Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of
Experience for Historians
Author(s): Bruce McConachie
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 569-594
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Doing Things with Image Schemas:
The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and
the Problem of Experience for Historians
Bruce McConachie
Bad as itmay sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along
as an artist without
the use of one or two sciences (Bertolt Brecht).1
Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past?
As performance historians, can we understand what Moli?re may have experienced
during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of
Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators inNew York may have
enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the
1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing for the London premiere of
A Doll's House in 1889? Or, to frame these questions as a historiographical problem, is
there enough common ground linking the present experience of the historian to the
probable experience of people from the past (as understood from the available
evidence) to arrive at some truths about these past experiences sparked by perform
ance events?
Before the "linguistic turn" in performance studies, the conventional answer to such
questions would likely have been a guarded "yes." Indeed, several forms of scholar
ship drawing on a variety of epistemologies have long validated the ability of
historians to understand and explain how particular people and groups of people
thought, felt, desired, and acted in terms of human experience. At the turn of the last
century, Wilhelm Dilthey combined the insights of German idealism, historical
method, and phenomenology to argue for the necessity of understanding the experi
ences of historically situated individuals. In the 1960s and 1970s, Raymond Williams,
working put of the Marxist tradition, developed the notion of an experience-based
"structure of feeling" to theorize historical change. More recently, Eric Lott combined
Lacanian theory with Fredric Jameson's historiography to explain the desires and
Bruce McConachie isDirector of Graduate Studies in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University
of Pittsburgh. He has written widely
on theatre
historiography
and American theatre history, including
Interpreting the Theatrical Past (1989), with Tom Postlewait, ana Melodramatic Formations:
American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (1992).
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 73.
TheatreJournal53 (2001)569-594 ? 2001 by The JohnsHopkins University Press
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570 / BruceMcConachie
feelings?the experiences?of spectators
at
nineteenth-century
minstrel shows.2 All of
these historians build their explanations on the assumption that there is enough
universality to human experience, at both the conscious and unconscious levels, for
them to construct valid history.
As historian Michael Pickering notes, however, "from the poststructuralist view
point, experience is the bridge which only asses cross. It is a bridge which is regarded
as far too rickety to be worthy of repair."3 Pickering singles out historian Joan Scott as
the chief poststructuralist proponent of repudiating conventional notions of "experi
ence." In brief, Scott attacks experience-based historical explanations for na?ve episte
mology. The typical conceptual use of "experience," she alleges, presupposes a
foundational mode of being which exists prior to language. Scott would keep the term
"experience," but redefine it as the product of "discourse." Like Pickering (and
others), Iwill use Scott's ideas on experience as "a test-case of the poststructuralist
take on the category."4 Compared to some historians such as Mark Poster and
Dominick LaCapra, Scott stakes out a version of poststructuralism inmore opposition
to traditional empirical and hermeneutic methods of doing history, but this position
also makes her critique of experience more challenging.5
Several historians, including other feminists, some intellectual historians, and
several materialists, have opposed Scott's undermining of "normal" history.6 While
each of the three opponents to Scott that Iwill examine offers important correctives to
her work, none of them puts forward a position that fully meets the epistemological
and empirical challenges of her assertions. Alternatively, Iwill argue that the cognitive
2
On Dilthey,
see his Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976) and H. Stewart
Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York:
Vintage, 1958), 185-200. Raymond Williams first used "structure of feeling"
as an analytic term in hjs
book with Michael Orrom, Preface toFilm (London: Film Drama Press, 1954). For a better example of his
deployment of the term, see Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Hogarth, 1987). Finally, Eric Lott's
book is Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and The American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1993).
3
Michael Pickering, History, Experience, and Cultural Studies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 208.
4Ibid.,245,n.2.
5
For Scott's use of "experience,"
see "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry, Y7 (Summer
1991), 773-97; "Experience" in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 22-40; and Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia/1988).
"Experience" attacks the position put forth by John Toews in his "Intellectual History After the
Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience," American Historical
Review, 92 (1987), 879-907. On Poster's and LaCapra's attempts to merge poststructuralism and more
conventional methods of history,
see Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary
Readings
and
Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Dominick LaCapra,
"History, Language and Reading: Waiting for Crillon," American Historical Review, 100:3 (June 1995),
799-828; and LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
6
In addition to Pickering, see, for example, Lisa Duggan, "Vive la difference: Joan Scott's Historical
Imperatives," Voice Literary Supplement January-February 1989), 37; Paula M.L. Moya, "Postmodernism,
Realism, and the Politics of Identity," in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of
Postmodernism, ed. Paula M.L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 67-101; Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and theWriting
of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 78-86,172-186; and John H. Zammito,
"Reading "Experience:" The Debate in Intellectual History among Scott, Toews, and LaCapra," in
Reclaiming identity, 279-311. Scott replied to some of her early critics in "A Reply to Criticism,"
International Labor and Working-Class History, 32 (Fall 1987), 39-45.
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DOINGTHINGS / 571
psychology of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as presented in the "embodied
realism" of their general approach to cognition, culture, and truth, provides a better
foundation for historians interested in establishing the usefulness and legitimacy of
experience in their work. Further, Lakoff and Johnson's philosophical realism, based in
the empirical work of cognitive science, is consonant with the hermeneutic empiricism
of much history writing. It also counters the validity of many of the working
assumptions of poststructuralist history, including those of Joan Scott. Overall, the
cognitive psychology of embodied realism extends the potential explanatory power of
performance historians tomake sense of past performance situations.7
The following essay is in three parts. First, Iwill outline Scott's poststructuralist
objections to "experience" and the attempts of several historians to rescue the term for
historical use. Next, Iwill present a brief overview of "embodied realism" focused
primarily on the ways inwhich the "cognitive unconscious," as Lakoff and Johnson
term it, structures experience. This section culminates in a discussion of Lakoff and
Johnson's major challenge to theatre studies: the need to rethink conventional notions
of aesthetics and rhetoric. In the longest section of the essay, Imove from largely
epistemological tomethodological concerns to demonstrate the usefulness of Lakoff
and Johnson's cognitive science by deploying their ideas about spatiality, projection,
and subjectivity to understand a
historically situated stage production. In particular, I
will suggest how embodied realism can help the historian to analyze how cold war
American audiences in New York may have constructed meanings during the
production of A Hatful of Rain in 1955. As Iwill show, Lakoff and Johnson open the
way for historians to understand the brain as the material site where ecology and
culture join to shape history and performance.
I
In Gender and thePolitics ofHistory (1988), "The Evidence of Experience," published
in Critical Inquiry (1991), and "Experience," anthologized in Feminists Theorize the
Political (1992), Joan Scott attacked historians for relying on na?ve notions of experi
ence as the foundation of their historical explanations:
When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject
(the person who had the experience
or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock
of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of
experience, about how subjects
are constituted as different in the first place, about how
one's vision is structured?about
language
or discourse in
history?are left aside.8
Individual experience cannot be a "bedrock of evidence" for historical writing, says
Scott, because the raw stuff of human action and perception only becomes experience
through the mediation of systems of representation, such as visual signs and spoken
7
See Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge toWestern
Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Also, Mark Johnson, The Body in theMind: The Bodily Basis of
Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Also relevant to the
cultural functions of cognitive metaphors
are
Raymond W. Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative
Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gerald Steen,
Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach (London and New York: Longman, 1994);
and Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
8
Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 777.
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572 / Bruce McConachie
language.
Because "discourses position subjects
and
produce
their
experiences,"
it
is "not individuals who have experiences, but subjects who are constituted through
experience."9 Experience is grounded in and hence subordinate to systems of
representation. If experience can be subsumed within discourse, as Scott claims, the
cognitive science of Lakoff and Johnson (and of all other cognitive psychologists) has
little to offer theatre studies. At stake for theatre scholars in the arguments over Scott's
position, however, is not just the usefulness of cognitive psychology, but the
epistemelogical basis for all truth claims in the field.
Like many poststructuralists, Scott turns toDerrida's deconstructive use of semiotics
to understand how discourse creates difference and meaning, and, consequently, helps
to shape historical inequities. In her introduction to Gender and the Politics ofHistory,
she states:
Any unitary concept rests
on?contains?repressed
or
negated material and so is unstable,
not unified_Fixed oppositions conceal the heterogeneity of either category, the extent to
which terms
presented
as
oppositional
are
interdependent.
. . .Contests about meaning
involve the introduction of new
oppositions, the reversal of hierarchies, the attempt to
expose repressed terms, to
challenge the natural status of seemingly dichotomous pairs,
and to expose their interdependence and their internal instability.
