The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater by R. D. Darren Gobert (review)

In a rather uncharitable accounting, Leibniz wrote in a letter circa 1679 (Philosophical Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), “Descartes himself had a rather limited mind. He excelled all people in speculation, but he discovered nothing useful for the portion of life which falls under the senses, and nothing useful in the practice of the arts” (241). Descartes was by the time of Leibniz’s negative assessment nearly thirty years dead, and both his abstract meditations on mind and physiological speculations on the body had entered the bloodstream, philosophically speaking. The time of idol-toppling was also well at hand and Descartes’s giant footprint revealed a certain slow- footedness when it came to nuanced thought in the minds of the philosophers who succeeded him and built on his premises. In this Descartes shared something with the actor-theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, who decisively changed the way in which we do, think about, and receive theatrical performance but was soon overtaken by his younger contemporaries, who had been his students and former acolytes. Even when praised, the philosopher and the theatrical theorist were held accountable for not realizing the potential of the new, for not being revolutionary enough as opposed to not having been revolutionary at all. Inarguably, Descartes and his cognitive opening of the mind’s “I” led to Stanislavsky, although what an actor knows is often concomitant with the practice by which he knows it. The quasi-scientifically derived affect of Stanislavskian mood and memory practices recalls Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes’s “inclination to give himself over to the invisible” rather than to patiently “reasoning about sensible things” (Leibniz 245). In what only appears to be an anti-theatrical position, Descartes’s unified world approach is corrected by the compossibile worlds philosophy proposed by Leibniz. Isn’t this what theatre does—acknowledge the possibility of multiple new worlds? But doesn’t theatre also suggest that it is the things of this world that are and must be our primary focus of attention, while at the same time arguing through example that theatre best materializes the limit-situation of life in the only (though not necessarily best possible) world in which we (get to) live?

The problem, to put it simply, is subjectivity, and therein lies the theatre historian’s quarry as well as his possible nemesis in arguing for the application of Descartes’s inner turn to theatre. The strength of R. Darren Gobert’s book, The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater, is to align itself not with Cartesian dualism but with the theatrical proofs of Descartes’s cultural relevance in the creation of the plays, performances, and even the theatrical architecture (premised on Cartesian optics) of his time. The Cartesian archive of theatre-based materials being slim (allowing him to be underrepresented by theatre historians), one must look to the repertoire and to the performance studies–authorized documentation of speech, image, and gesture in creating to make the case. Descartes, Gobert argues, moved from philosophy’s poaching of “theatre” as metaphor to the stage as metonymy, beyond linguistic affect to an actual (i.e., practical) mind-body convergence. In so doing, Descartes essentially invented the practice of embodied theory for the modern (st)age and opened wider a space for consideration of the “intersubjective encounter” (Gobert 10) of the actor and spectator in a shared space-place of being. This was both a frightening and unacceptable notion for the anti-theatrical Jansenists, whose penchant was for constraint (see Racine’s Phèdre, insightfully discussed in terms of the relationship of “the burdens of consanguinity” [blood] and “false visual perception” [eyes]) (Gobert 133, 144). Here one is reminded of Herbert Blau’s remark in Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), which Descartes would certainly have appreciated: “As Hamlet says of good and bad, thinking makes it so...