Theatrocracy

Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theatre

Peter Meineck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315466552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences – the study of human emotions – including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies.

This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama – its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators – and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.

1 Muthos

Probability and prediction

Aristotle famously describes muthos (plot/narrative) as “the soul of tragedy” (Poetics 1450a38) and narrative in action (praxis) as the aim of the art form (1450a23–26). For Aristotle, narrative should be well ordered and structured: in nature, as in drama, everything that is beautiful (kalos) must be perceptible. For example, if an animal is too small, we cannot see all of its constituent parts, just as we would be unable to perceive the totality of a 1,000-mile-long creature. In both cases we would be unable to discern their beauty. As the parts of organic structures need to be perceptible, so dramatic narratives ought to be well structured and not too long as to strain human memory (Poetics 1450b35–1451a6). But a unified structure is not enough on its own; the narrative needs to grab our attention, and it does this by means of challenging our expectations and arousing our sense of thaumasios (amazement). This in turn can lead to tragedy’s most powerful attribute and the one that made Plato rail against it – its ability to arouse the extreme emotions of its audience. Aristotle lights on eleos (empathy/pity) and phobos (fear) and remarks that these and other emotions are most highly provoked when the incidents of the narrative are unexpected by way of such devices as reversals (peripeteia) or recognitions (anagnōrisis). Yet Aristotle is not advocating for a theatre of complete surprisal; he writes that the most amazing are not those that seem completely random, but ones that “appear to have happened incidents as if it were on purpose.” His example is of the statue of Mitys at Argos that fell on and killed the murderer of the real Mitys. Therefore, actions that divert from the play’s structure momentarily and cause amazement, but then make sense within the larger world of the narrative, are the most effective (Poetics 1452a2–11). In many ways, what Aristotle is describing is probabilistic thinking and prediction.

In this chapter I re-examine this famous aspect of Poetics and suggest two main ideas: (1) that Aristotle is articulating a cognitive feature of Athenian society, one that is key to understanding the importance of its theatre – the concept of eikos, or probabalistic thinking; and (2) that Aristotle’s views on how a dramatist might create effective emotional theatre comport with contemporary theories of predictive processing. This is a unified theory of the mind that blends Bayesian and computational views of human cognition with philosophies of distributed cognition, including embodiment and enactivism, and it is the theory that underpins this cognitive study of ancient Greek drama. In particular, I want to focus on tragedy’s ability to evoke a sense of wonder (thaumasios) by engaging probabilistic thinking (eikos), which can elicit powerful empathetic emotions (such as eleos and phobos), which in turn can result in a mind-changing experience (catharsis). Greek drama sought to offer its audiences alternative viewpoints and different perspectives in an attempt to change entrenched mindsets. As we shall see, it did this via dissociation, attention, affect, and empathy in a multisensory experience involving environment, masks, movement, music, words, costumes, and objects. In order for these elements to be effective, they needed to be contained within a cognitive scaffolding that corresponded to the mentality of the audience the work was intended for. This was muthos – a story replete with revelations, reversals, and wonderment.

One of the means by which Greek drama provoked probabilistic thinking was peripeteia, a reversal or sudden change. Stephen Halliwell has described Aristotle’s concept of peripeteia in drama as being to “surprise us and arouse our minds to look for an underlying explanation of the ostensibly inexplicable.”¹ Halliwell identifies the attainment of a sense of wonderment as an underlying concept that unites Aristotle’s arguments in Poetics. He reminds us that Plato has Socrates declare in Theaetetus (155d) that “wonder is the source of philosophy,” and that Aristotle writes in Metaphysics “it is through wonder that people originally began to philosophize” (982b11–12).² I want to unpack what exactly Aristotle was getting at here and suggest that he identified how a well-crafted drama exploited the human cognitive perceptual systems that are provoked by novelty and prediction.

Making sense of surprisal

Predictive processing is a theory that has been developed through recent work in cognitive theory and computational neuroscience, which posits that the human brain is an active prediction generator constantly processing the bottom-up signals transmitted by our somatic sensory systems, which are actively compared to top-down models. Whenever a sense signal conflicts with the stored perceptual model, an “error correction” occurs involving attention, action, and inference. This theory developed to explain how the brain is able to quickly perceive the world without using the massive amount of energy requited to analyze and reconstruct every bit of sensory data that comes flooding in at every given moment of our existence (even in sleep). This is a world described by Andy Clark as made of patterns of expectation, “in which unexpected absences are as perceptually salient as any concrete event, and in which all our mental states are coloured by delicate estimations of our own uncertainty.”³

In his study of the communicative elements of audio-visual media including the theatre, Marshall Poe describes the human mind as “a remarkable pattern-building and pattern-recognizing machine.” The kind of perceptual structural disruptions that Aristotle describes, Poe calls intrusive signals and categorizes them as anomalies and puzzles. Hence, nothing will draw human attention like something that should not be there – “your ears and eyes, then, are designed to draw your attention to anomalies and make you investigate them whether you like it or not.”⁴ Poe echoes Aristotle’s comments on the human predilection to seek perceptual structure but also to be amazed by disruptions to those structural forms. In the Poetics, Aristotle wrote that theatrical works are called dramas because they represent humans doing (mimountai drõntas) and that mimesis (representation) is natural to human beings. Humans learn as they observe and infer what each thing is, and that tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry were generated out of this distinctively human natural trait (1450a15–17). Aristotle’s ideas on mimesis are not at all dissimilar to Andy Clark’s description of how the human mind uses predictive processing to sense the world and infer its meanings.