This kind of analysis,
theorized by Jacques Derrida as "deconstruction," makes it
possible
to
study systematically
(though
never
definitively
or
totally) the conflictual processes that produce meanings.10
Thus Scott advises historians to use the methods of poststructuralism "in trying to
understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which
identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced-"n She is particularly interested in the
othering of women through discourse and its material effects on their lives. Scott
concludes her 1991 essay with the statement: "Subjects are constituted discursively,
and experience is a linguistic event-[Consequently,] language is the site of history's
enactment."12
For anyone familiar with the insights of Michel Foucault, Scott's pronouncements
are not surprising. Despite the materialism of some of his work, Foucault emphasized
the power that circulated through systems of rules and procedures and, consequently,
shaped whole areas of historical experience. Like Scott, Foucault may be criticized for
a kind of linguistic idealism inwhich language itself becomes an autonomous system
ungrounded in thematerial forces of history. And for Scott, as for Foucault, questions
of experience outside the conventional workings of discourse are largely irrelevant
because systems of representation and their epistemic shifts are the primary organiz
ers of history.13 On the other hand, practitioners of Foucauldian history need not
separate their work entirely from realist and materialist premises. Joseph Roach, for
example, whose genealogies of performance in Cities of theDead trace the discursive
9
Ibid., 779.
10
Scott, Gender and the Politics ofHistory, 7.
11
Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 793.
12
Ibid.
13
See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 ed. Colin
Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). Also, see
Pickering's linking of Scott to Foucault, 221-230.
14
See Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia, 1996). For a recent
example
in theatre studies of a
history that relies on Scott's poststructuralism for epistemological and
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DOINGTHINGS / 573
and institutional practices of racism over time, has been singularly effective in
merging discursive and materialist approaches.14 In her 1988 book, Scott recommends
a similar genealogical approach for understanding historical constructions of gender.
Her 1991 essay, however, pushes the idealist side of Foucault to argue that language,
by itself, constitutes experience and hence makes history.
Not surprisingly, Marxists and other materialists were among the first to challenge
Scott's linguistic idealism. Their position had been prepared by N. Garnham in his
1983 article insisting on "the irreducible material determinants of the social process of
symbolic exchange."15 Another Marxist, Bryan D. Palmer, took Scott to task for
"following the logic of poststructuralism in a one-sided reification of language and
stubborn refusal of the multitude of structurally embedded historical factors that,
while related to discourse, are indeed separable."16 As Palmer points out, Scott, even as
she recognizes (with Derrida) that such Saussurian dualities as strong/weak, rational/
emotional, and material/spiritual that populate historical texts and shape definitions
of gender are inherently unstable and immaterial, nonetheless gives them the caus
ative power of material forces in her narratives. Although Palmer utterly rejects this
position, he has little to offer as an alternative to Scott's understanding of experience.
Building primarily on non-experiential assumptions about the material determinants
of history, Palmer believes that human experience plays a minor part in historical
dynamics.
Historian John Zammito, on the other hand, sees experience as central in construct
ing historical explanations. Zammito bases his opposition to Scott's poststructuralist
project on the postpositivist realism of Satya Mohanty.17 Mohanty is concerned that the
relativism preached by postmodernism is annulling the possibility of finding common
ground on which genuine dialogue among scholars may occur. Contra Mohanty and
Zammito, Scott asserts that commonality based on experience is a dangerous mirage.
According to Scott, historians who look to their own experience to know the
experience of historical Others engage in a kind of solipsism that allows them to claim
objectivity and rhetorical power. The concept of experience, she believes, "provides an
object for historians that can be known apart from their own role as meaning makers
and it then guarantees not only the objectivity of their knowledge, but their ability to
persuade others of its importance."18 From Scott's Nietzschean point of view, the
consensus of a scholarly community about the relative truth of an historical asser
tion?a consensus necessarily based on broadly shared experience?could only come
about by repressing conflicting points of view.
Mohanty and Zammito challenge the notion that systems of discourse involving
difference necessarily create experience and subject positions that cannot be changed.
methodological guidance,
see Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum
Stage (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). My review of Wearing the Breeches, which focuses on the
shortcomings of Scott's premises for historical explanation, is formcoming inAmerican Historical Review.
15Garnham, "Towards a
Theory of Cultural Materialism," Journal of Communication 33:3 (1983).
16
Palmer, Descent into Discourse, 179.
17
See Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997) and Mohanty, "The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial
Condition," in Reclaiming Identity, 29-66.
18
Scott, "Experience," 32.
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574 / Bruce McConachie
"Just how other, we need to force ourselves to specify, is the Other?" asks Mohanty.19
Drawing on Donald Davidson's rebuttal of Kuhnian relativism,20 Mohanty elevates the
capacity of humans to evaluate actions, purposes, and experiences and hence to arrive
at contingent positions of cross-cultural commonality. Human agency, in other words,
may modify old experiences and create new ones, closing the distances among
experiential differences and even facilitating a kind of objectivity among scholars.
Mohanty's position may be an attractive one?a new humanism beyond the essentialisms
and grand claims to objectivity of the old version?but is it credible? Perhaps human
will and reason can modify subject positions embedded in discourse, but historians
and others looking for empirical proof of such a claim have a right to be skeptical.
Unlike Mohanty and Zammito, Pickering draws on the historiographical past to
challenge Scott's poststructuralist reduction of experience to discourse. In addition to
outlining useful hermeneutic and empirical definitions of experience in the work of
Dilthey, Williams, and others, he invokes E.P. Thompson and Anthony Giddens on the
importance of historical context in the production ofmeaning. According to Pickering,
Scott makes the mistake of assuming that experience is individual and not "collec
tive,"21 as he asserts. States Pickering, "It is the socially organised production of culture
that needs to be emphasized, not the decoding of cultural texts. Any act of signification
or representation is always embedded in the social fields in which it ismade and
assimilated, inways which involve cultural practices atwork upon as well as within
the social relations inwhich they occur."22 From this position, Pickering iswilling to
meet Scott halfway on the importance of language. He recognizes, he says, "that the
realisation of such experiences intersects pivotally with language, for how else can we
have any mutual recognition of them [i.e., experiences]?"23
Nonetheless, systems of representation are not ontologically prior to experience for
Pickering. Language, he says, "iswhat experience is 'pressed out' into, the communi
cative forms inwhich they attain cultural meanings."24 The notion that discourse gives
form to some amorphous substance called experience, as a factory mold might shape
molten
plastic
or steel, is an
intriguing
one and reverses Scott's assumption that
experience only exists after discourse has shaped it. Despite asserting that various
forces of historical context constitute this primal, prelinguistic experience, however,
Pickering can arrive at no clear understanding of what this amorphous substance
might be. He cites Janet Wolff's view that the historian can demonstrate the consti
tuted nature of experience in the process of its exploration"25 through normal
empirical and hermeneutical methods enhanced by theoretical insights. This may
seem commonsensical enough, except that it leaves "experience" as a woolsack into
which the historian can stuff whatever conclusions about historical context she or he
might arrive at.What if prelinguistic experience is not amorphous at all, however?
19
In Zammito, "Reading 'Experience'," 303.
20
See Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a
Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries Into Truth and
Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 183-98.
21
Pickering, History, 222.
22
Ibid., 229.
23
Ibid., 228.
24Ibid.
^Ibid., 242.
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DOINGTHINGS / 575
What if structures mostly hard-wired in the mind shape experience before it emerges
as language? If these structures are generally the same for all people in all historical
periods, the historian can reach valid conclusions about the experiences of humans in
the past.
Each of these objections to Scott's poststructuralism raises important questions for
the historian, but none adequately addresses the challenges posed by her understand
ing of discourse and experience. Following Palmer, the historian is right to ask about
the general significance of experience, however itmight be defined, in explaining
historical dynamics. For some kinds of history?explorations of demographic shifts
and changing modes of economic production or, in performance history, investiga
tions of box office receipts and attendance fluctuations?the subjective side of human
experience is unlikely to play an important role in the historian's construction of
causation and explanation. But how can the historian know when subjective experi
ence might be relatively unimportant in crafting history? Zammito, following Mohanty,
raises the question of experience constituting some common ground that all humans
might share, despite their lived differences. If this were so, human experience might
provide for the possibility of widely shared, even "objective" knowledge (assuming an
epistemologically realist definition of objectivity). Pickering would
rightly ask Zammito,
however, about the formative influence of historical context in shaping this collective
experience and whether Mohanty's assumption of common ground could survive it.
Finally, Pickering's insights force the ontological question of how humans process
their interactions with theworld and come to understand them as "experiences": does
discourse shape experience or are there prelinguistic structures in the mind that
constitute all experience, including discourse?
"There is no social experience apart from people's perception of it," states Scott and
most of her critics would agree.26 Apart from behaviorist models of human action and
history, trying to explain what people thought they were doing often plays a
significant role in understanding their experiences. And it is especially important for
narratives of performance history which seek to understand why historically situated
playwrights, performers, and audiences made the choices they did. Perhaps the
crucial initial question, then, is the nature of perception. Does theway inwhich people
perceive themselves and theworld allow for the common
ground of experience hoped
for by Mohanty? Might the workings of perception and the mind facilitate enough
commonality to override the fracturings of perceived experiences resulting from
historical context? And how, finally, might perception and cognition shape, even help
to constitute what historians and others may logically and empirically understand to
be human experience?
