Performance, Cognition, and the Quest for an Affective Historiography

Around 1819, John Keats wrote the following lines in the margins of a draft for a longer satirical poem:

This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—I hold it toward you.¹

The poet has created a lyric moment describing his own hand as it traces these same sentences, a hand that after his death will haunt an unnamed listener.² The poem replicates a physical gesture, breaching the boundaries between text, body, and sentiment. The poet’s corporeality has been extended toward us through the cadences of his blank verse and the virtual envisioning of this hand. The text is an affective expansion of the original hand, now erased by death but still active by means of language. Vilém Flusser has defined affects as “states of mind translated into gestures,”³ and this is exactly what Keats has done by shaping a text that conflates an emotion with a motion: “See here it is—I hold it toward you.” But Flusser also considers any tool linked to the body as a gesture, so in this case we have to imagine the poet’s pen and its ink as part of his “earnest grasping,” his effort to get closer to us, extending his hand beyond its somatic demarcations. It is not coincidental that many critics believe Keats’s poem was probably written with a potential play in mind; what we find in this text is a performatic hand, a hand imbued with a strong sense of theatricality, a hand that maybe belonged to a character, not only or primarily to the poet himself—a distinction hard for us to make after two hundred years.

Keats’s poem conveys his thought gesturally, as many actors and dancers constantly do. Keats’s poem replicates the entanglement between body and affect that grounds our cultural elaborations, and recent cognitive investigations have been disclosing how tightly connected our movements and our brains actually are. To the extent that performance is a gestural encoding of our affective histories, as Farah Karim-Copper has shown in her analysis of hands in Shakespeare’s work,⁴ this interlacing of the cognitive with the performatic promises new avenues of inquiry for our understanding of how language, body, and feeling supplement and enable each other. It is into some of those avenues that I would like to turn during the rest of this discussion. I alert the reader to the fact that this essay is less an exhaustive unpacking of these issues than an initial mapping of some of the problems and the authors that can help us to start tackling them. I will also take the risk of provoking some conceptual and philosophical conundrums—and to experiment with some ideas and interrogations, too. Off we go.

I

Lawrence Shapiro divides recent cognitive controversies into two contending discourses.⁵ On the one hand, standard cognitive science envisions the brain as a computational center that receives information and delivers its outputs, following its own internal rules; the brain is located on the body, but the body itself is not necessarily part of the brain’s mechanism. On the other hand, some embodied cognition theorists prefer to see the relation between body and brain as a constitutive one; the body is not only a presenter of perceptions and fluctuations but an active element in the formation and maintenance of the brain itself. I think this last approach is particularly attractive for performance scholars, since it assumes that certain acts are not merely mimetic or citational but also articulative: Our iterations can lead to both organic and cultural adjustments. Bruce McConachie and Rhonda Blair⁶ have already tapped into these cognitive assertions in their recent studies of audiences and actors, and this tendency will certainly continue in the years to come...