Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism 9781474442268

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Di st r i but e d C o g n i t i o n i n Victoria n C u ltu re a n d M o de rnis m

The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition Series Editors: Miranda Anderson and Douglas Cairns Scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum track the notions of distributed cognition in a wide range of historical, cultural and literary contexts from antiquity through to the twentieth century. Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity Edited by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture Edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture Edited by Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau and Michael Wheeler Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism Edited by Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak

Visit the series website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehdc

Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism Edited by Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun­– ­Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12 Monotype Baskerville by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4224 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4226 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4227 5 (epub) The right of Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

C o n t e nts

List of Illustrations Series Preface   1. Distributed Cognition and the Humanities Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak   2. Introduction  I. Distributed Cognition in Victorian and Modernism Studies­– ­An Overview   Peter Garratt  II. Distributed Cognition in Victorian and Modernism Studies­– ­Our Volume   Miranda Anderson

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  3. The Victorian Extended Mind: George Eliot, Psychology and the Bounds of Cognition Peter Garratt

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  4. Instrumental Eyes: Enacted and Interactive Perception in Victorian Optical Technologies and Victorian Fiction Nicole Garrod-­Bush

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  5. Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle 79 Marion Thain   6. The Heterocosmic Self: Analogy, Temporality and Structural Couplings in Proust’s Swann’s Way 95 Marco Bernini   7. Distributed Cognition and the Phenomenology of Modernist Painting and Poetry (Rilke and Cézanne) Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­Ferencei

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  8. Directionality and Duration in Distributed Consciousness: Modernist Perspectives on Photographic Objectivity Adam Lively

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  9. Walking, Identity and Visual Perception in Romantic and Modernist Literature 152 Andrew Michael Roberts and Eleanore Widger 10. Surrealism, Chance and the Extended Mind Kerry Watson

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11. Distributed Cognition, Porous Qualia and Modernist Narrative Melba Cuddy-­Keane

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12. Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition E. T. Troscianko

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13. A 5th E: Distributed Cognition and the Question of Ethics in Benjamin and Vygotsky, and Horkheimer and Dewey Ben Morgan

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Notes on Contributors 251 Bibliography 254 Index 282

L i s t o f I l l us tra tions

Plate 1  Phenakistiscope, with additional discs. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Item number 69236. Plates 2 and 3  Victorian zoetropes. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Item numbers 69010 and 69110. Plate 4  Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, France, c. 1890. Oil on canvas. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Plate 5  André Kertész, ‘The Violinist’s Tune’. Abony, Hungary, 1921, © 2019 Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures. Plate 6  Anonymous, photograph illustrating Benjamin Péret, ‘La Nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse’, Minotaure 10 (1937). Plate 7  Henri Cartier-­Bresson, ‘Behind the Gare St. Lazare’, 1932, © Magnum Photos. Plate 8  Anonymous, photograph from Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-­la-­Morte ([1892] 1993: 23). Plate 9  Photograph from W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2002: 258), © courtesy of the Sebald Estate. Plate 10  Théodore Géricault, Study for Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818, Musée de Besançon. Photograph © RMN-­Grand Palais, Paris 2017. Plate 11  Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–19, Musée du Louvre. Photograph © RMN-­Grand Palais, Paris 2017. Plate 12  Pablo Picasso, Guitare, bec à gaz, flacon (Guitar, Gas-­jet and Bottle), 1913, National Galleries of Scotland, © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2017. Plate 13  André Masson, Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing), c. 1925, Centre Georges Pompidou, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017. Plate 14  Max Ernst, Untitled (unpublished collage for Une Semaine de Bonté), 1934, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017.

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Plate 15  Max Ernst, Elle garde son secret (She Keeps Her Secret), 1925, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017. Plate 16  Georges Hugnet, Portrait automatique de l’automate d’Albert-­le-­Grand (Automatic Portrait of the Automaton of Albertus Magnus), 1938, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017.

S e ri e s P ref a ce

This book, like the series of which it is part, explores the notion that the mind is spread out across brain, body and world, for which we have adopted ‘distributed cognition’ as the most comprehensive term. Distributed cognition primarily draws evidence from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. Distributed cognition covers an intertwined group of theories, which include enactivism and embodied, embedded and extended cognition, and which are also together known as ‘4E cognition’. An overview and explanation of the various strands of distributed cognition are provided in the general introduction. Distributed cognition can be used as a methodology through which to pursue study of the humanities and is also evident in past practices and thought. Our series considers a wide range of works from classical antiquity to modernism in order to explore ways in which the humanities benefits from thinking of cognition as distributed via objects, language and social, technological and natural resources and environments, and to examine earlier notions that cognition is distributed. Theories of distributed cognition are transformative in terms of how we understand human nature and the humanities: they enable a different way of perceiving our interactions in the world, highlighting the significant role of texts and other cultural artefacts as part of a biologically based and environmentally grounded account of the mind. Theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the humanities and the sciences through an account that combines biologically and culturally situated aspects of the mind. The series illuminates the ways in which past ideas and practices of distributed cognition are historically and culturally inflected and highlights the cognitive significance of material, linguistic and other sociocultural developments. This evidence has the potential to feed back into cognitive science and philosophy of mind, casting new light on current definitions and debates. Each volume provides a general and a period-­specific introduction. The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate r­ eaders unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. The period-­specific introductions provide a

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more detailed analysis of work in the cognitive humanities in the period covered by the volume, before going on to reflect on how the essays in the volume advance understanding in the humanities via distributed cognition. The project from which this series emerged provided participants with an online seminar series by philosophers working on various aspects of distributed cognition. These seminars are publicly available on the project’s website (http://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/seminars). The seminars aim to help researchers in the humanities think about how ideas in distributed cognition could inform, and be informed by, their work. Four workshops were held in the summer of 2015 at the University of Edinburgh and were attended by nearly all the volume contributors. The workshops brought participants together to collaborate in ways that contributed not just to the making of this series but to the development of this approach to the humanities. From the springboard of the seminar series, through the gathering together of scholars from across a range of disciplines and by ongoing interaction with the editorial team during the production of the final essays, the aim has been to provide a set of rigorous analyses of historical notions of distributed cognition. The series is deliberately exploratory: the areas covered by the essays are indicative of the benefits of the general approach of using distributed cognition to inform cultural interpretations. The first four volumes of the series concentrate primarily on Western Europe; however, we envisage further future volumes that will expand the scope of the series. If distributed cognition is understood as we contend, then this understanding has the potential to be valuable across the humanities as part of a new type of intellectual history. The four volumes are arranged chronologically and each of the volumes is edited by a period specialist (Cairns, Anderson, Rousseau, Garratt), a philosopher (Wheeler or Sprevak), and Anderson, whose central involvement in all four volumes ensured overall consistency in approach and style. At the very moment when modern-­day technological innovations reveal the extent to which cognition is not just all in the head, this series demonstrates that, just as humans have always relied on bodily and external resources, we have always developed theories, models and metaphors to make sense of the ways in which thought is dependent on being in the world.

Acknowledgements This series emerged from the project ‘A History of Distributed Cognition’ (2014– 18), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whom we should like to thank most warmly for their support. The idea for the project first came about in 2010. Miranda Anderson realised that the resonances she was exploring between recent ideas on distributed cognition and Renaissance notions of the mind were not just a matter of a correlation between two points in time, but reflected an important aspect of the mind in history that has been neglected, one that, fittingly, might be best explored through a collaborative project. Our interdisciplinary team has worked closely together developing the project, the monograph



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series and this general approach to the humanities: ours has been an intellectual endeavour akin to Hutchins’s description of a ship’s crew successfully navigating by means of collective computation (1995). With Douglas Cairns as Principal Investigator and the core project team of Miranda Anderson, Mark Sprevak and Michael Wheeler, we have collaborated closely both between ourselves and with other scholars. For volumes 3 and 4 respectively, the editorial team were joined by period specialists George Rousseau and Peter Garratt, who helped shape these volumes. Boleslaw Czarnecki, research assistant on the project during 2016–17, helped liaise with contributors and with the organisation of public engagement activities during this time. We were fortunate to have had two excellent auditors, in the shape of Terence Cave and Tim Crane, who used their years of accumulated experience and wisdom to help monitor our progress. Our advisory board offered expertise from across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines: Andy Clark, Giovanna Colombetti, Christopher Gill, David Konstan, Karin Kukkonen, Duncan Pritchard, Andrew Michael Roberts and Patricia Waugh. We are very grateful to the philosophers who came on board to provide us with the online seminars and joined us in online discussion: Andy Clark, Giovanna Colombetti, Shaun Gallagher, John Sutton, Deb Tollefsen, Dave Ward, Dan Zahavi, as well as our own Michael Wheeler. The editors would also like to thank those scholars (Sowon Park, Vanessa Ryan and Patricia Waugh) who made valuable contributions to the project workshops but whose papers could not for various reasons be included in the final volume. The editorial team is especially grateful to Duncan Pritchard and Eidyn, the University of Edinburgh’s Philosophy Research Centre, for their support of a pilot of this project in 2012–13. The Balzan Project, ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’, led by Terence Cave, also kindly supported the project, providing funds for the images on our website. The project has benefited from the involvement of many of the participants from the Balzan Project in our workshops and volumes including Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Mary Crane, Jennifer Gosetti-­Ferencei, Karin Kukkonen, Raphael Lyne, Emily Troscianko, and our own Miranda Anderson. Meanwhile, the AHRC-­funded Cognitive Futures in the Humanities Network (2012–14), co-­led by Peter Garratt, with Michael Wheeler as a founding steering-­committee member, has also fostered further productive interactions and cross-­fertilisation. We warmly thank the National Gallery of Scotland for helping us to source and secure our website images. The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) was our supportive project partner, and NMS staff met with the team to discuss and assist with the development of public engagement activities. These activities included a series of recorded public lectures, during which museum curators and academics provided their perspective on the cognitive implications of museum artefacts. Malcolm Knight, the multitalented man behind the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, illustrated the cognitive dimensions of masks and puppets and provided much entertainment during one of the NMS lectures. NMS also provided us with their classrooms for our school workshops. Lisa Hannah Thompson was an ­invaluable

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contributor to the development of our ideas on how best to shape the material and the programme for children in order to connect in fun and effective ways. Finally, we are grateful to our copy-editor, Cathy Falconer, for her consistently sharp-eyed attention to detail and to all the staff at Edinburgh University Press for their support throughout the process.

Editorial Notes Contributors have been allowed to follow their own preferences with regard to the use of original spelling and capitalisation in primary texts. The editors have sought to impose consistency within rather than between chapters.

Plate 1  Phenakistiscope, with additional discs. Users looked through the apertures of the outer wheel and saw the illustrations appear to move in the mirror when the wheel was spun. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Item number 69236.

Plate 2  Victorian zoetrope. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 69010.

Plate 3  Victorian zoetrope. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 69110.

Plate 4  Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, France, c. 1890. Oil on canvas. 35.2 x 46.2 cm. Inv. no. ZKR-558. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph by Vladimir Terebenin, © The State Hermitage Museum.

Plate 5  André Kertész, ‘The Violinist’s Tune’. Abony, Hungary, 1921, © 2019 Estate of André Kertész/ Higher Pictures.

Plate 6  Anonymous, photograph illustrating Benjamin Péret, ‘La Nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse’, Minotaure 10 (1937).

Plate 7  Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Behind the Gare St. Lazare’, 1932, © Magnum Photos.

Plate 8  Anonymous, photograph from Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte ([1892] 1993: 23).

Plate 9  Photograph from W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2002: 258), © courtesy of the Sebald Estate

Plate 10  Théodore Géricault, Study for Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818, Musée de Besançon. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais, Paris 2017.

Plate 11  Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–19, Musée du Louvre. Photograph © RMNGrand Palais, Paris 2017.

Plate 12  Pablo Picasso, Guitare, bec à gaz, flacon (Guitar, Gas-jet and Bottle), 1913, National Galleries of Scotland, © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2017.

Plate 13  André Masson, Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing), c. 1925, Centre Georges Pompidou, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017.

Plate 14  Max Ernst, Untitled (unpublished collage for Une Semaine de Bonté), 1934, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

Plate 15  Max Ernst, Elle garde son secret (She Keeps Her Secret), 1925, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017.

Plate 16  Georges Hugnet, Portrait automatique de l’automate d’Albert-le-Grand (Automatic Portrait of the Automaton of Albertus Magnus), 1938, National Galleries of Scotland, © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017.

1 D i st r i but e d C o g n i t i o n a nd the Hu ma nities Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak1

Consider counting on your fingers; or solving a challenging mathematical problem using pen and paper (or Napier’s bones, or a slide-­rule); or the way in which we routinely offload the psychological task of remembering phone numbers on to our ubiquitous mobile phones; or a brainstorming scenario in which new creative ideas emerge from a process of collective group interaction; or the manner in which the intelligent feat of ship navigation is realised through a pattern of embodied, information-­communicating social exchanges between crew members who, individually, perform purely local information-­processing tasks (such as bearing taking) using specialised technology. All of these examples of brain-­body-­world collaboration are, potentially at least, instances of the phenomenon that, illuminated from a historical perspective, is the topic of this volume. That phenomenon is distributed cognition. So what, precisely, is distributed cognition? The term itself is standardly traced to the pioneering work of the cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (see, canonically, Hutchins 1995, from where the example of ship navigation is taken). However, in using this introduction to sketch the conceptual background for the chapters that follow, we shall adopt an understanding of distributed cognition that arguably diverges somewhat from Hutchins’s own (for one thing, we make no demand that the target elements, whether located inside or outside the brain, should be understood as representational media; see e.g. Hutchins 1995: 373). Here we are aiming for a general and inclusive notion of cognition alongside a general and inclusive notion of what it means for cognition to be distributed. Thus the term ‘cognition’ should be understood liberally, as it routinely is in the day-­to-­day business of cognitive science, as picking out the domain of the psychological, where that domain encompasses phenomena that we often identify using terms such 1

We warmly thank Douglas Cairns for his assistance with this chapter. The authors would also like to thank the participants in a workshop at the University of Edinburgh in June 2017 who provided feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter: Felix Budelmann, Peter Garratt, Christopher Gill, Elspeth Jajdelska, Karin Kukkonen, Adam Lively, Andrew Michael Roberts, George Rousseau, William Short, Jan Söffner, Eleanore Widger and Clare Wright.

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as mind, thought, reasoning, perception, imagination, intelligence, emotion and experience (this list is not exhaustive), and includes various conscious, unconscious-­ but-­potentially-­conscious, and strictly non-­conscious states and processes. Given this broad conception of what cognition is, cognition may be said to be distributed when it is, in some way, spread out over the brain, the non-­neural body and (in many paradigm cases) an environment consisting of objects, tools, other artefacts, texts, individuals, groups and/or social/institutional structures. Advocates of distributed cognition argue that a great many examples of the kinds of cognitive phenomena identified above (reasoning, perception, emotion, etc.) are spread out in this way. To see why the notion of distributed cognition has attracted so much attention, here’s a way of thinking about how the contemporary discourses stationed in and around cognitive science arrived at what might justifiably, in the present context, be called the received (non-­distributed) view of mind. Although the very brief history lesson that follows involves the odd caricature, it is surely broadly accurate. According to the much-­maligned substance dualists (the most famous of whom is arguably Descartes), mind is a non-­physical entity that is metaphysically distinct from the material world. Here the material world includes not only the external tools and artefacts that human beings design, build and use, but also the thinker’s own organic body. On this model, the minds of other people become peculiarly inaccessible, and indeed one’s indirect knowledge of those minds, such as it is, seems to result from a precarious analogy with the correlations between thought and action in one’s own case. For this reason, plus a whole battery of others­– ­some scientific, some philosophical­– ­substance dualism is now officially unpopular in most of the relevant academic circles. Indeed, in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, mind has been placed firmly back in the material and social world. Or rather, it has been placed firmly in a particular segment of that world, namely the brain. As apparently demonstrated by all those ‘pictures of the brain thinking’ that we regularly receive from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans and the like, the received view is now that the brain is where the cognitive action is. This neuro-­centric orthodoxy is not an irrational position. Indeed, there is no doubt that many a good thing has come out of research programmes in psychology, neuroscience and elsewhere which embrace it. Nevertheless, the contemporary distributed cognition perspective is usefully depicted as a reaction against neuro-­centrism’s (allegedly) distorting influence. To be clear, no advocate of distributed cognition believes that the brain is somehow unimportant. Rather, (part of) the proposal is that to understand properly what the brain does, we need to take proper account of the subtle, complex and often surprising ways in which that venerable organ is enmeshed with, and often depends on, non-­neural bodily and environmental factors, in what is the co-­generation of thought and experience. One consequence of adopting a general and inclusive notion of distributed cognition is that there turns out to be more than one version of the idea from which to choose when developing the view. How, then, may we articulate the notion further? One taxonomic move that is increasingly popular in the literature is to



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unpack distributed cognition in terms of 4E cognition, where the four Es in question are embodied, embedded, extended and enactive. In other words, it is possible to provide a more detailed picture of distributed cognition by thinking in terms of the four Es and the pattern of symbiotic and sometimes not-­so-­symbiotic relationships between them. That’s what we shall now do, starting with the notion of embodied cognition. According to the hypothesis of embodied cognition, psychological states and processes are routinely shaped, in fundamental ways, by non-­neural bodily factors. In a full treatment of this idea, much more would need to be said about what the terms ‘shaped’ and ‘fundamental’ mean, but for present purposes the motivating thought will do: in order to understand cognition, the structures and forms of the non-­neural body need to be foregrounded in ways that are absent from the neuro-­centric orthodoxy. From this shared point of departure, the embodied cognition community has become home to a diverse kaleidoscope of projects. Thus embodiment is said to determine or condition the nature of concepts (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the character of perceptual experience (e.g. Noë 2004), various factors such as orientation and posture that do not themselves enter into the content of experience, but which preconceptually structure that experience (e.g. Gallagher 2005), and the architectures, assemblages and processing mechanisms that enable intelligent action (in the philosophical literature, see e.g. Clark 1997, 2008; Haugeland 1998; Wheeler 2005). As just one example of embodied cognition research, consider groundbreaking work in cognitive semantics on the role of embodiment in human sense-­making (how we experience the world to be meaningful). Johnson (1987) argues that we experience our bodies fundamentally as three-­dimensional containers into which we put things (e.g. food) and out of which things come (e.g. blood). The result is that the metaphor of containment becomes a preconceptual cognitive schema that heavily constrains other contexts of meaning. Thus, building on Johnson’s idea, Lakoff (1987) argues that the containment schema, as determined by our human experience of embodiment, even underlies abstract logical structures such as ‘P or not P’ (inside the container or outside of it). One apparent implication of this approach is that creatures with different experiences of embodiment will possess different preconceptual schemata and thus will inhabit different semantic landscapes. To the extent that embodiment is grounded in bodily acts, such as, say, the physical manipulations of instruments or tools, embodiment naturally encompasses a rich mode of environmental interaction, which is just to say that there is a natural route from embodied cognition to the second of the four Es, namely embedded cognition. According to the embedded view, the distinctive adaptive richness and/ or flexibility of intelligent thought and action is regularly, and perhaps sometimes necessarily, causally dependent on the bodily exploitation of certain environmental props or scaffolds. As an illustration, consider the phenomenon that Andy Clark has dubbed cognitive niche construction (e.g. Clark 2008; see also Wheeler and Clark 2008). This occurs when human beings build external structures that, often in combination with culturally transmitted practices, transform problem spaces in

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ways that promote, or sometimes obstruct, thinking and reasoning. A compelling example, which Clark sources from Beach (1988), is the way in which a skilled bartender may achieve the successful delivery of a large and complex order of cocktails (a relatively daunting memory task) by exploiting the fact that different kinds of cocktail often come in differently shaped glasses. Bartenders learn to retrieve the correct glass for each drink as it is requested, and to arrange the differently shaped glasses in a spatial sequence that tracks the temporal sequence of the drinks order, thus transforming a highly challenging memory task into a simpler (roughly) perception and association task. This reduces the burden on inner processing by exploiting a self-­created environmental structure according to a culturally inherited social practice. Of course, as indicated in the definition given of cognitive niche construction, not all cases of the environmental scaffolding of cognition will result in enhanced performance. The background picture here is of ‘our distinctive universal human nature, insofar as it exists at all, [as] a nature of biologically determined openness to deep, learning-­and development-­mediated, change’ (Wheeler and Clark 2008: 3572) and thus, given a technologically saturated environment, of human organisms as what Clark (2003) calls natural born cyborgs, creatures who are naturally evolved to seek out intimate unions with non-­biological resources. Overall, the ongoing operation of this evolved tendency has yielded myriad adaptive benefits, but sometimes the couplings that result will be adaptively neutral, inappropriate or dysfunctional. This observation points to an important vein of research on how ideas that are central to distributed cognition can contribute to areas such as psychopathology (e.g. Gallagher 2004; Fuchs 2005; Drayson 2009; Sprevak 2011). Despite the fact that the embedded theorist seeks to register the routinely performance-­boosting, often transformative, sometimes necessary, but occasionally obstructive, causal contributions made by environmental elements (paradigmatically, external technology) to many cognitive outcomes, she continues to hold that the actual thinking going on in such cases remains a resolutely skin-­side phenomenon, being either brain-­bound or (on a less common, more radical iteration of the view) distributed through the brain and the non-­neural body. By contrast, according to the advocate of extended cognition, it is literally true that the physical machinery of mind itself sometimes extends beyond the skull and skin (see, canonically, Clark and Chalmers 1998; for a collection that places the original Clark and Chalmers paper alongside a series of criticisms, defences and developments, see Menary 2010). More precisely, according to the hypothesis of extended cognition, there are actual (in this world) cases of intelligent thought and action, in which the material vehicles that realise the thinking and thoughts concerned are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that certain external factors are rightly accorded fundamentally the same cognitive status as would ordinarily be accorded to a subset of your neurons. Thus, under the right circumstances, your mobile phone literally counts as part of your mnemonic machinery, alongside some of your neurons. To bring home the distinction between embedded and extended cognition, as



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we have just introduced it, consider the example of a mathematical calculation achieved, in part, through the bodily manipulation of pen and paper. For both the embedded and the extended view, what we have here is a brain-­body-­pen-­ and-­paper system involving a beyond-­the-­skin element that, perhaps among other things, helps to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones (e.g. by acting as storage for intermediate calculations). For the embedded theorist, however, even if it is true that the overall mathematical problem could not have been solved, at least by some particular mathematician, without the use of pen and paper, nevertheless the external resource in play retains the status of a non-­cognitive aid to some internally located thinking system. By contrast, for the advocate of the extended view, the coupled system of pen-­and-­paper resource, appropriate bodily manipulations, and in-­the-­head processing may itself count as a cognitive architecture, even though it is a dynamically assembled (rather than hard-­wired) and essentially temporary (rather than persisting) coalition of elements. In other words, each of the differently located components of this distributed (over brain, body and world) multi-­factor system enjoys cognitive status, where the term ‘cognitive status’ should be understood as indicating whatever status it is that we ordinarily grant the brain. Here it is worth pausing to note that, in the distributed cognition literature, one can certainly find the term ‘extended cognition’ being given a less specific reading than we have just suggested, a reading which is tantamount to the interpretation we have adopted here of the term ‘distributed cognition’, and which thus encompasses embedded cognition and (at least many forms of) embodied cognition. This liberal usage is not negligent. For one thing, the boundary between internal and external is, in some contexts, fixed by the skin­– ­in which case gross bodily forms count as internal­– ­while in others it is fixed by the limits of the brain or central nervous system­– ­in which case gross bodily forms count as external. On the latter view, at least some forms of embodied cognition would count as cases of extended cognition. For another thing, given certain projects and purposes, the distinction between being a non-­cognitive but performance-­boosting scaffold and being a genuine part of one’s mental machinery may be a distraction, even if it is metaphysically legitimate. Nevertheless, it does seem clear that if one uses the term ‘extended cognition’ in the more inclusive way, one will need to find a different term for the case of what we might identify as metaphysical or constitutive extension (‘strictly extended’ maybe). Otherwise one will risk succumbing to what extended cognition theorists call cognitive bloat, an undesirable outcome in which one is forced to concede all sorts of mundane and unexciting cases of causal coupling between inner and external elements to be cases of extended cognition, thus generating a wildly counter-­intuitive position. It looks, then, as if there is a genuine argument to be had over whether it is possible to make the transition from embodied-­embedded cognition to extended cognition. And, indeed, this is a complicated and contested area (to sample just a small subset of views and the sometimes ill-­tempered debate, see e.g. Rowlands 1999, 2010; Menary 2007a, 2010; Adams and Aizawa 2008; Clark 2008; Rupert 2009; Sprevak 2009; Sutton 2010; Wheeler 2010). And it is possible

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that there won’t be a universal resolution. That is, it may be that while some cognitive phenomena reward an extended treatment (leading candidates might include memory, reasoning and problem-­solving), others will not. There is, for example, an ongoing debate over the credentials of extended consciousness (Hurley and Noë 2003; Noë 2004; Clark 2009; Hurley 2010; Ward 2012; Wheeler 2015). Our final ‘E’ is enactive. In the most general terms, a position is enactivist if it pursues some version of the claim that cognition unfolds (is enacted) in looping sensorimotor interactions between an active embodied organism and its environment. For the enactivist, then, cognition depends on a tight and dynamic relationship between perception and action. Enactivism also tends to foreground the disciplined examination of lived experience as a methodological tool in cognitive theory. This leads many enactivists to draw on the phenomenological philosophical tradition, as represented centrally by thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-­Ponty, a tradition which concentrates on the structures of, and the conditions for, lived experience. This productive engagement with phenomenology is especially prominent in relation to the enactivist understanding of the body not simply as a physical mechanism, but as a lived structure through which the world is experienced. (Although enactivism foregrounds phenomenology more so than the other branches of distributed cognition, that is not to say that it has a monopoly on phenomenology’s insights and conceptual machinery; see e.g. Gallagher 2005; Wheeler 2005; Zahavi 2014 for essentially non-­enactivist yet systematic appeals to phenomenology, in and around the distributed cognition literature.) The two most common forms of enactivism are sensorimotor enactivism (e.g. O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë 2004) and autopoietic enactivism (e.g. Varela et al. 1991; Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007), although another recent, and increasingly important, variant that we shall not discuss here is the so-­called radical enactivism of Hutto and Myin (2012). Sensorimotor enactivism is rooted in the thought that perceptual experience is constituted by implicit knowledge of so-­ called sensorimotor contingencies­– ­the law-­like effects that either my movement or the movements of objects in my sensory field have on the sensory input that I receive­– w ­ here the implicit knowledge in question is to be understood in terms of the possession and exercise of certain bodily skills. Thus consider my visual perception of a tomato. Although my visual access to that entity is aspectual (there is an obvious sense in which, given my embodied spatial perspective, I have visual access only to certain portions of it), my ordinary experience is nevertheless of the tomato as an intact, solid, three-­dimensional object. As one might put it, the tomato’s hidden-­from-­perspectival-­view aspects are nevertheless experientially present to me. According to the sensorimotor enactivist, this is explained by my implicit mastery of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies­– ­very roughly, the visual inputs my eyes would receive if I moved around the tomato, or if I turned it, or if it span round. This implicit sensorimotor knowledge is constitutive of my perceptual experience. Autopoietic enactivism is based on the idea that cognition is a process of sense-­ making by adaptively autonomous systems, where an autonomous system is a



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network of interdependent processes whose recurrent activity (a) produces and maintains the very boundary that determines the identity of that network as a unitary system, and concurrently (b) defines the ways in which that system may encounter perturbations from what is outside it while maintaining its organisation. A system is adaptively autonomous when it is able to alter its behaviour in response to changes in its environment in order to improve its situation, for example by sensorimotor activity. To illustrate this with an example that the autopoietic enactivists themselves often use, bacteria sense and swim towards the environmental area containing the greatest concentration of glucose molecules. Thus, as a consequence of the specific metabolically realised autonomy of the bacteria, glucose emerges as­– i­s brought forth as­– s­ ignificant for those organisms as food. As this example nicely illustrates, autopoietic enactivism is distinctive in forging a close connection between life and mind (cognition). As Thompson (2007: 128) puts it: ‘life and mind share a set of basic organizational principles, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. Mind is life-­like and life is mind-­like.’ One effect of enactive life-­mind continuity is to place affective phenomena such as emotions and moods at the very centre of the cognitive stage. As the glucose example highlights, enacted significance is fundamentally a matter of valence, that is, of being appropriately attracted and repelled by environmental factors that might improve or diminish organisational integrity. In this way, these factors are things that the organism cares about. This is the enactive root of affectivity. (For a developed enactive account of emotional episodes as self-­organising patterns of the whole embodied organism, see Colombetti 2014.) More generally, a 4E-­friendly treatment of affective phenomena will tend to reject a commonly held view in the psychology of emotions according to which there is a neat distinction between the cognitive components of emotions (e.g. the appraisal of a situation in relation to one’s well-­being) and their bodily components (e.g. arousal and facial expressions). For the advocate of embodied emotions, appraisal is itself a phenomenon that is spread out over both neural and non-­neural bodily factors (see, again, Colombetti 2014). In the background here is Damasio’s (e.g. 1999) influential notion of somatic markers, i.e. specific feelings in the body that accompany specific emotions (e.g. nausea with disgust) and which strongly shape subsequent decision-­making. A more controversial application of 4E thinking in the vicinity of affective phenomena is the claim that such phenomena may be extended beyond the skin of an individual, either over artefacts such as musical instruments (see e.g. Colombetti and Roberts 2015) or over other people (see e.g. Slaby 2014; Krueger and Szanto 2016). This final point brings us neatly to the issue of the social dimension of the 4E mind. Consider three possible ways in which cognition might be socially distributed: 1. I think some of the thoughts I think because, or perhaps only because, I am part of a particular social group. 2. My cognitive states or processes are socially as well as technologically extended,

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such that some of my cognitive machinery is located partly in the brains of other people. 3. Groups may have minds in much the same way that individuals have minds. Option 1 is perhaps most naturally understood as an embedded view according to which some psychological capacities realised wholly by neural states and processes are nevertheless manifested only in certain kinds of social circumstances, because they are socially scaffolded by those circumstances. Option 2 is the social version of the hypothesis of extended cognition. Consider Tom and Mary, a couple with a long and interdependent relationship. Perhaps Tom might come to trust, rely on and routinely access information stored in Mary’s brain, in such a way that, in certain contexts, her brain comes to play essentially the same role as his own neural resources, and thus constitute a repository of his memories (cf. Clark and Chalmers 1998). Both option 1 and option 2 may count as versions of what Wilson (2005) calls the social manifestation hypothesis, which maintains that cognition remains a ‘property of individuals, but only insofar as those individuals are situated or embedded in certain physical environments and social milieus’. By contrast, option 3 shifts the ownership of the relevant psychological states and processes from the individual to the group. According to 3, the group mind hypothesis, we should take at face value statements such as ‘the team desires a victory’ and ‘the crowd thinks the game is over’. Whole groups, and not merely the individuals out of which those groups are constructed, may non-­metaphorically be attributed with beliefs, desires, other psychological states and processes of reasoning (for versions of this view, see e.g. Huebner 2014; Tollefsen 2006). As one might imagine, much of the philosophical debate in this area concerns the conditions and circumstances under which it would be correct to adopt either option 2 or option 3, both of which might, to our modern thinking at least, seem counter-­intuitive or, from a theoretical perspective, metaphysically profligate (for an argument for the latter conclusion, see e.g. Rupert 2014). But even the seemingly less radical option 1 constitutes a prompt for a careful examination of the distributed causal mechanisms and social contexts that drive the processes concerned. Two further modulations of social cognition, when developed in a 4E register, bring out a final way in which the distributed perspective changes the shape of the received theoretical terrain. It has become a commonplace view in the psychology of social cognition that we navigate our social spaces either by predicting and explaining one another’s observable behaviour using what is tantamount to a commonsense theory of the hidden inner causes of that behaviour­– ­the beliefs, desires and other mental states inside other people’s heads­– o­ r by predicting and explaining that behaviour by internally simulating what we ourselves would think and experience in the same circumstances, in order to produce the same behaviour. On either of these models, and partially echoing the Cartesian dualism of days gone by (see above), our access to the mental states of the other person is fundamentally indirect, involving inference or simulation. However, some distributed cognition theorists (e.g. Gallagher 2008), drawing centrally on phenomenology, argue that



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our grasp of the mental states of another person with whom we are in perceptual contact is ordinarily direct, in that, rather than, for example, inferring another person’s joy from some of her facial movements, we see that joy directly, in her laughter. Relatedly, but moving away even further from the conventional assumption that a theory of social cognition should begin with a conception of people as isolated spectators, a distinctively enactive account of social cognition has emerged in the form of the participatory sense-­making approach (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). This approach begins with a conception of people not as spectators, but as engaged participants, and focuses on the ways in which individuals interactively coordinate their movements and utterances in social situations. For participatory sense-­making theorists, the interaction process itself can come to exhibit an enactive form of autonomy (see above), one that is generated by, but also constrains and scaffolds, the activity of the interacting individuals. The alleged directness of social cognition is grounded in the fact that we are so proficient at social interaction that the interactive process becomes transparent to us (De Jaegher 2009). This section has surveyed views that fall under the general heading of ‘distributed cognition’. What these views have in common is that they accord some kind of special role to the environment (perhaps including the bodily environment or social environment) that is missing in the traditional Cartesian or in more recent neuro-­centric cognitive theories. More to the fore in this introduction, however, is the diversity of views within the distributed cognition camp. We have seen that distributed cognition can roughly be split into 4 Es (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) with each ‘E’ admitting of further, sometimes competing, articulations in the hands of different philosophers and cognitive scientists (we have already met two kinds of enactivism). Philosophers and cognitive scientists who work in this area often adopt what might appear to be a mix-­and-­match approach: they accept some ‘distributed’ claims but reject others. Moreover, they may accept a different combination of distributed (or non-­distributed) claims about different parts of human mental life: some aspects of our mental life (perhaps our feelings of joy and pain) may be treated as purely internal while others (perhaps some of our memories and decision-­making) are distributed. A further complication is that, even if attention is restricted to a single aspect of human mental life, a distributed theorist may give a different distributed/non-­distributed answer for different human subjects in different environmental contexts at different times (some humans are more inclined than others to distribute their memory on to external devices). How should researchers in the humanities make sense of all this disagreement and diversity within the distributed cognition camp? We suggest that they cut through philosophical disagreements and explore the specific combination of distributed views that suits their interests. An application of distributed cognition in the humanities should be assessed on its own merits. A specific combination of ‘distributed’ views may prove more or less fruitful to understanding a particular historical phenomenon. And different combinations of ‘distributed’ views may prove suited to different historical phenomena. There is no reason why a single, one-­size-­fits-­all approach should be adopted.

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The merits of a particular combination of distributed views, in a particular historical setting, should be based on its pay-­off for our understanding in the humanities. We hope that the essays in the volume demonstrate both the value and the diversity of conceptual tools offered by a distributed cognition approach.

Distributed Cognition and the Cognitive Turn The question of how new insights into the nature of the mind illuminate our understanding of being human and our engagement with the world is one of the greatest issues facing the current generation of humanities scholars. Knowledge that is emerging from cognitive science and neuroscience, along with related research in disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and linguistics, casts a new light on issues that are central to the humanities, and enables us to better explain the nature of forms of human culture and how and why they emerge and evolve. Knowledge from the sciences can help to make a case for culture’s significance to being human. In turn, the humanities provide an archive of examples concerning how humans develop in a range of environments and evidence diverse ways in which we use and create resources as means to extend our capacities. This section provides a general overview of the emergence of the cognitive humanities and considers how distributed cognition interrogates and supplements existing humanities methodologies. In spite of the humanities’ increasing interdisciplinarity since the late 1950s, the long-­standing disciplinary antagonism between the arts and sciences continues (Snow 1993; Leavis 1962; Ortolano 2005). This tension is now further exacerbated by wider movements towards education’s commodification, quantification and rebranding as merely employment-­based training, with accompanying questions about the relevance and value of the arts and humanities (Collini 2009; Nussbaum 2010). The defensive response by many in the humanities has been to fall back on claims about the qualitative and irreducible nature of aesthetic values in the humanities and to view humanities scholars who draw on scientific knowledge as reductionists.2 The presumption is that scientific knowledge entails a constraint on, and a diminution of the value of, their own complex material and methodologies, rather than adding a further perspective. Yet, even for the hard problem of consciousness­– t­ hat is, the way it feels to be me or you­– p ­ hilosophers draw on insights from neuroscience. There is no reason why questions about the qualitative nature of our experience of cultural artefacts cannot be addressed, even if not solved outright, by neuroscientific insights. Moreover, a broad-­based approach that draws not just on the mind’s neural basis, but on the whole range of the human mind as evidenced in cultural texts and practices, seems likely to provide us with the fullest insights into these enduring questions. Phenomenology has influenced both philosophers focusing on culture or lan2

As Helen Small describes, ‘the humanities value qualitative above quantitative reasoning’ (2013: 57). Raymond Tallis (2011) provides an example of the anti-­scientific bent with his dismissal of a focus on the physical aspects of being human as ‘neuromania’ or ‘Darwinitis’.



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guage (so-­called ‘continental’ philosophers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Lacan) and models (in particular enactivism) that attempt to conceptualise scientific evidence of distributed cognition. However, in cultural studies phenomenological ideas became entangled with a tendency towards relativism, as part of a backlash against earlier humanist or structuralist notions of culture as revealing universal human attributes and values. Throughout history, oscillating drives towards universalism and relativism often culminate in polarised models, or one extreme sets the pendulum swinging back to the other extreme. In recent decades literary, historical and cultural criticism have focused on various kinds of postmodern relativism and social constructivism which resist anything interpretable as ‘facts’, ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ and in which human bodies are presented as merely cultural constructs (the tendency is notable in new historicism, cultural materialism and feminist, queer and globalisation studies). From classical antiquity onwards, there have been those who have questioned the extent of our access to a mind-­independent world: from Plato’s shadow-­watchers in the cave, to Descartes’s sceptical cogito ergo sum, to more recent thought experiments suggesting that our experience might be the same were we brains in a vat, to Bayesian predictive coding models, which some internalist-­ minded philosophers argue are a basis for assuming that cognition is skull-­bound, so that ‘conscious experience is like a fantasy or virtual reality’ (Hohwy 2013: 137). Early artificial intelligence and cybernetics influenced both cognitive scientists and the continental philosophers who in turn have informed cultural theory. Lacan, for instance, discussed the influence that cybernetics had on him, though in his dark version, humans become the processed rather than the processor: ‘It is the world of words which creates the world of things . . . Man speaks therefore, but it is because the symbol has made him man’ (Lacan 1981: 39). Higher-­level shifts in norms of understanding and focus cascade down, and so shape and are reshaped by disciplines into idiosyncratic manifestations of the higher-­level propensities into which (along with many other factors) they feed back. The linguistic turn in the humanities in the 1970s and 1980s argued that language consisted of a system of codes, with words caught up primarily in their relation to other words, with a consequent endless deferral of meaning and a disconnectedness to referents in the world. At the same time, classical cognitive science described cognition as occurring through computational manipulation of internal symbols. Such theories emphasised the role of arbitrary, abstract syntactic structures at the expense of attention to the emergence of meaning through our engagement in the world. More recently, Daniel Dennett suggested that ‘A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library’ (1991: 202). This may seem to relate straightforwardly to Lacanian-­type claims. Dennett himself has commented on the correspondences between these ideas and postmodern deconstructionism (410). However, Dennett reaches his suppositions through biologically grounded or organically inspired notions, such as memes, an idea developed by Richard Dawkins (who coined the term) to describe units of cultural transmission akin to genes as units of biological transmission (202–3). In contrast to such biologically grounded accounts, prevailing postmodern methodologies have argued that sociocultural forces are entirely

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responsible for human concepts and behaviour. For example, the elision of the physical body is evident in Judith Butler’s claim that ‘gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex’ (1998: 728). Whilst such accounts make visible sociocultural influences on biological categories, their rebuttal of the hegemony of the natural world and of the fixed nature of biological categories is problematic to the extent that it simply inverts the relationship and asserts the dominance of sociocultural forces over the realm of the natural and physical. The significant difference between a postmodern stance and Dennett’s viewpoint is highlighted by his concluding comment that ‘I wouldn’t say there is nothing outside the text. There are for instance all the bookcases, buildings, bodies, bacteria . . .’ (1991: 411). Embodied cognition­– ­that is, the notion that our physical bodies enable and constitute cognitive processes­– ­presents a greater challenge to postmodern accounts than do claims about its extended nature. Furthermore, distributed cognitive models make evident that the mind’s embedded or extended nature is not simply a matter of unconstrained cultural determinism. The elision of the physical body and world in postmodern accounts helps to perpetuate an apparent conflict between the arts and sciences that risks miring notions of being human (and the humanities) in isolated idealism. The recent rise of digital humanities, despite its use of distant reading and quantitative analyses,3 might be explained in part by technological advancements. These advancements massively increase the ways in which we can creatively use programs and technologies to inform and study our interaction with texts and artefacts. However, its rise may also be due to a theoretical tendency towards the virtual and virtualisation, with an over-­emphasis on the distinctiveness of human nature as arising from meta-­or trans-­physical capacities, a tendency which has been evident throughout history in idealist accounts of human nature (Hayles 1999; Nusselder 2009). As part of a countermovement in the humanities today, there is a shift towards the study of material culture, with a renewed focus on specific physical objects, physical environments and ecological contexts. We also find elision, if not of the physical body as a whole, then at least of the significance of the specifics of it, in some more functionalist accounts of the extended mind. Andy Clark accuses thinkers such as Damasio of biochauvinism because of the essential role they ascribe to the body in cognition. Instead, Clark argues, ‘the perceptual experience of differently embodied animals could in principle be identical, not merely similar to our own’ (2008: 193). Clark’s functionalist approach allows for the possibility that a non-­biological resource can play the same role as a biological one. Yet, elsewhere, Clark emphasises that external resources need not be functionally identical to internal ones to qualify as extended (1997: 220): a laptop does not store or compute information in the same way as a brain, 3

Franco Moretti coined the term ‘distant reading’ to describe the need for a world-­scale study of literature, which would draw on other researchers’ scholarship, in contrast to the conventional close reading of a small number of canonical texts (Moretti 2000). In his later work, and more generally, the term is now often used to describe the study of literature through data analysis or text-­mining of large-­scale corpora (Moretti 2013).



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and it can, for that reason, be useful in supplementing our neural capacities. On Clark’s view, there is a question about how much the material nature of a resource matters to how it fulfils its function, and this is important for how we evaluate the significance of different resources­– n ­ eural, bodily and non-­biological ones­– i­n different historical contexts. Our view is that in certain contexts, or while performing certain functions, a difference between human bodies or physical resources may matter; in other cases, it may not be significant. The richer idea that emerges from this perspective is that through differences, as well as similarities, various forms of representational, computational and mnemonic resources can supplement our biological limitations. We have seen that distributed cognition presents an array of competing and sometimes conflicting theories. This may appear a sign of fragility, but this diversity can be seen as reflecting the ways in which different cognitive models come to the fore in relation to different mental capacities or contexts. Shifting trends and debates about cognitive hierarchies, such as an emphasis on the role of embodiment or on particular methods or resources as extending representational or phenomenological possibilities, can be seen to emerge in relation to the development of, or reaction against, new genres, cultural modes and technological, scientific and sociocultural changes. Therefore, the multifaceted nature of distributed cognition as a theory is, in our view, a strength that reflects the operation of different cognitive norms and modes in the world. From the late 1980s and 1990s onwards a few ‘first-­wave’ thinkers in the cognitive humanities, primarily based in the US, adopted notions from evolutionary psychology or from cognitive linguistics that emphasised the universal aspects of humans’ cognitive and physical characteristics.4 A particularly influential idea was that humans tend to conceptualise non-­physical domains in terms of physical ones, and in contrast to postmodern deconstructionism, this suggested a specific way in which language is embodied. Engagement with these ideas in the humanities challenged existing disciplinary divisions and opened up new ways to think about what human beings have in common and how humans from diverse cultures can have some understanding of one another. Yet both evolutionary-­psychological and cognitive-­linguistic humanities approaches tend to operate without due attention to the many historical (and geographical) variables involved in cultural, linguistic and literary constructions. Such early cognitive humanities scholars therefore tended to set postmodern and cognitive approaches in irreconcilable opposition to one another. This risked simply repeating within the humanities the persisting methodological tensions between the arts and sciences through the siding of critics with oppositional explanatory paradigms. However, these first-­wave thinkers have remained largely on the peripheries of mainstream literary and cultural methodologies, against which some of them tend to situate themselves. Yet even from the early stages, cognitive humanities scholars drew attention to the benefits of engaging with scientific work on the mind, and not all their efforts 4

See, for example, Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Carroll 1994; Gottschall and Wilson 2005.

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were so oppositional. One of the first scholars to adopt a cognitive approach, which he argued was compatible with the more conventional approaches he was already using, was the psychoanalytical literary critic Norman Holland (1988). Most other early adopters of scientific work, models and metaphors as a means to inform our reading of texts in the emerging field of ‘cognitive poetics’ (such as Tsur 1992; Gibbs 1994; Turner 1991, 1996) were influenced by and developed cognitive linguistics’ notion of conceptual schema and argued for the everyday nature of figurative thought and language. There were, however, already outliers such as Ellen Spolsky, who was instead focused on reapplying the then fashionable theory of the modular mind to her analysis of literary texts as a means of engaging with poststructuralism (1993). Distributed cognition suggests another perspective to universalising models, one that takes account of the way in which embodiment is a crucial aspect of our extendedness, since it is our biological nature that enables us to incorporate sociocultural and technological resources into our cognitive systems. The significance of the human body arises also from its capacity for engagement and interaction. The dynamic cognitive roles of linguistic, sociocultural and technological resources are made possible by neurological plasticity.5 This raises the possibility that social constructivist models may have a neurological basis, as our ability to be (at times transparently) constructed by sociocultural forces relates to the adaptability of the human brain. At the same time, human adaptability and extendedness temper any notion of universal communal features shared across all humans that could be based on embodiment. While humans exhibit certain enduring biological characteristics, these characteristics dynamically interact with our sociocultural and environmental contexts. Together these lead to the manifestation of different kinds of minds and to the expression or suppression of particular forms of cognitive paradigms. This perception enables a reassessment of polar representations of the mind as either fixed and universal or as socially constructed and culturally relative­– ­two models which have constrained understandings of historical, as well as modern, concepts of the mind. Humans are particularly talented not just at evolutionarily adapting to niches, but also at adapting our niches to supplement our cognitive and other needs (Wheeler and Clark 2008). While humans’ capacity to exist within cognitive niches, with ongoing reciprocal interactions between niches and organisms, is shared across generations, these niches also reflect technological and sociocultural developments; ultimately, rather than either universalism or relativism, this implies that we shall find a rich combination of shared features and particular divergences across history and cultures. The paradigm of distributed cognition provides a middle way between relativism and universalism by highlighting the vital roles played by both physical and cultural resources in cognition. As a methodology, this provides a potential strategy 5

For just a few works that discuss neurological plasticity and adaptivity, see Ramachandran and Ramachandran 1996; Berti and Frassinetti 2000; Maravati and Iriki 2004; Gallagher 2005; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008; Clark 2008.



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for making headway in the science wars. In the conflict between radical postmodern relativism and science-­based realism, the question is whether facts about the world are merely culturally determined or whether those facts are grounded in some mind-­independent reality. Analysis of cognition needs to take into account not only the findings of current cognitive science, but also the imagery and narratives used in scientific, cultural and literary discourses. Cultural factors play an essential role in shaping the world, and acknowledging this should not require rejecting or devaluing the role of science. The influence of culture and its role in cognitive niche construction shapes even our disciplinary taxonomies­– c­ onstantly evolving scaffolds that accrete knowledge about specific domains. A combination of scientific and cultural knowledge is necessary to understand the nature of cognition and of being human in the world. Distributed cognition is a theoretical framework that enables one to grasp the mutual entanglement of science and culture. The importance of distributed cognition as a methodological approach grows out of its rootedness in bodies of knowledge from across the disciplinary spectrum, which together are reflective of the full scope of human nature. During the period in which our project has taken place, second-­wave ­thinkers in the cognitive humanities have begun to consider a more diverse range of approaches to the mind; the expansion of recent work in the field is discussed in each of the period-­specific introductions to the volumes. Our project sought to strengthen and stimulate increased interest in distributed cognition. The current book series provides a rigorous engagement with these ideas by humanities scholars and demonstrates that distributed cognition can helpfully illuminate cultural studies. Our aim is to inspire a broader re-­evaluation in the humanities of what is understood to count as cognition and to suggest a new way of doing intellectual history. The four current volumes on distributed cognition examine the practices and the explicit and implicit conceptual models that were in use from antiquity to the early twentieth century. Together the essays trace across Western European history developments and divergences among various concepts of distributed cognition that were circulating. The essays engage with recent debates about the various models of distributed cognition and bring these into discourse with research in the humanities through examination of the parallels to (and divergences from) these models and these debates in earlier cultural, philosophical and scientific works. The essays make evident some of the explicit and implicit grounds on which our present suppositions about cognition stand and also some of the knowledge and insights, as well as superstitions and ungrounded beliefs, that have been lost and obscured along the way. The reiterations and the diversity in expressions and practices of distributed cognition enrich and enlighten our understanding of wider forces and rhythms in the history of cognition. One important point that emerges is that notions of cognition can be shown to be fundamental to how we conceptualise debates in every discipline­– ­the study of cognitive phenomena cannot be considered a specialist niche, but is rather a necessary underpinning of any study of humans in the world. This series bears out the premise that ‘current philosophical notions [of distributed cognition] are simply the most recent manifestation of an

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enduring paradigm that reflects the non-­trivial participation of the body and world in cognition’ (Anderson 2015b: xi). In return for providing a scientific basis to our understanding of the mind in the humanities, historical studies have the potential to feed back and interrogate our current philosophical and scientific understanding of how cognition may be distributed across the body and the world. The historical lineage of non-­brain-­bound concepts of cognition demonstrates that such ideas are not merely a product of our own age. Cultural beliefs and philosophical interpretations map on to underlying physical features and processes in ways that function practically within a society. The volume introductions provide detailed overviews of the development of the cognitive humanities in relation to the periods they cover, but to briefly outline how distributed cognition can illuminate cultural interpretation by challenging models that view the body or the environment as peripheral to understanding the nature of cognition, we shall present a few instances that arise from our collaboration with the National Museum of Scotland. Distributed cognition raises questions about the nature and role of galleries and museums, demonstrating ways in which many of the artefacts extend either human cognitive or other physical capacities. There are some (perhaps obvious) examples of distributed cognition, such as the tally stick, which was a piece of bone or wood scored across with notches that was used, from around 30,000 years ago, to record numbers or messages. This was an ancient memory aid. Like the oft-­cited modern example of an iPhone, it remembers, so you need not. Basic tools controlled by bodily action gave way to mechanised tools that outsourced mechanical processes, through devices such as steam engines, and to automated and programmable agents, such as the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard Loom not only moved faster and more reliably than a human weaver, it took over the weaver’s cognitive load and allowed greater design complexity than would ordinarily be available from the average human weaver’s brain alone. In a trajectory familiar to those who work on the history of the book, a museum also makes evident the shift from oral traditions to literacy through the preservation of early memorial stones carved first with only images, then manuscripts which enabled more detailed storage, manipulation and communication of information, then printed books and presses that enabled the sharing of information on a larger scale, and finally we emerge into the modern world of computers and the internet. Encounters with museum artefacts involve both a conceptual encounter with an object’s caption and an experiential encounter with the object itself­– ­a metal helmet may automatically trigger a sense of weightiness (Bolens 2017). Yet, in some instances the contingent nature of one’s tacit knowledge may affect the extent to which artefacts prompt a kinesic or kinaesthetic response, with the cognitive capacity to simulate holding, wearing or interacting with an object relating partly to prior embodied and cultural experience, with more conceptual scaffolding (for example, via illustrations of past uses) needed for more obscure artefacts. Similarly, devices that may seem intuitive in one period often require significant amounts of culturally embedded knowledge that belie their apparent simplicity (Phillipson 2017).



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Distributed cognition invites a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary approaches, enabling a richly diverse appreciation of the reciprocal ways in which artefacts and humans have shaped each other. Distributed cognition creates a scientific basis for understanding the fundamental significance of culture to humans and the humanities. Describing perception, Alva Noë says, ‘We continuously move about and squint and adjust ourselves to . . . bring and maintain the world in focus’ (2015: 9). When we read literature, view art or engage with historical artefacts in a museum, we remain linked to our own particular ever-­shifting perspective and yet these cultural resources allow us to experience the world beyond our usual cognitive range. Each genre, each author or artist, and each work provides distinct forms of cognitive mediation. It does this in a way that reflects back on ourselves and the world around us, at the same time as it recalibrates and adds to the numerous virtual coordinates through which we more generally orient ourselves and enact our worlds. Texts, artworks and other cultural artefacts are imbued with mind, the mind of their creator and their context, and that of the spectator, reader or interactor. Objects, images and language, particularly those in consciously crafted literary and art works, provide catalytic scaffolding for perceptual flights into and beyond the usual constraints of our own imaginations, and can trigger a rich array of responses that are grounded in and recalibrate our emotional, physical and cultural natures, extending and revitalising our mental panoramas. Our series questions assumptions that have been made about historical notions of the mind, begins to trace the lineages of ideas about the mind across periods and cultures, and highlights the ways in which certain aspects of the mind come to the fore in certain contexts and traditions. The realisation of the distributed nature of cognition, which can induce both mind-­forged manacles and mind-­extending marvels, upholds the role of the humanities in wider society and more broadly challenges humans’ ways of being in the world. The extent of our capacity to extend our minds, across our current sociocultural panorama and physical world, and via the cognitive scaffolding provided by earlier generations, places in question the relatively short-­term individualistic ends that are currently being prioritised and endorsed in most modern societies. The value of the humanities in concert with the sciences is their capacity to extend our cognitive range beyond everyday constraints, by scaffolding critical thinking and enabling our minds to soar to the heights needed to tackle world-­sized and epic-­scale issues, as well as to supplement our ability to grasp more fully the diversity of other minds. Distributed cognition invites a more inclusive approach, which acknowledges that experience and understanding of the world and of the humanities is multifaceted and involves biological and sociocultural dimensions. Distributed cognition offers a reconsideration of the nature of the human mind, and so of being human, and, in turn, of the humanities.

2 I n t ro duc tion I. Distributed Cognition in Victorian and Modernism Studies – An Overview Peter Garratt

Cognitive approaches to literature, culture and the arts have expanded significantly over the last twenty years, yet models of distributed cognition have not been at the forefront of this flourishing in the humanities. Cognitive studies embraces such diverse areas as the empirical investigation of aesthetic experience, narrative theory and poetics, the study of film, archaeology and visual culture, and historicist literary criticism. It is a dynamic and diverse approach that has engaged with various aspects of the diverse fields of the cognitive sciences, psychology and philosophy of mind. Topics that have come to the fore are the emotions, empathy, theory of mind, concept-­formation and conceptual blending, reading and viewing, the artistic representation of minds and consciousness, and related topics that bear upon the interpretation of complex cultural works. For two decades or more, it was possible to regard cognitive studies as a niche interest confined to the margins of the humanities, notably in the discipline of English Literature. There, somewhat understandably, it was eyed sceptically from some quarters while only tentatively welcomed by others, or even simply ignored by overviews of literary and cultural theory.1 But conditions conducive to its arrival emerged in the 1990s: the waning influence of French ‘high’ theory, especially the perceived linguistic idealism of poststructuralism and Derridean deconstruction, overlapping with the so-­called decade of the brain and the rise of cognitive neuroscience, which themselves became topics ripe for exploration by celebrated contemporary writers like David Lodge, Richard Powers and Ian McEwan, in the form of the ‘neuro-­novel’. Latterly there has been a growing recognition in universities of the virtues of interdisciplinary research programmes, making possible new kinds of collaboration between humanities fields and the biosciences, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and the social sciences; yet emphasis has tended to remain on possibilities that may

 1

A notable example of omission is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch et al. 2010), a popular anthology used widely in undergraduate teaching, which features primary sources from antiquity to the present and claims to represent major critical movements and ideas comprehensively.



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emerge from the digital rather than the cognitive humanities.2 On the evidence of sympathetic journals, book series, edited volumes, conference calls for papers, funding awards and academic job descriptions, cognitive approaches are now gradually moving from the disciplinary margins into the institutional mainstream of Anglo-­American literary studies. None of this has happened inexorably, and the fate of cognitive studies in English and the wider humanities remains invigoratingly unsettled, even potentially divisive. All the same, distributed cognition has only just begun to be part of the picture. A relatively recent landmark publication, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), edited by Lisa Zunshine, a leading light in the area, amply illustrates the point. As its hefty spine and large list of contributors suggest, Zunshine’s book is intended to distinguish the field at the moment of its ripening­– ­admittedly a challenging task, given the heterogeneity noted above­– ­and it accomplishes that mission with barely a word about the enactive or extended mind or distributed cognition. One would not gather from its contents that influential philosophers and cognitive scientists intensely debate whether cognition is all in the head, nor would one learn much about how these debates are beginning to be taken up in the humanities as new ways of thinking about narrative representation, say, or the history of print culture. Patrick Colm Hogan’s chapter on cognitive theory, identity and postcolonialism is one of only a few contributions to focus attention on the way ‘minds are not only embodied, but also “situated” ’ (Zunshine 2015: 331), and the volume’s general emphasis falls on internal processing strategies (neural or representational) much more than on cognition as a form of dynamic environmental interaction. There is nothing particularly unusual about this: most accounts of the cognitive turn, certainly those written from the perspective of literary studies, derive from an orthodox internalist tradition rather than distributed models of thinking, even if they happen to brush with such ideas as environmental affordances or the embodied mind or cognitive prostheses.3 In another substantial contribution to the field, for instance, Nancy Easterlin (2012) proposes a theory of literary interpretation shaped by detailed, if selective, reference to cognitive and evolutionary psychology, which she develops in close analyses of works by major poets and novelists from the nineteenth century and the modernist period (Coleridge, Emily Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys). Easterlin engages with issues central to distributed cognition, without referring to it as such, when she glosses the concept of the ‘extended mind’ (185), a term she uses for the impact of human tool use and technological culture on, say, biological memory (pictures, language, numerical signs, ­handwriting,  2

An important recent critical reflection on the stakes of such interdisciplinarity can be found in Callard and Fitzgerald 2015.  3 Since the 1990s there have been some important attempts to describe the cognitive turn in the literary humanities, none of which engage particularly with distributed cognition while generally endorsing cognitive approaches (and occasionally neuroscientific approaches) to texts and reading; see for example Richardson 2004.

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print, technological data storage, and so on), as well as the human experience of being embedded in these material representational systems. Such routine extension, she goes on to explain, also helps confirm that ‘[human] cognition is a form of action and thus a reminder that the body and the external world are the condition of all thought and therefore integral to it’ (186), a commitment that sounds superficially similar to ideas closely associated with sensorimotor enactivism. What Easterlin’s extended mind invokes, however, is neither the heavily discussed extended mind hypothesis of Clark and Chalmers (1998), as one might suspect, nor the work of enactivist philosophers. Instead, her source is the somewhat earlier ideas of the cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald, whose evolutionary perspective on tool-use also happens to inform the subsequent ‘supersizing’ project of Clark (2008), though that is not particularly in Easterlin’s view: her own purpose in citing Donald is to find a credible psychobiological grounding for literary reading and the value of humanistic enquiry.4 So, while she seeks to challenge ‘machinelike models of the mind in literary studies’ (2012: 36), and specifically criticises conceptual blending theory for having too little to say about ‘nonlinguistic levels of cognition and emotion’ (186), Easterlin does not engage with more radical accounts of embodiment and scaffolding provided by the likes of Edwin Hutchins, James J. Gibson, Shaun Gallagher, Andy Clark, Alva Noë, Dan Hutto and Michael Wheeler­– ­partly, it seems, because she remains impressed by the role played by cognitive predispositions forged in the deep evolutionary past. Yet her striking suggestion that textual interpretation can sometimes be understood as a form of wayfaring, where ‘readers seek knowledge within the ecologies they inhabit’ (193), feels as if it strives for a distributed view of cognition with some relation to the ‘4E’ (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) picture described in finer-­grained detail by these thinkers and others. A specialised area which has responded directly to the 4E picture and ecological psychology is cognitive narrative theory, where worked examples from modernist writers are notably common. Cognitive narrative theory builds on, extends and supplements the earlier insights of structuralism, via research that bears upon the ‘nexus between narrative and mind’ (Herman 2010: 155). In fact, some theorists in cognitive narratology have dealt at length with concerns highly relevant to Easterlin’s intuition that features of writing like metaphor, image and symbol can be understood as ‘providing opportunities for (cognitive) action’ (Easterlin 2012: 193), in the manner of environmental affordances. Some leading cognitive narratologists have framed the involvement of the reader (or story recipient) in enactivist terms. As David Herman explains, ‘within the broad constraints set by genre,  4

Clark (2008) refers to Donald’s work in his explanation of habitual ‘epistemic actions’, which forms part of Clark’s account of how embodied actions can replace the need for informational availability to be represented in the brain. Citing Donald’s example of the multiple sub-­skills integrated in the task of driving a car, Clark claims that ‘Such [epistemic] actions are factored deep into the nested habit systems that enable the embodied embedded agent . . . to succeed at even the most cognitively demanding tasks’ (75).



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the hypothesized intentions of story creators, and the history of the interpreter’s prior engagement with the text, story recipients may recruit from a wide range of textual affordances to explore narrative worlds’ (Herman 2013: 51). Herman’s long-­standing objective has been to show that since narrative can and does scaffold sense-­making and intelligent behaviour more generally, its systematic study should be regarded as a vital contribution to the sciences of mind. Developing a hypothesis that incorporates insights from Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner and Andy Clark, all of whom have given explanatory weight to psychological tools and social interaction, he proposes that ‘storytelling practices take their place within a wider array of cultural institutions, norms, procedures, technological innovations, and embodied engagements with built as well as natural environments that provide crucial scaffolding for intelligent behavior’ (Herman 2013: 232). Put another way, stories are a way of extending or distributing minds, since narrative ‘at once reflects and reinforces the supra-­individual nature of intelligence’ (Herman 2013: 248). In a related move, Marco Caracciolo (2012) draws on enactivism in an effort to model textual understanding on participatory sense-­making. On this view, narrative meaning unfolds in the form of collaboration between embodied agents, the reader and an authorial point of view, who participate in a communicative interaction that brings forth a world: engaging with stories is ‘enactive’ in the strong sense, because it involves imaginatively enacting a non-­actual set of situations and events: by coordinating with the sensemaking of the story producers, recipients bring forth a ‘world’ charged with significance. Narrative is, therefore, one of the means whereby human meaning-­making can detach itself from the here and now, exploring possibilities that would be difficult or even impossible to consider in actuality. (Caracciolo 2012: 373–4) Other proponents of enactive approaches to literature and narrative have pursued similar or related goals, including: grounding an explanation of narrative intersubjectivity in shared intentionality (Popova 2014); rethinking received ideas of fictional worlds as immersive virtual illusions or a form of double-­think (Polvinen 2016, 2017); and challenging pictorial accounts of visual perception in accounting for how readers respond to imaginative worlds and imagine the perspective of fictional characters (Troscianko 2014). Such initiatives illustrate the emergence of a ‘second generation’ of cognitive narratology (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014), a term intended to distinguish between first-­wave cognitivism (which took the mind as an information processor or computer) and a new programme of research engaging with 4E approaches and supplementing them with two further E terms, experience and emotion (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014: 261). This goes beyond grounding meaning in embedded or enactive frameworks and includes extended cognition. Marco Bernini, a Beckett scholar and also a contributor to the present volume, suggests that the extended mind hypothesis can inform a theory of narrative worldmaking­– a­ ‘distributed account of agency in the writing process’ (Bernini

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2014: 349)­– ­which has parallels with Dirk Van Hulle’s (2013) investigations of manuscript production and revision by nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century authors, a historical and material exploration of textual genesis and authorship from a 4E perspective. Modernist culture in the first decades of the last century, particularly the fiction of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, with its rich creative use of free indirect discourse, internal monologue and the so-­called stream-­of-­ consciousness technique, has become associated with an exhilarating turn inward­ – ­a focusing of interest on the nature of conscious experience and a private, inner world. The inward turn is almost a cliché of this multifaceted historical and literary moment, one that cognitively oriented readings have already sought to confront, with some success. David Herman (2011) and Emily Troscianko (2014) both target this simplifying generalisation; Herman suggests, for instance, in a concerted reappraisal of modernist fictional minds, that writers like Woolf and Joyce effectively proclaimed the interdependence of inner and outer domains: ‘Arguably, instead of moving inward, or shifting their focus from public environments for action to a private, interior domain of cognition and contemplation, modernist writers pointed to the inseparability of perceiving and thinking from acting and interacting’ (Herman 2011: 253). This way of reading modernism as an important historical site for models of thinking and feeling that share much in common with extended and distributed cognition can be found in recent scholarship on Woolf in particular, a writer unusually absorbed in scientific, philosophical and political thought and closely integrated with influential networks of modernist intellectuals. Melba Cuddy-­Keane (2014), another contributor to this book, has analysed the representation of embodied thought with regard to the language of gestures and image schemas in her novel To the Lighthouse, while Patricia Waugh has described how the ‘resources of the novel offered Woolf the means to suspend, complicate and challenge the dualistic picture [of Cartesian mind and body], while negotiating a path clear of reductionist materialism, on the one side, or a cosmic idealism, on the other’ (Waugh 2012: 30). Woolf’s subtle solution was to form a distributed rather than a closed idea of mental life, a biologically grounded but extended soul, which shaped her view of artistic creation as a process not of externalising a preconceived inner design or form but rather (as represented in the figure of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse) one involving adjustments of relations between body, materials and environment, feedback loops and complex emergence. Inwardness has been associated not only with the arrival of avant-­garde modernist aesthetics. Important Victorian novelists, too, have been celebrated for their investigation of interior space and depth. As David Lodge remarks of Henry James: ‘Consciousness was his subject: how individuals privately interpret the world, and often get it wrong; how the minds of sensitive, intelligent individuals are forever analysing, interpreting, anticipating, suspecting, and questioning their own motives and those of others’ (Lodge 2002: 202). Similar claims could be made about George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and indeed cognitive literary studies (sometimes embracing neuroscience) has found the nineteenth-­century



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novel to be fertile territory for the analysis of literary minds (e.g. Young 2010). Some influential historical criticism of Victorian literature and culture has drawn on the complex interplay between imaginative writing and the period’s philosophy, psychology, physiology and neurology, often with reference to Gillian Beer’s (1983) seminal study of literary culture and Darwinian science in the Victorian era and also to Rick Rylance’s (2000) fine-­grained study of the emergence of Victorian psychology. In this connection one could pick out Nicholas Dames’s (2007) recovery of a physiological theory of novel-­reading, which shows that a version of embodied cognition informed understandings of reading practices long before the coinage of any such term; and also Gregory Tate’s (2012) interpretation of Victorian poetry and dialogue with nineteenth-­century psychology, which looks particularly at the growth of physical theories of the mind and emotional embodiment, and Suzanne Keen’s (2007) examination of narrative empathy and historical readers of fiction, which is partly concerned with the role of embodied responses in empathic identification with imaginary others. If none of these enquiries take distributed cognition as an organising frame, they do help to show how decisive shifts in Victorian psychology cut across scientific and cultural domains and increasingly came to acknowledge the formative role of the body and sensation in mental life and intentional action. Analysis of the period’s writing that does explicitly foreground situated and extended aspects of cognition is much more limited. The most detailed consideration appears in Alan Palmer’s (2010) exploration of the fictional mind as a social entity, at the heart of which is an argument about socially and physically distributed minds in Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. For Palmer, the nineteenth-­century novel offers a particularly good opportunity to push back against the uncritical internalism of most conventional literary criticism, in virtue of the fact it dramatises minds as socially embedded or networked and different degrees of what he calls ‘intermental’ thought spread across individual agents in collaborative units, such as the collective mind in Eliot’s Middlemarch. Elaborating on this idea of the social visibility of conscious selves, rather than on introspection, Palmer focuses on action, emotion, embodied interaction and bodily presentation, with reference to Andy Clark and other thinkers in the distributed cognition tradition, but with little awareness of how these canonical novels are grounded in a historical or intellectual context of their own. This, in fact, helps to elicit a concluding observation about the research field upon which the present volume bears. Beyond restating the point that distributed approaches have not been well represented in the rise of cognitive literary studies (and, revealingly, may be in tension with them, as Popova (2014) suggests), one can reflect that distributed cognition tends to feature in studies of Victorian and modernist writing and culture which are not offered as historically grounded explanations, while the overwhelming majority of relevant literary and cultural history has not worked with 4E or distributed models of cognition or made other moves to rethink the inward and isolated mind.

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II. Distributed Cognition in Victorian and Modernist Studies­– ­ Our Volume Miranda Anderson This volume brings together eleven chapters by international specialists working in the period between the mid-­nineteenth and early twentieth century in the fields of literature, art, philosophy, material culture, and history of science, medicine and technology. The chapters revitalise our understanding of Victorian and modernist culture by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the distributed nature of cognition. As described at more length in the series introduction (Chapter 1), distributed cognition is an umbrella term for the various approaches that reveal that cognition occurs through brain-­body-­world interactions; cognition is not just brain-­bound, nor does it occur merely through sociocultural forces or information flow. The first section of this introductory chapter on the period covered in this volume has provided a background to current research on topics related to distributed cognition, while this second section further considers the period’s mental panorama and how the various chapters in this volume represent, reflect and advance work in this area.5 The aims with which we presented participants in the research project from which this volume derives were either to consider the ways in which Victorian and modernist sources might be regarded as representing approaches that in some way prefigure current theories of distributed cognition, or to explore the ways in which current theories cast new light on Victorian and modernist phenomena, or the traditions through which they have been interpreted. A further aim is to demonstrate, and to stimulate wider critical investigations on, how approaches to distributed cognition in philosophy and cognitive science can inform, and be informed by, Victorian and modernist culture, by making evident the constraints and capacities of both past and current definitions and debates. The contributors represent an array of disciplines, with literary scholars having contributed the most chapters overall, due to the breadth of literary studies as a discipline and its pioneering interest in cognitive approaches to the humanities. The chapters directly engage with the various models in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science which challenge standard models that view the body and the environment as peripheral to an understanding of the nature of cognition. Distributed cognition covers an intertwined group of theories, which include enactivism and embodied, embedded and extended cognition, and which are also known collectively as ‘4E cognition’.6  5

This chapter benefited from Emily Troscianko’s thoughtful feedback and I would also like to warmly thank Adam Lively and Mark Sprevak for proofreading a draft.  6 Brief outlines of these theories are provided here where needed; the series introduction to this volume (Chapter 1) provides a detailed overview.



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Together the chapters make evident the ways in which particular notions and practices of distributed cognition emerged from the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed during this period. Since the end of our period of study here dovetails with the beginnings of current cognitive theories and philosophy of mind, a number of works discussed here in historical context, such as those of Merleau-­Ponty and Vygotsky, are also sometimes drawn on today. Here, however, they are seen anew against their cultural backdrop, such that additional insights emerge which may inform current theories, as in turn current theories can help articulate and supplement the insights of these earlier thinkers. As with other volumes in the series, ethical issues come particularly to the fore, as the contributing authors have tended to focus on the more problematic aspects of the means by which we distribute cognition, and they open up for discussion issues not yet sufficiently explored in current distributed cognitive models.

From the Victorian to the Modernist Mindscape In the hundred years from Victoria’s crowning to modernism’s peak, new theoretical and practical vantage points arose that transformed understandings of the temporal and spatial dimensions of cognition. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), alongside other geological and astronomical discoveries, revealed that time and space stretched beyond the bounds of prevailing opinion and everyday human comprehension. These discoveries threw into question religious beliefs and correlated ideological structures, revealing that human nature had evolved along with, and from, other creatures and life forms that were hundreds of thousands of years old. The realisation that human development and evolution were entwined with environments, across the span of both an individual and the species, also generated new questions and ideas about the nature of cognition. Explorations of the temporal and spatial dimensions of cognition, of embodied and environmentally situated cognition, and of developmental and social cognition, as well as critical questioning of received ideological and representational structures, are topics which recur across the chapters here on Victorian and modernist culture. Representationalism in art and in notions of the mind are intimately related despite a sideways disciplinary shift of perspective, which involves a move from an aesthetic to a psychological focus. The role of representation in cognition and in perception is a topic of debate in this period and continues to be one in the distributed cognition framework, which occupies a range of different positions on the extent of representation’s role, with only radical enactivism denying mental representation any role. The nineteenth century’s combining of scientific empiricism with a drive for practical applications fuelled the scientific and industrial revolutions, which were further contributed to by trade encouraged by the misbegotten goods and profits of colonialism. The theoretical and technological developments were transformative not only of ways of existing in the world, but also of understandings of the nature of the mind and self, bringing into question the nature of perception, experience and agency. The mass of technological innovations and advancements that enhanced

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humans’ physical, perceptual and cognitive capacities included improved transport and communication systems, the shift from steam to electric power, mechanisation, microscopes, photography, movies and X-­rays. The opening two chapters, Chapters 3 and 4, make evident the extent to which nineteenth-­century novels were grappling with notions of perception and cognition as distributed that arose from the psychophysical sciences and optical devices. Later chapters that bridge into modernist works and movements again explore changing understandings of perception, along with new media and experimental forms, as well as scrutinising issues around agency from various perspectives. Later theoretical advances, most notably Einstein’s theories of relativity (1905, 1915), compounded earlier scepticism, and now also threw into question the notions of objective scientific knowledge on which it had been based. Despite the different basis, this further heightened this period’s interest in the temporal as well as the spatial dimensions of cognition (see particularly Chapters 7 and 8). In the aesthetic sphere the empirical and practical impulse of the Victorian period was expressed primarily as a striving for realism and the didactic, which was fuelled by, and further fuelled, the revolution in social beliefs and practices. Increasing literacy, educational reform and the widespread cheap mass production and popularity of novels contributed to the sense of a shared intellectual life. Novelists displayed society to itself, focusing on ordinary and psychological subjects in their fictional works, and they participated in critical debates about the relation between mind and world in theoretical works. Echoing the Romantics’ passion for nature, but in opposition to their more exotic flights of fancy, as well as to idealism in general, George Eliot defined realism and its ends as the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life. (1856: 626) More baldly, Matthew Arnold suggested that ‘the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge’ is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’, which implies both the possibility of a strict correlation between representation and reality and the sense that such an objectivity transcends ordinary observational skills (1886: 1). Henry James anticipates Merleau-­Ponty in describing a novel as itself ‘a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism’, such that incidents, description and dialogue are not distinct, but instead ‘melt into each other at every breath’, as ‘intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression’ (James 1888: 392; cf. Merleau-­ Ponty 2012: 152–3). Similarly, in his defence of fiction, James argues that although ‘reality has a myriad forms’, imagination applied to the partial yet extensive nature of sensible experience suffices for knowledge (1888: 387–8): Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-­web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber

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of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative­– ­much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius­– ­it takes itself to the faintest hint of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. (388) Mind spans life and transforms experience into wonders. At the same time as he emphasises the mind’s discriminatory capacity, James presents an expansive consciousness with continuity across mind and life, such that present-­day enactivists might feel a frisson of recognition. As with distributed cognition, James evokes an epistemological realism, which is pluralist and recognises situatedness, yet is also committed to our access to reality despite the partial nature of each perspective. Our series claims that cognitive experience (and concepts of it) draws on and reaches towards different horizons­– ­from the phenomenological, aesthetic and ethical, to the sociocultural, scientific and technological­– ­such that it is persistently shape-­shifting, while yet providing bearings both on the nature of reality and on the specific vantage points from which it is experienced and grasped (such as is evident in James’s own gendered reference to a ‘man of genius’).7 Conceptual changes regarding the nature of time and space also stemmed from industrialisation, which led to the rise of efficiency systems and new labour practices. Industrialisation entailed the commodification and mechanisation of millions of people’s working lives. As with Darwin’s theories, the reflections that followed on from these widespread societal changes included reconsideration of the nature of the mind. Marx and Engels invert the solipsist’s claim that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so, instead contending that ‘Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life’ (1970: 47). This makes clear the sense of continuity between life and consciousness in Marx’s thinking, even if he takes things too far by simply upending the conventional hierarchy. Reciprocal enmeshment, along the lines of an Escher image, might more fully capture the dynamic of a distributed cognitive perspective: life structures the mind and the mind structures life. While often nowadays Marx is portrayed as merely exposing the play of ideological structures, he based his critique of capitalist industrialisation in terms of the effects on workers of the underlying material conditions into which they were contracted: ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general’ (1976: 3). As Marx and Engels repeat, their subject is the life-­processes of real people whose physical organisation produces their means of subsistence, and who thereby reproduce a mode of life, which in turn makes them what they are (1970: 42). It is from an (en)active and sensuous realm of blood and flesh that Marx and Engels, like us, set out. Several later chapters in this volume tackle the issue of human agency in relation to objects, habits, concepts or environments. The development of technology and the effects of industrialisation led to  7

Despite his adoption of this idiom, however, James immediately after tempers it by referring to ‘an English novelist, a woman of genius’ (1888: 388).

