Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind (review)

Like his Theatre of Chaos, which drew parallels between contemporary plays, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory, William Demastes's Staging Consciousness juxtaposes ideas derived from the emerging science of consciousness with similar notions embedded in (mostly) twentieth-century drama.

The science of consciousness, formerly the preserve of psychology, is now a convergence point for such disciplines as philosophy, physics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, neurobiology, evolutionary theory, self help, and even theology. Long dominated by Descartes, philosophy of mind was reclaimed by Bergson, Bertrand Russell, and the major existential phenomenologists, and rediscovered again in the 1990s as the study of consciousness found its way back to the brain.

In a relatively short book Demastes can give only a spotty account of the history and topography of the field he brings into play. Perhaps most sorely missing are any references to the novels of Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, whom Demastes's presumptive readers will almost inescapably associate with the stream of consciousness. In presenting his arguments, Demastes leans most heavily on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the polymath Francis Crick, such phenomenologists as Bert States and Stanton B. Garner, Jr., and least heavily on the life sciences. He does not mention Abraham Maslow or Robert Ornstein, alludes to Jung just twice in passing, leaves out William James, and makes no use of Gerald Edelman and Israel Rosenfield, whose accessible neurobiological research cleaves to the heart of Demastes's adopted thesis that consciousness is the result of material processes in the brain.

Subtitled Theater and the Materialization of Mind, the book would have benefited from a preface to set out its rationale more stringently. Generally speaking, Demastes seems intent on inviting a rapprochement among scientists investigating the physical sources of consciousness, playwrights whose dramaturgy escapes a psychology based in the mind/body dualism, and believers seeking scientific evidence for the soul. So much can be gleaned from chapter 1, "Toward a Materialization of Consciousness."

Chapter 2, "The Science of Consciousness," does not provide the expected historical or panoramic perspective on the field, though it does marshal from Dennett, David Chalmers, and phenomenology convincing arguments against Cartesianism. Relying on an article by Gordon Armstrong, Demastes introduces complexity theory—which examines the tendency for complex processes to emerge from simple happenings—to bolster the idea that the emergence of both consciousness and theatre was evolutionarily determined. Here also Demastes observes that theatre activates an audience response mediating the mind/body dualism.

Only in "Modernist Dramas of Consciousness" does Demastes begin to draw consistently, if idiosyncratically, on theatrical examples, linking the "move beyond realism" (54) with a "new materialism" (55) that rejects the hierarchy of mind over body. Pirandello, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett each merit a few pages. O'Neill's Iceman Cometh is mentioned, but not Strange Interlude. Waiting for Godot receives featured analysis, rather than the dramaticules (though Not I is quoted). There are no references to Strindberg's A Burned House, German Expressionism, the Neue Sachlichkeit (which translates as "new materialism"), synaesthesia experiments at the théâtre d'Art, or Nikolai Evreinov—all of which directly engage the materialization of mind.

Oddly, Demastes puts forth The Importance of Being Earnest at length (42-48) as a consequential contributor to our notion of consciousness, making it out to be not social satire but epistemological challenge: "The dream-thought it creates leads to a neural meltdown, encouraging a reconfiguration of our soft-wired system" (48). Some would demur from Demastes's judgment—that "thematic commentary" of the play has "rarely, if ever" (45) been successful and that Wilde abandons "fabula" (46 ff)—by noting that Earnest is a foundling story focusing, as such stories do, on identity.

The chapter entitled "Logic, Creativity, Etc." links the development of fuzzy logic and parallel processing in computing to a valorization of "illogical" drama that, by eschewing dualism, escapes "the rigid law of excluded middle" (67...