The Mind-Body Stage

In a rather uncharitable accounting, Leibniz wrote in a letter circa 1679 (Philosophical Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), “Descartes himself had a rather limited mind. He excelled all people in speculation, but he discovered nothing useful for the portion of life which falls under the senses, and nothing useful in the practice of the arts” (241). Descartes was by the time of Leibniz's negative assessment nearly thirty years dead, and both his abstract meditations on mind and physiological speculations on the body had entered the bloodstream, philosophically speaking. The time of idol-toppling was also well at hand and Descartes's giant footprint revealed a certain slow-footedness when it came to nuanced thought in the minds of the philosophers who succeeded him and built on his premises. In this Descartes shared something with the actor-theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, who decisively changed the way in which we do, think about, and receive theatrical performance but was soon overtaken by his younger contemporaries, who had been his students and former acolytes. Even when praised, the philosopher and the theatrical theorist were held accountable for not realizing the potential of the new, for not being revolutionary enough as opposed to not having been revolutionary at all. Inarguably, Descartes and his cognitive opening of the mind's “I” led to Stanislavsky, although what an actor knows is often concomitant with the practice by which he knows it. The quasi-scientifically derived affect of Stanislavskian mood and memory practices recalls Leibniz's criticism of Descartes's “inclination to give himself over to the invisible” rather than to patiently “reasoning about sensible things” (Leibniz 245). In what only appears to be an anti-theatrical position, Descartes's unified world approach is corrected by the compossibile worlds philosophy proposed by Leibniz. Isn't this what theatre does—acknowledge the possibility of multiple new worlds? But doesn't theatre also suggest that it is the things of this world that are and must be our primary focus of attention, while at the same time arguing through example that theatre best materializes the limit-situation of life in the only (though not necessarily best possible) world in which we (get to) live?The problem, to put it simply, is subjectivity, and therein lies the theatre historian's quarry as well as his possible nemesis in arguing for the application of Descartes's inner turn to theatre. The strength of R. Darren Gobert's book, The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater, is to align itself not with Cartesian dualism but with the theatrical proofs of Descartes's cultural relevance in the creation of the plays, performances, and even the theatrical architecture (premised on Cartesian optics) of his time. The Cartesian archive of theatre-based materials being slim (allowing him to be underrepresented by theatre historians), one must look to the repertoire and to the performance studies–authorized documentation of speech, image, and gesture in creating to make the case. Descartes, Gobert argues, moved from philosophy's poaching of “theatre” as metaphor to the stage as metonymy, beyond linguistic affect to an actual (i.e., practical) mind-body convergence. In so doing, Descartes essentially invented the practice of embodied theory for the modern (st)age and opened wider a space for consideration of the “intersubjective encounter” (Gobert 10) of the actor and spectator in a shared space-place of being. This was both a frightening and unacceptable notion for the anti-theatrical Jansenists, whose penchant was for constraint (see Racine's Phèdre, insightfully discussed in terms of the relationship of “the burdens of consanguinity” [blood] and “false visual perception” [eyes]) (Gobert 133, 144). Here one is reminded of Herbert Blau's remark in Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), which Descartes would certainly have appreciated: “As Hamlet says of good and bad, thinking makes it so” (xiii). To get Descartes out of his own head, so to speak, and to get our preconceptions regarding Descartes's relevance to theatrical practice out of what we make of his consciousness-raising philosophy as well, Gobert necessarily stresses the importance of his philosophy's emotional physiology, the very thing that Leibniz found wanting from a scientific perspective.I do not believe that the idea of mind in philosophy need be made to don theatrical trappings to prove kinship. The abstraction and invisibility of inwardness is not the problem per se, but the process whereby the deeper problem of art and existence is revealed. In fairness, though, Gobert's book is intended to redress the relative exclusion of Descartes from theatre history and historiography more than to argue philosophical points, although he must perforce do some of the latter. His main conduit for this is Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, which allows him to consider the emotive and physiological qualities of a ballet like La naissance de la paix (The Birth of Peace, 1649), which played the Royal Palace in Stockholm (where Descartes had influence and died the following year). The ballet was said to have been written by Descartes, who, Gobert argues, infused it with his wartime experience, his belief in memory's importance in how we think and feel, a more enlightened sense of female agency than he is generally credited for, and above all, his sense that “the mind submits to a body prompted by emotional stimulation” (Gobert 21). The notion broached in this section that we respond not solely or primarily to “external objects themselves but rather the signs that stand for them” (Gobert 26) constitutes no less than a paradigm shift that secures theatrical repertoire not just a foothold but a certain pride of place in the materials to be historically archived. Descartes's transference and upgrading of actor-audience sensitive “wonder” and its signs in Corneille's and Dryden's heroic tragedies offers Gobert his best argument for the philosopher's theatre historical reappraisal. Here an underappreciated Cartesian dialogical energy (which Leibniz read as ambivalence) is allied with a dramatic form that found itself constrained by a neoclassical bias in both structure and content, stuck somewhere between rhetoric and representation, reason and emotion, image and imago.Although Molière and his company parodied Corneille's heroic tragedies as they were interpreted by the troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and although neither company could be said to pursue psychological realism (“naturalness” being a vexed question in gauging historical performance—see the useful discussion of Molière's L'impromptu de Versailles), Gobert argues that the two playwrights, each in his own way, revealed in performance “what it means for the Cartesian subject to act” (Gobert 83). It is, of course, easily said of many acting styles in different historical periods that they seek “to align body and mind” (Gobert 82), but there can be no question that Descartes provided necessary ballast to render this claim “modern” and knowable on at least some level(s) to the playwrights and secondarily the performers of his time, place, and “philosophical moment” (Gobert 109). Between his works on consciousness and emotion, Descartes laid down a ground cloth onto which generations of actors tripped and artists dripped (Le Brun, as discussed in this study) in the struggle to strike a balance between representation and its meta-critique, between moral and aesthetic self-expression and self-control. Above all, Descartes provided an argument for making interiority visible, which changed acting styles, enabled the growth of “celebrity” as a concept, and advanced the careers of actresses who traded on performing their interiority for “effect” in England and in France.Cartesian philosophy, Gobert suggests, epistemically ruptured not just the neoclassical unities of the play text but the non-differentiation of playing space from audience space. Of course, much of this, as Gobert acknowledges, resulted from the introduction of Italian perspective scenery set off by curtains and proscenia, but the question of how a new episteme of ontological difference effects external change (in this case, how a mind-set becomes a play-set) is very much at the core of this book. In the end, Gobert successfully illustrates the ways in which Cartesian philosophy has been coterminous with meaningful changes in the theatre of interrelationship, whose borders are constantly in and at play

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