Theatricality and Cognitive Science: The Audience's Perception and Reception

Cognitive science is a real umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human communication and information processing: first of all cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, certain branches of linguistics and recently discourse analysis (used to describe the mechanisms of natural conversation as well as dramatic discourse, very long neglected). These various disciplines explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge. The debate between socio- and cognitive pragmaticists is still going on. The former are more interested in the inter-personal sphere, in the standards of social behavior, since in interactions linguistic (as well as other) behavior is often assessed socially. Conversely, for cognitive pragmaticists, more important than any social contract underlying interactions is the role played by personal beliefs, assumptions, inferences, and inner mental representations involved in the communicative event. Nevertheless, both share many common methods and basic views, and their specific concept of communication may help to define more convincingly the still quite vague notion of "theatricality." I would like here to attempt a first step toward understanding how theatrical language, as well as the audience's responses, are constrained and shaped by human information processing and communication, and how the various tools offered by cognitive science could be employed to analyze them in a relatively new way.

In earlier attempts to deal with the thorny problem of theatricality, theater scholars tried to define it within a binary opposition to the performance arts. Thus performance, while deconstructing theater's essential features, allowed these features to be seen more clearly. Thought of as the flip side of theater, performance was called a phenomenon of the here-and-now, with no other referent than itself. Since it distances itself from representation and rejects any codes and structures permitting signification, materials on which it works are used only to present; they are indexes, and not symbols or icons as is the rule in conventional theater. As a non-narrative and non-representational primary process, performance was often described as having no meaning and aiming at none. The only exception was to consider the entirety of a performance as an index of a desiring subject, either as a subject of a performer or as a subject of a spectator. Both the former and the latter were no longer dealing with symbolic structures specific to traditional theater productions. Disarticulating theater and rejecting its code, performance has allowed both of them to experience the unconscious, whether it be visual, auditory, kinetic or instinctive. And what is very important for my argument, its incidental or situational character was believed to have changed the once-contemplative role of the spectator into that of "involuntary witness," unconsciously reacting to a flow of stimuli.

Nevertheless, this very clear and therefore convincing dichotomy— theater vs. performance arts—must be said to be bogus, a late fruit of the unquestionable domination of semiotics in conceptualizing theater in the 1960s and '70s. I do not intend to question the important role played by semiotics in focusing the scholar's attention on theatrical performance. But the focus on producing meaning through signs and codes of the stage was dangerously one-sided, and consequently theatricality has been described only as a particular kind of semiotic process specific for theater, in which signs are used as signs of signs. However, it is true that in the 1980s the science of signs definitely included communicative aspects of the theater event, and theoretically allowed for a discrepancy between the meaning the producer thought to create, and the meaning created by the spectator during the process of reception. The shift influenced the idea of theatricality, and the kind of "doubling " of signs previously assigned primarily to theater was said to appear also in behavioral, situational, or communication processes. But since semiotics is still dealing only with an implicit or ideal spectator, it refuses to take into account specific pragmatic conditions of a communication event, considering only the meaning that has been coded...