Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (review)

As the title of this collection announces (somewhat redundantly), it marks an important "turn" in the cross-disciplinary application of theory to theatre, as a new paradigm for our millennium. Its introduction (by McConachie and Hart) gives a good overview of the current structural emphasis in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and brain science—known as "cognitivism"—which offers a counterbalance to the cultural relativism of recent poststructuralist theories in the humanities. The book's essays offer some fine examples of how such neo-structuralism might apply to drama, theatre, and performance studies. There is also a very helpful glossary (compiled by Jennifer Ewing Pierce). However, this collection is marred by its direct attacks on certain postmodern theories, particularly Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which deserve a more careful examination, critique, and perhaps reintegration with the empirically based cognitive theories championed here as "liberating" (23).

In his preface, McConachie stresses how this new scientific structuralism presents a "challenge [to] . . . Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and specific aspects of deconstruction, New Historicism, and Foucauldian discourse theory" due to the "empirically based tests" of cognitive "psychology, linguistics, [and] neuroscience" (ix). He states that "psychoanalysis and semiotics are both based in scientifically outmoded assumptions" (xii). Yet, there is no consideration in this book of the many scientists who find connections between neurology and psychoanalysis, including Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and those involved with the International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Society (founded in 2000 and chaired by researchers Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp). There are numerous publications in this field that find empirical bases for many of Freud's theories. Research has also been done on the material effects of psychotherapy in the brain (see Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World [New York: Other Press, 2002], 287–88). Therefore, to call Lacanian psychoanalysis "scientifically outmoded"—because it involves the arbitrariness of signifiers in Saussurean semiotics—is profoundly misleading, especially since Lacanian theory extends certain structural aspects of Freud's work in ways that might also be corroborated or refined by neuroscience. Instead, McConachie and Hart vastly oversimplify Lacan's theory as based on "a binary of Self and Other" (4), when it extensively deconstructs both of these terms. Further steps should be taken, beyond this groundbreaking collection in cognitive performance studies, to consider how specific poststructuralist theories, which explored cultural, philosophical, and linguistic contingencies over the past half-century, may now complement, not simply be replaced by, current structuralist research in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

In their introduction, McConachie and Hart say that their book is only "intended to open a door to cognitive studies for theatre and performance scholars," not cover the entire field (1). Yet, they are introducing readers to a crucial new perspective on our discipline through cognitive theories and empirical research about the mind's embodiment: how "having a human body guarantees that people's minds will produce a certain number of unchanging, cross-cultural, perhaps even universal structures" (8). Given this aim, it is unfortunate that the book does not explore more of the neurological aspects of the mind's embodiment in relation to theatre and performance. Various essays mention the work of specific neurologists, but there is not a full consideration of brain anatomy—regarding, for example, the asymmetrical functions of left and right hemispheres or emotions in the limbic system (which correspond in many ways to the Lacanian orders of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real). Also, this book fails to consider a leading cognitive psychologist who directly uses the metaphor of theatre to explore the inner workings of the mind: Bernard Baars, author of In the Theater of Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Individual essays by McConachie and Howard Mancing in the first and final sections of the book take simplistic potshots at Lacanian and Derridean theory. McConachie wants to move theatre studies "beyond Freud and Lacan," but he misrepresents both theorists by not considering any specifics from Freud and overlooking the interplay of Imaginary and Real...