To Bill Johnsen, mimetic theorist and innovative editor.Have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech and the thought?Yes, we have observed the powers of mimesis. And if we reload Socrates's untimely observation for our contemporary, hypermimetic times, we cannot help but wonder yet again: What is the relation between violence, imitation, and the unconscious in a world increasingly dominated by virtual representations of violence, (...) which, we are beginning to realize, may have contagious rather than cathartic effects? In Part One of this twofold argument, I traced a genealogy of the "cathartic hypothesis" via exemplary... (shrink)

Through a close analysis of socio-biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on motherhood and ‘mirror neurons’ it is argued that Hrdy’s claims exemplify how research that ostensibly bases itself on neuroscience, including in literary studies ‘literary Darwinism’, relies after all not on scientific, but on political assumptions, namely on underlying, unquestioned claims about the autonomous, transparent, liberal agent of consumer capitalism. These underpinning assumptions, it is further argued, involve the suppression or overlooking of an alternative, prior tradition of feminist theory, including (...) feminist science criticism. (shrink)

What role does “discursive consciousness” play in decision-making? How does it interact with “practical consciousness?” These two questions constitute two important gaps in strong practice theory that extend from Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to Stephen Vaisey's sociological dual-process model and beyond. The goal of this paper is to provide an empirical framework that expands the sociological dual-process model in order to fill these gaps using models from cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I use models of memory and moral judgment that highlight the (...) importance of executive functions and semantic memory. I outline each model as it pertains to the aforementioned gaps in strong practice theory. I then use the models from cognitive neuroscience to create an expanded dual-process model that addresses how and when conscious mental systems override and interact with subconscious mental systems in the use of cultural ends for decision-making. Finally, using this expanded model I address the sociological debate over the use of interview and survey data. My analysis reveals that surveys and interviews both elicit information encoded in declarative memory and differ primarily in the process of information retrieval that is required of respondents. (shrink)