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­ ostalgia for earlier forms of civilisation, social communities and natural envin ronments. Yet scepticism, provoked by resistance to the epistemic virtue stance of mainstream culture along with the rejection of many aspects of received epistemological traditions and the ethos of industrialism, simultaneously invigorated an ‘art for art’s sake’ backlash, which spawned various overlapping and sometimes conflicting movements. Aestheticism foregrounded sensuality, heightened personal experiences and experimental artistic, sexual and political practices, and it encouraged a turning away from the natural world, ordinary society and rationality. The Decadent and symbolist movements conceived of the aesthetic as discontinuous with the everyday due to its capacity to extend the human cognitive capacities, either towards a grasp on truth (according to the symbolist movement) or (for the Decadents) as a means to create an alternative realm of pleasure and reverie. The Decadent-­turned-­symbolist Mallarmé (1896), for example, claims that ‘it is poetry that makes up for the failure of language, providing an extra extension’ (1999: 230). Chapter 5 discusses how the works of authors such as Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-­Thomson combine aestheticism with psychophysical insights, while the emergence of Surrealism’s later search for universal truth via the unconscious mind is discussed in Chapter 10. More generally, early-­twentieth-­century disillusion unveiled anguished levels of self-­consciousness and spurred a desire for melded-­together aesthetic substitutes, transfigured and dislocated out of the fragments of earlier forms of representation, as a means to ward off utter dissolution: ‘these fragments I have shored up against my ruin’ (Eliot 1990: 41). This topic is examined in Chapter 9, which explores changing aesthetic notions of representation from Romanticism to modernism through analysis of literary depictions of walking. Current theorists of distributed cognition debate whether different resources can play functionally equivalent cognitive roles or entail differences. Similarly, some Victorian and modernist thinkers emphasise continuity, while others emphasise difference, across natural and man-­made resources and environments, with the latter position coming particularly to the fore in the early twentieth century. Chapter 13 looks back on the ramifications of the early Frankfurt School’s concerns about human susceptibility to becoming inescapably entrained by acculturated cognitive patterns. The Frankfurt School failed to engage fully with Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey, who argued that creative changes could emerge during imitation and intersubjectivity and so offered the theoretical possibility of an ethical outcome. Like Dewey, Trotsky believed art existed along a continuum with everyday communication, rather than in opposition to it. In reaction to the sceptical trend, Trotsky’s later reiteration of Marx’s emphasis on the significance of the embodied life and environment encompasses the origin and function of art: ‘[Art] is not a disembodied element feeding on itself but a function of social man indisputably tied to his life and environment.’ He emphasises both the biological and the historical conditions of the development of cognitive processes and art forms. New lives and environments give birth to new language and artistic forms, which in turn give birth to new thoughts and



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feelings: ‘Language, changed and complicated by urban conditions, gives the poet a new verbal material, and suggests or facilitates new word combinations for the poetic formulation of new thoughts or of new feelings’ (1924: 1008). Trotsky conceives of humans and their cultural forms as adaptively emerging from a combination of biological and social factors. He describes a lyric poem, for example, as emerging from the physiology of sex and from individual, racial and social elements, which together create ‘the psychologic superstructure of love’: ‘they produce new shadings and intonations, new spiritual demands, a need of a new vocabulary, and so they present new demands on poetry’ (1008). Darwin himself explained the variability of human mental faculties as resulting both from heritable features and from ‘diversified conditions’, and had used the notion of evolution as a means to understand cultural as well as biological phenomena: the ‘survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection’ (2004: I, 113). This is a period-­specific expression of an important strand in the history of distributed cognition. Looking back, these ideas have their roots in Socratic ‘midwifery’, which then flourished via the Neoplatonic tradition into the Renaissance and beyond, with the comparison of the offspring of the body, our children, with the offspring of the mind, our ideas, writings and inventions (Anderson 2015b). Later, these ideas gave rise to Dawkins’s term ‘memes’ and the field of memetics, in which replication with variation and selection is the evolutionary process for cultural units as well as genetic ones. Art’s capacity to expand the mind, either because of its emergence from embodied and situated lives, or through its sublimation and defamiliarisation of the habitual and the rational, is a consistent theme throughout the period this volume covers. These trends can usefully be compared with tensions in the distributed cognition framework though the fault lines shift. A cognitive niche­– ­aptly itself also a term adapted from evolutionary models­– i­s a human’s cultural accretion of knowledge and development of specially designed environments (Sterelny 2003; Wheeler and Clark 2008). In enactivist models, continuity between the properties of life and mind, and between biological and cultural resources and environments, both constrains and enables our sense-­making processes. Like phenomenological approaches, they also highlight the need to be aware of and critically reflect on automatic and habitual processes (e.g. Thompson 2007; Colombetti 2014; Noë 2015). Across the theoretical works of Marx, Trotsky, Freud and Jung there echoes a heightened consciousness of the multilevel range of cognitive processes, spanning brain, body and environment, and the importance of the play of non-­conscious structures and modes in the mind and the world. This is a theme that is taken up in chapters here via considerations of the role of the emotions and the body in terms of breath and heartbeat, and expressions and gestures (see in particular Chapters 5 and 11). Freud is particularly renowned for his conceptualisation of the unconscious, the sexual drive and the split nature of the psyche, which gave new importance to the role of the body and emotions (and produced highly p ­ roblematic narratives about family

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and social structures).8 As mentioned earlier, accessing the unconscious as a means of enlarging the domain of the mind beyond the realm of rational thinking is explored in relation to the Surrealists in Chapter 10, though notably, despite this considerable theoretical and methodological shift, the Surrealists nonetheless continue the tradition of artists extending their minds and creativity through the deployment of a range of concepts, methods and resources. Freud at once celebrates and yet is perturbed by the effects of human dependence on forms of assistance he thought of as disturbingly ad hoc and artificial: ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times’ (2001: 90–1). As a number of the following chapters here make evident (see particularly Chapters 5, 6 and 13), awareness of human extendedness is also accompanied by anxiety about the negative consequences, such as: systematisation, mechanisation, routinisation, technological capitalisation, nationalism, propaganda and the manipulation of the masses. The greater the cognitive role that it is acknowledged that external resources and environment can play, the more vulnerable human nature may appear. More positively, a proliferation of expressions of forms of what can be termed biosensibility or ecocognition, a feeling with and thinking through wider patterns and dynamics, also abound. This is grounded in an awareness of humans’ capacity for connectedness to and entanglement in environments, whether natural, urban, social, temporal or fictional. From this perspective, even the discriminatory gaps between the different factors and forms need not be perceived as inevitably entailing failures or lacks, but instead are that which underpins fusion, connection or immersion and vitally makes fission, defamiliarisation and reflection possible.

The Chapters Our volume’s opening chapters reveal that a wide range of Victorian works emphasise the cognitive roles played by embodied experience in the world, and the debate, diversity and tensions around contrasting psychological and perceptual models. In the first of these chapters, Peter Garratt opens with a comparison of the depiction of the mind in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) and Clark and Chalmers’ ‘The extended mind’ (1998) (Chapter 3). Garratt describes Eliot as playing out Clark and Chalmers’ notion of socially extended cognition avant la lettre, through the character Latimer’s ability to read other minds such that he is a personification of ‘mental bloat’ (00).9 The early Victorian phrenological  8

See Anderson 2015b for discussion of some parallels and distinctions between psychoanalytical and distributed cognitive approaches. Also, a comparison between psychoanalysis and enactivism in relation to medieval and Renaissance theories of the breath is explored in Fradenburg Joy in volume 2 of this series.  9 The term mental or cognitive bloat describes the concern that the notion of the extended mind can be taken too far and include as part of your cognitive system things that are not readily available or actively in use, such as the entirety of information available via Google (see the series introduction to this volume (Chapter 1)).



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essentialism, which was underwritten by brain-­mind analogies akin to current neurocentric models, is contrasted with the mid and late Victorian psychological models of influential thinkers such as George Henry Lewes, William James and Alexander Bain. Their psychological models provide evidence of earlier expressions of theories that have similarities to the present-­day ones of extended and enactive cognition. In addition, they represent the neglected lineage of various strands of the current species of distributed cognition, since in this volume in particular we come up against acknowledged precursors, as well as those still to be recognised as such. Garratt sketches a line from Lewes, Bain and Herbert Spencer, via John Dewey, to Alva Noë’s recent argument that perception is grounded in motor skills. The sketching in of this branch of psychology provides background to the cognitive entanglement of Lewes, and his partner George Eliot, and is followed by discussion of how several of Eliot’s works reflect a comparable shift in fictional realism towards a more holistic and enactive approach.10 Rather than a realism of pictorialist representationalism, these works evoke the immersive engagement of minds in worlds. Fiction reveals this worldly immersion to us, as it paradoxically provides a critical reflection by immersing us in its own thought-­worlds (Anderson and Iversen 2018). Garratt voices the concern that the current extended mind hypothesis can tend to focus exclusively on cognition as a form of problem-­solving: ‘unlike Clark, Eliot has generally in view a significantly more capacious interest in cognition than its utility in problem-­solving, one that takes account of affective phenomena’ (52).11 The focus on problem-­solving has been raised elsewhere in this series as a general issue for current distributed cognition theories (see particularly volume 3), as well as having been touched on by the 4E literature itself, though there, as in Garratt, this critique was aimed solely at the extended mind hypothesis (Thompson and Stapleton 2008). Where there is such a narrowing of focus, it can be illuminated and countered by examination of the wide range of levels 10

A passage in Daniel Deronda that describes the merging of thinking and feeling along with a merging of self into environment as Deronda whiles away the time in a rowing boat is helpfully linked by Garratt to Lewes’s conceptualisation of the ‘stream of thought’ (1860: 372). It might be added that Lewes had himself been influenced by Gustav Fechner and there is a passage in his Elemente der Psychophysik that strikingly shares in the particulars of Eliot’s rowing scene (1860: I, 14): ‘A metaphor: thought may be regarded as part of a stream of bodily processes itself, and may be real only in terms of these processes, or it may need this stream only for steering as an oarsman steers his boat, raising only some incidental ripples with his oar . . . Even the freest navigation is subject to laws, as to the nature of the elements and the means that serve it. Similarly, psychophysics will find it necessary, in any case, to deal with the relationship of higher mental activity to its physical base’ (1966: I, 13). While Fechner’s psychophysical work uses this brief fictional scenario to illustrate the nature of thought, Eliot wittily reconceives Fechner’s sketchy metaphorical anonymous figure of the rower in his boat as a fleshed-­out central character caught up in a dramatic scene of her novel, at the same time as she pointedly plays on the scene’s relevance to psychophysical theory. Eliot aptly adds emotion and engagement to the skeletal thought experiment through transforming it into the novelistic form, thereby also illustrating novels’ superior psychophysical power. 11 Though, of course, Clark does take account of the cognitive role of affective phenomena in many of his other works, e.g. Clark 2003.

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and modes of cognitive experience evident in historical, literary and art works, such as our series presents. The essays in this series serve as helpful reminders that not all cognitive phenomena can be fully grasped purely in problem-­solving terms, terms that tellingly originate from classical models of cognitive science and mark the influence of and focus on a shorter-­term developmental trajectory by the current theories and their consequent blind spots. In the following chapter, Nicole Garrod-­Bush examines how the Victorian invention of a range of optical devices challenged traditional concepts of vision as separate from other senses and as operating by generating internal representations, and instead led to observations on the similarity of vision to touch and its connection to motion (Chapter 4). These insights are compared with current theories on vision as dynamically driven by our interaction with environments, which came to the fore through the work of J. J. Gibson on ecological perception (1979)12 and, more recently, in Noë’s theory of enactive perception (2004). Gibson describes optic flow during motion as overcoming visual underdetermination, while Noë compares vision to touch and argues that our sense of knowing what is in the world around us is due to our sense of access to such knowledge through movement, rather than a stored internal mental representation of it in our head. The relation between hand and eye was highlighted in the Victorian period through the development of a range of hand-­operated moving-­image technologies. Garrod-­Bush describes how Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday’s experiments, lectures and demonstration models, which explored how animated images could be produced by manipulating persisting retinal afterimages, influenced the development into a popular pastime of the use of a range of such optical devices as the thaumatrope, the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope. Garrod-­Bush then goes on to show how such innovations inspired depictions of vision in psychological, philosophical and fictional works, demonstrating widespread evidence of tactile and proto-­ enactive notions of vision, and of vision as interlinked with other forms of sensory perception, or as a form of proprioception, with the eye sensing by progressively moving around its surroundings. In Charlotte Brontë’s, Charles Dickens’s and George Eliot’s novels the eyes’ capacities and actions are shown to be ‘embedded in a sensory landscape that is temporal, dimensional, textural and, most importantly, tactile’ (72). These two opening chapters helpfully fill in our understanding of the niche from which fictional depictions of vision and cognition emerged during the Victorian period. In this way they expand on Alan Palmer’s pioneering works which describe how minds in the nineteenth-­century novel are portrayed as socially distributed not only through language but also through embodiment, including through the gaze (2004, 2010). Palmer’s claims are grounded by these chapters in the broader context of nineteenth-­century belief systems and practices, which influenced and were in turn influenced by fictional depictions of vision and cognition as embodied, intersubjective and enactive.13 12 13

Notably, Gibson’s mentor was Edwin B. Holt, who had been taught by William James. Notably, proto-­enactive theories did not just emerge during this or the Victorian period, but ideas



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The next chapter sketches in for us another perspective on visual perception and enactive embodiment, but switches its focus to the genre of poetry and extends its gaze slightly further forward in time, towards the expression of these concepts in late-­nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­century aesthetics (Chapter 5). Marion Thain begins by examining the development of ideas of embodied cognition in the theoretical works of Bernard Berenson, Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-­ Thomson. While Henry James had earlier emphasised the role of the novelist’s imagination in bringing forth the revelations of sensible experience, Berenson’s Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896) showed that artists can enable us to realise objects’ embodied significance and the way in which we ascribe physical tangibility to visual impressions. Echoing Garrod-­Bush’s observations about vision in the Victorian period, Thain contends that Berenson’s description of a bodily engagement, rather than merely a reflective one, complicates the predominance in recent criticism of the view of early modernism as primarily involving passive specularity, the dissociation of sight and touch, and a separation of viewer and viewed. She further substantiates this claim through an examination of Lee and Anstruther-­ Thomson’s (1912) concept of aesthetic pleasure as an organic life phenomenon that was principally generated not cerebrally but by the heart and lungs, and notes its resemblance to the James-­Lange theory of emotion as physiologically based.14 In Lee’s 1923 work The Handling of Words, she emphasises both that reading is an embodied process and the role of form, as well as content, on a reader’s sensibility and imagination. Thain then discusses these thinkers’ influence on literary culture, particularly on the British impressionist poetry of Arthur Symons and the influence of Symons’ own essay on ‘The Decadent movement in literature’, in order to unearth a broader seam of phenomenological impressionism in fin de siècle aesthetics. In turning the discussion to Symons, Thain cites Giovanna Colombetti’s description of impressions as ‘relational phenomena that emerge in the interaction between perceiver and perceived person or situation’ (2014: 180); notably Colombetti in this passage is drawing on Dewey. In her analysis of Symons, Thain also draws on Merleau-­Ponty’s work (a notable influence on Colombetti, Noë and other enactivists). Merleau-­Ponty’s conceptualisation of experience as based in a body that both touches and is touched is used to distinguish between the impressionism of French visual artists, such as Monet, where the primary experience is as an object and of receiving an impression, and Symons, where the emphasis, following the lyric form, is on generating an impression as subject in the world. The issue of the distinction between generation versus reception in forms of ­cognitive of vision as touch-­like, as entangled with other sensory, affective and cognitive faculties, and as capable of being wielded, have been around for a very long time and also relate back to theories of extromission­– ­that is, visual perception as enabled by the emission of beams from the eyes (as in the ‘evil eye’ superstition). For example, see Anderson (2007a, 2015b) on the gaze in medieval and Renaissance literature, Lochman and Wojciehowski in volume 2 of this series on Renaissance gaze as affective penetration (2019), and Pagán Cánovas (2011) on the gaze in Greek mythology. 14 See Fradenburg Joy (2019) in volume 2 of this series for an enactive and psychoanalytical take on the role of the sigh and breathing in medieval and Renaissance works.

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coalescence recurs in this series, as it does in the history of ideas more generally. Meanwhile, the play of influences back and forth across disciplines and time culturally tallies with new richer ideas of evolution as not so much a straightforwardly branching tree but a web of looping processes that also features horizontal exchanges across species, reanimating in new and hybrid forms legacies of different times and spaces.15 The next chapter’s theoretical considerations are centred around an analysis of Marcel Proust’s works (Chapter 6). Marco Bernini discusses the consequences of theories of distributed cognition for understandings of the self, and the possible anxiety generated by ontological extendedness. Bernini also provides a new take on the notion of literature as itself a cognitive tool, by exploring it specifically in relation to our use of analogies.16 He builds on cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s (2001) claim that analogies are central to cognition by showing that they are central to Proust’s work and understanding of the self, and by arguing that literature more generally both exhibits and explores the meaning-­making nature of analogy with its ‘world-­multiplying’ properties (101). In Swann’s Way the character Marcel is seen either synchronically distributing himself across his environment or diachronically distributing himself across his memories as a means to quell a pervasive uneasiness. While habit leads to transparent couplings which anchor the self, their disruption leads to analogy-­making and the emergence of other possible worlds. Bernini finds that despite the persistence of a minimal self (a sense of existence), when fissures­– ­such as sleep­– ­have intervened, there automatically emerges a drive for a higher degree of selfhood such as can be accomplished via richer forms of embodied cognition and environmental coupling, or through analogical cognitive enhancement. This claim importantly tackles the tendency to describe the embodied, environmentally embedded self merely in terms of low-­level processes, with higher-­level processes generated solely by the autobiographical, representational or narrative aspects of the self. More generally, it might be concluded that humans rely on analogical or possible worlds as a means of extending the self across time and space, and as a form of meaning-­making amidst the fluxes of our spatiotemporal existence. Merleau-­Ponty reappears in the next chapter as a more central character, along with his fellow phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. Here, Jennifer Gosetti-­ Ferencei discusses the distributed nature of cognition in Rilke and Cézanne’s works (Chapter 7). Rilke and Cézanne both strikingly capture phenomena often thought of as beyond the realm of their art forms: Cézanne makes visible the nature of perception across time in visual art, and Rilke creates a sense of space in poetry. 15 16

For instance, see Arnold, Sapir and Martin 2008. On the ramifications of distributed cognition for notions of the self see also Clark 2008, and in relation to this potentially causing anxiety see particularly Anderson 2015b and Lyne in volume 2 of this series (2019); on literature as a mind tool, affordance or extension of cognitive circuitry see Anderson 2007b, 2015b; Anderson and Iversen 2018; Cave 2016; and chapters across volumes 1–4 of this series, particularly Burrows (2019) and Lee (2019).



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Cézanne distorts objects and scenes in his paintings in order to realise the virtually present and the temporally extended nature of embodied visual perception; for example, rather than portraying round objects elliptically, as they would appear in a photograph, he aims at the roundness they exhibit to embodied visual perception, such that the shape appears to emerge in time with our eyes’ movements. Merleau-­Ponty comments on an ‘inverted intentionality’ in another of Cézanne’s artworks, such that a ‘landscape thinks itself in him and he becomes its consciousness’ (1993: 358, 67; see p. 119 of this volume). Meanwhile Rilke, who wrote about Cézanne’s work and worked for Rodin, aims at a spatial poetics. He linguistically evokes the presence and self-­realisation of a thing, in what he called his ‘Thing-­ Poems’ (‘Ding-­Gedichte’), by capturing its structure and relation to embodied perception; for example, by portraying the dynamic of a ball’s movement through space, with a shift from a human perspective to that of the ball in motion choreographing the movements of the players below. The gap between aesthetics of visual and linguistic art forms is spanned by the realisation of the underpinning role of embodied cognition and intentionality in both, which leads to a sharing of characteristics across the aesthetics of art and literature. Cognitive linguistic and literary studies have played an important role by making evident language’s capacity to evoke perception, kinaesthesis and embodiment. While taking on board Noë’s view of the ways in which art enables us to reflect on our cognitive tools (2015), Gosetti-­ Ferencei adds the reminder that art also enables us ‘to reflect on the world as it presents itself’ to us (118). She closes with an injunction on the need to draw on insights from both cognitive science and phenomenology, combining third-­person empiricism and first-­person experiential perspectives in order to grasp visual and linguistic artworks’ common grounding in embodied cognition and intentionality. Since its roots and workings span the phenomenological and the cognitive scientific traditions, such an inclusive way forward is arguably precisely what a distributed cognitive approach has the potential to bring to aesthetics and to our understanding of being in the world. The following chapter might be described as exploring Merleau-­Ponty’s concept of ‘inverted intentionality’ from a surprising new angle, that is, through the medium of modernist photography (and novels that deploy photography) (Chapter 8). Drawing on Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) general claim that the environment can play an active role in driving cognition, Adam Lively contends that photography is just such a form of ‘active externalism’. He perceives two problems with current distributed cognitive theories: the presumption that the dominant direction of agency is from the subject towards the environment (directionality), and the tendency to think of distributed cognition in spatial terms, which elides the role of time (duration). Lively considers how the late Susan Hurley’s description of a ‘horizontal modularity’, involving personal and subpersonal ‘feedback loops of varying orbits’ in ‘a field of causal flows’, can act as a corrective to our tendency to neglect the way environments not only transform and reflect, but are also causally continuous with, human outputs (1998: 2). Modernist notions of photography as enabling objective observations mean that it could be conceived of as

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a ­perceptual prosthesis. Yet a photograph exceeds any finite definition, such as by a caption. Lively adapts Roland Barthes’s terms to distinguish between a photograph’s ‘studium’ (its general interest) and a studium’s puncturing by the ‘punctum’ (the contingent detail) which varies according to viewer. This perspective enables a reconceptualisation of viewing photography as involving ‘an enactive objectivity’ (138). Somewhat ironically, photography exposes the fact that the use of snapshot spatial terms rather than time-­oriented ones (brain-­body-­world extensions rather than past-­present-­future ones) fails to capture the durational nature of cognitive processes. Besides, the durational nature of even a snapshot is demonstrated by the Surrealists’ capturing of motion in their explosante-­fixe. Lively describes the use of photography for personal portraits rather than scientific or ideological endeavours in terms of a switch from an instrumental category to one of simulation. Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) emphasised the significance of duration and introduced the notion of the ontological unconscious, the being of the past, which Lively describes as transmitted by photographs. Georges Rodenbach’s symbolist novel Bruges-­la-­Morte (1892), which was the first novel to include photographs, is compared with W.  G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). The latter makes explicit the former’s implication that the dominance of agency shifts from the viewers to the photograph, through their immersion in the photograph’s representation of past life. In such cases, the tendency is for ‘the photographic image to cease to be an extension of the viewer’s mind, and instead for the viewer’s mind to become an extension of the photographic image’ (148).17 As mentioned earlier, a prevailing theme in these chapters is the widespread questioning of the nature of representation in art and literature, with increasing recourse to reflexivity and recursion as a means of illustrating the diffusive operation and circulatory nature of the mind. In the next chapter, Andrew Roberts and Eleanore Widger explore how concerns about representation relate to ideas about perception, motion and the recursive nature of systems that turn back self-­ reflexively on themselves (Chapter 9). Enactivist theories are recruited as a means to reconsider the notion of walking not merely as conducive to but as constitutive of cognition: ‘the walking subject is thinking not just in, but with, a landscape, or a crowd, or a room’ (152). Romantic and modernist literary works’ uses of walking to represent phenomenological experience are set against each other: Romantic poetry celebrates the life-­enhancing effects of walking in nature and the permeable nature of mind-­world interactions that occur, while modernist literature tends to represent the walker in an urban environment and is more ambivalent about 17

This chapter comes closest to overlapping with the new field in material culture of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO); however, in contrast to Heidegger’s distinction­– ­which has influenced distributed cognition accounts­– b ­ etween the present-­to-­hand (tool merely observed) and the ready-­ to-­hand (e.g. tool transparently in use and successfully incorporated), Graham Harman’s (2002) seminal OOO account instead argues that the latter signals that ‘tool-­beings retreat into a silent background’ (6), an account that echoes postmodern notions of the elusive, independent and inaccessible nature of the real or the referent.



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mind-­world relations.18 In examining the contrast, Roberts and Widger combine sensorimotor enactivism, which centres around the idea of cognition as embodied action (as discussed in several of the earlier chapters), and autopoietic enactivist approaches, which describe the way a living system strives to regulate and generate itself (Thompson 2007). The latter relates to the focus in literary studies on identity formation and construction­– ­though notably this has not tended to consider the biological dimensions, which are here added by an enactivist approach. Enactivism’s focus on cognition as relational and based in sensorimotor coupling and intersubjective interaction is associated with the rejection of notions of cognition as merely the internal representation of the external realm. In the domain of aesthetics this stance connects with the Romantic poets’ critical attitude to mimetic concepts of art (Abrams 1958), which radically re-­emerges in modernism’s even more extensive rejection of representation. Roberts and Widger’s enactive reading of the constitutive role of environment for the creative imagination in Wordsworth’s works notes his portrayal of perception and perspective as situated: for example, as attentive to ‘sensorimotor contingency’ (Noë 2004: 103). This situatedness in turn can have a formative effect on identity by consolidating one’s ‘sensorimotor subjectivity’ (Thompson 2005: 417), which enables a new understanding of ‘the Romantic emphasis on individuality through interaction’ (159). Meanwhile T. S. Eliot’s walkers are ensnared in oppressive cityscapes, which seem to be physical instantiations of ideological norms that encroach and fragment identities which are already self-­consciously modified by gender and class: cognitive extension can be constraining and identity-­destroying in a negative way.19 Roberts and Widger here raise an issue brought to the fore across this series: the current neglect of dysfunctional forms of distributed cognition due to philosophical and cognitive science’s focus on its functional utility. Virginia Woolf offers a point of juxtaposition to Eliot, in her portrayal of characters who are sustained by a sensory aesthetic and her depiction of the sense of cognitive connectedness that can emerge from walking. Her gestures towards the possibility of distributed identity as positive, rather than ethically problematic, link with a similar outlook that has been foregrounded in enactivism (e.g. Varela et al. 1991). As Roberts and Widger conclude, literary works can provide ‘nuanced social, historical, cultural and political specificities which inflect and enrich the theories of situated cognition’ (170). The following chapter provides another example of how distributed cognition can adapt to a discipline, tradition or period’s particularities, and how it makes visible the cognitive significance of these particularities and their relation to the available concepts, methods and resources. In this case, the chapter sets its 18

Volume 3 of this series provides a number of related chapters on ideas about the rejection of ­dualism and the cognitive role of the environment in Romanticism. 19 Richard Sha’s chapter on Blake’s ‘London’ in volume 3 (2019) offers a helpful point of comparison here, exhibiting an earlier instance of concern about the ideological dimensions of cognitive extension, as does George Rousseau’s chapter on Tristram Shandy’s dysfunctional extendeness in the same volume.

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­ iscussion of Surrealism against the backdrop of the shifting trends that preceded d it in nineteenth-­century representational art, impressionism and Cubism (Chapter 10). These different styles reflect and endorse belief in various notions of the mind and art, yet all in various ways exhibit some form of distributed cognition. Kerry Watson expands on Andy Clark’s observation that the artist’s use of a sketchpad is part of the creative process, involving ‘an iterated process of externalising and re-­ perceiving’ (2003: 77). She discusses how even when considering representational artists we need to look beyond the sketchpad: with Géricault, for example, iterative creativity begins with research that precedes the use of the sketchpad and then continues into the process of painting itself. Impressionism and Cubism’s affinity with phenomenological and enactive insights through their aim to capture the enmeshed nature of visual perception and thought is also discussed, before Watson proceeds to her central concern: a detailed account of Surrealism’s development. The Surrealists perceived their methods as enabling them to give up rational control and to evade aesthetic or moral concerns in order to get at ‘the actual functioning of thought’ (Breton 1972: 26). Surrealism intensifies concerns about representationalism in art and rebukes or even inverts the hierarchical division between low and high art that had emerged. Under the influence of Freudian, and later Jungian, psychoanalytical theories, Surrealists set out to expose the unconscious realm. They aimed at a certain transparency by adopting or adapting methods that employed chance in order to escape the obfuscations of their own rational thinking, and as in Hutchins’s (1995) notion of distributed cognition the Surrealists often worked as part of a collaborative team. Watson demonstrates that their use of a new range of artistic methods and materials should, like the sketchpad, be counted as integral to the creative process, since it enabled them to make work that would otherwise not have been possible. The Surrealists’ use of recursive processes of action, perception and manipulation in the creation of the artworks reveals that even creativity can be distributed, and, more generally, highlights the sheer diversity and range of practices and materials that can be considered cognitive resources. Cognition as a recursive process of casting beyond oneself is one of the themes in the next essay, which outlines three modes that distributed cognition takes in modernist literature: projecting, responding and circulating (Chapter 11).20 Melba Cuddy-­Keane situates the discussion regarding distributed cognition in terms of qualia: the way it captures what cognitive processes feel like (regardless of empirical concerns).21 Fictional narrative is a useful way to examine the topic of extended 20

Cuddy-­Keane distinguishes her use of these terms from what she refers to as those for ‘adult collaboration’ in Anderson (2015b); yet it would be more accurate to describe Anderson as identifying generation and reception as aspects of cognitive fusion in her analysis of the partial and dynamic nature of ad hoc cognitive amalgams. 21 Emily Troscianko coined the term ‘cognitive realism’ (2013a, 2014): ‘a cognitively realistic text is one whose evocation of a particular facet of cognition corresponds to the reality of how that cognitive faculty operates in readers’ minds’ (00), which is here given by Cuddy-­Keane as her term for fiction in which ‘the narrative simulates mental processes in real time’, distinguishing her use



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phenomenal consciousness, because it provides an unchanging account that draws both on the author’s and on collective thought and experience. Modernism brings to the fore not only the positive aspects of our relationality but also the dangers of forced or manipulative impositions of self on world or world on self. Cuddy-­Keane describes the modernist approach as involving a tightrope balance between ‘desiring connectivity and fearing coercion’ (190). This wariness, she contends­– ­though the other chapters here might place the robustness of this contention in doubt­ – ­is evident in an avoidance of the extremes of enactive or extended approaches, despite the pervasiveness of modernist versions of their more moderate siblings, embodied and embedded cognition. Projecting is examined in relation to the use of free indirect discourse in Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, which renders ambiguous the source by giving a character’s internal thoughts and feelings in the third person, and through fictional descriptions of pain-­induced out-­of-­body experiences leading to transformative in-­wider-­world experiences. John Ruskin’s introduction of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ term is contrasted with depictions of responsiveness to the energies and rhythms of the wider environment. Finally, against the backdrop of modernist ideas about insect colonies as superorganisms and the flocking behaviour of birds as exhibiting forms of collective thought, Cuddy-­Keane demonstrates Woolf’s exploration of the emergence of human groups, through movements rippling across and fluidly connecting individuals, with the accretion of an additional layer of complexity in play via humans’ linguistic patterning. Ultimately Woolf leaves us, as Cuddy-­Keane argues, with awareness of the collective work needed to transform our experiences of embodied relationality into active forms of social and planetary responsibility. On a similar note, Emily Troscianko points out that the shift towards distributed cognition has led to an increased awareness of the cognitive sciences’ relevance to cultural and aesthetic domains of the humanities, since it expands notions of cognition from just a focus on internal processing mechanisms to its role in experience (Chapter 12). Troscianko sets out both pro and contra arguments on the issue of whether Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality takes a distributed cognition perspective. Research has shown that abstract concepts tend to be grounded in embodied experience, and Nietzsche uses a familiar argument-­as-­path structure, a lexicalised and embedded metaphor which provides a fossilised route hardwired into the mind for easy thought traversal. Yet bizarre, unfamiliar and emotion-­ evoking metaphors intrude into and digress from this overarching conceit in such a way that increased active imagining is prompted in the reader. In his construction of textual imagery, Nietzsche shifts between nineteenth-­century pictorialist realism and modernism’s destabilising minimalist imagery. As Troscianko observes, there is ongoing debate around whether mental imagery is pictorialist or propositional, or, as more recently argued, enacted. While nineteenth-­century texts tend to deploy a pictorialist-­inspired accumulation of details, Nietzsche often deploys enactive in terms of her focus on the qualia, though Troscianko also covers this in her broader definition (cf. Cuddy-­Keane 192 n. 8, and Troscianko 213).

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modes that depend on underspecified action-­guided imagery. Lucia Foglia and Kevin O’Regan’s (2016) enactive account of the four distinctions between vision and visual imaging­– ­bodiliness, grabbiness, insubordinateness and richness­– ­is re-­ examined by Troscianko, who finds instead continuities across all domains except the last: Nietzsche’s language (like many other authors’) induces bodily, grabby and insubordinate imagery in the service of intellectual argumentation, though its richness remains distinct from the perceptual experiences generated without the intermediary of the written word. Another factor key to understanding Nietzsche’s rhetoric in a distributed sense is that he himself shifts between an intradiegetic persona enacting the conceptual journey through the text with the reader and an extradiegetic persona retrospectively considering a journey in thought previously undertaken, prior to its being written down or read­– ­thus placing in question its distributed cognitive nature; that is, was the journey actually just a post hoc fabrication, and what is the nature of the joint attention of reader and author, or the role of writing in thinking? The text, Troscianko concludes, not only illustrates Nietzsche’s perspectival attitude to morality, but also shows the limits of distributed cognition: ‘even context-­dependence is context dependent (distribution can come and go)’ (230). More generally, these volumes make evident that the human mind’s capacity to distribute across time and space is constant even if the nature and size of the repertoire are variable, and that the perpetually contracting and expanding nature of the distributed cognitive domain itself can be both a virtue and a curse. While Cuddy-­Keane inclines towards shrinking 4E cognition to 2Es on axes (embodied-­enactive and embedded-­extended), exploration of a path not taken by the Frankfurt School leads Ben Morgan to suggest ethics as a 5th E (Chapter 13). This suggestion reflects the general lack of discussion or foregrounding of ethics in many existing works on distributed cognition. A number of chapters across the series, particularly in this volume, have helped to bring this lack more into view. Ethical aspects and implications necessarily run across all the Es of 4E cognition, offering a rich seam for reconsideration of normative assumptions and stances. Morgan considers as parallel cases Walter Benjamin’s encounter with developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky and Max Horkheimer’s with pragmatist John Dewey. Benjamin contrasts the purely instrumental task-­oriented language of aphasics with the ideal of a non-­instrumental language beyond that which establishes a living relation to oneself and others. For Benjamin the mimetic faculty is a pre-­conscious and physical attunement to the world that is overwritten by culture, such that although our nature is fleetingly displayed in linguistic interactions it is difficult to disinter from our pragmatic dealings which are constrained by existing conceptuality, such that it remains always elusively out of reach. For Vygotsky language and thought are, as in a Venn diagram, irreducible to each other, and his notion of a zone of proximal development, whereby shared activity facilitates and extends a child’s conceptual reach, entails that imitation’s combining of innate and environmental processes remains open-­ended. Imitation as distributed and dynamically shaped by lived interactions opens scope for the emergence of new possible ways of being and interacting. Consequently, for Vygotsky our human-

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ity is expressible, while for Benjamin it appears only obscurely, like fitful lights gleaming on a distant shore as successive waves of history ceaselessly cast us back. Similarly for Horkheimer, our mechanised applications of inherited conceptual patterns run counter to the possibility of having our own experiences. Horkheimer applauds Dewey for what he views as a similar stance to his own regarding the resistance of aesthetics to instrumental reason, yet he ignores the fact that Dewey does not distinguish as sharply as he does between art and other forms of experience. Dewey presents a continuum rather than an opposition between the instrumental and non-­instrumental, such that, as with Vygotsky, our future orientation holds radical possibilities, whereas for Horkheimer probability problematically displaces objective truth. The failure of both Benjamin and Horkheimer to engage fully with the distinctions between their own stances and those of Vygotsky and Dewey leads to their failure to recognise the possibility that imitation is distributed and ethically inflected, Morgan concludes, and marks a resistance born out of their own academic conceptual constraints. It sees them seemingly fulfilling their own prophecies such that the possibility of creative distributed imitation to which their ideal of ethics aspires but defers is itself deferred.

Conclusion This volume reveals seismic shifts across the environmental, epistemological and sociocultural structures that informed the ways in which distributed cognition was conceived in this period. As with Henry James’s depiction of novelists all looking out of different windows on the same scene before them (1908: x), the chapters in this volume have provided detailed and nuanced perspectives on the formation of ideas around the play of the world in the mind and the mind in the world. The sustained attentiveness to the biologically, environmentally, socially, technologically, linguistically and artistically distributed nature of cognition throws into question the predominant view of the shift from Victorian culture and modernism as dominated by the rise of individualism: rather than simply a turning inwards or away from the world, an investigation and interrogation of the porous and negotiable nature of boundaries between self and world are evident, replacing any assumption of their distinctness, with an extended reflexivity and recursivity that entails generative feedback loops that are enacted through and extended into the world.22 In the works of writers such as Woolf and Proust, there appears a recognition of cognitive processes as polythetic ad hoc amalgams without any single determining feature and without a single hard boundary between an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ system. Such a recognition helps explain the changing array of significant contributory factors that shape cognition across different cases and contexts. It also helps us understand why the debate about what constitutes the mark of the mental continues 22

Notably, the term ‘recursivity’ dates to the late nineteenth century (see ; last accessed 6 February 2020): ‘defining the value of a ­function by using other values of the same function.’

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without resolution­– ­since, after all, the defining feature of cognition exemplified in these volumes is precisely its enduring adaptability (Anderson 2015a, 2015b). The extensive emergence of experimental art and literary forms and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both expressed and contributed to views of the mind and self as permeable and dynamic entities. The epistemological concerns that can emerge from such viewpoints, where the questioning of the extent to which we internally create and store accurate representational models of the world blurs into anxiety about the grounding of our knowledge structures, are currently evident in contemporary experiments in art and literary forms and in our more general concerns about the extent of our cognitive access to a verifiable world. Earlier debates can be helpfully understood as historically inflected and culturally situated expressions of a now even more pressing question: how the particularity of resources affects the functions they fulfil and their feedback into our biological cognitive capacities. This question has ramifications for how we evaluate the significance of different resources, neural, bodily and non-­biological, in different contexts. In general, the view proposed by this series is that in certain contexts or while performing certain functions a difference between resources may matter, though in other cases it may not be significant (see also Anderson 2015b). Again, it might be added that this variability is itself what allows for the perpetuation of different and conflicting views about the mind. The fluctuating expansions and contractions of our minds are explored in this series through the rigorous deployment of coalitions of works from varying times and disciplines in a way that is productively insightful in multiple domains. Encountering the historically inflected and culturally situated beliefs and practices of Victorian and modernist distributed cognition provides a new perspectival depth and broadening of our own limited purview­– ­current debates and definitions have themselves been created and constrained by their own developmental trajectories, and in this volume we see the emergence of a wider array of strands that have contributed to the current tradition than is generally recognised, and which may hold promise for resolution of current impasses. By addressing the ways in which cognition involves such brain-­body-­world processes and the ways in which beliefs and practices of distributed cognition are historically situated and culturally inflected, humanities scholars can newly come to know the significance of their own research matter and we can uphold its value as a vital aspect of our being human in the world.

3 Th e V i c t o r i a n E x t e n de d Mind : G eorg e Eliot, Psyc h o lo g y a n d t h e Bou nd s of C og nition Peter Garratt

George Eliot’s story The Lifted Veil (1859)­– ­in her words, a ‘jeu de melancholie’ (Haight 1954: 41)­– ­has at its centre a sickly, misanthropic narrator with two unusual abilities: seeing into the future, and accessing other people’s private thoughts. Exercised involuntarily, and seemingly sporadically, these ‘superadded’ (Eliot 2001: 14) forms of knowing shape the events and experiences related by this doleful figure, Latimer. Significantly, Latimer does not regard himself as a beneficiary of some mysteriously bestowed gift or magical affordance; the language used to describe his habit of ‘breaking in on the privacy of another soul’ (Eliot 2001: 38) implies instead some drastic psychological enlargement: But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me­– w ­ hen the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-­shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap. (Eliot 2001: 14) By means of this narrative conceit, The Lifted Veil conjures in disarmingly realist terms the image of a supersized mind. Latimer’s mental processes roam wildly in space and time, and their phenomenal effects appear at once magnifying and additive in character. Strikingly, though, the passage has a discernibly materialist register, almost bordering on abject humour, as Latimer compares mental states­ – ­beliefs and desires­– ­to aggregations of physical matter scrutinised under a microscope, in a thread of images evoking metabolic changes and organic decay (enervation, pain, excretion, decomposition). In this respect, The Lifted Veil bears some relation to a thought experiment. Where, the reader wants to ask, does Latimer’s mind stop and the rest of the world begin? A general form of that same question is

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posed at the start of ‘The extended mind’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 7), a seminal essay in the distributed cognition literature, and surprisingly germane to this text. For even if set in the context of Eliot’s developing moral aesthetic, and her ideas of fellow-­feeling or sympathy, The Lifted Veil continues to be fascinating because of its grotesque style of play with what the philosopher Michael Wheeler (2017) calls the ‘edge of thought’, as hinted at by its title’s suggestive threshold imagery.1 Beneath this somewhat gauche gothicism lies a more supple philosophical curiosity about the place of the mind in the world, the bounds of cognition, and how we understand the location of mental processes. Crucially, this is obviously not the same extended mind that Andy Clark and David Chalmers hypothesised in 1998, for at least two reasons. First, despite George Eliot’s studied psychological realism, which draws directly on the discourse of mid-­Victorian psychology, her literary invention of a mind like Latimer’s infringes natural laws, and Clark and Chalmers (1998: 7–8) intend extended cognition to bear upon everyday reasoning agents, not just imaginary, cyberpunk or ‘exotic’ situations. Second, a central thrust of the argument in ‘The extended mind’ concerns agent-­environment couplings and the claim that parts of the external world can, and do (at least some of the time), play a constitutive role in particular cognitive processes, despite lying outside the perimeter of the skin. One may choose to read Latimer’s powers of mindreading and clairvoyance as being equivalent, in a figurative way, to add-­on resources such as prosthetic technologies; but, if not, then his stark example offers little purchase on the dynamics of coupled systems. The narcissistic enclosure of the narrative situation might seem to confirm this: The Lifted Veil begins and ends with Latimer describing his own death, first as a visionary episode and then as an identical experience occurring in the narrative present, so that his account finishes where it proleptically began (a scene of Latimer sitting alone beside the hearth in his study, having chest pains, suffocating, then fatally losing consciousness). These circular structures of self and text work against any involving, connective, communing impetus in The Lifted Veil, and eventually confirm Latimer’s status as an island­– o­ r, as it were, a non-­coupled agent. Reduced, by the end, to a ‘wanderer in foreign countries’ (Eliot 2001: 42), he lives reclusively after separating from a wife, Bertha, who planned to poison him. One could note other less salient differences between these two hypotheses of mind extension. Noticeably, for instance, in ‘The extended mind’, Clark and Chalmers confine their choicest examples to problem-­solving scenarios with little obvious emotional valence­– ­arithmetic, Tetris puzzles, memory-­based urban ­navigation­– i­n contrast with Eliot’s interest in the affective, volitional and ethical textures of Latimer’s overextended, if simultaneously passive, mental world. All the same, it takes little effort to see that The Lifted Veil’s narrative intersects, perhaps piercingly critically, with the broader argument they mount which says that ‘once 1

Glossed briefly, ‘sympathy’ for Eliot names an important ethical act or process whereby the limitations of personal viewpoint and egotistical self-­interest are overcome, with regard to other minds and persons, precisely through individual imaginative comportment (see e.g. Ermarth 1985).



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the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 18). On a more specific level, it feels as though Eliot’s fictional scene literalises the consequences of their take on socially extended cognition, which affirms that ‘my mental states [can] be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 17). When Latimer intrudes on the private thoughts of those around him, their mental states come to constitute his own mental states, such that his cognitive machinery spans and incorporates theirs. So hellish and unremitting is this, Latimer emerges in the story as almost a personification of the problem known as ‘mental bloat’ (see e.g. Rupert 2004; Rowlands 2010; Gallagher 2013), the worry associated with functionalist versions of extended cognition (such as Clark’s) that it leads to potentially vast components of the world, entities like libraries or Google or legal systems, being liberally and improbably included in what counts as a cognitive process, thus overextending the mind. It feels safe to venture, in other words, that The Lifted Veil illustrates George Eliot thinking seriously about the mind as a distributed phenomenon, something achieved in her own imaginative terms and using the formal resources of fiction. Developing this point in relation to her work more generally, and to relevant features of mid-­nineteenth-­century psychology, this chapter seeks to recover the meaningful contours of what might be called, for ease, Victorian extended cognition. As should be clear, despite the choice of terminology, this procedure does not breezily subsume either Eliot or other writers of the time to a grand narrative of distributed cognition, based on claims of uncanny prescience or neat alignment with a set of present-­day frameworks that remain, in any case, more or less provisional, hypothetical, contentious, and sometimes incompatible. It would be practically impossible, as well as unsound, to retrofit or universalise such positions. At issue instead, foundationally, is a claim that mid-­Victorian writing and culture did not always think of the mind as sealed hermetically in the head. Enriching this with detail, the chapter then tries to say why this matters, identifying the consequential features of such an approach to George Eliot while establishing a conversation between a wider discursive regime of the past and another still in formation known as 4E cognitive science­– ­a task still largely unattempted by critics of the Victorian period.2 In its final phase, my argument offers a reading of Middlemarch that draws on Eliot’s most celebrated novel to engage critically with specific commitments associated with the extended and enactive camps, targeting Alva Noë in particular, precisely to allow the Victorian moment to speak both with and against the grain of the present.

2

Outside of narrative theory (e.g. Palmer 2010), I am unaware of any substantial study of Victorian literature and culture that ventures into the territory of extended cognition or 4E theories in a sustained way, though some insightful critics do acknowledge these frameworks tangentially, or in passing (e.g. Morgan 2017).

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Beyond Brainhood The reduction of mind to brain has roots in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century materialism, and earlier modern discourses of the self, where one finds the origins of what Fernando Vidal calls ‘brainhood’, the ontological quality of ‘being, rather than simply having, a brain’ (2009: 6). As Vidal puts it, after Locke, [inalienable self-­ownership] was necessarily located in the brain as [the] organ responsible for the functions with which the self was identified. By an intellectual mechanism involving both transitivity and metonymy­– ­from self-­functions to brain, from the part to the whole­– t­he self and the brain became consubstantial. The individualism characteristic of western and westernized societies, the supreme value given to the individual as autonomous agent of choice and initiative, and the corresponding emphasis on interiority at the expense of social bonds and contexts, are sustained by the brainhood ideology and reproduced by neurocultural discourses. (Vidal 2009: 7) If the perceived explanatory authority of today’s neuroscience (allied to concepts such as plasticity and to media-­friendly brain-­imaging techniques, especially fMRI) has begun to transform social understandings of the human person in ways that are neurally focused (see e.g. Slaby 2010; Blackman 2012), then such effects represent only the most recent phase in a much longer development. With the enactivist philosopher Alva Noë (2009: 19–24), we might ask if the promise to localise physical activation patterns makes functional magnetic resonance imaging the ‘new phrenology’. Certainly the heyday of phrenology, in roughly the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century, illustrates the longer formation of brainhood. Isolating the brain as the organ of the mind and seat of mental experience was essential to the empirical work of its pioneers, Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim. ‘The brain is exclusively the organ of the manifestations of mind,’ Gall and Spurzheim argued, drawing on the correlation between increased brain size and the child’s developing mind and, conversely, on the weakening of mental faculties in age or conditions of disease in proportion to alterations in the brain (Spurzheim 1815: 88). There was also the indisputable evidence of common sense: ‘every one feels that he thinks by means of his brain’ (Spurzheim 1815: 88). Popularised in the Romantic and early Victorian era, phrenology took cognitive functions and moral capacities to be localised in specific areas of the brain; as a practice, it took the undulating surface of the head to be legible through measurement. In this practical respect, operating tactilely at the level of the skull and skin, phrenology instantiated a peculiarly literal form of what 4E theorists refer to as ‘bioprejudices’ about the location of mind (Clark 2008: xxvi). Phrenological brainhood happens to be parodied in The Lifted Veil. As an overly sensitive boy, Latimer is sent to see a phrenologist by his overbearing father, a figure marked out in the text as a philistine (‘an intensely orderly man, in



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root and stem a banker’, Eliot 2001: 5). To him, the simplified surface/depth model of cranial reading evidently appeals. Brains plainly ground personhood. Ironically, for Latimer, the experience of having the surface of his head examined feels invasive and violating. The phrenologist, Mr Letherall, he reports, ‘took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner’, and then ‘pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it’ (6). Compounding the indelicacy of this commodifying touch (a reminder that brainhood could be lucrative for pseudoscientific practitioners) is the ghastly name Letherall itself. If not quite an example of Eliot’s occasional habit of mimetic naming (Grandcourt, Farebrother), Letherall is still associative: hearing it as ‘leather all’, the reader catches the briefest suggestion of leathering or thrashing and the pain of corporal punishment, or senses the leathery quality of the hands pressing on Latimer’s skull, while its written form is a mutation of Lethe, the classical river of forgetting (presumably Latimer wishes he could forget his visit to the phrenologist). Part of the point is that Letherall’s authority is self-­confirming: the examination reproduces what is already reliably known about Latimer’s shy, vaguely artistic temperament, only now locating it diagnostically in a spot somewhere near his eyebrows. The defective profile is then remedied with a form of systematic scientific education, which his father might have imposed on his effeminate son anyway. If redundant, however, the phrenological scene has a kind of primal significance in the wider context of Latimer’s autobiographical narrative, precisely because it foreshadows his mature habit of self-­pathologisation, disclosed in furtive references to his feeble personality type and his ‘abnormal mental condition’ (27). Like Eliot, Victorian psychology by the 1850s and 1860s had moved well beyond the essentialist assumptions of phrenology. That model of neural localisation, like the example of today’s publicly misunderstood fMRI scan, ‘reproduces the belief that humans have a biological self on which culture and intersubjectivity are somehow tacked’ (Vidal 2009: 10). In contrast, much influential Victorian psychological theory tended to adopt a more holistic and systemic view of the way sensations, feelings and higher-­order thinking rise and fall in the embodied organism. This meant a thoroughgoing challenge to the residual identification of the mind with the brain. The scientist, psychologist, philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes, who was also Eliot’s partner, argued that ‘to seek for an organ of the mind is not the less preposterous than to seek for an organ of the life’ (Lewes 1874: 160). Lewes recognised that embodied and environmental features of the agent’s world collaborate constitutively in the accomplishment of its mental processes. In a similar vein, the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain, a protégé of J. S. Mill and again a figure in Eliot’s intellectual orbit, found that ‘We have no right to limit [the mind] to any part of the organism; the mind cannot be denied to feel at the finger points’ (Bain 1873: 172). The positivist Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Psychology (1855), signed up to a mild, if heavily qualified, kind of cerebral localisation, based on the undisputed fact that each nerve fibre and ganglion has a specialised ‘duty’ in the nervous system at large, though Spencer attacked the ‘crudity’ of the phrenologists’ science and dismissed their essentially static understanding of mental faculties

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(Spencer 1855: 610). In any case, Spencer said, the material structure of the cerebrum does not feature demarcations corresponding to distinct powers or dispositions. Instead, individual mental faculties are realised from distributed rather than merely localised neural activity, as illustrated by the example of ‘acquisitiveness’: The portion of brain marked ‘acquisitiveness’ is supposed to be alone concerned in producing the desire of possession. But . . . the desire includes a great number of minor desires elsewhere located. As every more complex aggregation of psychical states, is evolved by the union of minor aggregations previously ­established­– ­results from the consolidation of co-­ordination of these; it follows that that which becomes more especially the seat of this more complex aggregation, or higher feeling, is simply the centre of co-­ordination by which all the minor aggregations are brought into relation. Hence, that particular portion of the cerebrum in which a particular faculty is said to be located, must be regarded as an agency by which the various actions going on in other parts of the cerebrum are combined in a particular way. (Spencer 1855: 611) Much of the explanatory force of Spencer’s description of neural dynamism here comes from terms such as ‘aggregation’ and ‘relation’­– a­ language of causal complexity. Acquisitiveness is constituted by spreading conglomerated changes, and not simply fixed in one brain region. But this motif of distributed action was not confined to the brain. Bain, especially, viewed the mind as an entity spread over the full extent of the physiological body. This was part of an attempt to integrate law-­like principles of associationist psychology, derived from Locke and Hartley, with more recent research by British and German physiologists. As Bain acknowledges in The Senses and the Intellect (1855), his first major study, every movement of nerve force, however modest, modifies the whole interconnected bodily system all the way to its peripheries, such that ‘the brain is only a part of the machinery of mind’ (Bain 1855: 60). Thinking and feeling are not confined to the head. Mind must be grasped as extensive with the coordinated changes and actions of the entire structural ensemble, spanning ‘the brain, nerves, muscles, and organs of sense’ (61). It is highly improbable, Bain insists, for an ‘isolated cerebral life’ to exist­– t­ hat is, for a brain-­bound mind to be viable­– ­and even sophisticated cognitive operations like thought and reminiscence would be impossible ‘without the more distant communications between the brain and the rest of the body­– ­the organs of sense and movement’ (62). From one angle, this looks like a nineteenth-­century argument against the brain-­ in-­a-­vat­– i­n other words, a commitment to seeing extra-­neural embodiment, broadly speaking, as a facilitating context necessary for minds like ours. And it is this­– ­but also something more. In the detail of Bain’s arguments, there is a remarkable shift away from a traditional notion of the mind as a repository of representations (impressions, images, ideas) and a move towards defining cognition as a mode of action and motion. This follows from the expanded stage on which Bain presents cerebral life, where the mind is dramatised as currents of nerve energy



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passing across the interdependent brain and body. Importantly, each impression is a transmission of influence that fades when its physical impetus is exhausted; for an impression to be revived, the currents of nerve energy must be set going again, as illustrated by gestural changes in the face and other expressive behaviour. But reviving impressions in this way does not draw on a ‘cerebral closet . . . or receptacle of sensation and imagery’ (Bain 1855: 61). In fact, Bain’s theory demolishes that supposition. What matters instead, on this account of embodied cognition, is that these distributed transfers of force obviate the need for a neural sensorium. Bain, in consequence, dispenses with psychology’s previous need for some inner chamber for housing retrievable neural representations, in favour of present-­moment systemic activations. It may be overstating things to liken the drift of his theory to sensorimotor enactivism, which downgrades the role of internal representations in certain cognitive performances, paradigmatically in visual perception (Noë 2004), as I will discuss. Bain’s assumptions are still guided by the representationalist orthodoxies of the Victorian age. But in his own terms, rather than those of Alva Noë, Bain is presiding over a decisive shift in theorising: from cognition as representing to cognition as doing. For George Henry Lewes too, ‘reflection and experiment convince us that Thought is an embodied process’ (Lewes 1874: 220). ‘Experiment’ is an apt term: George Eliot records in ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’ (1857) that during the mid-­1850s Lewes would encourage her to ‘try the experiment’ of writing a novel (Eliot 2000: 323). And in the experimental space of her fiction, Eliot explores the possibility of depicting networked subjectivity, drawing not only on her knowledge of physiological systems (blood, nerves, cells) but on the era’s transformative models of evolutionary biology, information and communication technologies, and transport networks, as several influential critics have shown (Beer 1983; Otis 2001; Menke 2008). Without rehearsing these readers’ interpretations, it is enough to say they affirm how Eliot’s social and moral vision of interconnected life depends on analogy with materially relational structures (wires, arteries, nervous tissue, and so on) that support distributed activity. As others have pointed out (e.g. Rylance 2000), Eliot extends this to a conception of mind. Relevant instances of her psychological portraiture implying a fully embodied and non-­localised process of circulation are legion: in Middlemarch alone (admittedly a particularly fine case) there are repeated allusions to mental force, as when Mr Casaubon is pitied in chapter 29 for never having his ‘consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action’ (Eliot 1994: 280), and when, earlier in the novel, Lydgate’s medical research (influenced by Xavier Bichat’s biology) is described as focusing on those ‘invisible thoroughfares’ of anatomical structure that ‘prepare human misery and joy’ (165). Such language is of a piece with the wider discourse found in Bain and Lewes that denied the brain was the seat of the mind. Eliot, likewise, persistently challenges neural determinism. Even if one takes the ‘cerebral subject’ as the anthropological figure of modernity par excellence (Vidal 2009), one should add that this subject was already being dismantled by mainstream Victorian culture at the time of its supposed construction.

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Minds Unbound That Eliot’s fiction, too, should take account of more expansive models of feeling and thinking is not altogether surprising, and not just because of her involvement with Lewes’s varied intellectual life and, vice versa, his role in hers.3 For more than twenty years, their remarkable and socially unorthodox unmarried relationship was shaped by mutual intellectual commerce, and overlapping material practices of reading and writing and thinking, culminating in Eliot bringing to fruition the final two volumes of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind after his death in 1878.4 Without painting their relationship as flawlessly close, and without dubiously casting her as an insecure female writer dependent on male support, one can observe the distributed aspects of their intellectual collaboration. Their long-­enwoven inner lives and projects would seem to dramatise in a particularly compelling way one of Clark and Chalmers’ main examples of socially extended cognition: an ‘unusually interdependent couple’ whose inner states and/or processes enjoy a ‘high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility’ (1998: 17). On this view, at a general and everyday level, such interdependence might be illustrated with a phenomenon like shared memory, where long-­term couples are able to recall some event or item of information together, from discursive interaction, so that the jointly elicited memory is a distributed, not individual, achievement (Harris 2011)­– ­though the creative and critical interdependence of Eliot and Lewes was spectacularly more refined, complex, evolved and consequential than this relatively limited and primitive example (see e.g. Rilet 2017).5 Distributed intelligence aside, Eliot’s artful prose, especially her late realism, plays sometimes exquisitely with the possibility of exteriorising inner worlds: He used his oars little, satisfied to go with the tide and be taken back by it. It was his habit to indulge himself in that solemn passivity which easily comes with the lengthening shadows and mellowing light, when thinking and desiring melt together imperceptibly, and what in other hours may have seemed argument takes the quality of passionate vision. By the time he had come back again with the tide past Richmond Bridge the sun was near setting; and the approach of 3

As a critical convenience, so as to avoid unnecessary confusion, I use here the name George Eliot whether referring to the biographical subject (Mary Ann Evans) or her authorial signature. 4 When Lewes died of enteritis in November 1878, volumes 4 and 5 of his magnum opus Problems of Life and Mind were unpublished. Working from his manuscript and notes, while in a state of grief in the immediate aftermath of his death, Eliot edited, transcribed, assembled and rewrote the material, taking the decision to divide Lewes’s work into one shorter fourth volume, The Study of Psychology, published in May 1879, and a longer and less coherent final instalment, Mind as a Function of the Organism, which followed in December 1879 (Henry 2015: 257–8). 5 Examining the Eliot-­Lewes case in terms of distributed cognition, even as a test case of the socially extended mind, would be worth an essay of its own. My present purposes prevent further elaboration of this biographical question, which also bears upon larger theoretical issues such as authorship and literary intentionality.



the v ic t or ia n ex tended m i nd  51 his favourite hour­– ­with its deepening stillness, and darkening masses of tree and building between the double glow of the sky and the river­– ­disposed him to linger as if they had been an unfinished strain of music. . . . He was forgetting everything else in a half-­speculative, half-­involuntary identification of himself with the objects he was looking at, thinking how far it might be possible habitually to shift his centre till his own personality would be no less outside him than the landscape. (Eliot 1995: 184–5)

This passage from Daniel Deronda (1876) depicts Deronda idling in a rowing boat on the Thames, having just exchanged a wordless look with a melancholy young woman on the riverbank. Moments later, he will save the woman, Mirah, from drowning herself. So the instant is poised between Deronda mentally registering this figure from a certain distance as a type­– ­rowing away, he parses her as a sorrowful beauty, statue-­like, pale, tragic­– ­and then, only a page or two later, his encounter with Mirah’s real, immediate, vulnerable presence. That larger transition conveys a change in Deronda’s mode of cognising, moving from highly mediated and representational perception (his densely imagistic sense of Mirah) to direct intersubjective awareness­– a­ shift from inner speech to embodied interaction. The passage captures a stage in that transition. As it unfolds, its language almost elatedly relaxes an urge to organise experience along an inner/outer axis, finally turning Deronda’s inward self outward, as it were, until equivalent to, or an objective part of, the scenic nocturne. The effect is an understated, yet radical, externalisation. One could remark, of course, that Eliot’s aim is to create a picturesque image of introspection: her atmospherics of mingling, fading and melting help shore up a poetically rich but conceptually basic metaphor (the mind is a flowing river) that elicits access to the character’s pensive inner world. Perhaps so, but Eliot emphasises how the act that lets Deronda’s mind ‘outside’ itself suspends inner thought and reflection (‘He was forgetting everything else’). Representationally rich cognition, exactly what Lewes would describe as the ‘stream of thought’ (1860: 312), suddenly yields to an immediate, unsymbolised ‘identification’ or involvement with his surroundings. In his discussion of the stream of thought, from the second volume of The Physiology of Common Life (1860), Lewes writes directly about mental processes depending on an ecological context. His topic is dreaming and the wandering mind. In contrast to dreaming, Lewes says, where associative succession is uninfluenced and uninterrupted by the outside world, waking cognition leans usefully on objects at hand to retain focus and execute tasks. He gives the example of working in his study. His concentration may sometimes meander vaguely or exotically, taking him to ‘Bagdad or Bassora’, but his ‘books, chairs, microscope, engravings, &c.’ guide him back to the business at hand: ‘If when I am working out some plan, or thinking of some problem, the thoughts wander away, lured by some accidental association, they are soon recalled again by the suggestions of the paper, portfolio, desk, or even by the very attitude in which I am sitting, and I recommence’ (Lewes 1860: 311–12). While this has the fulsome ring of Victorian duty and self-­discipline, the

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idea is one of environmentally embedded cognitive agency. The posture of his limbs affords writing; the objects and materials form an enabling niche. Getting down to writing, for Lewes, involves a cognitive system spanning embodiment, artefacts and locale. Somewhat differently, Daniel Deronda sculpts his environment while rowing on the river, just before re-­encountering Mirah. The word ‘habit’ appears once at the start of the passage (‘It was his habit to indulge himself’) and then reappears, in a cognate form, at the end (‘habitually to shift his centre’). As well as suspending a referential style of thought by momentarily emptying Deronda’s mind of symbolised knowing, the recurrence of the word implies skilful, practised behaviour. Deronda is learning a habit. Not just, or not even, his habit of rowing (recall how he gives up on the oars) but a habit of situated attunement. We know as much from his ‘half-­speculative, half-­involuntary’ poise, and the conducive mood which colours and connects everything in the scene: sky, water, reflections, shadows, trees, boat, reposing body. Habit, understood through enactivism, refers to more than unthinking routines; it denotes expertise derived from world-­involving action. As Alva Noë explains, ‘Habits and skills are environmental in the sense that they are triggered by environmental conditions and they vanish in the absence of the appropriate environmental setting.’ Habits show that human agents are not ‘autonomous islands of decision making’, for we are much more ‘intimately entangled with our environment than that’ (Noë 2009: 97). Eliot’s sense of habit dramatises a similar idea. Deronda’s thoughts are not merely ‘in’ his head, or in his embodied mind, but instead afforded by temporary environmental structures (light conditions, flowing river, tidal rhythm, vessel, and so on) that he languidly but skilfully modifies as a space for thinking. One could regard Deronda afloat, in snapshot, as a kind of temporary cognitive niche construction, along 4E lines. In Andy Clark’s terms, this kind of environmental tailoring has looping effects, making ‘physical structures combine with appropriate culturally transmitted practices to enhance problem solving and . . . make possible new forms of thought and reason’ (2008: 63). If we were to add feeling to this description, it would have a better purchase on the Daniel Deronda example. For, unlike Clark, Eliot generally has in view a significantly more capacious interest in cognition than its utility in problem-­solving, one that takes account of affective phenomena. To use Lewes’s formulation, ‘there can be no Cognition which does not involve Feeling, no Feeling which does not involve the characteristic element of Cognition (discrimination)’ (1879a: 441). As readers of George Eliot know well, her novels depict minds that are not just embodied but also, in various ways, embedded­– ­embedded in social flows of knowledge and feeling, in larger processes of historical development and progress, in limiting circumstances or conditions of relative ignorance. Her post-­Darwinian perspective means that the mutual adjustments of organism and environment provide the very substance of her realism, thematic and structural (see Beer 1983). The point, then, is that something less utopian is at stake in her understanding of cognitive niches than rational efficiencies and functional optimisation.



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Some of what I do consider to be at stake in this regard for George Eliot the novelist is explored at greater length in the section below. Adopting for now a broader perspective, what matters for some mid-­Victorian writers in respect of the mind unbound might be couched in enactivist terms: first, ‘cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’; and second, that the mind is not a ‘mirror of nature’ (Varela et al. 1991: 9). It is not the case that mid-­Victorian culture spookily anticipates these enactivist commitments. Rather, I suggest, a detailed genealogy of 4E cognitive science would discover that the intellectual world of Eliot, Lewes and their contemporaries provides one source of the distributed cognition frameworks presented by the likes of Clark and Noë, if an underappreciated one. Lewes’s five-­volume Problems of Life and Mind (1874–9) is a prime instance of a mid-­Victorian work articulating terms of reference for the later argument that an organism enacts its world influenced by a history of previous actions. While Noë, for one, makes quite clear in various places the nature of his debt to John Dewey, any acknowledgement of slightly earlier writers such as Lewes is unheard of in the literature. By way of brief illustration, a chapter epigraph in Noë’s Out of Our Heads is a sizeable excerpt from Dewey.6 In it, Dewey states the following: We see that man is somewhat more than a neatly dovetailed psychical machine who may be taken as an isolated individual, laid on the dissecting table of analysis and duly anatomized. We know that his life is bound up with the life of his society, of the nation in the ethos and nomos; we know that he is closely connected with all the past by the lines of education, tradition, and heredity. (quoted in Noë 2009: 67) This repeats, in broad strokes, the direction of Lewes’s thinking a decade earlier. Dewey tries in this essay to announce a break with associationist tradition and what he regarded as mid-­nineteenth-­century mechanistic psychophysiology (the target of the ‘neatly dovetailed psychical machine’ remark). But his emphasis here on the imbrication of mind in life, and in history and society, shares much with Lewes’s approach. As Lewes says in the final volume of Problems, unlike a machine, an ‘organism has a history, and is the expression of experiences’ (1879a: 88). In the fourth volume, he puts it even more directly: ‘It is therefore to History and the observation of man in social relations that we must look for data which may supplement those of Introspection and Physiology’ (Lewes 1879b: 80–1). This is Dewey’s point. Experiment has rightly replaced introspection in psychology, and mind is not isolable but a socially and historically modified entity. Lewes offers a vivid proof. If it were possible to compare the brain of a modern Englishman with the brain of an ancient Greek, they would look virtually identical, yet the ‘differences between the moral and intellectual activities of the two would be many and 6

No citation is provided by Noë but it comes from Dewey’s essay ‘The new psychology’ (1884).

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vast’ (Lewes 1879b: 153). One cannot attribute these cognitive divergences to inner machinery, only to the worlding of the mind. By 1872, when Middlemarch appeared, mid-­Victorian culture was so at ease with challenging the simple reduction of mind to brain that ideas of extended cognition could be leveraged for literary satire. In Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler’s utopian novel, the narrator Higgs journeys to the eponymous civilisation where he reads (and translates into English) ‘The Book of Machines’, a pivotal historical document upon whose arguments and authority Erewhonian society has rejected technology. Inventions and mechanical appliances have been consigned to the cultural past in Erewhon, exhibited as museum specimens or antiquarian objects and curated as if aspects of some ancient practice or abandoned belief system. As Higgs finds, this reflects the normalised social attitude that machines signal dangerous impurity. ‘The Book of the Machines’ argues trenchantly, using the rhetoric of the social body, that the rise of machines poses a threat equivalent to a demographic crisis (a swelling, unruly mass, racially distinct, poised to upset natural hierarchies), while also voicing an alarmist fear that cognition will spread into items of technology: ‘But who can say that the vapour-­engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line?’ (Butler 1985: 199). In this elaborately created Darwinian parody, where technology behaves with a fearfully absurd hereditary logic, one can nonetheless detect Butler searching for ways of imaginatively framing artificial intelligence and distributed cognition as cultural ideas. Ironically, Erewhon’s technophobic social consensus feels threatened by machines because human beings so readily adapt to them. The naturalness of human-­ technological coupling is a problem. The urge in ‘The Book of the Machines’ to cleanly preserve human uniqueness by allaying the threat of hybridisation (or, one might say, miscegenation) actually assumes the organic to be always already constituted by the machine. ‘What is a man’s eye but a machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through?’ asks its fictional author, for example (Butler 1985: 205), invoking as he does so the distinctly pre-­Victorian supposition (indeed, the early modern Cartesian-­dualist idea) of a homunculus interpreter stationed inside the head. Some of Erewhon’s first readers would have recognised this for the deliberately old-­fashioned internalist fantasy it was; some would have been struck by another view aired in ‘The Book of the Machines’, one less easily ridiculed because recovered by Higgs from a dissenting Erewhonian source, which announces: ‘Man has many extra-­corporeal members . . . His memory goes in his pocket-­book’ (Butler 1985: 224). Suggestive parallels between Butler’s pocket-­book and the much-­discussed case of Otto’s notebook (Clark and Chalmers 1998), both non-­neural extensions of biological memory, underline that Erewhon’s ironies also stretch out across brain, body and world.



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Varieties of Presence in Middlemarch Turning now to George Eliot, I want to bring out some of the implications of the Victorian extended mind by looking more closely at Middlemarch, a canonical realist novel celebrated for its subtle evocations of psychological interiority. My approach takes a cue from Alan Palmer’s (2010) narratological approach to social minds in fiction, which includes a chapter on Eliot’s novel. Palmer focuses on the group or collective mind as an aspect of a wider theoretical category he terms ‘intermentality’, proposing that Middlemarch (the place) has a visible mind over and above any of the individual minds that populate it. Without debating that precise proposal, or staying inside his methodological groove, my own critical perspective is sympathetic to Palmer’s (2010: 74) enlivening suggestion that Middlemarch stages a ‘fascination with the intermental process’ and his acute conceptual grip on fictional minds in terms other than introspection, informed by such theorists as Clifford Geertz, Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark. Adding to Palmer’s analysis, but breaking with its narratological approach, I want to pursue Eliot’s interest in the mind beyond the skin, though in the hope of reaching a more historically grounded assessment of the textures of the novel, while remaining in conversation with Victorian psychology. Not unexpectedly, given his theoretical investments, Palmer takes little account of the nineteenth-­century thought-­world to which Eliot belonged and that she so decisively shaped. Yet, as I have been showing, that world produced its own models of getting outside the head. Eliot published Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the same decade that Lewes worked on his Problems of Life and Mind; 1878 also saw the Cabinet Edition of The Lifted Veil, a reprint Eliot welcomed, publicly identifying her for the first time as the author of the strange story. These briefly sketched circumstances­­– ­­a matrix of psychological ideas, science, philosophy, critical thought, novelistic art­– ­provide a further way into the sort of 4E-­related questions that Palmer addresses in Social Minds in the Novel. To do this, I want to consider perception in Middlemarch, perception being one of the strategies of Eliot’s literary realism and also a privileged area of discussion in prominent theories of sensorimotor enactivism. Both, one might say, concern varieties of presence. For the sensorimotor enactivist, the world has presence when it is available to us. ‘Perceptual presence is availability’, and this includes the way that invisible parts of objects, such as the back side of a tomato, show up for us as present even though strictly absent (Noë 2012: 19). The reverse side of the tomato is still present to my awareness, Noë insists, because I know it to be in reach, in a practical sense. ‘An object or quality is perceptually present (i.e. it is an object of perceptual consciousness) when the perceiver understands­– i­n a practical, bodily way­– ­that there obtains a physical, motorsensory relation between the perceiver and the object’ (Noë 2012: 22). This is an ‘anti-­empiricism’, in the sense that it rejects indirect, causal, representational perception (the mediation of sensations, impressions, ideas) and instead takes perception to be accomplished by exercising bodily skill, rather than an act of internalisation (Noë 2012: 116). Vision is not picture-­like construction.

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Counter-­intuitively perhaps, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer both regard practical skill as a ground of perceptual knowledge. In the language of mid-­ Victorian mental science, which did reflect broadly empiricist and representational frameworks, they reach strikingly similar verdicts to Noë about some cases of perception.7 Bain argues that perceptions of distance, for example, are not primarily, or even at all, ocular. ‘Distance cannot be perceived by the eye’, he states, because the idea of distance by its very nature implies feelings and measurements out of the eye, and located in the other organs,­– ­the locomotive and other moving members. If our notion of distance did not reveal to us the fact by so many steps, or by a certain swing of the arm or bend of the body, we should make a definite change in the appearance of the object, it would not be a notion of distance. (Bain 1855: 365–6) As this makes clear, anticipating practised motorsensory movements, and not spectatorial detachment, is involved in making the world perceptually present in a meaningful way. In a different context, now discussing the volitional feelings, Bain offers an apposite example of skilful action scaffolding perceptual knowledge. A ‘highly trained’ labourer, looking at an object before him, anticipates ‘the fracture he is to make [in it] and the precise impetus to be thrown into the muscles of the arm’, and executes his cut ‘at one blow’ (Bain 1865: 355–6). Similarly, for Herbert Spencer in The Principles of Psychology, ‘our perceptions of distance are not originally visual, but result from muscular experiences, which visual ones serve to symbolise’ (1855: 219). In Lewes’s account of visual perception in the fragmentary last volume of Problems, he comments that perceptual presence includes qualities the eye cannot directly see: ‘The sight of an object recalls its unseen qualities’ (Lewes 1879a: 225). Now, there are subtle differences between this mid-­Victorian version of Noë’s tomato and the theory of enactivist perception itself. But this is hardly surprising: Lewes’s general theory of perception is inferential, in common with post-­Lockean psychology of the period. For him, apprehending the presence of the tomato, including its unseen reverse side, would come from inferential judgement based on grouping together smaller perceptions (of redness, roundness, and so on) and coming up with a solid whole. Noë’s insists, meanwhile, that we do not see sense data, or assemble an image: we just experience the tomato, which is available to us as an intact object in virtue of our sensorimotor skills. But, remarkably, Spencer’s views help show that the divergence here may not be so great. Spencer’s explana7

With regard to epistemology, Lewes occupied, quite self-­consciously, a position at the extremes of empiricism, not in the sense that knowledge, for him, could not be protected against solipsistic collapse but because he was aware of being located at the exhaustion of a nineteenth-­century ­empiricist/idealist opposition. ‘Metempirical’, a coinage of his that never caught on (Lewes 1874: 17), was intended to refer to knowledge extending beyond the strict limits of experience, in the empiricist sense, but cleansed of unwanted metaphysical associations.