Predictive processing is connected to Friston’s free energy principle, which states that any self-organizing system that is at equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy to resist a natural tendency to disorder or entropy.⁵ Maintaining low entropy means, in effect, minimizing states of surprise. Friston’s example is a fish out of water, which would be in a surprising state biologically and therefore in peril of great entropy, leading to its demise as a functional biological system. Therefore, the free energy principle has it that all living organisms must minimize the probability of encountering surprising states. What constitutes “surprisal” is based on each organism’s particular biological expectations, which are generated by its own internal model of its world. Friston’s fish has adapted to a world of water, and the entropy generated by the massive surprisal of the total removal of that world can prove fatal. Except that the fish’s own somatosensory systems autonomically communicate the surprisal and the fish’s nervous system produces the physical reaction of extreme bodily movements. These provide its only hope of convulsing back into the water. Thus, the extreme action generated by extreme entropy might mean that Friston’s fish out of water sometimes gets away.

Friston has suggested that the free energy principle must be highly hierarchical to be able to react to the multi-layer structure of the causal dependencies of its world. For the fish, this means it will react bodily more violently the longer it is out of water until complete entropy occurs. The fish has “learned” this behavior through its and its evolutionary ancestors’ interaction with its environment, which means that while its mental predictions of how to react in each surprising situation are stored “a priori,” the predictive model itself is “the sedimentation of ‘a posteriori’ information.” Thus, predictive processing is the interplay of a system of distributed cognition, or as Clark puts it, “since the causal web of interactions experienced by the [fish] has come effectively to be mirrored by, or embodied in, the [Fish’s] structure/function, it is appropriate to say that the [Fish] is, rather than has, a model of its world.”⁶ If, like Friston’s fish, we are also seeking to minimize free energy and avoid surprise, then what do we make of Aristotle’s views that it is the moment of profound surprisal – amazements – that produce the empathy and fear we need to feel to experience the catharsis of tragedy? This is exactly how Friston’s fish “learned” to flop violently about in a last-ditch and sometimes successful attempt to get back in the water – the fish is desperately trying to correct the error of entropy.

What Aristotle names thaumasios, Poe called anomalies, and Friston surprisal, Clark terms “error correction.” We need to understand this process to get a better grip on how theatre works and what I think Aristotle was attempting to describe. I have already explained how the living organism must minimize free energy to avoid entropy, but how does this work in practice? Clark provides a neat analogy with computer data compression, which minimizes bandwidth by predicting the pattern of the image it is compressing and sending. Rather than sending every single pixel that makes up the original image, it looks for the differences between pixels by finding the boundaries and then predicting where the pixels of the same color will be. As Clark explains, “it is the deviations from what is predicted that then carry the ‘news’, quantified as the difference (the “prediction error”) between the actual current signal and the predicted one.” This is the same process our digital TVs and computers utilize when we stream a film: almost all of the data required to reconstruct the image was already present in the previous frame.⁷

Predictive processing works in the same kind of way: we conserve free energy by creating models of the world around us based on our prior sensory experiences, and we then constantly modify these models as new sensory data is interpreted. We too cannot possibly process every detail of the world at all times, because we would quickly reach a state of sensorial overload and free energy entropy. Neuroscientist Chris Frith contends that what we really perceive are the brain’s models of the world or “fantasies that coincide with reality.”⁸ In effect, the brain is making a best guess about the bottom-up sensory information it receives. If the signal is not very “noisy” in cognitive terms – it confirms quickly to the predictive model – then it passes easily up the predictive error correction chain to form a percept. If, however, the signal is noisy and confounds the predictive model, then the system demands that we pay attention to the “error” or the surprise and correct it before it can be passed on up to form a percept. Clark describes this process as a multi-level bidirectional cascade of top-down probabilistic generative models.⁹ Aristotle’s description of the power of thaumasios is crafted along similar lines: the best plot surprises are ones we are able to resolve into some sort of predictive pattern “since the most amazing [incidents] even among random events are those which we perceive to have happened as if it were on purpose” (1452a6–8).

Aristotle is advising playwrights to deliberately sprinkle their plots with surprising, if ultimately predictable, twists and turns, but doesn’t this clash with Friston’s free energy principle, one of the methodological underpinnings of predictive processing? This problem has been called the “darkened room puzzle” in that if surprisal causes such a large expenditure of cognitive energy, why do we not seek out an unsurprising as possible sensorial environmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: theatre as a mimetic mind
• 1 Muthos: probability and prediction
• 2 Opsis: the embodied view
• 3 Ethos: the character of catharsis
• 4 Dianoia: intention in action
• 5 Melos: music and the mind
• 6 Lexis: somatosensory words
• 7 Metabasis: dissociation and democracy
• Index