Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 2019, Volume 18,
Issue 1, pp 1–17 |
Cite as
Mind and material engagement
Lambros Malafouris
Keble College & Institute of Archaeology
University of Oxford, OxfordUK
Open Access
First Online: 01 December 2018
Abstract
Material Engagement Theory (MET), which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In
How Things Shape the Mind (2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of
thinging and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.
Keywords
Material engagement theory Things Metaplasticity Pottery making Cognitive archaeology Enactivism
1 Introduction: walk the line
Let’s begin with a simple task. Take pen and paper. Draw a line. The sketch of any form will do. Just leave a trace. Make a mark. What constitutes an adequate description of, and how do we account for the process by which skills, hands, instruments and materials intersect to create a trail of ink on the paper’s surface? Our most habitual actions (psychical or physical) are experienced and become constituted where brain, body and culture conflate. Yet, finding adequate ways to describe this conflation, even in the simple case of line-making, pose a great challenge.
1 Where do we start delineating the boundaries of the marks our moving hand leave on a surface? What kind of mental processes and forms of representation can account for the origins and endings of the simple line we have drawn? Consider three common ways to describe the line. The first way is to think of it as an action: the drawing of a line. The second way is to think of it an object: a line drawn on paper. The third way is to think of the line as a sign: the index of our moving hand or perhaps the trace of a creative gesture.
2 Ontologically speaking, those three ways of seeing the line are inseparable. Each one of those ways supports, informs, constraints, causes and complements the other. To grasp their unity is to attend the cognitive life of the line. Attentiveness to the cognitive life of the line will allow us to see sentience in the trail of ink. Yet, more often than not, we seem to resist this realization. The preferred analytical convention is to break the line’s cognitive life into pieces: first by separating ourselves from the line and then by seeing the line as the ‘external’ product of a sentient ‘internal’ process. As ‘modern’ human observers we have learned to see the line where the movement stops and the drawing ends. We have also develop the conviction that some pre-formulated ‘idea’ or ‘mental representation’ of a line inside our head precedes and causes the materialization of the line in the outside world. The anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to this representational tendency as inversion. The logic of inversion, characteristic of modernity, manifest as an attempt to reconfigure the relational matrix of the world we live into a series of internal representational schemata of which our actions are but an outward expression: “Through inversion, beings originally open to the world are closed in upon themselves, sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects their inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with their surroundings” (Ingold
2010, 355). Most of our troubles with the nature and evolution of human cognition depend and stem from this representational logic of inversion that sets up the artificial opposition between mind and matter.
2 What if the mind has no a priori location?
Setting the boundaries of the human mind was never easy. Specifying the conditions under which a process falls on the ‘inside’ or on the ‘outside’ of those boundaries even more so. As I said, the conventional way of dealing with this problem, marking the mental and delineating those boundaries, has been to divide the world a priori in two parts, a mental part and a physical part. The mental part is the sentient part that thinks by re-presenting the other physical part that is lacking this precious ability. In one sense, the mental part deals with what is absent (representing, remembering, imagining) and the physical part with what is present (in the ways we touch the world and the world is touching us). For instance, the line in our example belongs to the physical part as the end-product of a human intention that originates in the mental part. Perhaps this bifurcation of the world works well within the metaphysical confines of a representational space where lines and material forms have no real life and where the physicality of traces does not matter. Yet, this separatist logic fails in most real-life situations where our ways of thinking, of making, and of doing, are inseparably linked as part of an evolving material ecology.
Cognitive archaeology (which is the field that examines the macro-history of human thinking: how it becomes constituted, transformed and reproduced in different contexts and configurations of brain-body-material environment in the course of human becoming) offers plenty of evidence to support this basic claim against the separation of thinking inside the head and acting inside the world.