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tion of habit in perception­– a­ gain, habit encompassing embodiment­– ­eliminates the need for any mediating inference or judgement to take place. If I stand a hundred yards from the front of a house, he says, the house ‘seems to be known immediately’ and ‘nothing is inferred’ (Spencer 1855: 189). The house, like the tomato on Noë’s view, is directly perceptually available to my habituated understanding. Presence­– ­achieving presence­– ­matters for Middlemarch’s realism. It is a novel that dramatises looking ceaselessly (for a range of views on optics and vision in the novel see Miller 1975; Flint 2000; Star 2013). On a familiar reading, its narrative’s insistent language of visual consciousness and perspective-­taking shows that perceiving is subjectivised, turned inward, figured as depth and interiority. In addition, its dominant narrative gaze, managing to hold together such a multitude of sprawling, striving, interacting lives, proceeds from an unidentified and unsituated ‘nobody’ (Ermarth 1983). A magisterial moment summing up the novel’s subjectivisation of looking happens in its Rome scenes, during the dismal honeymoon of Dorothea and Casaubon, when Dorothea’s visual field degenerates into a gaudy blur of touristic images, an ‘unintelligible’ swirl of blended impressions absorbed from Rome’s prized architecture (statues, ruins, the bronze canopy of St Peter’s) and its Renaissance art and religious mosaics, internalised as ‘forms pale and glowing’ that she retains in her mind long afterwards, likened, in a careful simile, to a ‘disease of the retina’ (Eliot 1994: 193–4). We might refresh our reading of this narrative crux. To be clear, it spectacularly captures Dorothea’s dim but stirring existential awareness of her undoubted error in marrying Casaubon, materialised as physical sensations, hinted at in her ‘electric shock’ (193). But its psychological crisis dramatises a failure of perceptual access to the world, a failure of presence. Affective imagery overwhelms her, marooning Dorothea in her own unstable and messy impressions. That this occurs in Rome, a place already familiar to the tourist-­observer from the city’s massive cultural mediation, from the images provided by centuries of historiography, paintings, photography, travel writing, and so on, only confirms the problem as one of excessive inner representation. This is crucial. Her mind cannot make Rome cohere as an internal, picture-­like image. What fails is the supposedly inferential, internalising, in-­the-­head labour of conscious perception. And it does so, I suggest, precisely because what the novel as a whole is doing (and so too Eliot herself, along with Lewes and other psychologists) is beginning to reconsider the received one-­way understanding of the psychology of perception. As in Spencer and Lewes, looking cannot be reduced to a retinal image: such is the ironic inaptness of the comparison of Dorothea’s mind to retinal disease. On the view of distributed cognition, and specifically on an enactive account of perception, the retina contributes to perceptual consciousness only in tandem with coordinated skilful action. In Noë’s words, ‘Seeing is not a process that starts from retinal pictures­– ­indeed, there are no retinal pictures­– ­and seeing itself is not pictorial’ (2012: 82). In this most exactingly thoughtful of nineteenth-­century novels, Dorothea is the focus for a thematic worry that the intellect itself can be ‘over-­intellectualized’, in the sense that all intellectual operations must always be ‘deliberate and detached’

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(Noë 2012: 120). Speaking to Will Ladislaw after returning from Rome, she tells him, ‘it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts’, then quickly clarifies: ‘those who have great thoughts get too much worn in working them out’ (Eliot 1994: 363). Her generalisation is really an unconscious recognition of Casaubon’s immense scholarly self-­regard, generously excusing his manifest failure to deliver on the promise of a Key to All Mythologies, though she says something apt when insisting that thought can be too laborious. Being his assistant, she wants to spread out Casaubon’s intellectual labour by becoming his ‘eyes’ and chasing library references (363)­– ­a kind of misguided extended cognition (and Casaubon’s own eyes do have a habit of staying shut). Later, she acknowledges to herself, fully grasping her marital disappointment, that ‘Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use’ (474). More to the point, Casaubon is an agonisingly laborious thinker, indeed a cruelly deliberative one; Dorothea’s remarks appear in close proximity to his letter to Will trying to thwart his residence in Middlemarch, which he writes without her knowledge. Everything he does and says is planned, hatched in advance, never improvised or attuned to the moment. Thought, to him, appears intracranial: he is diverted by ‘the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain’ (281). Distributed knowledge cannot easily rectify what the narrator calls the ‘stupidity’ of individual point of view (194), for sure. The general or collective mind of Middlemarch, to use Palmer’s categories, can be comically inept: Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr Vincy had threatened Wrench, and that Mrs Vincy had accused him of poisoning her son. Others were of opinion that Mr Lydgate’s passing by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many people believed that Lydgate’s coming to the town at all was due to Bulstrode; and Mrs Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it into her head that Mr Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode’s, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelic laymen. (263) These spreading misperceptions­– ­or their weaving patterns, using Eliot’s knitting image­– ­sharpen the reader’s sense of the errors of socially scaffolded minds. One irony, of course, is that Mrs Taft’s misgivings about Bulstrode, the dubious layman, rightly predict (in spirit, if not in detail) his eventual fall from grace later in the plot and Lydgate’s own reputational near-­miss by unwise financial entanglement with him. But such irony is only possible, and the comic movement of the passage is only possible, because the narrative gaze makes this present to us. I do not want to suggest this is picture-­like presence. The point can be illustrated via Will Ladislaw: in being, as his name implies, a source of volitional action and dramatic impetus in the novel, he has a capacity not just for spontaneous speech and deed

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but perceptual immediacy. Conversing with Dorothea in chapter 37, and now enamoured by her, Will has an ‘unspeakable’ certainty ‘that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be perfectly loved’ (363). His direct awareness, conjured by the appearance of the word ‘presence’ itself, is what matters. It happens as the pair are described, face to face, as two flowers spontaneously opening, with a rapport accomplished without sensory, verbal or conscious visualisation on Will’s part. Later on, Casaubon will be wrong when he attributes to Will his own tendency for explicit selfish forethought, for Will’s disposition is not to represent Dorothea, or his desire for her, in a deliberative way seizing on internalised ‘ordinary vulgar vision’­ – ­as the narrator quietly notices, ‘there was something so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was’ (468–9).8 Encountering the world, for Eliot, does of course include grappling with the furniture of other people’s inner lives and one’s own dense layers of recollection, decision and desire. What my argument is driving at does not necessarily impinge on that widely accepted understanding of the psychological texture of Middlemarch, though it may supplement it. In any case, my target is not narrowly mindreading. What I am proposing is that a meaningful parallel might be drawn between the procedural, formal task of Eliot’s literary realism in this novel and enactive perception (taken as a case of the extended mind, either broadly or stringently defined; as the latter, see Adams and Aizawa 2008). The presence upon which the venture of realism has to be staked, the gesture at reality that Eliot’s narrative makes, is not accomplished by means of pictorial representation. Earlier in her development as a novelist she greatly admired Dutch realist painting, with all its proto-­photographic exactness, and in, say, Adam Bede she depicts characters looking on the outside world through the window frames (Gould 2012: 418–20). The later realism of Middlemarch, in contrast, is not equivalent to minutely detailed, high-­resolution painting, just as for Noë perception is not pictorial seeing but presence in absence. The novel thematises, in certain moments, the embodied, practical availability of the world, its direct awareness that rescues selves from the peril of immersion in a mediating realm of sensation, and in this one can begin to recognise Eliot’s commitment to fiction’s insistent mode of presence.

Conclusion ‘We feel, think, and will. Where?’ asks Lewes in the last volume of Problems (1879a: 61). This is the general form of a question about the location and extent of the mental which George Eliot and mid-­Victorian psychology posed and tried to 8

An obvious counterexample might seem to be Will’s memorable line ‘You are a poem’ (223), voiced in response to Dorothea when she doubts being able to write a poem. To see her as a poem, a maximally representational thing, would seem to contradict the kind of perceptual immediacy I intend here. But, apart from this expression being prompted in the moment by a shared dynamic of conversation, Will’s point seems to be that the poem and the poet are coextensive. And he has already described his understanding of poetic creativity using a metaphor of skilled action: ‘a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion’ (223).

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answer. What was at stake in their approach to it, I have been arguing, were conceptions of thinking and feeling, or cognition in general, which not only assumed the active recruitment of the body beyond the brain (a point few readers of Eliot, say, would contest) but also something less expected: a set of views conforming to what this volume agrees is distributed cognition and what one might, hesitatingly perhaps, call the Victorian extended mind. One could reasonably worry that talk of cognitive niche construction or 4E theories just brings unwanted conceptual baggage to aspects of nineteenth-­century culture that can be articulated, and critically recovered, sufficiently clearly anyway. Like all theoretically minded reading, and all interpretation is more or less theoretical in the end, this charge cannot be escaped entirely. But there are at least two strong attractions, including a primary insistence that the intellectual world of Eliot and Lewes (including other relevant mid-­Victorian writers like Bain, Spencer and Butler, all interested in literature, psychology, biology and philosophy) constitutes an unrecognised part of the genealogy of current frameworks in embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition, alongside Dewey, William James and pragmatism. Secondly, no less importantly, the mind beyond the skin, an underappreciated part of Victorian literature and culture, is brought into focus by the 4E picture, revealingly in relation to a historical moment contesting a strictly internalist model of thinking, feeling and seeing, and aspiring imaginatively and theatrically to enlarge the bounds of cognition.

4 In st r u m e n t a l E y e s : E n a c ted a nd Intera ctiv e Per c ep t i o n i n V i c t o r i a n O p tica l T echnolog ies a nd V i c t o r i a n F iction Nicole Garrod-­Bush

The Victorian period witnessed a number of important technological inventions: from railway travel to photographic reproductions, it was a period in which the machine moved appreciably closer to human life­– ­in many cases, technology became smaller, portable, and was often hand-­operated, with the result that mechanism was increasingly incorporated into everyday life. The tangibility of technological processes came to the fore: technology was tactile and had to be simple to understand and easy to physically manipulate if it was to be a sustainable product in the burgeoning marketplace for consumer gadgets (see Richards 1990). This operational tactility also worked to underpin contemporary understandings of the role of the body in sensory and cognitive experience. The investigative and theoretical work of scientists and philosophers, some of which I explore in this chapter, increasingly looked to embodied experience to address questions of consciousness and mental activity, and often with an emphasis on how sensory modalities worked together. One new technology, the stereoscope­– a­ n optical device that made two images appear as a single three-­dimensional scene­– ­was promoted on precisely these grounds (see Plunkett 2013). Oliver Wendell Holmes, inventor of what we would now term the ‘third generation’ of stereoscopes (which were more compact and easier to operate by hand than previous models), wrote in 1859 that by means of these two different views of an object [the images placed into the stereoscope viewer], the mind, as it were, feels round it, and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we know it to be something more than a surface. (Holmes 1980: 75) Evoking claims that continue to interest philosophers and cognitive scientists today (Radman 2013), Holmes moves easily between ideas of tactility and opticality to theorise the stereoscopic experience. The mind ‘feels’ a dimensional environment because the eyes are imagined to be capable of identifying solidity and depth and it can ‘clasp’ objects as the hand would. Physicality and interaction are stressed in

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a model of perception which blends sensory modalities and relies on technology to demonstrate how information can be enacted by an embodied mind; in this case, the body needs to act in order for the mind to ‘see’ the illusion of depth in the stereoscope’s viewer, and in turn the act of seeing is imagined as a bodily act. This chapter begins by exploring the conjunction of the tactile and the optical in a particular type of Victorian visual technology­– p ­ ersistence-­of-­vision devices­– ­which presented, for the first time, virtual animated sequences of moving images. The hand-­operated spectacle they presented was underpinned by scientific investigation into the physiology of vision which revealed how closely connected the physical body was to sensory experience and cognitive functioning. After uncovering links between Victorian philosophy of mind and current theories of perception, I trace how in several popular works of Victorian fiction the ‘seeing hand’ and the ‘feeling eye’ were imagined to operate. I argue that cognition is shown to be enacted through an exploration of the environment by visual perception working in dynamic conjunction with bodily action. In turning to these technologies, whose novelty lay in being able to generate visual motion rather than simply represent it (by the use of reflection, for example), this chapter makes a case for the importance of visual interactivity over disengaged spectacularity in the Victorian period. It is an approach that dismisses, in Alva Noë’s terms, the ‘photographic model’ of receiving visual information, a model that places emphasis on visual perception being a passive and entirely brain-­based process (Noë 2004: 2). Instead, I show that Victorian perception was interactive and dependent on muscular feedback and skilful sensorimotor manipulation. Victorian optical technologies show us human perception operating in miniature, bringing forth a virtual moving image that has a fundamental connection to tactile feedback, skilful bodily manipulation, and understanding (Noë 2004: 1). The following section of this chapter argues that, as a consequence of new philosophical and physiological approaches to seeing, and of technological devices which required the eye and hand to work together, fictional descriptions of the eye and the action of looking present perception as an amalgamation of sensory experiences: sight and touch, the optical and muscular. My examples point towards a Victorian understanding of what would later be called ‘haptic perception’ (Marks 2002); we will imagine a model of perception in which the eye could be wielded, move through space, and act upon something with the intimacy of a felt encounter, and in doing so communicate wordlessly through the medium of touch. This tactile representation of perception moves away from passive spectacularity­– ­such as that found in photographic apertures or the physically distant screen of the panorama and late-­nineteenth-­century cinema­– ­and instead offers a reading of visual culture in the novel that stresses interaction, movement and the intimacy of perceptual sociability. Knowledge is enacted and shared through the corporeal interface of eye and environment. Victorian optical technologies increased awareness of how crucial physical action was to perception. These technologies help us to explore a mid-­nineteenth-­ century understanding of distributed cognition. Vision did not simply take place



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behind the eyes. The cognitive work of understanding one’s environment as a textured, dimensional space was enhanced by devices that demonstrated how the hand could help the eye to see, or even to see in newly tactile ways. Beyond being a process of pure opticality, perception was spread through the body. Perception was as dependent on the fingers as on the mind. The devices demonstrated how cognition could be thought of as being distributed across a network comprising brain, body and world (we might think, in Miranda Anderson’s terms, that ‘human cognitive processes can be constituted by coalitions of biological and non-­biological resources, rather than being confined to neural circuitry’ (2015b: 1)). It is not that moving-­image devices enhanced the capacities of the brain, extending minds into technologies to allow a new process to be carried out, or were essential to particular cognitive actions. In the technology-­as-­tool model of the extended mind, Andy Clark gives the example of our fingers offloading information into an electronic calculator in order to perform complex or difficult calculations, an action of ‘cognitive extension’ into the environment that shows that ‘the system we often refer to as “mind” is in fact much wider than the one we call “brain” ’ (Clark 1997: 215–17). Although the technologies under consideration in this chapter might well be taken to show that mind is not simply the physiological object we call brain, I am not claiming that animation devices extended the minds of users in this sense. What moving-­image technologies offered users was a demonstrable way to understand the dynamic aspects of visual perception. The manual operation necessary to their correct functioning mimicked perception’s ‘coalition’ of brain, body and environment, and these manual operations showed that perception does not just take place within or behind the eyes. They demonstrated the enacting of meaning that is the focus of contemporary work on enactive perception. Enactive perception is, broadly speaking, the idea that perceptions are not mirrored in the mind as though perceptions were mental images presented to some internal eye. Rather, perception is a dynamic interaction between human and environment: perceptions are generated, not passively received through a system of outer-­to-­inner transmission. Perception is a ‘formative’ and participatory activity, not an ‘extraction of information’ (Di Paolo et al. 2010: 39). In The Embodied Mind Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch argued that ‘knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history’ (1991: 149). The authors contend that this ‘nonobjectivist orientation’ and experiential approach to perception and sense-­making could be further connected to understanding human cognition in neuroscience, linguistics, phenomenology and cognitive psychology (Varela et al. 1991: 150). Cognitive science and philosophy have taken up that challenge, notably in explorations of the ‘4Es’ (embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition). Work here makes frequent use of the term ‘embodied action’, stemming from their position that

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cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and . . . that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. By using the term ‘action’ we mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition. (Varela et al. 1991: 173) The sensorimotor capacities of the body are important to enactive perception, for it is through the skilful manipulation of one’s body within the environment that meaning can be brought forth. As O’Regan and Noë write, with particular reference to optical perception, ‘vision is a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowledge, on the part of the perceiver, of what we call sensorimotor contingencies’ and this is a ‘practical’, not a ‘propositional’, form of knowledge (O’Regan and Noë 2001: 940, 944). This chapter draws on Noë’s work on the role of ‘practical’ sensory knowledge in enactive perception. ‘Perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills,’ he writes. Central to this is physical movement performed by the perceiver, for ‘perceiving is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.’ It is through ‘sensorimotor knowledge’, brought about by our physical interactions with the environment, that we understand concepts of size, shape, distance, volume, and so on. Knowledge is not simply dependent on this sensory feedback, but is ‘constituted’ by it (Noë 2004: 1–2). This argument seems to depend on the body’s ability to move adequately and accurately around its environment, which of course is not always possible. However, Noë counters that skilful bodily action can be found in many different forms of movement: those who are paralysed are still able to be mobile in the world using various forms of technological aids, and one’s eyes are always moving, even if the body itself cannot. The constant flickering saccades and microsaccades of the eye help us to realise direction and depth; a truly ‘inert perceiver’, one without any capacity for sensorimotor knowledge, is an almost impossible situation (Noë 2004: 17). Therefore, perceptual content can be enacted by any ‘thoughtful’ perceiver interacting with any kind of environment. Movement, then, is fundamental to perception, unlike the static ‘photographic model’ of internal representation that imagines ‘you open your eyes and you are given, at once, a sharply focused impression of the present world in all its detail’ (Noë 2004: 2). Noë argues that the relationship between perception and movement is merely ‘instrumental’ in the photographic model of perception­– i­t is the equivalent to moving the camera to another spot, opening the shutter, and sending another world-­picture to the mind (Noë 2004: 2). Notably, Noë chooses photography, another Victorian optical technology, to illustrate his distinction. In the present chapter, I focus on technologies that opposed the stasis of photography and relied instead on active physical manipulation to bring about their spectacle of animation. As such, they demonstrate how different optical technologies can offer distinct paradigms for thinking about visual perception. Moving-­image tech-



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nologies, which required human sensorimotor interaction, offer an early example of enactive perception. These moving-­image technologies contrast with Victorian photographic technology, both in terms of the phenomenological requirements on the user and in the way they promote a different model of perception in the Victorian period.

Optical Physiology and Moving-­Image Devices Narratives of Victorian visual culture have tended to frame optical experience of the period as predominantly passively spectacular: focus has been placed on large-­ scale static shows, such as the immersive canvases of the panorama or the projected images of the magic lantern, or on the captured photographic image. There has been an overarching emphasis on the physically uninvolved spectatorship of fixed spectacle­– w ­ hat Helen Groth has called the ‘spectacular stasis and visual mastery’ suggested by the panorama (2007: 217). This has led to a condensing of visual experience and lack of engagement with the importance and cultural impact of the nineteenth century’s interest in moving images, which were perceptually interactive and involved multiple sensory modes beyond just the optical. Alongside the ability to fix the image (as in photographic capture), the period showed a remarkable interest in making images mobile, in loosening images from their spectacular frame and moving them manually through, past, around and across the field of vision. In this chapter, I focus on pre-­cinematic persistence-­of-­vision devices, popularised in the 1830s. First developed as instruments of scientific investigation, they quickly entered the marketplace for optical entertainment and affordable consumer gadgetry. They worked by the manual operation of a disk, or drum, lined with successive images which, when spun and seen through a series of equally rotating apertures, presented an animated, repetitive sequence which gave the illusion of motion occurring upon a single spot. Hand, eye and brain worked together to provide a virtual image of movement which was premised on contemporary scientific understandings of how long images might persist to (or even within) the eye. In 1823, the physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkyně first used the term ‘afterimage’ to describe the visual trace which appeared to remain perceptually present to the eye even after its external referent had passed out of view (Wade 1998: 159).1 These illusive but persisting images were significant to studies of sensory perception and the connection between eye and brain, matter and memory. As Daniel Pick comments, they ‘undoubtedly bore witness to something; but what? If it was a verifiable experience, it was not simply the record of present stimulus. It brought 1

The phenomena of visual impressions appearing to linger as active perceptions after their external referent had disappeared has been discussed in writings on optics since antiquity. Anecdotes from Aristotle and Seneca describe seeing a shooting star with a burning tail streaming behind, and Alhazen and Isaac Newton both wrote on the example of a flaming stick which, when spun quickly, gave the appearance of a glowing circle of fire. See Sabra 1967.

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into focus the temporal aspect of observation and the ambiguous relationship of external and internal processes’ (1996: 188). In the early nineteenth century, a growing body of scientific work was addressing the physiology of vision and investigating the physical makeup of the eye, advancing on previous work which had focused on the external transmission of light (Wade and Heller 1997). Retinal afterimages were central to these studies for their presentation of ‘an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject’, as Jonathan Crary writes (1990: 98). Fundamental to this burgeoning field of optical research was the manipulation of stimuli and measurement of sensory response­– ­investigations which were both enabled by, and demonstrable through using, new optical technologies. New instruments enabled testing and measurement of visual temporality and persisting images, and the increasingly experimental nature of the research allowed the eye to be manipulated in response to controlled stimuli: it was possible to see the process of seeing, and to quantify perceptual reaction in a way not before appreciated. Persistence-­of-­vision devices were particularly useful to the manipulation and measurement of visual operation, and encouraged one to see perception fused more appreciably with cognition, as the role of the brain in not simply receiving but creating particular visual effects was increasingly acknowledged and tested. As Nicholas Wade and Dieter Heller explain, ‘it could be said that the development of sensory physiology and experimental psychology was as dependent on these devices as biology had been upon the microscope’ (1997: 228). The devices were invented in part as a way to investigate the retinal afterimages Purkyně had described, but their history is also entwined with developments in experimental physics. In a paper published in 1825, P.  M. Roget described what he termed the ‘curious optical deception’ which occurred when viewing the rotating spokes of a wheel through vertical apertures (1825: 131). Looking through the slats of a window blind at a carriage rolling past, he noted that the wheel’s spokes appeared curved instead of straight. Although puzzled by ‘the difficulty of detecting its real cause’, he found this illusion ‘irresistible’ and ‘exceedingly striking’ (Roget 1825: 131). By observing this phenomenon, Roget realised that when viewed without the apertures of the window blinds, the wheel appeared to simply rotate and its moving spokes were seen as when they are stationary­– a­ s straight lines. Viewed through the blinds, however, the apertures affected this smooth perception. As each partial visual impression (seen through the gaps in the blind) persisted to the eye, this caused each block of perception to be remade into a new collaged entity, thus producing the perception that the spokes were blurring into each other and appearing as curved lines. What the eye was seeing when it looked at the wheel through vertical apertures was a combined animation of different parts of the spokes joined together. Roget realised this ‘optical deception’ might offer a way to accurately measure the duration of retinal impressions. Later studies developed Roget’s initial investigations, and in so doing opened the study of this aspect of optics to a broader public fascinated to learn of the physiological science behind this apparent ‘deception’ of the eye through readily available technology.



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Experiments, lectures and demonstration models by Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday furthered persistence-­of-­vision’s move into public awareness. In 1831, Faraday published an essay on persisting impressions and, in collaboration with Wheatstone, lectured on this topic at the Royal Institution.2 His essay begins with an anecdotal experience of observing large cogged wheels rotating at a lead mill. He relates that if a single wheel is seen moving, the cogs appear blurred, yet if one wheel is rotating immediately in front of another, the cogs appeared stationary. When ‘visually superimposed, there appeared a fixed wheel’, Faraday writes (1831: 210). As per Roget’s earlier experimental observation of the curved spokes, if intermittent obstacles were placed between the moving object and the observer, individual successive impressions appeared to persist upon the retina and fused into a new, illusory image. It was almost impossible to convey the illusion described by Faraday in published writing. As Chitra Ramalingam explains, There was a constant tension between Faraday’s mode of representation and its referent. His papers were accompanied by static images . . . but his goal was to show that these images of seemingly enduring static structure actually marked a dynamic and complex movement, with a repeating temporal microstructure. (2010: 10) Faraday needed to find a way to demonstrate his findings using real-­life examples of minute movements. To this end, he devised a small-­scale replica of the cogged wheels he had seen in operation at the lead mill. He encouraged readers to build their own mechanism for seeing this phenomenon, acknowledging that ocular experimentation was likely to better convey his findings than reading a description. During his lectures, Faraday projected the rotating wheels on to a large screen. The effect was reinforced by providing his audience with smaller models that they were encouraged to try for themselves. One review comments that ‘upon the table and in the library were other kinds of wheels and forms, some marked with dark lines, some coloured, and all tending to produce variations of the appearance. . . . We anticipate that a very popular and philosophical toy will be produced upon these phenomena’ (Anon. 1831: 75). The reviewer was correct: instruments similar to those displayed after Faraday’s lectures soon began to be developed and sold, making the phenomenon of creating animated images using the technical manipulation of persisting retinal afterimages an increasingly popular pastime. One of the first such instruments was the thaumatrope, which became popular in the early 1830s. A piece of card with two different illustrations, front and back, was spun by a string, and the flickering motion presented an image that appeared 2

Their ‘Friday Evening Discourses’ communicated and promoted new scientific findings to a wider audience than the readers of elite scientific publications, and made generous use of technological models to investigate and demonstrate various aspects of experimental physics (see Morus 1998: 13–42).

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combined (a bird appeared inside its cage, for example). Writing on the thaumatrope as an important example of a ‘fabricated’ image, Crary asserts that it made clear ‘the rupture between perception and object’ (1990: 106): users made and observed a virtual image which did not exist as a physical reality. More sophisticated devices were then manufactured which incorporated apertures (using the method of Roget’s vertical blind and Faraday’s cogged wheels) that were able to offer a fully animated sequence. In 1832, a Belgian physicist, Joseph Plateau, created the phenakistiscope. This device was made of two discs joined on a spindle, with one disc containing a small number of apertures (often twelve to sixteen) cut into its outer circumference and the other disc containing a similar number of individual illustrations depicting a sequence of movement. When viewed in reflection using a mirror, the figures would appear animated (see Plate 1). Laurent Mannoni’s history of cinema describes how Plateau gifted Faraday with a prototype of his phenakistiscope in 1833 at a meeting in London. From that point, the device gained popular appeal in Britain as it was passed from person to person and then developed as a commercial gadget under the names ‘phantasmascope’ and ‘fantascope’, alluding to the spectral quality of its illusory animated display (Mannoni 2000: 220). Alongside the basic mechanism, multiple discs containing various different subjects were sold, enabling users to swap designs for different sequences of motion. A limitation of the phenakistiscope was that it could only be viewed by one person at a time. The zoetrope improved on this: it could be viewed by multiple spectators. Invented in 1834, the zoetrope was a hollow drum containing small apertures along its top section with a removable strip of sequential images placed at its base. The drum was spun by the hand of the viewer who, when looking into the drum through the apertures, would see the images animated into one relatively smooth sequence of movement (see Plates 2 and 3). Citing the investigations and public demonstrations of Roget and Faraday, its inventor, William Horner, wrote that the device ‘has rendered an instructive experiment highly popular’ (1834: 36–7). It was through optical commodities such as the thaumatrope, the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope that scientific discoveries about perception were discovered by a wider public of adults and children. A pamphlet advertising the zoetrope (Clarke c. 1867) shows a family crowding around the device, keen to see its spectacle. The pamphlet combines a description of the device’s mechanical operation with details about the underlying principles of retinal afterimages and visual persistence which produce the animated image. Hand-­ operated visual motion devices not only grew directly out of scientific research into ocular physiology, but helped to spread an awareness of the ways that the eye and brain worked collaboratively to ‘see’ the illusion of animation. Science mutated into popular entertainment, and popular entertainment, in turn, morphed into an everyday engagement with the latest scientific thinking.



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The Importance of Touch to Perception This chapter’s focus on both creating and viewing moving images enlarges what we know of the ways the Victorians experienced perception, and of what they understood about the physiology of the eye and its relation to the brain and the body. Such devices also draw our attention to how important bodily manipulation was in ‘acting out’ perception, as Noë terms it. ‘Perceiving is a kind of skillful bodily activity’, he writes, in which the body interacts with its environment to create meaning; as we have seen in the manual operation of persistence-­of-­vision devices, perceptual activity is enacted through the successful operation of our sensorimotor capabilities (Noë 2004: 1–2). The tactile involvement of the manipulating hand was necessary for the basic operation and to control the speed of moving-­image devices­– a­ n aspect crucial to the ‘correct’ viewing of their display. A zoetrope wheel spun clumsily, or too slowly, would fail to produce a smooth animation and its user would merely see each illustration as an individual image jolting along. Spun too quickly, the animation would whirl uncontrollably into a blur. The correct functioning of these devices was, then, contingent on knowledgeable and assured physical direction. Noë stresses the thoughtfulness inherent in perception: a blind person can perceive, but a thoughtless one cannot, because the ‘perceptual consciousness’ necessary to enact meaning from the world relies on ‘thoughtful, knowledgeable activity’ of precisely the kind required to successfully operate these technologies (2004: 3). With this operational tactility comes an awareness that the device’s rotation was always threatening to slow to a stop, breaking the desired illusion. The hand had to wait, poised to spin again, for the moment when the stroboscopic effect began to break down and lose its illusory appeal. Users were asked to delight in the creation of virtual visual motion (for the animation did not exist as a tangible object itself, but was a cognitive effect) while remaining vigilant to the inevitable moment when the hand was once more required to intervene. They were committing a cognitive sleight of hand, being awed at the spectacle of technologically mediated animations while at the same time physically, thoughtfully and skilfully creating this illusion. The scientific investigations and technological innovations which brought these devices into being encouraged a sense that perception was not merely mirroring the world in the brain, as in the photographic model of perception. Rather, perception occurred through a combination of mental and bodily actions. The ‘perceiver’s activity’ and ‘sensorimotor structure’ became the reference point for understanding perception, rather than a ‘pregiven, perceiver-­independent world’ (Varela et al. 1991: 173). Moving-­image technologies provide a clear example of how ‘a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain’, as Evan Thompson writes, ‘but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment’ (2007: 13). Such a ‘coupling’ with one’s environment means that the sense of touch was deeply implicated in Victorian optical experience. Written at the same time as

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these devices were being popularised, Alexander Bain’s philosophical work pays particular attention to the multisensory aspect of perception. In The Senses and the Intellect (1855), Bain describes that touch is of a ‘higher’ order than the senses of taste or smell, being ‘not a simple sense, but a compound of sense and motion’. Touch is ‘not merely a knowledge-­giving sense, as they all are, but a source of ideas and conceptions of the kind that remain in the intellect and embrace the outer world’­– ­much as the observation of visual motion was a composite of internal, cognitive processing and external, bodily operation (Bain 1855: 171). Referring to the ‘muscle sense’ first discussed in 1826 by Charles Bell (see Smith 2011), Bain states that it is ‘well admitted’ that ‘the feelings connected with the movements of the body, or the action of the muscles, have come to be recognised as a distinct class, differing materially from the sensations of the five senses’ (1855: 67). This ‘distinct’ sense of muscular movement, which we would now call proprioception, combines with the sense of sight to produce a fuller sensory experience: ‘The feelings arising from Sight alone make only one class of these sensations: the combination of optical and muscular states gives birth to the most various and interesting department of feelings connected with vision’ (Bain 1855: 233). Anticipating Noë’s claims, Bain is positing an enactive model of vision (understood here as more than mere mirroring or passive internal representation) that would contain a multitude­– ­a whole ‘department’­– o­ f feelings that result from the combination of optical and muscular work. This tactile sense of muscularity is a consequence of the mobile, almost tangible, way in which vision operates. ‘The eye is kept constantly at work upon the surrounding scene’, Bain describes, ‘following the outlines and windings of form, as these extend in every direction.’ The eye is imagined to spatially trace forms, much as a feeling hand might. Visual perception operates not as a single glance (as in the photographic model of perception) but as a ‘cohering and storing up’ of many views in ‘succession’, evoking the persistence-­of-­vision devices with their sequential images designed to be cognitively fused together. Bain builds on this point to argue that the eye feels its way around a landscape as if it were a muscular entity, following the contours of form and texture, and then creates a picture from these tactile composites (Bain 1855: 247). What he calls these ‘complex sensations of sight’ result ‘from the combination of optical effect with the feeling of movement arising out of the muscles of the eyeball’ (Bain 1855: 239; original emphasis). ‘Sensations of sight’, he writes, ‘are compounded of visual spectra and muscular feelings. A visible picture is, in fact, a train of rapid movements of the eyes, hither and thither, over luminous points, lines, and surfaces’ (Bain 1855: 350). The eye, driven by the surrounding musculature, operates in the same way as other bodily appendages, bound with nerve and muscle. It enters into and interacts with its environment in order to perceive. Noë’s examples offer a contemporary perspective. Think of touching a bottle with your eyes closed, he writes. It is only by moving our hands around the object that we gain a full sense of what it is, of its dimensions and aspects. So too with vision: ‘like touch, vision is active,’ he writes.



in s t ru mental eyes  71 You perceive the scene not all at once, in a flash. You move your eyes around the scene the way you move your hands about the bottle. As in touch, the content of visual experience is not given all at once. We gain content by looking around just as we gain tactile content by moving our hands. You enact your perceptual content, through the activity of skilful looking. (Noë 2004: 73; original emphasis)

Both Bain and Noë stress the temporal aspect of perception: vision is not given in an instant but rather it is a composite activity that involves movement. This movement also combines different sensory modalities, such as sight and touch. The eyes work like hands, and hands can operate like eyes. Both gather perceptions from interacting with the environment, thoughtfully and skilfully, and work together to perceive.3 As Isobel Armstrong has written, ‘seeing by touch displaces the notion of the passively received image on the retina and substitutes for it the process of experiment with data’ (2008: 334). It is experimentation, with and within one’s environment, which moving-­image technologies offered to Victorian users. Interaction was key. Their correct functioning was only brought about by knowledgeable operation and their animated sequence relied on the compositional method of perceiving described by Bain and Noë. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to literature of the Victorian period, and specifically some of the most widely read fictional texts. I argue that developments in optical technology, new understandings of the physiology of vision, and ideas about the blending of sensory information in the enactment of perception affected the representation of vision and visual experience in the novel. Such developments provoked a literary representation of perception as something tactile and physical that could be wielded and controlled, and which might metaphorically be manifested in the landscape of the novel as a touching, roaming and even following thing. I focus on the novel as the literary form most able to dramatise the experience of cognition, perception, visual memory and imaginative speculation from the perspective of individual characters.4 The physical operation of moving-­image technologies informed the choices Victorian authors made to describe precisely how their characters perceived. By incorporating references to the process of seeing, readers were themselves encouraged to imaginatively ‘see’ the animated unfolding of the plot and the material dimensionality of its fictional world.

3

The idea of ‘feeling vision’ and the connections between sight and touch in sensory experience has a long history, notably in what is known as ‘Molyneux’s problem’, which concerns the interoperability of the senses, the transferability of information between different sensory modalities, and the role of habitual judgement in forming perceptions, particularly with regard to dimensional perception. Morgan 1977 and Gallagher 2005 (153–72) address this issue and its implications for contemporary developmental psychology and neurophysiology. See also Noë 2004: 77–8. 4 This is swiftly becoming a busy and fruitful field of scholarly enquiry, with critics taking approaches from the history of psychology, cognitive studies, literary aesthetics and sensory studies (see particularly Esrock 1994, Scarry 1999, Herman 2013, Zunshine 2006 and Young 2010).

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Feeling Vision in Victorian Fiction To feel heat and pressure; to pin, fasten, arrest and hit; fix, follow, hold, release; drop, fire, search, screw; bite, strike, wander, fly; pierce, steal, nail, catch; direct, follow, speak and roam. These are just some of the actions and capacities of the eye as described in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. This list confounds expectations: it seems more a property of the hand to nail an object, to pierce, strike, pin or bite; the legs to wander, roam and follow; and the skin to feel heat and pressure. Yet all these functions contribute to a tactile and mobile representation of visual experience in Victorian fiction. Notice too that the perceiver’s eyes, carrying out these actions, are thoroughly embedded in a sensory landscape that is temporal, dimensional, textural and, most importantly, tactile. The fictional examples I discuss below describe the eye as it operates in real time; they offer a linguistic rendering of perception as it is carried out, moment by moment, giving readers an understanding of how perception in action feels. This encourages a reading of perception as an intimate, communicative interface between characters. It proposes a model of sociability in which the mobile eye weaves connections between characters and emphasises the inhabited, spatial texture of a literary world through an attention to the compositional process of perceiving, and to how it feels to see and be seen. Recent work by Alan Palmer has addressed the presentation of ‘social minds’ in the Victorian novel, contending that fiction of this period is marked by a concern with ‘joint, group, shared, or collective’ examples of ‘socially distributed cognition’. ‘As storyworlds are profoundly social in nature’, Palmer writes, ‘it could plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development, maintenance, modification, and breakdown of these intermental systems’ (2010: 41). My reading builds on Palmer’s identification of the ‘visibility of thought’ in fiction (2010: 108), especially in Charles Dickens’s novels, and focuses specifically on the role of tactile perception in building an imaginative world in which cognition is a visible process, often shared between characters, and where sensory information is interactively gathered across different modalities. This ‘socially distributed cognition’, to use Palmer’s phrase, is enacted through an encounter between perceiver and environment and draws on the interactive and highly tactile nature of perception found in the operation of persistence-­of-­vision devices. The following analysis concentrates on three aspects of tactile vision: eyes which fix or grasp their subject, eyes imagined as physical appendages able to be wielded against their subject, and eyes which metaphorically roam within the physical landscape. Although my literary examples neither comment explicitly on optical technologies nor directly reference the names of specific devices, my aim is instead to show that persistence-­of-­vision technologies and the physiological understanding of perception which underpinned their manual operation informed the way authors imagined and described the process of perception: how it is created, manipulated and controlled, how it feels to see or be seen, and, importantly, how tactile and



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enactive perception was thought to be. Dickens, Palmer argues, is a ‘novelist of appearances’ (2010: 105). His fiction is concerned with the outward, external presentation of mental experience, enabling characters, and indeed readers, to ‘see other characters’ personalities in action’ (Palmer 2010: 109). One way this occurs, I argue, is through the imagined physicality of the optical sense. This ‘fixing’ eye could have quite violent attributes. In Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–8), Mrs Skewton’s ‘glance of fire was bent downward upon [Edith]’ and Rob ‘nailed’ his eyes upon Mr Carker (2008b: 458, 330). Mrs Pipchin, the stern boarding-­house keeper of Paul Dombey’s youth, had ‘a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury’ (105). The description of her ‘hard grey eye’ occurs a further three times (147, 148 and 149), complementing and deepening the depiction of her constitution which, in spite of her need ‘to be coaxed to sleep by the soporific agency of sweet-­breads’, was ‘made of such hard metal’ (145). In focusing description specifically on her eyes, Dickens goes beyond generic description of her character by enabling readers to imagine how she perceives and how it might feel to be looked at by her ‘hard’ eyes. In these instances, the eye is compared to an object which could directly touch and impact upon things in the external environment. However, the converse scenario is also presented: objects are able to strike upon the sensate eye. In Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Mr Bounderby, suspecting that Stephen Blackpool had a part in the robbery of Coketown Bank, draws up a placard calling for Stephen’s apprehension with the offer of a reward: he had the whole printed in great black letters on a staring broadsheet; and he caused the walls to be posted with it in the dead of night, so that it should strike upon the sight of the whole population at one blow. . . . Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter of these placards, among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling wheels, for hours afterwards. (1995: 248) The impact of Bounderby’s text ‘strikes’ the eyes of the onlookers and, in the manner of a persisting retinal image, remains present to their vision for ‘hours’ afterwards. The mobile eye could also explore deep into its surroundings, not just fixedly looking upon but entering into another’s eyes, penetrating its subject. The commonly used phrase of ‘feeling someone’s eyes watching us’ is pertinent here, particularly in the work of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot: vision is felt upon the body as if it were touch. The development of the strange relationship in Brontë’s Villette (1853) between Lucy Snowe and Monsieur Paul often hinges on moments of intensely visual interaction. Early in the novel, Lucy withdraws into a classroom to read alone, yet she cannot escape the range of Paul’s observation: ‘two eyes first vaguely struck upon, and then hungrily dived into me’ (Brontë 2008b: 133). The charged culmination is a striking of eyes, as his sight finds its object and then ‘hungrily dived’ within­– ­his searching gaze here figured as a consuming, penetrative force. We can compare the physical action of Paul’s eyes to those of Graham,

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a childhood friend who acts as a brother to Lucy: ‘his lips let fall no caustic that burned to the bone; his eyes shot no morose shafts that went cold and rusty and venomed through your heart’ (223). Despite Lucy’s sharp attack on Paul’s caustic glances, such moments of silent communication, signalled by instances of profoundly tactile and affective looking, evidence their growing relationship as effectively as any dialogue might. Brontë’s earlier work shows the same interest in describing character relations in terms of their intimate, and often quite violent, visual communication. The male narrator of The Professor (published posthumously in 1857) foreshadows the intense and purposeful perceptual activity of Villette. Initially believing he may be beginning a romantic relationship with Zoraïde Reuter, William Crimsworth’s hopes are crushed when he secretly observes her discussing his infatuation with her soon-­to-­ be-­husband, Pelet. Feeling ‘feverish and fiery’ and unable to sleep, Crimsworth confronts Zoraïde in a characteristically brutish manner, employing only his eyes to indicate his knowledge of the situation: I passed on to the estrade, she followed me; her eye, fastened on my face, demanded of every feature the meaning of my changed and careless manner. ‘I will give her an answer,’ thought I; and, meeting her gaze full, arresting, fixing her glance, I shot into her eyes, from my own, a look, where there was no respect, no love, no tenderness, no gallantry; where the strictest analysis could detect nothing but scorn, hardihood, irony. I made her bear it, and feel it; her steady countenance did not change, but her colour rose. (Brontë 1998: 95) The ‘demands’ that Zoraïde’s eyes make of Crimsworth’s are countered by his stern, answering gaze: he first ‘arrests’ then ‘shoots’ a cold look directly into her eyes which she is made to ‘bear’ and ‘feel’, the colour rising to her face indicating­ – ­again wordlessly­– ­the effect of Crimsworth’s visual riposte. Through such perceptual collisions, communication can happen. The tactile eye is thus interactive: it feels its way around the world of each fiction, fixing upon, arresting, striking and shooting looks at its subject. The feeling borne by the receiver of such a mobile, tangible gaze is an equally important aspect to consider. Here, the eye-­as-­feeler is reversed to show the feeling of vision. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Gwendolen undergoes an experience of watchful eyes causing a sensory feeling of heat. At the opening of the novel, Deronda finds himself unable to look away from Gwendolen; his ‘arrested’ attention lends to his eyes a ‘growing expression of scrutiny’ as he continues to ‘follow’ the movement of her figure (Eliot 1995: 9–10). It is this visual scrutiny which Gwendolen feels. As she looks around the room, we read that in the course of that survey her eyes met Deronda’s, and instead of averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly conscious that they were arrested­– ­how long? . . . She felt the orbits of her eyes getting hot, and the certainty she had (without looking) of that man still watching her was something



in s t ru mental eyes  75 like a pressure which begins to be torturing. . . . She controlled her muscles, and showed no tremor of mouth or hands. Each time her stake was swept off she doubled it. Many were now watching her, but the sole observation she was conscious of was Deronda’s, who, though she never looked towards him, she was sure had not moved away. (Eliot 1995: 10–11)

Her eyes, ‘arrested’ by Deronda’s own, feel his gaze as a physical heat. Here, the eyes take on properties associated only with the skin. This becomes felt as an almost violent ‘pressure’; later, she is described as ‘still wincing’ under his ‘measuring gaze’ (13). The close focus upon the ‘orbits’ of the eyes, and upon the tremor of muscles, offers us an intensely realised impression of the feeling of being observed by a gaze which is wielded as if it were a physical appendage, able to apply pressure to its subject as a hand might. Likewise, Gwendolen’s eyes themselves are rendered as sensitive as the rest of the body; no longer apertures or enablers of pure perception, they appear as sensitive as the organ of skin. Alexander Bain’s theory that the eye operates by ranging over the contours of a visual field and collecting composite impressions supports the idea that vision and tactility are intimately connected to landscape and mobility, and that the muscular feeling of vision informs our sense of spatial awareness. ‘An object moving away from the eye in a straight line would give us a changing sensation’, he writes, ‘no less than an object moving across the field of view. An object moving obliquely, that is receding or approaching, while going across the view, would give a complex feeling embodied in the movements of the eye and head.’ Not only does the fundamental movement of the head, following the line of vision, encourage a sense of mobile, felt vision, so too does the stretch and flex of the eye’s musculature: ‘By means of the movements of the eye, we acquire impressions of the visual expanse or apparent magnitude. This visual expanse of bodies is determined by the range or sweep of the eye in passing over their whole extent. . . . The different degrees of movement and tension of the muscles that make the sweep are distinctly felt’ (Bain 1855: 243–5). Bain’s model is far from an understanding of perception as passive mirroring. It is the physical interaction of a perceiver with the environment which brings forth, or enacts, perception. One result of this is that the eye can act as a literal detecting body, moving around a scene and seeking out information as if it were a muscled, sensate body. Ronald Thomas (2003) has explored the Victorian visual technologies used to assist in police detective work: the photographic mug shot and the magnifying glass. But in the following instances, the eye is not a tool for detection but rather the investigating body itself. In Dickens’s Bleak House (1851), Guppy attempts to find the letters owned by Nemo and, to this end, he and Tony Weevle descend on Smallweed’s shop. On entering, they engage in small talk, but this does not stop their eyes become immediately active in carrying out their search around the premises: Mr Guppy’s eye follows Mr Weevle’s eye. Mr Weevle’s eye comes back without any new intelligence in it. Mr Guppy’s eye comes back and meets Mr

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Smallweed’s eye. That engaging old gentleman is still murmuring, like some wound-­up instrument running down. . . . Mr Smallweed has run down again, while Mr Weevle’s eye, attended by Mr Guppy’s eye, has again gone round the room and come back. (Dickens 2008a: 586) Later, searching the Dedlocks’ library for further evidence of handwriting, detective Bucket’s eye is described as ‘taking a pigeon-­flight round the room’ before finally ‘alight[ing] upon a table where letters are usually put as they arrive’. Only once his eye has retrieved this information does he draw ‘near and examines the [handwritten] directions’ (745). In Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), St John’s eye could ‘leave’ and wander around the room. Watching him reading, Jane relates that, thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and absorbed enough; but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving the outlandish-­looking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes fixing upon us, his fellow-­students, with a curious intensity of observation: if caught, it would be instantly withdrawn; yet ever and anon, it returned searchingly to our table. (Brontë 2008a: 396) St John’s furtive eye strays and then retreats when discovered, and Brontë’s specific description endows it with a firm sense of physicality and movement. Beyond surveying a room, the eye was imagined to venture out into the landscape of the novel too. Arriving at Thornfield house, Jane looks out of her window at the estate and its surroundings: There were the two wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-­ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two; how I longed to follow it farther! . . . I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer. (Brontë 2008a: 85) Jane’s striving for independence, knowledge and experience of the world is communicated not merely in the narrating of her ‘desires’ and ‘prayers’ for liberty, but also in the calmly seeking eye that metaphorically ‘passes’ across the landscape to rest upon and trace the contours of the surrounding topography. Jane is unable to roam out over the heath and distant peaks, but the eye fulfils this action for her, becoming the equivalent of a travelling body experiencing the natural surroundings beyond her place of work. As Bain comments, ‘There is a distinct emotional sensibility in the feeling of distance, more especially of remote distance. A far object exalts the muscular feeling of the eye, and is a source of lively pleasure’ (1855: 243). Later, when Jane decides to abandon Thornfield after discovering the secrets of

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Rochester’s past, her eye aids her search for shelter when she finds herself lost on the moors: My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape. I saw I had strayed far from the village: it was quite out of sight. . . . My eye still roved over the sullen swell and along the moor-­edge, vanishing amidst the wildest scenery, when at one dim point, far in among the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up. (Brontë 2008a: 330) As Jane ventures towards the light, it becomes a ‘whiteish object’ that then reveals itself as the ‘silhouette of a house’ (330). Jane’s haptic eye saves her from starvation on the moor and, ultimately, sets in motion her return to Rochester. Interestingly, this is a two-­way process which involves the input of her vision ‘into’ and across the landscape, but which is aided by light from the environment. This light enables the ‘dim’ scene through which her eye ‘roved’ to be revealed as a space of salvation. Although her view from Thornfield’s window and across the moor could be described as a panoramic survey (it conforms to this model: a single observer in a privileged visual position, overlooking a vast and distant expanse), her eye does not passively appraise the scene from a distance but immediately reaches out and enters into an imagined dimensional scene which is textured, massy and evocative of physical sensations. This is the haptic eye in action, roving around to collect data: perception is enactive.

Conclusion Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello write that ‘the experience of looking­– w ­ hether reading texts or enjoying pictures­– ­is never just visual, but is also tactile, kinaesthetic, fully embodied, and affected by the material properties of the objects we do our looking and reading with’ (2010: 4). In this chapter, I have argued that the presentation of perception in literary texts is directly and explicitly affected by ‘the objects we do our looking with’; specifically, moving-­image technologies encouraged a sense that seeing was absolutely entwined with the motion of the hand, making the eye a kind of proprioceptive sense, able to range, roam and feel its way around an external environment. These Victorian hand-­operated optical gadgets are important for what their mechanical structure and operation reveals about the interactivity of hand and eye, tactility and visuality, cognition and environment. In drawing attention to this technological, and indeed physiological, history, I have shown that fictional representations of the look and the eye itself imagine perception as an amalgamation of sensory experience­– ­sight and touch, the optical and muscular. This tactile representation of perception moves away from spectacularity and cinematic apertures and instead offers a reading of visual culture in the novel which stresses interface, movement and the intimacy of perceptual sociability. It furthers our understanding of distributed cognition before such terminology existed, demonstrating that

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mental experience did not simply take place within the brain or by use of a single sense modality; rather, cognition was enacted by a perceiver deeply involved with and reliant upon a tangible, dimensional environment.

5 A est h et i c P e r c e pt i o n a n d E mb od ied C og nition: A r t a n d L i t e r a t ure a t the Fin de S iècle Marion Thain

This chapter reflects on the history of only one part of the distributed cognition framework: embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is the view that the body plays a more central role in cognition than that of simply registering sensations or performing actions. Embodied cognition theorists challenge the brain/body duality by insisting that much of what has been thought to be brain function occurs across the body. As Alva Noë writes, ‘perception isn’t something that unfolds in the brain however characterized, whether in information-­processing terms, or those of neurophysiology. It is not the brain, it is the animal (or person), who sees’ (2004: 29). Embodied cognition means that the activities of consciousness are not based in an immaterial mind (as in the old Cartesian duality) nor solely in the brain and its neural networks (as in many materialist theories); rather, cognition is dependent upon the operations of the experiencing body at large. I’m interested in a variety of claims for the embodied mind, and ultimately in ‘enactive embodiment’, which is defined by the claim that ‘our ability to perceive not only depends on, but is constituted by, our possession of . . . sensorimotor knowledge’. For enactive theorists, ‘perceiving is a kind of skilful bodily activity’ (Noë 2004: 2). Embodied cognition demarcates a conceptual area within the much more general field of somatic registers we encounter in art and literature, and will be used in this chapter as a focus around which to bring together the work of a group of late-­nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­century aesthetes. The aim is not to find exact replicas of current conceptions of embodied cognition in the past, but to explore a point in the history of the formation of such ideas. This chapter highlights a point in history when psychological theory profoundly influenced aesthetic theory, in order to better understand and appreciate the experimental modes of perception explored within fin de siècle aesthetics. Starting with Bernard Berenson’s theory of ‘tactile values’, and Vernon Lee’s and Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson’s embodied ‘empathy’, I explore theories of the visual arts that belong to the history of formation of ideas of embodied perception. I then go on to ask what relevance this has for our reading of the contemporaneous literary arts that were strongly invested in visual culture, suggesting we might work towards a new understanding of the importance of modes of embodied cognition to British impressionist poetry in light of this moment in the

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history of art criticism. Situating this moment in relation to a broader phenomenological tradition, the chapter suggests that fin de siècle visual and literary aesthetics should be seen as part of a history of formation of ideas of embodied cognition.

The Dissociation of Touch and Sight versus ‘Tactile Values’ To assert the significance of tactile modes of perception for Victorian modernity might seem to be in tension with an influential field of scholarship that has located the modernity of nineteenth-­century visualities in a dislocation of sight and touch. Following Jonathan Crary’s powerful work on nineteenth-­century constructions of viewing and the viewer in Techniques of the Observer (1990), nineteenth-­century visuality has often been characterised with reference to that separation. Crary charts an ‘industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century’ that he attributes to the first half of the century and that he claims is a precondition for twentieth-­ century modernism­– t­he revolution that included photography, impressionism and other experimental modes of viewing (Crary 1990: 19, 14). This ‘remapping’ is, he claims, attendant on industrialisation and is characterised by the ‘dissociation of touch from sight [that] occurs within a pervasive “separation of the senses” ’ (Crary 1990: 19). While touch had, he notes, been seen as an integral component of vision in the previous two centuries, in the nineteenth century, ‘The loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space’ (Crary 1990: 19). The isolation of vision, Crary argues, created a new observer ‘fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption’­– ­and that consumption is often a mediated one: one in which the object viewed is often experienced as discontiguous with the viewer’s body.1 More recently, in Victorian Glassworlds, Isobel Armstrong influentially explores a culture of mediated vision in ways that pick up on some of Crary’s key themes. Focusing on the period 1830–80, her study explores the importance of that ‘layer of matter between the seer and the seen’ which, in the form of the window, the mirror and the lens, separated the viewer’s body from what is viewed (Armstrong 2008: 3). Towards the end of the century, we might think of key examples that support an idea of modernist visualities as, in various ways, alienated from touch. Impressionist painting, for example, with its focus on the play of light and shadow within a fairly flat plane, seems designed to isolate and foreground the optical sensations. Kinaesthetic and proprioceptive apprehension of space seems to play little role in these works. Indeed, one might see this as true also of the visualities that influenced the literary arts. Arthur Symons’ declaration in ‘The Decadent movement in literature’ (1893) of the significance of instrumental cultures of vis 1

Crary himself writes of the importance of the ‘embodied’ eye when he notes the significance for the period of an understanding of binocular vision (for which the eyes need to be understood in their location in the physical body), but this use of the term ‘embodied’ signifies something quite different from the more fully embodied tactile vision I will go on to explore in this chapter.

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uality to ‘Impressionist’ poetry of the fin de siècle is important here. Drawing on the metaphor of the opera glass to illustrate the innovation in literature he describes under the term ‘Impressionism’, Symons invokes the lens that Armstrong notes as a mediator between seer and seen: what he describes as ‘a special, unique way of seeing things’ (Symons 1893: 860). The image of the opera glass distances the body of the viewer from the scene viewed through the magnifying lens, suggesting that dissociation of sight from touch. Such isolation of vision might be thought to connect impressionism with a feature fundamentally central also to a conceptualisation of Decadence: that atomisation described by Paul Bourget. Bourget’s theory of Decadent society, one in which the individual dominates over the collective (a system in which there is a separation of parts from the whole), resonates with this idea of dissociated visual sensations. If a Decadent style is one in which ‘the unity of the book falls apart replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word’, then it is, implicitly, one in which the body breaks down into fetishised and isolated parts (Bourget 1883: 24–5).2 Perhaps little wonder then that the Decadent observer is presented by Symons as an impressionist. Yet at the same time an influential group of aesthetes were developing theories that proposed a phenomenologically embodied formulation of vision­– ­one which can be seen to extend theories of the close connection between touch and sight that had been current since the eighteenth century, but in which the newly cognitive function of the body is indebted to the distinctly ‘modern’ influence of late-­nineteenth-­century psychological and philosophical discourse. This movement put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue in ways that complicate any idea of the centrality of dissociated vision to late-­nineteenth-­century modernity, and it is on this group that I will focus. Indeed, I will argue that the experiments of early modernism were as much a result of these theories of tactile vision as they were of the dissociation Crary outlines. Bernard Berenson is the best known of the group of aesthetes explored in this chapter, and it is with his theory of ‘tactile values’ that I begin. In his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896), Berenson identifies both the centrality of touch to vision (‘every time our eyes recognise reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal impressions’) and the importance of capturing this dimension in painting (Berenson 1909: 4). Painters such as Giotto fully realised this, according to Berenson, understanding that without tactile values, paintings represent surface but not the heft or solidity of the objects depicted. It is important to understand that Berenson was not suggesting that an appeal to the tactile embodiment of vision was essential to naturalism or mimesis in painting, but that it was essential to our ability to ‘realise’ what is represented. The precise meaning of this term is not fleshed out, but it seems to point towards an experience of what is represented that goes beyond  2

‘L’unité du livre se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendence de la page, où la page se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendence de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place à l’indépendence du mot.’

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visual sensation. He writes, for example, that art ‘must give us not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity for realising them’, and in rendering tactile values ‘the artist extracts the corporeal significance of objects’ (1909: 40, 51–2). In other words, Berenson is determined that painting is not an art of the purely, and isolatable, visual sensation, but of the embodied vision with which we operate in the world. So, tactile value in painting is not about representing simply texture, or even depth and perspective or movement, but about giving the viewer the ‘feeling’ of the thing represented in a much broader sense. Indeed, the notion of ‘feeling’ or ‘feelings’ in Berenson’s account of tactile values might repay further scrutiny. By way of explaining the importance of the ‘realisation’ we get of objects through tactile values, he writes, ‘We realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own states, our own feelings’ (1909: 84–5). Here Berenson invokes our anthropomorphic talk of inanimate objects: ‘The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the work of art’ (1909: 84–5). The goal of art, here, seems to be to invoke a mimicking response in the viewer­– ­it succeeds when we cannot merely understand it in relation to our own experiences, but when the viewer ‘translates’ it into her or his experiences. Again, Berenson does not identify with any precision the nature of these ‘states’ and ‘feelings’, but I will go on to suggest there are ­reasons to think this ‘realisation’ might include a physiological component. First, though, it might well be asked how the tactile values noticed in the art of Renaissance painters is relevant to thinking about characterisations of modernist visualities. In fact, Berenson notes almost in passing that ‘Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be grappling with this problem seriously’ (1909: 59). To argue for a distinctly embodied late-­nineteenth-­century culture of visuality, it must be noticed that something like ‘tactile values’ had become centrally important to the practice of post-­impressionist art. Degas was an important figure for Berenson here. In a letter to Mary Costelloe in 1896, he describes visiting Moïse de Camondo’s collection of new paintings by Degas and Manet: Degas exquisitely illustrates my theories­– ­not only his execution but the choice of his motives is entirely determined by feeling for tactile values, for pressure and movements. . . . Camondo reports Degas saying ‘il faut peindre faux pour paraitre vrai’ [‘one must paint false to appear true’]. (Berenson 1896) In other words, photographic realism is not a good way for painting to get to a depiction of our experience of reality because we don’t experience the world with our eyes alone, but with a sight informed by touch and by the movement of our bodies in space. Such post-­impressionist experiments are surely at least as profound a component of the modernist revolution as are the disembodied visualities of Monet’s impressionism. This is certainly what R. G. Collingwood asserted in his 1938 analysis in The Principles of Art. For him it was Cézanne who effected this revolution:

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Every one in the course of [the nineteenth] century had supposed that painting was ‘a visual art’; that the painter was primarily a person who used his eyes, and used his hands only to record what the use of his eyes had revealed to him. Then came Cézanne, and began to paint like a blind man. (Collingwood 1958: 144) In depicting the experience of feeling the object rather than seeing it, Cézanne’s painting ignores ordinary rules of visual perspective and form to convey something of the world as it presents itself through touch. Collingwood exclaims: ‘Of course Cézanne was right. Painting can never be a visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes’ (1958: 144). For Collingwood, painting has its most intense relationship with the kinaesthetic potential of the body, rather than with the eye: ‘what can be painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity of painting it’ (1958: 145). Collingwood describes Berenson’s theory of tactile values as involving primarily the motor sensations of using our muscles and moving our limbs. This certainly seems to be what Berenson means by ‘realising’ the object represented: to realise, for Berenson, is to experience through the motor potential of the body, and through our sense of kinaesthesia. Collingwood goes on to interpret this as an imaginative experience, drawing on imaginary motor sensation (1958: 147). In this way, he ultimately uses Berenson and tactile values to feed his theory of the centrality of the imagination to art: ‘By creating for ourselves an imaginary experience of activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art’ (1958: 151). Collingwood repeats over and over the centrality of an ‘imaginative experience’, yet is this really the right way to read Berenson’s tactile values? By turning to the work of an influential contemporary and interlocutor of Berenson, I will suggest that Collingwood’s reading might not fully capture the importance of the body, and of the primacy of embodiment, to Berenson’s theory. To flesh out the psychological detail of the kinds of claims Berenson is making, and the modernist revolution in art they describe, one might well turn to his near-­neighbour in the outskirts of Florence: his interlocutor and, arguably, intellectual superior Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). At the same time as he was theorising tactile values, she was developing, with her collaborator Clementina Anstruther-­ Thomson, her own theory of ‘empathy’ in order to recognise the wide range of embodied sensations involved in the act of engaging with the visual arts.3 Like Berenson, Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson claim that the Old Masters painted ‘what they felt instead of what they saw’, but they offer a far more detailed psychological schema (Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson 1912: 211). Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson are very clear on the location of a meaningful response to art in the body, and the ‘states’ and ‘feelings’ Berenson invokes chime with their claims for a fully embodied vision, not the imaginative reflection Collingwood posits. Dealing explicitly, like Berenson, with the perception of form, Lee explains what it might be to ‘realise’ that perception. Using at times this same term that Berenson used rather allusively,  3

Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson’s ‘Beauty and ugliness’, published in the Contemporary Review in 1897, was based on experiments undertaken over the previous ten years.

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Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson tell us that ‘realisation’ (as opposed to ‘the mere recognition of Form’) occurs through physiological mimicry in the body of the forms perceived; we ‘make form exist in ourselves by alteration in our respiratory and equilibratory processes’ (1912: 176, 236). Based on a series of experiments with looking at art and other objects, ‘Beauty and ugliness’ argues that an experience of physiological changes (‘adjustments in highly vital processes’, particularly those of balance and breathing) is necessary, although not sufficient, for aesthetic cognition of form (1912: 176). Many examples of the realisation of form are worked through in the essay, to show that although we may have become unaware that we consistently attend to these physiological changes as a vital component in our cognition, we can with special effort become alert to their workings. Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson make very clear that aesthetic cognition is a process of the body: a combination of sense impressions and these physiological experiences provide ‘the raw materials of an aesthetic cognition’; these ‘adjustments of breathing and balance are the actual physical mechanism for the perception of Form’ (1912: 163, 168). All visual perception of form, in other words, corresponds to some kind of ‘perceptive motor adjustment’ (Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson 1912: 227). While Collingwood’s interpretation of ‘tactile values’ is of imaginative engagement, Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson suggest that the bodily engagement is real, not merely reflective, albeit operative at a level that might ordinarily fall beneath our notice. Since Berenson notoriously accused Lee of plagiarising ideas he had discussed with her while he was writing Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, it is probably safe to say that her understanding is more attuned to his own thinking than is Collingwood’s. There is no doubt that, for the authors of ‘Beauty and ugliness’, a key aim of the essay is to displace the centrality of the intellect to aesthetics, and to locate key aspects of aesthetic cognition firmly in the body. Aesthetic pleasure, they contend, ‘is a phenomenon, not of the cerebral, but of the organic life of the big viscera­– ­mainly the heart and lungs’ (Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson 1912: 171). Take, for example, the following analysis of the experience involved in viewing an ancient vase of a strong and pleasing aesthetic form: Looking at this jar one has a specific sense of a whole. One’s bodily sensations are extraordinarily composed, balanced, co-­related in their diversity. To begin with, the feet press on the ground while the eyes fix the base of the jar. Then one accompanies the lift up, so to speak, of the body of the jar by a lift up of one’s own body; and one accompanies by a slight sense of downward pressure of the head the downward pressure of the widened rim on the jar’s top. Meanwhile the jar’s equal sides bring both lungs into equal play; the curve outwards of the jar’s two sides is simultaneously followed by an inspiration as the eyes move up to the jar’s widest point. Then expiration begins, and the lungs seem slowly to collapse as the curve inward is followed by the eyes, till, the narrow part of the neck being reached, the ocular following of the widened-­out top provokes a short inspiration. Moreover, the shape of the jar provokes movements of balance, the left curve a shifting on to the left foot, and vice versa. A complete and equally dis-



ae st het ic perc eption an d em b o di ed co g ni t i o n  85 tributed set of bodily adjustments has accompanied the ocular sight of the jar; this totality of movements and harmony of movements in ourselves answers to the intellectual fact of finding that the jar is a harmonious whole. (Lee and Anstruther-­ Thomson 1912: 175–6)

It is our awareness (albeit at a barely recognised level) of these experiences of physical pain or pleasure that, for Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, is a key component of our aesthetic judgements of beauty or ugliness. In short, in their work on the centrality of the body to aesthetic cognition, the authors see themselves as ‘adding another of the functions of what we call mind to the processes of what we rather arbitrarily distinguish from it as the body’ (Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson 1912: 236). In doing so they firmly align themselves within a context of contemporaneous work in psychology on embodied cognition. The James-­Lange theory is a particularly important point of comparison, as both projects seek to assert the primacy of bodily processes for cerebration. Moreover, in a preface to the essay written by Lee when it was republished in the 1912 collection Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, she articulates in greater detail the importance of contemporaneous psychology to her theory. Here she notes that her original essay followed the work of the psychologist and philosopher Karl Groos and the German art historian August Schmarsow (both of whose work was published between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century), and what Groos called ‘innere Nachahmung’ (literally a kind of inner imitation). In later years, she notes, she has come to follow more the work of the German philosopher Theodor Lipps (and his hypothesis of ‘Einfühlung’, a ‘feeling in’ or empathy) in giving greater prominence to mental phenomena in the explanation of the aesthetic phenomenon, whatever its physiological origin (Lee and Anstruther-­ Thomson 1912: 154). Such a clear situating of her own ideas within the history of embodied cognition is helpful, and shows the extent to which aesthetics was directly absorbing the influence of contemporary psychological writings at this time. This is important in showing how the ideas I’m tracing, although connected with a much longer-­ standing recognition of a somatic dimension of vision, are more precisely indebted to late-­nineteenth-­century thinkers whose work has since come to underpin current theorisations of embodied cognition. Here, again, the key is that the body is not merely presented as the receiver of impressions, which are then subjected to cerebral appraisal, but that aesthetic cognition is more closely bound and intertwined with those bodily processes. Perception of form, for Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, results from a deep mimicking physiology in which tiny adjustments in the body’s musculature accompany visual sensations. These processes of the body are fundamentally involved in the process of cognition, rather than reporting to a brain-­based function of mind. When Noë says, in his recent theorisation of enactive embodiment, ‘we enact our perceptual experience; we act it out’ (Noë 2004: 1), he is referring primarily to the sensorimotor potential of the body in space. However, such

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formulations have an interesting resonance with Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson’s physiological mimicry, which shares with Noë the broad insistence that perception of form is premised on the body’s physical engagement with it.

Embodied Cognition and Lyric In addition to her better-­known work with the visual arts, Vernon Lee also turned her model of corporeal aesthetic cognition to literature. Her essays about the latter were written over a long period and finally collected into the book The Handling of Words in 1923. In this work, she is particularly interested in literary form, and its relationship with the reader (Lee 1927: 35). Making a clear distinction between content and form, Lee suggests that the process of reading is an embodied one and that the body reacts to the feel of literature’s form as well as to its content. Writing specifically of form, she notes: there are words which make the Reader think and feel, in a way make him live, slowly; and there are other words which make the Reader think, feel, and live quickly; and quickly and smoothly, or quickly and jerkily, as the case may be. (Lee 1927: 58–9) While she presents the achievement of a connection between form and content as necessary for the success of literature, content and form have, in her understanding, separable effects on the body (Lee 1927: 58–9). It is not only individual words that affect us somatically with their formal presence, according to Lee, but also whole passages and sections of text. In prose the ‘pattern of words’ (like the forms on the canvas of the painting) ‘solicits our responsive sensibility and imagination’ (Lee 1924: 8). It is worth noting that such somatic modes of reading have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Embodied cognition scholars such as Ellen Esrock, for example, explore the potential for somato-­viscero-­motor ‘reinterpretation’ as a somatic mode of engagement with text. In an essay from 2004 she considers, for example, the reader’s ‘reinterpretation’ of a description of vertical falling in a novel through their own process of breathing: During inhalation the diaphragm contracts and moves downward, enlarging the thoracic cavity. Air is drawn in through the nose or mouth and down through the throat and into the lungs. In exhalation the process is reversed and the same things move upward, leading to vertically oriented movements. (Esrock 2004: 83) This location of the reader’s response to an artistic work in the expansion and contraction of their lungs, thorax and diaphragm bears strong similarities to what we find in Vernon Lee’s theory. In The Handling of Words Lee defines the relationship between writer and reader as one of ‘Expression and Impression’: the goal of the writer is to create something



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of a physical impress upon the reader. What the writer attempts to ‘transfer from his own consciousness to his Readers’ are ‘frame of mind, a mood, an emotion’ (Lee 1927: 36). These qualities are associated by Lee with the fragment rather than the whole. Unlike a painter, the writer does not, for Lee, attempt to convey the whole of anything: either a complete picture or a convincing argument. Yet the fragments ‘contain the active essence, the taste, perfume, timbre, the something provocative of the mood’ (Lee 1927: 37). It is in this way the writer conveys a certain emotional import. For this reason, while Lee writes almost entirely about prose in The Handling of Words, it is to poetry that she turns as the most complete expression of this ambition: ‘Therefore, while Hegel said that all art tends to the condition of music, we might say, more truly, that all Writing, in the highest artistic sense, tends to the condition of the Lyric’ (1927: 37). It is this invitation to consider Lee’s theorisation of embodied cognition in relation to lyric poetry, specifically, that I want to take up here. The above description of literature might readily put us in mind of the impressionist Decadent lyric poem that, as Symons has described (to echo a phrase quoted earlier in this chapter), ‘is the sincere attempt to render a particular mood’. If Lee’s and Berenson’s theories of embodied cognition are to be transplanted into the literary realm, they might most naturally be found, perhaps, in the phenomenological lyrics of contemporaneous poets. The strong connections between the visual arts and literature in aestheticism­– ­including the vogue for ekphrasis (poems that attempt to render paintings) and the significance of other ideas of ‘translation’ between artistic media (for example, the ‘nocturne’ as a musical, painterly and poetic form)­– ­make one wonder whether it is possible that aestheticist poetry, saturated as it was in thinking about the visual arts, could not have felt (in some way, and to some extent) the impact of the theories of embodied vision explored above. Arthur Symons certainly engaged at length with the visual as well as literary arts­– ­and with the relationships between the arts­ – ­as his substantial body of criticism demonstrates. In exploring the poetry of one of Berenson’s and Lee’s fellow aesthetes, this chapter will go on to recognise the broader resonance of their formulations of a somatically, or tactilely, embodied cognition, by resituating debates around ‘Impressionist’ poetry. While not wanting to overstate the case (Symons was not a scholar of German psychology as Lee was, nor was his business a systematic philosophy of perception), this context might help us read impressionist poetry more fully. To be clear from the outset, what I propose in relation to my analysis of Symons is not simply that his poetry can be read in the way Lee suggests­– ­that it can be the object of a somatic reading. This might be true of all poetry. Instead my claim is that within the content of Symons’ poetry we can find something that looks very much like embodied cognition used as a poetic strategy. Indeed, the I/You frame of the love lyric offers a textual arena, and a particular capacity, for experimentation in modes of perception, and in ways of knowing. It is this potential that will be explored in what follows.

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Impressionist Poetry: Arthur Symons’ Embodied Lyric One must begin with the observation that far from speaking to Lee’s conception of embodied perception, the Decadent impressionist poem is associated more readily with a shift in the lyric genre from affiliation with the disembodied ear to affiliation with the disembodied eye. This shift from traditional associations with song to occupying a new place within modernist cultures of the scopic is charted in Arthur Symons’ ‘The Decadent movement in literature’, in which he describes a lyric poetry which ‘is the poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings’ (Symons 1893: 861). For Symons, Decadent poetry aspires to ‘a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’. The disembodied vision he theorises is inspired by French impressionist painting, which, with its emphasis on the play of light, highlights surface over depth, solidity or ‘heft’. I have already noted that he characterises the painterly poetry of impressionism through the metaphor of the opera glass, thus distancing the viewer’s body from the scene viewed, and emphasising the spectral nature of impressionist visual aesthetics (Symons 1893: 860). Yet even the impressionist poetry of Symons himself might be usefully read in relation to ‘tactile values’ and somatic ‘empathy’. In attempting to convey to the reader something that captures a mood, it is not the disembodied visual impression but the somatic impression that is often appealed to in Symons’ poetry: what Lee has described as the ‘active essence, the taste, perfume, timbre’. The disembodied voice may be a French aestheticist ideal, but (as in so many other ways) British Decadence was not the same as that seen in France, however much it was influenced by French writers. After all, ‘The Decadent movement in literature’ ends with particular praise for a poetry that reflects ‘the ache and throb of the body’ (Symons 1893: 867). Indeed, while Symons is in some ways the archetypal British impressionist poet, his verse employs the somatic in ways that do not align with an affiliation to the lyrically disembodied ear or eye, nor with the dissociation of sight from touch that Crary outlined. Lyric is often associated, in Symons’ work, with the body. ‘On the Road’ equates poetry with walking in true troubadour style: The rhythm of the roads I beat,   My blood leaps up, I shout aloud, My heart keeps measure with my feet. (Symons 1896: 89) This is certainly an embodied song. More pertinently for embodied cognition as opposed to a more general discourse of embodiment, his ekphrastic poem ‘For a Picture of Watteau’ expresses a mode of visual engagement that might benefit from being set alongside Berenson and Lee’s physiological aesthetics (Symons 1896: 91).4 Throughout the poem visual images and colours are translated into bodily  4

This is almost certainly written about a picture by Watteau rather than about a portrait of Watteau­ – ­Boucher’s well-­known portrait of Watteau has little relevance to this poem.



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states. In the first stanza, the ‘forest breathes in sleep, / Lifting a quiet breast; / It is the hour of rest’. Just as Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson noted shifts in breathing and the expansion and contraction of the ribcage as a key locus of aesthetic response in the viewer of an artwork, so Symons conveys a comprehension of the image through the somatic states of the body. In the second stanza, he goes on to describe the ‘autumn pallor’ blooming ‘Upon the cheek of day’­– a­ nother image that conjures a viscerally experienced state. The language of the poem continues with somatic vocabulary (e.g. ‘languid’ and ‘sighing’). A novel form of ekphrasis, but one that had a significant resonance with the work of an extended community of aesthetes in Italy. Beyond the specifically ekphrastic, we often see in Symons’ verse an impressionism of the skin and the flesh as much as the eye. The poem ‘Kisses’ attempts to ‘sing you the song of your kisses’, attending to the various touches­– ‘­soft’, ‘subtle’, ‘fluttering’, ‘cling[ing]’ and ‘unclos[ing]’ (Symons 1897: 19). What we see in this somatic impressionism is a visual perception intimately bound up with the tactile. Bodies intertwine in the 1897 volume London Nights in a way that focuses the body as a whole as the organ of recognition or apprehension of the other. What is figured in these poems is an erotic mode of connection that posits an epistemology of the body. ‘You’ is apprehended here not through the purely visual, nor through cerebral appraisal, but through a bodily encounter in which the other is known through a physical contiguity and entanglement. I have written elsewhere about the significance of this trope to a broader fin de siècle idea of lyric encounter (Thain 2016: 130–52), but the work of Arthur Symons offers a particularly useful focus for the current investigation. While the connection I want to make is ultimately a much broader one, it is worth noting that at times the somatic impression is registered in Symons’ lyrics through something that looks a little like the physiological mirroring of Lee’s ‘empathy’. In ‘Escalade’, for example, we find ‘my blood  / Dancing the measure of your mood’ (Symons 1897: 96). Whether the mimicking of ‘your mood’ in the dancing of ‘my blood’ is a necessary part of the cognitive act (as in Lee’s empathetic cognition) is not, of course, clear, but Symons’ erotics does seem to absorb some of the modes of somatic engagement we see in contemporaneous physiological aesthetics. Of course, in his Decadent ‘perversion’ of the traditional love lyric into a lyric of physical encounter, Symons also exploits the erotic potential that was implicit in Lee’s close attention to her lover Anstruther-­Thomson’s bodily responses to art. Symons’ somatic impressionism might be usefully glossed with the following twenty-­first-­century description of embodied cognition in which, Phenomenologically, impressions appear to exude from the other, so to speak, and I sense them as I sense the other’s smell or heat; likewise atmospheres appear to exude from a place or situation. This does not mean that impressions and atmospheres are ‘out there’ and exist independently of the perceiver. Rather, they are relational phenomena that emerge in the interaction between perceiver and perceived person or situation. (Colombetti 2014: 180)

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Colombetti cites intimate encounter as a particularly intense case of such e­ xperience­ – ­because it involves ‘my and the other’s lived bodies entangled in reciprocal sensing-­in’ (2014: 183)­– ­and it is no accident that it is in Symons’ erotics that we find this mode of lyric impressionism. A poem such as ‘Bianca’ (the first in the Bianca sequence) offers a good focus for the relationality of his somatic impressionism, and it is one I will return to as a focus of my engagement with Symons (Symons 1897: 91). Mouth and hands act as central points of contact in this poem in which the lyric other is known through a shared moment of physical encounter. Here the impression is gained as much through touch as sight, and the two work inseparably for its perceptual method. Crucially, the poem ends in a reference to a shared pulse­ – ­‘And hot against my finger-­tips, / The pulses leaping in her throat’­– ­signalling the formation of the impression in an intersubjective realm. Beyond the resonances with modes of perception theorised by his aestheticist contemporaries, a recurring mode for Symons’ erotic impressionism is that of bodily entanglement. To return to the penultimate stanza of ‘Bianca’, for example, in which the relationship between the lyric subject and object is one of bodily intermingling, we hear of lips ‘cling[ing]’ to lips, and ‘hands that hold me and entwine’. I suggest that for Symons, as for current theorists of enactive embodiment, ‘The world makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction’ (Noë 2004: 1). For Noë ‘all perception is touch-­like in this way: perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do’ (2004: 1). In Symons’ poems perception is gained through the sensorimotor potential of the body to ‘intertwine’ with another body, and the ‘touch-­like’ quality of perception is, in this somatic impressionism, dramatised through an actual ‘knit[ing]’ of flesh with flesh. Vision and tactility intertwine as closely as the bodies in this poem­– ­a dual perspective signalled in the first line of ‘Bianca’ in which the flesh of the lyric object is experienced as ‘hot’ and ‘white’. It is primarily in this way that impressionism becomes for Symons a highly embodied mode of perception, and one, moreover, worked through the erotic touch of his lyric encounter. The best way to understand the form of embodied mind imagined here might be through the work of the early-­twentieth-­century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. Merleau-­Ponty is a philosopher who is at the root of much of what we now think of as enactive embodiment, in which action-­orientation shapes cognitive processes. The rest of this chapter will draw on the work of Merleau-­Ponty to strengthen the connection already made between Symons’ poetry and current theorisations of embodied cognition by scholars such as Noë and Colombetti (for whom the work of Merleau-­Ponty is influential). The work of Merleau-­Ponty, as we will see, not only helps bridge this historical gap and more fully theorise what we find in Symons’ poetry, it also circles back to the paintings of Cézanne­– ­a lynchpin for my exploration­– ­to bind all of this together more tightly with the tactile values of Berenson, Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson with which I began.



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Phenomenological Impressionism and Merleau-­Ponty For Merleau-­Ponty perception is embodied in the fundamental sense that it is always bound up with the body as a thing that moves around and makes contact with other things. In ‘Eye and mind’, he writes, ‘Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the “I can” ’ (Merleau-­Ponty 1974: 283).5 It is perhaps this intentionality of vision that is at the heart of Berenson’s, Lee’s and Anstruther-­Thomson’s ideas of our aesthetic cognition of aesthetic form. If perception is dependent on the locomotive or enactive possibilities of the body, then it would not be a surprise if our visual understanding of pictorial form involved a set of somatic changes in which the body registered appropriate reactions. For Merleau-­Ponty, ‘vision happens among, or is caught in, things’: Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. (Merleau-­Ponty 1974: 284)6 This interrelation of vision and the body echoes to some extent, as we shall see below, Berenson’s claim (quoted earlier) that ‘every time our eyes recognise reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal impressions’. Indeed, it is fascinating to see that Merleau-­Ponty finds in Cézanne’s work similar principles of tactility to those Collingwood also found there, and which he related to Berenson’s theory of tactile values. In his 1945 essay ‘Cézanne’s doubt’, Merleau-­Ponty writes that Cézanne ‘wished to return to the object without abandoning the impressionist aesthetics which takes nature as its model’ (1993: 62).7 ‘Return[ing] to the object’ turns out to mean returning to something of the solidity of the object, not just the ‘sensuous surface’. Cézanne recognises, according to Merleau-­Ponty, that the ‘lived perspective’ (‘La perspective vécue’) is not ‘geometric or photographic’ (‘géométrique ou photographique’) (Merleau-­Ponty 1993: 64). This is not about indicating ‘visual’, or ‘pictorial’, perspective, but about conveying the solidity of an object­– ­something Merleau-­Ponty sees him doing through colour and through outline shape. Crucially, though, Merleau-­Ponty stresses that Cézanne’s use of colour is not suggestive of the tactile sensations that would give  5

‘Tout ce que je vois par principe est à ma portée, au moins à la portée de mon regard, relevé sur la carte du “je peux”.’  6 ‘Visible et mobile, mon corps est au nombre des choses, il est l’une d’elles, il est pris dans le tissu du monde et sa cohésion est celle d’une chose. Mais, puisqu’il voit et se meut, il tient les choses en cercle autour de soi, elles sont une annexe ou un prolongement de lui-­même, elles sont incrustées dans sa chair, elles font partie de sa définition pleine et le monde est fait de l’étoffe même du corps.’  7 ‘Il a voulu revenir à l’objet sans quitter l’esthétique impressionniste, qui prend modèle de la nature.’

