Theatre Optics: Enlightenment Theatre Architecture in France and the Architectonics of Husserl's Phenomenology

Abstract

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's 1804 engraving of a human eye that encompasses a theatre auditorium points to a neglected aspect of the history of Western theatre architecture: eighteenth-century architects in France drew spatial concepts and geometric forms from optics and applied them to reformist theatre designs. This borrowing from optics shows that the stage incorporated the representation of space that dominated Enlightenment natural philosophy, and it implies that theatre spectatorship sustained a mutually formative relationship with materialist theories of consciousness. This relationship, moreover, was not confined to Enlightenment France. An analysis of Edmund Husserl's twentieth-century phenomenological writings reveals that a set of architectural traits—an architectonics—permeates his model of the conscious mind. The spectatorial orientation of the subject that organizes Husserl's work suggests that phenomenology aligns the theatrical frame with the conditions of knowledge in general.