Observation and Objectivity

Rebellato, Dan. ‘Objectivity and Observation.’ The Cambridge Companion to Theatre & Science, edited by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 12-25.

I’ve written one of the chapter in the new Cambridge Companion to Theatre & Science, edited by the excellent Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. My topic is ‘Observation and Objectivity’; although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous precisely to the extent that they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter traces the development of objectivity both in science and theatre through classical and early-modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealisations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. The emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the anti-theatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos and indeterminacy.

This was a rather enjoyable chapter to write. In part it is right at the centre of my research into Naturalism, but in its need to range quite widely across theatre history it took me into fascinating areas that I previously knew little about. The essay started as a bit more of a defence of the idea of objectivity; the immediate context for wanting to take on this topic was the climate scepticism and fact-aversion of someone like Donald Trump. As I went further into the research, I was drawn a little further back into a more agnostic position on objectivity. Something I want to pursue in the future, though, is the idea of objectivity as a ‘view from nowhere’, because this may not be possible but it does seem like a valuable aspiration at times (whether in the form of the veil of ignorance, disinterested attention, outside eye, or something else). It feels intuitively counter to the theatre which is always from somewhere (very often, quite literally, from a particular numbered seat. But when I was working on Kantian aesthetics a decade ago, I was interested in his idea that in aesthetic attention we judge with our concepts in abeyance; that is, some of the quotidian grounding of our understanding is suspended when we consider something entirely in terms of its aesthetic beauty. And related to that, I started to wonder about the seat thing: it is true that when I think about most theatre shows I have seen, I can roughly remember where I was sitting. But when I think of what the show was like artistically I feel much less ‘positioned’. When I saw Paul Schofield in John Gabriel Borkman twenty years, I was right at the top of the circle, at the end of the row: quite possibly the worst seat in the house. Yet my memories of what made that show exciting are vivid and clear and granular, al most as if I’d been on the stage with them.