Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 173
We need to see what reasons support these intuitively surprising conclu-
sions, and why one might take a different view of the issues. I shall focus on
whether artistic performance in general requires an audience, while also
looking in particular at theatrical performance, the kind of performance
that concerns Woodruff. This will lead us to consider whether the audience
stands in a relation to a theatrical performance different from the one in
which it stands to performances in the other performing arts.
In Chapter 1, I suggested that someone counts as performing only if they
are guided in their actions by the anticipated evaluative attentions of an
intended audience who, it is assumed, will judge those actions according to
certain criteria. I also argued that one can perform even if one’s intended
audience is not actually attending to what is done. Recall Basil twirling his
umbrella on his way to the station. His actions are designed to produce a
particular effect on his intended audience – his watching neighbors. But,
I suggested, he is no less of a performer if, unbeknownst to him, no one
is actually watching. If, as I supposed, the presence of an actual audience
is unnecessary for Basil’s actions to qualify as a performance, why should
matters be any different when we turn to performances in the arts?
Nelson Goodman broadly concurs with this assessment of the situa-
tion (1984, 142–143). The intended function of performances in the arts,
according to Goodman, is to affect how we organize and perceive a world,
and this presupposes that the work is comprehended by an audience. But he
allows that there can be genuine artistic performances in the absence of an
audience, although such performances will of necessity fail to fulfill their
intended function. Such events, Goodman holds, are genuine performances
just as novels that never find a readership are genuine novels, and paintings
that are never exhibited for the appreciation of others are genuine paint-
ings. All that matters in each of these cases, we might say, is that we rightly
explain certain features of the ordering of the artistic manifold – in the case
of artistic performances, the actions executed by the performer – in terms
of the artist’s judgments as to how such an ordering would affect intended
receivers. Even in the absence of the attending eyes and ears of Berthold
and Magda, then, the event presented on stage in the provincial theater will
count as a performance as long as the company’s actions are shaped by the
anticipated eyes and ears of an intended audience. Let me “fit audience find,
though few,” said Milton.^1 Or indeed, we might add, if any.
Thom, however, insists that there is no performance without an actual audi-
ence. A performance, he maintains, must always be “directed towards some
kind of audience” (Thom 1993, 172). This is not the same as being presented
before an audience, since sporting events, while they are usually presented
before spectators, are not performances in the relevant sense (179). For actions
to be “directed towards” an audience, there must be some kind of address by the