Carys Bray’s novel ASong for Issy Bradley was published this week by Hutchinson, and it is so
far meeting with success: radio interviews, good reviews (The Times, The Guardian),
soundbites of approval from the likes of Nick Hornby, and the considerable
backing of the publisher’s publicity machine (which is both effective and
affecting a tired-looking Carys).
I knew the book was good. Ailsa Cox and I co-supervised the piece as part of a
PhD at Edge Hill University,
one of our literary successes (but not our only one). So it was good, before
the world gets hold of Carys, that she organised a launch on her home turf of
Southport (where the novel is set), in Broadhursts Bookshop in Market Street.
Cakes were made carrying the book cover; Patricia thought the cakes referred to
the amount of cake consumed in the novel (a bit like the Belgian food she knocked up for the launch of A Translated Man)! But this wasn’t the
case. It was emphatically local and the
better for that (despite the locality; see below).
Carys
stood on a chair, I think, and read a short comic-poignant passage from the
book. A Song revolves around the
death of a child – Issy –in a Mormon family
– the Bradleys and their differing
reactions to that. The novel therefore is formally ‘about’ point of view and
narrational voice, a good trick since at least since Browning’s The Ring and the Book, handled here with
gentle experimentation. (Read my previous posts on form. I’m deliberately speaking across the almost-universal
desire to see this book as a ‘woman’s novel’ or as an anti-Mormon novel. It’s
not. Men are allowed to weep over this book too. Mormons are welcome to read
it.)
Carys thanked a lot of people, including Ailsa and myself,
and began to defend the PhD novel and Creative Writing generally, as though
Hanif Kurieshi himself, the CW-hating Professor of CW, the Buddha of Kingston,
were in the room. For the record: he wasn’t. The room was, however, crowded
with talented writers who either teach or have benefited from studying Creative
Writing: Rodge Glass, Billy Cowan, Joanne Ashcroft, Patricia Farrell, Christine
Riaz, Sarah Billington, Claire Dean, Carol Fenlon, Ailsa Cox, just
to mention some of the Edge Hill ones; I spotted Cath Nichols and Sarah Dobbs
in the distance too. Luckily Prof Kurieshi wasn’t there. Somebody might have
come over all Fabricant. (Topical reference.)
Carys
later told Patricia that she expected to be quizzed about this issue in her
high-profile interviews, but hasn’t been (thus far). Her novel is dedicated to
Ailsa and myself, and I cannot thank Carys
enough for that, I found that deeply affecting, and she states boldly that her
novel derives from her PhD studies in the acknowledgements. You may notice how
many creative writers who have benefited from the academy fail to mention the
fact in their biogs and blurbs. Imagine a painter failing to mention he or she had studied
at the RCA. But then ‘writing can’t be taught’ we keep being told (when ‘bee
and chicken keeping’ (one of the oddest book categories in Broadhurst’s behind
Carys’ head as she read), parenting, playing the bassoon, potty-use, sexual
intercourse, nuclear physics and driving a car all can, though not together, of
course).
Then we are told we turn out clones of our own work! Anybody
reading this will gather that there’s not a lot of commonality between A Translated Man and A Song for Issy (except they are both
made up; yes, another media obsession: Carys’
novel is ‘autobiographical’, they say, as if to diminish its originality and
artifice.) Nor is there much between Ailsa’s compact, jump-cut stories (read one
here) and Carys’
equally compact but proportionate prose. (I could go on to demonstrate the
point with reference to Joanne Ashcroft’s new poetry, for example.)
So: congratulations Carys!
(And as my colleague Rodge Glass often puts it in emails: ‘Onwards!’) Here’s an
account of the novel from Carys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIvJv68G5lo
Details of MA in Creative Writing at Edge Hill here.
*
Diaristic musings: A bit of work: writing exercises; looking
at The Drop (to be published by
Oystercatcher next year); and ‘Petrarch 3’ in manuscript; Tim Atkins’ wonderful
PETRARCH COLLECTED ATKINS (did he?)
has arrived….Then up to Southport with Patricia, the weather glorious. Southport was horrible, despite the sunshine and heat.
