Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 187
to bear. For us to be moved to the intended state of outrage therefore seems
to require that we determine that the point of doing this on stage is to get
us to reflect upon things that are not present. This would involve the recog-
nition that the actors are presenting to us not characters about whose indi-
vidual fate we can care, but social roles that exemplify features of the society
in which we live. Thus, it seems, the emotional response at which Brecht
aims requires that the audience first takes an external interrogative interest
in the performance.
But it appears that Woodruff wants to exclude such an external inter-
rogative interest from our proper engagement with a dramatic performance
as presented to us in a theater. He claims that any reflection concerning the
intentions of the author (or, presumably, the director or the company) has
“nothing to do with theater as such” (Woodruff 2008, 200). And he rejects
“reflective identification” during a theatrical performance – reflection on
what it would be like to be a character presented on stage so as to know what
she felt – on the grounds that “the art of theater does not seek to engage an
audience through reflection, because this belongs not to watching but to
thought” (179). The place for reflection is in understanding the script of a
play, or after the curtain falls, he maintains. Reflection occurs only insofar as
our emotions are not engaged, and thus only insofar as we are not “watching.”
“The purpose of theater,” he maintains, “is watching” (37).
But why take this to be the purpose of theatrical art, rather than the means
whereby its purposes are achieved? It seems that these purposes, even if
Aristotelean, may require reflection, since reflective attempts to work out
what is going on inside a character seem crucial in some cases to understand-
ing what one is watching. Indeed, this is part of our internal interrogative
interest in a dramatic performance. Furthermore, a general proscription
on reflection while watching a dramatic performance would prohibit an
external interrogative interest in a drama one is watching. If, as I suggested
in Chapter 1, such an interrogative interest is integral to our engagement
with an artistic manifold as an artistic manifold, then to accept Woodruff’s’s
account seems to entail that a receiver’s having an artistic interest in a dra-
matic performance is incompatible with its functioning for that receiver as
theater. Also, if the outrage that is an aim of Brechtian theater presupposes
the adoption of an external interrogative interest, then a proscription on
reflection will exclude such emotional responses from the operations of
theater on Woodruff’s account.
How might Woodruff respond to these charges? We noted earlier that
he wishes to bring both Aristotelean and epic theater within the scope of
a model that locates their differences not in the presence or absence of a
role for emotional response, but in the ways in which the emotions play a
cognitive role. In both cases, he argues, we have “theater that seeks to engage