Tonight I attended a lecture given by Professor Bruce McConachie entitled “All the World is Not a Stage', hosted by the the Center for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent.
His paper went something like this.
Erving Goffman is wrong, the world is not a stage. The idea that social interaction/culture can 'replace' nature makes little evolutionary and/or cognitive sense, as nature and nurture are intertwined. Thus reality is not wholly socially constructed, rather our actions are a combination of acting roles (the illusion bit) and self; imitations are not illusions; the subjunctive worlds humans create are real; and so on and so forth.
Now, I'm not sociologically 'trained' enough to respond to this fully [though I would consider the proposition that I couldn't respond without sufficient training somewhat narrow minded], but I did find McConachie persuasive and engaging, especially in his belief that sociology could learn a lot by spending some time revisiting anthropology. Where I did find McConachie problematic however was in his appeal to science for some form of subterranean authority.
As my problems with the paper grew steadily, it seems prudent to outline them in turn, in the creeping chronological order in which they appeared.
First, in his initial criticisms of social constructivism, McConachie seemed happy to lump together the biological, the cognitive and the evolutionary. Now these fields obviously have their points of interaction, but his reductionism was undoubtedly crude.
Second, McConachie described empathy as the reading of a persons mind. And to give this statement some sense of gravitas he mentioned 'mirror neurons'. Later he used the concept of 'neural plasticity' as one reason why “we become out habits” [at which point he also seemed to be contradicting his attack on Goffman entirely...]. More on both these scientisms later. He also, continuing the 'mind' theme, stated, again as a counter to Goffman, that “our brains are part of the real world”. I have no problems with this statement. What I do have a problem with is his assumptions that the only alternative to this belief is Cartesian dualism. It is not (see Raymond Tallis).
Third (and this all came out in the Q&A session, when perhaps McConachie was being less cautious with his words), he stated that mirror neurons are the “lower level of empathy” on Thompson's scale (see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 2007), and that in order to perform well “actors [that being those on a stage] must work closely with the mirror neuron of other actors”.
Gradually then, although carefully avoiding the term 'neuroscience', McConachie descended into neuromania. Whether or not one believed his reading of Goffman and his alternative views on social interaction, this appeal to (neuro)science as subterranean empirical evidence is false. Mirror neurons are no longer considered as unproblematic as they were upon their 'discovery' in 1992; and neural plasticity has been widely derided as a term without meaning (see here). McConachie's understanding of (neuro)science is therefore deficient to the point of alarmingly basic. Moreover, recent neuroscience, and in particular the work of David Eagleman, might actually be in the process of providing evidence to prove Goffman's thesis. Eagleman is a divisive figure, but if his work on time and perception is right, that (in sum) there is a distinct gap between reality and perception during which time the brain filters and manages the information it is receiving before reporting an alternative 'reality' back to the host, then Goffman is back in the game (see here).
My problems with the paper are simple. Why do figures such as McConachie think reaching to a limited understanding of neuroscience for answers is a positive step in humanities scholarship? McConachie's paper was, after all, admirably inter/multi/trans/post-disciplinary [is anyone else bored of such shifting nomenclature?] and hence neuroscience was not needed to support his point (though studies of evolution and psychology clearly were, and indeed made welcome appearances). Indeed why place alongside a rich and diverse understanding of sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy et al, subterranean observations on a discipline towards which he clearly has limited, partial and hardly cutting edge knowledge of.
Much more work is needed to understand how and for what purpose humanities scholars - who I think we can safely say work in a field whose paradigm shifts tend to slow and tortuous - can logistically draw upon a field as fluid, radical, fresh, disrespectful towards meta-narratives and developing at such a breathtaking pace as neuroscience. Put McConachie in front of a room of scientists and I suspect that his subterranean scientism would have been uncovered more readily, and his paper, respectfully, put under severe scrutiny.
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