The Folk Science of Performance Theory

May 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term ‘theory’ as it is used in the arts, and particularly in performance, is markedly different from the use of the term in the hard sciences (1). In art, theory has no predictive value, its claims are not subject to falsification by empirical testing, it makes no hypotheses, and relates to no empirically established, objectively verifiable physical laws. Theory in performance is a kind of ‘organised seeing’ (reflecting its origins in theoria) and constitutes an attempt to order the experience by the imposition of structures of meaning onto performed events. The explanations which emerge from much performance theory therefore constitute a kind of ‘folk science’, an explanatory system which exists in the absence of, or prior to, empirical testing, and which orders common (or uncommon) sense.

1. The scientific definition of the terms theory has been usefully aired and clarified in the recent Intelligent Design debates. c.f. Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August,2005,page 32.

Posted in Art, Naive Physics, Performance, Seeing, Theory | No Comments »

Theory/Theatre Training

July 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One possible source of the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between theory and practice (specifically training for practice) in theatre is that training for practice utilises radically different (and possibly unfashionable) theories. Theory tends to be captivated by what Tooby and Cosmides refer to as the ’standard social science model’, in which the subject/person is a product of culture, with biology and evolutionary history playing little part in the construction of complex cultural behaviour. In this model the subject is constructed, fragmented, decentred, ‘hailed by a plethora of discourses’, mediated, screened out, and misrecognised even to itself. In stark contrast to this, the model of the subject, and their place in world, as implicit in the concepts and language of practical training, is vitalist, centered, dualist, a member of the ‘universal people’ (after D.E. Brown). It is interesting to note that no such disjunction exists in the training and education of athletes, who also require coaching to improve performance

Posted in Brown, D. E., Performance, Sport, Theatre, Theory, Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L., Training, Vitalism | No Comments »

Spurious Constructions

July 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Organised theoretical edifices, including scientific theories, metaphysical systems, and belief complexes, often contain entities which we may have no direct evidence of, but which must be posited to exist if the theory/belief is to maintain coherence. Such entities may be inferred circumstantially and may eventually turn out to be valid and ‘real’, or may be found to be purely fictitious. Non-real historical examples of such entities include epicycles, luminiferous ether, caloric, and ‘muelos’. An example of such a postulated entity which was subsequently acquired reality status is the planet Uranus, discovered not by observation but by inference, based on perturbations in the orbits of other heavenly bodies. It is tempting to assume that scientific progress and the dominance of rational physics in formulating evidence about the real world would reduce the reliance on such speculative entities, or at least that once an entity was found to be fictional that it would cease to appear in discourse (in the way that caloric does not routinely appear). However, this is not entirely the case, sometimes such fictions are allowed to survive in the language and in conception because they provide a particular human function related to the embodied nature of subjective being, as opposed to the disembodied nature of objective knowledge. Examples of such fictional entities might include: energy (as a substance or force), colours (as distinct, bounded entities), weight (as a property of substances and objects).

Routine discourse which includes reference to abstract concepts which can only be understood through the use of these spurious constructions, which function largely through the application of metaphors.

Posted in Belief, Fiction, Metaphor, Substance, Theory | No Comments »

Virtual Knowledge and Theoretical Entities

August 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

A body of theoretical knowledge is constructed partly through a process of inference. Ideas and concepts refer to the shape and texture of the knowledge body, and its motion through cultural or psychological space, but do not actually comprise that body at all. The effect of the presumed body of knowledge on the surrounding environment is noted, perturbations in the motion of observable entities is considered and measured, our most reliable instruments and power of feeling is put to the task.

“To my thinking” boomed the Professor, begging the question as usual, “the greatest triumph of the human mind was the calculation of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus.”
“And yours,” said the P.B.

(Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Irish dramatist, novelist. First published in 1934. More Pricks than Kicks, p. 67, Grove Press (1970). “The P.B.” is a character in the novel called The Polar Bear.)

Posted in Beckett, Samuel, Knowledge, Space, Theory | No Comments »

Myth and Theory

November 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

A myth is a theory of how some aspect of the world works, put overtly into the natural and embodied languages of narrative and image. This is not to say that myth is a poeticised, and therefore less accurate description of the workings of (some parts of the world) compared to other, more ‘rigorous’ theoretical descriptions; only that the metaphorical and embodied nature of myth is overt, whereas in other theoretical forms these qualities and techniques are covert.

Posted in Metaphor, Myth, Theory | No Comments »

From Apples to Planets

June 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The incorporation of theory such that it turns from speculation into common sense is also a process whereby metaphorical fiction becomes metaphorical fact. Given that all abstract concepts are only conceivable through metaphor and the embodied imagination, this transformation from speculation to incorporation does not involve a shift in the ontology of the information, but in its entanglement with the larger structures of previously existing embodied knowledge.

