In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Performance, Cognition, and the Quest for an Affective Historiography
• Leo Cabranes-Grant (bio)

Around 1819, John Keats wrote the following lines in the margins of a draft for a longer satirical poem:

This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—I hold it toward you.¹

The poet has created a lyric moment describing his own hand as it traces these same sentences, a hand that after his death will haunt an unnamed listener.² The poem replicates a physical gesture, breaching the boundaries between text, body, and sentiment. The poet’s corporeality has been extended toward us through the cadences of his blank verse and the virtual envisioning of this hand. The text is an affective expansion of the original hand, now erased by death but still active by means of language. Vilém Flusser has defined affects as “states of mind translated into gestures,”³ and this is exactly what Keats has done by shaping a text that conflates an emotion with a motion: “See here it is—I hold it toward you.” But Flusser also considers any tool linked to the body as a gesture, so in this case we have to imagine the poet’s pen and its ink as part of his “earnest grasping,” his effort to get closer to us, extending his hand beyond its somatic [End Page 200] demarcations. It is not coincidental that many critics believe Keats’s poem was probably written with a potential play in mind; what we find in this text is a performatic hand, a hand imbued with a strong sense of theatricality, a hand that maybe belonged to a character, not only or primarily to the poet himself—a distinction hard for us to make after two hundred years.

Keats’s poem conveys his thought gesturally, as many actors and dancers constantly do. Keats’s poem replicates the entanglement between body and affect that grounds our cultural elaborations, and recent cognitive investigations have been disclosing how tightly connected our movements and our brains actually are. To the extent that performance is a gestural encoding of our affective histories, as Farah Karim-Copper has shown in her analysis of hands in Shakespeare’s work,⁴ this interlacing of the cognitive with the performatic promises new avenues of inquiry for our understanding of how language, body, and feeling supplement and enable each other. It is into some of those avenues that I would like to turn during the rest of this discussion. I alert the reader to the fact that this essay is less an exhaustive unpacking of these issues than an initial mapping of some of the problems and the authors that can help us to start tackling them. I will also take the risk of provoking some conceptual and philosophical conundrums—and to experiment with some ideas and interrogations, too. Off we go.

I

Lawrence Shapiro divides recent cognitive controversies into two contending discourses.⁵ On the one hand, standard cognitive science envisions the brain as a computational center that receives information and delivers its outputs, following its own internal rules; the brain is located on the body, but the body itself is not necessarily part of the brain’s mechanism. On the other hand, some embodied cognition theorists prefer to see the relation between body and brain as a constitutive one; the body is not only a presenter of perceptions and fluctuations but an active element in the formation and maintenance of the brain itself. I think this last approach is particularly attractive for performance scholars, since it assumes that certain acts are not merely mimetic or citational but also articulative: Our iterations can lead to both organic and cultural adjustments. Bruce McConachie and Rhonda Blair⁶ have already tapped into these cognitive assertions in their recent studies of audiences and actors, and this tendency will certainly continue in the years to come...

中文翻译：

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表演，认知和对情感史学的追求

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 表演，认知和对情感史学的追求
• 里奥·卡布雷内斯（Leo Cabranes-Grant）（生物）

1819年左右，约翰·济慈（John Keats）在草稿中写了以下几行讽刺诗：

这只活着的手，现在温暖而有能力，如果天气寒冷，在坟墓冰冷的寂静中，会抓紧你的日子，让你梦days以求的夜晚冷清，你希望自己的内心充满血迹，在我的血管里红色的生活可能会再次流淌，您会良心冷静-看到这里-我抱着它朝着您。^1个

诗人创造了一个抒情瞬间，描述了自己的手，追寻着同样的句子，这只手在他去世后会困扰着一位不愿透露姓名的听众。²这首诗复制了一种肢体姿态，突破了文字，身体和情感之间的界限。诗人通过他空白诗句的节奏和这只手的虚拟构想，向我们扩展了他的肉体。文字是原始手的情感扩展，现已被死亡抹去，但仍通过语言活跃。VilémFlusser将情感定义为“将心理状态转化为手势”，³这正是济慈通过使文字以动作融合情感的方式来完成的：“看这里，就是我对你持握。” 但是Flusser还将与身体相关的任何工具都视为手势，因此在这种情况下，我们必须将诗人的钢笔和墨水想象为他“认真抓握”的一部分，他努力靠近我们，将手伸出手来。体细胞[End Page 200]分界。许多评论家认为济慈的诗歌可能是出于潜在的考虑而写的，这并非偶然。我们在本文中发现的是表演手，充满戏剧感的手，也许不仅属于或主要属于诗人本人的角色，这是两百年来我们很难做出的区分。

济慈的诗像许多演员和舞者不断地在做的那样，以手势的方式传达了他的思想。济慈的诗再现了身体之间的纠缠并影响了我们的文化内涵，最近的认知研究已经揭示了我们的运动与大脑之间的紧密联系。从某种程度上说，表演是我们情感史的一种姿态编码，正如法拉赫·卡里姆·科珀（Farah Karim-Copper）在莎士比亚作品中对双手的分析中所显示的那样，[ ^4]认知与表演的交织为我们对语言，身体和感觉如何相互补充和相互促进的理解提供了新的探索途径。在本讨论的其余部分中，我想谈谈其中的一些途径。我提醒读者，事实是，本文不是对这些问题的详尽介绍，而是对某些问题和作者的初步映射，它们可以帮助我们开始解决这些问题。我还将冒着挑起一些概念上和哲学上的难题的风险，并且还要尝试一些想法和质疑。走吧，我们走。

一世

劳伦斯·夏皮罗（Lawrence Shapiro）将最近的认知争论分为两个相互竞争的话题。⁵一方面，标准的认知科学将大脑设想为一个计算中心，它按照自己的内部规则接收信息并传递其输出。大脑位于身体上，但身体本身不一定是大脑机制的一部分。另一方面，一些具体化的认知理论家更倾向于将身体和大脑之间的关系看作是构成性的。身体不仅是感知和波动的呈现者，而且是大脑自身形成和维持的活跃元素。我认为这最后一种方法对表演学者特别有吸引力，因为它假定某些行为不仅是模仿或引用，而且是表达性的：我们的迭代可以导致组织性和文化性的调整。布鲁斯·麦康纳奇（Bruce McConachie）和朗达·布莱尔（Rhonda Blair）⁶ 在最近对观众和演员的研究中已经采用了这些认知断言，并且这种趋势肯定会在未来几年内继续...