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shape and depth because ‘These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception’ (1993: 65).8 This gives an idea of how ‘tactile values’ might indeed be intrinsic to vision. Merleau-­Ponty believes, ‘We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects’9­– ­these tactile impressions are indivisible from sight: ‘Cézanne even claimed that we see the odor.’10 Merleau-­ Ponty considers painting not an art of the trompe l’oeil, but one that to succeed must capture ‘the real’ (‘du réel’)­– t­he ‘imperious unity’, the ‘presence’, ‘insurpassable plenitude’11­– a­ nd that ‘real’ is a far broader experience than an isolated visuality (1993: 65). To express our experience of the world, painting must capture the unity of the senses: the indivisibility of the tactile and the visual. In short, Cézanne seeks ‘to make visible how the world touches us’ (Merleau-­Ponty 1993: 70).12 One can see this in paintings such as Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses (c. 1890). Here the scene is depicted not with the expected ‘visual’ perspective, but with an attention to tactile form, the strength of outline giving weight to the existence of the apples as globes, each of which is tactilely very distinct from the background table and cloth. Perspective is, after all, something seen but not necessarily felt; to touch is to be in physical contiguity with something and so precisely not to engage very directly with the phenomena of lines converging to distant vanishing points that present themselves to the eye. As O’Regan and Noë write, ‘you do not touch an object from a “point of view” ’ (2001: 942). Cézanne’s work acts, then, as a focus for recognising the close connections between, on the one hand, Berenson’s, Lee’s and Anstruther-­Thomson’s theories of embodiment, and, on the other hand, Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology. This might be helpful in furthering our understanding of the poetic impressionism of Arthur Symons. In Symons’ work we often see a mode of engagement with the world that does not separate the impression from the body, but ‘views’ things through the physical proximity of the touch of the body. In what I call Symons’ phenomenological impressionism, the encounter with the world­– ­and the process of understanding and relating to the world­– ­is through the tactile encompassing of the hands and the lips. It is through the intentionality of the poetic subject­– a­ nd through its ability to grasp and touch in addition to its capacity to be a passive receiver of the touch or impression­– t­hat the other is known in these poems. In ‘Bianca’, for example, the relationship between lyric self and other is described through physical contact: ‘I take her hands into my hands’; ‘I set my lips on hers; they close  / Into a false and phantom rose’ (Symons 1897: 91). Indeed, it is as if lyric subject and object operate in a realm in which knowledge is exchanged through touch in this poem: ‘I take her hands into my hands, / Silently, and she understands’. In this poem the body is certainly embedded physically in the world,  8

‘Dans la perception primordiale, ces distinctions du toucher et de la vue sont inconnues.’ ‘Nous voyons la profondeur, le velouté, la mollesse, la dureté des objets.’ 10 ‘Cézanne disait même: leur odeur.’ 11 ‘l’unité impérieuse’, ‘la présence’, ‘la plénitude imsurpassable’ 12 ‘faire voir comment il [le monde] nous touche’  9



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knowing through that physical agency Merleau-­Ponty describes (quoted above) as being ‘a thing among things . . . caught in the fabric of the world’. What we see in the poems by Symons discussed above is (to echo Merleau-­Ponty again) the knowing of things in the world as ‘an annex or prolongation of’ the body of the subject: ‘they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition’, and part of its intention. In ‘Bianca’ we see a mode of phenomenological impression in which the lyric subject draws attention to his awareness of himself as alternately toucher and touched, at different points in the poem: he both encompasses her hands in his but also feels her ‘strain[ing] my hands within her hands’. This self-­consciousness on the part of the perceiving subject is critical for Merleau-­Ponty, for whom the hand that is touching cannot simultaneously be experienced as the object that is touched, but the body’s capacity for both is what makes experience possible. One way of thinking about the difference between the visual impressionism of Monet and the phenomenological impressionism of Symons might be through this distinction. For the French impressionist painters, the key experience is one of receiving an impression, while for the poetic post-­impressionism of Symons, it is important that the subject is an agent in the world. Again, it is significant that the lyric is a genre traditionally framed by an interaction: the address of lyric ‘I’ to lyric ‘you’. For consciousness to be intentional (for the phenomenologists) is for it to be directed towards other things in the world, and this has a particular relevance within the generic space occupied by lyric.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to offer an alternative narrative to that of the disembodiment of modern visualities at the turn of the twentieth century. The work of Berenson, Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson demonstrates a meeting point of the history of psychology and the history of aesthetics that is an important moment in the history of what is now called embodied cognition. This, in turn, has given a context for a brief engagement with Arthur Symons’ poetry that offers a pathway for tracing the broader aesthetic resonance of such ideas within fin de siècle aesthetics. While there are clear differences between the work of Merleau-­Ponty, on the one hand, and the ‘tactile values’ and aesthetic empathy theorised by Berenson, Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson on the other, phenomenology acts as a useful intermediary to bridge, historically and conceptually, between the work of a group of aesthetes and Decadents at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary framework of distributed cognition that is the basis for our project. The connections traced in this chapter between a variety of fields­– ­ideas of embodied cognition in contemporary theory; writings on embodied aesthetic perception in the visual arts at the turn of the century; the bodily modes of Decadent poetry; twentieth-­century phenomenology­– a­ re not intended to delineate the echo of a single particular conception of embodied perception. The aim is rather to open up a chain of resonances across the history of a broader field of embodiment

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to show how current work in psychology and philosophy of mind might ultimately prompt new questions to be asked of late-­nineteenth-­century poetry and fresh explorations to be made of the historical formation of ideas currently interesting scholars in many different fields. Moreover, we might also ask what kinds of questions creative works, such as poems, have the potential to pose back to current theorists of embodied cognition. What thought experiments might they offer, and what new routes into familiar questions in psychology or philosophy might they suggest? In other words, the value of this type of exercise is not to find as exact a replica as possible of the current ideas of embodied cognition in literature of the past, but to enable different texts with different, but related, concerns to productively interrogate one another.

6 Th e H et e ro c o s m i c S e lf: A n a log y , T emp ora lity a nd S t r u c t ura l C o upli n g s i n Prou s t’s S wann’s Way Marco Bernini

The scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics

Introduction: A Waxing and Waning Self Theories of distributed cognition, whether championing embodiment, extension, the enactive modality or the embedded nature of cognitive processes (for a survey see Rowlands 2010: 51–84), stress that our cognitive negotiation with the world is a matter of relation, interaction and integration between the mind and the world. According to these approaches, the mind is not isolated, insulated, confined and impermeable to the world; rather it is ‘coupled’ (Varela et al. 1991; Clark 2008), overflowing, ‘unbounded’ (Menary 2007a) and ‘porous’ (Clark 2013). The idea of distribution of the mind into the world has contrasting conceptual consequences. From a cognitive viewpoint, it is largely considered as an empowering of the mind’s domain, an enlargement of its cognitive territory (a cognitive positivity). From an experiential angle, it might generate a feeling of disconcerting fluidity or even an anxiety of groundlessness (an ontological concern). The ontological fear of a shaky ground for our existence might prevail if we apply the idea of distribution to the self. What if we consider the self too as coupled, unbounded, overflowing and porous? The new question becoming, where does the self stop and the rest of the world begin? Clark and Chalmers paved the way for an application of the extended mind theory to the problem of selfhood and identity when in their seminal paper they asked, ‘What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so’ (2010: 39). Referring to their landmark thought experiment in which Otto, an individual with severe memory impairment, relies on his notebook to reach a destination, they argued that ‘the information in Otto’s notebook . . . is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent. What this comes to is that Otto himself is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources’ (2010: 39). Despite this early hunch, the application of the extended mind theory to the problem of selfhood has received so far surprisingly scarce attention. Even more

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surprisingly, the link between extended mind, memory and the self has been limited to synchronic, contingent, temporally restricted cases of cognition. Part of the strength of Descartes’s tautological formula about the role of the cogito in testifying to our existence came from its suitability to the problem of temporal persistence or endurance of the self. Distributed accounts of cognition have unleashed the mental from its internal boundaries, but have still to provide a comprehensive argument about how an extended and enactive self­– ­being constantly and porously coupled with and extended into external spaces, environments and technologies­ – ­behaves in time. In his Second Meditation, Descartes himself famously proposed a simple thought experiment in order to test how our mind keeps track of identity in spite of (physical, therefore temporal) mutability. He asks the reader to think of a piece of wax, which is ‘hard, cold, easy to touch . . . In short, it has all the properties that seem to be required for a given body to be known as distinctly as possible’ (Descartes 2008: 22). So far, Descartes says, it is easy to grasp its concrete existence for it seems impermeable and not prone to changes. But what if we bring the wax near the fire? Then ‘the shape is taken away, it grows in size, becomes liquid, becomes warm, it can hardly be touched’ (2008: 22). Does the same wax remain, Descartes asks? His rationalist answer is that it does, because notwithstanding all changes, identity is not grasped by the senses but ‘by the faculty of judging that is my mind’ (2008: 23). Descartes aimed at downgrading the role of the senses and of imagination in perception of external objects and events. For him, both our perception of the self and our perception of the world are ruled and kept consistent through our rational activity. Interestingly, in arguing for this claim, Descartes used for the wax the same qualifiers that distributed accounts of cognition use to recast the mind and the self­ – ­something ‘extended, flexible, mutable’ (2008: 22). By assigning these qualities to the mind and the self, though, extended and enactive approaches to cognition have reached the opposite conclusion to Descartes, claiming that the nature of our mind and self is constitutively tied to sensorimotor engagements with the world (with environments, tools, technologies) in which the body and senses play a crucial role. In short, if Descartes provided a compartmentalised account of the mind and the self as safely sheltered from worldly contingencies and temporal mutability, proponents of distributed cognition have been considering the former in terms of the latter. Passing from an idea of the self as ontologically solid and concrete to a waxing and waning entity, however, reopens the question that Descartes attempted to answer with his rationalist argument: how can the self persist in time if it is chiefly constituted by a series of constantly renewed couplings, enactions and extensions? If the self does persist, what are the processes responsible for the temporal unification and synthesis of what enactivists call different ‘sensorimotor contingencies’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001)? If the self does not persist, what kind of phenomenology and new ontology underlies, or results from, this shift? This chapter focuses on these questions as they relate to an extended and enactive view of the self in the space-­time trajectory explored in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way­– t­ he first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s work is regarded as



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the most monumental literary endeavour on temporality, self and memory. I shall argue, however, that extended and enactive frameworks can provide important new insights on the key claims and findings of Proust’s literary endeavour. Proust’s first volume presents a view that the self, as I shall explain in the next section, is inherently distributed: either synchronically distributed into the external environment or diachronically distributed in what Varela, Thompson and Rosch call a ‘history of structural couplings’ (1991: 217). The problem, for Proust as well as for the distributed cognition framework, is accounting for the mechanism or faculty that is able to unite these contingent couplings into a single, continuous and temporally consistent self. In other words: how can the self be one and the same in, through or in spite of temporal changes? Proust’s answer, this chapter argues, is that our cognitive faculty of making analogies (or what he defines as ‘the miracle of an analogy’, 2000a: 223; ‘le miracle d’une analogie’, 2016a: 178) is responsible­– ­an eminently sensorial faculty. As Douglas Hofstadter suggested, analogy lies at the ‘core of cognition’, not simply as a computational information device for problem-­solving, but as the ground for perception affecting each of our experiences of the world. In Hofstadter’s own analogical image, analogy is not an ‘itty-­bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition’, but ‘the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition­– a­ nalogy is everything, or nearly so, in my view’ (2001: 499). Proust seems to assign to analogy a similar centrality and ubiquity in cognition, with a particular relevance to our perception of our self in time. The self, for Proust, is constantly morphing and­– ­as the wax of Descartes or the self of distributed cognition­– ­does not have finite and concrete boundaries. As the narrator of the novel says from the very beginning, the problem arises from the ontological datum that ‘none of us can be said to constitute a material whole’ (Proust 2005: 20; ‘nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué’, 1988: 69). In Swann’s Way, analogy is at the same time presented as a prerequisite and a side effect of our extended and enactive self. On the one hand, in order to extend and couple with the world, the self is presented as analogically relying on previous experiences of past interactions with similar scenarios. If this analogical repertoire is recruited successfully, analogy faithfully (and transparently) serves what Proust criticises as ‘habit’ (for a survey of the concept in Proust and French philosophy see Fülöp 2014)­– ­the skilful mechanism responsible for our feeling of persistence in time; for the sense of a single self surviving and surfing mutable conditions. On the other hand, when habit misfires and a single analogical recognition of the world is negated, the protagonist becomes aware of the discontinuity in his temporal structure and he experiences an ontological anxiety of groundlessness. In the latter scenario, which is the one to which Proust assigns a revelatory ontological power, instead of sustaining a feeling of continuity, previously enacted worlds (and, importantly, even literary and imaginatively experienced worlds) backfire and re-­emerge as possible presents­– ­in a clash between synchronicity and diachronicity from which also emerges what I define as Proust’s ‘heterocosmic self’. Drawing on extended and enactive perspectives on mind and self, with forays

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into classic phenomenological accounts of the temporality of experience, this chapter investigates Proust’s exploration of the problematic extension of the self (temporally, spatially, ontologically). It suggests that for Proust analogy is the structural, cognitive, aesthetic and ontological principle of what I will call his theory of ‘distributed ontology’. In the first section, I introduce Proust’s idea of the self as analogically distributed in space, time and worlds along the synchronic, diachronic and heterocosmic axes. In the second section, I show how analogy is for Proust at the same time a key cognitive process in perception, an ontological condition of existence, and a writing tool for exploring and communicating the combination of the two. In the conclusion, I argue that as much as the contemporary sciences of the mind enlighten Proust’s exploration of the self, Proust’s work can also challenge and expand their field of investigation, especially by highlighting the role of analogy in distributed cognition.

Spatiotemporal Couplings and the Extended Self: Synchronicity, Diachronicity, Heterocosmicity So, where does the self stop and the world begin? Starting with the synchronic axis, and in line with the extended mind theory­– ­and even more so with enactivist accounts of cognition­– P ­ roust’s text collects examples of how, at every discrete moment in time, the self is coupled, interacting and integrating with the environment. Our self can be, for instance, spatially integrated with the room in which we sleep for a certain period of time. This kind of integration is, however, gradually achieved and easily disrupted. It takes time to get used to the coupling with the external space, or, in Proust’s terms, the coupling has to become a ‘habit’. The process is slow and painstaking, and we all know that the first nights in a new bedroom can be unsettling. This is exactly the situation in which we find the narrating character, Marcel,13 at the beginning of the novel. He tells us how troubling and frightful it has been for him, as a child, to achieve a feeling of integration with his bedroom in Combray, until habit turned his room into a ‘fixed point’ on which his existence and melancholic thoughts become ‘centred’ (Proust 2005: 8; ‘ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations’, 1988: 56). At the beginning, however, he was convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock . . . until habit had changed the colour of the curtains, silenced the clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass . . . Habit! that skilful but slow-­moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on 13

Notwithstanding the homonymy and the autobiographical similarities, it is common practice for Proust’s scholars to maintain a narratological distinction between Proust as the flesh-­and-­blood author and Marcel as the narrating protagonist. I will keep this distinction as neat as possible throughout the chapter, without entering the critical debate around the tension between the ­writing and fictional stances in Proust’s work (on which see, for instance, Balsamo 2007).



the heter oc osm i c s el f  99 end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable. (2005: 7; emphasis mine) j’avais été . . . convaincu de l’hostilité des rideaux violets et de l’insolente indifférence de la pendule . . . jusqu’à ce que l’habitude eût changé la couleur des rideaux, fait taire la pendule, enseigné la pitié à la glace oblique et cruelle . . . L’habitude! aménageuse habile mais bien lente et qui commence par laisser souffrir notre esprit pendant des semaines dans une installation provisoire; mais que malgré tout il est bien heureux de trouver, car sans l’habitude et réduit à ses seuls moyens il serait impuissant à nous rendre un logis habitable. (1988: 56–7; emphasis mine)

This passage already condenses important information about the functioning of analogy in spatiotemporal couplings. Before the coupling takes place and the integration with environmental conditions becomes transparent, signals from the world remain chaotic and call for interpretation. The character perceives this interpretive moment as an analogical process of anthropomorphism whereby inanimate things appear agentive. The pre-­coupling scenario, then, is not simply a lack of conceptual recognition or a wrong interpretation of perceptual patterns, but it discloses the possibility of alternative worlds, where objects have consciousness and intentions. As Waytz and colleagues point out, ‘anthropomorphism goes beyond providing purely behavioural or dispositional descriptions of observable actions (such as noting that a coyote is fast or aggressive); it involves attributing characteristics that people intuitively perceive to be uniquely human to nonhuman agents or events’ (Waytz et al. 2010: 58). Anthropomorphism is therefore a matter of perceiving possible worlds intruding on our reality, and by means of analogy detecting in the environment ‘both physical features, such as perceiving a religious agent in a humanlike form, and mental capacities that people believe are uniquely human, such as the capacity to have conscious awareness [and] possess explicit intentions’ (Waytz et al. 2010: 58). As the next section will show, this animist disposition of the main character of attributing malevolent intentions to curtains and clocks is just a local example of his broader attitude of thinking of souls (and selves) as potentially migrating or morphing into different shapes and forms across time. Analogy at the same time allows their detection and silences their presence by supporting the recognition of the environment which the habit is in charge of completing and stabilising. Habit will turn temporary quarters into transparent spatiotemporal couplings, in which the self can feel centred and cosmically anchored. Its ordering manoeuvre will silence the chaos, conceal the complexity of a possible cosmos, and assign to the self an illusory geocentric perspective. Thankfully, as soon as they are established, cognitive extensions with spaces can become so habitual that we barely perceive them. This is until something or someone alters the structure of the coupling and we start feeling again perturbations in our cognitive extended system. As Clark and Chalmers point out, these

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perturbations might be considered as threatening the very core of the self involved in the cognitive interaction. In line with what Proust is representing, they argue that a serious conception of the self as distributed in the environment ‘will have significant consequences . . . in the moral and social domain. It may be, for example, that in some cases interfering with someone’s environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person’ (Clark and Chalmers 2010: 39). Sometimes the interfering might be guided by the best of intentions, as when a family friend decides to give Marcel a magic lantern to entertain him before falling asleep. The gift has the opposite effect of altering the coupling between him and the room, generating a feeling of decentring and disanchoring of Marcel’s identity: Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern . . . But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room . . . Now I no longer recognised it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time. . . . I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed. (2005: 8–9; emphasis mine) On avait bien inventé, pour me ‘distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l’air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique . . . Mais ma tristesse n’en était qu’accrue, parce que rien que le changement d’éclairage détruisait l’habitude que j’avais de ma chamber . . . Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j’y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d’hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer. . . . Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j’avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu’à lui-­même. L’influence anesthésiante de l’habitude ayant cessé . . . (1988: 56–8; emphasis mine) The magic lantern, by projecting the colourful images of its glasses over the room, is perturbing and ultimately disrupts the spatiotemporal cognitive system constituted by Marcel coupled with his room. As the room is no longer recognised as his own, a fissure opens between his mind and the environment, and the formerly extended self returns fluctuating and awaiting further anchoring or extension. By loosening the connection with his room, he gets lost in this fissure. This cognitive fissure opens up a wider gap in which analogy comes into play. As the passage clearly shows, once the original connection is disrupted, Marcel begins analogically to recollect previous spatiotemporal extensions (such as arriving for the first time in a hotel). From the singularity of a stable, painfully achieved entanglement with the room (of one self in one world), he passes now to analogically perceive himself pulled into previously enacted worlds. As Alva Noë puts it, ‘habits are



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world-­involving’, since they are tied to the current world to which they belong, and these couplings constitute our self­– o­ r, as Noë puts it, ‘we are of them’ (2009: 69). Noë alludes also to the fragility of this relation, explaining how ‘habits and skills are environmental in the sense that they are triggered by environmental conditions and they vanish in the absence of the appropriate environmental settings’ (2009: 97). And as soon as habits are disrupted, analogy-­making comes to the fore of cognition (and awareness) firing a multiplicity of worlds, all potentially matching our perception. In short, if habits are world-­involving, defamiliarisation is world-­multiplying. Going back to the spatiotemporal axis, whenever there is a rupture in the synchronic spatial cognitive extension, the diachronic temporal axis re-­emerges in the guise of analogically triggered previous interactions between selves and worlds­– o­ r what I refer to in what follows as ‘analogical worlds’. This rupture, for Proust, is far from exceptional, and his view of the self in time is described as a discontinuous series of ‘new selves’, each of which ought to, according to the narrating protagonist, ‘bear a different name from the preceding one’ (1996: 681; ‘Ces nouveaux «moi» qui devraient porter un autre nom que le précédent’, 1990: 175; see Landy 2009: 105). In a radical view of the self as a fragile distributed entity, Proust seems to suggest that the rupture and the discontinuity occur on a daily basis. In fact, whenever we fall asleep, disconnecting from the room we sleep in, we disentangle from our extended self by losing our connection with the space. When we awake, we only gradually ‘read off’, in Marcel’s terms, signals in the environment to geolocalise our position in the world. However, the reconnection to the spatiotemporal position we actually occupy can go easily wrong, as the narrator explains in the following passage: When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. . . . suppose that he dozes off in some . . . abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place. (2005: 3; emphasis mine) Un homme qui dort, tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. Il les consulte d’instinct en s’éveillant et y lit en une seconde le point de la terre qu’il occupe, le temps qui s’est écoulé jusqu’à son réveil; mais leurs rangs peuvent se mêler, se rompre. . . . Que s’il s’assoupit dans une position . . . déplacée et divergente, par exemple après dîner assis dans un fauteuil, alors le bouleversement sera complet dans les mondes désorbités, le fauteuil magique le fera voyager à toute vitesse dans le temps et dans l’espace, et au moment d’ouvrir les paupières, il se croira couché quelques mois plus tôt dans une autre contrée. (1988: 52–3; emphasis mine)

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Here Proust is reflecting, through his narrating character, on what sleep and awakening might reveal about the continuity of self and consciousness. A couple of decades before Proust wrote this page, William James had already referred to sleep as one of the peculiar problems for the view of consciousness as a continuum. In his Principles of Psychology, James noted how, despite our feeling of continuity, ‘the life of the individual consciousness seems, however, to be an interrupted one . . . Sleep, fainting, coma, epilepsy, and other “unconscious” conditions are apt to break in and occupy large durations of what we nevertheless consider the mental history of a single man’ (2007: 199). Commenting on this passage by James, Owen Flanagan rightly points out that a ‘stream, then dry land, followed by another stream do not a single stream make’ (1992: 157). The cosmic imagery of Proust’s narrator seems to embrace this view about the problematic discontinuity of consciousness during sleep by recasting it on a cosmological spatiotemporal scale. He seems to suggest that, despite it being mostly an instantaneous and immediate reconnection, previous worlds (spatiotemporal enactments and extensions) and orbits are still present; and that a self, then no-­self, then self do not a single self make. If this liminal moment of awakening derails in the wrong reconnection or re-­extension, the world of a single man would fall out of his orbit and, traversing time and space, recouple with previously enacted worlds (and selves). As Proust suggests immediately after the above passage, this liminal transition before we reconnect to the place we are in­– a­ nd with the self resulting from this extension­– ­can sometimes last longer than usual, opening a larger fissure in which, before tying our self to a single world, our identity presents itself in the plural form of analogical memories of previous worlds we have experienced: [F]or me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was. I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk or flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-­dweller; but then the memory­– ­not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be­– ­would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-­being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-­lamps, then of shirts with turned-­down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego. (2005: 4; emphasis mine) Mais il suffisait que, dans mon lit même, mon sommeil fût profond et détendît entièrement mon esprit; alors celui-­ci lâchait le plan du lieu où je m’étais endormi, et quand je m’éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j’ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j’étais; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l’existence comme il peut frémir au fond d’un animal: j’étais plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes; mais alors le souvenir­– ­non encore du lieu



the heter oc osm i c s el f  103 où j’étais, mais de quelques-­uns de ceux que j’avais habités et où j’aurais pu être­– ­venait à moi comme un secours d’en haut pour me tirer du néant d’où je n’aurais pu sortir tout seul; je passais en une seconde par-­dessus des siècles de civilisation, et l’image confusément entrevue de lampes à pétrole, puis de chemises à col rabattu, recomposaient peu à peu les traits originaux de mon moi. (1988: 52–3; emphasis mine)

This passage explains how the synchronic extension of Marcel with the room is unleashed when falling asleep. On awakening, with the synchronic connection having been momentarily untied, a fissure opens in which the very feeling of personal identity is lost. The fissure or, in Proust’s terms, a relaxation of consciousness ignites analogies with a vast universe of possible worlds, first spanning and spinning centuries of civilisation, and then being gradually narrowed down to previous worlds Marcel had personally experienced as past self-­extensions. In the end, a single world and a single self are restored. These are key components of what I will call in the next section Proust’s theory of ‘distributed ontology’. Existence is distributed synchronically when it forms a unity of self and world at a specific moment in time. Existence is distributed diachronically as a series every time new selves couple with new worlds, in a feeling of discontinuous ontology. As a result of this double extension or, in Landy’s words, a Proustian ‘dual predicament’ (see Landy 2009: 101), the self becomes a fluid, ever-­changing entity which moves from world to world in what I would define as a heterocosmicity. For Marcel, each one of ‘those worlds which we call individuals’ (1996: 343; ‘mondes que nous appelons les individus’, 2016b: 246) is always distributed into a multiplicity of worlds. The fact that we perceive, albeit in rare conditions of disruption, this discontinuity from within could suggest that in the end something or someone remains constant after all. As Evan Thompson proposes, while interpreting the same passage from Proust in the light of phenomenological, enactivist and Buddhist traditions, although deep sleep creates a gap or rupture in our consciousness, we feel the gap from within upon awakening. Our waking sense that we were just asleep and unaware isn’t outside knowledge, it’s inside, firsthand experience. We’re aware of the gap of our consciousness from within our consciousness. (2014: 236) Thompson here is referring to the persistence of a minimal sense of self close to the ‘most rudimentary sense of existence’ of an ‘animal’s consciousness’ to which Proust is alluding. The distinction that Thompson stresses between the ‘self as the subject of present-­moment experience’ and the self as the ‘mentally represented object of autobiographical memory’ is an important one (2014: 236). The former minimal level of selfhood, Thompson says, already brings a degree of individual connectedness to the surrounding world, and this feeling is always present, even if just as the individual feeling of a me being lost. Still using the awakening state as an example, Antonio Damasio similarly explains how ‘awakening meant having my temporarily absent mind returned, but with me in it, both property (the mind) and proprietor (me) accounted for’ (2010: 4). Proust seems to grant this minimal level of

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subjectivity, yet emphasises how our mind and body are incapable of resting in it; they inescapably hurry into looking for a richer connection with the environment in order to regain a higher degree of selfhood. When the protagonist explains that ‘not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was’, he suggests that a minimal spatiotemporal coupling is thus the requisite for even a basic sense of self. Importantly, though, Proust does not seem to share the idea that higher levels of self-­identification are merely a representational, autobiographical or narrative affair of which mind and language are exclusively in charge. Quite the opposite: he presents the transition and the gap between the animal sense of existence and higher levels of spatiotemporal self-­individuation as something relying heavily on embodied (re-­established) cognition and (re-­established) coupling. In a non-­ representational, pre-­linguistic and enactive vein, Marcel reports how, even before my brain, hesitating at the threshold of times and shapes, had reassembled the circumstances sufficiently to identify the room, it­– ­my body­– ­would recall from each room in succession the style of the bed, the position of the doors, the angle at which the daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had in mind when I went to sleep and found there when I awoke. (2005: 5; emphasis mine) avant même que ma pensée, qui hésitait au seuil des temps et des formes, eût identifié le logis en rapprochant les circonstances, lui,­– m ­ on corps,­– ­se rappelait pour chacun le genre du lit, la place des portes, la prise de jour des fenêtres, l’existence d’un couloir, avec la pensée que j’avais en m’y endormant et que je retrouvais au réveil. (1988: 58; emphasis mine) The cosmological book of history of spatiotemporal couplings is not written in a language that only the rational faculty of judging can understand. Its deciphering is better performed by the senses, Proust says, in line with an anti-­Cartesian view of cognition. This is not surprising, given that the book collects a history of sensorimotor engagements and extensions. As for the problem of a discontinuity of the self, here Proust is writing about how the body is responsible for informing the mind about how to bridge the gap between pre-­and post-­sleep states and worlds. Yet the strength of the Proustian exploration relies more on the kind of ontological revelations we can access in the rare moments of defamiliarisation in which this transition becomes perceptible and the self is revealed as fluidly able to occupy multiple positions in space and time. To understand the self as constantly reconstituted by discrete sensorimotor interactions, we have to abandon the idea of a stable unity towards a conception of the self as an extended process generating a heterocosmicity. This also means that we have to get rid of the idea of the self as a single substantial entity. In this respect, what I have called the disclosing of a ‘fissure’ after the disconnection of sleep can be described, in the enactivist terms of Varela, Thompson and Rosch, as an ‘evocation of groundlessness’ (1991: 217–19). This



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unsettling moment shows us how our self is just a ‘history of structural couplings’, because ‘we could discern no subjective ground, no permanent and abiding ego-­ self. When we tried to find the objective ground that we thought must still be present, we found a world enacted by our history of structural coupling’ (Varela et al. 1991: 217). Analogy, by filling the ‘cognitive liminality’ (see Bernini 2015) of our momentary ‘evocation of groundlessness’, is the volume in which we ‘read off’ our history of distributed cognition. In other words, analogy is our history of structural couplings underlying the self as a history of distributed worlds. Therefore, a new set of questions arises. Where does one world stop and the rest of the worlds begin? How does the self migrate from one world to another? Do analogical relations also play a role in our interpretation of other people’s worlds? Can literary analogies function as tools for exploring the role of analogy in cognition? These are the questions that I will address in the next section.

Analogical Worlds: Metempsychosis, Retentional Trajectories and Distributed Ontology To recapitulate, Proust emphasises the role of analogy at at least two levels. First, analogies are the very ontological structure of our existence: they are the way in which our self is distributed in a succession of coupled enactions with worlds that each time can be­– ­voluntarily or not­– ­recalled. Second, Proust suggests that analogy-­making is a key cognitive process that recruits previous analogical worlds as key cognitive tools to make sense of reality. The liminal moments of groundlessness in which we can perceive the analogical process spinning worlds is an exceptional case that makes evident a process that is always operating: namely, our analogical mode of interaction with the world, our projecting over the current world analogical worlds in order to make sense of it. Between the self and reality, in fact, there is for Proust a constant veil, an opacity that has to be interpreted, mostly by means of analogies. He explains how, for him, ‘in all perception there exists a barrier as a result of which there is never absolute contact between reality and our intelligence’ (2000a: 357; ‘Car il y a entre nous et les êtres un liséré de contingences . . . qui empêche la mise en contact absolue de la réalité et de l’esprit’, 2016a: 281). As with the magic lantern, but with a more familiarising effect, it is by projecting previous analogical worlds over this opaque screen that we can make sense of what stands in front of us­– ­in terms of both continuity (it is my room) and discontinuity (it is my room in world x and not my room in world y). It is a matter of recognising patterns and novelty by resorting to previously experienced worldly extensions. In The Analogical Mind, Holyoak, Gentner and Kokinov describe analogy as ‘the ability to pick out patterns, to identify recurrences of these patterns despite variation in the elements that compose them . . . Analogy, in its most general sense, is this ability to think about relational patterns’ (2001: 2). In this definition, however, analogy seems to be exclusively about continuity and discontinuity­– ­a perceiving of differences in contiguity. I would suggest instead that Proust’s view is more radical, and that for him the relation between analogical worlds and the present

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world is not just a contiguity but close to, in Leibniz’s terms, a ‘compossibility’; that is, the idea that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds with which it co-­exists. For Proust, as soon as one world ceases to be actual­– ­as well as the self in it­– ­it does not cease to be present and to some extent possible. In his recent book, Proust as a Philosopher, Miguel de Beistegui also refers to Leibniz’s idea of worlds’ ‘compossibility’ (2013: 83), suggesting how in Proust every episode of involuntary memory or analogical memories in the gap of awakening functions as the projection of a medieval story­world by the magic lantern over the room of the young Marcel, where ‘both worlds, both spaces, and both eras blend and join into a single reality that’s irreducible to either one or the other, all the while remaining tangible and alive’. The idea of analogical compossibility of worlds, though, is in Proust a very specific kind of blend. If all the previously enacted worlds and selves remain dormant and alive, in the re-­activation of their presence we experience more a superimposition than a blend. The notion of ‘conceptual blending’, as formulated by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), can be useful to grasp the specificity of Proust’s analogical account of the extended or heterocosmic self. As we have seen, Proust considers analogy both as an ally of habit in maintaining a feeling of continuity and consistency in the self-­ world relation as well as the mechanism misfiring when this relation is momentarily broken. The former stabilising role of analogy is accounted for by Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 115–19) in terms of ‘compression’­– ­the mental faculty whereby we integrate multiple domains or elements into a single unified concept. For them, among many other forms of compressions our mind performs, the feeling of our identity as consistent in time is the result of this cognitive process. They suggest that our mind manages to compress each new evolving stage of our life into a single blend (our self), and that ‘human mental life is unthinkable without continual compression and decompression involving identity’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 115). The self, then, would be what Turner more recently has defined as an ‘overarching blended self, which can be stable in the blend despite considerable inconsistency across the various selves’ (Turner 2015: 79). This successful compression of multiple selves into a single, consistent blend is indeed something Proust recognises, but only as the more illusory and representational (that is, conceptual, abstract, disembodied) outcome of analogy­– a­ s the arranging cognitive work of habit that analogy can both support and unmask. For him, moments of decompression in what he later in the novel calls the ‘whirlpool of awakening’ (2005: 224; ‘tourbillon du réveil’, 1988: 277) are ontologically far more revealing, and the experience of being pulled into the cosmological whirlpool more enticing. These ruptures disclose at the same time the ‘distributed ontology’ of the self (the multiplicity of worlds still possible and accessible in the history book of structural couplings) as well as its groundlessness and fluidity. This is the kind of ontology that Proust aims at exploring, pointing at an idea of self as distributed into multiple space-­time worldly couplings thanks to its fluidity. And the idea of a superimposition in which discontinuities or disanalogies can be constantly perceived as ontologically present is for him more important than stressing



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the consistency of this superimposed mass of layers, as is evident in the following geological image: All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them­– ­between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired by a taste or ‘perfume’ . . .­ – ­if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation. (2005: 223; emphasis mine) Tous ces souvenirs ajoutés les uns aux autres ne formaient plus qu’une masse, mais non sans qu’on ne pût distinguer entre eux,­– e­ ntre les plus anciens, et ceux plus récents, nés d’un parfum . . .­– ­sinon des fissures, des failles véritables, du moins ces veinures, ces bigarrures de coloration, qui dans certaines roches, dans certains marbres, révèlent des différences d’origine, d’âge, de «formation». (1988: 276; emphasis mine) The reference to a ‘single mass’ can be read as an allusion to a sort of ontologically overarching self. However, Proust’s emphasis falls clearly more on the incomplete coalescence of the mass, and the entire image is aimed at accounting for the discernibility (that is, compossibility into the same substance) of the superimposed layers. If an idea of a self emerges from this metaphor, it is of the self as a node of compossible superimposed layers of previous enactions and extensions (elsewhere described as ‘the layers of my mental soil’, 2005: 221; ‘des gisements profonds de mon sol mental’, 1988: 274). Putting this geological image in relation to optical metaphors whereby Proust expresses the feeling of this distributed ontology of the self can help in clarifying why superimposition prevails on, or contrasts with, the idea of a self as a successful blend. The first optical device is the stereoscope. In the third volume, The Guermantes Way, Proust explains how to recall the image of Albertine from a temporal distance felt like looking at her ‘behind the lens of a stereoscope’ (2000b: 418; ‘derrière le verres d’un stéréoscope’, 2012: 352). Here, Proust is suggesting that by unifying two points in time (the present remembering self and the past experiencing self) we achieve (spatial) depth in (temporal) perspective. This perspectival view of self and memory had been for Proust a major aesthetic goal in representing the psychology of his characters, as he explained in an interview in Le Temps in 1913, famously asserting that ‘there is plane geometry and geometry in space. Well, for me the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time’ (13 Novembre 1913; ‘Vous savez qu’il y a une géométrie plane et une géométrie dans l’espace. Eh bien, pour moi, le roman ce n’est pas seulement de la psychologie plane, mais de la psychologie dans le temps’; my translation). The idea of the stereoscope, though, is only partly appropriate since the conjunction of past memories to the present moment discloses not just a three-­dimensional depth, but a four-­dimensional ontology of spaces and selves in time. For the narrating protagonist, the self is like

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a universe that you can travel, and in relation to his memories he admits an ‘inclination to travel’ (2005: 222; ‘désir de voyage’, 1988: 275) in time as space, or vice versa. As the church to which the protagonist used to walk as a child is textured by different strata from different epochs, the self is ‘an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-­dimensional space­– ­the name of the fourth dimension being Time­– ­extending through centuries its ancient nave’ (2005: 71; ‘un édifice occupant, si l’on peut dire, un espace à quatre dimensions­– ­la quatrième étant celle du Temps,­– ­déployant à travers les siècles son vaisseau’, 1988: 121; emphasis mine). As Shattuck notes, ‘Proust portrays not just a stereoscopic view of the self, but a “stereologic” consciousness which sees the world simultaneously’ (1982: 47). The idea of a stereoscope, though, remains valid insofar as it points at a necessary degree of analogical similarity between the two images in order for depth to emerge. This simultaneity of selves and analogical worlds, as we have seen, is mostly operating in the background, (pre)serving habitual recognition of a single self in a single spatiotemporal connection to a single world. But when analogy breaks rank, such as in the moment of awakening, we can have a glimpse of the ‘shifting and confused gusts of memory’ (2005: 6). To describe the blurred access to this analogical spinning of worlds and selves, Proust uses another optical image, that of a ‘bioscope’. He explains how ‘in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope’ (2005: 6; ‘souvent, ma brève incertitude du lieu où je me trouvais ne distinguait pas mieux les unes des autres les diverses suppositions dont elle était faite, que nous n’isolons, en voyant un cheval courir, les positions successives que nous montre le kinétoscope’, 1988: 54). Once again, in order for the bioscope to create a feeling of a moving horse, each image has to be at the same time similar and different. But here Proust is using the image to suggest that, in the feeling of a self moving through spaces and time, the protagonist is not able to isolate each image. The only dynamics he can perceive is that there are discrete images generating a movement. In other words, he is pointing at the feeling of rapid successions that approximates simultaneity­– ­the self becoming an almost simultaneous movement from world to world. If we were to complement Proust’s optical images with a more recent technological innovation derived from contemporary research on memory and imagery, the simultaneity of previously enacted worlds that he is describing can be thought of in terms of a holographic image. As Steven Kosslyn and colleagues suggested, memory does not work serially, ‘as if one were paging through a photo album, examining each snapshot in turn’. Instead, they explain, ‘it is possible that images themselves can be searched in parallel whenever a particular one is sought . . . this is just how holographic memory systems work’ (Kosslyn et al. 2006: 45). In a holographic image, a laser impresses the image of more than one object on a single plate, and the ‘same plate can retain images of many pairs of objects­– ­all of which are “searched” in parallel when light is shined through it’ (2006: 47). This simultaneous parallel search (and emersion) of multiple images from a single plate seems very close to what Proust is



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describing. In awakening, multiple analogical worlds are emerging and searched in parallel to match a single worldly scenario. In short, we can say that the heterocosmic self might become conscious of its ontology in momentary accesses to the holographic working of memory. In this respect, Proust is interestingly distancing himself from phenomenological accounts of memory and temporality. Building on Husserl’s view of temporality, Varela sets forth an important distinction between memory recollection and the phenomenology of our experience of time. In Husserl’s terms, Varela explains, our intimate experience of time has a tripartite structure, every temporal experience having an impression, a retention and a protention. When we experience an event or an object as extending in time, as with an unfolding melody, we do not perceive gaps between the notes. This is because each note follows the tripartite structure of temporality, according to which it brings a retention of the just-­past note, an impression of itself, and a protention to future possible notes. Memories, Varela argues, cannot be equivalent to retention because ‘in the present I “see” what just passed; in memory I can only hold it in a representation as if through a veil. Thus memory and evocation have a mode of appearance that is qualitatively different from nowness’ (1999b: 276). The retention of the just-­past moment has for Varela a phenomenological presence or a ‘nowness’ that memories do not. In Proust, though, this distinction is twisted, and Husserl’s terminology can be used to illuminate his peculiar ontological theory. As we have seen, it is precisely because memories are experienced as present, because past worlds are re-­presenting themselves qualitatively as a ‘nowness’, that the Proustian ontology and analogical cosmology reaches a hermeneutic salience (as opposed to a scientific validity). It is because what Varela calls ‘retentional trajectories’, usually operating at local and contingent levels of temporality, are stretching too far­– b ­ ringing back to the ‘nowness’ worlds that should be consigned to the abstract phenomenology of ­recollection­ – ­that the linear, self-­unifying sense of temporality turns into a centripetal force (Zahavi 2012). Retentional trajectories become possible orbits, and previous selves compossible planets. There is no simple and successful ‘blending’ of two worlds, but an ontological duplication and co-­existence. As for which experiential model might have helped Proust divine this sort of cosmological phenomenology, together with a sustained introspection on momentary disruptions of habit, the act of reading might have provided him with an experiential model of how this ontological compossibility can work. As Proust explains at the beginning of the novel, when reading literature we are immersed into (to an important extent, analogically; Green et al. 2003; Bernini and Caracciolo 2013), and we become part of, new fictional worlds without ceasing to occupy the world in which we are reading: ‘it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V’ (2005: 1; ‘il me semblait que j’étais moi-­même ce dont parlait l’ouvrage: une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint’, 1988: 49). As soon as Marcel stops reading, Proust goes on, the memories of the imaginary world in which he was immersed remain with him as ghostly presences, as ‘the thought

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of a previous existence must be after metempsychosis’ (2005: 1; ‘comme après la métempsycose les pensées d’une existence antérieure’, 1988: 49). The idea of a metempsychotic transfer or transmigration of one world into another, I would suggest, is crucial in Proust’s theory of distributed ontology­– a­ nd the concept of metempsychosis, so far analysed in his work as a religious experience (Lewis 2010: 81–110), can be naturalised as a cognitive theory of selves and world through the framework of distributed cognition. In Proust’s novel, previous selves, experiences and worlds migrate into the new following world in the same way imaginary worlds remain with us after reading. Not just as stored knowledge, but as what Fox Harrell (2013) defines as ‘phantasms’: presences that despite being non-­actual are analogically compossible and contribute to the meaning of our experience. Phantasms, Harrell explains, can be constituted either by cultural or phenomenological experiences, by artefacts, ­stories or lived memories. In Harrell’s words: We all have everyday experiences that are simultaneously understood within broader stories. The real-­world balcony might prompt you to imbue the scenario at hand with deeper significance. You might imagine calling up to your lover on the balcony, as you just saw in a scene from a filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. . . . The results of [this mapping] of imagery and ideas­– ­which you previously experienced . . .­– ­onto your immediate sensory perception of the balcony are phantasms. (2013: 5) Harrell here is pointing at the ghostly nature and meaning-­making import of what I have called Proust’s analogical worlds. For Proust, both the fictional and actual worlds we experience migrate in time and always remain ghostly or ‘phantasmal’ presences embedded in every new experience we make. A final question is how does this metempsychotic atmosphere migrate into Proust’s writing? It is enough to read the first pages of Swann’s Way to realise the overwhelming, or in Wasser’s (2014) terms ‘hyperbolic’, use of analogies in the novel (see also Virtanen 1954; Meyers 1972). These analogies, through which Marcel explains his own experience, often become sufficiently detailed, expanded and informationally ‘saturated’ (to use Doležel’s expression; 1998: 170) to count as proper embedded fictional worlds (Palmer 2004) in which the reader gets anomalously trapped and excessively immersed, almost forgetting the target experience which the comparison was about (see also Genette 1982: 203–28). Here is Marcel analogically comparing his lying in bed waiting in vain for his mother to an invalid in bed who vainly hopes someone is about to come: Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to set out on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakened by a sudden spasm, sees with glad relief a streak of daylight showing under his door. Thank God, it is morning! The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and someone will come to look after him. The thought of being assuaged gives him strength to endure his



the heter oc osm i c s el f  111 pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; someone has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night suffering without remedy. I would fall asleep . . . (2005: 2) Bientôt minuit. C’est l’instant où le malade, qui a été obligé de partir en voyage et a dû coucher dans un hôtel inconnu, réveillé par une crise, se réjouit en apercevant sous la porte une raie de jour. Quel bonheur, c’est déjà le matin! Dans un moment les domestiques seront levés, il pourra sonner, on viendra lui porter secours. L’espérance d’être soulagé lui donne du courage pour souffrir. Justement il a cru entendre des pas; les pas se rapprochent, puis s’éloignent. Et la raie de jour qui était sous sa porte a disparu. C’est minuit; on vient d’éteindre le gaz; le dernier domestique est parti et il faudra rester toute la nuit à souffrir sans remède. Je me rendormais . . . (1988: 50)

In Proust’s writing process, itself a cognitive extension (Menary 2007b; Bernini 2014), analogy becomes at the same time a tool for the expression or exploration of analogical worlds and a manifestation of what is explored or expressed. Proust’s hypertrophic use of analogies in his writing is a cognitive device for making manifest in literature what is already operating in everyday cognition. There are constant traces of other analogical worlds that live with us as meaning-­making presences, and literature can employ analogy to represent and explore this process. In Proust’s work, this is true not just for the protagonist’s individual world and experiences, but also for how Marcel or other characters make sense of each other. For instance, Swann obsessively compares people to Italian paintings. To him, the kitchen-­maiden’s smocks ‘recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-­maid he would say: “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?” ’ (2005: 94; ‘Comment va la Charité de Giotto?’, 1988: 145). When directed to other people, analogies can serve also as a cognitive tool for channelling empathy, as Husserl had already pointed out, talking of empathy as an ‘analogical transference’ by means of which we, in Husserl’s words, ‘couple’ or ‘pair’ with other people, establishing a ‘phenomenal unity’ (quoted in Zahavi 2014: 132–5). In Proust, the ‘phenomenal unity’ between two worlds (self-­to-­self; self-­to-­others; others-­to-­others) is always permeated by, and results in, a multiplicity of worlds, which nonetheless functions as a meaning-­making dynamic. As Merleau-­Ponty poignantly noted, human experience of reality is tied to a restricted and internal view from within a single world. We are not allowed a cosmological impartial view from elsewhere, which would allow us to contemplate, compare and describe the interaction between the multiple worlds of each individual. We are not, in Merleau-­Ponty’s phrasing, a kosmotheoros, because If I am a kosmotheoros, my sovereign gaze finds the things each in its own time, in its own place, as absolute individuals in a unique local and temporal disposition.

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Since they participate in the same significations each from its own place, one is led to conceive of another dimension that would be transversal to this flat multiplicity and that would be the system of signification without locality or temporality. (Merleau-­Ponty 1968: 113) Proust seems to acknowledge the separateness of each individual world (either within the diachronic unfolding of the self or in the synchronic interaction of different individuals) while at the same time suggesting that by using and bringing attention to the cognitive import of analogy we can, even if just for brief moments, access the kosmotheoros’s system of signification and perspective over the entire extended and heterocosmic universe.

Conclusion: Cognition and the Miracle of Analogy Tweaking Hofstadter’s remark about the ubiquitous role of analogy in mental processes, this chapter aimed at showing how Proust’s work places analogy at the core of distributed cognition. First, it showed how analogy is for Proust the ontological principle of the self considered as continuously extended in spatiotemporal couplings with the environment. These discrete extensions in space and time of an ever-­changing self remain, in Proust’s cosmological and metempsychotic imagery, constantly present and possible worlds (what I have called analogical worlds) that can re-­emerge whenever habit fails in its preserving (consolidating and illusory) cognitive work. Second, analogy is in Proust’s work a central cognitive process which, chiming with Hofstadter’s remark, operates (either consciously or unconsciously) in our perceptual and social experience of distributed re-­cognition. Third, literary analogies are in themselves cognitive tools that can at the same time express and explore analogical processes in our meaning-­making enaction of the world. This is the multilayered view of analogy that, I argued, can be detected if we look at Proust’s treatment of self and temporality through the lenses of extended and enactive theories of cognition. To show what Proust’s text (and literature in general) can offer to cognitive research is one of the objects of the present volume and a question that has to remain open for it to be productive. The present chapter, though, has endorsed the working assumption made by the psychologist Richard Epstein in his article on Proust and William James where he articulates the belief that ‘works of literature are one possible source of data about the subjective nature of experience, for the job of the writer is to record experiences (including internal experiences) that have not been noticed before’ (2004: 214). This holds true, I maintain, for the many insights Proust has developed by recording the functioning, malfunctioning and exploratory possibilities of the cognitive process he referred to as ‘the miracle of an analogy’ (Proust 2000a: 223). In order to better understand the specificity and autonomy of a literary exploration of cognition, though, we should also focus on what remains so far unaccountable by science, bearing in mind that, as the epigraph by Wittgenstein says, the scientific way of looking at the world is not the same as looking at it as a miracle.

7 D i st r i b u t e d C o g n i t i o n a n d the Phenomenolog y of M o d er n i st P a i n t i n g a n d P o e t ry (Rilk e a nd C éza nne) Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­Ferencei

Contemporary views of consciousness associated with the notion of ‘distributed cognition’ suggest that cognition is not exclusively an internal activity, or reducible to neural system activity alone, but also includes a distribution across motoric and perceptual experience and is in important ways interwoven with the surrounding environment. Some terms to describe this distribution include the mind as embodied, enactive and extended. Embodied models of cognition emphasise that cognition is not contained within a discrete, immaterial mind, or solely within the brain and its neural circuits; rather, cognition is dependent upon the operations of the experiencing body at large (Gallagher 2005; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela et al. 1991). Enactive models of cognition emphasise the biological foundations or the sensorimotor and perceptual dynamics that contribute to cognition (Noë 2004; Hurley 1998, 2001). Extended models of the mind focus on the ways in which the non-­biological resources in the surrounding world contribute to and are part of the cognitive system (Clark 2008). These theories oppose a Cartesian heritage that would segregate the human mind, and rationality, from involvement with the world. John Haugeland, an early proponent of distributed cognition, suggested that rather than being segregated, ‘the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages’ (1998: 223). It has been acknowledged that this view of consciousness echoes phenomenological insights from the early to mid-­ twentieth century, in particular Merleau-­Ponty’s analysis of cognition through active, embodied perception and its extension through objects, and Heidegger’s notion of the practical, enactive extension of human agency described as ‘being-­in-­the-­world’ (Rowlands 2009; Thompson 2007; Zahavi 2012). For Merleau-­Ponty, ‘the human being is, rather than a mind and a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things’ (2004: 56; ‘l’homme n’est pas un esprit et un corps mais un esprit avec un corps, et qui n’accède à la vérité des choses que parce que son corps est comme fiché en ells’, 2002: 23). Merleau-­ Ponty’s study of perception, in turn, was influenced by Heidegger’s description of the human existence as ecstatic­– l­iterally outside itself, as ‘being-­in-­the-­world’,

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extended through, and enactive by virtue of, its pragmatic projects and concerns. As Heidegger describes human existence: ‘Dasein finds “itself” proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids­– ­in those things . . . with which it is proximally concerned’ (1962: 155; ‘Dasein findet »sich selbst« zunächst in dem, was es betreibt, braucht, erwartet, verhütet­– ­in dem zunächst besorgten umweltlich Zuhandenen’, 1967: 119). In this chapter I would like to highlight implications of these views for aesthetics. I will show how such an understanding of consciousness is expressed in analogous ways in modern poetry and painting, specifically in works that have been the object of phenomenological study. Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (New Poems), for example, can be read according to a poetics of embodied and enactive cognition, and, in some moments, according to a poetics of extended cognition. Cézanne’s painting, which also informed Rilke’s poetics,1 has been shown by Merleau-­Ponty to express the embodied and enactive nature of visual cognition. In this chapter, I would like to suggest that our contemporary ideas about distributed cognition are indebted to, and may be engaged to help further develop, phenomenological insights into these modernist works. More broadly, I will suggest that an embodied cognitive aesthetics can illuminate the common resources in vital human intentionality of artworks across different media. Visual works of art, grounded in direct perception, and poetic ones, grounded in linguistic evocations, can be interpreted alike as cognitive artefacts, such that, as Terence Cave suggests of literary works, ‘we infer from them the continually remade presence of a living, embodied mind’ (2016: 10). Merleau-­Ponty’s (1962: xxiv) claim that philosophy, visual art and poetry share a common aim, and the poetic inspiration Rilke (1945, 2006) took from Cézanne and other visual artists, can be better understood by considering art and literature from a cognitive standpoint.

Distributed Cognition in Modern Painting: Cézanne Merleau-­Ponty’s studies of paintings by Paul Cézanne established what we could now call an embodied-­enactive view of painting. On the basis of his interpretation of one of the principle initiators of modernism, Merleau-­Ponty argued that painting should not be understood as a mimetic transfer, through internal representations, of a picture of the world from the mind on to a canvas. Rather, the painter translates the experience of living, moving perceptual vision on to the canvas through a form of embodied, enactive seeing. Merleau-­Ponty begins ‘Eye and mind’ (‘L’Oeil et l’esprit’) with the view that It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, 1

For a comparative treatment of Rilke and Cézanne from a phenomenological perspective see Gosetti-­Ferencei 2007: 151–83 and Heller 2005: 52–62.



mod e rn ist pa in t in g an d poet ry ( ri l ke and céz anne)  115 actual body­– ­not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement. (1993: 123) C’est en prêtant son corps au monde que le peintre change le monde en peinture. Pour comprendre ces transsubstantiations, il faut retrouver le corps opérant et actuel, celui qui n’est pas un morceau d’espace, un faisceau de fonctions, qui est un entrelacs de vision et de mouvement. (1964b: 16)

This intertwining of vision and movement is the basis for many enactive models of cognition. These latter may emphasise the connection between the sensorimotor subject and the surrounding world, suggesting that the dynamic between perception and action gives rise to cognition (Noë 2004; Hurley 1998, 2001). Alternatively, biologically based (autopoietic) approaches to enactive cognition may describe a continuous looping or feedback between the organism and its environment which further enables adaption, regulation and sense-­making (Varela et al. 1991; Thompson 2007). While phenomenology has been widely identified as a forerunner of the autopoietic view, Merleau-­Ponty’s project in Phenomenology of Perception also offered perhaps the first sustained philosophical analysis of the relation of vision to motoric action, which he also saw expressed in painting: ‘the visible world and the world of my motor projects are both total parts of the same being’ (1993: 124; ‘Le monde visible et celui de mes projets moteurs sont des parties totales du même Être’, 1964b: 17). As he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance­– ­and the body is our anchorage in a world’ (1962: 167; ‘Comprendre, c’est éprouver l’accord entre ce que nous visons et ce qui est donné, entre l’intention et l’effectuation­– e­ t le corps est notre ancrage dans un monde’, 1945: 169). This overlap between perception and motor projects allows for the elaboration and organisation of a cognitive system. For example, in the case of perception, I see an object as solid because I implicitly understand how its appearance would change if I were to move around it. I see an object as whole because my movement can potentially bring other aspects of it into view. I recognise certain properties of an object (shape, depth, etc.) in relation to what I would see were I to tilt it or turn it. Thus, visual cognition cannot be reduced to sensory input alone, but is generated out of an active and ever-­potentiated form of embodied looking. Like Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, an enactive view of perception argues that ‘perceiving is a kind of skillful bodily activity’ rather than the construction of an internal representation of the world in the mind or brain (Noë 2004: 2). ‘Genuine perceptual experience’, writes Alva Noë, ‘depends not only on the character and quality of stimulation, but on our exercise of sensorimotor knowledge’ (2004: 10). Merleau-­Ponty and contemporary enactivists also reject a foundational role for representation. The overlapping between vision and motoric action gives rise first to a pragmatic, rather than primarily representational, understanding of the mind,

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a view that will have significant implications for aesthetics. On the overlapping between perception and motoric action, Merleau-­Ponty writes: This extraordinary overlapping, which we never give enough thought to, forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-­er [sic] does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world. (1993: 124) Cet extraordinaire empiétement, auquel on ne songe pas assez, interdit de concevoir la vision comme une opération de pensée qui dresserait devant l’esprit un tableau ou une représentation du monde, un monde de l’immanence et de l’idéalité. Immergé dans le visible par son corps, lui-­même visible, le voyant ne s’approprie pas ce qu’il voit : il l’approche seulement par le regard, il ouvre sur le monde. (1964b: 17–18) Contemporary enactivists likewise reject the primacy of representational thinking. In the case of executing a physical action, we do not need to have first built up an inner representation of the environment and the relevant object in it. It is already there, and the object, say the cup handle, will guide my gaze. As Noë writes: Instead of having to ground ourselves by sheer cognition­– ­constructing a representation of the point in space in our minds­– ­we take advantage of the fact that we have more immediate links to the world because we are in the world from the start, and that we have the sorts of bodily skills to exploit those linkages. (2004: 23) The rejection of representationalism is particularly important for Merleau-­Ponty’s understanding of painting, allowing the phenomenologist to find in modern paintings new ways to think about the nature of perception and artistic mimesis. Merleau-­Ponty recognises in Cézanne a painterly practice that dispenses with both academic formalism and the particular representational strategies of Renaissance perspective. In the wake of impressionism, Cézanne aims to capture the sense of living natural perception in its subtle variability. His approach involves the novel use of colour (as building up masses for the object), visible brushstroke and moving, multiple outlines. Yet Cézanne also aims to restore to the painterly image the sense of the solidity that objects have in nature, a solidity which he regarded as lost in the impressionist emphasis on ephemeral qualities, such as light. The process Cézanne develops to marry impressionist vitality and pre-­impressionist solidity could be neither achieved nor explained by traditional models of mimetic representation. Rather than copying the perceived object­– ­projecting an idea or image of the mind originally drawn from perception on to a canvas­– ­the painter attempted, as Merleau-­Ponty describes, ‘to recapture the physiognomy of things and faces by the



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integral reproduction of their sensible configuration’ (1962: 376; ‘de rejoindre la physionomie des choses et des visages par la restitution intégrale de leur configuration sensible’, 1945: 372). Indeed, Cézanne rejected his early strategy of composing works from memory or fantasy, and dedicated himself to painting exclusively from life, where, of course, the painter always takes up a position vis-­à-­vis the objects of his regard. As Merleau-­Ponty explains it, the execution of the painting does not retrace some inner (or projected) image, but rather finds and expresses its object­– ­brings it to ‘réalization’, Cézanne (1995: 267) would say­– b ­ y translating the experience of seeing and visibility into the painted surface.2 Merleau-­Ponty looks for the interaction of sensation and kinesis, vision and action in this process. Of course, the eyes move and the hand draws and holds and moves the brush. The painter paints with his body, but also with the brushes and other instruments he uses to build up his picture in paint on the canvas. Merleau-­Ponty regards these implements of painting not merely as tools for the refinement or efficiency of practical action, but as cognitive tools, for seeing, looking and perceptual thinking­– ­in the same way written language not only records, but enables and extends, conceptual and other kinds of thought. In his study of bodily motility and perception, Merleau-­Ponty shows how the body expresses our power of ‘dilating our being-­in-­ the-­world’ (1962: 143; ‘dilater notre être au monde’, 1945: 168) through instruments that become part of our habitual actions. In the view of extended cognition associated, for example, with Andy Clark, material objects are considered a part of our cognitive system. Tools, pencils, notebooks, technological gadgets or maps can be not merely props for, but an integral part of, our cognitive undertaking. As Clark describes it, the cognitive loop through pencil and paper by which a physicist works out his thinking is a part of his thinking, ‘part of the physical machinery responsible for the shape of the flow of thoughts and ideas’ (2008: xxv). This view (without the terminology of machinery) finds a predecessor in Merleau-­ Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he examined the ways in which the body could extend its sensibility and expand the reach of its perception and thus of its potential knowledge. The blind man’s stick becomes a part of his bodily habit, transformed into ‘an area of sensitivity that extends the scope and active radius of his touch and provides a parallel to sight’ (1962: 165; ‘en zone sensible, il augmente l’ampleur et le rayon d’action du toucher, il est devenu l’analogue d’un regard’, 1945: 167), as Merleau-­Ponty explains. Our motoric responses adjust habitually through the body to a schematic inner reflection of the embodied self that extends to include such habituated tools. So too the painter’s brush becomes an extension of eye and hand, but also of mind, since for Cézanne painting is a form of thinking. Indeed, Cézanne’s painting itself becomes a kind of phenomenological instrument through which the painter, and his phenomenological interpreter, can consider the structure and expression of vision itself. Painting is thus not only an expression of visual thinking but also its extension, by offering a means of reflecting on the visual experience of the world. This is a broader acknowledgement of the significance of 2

On ‘réalization’ see Badt 1965: 195–6, 215–24; Altieri 2012.

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visual art than even Noë’s recent description of painting as a technology that allows for reflection on the way we organise our world through the ‘tools’ of pictures (2015: 20). Although art may allow us to reflect on our own cognitive tools, most art is not reducible to this task, just as most literature is not reducible to reflection primarily on the tool of language, though it may engage such reflection. Through painting we reflect on the world’s visual qualities, and on that world as it presents itself to and for our vision. For Merleau-­Ponty, painting illuminates the human experience of vision and visibility as such, and the relation between visibility and invisibility is the overarching theme of Merleau-­Ponty’s (1968) final work. Perhaps even more fundamental than instrumental extension itself is the role of what Merleau-­Ponty calls, in the Phenomenology of Perception, the ‘body-­schema’, based on the body’s spatiomotor interaction with the world (1962: 165). Although Merleau-­Ponty does not evoke this idea directly in his Cézanne essays, it may help to explain his view of Cézanne’s innovations in perspective. Merleau-­Ponty describes the body schema as the body’s extended image of itself: ‘Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body’ (1962: 239; ‘Toute perception extérieure est immédiatement synonyme d’une certaine perception de mon corps’, 1945: 239). The body’s sense of itself can be extended, as cognition is extended, through objects that are habitually coordinated with embodied actions. A woman accustomed to wearing a wide feathered hat does not need to calculate its distance from the edge of the doorway, for her implicit sense of her own height expands to accommodate the feather’s protrusion. A driver may get his or her car through a narrow opening in the same way, as if the car has become a temporary expansion of the embodied self. The hat and the car have become ‘potentialities of volume in the demand for a certain amount of free space’ (1962: 165; ‘des puissances volumineuses, l’exigence d’un certain espace libre’, 1945: 167). The body schema serves the painter’s ability to conjure, on a two-­dimensional surface, the way objects take up space or, as it were, inhabit their surroundings. Things to be painted are not merely depthless images, but dimensional masses, rooted among other things that take up space, which are partly given and partly not given to vision (for example, their other sides, their insides, the aspects obstructed by other things). This could be what Merleau-­Ponty means when he writes, in reference to painting, of things as having ‘this internal equivalent, a carnal formula of their presence that things arouse in me’ (1993: 126; ‘Cet équivalent interne, cette formule charnelle de leur présence que les choses suscitent en moi’, 1964b: 22). This equivalence also recalls the reversibility Merleau-­Ponty (1962: 109) invokes in Phenomenology of Perception to account for the ambiguity of the body that both touches and is touched.3 In the writings on painting, this reversibility is extended to vision: an embodied seer is also a body potentially seen. This being-­seen, the experience of taking up space, seems to be heightened, indeed exaggerated, in the experiences of some of the modernist painters whose 3

The link between reversibility and painting is discussed in Gosetti-­Ferencei 2007: 198–200 and Dillon 2004: 300. On reversibility see also Stawarska 2002 and Zahavi 1999: 107.



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work Merleau-­Ponty studies. Merleau-­Ponty refers to Paul Klee, who is said to evoke suggestions of an inverted intentionality: according to Merleau-­Ponty, Klee expresses not that he is looking at the trees, but that the trees are looking at him (Merleau-­Ponty 1993: 358). Cézanne too, in certain moments, is thought to have experienced a form of exchange, where the landscape thinks itself in him and he becomes its consciousness (Merleau-­Ponty 1993: 67). Insofar as Cézanne persistently adjusted his way of seeing to the demands of perceived nature, revisiting the same motif scores of times and painting it from so many slightly diverging angles, his sense of becoming a consciousness for the landscape need not be taken as mere solipsism. At the same time, the expressions by these painters of something like inverted intentionality can be interpreted as a heightened self-­schematisation of the looking body, aware of the relational nature of its being-­in-­the-­world. Cézanne spent a lifetime gradually learning how to translate visual perception into the touch of his brushwork, and in the process evolved in the way he saw nature. At the end of his life Cézanne himself expressed explicit awareness of how his body’s position was relevant to his grasp of a given subject-­matter, or what he called his ‘motif’. As he writes in a letter: Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study for the most powerful interest for months without changing place by turning now more to the right, now more to the left. (1995: 327) Ici, au bord de la rivière, les motifs se multiplient, le même sujet vu sous un angle différent offre un sujet d’étude du plus puissant intérêt, et si varié que je crois que je pourrais m’occuper pendent des mois sans changer de place en m’inclinant tantôt plus à droite, tantôt plus à gauche. (1978: 324) So it is not surprising that Merleau-­Ponty finds evidence in Cézanne’s paintings of enactive looking, rendered through distinctive elements of Cézanne’s practice. Many of Cézanne’s landscapes are built up by the overlapping planes of colour that almost seem to be in motion. Cézanne’s lines are not singular definitive outlines (of apples, for example) but are often plural, suggesting the object looked at from a moving eye. Thus Merleau-­Ponty describes the paradoxical vivacity of a still life: If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather the ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth­– ­that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one’s glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception. (1964a: 14–15)

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Si l’on marque d’un trait le contour d’une pomme, on en fait une chose, alors qu’il est la limite idéale vers laquelle les côtés de la pomme fuient en profondeur. Ne marquer aucun contour, ce serait enlever aux objets leur identité. En marquer un seul, ce serait sacrifier la profondeur, c’est-­à-­dire la dimensions qui nous donne la chose, non comme étalée devant nous, mais comme pleine de réserves et comme une réalité inépuisable. C’est pourquoi Cézanne suivra dans une modulation colorée le renflement de l’objet et marquera en traits bleus plusieurs contours. Le regard renvoyé de l’un à l’autre saisit un contour naissant entre eux tous comme il le fait dans la perception. (1966: 25) The presence of the object is suggested, captured as it may emerge, for example, when we first adjust our vision to a new room in brighter or dimmer light than that to which our eye is accustomed, or when, simply looking around us, we settle our gaze for the first time on a new object of attention. The novelty of Cézanne’s painterly strategies was at first misunderstood, even mocked, by many contemporaries­– ­his work was refused from the Paris Salon every year from 1865 to 1869 and was accepted only once, in 1882 (see Danchev 2012: ch. 9; Platzman 2001: 63). Yet his distortions in perspective came to be understood as an intensified, self-­reflective form of vision, and appreciated as ‘the exemplary “modern” art of its time’ (Shiff 1984: xvi). Rilke regarded Cézanne’s renderings as being able ‘to achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated’ (Rilke 1985: 34). But this required diverging from the conventions of perspective established by realism. In Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples (1890–4), for example, the cup and saucer would be elliptical in a photograph taken from the same point of view, but the distortion in the painting may better capture the feel of live perception (see Plate 4). Since perception in natural vision moves in time (such as when we take in objects casting our eyes over a large surface), and unfolds with even greater temporal extension through the process of visual study (as in painting), the result may be compared to an amalgam of several slightly divergent points of view. Merleau-­Ponty explains it thus: It is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-­all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. (1964a: 14) De même le génie de Cézanne est de faire que les déformations perspectives, par l’arrangement d’ensemble du tableau, cessent d’être visibles pour elles-­mêmes quand on le regarde globalement, et contribuent seulement, comme elles le font dans la vision naturelle, à donner l’impression d’un ordre naissant, d’un objet en train d’apparaître, en train de s’agglomérer sous nos yeux. (1966: 25)



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We should note that such distortions in modern painting, incidentally, may seem to offer greater accessibility and exposure of the object to vision than the photographic likeness would afford. The irregularly slanted or shaped cup, saucer and table surface lean forward in the picture plane rather than being tilted back away from the viewer. The irregularity increases the field of view, slanting the plane of the table, plate, saucer or other object toward the viewer, as if offering up the object to the viewer’s eye, grasp or approach. Thus Cézanne approaches physical nature as it is perceived through distinctly human perception, through the implicit meanings things may have for our being-­in-­the-­world. Merleau-­Ponty finds in Cézanne’s productive distortions a way of capturing the implicit and potential, or, as Husserl (1970: 162) described it, horizonal, aspects of perception. Part of the real presence or solidity Cézanne needed to capture (and much impressionism, with its emphasis on light, did not capture) is the sense of true dimensionality­– ­the fact that things that take up space before us have recesses and sides we cannot see. This potential content is described by Noë as that part of the perceptual experience that ‘has hidden facets or aspects’ and is ‘present only in its potential. Qualities are available in experiences as possibilities, as potentialities, but not as completed givens’ (2004: 217). For example, describing a cat behind a fence, only visible in the interstices, Noë illustrates the well-­established phenomenological point that we do not have to have visual access to the whole cat, nor do we have to have a representation of such in our minds, in order to perceive what it is. Hidden aspects and details on which we are not focused are potentially accessible, and so ‘they are, in this sense, virtually present’ (Noë 2004: 63). Or as Noë puts it more radically: ‘the content of experience . . . is virtual all the way in’ (2004: 134). But accounts of potential or virtual aspects of cognition differ somewhat between classical phenomenology and the enactive view offered by Noë, who argues that the virtual aspects are ‘present thanks to your possession of the skills needed to acquire the relevant information at will’ (2004: 134). Classical phenomenology regards this virtuality not only in terms of bodily skills, but also more broadly in terms of the phenomenal field as a whole­– ­the multivalent relation between consciousness and the objects of consciousness and the perceived or intuited relation of those objects to other subjects and to one another. Husserl’s notions of internal, external and world horizons, as well as the adumbrations surrounding the explicitly perceived, are meant to account for the implicit and potential presence of non-­ explicit aspects, sides and so forth that are necessary for the appearance of things as complete. Although only one or some, but not all, sides of the table or cup may be present to us in any given perception, we co-­perceive (or ‘apperceive’) (through internal horizons) the thing not as an aspect or side but as the presence of the whole object. Moreover, the cup may be obscured by, or obscure, the presence of other things in the phenomenal field, but the partial obscurities are there implicitly through what Husserl called the external horizons: And just as the individual thing in perception has meaning only through an open horizon of ‘possible perceptions,’ insofar as what is actually perceived ‘points’ to

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a systematic multiplicity of all possible perceptual exhibitings belonging to it harmoniously, so the thing has yet another horizon: besides this ‘internal horizon,’ it has an ‘external horizon’ precisely as a thing within a field of things; and this points finally to the whole ‘world as perceptual world.’ (1970: 162) Und wie das einzelne Ding in der Wahrnehmung nur Sinn hat durch einen offenen Horizont ‘möglicher Wahrnehmungen’, sofern das eigentlich Wahrgenommene auf eine systematische Mannigfaltigkeit möglicher ihm einstimmig zugehöriger wahrnehmungsmäßiger Darstellungen ‘verweist’, so hat das Ding noch einmal einen Horizont: gegenüber dem ‘Innenhorizont’ einen ‘Außenhorizont’, eben als Ding eines Dingfeldes; und das verweist schließlich auf die ganze ‘Welt als Wahrnehmungswelt’. (2012b: 175–6) The relationship of things in the perceptual field with other things is part of the vital richness of that field, and the whole enveloping world horizon is a regulative ideal for the subject who never has a total view of it. The world has nevertheless a coherence of inter-­involved horizons that provides an interpretive context for any skill-­grounded interaction of the subject. These horizons and their contribution to the fullness of the phenomenal field are described in Merleau-­Ponty’s rendering of the habitual expectations of embodied experience. Through moving about in the world, examining things and using them, we build up expectations and implicit ‘apperceptions’. These are grounded in embodied skills, but contextualised in a perceived ‘setting’: It is true that I see what I do see only from a certain angle, and I concede that a spectator differently placed sees what I can only conjecture. But these other spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the reverse or the underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-­exists in relation to the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it. The experiences of other people or those which await me if I change my position merely develop what is suggested by the horizons of my present experience, and add nothing to it. My perception brings into co-­ existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. My eyes and my hand know that any actual change of place would produce a sensible response entirely according to my expectation, and I can feel swarming beneath my gaze the countless mass of more detailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which I already have a hold. I am, therefore, conscious of perceiving a setting which ‘tolerates’ nothing more than is written or foreshadowed in my perception, and I am in present communication with a consummate fullness. (Merleau-­Ponty 1962: 394–5) Sans doute je ne le vois que sous uncertain angle et j’admets qu’un spectateur autrement placé aperçoive ce que je ne fais que deviner. Mais ces autres spectacles sont actuellement impliqués dans le mien comme le dos ou le dessous



mod e rn ist pa in t in g an d poet ry ( ri l ke and céz anne)  123 des objets est perçu en même temps que leur face visible ou comme la pièce voisine préexiste à la perception que j’en aurais effectivement si je m’y rendais ; les expériences d’autrui ou celles que j’obtiendrai en me déplaçant ne font que développer ce qui est indiqué par les horizons de mon expérience actuelle et n’y ajoutent rien. Ma perception fait coexister un nombre indéfini de chaînes perceptives qui la confirmeraient en tous points et concorderaient avec elles. Mon regard et ma main savent que tout déplacement effectif susciterait une réponse sensible exactement conforme à mon attente et je sens pulluler sous mon regard la masse infinie des perceptions plus détaillées que je tiens d’avance et sur lesquelles j’ai prise. J’ai donc conscience de percevoir un milieu qui ne «tolère» rien de plus que ce qui est écrit ou indiqué dans ma perception, je communique dans le présent avec une plénitude insurpassable. (Merleau-­Ponty 1945: 390)

In the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, this ‘consummate fullness’ is called the ‘inexhaustible’ quality of the world, and this seems to be, on Merleau-­Ponty’s interpretation, what Cézanne’s painting aimed to capture (Merleau-­Ponty 1962: xix). The adumbrations and perspectives which remain implicit for Cézanne themselves become part of the composition of Cubist depictions in his wake. This fullness or inexhaustibility does not only describe the skill-­bearing active anticipations of cognition, but has implications for the larger phenomenal field we experience. Thus Merleau-­Ponty cites the notion, found in Heidegger, of the ‘Weltlichkeit der Welt’ or the ‘worldliness of the world’ to situate his embodied subject (Merleau-­Ponty 1962: xix; Heidegger 1962: 63). As Heidegger puts it: ‘That inside which existing Dasein understands itself, is ‘there’ along with its factical existence . . . Dasein is its world existingly’ (‘Worinnen das existierende Dasein sich versteht, das ist mit seiner faktischen Existenz »da« . . . Dieses ist existierend seine Welt’, Heidegger 1962: 364). The ‘horizontal schema’ (‘das horizontale Schema’) of Dasein’s projects implies the encompassing surroundings in which the expressive adumbration of perspectives is possible (Heidegger 1962: 365). But just as Dasein remains ever-­open to possibility­– i­ndeed, is a structure of possibility­– s­ o too the world is never closed and wholly grasped. A similar view4 is found in Husserl’s notion of a ‘lifeworld’5 as comparable to ‘the unity of a living organism’ (1970: 113; ‘wie in der Einheit eines lebendigen Organismus’, 2012b: 116). Despite being grounded in the subject’s habits of perception and action, this world is one ‘the imperious unity’ (‘l’unité impérieuse’) of which is the never fully realisable goal of knowledge (Merleau-­Ponty 1962: xx; 1945: 26). Only with this larger acknowledgement of world can we see how bodies and places, as Edward Casey puts it, ‘interanimate each other’ (2009: 327). 4

Yet some differences between Husserl and Heidegger on the notion of ‘world’ are discussed in Carman 2003: 83–6. 5 For discussions of ‘lifeworld’ see Husserl 1999: 131 and 1970: §§ 33–8, 43, 51. See also Moran 2012: 178–217.

