
call
investigate
nudge
Cognitive
"cognitive
they
unconscious"
that shapes all perception. As Lakoff and Johnson explain,
While
thought
scientists
cognitive
a serious
ness
an
enormous
iceberg.
is 95 percent
thought
underestimate.
below
the 95 percent
Moreover,
and structures
The
all conscious
shapes
thought....
Conscious,
structured.
intricately
is the tip of
that unconscious
It includes
not
only
all of our
It is
rule of thumb
among
that may
be
thought?and
aware
the surface
of conscious
the
of all
cognitive
automatic
is vast
unconscious
cognitive
operations,
and
but
also all of our implicit knowledge. All of our knowledge and beliefs are framed in terms of
a
that resides mostly
system
functions
like a 'hidden
system
. . .It constitutes
of our experience.
conceptual
conceptual
aspects
in the
unconscious.
Our unconscious
cognitive
that shapes
how we
conceptualize
common
unreflective
sense.30
hand'
our
all
The cognitive unconscious
informs all systems of language and repre
consequently
sentation. Like Freudian and Lacanian theory, but with better empirical credentials
than either, cognitive science asserts that cognition structures all experience,
including
the experience
of discourse. As we will see, however,
this insight does not simply
collapse all of history and culture into cognitive psychology.
out one of the most
Among
cognitive scientists, Lakoff and Johnson have worked
and sophisticated
of
the
of the "cognitive
systematic
understandings
implications
turn" on other forms of knowledge,
including poststructuralism.
They and others
to validate
that the human mind works
have discovered
the truth of perceptions
From a traditional historical ancl philosophical
primarily through metaphors.
point of
a
to
truth.
In
Cartesian
and
view, of course, metaphors
rpad
poor
provide
empiricist
tliinking, metaphorical
language deviates from the language of verifiable representa
are to have any validity
tion. Conventionally,
ifmetaphors
beyond poetic evocation or
rhetorical flourish, they must express preexisting
similarities between phenomena.
In
a
to
it
matter
of
not
truth.
short, the traditional notion of metaphor
words,
relegates
on thirty years of experiments
in cognitive psychology
and a desire to
Drawing
construct
Lakoff and Johnson completely
empirically
responsible philosophy,
reject
the conventional
view of metaphor
in their philosophy
of "embodied
realism." Their
that all thinking relies on metaphor;
demonstrate
scientific and human
investigations
istic truth is impossible without
it.
Lakoff
and Johnson's embodied
realism holds that mental
concepts arise, funda
from
the
the
in
of
As
the
world.
"neural
mentally,
experience
body
beings," humans
must make meaning
within
certain "basic-level,"
''spatial relations," and "bodily
action" sch?mas, plus other concepts resulting from the interplay of experience
and
in
brain.
out
the
flesh
the
of
skeletal
patternings
"Primary metaphors"
possibilities
29
I have
two previous
the field before
We Act By:5
essays,
Actually,
nudged
through
"Metaphors
and
Historical
Kinesthetics,
Structures,"
Journal of Dramatic
Cognitive
psychology,
Theory and Criticism
8 (Spring
and
Performance
1993), 25-45
"Approaching
History
Through
Cognitive
Psychology,"
10 (1994), 113-22. Also working
in this emerging
of performance
and
studies
Assaph
interdiscipline
are
science
in the Theatre: A
of the Creation
"The Process
of Meaning
Baluch,
cognitive
Wojciech
(PhD Diss,
Cognitive
Approach"
Jagiellonian
University,
dance at the University
of California,
Riverside.
30
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy
in the Flesh, 13.
2000),
and
Jeff Friedman,
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a PhD
student
in
578
Bruce McConachie
/
sch?mas. Social stereotypes, prototypical
many of these foundational
examples, and
extend basic-level
other modes of categorizing
concepts. Regarding
spatial relations
the
for
which
learn at an early
humans
instance,
schema,
concepts,
"source-path-goal"
a
an
numerous
to
from
end
age by crawling
point, undergirds
starting point
a
that organize certain events in our lives as narratives with a beginning,
metaphors
a
an
and
action
end.
for
"Balance,"
middle,
schema, provides many metaphors
bodily
are
mental
and public justice. These primary metaphors
health, ethical behavior,
an
sense
create
in
two
the
that
"creative,"
they
phenomena
analogy linking
through
of an inherent, objective
they do not rely on the recognition
similarity;
similarity
between
two phenomena?a
realisms) assumes
realism (like other philo
recognition which embodied
to
be
Because
these and numerous
sophical
humanly
impossible.
to sensorimotor phenomena, most
link everyday experience
other primary metaphors
in the
conceptual
thinking cannot occur without metaphors.
Metaphors
originating
structure
unconscious
the
human
all
of
cognitive
perception
experience.
The foundational
sch?mas and primary metaphors
identified by Lakoff and Johnson
as
as
content
to
well
form
human
Each
of their concepts, together
provide
thinking.
with
their associated metaphors,
constrains
the kinds of meanings
that can follow
from it. The bodily action concept of "counterforce,"
for example, entails images that
involve a head-on meeting
of material
forces. This schema helps to organize our
of ice hockey, historical revolutions,
perceptions
not be made to fit the content usually organized
as
"full-empty"
and
and similar phenomena,
but it could
action
other
concepts, such
by
bodily
"iteration."
to Lakoff and Johnson, these submerged sch?mas and their metaphorical
According
extensions are nearly universal to human experience: "Much of a person's conceptual
across languages and cultures. Our concep
system is either universal or widespread
tual systems are not totally relative and not merely amatter of historical contingency,
even
though a degree of conceptual
relativity does exist and even though historical
matter
does
realism, cultural relativity
very much."31 Within embodied
contingency
of experience occur in two ways. Lakoff and Johnson note that
and the historicity
cultures typically differ in their "worldviews,"
which
they define as a "consistent
over one or more
and
of foundational
constellation"
concepts
primary metaphors
cultural domains, such as politics, morality, psychology,
etc."32 Certain basic sch?mas
in other words, organize significant areas of a culture. Secondly, new
and metaphors,
and other conceptual blends" can arise that facilitate shifts in
"complex metaphors
and
"time ismoney,"
historical
for instance,
thinking
change.33 The complex metaphor
to
structure
in
rise
West?a
the
of
the
helped
capitalism
metaphor
largely absent from
time.
cultures with less quantifiable
of
conceptions
are built on transhistorical,
for Lakoff and Johnson, all mental operations
sources.
not
That
transcendental,
is,
cognition emerges from every individual's
though
structures
with
the
all historical cultures, but it is not a
material
world
and
experience
some
nature.
of
immaterial
human
The same might be said of such
ahistorical,
part
as
and
that can be shown to derive from
narrative,
concepts
gender,
hierarchy?terms
Hence,
31
32
33
Ibid.,
6.
Ibid.,
511.
Ibid.,
97.
