Ocular Anatomy, Chiasm, and Theatre Architecture as a Material Phenomenology in Early Modern Europe
Pannill Camp
Amsterdam University Press eBooks December 31, 2008 DOI: 10.1515/9789048501229-012 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that Husserlian phenomenology incorporates the spatial logic of the Western proscenium stage, building consciousness as an architectural structure. Camp contends that the "chiasm" is central to this theatrical architectonics and that theatre architecture and geometric optics developed together from the seventeenth century, modeling a shared reorientation of humanity's relationship to the world. |
Abstract
Pannill CampHusserlian phenomenology , long a critical apparatus employed by theatre and performance scholars, is already infiltrated by a theatrical mode of thought that is more or less explicit in much of Husserl 's philosophy.It has chimerically incorporated the architecture of the theatre in the mode of the Western, frontally oriented, proscenium stage.Supporting such a claim requires a careful calibration of the terms of 'phenomenology' and of 'theatre architecture ' as historically bounded modes of thought, each of which reflects an underlying condition of knowing, or connaissance 1 , that is itself conditioned by history.The articulation of this connaissance is manifested in phenomenology 's tendency to build a structural consciousness, member by member, as though it were an architectural entity.Husserlian phenomenology can be seen as constituted by and as possessor of an architectonics that is distinctly theatrical in that it adopts certain spatial attributes of theatre architecture of the Renaissance and modern era.If it can be demonstrated that theatrical architecture as an ideal, if malleable, structure was available for more or less explicit incorporation into Husserl 's project, then one wonders 1) what attributes would recommend this particular architectural model above others and 2) what genealogical factors shaped theatre architecture such that these attributes were incorporated into it in the first place.It is here that the figure of the chiasm, a crossing of positional terms over each other in space, can be found occupying a central position in every sense.Western theatre architecture developed contemporaneously with the rationalization of ocular anatomy to geometric optics from the seventeenth century onwards, and there is reason to believe that the morphology of both types of structure manifests a grand, diffuse reorientation of mankind's relationship to the world.As vision, constituted in the emerging understanding of the eye's function, came to be a central figure for man's relationship to other things (which is to say, objectivity), theatre buildings came to model this same relationship and to embody an isomorphism with ocular anatomy.In each case, Plan drawing of a design by Charles de Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre for the Odéon (1770).
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