II
Understanding how human beings perceive the world and construct their experi
ences is the goal of cognitive science. A growing number of humanists have been using
26
Scott, "Experience," 40. The exceptions to her position are Palmer and other Marxist critics who
distinguish between perceived experience and behavior, which for them is largely unlighted by
conscious perception. If perception were mostly conscious, Lakoff and Johnson would agree; but, as
we shall see, it is not.
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576 / BruceMcConachie
the insights of cognitive science to open up their disciplines to new modes of
investigation and explanation. In film studies, Jan Simons deploys narrative theory
derived from Lakoff and Johnson's work to describe and analyze Dutch political
campaign films. Similarly, Warren Buckland, in the Cognitive Semiotics of Film, crafts a
"cognitive semantics" of film to understand the normative processes of film compre
hension.27 Buckland's study, which focuses on viewers' relation to the film screen in a
darkened auditorium as a projection of the cognitive schema of "containment," has
particular relevance for performance historians interested in the cognitive effects of
the proscenium arch in realistic and expressionistic productions.
A recent overview by Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, "Literary Studies
and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinarity," summarizes the current
influence of cognitive psychology in the field of literature. As in film studies, most
scholars applying the insights of cognitive science to texts have been theorists and
critics, not historians. Nonetheless, several of the literary studies discussed by Crane
and Richards have suggestive uses for performance historians. Memory in Oral
Traditions by David Rubin (1995), for example, uses cognitive science to analyze how
memory shapes oral poetry. His synthesis suggests the potential for new historical
insights into oral poetry meant for the stage, from Aeschylus to Eliot. Cognitive
science helps Ellen Spolsky's Gaps inNature (1993) account for creative innovation and
gender differences in the uses of language. Her work, which suggests a biological basis
for ?criture feminine, may help historians to distinguish more carefully between male
and female actors as well as writers. Several narratologists, including Marie-Laure
Ryan (Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, 1991) and Raymond
Gibbs (The Poetics ofMind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, 1994), have
used cognitive science to challenge old assumptions about narrative structure and
open up new understanding about the ubiquity of narrative imagining. Historians
interested in rescuing narrative history for public use may find confirmation and
insight in such studies. Finally, the books and articles of Mark Turner, who has
collaborated with cognitive scientist George Lakoff, delineate a "cognitive rhetoric"
which relates modes of historical as well as literary experience to foundational
sch?mas and metaphors of cognition. Turner, who has called for the reconstitution of
literary studies to incorporate cognitive science, would no doubt invite historians to
reconfigure their discipline along the same lines.28
27
See Jan Simons, Film, Language, and Conceptual Structures: Thinking Film in the Age of Cognitivism
(Amsterdam: Academisch Proefschrift, University of Amsterdam, 1995) and Warren Buckland, The
Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39-51.
28
See Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, "Literary Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a
New Interdisciplinarity," Mosaic 32:2 (June 1999), 123-40. Crane and Richardson summarize David C.
Rubin, Memory inOral Tradition: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the
Modular Mind (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1993); Marie-Laure J?yan, Possible Worlds, Artificial
Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); and about twenty
other books and articles. In addition toMark Turner's The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), see More than Cool Reason: A Field Guideto Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), written with George Lakoff, and "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory," Bridging the
Gap:Where. Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism, special issue of Stanford Humanities Review, 4:1
(1994), 110-12; and ReadingMinds: The Study of English in theAge of Cognitive Science (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
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DOINGTHINGS / 577
While I am not prepared to urge that all performance historians reconstruct
performance history within the parameters of cognitive science, I do want to give it a
nudge in that direction.29 Cognitive scientists investigate what they call a "cognitive
unconscious" that shapes all perception. As Lakoff and Johnson explain,
Conscious, thought is the tip of an enormous
iceberg.
It is the rule of thumb among
cognitive scientists that unconscious
thought is 95 percent of all
thought?and that may be
a serious underestimate. Moreover, the 95 percent below the surface of conscious aware
ness
shapes and structures all conscious thought.... The cognitive unconscious is vast and
intricately structured. It includes not
only all of our automatic cognitive operations, but
also all of our implicit knowledge. All of our knowledge and beliefs are framed in terms of
a
conceptual system that resides mostly
in the
cognitive unconscious. Our unconscious
conceptual system functions like a 'hidden hand' that
shapes how we
conceptualize all
aspects of our
experience.
. . .It constitutes our unreflective common sense.30
The cognitive unconscious consequently informs all systems of language and repre
sentation. Like Freudian and Lacanian theory, but with better empirical credentials
than either, cognitive science asserts that cognition structures all experience, including
the experience of discourse. As we will see, however, this insight does not simply
collapse all of history and culture into cognitive psychology.
Among cognitive scientists, Lakoff and Johnson have worked out one of the most
systematic and sophisticated understandings of the implications of the "cognitive
turn" on other forms of knowledge, including poststructuralism. They and others
have discovered that the human mind works to validate the truth of perceptions
primarily through metaphors. From a traditional historical ancl philosophical point of
view, of course, metaphors provide a poor rpad to truth. In Cartesian and empiricist
tliinking, metaphorical language deviates from the language of verifiable representa
tion. Conventionally, ifmetaphors are to have any validity beyond poetic evocation or
rhetorical flourish, they must express preexisting similarities between phenomena. In
short, the traditional notion of metaphor relegates it to amatter of words, not truth.
Drawing on thirty years of experiments in cognitive psychology and a desire to
construct empirically responsible philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson completely reject
the conventional view of metaphor in their philosophy of "embodied realism." Their
investigations demonstrate that all thinking relies on metaphor; scientific and human
istic truth is impossible without it.
Lakoff and Johnson's embodied realism holds that mental concepts arise, funda
mentally, from the experience of the body in the world. As "neural beings," humans
must make meaning within certain "basic-level," ''spatial relations," and "bodily
action" sch?mas, plus other concepts resulting from the interplay of experience and
patternings in the brain. "Primary metaphors" flesh out the skeletal possibilities of
29
Actually, I have nudged the field before through two previous essays, "Metaphors We Act By:5
Kinesthetics, Cognitive psychology, and Historical Structures," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
8 (Spring 1993), 25-45 and "Approaching Performance History Through Cognitive Psychology,"
Assaph 10 (1994), 113-22. Also working in this emerging interdiscipline of performance studies and
cognitive science are
Wojciech Baluch, "The Process of the Creation of Meaning in the Theatre: A
Cognitive Approach" (PhD Diss, Jagiellonian University, 2000), and Jeff Friedman, a PhD student in
dance at the University of California, Riverside.
30
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 13.
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578 / Bruce McConachie
many of these foundational sch?mas. Social stereotypes, prototypical examples, and
other modes of categorizing extend basic-level concepts. Regarding spatial relations
concepts, the "source-path-goal" schema, for instance, which humans learn at an early
age by crawling from a starting point to an end point, undergirds numerous
metaphors that organize certain events in our lives as narratives with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. "Balance," a bodily action schema, provides many metaphors for
mental health, ethical behavior, and public justice. These primary metaphors are
"creative," in the sense that they create an analogy linking two phenomena through
similarity; they do not rely on the recognition of an inherent, objective similarity
between two phenomena?a recognition which embodied realism (like other philo
sophical realisms) assumes to be humanly impossible. Because these and numerous
other primary metaphors link everyday experience to sensorimotor phenomena, most
conceptual thinking cannot occur without metaphors. Metaphors originating in the
cognitive unconscious structure the human perception of all experience.
The foundational sch?mas and primary metaphors identified by Lakoff and Johnson
provide content as well as form to human thinking. Each of their concepts, together
with their associated metaphors, constrains the kinds of meanings that can follow
from it. The bodily action concept of "counterforce," for example, entails images that
involve a head-on meeting of material forces. This schema helps to organize our
perceptions of ice hockey, historical revolutions, and similar phenomena, but it could
not be made to fit the content usually organized by other bodily action concepts, such
as
"full-empty"
and "iteration."
According to Lakoff and Johnson, these submerged sch?mas and their metaphorical
extensions are nearly universal to human experience: "Much of a person's conceptual
system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures. Our concep
tual systems are not totally relative and not merely amatter of historical contingency,
even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though historical
contingency does matter very much."31 Within embodied realism, cultural relativity
and the historicity of experience occur in two ways. Lakoff and Johnson note that
cultures typically differ in their "worldviews," which they define as a "consistent
constellation" of foundational concepts and primary metaphors over one or more
cultural domains, such as politics, morality, psychology, etc."32 Certain basic sch?mas
and metaphors, in other words, organize significant areas of a culture. Secondly, new
"complex metaphors and other conceptual blends" can arise that facilitate shifts in
thinking and historical change.33 The complex metaphor "time ismoney," for instance,
helped to structure the rise of capitalism in theWest?a metaphor largely absent from
cultures with less quantifiable conceptions of time.