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DOING THINGS /
579
sch?mas, and which are also, consequently,
categories and foundational
to all human cultures. Human biology and the material world are logically
universal
example above, for
prior to cognition for Lakoff and Johnson. In the source-path-goal
some
and the pull of
of
human
must
interaction
have
babies
example,
experience
state
"At
to
to
of
Lakoff and
the
heart
embodied
learn
crawl.
realism,"
gravity
an
an
our
in
environment
series of
with
"is
Johnson,
ongoing
physical engagement
interactions."34 Thus they reject a strict subject-object dichotomy which results either in
an epistemology
relativism. Their phi
of disembodied
objectivity or intersubjective
basic-level
losophy has affinities with
Wittgenstein.
the realism of John Dewey,
Hilary
Putnam,
and Ludwig
realism views several of the assertions of post
and Johnson's embodied
as "empirically incorrect."35 Like other philosophical
realisms, embodied
realism does not claim a God's eye notion of objectivity, but it does reject the anti
Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive semantics also
foundationalism
of poststructuralism.
counters a claim of Saussurian
rests, that the
semiotics, upon which deconstruction
is
and
relation between
arbitrary. Rather, they state,
completely
signifiers
signifieds
most language "is neither completely arbitrary nor completely predictable, but rather
Lakoff
structuralism
their morphemes,
to some degree."36 That is, the parts of most words,
Lakoff and Johnson give as an
of the word as a whole.
the meaning
of the parts of "refrigerator" were
example the word "refrigerator." If the meanings
mean
that makes things cold again," an
would
the
word
added together,
"something
nor
is
that
neither
predictable but can be said to be
arbitrary
approximate meaning
'motivated'
"motivate"
of the noun (464). They also dispute Derrida's notion of
by the morphemes
in
doctrine that signs come in oppositional
Saussure?the
"?iff?rance," likewise based
to
define one sign in terms of its opposite
force interpreters
pairs which consequently
even though any final designation
of meaning
is
black/white),
(e.g., male/female,
in
is
the
"there
to
semantics
of
the
science,
nothing
cognitive
impossible/According
motivated
world or people that fixes these interpretations"
(466). Lakoff and Johnson demon
strate that interpreters of signs have many more choices than the oppositional
pairings
that Saussure and Derrida assume, including ironic reversals of apparently opposite
the historical and
meanings.
Finally, as already noted, Lakoff and Johnson dispute
across
cultures and
cultural relativism of poststructuralism.
systems
Representational
historical
time
periods
historians may
because certain
and
perception
translate
spatial
are
not
incommensurable,
they
assert.
Anthropologists
and
and interpret among different cultures and time periods
to human
relation and bodily action concepts are universal
experience.37
the major
embodied
realism resolves
problems
epistemological
Consequently,
to
continue
historians
eager
facing
using "experience" for their historical explanations
use
and historiographical
justifications. Even Bryan Palmer, who has little historical
34
Ibid.,
90.
35
Ibid., 464.
36
Ibid.
37
F. Elizabeth
for a Materialist
Studies: Outlines
and Early Modern
System,
a
to present
science
[1998], 311^43), uses cognitive
critique
compelling
of
not
abandon
all of the claims
and
but does
ahistoricism,
Her article, as she states, "demonstrate^]
how a cognitive-based
poststructuralism
poststructuralism.
better enables us to model
and cultural exchange"
of material
the vision of a materialist
dialectic
(313).
Linguistics,"
of Derrida's
Hart,
in her
"Matter,
6.3
(Configurations,
latent
formalism
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580
/
BruceMcConachie
basis of Lakoff and Johnson's
for subjective experience, could applaud the materialist
a solid
realism. For Zammito
and Mohanty,
embodied
realism provides
embodied
Its
science
for
much
of
their
foundation
realism.
postpositivist
cognitive
empirical
is constituted
for the
and provides
demonstrates
how cross-cultural
commonality
in
of
universals
of
of
the
realist
based
the
possibility
scholarly objectivity
variety
occur
at
Because
the
unconscious
embodied
these
universals
level,
experience.
claims for human
agency. With
optimistic
they do modify Mohanty's
with
human
interaction
environment
that
the
shapes the neural
ecology?specifically
of
the
and
for
Lakoff
Johnson, embodied
development
brain?preceding
history
realism also limits the determining
effects of historical context that concern Pickering.
however,
the insights of Pickering and of Lakoff and Johnson, it appears that
as occurring at two levels, the cognitive and the
experience might best be understood
historical. The universals of the cognitive
level always shape how people experience
the
their lives in history but because of the many possibilities
of cognitive experience,
never
it
it
level.
In
determines
the
historical
level,
constrains,
effect,
cognitive
though
in their
to incorporate
the cognitive
unconscious
for historians
may be possible
of experience and context in much
the same way that some historians
explanations
as a foundation
have used a Freudian or Lacanian unconscious
for their history
To synthesize
writing. To paraphrase Marx, people, not texts, make history,
it in ecologies and with brains of their own choosing.
To understand
though
they never make
the historical experience of
the cognitive
level has constrained
realism
that
the
requires
theatregoing,
performance historian rejoin theatri
In
distinc
cal rhetoric and aesthetic style.
conventional
theory, the rhetoric/aesthetic
a
assumes
tion
radical dichotomy
between
subjects and objectively
experiencing
knowable
Lakoff and Johnson do not comment directly on this
objects. Although
of the errors of "disembodied
analytical separation in theatre studies, their discussion
how
embodied
scientific
"create[s]
and
realism" is relevant to it. This disembodied
way of doing science, they state,
an unbridgeable
chasm between
ontological
'objects' which are 'out there'
subjectivity,
which
is
'in here.'"
They
continue:
"Once
the
separation
is made,
there are only two possible, equally erroneous, conceptions
of objectivity: Objectivity
is either given by the 'things themselves'
(the objects) or by the intersubjective
structures of consciousness
shared by all people
(the subjects)."38 As Lakoff and
most aesthetic and rhetorical
what
"disembodied
like
realism,"
Johnson point out,
or
as
is
"misses
embodied,
that,
imaginative creatures, we never were separated
theory,
in theatrical terms, the "response" of
divorced from reality in thefirst place"39 Restated
the audience was never separated or divorced
from the "reality" on stage at all.
can
no
about the formal proper
humans
Consequently,
gain
objective understanding
ties of theatrical objects on the stage or of a separable, discrete response to them from
members
of the audience. The relationship
connecting
events on the stage to the audience must be understood
to the stage and
spectators
as a single phenomenon.
that makes
mechanism
science provides
Cognitive
insight into the psychological
I
limit
the
in
will
this relationship
all
following
possible
performances.
Although
to dramatic theatre for the sake of clarity and concision,
itwill be evident
discussion
that this mechanism
^Lakoff
39
Ibid.,
and Johnson,
93. Emphasis
engages
Philosophy
in original.
"spectators" with
in the Flesh,
"actors"
in all modes
93.
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of performance.
DOING THINGS /
581
on experiments
the
from several researchers, Lakoff and Johnson discuss
means
in
themselves
with
others
humans
which
imaginatively
identify
primary
by
in
to
imitate
is
another
that
learned
if"
situations.
The
"as
fictitious,
person
ability
as
of
the
the
involves imagining oneself
childhood
other?metaphori
inhabiting
body
cally projecting the self onto someone else. This, of course, is the basis of theatre, for
both actors and spectators, and it occurs in two primary ways: advisory projection and
state Lakoff and Johnson,
"I am
In advisory
projection,
projection.
empathetic
so
with
In the
I
onto
life
values.
that
values
my
you
experience your
projecting my
am
I
but
with
values
other type, empathetic projection,
your
your life,
experiencing
Drawing
projected onto my subjective experience."40 In theatrical terms, both kinds of projec
the bodies of actors (and potentially
tion involve spectators imaginatively
occupying
The difference involves "values," one's own or another's.
others) in the performance.
of projection are simple enough, the results are often quite
the mechanics
of
of drama involve the audience in numerous moments
Most
complex.
performances
a distinction
that
is
when
the
further
and
complicated
advisory
empathetic projection,
on
spectator's values are nearly identical with the values of the figure identified with
the stage. And who or what is this figure? In realist plays, inwhich the presence of the
actor mostly
"becomes" a fictitious character for the audience, spectators will prima
themselves
rily imagine
projecting their subjectivity onto the body of the "character."
