Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre

Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319917948
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of movement experience and the insights of cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics, it considers how we inhabit the movements of others and how these movements inhabit us. Individual chapters explore the dynamics of movement and animation, action and intentionality, kinesthetic resonance (or mirroring), language, speech, and empathy. In one of its most important contributions to the study of theatre, performance, and spectatorship, this book foregrounds otherness, divergence, and disability in its account of movement perception. The discussions of this and other issues are accompanied by detailed analysis of theatre, puppetry, and dance performances.

© The Author(s) 2018

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the TheatreCognitive Studies in Literature and Performancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_7

Begin Abstract

Empathy and Otherness

Stanton B. GarnerJr.¹

(1)

Department of English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

Stanton B. GarnerJr.

End Abstract

What Is Empathy?

It is hard to escape the word empathy these days. In his 2006 graduation address at Northwestern University, future US President Barack Obama urged graduates to cultivate this critical social capacity: “There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.”¹ In the aftermath of his presidential successor’s surprise election ten years later, technology writer Om Malik charged Silicon Valley with having displayed a “distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry.”² Questionnaires measure “empathy quotients,” and programs fostering empathy development are offered by schools, medical/health facilities, and prisons. Empathy has also been heralded as a key to successful leadership, business communication, and competitiveness.³ In the era of late capitalism, it seems, even empathy can be monetized.

What, though, is empathy? As I noted in the introduction to this book, the term is notoriously imprecise, carrying with it the philosophical, scientific, psychological, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and popular histories of its use since Edward Titchener introduced the word in the early twentieth century.⁴ The term is sometimes confused with sympathy, which may owe something to the fact that David Hume and Adam Smith used the latter term in the eighteenth century to describe other-directed engagements that would subsequently be attributed to empathy. Today the word sympathy denotes a concern for another’s suffering, while empathy typically refers to the act of recognizing and sharing another person’s feelings, sensorimotor experiences, and/or perspectives. When it comes to the specific engagements that empathy opens up or the exact operations that underlie it, the study of empathy has been an arena of conflicting definitions and operations. As noted in my introduction, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers of mind, and neuroscientists propose different kinds of empathy or empathic mechanisms.⁵ One of the most common of these involves a distinction between motor empathy, emotional or affective empathy, and cognitive empathy (the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state).⁶ Another frequently proposed distinction is that between lower-order and higher-order empathic mechanisms. In this framework, largely automatic forms of self–other matching such as motor resonance or emotional contagion are distinguished from conscious processes such as perspective taking or imagining how one would feel if one were in the other’s shoes.⁷ While some who adopt this framework see the former providing a foundation for the other (bottom-up processing), others consider higher-order empathy—the ability to imagine the minds of others—to be the guiding operation in empathic encounters (top-down processing). The frameworks that scientists and philosophers adopt for understanding empathic processes—and the empathic elements within those frameworks that they choose to study—can provide different, seemingly incompatible accounts of empathy and the operations that underlie it. A way out of this situation is offered by those who argue that empathy is a multi-faceted phenomenon, with different processes working together to register and explore the experience of others. As Christian Keysers suggests, “Empathy should thus be seen as a mosaic of subcomponents that together build up the final image of what goes on in other people.”⁸

Empathy, we know, is an individual and variable activity: some people are more easily attuned to the emotions, intentions, or perspectives of others, and the same individual can empathize in different ways and to different degrees based on the individuals she observes or engages with and the situations in which empathic opportunities arise. While empathy is clearly automatic in some of its operations, it is also context and target dependent. Social neuroscientist Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is a motivated phenomenon in which observers are predisposed to experience empathy or avoid it.⁹ They do so order to avoid painful emotions and costly ethical demands (giving to a charitable organization to help alleviate hunger, for instance), to reap the benefits of identifying with positive emotions, to enhance competitiveness, to benefit from the positive self-image that empathy can confer, and to strengthen group affiliation. This last motivation explains the fact that people have stronger empathic responses when witnessing people whom they identify with experiencing pain than with those they do not.¹⁰ In sharply demarcated in-group/out-group identifications (a bitterly contested sports rivalry, intense racial antagonism) detachment from empathic engagement may turn into counter-empathy, enjoyment of another’s pain. According to Zaki, individuals employ regulatory strategies to enhance or inhibit empathic response. In one of these, situation selection, observers choose to put themselves in, or take themselves out of, situations where empathy may arise, thereby “making choices about empathic engagement before being exposed to targets at all.”¹¹ In another, attentional modulation, observers direct their attention away from or toward empathic targets and affective cues—choosing to look away from someone whose suffering causes distress, for example, or toward someone whose excitement one wants to share. With the final strategy, appraisal, observers make assessments concerning the intensity, meaning, or value of a target’s affective states—deciding, for instance, that a hungry person’s situation results from a failure of personal responsibility (an appraisal that may curtail empathy) or that it results from unjust economic policies (an appraisal that may facilitate it). These strategies for regulating empathy operate in tandem with each other at the pre-deliberative level to establish individual, contextually responsive attunements and engagements.