The streets were clogged with obese people, the restaurants full of porkers
chomping their way through triple-decker burgers, or guzzling gallons of
fish-bone soup, and lots of lame people cluttering the otherwise impressive
Parisian arcades (having trouble with my own feet means I noticed the unusually
large proportion of crutch or cane carrying-promenaders, a lot of them of
course ‘disabled’ by obesity, it has to be said against them). The sea is a
mile away over the sand, a glimmering mirage. The real ale was terrible (except
in Wetherspoons, where they even had an Arundel ale). The only bits we enjoyed
were the corporate and stylised cool of Pizza Express and the emphatically
non-corporate old school swelter of Broadhursts Bookshop itself, which we
visited, silently noting the window-display of Carys’ novel, mid-afternoon, before the
launch at 5.30. I hummed and harred over an early twentieth century biography
of Verlaine, written by some pompous chap in government livery, in his misty
photograph, but decided (regretfully) against it.
After the reading we had a good and animated chat with
colleagues, students, ex-students and friends (overlapping categories to be
sure), before heading back to civilisation, Liverpool, generally, and The Lion,
more particularly, with its excellent The Lion Returns ale and pork pies, its
tiled décor, and the cheeky-winky eye of George Formby wishing us ‘Best Wishes’
(autographed) from the wall. George rather than Formby, I think.
And here is the hub-post to the research that went into the book:
I
have been writing a study of the forms of recent innovative poetries (mainly
British but with some international poets), which is underlined by a conception
of form itself, that emphasises form not as a vessel to contain its contents,
but as a readerly process of forming which is already meaningful, and which
brings the text into existence. I have been using this blog as a machine for
thinking through some of the implications of this, by posting early thoughts,
dry-runs, practice-led spin-offs, some recovered earlier texts, some discarded
passages, and even a few completed fragments of the book. Here’s a summary of
the main argument which lies behind many of the existing posts.
Instrumentalist
studies of literature abound, which offer readings in terms of
socio-historical, contextual issues, ‘issues’ of gender, sexuality, space,
place, spectrality, etc. However, to successfully engage in the reading of
poetry – and particularly the reading of ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry –
means to necessarily engage with the forms of the artifice employed and (at a
level of some remove) with the notion of ‘form’ itself. There are, of course,
readings of poetic form, but they either tend to cling to the vestigial
decencies of New Critical practice or are technical, as in most work on
prosody, which seems a descendent of even older philological scholarship.
The
study of what has come to be called ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ has not
been given to instrumentalist readings, as it happens, but there has yet to be
a study which combines the already close textual reading common within this
field with the work of the so-called New Formalist critics, who have
spearheaded a cleansing operation within the field of Romantic Studies, where
New Historicist and other contextual methods, once held sway over the corpus.
The leading theorist of this group, Susan J. Wolfson, states: ‘My deepest claim
is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as
information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a
specific kind of critical attention.’
My
approach derives from my axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation
of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Instead
of an historical reading of the kinds of alternative British poetries under the
label ‘linguistically innovative’ (my previous volumes The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool University Press, 2005; access its main thesis here)and
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry(Shearsman,
2011) offered this and more), this investigation
argues that the attention of any formal
study of contemporary poetry must be dual. It must focus on form in the
technical sense, on identifiable forms
in play (enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc.), and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises
acts of forming and our apprehension
of their coming to form. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease.
Associating one with the other, Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature argues that form is the force that
stages a performance of any text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the
literary work, which means that form needs to be understood verbally – as
‘taking form”, of “forming”, or even “loosing form”’,but he insists that the devices of artifice
‘are precisely what call forth the performative response’ of any engaged
reader, directly connected to the event of singularity which is the irruption
of an inventive otherness in our productive reading.
Both
types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive charge,
demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of
knowledge(s) and might show how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge
might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force
operating on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the
case of poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are
staged by form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into
fluxing semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. Wolfson even
writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. Formal
considerations of both kinds (forms
and forming) are engaged by active
reading and enact meanings that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (and on rare
occasions reinforce) the kind of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and
Attridge both decry as ‘paraphrase’. If apprehension of form is not, or not
only, a matter of collecting the devices of poetic artifice, of forms, but a question of entering into
the process by which the text finds form in our reading, as forming, there can be, strictly, no
paraphrase; indeed, paraphrase, a mode by which meaning is supposedly skimmed
off the surface of reading as a residue or even an essence, or worse, a
‘political’ slogan, is a violation of the processes of forms forming.