Hence, for Lakoff and Johnson, all mental operations are built on transhistorical,
though not transcendental, sources. That is, cognition emerges from every individual's
experience with thematerial world and structures all historical cultures, but it is not a
part of some ahistorical, immaterial human nature. The same might be said of such
concepts as narrative, gender, and hierarchy?terms that can be shown to derive from
31
Ibid., 6.
32
Ibid., 511.
33
Ibid., 97.
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DOINGTHINGS / 579
basic-level categories and foundational sch?mas, and which are also, consequently,
universal to all human cultures. Human biology and the material world are logically
prior to cognition for Lakoff and Johnson. In the source-path-goal example above, for
example, babies must have some experience of human interaction and the pull of
gravity to learn to crawl. "At the heart of embodied realism," state Lakoff and
Johnson, "is our physical engagement with an environment in an ongoing series of
interactions."34 Thus they reject a strict subject-object dichotomy which results either in
an epistemology of disembodied objectivity or intersubjective relativism. Their phi
losophy has affinities with the realism of John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
Lakoff and Johnson's embodied realism views several of the assertions of post
structuralism as "empirically incorrect."35 Like other philosophical realisms, embodied
realism does not claim a God's eye notion of objectivity, but it does reject the anti
foundationalism of poststructuralism. Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive semantics also
counters a claim of Saussurian semiotics, upon which deconstruction rests, that the
relation between signifiers and signifieds is completely arbitrary. Rather, they state,
most language "is neither completely arbitrary nor completely predictable, but rather
'motivated' to some degree."36 That is, the parts of most words, their morphemes,
"motivate" the meaning of the word as a whole. Lakoff and Johnson give as an
example the word "refrigerator." If the meanings of the parts of "refrigerator" were
added together, the word would mean "something that makes things cold again," an
approximate meaning that is neither arbitrary nor predictable but can be said to be
motivated by themorphemes of the noun (464). They also dispute Derrida's notion of
"?iff?rance," likewise based in Saussure?the doctrine that signs come in oppositional
pairs which consequently force interpreters to define one sign in terms of its opposite
(e.g., male/female, black/white), even though any final designation of meaning is
impossible/According to the semantics of cognitive science, "there is nothing in the
world or people that fixes these interpretations" (466). Lakoff and Johnson demon
strate that interpreters of signs have many more choices than the oppositional pairings
that Saussure and Derrida assume, including ironic reversals of apparently opposite
meanings. Finally, as already noted, Lakoff and Johnson dispute the historical and
cultural relativism of poststructuralism. Representational systems across cultures and
historical time
periods
are not incommensurable, they
assert.
Anthropologists
and
historians may translate and interpret among different cultures and time periods
because certain spatial relation and bodily action concepts are universal to human
perception
and
experience.37
Consequently, embodied realism resolves the major epistemological problems
facing historians eager to continue using "experience" for their historical explanations
and historiographical justifications. Even Bryan Palmer, who has little historical use
34
Ibid., 90.
35
Ibid., 464.
36
Ibid.
37
F. Elizabeth Hart, in her "Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist
Linguistics," (Configurations, 6.3 [1998], 311^43), uses
cognitive science to present
a
compelling critique
of Derrida's latent formalism and ahistoricism, but does not abandon all of the claims of
poststructuralism. Her article, as she states, "demonstrate^] how a
cognitive-based poststructuralism
better enables us tomodel the vision of amaterialist dialectic of material and cultural exchange" (313).
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580 / BruceMcConachie
for subjective experience, could applaud thematerialist basis of Lakoff and Johnson's
embodied realism. For Zammito and Mohanty, embodied realism provides a solid
empirical foundation for much of their postpositivist realism. Its cognitive science
demonstrates how cross-cultural commonality is constituted and provides for the
possibility of scholarly objectivity of the realist variety based in the universals of
embodied experience. Because these universals occur at the unconscious level,
however, they do modify Mohanty's optimistic claims for human agency. With
ecology?specifically human interaction with the environment that shapes the neural
development of the brain?preceding history for Lakoff and Johnson, embodied
realism also limits the determining effects of historical context that concern Pickering.
To synthesize the insights of Pickering and of Lakoff and Johnson, it appears that
experience might best be understood as occurring at two levels, the cognitive and the
historical. The universals of the cognitive level always shape how people experience
their lives in history but because of themany possibilities of cognitive experience, the
cognitive level, though it constrains, never determines the historical level. In effect, it
may be possible for historians to incorporate the cognitive unconscious in their
explanations of experience and context inmuch the same way that some historians
have used a Freudian or Lacanian unconscious as a foundation for their history
writing. To paraphrase Marx, people, not texts, make history, though they never make
it in ecologies and with brains of their own choosing.
To understand how the cognitive level has constrained the historical experience of
theatregoing, embodied realism requires that the performance historian rejoin theatri
cal rhetoric and aesthetic style. In conventional theory, the rhetoric/aesthetic distinc
tion assumes a radical dichotomy between experiencing subjects and objectively
knowable objects. Although Lakoff and Johnson do not comment directly
on this
analytical separation in theatre studies, their discussion of the errors of "disembodied
scientific realism" is relevant to it. This disembodied way of doing science, they state,
"create[s] an unbridgeable ontological chasm between 'objects' which are 'out there'
and
subjectivity,
which is 'in here.'"
They
continue: "Once the separation
is made,
there are only two possible, equally erroneous, conceptions of objectivity: Objectivity
is either given by the 'things themselves' (the objects) or by the intersubjective
structures of consciousness shared by all people (the subjects)."38 As Lakoff and
Johnson point out, what "disembodied realism," like most aesthetic and rhetorical
theory, "misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or
divorced from reality in thefirst place"39 Restated in theatrical terms, the "response" of
the audience was never separated or divorced from the "reality" on stage at all.
Consequently, humans can gain no objective understanding about the formal proper
ties of theatrical objects on the stage or of a separable, discrete response to them from
members of the audience. The relationship connecting spectators to the stage and
events on the stage to the audience must be understood as a single phenomenon.
Cognitive science provides insight into the psychological mechanism that makes
this relationship possible in all performances. Although Iwill limit the following
discussion to dramatic theatre for the sake of clarity and concision, itwill be evident
that this mechanism engages "spectators" with "actors" in all modes of performance.
^Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 93.
39
Ibid., 93. Emphasis in
original.
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DOINGTHINGS / 581
Drawing on experiments from several researchers, Lakoff and Johnson discuss the
primary means by which humans imaginatively identify themselves with others in
fictitious, "as if" situations. The ability to imitate another person that is learned in
childhood involves imagining oneself as inhabiting the body of the other?metaphori
cally projecting the self onto someone else. This, of course, is the basis of theatre, for
both actors and spectators, and it occurs in two primary ways: advisory projection and
empathetic projection. In advisory projection, state Lakoff and Johnson, "I am
projecting my values onto you so that I experience your life with my values. In the
other type, empathetic projection, I am experiencing your life, but with your values
projected onto my subjective experience."40 In theatrical terms, both kinds of projec
tion involve spectators imaginatively occupying the bodies of actors (and potentially
others) in the performance. The difference involves "values," one's own or another's.
While the mechanics of projection are simple enough, the results are often quite
complex. Most performances of drama involve the audience in numerous moments of
advisory and empathetic projection,
a distinction that is further complicated when the
spectator's values are nearly identical with the values of the figure identified with on
the stage. And who or what is this figure? In realist plays, inwhich the presence of the
actor mostly "becomes" a fictitious character for the audience, spectators will prima
rily imagine themselves projecting their subjectivity onto the body of the "character."
In some modes of theatre that encourage the audience to separate the actor from the
character, however?productions of Brecht's and Pirandello's plays are obvious
examples? spectators may mix their projections between actors and characters. But
characters, of course, have no bodies without actors; the possibilities for complexity in
advisory and empathetic projection multiply.
The approach to theatrical rhetoric embedded in Lakoff and Johnson's philosophy
comes closest to the phenomenological materialism advocated in Theatre and Everyday
Life: An Ethics of Performance by Alan Read and The Fate of the Object: From Modern
Object toPostmodern Sign inPerformance, Art, and Poetry by Jon Erickson.41 Read locates
the process of theatre in the interplay of spectating and performing bodies. "Theatre is
an expressive practice that involves an audience through themedium of images at the
center of which is the human body," he states.42 Theatre and Everyday Life draws on
theatre
history
to remind readers that actors and spectators shared the same audito
rium light until very recently, for example. For Read, the dynamic of interacting bodies
in the same space continues to be a prerequisite for any viable definition of theatrical
performance.
Although Erickson's The Fate of the Object leaves unquestioned the conventional
subject/object dichotomy of conventional rhetoric and aesthetics, the author's
understanding of an actor's "presence" is useful for teasing out an implicit theatrical
rhetoric within embodied realism. Actors, says Erickson, can never fully become nor
^Ibid., 281.
41
Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1993) and Jon Erickson, The Fate of the
Object (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Significantly, Lakoff and Johnson
recognize that certain insights of phenomenology and materialism coincide closely with embodied
realism (Philosophy of the Flesh, 108-109). Johnson, in fact, refers to his position as
"descriptive
or
empirical phenomenology" (The Body in theMind, xxxvii).