3 Perhaps this claim is less obvious for other disciplines that do not afford a deep time perspective and lack any particular expertise or familiarity with the causal efficacy of material culture in human cognitive life. I should make it clear, then, that not just the size of our brains and the shape of our bodies but our ways of thinking and of socializing are rooted in those elementary gestures of enactive material signification. Line making is just one elementary example of that process. Humans become ‘
through a saturated, situated engagement of thinking and feeling with things and form-generating materials’ (Malafouris
2014, 144 italics in the original). I call that process creative
thinging and will return to exemplify its meaning below. Suffice it for now to say that from the earliest lithic ecologies to the latest digital ontologies this process is at the heart of human evolution. Humans think by constructing signs, by drawing lines and by leaving memory traces. They do all that primarily by means of their moving bodies, especially their hands. This is not to say that the signs we make or the lines we draw merely ‘represent’ or ‘reflect’ intelligence. The ‘reflected’ intelligence is not hidden away in some separate ‘mental’ realm inside the skull. The moving hand and its material traces do not just externalise the internal workings of a mind. Instead, intelligence is enacted through them; it proceeds along lines and material signs of one kind or another. For instance, the making of a stone tool is not the product of thinking; it is a way of thinking. When we look at a stone tool we don’t simply see the externalization of form, skill or memory; rather we observe how the affordances of stone make possible for human bodies to learn and to remember skills, to sense causality, or to enact intentions. In short, within a lithic ecology, stone tools bring forth and constrain the organism’s possibilities for action and imagination. In that sense the process of thinking is effectively turned inside out. Our forms of bodily extension and material engagement are not simply external markers of a distinctive human mental architecture. Rather, they actively and meaningfully participate in the process we call mind.
This basic idea of a mind not limited by the skin has a long ancestry in various intellectual traditions. We are mistaken, the early pragmatist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce reminds us, “to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relation of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness.” (Peirce
1994, 6.268). Indeed, from John Dewey’s ‘transactional’ sense of ‘situation’, to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of becoming, to Henri Louis Bergson’s idea of ‘creative evolution’ (
1998)[1911]), to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (
1962,
1968), to the more recent work in ecological psychology of Gibson (
1977,
1979) and Gregory Bateson’s (1973;
1979),
4 critiques of the oppressive modernist alienation of the mind from the material world have been gathering momentum throughout the twentieth century. Today, the debate continues more intensely than ever, with new theoretical and empirical work on enactive, distributed, embodied and extended cognition (Varela et al.
1991; Hutchins
1995,
2010a; Clark
1997; Chemero
2009; Thompson
2007; Hutto and Myin
2013; Gallagher
2017; Laland
2017).
What then if, trying to answer the fundamental questions about the nature of human intelligence, we start from the assumption that the mind has no a priori location or place of origin? What if, adopting a point of view well supported in cognitive archaeology and anthropology, we assume that the stuff of mind do not exist only inside the head but can be found also, if not primarily, inside the world?
3 Where brain, body and culture conflate
Let me rephrase those questions returning to the example we have started this article with: what if the lines we leave behind in drawing, like the paths we lay down in walking, are marking the mental? Imagine we were to re-describe the process of line-making by focusing on the moment where the pen stops but is still touching the paper’s surface. It seems that, for that single moment, all three aspects of form-making, i.e., the line as gesture, the line as object and the line as a trace co-exist. They are no longer seen as separate, instead, they can be seen as a transformative, constitutive intertwining of neural, bodily, and material recourses. What then if we try to create a theory of human intelligence taking this enactive co-habitation of marks and traces (both neural and extra-neural) as the point of initiation?
Accepting that human thought processes are better described as
hylonoetic5 semiotic fields — a mindscape constituted by bodily practices and artefacts— places us in position to restate the problem of the interaction between cognition and material culture. Not just the lines we draw on paper, but also our imaginary lines, those that connect our past with our present and possible future and allow us to become the self-conscious beings we are, exist in the middle space where brain, body and culture conflate: never entirely mental, in the ‘internal’ sense, and never just material, in the ‘external’ sense. Neither mind, in the cognitivist sense, nor matter in the materialist sense. What kind of theory can describe that middle?
Material Engagement Theory suggests a way of looking at, and sets out a possible pathway to approach, this middle in-between space where brain, body and culture conflate (Malafouris
2004,
2013). Grounded in the anthropological archaeology of the mind (Malafouris
2004; Malafouris and Renfrew
2008,
2010; Renfrew
2004; Renfrew et al.
