Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy

5. Philosophy and Drama: Performance, Interpretation, and Intentionality

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Philosophy and Drama Performance, Interpretation, and Intentionality Noël Carroll The Philosophy of Theater The purpose of this article is to probe one of the central questions of the philosophy of theater, namely, “What is drama?” However, before broaching the issue of the nature of drama, there is a more basic question: how are we to understand the very notion of a philosophy of theater? For surely one’s conception of the philosophy of theater will in›uence one’s approach to answering the query, “What is drama?” So let me begin by saying brie›y where I am coming from philosophically before we plunge into the more substantive topic of the nature of drama. The brand of philosophy to be mobilized in this essay is often referred to as analytic philosophy. So a ‹rst step in clarifying what is involved in this sort of philosophy is to say what it is that analytic philosophers analyze . If one is a philosopher of theater, upon what aspects of theater does one focus? Notice that the label—the philosophy of theater—is reminiscent structurally of the philosophies of so much else. It is the philosophy of something . What ‹lls in the blank in the “philosophy of ——?” Usually the name of some practice—like the philosophy of law. Often these are practices of inquiry—for example, the philosophy of science or of mathematics or of history. But there may also be a philosophy of some practical activity or set of activities—like the philosophy of sport. The philosophy of theater is this sort of activity or practice—primarily a matter of making and doing, rather than one of pure inquiry. Practices, moreover, have a conceptual dimension. That is, practices are 104 organized by certain deep concepts that make the practice possible or, to put it differently, that constitute the practice as the practice it is. For instance, law is a practice. In order to conduct legal activities a whole set of often interrelated concepts are presupposed, including guilt, personhood, intentionality, and, of course, the very idea of law itself. The analytic philosophy of law takes as its fundamental task the analysis of the concepts that make a practice like the law possible.1 A philosopher of law asks what constitutes legal personhood, guilt, mens rea, and, most importantly, what makes something a law. Is something a law in virtue of its relation to some transcendent morality, sometimes called natural law, or is it merely that which has been promulgated by a duly appointed body of legislators applying recognized procedures in the right way? Just as the philosophy of law attempts to clarify the nature of the concepts that make the practice of law possible, similarly the philosophy of theater interrogates or analyzes the founding concepts of the art of theater. One such concept is that of drama. In this essay, I attempt to elucidate the notion of drama. One discovery about the concept of drama that I will attempt to defend is that it involves not one concept, but at least two. That is, the concept drama can apply to either a play text or play-plan, on the one hand, or to a play performance, on the other hand. I will then go on to try to illuminate the distinction between these two applications of drama. One conclusion that I will draw is that drama-as-performance differs in profound ontological respects from mass mediatized performances. This ‹nding is at odds with the position recently and ably defended by Philip Auslander.2 So the ‹nal section of this essay will address the kinds of objections Auslander raises to the type of analysis advanced of drama-as-performance . What Is Drama? One of the fundamental concepts that organizes the practice of theater is drama. According to Aristotle, the concept of drama was derived from a Greek word for “doing” or “acting.”3 Aristotle used this word to refer to the representation of action. But, of course, the action that concerned Aristotle could be represented in two ways: by means of the play text, as composed by a Sophocles, or by means of a performance of the play text by some ancient Athenian troupe or a contemporary one. This duality in the notion of drama is mirrored in our own usage. For example, if we want to Philosophy and Drama
105 ‹nd the play scripts in the bookstore, we will have...