Paraphrase is amnesia of form.
Although
‘the vitality of reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from
any uniform discipline,’ as Wolfson has it, this volume will demonstrate how
‘issues’ may be read in literary works, ‘through’ form and not as an avoidance
of it. ‘Formalist’ has a bad press when it seems to imply autonomist or
aestheticist remove, but a poem is opened up to the world only through its
form. While there will be some contextual information presented, thinking about
poems and thinking about form, particularly through its evanescent cognitive
content, will be the main focus.
My
previous studies have taken historical and ethical approaches to these writers
and my criticism has always been informed (tacitly) by my own work as a poet,
and by my interest in poetics as a speculative writerly discourse. I have a
particular interest in the wily and even self-deceptive way writers talk to
themselves through poetics, and this requires a reading that does not reduce
its conjectural nature and function to intentional statements or ersatz
literary criticism. Poetics arises as an incidental activity of poets
throughout and will be addressed directly as text in several parts. Theorised
close reading might be a thumbnail description of my method. I have decided to
extend the range of my coverage of British poets and have not pursued some
writers (Tom Raworth and Iain Sinclair, for example) whose work I have analysed
in previous books and articles. Another aim of the book is to demonstrate the
formal range of linguistically innovative poetry.
Readers
of this book (and these posts) will find a challenging thesis about form (taken
dually as identifiable devices of form and processes of forming) that may well
influence their reading-processes on a permanent basis. This will be combined
with discussions of important British (and some other) poets, most of whom are
relatively well-known, others of whom are still emerging. The originality and
marketability of the book is that it combines a summary of formalist and
aestheticist thinking that is currently fashionable in one area of literary
studies (Romanticism) and applies it to another (contemporary poetry) which has
not hitherto been overly invaded by this mode of enquiry. It will therefore be
of interest to those studying literary theory as well as those studying
contemporary poetry. Its interest in form will draw in readers who are following
theorists as various as Derek Attridge, T.W. Adorno, as well as the New
Formalists and other aesthetic theorists, particularly those who argue the case
increasingly for a cognitive function in formal elements.
What
follows is a list of contents with raw links (and references to a number of
offline and print sources) to relevant pages on Pages. The final book will differ considerably from these passages,
but you could read through the posts to get a glimpse of the rough thinking. Or
scroll back through Pages’pages until you reach August 2013. Or
dip and sample. Or even follow a link and lose yourself. (Indeed, scroll through later posts, such as this one here, which offers the final list of contents which differs, mainly in its ordering of chapters, from the one below.)
The Meaning of Form
Introduction: Form’s Mordant Eye
See
the above text and the first paragraph or two of this essay on John Seed:
Here
are some posts grappling with the question of the cognitive function of form
(some of which are linked to later chapters as well since this is a matter of
conclusions as well as introductions):
Here's a later post on Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (2015) and its relevance to the theory of this project (ie, the content of the posts above).
Here's my first footnote to this chapter (and the last to the book).
Here's a footnote harking back to some 1981 meditations on 'formalist-humanism'.
Here's a mini-lecture and handout on 'form' that I use with literature and creative writing students.
See
review of On Form by Angela Leighton,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative
Poetry, Vol 3: No 1, March 2011: 63-66.
Chapter One: Convention and Constraint: Form in the
Innovative Sonnet Sequence
See the 14 posts under
that title that deliberately mime the structure of the sonnet. Very early
thinking, very playful. Here’s a sonnet made of links:
There is a post on the shift from the temporal to the spatial here. (This includes thoughts on Kamau Brathwaite included, about whose work I was considering writing about in this project.)
Chapter 2 Artifice, Artifact and Artificer: Veronica
Forrest-Thomson and Christopher Middleton
See ‘Linguistically
Wounded: The Poetical Scholarship of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’ in ed. Turley,
Richard Margraf, The Writer in the
Academy: Creative Interfrictions, Essays and Studies 2011. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011: 133-55.
