Conventional performance

Virtually all human performance is today conventionalized in adults, and to varying degrees in children. Music is conventionalized song-and-dance. Digital scales, with fixed tonal intervals, presumably derive from the invention of musical instruments (Storr, 1993), as there is no reason for the human voice to constrain itself in this way (Dosher, 1994).

The decorative arts are conventionalized forms of mark-making behaviour. Nomadic hunters, with few possessions and no permanent homes to decorate, often paint their own bodies (Ebin, 1979), and modem children make marks indifferently on paper, walls, and themselves. The first surfaces plied with ochre by our Homo erectus

ancestors may well have been their own hominid skins (Bahn & Vertut, 1988; Knight, Power & Watts, 1995).

The representational arts are equally conventionalized. The post-industrial west has seen a rebellion against the conventions of academic art: but even here,

‘spontaneity’, ‘creativity’, and ‘originality’ have become the most tyrannical of social mandates (Krauss, 1985), to the extent that we groan at the thought of another

Duchamp urinal, or a sheep pickled in formaldehyde.

Strictly, what I am calling the ‘conventional mode’ is itself multiple, since it includes implicit and mimetic modes in conventionalized form. Ritual, ballet, and cinema combine music, dance, pantomime, visual metaphor, gesture in all three modes, and iconographie settings both realistic and fantastic.

The most salient feature of modem human behaviour is performative display. People who spend 35 hours a week in obligatory role-play at work {cf. Goffman, 1959), may spend as many hours watching televized role-play at home. And we have

other leisure activities, all of which involve display - not just music, cinema, and theatre, but mundane activities like cooking, gardening, and home decoration. We turn the food we eat, the homes we live in, and the plots of ground around our homes, into social displays. Then we go on holiday, where even lying on a beach is display,

sometimes demanding onerous cultivation of physique and suntan.

Jewellery, sporting trophies, stamp collections, academic diplomas. Baroque churches, and even the rags of the penniless ascetic, are all displays of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1972) - material, moral, social, intellectual, or spiritual wealth. The fact that wealth is so often displayed reveals the fundamentally theatrical character of economic activity. Cars that can travel at twice the legal speed limit, baseball caps with Bugs Bunny ears, and lavatory brushes shaped like geese - much of the stuff we spend our hard-earned money on - are the props and backdrops for the roles we assume or aspire to in our daily lives.

‘Symbolism’ versus social display

The real-world social mirroring behaviours described above allow us to develop a scheme which avoids:

1. Creating an artificial discontinuity between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ 2. Fabricating Platonic or Saussurian worlds of disembodied meaning and

‘symbolism’

In fact we can dispense with the word ‘symbol’ altogether, except perhaps for convenience in very general contexts, usually with the proviso that more precise

definition will be attempted later.

The trouble with ‘symbolism’ is that the word means different things to different people, and shifts its meaning from one context to another. Consequently, cognitive, biological, and social scientists talk endlessly past each other, creating arguments which appear to be substantive but are only semantic. More fatally, the notion of ‘cultural symbolism’ suffers from an anthropocentric circularity of definition, sustaining the myth of opposition between nature and culture, and obfuscating our own self-ignorance.

All this can be avoided by referring instead to social mirroring behaviour. We can say with some confidence what a gesture-call is, or a dramatic icon, or projective play, just as we can call a spade a spade. We can categorize their functions as

communication, play, or performance, and their modes as implicit, mimetic, or conventional. Words like ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ can be returned to the comfortable imprecision of folk usage, where they rightfully belong.

SOCIAL DISPLAY AND SELF! OTHER-AWARENESS Social display as a phylogenetic sequence

Our social mirroring behaviours could not have emerged all at once, and must have evolved in a logical order. Communication has to be the oldest form of

intersubjectivity, since even cells ‘talk’ to each other in chemical languages. Human performance appears to have evolved as a playful extension of communication. Play is common to many animals (even protozoa have exploratory behaviour: Hameroff,

1994), whereas performance is more variable and specialized. So we can envisage an ‘evolutionary arrow’ from left to right across Table 3.1.

The same can be said for the three modes: impHcit behaviour has to be older than mimetic behaviour, and both have to be in place before they can be conventional­ ized as we find them in modem human culture. So Table 3.1 has a ‘down’ as well as an ‘across’ arrow, and implies at least three ‘rubicons’ during human evolution.

If play and performance generate the preconditions for voluntary

communication - cooperative trust (Whiten, 1993) and reflective consciousness (Mead, 1934) - we could infer that play or performance in one mode facilitates the emergence of communication in a higher mode. This is a general extension of Durkheim’s (1912) theory that ritual pantomime (mimetic performance) is the prerequisite for language (conventional communication). So we might combine the ‘down’ and ‘across’ arrows into an evolutionary spiral (Table 3.2), and infer a parallel evolution of self/other­ awareness.

We humans invent ever more expansive social mirrors - writing, printing from moveable type, telecommunications, the Internet, etc. {cf. Donald, 1991). Creating emergent orders is the special talent of our species, and in the process we continually reinvent ourselves.

Is there empirical evidence for the evolutionary sequence implied by Table 3.2, and does it correlate with the evolution of self-awareness? There are six potential sources for such evidence:

1. A comparison of social displays across animal taxa

2. A similar comparison of self-awareness, using cognitive tests 3. The development of social displays in children

5. Functional brain anatomy subserving display/self-awareness 6. The archaeological and fossil records of hominid evolution

The first four types of analysis are reviewed below. I will deal with the fifth in Chapters 4 and 5, and the sixth in Chapters 6 and 7. All six approaches have

significant problems, but if we can arrive at some degree of consensus between them, we can at least claim to have a hypothesis worthy of serious attention.