In some modes of theatre that encourage
the audience to separate the actor from the
and Pirandello's
of
Brecht's
character, however?productions
plays are obvious
While
examples?
characters,
advisory
spectators may mix their projections between actors and characters. But
in
for complexity
of course, have no bodies without
actors; the possibilities
and empathetic projection multiply.
in Lakoff and Johnson's philosophy
The approach to theatrical rhetoric embedded
comes closest to the phenomenological
in Theatre and Everyday
materialism
advocated
An
and
The
Fate
the
Alan
Read
Ethics
of
Object: From Modern
of Performance by
Life:
to
in
and
Erickson.41
Read locates
Postmodern
Art,
Performance,
Poetry by Jon
Object
Sign
the process of theatre in the interplay of spectating and performing bodies. "Theatre is
an expressive practice that involves an audience through the medium
of images at the
center of which
is the human body," he states.42 Theatre and Everyday Life draws on
theatre
history
to
remind
readers
that
actors
and
spectators
shared
the
same
audito
rium light until very recently, for example. For Read, the dynamic of interacting bodies
in the same space continues to be a prerequisite
for any viable definition of theatrical
performance.
the conventional
Erickson's The Fate of the Object leaves unquestioned
Although
of
rhetoric
and
the author's
conventional
aesthetics,
subject/object
dichotomy
an
an
out
is
useful
for
of
actor's "presence"
teasing
understanding
implicit theatrical
can
never
rhetoric within embodied
realism. Actors, says Erickson,
fully become nor
^Ibid.,
41
Alan
281.
Theatre and Everyday Life (London: Routledge,
The Fate of the
1993) and Jon Erickson,
MI: University
and
of Michigan
Lakoff
Press,
(Ann Arbor,
1995). Significantly,
Johnson
that certain
and materialism
coincide
embodied
of phenomenology
recognize
insights
closely with
or
as "descriptive
in fact, refers
to his position
realism
Johnson,
(Philosophy
of the Flesh, 108-109).
(The Body in theMind,
xxxvii).
empirical
phenomenology"
42
Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 10.
Read,
Object
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582
BruceMcConachie
/
fully erase a spectator's perception of them as both corporal beings and signs of some
Other person; they are, consequently,
In
both bodies and characters, simultaneously.
fact, alleges Erickson, "the tension between the body as object and the body as sign gives
birth to an awareness of presence as the tension between basic corporal being and the
becoming of signification."43 Following Lakoff and Johnson, one might emend Erickson's
statement to note the gestalt nature of audience projection. That is, spectators project
themselves onto the "presence" of actors, a presence constituted both by the body of
in the performance.
the actor and by the actor's significance
This significance might
a
the
actor
from
of
Brechtian
the
range
persona
meaning
presents to the audience as
"herself" to the meaning
of a fully embodied male "character" portrayed by a.Method
actor. Hence,
onto the presence of an actor on
spectators project their subjectivity
In
the
into that
reads
his or her own values
stage.
spectator
advisory projection,
When
is
the
take
what
presence.
spectators
empathetic,
projection
they perceive are
the values
of that presence
and read them into their imaginative
experience
of it.
Projection onto the presence of an actor is the first step in the dynamics of dramatic
rhetoric and response on stage. Spectator projection of ametaphor binding these actor
is generally
characters together in a narrative
is a
the second. Narrative
imagining
human
As
of
Turner
theorist
Mark
foundational
part
cognition.
literary-cognitive
is a constant mental activity ... essential to human thought." The
notes, "storytelling
urge to narrate
numerous events
Rather
from
from the source-path-goal
proceeds
image schema and frames
in everyday life, from pouring a cup of coffee to imagining a journey.
than being optional or merely
literary, narrativity
"appears to be inseparable
our
evolutionary
past
and
our
necessary
personal
experience,"44
states
Turner.
to imagine stories prompts
to look for narrative
This human proclivity
theatregoers
links among the events on stage and connect them into cohesive series and wholes. As
with projections
onto the presence
of actors, the preferred
forms and genres of
narrative
and
cultures.
Hence different
often
vary widely
among periods
imagining
in
kinds of actor-characters
and specific stories about them have gained popularity
A
and
home
hero
his
had
relevance
historical
voyage
specific
periods.
wily
significant
for ancient Greeks listening to the story of Odysseus.
Londoners,
Eighteenth-century
on the other hand, eagerly watched
stories that separated true "men of sentiment"
from
false
ones.
If imaginative projection couples spectators to the presence
a
stories, how can the theorist-historian
forge new synthesis of
to account for this linkage between audiences and performers?
sense must now encompass not only how, but what audiences
onto and what stories were told through these actor-characters
in
of actors embedded
rhetoric and aesthetics
Rhetoric in this larger
projected themselves
on the stage. Plays will
be aesthetically
successful and rhetorically persuasive,
then, insofar as they encour
to adopt a phrase
to
onto
that
themselves
mattered,"
spectators
aged
"figures
project
from philosopher
involved, as well, in "stories that mattered."45
Judith Butler?figures
is
that persuasion
This sense of rhetoric approaches Kenneth Burke's understanding
43
in the original.
The Fate of the Object, 62. Emphasis
Erickson,
MMark Turner, The Literary Mind,
12, 25.
On the Discursive
Limits of "Sex" (New
45See Bodies That Matter:
York: Routledge,
1993). In general,
that humans
learn to perform
Butler
Johnson would
agree with
although
sexuality,
they
Much
would
the Lacanian
of her argument.
of this learning occurs at an earlier
premises
disagree with
that Freud and Lacan did not recognize.
age and happens
through processes
Lakoff
and
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DOING THINGS /
583
always preceded by identification; for rhetoric to work in the theatre, spectators must
be able to identify the story they are watching
and be able to identify with
it?in
Lakoff and Johnson's terms, to project themselves onto it.46Burke's sense of rhetoric
the notion of projection as identification
still
realism/but
gets us closer to embodied
involves subjects operating on objects. For the kind of interaction that Lakoff and
in effect, push back; the specific
the figures projected onto must,
Johnson envision,
content of the actor's presence;?-both
in the
and significance
his/her
corporality
narrative?must
both empower and constrain the kinds of identification
and projec
tion possible
for spectators in the theatre. Because of this interplay of projection and
in narrative,
rhetoric is always a local affair, difficult
to
actorly content embedded
in which
certain kinds of
about beyond
groups of theatrical events
generalize
audiences meet specific kinds of figures and experience particular stories on the stage.
As a result of this interaction,
certain kinds of plays fashion certain groups of
and
spectators
vice
versa.
Ill
in the theatre necessarily
The specificity of aesthetic and rhetorical dynamics
throws
and response, aesthetics and rhetoric, into the arena of history.
theatrical production
reassurance for most
realism offers epistemological
Nonetheless,
although embodied
its
for the practice of history, specifically
the
historians,
methodological
implications
writing of performance
history, are far from clear. As Lakoff and Johnson recognize,
humans use basic level categories,
thousands of
sch?mas, and primary metaphors
sense of their world. With
so many
times each day to make
category
types and
at play, how can the historian know which ones achieved more relative
metaphors
importance than others during a specific historical period? Luckily for the perform
ance historian> performances
tend to be "condensational
events" in which
certain
as
condensed
from cultural-historical
interaction,
primary metaphors,
emerge
amodern
football game, for example, involves the spectator in
significant.47 Watching
but among these the spatial relations concepts of
thousands of cognitive processes,
containment and part-whole
and the physical action concepts of compulsion,
iteration,
recur with enough regularity and
even
to
and counterforce
and
complexity
shape
call their experience
of the game. The
constitute what most
spectators would
the role of football in the context of
performance historian interested in understanding
of how
contemporary America might begin with this relatively formal understanding
the game is played and investigate other public events inwhich these spatial relations
and physical
action sch?mas predominate.
