Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 2, August 2015
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Zamir, Tzachi. Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self (University of Michigan Press, 2013) – 388 pages.
Reviewed by
Kansas State University
Tzachi Zamir’s book is subtle, careful, has a wealth of good examples, and is responsive and responsible to a wide range of literatures. One of the most remarkable things about the book is the breadth of concerns it addresses. That it does so carefully and responsibly is a real achievement. The topics Zamir discusses in the latter half of the book have a long tradition. Still, I think very few people have the sensitivity, either theoretical or practical, to pull off this kind of discussion. Zamir clearly does. Moreover, his sensitivity derives from a desire to be faithful to the topics and to the facts, wherever they lead him.
I should also note that the book is challenging. I do not mean it is inaccessible. It is accessible, for actors, post-graduate students of theatre, and the better upper-level undergraduates as well. Plus, there are plenty of footnotes to chase. It is challenging because it goes against cant in both theatre theory and in philosophy. One the one hand, there may be a quick tendency to regard Zamir’s explanation of acting as resting on foundations that ignore fundamental post-humanist critiques. But Zamir himself ably addresses that issue head on (directly at Acts: 28-30, and less directly but no less forcefully at 169ff). And, on the other, the book represents a genuinely novel approach to the moral dimension of arts, the art of theatre in particular, that is simply not anticipated in so-called ‘analytic philosophy of art’ so far as I know. As an ‘analytic philosopher’ myself, I look forward to the inevitable discussion his approach will generate.
The motivation of spectators to come to the theatre is central to Zamir’s aims in the book. The thought is that there is something actors do that attracts spectators, and we can explain what motivates spectators to come to the theatre by understanding what it is that actors do. On the basis of the account of acting he offers, Zamir proposes we can understand a range of other phenomena that are often discussed as unrelated to acting and, even when discussed as related, seem to miss the point of the phenomena in our lives. Accordingly, this book begins with a set of problems about the nature of acting. As Zamir rightly contends, there has been very little on this particular topic to be found in the philosophical literature.
Part I of the book, entitled ‘Life on Stage’, consists of five chapters setting forth the core ideas. Part II, entitled ‘Staging Fictions’, consists of three chapters exploring the relationship between literature and theater and exploring the very idea of amplification in its purest form: in performances involving puppets and other animated objects. In Part III, ‘Between Life and Stage’, Zamir applies the idea of the amplification of the actor’s own life in the rehearsal process—her ‘self-shaping’—and notices there sources for re-thinking the morality of performances, both in the moral dimensions of what it may take to produce a particular performance and in the self-shaping mode that is employed in pornography. In the final Part of the book, ‘Life as Stage’, he discusses two modes of ‘self-theatricalization’ that are important in life and on stage, self-theatricalization in the contexts of love and of death.
*****
Three points in the book are especially likely to generate discussions among theatre theorists and students of theatre.
1) At the outset of the chapter devoted to explaining his core ideas, Zamir offers this definition of acting: ‘Acting is a gateway to living more’ (Acts: 17). The key term he uses to explain ‘living more’ is ‘Existential Amplification’. The latter is a term of art, of course, requiring some explanation itself. And here is how he explains it.
Personal existence is partly reducible to a set of possibilities. A person is a cluster of possibilities, and actualizes a small portion of these... Thinking of existence in this way explains responses such as feeling pity for people born with radically fewer prospects, being charmed by a baby or experiencing difficulty in meeting the gaze of the terminally ill... (Acts: 17) Spotlighting how possibilities are constitutive of existence also illuminates some kinds of fascination: We experience fascination—an experience of an incompletely understood attraction—upon recognizing a force that extends possibilities and is, in this sense, life-amplifying (Acts: 18, italics in original).
In terms of this core conception, Zamir characterizes acting: ‘Actors [he suggests], amplify their own lives by imaginatively embodying alien existential possibilities’. [Acting] achieves this via the intimate identification required by theatrical embodiment and the momentary cooperation of others with this process when they validate it as audience’ (Acts: 18, italics in original).
2) Both philosophers of art and theatre theorists are likely to find Zamir’s connection between theater and morality controversial and challenging. His central idea is that a correct story about acting shows why it cannot be insulated from concerns about the actor’s actual identity and that there are obvious moral problems that this lack of insulation engages. This occasions new problems concerning the morality of acting when that requires manipulation, by the director for example, in order to gain success in the role that even the actor her- or him-self may desire to portray. In the rehearsal context, these are issues that are compelling and put into question, in a rather stark way, some common practices in acting schools and in professional theatre as well.
3) In his discussions of forms of self-theatricalization, Zamir explores his central notions revealing them to be a dynamic process that can go in more than one direction: in theatre one moves from subjective experience to amplified existence ‘through the realization of more possibilities’ (Acts: 170); but in self-theatricalizing cases, such as masochism and anorexia, the move is rather ‘the narrowing down of the self’ by the use of theatrical forms that permit the player ‘to participate in a single play’ (Acts: 170). This is a thoughtful and engaging discussion that is likely to, and deserves to, spark long and serious debate.
*****
I conclude by expressing some worries I have about Zamir’s approach to the core ideas.
My worries begin with the issue of the relation between pretending and acting that Zamir discusses in the chapter on the actor’s experience of ‘existential amplification’. Zamir assembles four facts that he thinks pose problems for the pretense view. I agree that pretending and acting are different phenomena; but I do not think attending to these four facts helps us see why that is so. For I do not think it obvious that pretend behavior—understood as grounded in, and merely an extension of, children’s games of make-believe—actually either (a) induces false beliefs rather than fictional beliefs, (b) is instrumental—has a predetermined goal to which it is merely a means, (c) lacks curiosity for one of its standard motives, or (d) is manipulative and not an ‘invitation to partake of another’s experience’ (Acts: 34-35). Nor need pretense, understood as an extension of everyday make-believe, ‘usually [be] experienced as aggressive while acting is not’ (Acts: 35).
This is because contemporary theories of pretense, grounded in cognitive psychology and corresponding areas of philosophy of mind, analyze pretense by distinguishing different kinds of ‘as-if behavior.’ What Zamir has given us seems just a more sophisticated way of understanding acting as pretending. What goes into behaving as-if p were true while knowing or believing it is not—whether that behavior is undertaken in a theatrical setting or others that are important in everyday life outside the theater—might be explained by appeal to ‘existential amplification’. But on the contemporary view of pretending, neither acting nor existential amplification need be understood as contrasting with it. They appear, instead, as elements that merely flesh out what is going on when one pretends, imaginatively pretends, to be another person, either within the confines of the institution of the theater or in order actively to explore possibilities outside of it. In other terms, it can still appear that acting, explained as a kind of existential amplification, is simply a component of non-deceptive pretense.
This fact, and the issues surrounding it, is also involved in a second problem that it seems gets less notice in Zamir’s book than it should, namely the ferocious debate raging since the 1980s between those who have viewed acting as contrasted to ‘performance’ and those who have viewed acting as a kind of performance. While he often gives admirable and careful attention to theater and performance theory, this debate seems largely to have dropped below the radar in his book. But it has been important in theater and performance theory, and still is, or so I believe. This will be crucially important if, as I suspect, his view turns out to be a variant on the hypothesis that acting is a form of non-deceptive pretense.