John Sutton, Chapter 3. in C. Knappett, L. Malafouris (eds.), Material Agency
※ 메모:
If cognition is distributed as well as embodied, then explanation in cognitive
science must often highlight more or less transient extended systems spanning
embodied brains, social networks or resources and key parts of the natural and
the cultural world. These key parts of material culture are not simply cues which
trigger the truly cognitive apparatus inside the head but instead form ‘‘a continuous
part of the machinery itself ’’, as ‘‘systemic components the interaction
of which brings forth the cognitive process in question’’ (Malafouris, 2004:58).
On this view, cognitive science is thus not just the study of the brain: indeed,
even neuroscience cannot be the study of the brain alone, for brains coupled
with external resources may have unique functional and dynamical characteristics
apparent only when we also attend to the nature of those resources and the
peculiarities of the interaction. This chapter argues that if cognition is indeed
thus distributed, then cognition is also historical and heterogeneous and must
also be analysed diachronically and differentially. If mind is extended, that is
to say, then historical cognitive sciences are essential to the interdisciplinary
enterprise.
This is not just because individual brains themselves are ‘‘biosocial organs
permeated by history’’ (Cowley, 2002:75) but also on the longer scale because
of dramatic historical diversity in the nature, properties and use of cognitive
artefacts. According to Andy Clark, ‘‘the single most important task’’ for ‘‘a
science of the bio-technological mind’’ is to understand ‘‘the range and variety of
types of cognitive scaffolding and the different ways in which non-biological
scaffolding can augment (or impair) performance’’ (Clark, 2002:29, my italics).
Unique historical and cultural features of human beings extended cognitive
make-up are thus not accidental extras added to a basic biologically given mind.
Rather, such changing media, objects, routines, institutions and practices have long been integral parts of the coordinated, interactive cognitive systems in
which our characteristic plasticity is revealed, engaged and transformed.
Although Clark and other enthusiasts of distributed cognition push on to
analyse our couplings with new cognitive technologies, there is nothing ‘posthuman’
about the framework itself: if we are natural-born cyborgs now, we
always have been. So while some historical, anthropological and archaeological
investigations of independent interest can be given a new twist in the light of
distributed cognition, they should also help us further develop specific ideas
within that theoretical framework (Sutton, forthcoming, a). The nature and
extent of diversity in activities of remembering and reasoning, imagining and
decision-making, acting and feeling has to be tested across detailed case studies
of specific historical periods and cultural contexts. Because neural, bodily,
material and social resources can complement one another while retaining their
own dynamics in making their distinct contributions to integrated cognitive
systems, the extent of such integration with external resources varies on a range
of dimensions: the context-dependence of flexible intelligent activity itself varies
with context, and on occasion – for some individuals or in some unique cultural
situations – some activity of embodied brains will be relatively shielded from
their environment.
A key current task, then, is the identification of these significant dimensions
of variation in constructing better typologies of distributed cognitive systems.
What are the synchronic and diachronic principles of coordination between
diverse components? What are the different forms of coupling, involving distinct
forms of availability and use of external resources? How truly interactive
are particular emergent systems and how durable? Cross-cultural and historical
data, understandably, have not typically been consulted by those theorists
currently working towards a multidimensional framework by addressing these
questions (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Kirsh, 2006; Poirier and Chicoisne, 2006;
Sutton, 2006; Wilson and Clark, forthcoming). But alongside relevant work in
more recent cultural and cognitive history, which I discuss below, cognitive
archaeology can contribute directly to this task both by offering detailed case
studies and by broadening theoretical horizons in cognitive science. There
are rich resources for these debates, resources of which the broader cognitive
scientific community should be better aware, in research on memory in traditions
of archaeology which have not explicitly or deliberately engaged with
distributed cognition (Alcock, 2002; Ingold, 1998:40–42; Olsen, 2003; Rowlands,
1993; Van Dyke and Alcock, 2003; Williams, 2004). But for now, I focus
on a series of related challenges which have already been put directly to the
distributed cognition/ extended mind frameworks by cognitive archaeologists,
challenges which for the purposes of this chapter I take to be crystallised
in an important recent discussion by Lambros Malafouris (2004) of ‘‘the
cognitive basis of material engagement’’ (compare also Knappett, 2004,
2005). I develop my case hereby seeking to clarify these challenges and to
begin to address them. I deal with issues about history and dynamics, about
interactivity and material agency and about skills and skill memory......
Exograms, History and the Cognitive Life of Things
Culturally specific technologies and media, according to Merlin Donald’s influential scheme, have constituted part of human cognitive architecture since the upper Palaeolithic period. In particular, changes since then in external symbol systems, which consist of arrays of retrievable traces or ‘exograms’, have dramatically altered the capacity and operation of human memory (Donald, 1991:308–333; 1998a). Identifying certain common features across the diverse history of external representations–body markings, grave decorations, hieroglyphics, maps, musical scores, writing systems, architectural diagrams and so on–Donald focussed our attention on the new cognitive profiles that characterise creatures (and societies of creatures) who can draw on these exograms in addition to neural engrams. Thoughts and memories, for example, become more durable and more easily transmissible and reformattable across media and contexts and are plugged in to vastly larger databases of inherited knowledge (Donald, 1991:314–9). Mark Rowlands built on Donald’s work to argue
that much of human memory is essentially (not accidentally) environment involving and primarily consists in our ability to interface with a range of different collective memory networks (Rowlands, 1999:119–147, also drawing on important work by Rubin, 1995).
Because Donald’s substantial treatment of extended memory systems did draw on a wealth of historical and cross-cultural evidence, it drew critical engagement and commentary from cognitive archaeologists interested in material agency (Renfrew, 1998, 2003; Thomas, 1998). Malafouris builds on this work in arguing that Donald’s scheme is problematically restricted and incomplete. Due to his ‘‘preoccupation with ‘exographic storage’’’, firstly, Donald cannot
accommodate cases in which artefacts have ‘‘a dynamic cognitive biography’’, and neglects the unique and idiosyncratic socio-technocultural histories which archaeologists must study (2004:56). As a result, Malafouris suggests, Donald fails to allow for the active role of objects in coordinated interaction, his scheme too rigid in its assumption of ‘‘a passive external ‘long-term’ store’’ (2004:57). Further, Donald retains too much from classical cognitivism in his focus on
straightforward, explicit information transmission, and thus his scheme is blind both to the nonsymbolic cognitive roles of artefacts and to the centrality of know-how and embodied skill in the many diverse ways we ‘‘think through things, in action’’ (2004:57–58). For these reasons, Malafouris thinks we need alternative frameworks to do justice to ‘‘the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’’ (2004:55). Such views of distributed cognition, he implies, unhelpfully treat the cognitive life of things in artificial isolation from their social life (2004:56).[1]
....
[1] Malafouris repeatedly insists that analysis must include simultaneous attention to material,
social and cognitive dimensions, and my responses in this essay seek to show that this is possible. Our views contrast with certain other strands within material culture studies in which the social and the cognitive are decentred or excluded: one recent collection advertises that its constituent essays ‘‘signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material’’ (Miller, 2005: back cover).
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