This method
that
begins by assuming
Lakoff and Johnson's terminology describes real interactions in the material world of
a performance
and then it uses empirical and hermeneutical
to find and
techniques
the
investigate
same
events
in similar
performances.
46
See A Rhetoric
insights
Cambridge
spectatorial
relevance."
3rd edition
of California
Press, 1969). Robert Wess's
ofMotives,
(Berkeley: University
in Kenneth
Burkean
Burke: Rhetoric,
Postmodernism
rhetoric,
Subjectivity,
(Cambridge:
relevant
in this
for
Press,
1996), are particularly
University
regard. Also
significant
is
Dan
and
what
Deirdre
Wilson
termed
have
"the
of
meaning-making
Sperber
principle
into
From
new
will process
audience
members
their point of view,
in the theatre
information
to
their
of
the
context
and if the processing
dramatic/theatrical
only
understanding
effort is small. See Relevance: Communication
and Cognition
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986).
47
The term "condensational
event"
is Roach's.
See his Cities of the Dead, 28-30,
et passim.
if it contributes
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584
BruceMcConachie
/
the historian will need some
Before getting very far in the above example, however,
sense
other
that are like football
in
the
of
many
public performances
help
making
a
to
or
football games and
scheme
relate
he
will
She
need
games.
larger explanatory
to the larger
contests
and
similar performances
corporate takeovers)
(say, political
its
At
this
and
American
cultures.
of
and
traditions
juncture, the
processes
history
historian must choose from among a variety of theories that relate a culture-historical
theory?and
part to its larger whole. Systems theory, social practice theory, hegemony
all possible, as long as their claims and
and variations?are
their many combinations
are adequately
of embodied
and hermeneutics
fitted to the empiricism
procedures
of a dominant
the hegemony
realism. Following Lakoff and Johnson, for example,
of concepts and
"constellations"
culture may now be defined as mutually
supportive
the
classes.
certain
social
and
Given
of
the
power
groups
legitimating
metaphors
con
in
the
of
reservoir
brain, however, hegemonic
cognitive possibilities
biological
in
tainment is always structurally unstable. As theorist Michael
Ryan once noted
read through the lens of Lakoff and Johnson,
another context, cultural hegemony,
would become "a blanket thrown over a tiger rather than awindowless
prison." In the
the cognitive reserve of concepts and metaphors
of Raymond Williams,
terminology
enormous
of the dominant culture constitutes a potentially
beyond the constellations
some
the
of which could become "oppositional,"
"residual culture,"
given
right agents
and
circumstances.48
version of hegemony
the insights of embodied realism assisted by amodified
a valid method
to
it
is
derive
for
possible
theory (and assuming adequate evidence),
a
at
most
the
of
of
normative
the
spectators
specific
experiences
production
explaining
in exploring
the
is interested
that the historian
play in history. Let us suppose
of A Hatful of Rain, by Michael Gazzo, which
audience's experience of the production
in 1955 and 1956. Hatful opened at the Lyceum Theatre on
played on Broadway
9 November
1955 with Ben Gazzara in the leading role and ran for over two hundred
Using
of the
Many questions might be asked about spectators' experience
performances.
we
limit
the
discussion
will
this
but
of
for
show,
purposes
exploration
methodological
of their experience of the theatrical space, the narrative of the
to initial explorations
Ben Gazzara-Johnny
Pope. Determining
play, and the presence of actor-character
outside of, or perhaps against the
the experience of Hatful worked within,
whether
dominant culture of the period is the general task of the historian interested in fusing
of Lakoff and Johnson.
theory with the cognitive psychology
hegemony
and the
in Marxism
of Film: Discourse,
"The Politics
Ideology,"
Psychoanalysis,
Ryan,
of Illinois Press,
Lawrence
Nelson
ed.
and
Culture,
(Urbana:
University
Grossberg
Cary
of
Interpretation
see Antonio
Selections from the Prison Notebooks
Gramsci,
of Antonio
1988), 485. On cultural hegemony,
Nowell-Smith
Hoare
and Geoffrey
ed. Quinton
Publishers,
1971);
Gramsci,
(New York: International
inMaterialism
in Problems
Cultural
in Marxist
"Base and Superstructure
Williams,
Theory,"
Raymond
Marxism
and Literature
and Williams,
and Culture
Verso,
(Oxford: Oxford
1980), 31-49;
(London:
^Michael
Press,
1977). For useful
interpretations
University
and Socialist Strategy:
Chantel Mouffe,
Hegemony
Left Books,
1985); TJ. Jackson Lears, "The Concept
American
90 (June
Review,
Theatre History,"
to Write
eds. Thomas
Postlewait
Historical
Hegemony
Performance,
Press,
1989),
of Gramsci
Towards
and Williams,
Democratic
a Radical
see Ernesto
Politics
Laclau
(London:
and
New
and Possibilities,"
Problems
of Cultural Hegemony:
the
of Cultural
and my
1985), 567-93;
essay,
Concept
"Using
in Historiography
and
the Theatrical Past: Essays
in Interpreting
and
Bruce
A. McConachie
(Iowa
City,
IA: University
37-58.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
of
Iowa
DOING THINGS /
585
informed hermeneutics.
for this task is theoretically
The methodology
appropriate
it
is
that certain image
and
clear
the
of
Lakoff
Johnson's insights,
validity
Assuming
the
in the mainstream
culture of the 1950s. Were these mostly
sch?mas predominated
same sch?mas that organized
and experience of spatiality,
the spectator's perception
narrative, and presence at the production of Hatful? If so, the historian could conclude
culture of the
the dominant American
that the production
largely worked within
the image sch?mas of both the production and the culture involves
1950s. Determining
a process by which
back and forth between
the
the historian moves
hermeneutics,
and explaining
that
for interpreting
and the image sch?mas available
evidence
evidence. This process gradually eliminates some of the two dozen or so major image
sch?mas
focuses
identified by Lakoff and Johnson as the basis for probable explanations
on the few that can account for more of the available evidence.
and
culture of the 1950s, the historian must assess a wide
regard to the dominant
to
discover
the
evidence
of
key image sch?mas that shaped the decade. Wide
variety
that survey several domains of the culture,
histories
cultural
many
among
reading
to
with
several
close
attention
significant primary sources, will be the primary
coupled
the historian will find that many Americans
tool here. Not surprisingly,
perhaps,
a football
1950s much as they experienced
culture
of
the
dominant
the
experienced
and
of
sch?mas
the
iteration,
containment,
game;
compulsion,
part-whole,
image
With
these relevant
lives. Among
of everyday
counterforce
shaped significant domains
most
will
draw
the
interest
of
American
the
schema
of
"containment"
likely
images,
historians who know anything about the U.S. in the 1950s. "Containment" named the
foreign policy of the United States during the early Cold War and continues to shape
the explanations
of several significant cultural histories,
including Robert Corber's
in
War
the
homosexual
in
America
Cold
closet), Alan
(containment
Homosexuality
Nadel's Containment Culture (an analysis of several narrative responses to the Atomic
as container).49
age), and Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound (the suburban family
that
the
of contain
the historian might
schema
From this general overview,
suspect
ment could have been a potent nucleus of the dominant culture of the decade, around
which
swirled
other sch?mas
in significant
fields of cultural
force.