2008; Iliopoulos and Malafouris
2014), the material engagement approach is committed to observing and describing cognitive life as we find it, enacted inside the world by the people of different places and times (past and present). Based on that commitment the material engagement approach comprises some radical ideas, perspectives and epistemic constrains, that allow us to take seriously the materiality of mind-stuff in the way we approach the study of human thought. Below I offer a summary of some major differentiating features.
3.1 On boundaries and mind-stuff: a process archaeology of mind
One important characteristic of the Material Engagement approach that follows naturally from our previous discussion, lies in its conviction that in order to study the cognitive life of any species we need to understand the lines, forms and material traces left or made in the course of it’s becoming. That is, we need to follow the variety of mind-stuff as they fold and unfold, entangle and disentangle, in different temporal and spatial scales of a species’ phylogeny or ontogeny. With mind-stuff I refer to the dynamic ensembles, flows and configurations of matter and energy by which sentient creatures become organized and relate to their surrounding environment and to each other. We should not forget that, what we try to articulate when we use the term ‘mind’, can be better described as a verb. There is no such universal thing as ‘the mind’, rather there is a variety of human (or by extension non-human)
ways of thinking enacted by specific bodies in specific situations (historical, social or cultural)
. What we call mind is a ‘process’ constituted by the continuous recycling and re-organisation of mind-stuff, i.e., a cognitive becoming. Thinking, like form-making, exists in a state of perpetual movement. Minds never stop minding. Minds always become. This applies to every sentient organism but is especially true in the case of humans given the profound plasticity and immense variety of the material forms that we make (Idhe and Malafouris
2018; Ingold
2013).
MET proposes that we can only understand human beings (what is it to be human) by understanding the modes of
human cognitive becoming (how human minds become) (Gosden and Malafouris
2015; Malafouris
2015,
2016a,
b). These modes of becoming are actualised at different temporal and spatial scales (personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal) by means of material engagement. That also means that MET, although sensitive to the faster timescales of neural events, is mainly concerned with slower timescales characteristic of human activity both at the developmental and the evolutionary scale (see also Aston this issue). The unhelpful antinomies of mind/matter, nature/culture and people/things now give way to a more productive focus on the ways materiality becomes entangled with our lived experience and thinking. We have a plastic mind, inextricably intertwined with the plasticity of culture. I call that special feature of human becoming metaplasticity (Malafouris
2010a,
2013,
2015). Material Engagement Theory takes this metaplastic recursive relationship between brains, bodies and things as the main analytical unit for the study of human thought processes. Contrary to methodological individualism, that is the view that anything mental must refer to, and is explained by processes internal to the individual, the study of metaplasticity demands an action-centered methodology especially adapted for handling the complexities of human cognitive becoming in a variety of socio-material settings and across the scales of time. As the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins points out “the proper unit of analysis for cognition should not be set a priori, but should be responsive to the nature of the phenomena under study” (Hutchins
2010b, 426). MET provide such a flexible unit of analysis that allows to view the mind as situated within and constituted by the material world rather than merely being
about the world.
Perhaps, sometimes, for specific questions and phenomena under investigation, the right boundaries must be closed, narrow and specific. Cognitive neuroscience, to give one example, operates on that assumption focusing on the study of so-called ‘neural’ representations and their complex networks of activation and de-activation human brain. Methodologically speaking, this closure makes good sense if you’re just interested in the human brain and what flows therein, which now can be measured by means of blood oxygen level – dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging. But the narrow substitutional logic of such a reductionist approach embodies a neurocentric attitude that can mislead us to think that all that really matters to study the mind is to understand the nature, formation and processing of internal mental representations. This threatens to turn human cognitive life into a lifeless abstraction. On the contrary, human cognitive life extends beyond skin and skull. As a result, it is important, when we decide exactly how and where to set the boundaries of the cognitive phenomena we seek to investigate, not to “cut lines of interaction in ways that leave key aspects of the phenomena unexplained or unexplainable” (Hutchins
2010b, 426). One of the major challenges for MET is to study the changing nature of those boundaries in the course of human becoming and the role they may have played in determining the possible interactions across the world/body/brain system. . . .
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Mind and material engagement
