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13 - Introducing Consumers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2020

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Summary

I think it is appropriate to associate the vertical dimension in the movement of Being with its simple being there (or, more precisely with its emergence into being there and with occupying a space), whereas the horizontal dimension points to Being as being perceived, which also means to Being offering itself to somebody's view (as an appearance and as an “ob-ject,” as something that moves “toward” or “against” an observer).

What is seen matters; the scene on the page and on the stage offers itself to view. The eye traces prose along the lines of the page, watches the bodies of performers moving in space on the stage. We grasp Being through an idea produced by a presence that we see. Equally, art anticipates its future consumption by a viewer, and it reflects retrospectively on what happened in the moment of consumption, or what it knows of that happening. In this section, we look at fictions of the presence of consumers and the rival claims to presence at and with the act of consumption offered by novels and plays in their competition for the market of fiction.

It is the presence of an audience that most distinguishes the fiction of the stage from that of the page in the long history of anti-theatrical sentiment and consequent censorship. As late as 1909 the UK Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship) stresses that the presence of an audience – and especially the shared experience of affect between them – exacerbates the influence of ideas.

The existence of an audience, moved by the same emotions, its members conscious of one another's presence, intensifies the influence of what is done and spoken on stage… The performance, day after day, in the presence of numbers of people, of plays containing [indecency, libel and blasphemy] would have cumulative effects to which the conveyance of similar ideas by print offers no analogy.

We can see in this early twentieth-century judgement the privileging of a model of art as an act of communication between ‘author’ and ‘audience’. The Select Committee understands ‘what is done and spoken on stage’ as a conduit for a set of ideas.

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Fictions of Presence
Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain
, pp. 225 - 234
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

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