[article, published] and parts of ‘Poetics
as Conjecture and Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13 March 2007
at Edge Hill University’,
New Writing. Vol 5: 1 (2008): 3-26. The 'Christopher Middleton' part of this chapter (to be removed from the final book) appears in the latest edition of The Wolf. It may be read here:
Chapter 5. Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and
Thought-Experiments in the Theatre of Semantic Poetry
See ‘Stefan Themerson and the Theatre of
Semantic Poetry’. in eds. Blaim, Ludmiły Gruszewskiej, and David,
Malcolm (eds.), Eseje o Współczesnej
Poezji Brytyjskiej i Irlandzkiej, Volume 5: Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego,Ludmi: 245-262.
An aside on Themerson's philosophy of 'aims of means' appears here.
Chapter 6. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and
Peter Hughes’ Petrarch
Thoughts on ‘Petrarch 3’
(and some attention to my later many versions of this one sonnet):
This is how the contents of the previous two posts (here and here) were chanelled into a concise paragraph for my work in form. There is some repetition but I thought a few people might be interested in how I square my circles. RS
………………………………………………………experience.’
(Jarvis 2011: 7) His first axiom is that ‘technique is the way art thinks’
(Jarvis 2011: 7). Elsewhere in an incidental attack on Creative Writing
workshop methodology, Jarvis affirms that ‘Technique … is itself cognitive and
critical, not purely instrumental craft’, which broadens his analysis to all
levels of artifice and form, and to poesis and praxis generally. [1]
(Jarvis 1998b: 108) In other words, ‘technique knows something about the world.
Yet it knows it, Adorno suggests, just by the most obsessive, and perhaps even
the most fetishistic and solipsistic, absorption in its own proper stuff,’ that
is, in its form. (Jarvis 2011: 7) Form, Adorno reminds us, is ‘the objective
organisation within each artwork of what appears to be bindingly eloquent’, but
it has an eloquence of its own. (Adorno 2002: 143)
To regard cognition as having
independent existence outside the brain, inherent in things in general (or in
form in particular), is not a mystical or magical formulation. Indeed it can be
conceived of as a variety of ‘material engagement’ in the light of a cognitive
theory that takes that very name as its own. Lambros Malafouris’ How Things Shape the Mind (2013)
contrasts internalist views of mind, in which a Cartesian entity computes and
calibrates a world it cannot enter, with his own externalist one that
recognises ‘the intersection between cognition and material culture’,
(Malafouris 2013: 17) that sees the mind as engaging, and interacting with,
learning from and with, the world, entering it via means of what he calls ‘the
extended mind’. (Malafouris 2013: 17) ‘For active externalism, marks made with
a pen on paper are not an ongoing external record of the contents of mental
states; they are an extension of those states.’ (Malafouris 2013: 74) It
follows that ‘Cognition has no location,’ or not fixed location between brains
and things. (Malafouris 2013: 85) Malafouris is an archaeologist and his
examples are prehistoric as well as historic. ‘Mark-making action and thinking are the same,’ he remarks of early
stone inscriptions (Malafouris 2013: 190) which, he points out with care, may not have originally been depictions; the
marks and lines may ‘externalize nothing
but the very process of externalization’, pure external cognition. As such
artefactual actions developed towards depiction (over breathtaking lengths of
time) ‘those early pictures bring forth a
new process of acting within this world and, at the same time, thinking about
it’. (Malafouris 2013: 203) This is nothing less than a story about how we
became human (and how we know we are human), through the agency of this radical
interpenetration of mind and world: ‘Our ways of thinking are not merely
causally dependent upon but constituted by
extracranial bodily processes and material artefacts.’ (Malafouris 2013: 227)
But things are also mobile, though their affective states have remained largely
unrecognised by the social sciences until now. ‘The sensual properties of
things and the aesthetic experience of things permeate every aspect of our
cognitive activities and permeate our social and emotional relationships.’