then check Lakoff
To investigate
this hunch more thoroughly, the historian would
to Johnson,
and Johnson's understanding
of the dynamics of "containment." According
are embedded
in this schema:
five entailments
or resistance
involves
of containment
to,
from,
protection
experience
typically
are
are in a case,
forceful
forces. When
against
they
protected
eyeglasses
impacts,
When
I am in a room
forces within
the container.
also limits and restricts
(ii) Containment
or in a
am restrained
movements,
of
I
Because
this
in
of
restraint
forceful
(iii)
my
jacket,
a relative
of location.
the fish gets
the contained
For example,
forces,
gets
fixity
object
(i) The
external
located in the fishbowl. The cup is held in the hand, (iv) This relative fixing of location
within
the container
means
that
the contained
object
becomes
either
accessible
or
inacces
sible to the observer. It is either held so that it can be observed or else the container itself
blocks or hides the object from view, (v) Finally, we experience transitivity in containment.
49
Robert
in Cold War America:
Resistance
and the Crisis
J. Corber,
Homosexuality
of Masculinity
in the
Bound: American
Families
Press,
1997); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward
(Durham: Duke University
Containment
Culture: American Narratives,
Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books,
1988); and Alan Nadel,
and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University
Press,
Postmodernism,
1995).
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586
Bruce McConachie
/
is in B is also
If B is in A, then whatever
then I am also in my
room.50
With
this definition
in hand,
If I am
in A.
the historian
can
in my
bed
and my
bed
is in my
room,
to see how
closely
several domains of the culture.
look more
and organized
"containment" penetrated
thoroughly
was
a
the National
of
the
that
it
part
Security Act of 1947,
underlay
thinking
Clearly,
the
the CIA and the security protocols of the era. Taken as a whole,
which established
as a unit of containment;
inside the U.S. is secret knowledge
act maps the nation-state
to
Johnson's first entailment above/the act is designed
requiring protection. Regarding
Soviet
the
from
external
this
Union,
forces,
although
chiefly
protect
knowledge
an antagonist.
In terms of
theoretically any force in the rest of the world might become
will
in which
the security establishment
not only limits the ways
(ii), containment
handle these secrets, it also puts severe restrictions on the freedoms of all other citizens
of fortress America. The other three entailments also organized
within
the boundaries
under the logic of
the transitivity of containment, which,
the 1947 act, including
the U.S. must.be
meant
in
within
all
that
citizens
private organizations
McCarthyism,
a citizen in the
a
was
in
PTA
A
also
Communism.
local
of
parent
suspected
aiding
in a cell of subversives.
and might be an innocent participant
nation-state
cold war culture. Americans
Other "containers" pervaded
during the 1950s tended
to regard the self as a container, typically an ego of innocence and vulnerability. Thus,
popular media analysts like Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders, 1956) convinced
of
the mental boundaries
to worry
that advertising was piercing
many Americans
never
selves and injecting them with false values (i) and psychoanalysts,
American
their patients' dreams to
in the United States, analyzed
before (or since) as popular
within
their selves (iv). Talking heads and Holly
the hidden memories
understand
the white,
suburban family as another container,
wood films typically understood
on its husbands
as
and wives
it
restraints
sexual
exerted
insofar
(ii).
especially
as the Chosen People of God encouraged many citizens to fixate
the
nation
Imagining
the 1950s (iii).
on the presumed
character" during
of the "American
qualities
a hidden but very real threat within
the
harbor
could
sin,
Nonetheless,
goodness
in
and
salvation
to
interest
led
that
much
Chosen People
(iv)
repentance
popular
the Family,
during the early Cold War. For many Americans, marital "togetherness,"
which
within
transitive
boxes
and the Chosen People provided
(v)
imaginative,
as amodel for the "FreeWorld."
American morality
could be protected and vindicated
could easily
of these and other cold war containers
Teasing out the entailments
consume
several
volumes
of
cultural
history.
In short,
the historian
can
find
numerous
onto their laws,
the schema of containment
mapped
of their culture to
their religion, and other domains
in the
in their lives. "Containment" was as ubiquitous
explain significant experiences
dominant culture of cold war America as was the spatial relations schema of "balance"
France.
in the culture of Enlightenment
instances
in which
their families,
Americans
their literature,
the general dynamics of what the historian might begin calling
established
Having
of Hatful. Did most
"containment
culture," s/he next turns to the production
of its star
and the presence
its narrative,
of its spatiality,
experience
spectators'
cognition? Turning first to
performer also legitimate and hence reinforce containment
50
Johnson,
The Body
in theMind,
22.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
DOING THINGS /
587
spatiality, the historian will recognize the Lyceum Theatre as a conventional
Broadway
in the Broadway area during the 1950s, the
auditorium. Like all other theatre buildings
that spectators in orchestra and balcony seats look at a production
Lyceum mandated
on a stage that was
framed and visually
contained by a proscenium
arch. This
common
for the reception of every Broadway
spatiality had important implications
In
to
the
schema
and
addition
of
containment,
production.
simple observation
and "ne?r-far" organize this
reveal that the sch?mas of "center-periphery,"
deduction
on
spatial dynamic in the unconscious minds of humans. Proscenium
spatiality draws
what Neil
Smith and Cindi Katz
term the "absolute
space" of Euclidian geometry and
in proscenium
the
of the audience
positioning
philosophy51 Historically,
Renaissance
As
in the
from
the
of
idealized
painting.
perspectivism
developed
Prince at the center
Farnese, for instance, the all-seeing eyes of the Renaissance
auditorium
line behind the proscenium
and fixed
gazed toward a horizon
in space according to their distance from his vision. With the proscenium
arch
Cartesian
staging
Teatro
of the
objects
as a picture frame organizing
stage objects for this type of panoptic vision, the West
a means
the assumptions
of Cartesian philosophy
into
discovered
of transforming
theatre architecture and viewing experience. As Daniel Dennett has noted, Descartes
conceived of thinking as a mental
theatre in which a single, silent spectator observed
metaphorical
objects illuminated by the inner light of reason. Hence, human under
could
arrive at objective
that "his" [sic]
standing
insight secure in the knowledge
mental representations were a true picture of the external world.52 Following
from its
foundation
in
the
thinking organized
passive objects.
concepts
a world
of
containment,
in which
and
center-periphery,
people
believed
near-far,
Cartesian
they could gaze objectively
at
This legacy partly shaped the modern
realist theatre, with the apparent objectivity
of the photograph
standing as the guarantor of truth on the realist stage. Other
in the theatre also reinforced the Cartesian assump
conventions
of modern viewing
tion that spectators could separate themselves
from the realities on stage and gaze at
them as the ideal jailor in Jeremy Bentham's
"Panopticon" might have gazed at his
The dimming
of house lights, for example, discouraged
spectators from
that
be
of
theatrical
with
the actors and
believing
co-producers
enjoyment
they might
led to a more privatized
theatrical experience
for the audience. Likewise,
the disap
erasure of the technical means
pearance of the prompter and the partial or wholesale
of production
from the view of spectators (such as changes in scenery and lighting)
also reinforced their belief that they could separate themselves
from the "objects" on
theatre in the twentieth
forms of bourgeois
stage. These conventions
shaped most
century, including the viewing experience of all Broadway
spectators in the 1950s.53
prisoners.
a
51N. Smith, and C. Katz,"Grounding
Towards
Place and the Politics
Politics,"
Metaphor:
Spatialized
M.
ed.