42
Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 10.
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582 / BruceMcConachie
fully erase a spectator's perception of them as both corporal beings and signs of some
Other person; they are, consequently, both bodies and characters, simultaneously. In
fact, alleges Erickson, "the tension between the body as object and the body as sign gives
birth to an awareness of presence as the tension between basic corporal being and the
becoming of signification."43 Following Lakoff and Johnson, one might emend Erickson's
statement to note the gestalt nature of audience projection. That is, spectators project
themselves onto the "presence" of actors, a presence constituted both by the body of
the actor and by the actor's significance in the performance. This significance might
range from the meaning of the persona a Brechtian actor presents to the audience as
"herself" to themeaning of a fully embodied male "character" portrayed by a.Method
actor. Hence, spectators project their subjectivity onto the presence of an actor on
stage. In advisory projection, the spectator reads his or her own values into that
presence. When the projection is empathetic, spectators take what they perceive are
the values of that presence and read them into their imaginative experience of it.
Projection onto the presence of an actor is the first step in the dynamics of dramatic
rhetoric and response on stage. Spectator projection of ametaphor binding these actor
characters together in a narrative is generally the second. Narrative imagining is a
foundational part of human cognition. As literary-cognitive theorist Mark Turner
notes, "storytelling is a constant mental activity
... essential to human thought." The
urge to narrate proceeds from the source-path-goal image schema and frames
numerous events in everyday life, from pouring a cup of coffee to imagining a journey.
Rather than being optional or merely literary, narrativity "appears to be inseparable
from our
evolutionary past and our
necessary personal experience,"44
states Turner.
This human proclivity to imagine stories prompts theatregoers to look for narrative
links among the events on stage and connect them into cohesive series and wholes. As
with projections onto the presence of actors, the preferred forms and genres of
narrative imagining often vary widely among periods and cultures. Hence different
kinds of actor-characters and specific stories about them have gained popularity in
specific historical periods. A wily hero and his voyage home had significant relevance
for ancient Greeks listening to the story of Odysseus. Eighteenth-century Londoners,
on the other hand, eagerly watched stories that separated true "men of sentiment"
from false ones.
If imaginative projection couples spectators to the presence of actors embedded in
stories, how can the theorist-historian forge
a new synthesis of rhetoric and aesthetics
to account for this linkage between audiences and performers? Rhetoric in this larger
sense must now encompass not only how, but what audiences projected themselves
onto and what stories were told through these actor-characters on the stage. Plays will
be aesthetically successful and rhetorically persuasive, then, insofar as they encour
aged spectators to project themselves onto "figures that mattered," to adopt a phrase
from philosopher Judith Butler?figures involved, aswell, in "stories thatmattered."45
This sense of rhetoric approaches Kenneth Burke's understanding that persuasion is
43
Erickson, The Fate of the Object, 62. Emphasis in the original.
MMark Turner, The Literary Mind, 12, 25.
45See Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993). In general,
Lakoff and Johnson would agree with Butler that humans learn to perform sexuality, although they
would disagree with the Lacanian premises of her argument. Much of this learning
occurs at an earlier
age and happens through processes that Freud and Lacan did not recognize.
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DOINGTHINGS / 583
always preceded by identification; for rhetoric towork in the theatre, spectators must
be able to identify the story they are watching and be able to identify with it?in
Lakoff and Johnson's terms, to project themselves onto it.46Burke's sense of rhetoric
gets us closer to embodied realism/but the notion of projection as identification still
involves subjects operating on objects. For the kind of interaction that Lakoff and
Johnson envision, the figures projected onto must, in effect, push back; the specific
content of the actor's presence;?-both his/her corporality and significance in the
narrative?must both empower and constrain the kinds of identification and projec
tion possible for spectators in the theatre. Because of this interplay of projection and
actorly content embedded in narrative, rhetoric is always a local affair, difficult to
generalize about beyond groups of theatrical events in which certain kinds of
audiences meet specific kinds of figures and experience particular stories on the stage.
As a result of this interaction, certain kinds of plays fashion certain groups of
spectators and vice versa.
Ill
The specificity of aesthetic and rhetorical dynamics in the theatre necessarily throws
theatrical production and response, aesthetics and rhetoric, into the arena of history.
Nonetheless, although embodied realism offers epistemological reassurance formost
historians, itsmethodological implications for the practice of history, specifically the
writing of performance history, are far from clear. As Lakoff and Johnson recognize,
humans use basic level categories, sch?mas, and primary metaphors thousands of
times each day to make sense of their world. With so many category types and
metaphors at play, how can the historian know which ones achieved more relative
importance than others during a specific historical period? Luckily for the perform
ance historian> performances tend to be "condensational events" in which certain
primary metaphors, condensed from cultural-historical interaction, emerge as
significant.47 Watching amodern football game, for example, involves the spectator in
thousands of cognitive processes, but among these the spatial relations concepts of
containment and part-whole and the physical action concepts of compulsion, iteration,
and counterforce recur with enough regularity and complexity to shape and even
constitute what most spectators would call their experience of the game. The
performance historian interested in understanding the role of football in the context of
contemporary America might begin with this relatively formal understanding of how
the game is played and investigate other public events inwhich these spatial relations
and physical action sch?mas predominate. This method begins by assuming that
Lakoff and Johnson's terminology describes real interactions in the material world of
a performance and then it uses empirical and hermeneutical techniques to find and
investigate the same events in similar
performances.
46
See A Rhetoric ofMotives, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Robert Wess's
insights into Burkean rhetoric, in Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), are
particularly relevant in this regard. Also significant for
spectatorial meaning-making iswhat Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have termed "the principle of
relevance." From their point of view, audience members will process new information in the theatre
only if it contributes to their understanding of the dramatic/theatrical context and if the processing
effort is small. See Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
47
The term "condensational event" is Roach's. See his Cities of the Dead, 28-30, et passim.
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584 / BruceMcConachie
Before getting very far in the above example, however, the historian will need some
help inmaking sense of the many other public performances that are like football
games. She or he will need a larger explanatory scheme to relate football games and
similar performances (say, political contests and corporate takeovers) to the larger
processes and traditions of American history and its cultures. At this juncture, the
historian must choose from among a variety of theories that relate a culture-historical
part to its larger whole. Systems theory, social practice theory, hegemony theory?and
their many combinations and variations?are all possible, as long as their claims and
procedures are adequately fitted to the empiricism and hermeneutics of embodied
realism. Following Lakoff and Johnson, for example, the hegemony of a dominant
culture may now be defined asmutually supportive "constellations" of concepts and
metaphors legitimating the power of certain social groups and classes. Given the
biological reservoir of cognitive possibilities in the brain, however, hegemonic con
tainment is always structurally unstable. As theorist Michael Ryan once noted in
another context, cultural hegemony, read through the lens of Lakoff and Johnson,
would become "a blanket thrown over a tiger rather than awindowless prison." In the
terminology of Raymond Williams, the cognitive reserve of concepts and metaphors
beyond the constellations of the dominant culture constitutes a potentially enormous
"residual culture," some of which could become "oppositional," given the right agents
and circumstances.48
Using the insights of embodied realism assisted by amodified version of hegemony
theory (and assuming adequate evidence), it is possible to derive a valid method for
explaining the normative experiences of most spectators at the production of a specific
play in history. Let us suppose that the historian is interested in exploring the
audience's experience of the production of A Hatful of Rain, by Michael Gazzo, which
played on Broadway in 1955 and 1956. Hatful opened at the Lyceum Theatre on
9November 1955 with Ben Gazzara in the leading role and ran for over two hundred
performances. Many questions might be asked about spectators' experience of the
show, but for purposes of this methodological exploration we will limit the discussion
to initial explorations of their experience of the theatrical space, the narrative of the
play, and the presence of actor-character Ben Gazzara-Johnny Pope. Determining
whether the experience of Hatful worked within, outside of, or perhaps against the
dominant culture of the period is the general task of the historian interested in fusing
hegemony theory with the cognitive psychology of Lakoff and Johnson.
^Michael Ryan, "The Politics of Film: Discourse, Psychoanalysis, Ideology,"
inMarxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988), 485. On cultural hegemony,
see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from
the Prison Notebooks of Antonio
Gramsci, ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971);
Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure
inMarxist Cultural Theory," in Problems inMaterialism
and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 31-49; and Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977). For useful interpretations of Gramsci and Williams, see Ernesto Laclau and
Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New
Left Books, 1985); TJ. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,"
American Historical Review, 90 (June 1985), 567-93; and my essay, "Using the Concept of Cultural
Hegemony
toWrite Theatre History," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in Historiography and
Performance, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa
Press, 1989), 37-58.
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DOINGTHINGS / 585
The methodology appropriate for this task is theoretically informed hermeneutics.