(Malafouris 2013: 87)The uses of
objects in mourning, or the uses of religious ikons to access absent beings or
to concretize abstract entities, are powerful examples. Arguably a literary
work might be one of those objects, and its formal properties, its form, could
be thought of in this way as a material cognitive entity. When Malafouris
comments that ‘Meaning does not reside in the material sign; it emerges from
the various parameters of its performance and usage as they are actualized in the
process of engagement,’ he sounds distinctly like Derek Attridge on the way we
form objects as art. (Malafouris 2013: 117) More importantly, and from the
position of poesis, ‘“Form” is always “informed” by the properties of the
material to which it gives shape.’ (Malafouris 2013: 177) The result of this,
in the case of a potter, is revelatory. ‘The being of the potter,’ as
Malafouris nicely puts it, ‘is co-dependent and interweaved with the becoming
of the pot.’ (Malafouris 2013: 212) The cognition of the potter, and even his
or her neural pathways, are changed by the cognitive function of the artefact.
Form in a literary work is arguably cognitive – whether through de Bolla’s
active aesthetic experiencing, Wood’s ‘hunch’ about knowing forms, or Jarvis’ affective
prosody – through the processes of material engagement, through the
apprehension of actual forms that embody cognition and through a reader’s
involvement in perceptible acts of forming.[2]
Angela
Leighton’s On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism,
and the Legacy of a Word (2007) has the benefit of coming relatively late
to the debate and she judiciously accounts for Wolfson, de Bolla, Attridge and
Wood. (It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of current British criticism that
the sources referred to above connected with linguistically innovative poetry,
Forrest-Thomson, Bernstein, and Jarvis, seem beyond her scope.) Her book offers
useful readings of the history of the term form and of…………………………………………………………………………
Quite a lot of this 'work on form' as I call it above has appeared on this blog and a description of it and links to all the posts in order may be found here.
[1]Jarvis identifies
another instrumentalism to guard against, that of value-free reifications of
technique, particularly in terms of discussions of poesis and in the teaching
of creative writing.
There are some unresolved
problems with his theory, and they emerge from his study of the poesis of
contemporary potters. Unaware of the ‘decisions’ made, the potter nevertheless
declares that he or she made the pot. This is an ‘agency judgement’ and while
artificers can conceive of the act as enactive, something happens to us in such
an act and we nevertheless claim authorship. (Malafouris 2013: 218).
‘Unfortunately,’ laments Lambros, ‘although a good phenomenological description
can pull us inside this seamless flow of activity and agency, when we cut the
flow and press the question of agency our inner Cartesian self or “interpreter”
wakes up to take control of the situation.’ (Malafouris 2013: 220) If
Malafouris is to ‘put back together’ the active and passive parts of a creative
act, ‘and account for their ongoing and irreducible causal coupling’ he admits,
‘it remains to be seen whether agency can offer a way to bridge the neural and
cultural correlates of our bodily selves’. (Malafouris 2013: 226) He is still
inspired by a ‘vision of the cognitive life of things’ which involves ‘the
distributed and compositionally plastic image of the potter skillfully engaging
the clay’, rather than by ‘the linear architecture of a Turing machine’, but
admits to not having forged that link in his work thus far. (Malafouris 2013:
238) I should also record that the discovery of Malafouris’ book occurred late
in the writing of this book.
Work Cited
Malafouris, Lambros. How
Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge,
Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2013.
Fast forward to 13.00 minutes to hear Lambros Malafournis talking about Material Engagement.
On April 30th I went to FACT to attend part of the Torque Symposium ('a day of talks, films and debate, exploring the twisting together of mind, technology and language') co-organised by Nathan Jones, one of my co-organisers of the Storm
and Golden Sky readings. It was a relief to find a general sense today of a
more interactive notion of human agency among the cybernetic environment,
neither utopian nor dystopian. It was for this line of thinking that they
invited Lambros Malafouris to speak, and speak he did. As an archaeologist he
took the long view – and took a long time. Twenty minutes was clearly not long
enough to articulate what was clearly an argument for the re-location of mind
from the brain into the environment, a theory of embodied engagement that
immediately excited me. As he writes, and may well have said: ‘Our ways of
thinking are not merely causally dependent upon but constituted by extracranial bodily processes and material artefacts.’
(Malafouris 2013: 227) In short, and in Jonathan Kingdom’s
differently spelt words, humans are ‘artefacts of their own artefacts’.
