The atom of human process: experience is the very stuff of drama

Turner argues that humans are Homo Performans, self-performing animals, and further that

“the basic stuff of social life is performance” (Turner 1988: 81). Referring to Goffman’s thesis of the presentation of self in everyday life Turner describes how “Self is presented through the

performance of roles, through performance that breaks roles, and through declaring to a given public that one has undergone a transformation of state and status” (ibid: 81). To understand how we humans perform to given publics in life, I will first look closer at the very atom of

Burke’s Dramatism; life is theatre Goffman’s Dramaturgy; life is like theatre

Turner’s Social Drama; life produce art & art produce life

performance: a relationship Turner describes between experience and expression.

In Turner’s views “all human act is impregnated with meaning (…) Meaning arises when we try to put what culture and language have crystallized from the past together with what we feel, wish, and think about our present point in life” (Turner 1986: 33). How ‘meaning’ arises when we put together the past with what we feel, wish and think about our present point in life is connected to the concept of ‘experience’. When Turner states that experience is the basic stuff of performance, he also points to how experience is feeding into the expressions of performance and drama of ‘how we present ourselves’ in everyday life. Experience and expression are closely related, but in Turner’s view experience is the “stuff” feeding us with “meaning” that can become expressions e.g. social or cultural dramas. And expressions also feed into and produce new experiences. But let us stay with Turner’s ideas of experience for a little while. Turner states that

“Experience of this sort is the very stuff of drama – both social drama, where conflicts are worked out in social action, and stage drama, where they are mirrored in a host of aesthetic experimental frames, symbols, and hypothetical plottings” (Turner, in Turner & Bruner 1986: 34).

When explaining the concept of ’experience’ Turner refers to the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who both describe everyday life as pulsating and rhythmic, between passages of tension and harmony, between ‘mere experience’ and ‘an experience’. Turner cites and summarizes Dewey, “Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and reunions, the experience of a living creature is capable of aesthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. (...), moments of fulfillment punctuate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals” (Turner, in Turner & Bruner 1986: 38, Turner’s italics). In relation to Dilthey, Turner was especially interested in his concept of lived experience: Erlebnis. As described by Edith Turner, Victor Turner’s co-fieldworker and wife, “At the basis of Dilthey´s world view was

‘experience’, the atom, as it were, of human process. From experience arise value and meaning”

(E. Turner 1985: 10). How ‘Experience’ as the atom of human process is producing value and meanings is related to the symbols that Turner had analysed and described in relation to the concepts of liminality and social dramas.

In order to describe how we humans experience social life and phenomena’s, Turner makes use of Dilthey´s term Erlebnis that describes a state of being consciously and emotionally affected by an event (as opposed to experience as Erfahrung: as a passive observation of facts or events as a source of knowledge). Erlebnis, meaning ‘to be alive when something happens’ is derived from erleben; ‘to live through’ or ‘what has been lived through’ (Arthos 2000). Experiences as Erlebnis is not just ‘mere experience’ but ‘an experience’ that affects the person and probes values such as how we feel, wish and think about our present point in life, and urges us to retell

our experience to others.

Turner is further inspired by Dilthey´s distinction between Erlebnis as an experience and erleben as mere experience. Turner explains how an experience is the experience that stands out from the constant stream of experience (of mere experience) and has a specific structure of initiation and consummation. Experience as Erlebnis is the episodes that stand out from our consciousness and memory. In Turner’s words, “Mere experience is simply the passive endurance and acceptance of events. An experience, like a rock in a Zen sand garden, stands out from the evenness of passing hours and years and forms what Dilthey called a structure of experience. In other words, it does not have an arbitrary beginning and end, cut out of the stream of chronological temporality, but has what Dewey called ‘an initiation and a consummation’” (Turner 1986: 35, Turner’s italics).