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Moreover, other qualities pertain to our relations to the world than what I can do to, or with, objects in my reach. We can perceive the world, for instance, with aesthetic receptivity, as well as affective and existential relations, what Heidegger called ‘mood’ (Stimmung) or ‘attunement’ (Gestimmtheit) or ‘concern’ (Sorge), which involve being affected by, as much as affecting, worldly things and events (Heidegger 1962: 134). Heidegger’s later work will describe the world as most originally accessible not through pragmatic action, but rather through the receptivity of poetic language (Heidegger 1971; see Gosetti-­Ferencei 2012 and 2004). Merleau-­Ponty’s suggestions about reversals of intentionality, and his claim that the significance of a painting will always exceed ‘the intended meaning’ (1993: 105; ‘les intentions délibérées’, 1960: 85), suggest an element of such receptivity in the making of visual art. This larger sense of the world horizon and the interanimation of the embodied subject and its world seems integral to Cézanne’s project. Developing novel techniques, Cézanne wanted to capture both the live quality of perception and the fact that, although our eyes are moving and the atmospheric elements around the object are ever changing­– ­the ephemerality captured in impressionist paintings­– ­we nevertheless experience a world that has its own coherence and internal organisation. The impressionists emphasised shifting light and changes of atmosphere­– ­as we can see for instance in Monet’s Haystacks series (1888–9 and 1890–1), depicted at different times of day and in different seasons. Cézanne recognised, however, that we also see the world in its solidity; however much it is shifting for the viewer, the phenomenal world is nevertheless relatively stable in its formations despite such change. Thus Cézanne’s advance was to learn from both impressionism and the geometrical techniques of classical painting, for ‘he did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization’ (Merleau-­Ponty 1964a: 13; ‘Il ne veut pas séparer les choses fixes qui apparaissent sous notre regard et leur manière fuyante d’apparaître, il veut peindre la matière en train de se donner forme, l’ordre naissant par une organisation spontanée’, 1966: 23). In this description of Cézanne, Merleau-­Ponty offers what comes close to a description of his own understanding of the task of phenomenology itself. Merleau-­Ponty’s studies of Cézanne show not only how an understanding of visual cognition is necessary to grasp the nature of painting, but how painting can help to reveal the nature of distributed cognition.

Embodied and Extended Cognition in Rilke’s New Poems Comparable insights may also be won through poetic means. Rilke, a poet long associated with phenomenology (Hamburger 1966; Gosetti-­Ferencei 2007; Fischer 2015), was also attracted to the paintings of Cézanne, and wrote a series of letters on Cézanne’s paintings that he studied while he lived in Paris and worked as secretary to the sculptor Rodin. From these artists, Rilke adapted strategies that inform



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a new attention in poetics to the experience of spatiotemporal and perceptual relationships. The potential convergences Rilke saw between the visual imagery of Cézanne’s paintings and the linguistic imagery of poems pose the question of medium (Rilke 1945; Gosetti-­Ferencei 2007: 151–83; Heller 2005: 52–62). Of course, poetry relies on linguistic signs rather than the direct perceptual stimulus of painting. This difference becomes less problematic, however, with recent approaches in literary and linguistic theory that address the capacity of language­– a­ nd the use of image, metaphor, rhythm or verbal cadence, for example­– t­o evoke perception, kinaesthesis and other aspects of enactive embodiment. Literary images have been seen not merely as representational or conceptual, but as provoking what Scarry called perceptual mimesis, or percept-­like appearances for the reader (Scarry 1997; Kuzmičová 2014). The mental imagining provoked by language has been described as spatial rather than propositional in nature (Kosslyn et al. 2006). Metaphor, too, is recognised as originating in cognitive transfers from kinaesthetic and sensorimotor experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 45–72), and recent cognitivist readings of literature have focused on kinaesthetic and gestural evocations of literary expression (Bolens 2012; Cave 2016). Research into linguistic comprehension suggests a role for the evocation of embodiment (Kaup et al. 2016; Zwaan 2014; Zwaan and Madden 2005). An enactive, embodied aesthetics drawing on such sources may help to explain the transition between visual perception engaged by painting and the linguistic evocation of perceptual experience in poetry. We can see some of these evocations in the Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), in which Rilke aimed to create what he called ‘Ding-­Gedichte’, or ‘thing poems’. Influenced by Rodin’s sculptures and Cézanne’s réalization, Rilke aimed to linguistically conjure a sense of the presence, distinctness and self-­realisation of a thing, thus hoping to create an analogon of its perceptual structure in the form of the poem itself. The extent to which he achieved this, I will show, is not due to a merely aesthetic or symbolic modelling of the object, but by describing the thing in dynamic correlation with an embodied, perceiving subject. Several poems in the Neue Gedichte focus on an intense physical embodiment as constitutive of the essence of the thing described. ‘Der Panther’ (‘The Panther’), for instance, which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, builds up an image of the caged animal in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris (Rilke 2001: 62–3; Gosetti-­ Ferencei 2017). The panther paces in a circle behind the bars of its cage. The poem begins by describing the panther’s own perspective, its ‘gaze’ (‘Blick’), which ambiguously suggests both the first-­person visual perspective of the animal, and what the speaker can observe in the animal’s activity of looking. The speaker’s imagining what the animal would see from the inside of its cage might be described as a projection of the animal’s enactive cognition. This projection is supported by the reader’s imagined undertaking of the rhythm of the panther’s pacing, in part effected through the iambic beat of the lines in the original German: ‘Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe / und hinter tausend Stäben keine

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Welt’ (‘it seems to it as if there are a thousand bars / and behind the thousand bars, no world’).6 The cage, however, forces interruption and breakdown of the animal’s natural activity. For, as the speaker suggests, the confinement not only prevents the animal from moving forward, but paralyses its will to all movement and action beyond the inner circling. The animal can perceive objects lying beyond the cage­– ­including, presumably, the speaker of the poem observing it­– ­but its intentional projection is radically restricted. This restriction shuts down the awareness of an enveloping world horizon of potentiality. The shift away from the animal’s point of view in the second stanza seems to concretise the contraction of the animal’s intentional agency. The speaker describes the animal in circular movement­– ­‘wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte’ (‘like a dance of strength around a centre’)­– ­and ­imagines the numbed will at its centre. The importance of these evocations of movement and contraction may be overlooked if we regard Rilke as attempting to capture the essence of the thing by modelling its surface as a sculptor might do (cf. Dürr 2006: 82–3; Ryan 2001: 141). Ryan, while rightly rejecting a symbolic interpretation of what the panther ‘stands for’, attributes the panther’s movement around its own will to the ‘self-­determinedness’ of the panther, comparable to the self-­containment of a sculpture, and dismisses as irrelevant the animal’s imprisonment (Ryan 2001: 141). In my view this describes not only the poem, but also sculpture that influenced Rilke, in misleadingly static terms, and underplays the dynamic of the reversal of perspective in the poem in which subject and object become ‘interanimated’ (Heller 2005: 55). For Rilke engages further perspectival shifting in ‘The Panther’: from the depiction of the panther’s own gaze and the panther’s perspective of the world outside the cage in the first stanza, to the outward depiction, from the speaker’s perspective, of the panther’s embodied movement, in the second stanza, to the internalisation, as imagined by the speaker, of what the panther sees, in the third stanza. There we see the gaze of the panther crystallised as an image: ‘Dann geht ein Bild hinein / geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille – / und hört im Herzen auf zu sein’ (‘Then an image enters / goes through the limbs’ taut stillness – / and in the heart, ceases to be’). Such internalisation of the panther’s perspective as image is expressed in embodied terms, as if the image travels through the limbs of the animal, and to its very heart. While Rilke’s description is metaphorical, it nevertheless seems to anticipate the contemporary interest in the embodied origins of mental imagery. ‘Spanische Tänzerin’ (‘Spanish Dancer’), in contrast to the panther poem, describes a human subject in vibrant motion, a Flamenco dancer enthralling her audience with an absorbing physical spectacle (Rilke 2001: 125). The speaker compares the dancer to a match that comes alight and grows into a swirling flame. With castanets in hand keeping rhythm, the dancer circles and twirls intensely as a moving flame might, weaves her arms about her (like snakes), suddenly halts as 6

Here, as in all citations from Rilke, my translation diverges from that of Snow.



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if to cast off fire, and stamps with her feet as if to stamp it out. Rilke’s metaphoric description of the dancer’s movement could be described through the semantic approach to embodied cognition beginning with Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), which has aimed to explain the embodied origins of basic metaphors (a relevant example here would be that we describe both erotic passion and anger as ‘hot’­ – ­captured in Rilke’s ‘heiss’). In ‘Spanish Dancer’, the dancer and audience are connected through the shared metaphorical evocation of the flame. The castanets in the dancer’s hands, of course, provide the auditory rhythm, both determined by the dance and regulating its ongoing movement. This is again echoed linguistically in the iambic pentameter of the original German: ‘Und plötzlich ist er Flamme, ganz und gar’ (‘And suddenly it is entirely flame’). In addition to living sentient beings, the New Poems also feature expressive objects of human making, examined in their profound interconnection with or effect on a human subject. ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’ (‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’) describes a fragment of an ancient Greek sculpture Rilke had seen in the Louvre (Rilke 2001: 182). The poem describes the occasion of an extraordinary exchange between the object and the subject who, in a reversal of intentionality resonant with the sentiments of Klee and Cézanne, feels himself observed by the statue. ‘Denn da ist keine Stelle / Die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern’ (‘For there is no place / That does not see you. You must change your life’). Since this imperative is uttered in the second person, it simultaneously addresses the viewer of the statue and the reader of Rilke’s poem. It is as if Rilke literalises Hegel’s insight that as a work of art, the sculpture embodies the transformation of substance into subject­– ­although according to Hegel, sculpture must cede to poetry here, because the latter is better able to express human action and its motives, and a series of expressions of ‘the inner idea, intuition, and feeling’ (‘des inneren Vorstellens, Anschauens und Empfindens’) (Hegel 1975: 703; 1970: 224). Yet in Rilke’s rendering, the fragmentary sculpture provokes the viewer’s (and reader’s) projection through vivifying images of embodiment, as if Rilke creates the inner life of the sculpture through a rendering of its receptive projection. Physical aspects of the sculpture in the form of the human body are described in images that are intimately animating. Rilke’s speaker describes the imagined missing head (‘Haupt’), and its eyes (‘Augenäpfel’) metaphorically evoking ripening fruit; the torso is said metaphorically to glow (‘glüht’) and shine (‘glänzt’) along with the sculpture’s own ‘looking’ (‘Schauen’); the breast in its outline is said to dazzle (‘blenden’); the hips and thighs twist like a smile (‘Lächeln’), evoking fertility. The stone glistens (‘flimmerte’) and expands its light as from a star. This relationship between the speaker of the poem and the sculpture might be helpfully contrasted to what Husserl called an ‘analogical’ apprehension of the other in his or her animate organism or Leib (1999: 114). Husserl argues that we come to experience the other subject indirectly, through a pairing in which ‘the other is a “mirroring” of my own self and yet not a mirroring proper’ (1999: 94; ‘der Andere ist Speigelung meiner Selbst, und doch nicht eigentlich Speigelung’, 2012a: 94). The animate intentionality of other embodied subjects is not directly

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grasped, but rather mediated through analogical apprehension (Husserl 1999: 87). It might be said that, despite its species difference, Rilke’s speaker in ‘The Panther’ engages a kind of apprehension of another embodied intentional being, but obviates the analogical indirectness through poetical projection of that being’s internalised mental imagery. While in ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ the other is but an expressive artwork, its intentionality seems to be at once projected and aesthetically perceived by the speaker in a form of interanimation. Finally, Rilke’s poem ‘Der Ball’ (‘The Ball’) describes cognitive extension through an inanimate object, suggesting human engagement of space, gravity and motion germane not only to childhood play but also to philosophical and scientific study of nature. Der Ball Du Runder, der das Wärme aus zwei Händen Im Fliegen, oben, fortgiebt, sorglos wie sein Eigenes; was in den Gegenständen nicht bleiben kann, zu unbeschwert fuer sie, zu wenig Ding und doch noch Ding genug, um nicht aus allem draußen Aufgereihten unsichtbar plötzlich in uns einzugleiten: das glitt in dich, du zwischen Fall und Flug noch Unentschlossener: der, wenn er steigt, als haette er ihn mit hinaufgehoben, den Wurf entführt und freilässt –, und sich neigt und einhält und den Spielenden von oben auf einmal eine neue Stelle zeigt, sie ordnend wie zu einer Tanzfigur, um dann, erwartet und erwünscht von allen, rasch, einfach, kunstlos, ganz Natur, dem Becher hoher Hände zuzufallen. The Ball You round one, which disperses in its flight, Above, the warmth from two hands, carefree as If its own; that which in objects Cannot remain, too unburdened for them, Scarcely a thing and yet still thing enough For it not, from all that is ordered outside, To slip into us invisibly: That slipped into you, who between fall and flight Are still undecided: which, when it climbs As though it had lifted the throw as well,



mod e rn ist pa in t in g an d poet ry ( ri l ke and céz anne)  129 Abducts and sets free –, and inclines And holds and shows the players from above All at once a new position, Coordinating them like a choreography, In order then, expected and desired by all, Swift, simple, artless, completely nature, To fall into the cup of high hands. (Rilke 2001: 307–8)

The ball in this poem has been interpreted in Rilke scholarship in abstract terms, its trajectory, for example, symbolising the path of human existence, or the prototype or essence of a thing in its self-­actuation (Ryan 2001: 149). A more recent reading of the poem according to a phenomenology of movement would be compatible with my view that the poem explores how human experience is extended­ – ­both physically and metaphorically­– ­by our physical interaction with things (Fischer 2015: 292). ‘Du Runder’ (‘You round one’), it begins. The ball addressed in the second person is thereby included in the sphere of intimate human significance. The ball is described at the outset of the poem in terms of the lingering warmth of the hands of the thrower, which then dissipates. There may be psychological relevance to this warmth, but I read here, at least implicitly, a distinctly cognitive connection between the human and the thing that extends its reach into the world. We may recall discussions of toys in philosophy and psychology as props for make-­believe, and their function in mastering a space of play (Walton 1993; Winnicott 2005). I would argue that the ball enables not only playful delight, but functional extension of human cognition. Tools extend human efforts at making, and sticks can extend efforts at walking, but in this case the extension is observational, like an object dropped into water to check its depth. The qualities of the ball itself of course invite human action: it is designed to be the right size and shape for human hands which can cup around it; the ball is round and full of air and so rolls, bounces, and is light enough to be tossed. The ball is not properly speaking a tool, and, in comparison with a hammer or even a stick, it is hard to imagine, given its roundness, what it could be used for. But the ball allows a vicarious reach and flight that the human body alone does not manage. The delight of throwing a ball upwards or across a plane of space is a vicarious exploration of flight which gravity and the structure and weight of the human body forbid us. Moreover, physical interaction with the ball reveals to us something about how the world works. Small children, as we know, not only develop their own gross motor skills and hand-­eye coordination from such play, but also learn implicitly about properties of certain objects: roundness as it tends to rolling or spinning, the buoyancy of air-­filled objects, the arc of a trajectory of rising and falling. It is worth recalling that observations or thought experiments regarding balls or other round objects (apples, boulders, pebbles) led to discoveries about gravity and the factors

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that affect the speed of falling. In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci devotes many pages to the study of balls in their mechanics of percussion, projection and friction; to the movement of the human body in throwing; and he uses balls in physical or conceptual experiments for the study of echoes, heat radiation, weaponry and floatation. And he comments in his prophecies on how, when used for playing games, ‘the skins of animals’ can provoke emotional excitement among men.7 No doubt many an athlete would recognise Merleau-­Ponty’s claim that things ‘are an annex or prolongation of [the body]; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body’ (1993: 125; ‘sont une annexe ou un prolongement . . . elles sont incrustées dans sa chair, elles font partie de sa définition pleine et le monde est fait de l’étoffe même du corps’, 1964b: 19). The ball extends the human capacity to inquire into and experience the physical world and indeed our own physicality. This may be why Rilke claimed that his poem was a study of the object in motion, without subjective influence (‘without adding anything of Rilke’): My poem ‘Der Ball’ is a complete success in this respect. There I gave expression to nothing else than almost unutterable pure motion­– ­and therefore it is my best poem. (quoted in Dürr 2006: 83) Mein Gedicht ‘der Ball’ ist mir in dieser Weise ganz gelungen. Da habe ich gar nichts als fast Unaussprechbare einer reinen Bewegung ausgesprochen­– ­und darum ist es mein bestest Gedicht. (quoted in Von Schmidt-­Pauli 1940: 20) Rilke’s speaker enjoys the ball’s trajectory of free movement. The speaker describes the process of upward flight, a seeming hovering, and fall: the climb is described, the incline, the seeming hesitation and taking up of a new position as if the movement were a figuration in a dance. Yet the speaker is clear that what becomes known through the interaction with the ball is not merely art, but something ‘rasch, einfach, kunstlos, ganz Natur’ (‘swift, simple, artless, completely nature’). This light thing of human design is an entity with which the subject can interact in a way that becomes the subject’s observational extension, similarly to the way the physicist’s paper and pencil are said by Clark (cited above) to extend his thinking. What Rilke’s speaker offers in the description of the flight and fall of the ball is not a physics lesson, of course, but rather an exploration of a pre-­scientific reflection on the forces and qualities of nature. Yet the description of the flight and fall of the ball in Rilke’s poem does in some ways poetically reflect what actually happens when a ball is tossed in the air. The ball, as we know, does not move up and down at a continuous speed. Rather the upward velocity initiated by the throw decelerates until, at the apex, the ball changes direction and moves downwards. The speaker describes this as a moment of indecision or hesitation between fall and flight, while the penultimate stanza itself slows to give a description of how the 7

Leonardo da Vinci 1954: 1116; see also 268, 508, 524, 559, 600, 787, 807.



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ball ‘inclines / and holds and shows the players from above / All at once a new position’. The apex is reflected in the poem at line 11, with a dash after ‘Abducts and sets free’. Of course, the ball occasions not only throwing but also catching, and the poem indicates, in ‘the cup of high hands’, something of the satisfaction of bringing an action to fruition. There is satisfaction in the subject’s own skill, but then also an affective and aesthetic savouring of this process and its extension beyond the agent of the action. This savouring highlights the open relation between the enactive embodied subject and the surrounding space which the activity of throwing the ball has brought to notice. Rilke’s final imagery, I think, suggests the human subject’s savouring of the flight itself as a metaphor of freedom: just as the warmth of the human hands was said to linger on the ball’s surface, so then the freedom suggested by the ball’s flight can be felt in the hands which catch it. The slight bounce from the momentum of the ball against the receiving surface of the hands is evoked in the double alliteration, in the original German, of the final phrase: ‘dem Becher hoher Hände zuzufallen’ (‘To fall into the cup of high hands’).

Conclusion When the ball falls into the cup of the open, expecting hands, Rilke realises an image that helps to illustrate insights common to phenomenology and accounts of distributed cognition. The dynamic interaction of perception, movement, intentionality and object constitutes and sustains a vital nexus of embodied action. The poem itself, when read as an expression of what Terence Cave calls our ‘cognitive ecology’, becomes a linguistic artefact that aids reflection on our embodied being-­ in-­the-­world (Cave 2016: 5). In this light we can consider the fact that Merleau-­ Ponty, though primarily invested in painting and visual art, compares embodied experience to a poem. Like a work of art, the human body is a ‘nexus of living meanings’ (‘un nœud de significations vivantes’) where the form and material of expression are indistinguishable from the meaning expressed (Merleau-­Ponty 1962: 192, 1945: 177). ‘Language bears the meaning of thought’, he writes, ‘as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of the body . . . The writer’s act of expression is not very different from the painter’s’ (1993: 82; Le langage . . . porte son sens comme la trace d’un pas signifie le mouvement et l’effort d’un corps . . . son operation n’est pas très différente de celle du Peintre’, 1960: 56). I have suggested in this chapter that a phenomenological aesthetics attuned to distributed cognition can address works of art from different media, by highlighting their expressions of embodied cognition. This counters a conceptual segregation between visual and linguistic arts first articulated by Lessing (1766), who assigned painting to the spatial arts and poetry to the temporal (Lessing 1984). This division still reigns in aesthetics and art criticism, particularly in respect to modern art, for which, as Clement Greenberg puts it, the ‘expressive resources of the medium’ remain a central preoccupation (2000: 65). Greenberg would have us take in a painting immediately, as an

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emblem of simultaneity and spatiality, while poetry would be left to engage a non-­ spatial sequential unfolding of linguistic signs (Greenberg 1985: 4; see Harris 2005: 29–33). Yet a phenomenological and distributed-­cognitive interpretation of the arts seems to challenge this division. Cézanne’s work undermines the traditional exclusion of temporality from painting by associating perception with the changing perspective of an embodied agent. A painting is of course itself a fixed object, but its image emerges from (and may reflect) a moving body in the world, and invites a looking from a body that is itself in motion. Rilke defies the segregation of poetry from the spatial arts by elaborating what I would call a cognitive poetics of space. His renderings of animate, expressive and inanimate objects evoke sensorimotor, kinaesthetic and perceptual experiences, and construct interanimating relations between subjects and objects of perception. This exploration, in the context of modern painting and poetry, of the relationship between classical phenomenological sources and more recent cognitive theory offers a few further implications. I would first of all suggest that adherents of phenomenology in post-­Kantian thought today can be brought into conversation with cognitive studies without presupposing the latter would be unable to address poetry and art in experiential terms. Recent cognitive studies can remind phenomenologists as well as aestheticians of the actual, rather than merely thematised, subject of embodied experience, as well as of the actually embodied viewer of art or reader of literary works. Approaches so informed can consider cognitive operations that do not register on the level of consciousness. And they can curb what might be regarded as the ontological excesses of later phenomenology, where, for example, Heidegger describes language itself speaking, or Merleau-­Ponty, in his last work, describes the ‘flesh’ of being in terms that may exceed the bounds of phenomenological description and often seem to leave the experiencing subject behind (Heidegger 1971: 134; Merleau-­Ponty 1968: 88). At the same time, phenomenology should remind those in cognitive studies of the subjective experiential dimension that empirical research may not be able to capture or to capture directly, and ‘provide a philosophical framework for assessing the meaning and significance of this research for our self-­understanding’ (Thompson 2007: 16). In this light, I would assert that the difference between the first-­and third-­person approaches of phenomenology and empirical science, respectively, is not, as Noë has argued, a merely grammatical difference. Noë has argued that it is ‘of no relevance’ to distinguish between first-­and third-­person access to consciousness as a matter of inquiry (2007: 240). But that is already to deny the significance of the lived quality of the subject-­matter of introspective perception. It is this quality which Rilke’s poetry­– a­ nd perhaps much modern poetry­– ­and the atmosphere of Cézanne’s most accomplished paintings seem to capture. Phenomenology demonstrates the irreducibility of the perspective of the experiencing subject and of the phenomenal nature of this experience, both of which are unavoidably neglected when that subject is treated primarily as an object of empirical measurement and scientific observation. It is partly on phenomenological grounds­– ­as accessed through the first-­person perspective and description



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of that experience­– ­that reductively neuroscientific accounts of the mind are being challenged (Modell 2003). Advocates of phenomenological and enactivist approaches to art and literature have resisted the recent trend to reduce art and literature exclusively to neuroscientific explanations (Noë 2015: 94–8; Gosetti-­Ferencei 2014). If painting is not merely the translation of neurally grounded representations onto canvas, but involves the body in cognitively constitutive ways, painting cannot be explained entirely according to the activity of the brain, as one neuroscientist has aimed to do (Zeki 1999: 1, 2002: 54), just as literature cannot be accounted for principally by reference to neuronal activity, as some scholars have proposed (Lauer 2007, 2009; Salgaro 2009). A study of Cézanne’s process­– ­to name that of only a single painter­– ­reveals a wider distribution of cognitive experience than neuroaesthetics could account for. Cézanne’s eyes, hands, body, his receptive approach to the mountain and other landscapes he painted scores of times, his methods of study and contemplation of them, and his technical innovations and experimentation in different forms of expression involve processes that exceed what can be explained by neurological activity alone. Cézanne’s paintings are ‘concrete forms and were formed as part of a dynamic, experiential, and embodied activity’ (Ione 2000: 63), and Rilke’s poetry, I have demonstrated, can be similarly approached. The aesthetics of distributed cognition I have proposed in this chapter can understand art and literature as both expressing, and reflecting on, our cognitively embodied life.

8 Di r ec t i o n a li t y a n d D ura tion in D is trib u ted Co n s ci o us n e s s : M o de rnis t Pers p ectiv es on P h o t o g r a ph i c Ob jectiv ity Adam Lively

In ‘The extended mind’, Andy Clark and David Chalmers write of ‘an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes’ (2002: 643). This chapter considers photography in that light, that is, as a highly significant feature of the modern perceptual and cultural environment that drives cognitive processes. It highlights, in particular, two issues that arise when one considers the notion of distributed consciousness and cognition in relation to the photographic. The first of these is the issue of directionality. Though Clark and Chalmers write of the ‘active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes’, there is a strong tendency in the philosophical literature on the extended mind for this active role to be seen primarily in instrumental terms (Hurley 1998: 11). Paradigmatic examples like ‘Otto’s notebook’ in Clark and Chalmers’ essay paint a picture of agency located in a subject, with objects outside the body serving as tools: though these tools have an active role in the system as a whole, the dominant directionality of the system is one that has the subject as origin and flows out into the environment. The second issue concerns whether, when it comes to thinking about distributed consciousness and cognition, one can and should think about the relation between mind, body and world primarily in spatial terms. The assumption that it makes sense to do so underlies both the use of spatial metaphors in the central concepts (‘extension’, ‘distribution’) and the debates over where lines or boundaries can be drawn between what is internal and external to mind and consciousness (Lenay and Steiner 2010). An alternative view, occluded by the tendency to think about the problem in spatial terms, is one that holds the relation of mind, body and world to be first and foremost a matter of time or duration. These two issues, I argue, are raised in a particularly strong form when we consider interaction with a photograph. The idea of photography’s objectivity plays a key role in the argument, and in the first section I distinguish between two senses of photographic objectivity­– o­ n the one hand, a positivistic sense that links it with instrumental (for example scientific or ideological) uses of the photograph; and on the other hand an immersive objectivity that tends, by attributing agency to the object rather than the subject, to reverse the directionality implicit in the positivistic interpretation. In the following two sections I examine two modernist mani-



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festations of this latter, immersive form of photographic objectivity. In the second section, I discuss photography in relation to Surrealism, focusing on its important role in Surrealism’s exploration of the radical indeterminacy and subjectivity of the material world: the Surrealist perspective highlights how photography tends both to collapse distinctions between internal and external in relation to mind and consciousness and to suggest ways in which agency itself can be thought of as distributed. In the third section, these themes are pursued in relation to literary works by Georges Rodenbach (1855–98) and W.  G. Sebald (1944–2001): here, the incorporation of photographs within narrative texts highlights both how perceptual immersion in the photograph can engender a ‘dysfunctional’ state of melancholic stasis in the subject, and also how internalisation of the photograph’s objectivity should be understood as a durational process, that is, in temporal rather than spatial terms. In the concluding section I suggest how light can be shed on these issues of directionality and duration by the important role that photography plays as a provocation for Henri Bergson’s radically externalist account of perception and for his distinction between space and duration. For Bergson, the phenomenon of photography brings to awareness the fact that perception, as distinct from the memory that prolongs it in the conscious mind, is a part of the material world: the impulses in the brain that constitute perception are physical, spatial phenomena, just like the chemical reactions that produce the photographic image. Mind and consciousness, however, are durational rather than spatial. The internalisation of the photographic image by consciousness, as exemplified in modernist responses to photography, with their topologically unstable dynamics as between that which is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ consciousness, strikingly demonstrates the relevance to contemporary debates of Bergson’s notion of the ‘extended mind’, on which view the mind should be conceived not in spatial but in durational terms, as a continuous evolution of heterogeneous states.

Photographic Objectivity Examples of external vehicles for cognition and consciousness cited in philosophical and psychological discussions of the extended mind tend to fall into two categories: on the one hand, physical tools and prostheses (the blind person’s cane), and, on the other, symbol systems (for example Otto’s notebook). Photography has a quality that does not fit neatly into either of these categories­– ­that of being an indexical trace of the real. Take Edgar Allan Poe’s expression of wonder, written in 1840, at the new invention: All language must fall short of conveying any just idea of the truth, and this will not appear so wonderful when we reflect that the source of vision itself has been, in this instance, the designer. Perhaps, if we imagine the distinctness with which an object is reflected in a positively perfect mirror, we come as near the reality as by any other means. For in truth, the Daguerreotyped plate is . . . infinitely

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more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear­– ­but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. (Poe 1980: 38) The photograph here is specifically contrasted with symbolic representations that involve the intervention of the human hand: for Poe, the Daguerreotype or ‘photogenic drawing’ has been crafted not by human hand but by the object itself. It achieves a kind of identity with the object. Similarly, among early practitioners of photography, Daguerre himself speaks of ‘the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura’, while Hercules Florence refers to ‘drawings made by nature’, and Henry Fox Talbot writes of ‘Photogenic drawing or nature painted by herself’, or The Pencil of Nature, to quote the title of his pioneering photographic book of 1844–6 (Batchen 1997: 62–3). The term ‘photography’, first used by Florence in 1834, combines the Greek terms phos (light) and graphie (writing/drawing/delineation). Looking back on the nineteenth-­ century history of photography, Siegfried Kracauer notes the significance of its simultaneity with positivism, and with realism in the arts: according to this influential conception highlighted by Kracauer, photography seemed to fulfil Taine’s dictum that ‘I want to reproduce the objects as they are, or as they would be even if I did not exist’ (Kracauer 1960: 5). In this same spirit, László Moholy-­Nagy, one of the leading practitioner-­theorists of the first half of the twentieth century, celebrated the fact that­– ­by way of contrast to the ‘conceptual image’ formed by individual subjective perception­– ­‘in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective . . .’ (1969: 28; ‘besitzen wir in dem fotografischen Apparat das verläßlichste Hilfsmittel zu Anfängen eines objektiven Sehens. Ein jeder wird genötigt sein, das Optisch wahre, das aus sich selbst Deutbare, Objektive zu sehen . . .’, 1927: 26). In particular, the reduction of exposure times enabled photography to capture and freeze movements invisible to normal perception (Ernst Mach’s experiments in the 1880s photographing bullets in flight, for example, and Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human and animal motion), bringing to awareness what Walter Benjamin in 1936 would term the ‘optical unconscious’.1 The objectivity of the photograph, understood in this positivist sense, lends itself to that instrumental use of external vehicles paradigmatically highlighted by accounts of the extended mind: the photograph becomes a perceptual prosthesis. To cite an 1

Jonathan Crary has observed that the recording by Mach’s photographs of the shock waves travelling just ahead of the bullets ‘suggest[ed] some of the radical rearrangements of perceptual “truths” made possible by machinic speeds. Such photographs overturned conventional cognitive assumptions about cause and effect and defamiliarized the apparent nature of a physical event’ (1999: 142).



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apt example, in the early 1860s the American writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes used instantaneous photographs of able-­bodied people walking to identify deficiencies in the design of an artificial leg then being fitted to amputee veterans of the Civil War (Kracauer 1960: 5; Marien 2002: 132). The positivist understanding of photography’s objectivity underlies not only its use in scientific investigation,2 but also its use as documentary evidence­– ­for example in Jacob Riis’s exposés of the overcrowded conditions of New York tenements, enabled by the development of flashlight technology in the 1890s (Marien 2002: 205–6). Yet there remains an aspect of the photograph’s objectivity that outstrips any utilitarian frame into which it may be cast, for example by its caption. Roland Barthes (1984) would express this aspect in terms of a distinction between what he termed the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ of the photograph: the studium is the generalised interest that one brings to bear on a photograph (for example as political testimony or historical documentation), whereas the punctum is the contingent, accidental detail­– ­brought to awareness when reality is frozen and examined, as under Poe’s microscope­– ­that ‘punctures’ the studium for a viewer. The punctum lends itself to what one might term ‘metonymic expansion’. When Barthes looks at André Kertész’s photograph of a blind violinist being led by a boy (Plate 5), his eye is drawn to the dirt road: ‘its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent . . . I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-­ago travels in Hungary and Rumania [sic]’ (1984: 45; ‘le grain de cette chaussée terreuse me donne la certitude d’être en Europe centrale; je perçois le referent . . . je reconnais, de tout mon corps, les bourgades que j’ai traversées lors d’anciens voyages en Hongrie et en Roumanie’, 1980: 77). For Siegfried Kracauer, similarly, the photograph has an affinity with ‘endlessness’, which follows from its attraction to fortuitous moments ‘which represent fragments rather than wholes’: [The photograph’s] frame marks a provisional limit; its content refers to other contents outside the frame; and its structure denotes something that cannot be encompassed­– ­physical existence . . . In this respect, there is an analogy between the photographic approach and scientific investigation: both probe into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them. (Kracauer 1960: 19–20) Kracauer’s observation recalls Poe’s expression of wonder at the Daguerreotype, and in particular the emphasis that he puts on the term infinitely when he describes that microscopic scrutiny of the Daguerreotyped plate that reveals a ‘perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented’ (Poe 1980: 38). But the conception of the photograph’s objectivity to which we are now moving differs radically from the positivist conception of an objectivity that is determinate 2

Darwin justified his use of photographs in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) on the grounds that they could be relied on to convey the ‘most evanescent and fleeting facial expressions’ (quoted in Kracauer 1960: 5).

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by being removed from any particular perspective. For Barthes’s fascination with the dirt road is entirely personal; others might be drawn to a quite different punctum. My own eye, for example, is drawn to the toddler who faces the camera, and in particular to the direction of his gaze into the ‘blind field’ beyond the photographic frame: what is he looking at? A corollary of the photograph’s revelation of the contingency and infinity of the material world, Kracauer observes, is its indeterminacy: ‘however selective photographs are, they cannot deny the tendency toward the unorganised and diffuse which marks them as records . . . As compared with a photograph, any painting has a relatively definite significance’ (1960: 20). The objectivity of the photograph conceived in these terms, as opposed to the positivist conception, has an indeterminacy that invites determination(s) by the viewer: one might call it an enactive objectivity, even a subjective objectivity. In terms of the cultural history of the photograph, the oscillation between these two forms of objectivity can be seen in the concurrence, alongside the scientific and instrumental uses of photography referred to above, of photography in its most widespread and popular role since its very inception: that of a memento, notably in the form of a portrait. Here, Poe’s observation that the photograph tends towards a ‘perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented’ attains its full force. In contrast to the many cultural analyses of photography that emphasise its mechanical reproducibility, Elizabeth Edwards (2009) has described some of the ways in which photographs of family and loved ones have been treated as special material objects in their own right, from elaborate presentation in albums to incorporation in jewellery alongside relics such as locks of hair; in handling such photographs, she notes, people often feel the need to touch and caress them.3 Poe, in the passage quoted above, describes the photograph as being ‘designed’ by the ‘source of vision’­– ­that is, by the object photographed: the photograph is a direct emanation of the photographed person or object, bearing an indexical and metonymic relation to it. André Bazin, in his essay ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (1945), traces the origins of photography back to such practices as Egyptian mummification: photography is characterised by a ‘transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction’ (2005: 14; ‘un transfert de réalité de la chose sur sa reproduction’, 1997: 14), since ‘[i]n spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually, re-­presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space’ (2005: 13–14; ‘[q]uelles que soient les objections de notre esprit critique nous sommes obliges de croire à l’existence de l’objet representé, c’est-­à-­dire rendu present dans le temps et dans l’espace’, 1997: 13–14). As Rosalind Krauss writes: The photograph is . . . genetically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, cast 3

W. J. T. Mitchell recounts a colleague’s demonstration-­experiment with resolutely deconstructionist students who scoff at the notion of the ‘magical’ properties of the photograph as object: he asks them each to take a photograph of their mother and then cut the eyes out of it (2005: 9).



dir ec t iona lit y an d durat i o n  139 shadows, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. Technically and semiologically speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes. (1985: 31)

The photographic image’s quality as an existential, indexical trace of the presence of the loved one imparts to the photograph-­as-­object a ‘magical’ power that transcends its mechanical reproducibility. A striking literary exploration of this thought can be found in Thomas Hardy’s short story ‘An imaginative woman’ (1894), the plot of which ironically combines the idea of the magical properties of the photograph as an extension of the real with the idea of the indeterminacy of the photographic image. A young woman, unhappily married, becomes obsessed with a poet without ever succeeding in meeting him. She and her husband have been given temporary use of the poet’s rooms in a seaside lodging house. There is a photograph of the poet in the rooms, which the wife has taken to touching and kissing, and one night when her husband is away, she places it beside her on the pillow. It becomes part of an atmosphere of indexical trace, both sensual and imaginative, that envelops her: ‘And now her hair was dragging where his arm had lain . . . she was sleeping on a poet’s lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his spirit as by an ether’ (1979: 318). Later, following her death in childbirth, her husband discovers the photograph and thinks he can detect a resemblance to her son, whom he then rejects. Implicit in the plot of the story, haunting it, is not only the thought that it is the photograph (with its stimulus to the imagination) with which she is in love, but also the strange notion that it is the photograph that has impregnated her. Alongside the positivistic interpretation of photographic objectivity, then­– ­an interpretation that lends itself to instrumental scientific and documentary uses, and which is congruent with the instrumentalist perspective on distributed consciousness and cognition­– ­we find a conception of photographic objectivity that is oriented towards the object, in the sense that the photographic image as material object is seen as emanating, as an indexical trace, from the object itself. When Poe examines his Daguerreotype through his microscope, the microscope enables an extension of his perception, but the Daguerreotype itself has an existence whose source lies in the other direction­– ­not in perception, but in the object. The viewer’s perception of the object is only through the materiality of the photograph, but because of photography’s ‘transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction’, in Bazin’s words, the photograph can stimulate a sense of immersion in the object. Painting, too, may stimulate a sense of immersion, but in the case of photography, as we have seen, the immersion has an indeterminacy and open-­endedness, a fragmentary quality, that draws from the viewer further enactive response, further exploration of the endless metonymic world within and beyond the frame. These two interpretations of the photograph’s objectivity correspond to two forms of interaction with the photograph­– ­one instrumental and drawing on symbolic codes (scientific, ideological, etc.), the other immersive and aligned with exploratory simulations of a direct experience of the object. The two forms of

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i­nteraction are not mutually exclusive: the same photograph may be seen according to opposite interpretations by different viewers or at different times (what to one person is a cherished memento of a loved one may be to another an ideological or scientific document). Or both forms of interaction may co-­exist in a single experience of a photograph, in various possible relations of switching or oscillation (as in Barthes’s case of a studium ruptured by a punctum), or of mutual support. This picture of simultaneous, concurrent forms of interaction with the photograph can be put in the framework of the theoretical model that Susan Hurley presents in Consciousness in Action. Hurley argues against the ‘vertical modularity’ of a classical model of cognition that equates the distinction between perception and action with a linear chain of input and output. In place of this ‘vertical’ cut, she proposes a ‘horizontal modularity’ that distinguishes between, on the one hand, a personal, normative level at which distinctions of perception and action emerge, and, on the other hand, a subpersonal level of causal interactions with the environment; the latter consist of ‘a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits’, which include ‘not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning’. From the point of view of these feedback loops, the individual person can be seen as a ‘dynamic’ or ‘structural singularity’ in a ‘field of causal flows’ (Hurley 1998: 2). The case of photography, as outlined above, can be interpreted in terms of the dynamic interaction that Hurley points to between various mind-­world loops. Crucially, the loops represented by the two forms of photographic objectivity outlined above, the instrumental and the immersive, differ in their directionality: the first originates in the subject, which interprets and utilises the photograph according to cultural and symbolic codes; the second originates in the object, which through the mediation of the photographic image elicits experiential simulations from the subject (the exact nature of these simulations being indeterminate).4 Hurley observes that cognitivism traditionally studies the functions that transform inputs into outputs: we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them. (1998: 2)

4

The distinction being made here can be aligned with the distinction that Omar Lizardo makes, in his historical survey of the concept of internalisation, between a ‘classical’ approach, on the one hand, by which internalisation is conceived in terms of symbolic representations, and an embodied approach, on the other hand, which is rooted (as in the notion of ‘image schemata’) on simulations of the movements of perceptions and actions (Lizardo 2015).



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According to Hurley, the relationship is not straightforwardly causal or even isomorphic between, on the one hand, the subpersonal level of interacting brain-­ body-­world loops and, on the other, the personal level at which the interaction of perception and action crystallises into what she terms a ‘perspective’: the interdependence of perception and action that perspective involves can be explained in terms of their co-­dependence on a subpersonal dynamic singularity. This subpersonal aspect of unity does not support sharp causal boundaries either between mind and world or between perception and action. (1998: 3) In the following sections I will describe two modernist perspectives on the ­photograph­– t­ he Surrealist and the melancholy­– t­ hat differ widely in the relations they instantiate between perception and (in)action. But both emerge, as I shall show, from that system of interaction with the photograph that we have seen to be geared to a flow from object to subject, from exteriority to interiority (from output to input, in Hurley’s terms): what is at stake in this case is a process of internalisation rather than externalisation. At this point a revealing confusion of terms has entered my account­– o­ r more precisely, a tension between the underlying metaphors being employed. Earlier I spoke of the form of photographic objectivity that was oriented towards the object as being ‘immersive’. And yet now I speak of this same form as involving an ‘internalisation’: is it not strange­– ­convoluted­ – ­to speak of internalising something in which one is immersed? Does it not imply an impossible topology, this envisaging oneself as surrounding (internalising) something that surrounds one? The case of photography provides a paradigmatic instance of how, in Hurley’s words, the subpersonal loops militate against the drawing of ‘sharp causal boundaries . . . between mind and world’. The lesson of photography is that the relation between mind, body and world cannot be thought of in terms of spatial metaphors; such metaphors capture only a snapshot, as a still photograph does, of what is in fact a durational process that is continually evolving new topologies. In the final section I will expand on the Bergsonian notion of duration, by which the relation between subject and object can be understood as fundamentally a temporal rather than spatial relation.

Photographic Objectivity and Surrealism Though today’s most immediate popular associations of Surrealism may be with poetry and with the paintings of artists such as Dali and Magritte, photography had a distinctive and central place in the Surrealist movement. The use of photography by the Surrealists should be placed in the context of their interest both in exploring a wide range of media and in breaking down the disciplinary ­barriers between artistic media­– ­the incorporation of poetic text into paintings, for example, by Joan Miró (Caws 2004: 55). It should also be seen in the context of their exploration of new ways of making artworks such as frottage, fumage and

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­decalcomania which involved both chance and direct, indexical contact with the material world (Caws 2004: 20, 64).5 The photograph was used as a Surrealist image in its own right, as illustration in conjunction with text, as an element in a montage, and as documentation of Surrealist sculptures, ‘found objects’ and ‘assemblages’ of objects (Krauss and Livingston 1985). Surrealist photography was also notable for its experimentation with and extensions of photography’s basic quality as an indexical trace of light­– ­for example in the use of double-­exposures, and in Man Ray’s development of techniques such as the rayograph (‘camera-­less’ photography using direct exposure of objects on to photosensitive paper) and solarisation (deliberate over-­exposure of the plate or film during developing) (Krauss 1985: 24–5; Ades 2008: 99). In a sense, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, the significance that photography would come to have for Surrealism is counter-­intuitive: if Surrealism is concerned with inner imagination and freedom, with subjective realms of dream, with fantasy revealed through practices such as ‘automatic’ writing and drawing, then photography would seem to be its antithesis (1985: 15). And indeed, in the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) André Breton seems to associate photography with the kind of realist aesthetic that he disparages in nineteenth-­century literary tradition; indeed, he proposes that the passages of description that he finds so tedious in the realist novel should in future be replaced by photographs. The idea of photography as documentation also finds its way into the pages of La Révolution surréaliste (1924– 9), the dry, formal layout of which­– w ­ ith illustrative photographs accompanying reports on experiments with automatic writing, accounts of dreams, ‘chronicles’ experimentally investigating everyday material found in newspapers, adverts, and so on­– ­was deliberately modelled on La Nature, a contemporary journal devoted to ‘science and its application to art and industry’ (Caws 2004: 51; Krauss 1985: 19). This conception of photography as documentation and verification aligns itself with the positivistic conception of photographic objectivity discussed in the previous section. Yet in André Breton’s Nadja (1928) we see how, in the context of Surrealist ideas on the relationship between mind and world, this positivistic conception can morph into its opposite, into a conception of photographic objectivity that is radically subjective in that it involves a complete immersion of the self in the object. At the heart of Breton’s book is an account of his relationship with a mentally disturbed and fragile young woman, the Nadja of the title, whom he meets on the streets of Paris. The story of their wanderings through the city is really the story of Breton’s fascination with Nadja’s extreme openness and sensitivity to her surroundings, and her ability to read in them esoteric signs and connections­– s­ igns that become signposts for her erratic and ‘aimless’ physical and mental journey. The book’s photographs are for the most part plain snapshots of people and places 5

In frottage, paper was spread on everyday surfaces such as floors, and a ‘rubbing’ taken to create an image of its texture; fumage used the deposit of smoke from a candle or oil lamp to form the image; decalcomania involved spreading paint on to smooth coated paper, then pressing another piece of paper on to it. On this topic also see Kerry Watson’s chapter in this volume.



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mentioned in the text; the captions consist of citations of the text, emphasising the images’ purely illustrative character. Yet despite the limitations of Breton’s use of photographs in Nadja, their positivist, documentary quality takes on a different character by being placed in a context that transforms them into signposts for Nadja’s and Breton’s deeply subjective journey. In a long, discursive introductory section that lays out the aesthetic and philosophical context for Nadja’s story, Breton’s description of the world of signs-­ written-­into-­reality that he is about to enter invokes just those qualities of instantaneity, immediacy and indeterminacy that, as we saw in the previous section, are characteristic of the immersive perspective on photographic objectivity. He is about to be admitted, he writes, [into] an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on a piano, flashes of light that would make you see, really see, if only they were not so much quicker than all the rest. I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value; but which, by their absolutely unexpected, violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke . . . belong to the order of pure observation, but . . . on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal . . . (Breton 1960: 19) dans un monde comme défendu qui est celui des rapprochements soudains, des pétrifiantes coïncidences, des réflexes primant tout autre essor du mental, des accords plaques comme au piano, des éclairs qui feraient voir, mais alors voir, s’ils n’étaient encore plus rapides que les autres. Il s’agit de faits de valeur intrinsèque sans doute peu contrôlable mais qui, par leur caractère absolument inattendu, violemment incident, et le genre d’associations d’idées suspectes qu’ils éveillent, . . . fussent-­ils de l’ordre de la constatation pure, présentent chaque fois toutes les apparences d’un signal, sans qu’on puisse dire au juste de quel signal . . . (Breton 1964a: 19–20) The Surrealist view of the world is a fusion of the objective (‘pure observation’) with the profoundly subjective (‘all the appearances of a signal’): elsewhere, Breton would define his Surrealist concept of ‘objective chance’ as a response in the external world to a question we didn’t know we had (Caws 2004: 94). In the introduction to her translation of Breton’s second book-­length text to include photographs, Mad Love (‘L’Amour Fou’) (1937), Mary Ann Caws writes that ‘[b]y what Breton was to call the law of objective chance, he expected the inner and the outer experiences to mingle in an ongoing, constant communication’ (1987: xiii). In this book, Breton goes further to explain what he means by this ‘constant communication’ between inner and outer, subject and object. The explanation takes the form of an unpacking of a phrase that he introduces in the last sentence of Nadja: ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’

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(1960: 160; ‘La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas’, 1964a: 190). Breton identifies three aspects to the ‘convulsive beauty’ by which the Surrealist vision finds a ‘forest of signs’ in the world; these he labels the ‘magique-­circonstancielle’, the ‘érotique-­voilée’ and the ‘explosante-­fixe’ (1964b: 21). They correspond to aspects of that immersive, object-­oriented photographic objectivity that we discussed in the previous section. The magique-­circonstancielle corresponds to the contingency and indeterminacy inherent to the photograph (that contingency by which any ‘studium’ of a photograph, in Barthes’s terms, is liable to be punctured by a ‘punctum’, a contingent detail, that speaks uniquely to the subjectivity of a particular viewer); it denotes the ‘found object’, an instance of ‘objective chance’ where ‘an emissary from the external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire. The found object is a sign of that desire’ (Krauss 1985: 35). The ‘érotique-­voilée’ corresponds, too, to the contingency that speaks to subjective desire, but in the specific form of a mimetic representation, as when inorganic matter appears to shape itself like a statue. And the ‘explosante-­fixe’ corresponds to the photograph’s instantaneity, its freezing of duration, denoting the way an object can embody the arresting or exhaustion of motion; by way of illustration, Breton cites a classic Surrealist image of an abandoned train in a forest (Plate 6). All these aspects of Breton’s ‘convulsive beauty’ correspond to the immersive perspective on photographic objectivity, to an interaction between subject and object that is geared to the object: the world, the object, becomes an answer that provokes its own corresponding question in the subject­– ­the movement, in Susan Hurley’s terms, is from output to input. But it is the third aspect, the explosante-­fixe, that is of special importance for our purposes because of the way it highlights how photography can be related to Hurley’s account of the subpersonal mind-­body-­ world loops that constitute the organism’s interaction with its life-­world. According to Hurley, animals with minds can be seen as ‘dynamic singularities . . . in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits’ (1998: 2). Photography’s peculiar gift, by way of its taking an instantaneous slice through time, is to reveal the structure of simultaneous d­ urations­ – ­this in a Bergsonian sense (to be made explicit in the concluding section) of movements that are not merely spatial but intrinsically temporal­– ­underlying the creation of dynamic singularities: the photographic perspective is that of a dynamic singularity. In the case of the image of the train in the forest, the juxtaposition it presents can be interpreted in any number of ways (nature vs technology, male vs female, etc.), but underlying such idealisations is a felt sense of contrast between the duration represented by organic growth and that represented by the (arrested) technology of the locomotive. In the case of photographs with human subjects, photography’s revelation of simultaneous dimensions serves to support Hurley’s distinction between, on the one hand, the subpersonal field of systematic causal interaction in the context of which thinking animals constitute dynamic singularities, and, on the other hand, the personal-­level judgements that are made about perception and action. In an image such as Henri Cartier-­Bresson’s famous ‘Behind the Gare St.



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Lazare’ (1932) (Plate 7), we see the photograph’s capacity to strip away the personal level, to isolate the singularity of intersecting dynamic forces and durations­ – ­the velocity and determination of the man; the forces of gravity; the rhythms of day and night (is he on his way to work?); the meteorological cycles of precipitation (that have created the puddle)­– ­that go to make up this instant.6

Photographic Objectivity and Melancholy According to the Surrealist view, the photograph’s immersive objectivity is a spur to exploration and positive action: the object, as Breton put it, is an answer that provokes a question from the subject. But in the case of the literary treatments of the photograph that I discuss now, where actual photographs are incorporated into the text, the orientation towards the object tends to inhibit action. The subject becomes lost in the labyrinth of the photograph’s indeterminacy, and immersion leads to stasis and melancholy.7 The association between photography and melancholy is a marked feature of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-­la-­Morte (1892), thought to be the first work of fiction to incorporate photography as part of its original conception (see Plate 8).8 Hugh Viane, the protagonist of the novel, is a widower, paralysed with grief for his young, dead wife, who has moved to Bruges, a silent, brooding city of canals and churches. On one of his lonely wanderings through the city, Viane sees a woman in the street who bears a striking resemblance to his dead wife. Especially striking is her hair, which matches exactly his dead wife’s hair, locks of which he keeps in a household shrine (Rodenbach 1993: 26). He follows the woman, becomes obsessed with her, and they form a relationship. Jane, the woman he has fixed on, is an actress (and, it is implied, a prostitute) who proceeds to manipulate and steal from Viane. In the final climactic scene of the novel, Jane violates the shrine to the dead wife and taunts Viane; he reacts by strangling her with his dead wife’s hair. In a foreword to the novel, Rodenbach writes that the inclusion in the text of photographs of Bruges is not merely for the sake of illustration or documentation, but

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Clive Scott has argued that the ‘instant’ of the photograph ‘immobilises not only the totality of space but also the totality, not of time, but of available temporalities’, capturing ‘the coincidence of different durations’ (2007: 46–7). 7 For a discussion of the association between photography and melancholy see Kracauer 1960: 16–17. 8 Georges Rodenbach (1855–98) was a Belgian symbolist poet who moved to Paris and became part of Mallarmé’s circle. In his monograph on Rodenbach, Paul Gorceix argues that Belgian symbolism was characterised in particular by a contemplative fascination with objects, an infusion of the everyday with, as he writes, ‘a transcendental existence, accomplished in silence’ (‘une existence transcendantale, qui s’accomplit dans le silence’, 2006: 15). Gorceix doesn’t make the connection between this idea and Rodenbach’s use of photography, which itself could be said to have ‘a transcendental existence, accomplished in silence’.

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so that all those who read this work may themselves feel the presence and the influence of the city, experience the contagiousness of the waters, and be conscious of the long shadows of the high towers as they fall across the text. (1993: 15) afin que ceux qui nous liront subissent aussi la présence et l’influence de la Ville, éprouvent la contagion des eaux mieux voisines, sentent à leur tour l’ombre des hautes tours allongée sur le texte. (1986: 15) The reader’s experiential immersion in the photographs­– t­he text’s immersion in the photographs­– ­mirrors Viane’s immersion in the atmosphere of the city, which corresponds to his own state of mind: ‘as evening approached, he liked to walk, looking for analogies to his grief in deserted canals and ecclesiastical districts’ (2005: 26; ‘il aimait cheminer aux approches du soir et chercher des analogies à son deuil dans de solitaires canaux et d’ecclésiastiques quartiers’, 1986: 20). The motif of parallels, analogies, mirrorings and resemblances runs throughout the text, from the descriptions of the reflections in the still surfaces of the canals, through the perceived resemblance of Jane to the dead wife, to Viane’s belief that the mirror before which his wife would dress her hair still holds her image in its depths. (One recalls at this point Poe’s account of the Daguerreotype, quoted above.) Where in Breton’s photo-­text Nadja the ‘forest of signs’ presented by Paris is seen as a stimulus to a journey of self-­discovery through the material world, in Bruges-­la-­Morte the web of resemblances that holds Viane in thrall acts more like a net which inhibits action and agency. Paul Edwards links the photographs in Bruges-­la-­Morte to the motif of relics and traces: the motionless grey photographs of the ‘dead’ town evoke the idea, prevalent in late-­twentieth-­century writings on photography, that ‘photography is a reminder of death . . . a trace or relic of the real’ (2000: 71). Barthes, for example, echoes the essay by Bazin quoted above when he writes that the photograph is not ‘a “copy” of reality, but . . . an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art’ (1984: 88; ‘une “copie” du réel­– m ­ ais . . . une emanation du réel passé: une magie, non un art’, 1980: 138); the evidential force of the photograph ‘bears not on the object but on time’ (1984: 89; ‘porte, non sur l’objet, mais sur le temps’, 1980: 139). W. G. Sebald, who was steeped in these writings by Barthes, Susan Sontag and others (Scott 2011), incorporates old photographs in all his narratives, but unlike Breton and Rodenbach he weaves the encounter and interaction with them into the ­narrative­– ­as in a passage in The Emigrants when the narrator examines a ­photograph album: Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them. (Sebald 1996: 45–6)



dir ec t iona lit y an d durat i o n  147 Ein Mal ums andere, vorwärts und rückwärts durchblätterte ich dieses Album an jenem Nachmittag und habe es seither immer wieder von neuem durchblättert, weil es mir beim Betrachten der darin enthaltenen Bilder tatsächlich schien und nach wie vor sceint, als kehrten die Toten zurück oder als stünden wir im Begriff, einzugehen zu ihnen. (Sebald 2001a: 68–9)

In Austerlitz, Jacques Austerlitz, himself a keen photographer, returns to Prague, his birthplace, to try to recover memories of his life before the Kindertransport took him to England and his parents disappeared into the Nazi concentration camps. His former nursery-­maid gives him a photograph of himself aged six, dressed as a page boy, taken only three months before he left Prague (Plate 9). Like Poe, Austerlitz examines the photograph with a magnifying glass, and as he does so, there is a reorientation of agency­– a­ ttention, vision, action now emanates not from Austerlitz but from the photograph, which has itself become identical with the boy. His search for active memory proves fruitless, and instead it is the photograph, the boy, who becomes active: I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the grey light of the dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him. (2002: 260) jede Einzelheit habe ich mit dem Vergrößerungsglas untersucht, ohne je den geringsten Anhalt zu finden. Und immer fühlte ich mich dabei durchdrungen von dem forschenden Blick des Pagen, der gekommen war, sein Teil zurückzufordern und der nun im Morgengrauen auf dem leeren Feld darauf wartete, daß ich den Handschuh aufheben und das ihm bevorstehende Unglück abwenden würde. (2001b: 264) Contemplation of the photograph leads Austerlitz further towards the melancholy reflection that it is the dead who are truly active and alive, and the living who are unreal and dead: I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. (2002: 261) ist es mir immer mehr, als gäbe es überhaupt keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Räume, zwischen denen die Lebenendigen und die Toten, je nachdem es ihnen zumute

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ist, hin und her gehen könen, und je länger ich es bedenke, desto mehr kommt mir vor, daß wir, die wir uns noch am Leben befinden, in den Augen der Toten irreale und nur manchmal, unter bestimmen Lichtverhältnissen und atmosphärischen Bedingungen sichtbar werdende Wesen sind. (2001b: 265) The absorption of­– ­and in­– ­the photograph, in Sebald’s account, involves a radical inversion of agency as between subject and object. A melancholy, traumatised loss of self in the objectivity of the photograph­– ­implicit in Bruges-­la-­Morte­ – ­is here made explicit. It is the material traces of the dead that live; the living are merely their feeble echoes. The modernist perspectives on photography that I have indicated in this and the previous section bring to awareness a feature of photography, intrinsic to the nature of its production, that I have called its ‘immersive objectivity’. In the cases of both Surrealist and literary-­melancholic perspectives on photography, this involves a reorientation of agency from the subject to the object. The kind of analysis that I have proposed here could be extended to other uses of photography­– i­n celebrity culture, for example, or advertising, or political propaganda, or pornography. In all these cases of immersive identification­– ­of the viewer held in thrall to the image­ – ­there is a tendency, exploited by its users, for the photographic image to cease to be an extension of the viewer’s mind, and instead for the viewer’s mind to become an extension of the photographic image.

Conclusion: Bergsonian Reflections on Photography The case of photography, I have argued, bears on two issues in particular with regard to theories of distributed cognition and the extended mind: on the one hand, the question of agency and instrumentality, of whether causal flow out from the subject through external objects should be taken as the norm; and on the other hand, the question of space and time in relation to the interactions of mind, body and world. To conclude, I will show how Bergsonian ideas cast light on these issues. The example of photography was of crucial importance for Bergson: it acted as a provocation. In what follows, I work backwards from Bergson’s ideas on perception, memory and consciousness to their original provocation in photography, in order to show what light they shed on the issues of directionality and duration outlined above. In Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson sets himself the task of establishing a basis for recognising the reality of mind (‘spirit’) and the reality of matter, and the relation between them­– ­and of doing so without falling into a Cartesian dualism which assigns to them a different substance and thus makes the interaction between them (which all our experience affirms) incomprehensible. This latter position, Bergson argues, is the cul-­de-­sac on which both materialism and idealism converge (2004: 302). He focuses on memory, because it is in memory ‘that we can grasp spirit in its most tangible form’ (2004: 81; ‘où nous prètendons saisir l’esprit sous sa forme la plus palpable’, 1900: 68): memory is a principal mechanism by which conscious-



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ness selects and modifies the impulses and movements which are continuously passing through the brain and body in cycles of perception and action. For the brain, according to Bergson, does not form ‘representations’; rather, it transmits, sends back or inhibits movements (2004: 40). In evolutionary terms, the development of the central nervous system and brain has multiplied the different pathways along which movement can be transmitted, either as actualised actions or as ‘nascent’ or virtual movements (2004: 19–20): consciousness consists in this ever-­greater scope and freedom with which animals can inhibit, transmit or return these impulses given in perception. And central to consciousness is memory, which prolongs past actions into the present and thereby not only increases the latitude of choice available to action, but also establishes the continuity of consciousness. Though in actual consciousness memory and perception are inextricably bound up together, the task of the psychologist, according to Bergson, is to dissociate them, to show that the difference between them is one of kind rather than degree (2004: 72). It is here, in the theoretical isolation of pure perception from memory, that the example of photography acquires importance in Bergson’s argument. Perception, for Bergson, is a matter not of forming mental representations, but of excitation and stimulus to action; its evolutionary prototype is the sense of touch, at once passive and active, by which primitive organisms such as protozoa simultaneously sense and seize a prey, or sense and withdraw from a danger (2004: 22). The phenomenon of photography, in this context, highlights the fact that pure perception is physical, a part of the material world. In the first section we saw how the earliest commentators on photography stressed the mechanical and physical nature of the basic process, operating without the intervention of human hand or mind; I noted how implicit in the term ‘photo-­graphy’ is the idea that it is the light emanating from the object that has made the image, and how a powerful current in the cultural history of photography is the idea that the photograph is a material trace, a relic, of the photographed person. We imagine perception, Bergson writes, to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception­– ­a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-­matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? (2004: 31) comme un vue photographique des choses, qui se prendrait d’un point déterminé avec un appareil spéciale, tel que l’organe de perception, et qui se développerait ensuite dans la substance cérébrale par je ne sais quel processus d’élaboration chimique et physique. Mais comment ne pas voir que la photographie, si photographie il y a, est déjà prise, déjà tire, dans l’intérieur même ds choses et pour tous les points de l’espace? (1900: 26)

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The photograph and the photographic apparatus are a part of the material world­ – ­and their example, as a kind of materialisation of perception, brings to awareness how pure perception, along with the brain that transmits its impulses, is also a physical, material phenomenon. Bergson’s ‘photographic’ view of perception is radically, ontologically ‘externalist’; pure perception, isolated from memory, is out there, belonging to objects themselves rather than to an internal realm of mental representation: ‘My perception . . . can only be some part of objects themselves: it is in them rather than they in it’ (2004: 304). Bergson’s analogy between pure perception and the phenomenon of photography, turned on photography itself, helps us understand that orientation-­towards-­the-­object, the immersive objectivity, that we have identified in the experience of the photograph: as an ineliminable residue behind any instrumental or communicative use (the punctum lurking behind any studium), the photograph carries a materialisation of that complete identity with the object, through an indexical, causal connection, that Bergson discovers in pure perception. The photograph highlights how, as Bergson writes, the relation between perception and matter is not one of kind, between subject and object, but one of degree, between part and whole (2004: 305). The difference between a photograph and actual perception is that the mechanical action of the camera stops at the production of the photograph (the ‘perception’, according to the analogy), whereas in the case of an organism the perception is a preparation for and stimulus to action. As we have seen, Bergson regards these stimuli as propagated and prolonged, through complex internal structures of virtuality, selection and inhibition, in the brain: consciousness­– o­ f which memory, the prolongation of the past into the present, is a central component­– ­is nothing other than the scope and amplitude of these latter processes. The experience of photography, the internalisation of the photographic image, can be taken as an example. In the first place, as we have seen, there is a strong impulse in the experience of the photograph (exploited, for example, in the Surrealist concept of explosante-­fixe) towards a perception of virtual durations and movements. And secondly, the photographic image itself­– ­as an indexical, material trace of a particular object at a particular instant in time­– ­has its own duration, its own history, that may intersect in important ways with that of the viewer (as in the case of Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz). By its very materialisation and actualisation of instantaneous ‘pure perception’, the photograph thus throws into relief, by way of contrast, the durational character of its internalisation by a viewer. I suggested above, in my discussion of photography’s immersive objectivity, that the experience of photography, its absorption and internalisation, is peculiarly prone to involutions and convolutions of subject and object, of what is marked as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ consciousness; in the cases of both the Surrealist and the literary-­melancholic perspectives on photography, the internalisation of the photograph’s indexical trace of reality generates an oscillation between objectivity and subjectivity that precludes the establishment of a stable topology of inside/outside. It is here that Bergson’s notion of duration can come into play, for key to that notion is the idea that duration, the real experience



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of time as opposed to the abstraction of scientific linear ‘time’, cannot be reduced to a spatial analogy. Unlike abstract scientific time, which is conceived as moving through a homogeneous space, duration is a creative evolution that is marked, moment by moment, by heterogeneity, by the emergence of something qualitatively new. Consciousness, according to Bergson, has this durational ­character­ – ­and when consciousness is distributed or mediated across the experience of photography, Bergson’s contention that the relation of subject and object should be seen in temporal rather than spatial terms comes into particularly sharp focus. Bergson’s ideas concerning radical perceptual externalism and duration have a particular pertinence when it comes to considering the questions of directionality and duration raised by the distribution of consciousness and cognition across viewer and photograph.

9 Wal ki n g , I de n t i t y a n d Vis u a l Percep tion in R o ma n t i c a n d M o dernis t Litera tu re Andrew Michael Roberts and Eleanore Widger

Introduction In this chapter we consider enactivist theories of cognition and perception in relation to aspects of Romantic and modernist literature.1 In particular we focus on how walking, in both rural and urban environments, relates to visual perception and the representation of the visual field and how movement and visuality inflect ideas of subjectivity, identity and consciousness. The field referred to as ‘distributed cognition’ or ‘situated cognition’ is generally taken to include the four ‘E’s­– ­embedded, embodied, enactive and extended­– a­ nd there is some debate about the extent to which these are complementary, overlapping or in conflict. In focusing on enactive cognition, we take it that embedded and embodied views are necessarily included. As Evan Thompson puts it: ‘According to the enactive approach, the human mind is embodied in our entire organism and embedded in the world, and hence is not reducible to structures inside the head’ (2005: 408). Although the last phrase here gestures towards ideas of extension, we do not take the view that extended mind in the strong sense is implicit in enactivism; it can, indeed, be argued that there are incompatibilities between enactivism and extended mind theory (Thompson 2005: 407–8). Many writers, from Romantic poets to contemporary psychogeographers, have associated walking with forms of reflection. Theories of distributed cognition generally may suggest ways of interpreting walking, not as merely conducive to certain forms of thought and experience, but as constitutive of those forms; that the walking subject is thinking not just in, but with, a landscape, or a crowd, or a room. An inclusive definition of enactivism is given by Thompson (2005: 407–8), who identifies five key ideas: 1. ‘living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their identities, and thereby enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains’ 2. ‘the nervous system is an autonomous system [which] . . . generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity’  1

On sensorimotor and autopoietic forms of enactivism see Ward 2014.

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3. ‘cognition is a form of embodied action [emerging from] . . . recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action’ 4. ‘a cognitive being’s world is not . . . [an] external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted . . . by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment [an idea which] . . . links the enactive approach to phenomenological philosophy, for both maintain that cognition bears a constitutive relation to its objects’ 5. ‘experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind’. The autopoietic form of enactivism is effectively defined by (1) and (2), but particularly (1). The sensorimotor form of enactivism is defined by (3) and (4), but particularly (3). The idea of living beings as actively generating and maintaining their own identities has obvious relevance to studies in literature (and art); in much of the Western tradition at least, questions about the definition, formation and construction of identity have been crucial concerns. Thompson also specifies ‘intersubjective interaction’ as a field of application for enactive cognitive science: other individuals, and the social realm more generally, constitute for humans crucial elements of the environment and crucial objects. He lists three ‘permanent and intertwined modes of bodily activity’ (2005: 408) (bearing in mind that his non-­ Cartesian approach means that the bodily is also the cognitive): self-­regulation, sensorimotor coupling and intersubjective interaction. Therefore, we may add ‘intersubjective interaction’ to identity-­generation and identity-­maintenance as forms of enactivist cognitive science which have obvious connections to the concerns of literature. It is also worth noting at the outset the rejection of primarily representational models of perception, mentioned in (4) above, which is central to enactivism.2 We shall suggest that there is a parallel between this rejection of representation and the break with mimetic concepts of art, a break which is crucial to both Romantic and modernist literature. The emergence of ‘situated cognition’ forms of cognitive science may enable stronger links to be made to literary and aesthetic theory and practice. The distance which previously existed between these fields may be indicated by the fact that (5) above –the relevance of experience­– ­is worth stating in the context of cognitive science, since the contrary view­– ­that experience is not central to the understanding of the mind­– ­is more or less inconceivable within the context of literary studies or the humanities more generally. We draw in particular on Alva Noë’s (2004) account of sensorimotor enactivism, on Evan Thompson’s (2007) account of autopoietic enactivism, and on Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991). We discuss Romantic and modernist works because much of modernist aesthetics evolves in reactive  2

Compare Noë’s comment: ‘A second implication of the enactive approach is that we ought to reject the idea . . . that perception is a process in the brain whereby the perceptual system constructs an internal representation of the world’ (2004: 2). ‘Situated cognition’ is the term favoured by Robbins and Aydede (2009).

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and integrative relation to Romanticism (though clearly there would be potential for related study of Victorian literature). Specifically, Romantic poetry offers particular configurations of visuality and movement to which modernist work can be readily contrasted. In general, Romantic poetry offers an affirmative account of unconstrained walking in a rural environment, facilitating a positive, identity-­ enhancing interaction. In contrast, modernist literature shows a marked duality in its representation of urban walking. T. S. Eliot’s early poetry often portrays walking constrained by an oppressive urban environment in a manner which threatens to fragment or dissolve identity and experiences which have existential, class-­related and gendered dimensions. This introduces the possibility of dysfunctional or failed forms of distributed cognition, which are perhaps neglected in the standard literature on this topic because of a tendency to focus on the functional utility of distributed cognition.3 Women’s urban walking in the modernist period has often been seen to be constrained by gendered attitudes and power structures. However, Virginia Woolf celebrates the aesthetic and sensory pleasures of urban walking (though inflected by constraints of gender and class); this can lead to more affirmative versions of dispersed identity.

Romantic Walking and the Sensorimotor Subject Varela, Thompson and Rosch write: it is because reflection in our culture has been severed from its bodily life that the mind-­body problem has become a central topic for abstract reflection . . . Reflection is taken to be distinctively mental, and so the problem arises of how it could ever be linked to bodily life. (1991: 30) This problem, they argue, was ‘a product of scientific practices­– ­those of disembodied, unmindful reflection’ (1991: 28), most trenchantly articulated by Descartes. Roughly two hundred years before the publication of The Embodied Mind, the Romantics were writing poetry which sought to ‘put man and his mind back into nature’ (Abrams 1984: 215), as part of their attempt to ‘revitalize the material and mechanical universe which had emerged from the philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes’, and to ‘overcome the sense of man’s alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object’ (Abrams 1958: 65). Enactivism and Romanticism therefore share a reaction against the legacy of Cartesian phi 3

Since autopoiesis is defined in terms of a system which ‘persists in continuous self-­production as a spatially distinct individual’ (Thompson 2007: 101), most of what is written about it focuses on its success (survival). However, both evolutionary process and empirical observation of life must imply that it often fails. Maturana and Varela, in their definition of an ‘autopoietic machine’, do refer to ‘a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components’ (our emphasis) (1980: 78), but as part of a process of continuous regeneration. Thompson’s explication of a minimal autopoietic system characterises it by ‘Two competitive reactions­– o­ ne that builds the component of the boundary and another one that destroys it’ (2007: 114).



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losophy, and the need to develop an account of human consciousness as a process of the material body. The Romantics recognised that the body, as agent of movement and sensory perception, is required in the activity of the mind, making the Romantic period an important moment for the study of the history of distributed cognition. In particular, in walking poems such as Descriptive Sketches, The Prelude and ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth relates his mental activity specifically to his movement within the landscape, implying a determinative relationship between his encounter with the landscape and the content of his thought. His famous preference for pacing the road at Rydal Mount whilst composing his poems further speaks of the congruity he evidently felt to exist between walking and thinking, and points to a Romantic theory of mind in which the body is seen to play a vital role. In Descriptive Sketches, an early work in which Wordsworth makes a pedestrian tour of the Alps, his understanding of the role of the body in visual perception is indicated by an emphasis on the changing perspectives facilitated by movement. We suggest this can be explained in terms of Noë’s sensorimotor enactivism, in which perceivers are said to have an ‘implicit understanding’ and ‘skillful mastery’ of the laws and regularities which connect movement with visual perception (2004: 63, 66). Following Thompson’s discussion of subjectivity, which claims that a ‘dynamic sensorimotor approach’ such as Noë’s requires ‘a notion of selfhood or agency’ (2005: 417), we go on to suggest that Wordsworth’s positive, identity-­ enhancing account of rural walking attests to the autopoietic function of Romantic walking (relating to point (1) above). It is our contention that new insights provided by sensorimotor and autopoietic enactivism can put fresh emphasis on the importance of embodiment to Romantic poetry, and could also form the basis of an enactive understanding of Wordsworth’s notion of mind-­world reciprocity in the creative imagination. Wordsworth is not usually viewed as a champion of ‘descriptive’ poetic language, favouring instead an interpretation of poetic expression as the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Nor does he attribute great artistic value to ‘mimetic’ landscape paintings, ‘those mimic sights that ape  / The absolute presence of reality, / . . . Confession of man’s weakness, and his loves’ (1990: vii, ll. 248–55). Descriptive Sketches would therefore seem an unlikely title for one of his most substantial works. Yet the double emphasis in this poem on his pedestrian mode of  travel and visual experience of the Alpine landscape is important in the context of investigation into the literary heritage of enactivism. As the poet-­ traveller advances through ‘files of road-­elms’, the ‘long-­drawn vista’ suddenly offers a glimpse of the Alps, which, ‘ascending white in air, / Toy with the sun and glitter from afar’ (1984: ll. 46–51). The stanza immediately following this begins, ‘And now, emerging from the forest’s gloom, / I greet thee, Chartreuse, while I mourn thy doom’ (1984: ll. 52–3). An explicit connection is made in these passages between the path which the traveller’s ‘footsteps led’ (1984: l. 45) and his confrontation by such spectacular sights­– ­‘But lo!’ he exclaims when the ‘straggl[ing]’ pathway opens upon the mountain. In making such a connection, Wordsworth

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implies an understanding of the fact that the appearance of the vista would necessarily be ‘affected by changes in a perceiver’s geometrical relation’ to it (Noë 2004: 129). In other words, he makes a link between where the body is and what it can see, which Noë expresses as ‘sensorimotor contingency’ (2004: 103), and which will go on to structure the rest of the poem. Throughout Descriptive Sketches, pauses in the walk provide opportunities for the traveller to ‘sketch’ this sublime landscape. For example, during a pause in which he contemplates the lucky Bayard, who, ‘rivet[ed] to the spot’ by ‘passion’, catches the ‘last sunbeam’ of the day, he writes: But now with other mind I stand alone Upon the summit of this naked cone, And watch the fearless chamois-­hunter chase His prey, through tracts abrupt of desolate space. (1984: ll. 303–6) The ‘But now’ which precedes the description of this visual experience implies his awareness of the effects of his position on what he can see, in contrast to what he might see from other possible vantage points. The traveller ‘loiter[s]’, and ‘stops’, and the particularity of his position is often indicated in phrases such as ‘Aloft, here’ (1984: ll. 89, 93, 97). Prepositions of place ‘Mid’, ‘Between’, ‘Within’, ‘By’ and ‘On’ similarly begin lines 540–4. Significant here is Merleau-­Ponty’s claim that ‘if the words “enclose” and “between” have a sense for us, they must borrow it from our experience as embodied subjects’ (2012: 210). Not only does Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology provide a link between the Romantics, whose thought was evidently influential on his own thought, and enactivists, for whom he is an acknowledged predecessor, but this specific claim establishes the fundamental relationship between the subjective perceptual body and its position within the environment. Wordsworth’s repeated use of prepositions of place is a similar acknowledgement of the status of the traveller as ‘embodied subject’, for whom ‘sense’, or meaning, is derived in accordance with his implicit understanding of sensorimotor contingency. The descriptive sketches offered are in series, embodying the process of moving, stopping, looking and calibrating position, which explicates so clearly Wordsworth’s grasp of sensorimotor contingency.

Autopoiesis and the Romantic Walker Long walks such as Wordsworth’s Alpine excursion in Descriptive Sketches have a particular association with the Romantic lyric subject. Indeed, all the major Romantic writers describe pedestrian journeys of some kind, whether in the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, the Quantocks, or further afield in France, Italy, Switzerland and Scandinavia. The significance of these journeys to Romantic subjectivity is clearly bound up with political events during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and cultural phenomena such as picturesque tourism. But, as Rebecca Solnit points out, although by the late eighteenth century people had

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begun ‘to admire some of the wildest features of the British countryside’, and ‘a few people had begun to climb mountains’ in France and Switzerland, ‘Wordsworth and his companions are said to have made walking into something else, something new’, walking ‘for its own sake and for the pleasure of being in the landscape’.4 In her ‘history of walking’, Solnit describes how, until the seventeenth century, recreational walking was often an indoor activity, used mainly for exercise or private conversation (2001: 86). During the Romantic period, however, the experiential aspects of walking began to be valued over the practical ones. In the now ‘safer’ outdoor environment, walkers could enjoy physical exertion, and a deeper engagement with their natural environment (Solnit 2001: 83). In Solnit’s words, ‘[u]ntil the surroundings became important, the walk was just movement, not experience’ (2001: 87). Whilst the changing culture around walking clearly contributed to the development of Romantic subjectivity, and continues to be relevant to contemporary interpretations of Romantic texts, autopoietic enactivism provides an explanation for why the experiential aspect of walking was so crucial to Romantic identity construction on an individual level. In Descriptive Sketches, the movement of the traveller’s body, along with changes in atmospheric conditions, is explicitly recognised as enabling a changing view of the world. But the changing view has the effect of consolidating the traveller’s subject position. As Solnit expresses it, ‘travel can be a way to experience th[e] continuity of self amid the flux of the world and thus to begin to understand each and their relationship to each other’, or in other words, the body’s movement through an environment ‘is how one distinguishes the one from the other’ (2001: 27). The affirmative or consolidatory effect on identity that Solnit attributes to walking can be understood in terms of Thompson’s ‘sensorimotor subjectivity’, which situates the capacity for skilful mastery of sensorimotor contingency in autonomous, or agential, beings. Thompson claims that the ‘dynamic sensorimotor approach needs a notion of selfhood or agency, because to explain perceptual experience it appeals to sensorimotor knowledge. Knowledge implies a knower or agent or self that embodies this knowledge’ (2005: 417). The basis of the autonomy of this knower or self is, according to Thompson, autopoiesis. Calling on the paradigm of the cell, he explains that ‘it is organized as a self-­producing and self-­maintaining network that constructs its own membrane boundary and actively regulates its background or boundary conditions so as to remain viable in its environment’ (417). The fact that the cell has a permeable membrane which allows it to absorb nutrients from its environment does not compromise but in fact reinforces its integrity as a self-­sustaining and therefore autonomous agent. In other words, interaction with the environment, and even the infiltration of external substances, is evidence of the cell’s autonomy. This also applies to more complex beings, whose nervous systems ‘couple movement’ with the ‘stream of sensory information in a continuous circular fashion’ (417).  4

Solnit 2001: 82. See also chapter 7, ‘The legs of William Wordsworth’, in Solnit 2001: 104–17.