An example of this process may be the changing status of the ‘theory’ of gravitation since it was first described in reasonably modern form by Newton in the 17th Century. Included within the Principia as a convenient way of talking about the observed relationship between large objects, Gravity, as Newton introduced it, was seen primarily as a ‘force’, and indeed this is still the way it is commonly considered today. As a force, gravity takes its meaning from the embodied experiences of pushing and pulling material objects around. Force has a muscular meaningfulness which is fully incorporated, in the most literal sense of the word, into our day to day experience. Our experience of physical force preceded consciousness and that experience is built into the development of consciousness at the most fundamental level. Force, as a physical fact, we completely understand. When we apply the term ‘force’ to gravity, as we routinely do since Newton, we are using the deep understanding of physical force as a metaphor for an abstract concept. Newton himself, however, did not conceive of gravity in this way; for him, gravity was simply the name that he gave to the purely mathematical relationships governing falling or orbiting bodies, from apples to planets. Several of his contemporaries did take his concept literally and assumed that he was positing such a force, a notion which, at the time, was considered absurd and anti-scientific. This putative force could cause ‘action at a distance’, movement without physical contact or detectable radiation, and was therefore not a scientifically credible concept at all. At that time, science strived for physical and material explanation and the supposed ‘force’ of gravity smacked of the occult. The fact that the idea of gravity as a force did not disappear from the language of science, and is still around in the popular imagination today demonstrates that what began as a convenient fiction used to prop up certain mathematical findings transmuted into something approaching a fact. This transformation or actualisation is not due to new understandings about gravity, new ways of detecting it, controlling it, or producing it. Rather, the change that has resulted in the ‘fact’ of a gravitational force is the gradual integration of the fiction into the wider metaphorical structure of scientific and popular knowledge. Specifically, the metaphor that gravity is a force is now incorporated into a large number of other scientific theories including those related to astrophysics, aeronautics, geology etc etc. The overall metaphorical and imaginary structure of science, honed and pruned by the scientific method to ensure coherence and consistency, now contains the fact of the force of gravity.

Posted in Metaphor, Newton, Isaac, Sense, Theory | No Comments »

The Affordance of Theory

July 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Sometimes ideas are difficult to grasp. At other times they might go right over my head or be simply too hard, too thorny, too slippery, or too big to get my head around. These choices of terms that we use to describe the experience of difficulty we face when confronted by such ideas is suggested of a particular kind of relationship, or rather lack of relationship, between these ideas and ourselves.

The philosopher J.J. Gibson (1977, 1979) proposed a theory of perception (and by extension, cognition) in which the repertory of basic elements that we draw upon when visual engaging with the world is not the abstract logical world of geometrical shapes and forms but the potential for physical action that objects and spaces presented. When we see a table, for example, we do not see a set of connected rectangular solids which we mentally assemble and subsequently recognise as a piece of furniture that we might then choose to lay for dinner. Rather, Gibson would claim, we percieve primarily a ’supportable surface’ which only later might we decompose into its logical constituent parts. He termed these primary perceptual qualities ‘affordances’ and the objects and spaces to which we relate ‘affordance structures’. Clearly, the affordance of an object is dependent largely on the form of the living body and on the needs, habits, and preferences of the entity possessing that body. An object which is recognisable as a ’supportable surface’ by one entity, and might therefore be subsequently thought of as a table, might not afford the possibility of that kind of use by a differently-bodied entity, and cannot be recognised in the same way. (Some artworks play with these affordance differences to generate specific effects, for example, the work of Claus Oldenberg.)

Recognition therefore, at its most basic level, is a function of seeing the use of an object or space, and is an embodied, felt sense. If we return to the difficulty associated with trying to grasp ideas which are too hard, or trying to get our head around theories which are too deep etc. one possible interpretation for what is going on in those moments is that the difficulty is one not of intelligence or concentration but of perception. In order to recognise an object in real space one needs to imagine physicaly engaging with it, one needs to imagine this protrusion as a handle and this surface as supportable. Similarly, in the theoretical, metaphorical space of ideas, one needs to be able to imaginatively perceive the affordances of those ideas. One needs to be able to imagine holding firmly to a conveniently placed axiom as one steps across a syllogistic divide; narrowly avoiding a paradox by stepping back and containing the contradictory terms within a greater explanatory framework. It should be remembered that abstract thinking of the type that makes up all theoretical ideas, is always ultimately made up of embodied metaphor, because embodied metaphor is the language of cognition. So if complex ideas are to be grasped, stood under, held, or deconstructed, then we need to treat them as Gibsonian affordance structures.

James J. Gibson (1977), The Theory of Affordances. In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, ISBN 0-470-99014-7

James J. Gibson (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, ISBN 0-89859-959-8

Posted in Affordance, Gibson, James J., Grasp, Perception, Theory | No Comments »

Metaphor Theory as a Conceptual Framework

November 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Conceptual metaphor theory provides a meta-analytic framework to consider a range of different types of writing: scientific, poetry, impressionistic, anecdotal, imagistic, and technical. All of these highly varied writing forms, and the concepts they refer to, are ultimately grounded in the common vocabulary of the body and the sensorimotor system. Indeed, there is no good reason why non-written forms might not also be embraced within the terms of CMT since pictures, actions, objects, etc are as susceptible to metaphor analysis as written or spoken texts.

George Lakoff in ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ begins just such a cross-modal analysis in his discussion of the concept of anger. Through the identification of a key metaphor for anger in which it is conceived of as pressure in a sealed container, (usually in the presence of heat), he is able to track this idea across personal narratives, cartoon images, fictional writings, and scientific (psychoanalytic) texts.

The common ground of conceptual metaphor in which all expression operates, regardless of its status as objective or subjective, personal or interpersonal, scientific or artistic, provides a space in which all of these expressive forms can be considered.

It further seems likely that the organisational devices that hold together individual and collective pieces of writing might also function metaphorically, as for example when we understand a story as having a ‘narrative arc’. The ‘arc’ of a story, whilst evidently abstract and intangible, is conceptualised through embodied experiences of similar arcs in the physical world, the most common being the flight of a projectile or possibly the swinging of the limbs during walking. These physical schema provide the source metaphor for an embodied understanding of the structure through which ideas are expressed. It may be interesting to consider what embodied schema may (or may not) be mobilised in the understanding of texts which have non-linear structures, this blog for example.

Posted in Binding, Metaphor, Schema, Theory, thesis | No Comments »