(Malafouris 2013: 231)
Perhaps it stirred something in the archaeology of my own cognition;
it took me back to my earliest theoretical days of PhD study (very early 80s),
reading Merleau-Ponty, Polyani, Popper and (to a lesser extent) Gregory Bateson,
reading that was supplanted quickly by the classics of the post-structuralist
revolution, but leaving behind traces: a fondness for phenomenological
terminology, the thought of knowledge as personal and integrated and
interrelated; and I even recently marshalled Popper in an argument against
self-expression in art (here). Those thinkers changed things at a deep structure in a
way that (perhaps I’m recognising this for the first time) Derrida and Deleuze
never did (though Lyotard and Guattari stuck in parts). In the arguments of
Lambros Malafouris I sensed something similar. I didn’t immediately think of an
application in my current work on form as forms and acts of forming, work in
which old discoveries, like Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Herbert Marcuse, even
Yuri Lotman, rub shoulders with newer ones, like Rancière, Susan Wolfson, and Derek
Attridge, particularly the latter’s singular The Singularity of Literature which should be read by everyone who
makes or receives art. Adorno must belong to some putative middle-period, but
he’s there still, casting the dark drape of history over aesthetic utopia. Most
of these last names have appeared in posts made here between August 2013 and
now. This list is just to clarify, for myself, perhaps, a phenomenology of
intellectual influences, to which I think – with a sense that I should return
to Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi and Bateson, all three offering the riddle of the
blind man’s stick to open the question of where cognition ends – that Lambros
Malafouris will be added. I felt the same when I read Doreen Massey's for space.
I left FACT for work. (I had a final evening session of the
MA in Creative Writing to run, where we, ironically, all had to expound upon
something we’d read that had made us write. I talked about the Petrarch work,both my essay and the ‘Petrarch 3’ poems that followed; my diary records I read
my unsavoury Jimmy Savile poem, which had persuaded me to stop this Oulipean
versioning, as I told my students.) The first thing I did at Edge Hill was
order Malafouris’ new book through interlibrary loan. The first thing I did
when I received it was to buy a copy. I sensed that this book, supposedly a
volume of ‘cognitive science/archaeology’ according to its back cover, would
require a longer read, and would be an influence on my thinking: about thinking
(‘metacognition’ as he calls it), about perception, about pre-history and
history, about art and artefacts, about poesis and poetics, about writing,
about creativity, and even about the teaching of creative writing… Partly this
has to do with the fact that, even if every hypothesis he furnishes is wrong,
the breadth of knowledge (and, I emphasise, despite my looking back to
Merleau-Ponty and co, with whom he kicks off) recent knowledge in many fields that he opens up, is valuable in
its own right. It’s a bit of a relief to be delivered from an intellectual environment
in which people (including myself) are still spouting Roland Barthes as though
it was the Last Word (no harm meant to the old aesthete there!).
To summarise HowThings Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (MIT Press, 2013) is
quite difficult, given how tightly written it is, so I’m not going to attempt
that. I’m going to extract his main hypotheses and articulate them. At the back
of my mind is whether I can use this material to integrate it into a reading of
the cognitive nature of form (material from current researches outlined here).
The blind man’s stick is a fairly mundane example of the
‘zone of material engagement, i.e. the
zone in which brains, bodies, and things conflate, mutually catalyzing and
constituting one another’. (Malafouris 2013: 5). Internalist views of mind
are contrasted with operations in this zone at ‘the intersection between
cognition and material culture’, and externalist views are entertained,
involving theories of ‘the extended mind, the active sign, and material
agency’. (17) ‘For active externalism, marks made with a pen on paper are not
an ongoing external record of the contents of mental states’ – which is a widely
held belief now – ‘they are an extension of those states’, like the blind man’s
stick. (74) ‘Cognition has no location,’ he observes. (85) But things are also
mobile, their affective states largely unrecognised by various social sciences,
‘The sensual properties of things and the aesthetic experience of things
permeate every aspect of our cognitive activities and permeate our social and
emotional relationships.’ (87)The use
of objects in mourning, or the use of religious ikons to access absent beings
or to concretize abstract entities, would be powerful examples. (Would a poem?)
Discussing what he calls the enactive sign, Malafouris reminds us: ‘Cultural
things provide the mediational means to domesticate the embodied imagination.’
(105) It is worth noting that he prefers a Peircian semiotics to a Saussaurean
model and rejects the linguistic analogy that has been both generational and
distorting for the social sciences, the notion that ‘X’ is structured like a
language, for example.