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We suggest that a similar belief in individuality through interaction is at the core of literary Romanticism. In addition to the function of walking in reinforcing sensorimotor subjectivity, Wordsworth’s walks, particularly in The Prelude, bolster his own identity in an intersubjective context. A ‘favourite pleasure’ of his since ‘earliest youth’ has been, he says, to walk alone Along the public Way, when, for the night Deserted, in its silence it assumes A character of deeper quietness Than pathless solitudes. (1990: iv, ll. 363–8) During such nocturnal walks, he goes on, ‘near objects . . .  / Perforce intruded on the listless sense / Quiescent’ (ll. 378–80). But, like the cell whose permeability does not compromise but in fact indicates the presence of its boundary membrane, Wordsworth ‘acquiesces’ to the intrusion of sensory information on his ‘exhausted mind’ (l. 381), without risk to his identity as the agent of the walk. Pre-­empting the claims of autopoiesis, he writes, Thus did I steal along that silent road, My body from the stillness drinking in A restoration like the calm of sleep But sweeter far. (ll. 385–8) Here, ‘drinking in’ the atmosphere of his surroundings has, specifically, a physically ‘restorative’ power. Crucially, it induces ‘A consciousness of animal delight, / A self-­possession felt in every pause / And every gentle movement of my frame’ (ll. 396–8). So, ambulation, coupled with an openness to the sensory pleasures of the environment, engender in the Romantic subject a particular heightened sense of self­– ­a sense of agential confidence which depends on a willing integration with nature. According to Karl Kroeber, ‘Wordsworth’s profoundest discovery-­creation was that we dehumanize ourselves most perniciously when we use our consciousness to separate ourselves from nature’ (1994: 138). The Romantics, Kroeber claims, intuited the fact that consciousness is a ‘material evolutionary process’, long before neuroscientists began to study the brain (1994: 132). Wordsworth’s acknowledgement of ‘animal delight’ is, in this light, a humanising one, and one which presents consciousness as the prerequisite not only of subjective identity, but also of belonging to the material world. The interchange between solitariness and communion with others is also key to Wordsworth’s understanding of his own identity. For example, when he takes up residence at Cambridge, as he describes in book iii of The Prelude, he realises, Though I had been train’d up to stand unpropp’d, And independent musings pleased me so



walking, iden t ity an d vi s ual p ercep t i o n  159 That spells seem’d on me when I was alone, Yet could I only cleave to solitude In lonesome places; if a throng was near That way I lean’d by nature; for my heart Was social, and lov’d idleness and joy. (1990: iii, ll. 230–6)

Returning home during the Summer Vacation of book iv, after ‘having clomb / The Heights of Kendal’, and ‘overlook’d the bed of Windermere’, Wordsworth savours the ‘narrow precincts’ of the family home all the more for the ‘filial’ love they elicit (1990: iv, ll. 1–2, 4, 31, 28). When, shortly after, he takes a walk through the local area, he claims, The face of every neighbour whom I met Was as a volume to me; some I hail’d Far off, upon the road, or at their work, Unceremonious greetings, interchang’d With half the length of a long field between. (1990: iv, ll. 58–62) Those episodes of The Prelude in which Wordsworth meets fellow road-­users or rural dwellers are clearly inflected with the republican politics surrounding the French Revolution, but they also reinforce more generally his feeling that identity is produced through interaction. His use of ‘interchange’ in the passage above is important, as it characterises his broader attitudes towards human existence within an intersubjective, sensory and imaginatively constructed world. In other words, according to Wordsworth’s conception of the universe, individual identity is necessarily routed in a context of interconnectedness. Thompson’s ‘sensorimotor subjectivity’, grounded in the autopoietic organisation of the organism, provides a biological-­cognitive explanation for what Solnit describes as the ‘continuity of the self amid the flux of the world’, as well as a thematic metaphor for the Romantic emphasis on individuality through interaction.

The Road as Cognitive Agent: Is Wordsworth’s Consciousness Extended? In Wordsworth’s walking poems, movement is specifically related to the sensorimotor contingencies which control visual perception and which ground perceptual acts in autonomous, agential beings. There is therefore clear evidence of his belief in the interactivity of mind and motion, walking being not only conducive to thought­– ­and indeed poetry composition­– ­but also an important factor in his autopoietic and social identity construction. The Romantic emphasis on the creative imagination limits, or at least complicates, the application of enactive theory in an important way, however. Wordsworth recognises the role his body plays in shaping his visual experience, but he does not necessarily make the connection between the nervous system governing his motility and the meaning

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or ­significance he derives from his environment. In a study of historical expressions of ideas related to distributed cognition, the role Wordsworth ascribes, or doesn’t ascribe, to the road itself is a key question. So far in this chapter, the road has been the context in which sensorimotor subjectivity is brought to bear, and in which intersubjective encounters take place, providing a material support for cognition. But analogy with extended cognition would require that Wordsworth understands the road to relate to cognition in a more determinative way. In Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth writes of the traveller that ‘chastening thoughts of sweetest use, bestowed / By wisdom, moralise his pensive road’ (1984: ll. 27–8). The road here is itself ‘pensive’, suggesting it plays a structural or causal role in the traveller’s own thoughts. On the one hand, it is the walk itself, or the sequential movement from one point to another, that facilitates this cognitive journey from initial thought to a more systematised morality. Particular modes of walking are seen to bring about particular cognitive states, or to determine the content of the traveller’s thought, for example when Wordsworth claims, ‘Brisk toil, alternating with ready ease,  / Feeds the clear current of his sympathies’ (1984: ll.  17–18). Yet on the other hand, the ‘road’ in this passage would seem to have a metaphorical value, signifying the internal journey from thought to moral application­ – ­the actual road being moralised or attributed with pensiveness through its correspondence with the cognitive process. As such, one of the problems of analysing Wordsworth through the history of distributed cognition is the fact, as M.  H. Abrams puts it, that ‘we cannot discuss the activities of mind without metaphor’ (1958: 53). Is the road in Descriptive Sketches actually pensive, in the sense that it takes part in the traveller’s thought process, or is it invested with pensiveness, in the sense that the external world reflects back to the traveller his own mood? Is this actually an example of Wordsworth’s use of transferred epithet? Wordsworth’s poetry is full of passages like the one above, in which a quality of nature seems at the same time to be observed and projected by the poet, evincing the ‘eminent . . . preoccupation’, amongst Romantic poets and theorists, with ‘the transference of the life of the observer to the things he observes’ (Abrams 1958: 55). The extent to which Wordsworth’s notion of transference is compatible with the idea of an enactive self who is ‘structurally coupled’ with the environment (Varela et al. 1991: 165) is an area for further enquiry. Does Wordsworth’s tendency towards metaphor and transferred epithet, and his hesitance in assigning any consistent or secure sentience to nature itself, preclude analogy with distributed cognition? As we now go on to show, modernist literature, in which mental activity is frequently externalised, might offer more convincing articulations of distributed cognition than Romantic literature, at the same time as a shared interest in walking reinforces the importance of experience to literary representations of self and mind.



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Constraint and Failed Autopoiesis in Modernist Walking ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is a canonical instance of a modernist poem which explores forms of consciousness specific to a modern, urban environment. It contains a number of crucial acts of walking, two of which frame the poem. First, the (presumptively male) flâneurish opening invitation to the reader or a companion to walk the urban labyrinth: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-­deserted streets, [. . .] Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit. (Eliot 1974: ll. 1–4, 8–12) Then the repeated image of women walking to and fro in an interior setting that evokes an oppressive sense of cultural sophistication: In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo (ll. 13–14) Then a return to the dingy streets: ‘I have gone at dusk through narrow streets’. And, finally, an ironic Romantic vision of walking in a natural/mythical environment: Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-­girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown. (ll. 122–31) In the opening lines we have the striking simile of streets and argument. At first sight the argument seems merely a simile for the winding streets. But since an argument is more likely to lead to ‘an overwhelming question’, that relation seems

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reversed, with the streets suggesting the circuitous nature of the argument. There is an effect here of externalised or enactive cognition. According to autopoietic enactivism ‘[l]iving organisms bring about their own identity by interacting with their environment to create and sustain their status as distinct biological entities’ (Ward 2014). Prufrock’s (planned) walk could be described as an interaction with the environment ‘to create and sustain [his] status as [a] distinct biological entity’­– ­although ‘social entity’ might seem equally appropriate: his social anxiety is central to the mood of the poem, but is consistently given an existential dimension. While a conventional account of these lines as simile would suggest that the streets represent the argument (and vice versa), an enactivist account would tempt us to say that the cognitive process of the argument is enacted in the process of walking through the streets. However, the image of the anaesthetised patient­– ­an organism in danger of not sustaining its status as a distinct biological entity­– ­alerts us from the start to the possibility of dysfunctional or failed forms of enaction. ‘Prufrock’ is, notoriously, a work of fragmentation: of text, of self and of body. Prufrock describes his own sense of self and of body in terms of degeneration and fragmentation: With a bald spot in the middle of my hair – (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’) [. . .] (They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’) (ll. 40–1, 44) The women in the poems are also described in terms of body parts: arms, hair, faces, eyes. This fragmentation contrasts with Wordsworth’s use of the surrounding environment to affirm his own differentiation as a unity, by exploring the boundaries that separate his body and mind from the rest of nature, whereas the permeability of Prufrock’s mind and body seems to compromise his boundaries, such that differentiation is at risk. Hence, perhaps, the parodic vision of unconstrained Romantic walking with which the poem ends, where Wordsworthian affirmation and identity-­enhancing interaction has declined into a kitsch or inauthentic version of a ‘Romantic’ walk. Clothed in embarrassing white trousers, Prufrock can glimpse visions of the mythical or magical, but they ride away from him. He can walk on the beach but not ‘linger in the chambers of the sea’ (without becoming ‘a pair of ragged claws’­– ­a fate he imagines for himself earlier in the poem). The mermaids can swim but presumably not walk. Prufrock’s wish to create or recreate himself (as lover, Hamlet, Romantic visionary) is unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Turning to the sensorimotor form of enactivism, one might return to those fragmentary body parts in ‘Prufrock’ and think of Noë’s example of the motionless cat behind the picket fence, which he claims is perceptually present as a whole, despite being only partially visible (2004: 67). This might be applied to the poetic use of body parts in ‘Prufrock’. The reader, encountering the allusions to a bald spot, arms and legs, eyes, and so on, understands this as, in Barthes’s terms, a second-­ order effect, a poetic metalanguage­– n ­ ot the meaning of the words, but the poetic



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meaning of their meaning (Barthes 2000: 109). Prufrock (and to some extent the women) are the cat behind the fence: we infer that they are whole. But we recognise that the word choice and patterning invite us to indulge the fantasy of their not being whole; and, in case that is not sufficient, Prufrock imagines (though he says he has ‘seen’) a literal fragmentation: ‘my head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter’ (l. 82). We might generalise this sense of failed autopoiesis and constrained walking by considering Noë’s arguments in relation to cultural, historical and social specifics. For example, in relation to the cat behind the picket fence, Noë asks: ‘Why should the brain need to represent the cat in all its detail, when all the information you need is available when you need it by eye and head movements’ (2004: 62). This is a version of the ‘world . . . as its own best model’ argument, which is associated with Brooks and others.5 It is easy enough to look behind (and through) a picket fence. For Wordsworth, a prodigious walker, it was quite possible to look behind, or round, a mountain. Urban modernity, however, involved environments which restricted the access needed to complete a sense of the object in the environment. Narrow, winding streets, and concentrations of buildings, deny us the opportunity to see all round an object, constraining our sensorimotor contingencies. This is not an argument against Noë’s model. Clearly, the sensorimotor possibilities vary in all sorts of ways and constraint is relative to the particular environment and body. As Noë points out, even paralysed individuals are still engaged in orienting themselves in relation to the world (2004: 12–14). The point is rather that an enactivist model of perception may offer new ways of conceptualising historical changes in perception through consideration of how specific historical conditions affect enactive processes. Gender differences would be an aspect of such historicisation. Feminist work on the flâneur, and on urban spaces, has identified the extent to which the metropolis of modernity constrained, as well as (sometimes) enabled, women’s perceptual experience.6

Freedom and the Fluid Self in Modernist Walking Virginia Woolf’s writing expresses both a sense of constraint and a feeling of liberty in respect of perceptual experience of the urban environment. The importance of walking in her novel Mrs Dalloway has been noted by a number of critics.7 Like all Woolf’s novels, it is much concerned with the formation and development of the self, seen as a fluid and continuing process, expressed through perception, thought, fantasy and memory as well as through event and human interaction. Sense impres 5

See Noë 2004: 234, n. 14: ‘This idea that we can forgo representation by making use of the presence of the world was perhaps first suggested by Dreyfus ([1972] 1999) and, independently, by Minsky (1985). In recent discussion, it was hit upon by Kevin O’Regan (1992) (who suggests that we let the world serve as an external memory store) and Rodney Brooks (1991) (who suggests that the world can serve as its own best model).’  6 See Wolff 1985 and Pollock 1988: 50–90 (chapter 3, ‘Modernity and the spaces of femininity’).  7 See Outka 2013; Wood 2003; Bowlby 1992.

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sions, often aesthetically charged, play a major role in this. These elements of the novel convey dimensions of human freedom. Item four from Thompson’s list of enactive assumptions seems highly relevant: Woolf certainly presents the ‘world’ of her characters as ‘a relational domain’ in which self is generated and maintained through continuous processes of perceptual interaction with the environment (Thompson 2005: 407). On the other hand, great emphasis is also placed by Woolf on an ‘inner world’ of fantasy and memory, in striking narrative sequences which move away from the ‘current’ time and place of the narrated instance. This might seem counter to the scepticism about representationalism within enactive theory: Woolf’s characters often seem to carry an internal represented world. However, enactivism need not preclude any internal representation.8 Varela uses walking as a metaphor for the process of autopoiesis, drawing his language from a poetic source, the work of Machado: ‘Wanderer the road is your footsteps, nothing else; you lay down a path in walking.’9 The phrase also suggests something of the circularity of autopoiesis: walking on a path which is created by walking. This is explicated at the cellular level by Thompson: ‘a cell produces its own components, which in turn produce it, in an ongoing circular process. The word “autopoiesis” was coined to name this kind of circular self-­production’ (2007: 98). This suggests something of the way in which enactivism links perception and action to subjectivity; as Thompson puts it, ‘the enactive approach explicates selfhood and subjectivity from the ground up’ (2007: 141). Applied to selfhood or subjectivity, the circular process of autopoiesis offers a model which bypasses the binary of essence versus social construction. Like the cell which is involved in ‘continually exchanging matter and energy with its environment’, the self is self-­producing in interaction with the (social) environment (Thompson 2007: 98). The narrative of Mrs Dalloway presents subjectivity in a highly embodied manner; for example, the way in which the protagonist is defined by bodily posture and in relation to the environment: ‘She stiffened a little on the kerb’; ‘She stiffened a little; so she would stand at the top of her stairs’ (Woolf 1976: 5, 17). It is ambiguous to what extent she is aware of her own bodily processes in these passages, since the focalisation of these observations is uncertain. The narrative of the novel also closely integrates subjectivity and perception, seen as creative activities but vulnerable to the emotional lability which that implies­– ­an approach clearly indebted to Romanticism (see Roberts 1991). For example, the following passage articulates perceptions which are in part those of Peter Walsh but in part anonymous, generalised or collective, and which thereby relate his subjective experience to general experience and, via the allusion to rigidity, to the already-­quoted attribute of stiffness in Clarissa:

 8

See Noë, who, having rejected the view that perception is a process of ‘internal representation of the world’, adds that ‘very likely there are internal representations in the brain (e.g., content-­bearing internal states)’ (Noë 2004: 2).  9 Varela, qtd in Thompson 2007: 13.



walking, iden t ity an d vi s ual p ercep t i o n  165 As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me. (Woolf 1976: 45)

Enactivism offers us a new way of explaining the creative qualities of perception and subjectivity in Woolf’s writing, and the connection of both to physical movement and action, via the concept of autopoiesis. Thompson’s account of enactivism in a sense naturalises, or universalises, the Romantic idea of perception as creative and this creativity as fundamental to human freedom, by proposing that the dynamic, sensorimotor relationship between the organism and the world requires that the organism be a self-­determining (autopoietic) agent. However, as in the case of Prufrock, and as in examples of the failing or suspension of the Romantic imagination, self-­determination is a fragile process. When the dynamic relationship is interrupted, there is an effect of hollowing-­out of subjectivity. So the novel also expresses constraint via enactive and embodied accounts of walking. The often pleasurable walking of Clarissa, Peter and others as they carry out errands or head for appointments is contrasted with the desperate, at times aimless walking of Septimus and Rezia, passing time until their appointment with Sir William Bradshaw. Septimus’s last bodily movement is that of flinging himself to his death. Walking seems to function as a central metaphor for forms of being in the world, and forms of social relation. For example, a unit of cadets marching to lay a wreath represents, ambivalently, both conventional virtues (‘duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England’) and a loss of human autonomy: ‘as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with all of its varieties . . . had been . . . drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline’ (Woolf 1976: 47). Placed alongside Thompson’s first enactive idea, ‘that living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their identities, and thereby . . . bring forth their own cognitive domains’, this passage suggests a sociopolitical inflection to the principle (Thompson 2005: 407). We suggest that this may be one of the key roles of literature in relation to theories of distributed cognition: to inflect their universalism with historical specificity. Human autonomy can be curtailed or suspended, as happens formally under military discipline; Woolf uses the act and motion of marching to symbolise this, and, specifically, to symbolise a constraint upon ‘life’. The echo of Clarissa’s ‘stiffening’ in the ‘stiff yet staring corpse’ links Clarissa to the cadets, and both to the presence or threat of death, that which autopoiesis holds at bay. Other aspects of life are also expressed by Woolf in terms of walking, and hence in terms of bodily movement and associated proprioception. These aspects include emotions and intersubjective relations: Mrs Dalloway reflects about Peter Walsh that ‘he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this’ (Woolf 1976: 8). A Romantic impulse is expressed in specifically anti-­Romantic (that is, pro-­urban) terms: ‘ “I love walking in London,” said Mrs Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than walking in the country” ’ (7). Social

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­ ositioning is expressed through walking: ‘there was something hesitating, trailing, p in the man’s walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West End on a weekday at this hour for years’ (75). And even an apocalyptic or distancing vision of the future is expressed in terms of walking and paths: ‘when London is a grass-­grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones’ (16). The focus on ‘life’ in Mrs Dalloway is a striking point of affinity with enactive theories, such as those of Varela and Thompson, which seek to connect human cognitive and other processes with the basic functions of life at a cellular level, and evolutionary processes. Her work has striking congruence with the deep continuity thesis of life and mind, as Thompson describes it: ‘life and mind share a set of basic organizational properties, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental of life’ (2007: 128). And, most crucially for the parallels with literature: This thought is that the continuity of life and mind is not simply organizational, or functional or behavioural, but also phenomenological . . . the continuity includes the subjective and experiential aspects of mental life as well as the cognitive aspects . . . ‘The great contradictions which man [sic] discovers in himself­ – ­freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and mortality­– ­have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life . . .’10 In her famous defence of modernist fictional form and style in the essay ‘Modern fiction’, Woolf describes ‘life’ as ‘a luminous halo, a semi-­transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (1966: 106), a wording which bears comparison with the permeable membrane of the cell which enables its autopoiesis: ‘a cell is a thermodynamically-­open system, continually exchanging matter and energy with its environment’ (Thompson 2007: 98). Woolf’s fiction shares with enactive theory an interest in defining what characterises ‘life’, what it means to be alive or a living being. Thompson, having considered three complementary ways of characterising life in contemporary biology (genetic, ecological and organism-­based), suggests that the theory of autopoiesis offers criteria for distinguishing living systems in terms of their ‘relational form or organisation’ (2007: 95–7). In Mrs Dalloway, life, its qualities and how it is maintained are central themes, and are defined in relational terms, of autonomy and interaction. Peter Walsh reflects upon the subject: The compensation of growing old . . . was . . . one has gained . . . the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence­– t­he power of taking hold of 10

Thompson 2007: 129. The internal quotation is from Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; reprinted Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. ix.



walking, iden t ity an d vi s ual p ercep t i o n  167 e­ xperience . . . now, at the age of fifty-­three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out . . . the full flavour. (Woolf 1976: 71)

In the description of the old woman singing for money opposite Regent’s Park tube station, we find Woolf’s characteristically modernist linking of the moment of perception with vast timescales and universal visions: ‘the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth’ (72–4). The woman is imagined as singing ‘[t]hrough all ages­– ­when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise’ (73). This expresses something of the link between human consciousness and more primitive forms of life asserted in the passage quoted above by Thompson concerning the ‘great contradictions’ of human experience. The affirmative visions of life in the novel are challenged by Septimus’s tragic vision of life: ‘human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness’ (80). In the figure of Bradshaw, the novel challenges the survival orientation of conventional common sense, ‘balance’ and social conformity: others, inspired by heaven knows what intemperate madness . . . questioned, even more imperiously, life itself. Why live, they demanded? Sir William replied that life was good . . . And then stole out from her hiding place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relatives of his victims. (91) Septimus’s suicide, embodying the Freudian death-­ drive, seems to exemplify destructive autopoiesis­– ­a seeming contradiction in terms, but meaningful if one considers the preservation of some form of subjective autonomy as crucial. His sense of self, his embodiment in the world and his relation to its social conditions have become such that he can only defend the integrity of that self, as he perceives it, by an act of self-­destruction. Since he is suffering from war trauma, this act is an echo or symbol of the vast self-­destruction of Western Europe in the First World War. Critical interpretations of the novel have tended to see a redemptive aspect to this death, however, following the lead of Clarissa, who sees it as a form of preservation of the authentic self: ‘it is a critical commonplace that Clarissa receives from Septimus a cathartic, vicarious experience of death that releases her to experience life’s pleasures more deeply’ (Abel 1988: 118). Can the biologically based autopoietic theory of life encompass such an existential act of ‘creative’ self-­destruction? Abel’s statement implies some sort of trans-­individual reciprocity between creative and destructive or failed autopoiesis, which might indicate adaptive processes at

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the level of the social group (rather than the organism or gene), raising wider questions about the role of autopoiesis in evolutionary processes.11 The link between walking and argument which we found in ‘Prufrock’ is echoed in Woolf’s book specifically concerned with women’s access to spaces, A Room of One’s Own. Rachel Bowlby, having commented on the element of feminine flânerie in Mrs Dalloway, identifies the metaphorical links between walking and writing exemplified in A Room of One’s Own: The figure of rambling serves to suggest the argument which turns into the narrative of its own lack of an ending . . . ‘How I arrived’, in the context of the general language of strolling and rambling, exposes one of a whole clutch of metaphors which writers and readers normally pass by without a second glance. Introduction, digression, excursus, passage: it is as though the very grounds of rhetoric were made for walking on, measured out in properly poetical metres and feet. (1992: 35–6) Bowlby’s interpretation of walking in Woolf’s essay ‘Street haunting’ (written in 1930) identifies several themes which might parallel or refine enactive accounts of perception. The first is a play of identity and anonymity: setting out to walk the city streets, the female narrator feels ‘We are no longer quite ourselves . . . we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’.12 A biological metaphor is used by Woolf for this process in which a created social identity is shed in favour of immersion in perception: The shell-­like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left . . . a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. (2012) In Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s account, the self, defined in opposition to the object (Woolf’s ‘a shape distinct from others’), is a product of what they term ‘Cartesian anxiety’, the ‘craving for an absolute ground’ (1991: 140). As against this, an enactive account of experience (along with, for Varela, Thompson and Rosch, a Buddhist one) implies that, in phenomenological terms, ‘groundlessness is the very condition for the richly textured and interdependent world of human experience’ (1991: 144). Woolf’s fiction and non-­fiction make up one of the great modernist explorations of the nature of human consciousness, and her writing in many ways embraces groundlessness, avoiding a privileging of ‘mind’ or ‘world’ (Varela et al. 1991: 141) through a series of explorations which both foreground and problematise ideas of self. The multiple, interacting centres of consciousness in The Waves are a notable example. Her fascination with the varied texture of experience seems very much in accord with Varela, Thompson 11 12

On this issue, see Gould 2007: 226–7. Woolf 2012, qtd in Bowlby 1992: 38.



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and Rosch’s philosophical and ethical critique of the idea of the ‘autonomous self’ (1991: 246).

Conclusion A linking factor in the set of relations which we have explored between enactivism, Romanticism and modernism lies in forms of recursiveness, leading to a problematics of representation. The classical idea of art as mimesis or imitation offers a conception of literary works as representations of the world: Poetry aims to project a world upon the mind’s eye, just as painting seeks to present the mute objects of the world in a framework that will make them speak. The mimetic analogy between painting and poetry is symmetrical with the mimetic analogy between life and art. (Melville and Readings 1995: 8) Different forms and interpretations of Romanticism question and complicate the idea of representation in various ways. On a traditional, idealist view of anglophone Romanticism, explorations of consciousness and creative accounts of perception, in reaction to eighteenth-­century theories of mind, move literature and art away from mimesis towards expression and creation: the shift from ‘mirror’ to ‘lamp’ (as in Abrams 1958). Recursiveness, in the form of the mind’s self-­scrutiny, is central to this shift. More recent New Historicist accounts of Romanticism complicate and diversify the nature and objects of representation by reading Romantic poetry in relation to other forms of text, and in relation to its own omissions. German Romantic poetics and philosophy produces a series of often paradoxical discourses around representation, again frequently using recursive modes of thought. Andrew Bowie comments that, for Novalis, it is reflection on the ‘I’ by the ‘I’ which shows the impossibility of representing the ‘I’ (Bowie 1990: 75–6). This is one basis for Novalis’s claim that ‘Poesie, which means art in general, in the sense of Poesis, creation, “represents the unrepresentable” ’ (Bowie 1990: 76). In enactivist theory, Varela, Thompson and Rosch see embodied cognition’s rediscovery of ‘common sense’ as entailing anti-­representationism and a view of cognition as a creative process: ‘we must invert the representationist attitude by treating context-­dependent know-­how not as a residual artefact that can be progressively eliminated by the discovery of more sophisticated rules but as, in fact, the very essence of creative cognition’ (1991: 148). And in certain notions of modernism, reflexivity in respect of the medium of each art form, and in respect of art itself, leads to rejection or transformation of the idea of representation: The various paths opened towards medium specificity all bid to free mimesis from its dependence on representation of the world or its meanings. Each particular art now seems called upon to realise its self above all, and this task may lead it to transform the notion of representation or to break with it altogether. (Melville and Readings 1995: 10)

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In its most intense form, this results in Mallarmé’s ‘poetry whose subject is itself’ (Meltzer 1989: 818). In parallel, enactive versions of cognitive science are anti-­ representationist and offer recursive models of cognitive systems: an important and pervasive shift . . . in cognitive science . . . requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic . . . [this shift] reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationship but by their operational closure . . . [which is] a way of specifying classes of process that . . . turn back on themselves to form autonomous networks . . . [which are] defined by internal mechanisms of self-­ organisation (autonomy). (Varela et al. 1991: 139–40) Here it is tempting to hear an echo of the aesthetic autonomy of the modernist artwork. More generally, we hope to have shown that modernism, by challenging the terms of realism, representation and subjectivity, generates radical questioning of concepts of mind, self and world in a manner which, while it neither simply anticipates, nor is simply superseded by, phenomenological and enactive accounts, intersects with them in numerous instructive respects. In particular, the embodied, embedded and enacted accounts of cognition and perception connect the Romantic and modernist interrogation of the nature of self and life to biological and phenomenological theories, while the literary works offer nuanced social, historical, cultural and political specificities which inflect and enrich the theories of situated cognition.

10 S u r r ea l i s m, C h a n ce a n d the Extend ed Mind Kerry Watson

Introduction When Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term ‘sur-­réaliste’ in 1917, he meant it to express the extreme, absurdist super-­reality of plays (like his own Les Mamelles de Tirésias) which were confounding Parisian audiences of the time (Ciolkowska 1918: 56). In present-­day usage, the word ‘surreal’ is synonymous with incongruity, but Apollinaire’s own definition uses the invention of the wheel, that great advance in civilisation, as an example of super-­reality: ‘When man wished to imitate his own walk, he created the wheel; he thus made super-­realism without knowing he did’ (quoted in Ciolkowska 1918: 56). The Surrealist movement, which emerged in Paris during the early 1920s, was a cultural and philosophical movement marked by a desire to extend our understanding of the world. The artists associated with the movement no longer limited themselves to the representation of physical reality, but sought to express alternate realities held in both their subconscious and unconscious minds. Surrealist ­cognition­– ­the mental processes by which they understood the world­– ­was reliant on an acceptance of the impossible and was by necessity distributed across brain, body and world. Current ideas about distributed cognition, in particular theories of the extended mind, propose that cognition does not happen purely in the brain, but extends into the world. Distributed cognition is integral to Surrealist processes, which included the exploitation of chance by using techniques and materials which could enhance an individual’s or a group’s ability to tap into subconscious and unconscious thoughts and memories.

The Artist’s Sketchbook Why the need to sketch? Why not simply imagine the final artwork ‘in the mind’s eye’ and then execute it directly on the canvas? (Clark 2003: 76) The artist’s sketchbook is an oft-­cited example of the extended mind. In this scenario, the sketchbook becomes part of the artist’s cognitive processes: the artist’s

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use of sketchbook and pencil is analogous to the mathematician’s working out sums on paper or their use of a calculator. In the context of wider discussion around distributed cognition, the tools we use extend our cognitive abilities and result in the supersizing of our minds, to use Andy Clark’s phrase (2008). The sketchbook as a mind tool provides a useful example, but it is also conceptually clumsy in art-­ historical terms because it encourages a focus on traditional, representational art. In considering art-­historical examples of distributed cognition, we might instead seek out Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenological approach to the relationship between art and cognition­– ­the body being the locus of our knowledge of the world, and art being an expression of such knowledge. Merleau-­Ponty’s discussions of Paul Cézanne’s paintings centre on ideas of perception and representation which, while valid, fail to give us the language to discuss later developments in the early-­twentieth-­century European avant-­garde and beyond. However, Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Cézanne’s painting, specifically discussion of Cézanne’s statement that he ‘thinks in painting’ (1993: 139), does helpfully inform recent theories of enactivism in relation to the making of pictures as discussed by Alva Noë: ‘Picture making, like experience itself, is an activity’ (2004: 192). If we were to accept the concept of the artist’s sketchbook as a kind of shorthand for the enormous variety of methods and materials available to the artist, then all material elements used in producing a work of art should be considered ‘tools’. In the context of embodied cognition, enactivism and the extended mind, some of the relevant tools at the Surrealist artist’s disposal included methods such as automatic drawing, collage, frottage and decalcomania. In each of these methods, there is an element of surrender of the artist’s agency, in favour of the autonomy of the materials: automatic drawing demands that the artist enter a trance-­like state and is produced by seemingly involuntary action, with the pen or pencil unguided by conscious intent; collage uses found images, cut out, assembled at random and stuck down with glue; with frottage, a rubbing taken from a textured surface forms the basis of the image; and decalcomania uses inkblots, made by pressing ink or paint between two sheets of paper. In André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) he called for Surrealism to be ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ (‘Automatisme psychique pur’) and for the artists and writers in the group to be ‘modest recording instruments’ (‘les modestes appareils enregistreurs’), capturing and examining traces of the unconscious (Breton 1972: 26–8; 1985: 36–9). Thus, the artists and writers themselves also become tools. In Bretonian terms, thought was something that existed autonomously and could be tapped into by writers and artists who had freed themselves from reason. Early experiments, which led to the formulation of Breton’s theories on the subject, involved free association and self-­hypnotism, with both techniques facilitating verbal automatism and producing images which would be rejected by the rational mind. These methods were intended to give shocking results, like Lautréamont’s ‘chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an dissecting table’ (‘la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à



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coudre et d’un parapluie’), that were in effect as surprising to the author himself as to any audience (1874: 290; 1978: 217). Much of the discussion of automatism focuses on the written word, because while Surrealist practice quickly extended to the visual arts, it began primarily as a literary movement, with writer and poet André Breton at its head. By 1928, however, Breton was claiming a similar status for painting as was already granted for poetic language (1965: 2). In The Surrealist Mind J. H. Matthews discusses automatic writing at length before moving on to visual art. His chief point is linked to the Surrealist conception of the ‘real functioning of thought’ as something that can be accessed with some degree of control but without recourse to ‘routine techniques’. He argues: ‘Central in all this is the fact that automatic writing does not betray loss of control but its deliberate surrender’ (Matthews 1991: 47). Automatic drawing, collage and decalcomania, which are expressly intended to bypass reason and logic, also preclude the value judgements attached to artistic skill and introduce chance as an integral part of the creative process: the idea is that anyone can produce a Surrealist image. As methods, they were selected because their results could not be premeditated, or because they allowed a more direct juxtaposition of visual elements in the spirit of free association. If the artist does not know what the result of an action will be, that very action and its result could be seen as part of the cognitive process. Regardless of how true it is to say that these works are a direct expression of the unconscious mind, the process of creating them has involved a dynamic interaction between the artist and their environment. If the key to such creative practices is in their circumvention of the rational mind through the employment of chance, how integral are the methods and materials themselves to cognition?

The Painter’s Body The painter ‘takes his body with him’, says Valéry. Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. (Merleau-­Ponty 1993: 123) In the tradition of representational art, the artist possesses certain skills in draughtsmanship and knowledge of their materials. Take as an example Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1818–19. Before putting brush to canvas, Géricault plans. He plans in infinite detail, he sketches from life, and he makes colour studies of dead bodies in the morgue. He even goes so far as to interview two survivors of the shipwreck that was the subject of his masterpiece. The work was calculated to shock through both its controversial subject matter and the extreme realism of Géricault’s treatment.1 Like the sketchbook in Clark’s example, the series of studies and compositional sketches, which Géricault never intended for public c­ onsumption, here 1

The French frigate the Méduse ran aground off the coast of Mauritania on 2 July 1816. Survivors of the wreck had been forced to cannibalise their dead shipmates to stay alive.

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perform a specific function. The sketches are part of the precedent on which our understanding of the process of traditional painting is based (see Plates 10 and 11). How this differs from a number of the Surrealists’ artistic practices is in the accumulated skill and knowledge required to make a painting of this kind. In Surrealist practice, techniques were chosen precisely because no prior skill or knowledge was required. As Matthews points out: That was the remarkable thing about surrealist painting and graphic inquiry. They proved capable of breaking out of the limitations that follow upon the deliberate application of paint to canvas which, in the pages of La révolution surréaliste, had prompted Pierre Naville to doubt the feasibility of surrealist painting. (1991: 105) During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries artists became interested in depicting what we perceive rather than what we think we see, exploring the difference between direct and indirect realism, or the idea that our perception is an internal model based on fragments of information. For example, we understand an apple to be a three-­dimensional object because we have seen it from multiple viewpoints, but our depiction of it from a single viewpoint is also based on this past knowledge. The impressionist painters threw away the sketchbook in favour of painting en plein air. As they were interested in colour and capturing fleeting effects of light, preliminary sketches in black and white were of limited use as part of their visual language because light is colour (Seligmann 1952: 44–5). Cubism is the canonical example in the development of abstract art because Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were searching for a means of showing how we perceive a three-­dimensional object on the two-­dimensional surface of the canvas. André Breton perhaps admired Picasso largely because the painter was starting to show things that had never been seen­– ­an alternative reality with multiple viewpoints, depicted simultaneously on the canvas, as though the viewer, in the act of looking, was also moving around the object and perceiving it actively, as the artist had when he was making the picture (see Plate 12). In terms of distributed cognition, this brand of active perception as part of the artist’s working process, and indeed its communication in the end result, supports theories of enactivism. Noë explains visual perception as an active process, like touching, and in relation to Cubism he argues: Cubism is an artistic movement that captures the enactive insight. Paintings by Braque and Picasso in the Cubist period demand precisely that you attend to the fact that an object affords a potential for movement and, therefore, sensory experience. The item is revealed from all sides at once, as it were. The visual and the thought are commingled in the picture. (2004: 189) Seeing is like touching, or like painting, according to Noë’s enactive view of the world (once again, based on the standard view of representational art), which has



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the artist involved in an active process of perception and experience, and Noë describes the ‘dynamic pattern of engagement among painter, the scene, and the canvas’ (2004: 223). This looped and indivisible inside/outside process of seeing and painting, also described by Merleau-­Ponty as an overlapping of the visible world and the body (1993: 124), readily characterises the classic modernism of Cézanne, for example, but can perhaps also be applied to less rigidly representational tropes like Surrealist automatism by examining how automatism sought to further break down divisions between mind and body, internal and external worlds. The Surrealists placed the artist and viewer on the same level; the artist is just as surprised by the work, going through the same process of perceiving it, appreciating it and interpreting it as the viewer does. This is particularly applicable in cases where the image is made by chance, then interpreted by the artist themselves or their collaborators, for example the creation of an image using decalcomania which would then be given a title appropriate to its reading or interpretation. Clark’s discussion of sketching as ‘an iterated process of externalising and re-­ perceiving’ (2003: 77), rather than a process of apprehending a mental image and translating that directly to canvas with little amendment, explains Géricault’s need to sketch. As a representational painter, Géricault is gathering information and practising the actions associated with the making of the final painting; however, as I have already argued, the process of ‘sketching’ should not be differentiated from any other form of physical action involved in making art. Géricault may have planned his masterpiece in great detail, but the iterative process of creativity did not cease to happen as soon as he applied the first brushstroke to his final canvas. Van Leeuwen, Verstijnen and Hekkert offer up some more detail on this topic, presenting the creation of (particularly abstract) art as a continually ‘interactive process of imagining, sketching and evaluating’ (Scott Jordan 1999: 179–218). As Clark phrases it, the questions they raise revolve around how much the end result is dependent on the process of ‘sketching’, and how much of the cognitive process is bound up in this: ‘In this looping process the artist first sketches and then perceptually, not merely imaginatively, re-­encounters visual forms, which she can then inspect, tweak, and re-­sketch so as to create a final product that supports a densely multi-­layered set of structural interpretations’ (2003: 77). Noë takes this further by suggesting that seeing is like touching, or painting, and that the producer’s experience is much the same as the viewer’s, an observation comparable to the Surrealists’ view of artistic production (2004: 223). This might suggest that the externalisation of the image held in the mind’s eye (if that is indeed what is happening) is always filtered through the artist’s skill and/or the medium, by which I mean both technique and materials. If an image is imagined and not a direct observation of the external world, then the enactivist view described by Noë is contingent on the action of making the picture, of transferring the image to paper or canvas, rather than being contingent on the action of seeing. Gunter Bandmann has discussed the role of materials in the creation of an artwork with respect to the nineteenth-­century convention of Wahrheit zu Materialien

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(truth to materials) (1971: 148). In discussion of Max Ernst’s collages, Werner Spies paraphrases Bandmann, saying that he suggests that ‘it was Novalis who first described the dialogue between artist and material and questioned how autonomous an artist may claim to be in his working process’ (1988: 21). Spies quotes Bandmann himself stating that in addition to the artist’s will, and the tools at their disposal, the material itself is an active part of the creative process: ‘In other words, every tool modifies the powers and thoughts of the artist as it transmits them to material, and vice versa­– ­it modifies the resistance of the material which it transmits to the artist!’ (quoted in Spies 1988: 21). Edwin Hutchins, in his book Cognition in the Wild, also says that tools do not ‘stand between the user and the task’ but that they are ‘brought into co-­ordination in the performance of the task’ (1995: 154, 290). Hutchins argues that cognitive processes are distributed across complex sociocultural contexts, via tools that incorporate expertise and through teams collaboratively computing tasks. This is important in relation to particular Surrealist practices like the exquisite corpse (derived from the parlour game popularly known as ‘Consequences’), which was a form of collaborative automatism, but also more generally for Surrealists, who had a strong disposition towards collaborative activity and collective interpretation of both written and visual material. Hutchins’s version of distributed cognition is very much rooted in team activities, whereas Clark focuses on how individual ability is enhanced by the use of tools: The sketch pad is not just a convenience for the artist, nor simply a kind of external memory or durable medium for storage of fully formed ideas. Instead, the iterated process of externalizing and re-­perceiving turns out to be integral to the process of artistic cognition itself. (Clark 2003: 77) The idea of a looped, circular dialogue between brain, body and world would seem to be reinforced by Bandmann’s reading of Novalis who had first questioned the autonomy of the artist in relation to their materials (Spies 1988: 21). Bandmann paraphrases this, saying ‘every tool modifies the powers and thoughts of the artist as it transmits them to the material, and vice versa’ (1971: 148), introducing the tools as intermediary between artist and material. By extension, the choice of materials and methods­– i­n the case of the Surrealists, this includes ideas of chance and the irrational­– ­exerts its own influence on artistic cognition.

The Surreal Mind I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. (Breton 1972: 14) Je crois à la résolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rêve et la réalité, en une sorte de réalité absolue, de surréalité, si l’on peut ainsi dire. (Breton 1985: 24)



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Surrealism was much more than an artistic and literary movement; it was a philosophy and an all-­encompassing way of life. What Breton and others were trying to do was to equip everyone, regardless of their place in society, with tools that would allow them to tap into limitless creativity. Dada and Surrealism essentially come from the same place: a reaction against the turmoil and conflict across Europe, the First World War, and the kind of accepted rationality that Tristan Tzara, Breton and others saw as having caused this turn of events (Balakian 1970: 23). However, while Dada negated the world, Surrealism sought instead to unlock all its potential realities. In Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) Breton recounts a story during which the phrase ‘There is a man cut in two by the window’ occurs to him, apparently without reason. He is alone in his apartment, about to fall asleep; he perceives the phrase and it is accompanied by a faint visual image. He goes on to say that, were he a painter, the visual depiction would have become more important to him than the phrase. As it stands, Breton has a writer’s preference for the phrase; however, he goes on to say that: Since that day, I have had occasion to concentrate my attention voluntarily on similar apparitions, and I know they are fully as clear as auditory phenomena. With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines. Here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing . . . upon opening my eyes I would get the very strong impression of something never seen. (Breton 1972: 21) Depuis ce jour, il m’est arrivé de concentrer volontairement mon attention sur de semblables apparitions et je sais qu’elles ne le cèdent point en netteté aux phénomènes auditifs. Muni d’un crayon et d’une feuille blanche, il me serait facile d’en suivre les contours. C’est que là encore il ne s’agit pas de dessiner, il ne s’agit que de calquer. (Breton 1985: 31–2) This idea of something ‘never seen’ is vital, as is the implication that no artistic skill is required for the action of ‘tracing’. The suggestion is that the image produced has emerged from somewhere deep in Breton’s subconscious, so deep that his conscious mind has no preconceived notion of it as it would of a thing (an event or object) in the real, waking world. Breton goes on to quote Pierre Reverdy, writing in the magazine Nord-­Sud as early as 1918, who says: The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be­– ­the greater its emotional power and poetic reality . . . (quoted in Breton 1972: 20)

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L’image est une création pure de l’esprit. Elle ne peut naître d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte­– ­plus elle aura de puissance émotive et de réalité poétique . . . (quoted in Breton 1985: 31) In Breton’s case, there is one reality (waking) in which a man leans through an open window; and another (dream) where he is bisected by the glass panes of the window he leans through, but is strangely unharmed. While Reverdy’s ‘pure creation of the mind’ suggests a separation of mind and body, Breton’s apparition is embedded in perception and the corporeal experience. But still, Breton’s ‘image’ is purely mental and he believes he can ‘trace’ it to give an accurate visual representation of his fully formed mental image. Breton’s recounted experience of the overlapping of dream and reality here provides the impetus for obtaining what he describes as ‘a monologue spoken as rapidly as possibly without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties’ (1972: 23; ‘un monologue de débit aussi rapide que possible, sur lequel l’esprit critique du sujet ne fasse porter aucun jugement’, Breton 1985: 33). Breton goes on to supply a dictionary definition of Surrealism which places its emphasis on automatism: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express­– v­ erbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner­– ­the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (Breton 1972: 26) SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. (Breton 1985: 36) So Surrealist thought is not conscious thought. The Surrealist mind is receptive and the Surrealist artist or writer is a mere ‘recording instrument’, dipping into the signals of the mind much as you would dip into a stream. Matthews discusses this assumption in The Surrealist Mind, presenting thought and the mind in Surrealism as something which exists autonomously, something that can be ‘broken in upon’ (1991: 46). Breton goes on to provide instructions on how to achieve a written Surrealist composition: ‘Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents and the talents of everyone else’ (1972: 29; ‘Placez-­vous dans l’état le plus passif, ou réceptif, que vous pourrez. Faites abstraction de votre génie, de vos talents et de ceux de tous les autres’, 1985: 41). The goal is to write quickly, completely without premeditation. He accepts



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Reverdy’s idea of two distant realities and rejects the possibility that the mind could consciously grasp the relationship between the two. Breton goes on to say: ‘When the difference exists only slightly, as in a comparison, the spark is lacking’ (1972: 37; ‘Lorsque cette différence existe à peine comme dans la comparaison, l’étincelle ne se produit pas’, 1990: 49). This is the crux of the problem the Surrealists have with purely representational painting: it imitates reality and neglects the marvellous, the unconscious ‘sur-­reality’ accessed through, for example, a dream state. There is a contradiction here in that Breton’s idea of a mental image is one that occurs at random and is a product of the Surrealist unconscious. In general phenomenological terms, however, the argument runs that the image cannot be purely mental. According to Merleau-­Ponty: The word ‘image’ is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-­a-­brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the painting belongs to the in-­itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. (1993: 126) The problem for Merleau-­Ponty is that the drawn image is an autonomous ‘outside’ manifestation of this idea we have of a mental image, which is incomplete until realised. Rather than a tracing or exact copy of what we see in the mind’s eye, it is tempered by the outside: by both materials and environment. To return to Breton’s account, this forms the basis of Surrealist automatism. Robert Desnos was one of the most prominent poets in the Surrealist movement during the époque des sommeils (the period of trances) which occurred in late 1922 and which may have been revived after the establishment of the Bureau de recherches surréaliste in 1924. According to Balakian, ‘For a while Desnos went regularly to Breton’s apartment and fell asleep right after dinner, making ecstatic pronouncements upon waking. His sleeping séances became deeper and more complicated until one night Breton had to fetch a doctor to wake him’ (1970: 127). Desnos was hailed by Breton as ‘Surrealism’s chosen prophet’ (1924) and there are many descriptions of his hypnotic trances which produced all kinds of automatic utterances: At the start of a session Desnos’s head would fall dramatically upon the table, whereupon he would begin speaking in a shrill voice accompanied by stertorous breathing. His portentous utterances, foretelling events such as the deaths of various group members, were dutifully recorded. (Lomas and Stubbs 2013: 233) Breton praised him as the equal of Freud and Picasso in his ‘fanaticism’. Automatism was practised by Desnos and others as part of the Surrealists’ social activity and, later, under the banner of the Bureau de recherches surréaliste as pseudo-­scientific research. An account of Desnos’s performance at the first automatist session, held

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in 1922, describes that he ‘sighed and, without speaking, began to scratch the table “compulsively” with his fingernails’ (Conley 2003: 17). Thereafter Desnos was supplied with pencil and paper and his unconscious actions became writing. In the means of recording his ‘body in action’ (Conley 2003: 17) we find something of the transparency described by Clark, who points out that transparent tools are ‘almost-­ invisible’ but ‘by no means a new invention’, and he includes pen and paper as examples (Clark 2003: 43). Returning to the extended mind, if transparency is key to freeing the artist in the use of tools for cognition, how does this relate to the Surrealists’ use of chance? One of the main motivating factors in their choice to use methods such as automatism, collage and frottage was, in the first instance, their ease of use. There is no extensive training or skill required to make an inkblot or a rubbing. These are things that a child could do; in fact the Surrealists’ interest in child art, outsider art and so-­called primitive art stems from their belief that children, the insane and the ‘other’ were already closer to the absolute truth they were seeking. The perception was that people who existed on the fringes of (Western) social norms operated without the inhibitions of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The concept of play is vital in the Surrealist lexicon of means of unlocking the unconscious. As Matthews has put it: ‘The surrealists’ sense of wonder at creative achievement was intensified by their pleasure at seeing how little it takes for wonder to be released’ (1991: 120). According to Matthews, the critic of Surrealist art encounters a number of ­problems stemming from the accepted codes of art and literature: Because surrealism did not exclude fun, it appears from where the commentator stands that, in surrealist works, the high seriousness of art and literature is patently compromised, sometimes being excluded entirely. Tacitly associating simplicity of means with lack of worthwhile ambition, the critic looks upon these methods as merely trivial. (1991: 120) The methods, childish and trivial though they may appear to be, hold something of the transparency discussed by Clark and others as a condition of distributed cognition. The immediacy of drawing provides a point of departure for a fuller investigation into what constitutes a truly automatic and unconscious method of making an image. Writing and drawing can be automatic by virtue of their familiarity and relative simplicity. Concepts of chance and the random generation of text or image with no preconceived idea of the end result are, as we have seen, central to Surrealist thought. However, closer examination of many examples of so-­called pure psychic automatism often reveals some degree of preconception on the part of the artist or author. To take a typical example of Surrealist automatism, one of André Masson’s drawings shows a series of both fully recognisable and highly schematic images, distributed evenly across the page, with little or no overlap (see Plate 13). This might suggest some conscious compositional input on Masson’s part. There is some empirical evidence available that the drawings of young children made in



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sequence will not necessarily reflect graphically the sequence of actions carried out in the making of the drawing. The individual elements of the drawing are often distributed randomly across the space of the page. What matters to the child is the order in which the action of drawing takes place: This representational aspect of motor behaviour is quite apparent in young children. Jacqueline Goodnow reports that when kindergarten children are asked to match a series of sounds with a series of dots, they draw the dots in a line from left to right but do not leave blank spaces on the paper to match the intervals between groups of sounds. Instead they often use motor pauses: make two dots, pause, make another two dots, etc. For them, this does justice to the sound model even though the intervals do not show up on paper. (Arnheim 1974: 172) The approach is highly intuitive, but the result is not necessarily how an adult would plan to do it. One might expect a result similar to that of a child’s to arise from the truly unconscious action of an artist executing an automatic drawing. In fact, one of the least consciously composed examples of automatic drawing is Salvador Dalí’s frontispiece etching to a collection of poems by Georges Hugnet entitled Onan (1934). Allegedly, Dalí executed the drawing with one hand while masturbating vigorously with the other. Dalí called these images Espasmo-­graffisme (Spasmographisms). Onan’s frontispiece bears an inscription etched on to the plate in French by Dalí’s own hand: ‘“Espasmo-graffisme” obtained with the left hand while with the right hand I masturbate myself to bleeding-point, to the bone, to the helices of the calix!’ (my translation, ‘«Espasmo-graffisme» obtenu avec la main gauche pendant qu’avec la main droite je me masturbe jusqu’au sang jusqu’au l’os jusqu’aux hélices du calix!’, Hugnet 1934: frontis.). Arguably this could be construed as simply a restriction on fine motor control, but the resulting image shows the kind of true randomness that would appear to have been the aim of the automatic endeavours of the group. Given the framework of cognitive science, and specifically theories of distributed cognition touching on enactivism and the extended mind, I am not suggesting that Masson sat down in front of his sheet of paper with a pre-­existing mental image in mind. Rather, I would argue that automatism in its graphic form (bearing in mind that this practice later gives rise to abstract expressionism) fits with theories of enactivism expounded by Noë and others, as an iterative process. Masson’s initial mark-­making enables him to continue in a form of graphical free association. In a discussion of drawing as motion, Arnheim describes the child’s first impulse to draw: The first scribbles of a child are not intended as representation. They are a form of enjoyable motor activity in which the child exercises his limbs, with the added pleasure of having visible traces produced by the vigorous back-­and-­forth action of the arms. It is an exciting experience to bring about something visible that was not there before. (1974: 171)

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This description echoes Matthews on the ‘surrealists’ sense of wonder’ at the creative act, and the idea that the artist can be as surprised as the viewer by the resulting image. This also returns us to the idea of the ‘never seen’ written about by Breton (1972: 21). This point is further demonstrated by the adoption of techniques such as frottage and decalcomania, which provide a ready-­made starting point for perception, interpretation and further active creation. In this way, the Surrealists were able to use tools and environments to try to record thought processes which would ordinarily remain hidden in their unconscious minds. Given that automatism forms the core of early Surrealist activities, one might reasonably expect there to be more examples of automatic drawing, or certainly for there to have been more enthusiastic adopters of the technique among artists associated with the group. That many of these artists turned instead to other methods is revealing in terms of the relative success of each method in achieving their goal of pure psychic automatism.

Chance as Extension Max Ernst says quite precisely what chance meant to him by referring to Hume’s definition: ‘Chance as Hume defined it: the equivalent of the ignorance in which we find ourselves with regard to the real causes of events.’ (Spies 1988: 51) In the search for an equivalent in visual art to automatic writing, Max Ernst was one artist who continually pushed the boundaries between active choice and passive chance which were so central to Surrealist theories of automatism. The Surrealist use of collage emerges from the Dada attitude of using non-­artistic materials (Adamowicz 1998: 3). According to Louis Aragon, ‘Once the principle of collage was admitted, painters had passed unaware from white to black magic. It was too late to retreat’ (quoted in Cowling 1997: 147; ‘Le principe du collage admis, les peintres avaient passé sans en rien savoir de la magie blanche à la magie noire. Il était trop tard pour reculer’, Aragon 1930). In writing about Ernst’s collages, Aragon (1930) hailed the democratisation of art which the collage technique made possible. Of the artists for whom collage was a central part of their practice, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters were perhaps the most prolific, and consistent, collagists and both were also associated with German Dada, Ernst in Cologne and Schwitters in Hanover. Their work makes use of the everyday in a way that points to the division between high and low art and makes explicit their contempt for an attitude that places academic art above the imagery found in popular culture. Ernst wrote excitedly in Au-­delà de la peinture (1937) about his discoveries of both collage and frottage, specifically framing them as automatic techniques. His accounts of both discoveries bear a striking formal resemblance to one another. On collage, Ernst says: One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my eyes the pages of an illustrated catalogue



surr ea lis m, c ha nc e an d t h e ex t ended m i nd  183 showing objects for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic demonstration. There I found elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep. (quoted in Spies 1988: 29) Un jour de l’an 1919, me trouvant par un temps de pluie dans une ville au bord du Rhin, je fus frappé par l’obsession qu-­excerçaient sur mon regard irrité les pages d’un catalogue illustré où figuraient des objets pour la démonstration anthropologique, microscopique, psychologique, minéralogique et paléontologique. J’y trouvais réunis de éléments de figuration tellement distants que l’absurdité même de cet assemblage provoqua en moi une intensification subite des facultés visionnaires et fit naître une succession hallucinante d’images contrdictoires, images doubles, triples et multiples, se superposant les unes aux autres avec la persistance et la rapidité qui sont le propre des souvenirs amoureux et des visions de demi-­sommeil. (Ernst 1937: 33)

Ernst’s first exhibition in Paris, held at René Hilsum’s gallery Au Sans Pareil in 1921, included several collages découpages, in Ernst’s terminology, alongside works in a variety of other media (Spies 1988: 81). These images used pre-­existing visual elements taken from a range of sources of the type later described by him in Au-­delà de la peinture. These sources give Ernst’s collages a particular aesthetic character, due to his almost exclusive use of the type of engraved illustrations common to late-­nineteenth-­ century encyclopaedias, technical/scientific publications, newspapers and magazines, and popular fiction. Spies points out that these wood-­engraved illustrations fall on the side of ‘low art’, occupying as they do the pages of books and journals intended for a newly literate audience comprised of the lower and middle classes. Such sources offered Ernst a diverse range of imagery to select from while the style of illustration remains strangely uniform, largely due to the characteristics of the medium (wood-­engraved illustrations) and the fashion of the time (Spies 1988: 77). One of the key aims of collage as a Surrealist technique is the disorientation of both producer and viewer. The juxtaposition of disparate elements surprises the artist involved in the creation of the image as much as the viewer. The effectiveness of this method is debatable: one could say that conscious decisions are constantly being made as the image is being assembled. Indeed, Spies refers to the issue of personnalité du choix as a crucial element of Ernst’s oeuvre in which, he argues, collage plays a central role (1988: 9). The interesting thing here is that the artist, in this case Ernst, is choosing pre-­existing images to make up the final image, and its disconcerting effect is partly due to their pre-­existence and partly due to Ernst’s choice in the matter. There is a transformative aspect to collage which allows for these conscious decisions, in that two entirely separate realities can co-­exist on a single picture plane (see Plate 14).

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The importance of the graphic gesture in automatic writing is something that is absent in collage. The evolution of collage as automatic technique in some way rests on this difference, precisely because it contains absolutely no graphic gesture. The collagist cuts and assembles but does not draw or write. Their tools are a scalpel and glue, so the action of the mind, eye and hand are different to drawing or writing. Clark suggests that the pencil is a transparent tool, an ‘extension of the hand’ (2003: 9), but what if the material tools are not being used in quite this way? The scalpel could stand in for a pencil: it is held and directed by the hand. Instead of communication on paper, however, the artist puts down the scalpel and the cut-­out element itself becomes the artist’s tool. The pre-­existence of the images used means that Ernst’s first actions of selection directly engage with his environment. Though Spies refers to a ‘mental image’ which guides the selection of cut-­ out elements, the realisation of this image depends on more than the artist’s hand. The diversity of techniques used, and Ernst’s rewriting of his own history and thought processes in relation to these techniques, can make the relative importance of chance difficult to pin down. In reality the ongoing practice of collage and the subsequent development of frottage, where a piece of thin paper is laid over a textured surface and a soft pencil rubbed across it to transfer the texture to the paper, are gradual and take in many influences even though Ernst himself presents them as instances of sudden inspiration. Spies pinpoints the opposing forces of ‘utmost freedom’ and ‘utmost determinateness’ as the axis upon which Ernst’s use of both frottage and collage turns (1969: v). What he means by this is that, like Leonardo da Vinci’s technique of throwing a sponge soaked in paint against a wall and then working the resultant fantastic patterns into something recognisable and familiar, Ernst uses both collage and frottage to ‘force inspiration’. The textures of everyday life, a wooden floorboard or a slice of bread, stand in for the more conventional tools of the artist: ‘Now the grained texture of a floor, for example, replaces the stroke of a brush or pen’ (Spies 1986: 9). The almost dizzying excitement Ernst describes himself experiencing is linked to the freedom described by Spies: ‘To the artist frottage is not only a technique in which two object-­planes overlap and penetrate each other; it is also a means by which he frees himself from his inhibitions’ (Spies 1986: 9) (see Plate 15). Despite the creative efforts of Masson and Ernst, the problems inherent in automatic drawing and even collage or frottage as forms of ‘pure psychic automatism’ are emphasised by Breton’s avoidance of a definition of pictorial automatism. Writing in La Révolution surréaliste, Pierre Naville stated that: Everyone knows that there can be no such thing as surrealist painting. Neither pencil strokes made by random gesture nor images that reconstruct the outlines of a dream or an imaginative fantasy can qualify for that appellation. (quoted in Spies 1988: 62) Plus personne n’ignore qu’il n’y a pas de peinture surréaliste. Ni les traits du crayon livré au hasard des gestes, ni l’image retraçant les figures de rêve, ni les fantaisies



surr ea lis m, c ha nc e an d t h e ex t ended m i nd  185 imaginatives, c’est bien entendu, ne peuvent être ansi qualifiées. (Naville 1925: 27)

It is not until 1936, with his first experiments in decalcomania, that Breton feels comfortable with the definition of a successful automatic method. As David Lomas and Jeremy Stubbs write, ‘It is notable, however, that the various new automatic techniques that emerge in the 1930s­– f­umage, decalcomania, and so forth­– ­abandon any concern to register the artist’s individual unconscious’ (2013: 212). Although there are some tensions to be found between Ernst’s own presentation of his working methods and the actual instances of genuine chance and randomness to be found by the viewer or commentator, Matthews points out that ‘Ernst’s remarks on his discovery of the technique of frottage stand out as quite significant. They stress that the person making the frottage is no more than a spectator, present at and assisting in . . . the manifestation of an image’ (1991: 123). The passivity of the artist in the use of these techniques has been called into question by Spies and more recently by Lomas and Stubbs’s interpretation of simulation in Surrealism. What is clear is that, despite the Surrealist rhetoric, the 1936 adoption of decalcomania was viewed as a far more successful form of automatism than early experiments with automatic drawing, collage or frottage, and that this was largely to do with the nature of the technique and the degree of control ultimately held over the final image by the individual artist. According to the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, compiled by Breton, Eluard and others and published in 1938, ‘decalcomania (without a preconceived object or decalcomania of desire)’ (Hugnet 1936: 29; ‘DÉCALCOMANIE [sans objet préconçu ou décalcomanie du désir]’, Breton 1936: 18) was discovered by Spanish Surrealist Óscar Domínguez in 1936 (1938: 9). This ‘discovery’ is something of a misnomer. Like many Surrealist discoveries it is derivative, the adoption and adaptation of an existing technique. Decalcomania is essentially the process of transferring images from one surface to another by pressing wet paint between two sheets of paper, producing an ‘inkblot’. The technique favoured by the Surrealists was, for example, similar to the method used by Hermann Rorschach to generate random images which then formed the basis of psychological assessments. His book Psychodiagnostik was published in 1921 and it is worth noting that the sale of the contents of Breton’s apartment in 2003 revealed that he owned a copy, though it is far from certain that Breton and others were aware of Rorschach’s work before 1936. What is clear is that decalcomania had become a reasonably common trick for creating random images and patterns well before the 1936 discovery by Domínguez. According to Breton, writing in Minotaure in 1936, to obtain a decalcomania one should: With a broad brush, spread some black gouache, more or less diluted in places, on a sheet of white glazed paper and then cover this immediately with a similar sheet which you will press down lightly with the back of your hand. Take this

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upper sheet by one edge and peel it off slowly as you would do with an ordinary transfer, then continue to reapply it and lift it away again until the colour is almost dry. (quoted in Leal 2013: 5) Étendez au moyen d’un gros pinceau de la gouache noire, plus ou moins diluée par places, sur une feuille de papier blanc satiné que vous recouvrez aussitôt d’une feuille semblable sur laquelle vous exercez du revers de la main une pression moyenne. Soulevez sans hâte par son bord supérieur cette seconde feuille à la maniére dont on procède pour la décalcomanie, quitte à la réappliquer et à la soulever de nouveau jusqu’à séchage à peu près complet. (Breton 1936: 18) The characteristic result is spongy-­textured and infinitely suggestive and was often interpreted by the Surrealists in terms of landscape and underwater scenes. Breton somewhat disingenuously discusses Domínguez’s discovery of the technique in the same breath as describing decalcomania as a pastime commonly enjoyed by children. ‘but the elementary technique of which children are capable is far from exhausting the resources of such a process’ (quoted in Leal 2013: 4; ‘mais la technique élémentaire qu’on peut attendre d’eux est loin d’epuiser les ressources d’un tel procédé’, Breton 1936: 18). The reference to decalcomania as a childish diversion should not be glossed over. One of the reasons Breton was so excited by this discovery was down to the simplicity of the technique and, as he clearly states, the limitless possibilities it opened up to all Surrealists, whether they were writers or artists. As highlighted by Kim Grant in an article about the periodical Cahiers d’Art and its championing of the avant-­garde, ‘Breton presented Domínguez’s decalcomania as the first truly automatic Surrealist technique of image production because it did not rely on the artist’s technical skill; thus, it could be created and employed as an imaginative stimulus by everyone’ (2010: 219). Of the artists and writers who produced the decalcomanias which illustrate the 1936 Minotaure article, not all were as enthralled with the method as Breton and Domínguez. Yves Tanguy abandoned decalcomania almost as soon as he had tried it. Georges Hugnet, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic adopter and decalcomania endpapers became one of the signatures of his beautiful book bindings. In an article outlining the impact of Surrealism in 1936 which was published in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art to coincide with their exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’, Hugnet says: Oscar Domínguez by trompe l’oeil and Surrealist deformation evokes infinitely varied flora and fauna. A truly magic process used by Domínguez and many Surrealists is called by Breton ‘decalcomania with no preconceived object, decalcomania of chance’ and puts within everyone’s reach the making of the most exciting poetry. (1936: 29) In Hugnet’s satirically titled ‘portrait’ of Albertus Magnus, we see him referencing a thirteenth-­century German theologian and alchemist who was one of the heroes



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of the Surrealist group. Just as Domínguez went on to produce more highly manipulated decalcomania works, with a shift in emphasis to active manipulation and interpretation of the textures produced, Hugnet produces what is recognisable as a head in profile. We are led to believe that the choice of subject comes after the action of making the work, although the inkblot could easily have been manipulated to produce the shape of a head in profile (see Plate 16). The choice of decalcomania as the pinnacle of automatism relates to the relative transparency of the technique. First, it is so simple, a child can do it. Second, the image produced is seen to be completely random and free from self-­conscious design. The image can be produced almost without conscious thought beyond that involved in applying paint to paper, folding and pressing the paper together. Clark’s arguments are framed around transparent technologies, and some of what he says can be applied here: These tools or resources are usually no more the object of our conscious thought and reason than is the pen with which we write, the hand that holds it while writing, or the various neural subsystems that form the grip and guide the fingers . . . There is no merger so intimate as that which is barely noticed. (2003: 28–9) The Surrealists’ process, which becomes more exaggerated as their use of decalcomania develops, is a classically looped process of doing, seeing and interpreting, which then extends from pure interpretation, via the allocation of a title to an untouched inkblot, to manipulation of the image according to their interpretation.

Conclusion To sum up, although there are contradictory elements within the story of Surrealist automatism, this examination of some of the methods used is intended as a contribution to discussions of distributed cognition in an art-­historical context. The aspects of the extended mind theory, and enactivism, which can be applied to creative artistic processes are linked to two main ideas. First, that the artistic medium­ – ­whether this is painting, drawing, collage, frottage or decalcomania­– ­can be considered as a tool regardless of its specific nature. Second, that the Surrealists’ choice of particular tools was based on their relative transparency. That transparency was achieved through simplicity of means, rather than the familiarity of skilled activity, which is where the Surrealists diverge from the kind of art practised in the Parisian academies up to and including the early twentieth century. To treat the medium as a tool, we have to think of scissors, paper and ink, together with the source material (in the case of Ernst’s collages, and the textures used in frottage) and the action (of pressing the paper together to transfer ink in decalcomania), as tools which are ‘brought into co-­ordination in the performance of the task’ (Hutchins 1995: 290). If the artist sketches as part of an iterative process, then Surrealist activities such as automatic drawing, collage, frottage and decalcomania are also part of an iterative process, albeit one that bypasses conscious decision-­making, if the Surrealists

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themselves are to be believed. Recent commentators have quite rightly introduced a note of scepticism here (Lomas and Stubbs 2013; Adamowicz 1998), which means that another interpretation is possible­– ­that the introduction of chance is just another part of the artist’s ‘sketching’ process, something that all visual artists right back to Leonardo engage with on some level. This would mean that chance and the variety of methods employed to exploit it are valid, on similar terms as the sketchbook, to be held as transparent tools for extending the artist’s mind. If cognition is something that happens across brain, body and environment, and our minds are ‘supersized’ by the use of a variety of tools, then the Surrealist artist’s creative practice is a fine example of distributed cognition. Artists like André Masson, Max Ernst and Georges Hugnet made work that would not have been possible without the methods and materials at their disposal: their artistic cognition was distributed across brain, body and world.2

2

Editorial note: the author was unable to reference the original works she used from the National Gallery of Scotland archival and special collections due to the closure of the galleries during the Covid-19 pandemic, but she has managed to source later editions and translations, except in the case of the 1924 Breton article on Desnos and the 1930 Aragon title which are therefore given here without their page references.

11 D i st r i but e d C o g n i t i o n , Porou s Q u a lia a nd M o de r n i s t N a rra tiv e Melba Cuddy-­Keane

The first definitions of modernism, formulated in the 1970s, highlighted, among its dominant features, ‘the dis-­establishing of communal reality’ and the consequent turn to an individualist epistemology in which ‘all realities have become subjective fictions’ (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 27). More recent views, focusing on modernisms in the plural, reveal the historical record to be more nuanced and complex. Rather than simply abandoning communal for individualist models, modernists were pervasively rethinking the assumed opposition, and in ways that resonate strongly with theorisations of distributed cognition today. D. H. Lawrence ruminated about the distinction between his hand (alive) and his pen (not alive), but thought of his fingernails as crossing the ‘mysterious Rubicon’ between animate and inanimate (1936: 533). In France, Jules Romains developed the influential theory of l’unanimisme, positing that in various common gathering points in ordinary life­– ­at a funeral or in the theatre, in cafés or in army barracks­– ­we can, for transitory, fleeting moments, experience a collective soul;1 in England, Rebecca West speculated about a collective mind embodied in a ‘partially external super-­ cortex’ (1928: 177).2 Virginia Woolf, despite her well-­recognised representations of interior consciousness, posited numerous forms of collective existence, whether the ‘common mind’ experienced in reading (1992b: 178), the ‘thinking in common’ behind literary masterpieces (1993: 59), or the ‘rhythmical sense’ that opens the poet’s mind to the ‘mysterious affinity’ linking ‘men and women, omnibuses, sparrows’ and sets ‘the taxis . . . dancing with the daffodils’ (1986: 230). While often imagistic and speculative, such instances evidence a pervasive questioning of the borders of selfhood, as modernists sought fresh understandings of interconnections  1

For an early articulation of these ideas see Romains 1905; Romains also promoted the idea that ‘one of the functions of literature was going to be precisely to help this consciousness be free and express itself’ (Romains 1944: iv).  2 The term has been recently picked up in IT and defined as ‘externalized information p ­ rocessing . . . that far surpasses our biological provision’ but still affords an ‘individualized Personal Database’ for managing super-­complex tasks (Boettcher 2014: 478, 479). For a dystopian view of the destructive effects of networked society as a contemporary superorganism, however, see Dash Shaw’s graphic novel BodyWorld (2010).

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between individual human life and broader social, animal and environmental worlds.3 The modernist period, however, also confronted the dramatic emergence of aggressive nationalisms and the stark truth that some forms of collective behaviour have deadly effects. Gustave Le Bon’s ‘crowd’ (1895) and Wilfred Trotter’s ‘herd’ (1916) warned of the irrationality and manipulability of mob sentiment under the sway of charismatic leaders, tapping into fears that both Nazism and Fascism were to fulfil. Criticisms of the common mind were not limited to foreign antagonists: the narrator in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India bitterly describes how, when national superiority was threatened, the English Club ‘rallied to the banner of race’, since ‘the herd had decided on emotion’ and ‘the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community’ (2000: 174–5). Conversely, in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable­– ­almost a companion novel to Forster’s, told from an Indian point of view­– t­ he protagonist Bakha keeps a little apart from the ‘surging crowd’ and ‘rushing stream of people’ amassing to hear Gandhi’s speech (1940: 137). Resisting mass emotion, Bakha goes home to talk with his father and to think about what he has heard. Concerns about the stunting effects of mass formations surface as well in modernism’s response to the technologically extended mind. As Adam Hammond has argued in tracing the foundations of Marshall McLuhan’s thought back to Wyndham Lewis, modernist media critics decried not technology itself, but the manipulative power of those who controlled it: while Lewis declaimed against the militaristic organisation of public media, McLuhan targeted the predominance of commercial interests (Hammond 2016). If modernists then urged the importance of active individual response, that move was oppositional not to community but to the specific ills of a manipulative, top-­down system. The question was how to bond closely with others while still preserving agency and critical thought. Poised thus between desiring connectivity and fearing coercion, the modernist approach to distributed cognition is typically loose, non-­declamatory and delicate. In literary writings in particular, distributed cognition is generally expressed through suggestion rather than explanation, through imagistic, semi-­conscious association rather than conscious thought. Cognitive connectivity is figured as experience rather than asserted as objective truth. In modernist literature, we know distributed cognition not as fact but as feeling. We know it as qualia: what it is like to feel that our lives extend beyond our skins.

Qualia and Truth The nature and even the existence of qualia has been the centre of much debate, generating more controversies than we have room to consider here.4 My approach  3

For the pervasiveness of interconnected models in the modernist period see ‘Common mind, group-­thinking’ in Cuddy-­Keane et al. 2014: 40–5.  4 One controversy is whether the nature of any given quale derives from the perceived object, so



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is instead to take the basic and simple definition of qualia­– ­what experience seems, phenomenologically, to be like­– a­ nd to ask what light it might shed on the rendering of experience in modernist literature, specifically when the experience includes the feeling of something shared. While current discussions of qualia tend to focus on clearly defined sensory experiences­– ­what it is like to see red, hear a ringing tone, or feel pain­– t­he quale I am tracking is the feeling of porosity that yields a sense of being in, or extending into, the world.5 This particular feeling is by nature diffusive and elusive, and certainly slippery enough to raise the question, how can we know what it is? But the problems of knowledge and verification merely go to the heart of one of the most significant questions pertaining to distributed cognition: how can we know it exists? One of the most challenging issues when considering non-­empirical evidence is the truth status of any resultant claims. In addition to the basic question of whether a narrative account of a feeling (fictional or non-­fictional) can be taken as commensurate with the feeling, we face the more specific question of whether the feeling of being connected signifies that connection is actually taking place. ‘But I thought you felt the same way’ is too common an experience, in life and in literature, for us to ignore. Can we ever truly know if our sense of sharing is shared? Can we measure or verify the presence or absence of an experience that depends on an imponderable blend? At present, we have no means of proving that shared activity is occurring or that it isn’t. It may seem strange at this point to turn to Daniel Dennett, whose essay ‘Quining qualia’ dismissed claims for qualia as ‘directly apprehensible properties of experience’ (1988: 75). Yet Dennett’s attack was levelled at the apparently paradoxical claims that qualia are ineffable subjective experiences and that they can be objectively isolated and defined. Given his rationalist approach, Dennett understandably concluded that the properties being claimed as phenomenal are actually relational and extrinsic properties that we subjectively detect. What we have, he argued, is a distinctly analysable information-­processing apparatus. But what if we hold to the basic and simple definition of qualia: not what an experience ‘is’, but what experience seems to us to be like? Indeed, Dennett himself performs this shift when he revisits the topic in 2007. Despite his previous article’s objection to the treatment of physical properties as if they were phenomenal properties, Dennett now explains that he is not dismissing phenomenological experience itself. But such experience, he argues, cannot be approached through a scientific ontology, dependent on empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) truth. Instead, he proposes that qualia should be approached as the ‘manifest ontology’ of the subject: the truth of what someone that the experience of redness inheres in­– t­hat is, is intrinsic to­– r­ ed, or whether it is an effect of purely subjective perception. The same controversy informs the closely related modernist term ‘impression’, revealing it too as a site of troubled boundaries between inner and outer worlds. See ‘Impression, impressionism’ in Cuddy-­Keane et al. 2014: 125–9.  5 Martha Nussbaum argues, for example, that in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Strether’s newfound ability to be ‘porous and susceptible of influence’ overturns the ‘ineluctable agency’ of the Kantian self, as comically portrayed in Mrs Newsome (1990: 180).

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is experiencing (2007: 250, italics in original). While arguing that evidence from the subjective world should not be mistaken as empirical evidence, he claims that we can regard subjective accounts as truths that operate much like the truth of fiction. While conjecturing that manifest ontology may eventually be supported by scientific ontology, linking the experience of cognitive processes firmly to neural functioning,6 until then, he asserts, we should remain agnostic about what consciousness is and focus on ‘how it behaves’ (2007: 267, italics in original). Rather than weakening the case, Dennett’s delineation of subjective accounts clarifies and enables our task: we can admit that claims for distributed cognition rely on interpretation and speculation and take our project as understanding when, why and how consciousness has been experienced or imagined in this way. We can set aside the empirical task of determining where shared cognition takes place and the metaphysical question of whether cognition can be actually shared; our feelings of shared cognition are all we need to know. In our quest to understand how the consciousness of sharing behaves, we can seek truths that operate like the truth of fiction or, as in the present study, the truths of some fiction.

Qualia, Fiction and Distributed Cognition Narrative is a fertile ground for understanding distributed cognition, offering, rather than abstract theory, descriptions of qualia in embodied and living terms. But although autobiographical narratives increasingly play a role in neuroscientific studies,7 if we are looking for reliable access to actual experience, fictional narratives constitute an especially difficult case. While all narrative is at one remove from experience, presenting not feeling itself but a verbal (or graphic) account of it, fictional narrative exists at one further remove, since its accounts derive not from the person who purportedly had the experience but from an author who attributes feelings to imagined characters. How can we be learning about real-­world cognition at all? Fiction becomes cognitively analysable, I suggest, once we conceive the author’s work as translation. In the type of fiction I describe as cognitive realism, the narrative simulates mental processes in real time, condensing and translating a writer’s multiple first-­person experiences and third-­person observations, along with the inevitable seepage into the work of collective experience and thought.8 A fictional  6

I do not mean to imply that I accept all Dennett’s arguments; in particular, his claim that the ultimate test of any postulate about consciousness is robotic simulation is something, to echo Dennett, I must ‘remain agnostic about’.  7 See, for example, note 11.  8 The term ‘cognitive realism’ has been used in a slightly different way by Emily Troscianko to imply a correspondence between a literary text’s understanding of mental processes and the way cognition in reality works. My use of the term pertains only to texts that offer simulations of real-­ time thinking and, mindful of uncertainties and controversies in the present state of neuroscientific knowledge, I claim their realism lies in their correspondence to experience, not to what cognition is.

