Abstract
Alston explores what he calls ‘narcissistic participation’ as a key feature of an audience’s productive engagement in immersive theatre. He takes as a case study Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011), a headphone performance for an audience of one to be experienced whilst shut inside a very small and very cold box. Through a critical analysis of Cold Storage informed by affect studies, he identifies the production and experience of affect as important aesthetic features of an immersive theatre aesthetic that preclude disinterest. Alston reflects on the biopolitical ramifications that accompany these features by considering immaterial production in the neoliberal economy, along with the cultural resonances of narcissistic participation, revealing the close imbrication of aesthetics and politics while immersed in the box’s interior.
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Notes
- 1.
For neurologist Antonio Damasio, in Descartes’ Error, the brain and body are thought of as indissociable, ‘integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits (including endocrine, immune, and autonomic neural components)’ (Damasio, 1994, p. xxvii). This perspective participates in recent theoretical shifts toward the embodied mind thesis (see Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 37–8; Johnson, 1987, p. xiii; Johnson, 2007, p. 1).
- 2.
See also Damasio’s notion of the somatic-marker hypothesis. For Damasio, emotion relates to embodied learning stretching as much into the past as the present. It also relates to processes of cognition and evaluation that are marked by it (Damasio, 1994, p. 173; see also pp. 185, 196). This latter is what Damasio dubs the ‘somatic-marker hypothesis’: a technical term that usefully adds to Arnold’s notion of affective memory. Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis looks at how a feeling body affects cognition (Damasio, 1994, p. 173). Damasio’s research, then, suggests that emotion impacts on what we think, how we think and consequently how we think of ourselves.
- 3.
Fried is here addressing minimalist artist Tony Smith’s recollection of a car journey, in which Smith describes his aesthetic experience of the world outside his car. The implication that arises from Fried’s analysis of Smith’s recollection is that the objectification of experience is also applicable to literalist art.
- 4.
For recent contestations of this formulation, see Gebauer et al. (2012).
- 5.
Theatre researchers and neuroscientists have explored how mimicking emotional expression can produce emotion in the actor, spawning a branch of actor training that uses the performance of emotion to induce affect (see Bloch, 1993; Rix, 1993). This takes Diderot’s advice to the actor and turns it on its head, collapsing the distance between emotional display and feeling an emotion.
- 6.
This is not to be confused with the subject of Colin Radford’s bewilderment in his article, ‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina’. For Radford, being moved to tears by the fate of a fictional character is incoherent (Radford & Weston, 1975, p. 78). My focus here, in contrast, is not so much on what might move an audience, but the movement itself: that is, the state of being affected in the theatre, as a state that becomes aestheticised.
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Alston, A. (2016). Theatre in a Box: Affect and Narcissism in Ray Lee’s Cold Storage . In: Beyond Immersive Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_2
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