S.
Pile
Keith
and
75.
(London:
1993),
of Identity,
Routledge,
52
See Daniel
Consciousness
science
Dennett,
(Boston: Little, Brown,
1991). The cognitive
Explained
case
is well
R. Demasi?
in Descartes'
Error: Emotion,
against Cartesian
thinking
argued
by Antonio
Brain (New York: Putnam,
Reason, and the Human
1994).
53
As Foucault
the Panopticon
extended
of objectification.
On
noted,
Enlightenment
principles
see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
in performance,
vision
Exhib
panoptic
"Objects of Ethnography,"
The
and
Cultures:
Poetics
Politics
ed. I. Karp and S.D. Levine
DC:
iting
ofMuseum
Display,
(Washington,
Smithsonian
Institution
Modern
Theater and the Rhetoric of Drama
Press,
1991), 401-34. W.B. Worthen,
(Berkeley:
University
of California
Press,
1992),
12-98, makes
a similar
point
about
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objectification
as
588
Bruce McConachie
/
From
the point of view of Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive
the
science, however,
to induce an objectifying gaze from spectators can never completely
succeed
it posits auditors as subjects and the stage as a world of objects, a
dichotomy
that does not exist. The question for the historian, then, iswhat kind of projection from
its audience did proscenium
Put this
encourage,
viewing
advisory or empathetic?
it
is
that
the
of
the
effect
arch
way,
apparent
panopticon
proscenium
primarily induced
its
because
toward
made
advisory projection,
tendency
objectification
empathy, the
an
more
of
actor-character's
onto
the
values
difficult.
On
the other
self,
projection
a
out
cannot
rule
As
fundamental
human
hand, proscenium
spatiality
empathy
attribute, empathetic projection cannot be erased from theatrical interaction, though it
less desirable
for spectators. Consequently,
the historian's
conclusion
may be made
about the likelihood of advisory projection dominating
the spectator's experience of
Hatful can be only tentative. Itmust be tested against other evidence.
attempt
because
Did the script of Hatful primarily evoke advisory projection
for Johnny Pope, the
In conventional
of Gazzo's melodrama?
rhetorical terms, does Gazzo
protagonist
construct his play so as to induce his audience to take Johnny's values as our own or
do we rather pity his emptiness and confusion and project our own values onto him?
The exposition of Gazzo's
realist play reveals that Johnny Pope fought in the Korean
treatment after his return, went to college on the GI Bill,
War, received psychological
In the present time of the drama, however,
took a job as amachinist,
and got married.
he has lost the last of several jobs, stopped attending college,
with or even talk seriously to his wife, even though she is
Near the end of the first scene, the audience learns the reason
Johnny has become a heroin addict. The rest of the drama
and refuses tomake love
about to have their baby.
for his recent behavior?
explores his attempts to
break
the habit, mend his marriage,
and reconcile with his father and brother. It
scene when Johnny, hallucinating
climaxes in a tempestuous
and badly in need of a fix,
breaks out of his bedroom and must be restrained by his family. In the last moments
of
the drama, his wife calls the police to take Johnny to the hospital.54 An initial reading
of the play suggests that advisory projection, not empathy, is the primary dramatic
hook of Hatful.
Contextual
of some of the reviews sparked by Hatful also point to the
considerations
dominance
of advisory projection shaping the experience of spectators. In his review
of Hatful, Brooks Atkinson
called Ben Gazzara's
Johnny "a manly
performance,
but
of
critic
Boston
Globe
Elliott
free
Norton noted that Gazzara's
moody
whining."55
when
the
except in those moments
Johnny "carries a burden of anguish manfully
a
a
as
or
a
wear
on
moment
To
when
off."
stage
designate
manly
drugs
performance
to realist
inherent
realist
theatre
theatre.
(or anything
As
else)
caused by the spatiality
noted,
however,
objectification
be complete.
Other
factors in the performance
may
spark
cannot
that spatial dynamics
control or override.
previously
can never
of
in
an
spectators
empathetic
relationship
54
see Michael
For the Broadway
A Hatful
in Famous
Vicente
Gazzo,
of Rain
script of the play,
American
1962), 313-84.
(New York: Dell,
Plays of the 1950s, ed. Lee Strasberg
55
wrote
The following
about Hatful
New York reviewers
after opening
night: Chapman,
Daily News
(10 November 1955);Watts, New York Post (10 November 1955);McClain, JournalAmerican (10
November 1955);Kerr,New YorkHerald Tribune (10November 1955);Atkinson, TheNew YorkTimes (10
November
Gazzara"
reviews,
1955). Other
including
Files
and "Hatful of Rain" Clipping
Elliot
Norton's
at the New
York
for
the Boston
Public
Library
Globe, are in the "Ben
Arts.
of Performing
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DOING THINGS /
589
that the play evoked some
else suggests
slips into something
a
actor
credible Johnny Pope might have
roles. Any
anxiety
performing
induced this kind of dubious praise from a critic because the character was posed at a
was synonymous with the
Since adult masculinity
crisis point of cold war masculinity.
notes
role of breadwinner,
social historian Barbara Ehrenreich,
manful
performance
about gender
The man
the
who
schema
shaded
into
mother,
and
diagnosis
failed
to achieve
this
role was
either
not
fully
adult
or not
In
fully masculine.
of male
developed
by mid-century
pathology
psychologists,
in turn, a manifestation
which
of unnatural
was,
infantilism,
of symptomatology
its clinical
the entire
reached
complex
immaturity
on the
fixation
climax
in
the
of homosexuality.56
Johnny Pope is a case study of this type, an adult boy tending toward infantilism and
who cannot reach authentic manhood
until his childhood and wartime
homosexuality
traumas are resolved. His drug addiction, while
the focus of the drama, is not the
source of his problems, which are mired in his search for the mother he never had and
the Oedipal
rage he still feels toward his father.
To plumb the depths of Johnny's psychology,
Gazzo deploys
three male pushers
who both supply and harass him. When read in the context of cold war paranoia, the
interactions between
of
Johnny and the pushers
replicate a cold war narrative
concern
to
in
Americans
the
mid-1950s.
Two of the pushers, Apples,
many
compelling
an infantile, giggling homosexual who plays with weapons,
and Chuch, an ape-like,
are partly alter-ego
slow moving
zombie who
crushes his victims,
emblems
of
Johnny's disintegrating
personality. The third, Mother, a reptilian figure in an exquis
ite suit and dark glasses, is a metaphor
for the real mother
Johnny lost as a young
child. Their names are ironic signifiers of their true nature: "Apples" connotes a fall
from grace, a perverted
innocence; Chuch, close in sound to "church," is the bestial
a
opposite of churchman; and Mother, whose only milk is the white powder of heroin,
that could lead to death. Together, they are like a family of
encourages a dependency
the desiccated,
zombie-like
Invasion of the Body
pod-people,
figures from Hollywood's
Snatchers (1956). Mother, Apples,
and Chuch are the alternative
family that could
Johnny's wife, brother, and father unless he can resolve his problems. More
immediately,
they suggest that Johnny has regressed to a substitute mother who is
replace
him
turning
much
into
a
monster.
perverted
Johnny
may
of the time, but on the inside the pod people
look
normal
on
are destroying
the
outside
for
his authenticity.
The subtext of Invasion of the Body Snatchers centered on subversion
from within by
Communists.
