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A Spectatorial Dramaturgy, or the Spectator enters the Ethical Frame.

This chapter makes a specific contribution to the scholarship and discussion of the ethics of viewing. The chapter argues that a spectatorial dramaturgy underpins the cinematic as well as theatre experience, predicated on notions of death and the erotic as existential, ethical tropes in human culture. The spectator accepts a fiction as-if real, whilst looking and watching and being looked at and watched by others sharing the experience; such reciprocal ‘being-in-the-world' confirms our qualified and qualifying agency.

My research draws on material outside theatre theory (relationship theory) contributing to a theory of spectatorial dramaturgy. It addresses ‘Boltanski’s dilemma’ where fictions put us ‘in position’ to feel and imagine the circumstances of our-self and others in ‘relation to’ reciprocal social life with its moral tensions and dilemmas for learning and action. Whilst such fictions offer images of redemption out of suffering, they cannot resolve suffering in it-self. The piece considers the spectator’s phenomenological position, whilst furthering the implications for qualified agency of being, as viewers, inveterate poachers and nomads. This develops the necessity of ‘recycling’ as qualified-qualifying agents question and use what they inherit, rework what is known, out-reach the familiar towards the imagined.

A methodology of case studies is used to illustrate the positioning of the spectator regarding non-diegetic and other cinematic devices. I argue that these ‘blurr the line’ between the mimetic mode and the spectator whereby only the spectator (not the character) is aware of the devices. The methodology thus foregrounds the privileged position of the spectator that such devices are never-the-less predicated on.

Research disseminated as chapter in 'Film and Ethics: What Would You Have Done?' ed. Jacqui Miller, ISBN: 978-1-4438-4416-1. 2013