Naive Theatre and Consciousness Research

May 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Theatre |

A number of significant explanations and criticisms of mind and consciousness use the metaphor of performance and theatre. Concepts such as ’scripts’ and ‘roles’ populate consciousness theory and psychology more widely, and of course the origin of the word ‘persona’ lies with the Greek word for theatrical mask. Bernard Baars particularly uses many of the entailments of this metaphor in his Global Workspace theory, including the ’spotlight’ of attention, the darkness in which the audience sits, and the unconscious mental systems that take place ‘behind the scenes’. The model of a theatrical consciousness is also deeply embedded in the popular imagination and in the principles of naive psychology. Even the elimination of the audience from this model, as argued effectively by Daniel Dennett, does not collapse the rest of the edifice.

An attractive aspect of this metaphor which may help to explain its resilience is that it seems to bring with it an explanation of consciousness which captures something of phenomenal experience. The ‘theatre of consciousness’ feels intuitively satisfying as an explanation for what it is like to be alive and awake, where other, perhaps more purely physical descriptions do not. This intuitive satisfaction however, comes at the cost of simplifying theatre to an extent which makes it unrecognizable to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with theatre itself. Modern performance theory demonstrates that the combination of components used within the metaphor; darkness and light, spotlights and scenery, active actors and passive (or unnecessary) audience is not how theatre works at all. As a source metaphor, it is as naive as some of the models of consciousness to which it is applied.
This paper will unpack the theatre metaphor in terms of contemporary performance studies, outlining the ways in which it departs significantly from actual theatre practice and theory, whilst acknowledging that the metaphor does correspond to a folk understanding of theatre.
Finally, consideration will be given to what significance there may be in the fact that both a naive understanding of theatre and an understanding of consciousness share a common conceptual structure.