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character is a product of such translation, offering experienced-­based theories of cognition transcribed into concrete terms. The world of fiction offers Dennett’s manifest ontology: the truth of accumulated experiences of how cognition seems to behave. For the modernist writer in particular, a second layer of translation involves recasting the incommunicable into communicable terms, by transmuting predominantly nonverbal experience into conscious verbalised form. This element makes modernist fiction especially relevant for a study of qualia, but there are slippery terms here to explain. As David Chalmers has argued, qualia are essential to human consciousness, to our formation of a sense of what it is like to be.9 But that does not mean that qualia are necessarily conscious­– ­to shift to the specific meaning of conscious as rational wakeful attention. As studies of mind-­wandering and dreaming show, we can be aware without being consciously attentive;10 in modernist cognitive realism, while the author communicates through narrative an understanding of forms that qualia can take, the characters or personae may be immersed in the phenomenal or emotional experience, without any conscious observations or self-­reflections on their part. The experience necessarily rendered in words is indeed most often not verbal: it may comprise bodily experiences of which the subject is aware but not directly controlling; it may involve imagistic and associative thinking­– ­processes that happen so rapidly that the narrative fragments into pieces as it mimics their speed. The modernist writer’s focus on such processes reflects the era’s growing and widespread interest in active unconscious processes, but for distributed cognition, the significance is greater yet. The feeling of being distributed is part of our phenomenal consciousness. It offers not empirical truth but the knowledge we derive from experience, and, as such, it has power to affect and transform our lives. Phenomenal consciousness of distributed cognition thus differs significantly from the rational additive processes of interactive information systems. When my technology functions as memory storage, for example, it operates as a simple retrieval mechanism, a useful but delimited addition to my cognition. In contrast, a poem about loss may transport me into experiences and reflections well beyond my own, altering and expanding the realm of my perceptions and understanding. I am likely to experience the notebook or computer as a helpful appendage to my thought, but the poem is more likely to make me feel I am cognitively navigating the associative pathways of another mind, in ways that reorganise my brain. The distinction holds true not only for personal experience but also for larger systems: the practical task-­ performance of a group (a committee setting down to its work) is most likely to be experienced as an interactive relation among separate participants, each of whom makes a quantifiable individual contribution; a communal musical or theatrical  9

‘To be conscious, in this sense, is roughly to have qualia’ (Chalmers 1996: 6). This type of cognition has been variously discussed as pre-­reflective cognition, phenomenal consciousness and unguided attention. For modernist forms of reference see ‘Unconscious’ in Cuddy-­ Keane et al. 2014: 223–30.

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performance, however, or a walk in a quiet forest both offer greater potential for gestalt perception and experiencing the environmental whole­– ­the feeling, that is, that our consciousness is intrinsically connected to the consciousness of others or inextricably synchronised with the rhythms of the natural world.

The Varieties of Porous Qualia: A Beginning Typology What happens to qualia, however, when we translate experiential knowledge into analytic terms? Subjective narratives, whether autobiographical or fictional, become filtered through another mind­– ­the scientist or literary critic­– ­threatening even further distance from the primary experience. Dennett, however, proposes that the gap can be overcome by a process he terms ‘heterophenomenology’, which he offers as the bridge between subjectivity and the natural sciences. Whereas autophenomenology depends on self-­reflexivity alone, heterophenomenology assumes the burden of ‘making soliloquies comprehensible to an audience aside from [the primary experiencer]’ (2007: 264). While acknowledging that we never have a ‘perfectly neutral, perfectly theory-­free testimony from subjects or theory-­free inquiry from researchers’ (263), Dennett rejects the idea that interpretation is therefore an ‘ineliminably subjective and relativistic affair’ (251). Heterophenomenology, he argues, becomes accountable by employing ‘rules of interpretation’ and following ‘standards of intersubjective agreement’. Such rigour makes ‘first-­person methods available to the natural sciences’, while establishing a principle that should apply to ‘humanities and the humanistic social sciences’ as well.11 Literary analysis, however, entails one significant difference: the first-­person reporter is rarely available for questioning. Yet the literary record offers distinct advantages. First, it offers a richly dense accumulation of experience, formed not only from the experience of an individual author but also from what Woolf termed ‘thinking in common’, or what I have described as the seepage into the literary work of collective experience and thought. Secondly, the record is stable and long-­lasting while, at the same time, it offers a prismatic surface that will reveal, depending on our questions, different dimensions and depths. It is available for, and repays, prolonged and detailed scrutiny. And, like Dennett’s claims for the sciences, such literary scrutiny achieves rigour through discipline-­based procedures 11

In Inner Experience and Neuroscience, Donald Price and James Barrell argue for ‘a science of human meaning and consciousness’ that would employ disciplined third-­person methods of testing and questioning to bring subliminal first-­person awareness into conscious articulation (2012: 1). Using a broad definition of qualia as comprising a ‘vast array of perceptions, feelings, and meanings’ (5), they show how subjects whose physiological indicators are similar can nonetheless describe different qualia: two students in a glassed-­in elevator evidenced similar symptoms of anxiety, but analysis subsequent to the event revealed that one experienced claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and the other, acrophobia (fear of heights). Significantly for our understanding of distributed cognition, phenomenal experience reflects both the influence of personal circumstances and history and ‘a partial commonality of meanings’ (179).

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and methods. The narratological method I employ here is analytic and comparative, distinguishing described experiences according to their different kinds. But my object is not mere categorisation; probing differences helps us to identify the component elements that make each experience meaningful, and the fundamental question is not what a category is but how individual examples behave. Cognitive narratology seeks thus to advance both our understanding of the nature and significance of stories and the range and the scope of cognitive life. The following analysis thus considers a range of modernist accounts of qualia with the aim of identifying different degrees or forms that the feeling of being distributed can take. My initial examples are weak versions, in which individual cognition merely thinks through the outer environment; my last example is a strong version, in which inner and outer distinctions are overwritten by a continuous loop. I begin with individual interiorised minds accessed through what is termed consciousness representation and end with communally distributed minds manifested in physical movement. But while these forms operate somewhat differently, they frequently overlap and indeed represent gradations along a scale. As David Herman argues, although modernist fiction reveals ‘the mind as inextricably embedded in contexts for action and interaction’, embedded experience ranges along a ‘continuum’ from ‘loose coupling’ to ‘tight coupling between an intelligent agent and that agent’s environment’ (2011: 249). Once we determine that a feeling of shared experience is being expressed, the interesting questions pertain to its nature and its relative strength. Conceiving qualia in terms of gradations along a continuum raises the possibility that the 4Es with which these volumes are concerned may be more fruitfully conceived as 2Es with spectrums that range from lesser to greater degrees. Extended cognition emerges as a more radical version of embedded, with the spectrum between them ranging from the basic postulate that thinking is never independent from context to the radical hypothesis that thinking is invariably a shared process performed by a collective mind (including non-­human participants as well).12 The embodied-­enactive spectrum ranges from the relatively non-­controversial concept that sensory perceptions and physical gestures play a role in cognition to the radical assertion that basic cognition derives from the human organism’s direct interaction with the environment, unmediated by mental representations (Hutto and Myin 2012). The modernist examples that follow do not suggest extreme forms of extended cognition, perhaps because the social and political developments of the time warned so strongly of the dangers inherent in abandoning individual agency; nor do these writings display a radical enactivism, given their commitment to a medium that operates through language and mental imagery. Yet all the examples combine feelings of being embedded and embodied, and all contribute to a 12

Gavan Lintern (2007) offers a useful distinction between joint as a process in which all participate and shared as a process in which all participants have equal access to the one cognitive system. The former is integrative; the latter, unitary. Within such definition, shared would be the radical extreme.

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diffusive sense of selfhood in contrast to the coherent, uniform identity conferred by systematised belief. By analysing their differences, however, we can begin to establish a typology of what we might call the qualia of porosity or, more simply, porous qualia: variants of what it is like to feel our cognitive life extend beyond our skins.13 In what follows, I identify three different modes of cognitive processing, which I term ‘projecting’, ‘responding’ and ‘circulating’.14 The first form indicates the weakest presence of distributed cognition; in the second and third forms, porosity is increasingly strong.

Projecting In the early decades of the twentieth century, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf­ – ­supposed antagonists in novelistic form­– ­both ventured into strikingly new areas in narrated bodily experience: Bennett, in The Old Wives’ Tale, describes a woman’s pain in childbirth; Woolf, in The Voyage Out, a woman’s lingering slow death. Both novels convey the experience in a subjective account, but both utilise free indirect discourse (FID), a technique that, by rendering internal thoughts and feelings in the third person, involves a double voicing of narrator and fictional character. FID allows readers easily to accept the transmutation of physical experience into descriptive language, while leaving ambiguous whether the words being attributed to a character are literal thoughts or suggestive translations of feelings experienced at a seemingly semi-­conscious level. Both physical experiences are in extremis, one involving acute pain, the other, acute dislocation and disorientation, and in both episodes the overwhelming powerfulness of physical sensation causes feelings of distance and alienation from the social world. Although both women have attendants trying to help them, Bennett’s Constance feels ‘alone, panic-­stricken’ (2007: 190), while Woolf’s Rachel is troubled ‘when people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone’ (1992d: 328).15 Yet also in both episodes, withdrawal from the human world is accompanied by closer identification with the non-­human world. Constance feels she is ‘Why, not even a woman now! Nothing but a kind of 13

In ‘Virginia Woolf and cohabiting communities’ (2019) I posit four forms of collective experience: (1) cooperation or helping each other; (2) collaboration or producing together; (3) consensus or uniting in view; and (4) cohabitation­– ­or participating in one world. With no intentional reference to the 4Es, my 4Cs similarly argue the need to discriminate between different forms of communal thinking, which can then be analysed for negative or positive effects. 14 Projecting and responding resemble the generative and receptive processes posited as the double components of creativity (Barbot et al. 2013), childhood acquisition of language (Pear 2016) and adult collaboration (Anderson 2015a). However, whereas generative generally implies individual production, projecting entails moving out from individual consciousness to the qualia of a blended mind. Similarly, while receptive implies incorporating the productions of others, responding suggests the mind is altered in response to an invitation or call. Finally, circulating implies something beyond collaboration’s exchange among participating parts: a repeated but always-­changing ­pattern of collective life that is always both passing and passed on. 15 This scene has been frequently related to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic, and is discussed as exemplifying ‘the importance of bodies and embodied relations’ by Lorraine Sim (2010: 105).



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animalized victim!’ (190).16 Rachel feels herself lying on the ‘surface of the dark, sticky pool’ borne up and down by waves, and then shifts from being in nature to being herself part of the natural world: her body ‘became a drift of melting snow’ and her voice ‘became a bird and flew away’ (327). Woolf’s use of FID is more extensive than Bennett’s, and Woolf’s highly imagistic language more closely captures bodily sensation. But both writers suggest the qualia of leaving one’s own body and projecting out to blend with natural or non-­human worlds. Additionally for both characters, the feeling of being extended alters their sense of self, displacing and obliterating conventionally individualised human identity. Constance suffers ‘the supreme endless spasm, during which she gave up the ghost and bade good-­bye to her very self’ (190); Rachel lies ‘conscious of her body floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room’, with that part of her that has escaped not wishing to be remembered and recalled (328). In the outcomes, neither novel ultimately negates the idea of a discrete individual self that functions in the social world: in Bennett’s novel, Constance returns to her daily life, with the added role of mother; in Woolf’s novel, the surviving characters, after the initial shock of grieving, pick up their own particular lives.17 But these novels strikingly present the two kinds of experience in juxtaposition, granting neither precedence over the other; they are both ‘authentic’ experiences of what can be felt. The characters generally function as individuals in their daily interactions, but we are also shown characters who, in heightened moments, access a parallel, contrasting sense of being, in which self-­relevance and indeed the human self is diminished and the self blends with natural and non-­human worlds.

Responding Relocating the human within the broader natural world, however, raises a fundamental question, encapsulated in the famous conundrum posed in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: ‘Think of a kitchen table . . . when you’re not there’ (1992c: 28). Can we ever know any reality outside our own minds? Reviewing a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Edward Sackville-­West went to the heart of the matter, claiming that in these poems, Rilke was confronting the problem encountered by ‘all the greatest artists in their final period of creation’: ‘the problem of the Pathetic Fallacy’ (1939: 902). Why a poetic device would emerge as a death-­bed consideration might well seem outlandish, until we consider the  root meaning of the term: the pathetic fallacy signifies the error of attributing to the natural world a pathetic or empathetic response to human experience. In the words of John Ruskin, who introduced the term, it signifies ‘the extraordinary, or 16

Significantly, while expressions being attributed to Constance are in quotation marks up to this point, here the quotation marks disappear, signalling a move beyond verbalisation. 17 For a discussion, however, of the communal rhythms in this return, see my ‘Virginia Woolf and cohabiting communities’ (2019).

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false appearances’ that are ‘entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us’, ‘when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy’ (1856: 159–60); in George Eliot’s succinct summary, it is ‘the transference to external objects of the spectator’s own emotions’ (1856: 631). Theories of distributed cognition are plagued by precisely this consideration: in positing an extended mind beyond the individual self, do we not project our own sensibilities on to the external world? Is Constance not appropriating non-­ human animal life; is Rachel not merely annexing nature to her own body? Are seemingly outward projections nothing but metaphoric expressions of human emotions? Since the experience for both these characters entails a sense of self-­ diminishment, some indication of a genuine movement beyond the self is implied through its consequent and manifest effect. But in Rilke, Sackville-­West found a poet who directly confronted ‘the evident life of inanimate objects’ (1939: 902), finding resolution not by projecting the human world into the non-­human, but by imagining a non-­human world that draws the human in: ‘Does the cosmic space we dissolve into taste of us, then?’18 In Rilke’s poems, Sackville-­West explains, ‘the Angel is the symbol of a kind of existence in which the two rhythms of life­– ­that of the human being and that of the thing­– ­are united in a single harmony’ (1939: 902). Significantly, Sackville-­West finds the resolution to pathetic fallacy not in conceptual knowledge but in sensitivity to rhythm, a core element in modernist accounts of porous qualia.19 As we shall see, when fictional characters respond to rhythms in larger natural or indeed social worlds, embodied cognition becomes more strongly extended and enactive, not merely finding correspondences in what lies beyond the self, but creating, through a process of blending, new experiences of selfhood. In The Voyage Out, human repetition of nature’s rhythms occurs as, following Rachel’s death, the community draws together during an evening storm. The violence of the storm parallels the violence of grief, suggesting a common form of pathetic fallacy: the elegiac device of calling on nature to mourn. But rather than nature reflecting human emotion, the environment performs an action which is then repeated on the human level. As the storm approaches, the atmosphere becomes close and heavy; the waves lie ‘rigid’; the air has ‘no room’ to move (347). Then the ‘feeling of pressure and restraint’ is relieved by motion: ‘the wind seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth’; ‘the bushes outside were ruffled and whitened’; ‘the rain rushed down’ (347, 348). The bodily schema enacted in nature is ‘letting go’­– ­a physical release that the group imitates by emotionally releasing the tension caused by Rachel’s death. The survivors furthermore experience the release not as individuals but as a group: they speak the same thing (‘It’s 18

Sackville-­West is quoting Rilke’s Second Elegy as translated by J.  B. Leishman and Stephen Spender in the book under review (Sackville-­West 1939: 902). 19 For modernist perceptions of rhythm as a cosmic unifying force see ‘Rhythm’ in Cuddy-­Keane et al. 2014: 203–9.

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coming!’), ‘simultaneously’ but ‘in many different languages’ (347); then, in the dark, they become a chorus of anonymous voices: ‘several voices exclai[m] at the same moment’; then the narrative identifies simply ‘a man’s voice’, then ‘another voice’, evidencing an anonymous merging into a larger whole (348). As the cacophonous sound finally undergoes a ‘perceptible slackening’ and ‘the atmosphere bec[omes] lighter’, an unidentified voice breathes out, ‘It’s over.’ Cognitively, the storm pulls the human community into nature’s rhythms, building and releasing tension; furthermore, the experience of this ‘great confused ocean of air’, even though it involves fear, draws individuals together, briefly to form an undifferentiated whole. The qualia that Woolf describes are thus both embodied and embedded, reflecting a blending with nature that comes not from projection but from response.20 A similar movement occurs in the ending of James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’. As David Herman has expertly shown, this passage is extraordinarily rich in the multiplicity of cognitive processes it instantiates, including perceptions, memories, inferences about minds, and qualia as well. But my specific interest here is the snow and its role in the main character’s sense of embodied connection­– ­the way, that is, the snow participates in what it is like to experience an environmentally and socially embedded mind. Like Herman, I focus on the relation between the two window scenes in the story, but I seek more specifically to show how they help to define the difference between projecting and responding and the greater movement, in the latter, beyond the self. In the first window scene, Gabriel stands looking out a window during a house party, gazing at the winter scene outside. In an imagined deictic shift, he projects himself bodily into the outer world, moving along the river and through the park, observing the snow on the Wellington monument (almost the entirety of this scene must be in his imagination, since in the non-­fictional Dublin, the monument would not be observable from his aunt’s house). Gabriel also projects his desire on to the landscape, creating out of the outside world an environment of peace and solitude where he would rather be. And the action that initiates his daydream­– ­his warm fingers tapping on the cold glass­– ­emphasises the separation between Gabriel’s actual (inside) and imagined (outside) worlds. In the final scene in the story, as Gabriel stands looking out the bedroom window in a hotel, he is drawn into synchrony with natural rhythms, much like the group at the end of The Voyage Out. Gabriel has been lying in bed, thinking of Michael Furey, the young man who fell in love with Gabriel’s wife Gretta a long time ago, and once again Gabriel imagines an outer scene: ‘the form of a young man ­standing 20

The communal nature of Woolf’s ending has been generally overlooked by recent critics more intent on the loss of Rachel’s individual self. Yet E. M. Forster linked this ending to Jules Romains’s Unanimism, and, reviewing To the Lighthouse, Jean-­Jacques Mayoux wrote, ‘C’est un charactère de la vision­– ­peut-­être de la vision féminine de l’auteur­– ­. . . qu’elle voit les êtres humains non point séparés, mais dans un groupe’ (‘It is characteristic of her vision­– p ­ erhaps of the author’s feminine vision­– ­. . . that she regards human beings not separately, but in a group’) (1928: 427).

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under a dripping tree’ (1967: 223). But this time the description suggests not a projection of desire but an encounter with desire’s other: ‘He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.’ As his imaginative vision expands mistily into the realm of the dead, Gabriel’s own habitual egotism begins to slip away: ‘His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world.’ But the full abandonment of the individuated self occurs in response to inanimate nature’s call. In Gretta’s description of her last meeting with Furey, he had called her attention by throwing gravel up at her window; in the present scene, Gabriel’s attention is similarly drawn by a tapping on the window, but now it is produced by the snow outside. As he turns to look out the window, his mind’s eye follows the blanketing snow across all Ireland and out into the sea, expanding finally out to the farthest expanse of the universe. And his experience of blending into the world causes delimiting borders to disappear: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’ (224). The feeling here is what it is like to experience encompassing whiteness: the object world pervades Gabriel’s consciousness, making inside and outside one. Rather than reading Joyce’s snow as symbolic or metaphoric projections of the human mind, an approach through distributed cognition reads the snow as snow, a material part of the natural world. As physical presence, not mental representation, the snow participates in, and indeed furthers, Gabriel’s cognitive development, leading him to feelings and perceptions unavailable to him on his own. Without attributing any volitional intentionality to snow, we can sense the felt quality of what it is like to blend with the wintry environment and we can trace that blending’s effects. Whether it is the uniform whiteness, the falling, descending movement, or the muted and muffled sounds, the physical rhythms of nature bring Gabriel to a quiet, holistic perception that overcomes the normalised rationalist separations of self and world, and life and death. Whereas projection had allowed Gabriel to indulge his personal and defensive self-­image as aloof and isolated, responding to the call of his environment resituates him as a small but participating part of a larger world.

Circulating The first and the simplest form of porous qualia I am proposing is projecting: seeking correlates for our own experience through identifications with the outer world. My second form adds the dimension of solicitation coming from without, in a dynamic of ‘call and response’. Whereas for both Constance and Rachel, physical experiences of their own bodies instigate feelings of blending, for the community in The Voyage Out and for Gabriel, the rhythms and movements of the natural world draw out their empathetic response. My third form of porous qualia goes beyond both projecting and responding to the feeling of participating in an interweaving, inter-­responsive whole. However much Gabriel may be affected by the falling snow, there is no indication that he feels the snow is in turn affected



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by him;21 in contrast, my final form of porous qualia involves the feeling of being immersed in a communal mind through which experience constantly flows. The whole is not a static unified object but a moving mass, and so my term for this form is ‘circulating’. As the strongest form of porous qualia exemplified here, circulating takes us further along the embodiment spectrum toward the enactive and further along the embedded spectrum toward the extended mind. The modernist period, as I have noted, saw increasing concerns about herd psychology and the dangers of people behaving as a mass. Yet, as philosopher Robert Wilson points out, a contrasting stream of thought­– i­ncluding Émile Durkheim’s ‘collective consciousness’ and William McDougall’s ‘group mind’­– f­ocused positively on the collective creation of culture. Whereas the mass is swayed by contagion into uniformity, often manipulated by a charismatic leader, the collective or group is a dynamic body. Further examples of dynamic groups came from the biological study of superorganisms, a term first used in the eighteenth century to refer to the Earth as a self-­organising system constantly changing through interactions of organic and inorganic forms. In the modernist period, the term ‘superorganism’ was influentially applied to insect colonies by entomologist William Morton Wheeler to explain the way adaption and natural selection can operate at the level of the group (1911). But while the obvious candidates for study as superorganisms were social insects such as ants and bees who depend on communal activity and organisation for food and reproduction, a more complex and more puzzling phenomenon presented itself in the flocking movements of birds. Edmund Selous, a British ornithologist who wrote eight books based on his observations of bird behaviour, devoted many pages to describing the fluid and instantaneously changing patterns created by flocks comprising hundreds if not thousands of birds.22 While Selous conveyed the extraordinary beauty of these coordinated motions­– ­often likened today to a dance in the sky­– h ­ e also found the origins and purpose of the sudden gusts of flight impossible to explain without positing that some kind of telepathic communication was taking place. On 30 July 1931 the Times Literary Supplement published a review of Selous’s most recent book, Thought-­Transference (or What?) in Birds. The reviewer, Basil de Sélincourt, rejects Selous’s speculations, asserting that we ‘should not credit birds with thought’, and proffers instead the survival-­based explanation that the birds are instinctively practising the alertness needed for their safety. Yet the review, entitled ‘Group-­action in birds’, is inadvertently more evocative than dismissive and actually lends support to Selous’s approach. De Sélincourt offers compelling descriptions of ‘flocks of starlings that rise, wheel and settle as if animated by one 21

Ronald Giere argues that ‘one can usefully introduce a notion of distributed cognition without attributing other cognitive attributes, such as knowing, let alone having a mind or being conscious, to distributed cognitive systems’ (2007: 313). Picking up on Giere’s distinction, we can consider Joyce’s snow part of a distributed cognitive system, without conceiving the snow as possessing cognitive agency. 22 One of the most striking examples, known as a murmuration of starlings, can be seen on many YouTube sites.

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impulse’ and ‘flocks of sparrows’ that ‘go up in a cloud for no apparent reason, and then drop back again to their feeding with the gradated movement of a closed fan’. His hypothesis of survival pragmatics is overshadowed by the spontaneity and beauty of the wave movements and the mystery of a single bird’s staying on the ground. Although he reductively assigns the birds’ movements to ‘normal sense perception’, his descriptions show normal perception to be accomplishing extraordinary feats. Finally, while he dismisses Selous’s suggestion of human parallels, arguing that they would ‘send us searching for some supernormal or even supernatural agency’, de Sélincourt’s own proffered analogy that, in lying down together, pigs develop ‘a certain luxury of family feeling’ treats ‘family feeling’ as an embodied cross-­species term. Less than two weeks before this review appeared, Virginia Woolf gave the finished manuscript of The Waves to Leonard to read. The rhythmic structure of this novel derives from fluctuations between individual separateness and group collectivity, and the descriptive interchapters depict alternations between single and choric bird song and between the motions of single birds and birds amassed together in flight. Like Selous and de Sélincourt, Woolf describes the flock’s extraordinary formations. Birds descend en masse ‘like a net’ ‘on the tree-­tops’, yet one bird heads off alone; other birds turn and slice through the formation so that it looks like ‘one body cut into a thousand shreds’ (1992e: 139). Woolf’s collective is rent by violence and disruption, but the birds model a form of communal dynamics that, with its looseness, fluidity and instability, brings individuals together without imposing an organisational unity that would make them all the same. Paralleling such bird flight with the complex interweaving human voices in the novel’s chapters, Woolf then offers a model communal dynamics that obtains in both human and non-­human worlds. My claim is that Woolf is not using birds metaphorically. The interweaving of birds throughout the novel­– ­for they seep as well into the characters’ imagistic soliloquies­– ­implies not analogy or mere likeness but literal connectivity between human and non-­human animals on a fundamental organic level.23 Woolf may or may not have known Selous’s book, but she had an intense interest in the natural sciences and Selous’s work, as de Sélincourt’s prominent review indicates, was in the broad public domain.24 But Woolf’s approach also reflects a pervasive modernist fascination with rhythmic relations: the connectivities rhythmically enacted within a species and the commonalities rhythmically flowing through and linking animate and even inanimate life. Rhythm, not always promising regularity, was for many modernists the glue of the world; bird flight, with its 23

Parallels between birds and humans run throughout Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts, in which the total environment participates in an outdoor pageant: ‘the trees tossing and the birds swirling seemed called out of their private lives, out of their separate avocations, and made to take part’ (1992a: 71). 24 Christina Alt (2010) shows that work by ornithologists like Selous and Julian Huxley was popular and accessible during Woolf’s time, and strongly aligned with Woolf’s interests.

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undulating rhythms, was correspondingly powerful evidence of the potential in mobile forms. One of the striking features of the flocking behaviour of starlings is that, unlike the linear V formations of flying geese, swarming flocks have no single leader. As Selous noted, changes in direction can be initiated by any individual bird. A recent overview of the topic goes further to state ‘clusters are democratic’, permeating up ‘from the grassroots’ (Friederici 2009). How the motion of a single bird diffuses through the entire flock seems now to be at least partially explained. With the advantage of high-­speed photography and computer simulations, researchers have been able to observe that each bird coordinates its motion in relation to its six or seven immediate neighbours, and the local fluctuations are passed on through the group, much like the responsive repetition of action in a chorus line, but with more allowance for variation and novelty.25 Rather than telepathic, the communication is both embodied and enactive: the sensory signals are not only visual but also acoustical and tactile, involving responses to sounds and the rushing air. While the strongest explanation for such behaviour is still species survival, some scientists, finding that the extraordinary formations go beyond and even sometimes contradict survival tactics, speculate instead that flocking may be an emergent phenomenon. While ‘emergence’ is a slippery term with somewhat differing meanings in physics, biology, philosophy and complex systems theory, the basic concept entails the emergence of higher-­level patterns from lower-­level functions, where the higher-­level effects are complex, to some extent unpredictable, and more than a sum of the functioning parts. Examples range from the formation of waves from water molecules to the emergence of consciousness from the neural networks of the brain. When emergence characterises collective behaviour (in human or non-­ human animals), actions performed by a group differ distinctively from any action individuals can perform alone; yet the cause for such behaviour is not top-­down executive planning but spontaneous interactions among participating organisms, permeating the whole from the bottom up. If flocking is an emergent phenomenon, the complex interactive patterns are simply manifestations of what these birds are able physically and biologically to do. They fly that way because they can fly that way, and they can fly that way because it is in their nature to have a collective life. Shifting from bird flight back to modernist literature takes us back to the question of parallels. Are there literary descriptions of similar interactive, coordinated movements in humans? Do such descriptions imply that any purpose, like species survival, is being served? Or do they suggest emergent behaviour, spontaneously arising from a propensity, in human nature, to act in collective ways? In The Years, the novel Woolf wrote after The Waves, body movements ripple through a human group like the undulations in a murmuration of starlings, in rhythmic but not routinely regular ways. Like the bird flight, Woolf’s group formations emanate from the spontaneous movements of individuals; passed on, the physical gestures 25

For recent scientific analyses of bird flight see Bajec and Heppner 2009; Cavagna et al. 2013; Hemelrijk and Hildenbrandt 2015.

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are both echoed and altered, creating a complex mobile pattern, detectable only at the level of the group. Both Woolf and Selous may well have been tracking a sensorimotor way of articulating group identity, a natural trait shared by birds and humans. But the significance for the human world is not quite the same. The expansion of the birds’ flight patterns beyond the necessary actions for survival suggests that their behaviour may be their way of enacting, even celebrating, their life as a group. In Woolf’s novel, the implications of the group formations go further to suggest that radically different and potentially transformative forms of community are being sought and sketched out. The Years falls into that somewhat neglected modernist genre of the family saga, following an extended family of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins, along with a few continuing family friends. Dipping into and skipping through time from 1880 to the early 1930s, focusing now on this character, now on that, the novel ends with all the characters gathered together in a communal scene. To describe the conversation during this party as disjointed is an understatement indeed. People fail to listen to what someone else is saying; people get distracted and don’t finish their sentences; they get interrupted by other people or by the music and lose their train of thought. If conversation jangles, however, something else circulates in the room making connections: there are fifteen instances of hands catching or stretching out to grasp someone else’s hand, ten gestures in which someone pats, or lays a hand on, or brushes against another person’s knee, eight where hands are placed on another’s shoulders, and five where a hand taps or is laid on an arm. Most of the hand movements are gestures of welcoming and greeting, but they progress from expressing openness to conveying affection and intimacy when hands touch shoulders or knees. In Woolf’s loose and capacious collective, touch is not always harmonious: Rose somewhat aggressively taps on her brother’s arm, and he later taps her shoulder, re-­enacting their childhood quarrels. Yet Peggy softens her irritation with her brother North by laying her hand on his arm. Moreover, as her hand remains on his arm and she feels its hard and taut muscle, Peggy reflects on how touch realises both ‘the nearness of human beings and their distance, so that if one meant to help one hurt, yet they depended on each other’ (1998: 290). Human touch does not quite produce the sensuous luxury of family feeling that de Sélincourt imagined in a covey of little pigs. But whereas de Sélincourt privileges ‘unanimity’ over the mere ‘wave-­communication’ he attributes to birds, it is wave-­communication, not unanimity, that functions positively in group formation in The Years. Touch circulates underneath the fragmented conversations, passing through the room like a dance. Touching is not sex-­differentiated: touching shoulders includes niece-­aunt, father-­daughter and brother-­sister relationships. Perhaps the party’s most intimate gesture is laying a hand on someone’s knee, a gesture that crosses borders of sex and age and ties of blood, expanding from aunt-­nephew (reciprocally), to a woman and her former rejected lover, to a homosexual male foreigner and his intimate female friend’s sister, including as well the anonymous



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dancers who brush against numerous knees.26 Further, in a bonding touch extending to strangers, the hostess lays encouraging hands on the shoulders of the porter’s children, who suddenly appear at the door. And in the last gesture, as if to invite an ongoing chain of connection, the eldest daughter in the family turns from a window and holds out her hands­– a­ gesture made to her brother but, as she faces the room, by implication extending to everyone, including the reader as well. The varying but rhythmic repetition of touch expands the circle of intimacy, offering a loose bodily connection with an ever-­expanding arc. Resembling the chain reactions in coordinated bird flight, the motley and disparate group gathered together at the end of The Years enacts togetherness through a circle of touch. The form of community modelled by their interrelated movements is furthermore strikingly similar, in characteristics, to bird flocks: democratic, interactive, embodied and emergent. The movements have no central originating point: the circuit depends on complex and differentiated human interactors. Each touch is distinctive but the ripple effect of repeated gesture reflects a group creation of patterning that exceeds its individual parts. As wave-­communication, not unanimity, the circulating gestures are indicative more of improvisation than of order, but the fluid, unpredictable motions embody a way of living relationally that is both responsive to the individual and capable of change. Despite the similarities with bird flight, however, I am not suggesting that humans and birds share a common nature; we are more likely tracking a cognitive process that runs across species, but is more complex in humans than in birds. In humans, for example, the group pattern is not as biologically uniform as it is in birds; starlings and geese invariably fly in their distinctive formations, whereas humans can form and have formed themselves into both leader-­dominated and democratic communal structures. In humans, embodied relations are also crisscrossed with opposing communicative lines, and the combinatory power of imagistic embodied thinking can be overridden by the dissecting operations of analytic thought.27 As one of Woolf’s characters thinks near the beginning of the party, ‘The steps from brain to brain must be cut very shallow, if thought is to mount them’ (257). Yet, Woolf suggests, unifying possibilities can be glimpsed at the level of phenomenal consciousness: another character, sensing rhythmic echoes, later wonders, ‘Is there a pattern, a theme, recurring, like music, half remembered, half foreseen? . . . a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible?’ (270). No one person at the party, it must be noted, comments on the cycle of touch rhythmically travelling the room, nor does the narrator refer to touch as an explicit theme. Yet the rhythmic pattern in the text instantiates ‘a pattern . . . recurring, like music’, inviting a phenomenal perception of repetition and connection: a feeling, experienced perhaps by 26

The pairings are: Eleanor and North, Eleanor and Renny, Sara and Nicholas; Kitty and Edward, and Nicholas and Maggie. 27 In Between the Acts, the narrator distinguishes between logical ‘separatists’ and intuitive ‘unifiers’, offering distinctions that could describe different characters or different states of the collective mind (1992a: 72).

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c­ haracters and readers alike, of what is it like to be connected in a fragmented, disjointed yet nonetheless interacting whole. But the question remains: can such qualia be actively cognitive, if we take cognitive work to entail something productive of change? I think Woolf’s answer here is yes, but provisionally. Elsewhere I have posited a form of embodied cognition in which physical gestures enact embodied or dynamic schemas that can be directly, if subliminally, employed for practical use.28 Navigational actions (circling back, breaking through) or body movements (stretching, jumping), for example, can offer strategies for working out problems without recourse to semantic articulation. The focus in this approach is not on the way grasping a hammer can produce the concept of grasping an idea, but on the way reaching out and holding on can be applied to, mapped on to, a variety of situations in which reaching and holding can be productively performed.29 In Woolf’s novel, the ‘gigantic pattern’ glimpsed by one character and, as I suggest, sensed by the rhythmically sensitive reader is the dynamic schema of collective inter-­responsiveness, and it performs the cognitive work of counteracting the traditional investment in the individual self with a complex awareness of relational selfhood. But the further implication of Woolf’s novel is that such sensed relationality needs to be translated into social responsibility: embodied perceptions must be complemented by conscious practical work.

From Relationality to Responsibility Despite the fragmentation in the conversations and the conflicts between interior thoughts, one reiterated question at Woolf’s party links the interiorised minds. How might we live differently? How can we create a better world based on a fuller understanding of ourselves? The question flickers through the group like circulating touch, and like touch, at its core is the fundamental problem of relationality­ – ­how it involves both nearness and distance, how it is the most problematic aspect of being human and the most essential. In this novel, Woolf suggests that the first stage towards any answer lies in experiencing the qualia of relational selfhood, but she warns that the second more difficult phase is to create laws and belief systems grounded on relationality rather than on claims of individual rights. In an earlier scene, two characters together articulate the problem, as one character begins a sentence, ‘if we do not know ourselves, how then can we make religions, laws, that –’ and the other continues, ‘That fit­– t­hat fit’ (205).30 The enormous problem, of 28

See my ‘Movement, space, and embodied cognition in To the Lighthouse’ (2014). It is tempting to connect this approach with work being done in the relatively new field of motor cognition, but the primary focus there has been to tie movement to semantics, much along the lines of the conceptual metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson. What we find so frequently in modernist descriptions of embodiment is a level of cognitive work occurring before the linguistic stage. 30 Unfinished sentences, in Woolf’s writings, are generally signs not of failure but of openness to others, as evidenced here in the characters’ mutual struggle to articulate a shared problem. In the review mentioned above, Jean-­Jacques Mayoux wrote that what fascinated Woolf most about 29



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course, is defining ‘ourselves’, but Woolf’s insistence on the plural looks toward a new ecology that would transform our political and social worlds. Not proposing herself a shape for responsible relational government or society, Woolf turns the problem over to the collective mind. As one character at the party reflects, one gets ‘knots in the middle of the forehead’ from ‘thinking alone’ (303), while the novel ends on an open question directed to the assembled group: ‘And now?’ (318). The time is 1937; it is also our own moment, for after many chapters entitled with specific dates, the last chapter is headed simply ‘Present Day’. The novel is not just about the feeling that we exist collectively; it asks how we can use that feeling to build a better world. Filtered through bird flight, wave connection and rhythmic touch, The Years thus contributes two significant dimensions to the history of distributed cognition: it shows how embodied experiences of porosity can prompt us to redefine our selfhood as relational beings; it also argues that the feeling that we exist relationally must be supplemented by collective responsibility and conscious collaborative work.31

Concluding Thoughts In the history of distributed cognition, modernism offers striking examples of the way we can and do feel part of a distributed world. Moreover, modernist literature suggests three ways we come to feelings of distributed cognition: we cast outside ourselves for connections, seeking forms that correspond to our feelings; we respond to a call from the outside world, shifting our centre to an intermediate space; we enter into a participatory relation, feeling ourselves actively engaged in an interweaving, ‘inter-­responsive’ whole. Each of these cognitive processes is shown to have potentially positive and transformative effects, urging us, respectively, to embrace more fluid constructs of the self, to abandon our habitual egocentric perspective, and to value forms of collective experience that preserve the differences requisite for a non-­coercive, interactive world. Yet, on a cautionary note, these modernist examples also point to the need for subject/object balance, somewhere between projection as the imposition of the self on the environment and coercion as the control of the self by a force outside. They argue the need both to retain at least some measure of individual agency and to respect difference in human beings was, above all, ‘leurs rapports réciproques’ and ‘leurs disposition à de tels rapports’ (‘their reciprocal understandings’ and ‘their inclinations toward [creating] such understandings’) (1928: 427). 31 Neuroscientists are currently tracking two complex, interrelated neural systems: the default network, preferentially engaged in non-­directed, exploratory thought, and the attentional networks, activated when we focus on external tasks. Woolf’s narratives, I argue, offer provocative insights into the non-­conscious, embodied and unbounded processes­– ­including porous qualia­– ­associated with the default mode (see my ‘Mind-­wandering and mindfulness’, 2016). At the same time, the brain’s rapid toggling back and forth between these two differently oriented systems accords with Woolf’s underlying insistence on the need to convert our feelings as collective beings into social and political forms.

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individual forms of life. Modernism characteristically keeps us mindful of complexity­– ­a trait that, perhaps more than anything, highlights modernist narrative’s vital contribution to our own attempts to think the mind’s whole. Finally, for the field of distributed cognition, an approach through qualia offers both epistemological resolution and methodological possibility. If we cannot, at least at present, demonstrate empirically the extent to which cognition can be shared, we do have compelling evidence that people can feel they are participating in extended cognitive life. We can pursue a study of manifest ontologies, analysing the forms such experience takes. In this respect, narratological analysis helps us to bridge between subjective, even fictional, accounts of experience and third-­person understandings: we can gain reliable access to cognitive processes (not merely thoughts) beyond our individual experience, as long as we bear in mind that what we are accessing is not what cognition is but what cognitive processes are felt to be like. Such study can both clarify the knowledge we derive from experiencing porous qualia and further the possibility that we will base more of our actions on those experiences, in humanly and planetarily helpful ways.

12 N i et z sc h e ’ s G e nea log ie d e r Moral Pro a nd C ontra D i s t ri but e d C og nition E. T. Troscianko

The body and physiology the starting point: why? Ausgangspunkt vom Leibe und von der Physiologie: warum? Nietzsche, Will to Power (Wille zur Macht), §492 The mind extends beyond the confines of the skull. That is one way of summarising the essence of the 4E paradigm of cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) (Menary 2010), or a roughly equivalent defining principle of distributed cognition: the mind is distributed across the brain, the rest of the body, and the sociocultural and natural world. Running counter to the still-­prevailing wisdom that ‘minds are simply what brains do’ (Minsky 1985: 287), these models of mind insist, one way or another, that the whole body and the environment co-­constitute our cognitive life. This way of thinking about thinking has become an important scientific counterweight to neurocentric models. As our scientific understanding of the mind has moved away from a focus on centralised amodal symbol manipulation, and instead has begun to emphasise dynamic interactions with the body and the environment, science has come to seem more relevant to questions of experience as well as of processing: it promises us purchase on the what-­it’s-­like as well as on the underlying mechanisms. These developments have therefore also helped foster dialogue between the cognitive sciences and areas of the humanities which might otherwise have remained more resistant to dialogue with science, because the pay-­offs of this dialogue for questions about, say, the cultural or aesthetic contexts for experience are now far clearer. Philosophical traditions like phenomenology have been strongly implicated in this rejection of the computational models that dominated mid-­to late-­twentieth-­ century cognitive science, and philosophers including Merleau-­Ponty and Husserl, as well as Wittgenstein, Ryle and William James, are often name-­checked in connection with distributed cognition, as thinkers who prefigured its current incarnation. Some have argued (Bamford 2007; Welshon 2015) that Nietzsche too can be included on the list of those who explored distributed cognition avant la lettre. He was a far from systematic philosopher, so claiming for him a fully worked-­out model of distributed cognition would be a stretch. But many of his philosophical

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ideas and tendencies are compatible with the basic principles of distributed cognition: he leans towards eliminativist physicalist explanations of mind (saying that things like consciousness, the soul and the will are better dealt with as physiological rather than metaphysical or moral entities), and he promotes fundamental psychological concepts (most notably the drive) that are arguably compatible with ‘embodied embedded dynamicist views’ (Welshon 2015). But here I propose to shift the focus slightly, from Nietzsche’s philosophy to how he conveys it; to Nietzsche’s style rather than his content­– o­ r rather, to how his style and content interact. Nietzsche is one of the most rhetorically flamboyant of all philosophers, so these interactions draw attention to themselves. How he says what he says is conspicuously important. This quality is reflected in the fact that his writing has been much analysed not just by philosophers but by literary critics too. One of the primary features that attracts attention to Nietzsche’s works as philosophical literature, or literary philosophy, is their use of metaphor. Thus commentators have, for example, discussed the role of metaphor and other rhetorical forms in Nietzsche’s thought (Deming 2004); explored the hazy borderlands between Nietzsche’s metaphorical and literal language as a window on to his intellectual influences (Robertson 2005); argued for the importance of fictions, descriptions and metaphors to understanding his philosophy of language (Emden 2005); and compared his uses of metaphor and motif to those of Goethe and Günter Grass in a discussion of chaos and complexity theory (McCarthy 2006). An explicit or implicit hierarchy of disciplines is apparent in most interdisciplinary treatments of Nietzsche’s work (McCarthy’s book being a notable exception). In general in these analyses, the main goal is to understand the philosophy better by attending to its ‘literary’ qualities, whether that means showing how a text enacts its own will to power or illuminating Nietzsche’s philosophy of language or his fusion of philology with biology and physiology. When one drills down a little, however, all these arguments are arguments about the linguistically mediated workings of the human mind: they are concerned with how Nietzsche’s texts affect readers (Deming) or how language works (Emden), or with the underlying structures linking living organisms and social institutions (Robertson), or the commonalities between science and literature as forms of creative thought (McCarthy). As such, they are arguments about ‘literature’ as much as about ‘philosophy’. The point here is therefore not to see where Nietzsche managed to ‘get it right’ in a way now magisterially confirmed by contemporary science (‘Neuroscience confirms Nietzsche’s hypothesis’, ‘This claim has been spectacularly vindicated by recent developments in cognitive neuroscience of consciousness’, etc.; see Welshon 2015). The idea is instead to treat Nietzsche equally as writer and thinker, with an even-­handedness mandated specifically by the tenets of distributed cognition, in which embodied acts like writing are not subservient to thought, but integral to them. The conceptual framework of distributed cognition offers a valuable way into the study of Nietzsche’s writing as literary writing­– o­ r rather, as writing which is dense in qualities usually thought of as literary. A cognitive, and specifically a distributed, approach has much to offer analyses like those cited in the preceding



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paragraphs. The distributed model of mind can shed light on the many manifestations of mind with a contextual breadth that makes it eminently suited to diverse readings of any philosopher as writer, or vice versa. In what follows, then, we’ll turn an eye to the convergences and divergences between textual form and content. We will ask, firstly, how these may affect ­readers’ responses to the text in question. The answer to this question will help situate Nietzsche’s thought in relation to current conceptual paradigms and will inform our current thinking about distributed cognition. And this in turn will offer new insight into the nature of literary response and its importance to future explorations of the nature of mind. The fulcrum of our inquiries into Nietzsche’s use of language and how it prompts readers’ engagement will be the basic question about integration and constitution that remains so thorny in the field: are aspects of the body and/or the environment really so integral to the mind-­as-­system that the system should be described and studied as including them (e.g. Varela et al. 1991; O’Regan and Noë 2001; Clark 2008)? Or are the ways in which body and environment contribute to the mind’s functions transient, optional and/or dissimilar enough that defining and studying them as a single system is counter-­productive (e.g. Adams and Aizawa 2001; Wilson 2002; Fodor 2009)? In essence, is the distribution real extension or mere scaffolding? In the text we’ll be exploring, Nietzsche comes down on both sides or neither, and the vacillations and combinations of his positions are an instructive part of the pre-­history of distributed cognition, as well as suggesting a new way of thinking about how the distributedness of cognition can itself be modulated in the shifting relations between author, text and reader. The text I’ve chosen is On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift; henceforth GM).1 This is not the text in which Nietzsche most explicitly expounds his ideas about embodiment, enaction, or any of the many Es and human nature; these are more fully worked out in texts like The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882), Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886) and The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, published posthumously). Nor is it Nietzsche’s most ‘literary’ text: that accolade tends to go to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883). But I have chosen it precisely for these ‘negative’ qualities. The prevalence of ‘literary’ features in a polemical text like GM illustrates their ubiquity in Nietzsche’s philosophical thought, while the text’s wide-­ranging disquisitions on morality, religion, class, law and all the rest let us assess the presence or absence of ideas about the distribution of cognition in Nietzsche’s thinking on other matters. And this in turn gives us purchase on the question of whether distribution is, for Nietzsche (both in what he writes about and in how he thinks), a fundamental fact about cognition rather than featuring only when it is centre-­stage. Published in 1887, GM is the highly rhetorical culmination of Nietzsche’s critical project of the ‘revaluation of all values’ (‘Umwertung aller Werte’). The text’s contribution to this project depends on two philosophical principles. The first 1

All translations from the German throughout this chapter are my own.

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is perspectivism, the idea that there are no objective facts, only perspectives on things; truth is at best the integration of multiple perspectives. The second is genealogy, the idea that the reality of a phenomenon can be revealed by investigation of its origins. The case study is morality: the reality of morality, investigated genealogically, is revealed as nothing but perspectival (a process which involves a lot of overturning of our usual ways of classifying (im)moral people and actions). Obviously there is already something of a tension here: one way of doing genealogical philosophy would be to dig down to a bedrock of objective truth incompatible with perspectivism. We’ll come back to this later. For now, though, both principles can be understood as compatible in a basic way with important tenets of distributed cognition. Perspectivism might draw our attention to the situatedness of thought, and the fact that our truths can be constructed only through cognitive-­perceptual engagement with the world; genealogy might remind us that the natural and the conceptual world share a recoverable evolutionary history. So in philosophical terms GM makes for an interesting test case for Nietzsche as a philosopher of distributed cognition. The text is interesting rhetorically too. It consists of a prologue and three essays, the first entitled ‘ “Good and evil”, “good and bad” ’ (‘ “Gut und Boese”, “Gut und Schlecht” ’), the second ‘ “Guilt”, “bad conscience”, and related matters’ (‘ “Schuld”, “Schlechtes Gewissen”, und Verwandtes’), and the third ‘What do ascetic ideals mean?’ (‘Was bedeuten asketische Ideale?’). Each of the three essays is split into between seventeen and twenty-­eight numbered sections, and is written in the first person, periodically addressing the reader directly in the second person. Nietzsche’s language is, as ever, unconventionally opinionated, often aggressively defiant, and heavily laden with metaphor. It is shaped by a basic conceptual metaphor, the argument-­as-­path, and it revivifies this lexicalised metaphorical structure by interspersing the invocations of a journey along a path with numerous destinations, often conspicuously horrific, grotesque or otherwise offputting, or (less often) idyllically idealised, all of them metaphorically representing the concepts being revaluated. The endpoint of this philosophical and perspectival journey will, the narrator hopes, be a discovery of the reality of morality. As we will see, the interaction between the philosophical enterprise and the rhetorical project of its communication is closely bound up with the contradiction that turns out to be inherent in this ‘discovery’ of ‘reality’. My analysis of this interaction between the philosophy and the rhetoric will take in discussion of the main features of distributed cognition which span the textual-­ cognitive divide. Language as a whole can be thought of as the ultimate affordance for cognitive action, and I will show how its more specific properties, like metaphor, linguistic categorisation, textual imagery (visuospatial description), and perspective or focalisation, can be profitably understood as affordances, for both writer and reader, on multiple dimensions of the distributed mind, from perception and mental imagery to abstract thought, emotion, attention and social cognition. The logic underlying my tracing of these links between mind and text is encapsulated in the concept of cognitive realism (developed more fully in e.g. Troscianko



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2013a, 2014). The basic idea is that a cognitively realistic text is one whose evocation of a particular facet of cognition corresponds to the reality of how that cognitive faculty operates in readers’ minds. A cognitively unrealistic text, meanwhile, is one in which there is a divergence rather than convergence between the workings of the mind as textually evoked and as operating outside the text. A single text may well be cognitively realistic in some respects (say, in its evocation of memory) and not in others (for instance in how it evokes some aspect of attention). There is nothing inherently better about being realistic than unrealistic; the benefit of the labels is in generating hypotheses about likely dynamics of text–­mind interaction. They do so by helping us clarify the relationships between cognition evoked in texts, cognition as the operation of minds (of readers and writers), and cognition as intuited in folk psychology. The identification of cognitive realism, as I practise it, involves no a priori privileging of, say, neuroscience over anthropology, or experimental psychology over phenomenology; the focus is on what needs to be explained, not any particular method for explaining it. It also takes a pragmatic stance on the inevitable provisionality of human knowledge about the cognitive realities: the fact that our understanding keeps moving would be a bad reason not to draw on it. Finally, as a concept focused on textual manifestations of cognitive structures, cognitive realism can be attributed to a text independently of any claims about authorial intention. Whether or not we consider Nietzsche to have subscribed to any form of philosophical realism, for example, it is perfectly possible not only to pursue a conceptually realist agenda in analysing his texts (systematically identifying the common structures of our thinking), but also to identify in his textual creations the implicit or explicit markers of a similar agenda. Indeed, the gaps between inferred intention and its expression will be an important part of the discussion to come.

Pro Distributed Cognition Let’s now turn to the text, and start with its basic structure of argument-­as-­path. As the text unfolds, narrator and reader move almost hand in hand along a path through rhetorical space, with many of the numbered sections beginning or ending with helpful words of guidance. The narrator signals digression, deferral, return, revision, progress in approaching the goal that is ‘the problem’; he warns us that we will both need ‘stamina’ (2.19; ‘eine[n] langen Atem’­– ­lit. long breath) for a difficult search; he beckons us to changes of direction, distance and location, from the horizontal perspective to an elevated standpoint over a totality to a zoomed-­in view of ressentiment as a violet to be studied ‘in close-­up’ (2.11; ‘aus der Nähe’). He often employs formulations which emphasise physical progress along a path: ‘to take up again the course of our inquiry’ (2.8; ‘um den Gang unsrer Untersuchung wieder aufzunehmen’), for example, or ‘for now, let us pursue the course of this whole development of the consciousness of guilt to its conclusion’ (2.20; ‘führen wir jetzt nur den Gang dieser ganzen Schuldbewußtseins-­Entwicklung vorläufig zu Ende’). And our path is one amongst many others. Some are good paths: ‘which

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paths lead to this goal? And which of them most safely?’ (3.20; ‘welche Wege führen zu diesem Ziele? Und welche von ihnen am sichersten?’). Some are not: ‘it is a path that will perhaps lead us in particular to the great nausea’ (3.19; ‘es ist ein Weg, der vielleicht gerade uns zum großen Ekel führt’). Some are favoured by people definitely not to be emulated: ‘His soul limps; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back doors, everything hidden appeals to him as his world’ (1.10; ‘Seine Seele schielt; sein Geist liebt Schlupfwinkel, Schleichwege und Hintertüren, alles Versteckte mutet ihn an als seine Welt’). By guiding us in this way through a network of possible routes, the text exploits a cluster of basic cognitive metaphors described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By: ‘AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY, A JOURNEY DEFINES A PATH, and A PATH DEFINES A SURFACE’ (1980: 89–103). According to conceptual metaphor theory, the structures of our bodies and physical environments shape our conceptual structures, and the common argument– journey–­path–­surface equivalences (‘are you with me?’, ‘let’s pursue this idea a little further’, ‘we’ve covered a lot of ground’, ‘now we need to go back over that point’) are a prime example of this interpenetration: we naturally construe the making of conceptual progress in the physical terms of progress through systematically structured space. This type of construal is cognitively ubiquitous, and the value system to which it attaches is equally entrenched: broadly speaking, forwards is good and up tends to be likewise. These associations hold here too, except for a few contrasting philosophical trajectories through space, like the penetration downwards of ‘a scepticism that dug deeper and deeper’ (P.5; ‘eine immer tiefer grabende Skepsis’) and the backwards movement of etymology (1.4). In these ways, Nietzsche taps in uncomplicatedly to deeply embedded structures of thought, in their environmentally distributed essence: the textually evoked path is part of the argument. This cognitive realism serves to draw in the reader by structuring the argument in the most natural way possible, probably thereby maximising the degree of spontaneity with which we engage, step by step, with difficult ideas about the relations between good, bad and evil. The individual words and phrases used to construct this metaphorical field of paths vary in their positions on the spectrum from wholly lexicalised to more novel. As such, they may prompt responses that shift between experiences in which these structures are a relatively inconspicuous framework for conceptual thought, and experiences in which the metaphors act as prompts to more explicit visuospatial imagining. Even at the more implicit end of the spectrum, however, embodiment and enaction remain important. Research on metaphor processing indicates that readers engage in embodied ways with even lexicalised, or ‘dead’, verbal metaphors: ‘People’s understanding of abstract events, such as “grasping the concept”, is constrained by aspects of their embodied experience as if they were immersed in the discourse situation, even when the described situations can only be metaphorically realized’ (Gibbs 2017: 225). Making a congruent physical movement (reaching out to grasp something) increases the speed of comprehension of phrases like ‘grasp the concept’ (Wilson and Gibbs 2007), and when participants were asked to form mental images



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in response to metaphorical phrases like ‘tear apart the argument’, performing relevant movements (e.g. tearing something) enhanced the mental imagery, which exhibited important embodied qualities of the actions being referred to (like the object one has torn apart no longer existing; see Gibbs et al. 2006). So the path structure provides a straightforward way of engaging the sensorimotor invariants which connect our mental life with the rest of nature, probably prompting relatively attenuated imaginative responses in readers. Instances of explicit signalling become less frequent as the argument progresses, as if the narrator takes the reader’s accompaniment increasingly for granted. But this is where the more novel metaphors come in, prompting perhaps more fully formed imaginative experiences. We are led through a multitude of spaces­– ­swamps and deserts, dark corners and cages, plunging boulders, summits and the subterranean­– w ­ hich sustain throughout the impression of a wide-­roaming journey through fast-­changing terrain. From the outset, then, stasis is rejected for movement in a context of communicative proximity, conveying and promoting the philosophical agility that perspectivism demands of those who contemplate it. Movement is essential to the argument, and is made perceptually and emotionally appealing by the places it takes us. We are told of a hidden blossoming world like secret gardens (P.3); we are encouraged to be the educated, brave and hard-­ working comrades who will come and explore a hidden land (of morality) with new questions and new eyes (P.7); we are told we will need to be ready for winter walks in thin mountain air (2.24); we are encouraged in nausea at the dissembling and sugary poisonous weeds that grow in the swamp of those who are weak and suffering and self-­pitying (3.14). All these things intersperse the basic enactive participation in the intellectual journey itself with concisely potent prompts both to more explicit imagining and to pronounced emotional appraisal of what is given. Emotions can be understood as evolved responses in which appraisal of what this means to me now serves to establish action tendencies that flexibly guide appropriate action (Frijda 2007; Troscianko 2014: esp. 164–72). Feeling excitement, for instance, gives me (via the adrenalin response that increases heart rate) the sense of having more energy, and makes it more likely that I will seek out opportunities to use that energy. The appraisals elicited here through multisensory descriptions are all geared towards making us more likely to categorically reject the supposedly negative, and embrace the apparently positive (not least by retaining the energy to continue this journey at all). The exhilarating, the idyllic, the mysterious, are pitted against the revolting and the despicable, and so our imaginative and emotional responses are harnessed, via unconventional and evanescent metaphors, in service of the conceptual case being made through the underlying lexicalised metaphorical structure of the argument as path. Through this combination of strategies, the language of the text affords specific cognitive possibilities. It creates potential for readers’ responses and subsequent behaviours, by offering an environment­– ­a set of cognitive niches­– i­n which new ways of thinking are possible. The psychologist J. J. Gibson defined an affordance as the potential use which an object or other feature of the environment offers to

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a living creature. The literary scholar Terence Cave has recently expanded the definition to include ‘not only the uses of an object but also the object itself viewed in the light of those uses: . . . the wheel is an affordance for transportation, for pulleys and gears, for clockwork, and so forth’ (2016: 48). Language is an affordance par excellence. Like any complex text, this one exploits language’s capacity both to be a multipurpose affordance (that is, to trigger numerous new ways of thinking about things) and to generate multiple additional affordances (like specific rhetorical tropes that encourage particular cognitive acts) in a cascade of cognitive facilitation. One of the most significant roles of an affordance is to allow us to ‘grasp multiple phenomena as packages, or integrated wholes’ (Cave 2016: 50): the wheel gives us the potential for constructing a complex array of possible wheels with varied uses, all linked by our perception of the simple form of a circle supported by spokes. If successful affordances are those that, ‘while affording that single conspectus, . . . don’t efface or suppress the seething mass of particular things that inhabit them’ (ibid.), then Nietzsche’s language is a fairly successful set of them. From swamps to underground caverns, its multiplicity of interrelated textual images all aim at demonstrating those two basic principles of perspectivism and genealogy from numerous angles, by prompting numerous embodied and enactive responses congruent with them. One of the striking qualities of GM’s textual imagery is its intrusiveness. The polemic relies on attention-­grabbing, sensorily rich descriptions: of ‘old, cold, boring frogs . . . crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp’ (1.1; ‘alte, kalte, langweilige Frösche . . . , die am Menschen herum, in den Menschen hinein kriechen und hüpfen, wie als ob sie da so recht in ihrem Elemente wären, nämlich in einem Sumpfe’); of ‘a volcano of mud . . . with that oversalted, overloud, vulgar loquacity with which all volcanoes have spoken until now’ (1.4; ‘ein schlammichter Vulkan . . . mit jener versalzten, überlauten, gemeinen Beredsamkeit, mit der bisher alle Vulkane geredet haben’); of ‘the brightly coloured, dangerous winged insect, the “spirit” that this caterpillar hid within itself’ (3.10; ‘das bunte und gefährliche Flügeltier, jener “Geist”, den diese Raupe in sich barg’). These qualities exploit the capacity of language to prompt powerful experiences of guided mental imagery or imagining. In a discussion of the embodied and enactive characteristics of mental imagery, Lucia Foglia and Kevin O’Regan (2016) suggest four qualities which distinguish vision from visual imagining: the fact that, in vision, bodily movements cause sensory changes (‘bodiliness’); the fact that sudden external events (like a bright flash of light) can incontrovertibly grab your cognitive system (‘grabbiness’); the fact that (unless you try to cut it off altogether) sensory input is not under your voluntary control, as when someone moves something you are looking at (‘insubordinateness’); and finally the fact that any amount of detail is immediately available by the slightest flick of the eye or of attention, rather than needing to be mentally constructed (‘richness’). But as is common when psychologists are thinking about imagery, little heed is given to the fact that imaginative experiences are always



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prompted by something, that they are inevitably affected by what prompts them, and furthermore that the qualities of the prompt often afford precisely the characteristics from which imagery is supposedly debarred. This is particularly clear when it comes to the imaginings elicited by written language. So let’s take the supposed differences between seeing and imagining one by one. First, the research on metaphor processing I mentioned above (and many other related studies) indicates that performing congruent actions both speeds up comprehension and enhances imagery. Hence bodiliness is a characteristic of linguistically guided imagining. Secondly, sudden changes in a linguistic description (words on a page or screen) are not qualitatively different from sudden changes in any other environmental stimuli; as all good advertisers know, strongly valenced words can grab attention on a page or screen, and intriguing, disturbing, impressive or otherwise striking textual images and the experiences they spontaneously generate can be almost as hard to pull one’s mind away from as their equivalents in moving images or in the directly seen world around us. Hence grabbiness is a characteristic of linguistically guided imagining. Thirdly, what we imagine when we read is, precisely, guided: it strikes a balance between being out of our control (the text exists and there’s nothing we can do to change it) and being apparently under our control (the words are only prompts to imaginative experience, and leave much more to interpretive latitude than, say, filmed images). In the process of reading, we are repeatedly confronted with changing input that alters our imaginative experience in ways beyond our control (unless we choose to close the book entirely­– ­but even this may be futile). Hence insubordinateness is a characteristic of linguistically guided imagining. In these three respects, then, imaginative experiences prompted by linguistic descriptions of things can be compellingly similar, in embodied and enactive ways, to direct sensory experiences of those things. By leading us through swamps, mountains, volcanoes, underground workshops, the North Pole and outer space, Nietzsche (via his narrator) exploits this similarity by ratcheting up the bodiliness (by leading us through rapidly changing ecologies of argumentation), the grabbiness (by guiding us into provocatively intense scenes and images), and the insubordinateness (by offering us one image after another, with little predictability). The big difference from seeing comes with the dimension of ‘richness’: the constant availability of all the detail one could possibly need, much of it accessible by just the tiniest movements of the eyes. As readers we can certainly choose to glance back at nearby sections of text if we find a particular part of a description confusing or underspecified, but often the clarifying information we seek will not be forthcoming: detail will simply not be given. Important details may, of course, also not be available in the world we see: half an object may be unavoidably occluded by another, the fog may be impenetrably thick, our shortsightedness too acute. But the kinds of indeterminateness these factors create feel different from the textual kinds, not least because it feels like there are ways round them: walk round to the other side of the object, wait for the fog to clear, dig out our glasses. And of course these ways round are ways of revealing what is there, rather than creating it. A

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written text has a dauntingly complete kind of incompleteness. Where there are gaps that bother us, the text will not let us pretend that their filling-­in comes from anywhere but our own creative efforts. All detail is not created equal, however. In some descriptive styles the gaps seem more prominent, less systematic, or otherwise more frustrating, unsettling or demanding of effort than in others. At the level of literary history we can identify a shift from the style of nineteenth-­century realism to that of high modernism­– ­very crudely speaking, a shift from stable accumulation of descriptive detail to a more destabilised, fragmentary or minimalist mode of description (Troscianko 2014). Chronologically, Nietzsche stood on the boundary between realism and modernism, and his texts contributed to the distinctive scientific, philosophical and aesthetic cross-­fertilisation that constituted the modernist movement. Stylistically, even his more narratively driven works like Zarathustra are marked by conceptual and poetic experimentation with the creation of textual worlds rather than by a more externally referential representation of them. The implications of this stylistic transition for readers’ experiences can be best grasped by considering how sensory imagining works, which takes us straight into questions about cognitive distribution. A still-­unresolved ‘imagery debate’ has long tried to adjudicate between claims that mental imagery (by which is typically meant visual imagining) operates by means of picture-­like mental/neural representations, and counterclaims that it operates through language-­ like representations. More recently, a third camp joined the fray, proposing that neural representation (of the thing being imagined) is a red herring, and that what is actually going on is some version (actual or potential) of the exploratory actions through which we see, where what is represented are the rules guiding the exploration, not the percept itself. The sensorimotor strand, into which Foglia and O’Regan’s argument falls, says that only the potential for exploration is needed; the enactivist position they distinguish themselves from holds that at least partial rehearsal of the exploration actually occurs (see e.g. Thomas 1999, 2016; Thompson 2007: 295–9). This newer, distributed perspective accounts far better for much of the elusive phenomenology of seeing and imagining, and it also­– ­in my view and others’ (Troscianko 2013b, 2014; Thomas 2016)­– ­avoids the deepest pitfalls of the other approaches, in particular: how could any kind of neural representation of something ever generate or be identical with an experience of seeing that thing? Distributed perspectives do not solve the hard problem, but nor do they pose it in such unyielding terms as representationalism does; maybe they even sidestep it. And when we apply the distributed view to the activity of imagining in response to linguistic prompts, it yields specific hypotheses: for example, that higher levels of descriptive detail do not necessarily make for a more engaging experience, since neither vision nor the visual imagination requires the accumulation of pictorial (or propositional) detail; rather, both operate happily in moment-­to-­moment, incomplete, action-­guided ways. This runs counter to the folk-­psychological intuition that imagining happens via pictures in the head (‘I pictured him running round in circles’), and that the accumulation of detail is what gives us traction on the seen or imagined world.



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Many texts are structured by more or less pictorialist principles, congruent with the problematic folk psychology of mental images as pictures. Others mimic more closely the ease with which visual perception copes with vast gaps and unspecifieds, relying on moment-­to-­moment action-­guided engagement (Troscianko 2013b, 2014). In line with its position relative to the realist-­modernist divide, GM offers many examples of the potency of underspecification: very few of the descriptions are fleshed out beyond a few telling generalisations. Take the narrator’s evocation of the place he has reached as a result of all his questions and answers. He has ­pursued all the many investigations, conjectures, probabilities, until at last I had my own territory, my own soil, a whole concealed growing blossoming world, like secret gardens of which no one must suspect a thing . . . bis ich endlich ein eignes Land, einen eignen Boden hatte, eine ganze verschwiegene wachsende blühende Welt, heimliche Gärten gleichsam, von denen niemand etwas ahnen durfte . . . (P.3) The basic-­level categories of soil and gardens are tied to the higher-­level concepts of territory and world by the envisionable verbs growing and blossoming. Very little is given, but from it we may conjure all kinds of walled gardens, bright flowers and fertile soils, and connect them cognitively with the expansiveness of whole worlds­– ­and connect those in turn with the abstractions of theological and moral prejudice, the value judgements of good and evil, and their relation to the will of life or the degeneration of life. Precisely through their descriptive economy, passages like these give us an appealing means of ‘trac[ing] the chain of abstraction that takes us from categories acquired through direct sensory experience to those acquired through linguistic “hearsay” ’ (Harnad 2003). The act of recognition is an act of seeing-­as, after which we can give what we have recognised a name. Recognising requires the capacity to abstract­– ­that is, to pick out some of the sensory input and ignore the rest. To recognise some of a hedgerow full of flowers as primroses requires us to seek out pale-­ yellowness and five-­petalledness and to ignore irrelevant distinctions like the brown of withered petals. And recognising the flowers as flowers already requires that we seek out leaves and petals and ignore everything else. Once we have abstracted we can recognise, and once we have recognised we can name and categorise, and these names and categories will in turn feed into subsequent acts of recognition. In the case of Nietzsche’s secret gardens, the secretness and the growing and blossoming are the relevant qualities of the soil and the gardens, and these are what makes of them a territory and a world, and being habitable worlds or territories is what makes them meaningful in this process of learning to look for the origins of evil in the right place. Many of the descriptions in this text make salient in this kind of way the links that take us up and down the chain between sensorimotor invariants (the ways in which things impact on our sensory and motor systems) and abstract concepts (good and evil, good and bad, conscience, truth, et al.).

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At the root of all our categories is sensorimotor embodiment: the ways we behave towards things (eat or don’t eat, mate with, flee from, seek out, fashion into tools), including highly abstracted things like good and evil. These categories denote broad sets of things to which we respond in roughly similar ways: through the emotions of attraction or fear, for example, and through subsequent arousal, positive or negative affect, and appropriate action tendencies (approach, retreat). Categories are shaped partly by hearsay: by what entities other (trusted) people tell us fall into them. But ‘categories cannot be hearsay all the way down’ (Harnad 2003). At some point we hit a sensorimotor rock bottom. Or rather, we always started out there, little as it may sometimes seem. Some abstractions, like untruth, may require more abstracting steps than others, such as beauty, but both are in fact shaped more directly than it often seems by what we, or our ancestors, have sampled directly with our senses: camouflage or poisonous berries; complementary colouring or symmetry. The natural world and the worlds that language creates are vast complexes of affordances for embodied cognitive action, and Nietzsche’s language here exposes the dynamic underpinnings of those structures of action affordance. Over and over, as part of the genealogical method, we are offered tangible instantiations of possible sensorimotor bases for moral abstractions. Consider the glimpse we are given down into the secret of how ideals are fabricated: Come on! Here we have a clear view into this dark workshop . . . I cannot see anything, but I can hear all the better. There is a cautious, malicious, soft rumouring and whispering from every nook and cranny . . . Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment . . . impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’, timid baseness into ‘humility’, submission to people one hates into ‘obedience’ (namely towards someone who, they say, orders this subservience­– t­hey call him God) . . . But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated­– ­it seems to me to stink of nothing but lies. Wohlan! Hier ist der Blick offen in diese dunkle Werkstätte . . . Ich sehe nichts, ich höre um so mehr. Es ist ein vorsichtiges tückisches leises Munkeln und Zusammenflüstern aus allen Ecken und Winkeln . . . Die Schwäche soll zum Verdienste umgelogen warden . . . und die Ohnmacht, die nicht vergilt, zur ‘Güte’; die ängstliche Niedrigkeit zur ‘Demut’; die Unterwerfung vor denen, die man haßt, zum ‘Gehorsam’ (nämlich gegen einen, von dem sie sagen, er befehle diese Unterwerfung­– ­sie heißen ihn Gott) . . . Aber genug! genug! Ich halte es nicht mehr aus. Schlechte Luft! Schlechte Luft! Diese Werkstätte, wo man Ideale ­fabriziert­– ­mich dünkt, sie stinkt vor lauter Lügen. (1.14) Although it’s hard to imagine anything very concrete when we read goodness, humility and obedience, when I read this I have a strong imaginative experience of the underground workshop (something like Saruman’s hellish caverns where slimy



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orcs are spawned) and the deceitful forging (as forgery) of one visually unspecified thing into another, all surrounded by lots of nasty smells and whispers. The visual, auditory and olfactory contributions to my experience mean that my emotional appraisal of the forging, and the resulting strongly valenced affect, are rich with perceptual directness. Of course, we all know that our senses can deceive, and that sensory capacities mediated through language and the imagination are even more liable to deception, but we also know that once we have seen or imagined anything, it is that little bit harder to discount. Once we have, all the attendant cognitive-­ emotional responses are rehearsed or at least primed, just as if what we had seen or imagined were veridical. And in this passage, moreover, the inherent perceptual underspecification of the abstract concepts allows for their direct incorporation into the deeply concrete, which makes it all the easier to feel: I saw the subservience being twisted into obedience! In all these ways, we can understand the textual dynamics of GM as grounded, often quite saliently, in the sensorimotor and environmentally extended systems central to distributed cognition. At the extradiegetic level too (outside the text world), distributed cognition is acknowledged as crucial. The narrator-­author of GM is described as resuming his reflections on the origins of moral prejudices begun in Human, All Too Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878), which I began to write in Sorrento, during a winter that allowed me to pause, as a wanderer pauses, and survey the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had just travelled. deren Niederschrift in Sorrent begonnen wurde, während eines Winters, der es mir erlaubte, haltzumachen, wie ein Wandrer haltmacht, und das weite und gefährliche Land zu überschauen, durch das mein Geist bis dahin gewandert war. (P.2) The writing of that earlier text, which fed into this one, was the culmination of months of dangerous journeying, from a vantage point at the journey’s end. And the need for a stable grounding for the communicative act, in figurative but perhaps also literal space, is raised elsewhere, in a letter Nietzsche wrote on 20 July 1886, the year preceding the composition of GM. He speaks of The difficulty I had this time in speaking (more than that, in finding the place from which I could speak­– ­that is to say, directly after Zarathustra . . .). To be able to speak of an ‘ideal’, one has to create distance and a more lowly position . . . Die Schwierigkeit, die es dies Mal für mich hatte, zu reden (noch mehr: den Ort zu finden, von wo aus ich reden konnte, nämlich unmittelbar nach dem Zarathustra . . .). Um von einem ‘Ideal’ reden zu können, muss man eine Distanz und einen niedrigeren Ort schaffen . . . (1986: VII, 212)

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Spatial metaphors abound in this description of the prerequisites of speaking/­ writing, giving us a sense of an authorial stance in which the importance of grounding is recognised, not just in the sense in which all cognition is distributed across a body and an environment, but also in the stronger sense of needing a specific location that offers cognitive stability and other relevant kinds of orientation. And this, though it seems like more evidence for distributed cognition, is our first major clue pointing towards the aspects of this text that run counter to the foundations of distributed cognition, at least in their more extreme incarnations. In turn, these elements can also be seen to indicate that the professed intention behind the text (to promote the two principles of perspectivism and genealogy) is not wholly borne out in the textual construction. And this has consequences for how we think about the cognitive structures linking author, narrator and reader, here and more generally.

