Carlson

Works

One survey and one argument, and the difference between them matters.

• Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996) is the standard mapping of the field, and is cited far more often for its coverage than for a thesis of its own.
• The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (2001) is the argument — ghosting as the condition of theatrical reception.
• Theories of the Theatre (1984) traces dramatic theory from the Greeks onward and supplies the historical depth behind both.

Central ideas

The central idea is about repetition, and it cuts against novelty as a value.

• Ghosting: an audience receives a performance through prior ones. The actor carries earlier roles, the text carries earlier stagings, the space carries what happened in it, and none of that can be switched off.
• Theatre is therefore a memory machine rather than a machine for making new things, and its power comes from recognition operating against difference.
• Performance as a contested term: he documents rather than resolves the range from theatrical performance to social role to performativity in speech, and treats the confusion between them as a real problem in the literature.
• The field's boundary question — what counts as performance at all — is presented as unsettled, which is a finding rather than an evasion.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose overlap he specifically warns about.

• Ghosting: reception shaped by memory of prior performances, not a supernatural metaphor and not intertextuality in general.
• Performance: in this literature a family of distinct senses — staged event, social role, speech-act performativity — which are not interchangeable.
• Memory machine: a description of how theatre operates, not a claim that theatre is about memory as subject matter.

Debates and disagreements

The disputes he documents are the field's, and one bears directly on this lineage.

• Whether performance disappears — Peggy Phelan's position that performance's ontology is disappearance and that documentation betrays it — against accounts, including Rebecca Schneider's, in which performance remains as residue.
• How far performance studies should absorb social and everyday behaviour before the category stops doing work, which is Schechner's expansion and its critics.
• Whether a survey position like his own can be neutral, or whether mapping a field is itself an argument about its shape.

Intellectual relationships

He works across theatre studies and the performance-studies turn.

• Richard Schechner is the founding figure of performance studies whose expansion of the term Carlson documents.
• Peggy Phelan is the counterposition on documentation and disappearance.
• Erving Goffman supplies the social-role sense of performance that the field borrowed and sometimes conflated with the theatrical one.
• Joseph Roach's surrogation is the adjacent account of how performance transmits through substitution.

How it changes this reading

Carlson is named in the lineage of the Performative-dramaturgical lens and supplies its account of reception.

• The lens asks what happens when a person appears before others; Carlson supplies ghosting as the term for the fact that appearance is always received through prior appearances.
• That bears on any reading of repeated public participation: a later occasion is not an independent event for those who were at an earlier one, so recurrence changes reception rather than merely accumulating.
• It is not evidence about how any audience received anything, which the lens cannot recover.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four figures who divide over what performance is.

• Carlson maps the field and argues for ghosting — reception through memory of prior performances.
• Richard Schechner extends performance across ritual, play, sport and everyday life, treating restored behaviour as the common structure.
• Peggy Phelan holds that performance's ontology is disappearance and that its value lies in what cannot be documented or reproduced.
• Erving Goffman analyses the presentation of self in ordinary interaction, sociologically rather than theatrically.

Where the ideas meet

The four agree on a starting point despite disagreeing about almost everything after it.

• None treats a performance as a self-contained object independent of its reception.
• All four hold that what an audience or interlocutor brings is constitutive rather than incidental.
• Each attends to the event as it occurs rather than to a text or script behind it.

Where they part

Phelan and Carlson are close to incompatible, and the lens must choose.

• Phelan's disappearance holds that performance cannot survive its moment; Carlson's ghosting holds that prior performances persist and shape the next. A reading cannot use both for the same claim.
• Schechner's expansion makes everyday conduct performance; Goffman is already there sociologically, and merging them collapses a real difference between a discipline's object and a metaphor for social life.
• Goffman's performance is not theatrical in Carlson's sense, and treating the two as one term is exactly the confusion Carlson documents as a problem.

Limits

• Ghosting describes reception by an audience and cannot be recovered from a record made by a performer.
• The field's internal disagreements mean no single account of performance can be cited as settled.

Criticisms

The objections are mostly about the survey position.

• A field map can present contested positions as a settled taxonomy, which is the standard risk of the genre.
• Ghosting is difficult to test: reception through memory is plausible and hard to isolate from other influences on how a work is received.
• The scope of the survey is weighted toward Western theatre, and the field's boundary problem is documented more than it is resolved.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Using ghosting as a general term for intertextuality or influence rather than for reception shaped by prior performances.
• Citing his survey as though its coverage constituted agreement in the field.
• Treating theatrical performance, social role and speech-act performativity as one concept, which is the conflation his work identifies.
• Inferring how an audience received something from an account written by the performer.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish how any performance was received.
• It cannot convert an account of theatrical reception into a fact about a person who performed.