From the writings of Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl to the present, phenomenology has adopted a different perspective on empathy than those adopted by empirical science. Detailed discussion of this perspective is beyond my purpose here, but I will identify some of its features that bear on my analysis of kinesthesia, resonance, and empathic engagement in this book.¹² When phenomenologists talk about empathy, they do so as part of the broader question of intersubjectivity. How do I apprehend the minds and experiences of others, and in what ways are these given to me? Rejecting any suggestion that this apprehension entails an inference based on one’s own experience, phenomenologists insist that one experiences the other directly through the gestures and actions that express her emotions and intentions. I do not infer that a child running toward me is frightened or happy, for example; I observe these states directly in her expression and movements. Consciousness, phenomenologists claim, is open and directed to the experience of others just as it is open and directed to the world it inhabits. Indeed, the objective world discloses the other to me at the same moment it discloses itself, for my knowledge that a rock facing me has another side involves an awareness that it is seeable from other vantage points. The same thing applies to me, since I exist for others and derive my awareness of myself, in part, through the other’s awareness of me. The world, the other, and I myself, in other words, are constituted intersubjectively, which is another way of saying that the consciousness of the other—or my consciousness-of-the-consciousness-of-the-other—is phenomenologically irreducible in my experience.

In her 1917 treatise On the Problem of Empathy, which originated as a dissertation written under Edmund Husserl’s supervision, Edith Stein applies the term empathy to all “acts in which foreign experience is comprehended.”¹³ This is at once a broader and more restricted definition of the term than many of the definitions surveyed above. Because the experience of others is something I can directly observe in their actions and expressions, Stein distinguishes the apprehension of another’s experience from the apprehension of non-experiencing objects. When someone tells me that he has lost his brother, she writes, I become aware of his pain. Although I perceive the person’s pain in his countenance, it is not given to me as a thing; rather, “I perceive this countenance outwardly and the pain is given ‘at one’ with it.”¹⁴ In this sense, the pain I perceive is not given to me “primordially” in the same way that the appearance of a tree (or the pained countenance) is.¹⁵ This distinction is amplified in all levels of empathic engagement. Imagining the sight of a person sitting at a table, Stein writes:

The hand resting on the table does not lie there like the book beside it. It “presses” against the table more or less strongly; it lies there limpid or stretched; and I “see” these sensations of pressure and tension in a con-primordial way. If I follow out the tendencies to fulfillment in this “co-comprehension,” my hand is moved (not in reality, but “as if”) to the place of the foreign one. It is moved into it and occupies its position and attitude, now feeling its sensations, though not primordially and not as being its own.¹⁶

Like Husserl, Stein rejects Lipps’s suggestion that the observer watching an acrobat becomes one with the moving figure in an act of empathic merging: “I am not one with the acrobat but only ‘at’ him. I do not actually go through his motions but quasi.”¹⁷ This distinction is useful when it comes to measuring claims about what empathy accomplishes and what it does not.

Empathy manifests itself in multiple ways, according to phenomenologists, but these processes or types of empathy are not as sharply distinguished as they are in psychological or neuroscientific accounts, nor are they attributable to separate faculties, cognitive or otherwise. Rather, they represent different accomplishments within a common self–other orientation. What Stein calls reiterative empathy, for instance—my awareness that I exist as an empathic target for the other as she exists for me—is both a form of empathy and an elaboration of the same intersubjective awareness that underlies all of one’s encounters. Evan Thompson draws on this tradition and the holistic understanding of empathy it provides in order to propose a “phenomenological typology” of empathic experience. According to Thompson, empathy entails the following modes, or levels:

1. 1.
   the passiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Movement and Animation
• Movement, Difference, and Ability
• Movement, Attention, and Intentionality
• Kinesthetic Resonance
• Language, Speech, and Movement
• Empathy and Otherness
• Back Matter