Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy

15. Theatricality, Convention, and the Principle of Charity

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Theatricality, Convention, and the Principle of Charity Michael L. Quinn One of the crucial words that remains in the vocabularies of both the practical theater and theater theory, though in a fairly unexamined state, is convention. From the sociological standpoint of Elizabeth Burns the “theatrical metaphor” generated conventions that served as constitutive agreements for knowledge.1 Yet this metaphor is also, for her, a “mode of perception ,” a basic phenomenological category like those described by Ernst Cassirer or Susanne K. Langer, which produces the social concepts that make theater—and any other concomitant forms of analogical “theatricality ” in other contexts—possible.2 Theater for Burns, then, is not a kind of knowledge but a perspective on knowledge, grounded in a convention that is comparable to other conventions of philosophy. The conventional theory of theatricality enabled not only the construction of American dramaturgical sociology, as in the work of Erving Goffman and Raymond Cohen, but also a number of other, more artistically oriented kinds of discourse.3 So, for example, the idea of conventional theatricality has provided a premise for arguments about spectatorship and authenticity in painting for art historians like Svetlana Alpers and Michael Fried.4 In terms of Marxist literary criticism theatricality amounts to the imagination, for critics like Terry Eagleton, of a history that is conceived outside, or logically prior to, ideology. The parallel I am pursuing, then, may be schematized as follows: history/ideology → dramatic text → dramatic production history → ideology → literary text 301 The literary text, that is to say, produces ideology (itself a production) in a way analogous to the operations of dramatic production on dramatic text. And just as the dramatic production’s relation to its text reveals the text’s internal relations to its “world” under the form of its own constitution of them, the literary text’s relation to ideology so constitutes that ideology as to reveal something of its relations to history.5 The presence of such an analogizing concept of convention may be most pervasive of all in the thought of Saussurean structuralism, in which the premise of an arbitrary sign often leads to the assumption that “unmotivated ” signs, and even tenuously motivated ones, are consequently aspects of the conventional structure of language that are historically negotiated.6 In its more extreme forms this attitude about the negotiability of conventions, such as the psychoanalytic version employed by Coward and Ellis in Language and Materialism, results in a hopelessly con›icted account of human action and judgment.7 Deconstruction has only deepened the widespread conviction that conventional signs are negotiable, and in this case the relativist critique of signs is sometimes extended—though not by Derrida—to the concept of truth itself, a view that even in its most persuasive constructions can make no sense.8 I propose to explore the very idea of a conventional theatricality , for the interpretive process of taking conventions for granted seems to me to be very suggestive for semiotic theater theory, and particularly for the understanding of some rather extreme challenges to the possibility of truthful communication.9 Quince, Questions, and Coordination David Lewis de‹nes conventions within a larger ‹eld of what he calls “coordination problems,” or “situations of interdependent decision . . . in which coincidence of interest predominates,” that is, in which people “have a common interest in all doing the same of one of several alternative actions.”10 Coordination—that is, mutual understanding—might be reached tacitly, through a process of thought that converges in a unique, commonly conceived, salient action. Most often, though, coordination problems are solved through precedents. Fictional precedents, and those negotiated through language, are as good as experience. And the more precedents for a situation, however various or analogical, the more likely that a “regularity of behavior” will emerge.11 This regularity, then, is what 302
Staging Philosophy Lewis calls a convention. In relation to Burns’s sociology of knowledge, a theater and its theatricality are thus matters of precedent and common understanding; they are what they have been and what people think they are, and they amount to however people treat them. What are some of the problems in this view of convention? Firstly, the question of common interest is crucial; how do we know which interests people have in common in a complicated social situation like a supposed theater performance? What sorts of conventional steps, such as contracts, will be necessary to secure a common understanding...