To describe the structures of an experience Turner draws on Dewey’s concept of

experience as having some kind of temporal initiation and consummation, but not an actual beginning and end cut out from the stream of mere experience. Turner states, “These experiences that erupt

from or disrupt routinized, repetitive behaviour begin with shocks of pain or pleasure. Such shocks are evocative (…) the emotions of past experiences color the image and outlines revived by present shock. What happens next is an anxious need to find meaning in what has disconcerted us, whether by pain or pleasure, and converted mere experience into an experience. All this when we try to put past and present together” (ibid: 35-36).

When an experience (Erlebnis) erupts from mere experience (erleben) it impacts how we search (in our past) for a meaning in the specific ‘here and now’

moment we are experiencing. Turner states that

“meaning is apprehended by looking back over a temporal process” (Turner 1982: 76, Turner´s emphasis). He explains Dilthey´s ‘structure of experiences’ as a trichotomy of cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions (see ill. 2.1.2.1a) by

“having a temporal or processual structure – they

‘processed’ through distinguishable stages” (Turner

Ill 2.1.2.1a: Structures of an experience A Wenn diagram illustrating the temporal organization of meaning, value and ends:

‘Meaning’ is essentially a cognitive structure oriented to the past.

‘Value’ is an affective structure tied to the vicissitudes of the present moment.

‘Ends’ are volitional structures tied to goal-directed behavior oriented toward an emerging future. (Turner 1986: 214-15)

1986: 35). Turner summarizes the temporal links to the past and the future in the specific here and now moment of an experience: “Thus experience is both ‘living through’ and ‘thinking back’.

It is also ‘willing or wishing forward’” (Turner 1982: 18).

Turner furthermore builds on Dilthey’s five moments of experience (ibid: 13-14). Dilthey sees various ‘moments of experience’ to be integral components of the eventual organization of any distinctive ‘structure of experience’. The five moments consist of: the perceptual core, the evocation of past images, the revival of associated feelings, the emergence of meaning and value and finally the expression of experience.

Turner argues that it is only in the fifth moment of expression as ausdruck that the

‘structured unit of experience’ can be said to reveal itself, and that “a performance then is the proper finale of an experience”. Turner is referring to the etymology of the term ‘performances’ meaning “to complete or to carry out thoroughly” (ibid: 15)

Turner describes the relationship between experience and expression by explaining how ‘an experience’, as an eruption from everyday routine, leads to expression; Experience urges towards expression. Since we are social human beings, we express to others what we have learned through our experiences. We express experience through different aesthetic formats such as stories, pictures, art, music and performance in general. Turner also builds on Dewey´s ideas in the connection between experience and expression from Dewey´s important book from 1934: Art as Experience. Dewey describes how ’works of art’ are “celebrations, recognized as such of ordinary experience” (Turner 1986: 34). In Dilthey´s understanding of cultural expression, expression is

“crystallized secretion of once living human experience” (Turner 1982: 17).

Let us return to the quote of how “Experience always seeks its ‘best’, i.e. most aesthetic expression in performance,” since cultures “are better compared through their rituals, theatres, tales, ballads, epics, operas than through their habits” (Turner 1986: 13). Experiences expressed in performance try to articulate ‘meanings’ of cultures, which Turner holds are better compared in performance than through habits. Now we have acquired an understanding of Turner’s view of the very atom of human process where experience is the stuff of drama. Experiences of the dramatic process are further hedged in more overall structures shielded in a safe void from the everyday, what Turner calls liminality.

Five moments of an experience 1: A perceptual core, more intense emotions,

pleasure or pain than in normal activity.

2: The clear evocation or bringing up of past experiences.

3: The revival of feelings associated with past events of symbolic or emotional importance.

4: The generation of meaning by linking thoughts about the past and present events.

5: The experience is completed when expressed and communicated in such a way the audience can develop an understanding of the performance.

(Turner 1982: 13-14).

Ill 2.1.2.1b: An experience;

the atom of human process:

Erlebnis as the structure of experience. An experience has cognitive structures oriented to the past, an affective structure tied to the present moment, and volitional structures tied toward an emerging future (ibid: 214-5).