In his 2008 Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, Bruce McConachie argues for the value of science in arriving at knowledge about theatre audiences:

Given two competing conclusions about spectatorship where scientific knowledge is relevant, with both claims based in a fair reading of available evidence, we should trust the claim that is also reliant on empirical evidence and falsifiable theory over the claim that is not. (14-15)

According to McConachie, there are three reasons why it is not easy to put this principle into practice. First, scientists do not agree as to what constitutes a fair reading. Second, a clash between those who favour the science approach and those who favour a different, non-scientific approach, has affected film studies adversely and could develop in the context of theatre and performance studies. Third,

some theatre and performance scholars, like many popularisers of cognitive science, may avoid the complex challenges that cognitive approaches present to our disciplinary paradigms and simply cherry-pick a few key ideas from the sciences that seem to confirm their present beliefs and prejudices. (15)

McConachie refers to my work in a footnote to this statement as an example of this third reason why it is not easy to put a scientific approach to phenomena of theatre and performance into practice. He quotes selectively rather than fully, from a short article (5,700 words) published in 2003, rather than from later, more detailed publications in which I discuss, explain and justify my approach in much more detail. My starting point is a general interest in theatre, and on that basis I notice specific experiences that I encounter in the context of theatre, and I note, too, that others are likely to have had similar experiences, because I find that others talk or write about such experiences and seek to contextualise those experiences, to understand their nature. In relation to the published work of others about such experiences of phenomena in the theatre, I, too, want to understand what is happening here, how those phenomena create those experiences. I ask questions, and in some cases, the solutions that my colleagues suggest in conversation or in their writing convince me and I consider a question answered to my satisfaction. In other cases, I am not fully convinced, or not at all convinced, by colleagues’ attempts at answers, or I find that nobody has got an answer, or nobody has even asked the question, and thus there can be no answers. In those cases my approach is pragmatic, and I seek answers wherever I can find them. I am not limiting myself to any one theory or set of theories or angle or perspective of approach. Over the years, I have found, in the course, and as a result of, exploring a wide range of theories, angles, perspectives and approaches in arriving at answers to my questions, that consciousness studies in the widest sense of the concept, has proved most fruitful in providing me with the answers I am looking for. Consciousness studies is a wide-ranging umbrella term.

Cognitive science is one branch of consciousness studies among many others. McConachie has selected cognitive science from among many other possible approaches within consciousness studies as the central focus of his research as documented in his book. I have not chosen cognitive science and the model of consciousness related to it, but the model of consciousness based on Indian Vedanta philosophy, as the central focus of my research into the relationship between theatre, performance and consciousness. If my approach is an instance of cherry-picking, as McConachie suggests, then so is his. If my approach is an instance of an “implicit claim for an academic free-for-all” (2008: 215), as McConachie suggests, then so is his. The categories of cherry-picking and academic free-for-all do not help any debate. Even less does the suggestion that such alleged inappropriate activity is due to the “unwillingness to abandon past theories”—I could argue in return that McConachie is unwilling to abandon an outdated and inappropriate dichotomy of “good” and “bad” science, and that would lead nowhere meaningful either. When McConachie writes that the activity for which he quotes me as an example could also be a “popular fad” or “simple scholarly laziness” (2008: 15), he has reached, sadly, a level of discourse that is no longer that of academic argument and, to continue the exercise of mud-slinging I can point happily to McConachie’s misspelling of my name.

Back to the argument, though: McConachie is at pains, in his book, to define cognitive science as a science in relation to many parameters that are “not science”, and sets up the dichotomy of “good science” and “bad science”, with cognitive science as representative of “good science” and my approach, implicitly, as “bad science”. My approach becomes an example of bad science for McConachie because my approach rhetorically side-tracks, as he puts it “any questions about the kinds of empirical tests that might provisionally validate or falisify” (2008: 215) the implications of research insights based on my application of the Vedanta model of consciousness in addressing questions about the nature of theatre. I see my work to date as my contribution to an on-going debate: the new answers I offer in response to a number of specific questions are in all cases open to further theoretical modification, but also to empirical research. In the latter case, my new answers may be regarded as well-argued hypotheses, which can be operationalized further, to transform them into the starting points for empirical research. Empirical research specifically based on my work has not been carried out so far, but this does not imply that it is not possible in principle.

McConachie, finally, argues that a further component in the rhetorical side-tracking of any questions about the “kinds of empirical tests that might provisionally validate or falisify” the implications of my approach is my “extreme cultural relativism” (2008: 215). Relativism is defined as one specific thing being considered “as relative in relation to a framework or standpoint” (such as culture), and denial “that any standpoint is uniquely privileged above all others” (Westacott 2001). I cannot see either in any of my work. On the contrary, I argue, in the context of the Vedanta model of consciousness, that consciousness is, at the level of pure consciousness, which, as I have argued in my work, is an essential aspect of experience in the theatre, universal, and the same for every human being. However, linguistic expression of experiences of pure consciousness are by necessity culture-specific in so far as the specific terms any person will have at his or her disposal to capture, fathom and describe an experience will be dependent on the language that person has learnt, and the level of education as reflected in the use of language. Those are culture-specific and will account for the differences in people’s accounts of the experience of pure consciousness, i.e., of what is in effect the same experience across the word independent of culture. Cognitive neuroscience can test this claim: if the claim is appropriate, then the same activity with a predictable impact on consciousness, e.g., meditation, should elicit the same changes in psychological and physiological measures of subjects across the world, independent of cultural and educational background, and independent of how they describe in words the experience in meditation of altered states of consciousness.

To conclude: while there may be the kind of work McConachie criticises, for the reasons outlined above, I cannot recognise my work as an example.