Gazzo's
of
reminded
family
spectators of the same
pushers probably
radical Other in the American
In the early 1950s, novelists,
cold war imagination.
churchmen, and others imagined a variety of "Commies" that continued to
politicians,
circulate in the culture long after the ravages of McCarthyism
had passed
into
memory. Communists
like Apples, Mafioso
Spellman?to
56
The Hearts
were
ofMen:
American
to robots such as Chuch,
infantile homosexuals
to Mother,
even?in
the words
of Cardinal
men
a
of
fiendish, ghoulish
designation
slaughter,"57
likened
hoodlums
"the world's most
Dreams
similar
and the Flight from Commitment
(Garden
City,
1983), 20.
57
Quoted
University
J.Whitfield,
by Stephen
Press,
1996), 96.
The Culture
of the Cold War,
2nd ed.
(Baltimore:
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The
NJ: Doubleday,
Johns Hopkins
590
BruceMcConachie
/
that easily applies to all three of Gazzo's grotesques.
and intellectuals with Communists
homosexuals
had conflated
as "dilettante
Senator McCarthy
in such phrases
and "the prancing mimics of the Moscow
party line."58 In the immensely
diplomats"
were the opposite of
in
novels
the
"commies"
popular
early 1950s,
by Mickey Spillane
were
Americans.
and
wholesome,
decadent, degraded, and soft?
healthy,
tough
They
to die in One Lonely Night
"dumb as horse manure,"
for instance, and easily deserving
of
kill-'em-all
machismo
travelled
rhetoric
(1951).59 Spillane's
widely,
infecting even
The
Center
of
Vital
Arthur
the sober political
Jr.
(1949), by
analysis
Schlesinger,
Schlesinger praised the "new virility" that American postwar leaders had brought to
it to the "political sterility" of the old-guard
leftists and the
public life, contrasting
was
For
class.
Communism
emasculated
Schlesinger,
ruling
"something secret, sweaty,
... as homosexuals
in a boys school."60
and furtive, like nothing so much
Like Schlesinger, most anti-Communists
agreed that the Red Menace brought with
it sexual perversion
and chaos. To heighten
the latent sexual threat already posed by
his
Gazzo
monsters,
introduces
Putski,
a
rich
strung-out,
young
woman
wearing
nothing more than shoes and a fur coat, into the final appearance of his pushers. The
for her sexually suggestive
audience probably classified Putski as a nymphomaniac
A
the
souvenir
from
for
the Broadway production
program
picture
body language.
foot propped up on
shows her sitting in profile on a kitchen chair, her downstage
another chair revealing a bare leg, bent at the knee, thus opening a view of her crotch
to the three men sitting and standing above her. The pushers, however, remain numb
to her proffered charms.61 Putski's presence on stage pointed up Johnny's precarious
sexual relationship with his wife. His addiction-induced
impotence is driving his wife
into the arms of his brother, a problem both are resisting but neither seems able to
traumas and dependencies,
sexual chaos is
resolve. Because of Johnny's boyhood
an
turns
If
he
domestic
of
American
the
passive and soft,
happiness
subverting
family.
a
to
could
weaken
American
this American
future
national
key
strength,
fatally
boy,
society
While
from within.
the
critic-historian
can
read
these
concerns
into
Hatful,
how
can
be
s/he
sure
that they were also a part of the cold war audience's experience of the play? There's no
in the reviews and or in other material
from the production
evidence
(advertising,
the
of the audience to fears about
releases,
etc.)
response
press
directly linking
photos,
realism of Lakoff and Johnson can assist the
subversion. Here iswhere the embodied
in moving
historian
beyond a narrow empiricist approach to the evidence and help
to understand
situated spectators.
the narrative
him/her
imagining of historically
are
if humans
Lakoff
and
the
of
Johnson's
cognitive psychology,
Following
logic
domi
narratives
if
containment
and
hard-wired
for
constructing
thinking
effectively
not to suppose
that
in the 1950s, it is counter-intuitive
narratives
nated many
to
onto
the
narrative
of
containment
inducements
map
Hatful,
spectators, given many
like other cognitive pro
not do so. Spectatorial narrative
would
imagining, which
Cold War America: From Hiroshima
^Quoted
by Lawrence Wittner,
Publishers,
1974), 95.
59
The Culture of the Cold War, 36.
Whitfield,
Families
Bound: American
^Quoted
by Elaine Tyler May, Homeward
Basic Books,
1988), 98.
61
Hatful file.
toWatergate
(New
in the Cold War
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York:
Era
Praeger
(New
York:
DOING THINGS /
591
cesses occurs at largely unconscious
levels, would not likely lead reviewers and others
to comment directly on its dynamics; most narrative construction
is simply a part of
the cognitive and cultural taken-for-granted.
The application of this historical method
cannot produce certainty, of course, but it can lead to valid judgments that rely on a
kind of cognitive probability.
can turn to Lakoff and Johnson's discussion
of the contained self for
In their chapter on
of this interpretation
of spectator experience.
partial validation
in
the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson note that
cognitive conceptions of the self in Philosophy
"the self as container" is but one of several conceptions
the metaphor
that individuals
and cultures may use to structure "self" understanding;
other metaphors
include the
self" and the "social self."62 When people
look at themselves
and
"physical-object
others as containers,
that self to
they often look for one or several features within
The historian
its essence. Hence
containment
leads to essentialist
thinking
typically
thinking, the belief, note Lakoff and Johnson, that "every entity has an 'essence' or
it the kind of thing it is and is the
that makes
'nature,' that is a collection of properties
causal source of its natural behavior."63 Lakoff and Johnson term this the "folk theory
in the philosophies
and discuss
its pervasive
of essences"
influence
of Plato and
Aristotle.64 The "folk theory of essences" structured much cold war thinking, including
represent
the psychologized,
authentic self at the center of Hatful. The main story of Gazzo's
melodrama
pits Johnny Pope's psychological
against those who would
authenticity
subvert its essence. Like The Catcher in the Rye and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,
influential novels of the decade, Hatful is a narrative that centers on authenticity, and
the cognitive logic of containment.
such narratives typically work within
to the presence of Gazzara-Pope
in Hatful, the historian would want
to
the spectator's experience of "method" acting might have shaped her/his
interaction with the performance. When audiences
identified with Johnny Pope, they
as a new
onto
Ben
in the mid-1950s
themselves
renouned
Gazzara, already
projected
in Cue magazine
in 1955?one
"method" star. In an interview
of several given by
actor credited Strasberg for his success. Lee, he said, was
Gazzara in the mid-50s?the
"a bonafide
to studying with
and "working with him was
genius"
equivalent
an
as
in
earlier period." The article introduced Gazzara
Stanislavsky
"typical" of the
Turning
know how
new
stars:
Method
"They
noisily
eschew
glamour,
dress
are
carelessly,
intensely
intense. They endless discuss motivation,
integrity, the search for values, tab our times
the age of anxiety." As if to confirm the cliche of the method
actor, Gazzara admitted
his therapeutic need to find relaxation through painting: "These are tense times and
we
are
all
taut."65
Walter Kerr's review suggests
of Johnny Pope:
embodiment
Ben
Gazzara's
tensions
of
how Gazzara
Clipping
to develop
technique
veteran
is a brilliant
"hooked"
tour
hopelessly
are his to elaborate
the evening
and to control. Whether
62
in the Flesh, 267-89.
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy
63
Ibid., 363.
64
Ibid., 364-90.
