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.
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| The Book: The Man |
For those who can buy The
Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for
libraries, here are the places