Assuming the validity of Lakoff and Johnson's insights, it is clear that certain image
sch?mas predominated in the mainstream culture of the 1950s. Were these mostly the
same sch?mas that organized the spectator's perception and experience of spatiality,
narrative, and presence at the production of Hatful? If so, the historian could conclude
that the production largely worked within the dominant American culture of the
1950s. Determining the image sch?mas of both the production and the culture involves
hermeneutics, a process by which the historian moves back and forth between the
evidence and the image sch?mas available for interpreting and explaining that
evidence. This process gradually eliminates some of the two dozen or somajor image
sch?mas identified by Lakoff and Johnson as the basis for probable explanations and
focuses on the few that can account formore of the available evidence.
With regard to the dominant culture of the 1950s, the historian must assess awide
variety of evidence to discover the key image sch?mas that shaped the decade. Wide
reading among many cultural histories that survey several domains of the culture,
coupled with close attention to several significant primary sources, will be the primary
tool here. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the historian will find that many Americans
experienced the dominant culture of the 1950s much as they experienced a football
game; the image sch?mas of containment, part-whole, compulsion, iteration, and
counterforce shaped significant domains of everyday lives. Among these relevant
images, the schema of "containment" will likely draw the interest of most American
historians who know anything about the U.S. in the 1950s. "Containment" named the
foreign policy of the United States during the early Cold War and continues to shape
the explanations of several significant cultural histories, including Robert Corber's
Homosexuality in Cold War America (containment in the homosexual closet), Alan
Nadel's Containment Culture (an analysis of several narrative responses to the Atomic
age), and Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound (the suburban family as container).49
From this general overview, the historian might suspect that the schema of contain
ment could have been a potent nucleus of the dominant culture of the decade, around
which swirled other sch?mas in significant fields of cultural force.
To investigate this hunch more thoroughly, the historian would then check Lakoff
and Johnson's understanding of the dynamics of "containment." According to Johnson,
five entailments are embedded in this schema:
(i) The experience of containment typically involves protection from, or resistance to,
external forces. When eyeglasses
are in a case, they
are
protected against forceful impacts,
(ii) Containment also limits and restricts forces within the container. When I am in a room
or in a
jacket, I am restrained in my forceful movements, (iii) Because of this restraint of
forces, the contained object gets
a relative fixity of location. For example, the fish gets
located in the fishbowl. The cup is held in the hand, (iv) This relative fixing of location
within the container means that the contained object becomes either accessible or inacces
sible to the observer. It is either held so that it can be observed or else the container itself
blocks or hides the object from view, (v)Finally, we experience transitivity in containment.
49
Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the
Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives,
Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
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586 / Bruce McConachie
If B is in A, then whatever is in B is also in A. If I am inmy bed and my bed is inmy room,
then I am also in my room.50
With this definition in hand, the historian can look more closely to see how
thoroughly "containment" penetrated and organized several domains of the culture.
Clearly, itwas a part of the thinking that underlay the National Security Act of 1947,
which established the CIA and the security protocols of the era. Taken as awhole, the
act maps the nation-state as a unit of containment; inside the U.S. is secret knowledge
requiring protection. Regarding Johnson's first entailment above/the act is designed to
protect this knowledge from external forces, chiefly the Soviet Union, although
theoretically any force in the rest of theworld might become an antagonist. In terms of
(ii), containment not only limits the ways in which the security establishment will
handle these secrets, it also puts severe restrictions on the freedoms of all other citizens
within the boundaries of fortress America. The other three entailments also organized
the 1947 act, including the transitivity of containment, which, under the logic of
McCarthyism, meant that citizens in all private organizations within the U.S. must.be
suspected of aiding Communism. A parent in a local PTA was also a citizen in the
nation-state and might be an innocent participant in a cell of subversives.
Other "containers" pervaded cold war culture. Americans during the 1950s tended
to regard the self as a container, typically an ego of innocence and vulnerability. Thus,
popular media analysts like Vance Packard (TheHidden Persuaders, 1956) convinced
many Americans to worry that advertising was piercing the mental boundaries of
American selves and injecting them with false values (i) and psychoanalysts,
never
before (or since) as popular in the United States, analyzed their patients' dreams to
understand the hidden memories within their selves (iv). Talking heads and Holly
wood films typically understood the white, suburban family as another container,
especially insofar as it exerted sexual restraints on its husbands and wives (ii).
Imagining the nation as the Chosen People of God encouraged many citizens to fixate
on the presumed qualities of the "American character" during the 1950s (iii).
Nonetheless, goodness could harbor sin, a hidden but very real threat within the
Chosen People (iv) that led to much popular interest in repentance and salvation
during the early Cold War. For many Americans, marital "togetherness," the Family,
and the Chosen People provided imaginative, transitive boxes (v) within which
American morality could be protected and vindicated as amodel for the "FreeWorld."
Teasing out the entailments of these and other cold war containers could easily
consume several volumes of cultural history.
In short, the historian can find numerous
instances in which Americans mapped the schema of containment onto their laws,
their families, their literature, their religion, and other domains of their culture to
explain significant experiences in their lives. "Containment" was as ubiquitous in the
dominant culture of cold war America aswas the spatial relations schema of "balance"
in the culture of Enlightenment France.
Having established the general dynamics of what the historian might begin calling
"containment culture," s/he next turns to the production of Hatful. Did most
spectators' experience of its spatiality, its narrative, and the presence of its star
performer also legitimate and hence reinforce containment cognition? Turning first to
50
Johnson, The Body in theMind, 22.
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DOINGTHINGS / 587
spatiality, the historian will recognize the Lyceum Theatre as a conventional Broadway
auditorium. Like all other theatre buildings in the Broadway area during the 1950s, the
Lyceum mandated that spectators in orchestra and balcony seats look at a production
on a stage that was framed and visually contained by a proscenium arch. This
common spatiality had important implications for the reception of every Broadway
production. In addition to the schema of containment, simple observation and
deduction reveal that the sch?mas of "center-periphery," and "ne?r-far" organize this
spatial dynamic in the unconscious minds of humans. Proscenium spatiality draws on
what Neil Smith and Cindi Katz term the "absolute space" of Euclidian geometry and
Cartesian philosophy51 Historically, the positioning of the audience in proscenium
staging developed from the perspectivism of Renaissance painting. As idealized in the
Teatro Farnese, for instance, the all-seeing eyes of the Renaissance Prince at the center
of the auditorium gazed toward a horizon line behind the proscenium and fixed
objects in space according to their distance from his vision. With the proscenium arch
as a picture frame organizing stage objects for this type of panoptic vision, theWest
discovered a means of transforming the assumptions of Cartesian philosophy into
theatre architecture and viewing experience. As Daniel Dennett has noted, Descartes
conceived of thinking as amental theatre inwhich a single, silent spectator observed
metaphorical objects illuminated by the inner light of reason. Hence, human under
standing could arrive at objective insight secure in the knowledge that "his" [sic]
mental representations were a true picture of the external world.52 Following from its
foundation in the
concepts of containment, center-periphery,
and near-far, Cartesian
thinking organized aworld inwhich people believed they could gaze objectively at
passive objects.
This legacy partly shaped the modern realist theatre, with the apparent objectivity
of the photograph standing as the guarantor of truth on the realist stage. Other
conventions of modern viewing in the theatre also reinforced the Cartesian assump
tion that spectators could separate themselves from the realities on stage and gaze at
them as the ideal jailor in Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" might have gazed at his
prisoners. The dimming of house lights, for example, discouraged spectators from
believing that they might be co-producers of theatrical enjoyment with the actors and
led to amore privatized theatrical experience for the audience. Likewise, the disap
pearance of the prompter and the partial or wholesale erasure of the technical means
of production from the view of spectators (such as changes in scenery and lighting)
also reinforced their belief that they could separate themselves from the "objects" on
stage. These conventions shaped most forms of bourgeois theatre in the twentieth
century, including the viewing experience of all Broadway spectators in the 1950s.53
51N. Smith, and C. Katz,"Grounding Metaphor: Towards a
Spatialized Politics," Place and the Politics
of Identity, ed. M. Keith and S. Pile (London: Routledge, 1993), 75.
52
See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). The cognitive science
case
against Cartesian thinking is well argued by Antonio R. Demasi? in Descartes' Error: Emotion,
Reason, and theHuman Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994).
53
As Foucault noted, the Panopticon extended Enlightenment principles of objectification. On
panoptic vision in performance,
see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Objects of Ethnography," Exhib
iting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics ofMuseum Display, ed. I.Karp and S.D. Levine (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 401-34. W.B. Worthen, Modern Theater and the Rhetoric of Drama
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 12-98, makes a similar point about objectification
as
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588 / Bruce McConachie
From the point of view of Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive science, however, the
attempt to induce an
objectifying gaze from spectators can never completely succeed
because it posits auditors as subjects and the stage as aworld of objects, a dichotomy
that does not exist. The question for the historian, then, iswhat kind of projection from
its audience did proscenium viewing encourage, advisory or empathetic? Put this
way, it is apparent that the panopticon effect of the proscenium arch primarily induced
advisory projection, because its tendency toward objectification made empathy, the
projection of an actor-character's values onto the self, more difficult. On the other
hand, proscenium spatiality cannot rule out empathy As a fundamental human
attribute, empathetic projection cannot be erased from theatrical interaction, though it
may be made less desirable for spectators. Consequently, the historian's conclusion
about the likelihood of advisory projection dominating the spectator's experience of
Hatful can be only tentative. Itmust be tested against other evidence.
