Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians

Bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences (Bertolt Brecht). ¹

Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past? As performance historians, can we understand what Molière may have experienced during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators in New York may have enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the 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 probable experience of people from the past (as understood from the available evidence) to arrive at some truths about these past experiences sparked by performance events?

Before the "linguistic turn" in performance studies, the conventional answer to such questions would likely have been a guarded "yes." Indeed, several forms of scholarship drawing on a variety of epistemologies have long validated the ability of historians to understand and explain how particular people and groups of people thought, felt, desired, and acted in terms of human experience. At the turn of the last century, Wilhelm Dilthey combined the insights of German idealism, historical method, and phenomenology to argue for the necessity of understanding the experiences of historically situated individuals. In the 1960s and 1970s, Raymond Williams, working out of the Marxist tradition, developed the notion of an experience-based "structure of feeling" to theorize historical change. More recently, Eric Lott combined Lacanian theory with Fredric Jameson's historiography to explain the desires and feelings--the experiences--of spectators at nineteenth-century minstrel shows. ² All of these historians build their explanations on the assumption that there is enough universality to human experience, at both the conscious and unconscious levels, for them to construct valid history.

As historian Michael Pickering notes, however, "from the poststructuralist viewpoint, experience is the bridge which only asses cross. It is a bridge which is regarded as far too rickety to be worthy of repair." ³ Pickering singles out historian Joan Scott as the chief poststructuralist proponent of repudiating conventional notions of "experience." In brief, Scott attacks experience-based historical explanations for naïve epistemology. The typical conceptual use of "experience," she alleges, presupposes a foundational mode of being which exists prior to language. Scott would keep the term "experience," but redefine it as the product of "discourse." Like Pickering (and others), I will use Scott's ideas on experience as "a test-case of the poststructuralist take on the category." ⁴ Compared to some historians such as Mark Poster and Dominick LaCapra, Scott stakes out a version of poststructuralism in more opposition to traditional empirical and hermeneutic methods of doing history, but this position also makes her critique of experience more challenging. ⁵

Several historians, including other feminists, some intellectual historians, and several materialists, have opposed Scott's undermining of "normal" history. ⁶ While each of the three opponents to Scott that I will examine offers important correctives to her work, none of them puts forward a position that fully meets the epistemological and empirical challenges of her assertions. Alternatively, I will argue that the cognitive psychology of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as presented in the "embodied realism" of their general approach to cognition, culture, and truth, provides a better foundation for historians interested in establishing the usefulness and legitimacy of experience in their work. Further, Lakoff and Johnson's philosophical realism, based in 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 assumptions of poststructuralist...