The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds by Michael Y. Bennett

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds by Michael Y. Bennett Brice Ezell The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds. By Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge, 2021. Cloth: $160.00, eBook: $48.95. 150 pages. Michael Y. Bennett occupies a near-solitary place in what he rightly calls the "philosophical turn in theatre and performance studies in the new millennium" (3). This "turn" has to do with the philosophical tradition in which Bennett anchors his work: analytic philosophy. There are now numerous studies of other philosophical entanglements with drama and theatre that feature philosophers dating from the ancient tradition (Plato, in Martin Puchner's The Drama of Ideas) all the way up to twentieth-century thinkers like Hannah Arendt (in Minou Arjomand's Staged). But although analytic philosophy has been the dominant academic mode of philosophy in the United States and Great Britain for the bulk of the twentieth century and up to the present, it has received little engagement from the world of drama and theatre studies. In a 2018 special issue of Anglia on drama, theatre, and philosophy, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca goes so far as to argue against the legitimacy of an analytic approach to theatre. A recent uptick in literary interest in the analytic tradition, particularly in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, has not, it seems, encouraged drama and theatre scholars to look in that direction. Except, that is, for Bennett. His latest monograph, The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds, follows and builds upon his Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (2017). Where the latter offers a broad analytic approach to the events of a theatrical production, this new book applies a specific analytic subfield, epistemology, to a core theatrical "problem"—namely, the question of whether the experience of being in an audience is shared. As he does in World of the Play (where, for example, he argues that the events of a play occur in the past subjunctive rather than the present), Bennett advances some unorthodox positions. Chief among these is his claim that "viewing performance is not a shared experience," but is instead an "intersubjective" experience "often modified by other viewers" (3). To elucidate his position, Bennett brings together theatrical concerns with numerous philosophers and examples from analytic epistemology that will be familiar to philosophy undergraduates, such as Edmund Gettier's famous "Gettier cases." For many in theatre and performance studies without traditional philosophical training, however, this philosophy can be a useful new resource. The Problems of Viewing Performance initiates an intriguing conversation. [End Page 93] He is perhaps too quick to dismiss a good deal of scholarship on audience studies when he says that the "performer-audience model of theatrical production and reception is based on a largely unproblematized and simple conceptual structure of an audience at the theatre" (15); the aforementioned Staged is just one recent example of many monographs that theorize the nature of a theatrical audience. But Bennett wisely outlines the myriad ways that the questions raised by analytic epistemology bear upon our notions of audience, examined or unexamined. These questions include: "What is the nature of our own mind?" "What is the relationship between my mind and the minds of others?" The Problems of Viewing Performance utilizes a bipartite structure. These halves are neatly organized, as is the volume itself. Bennett writes clearly and precisely and is careful to define terms. Part I, spanning chapters 1–3, focuses on Bennett's analytic epistemological approach to the theatre, in which he troubles the commonsense notion that theatrical audiences have a "shared" experience. Part II, chapters 4-8, surveys a wide range of plays, including two medieval vernacular plays, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and some well-known works by contemporary playwrights such as Tony Kushner and Maria Irene Fornés. The topics explored in these stand-alone chapters frequently call back to The Problems of Viewing Performance's theoretical first half, yet at times the book drifts. The argument presented in chapter 5 about the medieval plays Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance highlights the traditionally drawn boundaries between stage and audience, which naturally impact how audiences gather knowledge...