From Props to Affordances: An Ecological Approach to Theatrical Objects

From Props to Affordances An Ecological Approach to Theatrical Objects Teemu Paavolainen In the subject-­ oriented criticism inaugurated by Aristotle, stage objects either remain at the bottom of the hierarchy of theatrical elements deemed worthy of analysis . . . or else drop out of critical sight altogether. —Andrew Sofer Looking at how scenography has traditionally been conceptualized , we basically find two levels of abstraction and analysis: one concerned with “objects”—a theoretical, detached, and fairly recent concern—and one, with the more pragmatic vocabulary of scenery , props, and perhaps costumes. A proponent of the former, semioti­ cian Patrice Pavis notes the “difficulty of drawing a definite boundary between the actor and the surrounding world” as a basis for using object as the analytical term—one he finds “neutral [and] empty,” as opposed to the baggage of tradition carried by props or scenery. Part of a “Western cultural heritage,” he deems the latter terms “classical,” or even “antiquated ,” and in the event of performance, these alleged categories do indeed easily morph into one another, as many a theatre scholar has effectively argued. A bit of costume may occasionally turn into a prop, and a chair will only remain a bit of “scenery” until drawn into the action itself; as Manfred Pfister aptly puts it, any object may “shift from one position to another within the structural spectrum of ‘figure-­ costume-­ property-­ set.’” In other words still, none of these positions can really be “delimited as a closed sphere,” any more than can the very categories of actor and object, in the end. This is how the issue was framed in 1940, already, by the Prague School semiotician Jiří Veltruský. Advocating an idea of a living continuum over any fixed categories, he found the above kind of fluctuation a matter of actors and objects alike (set, props, and costume) gaining and shedding what he enigmatically called their “action force.”1 Veltruský’s concept has been deservedly influential. In what comes closest to a definition, he says this force “attracts a certain action” to From Props to Affordances      117 the prop or whatever has such, and “provokes in us the expectation of [that] action.” Dynamic by nature, it also emerges as relative to what he calls “the static forces of characterization,” predominant when a dagger , for instance, merely appears as part of a costume. In the dynamic context of stabbing someone, it exhibits its action force and “becomes a prop,” functioning as “a sign of murder” thereafter. For historian of props Andrew Sofer, however, this appears “murky” and too universal for distinguishing stage objects from stage subjects. Equating Veltruský’s concept with “semiotic subjectivity,” Sofer thus arrives at much the same boundary syndrome as did Pavis, earlier. For a different line of interpretation , still, Gay McAuley refers action force to what anthropologist Marcel Jousse dubs “the gesture of things”—that “we really know things only to the extent that they perform or ‘gestualise’ themselves in us”—­ and suggests this goes beyond action force: instead of just creating expectations or (passively) participating in action, objects “contain their own gestural demands” and actually impose behavior on actors. In Sofer’s refreshingly sober analysis, finally, objects only “become props” when physically manipulated by actors: regardless of their size or portability or whatever other conceivable conditions, “wherever a prop exists, an actor-­ object interaction exists.” With motion as the prop’s “defining feature,” he denies their having any “underlying logic” other than “what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance.”2 As these examples should suffice to attest, then, there cannot really be any objectively necessary and sufficient properties to stage properties— as is often the case with human categories, more generally, the boundaries are inescapably fuzzy. Just think of comedy and tragedy: we’re sure that the central examples are very different, but there’s clearly gray area in between. In cognitive theories of categorization (drawing explicitly on Wittgenstein’s insights) such central members of categories have been termed “prototypes.” For example, furniture and tools would be clearer cases of artifacts than buildings or bread, the whole category defined only by family resemblance. Likewise, props could be considered prototypical of theatrical objects—­ Veltruský’s continuum, allowing a degree of creativity...