It is surprising, given Malafouris’ range (from sociology to
neuro-science, for example), that he doesn’t make some supportive use of
Bakhtin (or Vološinov). However, when he says, ‘Meaning does not reside in the
material sign; it emerges from the various parameters of its performance and
usage as they are actualized in the process of engagement,’ (117) he sounds
like an unconscious echo of Derek Attridge on forming objects in our perception
of them as art. This is encouraging for me, but we mustn’t lose the big
picture.
‘Material signs do not represent; they enact.’ (118) Malafouris
is suspicious of representation, largely I think because of its use in
internalist neuro-science to describe the mind looking out at the world in a
detached Cartesian way; it kind of scribbles down an image of the outside, in a
philosophic version of locked-in syndrome, monadic, instead of engaging with,
and interacting with, learning from and with, it. Indeed, one of the
cornerstones of his Material Engagement Theory is expressed by Malafouris in
his frequent enaction of italics: ‘If
there is such a thing as human agency, then there is material agency; there is
no way human and material agency can be disentangled.’ (119) ‘Agency and
intentionality’ belong exclusively to neither humans nor objects; ‘they are
emergent properties of material engagement’ (149) for homo faber, as he wishes to designate human kind. (154) What this
human kind makes is tools, of course, which he dubs ‘enactive prostheses’.
(154) Well and good, although agency and intentionality cause him some problems
later on.
Malafouris is an archaeologist and his quest for the
cognitive function of things is part of his quest to discover when that faculty
was born and how it was born, and he has to counter a number of orthodoxies,
which I am going to leave to one side for the sake of expository clarity, as I
am going to leave much of his specific archaeological evidence alone. However
one example is instructive to summary. ‘Knapping stone’ in pre-history is
regarded as ‘an act of thought – that
is, a cognitive process that criss-crosses the boundaries of skin and skull,
since its effective implementation involves elements that extend beyond the
purely “mental” or “neural”… The flaking intention is constituted, at least
partially, by the stone and the marks left on its surface.’ (19)How does this happen? (Or did.) Malafouris is
particularly helpful with this example (with diagrams as well as words, some of
which he used as slides at FACT and on the video above). ‘Intention .. comes … in the action…’ as the stone and knapper
take turns to become the extension of the other. ‘The stone projects toward the
knapper as much as the knapper projects towards the stone, and together they
delineate the cognitive map of what we may call an extended intentional state. The knapper first thinks through and with the stone before being able to think about the stone and hence about himself as a conscious and
reflectively aware agent.’ (176) Metacognition was achieved. Consciousness at
this point changed, and perhaps even the brain changed. (Malaforouris makes use
of some studies that show that taxi drivers and habitual musicians develop
different neural pathways to those not driving or playing. ‘Things change the
brain. They effect extensive rewiring by fine tuning existing brain pathways,
by generating new connections … or by transforming what was a useful brain
function in one context into another.’ (247) What must be happening to writers,
I wonder, speaking as one and as the teacher of hundreds? As he says of visual
art: ‘The artist’s sketchpad isn’t just a storage vehicle for externalizing
pre-existing visual images; it is a tightly coupled and intrinsic part of
artistic cognition itself.’ Ditto the acct of writing. (237))
Interestingly for my project this has a formal aspect. ‘Form
is not imposed from the outside; it
is, rather, brought forth or revealed from the inside. What we call “form”
exists as a surface property rather than a static mental event. It exists,’ as
we might expect now, ‘where the projective mind meets the material at hand …
More importantly, “form” is always “informed” by the properties of the material
to which it gives shape.’ (177) Of course, Malafouris’ main point is that
cognition develops in interaction with the external world, and it is a good
one, but ‘surface property’ probably sells form short in the sense in which I
am developing it. An artefact is produced in dialogue. ‘Mark-making action and thinking are the same,’ he remarks of early
inscriptions, (190) which, he points out with care, may not have originally been depictions; the marks and lines may ‘externalize nothing but the very process of
externalization’ which would develop into depictions (over breathtaking
lengths of time). Even then, ‘those early pictures bring forth a new process of acting within this world and, at the
same time, thinking about it’. (203) This is nothing less than a story about
how we became human (and how we know we are human).
