Textures of Thought: Theatricality, Performativity and the Extended/Enactive Debate

Abstract

While relatively recent, the 'cognitive turn' in theatre and performance studies has engaged a growing community of scholars who are now looking to the sciences of the mind for no less than a paradigm shift. Whether or not this promise is delivered, the enterprise would benefit from further reflection on its underlying assumptions and ideologies. In this chapter, I wish to engage the very interface of the two fields by targeting four contested concepts in their current discourses: specifically, by interweaving extended and enactive notions of mind with the well-worn humanistic idioms of theatricality and performativity. While all four defy clear-cut definition, they all promote generally world-involving philosophies of sense and identity, and do indeed appear to share some core assumptions. In particular, I will argue that certain valorisations of the former bear considerable discursive affinities with the latter—the extended with the theatrical, the enactive with the performative—and that these family resemblances may help articulate blind spots on both fronts. Rather than reduce either pair to the other, let alone explain either away, my aim is to discuss them as aspects of wider ‘cognitive ecologies’: while both cognitive and theatre studies have witnessed a shift from representations and pre-given identities to a focus on embodied action and performance, ecology here names a parallel (potential) extension beyond individual brains or actors to wider textures of thought. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)