Did the script of Hatful primarily evoke advisory projection for Johnny Pope, the
protagonist of Gazzo's melodrama? In conventional rhetorical terms, does Gazzo
construct his play so as to induce his audience to take Johnny's values as our own or
do we rather pity his emptiness and confusion and project our own values onto him?
The exposition of Gazzo's realist play reveals that Johnny Pope fought in the Korean
War, received psychological treatment after his return, went to college on the GI Bill,
took a job as amachinist, and got married. In the present time of the drama, however,
he has lost the last of several jobs, stopped attending college, and refuses tomake love
with or even talk seriously to his wife, even though she is about to have their baby.
Near the end of the first scene, the audience learns the reason for his recent behavior?
Johnny has become a heroin addict. The rest of the drama explores his attempts to
break the habit, mend his marriage, and reconcile with his father and brother. It
climaxes in a tempestuous scene when Johnny, hallucinating and badly in need of a fix,
breaks out of his bedroom and must be restrained by his family. In the lastmoments of
the drama, his wife calls the police to take Johnny to the hospital.54 An initial reading
of the play suggests that advisory projection, not empathy, is the primary dramatic
hook of Hatful.
Contextual considerations of some of the reviews sparked by Hatful also point to the
dominance of advisory projection shaping the experience of spectators. In his review
of Hatful, Brooks Atkinson called Ben Gazzara's Johnny "a manly performance,
moody but free of whining."55 Boston Globe critic Elliott Norton noted that Gazzara's
Johnny "carries a burden of anguish manfully except in those moments when the
drugs wear off." To designate a
performance as manly or amoment on stage when a
inherent to realist theatre. As
previously noted, however, objectification caused by the spatiality of
realist theatre (or anything else) can never be complete. Other factors in the performance may spark in
spectators an
empathetic relationship that spatial dynamics cannot control or override.
54
For the Broadway script of the play, see Michael Vicente Gazzo, A Hatful of Rain in Famous
American Plays of the 1950s, ed. Lee Strasberg (New York: Dell, 1962), 313-84.
55
The following New York reviewers wrote about Hatful after opening night: Chapman, Daily News
(10November 1955);Watts, New York Post (10November 1955);McClain, JournalAmerican (10
November 1955);Kerr,New YorkHerald Tribune (10November 1955);Atkinson, TheNew YorkTimes (10
November 1955). Other reviews, including Elliot Norton's for the Boston Globe, are in the "Ben
Gazzara" and "Hatful of Rain" Clipping Files at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts.
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DOINGTHINGS / 589
manful performance slips into something else suggests that the play evoked some
anxiety about gender roles. Any actor performing a credible Johnny Pope might have
induced this kind of dubious praise from a critic because the character was posed at a
crisis point of cold war masculinity. Since adult masculinity was synonymous with the
role of breadwinner, notes social historian Barbara Ehrenreich,
The man who failed to achieve this role was either not fully adult or not fully masculine. In
the schema of male
pathology developed by mid-century psychologists, immaturity
shaded into infantilism, which was, in turn, a manifestation of unnatural fixation on the
mother, and the entire complex of
symptomatology reached its clinical climax in the
diagnosis of homosexuality.56
Johnny Pope is a case study of this type, an adult boy tending toward infantilism and
homosexuality who cannot reach authentic manhood until his childhood and wartime
traumas are resolved. His drug addiction, while the focus of the drama, is not the
source of his problems, which aremired in his search for themother he never had and
the Oedipal rage he still feels toward his father.
To plumb the depths of Johnny's psychology, Gazzo deploys three male pushers
who both supply and harass him. When read in the context of cold war paranoia, the
interactions between Johnny and the pushers replicate a cold war narrative of
compelling concern tomany Americans in the mid-1950s. Two of the pushers, Apples,
an infantile, giggling homosexual who plays with weapons, and Chuch, an ape-like,
slow moving zombie who crushes his victims, are partly alter-ego emblems of
Johnny's disintegrating personality. The third, Mother, a reptilian figure in an exquis
ite suit and dark glasses, is ametaphor for the real mother Johnny lost as a young
child. Their names are ironic signifiers of their true nature: "Apples" connotes a fall
from grace, a perverted innocence; Chuch, close in sound to "church," is the bestial
opposite of a churchman; and Mother, whose only milk is thewhite powder of heroin,
encourages a dependency that could lead to death. Together, they are like a family of
pod-people, the desiccated, zombie-like figures from Hollywood's Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956). Mother, Apples, and Chuch are the alternative family that could
replace Johnny's wife, brother, and father unless he can resolve his problems. More
immediately, they suggest that Johnny has regressed to a substitute mother who is
turning him into a
perverted monster.
Johnny may look normal on the outside for
much of the time, but on the inside the pod people are destroying his authenticity.
The subtext of Invasion of the Body Snatchers centered on subversion from within by
Communists. Gazzo's family of pushers probably reminded spectators of the same
radical Other in the American cold war imagination. In the early 1950s, novelists,
politicians, churchmen, and others imagined a variety of "Commies" that continued to
circulate in the culture long after the ravages of McCarthyism had passed into
memory. Communists were likened to robots such as Chuch, infantile homosexuals
like Apples, Mafioso hoodlums similar toMother, even?in the words of Cardinal
Spellman?to "the world's most fiendish, ghoulish men of slaughter,"57 a designation
56
The Hearts ofMen: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday,
1983), 20.
57
Quoted by Stephen J.Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), 96.
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590 / BruceMcConachie
that easily applies to all three of Gazzo's grotesques. Senator McCarthy had conflated
homosexuals and intellectuals with Communists in such phrases as "dilettante
diplomats" and "the prancing mimics of theMoscow party line."58 In the immensely
popular novels by Mickey Spillane in the early 1950s, "commies" were the opposite of
wholesome, healthy, and tough Americans. They were decadent, degraded, and soft?
"dumb as horse manure," for instance, and easily deserving to die inOne Lonely Night
(1951).59 Spillane's rhetoric of kill-'em-all machismo travelled widely, infecting even
the sober political analysis of The Vital Center (1949), by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Schlesinger praised the "new virility" that American postwar leaders had brought to
public life, contrasting it to the "political sterility" of the old-guard leftists and the
emasculated ruling class. For Schlesinger, Communism was "something secret, sweaty,
and furtive, like nothing so much ... as homosexuals in a boys school."60
Like Schlesinger, most anti-Communists agreed that the Red Menace brought with
it sexual perversion and chaos. To heighten the latent sexual threat already posed by
his monsters, Gazzo introduces Putski, a
strung-out, rich young
woman
wearing
nothing more than shoes and a fur coat, into the final appearance of his pushers. The
audience probably classified Putski as a nymphomaniac for her sexually suggestive
body language. A picture from the souvenir program for the Broadway production
shows her sitting in profile on a kitchen chair, her downstage foot propped up on
another chair revealing a bare leg, bent at the knee, thus opening a view of her crotch
to the three men sitting and standing above her. The pushers, however, remain numb
to her proffered charms.61 Putski's presence on stage pointed up Johnny's precarious
sexual relationship with his wife. His addiction-induced impotence is driving his wife
into the arms of his brother, a problem both are resisting but neither seems able to
resolve. Because of Johnny's boyhood traumas and dependencies, sexual chaos is
subverting the domestic happiness of an American family. Ifhe turns passive and soft,
this American boy, a key to future national strength, could fatally weaken American
society from within.
While the critic-historian can read these concerns into
Hatful,
how can s/he be sure
that they were also a part of the cold war audience's experience of the play? There's no
evidence in the reviews and or in other material from the production (advertising,
photos, press releases, etc.) directly linking the response of the audience to fears about
subversion. Here iswhere the embodied realism of Lakoff and Johnson can assist the
historian inmoving beyond a narrow empiricist approach to the evidence and help
him/her to understand the narrative imagining of historically situated spectators.
Following the logic of Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive psychology, if humans are
effectively hard-wired for constructing narratives and if containment thinking domi
nated many narratives in the 1950s, it is counter-intuitive not to suppose that
spectators, given many inducements tomap containment onto the narrative of Hatful,
would not do so. Spectatorial narrative imagining, which like other cognitive pro
^Quoted by Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima toWatergate (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1974), 95.
59
Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 36.
^Quoted by Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York:
Basic Books, 1988), 98.
61
Hatful file.
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DOINGTHINGS / 591
cesses occurs at largely unconscious levels, would not likely lead reviewers and others
to comment directly on its dynamics; most narrative construction is simply a part of
the cognitive and cultural taken-for-granted. The application of this historical method
cannot produce certainty, of course, but it can lead to valid judgments that rely on a
kind of cognitive probability.
