Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 175
Thus far, however, we have seen nothing to demonstrate that, in being
directed towards an audience, a performance requires an actual audience. But
Thom thinks that this follows from the distinctive nature of the address that
partly constitutes a performance. This, he thinks, undermines Goodman’s
analogy between an audienceless performance and a readerless novel, for a
novel does not involve the same kind of address as a performance:
In doing something that has the force of saying, “Attend to me,” I am not just
making a hypothetical address, as the author of a work does, to whoever
happens to be an addressee, rather, I make a categorical address to the audi-
ence, whom I assume to exist. In performing, I believe myself to be referring
to present persons, to whom I am in effect saying, “You, attend to me.” If no
one is present at the performance, there is a failure of reference. By contrast,
if the novel remains unpublished or the painting unexhibited, then there is no
failure of reference because the work did not refer to anyone in the first
place, even though it was made for a public to behold. The audience is not a
mere dispensable accessory to performance ... All performance needs an
audience if its reference is to succeed and if its assumption of audience
attention and demand is to be warranted. (Thom 1993, 192)
Thom relies here on an analogy between the address issued by those partici-
pating in a performance, and an ordinary linguistic utterance that contains
a term that purports, but fails, to refer, such as “the present king of France”
as uttered in 2010. Just as such an utterance fails to make a statement if its
purportedly referring term fails to actually refer, so a “performance” whose
address fails to refer to an actual audience is not really a performance at all.
The correct analysis of utterances containing non-referring terms like
“the present King of France” as their grammatical subjects is a matter of
some dispute in the philosophy of language, and it is by no means uncontro-
versial to claim, as Thom does, that such an utterance fails to make a state-
ment.^2 However, we need not take a stand on this matter in order to see that
there is something suspect in Thom’s attempt to draw an analogy between
the question “Does an utterance of a sentence containing a non-referring
singular term make a genuine statement?” and the question at hand, “Does
an attempt to stage a performance whose ‘address’ fails to refer to an actual
audience count as a genuine performance?” For it is obvious that we can
perform various speech acts other than making statements – issuing direc-
tives or expressing intentions, for example – by means of sentences that
contain non-referring expressions. Consider, for example, “The next person
to talk in this class will get a detention,” uttered by a teacher. Her inten-
tion is precisely that no one should satisfy the subject expression, but her
success in bringing about this state of affairs does not entail that she failed
to issue a directive. Or consider the following prescription by a composer