Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 19 Number 2/3 August/December 2018
(Final Issue)
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Editorial on the Final Issue
of
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
This editorial introduces what will be the last issue of Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. Material will be added until the end of December 2018 to allow esp. book reviews to appear as they come in, and the occasional final contribution to the articles section.
In the social sciences and sciences, it has been notoriously difficult, even impossible, to argue any causality—correlation is as close as these approaches get. It is against this background that I point to the following broad development, which overlaps with my own. In 1991, I began with my research into the relationship between insights in consciousness studies and theatre. In 1994, the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson launched the first of the ongoing bi-annual conferences, Towards a Science of Consciousness. In 1994, the Journal of Consciousness Studies was launched, 1996 saw the launch of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness with its annual conferences and its journal, Consciousness and Cognition. 1996 also saw the publication of my doctoral thesis. The British Psychological Society founded its sections on Consciousness and Experiential Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology in 1997. It is also in these years that other publications began to emerge in the field of theatre, literature and consciousness, for example with Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow's Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond (1997). In 1999 I edited, “Performance and Consciousness” as a themed issue of Performing Arts International, in 2000 I launched the peer reviewed journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, in 2001 followed an issue on “Consciousness and Drama” in Studies in the Literary Imagination. The Intellect and Rodopi book series were launched in 2005, as well as a bi-annual conference series, Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, which I hosted in Aberystwyth (2005, 2007), Lincoln (2009, 2011, 2013) and New York (with Gregory Tague at St Francis College, 2015).
In 2006, Jade Rosina McCutcheon and I launched the working group Performance and Consciousness at the International Federation for Theatre Research. In the Lincoln School of Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln, an MA Theatre and Consciousness ran from 2008/9 to 2010/11, with a total of ten graduates, and the subsequent MA Drama in the Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts had a pathway “Theatre and Consciousness” with five graduates.
The editorial policy for both the CLA journal and for the two book-series was intentionally wide open, not geared towards any specific ideology or methodological approach. In particular, the editorial boards of the journal and the book series embraced new ideas, no matter how radical, as long as they were presented in a robust way. Rodopi in particular supported this policy by allowing decisions about accepting a proposal or, based on the accepted proposal, accepting the completed manuscript, to be taken solely by the members of the editorial board, who engaged in thorough peer review.
When Rodopi was taken over by Brill quite recently, their new requirement for peer review outside of the editorial board would have been problematic in the earlier phase when the consciousness, literature and the arts field was in its infancy. However, the field has become sufficiently established in the meantime, and such concerns are no longer needed.
Those still active in Higher Education will need to consider carefully whether explicit rules and implicit expectations or fears regarding research audit procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom, may have a debilitating impact on the opportunities they allow researchers to develop and present genuinely new insights, as they have been presented in the CLA journal and the Rodopi/Brill and Intellect book-series, and as I am presenting them in this book. It stands to reason that it is in principle impossible, or at least very difficult, to predict anything genuinely new—if it is predictable, it cannot be new to the extent that it is being predicted. The danger is that structures such as the REF limit what is acceptable as research, or what scores highly, to predictable contexts, because in that way the chance for new insights is at best limited. REF-procedures might serve to consolidate and perpetuate the status quo and managers afraid of losing funding that depends on the outcomes of such audits might award work that plays it safe.
Approximately the same time that the conference series, and the two book-series were launched marks the beginning of the “cognitive turn” in performance and literary studies—insights specifically from cognitive science were used to further understand phenomena of performance, including theatre, and literature. A few years later, spirituality, anchored in religions and religious studies/theology entered the formalised scene, with a Performance, Religion and Spirituality working group within the International Federation for Theatre Research, which also launched its own journal.
The open nature of the initial Consciousness, Literature and the Arts development separated into those two more formalised, but also by the very nature of that formalisation, more limited branches. At the University of Huddersfield, UK, the Centre for Psychophysical Performance Research, founded by Franc Chamberlain and Deborah Middleton, focuses on Mindfulness and performance, with a new journal on that topic launched in 2017/18.
It is even possible to refer to the Performance Philosophy area in this context, which may well have been first formalised through the foundation, by Dan Watt and myself, of the working group Performance and Philosophy within TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) in 2005, still continuing, and the immensely popular Performance Philosophy network formally launched in 2013 with an international conference of which Watt was a co-organiser—it now has its own book series and journal (the journal co-edited by Watt).
I want to conclude with an expression of my gratitude to all who have made this publication possible, colleagues on the editorial board, university administrators and IT experts who supported its publication over many years, and of course all the contributors. It has been pioneering work, which was very exciting and, as I suggested above, there is a considerable legacy to be collectively proud of.