Philosophy of the Performing Arts

176 performance as art
whose work remains sadly unperformed: “Performers of my work must pro-
duce the following sound sequence.” The lack of performers does not entail
that the composer failed to issue a prescription.
Is it nonetheless necessary for a speech act having the form of an address
of the sort contained in Thom’s analysis of performance to have an actual
addressee? As Thom sets it out, the address has the form of an imperative
addressed to a particular subject. The suggestion, then, must be that one can
issue such an imperative only if the addressed subject exists. But why think
this is so? Should we say that the nervous sentry who hallucinates the sound
of an intruder and utters the words “You there, stop or I’ll shoot!” has failed
to issue an order? Of course, it is difficult to make sense of someone uttering
such an imperative if they don’t believe that the addressee of the imperative
exists. So we might think it is not possible for actors in an empty hall to
issue the address necessary if what they do is to count as a performance, for
how can they issue an address to a subject they know does not exist? But this
assumes that Thom’s way of characterizing what it is for an action to be “for
an audience” – in terms of an address directed at an identified or a presumed
audience – is correct. Is this preferable, however, to the account proposed in
Chapter 1, in terms of the performer’s actions being guided by the expected
responses of an intended audience?
To answer this question, we must clarify certain aspects of this account
that have thus far gone unelucidated. This will also allow us to identify certain
implications of the account. Consider first the notion of an “intended audi-
ence” whose anticipated assessments consciously guide a performer in her
actions. The performer’s intended audience is composed of those for whom
the performance is done. This audience must be in some way identifiable by
the performer – either by acquaintance or under some description^3 – and
she must have certain beliefs or expectations as to how this audience will
respond to various things that she might do. Only under these conditions
does it make sense to think of the performer as guided in her actions by expec-
tations about this audience. But a performer can be so guided whether or
not her intended audience is actually paying attention, and indeed whether
or not her intended audience actually exists. In fact, the performer doesn’t
even need to believe her intended audience exists in order to be so guided.
Consider a dancer whose dance tutor has recently died. She can surely per-
form a particular dance for her late tutor in the sense we have identified. She
pays attention to certain details that she knows were of particular concern to
him; she obtains pleasure from executing a particular movement in the way
that she knows would have given him pleasure, etc.
This brings out a second feature of the proposed account of performing. To
characterize an agent as performing is to place her actions within a particular
kind of explanatory space. We assume that certain details of those actions are