It is also about how we are still human (rather than
post-human as some of the contributors to the FACT symposium went on to tell
us, having not learnt that man has always been a cyborg, and doesn’t need to
throw himself down that stairwell). Malafouris has been watching contemporary
potters (doubtless he is drawn to pottery for its archaeological parallels,
though he doesn’t say so, but the actions he describes are happening in the
present). ‘The being of the potter,’ he rather nicely puts it, ‘is co-dependent
and interweaved with the becoming of the pot.’ (212) We really can’t tell the
dancer from the dance, as Yeats suggested, or perhaps even the poet from the
poem. To do so is to question, or complicate, the kind of causality that any
creative artist lays claim to when he or she authors, or claims to author, an
artefact. (Leach made this pot; Jo Blowers danced that dance; Yeats wrote that
poem. Interestingly, Attridge argues that it is important for us to regard an
artistic work as authored.) This is a question of agency too, and it is not
clear how causality works here. In fact, at this point in the argument it becomes
more conjectural and even morally complicated. ‘Discerning the causal links and
determining the direction of causality is not as direct and straightforward as
we might initially think. The wheel … subsume(s) the plans of the potter and
itself define(s) the contours of activity.’ (217) A good potter, of course,
would know this and use ‘this self-as-agent knowledge … to fill in or interpret
the gray zones in the phenomenal experience of action.’ (217) Unaware of the
‘decisions’ made, the potter nevertheless declares that he or she made the pot.
This is an ‘agency judgement’ and while artificers can conceive of the act as
enactive, something happens to us in such an act and we nevertheless claim
authorship. (218) ‘Unfortunately,’ laments Lambros, ‘although a good
phenomenological description can pull us inside this seamless flow of activity
and agency,’ which is what we get, with increasing intensity throughout the
book, ‘when we cut the flow and press the question of agency our inner Cartesian
self or “interpreter” wakes up to take control of the situation.’ (220) This is
true: I claim to play That’s Life; I
don’t claim it on the guitar’s behalf. That’s life I guess and the question of
agency in the case of man + gun = gunman is raised and leaves a perturbing
conclusion: ‘Action involves a coalescence of human and non-human elements, and
thus responsibility for action must be shared among those elements.’ (221) A
round of applause for my guitar; life without the possibility of parole (I watch
too much FBI Files) for the gun.
The conclusion to the chapter dealing with the potter (which
may be read here in an earlier version) is more tentative than for others.
‘Some of the most interesting questions about agency in the context of embodied
mediated action can be found only “in the wild”,’ (226) he says, for example in
the distinction drawn between ownership and agency in the potter’s (and clay’s)
actions. ‘Although an experienced potter immersed in the shaping of a vessel
will often report that the sense of ownership (that is, the sense that it is
his hands that touch and move the clay) is experienced throughout the activity,
the sense of agency (that is, the feeling that it is he that is causing the
movement) is often disrupted.’ (224) He or she owns his or her body but is not
always conscious of its actions. If Malafouris is to ‘put back together’ the
active and passive parts of a creative act, ‘and account for their ongoing and
irreducible causal coupling’ he admits, ‘it remains to be seen whether agency
can offer a way to bridge the neural and cultural correlates of our bodily
selves’. (226) He is still inspired by a ‘vision of the cognitive life of
things’ which involves ‘the distributed and compositionally plastic image of
the potter skillfully engaging the clay’, rather than by ‘the linear architecture
of a Turing machine’, but admits to not having forged that link. (238) ‘It
remains to be seen,’ is, I hope, a passive formulation to indicate that this
research has not yet been done and that Malafouris will conduct, or inspire,
it.
In terms of my work on cognitive form I can argue that to
regard cognition as being capable of existing outside the brain is not a
mystical or magical formulation, indeed it can be conceived of as a variety of
‘material engagement’ in the light of this theory that takes that very name as
its own. But that’s a separate argument (and an opening sentence). It’s the
next argument and (I should say) only one of the speculative branches of
thought that have been provoked by my engagement with the thing that is
Malafouris’ book, with which (I should also say) I have not completed my
engagement or it its enactment with me.
The Book: The Man
To access a description of my current project, and to access all the links to posts on Pages relating to The Meaning of Form, click here.
For those who can buy The
Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for
libraries, here are the places