65
See Cue (March 13, 1955), 13 in the "Ben Gazzara"
Performing
used method
File, New
de
force.
he
York
Arts.
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The
is cocking
Public
his
alarming
his head
Library
of
592
BruceMcConachie
/
to one
bed
side
in
and
anguish,
man
ordinary
his mouth
twisting
is there.
the control
them
behind
into a sick,
The
is credible
spine-tingling
too.66
as a performer
allowed
and decency within
goodness
his true self.
to overwhelm
Gazzara's
are
eruptions
diving
into a
headfirst
credible;
violently
the
for sharp contrasts between
Johnny's
the Monster
Addict without
that
control
generalized
threatened
or
smile,
self-pitying
and
Colin Counsell's
semiotic reading of method
performing helps to locate Gazzara's
within
containment
notes four
the
culture
of
the Cold War. Counsell
performance
on
a physical
actors
attributes
of
method
from
and
film:
stage
general
signification
as a sign of naturalness
ease that audiences understood
and authenticity; eruptive and
emotions
often unpredictable
(e.g., anguish, trauma, joy, etc.) usually read by specta
tors as psychological
and signs from the actor such as
intensity and/or disturbance;
vocal inflections, and nuances of gesture that indicated
tics, "spontaneous"
inner life. These "three consistent
features of the Method
performance,"
states Counsell,
actors
"form the core of its iconography,
for although Strasbergian
behavioral
a complex
often
fall
own
their
employ
into predictable
were
mannerisms
numerous
unique
categories,
so
readily
proffering
observable
actors
other method
personae,
performance
in the
the same
their mannerisms
orders
of Brando,
performances
that they could be parodied
nevertheless
of meaning."67
Gazzara,
These
and
by the end of the 1950s.
fourth attribute of "method" acting confirms its ties to the contained,
self of cold war culture, and thus to the self of Gazzara-Pope
inHatful.
psychologized
to
the
to
of
the
essential
self
break
social
free?from
Counsell,
According
struggle
or any of numerous
codes, a tortured past, drug addiction, a restrictive conscience,
Counsell's
other oppressions?constituted
calls the signs of this conflict
we
When
and
failing,
their
see
we
thoughts
blocked'
character
The
the primary conflict of method
"the iconography of neurosis,"68
performance.
Counsell
explaining:
to communicate
their emotions
fighting
language,
to convey
that language
that
is inadequate
them,
can express.
run
than words
In inferring
the existence
of
feelings
deeper
at expression
to spectators
that the
the failed
then,
attempt
signals
cannot
be seen.69
dimensions
which
with
wrestling
this as an indication
characters
read
and
feelings,
possesses
is that spectators perceive a fractured character, divided
notes that the "method" actor of public perception was
the grip of neurotic struggle.
result, says Counsell,
against himself?Counsell
always male?in
correct regarding the experience
for spectators of method
may be mostly
actor
it
the
is
that
audiences
classified
but
presence of method
unlikely
performance,
as
in
neurotic. Following Counsell, Gazzara-Pope
characters
Hatful may have seemed
somewhat crazy, but, more importantly, most spectators probably viewed his psycho
light. Kerr, for example, found Gazzara's
logical intensity and eruptions in a positive
Counsell
66
10 November
1955.
Kerr, New York Herald Tribune,
67
to Twentieth-Century
Theatre (London and New
Colin Counsell,
Signs of Performance: An Introduction
and the Cold War,"
Theatre Survey 41:1
"Method Acting
York: Routledge,
1996), 59. See also my essay,
(May 2000), 47-67.
68
66.
Counsell,
Signs of Performance,
69
Ibid., 67.
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DOING THINGS /
593
to be "sharp, urban, honest in the best Actors Studio style,"
"stammering vernacular"
but sympathized
with
the character's
attempt to fight through his psychological
and
his
his
wife, and his family. Likewise, none of the critics
regain
sanity,
problems
dismissed
the figure as a hopeless neurotic; all believed
the struggle of an innocent,
authentic
self to break free from drug addiction was worthy
of sympathy
and
a
admiration. More
his
of
absence
clear
apparent emptiness,
likely, Gazzara-Pope's
to fill in the blank through advisory projection with
invited audiences
psychology,
ethical attributes that they ascribed to themselves. From the spectator's point of view,
could be sympathetic
method
like Gazzara-Pope
actor-characters
fellow
victims,
sufferers,
and
even
stars.
The historian's
initial investigation
of Hatful using Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive
a
and
version
modified
of
psychology
hegemony
theory, then, will likely lead to the
tentative conclusion that the production did induce many of the same experiences
for
as
1950s.
the
dominant
culture
is
of
the
There
evidence
that
the
spectators
significant
of containment
tie linking the spatiality, narrative
the main
experience
provided
framework, and star acting of Hatful to the cold war culture of the era. Other links
joining the narrative of the play to the larger culture of containment might also be
adduced to support this claim?hypodermic
models of influence (from drug addiction
a
to brainwashing),
of
vacuumed-out
self, and the narcissism of consumerism
images
to fill this empty self, among them. Significantly,
the dominant culture also understood
actor as a type of narcissist, even as it celebrated his self involvement.70
the method
links increase the cognitive probability
that audiences processed
of
schema
of containment.
the
Hatful through
enjoyment
image
These
much
of their
As suggestive as these links are, however, other questions must be answered before
the historian could claim that the production
of Hatful worked primarily within
the
dominant culture for its audience. First, the historian must know more about the social
and dynamics
of mid-50s Broadway
demographics
spectators. Were most of them a
culture? Second, containment
part of the hegemonic
thinking, though a significant
other image
culture, cannot have been the whole of it.Which
part of the dominant
sch?mas played a significant role in the cultural imagining and how did they intersect
with Hatful? Productions
of plays like Hatful rarely achieve cultural influence by
themselves. What other plays (and films, novels, and other performances)
from the
their general
period were doing similar cultural work and how significant were
effects? Also, how were some theatrical events of the 1950s able to problematize
and
even oppose
of containment
the hegemony
culture? It may be that the
perhaps
Williams-Kazan
collaboration of Cat on aHot Tin Roof, which shared many similarities
with Hatful (including a starring role for Gazzara), will provide a telling contrast.
Finally, while the cognitive categories of Lakoff and Johnson can help to describe and
70
To establish
Toward
Yale
Philip
a Cultural
University
American Acting
these
see Gazzo's
and several cultural and theatre historians,
play, the reviews,
the Self, Constructing
America: A Cultural History
of Psycho
Culture of Narcissism:
The
American
Lasch,
1995);
therapy (Boston: Addison,
Wesley,
Christopher
Life in
an
of
Lutz, "Epistemology
(New York: W.W. Norton,
1979); Catherine
Age of Diminishing
Expectations
the Bunker: The Brainwashed
and Other New
of Permanent
the Psychological:
War,"
Subjects
Inventing
including
links,
Cushman,
Constructing
ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy
(New Haven:
of Emotional
Life in America,
Schnog
an
and Steve Vineberg,
Method
Actors:
Three Generations
1997), 245-67;
of
(New York: Macmillan,
1991).
History
Press,
Style
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594
/
BruceMcConachie
culture, they cannot take the historian very far in explaining
interpret a dominant
it came from. What
where
sch?mas constructed
the hegemonic
culture in the U.S.
take
The
the
1950s
and
did
containment
its
before
culture
historian eager
why
place?
to explain this shift would need to deploy modes of doing history consonant with the
embodied
realism of Lakoff and Johnson. There are several possibilities
here, but Joan
is
not
idealism
them.
Scott's linguistic
among
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