The historian can turn to Lakoff and Johnson's discussion of the contained self for
partial validation of this interpretation of spectator experience. In their chapter on
cognitive conceptions of the self in Philosophy in theFlesh, Lakoff and Johnson note that
themetaphor "the self as container" is but one of several conceptions that individuals
and cultures may use to structure "self" understanding; other metaphors include the
"physical-object self" and the "social self."62When people look at themselves and
others as containers, they often look for one or several features within that self to
represent its essence. Hence containment thinking typically leads to essentialist
thinking, the belief, note Lakoff and Johnson, that "every entity has an 'essence' or
'nature,' that is a collection of properties thatmakes it the kind of thing it is and is the
causal source of its natural behavior."63 Lakoff and Johnson term this the "folk theory
of essences" and discuss its pervasive influence in the philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle.64 The "folk theory of essences" structured much cold war thinking, including
the psychologized, authentic self at the center of Hatful. The main story of Gazzo's
melodrama pits Johnny Pope's psychological authenticity against those who would
subvert its essence. Like The Catcher in the Rye and TheMan in the Grey Flannel Suit,
influential novels of the decade, Hatful is a narrative that centers on authenticity, and
such narratives typically work within the cognitive logic of containment.
Turning to the presence of Gazzara-Pope in Hatful, the historian would want to
know how the spectator's experience of "method" acting might have shaped her/his
interaction with the performance. When audiences identified with Johnny Pope, they
projected themselves onto Ben Gazzara, already renouned in the mid-1950s as a new
"method" star. In an interview in Cue magazine in 1955?one of several given by
Gazzara in themid-50s?the actor credited Strasberg for his success. Lee, he said, was
"a bonafide genius" and "working with him was equivalent to studying with
Stanislavsky in an earlier period." The article introduced Gazzara as "typical" of the
new Method stars:
"They noisily eschew glamour, dress carelessly,
are
intensely
intense. They endless discuss motivation, integrity, the search for values, tab our times
the age of anxiety." As if to confirm the cliche of the method actor, Gazzara admitted
his therapeutic need to find relaxation through painting: "These are tense times and
we are all taut."65
Walter Kerr's review suggests how Gazzara used method technique to develop his
embodiment of Johnny Pope:
Ben Gazzara's
hopelessly "hooked" veteran is a brilliant tour de force. The
alarming
tensions of the evening
are his to elaborate and to control. Whether he is
cocking his head
62
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 267-89.
63
Ibid., 363.
64
Ibid., 364-90.
65
See Cue (March 13, 1955), 13 in the "Ben Gazzara" Clipping File, New York Public Library of
Performing Arts.
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592 / BruceMcConachie
to one side and twisting his mouth into a sick, self-pitying smile, or
diving headfirst into a
bed in
anguish, the control is there. The
spine-tingling eruptions
are
violently credible; the
ordinary
man behind them is credible too.66
Gazzara's control as a performer allowed for sharp contrasts between Johnny's
generalized goodness and decency within and the Monster Addict without that
threatened to overwhelm his true self.
Colin Counsell's semiotic reading of method performing helps to locate Gazzara's
performance within the containment culture of the Cold War. Counsell notes four
general attributes of method signification from actors on stage and film: a physical
ease that audiences understood as a sign of naturalness and authenticity; eruptive and
often unpredictable emotions (e.g., anguish, trauma, joy, etc.) usually read by specta
tors as psychological intensity and/or disturbance; and signs from the actor such as
behavioral tics, "spontaneous" vocal inflections, and nuances of gesture that indicated
a complex inner life. These "three consistent features of the Method performance,"
states Counsell, "form the core of its iconography, for although Strasbergian actors
often
employ
their own
unique performance personae, their mannerisms nevertheless
fall into predictable categories, proffering the same orders of meaning."67 These
mannerisms were so
readily
observable in the
performances
of Brando, Gazzara, and
numerous other method actors that they could be parodied by the end of the 1950s.
Counsell's fourth attribute of "method" acting confirms its ties to the contained,
psychologized self of cold war culture, and thus to the self of Gazzara-Pope inHatful.
According to Counsell, the struggle of the essential self to break free?from social
codes, a tortured past, drug addiction, a restrictive conscience, or any of numerous
other oppressions?constituted the primary conflict ofmethod performance. Counsell
calls the signs of this conflict "the iconography of neurosis,"68 explaining:
When we see characters wrestling with
language, fighting
to communicate their emotions
and
failing,
we read this as an indication that language is inadequate to convey them, that
their thoughts and feelings
run
deeper than words can express. In inferring the existence of
blocked' feelings, then, the failed attempt at expression signals
to spectators that the
character possesses dimensions which cannot be seen.69
The result, says Counsell, is that spectators perceive a fractured character, divided
against himself?Counsell notes that the "method" actor of public perception was
always male?in the grip of neurotic struggle.
Counsell may be mostly correct regarding the experience for spectators of method
performance, but it is unlikely that audiences classified the presence of method actor
characters as neurotic. Following Counsell, Gazzara-Pope inHatful may have seemed
somewhat crazy, but, more importantly, most spectators probably viewed his psycho
logical intensity and eruptions in a positive light. Kerr, for example, found Gazzara's
66
Kerr, New York Herald Tribune, 10 November 1955.
67
Colin Counsell, Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996), 59. See also my essay, "Method Acting and the Cold War," Theatre Survey 41:1
(May 2000), 47-67.
68
Counsell, Signs of Performance, 66.
69
Ibid., 67.
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DOINGTHINGS / 593
"stammering vernacular" to be "sharp, urban, honest in the best Actors Studio style,"
but sympathized with the character's attempt to fight through his psychological
problems and regain his sanity, his wife, and his family. Likewise, none of the critics
dismissed the figure as a hopeless neurotic; all believed the struggle of an innocent,
authentic self to break free from drug addiction was worthy of sympathy and
admiration. More likely, Gazzara-Pope's apparent emptiness, his absence of a clear
psychology, invited audiences to fill in the blank through advisory projection with
ethical attributes that they ascribed to themselves. From the spectator's point of view,
method actor-characters like Gazzara-Pope could be sympathetic victims, fellow
sufferers, and even stars.
The historian's initial investigation of Hatful using Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive
psychology and amodified version of hegemony theory, then, will likely lead to the
tentative conclusion that the production did induce many of the same experiences for
spectators as the dominant culture of the 1950s. There is significant evidence that the
experience of containment provided the main tie linking the spatiality, narrative
framework, and star acting of Hatful to the cold war culture of the era. Other links
joining the narrative of the play to the larger culture of containment might also be
adduced to support this claim?hypodermic models of influence (from drug addiction
to brainwashing), images of a vacuumed-out self, and the narcissism of consumerism
to fill this empty self, among them. Significantly, the dominant culture also understood
the method actor as a type of narcissist, even as it celebrated his self involvement.70
These links increase the cognitive probability that audiences processed much of their
enjoyment of Hatful through the image schema of containment.
As suggestive as these links are, however, other questions must be answered before
the historian could claim that the production of Hatful worked primarily within the
dominant culture for its audience. First, the historian must know more about the social
demographics and dynamics of mid-50s Broadway spectators. Were most of them a
part of the hegemonic culture? Second, containment thinking, though a significant
part of the dominant culture, cannot have been the whole of it.Which other image
sch?mas played a significant role in the cultural imagining and how did they intersect
with Hatful? Productions of plays like Hatful rarely achieve cultural influence by
themselves. What other plays (and films, novels, and other performances) from the
period were doing similar cultural work and how significant were their general
effects? Also, how were some theatrical events of the 1950s able to problematize and
perhaps even oppose the hegemony of containment culture? It may be that the
Williams-Kazan collaboration of Cat on aHot Tin Roof, which shared many similarities
with Hatful (including a starring role for Gazzara), will provide a telling contrast.
Finally, while the cognitive categories of Lakoff and Johnson can help to describe and
70
To establish these links, see Gazzo's play, the reviews, and several cultural and theatre historians,
including Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psycho
therapy (Boston: Addison, Wesley, 1995); Christopher Lasch, The Culture ofNarcissism: American Life in
an
Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979); Catherine Lutz, "Epistemology of
the Bunker: The Brainwashed and Other New Subjects of Permanent War," Inventing the
Psychological:
Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life inAmerica, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997), 245-67; and Steve Vineberg, Method Actors: Three Generations of
an
American Acting Style (New York: Macmillan, 1991).
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594 / BruceMcConachie
interpret a dominant culture, they cannot take the historian very far in explaining
where it came from. What sch?mas constructed the hegemonic culture in the U.S.
before the 1950s and why did containment culture take its place? The historian eager
to explain this shift would need to deploy modes of doing history consonant with the
embodied realism of Lakoff and Johnson. There are several possibilities here, but Joan
Scott's linguistic idealism is not among them.
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