Contra Distributed Cognition The ‘place to speak from’ is configured, in the passage from the prologue which mentions Sorrento and Human, All Too Human, as a firm piece of ground on which to rest and take stock after the dangerous cognitive progress has been made. This might seem unobjectionable, except that the rhetorical construction of the text implies otherwise: as we have seen, what the rhetoric appears to say is ‘let’s explore these conceptual territories together as we go along’. In fact, it becomes clear that there are two journeys, and that the one that matters has already been made; instances of the past tense, and of the first-­person singular rather than plural, intimate that we are following an already marked-­out route rather than accompanying the narrator in the staking-­out of new territories. Despite all the drama of revisionism which the text enacts, certainty is perhaps its static starting point and destination. That is, the structures of distributed nature of cognition might be a retrospectively superficial gloss on the text rather than manifesting the reality of its creation. A closer look at Nietzsche’s employment of tense, narrative perspective and apostrophe, and visuospatial description will help us find out. This in turn will generate hypotheses as to what all this means for readers’ reception of the text, and for distributed cognition in general. Even while evoking and encouraging a shared movement along the path he is treading, then, the narrator also describes gestures which, rather than connecting narrator with reader, refer to the narrator alone, at undefined points in the pre-­ textual past: he has been propelled by the ‘prompt’, or ‘stimulus’ (P.4; ‘Anstoß’), of an opposed intellectual position, or by the curiosity and suspicion he felt even as a thirteen-­year-­old (P.3), or by a ‘point in the right direction’ (1.4; ‘Fingerzeig zum rechten Wege’). Then, as if to paste over the cracks, the pointers that the narrator alone has heeded are echoed by the signs and cues that direct reader and narrator together: ‘and here we get at least a first signal’ (3.6; ‘so bekommen wir hier wenigstens einen ersten Wink’). The signalling gesture is towards meaning (what does it mean for a philosopher to pay homage to ascetic ideals?)­– ­an ontological



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entity explicitly figured as a location in space, but one to which the narrator seems to have made progress sometime earlier, without us. These references to past movements occur mostly in the prologue, and towards the beginning of the first essay, in which the tense slides from past to present. At such points, a little gap is opened up between the conceptual path and our cognitive act of following it: the path has already been followed, so if we do imagine it, we are in these moments less likely to imagine it from an internal embedded perspective, and more likely to take an external, possibly bird’s-­eye or at least more distanced point of view. While so much in this text is persuasion to a shared and presently occurring philosophical movement, it sometimes seems that the narrator is not even retracing with us a path he had already taken before, let alone walking it for the first time with us; the wanderer of the previous quotation has in fact halted, turned to look back, and reduced the writing process to stasis, to a retrospective gaze over space already moved across. So maybe the writing process merely succeeded the thinking rather than being integral to it, and there was no literal embedded enactivism in it. These stops along the way thus both proclaim and undercut the reality of the philosophical movements within and between them: the movements embody the situated perspectivism of the genealogical text but are revealed, perhaps, as rhetorical overlay. The argument is given a form that encourages enactive imagination, but now it seems also to ask it not to go too far: trust me, I know what is here and what it means, because I have been here already. My cognition was distributed so yours does not have to be. Or simply: distributed cognition makes for a nice kind of rhetoric, doesn’t it? A journey shared is now split in two: into a past completed journey and a retracing of it from the standpoint of its destination. This bifurcation has several implications. Firstly, because there are two journeys, the relation between the two journeyers (narrator and reader) is changed; for me at least, once even one of these cracks registers, I start to feel that rather than walking together, I’m being shouted down to from an elevated position at the journey’s end. This in turn changes the social dynamic from one of situated joint attention to a more diffuse kind of sharing. Joint attention is the shared focus of two or more individuals on one object, in its strongest form also with awareness of the other’s attention to the same object. In childhood development, learning to engage in joint attention is closely linked to the emergent abilities to follow another’s gaze, infer intentions and direct others’ attention (Roessler 2005). And language can be thought of as one of adult humans’ best ways of creating joint attention: Despite what many philosophers believe, or used to believe, language is not primarily a means for communicating facts about the world. It is above all a means for producing what psychologists call ‘joint attention’. The most elementary form of language, the ostensive, is a pointing gesture. But what is worth pointing at? (Van Oort 2016: 195)

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We are used to reading with a tacit agreement that what is being pointed at through the language of the text is worth pointing at, and worth our efforts of attention in following the gaze and the outstretched arm, and in working out what the intention of the pointer was in pointing. One of the linguistic tricks that reduces the burden of our effort is the adoption of a clear perspective­– v­ isual and/or more broadly cognitive­– a­ s part of the textual construction. In fictional texts we usually refer to this in terms of narrative perspective and/or focalisation. The difference between a text that is focalised intradiegetically (by someone personified within the fictional world) and one focalised extradiegetically (by a ‘persona’ manifested only through the words of the text) is, broadly speaking, the difference between being offered the possibility of a strongly situated form of joint attention (here we both are, looking at the same thing) and being offered a much more opaque kind of sharing (here is what I want to show you, but you have no idea where I’m seeing it from, or even whether ‘seeing’ is the right verb to be using, because I’m not even in any strong sense a personified entity). The former, drawing on explicit social and physical contexts, is more strongly distributed than the latter, to which the usual cognitive rules need not all apply. Nietzsche’s technique here is somewhere in between. The narrator sometimes seems part of the world he creates. He is a man whose questions and answers about good and bad and evil have brought him to his secret gardens. He looks scornfully at the nihilistic historians who gaze out on to the North Pole, but he would vastly prefer to wander ‘through the most dismal grey cold mists’ (3.26; ‘durch die düstersten grauen kalten Nebel’) with them than fraternise with the modern pleasure-­seeking ‘artistic’ historians. When he thinks about nature-­denying religion he feels ‘black, gloomy, unnerving sadness’ (2.22; ‘schwarz[e] duster[e] entnervend[e] Traurigkeit’) such that he has to prevent himself from peering for too long into these abysses. But often he evokes territories without any self-­situating, as though he were a disembodied extradiegetic narrator: he has no definable spatial or personal relationship to the ‘desert’ that is ‘not romantic enough, not Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a stage desert’ (3.8; ‘nicht romantisch und syrisch genug, lange nicht Theater-­Wüste genug’) for the people who play at being intellectuals; or to the ‘sunnier, warmer, more enlightened world’ (3.10; ‘sonnigeren, wärmeren, aufgehellteren Welt’) into which the bright-­coloured spirit butterfly emerges from its monk-­like caterpillar. And similarly, the perspective that we as readers are encouraged to adopt vacillates between sharing joint attention with the situated narrator and being shown new things and places by either a disembodied narrator or a narrator pointing at them from far away beyond us. Joint attention therefore cannot consistently serve its fundamental evolved purpose of facilitating the understanding of another mind, ‘from the inside’­– ­that is, from within the same situation (Roessler 2005). I have no idea who this man my guide is, apart from the fact that he really dislikes ascetics, modern historians, the New Testament, and quite a few other things. We rarely ‘see eye to eye’ in the sense of coming to know and trust each other through shared gaze. There is potential for this textual environment to yield a richly situated experience in which joint attention facilitates the conceptual adventure, but it is not fully



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realised. The distribution of cognition between reader, narrator and diegetic world is qualified by the narrator’s tricksiness­– w ­ hich in turn brings questions about the cognitive relation between author and narrator to the foreground too. There is only one moment when the connection between narrator and reader is instantiated in the text as a social one. The passage we considered earlier, giving us a glimpse into the workshops where ideals are forged, is structured as a situated dialogue. After summoning those who are brave enough to come and look down, the narrator continues: Wait just a moment more, my good man of daredevil impertinence: your eyes need to adjust to this false, shimmering light . . . There! That’s enough! Now you can speak! What’s happening down there? Tell me what you see, you with your most dangerous curiosity­– ­now I am the one who’s listening. – Warten Sie noch einen Augenblick, mein Herr Vorwitz und Wagehals: Ihr Auge muß sich erst an dieses falsche schillernde Licht gewöhnen . . . So! Genug! Reden Sie jetzt! Was geht da unten vor? Sprechen Sie aus, was Sie sehen, Mann der gefährlichsten Neugierde­– ­jetzt bin ich der, welcher zuhört.­– ­(1.14) Then the man who answers the call describes how he can only hear and not see; he is prompted repeatedly by the narrator to ‘go on!’ with his description (‘Weiter!’); he recounts the conversation he has with the rumour-­mongers, and then when he cannot bear it any longer­– ‘­bad air, bad air!’ (‘Schlechte Luft! Schlechte Luft!’)­ – ­the narrator does not let him go but directs his attention to other things­– ‘­No! Wait a moment! You haven’t said anything yet about . . .’ (‘Nein! Noch einen Augenblick! Sie sagten noch nichts von . . .’)­– ­and finally it is the narrator who calls out ‘Enough! Enough!’ and brings the scene to a close. The narrator opens up a dialogic space by summoning me, as the man, his hypothetical reader-­listener, to look down into the dark workshops, but then immediately closes that space down again. The man seems to be someone separate from the narrator, but he exactly echoes the narrator’s own previous execration of ‘bad air’, as ‘the one thing I really cannot bear’ (1.12; ‘das gerade mir ganz Unerträgliche’). The ventriloquism is acknowledged in the man’s line ‘it’s just as you said’ (‘es steht damit so, wie Sie es sagten’). A situation where it seemed that I, or at least my male textual incarnation, as imagined by the author via his narrator, might finally get the chance to show the narrator something (‘now I am the one who’s listening’) is reduced to yet one more in which the narrator has seen and done it all before­– ­even put exact replicas of his words into my mouth. If the narrator and his creation­– ­the man, me­– ­have so totally overlapping views, and if the reader who seemed to be being addressed is forced into the role of the man who blindly echoes the narrator, there is no room left for any kind of movement, any meaningfully joint attention between two human beings, let alone for perspectivist integration of subjectivities. The socially distributed aspects of this intellectual episode feel uncomfortably staged.

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This equivocation between one journey and two, between joint and disjunct attention, between monologue and dialogue, has likely consequences for readers’ experiences, and specifically for the extent to which the distributed aspects of our cognitive engagement are promoted by the rhetorical construction. The equivocation may also tell us something about the writing process. The suggestion that the journey that matters was completed before the text was written is also a suggestion that the writing had no effect on the thinking. The cognitive literary scholar Marco Bernini (2014) envisages the writerly process of ‘worlding a story’ as the activation of a set of imaginative feedback loops in which the imagined elements, once generated, can be explored, and in the exploration generate cognitive feedback that affects the original intentions, which results in the generation of new imagined elements. In this sense, the emergent language of the text both constrains and affords new possibilities and intentions. But if the writing is conceived of as mere ‘writing-­ down’ (‘Niederschrift’) at the cognitive journey’s end, as a mechanical getting-­on-­ to-­paper of what is already fully formulated, there is no space for the generation and the exploration of the textually created world to be reciprocally interactive. In this text, instead of cognitive feedback arising between the metaphors and their meanings, it comes to seem that the model for writing is more like: get the ideas straight first, and add the rhetoric of a textual journey afterwards. If the writing is less inherent to the thinking than it seemed, then the role of the conceptual metaphors is much reduced: the journey metaphor is still important to communicative persuasion, but not to the cognitive activity that precedes it, as a mnemonic or imaginative or otherwise conceptual aid to creativity. With a long-­ dead author, this kind of claim about the importance or otherwise of the linguistic structures to the cognitive processes can probably never even begin to be tested, but uses of tense (is the journey happening now, or did it take place earlier?) and of perspective and pronouns (who is journeying: speaker, recipient, or both?) in conceptual metaphor might more generally be an interesting metric to explore as an indicator for the salience of distributed cognition in the writing process, or the extent to which writing is itself thinking. Of course, narrator and author are not one and the same, so the rhetorical configuring of the argument doesn’t necessarily say anything directly about the nature of its actual cognitive construction somewhere in nineteenth-­century Germany. But it is certainly telling that the author left GM scattered with all these bits of counterevidence against the stronger hypotheses of distributed cognition, especially given how neatly those principles support the conceptual journey being urged on us. What other evidence is there that this text may promote a rather weaker model of distributed cognition than it at first seemed to? Well, when we look more closely at them, many of the descriptions of places we visit on our journey turn out to lack embodied and/or enactive qualities. Sometimes this is deliberate, as part of a criticism of a rival position (like the landscape of the modern historiographers as that of the lone North Pole explorer (3.26)), but sometimes it seems less so. The narrator’s description of the secret gardens he has finally reached after



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all his philosophising concludes: ‘Oh, how happy we are, we discoverers, as long as we can only keep quiet for long enough!’ (P.3; ‘O wie wir glücklich sind, wir Erkennenden, vorausgesetzt, daß wir nur lange genug zu schweigen wissen!’). This intellectual idyll is endangered by talking about it, it seems, but the aim of the whole text can also surely be none other than to widen the circle of ‘those in the know’ (‘wir Erkennenden’). The exclusive first-­person plural (we are the clique, stay out) merges persuasively with the connective version (come in, we’re all friends here) (see also Kaulhausen 1977: 103–5). But ultimately, rhetorical misdirection, combined with the evocative potency of those secretly blossoming gardens, creates a powerful pointer back to a rejected way of doing moral philosophy: the narrator said he got there only because he learnt ‘no longer [to look for] the origin of evil behind the world’ (P.3; ‘nicht mehr den Ursprung des Bösen hinter der Welt [zu suchen]’). If you look for explanation, origin, meaning, behind and beyond, he says, you can never attain the earthly paradise of the genealogical perspective. But this paradise, it turns out, is an (unintentionally?) ironic idyll behind and beyond all those mistakes. Nietzsche repeatedly evades the perspectival limitations­– o­r the limitless ­instability­– o­ f language and interpretation, even as he appears to promote them. Let’s look at two contrasting examples of how he does both at once, and at what they mean for degrees of cognitive distribution in the text, reader and writer. In the third essay, the narrator makes an abrupt, alienating, disorientating and also illuminating shift to a new perspective. Read from a distant star, the upper-­case lettering of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth is the ultimate ascetic star, a recess of discontented, arrogant, and unpleasant creatures. Von einem fernen Gestirn aus gelesen, würde vielleicht die Majuskel-­Schrift unsres Erden-­Daseins zu dem Schluß verführen, die Erde sei der eigentlich asketische Stern, ein Winkel mißvergnügter, hochmütiger und widriger Geschöpfe. (3.11) This wrench into an extra-­terrestrial perspective reveals the ambiguities inherent in the rhetorical presentation of a genealogical perspectivism. To present a world read as text from a place above the earth conveys the perspectivist point that all omniscience is a form of interpretation, subject to all the limitations that language entails; yet to present the world read as text from a place above the earth is a perspectival stance taken to the extreme at which it overcomes all limitations of perspective and enacts all-­seeing omniscience. To stand in outer space is to say that there is no authoritative ‘outer’ space­– a­ nd yet to keep standing there saying it. The narrator does not explicitly place himself there: the position on a distant star, and Earth’s appearance from it, are only hypothetical. But it is nonetheless a powerful imaginative prompt, and an odd kind of self-­reflexive linguistic affordance­– o­ ne that makes us visually imagine written

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language itself as a binding-­together, in capital-­letter form, of our whole world and all the beings in it. As I read I see the earth as a cluster of blue-­and-­green 3D capital letters, and I am given a ready-­made emotional appraisal for them (discontent etc.) by which the narrator’s version of the ascetic is further reinforced. This image feels like a brief admission that perspectival limitations are being rejected­– ­a rejection that has perhaps been going on throughout, as background to (even justification for, incontrovertible truth behind), the ongoing rhetoric which supposedly simulates philosophical movement but may be rather a substitution for it. And then, a little later, we encounter our opposite example. Here the narrator imitates Luther’s famous declaration in response to the Roman Emperor’s demand that he recant his writings: ‘ “Here I stand, I can do no other”­– ­I have the courage of my bad taste’ (3.22; ‘ “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders”­– ­ich habe den Mut zu meinem schlechten Geschmack’). This is his way of saying that he must have bad taste (because the taste of two millennia is against him), but at the same time that everyone else’s taste is bad (because he has just said that the New Testament is the most overvalued work ever). This is aposiopesis, or ‘ “becoming silent”, . . . a rhetorical halt, a narrative arrest or incompleteness’, in which, ‘while the idea is literally unexpressed, it is clearly perceived by the audience, by the interlocutor’ (Allison 1998: 11). This is also ostension par excellence, just like the pointing gestures I mentioned earlier: by standing and saying he can do nothing but stand, the narrator does nothing more or less than command attention, to the act of standing. This highly rhetorical halt is actually another movement: the stance which says it must be static is a movement beyond itself, just as its expression of powerlessness is one of confidence. An opinion is just an opinion, but points precisely thereby to its truth: in not going further (making the transition from opinion to truth) it declares the impossibility of doing so. This is language at its most crystallised, and language can convey nothing but opinion, it says, yet this is all the truth you need. A rhetorical configuration of space in its most minimal form­– a­ point of ground occupied­– c­ reates a connection with a whole rhetorical universe of such standpoints, and thereby enacts a condensed form of distributed communication: it leaps from the brain to the rest of the body to the physical world, to the historical world, to readers a century ago and right now. This stance restates the text’s conceptual foundation: the impossibility of adopting a standpoint in any space other than a perspectivally created one. But now that all the etymological-­genealogical reworkings of our habitual categorisations of things have made clear how central language is to the whole distributed constellation that includes human morality and our ability to think about it, we may almost believe we do not need any other space. And thereby that impossibility becomes meaningless, and perspectivism collapses in on itself. The single point of ground occupied, and which cannot be stepped beyond, expands to an infinity as great as that of outer space. And so the image of the man who stands and lets his standing be his words consummately expresses a philosophy­– ­not least the paradoxes that seem to betray its boundaries. This brings us back to the place the author-­narrator said he needed (‘den Ort . . . von wo aus ich reden konnte’). Directing us through its succession of disparate land-



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scapes, GM makes clear that the need for a place from which to speak, a particular perspective from which truth can be declaimed, is fundamental to a text whose methodology tends towards denial of all possibility of such a place. This means the text is spoken from a stance of opposition to its own principles, by the genealogist positioned beyond his genealogy. The Streitschrift, the polemic (lit. argument piece), was never an argument with anyone, just as we never trod its path together. ‘Can the genealogical narrative find any place within it for the genealogist?’ Alasdair MacIntyre asks (1994: 303). Here, a more pertinent way of phrasing the question might be: does the genealogist displace the genealogy? Does the rhetorician displace the philosophy? Yet perhaps this opposition too is untenable within the linguistic space which both cannot help but occupy. Sometimes it seems that reader and narrator are making a philosophical journey together. Sometimes it seems that that progression into the conceptual unknown was in fact a past movement into that unknown, now being rhetorically recreated. This re-­enactment, though less than true ‘discovery’, is at least re-­enactment of a truly philosophical openness to an infinity of perspectivism genealogically discovered. But then one starts to wonder whether this highly linguistic philosophy actually requires the full cognitive equivalent of rhetoric’s place from which to speak: a place from which to think this genealogical perspectivism. But of course the idea of stable ground from which to think contradicts the things being thought. There are in theory two ways of practising the genealogical method. One is ‘abyssal (abgründlich or untergründlich)’; the other is ‘foundational (gründlich)’ (Blondel 1994: 313). Taken to its extreme, genealogy may be ‘abyssal’, and so correspond to the absolute relativism of perspectivism. But in its conventional form­– ­and ultimately, it seems, as practised here­– i­ t is ‘foundational’: it leads back to an originary certainty. The narrator never descends into the abysses he points out to us; he recoils from what lies below, stays resolutely on firm ground, subjects us perhaps to a little of the vertigo of looking down (from ground level or a far-­flung star), but never more than is nicely exhilarating. Embodied, enactive, socially and environmentally embedded cognition declares its own limits here, and so apparently also the limits of its subject matter.

What All This Means for Distributed Cognition The entire experience of writing this chapter has been somewhat vertigo-­inducing, because the analysis of the structures of argument as path have made me so hyperaware of how Nietzsche’s shifting metaphors and perspectives have been shaping my own, and how both his and mine have been shaping the argument I have been trying to make. Whether or not the metaphors and all else that has ended up on the page convey the extent to which this argument has been constructed as I have gone along, in the constant interaction of thought and typed word, only you can say. But especially in writing and rewriting this conclusion, the total dependency of my thinking on my writing has been precariously clear to me. What are we left with, at the end of our exploration of Nietzsche’s equivocally

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distributed textual journey? To try to make sense of where Nietzsche’s readers may end up, I will return to the concept of cognitive realism. One of its benefits is in the prompt it provides to tease apart the cognitive realities from the intuitions we have about how our minds work, and make hypotheses as to how the textual structures may, by corresponding to one or other or both, elicit particular kinds of responses in readers. GM’s basic path metaphor is cognitively realistic in drawing on a ubiquitous metaphorical structure: nothing could be more familiar than being asked to follow someone’s thought processes as if on a journey, and so the text compels through the simple congruence of linguistic structures with cognitive ones. On the other hand, though, readers not primed to focus on cognition or its distributed aspects are likely to be unaware of this ubiquity, and to have a rough set of beliefs about the self-­sufficiency of philosophical argumentation, as abstraction with no need for metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). The use of the path structure conforms to the cognitive realities and diverges from the folk psychology­– b ­ ut because the language of the path has so long been lexicalised, the unsettling effects of that divergence are neutralised. In theory, that is. But actually, because from the outset the path motif is complicated by shifts in tense, contradictions in perspective and all the rest, it repeatedly draws attention to itself, and is likely to make readers aware of the shifting relations between it and the concepts (of perspectivism and genealogy) it is being used to promote. The more the textual features draw attention to themselves in their internal contradictions, the more they have the potential to make us wonder whether the apparent recoil from thoroughgoing perspectivism and abyssal genealogy is actually the ultimate demonstration of these principles­– ­reminding us, after all, that even context-­dependence is context-­dependent (distribution can come and go), and that the firm footing of stasis is, after all, no less context-­dependent than the daring movement of journeying. All this is unsettling because it brings the principles of distributed cognition into view only in the process of undercutting them: the revivifying of the familiar old distributed metaphors takes place only because their straightforward distributedness (walking along a physical-­conceptual path accompanying one’s interlocutor) is countered. The cognitive realism inherent in both using and subverting the structures of the central conceptual metaphor and all that goes with it probably ends up being the most intellectually compelling imaginable support for perspectivism and (abyssal) genealogy, precisely in the unsettling experiential effects that initially make us doubt the conceptual consistency. In this sense, GM offers an experiential trajectory that brings some of the mechanisms of the distributed mind into view, inviting us to perform imaginative feats which are unfamiliar in anything but the reading of more or less complex verbal texts: imagining an ambiguously connected potential pair of journeys, paying joint attention with someone who is sometimes disembodied and sometimes not, talking to someone who puts words into your mouth (and maybe even changes your sex), imagining a single point in space which is the whole universe, or outer space which is beyond everything and nothing . . . Our attempts at these feats foreground



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the relations within the author–­narrator–­text–­reader cognitive system, making us speculate on how the author’s thinking related to his writing, or how it was informed by our imagined engagement with it; or on how the narrator seduces or bullies us into thinking with him. In these interrelations the value of studying texts like these for the science of distributed cognition becomes clear: a text such as GM offers a case study of the subtle temporal dynamics that mediate between the mechanisms and the experience of distributed cognition as cued by language, our most fertile generator of cognitive affordances. Studying texts and readers’ responses to them offers ways of finding out whether, for example, it is easier to follow an argument when it’s structured as a path, and what happens when that path gets as distinctly strange as here; or whether imaginative experience requires sensorimotor rehearsal or the mere potential for it (and what such rehearsal could mean when the instructions are so bizarre); and innumerable other questions of this kind. By complicating both the mechanisms and the experiences of cognitive distribution, a text like this focuses questions about the relation between the two, questions which have been part of the field since early examples like Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) Tetris illustration: if I feel I am rotating a Tetris shape in my mind, or not, as opposed to rotating it on the screen, or not, what does any of that say about how ‘I’ am ‘actually’ fitting the shapes together? When experience is defamiliarised uncomfortably out of what we take for granted, it has a chance of advancing us further into the territory of the biggest questions we do not even know how to ask yet (Blackmore and Troscianko 2018): the question of how conscious experience relates to anything material, and so what it could mean for the workings of minds to include the entire universe, or some or none of it.

13 A 5 t h E : D i s t ri but e d C o g n i t ion a nd the Q u es tion of E t h i c s i n B e n j a m i n a n d V y g ots k y , a nd Hork heimer a n d D e w ey  Ben Morgan

Distributed Cognition and Ethics: The Historical View This chapter revisits Walter Benjamin’s brief encounter, in the mid-­1930s, with the work of the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, putting it in the wider context of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist-­oriented critique of pragmatism in the early twentieth century so as to uncover a generally neglected side of their interdisciplinary undertaking. Benjamin’s response to Vygotsky and, alongside that, Horkheimer’s response to Dewey show the thought of the Frankfurt School at a pivotal moment in its development, and allow us retrospectively to imagine a different version of the bold project that Horkheimer announced when he took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1931, one that is closer to more recent models of distributed cognition, but that contributes to these more recent models by realigning how they treat normative questions, adding a 5th E to the existing 4Es: embedded, embodied, extended, enactive­– a­ nd ethically inflected cognition. An initial connection between distributed, and specifically enactive, approaches and ethics was made by Francesco Varela in lectures first published in Italian in 1992 as Un Know-­How per l’Etica (Varela 1999a). Varela drew on Dewey and Hubert Dreyfus to argue that situated, ethically inflected coping should be given both practical and theoretical priority over the forms of conscious deliberation that feature more usually in debates in moral philosophy. At the same time, he explicitly excluded consideration of developmental questions as to how we become the sort of everyday ethical experts to which his analysis draws attention (Varela 1999a: 24). These developmentally oriented questions have been given more scrutiny recently, as theorists think through the philosophical and ethical implications of research into forms of bodily attunement to others, dubbed ‘primary intersubjectivity’ by Colwyn Trevarthen (1979), that underlie and facilitate more complex and reflective forms of interaction.1 As we shall see, the steps connecting primary 1

See Colombetti and Torrance 2009; Varga and Gallagher 2012; Gallagher 2014; Gallagher et al. 2018.



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intersubjectivity and ethics are not obvious. Yet I hope to show that a return to the early years of the Frankfurt School helps us at least to get the questions into sharper focus, if not to begin formulating some more specific answers.2 The critical programme of the early Frankfurt School had problems with its normative foundations. In Horkheimer’s account, the ultimate motivation of the collaborative, interdisciplinary project of the Institute for Social Research was ethical and political. The rigorous pooling of concepts and methods from philosophy, cultural criticism, psychology, anthropology, biology, economics and sociology should be, he argued, guided by normative questions about human flourishing (Horkheimer 1993: 1–14). At the same time, the basis of the normative critique was not clear. Horkheimer, from his inaugural address in 1931 to the publication of his explicit reckoning with pragmatism in Eclipse of Reason (1947), was searching for norms of truth, meaning and conceptuality that were not simply the product of current social practices (Horkheimer 1992: 48–50). But, as Habermas has pointed out, the result of this line of argument was that norms with any critical purchase had to be placed beyond existing forms of lived human interaction because they would otherwise be the mere reflexes of ideology. In Horkheimer’s arguments, rational critique was effectively forced to turn against its own practices and criteria of evaluation (Habermas 1987: 106–30). The particular interest of Benjamin’s reading of Vygotsky is that it suggests a moment in the mid-­1930s when this bleak view had not quite taken hold, and when, more importantly, Horkheimer and his collaborators in the Frankfurt School were thinking hard about the relation between conceptual thought and embodied practices, exploring the forms of interaction from which our habits of thinking emerge in the hope of understanding the processes by which human beings come to live in what, following Charles Taylor, could be called the space of ethics.3 The reasons for returning to Benjamin’s engagement with Vygotsky are, thus, three-­fold. The first is historical: the encounter gives a sense of the debates out of which modern investigations of the interaction between cognition and social practices emerged. The second is that connecting with these 2

I am grateful to Meindert Peters, Naomi Rokotnitz and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter. Connections between work on embodied and distributed forms of cognition, on the one hand, and ethics, on the other, are wider than the debates about primary intersubjectivity that are the focus here. For instance, in analyses which pay particular attention to bodily attunement, Rokotnitz (2011, 2014) shows the ethical potential of arguments about extended and embodied cognition by combining them with the work of existentialist thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. There has also been consideration of the way distributed cognition transforms our understanding of the concepts of agency and the will (Ross et al. 2007; Clark et al. 2013). Mason Cash investigates the implications of models of distributed cognition for ideas of individual responsibility and autonomy (2010, 2013). Also relevant are discussions of the connections between models of distributed and enactive cognition and questions of norms and institutions (Steiner and Stewart 2009; Gallagher 2013; De Jaegher 2013; Slaby and Gallagher 2015). 3 ‘To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary’ (Taylor 1989: 28).

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early discussions reminds us of the ethical and normative questions that originally informed the research, although they later fell by the wayside. This leads to the third reason, which is that viewing the project of the Frankfurt School through the lens of Vygotsky transforms our understanding of its interdisciplinary, socially critical project, showing us a direction that, for historical and biographical reasons, Benjamin, Horkheimer and colleagues were unable to pursue further, but which we, eighty years later, are better poised to follow through. Indeed, as I hope to show, the arguments that Benjamin and Horkheimer abandoned suggest that a discussion of distributed cognition will always also be a discussion of the normative context in which cognitive practices arise. The conceptual explorations of Benjamin, Vygotsky and Horkheimer thus prefigure more recent considerations of what John Haugeland, in an exchange with Andy Clark, called the norm-­ hungriness of interacting human beings (Clapin 2002: 30). Returning to the 1930s and this moment of conceptual experimentation in the trajectory of the Frankfurt School will allow us both to reconsider its legacy of social critique and to forge connections between these ethical concerns and more recent understanding of the way cognition is spread across forms of social interaction: distributed cognition meets social critique. Before we move on to the discussion of the material from the 1930s, it is worth noting how recent work explicitly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School confirms the potential of this dual focus whilst at the same time highlighting the problems that remain unresolved. In his 2005 Tanner lectures, the current director of the Institute for Social Research, Axel Honneth, turned to thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, namely Lukács, Heidegger and Dewey, and juxtaposed their philosophical insights into the structural sociality of human identity with recent research in developmental psychology so as to articulate an account of human interaction that was both empirically grounded and ethically oriented (Honneth et al. 2008). As the responses by Judith Butler and Jonathan Lear pointed out, the connection between ethics and the model of deep human sociality that Honneth derived from Lukács, Heidegger and Dewey was implausible because it depended for its ethical norms on an idealised state of pure connection between the human infant and the people caring for it (Honneth et al. 2008: 108, 131–2). Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher have argued that a more differentiated and more up-­to-­date account of forms of primary intersubjectivity can open the way for an empirical investigation of the normative claims that Honneth needs to underpin his social critique, and so avoid the accusation of ‘an overly optimistic anthropology’ (Varga and Gallagher 2012: 255–6). Nevertheless, their argument does not yet show how the step can be made from the study of pre-­cognitive, visceral interaction to normative claims about human flourishing, unless we assume that the pre-­cognitive interaction just is ethical, an idealisation that Butler and Lear rightly challenge. As we will see, it is in particular the insights into socially distributed patterns of human identity that Benjamin encounters in Vygotsky and Horkheimer in Dewey that can help to unpack in more conceptual detail the connection between norms, on the one hand, and forms of primary intersubjectivity, on the other.



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Ironically, the result of this analysis of Benjamin and Horkheimer’s work will return us to a path that Honneth considered, but found unfruitful, over twenty-­five years ago in an essay he wrote to mark the centenary of Benjamin’s birth in 1992. In this earlier text, Honneth saw the importance to Benjamin’s socially critical project of the concept of an emphatic experience of connection to the world and to others. But in the 1990s, Honneth (1993) was unsure how to describe this sense of connectedness without lapsing into metaphysics. As I hope to demonstrate, this lapse into metaphysics can be avoided by drawing on the wealth of new research into forms of human attunement that has emerged since the 1990s, and, in addition, by expanding our reading of the thinkers from the 1920s and 1930s to include Vygotsky and Dewey and their analysis of the shared human activities that are the locus and the vehicle of elemental forms of human openness. This more situated, practice-­ oriented, distributed approach to primary interaction allows us productively to build on and transcend the otherwise frustratingly limited intuitions articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer in their conception of mimetic impulses (Morgan 2001) and by Heidegger in his idea of Mitsein or ‘Being-­with’ (Morgan 2013: 37–45).

The Practical Genesis of Thinking Benjamin read Vygotsky in preparation for his research report on ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’ which was published in the organ of the Frankfurt School, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, in 1935.4 The particular essay he read, ‘Die genetischen Wurzeln des Denkens und der Sprache (Wygotski 1929; ‘The developmental roots of thinking and language’), was published in the journal Unter dem Banner des Marxismus and is an early draft of the material Vygotsky published as chapter 4 of his Thought and Language (2012: 73–101). The book version was published in 1934, the year of his death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-­eight. The text of the essay differs from the book in two ways. As well as having an introductory section that frames the arguments as the elaboration of a specifically Marxist developmental psychology (Wygotski 1929: 450–3), the text includes paragraphs from the extended critique of Piaget that opens Thought and Language (Vygotsky 2012: 13–59). Though in an abridged version, the essay thus gives a clear picture of the position 4

Benjamin 1972–82: III, 452–80; Benjamin 1996–2003: III, 68–93. Further references to these editions of Benjamin’s writings will be given parenthetically in the text using the abbreviations GS (Gesammelte Schriften) and SW (Selected Writings) and giving volume and page number (GS III, 452–80; SW III, 68–93). For the circumstances of the essay’s composition in 1934, see Eiland and Jennings 2014: 427–8. I’m not the first to have been drawn to the essay. Blair Ogden has explored the way the idea of a ‘physiognomy of language’, elaborated in 1932 by Heinz Werner, shaped Benjamin’s developing theory of language, opening up productive connections between Benjamin’s position and that of Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations also show traces of Werner’s influence (Ogden 2010). Nicola Gess has similarly reconstructed Benjamin’s debt to Werner, but also considered other figures discussed in the research report such as Karl Bühler, setting out the theory of gesture that underlies Benjamin’s model of language both in the research report and in the account of children’s theatre that he wrote for Asja Lacis in 1929 (Gess 2012). Neither of these essays ­reconstructs the relationship to Vygotsky’s thought.

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presented in the longer text. Before analysing Benjamin’s selective engagement with Vygotsky, I’ll give a brief overview of the arguments in the essay published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus and elaborated at more length in Thought and Language, and then turn to Benjamin’s selective appropriation of Vygotsky’s position in his research report. In Thought and Language, Vygotsky develops two main arguments. The first is to show how the ability to think and the propensity to use language must be viewed, in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms, as separate phenomena, albeit ones that interconnect at certain points in their development. He uses the image of a Venn diagram to explain the point: Schematically, we may imagine thought and speech as two intersecting circles. In their overlapping parts, thought and speech coincide to produce what is called verbal thought. Verbal thought, however, does not by any means include all forms of thought or all forms of speech. There is a vast area of thought that has no direct relation to speech. The thinking manifested in the use of tools belongs in this area, as does practical intellect in general . . . Nor are there any psychological reasons to derive all forms of speech activity from thought. No thought process may be involved when a subject silently recites to himself a poem learned by heart or mentally repeats a sentence supplied to him for experimental ­purposes . . . Finally, there is ‘lyrical’ speech, prompted by emotion. Though it has all the earmarks of speech, it can scarcely be classified with intellectual activity in the proper sense of the term. (Vygotsky 2012: 94) Das Verhältnis zwischen Denken und Sprache könnte man in diesem Falle schematisch durch zwei sich scheidende Kreise darstellen, um zu zeigen, daß bestimmte Teile der Denk-­und Sprachprozesse zusammenfallen. Es ist dies die Sphäre des sogenannten „sprachlichen Denkens“. Aber dieses Sprachdenken erschöpft weder alle Formen des Denkens noch alle Formen des Sprechens. Es gibt ein ausgedehntes Gebiet des Denkens, das zum Sprachdenken keine unmittelbare Beziehung hat. Hierher gehört vor allem . . . das technische und Werkzeugdenken und überhaupt das ganze Gebiet des sogenannten praktischen Verstandes . . . Es ist auch psychologisch in keiner Weise begründet, alle Arten der sprachlichen Betätigung des Menschen auf das Denken zu beziehen. Wenn ich z. B. im inneren Sprechprozeß irgendein auswendig gelerntes Gedicht reproduziere oder irgendeinen vom Experimentator aufgegebenen Satz wiederhole, so ist es in diesen Fällen durchaus unbegründet, diese Operationen in das Gebiet des Denkens zu verweisen . . . Auch die Sprache mit emotional-­expressiver Funktion, die „lyrisch gefärbte“ Sprache, die wohl alle Kennzeichen der Sprache aufweist, kann trotzdem kaum als intellektuelle Betätigung im eigentlichen Sinne des Wortes betrachtet werden. (Wygotski 1929: 615–16) Reviewing the literature available to him from ethology, Vygotsky points out, on the one hand, that the sort of problem-­solving ability and tool use that we find in other



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primates can be developed without the ability to use language. Indeed, Vygotsky emphasises, in a move that parallels Heidegger’s arguments about Zuhandenheit or unthematised skilled coping in the first part of Being and Time (Heidegger 1967: 69, 160–2; Dreyfus 1991: 215–18), that ‘thinking in terms of tools’ and the understanding of mechanical connections can precede and be independent of the use of language for humans, too (Vygotsky 2012: 86; Wygotski 1929: 467). On the other hand, many aspects of interaction and communication can occur before and without thinking: expressing emotions and getting, and responding to, the attention of others can all happen without higher forms of intellectual activity. This clear, methodological separation leads us to the second point of Vygotsky’s arguments: our ability to think can be shown to develop out of our practical interaction with others. Thinking, for Vygotsky, entails the internalisation of the things children learn to do with adults as they solve problems. It is a redeployed form of embodied interaction. I will set out how Vygotsky makes this point in his critique of Piaget, but before I do so it is worth making the connection to current arguments to point out how this position is effectively the ‘extended mind’ model in reverse. Andy Clark cites Vygotsky as one of the theorists who ‘actively anticipated’ later twentieth-­century attempts to reimagine the way human identities are scaffolded and shaped by the environment in which they develop, be it social or material (Clark 1997: 35, 45–6). Nevertheless, Clark’s frequent recourse to the metaphor of the ‘leakage of the self into the local surroundings’ betrays an important difference in emphasis (1997: 216). Rather than suggesting, as Clark and others have done, that our thinking processes reach out beyond the brain to include the notebook­– ­be it analogue or digital­– ­with which we keep track of our diary commitments or our calculations, and so spread ‘mind’ across our practical interaction with the environment, Vygotsky argues that our practical activities are adapted and habitualised to become the very means of our thinking: the world gets inside our head, as much as the mind leaking out into the environment.5 For Vygotsky, this is because human beings must be conceived socially in order to be understood individually. Interaction, both ontogenetically and methodologically, must come first: ‘the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual’ (Vygotsky 2012: 38). The full details of this idea were not available to Benjamin in the condensed version of Vygotsky that he read in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus. Nevertheless, the core of Vygotsky’s position, as he developed it by extending and modifying Piaget’s experiments, is summarised in the essay, and indeed cited by Benjamin in his research report (GS III, 475; SW III, 82). Vygotsky is responding to Piaget’s idea of ‘egocentric speech’, a stage in infant development when children talk to themselves but what they say, if it is written down, and taken out of context, is not intelligible 5

John Sutton notes a similar blurring of the boundary between the inside and the outside in the habits and techniques learned to support the processes of memory with ‘culturally sculpted ­internalized surrogates’ (2010: 212–13).

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to someone else. In Piaget’s model, this is evidence of the primary, pleasure-­driven, imaginative mode of being which children embody and which the process of socialisation replaces with the shared and shareable habits of rational communication. The speech is ‘egocentric’ because it is not interested in the perspective of others. It accompanies actions but bears no relation to the outside world. Vygotsky and his collaborators designed an experiment that questioned this account of the inner life of children and the suppositions on which it depends. According to Piaget, the time children spend in ‘egocentric’ speech decreases as they become increasingly socialised. ‘Egocentric speech’ also plays no practical role in their behaviour: inner life bubbles and babbles away, and then is gradually suppressed as the norms of communication are inculcated in the child. By contrast, Vygotsky noticed that when a child’s activity is interrupted in some way, ‘egocentric speech’ increases. If the pencil is blunt or broken or missing when the child is trying to draw something, dealing with this problem will involve the sort of speech habits Piaget called egocentric: ‘egocentric speech appeared when a child tries to comprehend the situation, to find a solution, or to plan a nascent activity’ (Vygotsky 2012: 32; Wygotski 1929: 612). In a passage that was not included in the essay Benjamin read, Vygotsky summarises as follows: The primary function of speech, in both children and adults, is communication, social contact. The earliest speech of the child is therefore essentially social . . . At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric speech and communicative speech. (We prefer to use the term communicative for the form of speech Piaget calls socialized, as though it had been something else before becoming social. From our point of view, the two forms, communication and egocentric, are both social, though their functions differ.) Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms to the sphere of inner-­personal psychic functions. (Vygotsky 2012: 35–6) Two points in particular emerge from Vygotsky’s approach. First, he explores the borderline between the biological and the sociohistorical, showing how the developing forms of human, collaborative practice must be given methodological priority. The human animal, and his or her cognitive processes, cannot be considered atomistically (Lourenço 2012). As he sums up in a passage Benjamin did have access to: Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form of behavior, but is determined by a historical-­cultural process and has specific properties and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and speech. (Vygotsky 2012: 101) Wir glauben, daß die vorhergehenden Abschnitte mit genügender Klarheit gezeigt haben, daß das sprachliche Denken keine natürliche, urwüchsige Verhaltungsweise ist, sondern eine historische Form, die sich von der natürlichen



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Secondly, Vygotsky’s project is not dissimilar to that of the Frankfurt School. He reads widely in philosophy, literature and the latest psychology, and works in an empirically grounded, open-­minded manner to develop an understanding of the fundamental layers of human interaction. What is striking about Benjamin’s response to his essay is that it registers neither the methodological commitment to break with Cartesian models of thought, nor the steps that Vygotsky takes to elaborate a post-­Cartesian psychology, perhaps because Benjamin has his own ways of rethinking and escaping the legacy of an isolated philosophical subject (Morgan 2012). Nevertheless, there is an ethical urgency to Benjamin’s thought that adds importantly to Vygotsky’s approach. Before summarising Benjamin’s brief encounter with Vygotsky, it will be helpful to situate his essay in the wider project of the Frankfurt School, so that we can see how the encounter with this innovative developmental psychology relates to the concerns of Benjamin, Horkheimer and their colleagues in the mid-­1930s.

Benjamin’s Brief Encounter with Vygotsky In 1938, three years after the publication of the research report, Benjamin wrote a brief account of the activities of the Institute for Social Research for the journal Wert und Maß, under the title ‘Ein deutsches Institut freier Forschung’ (‘A German institute of independent research’). As his correspondence about the article with Horkheimer reveals, the point of the piece was to draw the attention of bourgeois German readers to the important work of the Frankfurt School; the article would particularly emphasise the connection to Freud exemplified especially by Fromm’s work (GS III, 682), and it would not use the words ‘materialism’ or ‘dialectics’ (GS III, 684). The article can help us locate Benjamin’s relation to the wider project of the Frankfurt School. The first point to note is the commitment to what might now be called an ‘ecologically valid’ account of social and psychological processes: What we are discussing here can only with difficulty be presented as a particular doctrine and certainly not as a system. Rather it is the deposit left by an experience with which all the analyses are imbued and from which they cannot be detached. This experience suggests that the methodological rigour on which academic investigation prides itself only earns its title when it includes within its purview both the experiment conducted in the separate realm of the laboratory and also that which is run in the open space of history itself. (SW III, 307–8, translation amended) Was hier in Frage steht, läßt sich schwerlich als Lehrmeinung, gewiß nicht als System darlegen. Es erscheint am ehesten als Niederschlag einer alle

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Überlegungen durchdringenden, unveräußerlichen Erfahrung. Sie besagt, daß die methodische Strenge, in der die Wissenschaft ihre Ehre sucht, ihren Namen nur dann verdient, wenn sie nicht nur das im abgeschiedenen Raume des Laboratoriums sondern auch das im freien der Geschichte bewerkstelligte Experiment in ihrem Horizont einbezieht. (GS III, 519) Benjamin’s version of intellectual endeavour is here modelled on and in dialogue with the natural sciences, insofar as it invokes the space of the laboratory. At the same time, the practices and precision of the lab must be pushed to the point that they can engage with the complex social processes unfolding in real time. In the closing lines of the essay, Benjamin asks rhetorically whether, when engaging with social complexities, it will not be possible for the analyses of the Frankfurt School to capture the traces of a transformed and transformable humanity in its dissection of the decaying social structures of the present: Can those elements be separated from the decay of democratic society that, linked as they are to its pre-­history and future dreams, do not try to deny their solidarity with the society to come or indeed with humanity itself? (SW III, 313, translation amended) Lassen sich aus dem Zerfallsprozeß der demokratischen Gesellschaft noch die Elemente aussondern, die­– ­ihrer Frühzeit und ihrem Traum verbunden­– ­die Solidarität mit einer kommenden, mit der Menschheit selbst, nicht verleugnen? (GS III, 526) With these two ideas of an interdisciplinary project in dialogue with the laboratory, and the critical engagement with the future as it emerges from the present, we can turn to Benjamin’s deployment of Vygotsky. As Nicola Gess has argued, the terminus ad quem of Benjamin’s essay is his theory of gesture, and the revelation of creaturely fragility that an embodied approach to language uncovers (2012: 193). To this end, he starts with onomatopoeic accounts of the origins of languages, lingers briefly with the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl’s idea of language as a ‘gesture of the voice’, before returning, after some detours, to a more explicit engagement with socially oriented forms of imitation and the language of gesture. Vygotsky’s thought is just a staging point along this journey. In fact, Thought and Language does include a brief discussion of pointing as a form of embodied intentionality (2012: 68–9). However, it is in a part of the book not included in Benjamin’s source, so Vygotsky’s interest in pointing does not feature in Benjamin’s argument. The aspects of his work singled out instead are: first, the way in which Vygotsky separates thought from language (so, his account of non-­thematised coping, on the one hand, and the social and expressive aspects of language on the other) (GS III, 472–3; SW III, 80–1), and, second, the socially oriented modification of Piaget’s ‘egocentric speech’ proposed by Vygotsky; the summary of his experimental findings given



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in the German translation of his work is quoted at some length (GS III, 475; SW III, 82–3). Vygotsky interests Benjamin because he introduces an embodied sense of thought into the essay (although the form of embodiment to which Benjamin finally appeals is pointedly non-­instrumental in a way that Vygotsky’s is not). He is also important as a critic of behaviourism who offers an account of psychological development that acknowledges the importance of the child’s inner world. At the same time, Benjamin is not concerned with the differentiated way in which Vygotsky seeks to show patterns of thought shaped by interaction, and the manner in which he rethinks presuppositions while at the same time generating an empirical research programme. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s essay does finish with insights from the laboratory, quoting a further empirical investigation into language loss. He uses the study to set out the ethical standard that he thinks should guide the sociology of language more generally. At the very end of the essay, therefore, we catch a glimpse of the normative framework that underpins Benjamin’s approach in a way that shows what separates him from Vygotsky’s position, whilst simultaneously suggesting how  the latter’s emphasis on the creative dynamism of situated interaction can temper the tendency to hyperbole and abstraction in Benjamin’s ethics. Benjamin quotes the pioneering neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein’s study of aphasia, which argues that patients afflicted by the condition are limited to a predominantly concrete relation to the world, and seem to have lost the ability to stand back from immediate practical concerns. These patients are confined to a language that is purely instrumental.6 For Goldstein, the limit on human interaction which the condition imposes points to its opposite: genuinely non-­instrumental interaction grounded in language: As soon as an individual uses language to establish a living relation to him-­or herself or to fellow human beings, language ceases to be an instrument, a mere means, and becomes instead a manifestation, a disclosure of our innermost being and of the psychological band that connects us to ourselves and to our fellow humans. (quoted in SW III, 85–6, translation amended) Sobald der Mensch sich der Sprache bedient, um eine lebendige Beziehung zu sich selbst oder zu seinesgleichen herzustellen, ist die Sprache nicht mehr ein Instrument, nicht mehr ein Mittel, sondern eine Manifestation, eine Offenbarung unseres innersten Wesens und des psychischen Bandes, das uns mit uns selbst und unseresgleichen verbindet. (quoted in GS III, 480) Benjamin adds: ‘This insight stands­– e­ xplicitly or silently­– a­ s the first step in the sociology of language’ (GS III, 480; SW III, 86, translation amended; ‘Diese Einsicht 6

For an account of Goldstein’s work on aphasia that suggests he didn’t view it only as a loss of the ‘abstract’ i.e. non-­instrumental cognitive capacities, see Goldstein 1990.

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ist es, die ausdrücklich oder stillschweigend am Anfang der Sprachsoziologie steht’). Benjamin thus rounds off his essay by citing an empirical study that takes the predominantly task-­oriented language of patients afflicted with aphasia as an occasion to invoke, by contrast, the idea of a radically non-­instrumental language, a language that is supposed to be connected to the living core of a human being. As Benjamin recalled in a letter to Werner Kraft in January 1936, the positive formulation of this theory of language is to be found in the short text ‘On the mimetic faculty’ that he wrote in Ibiza in the summer of 1933 (GS III, 674), revising a text he had first worked on in January of that year (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 388). A brief look at Benjamin’s condensed and slightly cryptic formulation of his own position will allow us to understand both the normative force of his arguments and the ways his understanding of those norms limits his engagement with Vygotsky’s practically oriented, experimental approach. Benjamin’s approach is historical: he imagines slow but profound changes in the way human beings relate to their environment. The mimetic faculty names a form of physical attunement to the world that comes, in the development of culture, to be mediated by language. Graphology, or the study of handwriting, supplies Benjamin with an analogy to explain how normal communication and mimetic attunement interact with each other (GS II, 212–13; SW II, 722). If we write out a sentence by hand, the words communicate the semantic content of the sentence. But the handwriting itself says something more about us which can only be said by writing the words out, but which communicates over and above what the words themselves communicate. Benjamin’s longer discussions of graphology, in a book review from 1928 (GS III, 135–9; SW II, 131–4) and a radio talk from 1930 (SW II, 398–400), show him cautiously distancing himself from existing models of what it is that is communicated: both the vitalist life force invoked in Ludwig Klages’s analyses of writing as a form of gesture and the Freudian unconscious presupposed in Anja and Georg Mendelssohn’s psychoanalytic approach (GS III, 138; SW II, 133).7 Nevertheless, we are presented with ‘the pantomime of the entire nature and existence of mankind’ (GS III, 139; SW II, 134). As we interact linguistically, we similarly display our ‘entire nature and existence’ in a way that both underpins and outstrips our pragmatic dealings with each other. But this knowledge of ourselves is not easy to assimilate. It accompanies every word and every communicative gesture. But at the same time it is ephemeral. ‘It flits past’ (GS II, 213; SW II, 722) like a flash of lightning. And even where we notice it, we might not understand it. In the essay on Kafka that Benjamin worked on in 1934, around the time he was also writing his research report on the sociology of language, Benjamin returned to the idea of a gestural habitus communicating over and beyond the language of words. But in this text, technology has radically changed our embodied existence, and if we grasp what human bodies communicate it is only with great effort, riding against a ‘tempest that blows from forgetting’ (GS II, 436; SW II, 814). 7

The radio text is included in the new edition of Benjamin’s Rundfunkarbeiten (2017: 485–7).



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Human culture, for Benjamin, contains the record of our full, embodied involvement with each other and the world around us, and it is the task of a critical philosophy to articulate the occluded layer of experience that transcends our practical engagements. Benjamin thus differs from Vygotsky in the way his account of language acquisition is shadowed by the image of a genuine humanity, untrammelled by alienatingly instrumental forms of behaviour. At the same time, his ethical norms can only be indirectly articulated, situated as they are beyond normally communicative language: we must somehow catch the images of our mimetic inheritance as they flash up and fade away. The idea of a something beyond familiar language is a seductive one; it contains the promise of new ways of doing and seeing things, of a realm beyond the constraints of routinised behaviour. Moreover, it suggests that to describe this realm is to miss the point: the new, in its novelty, must necessarily confound our attempts to grasp it in yesterday’s conceptuality. So we must confine ourselves to metaphorical allusions like the lightning, or to rhetorical questions of the sort we have seen at the end of ‘A German institute of independent research’ that involve us in the quest for an inexpressible humanity that, in Derridean mode, is always to come (GS III, 526; SW III, 313). The comparison with Vygotsky helps us to break with the seductive, but disappointing, promise of what our concepts cannot say whilst preserving the ethical drive that inspires Benjamin’s metaphors. If we follow Vygotsky’s idea that thought and language do not have to be identified, then we do not in fact need to get so stuck with the idea of an inexpressible ‘beyond’ to language. We can, rather, observe how people behave, and we can listen to and analyse how they talk and write, and we can watch the two aspects of human behaviour connect and disconnect. Our own tools are themselves practical and intellectual, working on different levels, and a flexible enough way to surprise ourselves out of our habits. This does not mean that we lose the ethical challenge of thinking about the humanity to come. But this focus will lose the generality that gave it grandeur but deprived it of a situation in which it could be tried out, tried on and tested. We will be concerned not with a realm beyond our current life but with ‘the state of existence at specified times and places and the state of affection, plans and purposes under concrete circumstances’ (Dewey 1984: 36). The result will be ethical, but in a modest Aristotelian vein: gathering evidence to assess what would be the appropriate thing to do in this situation, given these circumstances and these behavioural, biological and historical constraints. More importantly, the result will acknowledge that there is no humanity to come, only the fragile, insufficient humanity of the present. Methodological innovations that Vygotsky’s work can bring to Benjamin’s approach are thus, first, a focus on the ways in which behaviour and language aren’t reducible to each other, and, second, an awareness of how the tensions between behaviour, thought and language are vital to emotional and intellectual growth. In this spirit, Vygotsky elaborated the idea of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky 1978: 79–91; see Wertsch 1984). It does not explicitly feature in the essay published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus in 1929. However, the idea

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brings into focus the methodological innovations that Vygotsky’s work introduces when compared with that of Benjamin and the other members of the Frankfurt School for whom the latter wrote the research report on the sociology of language. In particular, it helps us reconceive the behaviours that, for the Frankfurt School, get grouped together and mythologised as ‘mimesis’. Vygotsky uses the concept of the zone of proximal development to highlight how shared activity stretches and expands the conceptual reach of the developing child. Vygotsky noticed that most experiments assessing a child’s intellectual development test what he or she is able to do unaided. A different assessment is reached when experimenters explore what children can do in collaboration with an adult or more experienced peer. Underpinning this expansion of a child’s cognitive range is a particular form of imitation: ‘Children can imitate a variety of actions that go well beyond the limits of their own capabilities’ (Vygotsky 1978: 88). Shared activity facilitates learning over and beyond the developmental stage that the child is currently at, and, as we have already seen in the example of children recycling the problem-­solving conversations they have had with others, the activities are adopted and internalised to become part of the individual’s cognitive repertoire: an essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are internalized, they become part of the child’s independent developmental achievement. (Vygotsky 1978: 90) The exact mechanisms of this creative imitation are still being explored today. If the discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s led to a flurry of excitement that the innate, neural substrates of imitation had been isolated, more recent work suggests something closer to Vygotsky’s position. Imitation appears to be ‘an emergent product of both native and environmental influences’ (Oostenbroek et al. 2016: 1336), itself learned by infants through social interaction (Heyes 2016). If this is the case, then the qualitative difference that Benjamin’s model of language suggested between, on the one hand, the mimetic force despite, or alongside, the semiotic aspects of language and, on the other, communicative behaviour is methodologically unnecessary. Imitation is itself distributed. Rather than imagining an infant using a raw, in-­born faculty to imitate something done by another (atomistically conceived) individual, the Vygotskian approach suggests that it is the dynamic situation of shared interaction itself that allows the imitative behaviour to develop. Moreover, Vygotsky hoped to understand what aspects of the dynamic situation contribute to cognitive and social development. His experiments were designed to pick apart forms of behaviour that seem automatic and immediate (e.g. the thoughts that I think to myself) and to show their genesis. The contrast to the Frankfurt School approach is clear. Where Benjamin’s argument juxtaposes (limited) instrumental behaviour with (richer, better) mimetic interaction, Vygotsky is



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more interested in understanding the specific, socially situated mechanisms, both dynamic and creative, that foster learning and allow human beings to flourish in the context of shared interaction. What limited Benjamin’s engagement with Vygotsky, then, was a suspicion of all forms of instrumental reason that led him to construct an opposition between the mimetic faculty and goal-­oriented forms of behaviour. Vygotsky’s approach and more recent research suggest a more complex view of action and interaction. An important consequence of the more complex model is that it raises anew the question as to what, if not instrumental thinking, causes the combination of creative imitation and goal-­oriented interaction to become fixed in habits which hinder rather than foster human flourishing. Axel Honneth, in good Frankfurt School tradition as we have seen, suggested that the answer was ‘reification’, or treating people as things, taking the term from Lukács but reconfiguring it to mean a detachment from the levels of pre-­cognitive interaction and visceral attunement that many developmental psychologists now believe underpin the subsequent emergence of forms of perspective-­taking, reciprocity and recognition (Honneth et al. 2008: 56–60). But, as Raymond Geuss pointed out, this doesn’t solve the problem, evident in Benjamin’s or Adorno’s idea of mimesis, of imagining a layer of human experience which is magically beyond all forms of instrumentalization (Honneth et al. 2008: 126–7). Responding to his critics, Honneth tempers his claim and agrees that the visceral engagement that underpins the development of more complex forms of sociality must itself be before or beyond normativity. The bodily, engaged stance itself ‘has no normative orientation’ (Honneth et al. 2008: 152). However, even though Honneth and Butler, Geuss and Lear all agree on this point, the admission of a pre-­or a-­normative founding layer of primal responsiveness doesn’t solve the conceptual problems: it can’t explain the relation between human responsiveness and norms. How and why do the deepest levels of human experience come to be normatively inflected? Varga and Gallagher suggest further empirical work can help to articulate in more detail the relations between social norms and what they call ‘affective proximity’ (Varga and Gallagher 2012: 255–6). The claim is no doubt true but it parks the problem in the future. Colombetti and Torrance make the stronger conjecture that this layer of interaction, or what they call ‘the negotiative dance of participatory sense-­making’, must be ‘inevitably ethical in nature’ (Colombetti and Torrance 2009: 523). But they don’t explain how or why. But all is not lost. The distributed model of imitation and learning that emerges from Vygotsky’s approach allows us to see how this might be the case, for it insists that the forms of primal responsiveness can’t be isolated from situated social interaction. Moreover, it spurs us on to imagine how we might unpick complex reactions to reconstruct the forms of interaction that, to use Vygotsky’s metaphor, have become ‘fossilized’ in apparently automatic responses (Vygotsky 1978: 68). Such an investigation will endeavour to reconstruct how the norms that are already part of the interaction between adults and children are taken over, but also dynamically adapted by the participants in the sort of ‘negotiative dance’ invoked by Colombetti

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and Torrance. Benjamin’s insistence on radical non-­instrumentality can then act as a reminder that a fulfilling human life won’t be exhaustively embodied in present practices, and indeed that present practices don’t exhaust themselves, but are dynamic and historically rich over and beyond our explicit understanding of them. The encounter between his work and that of Vygotsky highlights how the deep, primal forms of human interaction, as they develop and are shaped by lived communication, always raise questions about better and worse ways of doing what we do, that is to say, they inhabit and sustain what Charles Taylor calls a ‘moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not’ (Taylor 1989: 28). As we, in Vygotskian fashion, study the forms of interaction that enable and constrain human thinking, the Benjaminian ethical questions don’t go away.

Instrumental Reason, Pragmatism and Distributed Cognition The methodological points that emerge from my critical analysis of Benjamin’s encounter with Vygotsky are thus: first, analysing ‘fossilized’ forms of behaviour to see what constitutes them (rather than setting up an opposition between the instrumental and the non-­instrumental); and, second, a focus on interaction (what happens in the space between people; distributed imitation). Unpacking automatic behaviours and studying interaction both have the effect of emphasising the dynamic nature of human communication. Even the most fossilised, automatic responses, including imitation itself (Heyes 2016), have a history. And if they have a history, they have a future: the potential to be otherwise, to be better or worse. They are ethically inflected. In terms of current debates, returning to Benjamin’s encounter with Vygotsky gives us some conceptual resources to transcend the limitations of existing appeals to ‘mimesis’, ‘primary intersubjectivity’, ‘affective proximity’ or ‘participatory sense-­making’, in the arguments of Honneth et al., Varga and Gallagher, and Colombetti and Torrance, by drawing attention to the socially situated and historically mediated nature of even the deepest layers of human experience, but not in a general way, in the mode of social constructionist arguments in the 1980s and 1990s, but by creatively finding ways of ‘de-­fossilizing’ automatic responses. The sorts of sceptical questions about norms of parenting and the ‘social relations that make possible the emergence of the child’ (Honneth et al. 2008: 108) that, for Butler, seem to call into question the very project of developmental psychology (Honneth et al. 2008: 110) are in fact entirely compatible with an open-­ minded, Vygotskian approach to experimental design. Understanding how current practices foster and inhibit cognitive and social development will always also entail questions about whether the process we are studying was done well. Underpinning this argument is a basically Aristotelian model of human practices, not found explicitly in either Benjamin or Vygotsky, as dynamic and teleological: ‘Every craft and every line of inquiry, and likewise every action and decision, seems to seek some good’ (Aristotle 1999: 1 (1094a)). Some version of



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this argument is needed if we are to understand why the socially situated nature of visceral human interaction is also the key to its normativity, that is to say, if we are to make the step from a distributed to a fully developed 5E understanding of human interaction as embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and also ethically inflected at the most fundamental level. Intriguingly, Horkheimer himself encountered an early-­twentieth-­century version of this argument in the work of John Dewey. His reading of Dewey occurs at about the same point in the development of the Frankfurt School’s position as Benjamin’s with Vygotsky, as part of the long, preparatory work that eventually led to the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason in 1947. Like Benjamin’s response, it represents something of a missed opportunity. The over-­emphasis on bad forms of instrumental reason inhibits the willingness of both Benjamin and Horkheimer to engage with the creative potential of more empirically focused forms of philosophy and psychology. To finish my argument, and clarify the aspects of Frankfurt School thought that can be productively abandoned as we return to their bold, socially critical interdisciplinary endeavour, I will look briefly at Horkheimer’s critique of Dewey, and the implications that it has for reimagining the project of the Frankfurt School and its contribution to a history of distributed cognition. As we shall see, the habits of thought that limited Benjamin’s reading of Vygotsky are the same ones that constrain Horkheimer’s approach to Dewey. Observing the parallel will help us to gain a clearer sense of the habits we need to overcome if we are productively to continue the interdisciplinary social critique inaugurated by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer’s response to Dewey is ambivalent. In his essay ‘Art and mass culture’ (1941), he approvingly cites Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) because the model of art presented there is thought to protect aesthetic experience from reified structures of communication. As Horkheimer summarises: ‘To the extent that the last works of art still communicate, they denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay’ (1972: 279). The same suspicion that communication is in fact only reified, instrumental action that informed Benjamin’s account of language returns here with even more force. Horkheimer’s essay concludes: ‘In a beautiful passage of his book, Dewey explains that communication is the consequence and not the intention of the artistic work’ (1972: 290). For Horkheimer, therefore, Dewey can be cited as an ally who similarly champions aesthetic resistance to instrumental reason. However, Horkheimer’s reading of Dewey is very selective. It ignores the ways in which art, in Dewey’s more optimistic account, is not irrevocably separated from other forms of cultural activity, but rather an emphatic version of a structure common to all genuine experience (Dewey 1980: 11). More importantly, it ignores the degree to which, for Dewey, aesthetic responses ‘are actions. They are modes of participation’ (Noë 2015: 133). ‘Art is a quality of doing and of what is done’ (Dewey 1980: 222). Like Vygotsky, Dewey emphasises the shared human practices underpinning forms of perception and cognition that appear, at first sight, to be immediate. But Horkheimer has no time for such arguments, equating them with

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a crude instrumentalism, as becomes apparent in his harsh critique of Dewey in Eclipse of Reason. The step that Horkheimer is unwilling to follow Dewey in is that of connecting the creatively non-­instrumental with the practical. In Horkheimer’s view, a focus on current practices will necessarily be constraining. For this reason, he is deeply troubled by the practice-­oriented model of truth he finds in Pierce and Dewey, saying, by contrast, that Kant ‘did not liquidate truth by identifying it with practical actions of verification’ (Horkheimer 1992: 43). For pragmatism, he claims, probability replaces truth (1992: 43). Moreover, this probabilistic, future-­oriented focus on results threatens to subsume the past (1992: 44). Horkheimer’s concern is partly misplaced. For Dewey, the orientation towards the future has the potential to be radical and socially transformatory: ‘a philosophy which merely reflected and reported the chief features of the existing situation as if they were final, without regard to what they may become, would be . . . repulsively materialistic’ (1984: 64). Nevertheless, Horkheimer’s critique raises the useful question as to whose practices are affirmed by their success: ‘the subjectivism of the school lies in the role that “our” practices, actions, and interests play in its theory of knowledge’ (Horkheimer 1992: 45). However, Dewey’s position is not undermined by this worry. Horkheimer’s critical question just makes explicit the necessarily situated nature of knowledge once we give up a more absolute model of truth. But Horkheimer, like Benjamin with his worries about mere communication, does not like the idea that philosophical concepts are finally part of human activity. Horkheimer imagines a sense of truth beyond human truths, not limited to human interests, and misses in Dewey’s position what he calls ‘objective contents’, that is to say, something more than ‘our’ interested engagement with the world (1992: 46). Indeed, he explicitly rejects the idea of thinking as a form of activity, cleaving instead to a contemplative model of philosophy and the truths it produces: But a doctrine that seriously attempts to dissolve the intellectual categories­– ­such as truth, meaning, or conceptions­– ­into practical attitudes cannot itself expect to be conceived in the intellectual sense of the word; it can only try to function as a mechanism for starting certain series of events. According to Dewey, whose philosophy is the most radical and consistent form of pragmatism, his own theory ‘means that knowing is literally something we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaviour towards facts, and that active experimentation is essential to verification’.8 This, at least, is consistent, but abolishes philosophical thought while it still is philosophical thought. The ideal pragmatistic philosopher would be he who, as the Latin adage has it, remains silent. (Horkheimer 1992: 48–9)

8

Horkheimer is here quoting John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), p. 330.



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Horkheimer’s contemplative model of truth plays a role in his argument analogous to Benjamin’s invocation of the humanity that ‘flashes up’ beyond or despite the communicative, instrumental side of language: it makes him indifferent to the complexities of a model of human practice that isn’t his own. Just as Benjamin did not note Vygotsky’s account of the way interaction can be re-­appropriated, internalised and redeployed as children learn the powerful habits of thought, so Horkheimer, for all his awareness of Dewey’s interest in forms of non-­instrumental (aesthetic) experience, cannot disentangle activity in Dewey from a very narrow form of managing the world. Although Dewey explicitly insists that science is not ‘the only valid kind of knowledge’ (1984: 200), and writes frequently of the open-­ ended, physically and emotionally engaged encounter of the knower with his or her environment, Horkheimer imposes on his thought the same opposition between the instrumental and the non-­instrumental with which he operates, and so finds Dewey mostly wanting.

Conclusion Returning to the years when the position of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers had not yet been fixed reveals the potential for productive cross-­ fertilisation with approaches for which cognition was explicitly spread across shared practices. For both Vygotsky and Dewey, thinking is inseparable from doing things with other human beings, and is distributed across this interaction. What prevents the productive interchange from taking place in the 1930s and 1940s are the urgent ethical questions that Horkheimer and Benjamin bring to reading their practice-­oriented peers. Horkheimer asks: whose practices? Benjamin asks: which humanity? These are the right questions to be asking, and they highlight the degree to which the activities and forms of interaction that enable and sustain forms of cognition will always be ethically inflected. But Horkheimer and Benjamin themselves cannot help us pick apart the ‘fossilized’ processes by which certain forms of behaviour come to be fixed, to seem immediate and unquestionable. Nor, as Honneth discovered, does the appeal to forms of visceral attunement in itself guarantee that interaction will necessarily be rich and humanising. What we need instead is the kind of experimental imagination invoked by Dewey and embodied by Vygotsky which returns to the formative years of human intersubjectivity to find ways of ‘de-­fossilizing’ and defamiliarising interaction. If even imitation is not innate but rather ‘an emergent product of both native and environmental influences’ (Oostenbroek et al. 2016: 1336), then experiments can explore how these processes of imitation develop, and what variables produce more or less scope for creative re-­appropriation. At the same time, a philosophically informed comparative anthropology can explore the ‘space of possibility’ for fostering these forms of creativity and freedom (Flanagan 2017). In a letter he wrote shortly after the publication of Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer lamented ‘a much needed Philosophy of Experience in contrast to Dewey’s Instrumentalism’ (1987–96: vol. 17, 935). Such a philosophy, for Horkheimer,

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would counter ‘the individual’s increasing inability to have experiences of his own’ (935). This failure, for Horkheimer, arises because the pseudo-­individual, to borrow the term from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1987–96: vol. 5, 181), ‘applies mechanically the conceptual patterns handed down by industrialized society, and by this very process deprives the conceptual patterns thus misused of their intellectual substance’ (1987–96: vol. 17, 935). At the heart of both Horkheimer’s and Benjamin’s ethics, therefore, we find the ideal of creative imitation. At the same time, both thinkers reach the limit of their conceptual imagination when it comes to rethinking the situations in which, in the everyday interaction of human beings, such creative imitation might be fostered or stifled. As a consequence, neither thinker can imagine that creativity is itself distributed, since for both men, interaction with others immediately seems constraining.9 It is indeed hard to understand that things which phenomenologically (to an adult at least) feel immediate are actually the automated product of years of acculturation. Horkheimer himself was no stranger to the idea that our emotional life is shaped by social context. For instance, in his ‘Remarks on philosophical anthropology’ (‘Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie’), published in 1935 in the same issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung as Benjamin’s essay on the sociology of language, he suggests that forms of emotional interaction such as ‘love, understanding, sympathy’ (‘Liebe, Verständnis, Sympathie’)­– t­hat is to say, forms of what in contemporary philos­ ophy of mind would be called ‘mindreading’­– a­ re all historically shaped (1987–96: vol. 3, 273). Nevertheless, the methodological resources that would help him, or Benjamin, develop this insight in an empirically founded and differentiated way remained invisible to him. It would be the topic of a further essay to understand this blindness in more detail as itself the product of a certain failure of creativity. Horkheimer’s critique of Dewey echoes that of Max Scheler, whose account of American pragmatism, published in 1926, Horkheimer very much admired (Scheler 1977; Horkheimer 1987–96: vol. 17, 936). Perhaps Horkheimer’s confrontation with Dewey was inescapably constrained by the academic culture in which he grew up. Be that as it may, the neuralgic point, around which the texts of Benjamin, Vygotsky, Horkheimer and Dewey can in retrospect be grouped, is that of distributed imitation: the dynamic patterns of imitative interaction in which human beings participate as they become the irrecusably ethical beings that they are.

9

We find the same habit of thought in Levinas (Morgan 2011).

N o t e s o n C o ntrib u tors

Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow in History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Renaissance Extended Mind (2015) and she has recently published articles in Narrative, Poetics Today and Frontiers in Psychology. Marco Bernini is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies in the Department of English Studies and a member of the interdisciplinary project on auditory-­verbal hallucinations ‘Hearing the Voice’ at Durham University. His research focuses on narrative theory, modernist fiction and cognitive science. His forthcoming monograph for Oxford University Press is titled Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models, and Exploratory Narratives (2021). Melba Cuddy-­Keane is Emerita Professor of English, University of Toronto. Her research areas are modernism, narratology and book history/print culture; her publications include Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2003) and, co-­ authored with Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat, Modernism: Keywords (2014). Her essays on art and cognition focus on soundscapes and auditory perception; navigation and non-­conscious thought; bodily and conceptual schemas; mind-­wandering and mindfulness; somatic dance; and spatial imagination and the ‘storymind’. Peter Garratt is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His publications include Victorian Empiricism (2010) and, as editor, The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (2016). He has recently written on Ruskin and Vernon Lee in a book on Reading Breath in Literature (2018), edited by Arthur Rose, and he is now writing a study of Dickens and voice-­hearing. Nicole Garrod-Bush completed a PhD on Victorian fiction and technologies of the moving image in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.

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Her research explores the representation of perception in fiction, and the history and philosophy of optical technology. Her recent publications have looked at the kaleidoscope and metaphors of visual patterning in literature. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. She is author of The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; Exotic Spaces in German Modernism; The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature; Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language, and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize. Her most recent book, with Oxford University Press, is On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. Adam Lively received his doctorate from the University of London and has published academic articles on literary theory and semiotics. He has also published four novels and a number of short stories. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing and English at Middlesex University, where he runs an online MA in Novel-­Writing. Ben Morgan is Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College, Associate Professor of German, and Co-­ Convenor of the Comparative Criticism and Translation Programme at the University of Oxford. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (2013), and editor with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan of Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky of Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture (Poetics Today, 2017). Andrew Michael Roberts is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Dundee and Co-­Director of the Centre for Poetic Innovation (Universities of Dundee and St Andrews). His research interests are in modernist fiction and poetry, contemporary British poetry and literature in relation to science and visual culture. He was PI for the AHRC project ‘Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition’ (2009–11). His books include Conrad and Masculinity (2000) and Geoffrey Hill (2004). Mark Sprevak is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics, with particular focus on the cognitive sciences. He has published articles in, among other places, The Journal of Philosophy, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. His book The Computational Mind is forthcoming from Routledge. Marion Thain is Professor of Literature and Culture in the English department at King’s College London. She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and then worked in English departments at Russell



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Group universities in the UK, before moving to New York University as a Professor of Arts and Literature in the school of interdisciplinary global liberal arts and Director of Digital Humanities for NYU. She returned to the UK in autumn 2018. Emily Troscianko is a Research Associate at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford, as well as a writer and an eating-­disorder recovery coach. With a background in cognitive literary studies, and particular interests in the embodied and enactive nature of text-­cued imagery and emotional response, her current research centres on the connections between literary reading and mental health. Kerry Watson has been Librarian at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since 2007. She shares responsibility for a world-­renowned collection of archival and special collections material relating to Dada and Surrealism, and has a particular interest in Surrealist automatic techniques, printmaking and artists’ books. In 2016 she was a member of the curatorial team for Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous, a major international touring exhibition. Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology and artificial intelligence) and philosophy of mind. He also works on Heidegger and on developing ideas at the interface between the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions. His book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step, was published by MIT Press in 2005. Eleanore Widger received a doctorate from the University of Dundee in 2018 on contemporary British ‘radical landscape poetry’ and Romantic environmental aesthetics. She was the 2018 Doctoral Fellow at the Centre of Poetic Innovation and began her postdoctoral research with an NPIF Innovation Placement at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. Her work has been published in English and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

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I n de x

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate footnotes. 4E cognition, ix, 3–9, 24, 209; see also embedded cognition; embodied cognition; enactive cognition; extended cognition abstraction, 219, 220–1 acquisitiveness, 48 active externalism, 35, 134 Adorno, Theodor, 235, 245 aesthetic perception empathy, 83–6, 88 lyric, 87, 88–90 tactile values, 81–3, 88, 91, 92 aesthetic pleasure, 33 aestheticism, 28 aesthetics, 26, 37, 114, 116 affordances, 215–16 afterimages, 65–6 agent-environment couplings, 44; see also coupled systems Analogical Mind, The (Holyoak, Gentner and Kokinov), 105 analogical worlds, 101, 105–12 analogy, 34, 97, 99, 100–1, 105 Anderson, Miranda, 16 anglophone Romanticism, 169 anonymity, 168 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina, 83–6 anthropomorphism, 82, 99 aphasia / aphasics, 40, 241–2 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 171 aposiopesis, 228 Aragon, Louise, 182 ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’ (‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, Rilke), 127–8 Aristotle, 246 Armstrong, Isobel, 71, 80 Arnheim, R., 181

Arnold, Matthew, 26 art, 118, 169, 172 ‘Art and mass culture’ (Horkheimer), 247–9 Art as Experience (Dewey), 247 artefacts, 16–17, 28–9, 35 artificial intelligence, 11 artists, 33 artist’s sketchbook, 171–3, 176 atomisation, 81 Au-delà de la peinture (Ernst), 182–3 Austerlitz (Sebald), Plate 9, 36, 147–8 Automatic Drawing (Masson), Plate 13 Automatic Portrait of the Automaton of Albertus Magnus (Hugnet), Plate 16 automatic writing, 173 automatism, 172–3, 175, 178, 179–81 and chance, 182–7 autophenomenology, 194 autopoiesis, 154n modernist walking, 161–3, 164, 165, 166, 167 Romantic walking, 156–9 autopoietic enactivism, 6–7, 37, 115, 153, 162 Bain, Alexander, 47, 48–9, 56, 70, 71, 75, 76 Balakian, A., 179 ‘Ball, Der’ (‘The Ball’, Rilke), 128–31 Bandmann, Gunter, 175–6 bartenders, 4 Barthes, Roland, 137, 146 Bazin, André, 138, 139, 146 beauty, 143–4 ‘Beauty and ugliness’ (Lee and AnstrutherThomson), 83n, 84–5 Beer, Gillian, 23 ‘Behind the Gare St. Lazare’ (Cartier-Bresson), Plate 7, 144–5



in dex   283

‘being-in-the-world’, 113–14 Beistegui, Miguel de, 106 Belgian symbolism, 145n Benjamin, Walter, 40–1, 249 encounter with Vygotsky, 232, 233–5, 239–46 Berenson, Bernard, 33, 81–2, 83, 84, 91 Bergson, Henri, 135, 148–51 Bernini, Marco, 21–2, 226 ‘Bianca’ (Symons), 90, 92–3 bioprejudices, 46 biosensibility, 30 bioscopes, 108 birds, 201–3 Bleak House (Dickens), 75–6 body-schema, 118 Bourget, Paul, 81 Bowie, A., 169 Bowlby, R., 168 brain, 149 brainhood, 46–8 Breton, A., 173 decalcomania, 185–7 Mad Love, 143 Manifeste du Surréalisme, 142, 172, 177–9 Nadja, 142–4, 146 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 76–7 The Professor, 74 Villette, 73–4 vision, 32 Bruges-la-Morte (Rodenbach), Plate 8, 35, 145–6 Bureau de recherches surréaliste, 179–80 Butler, Judith, 12, 234 Calè, Luisa, 77 Camondo, Moïse de, 82 Caracciolo, Marco, 21 Casey, Edward, 123 Cave, Terence, 114, 131, 216 Caws, Mary Ann, 143 cerebral life, 48–9 Cézanne, Paul, 34–5, 82–3, 124–5, 132, 133 Merleau-Ponty on, 91–2, 114–24, 172 Still Life with Apples, Plate 4, 120 Chalmers, David, 44–5, 95, 99–100, 134, 193, 231 chance, 143–4, 173, 175, 176, 180, 182–7, 188 childhood development, 223, 237–8, 244 children, 180, 181 circulating, 200–6 Clark, Andy active externalism, 134 artist’s sketchbook, 38, 175, 176 cognitive extension, 63, 99–100 cognitive niche construction, 3–4, 52

embodied cognition, 12–13 epistemic actions, 20n extended cognition, 117 extended mind, 44–5 natural born cyborgs, 4 selfhood, 95 Tetris, 231 tools, 184, 187 on Vygotsky, 237 cognition, 1–2 Cognition in the Wild (Hutchins), 176 cognitive (mental) bloat, 30n, 45 cognitive ecology, 131 cognitive experience, 27 cognitive extension, 63 cognitive humanities, 10–17 cognitive linguistic studies, 35 cognitive literary studies, 22–3, 35 cognitive narrative theory, 20–1 cognitive neuroscience, 18 cognitive niche construction, 3–4, 14, 15, 52, 60 cognitive niches, 29 cognitive realism, 192, 193, 212–13, 214, 230 cognitive sciences, 11 cognitive studies, 18–19, 132 cognitive turn, 10–17, 19 collages, 182–4 Untitled (Ernst), Plate 14 collective behaviour, 190, 203 collective experience, 196n collective groups, 201–2 collective mind, 23, 55, 58, 208; see also communal mind Collingwood, R. G., 82–3 Colombetti, G., 89–90, 245 colour, 91–2 common sense, 46, 167, 169 communal mind, 201; see also collective mind communication, 247 compossibility, 106 compression, 106 conceptual bleeding, 106 conceptual metaphor theory, 214 conceptual metaphors, 226 consciousness David Chalmers, 193–4 Henri Bergson, 148–9, 150, 151 Henry James, 22, 27 Marcel Proust, 103 William James, 102 see also unconscious Consciousness in Action (Hurley), 140–1 convulsive beauty, 143–4 coupled systems, 44, 54, 69–70, 95; see also spatiotemporal couplings; structural couplings

284

in dex

Crary, Jonathan, 66, 68, 80 creative imagination, 250 creative process, 38 Cubism, 174 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 22 cultural studies, 11 culture, 14–15, 17 cybernetics, 11 Dada, 177 Daguerre, Louis, 136 Daguerreotype, 136, 137, 139 Dalí, Salvador, 181 Damasio, A., 7, 12, 103 Dames, Nicholas, 23 Daniel Deronda (Eliot, G.), 31n, 50–1, 52, 55, 74–5 Darwin, Charles, 25, 29, 137n De Sélincourt, Basil, 201–2 ‘Dead, The’ (Joyce), 199–200, 200–1 Decadence, 28, 81, 87, 88, 93 decalcomania, 142, 182, 185–7 decompression, 106 Degas, Edgar, 82 Dennett, D., 11, 12, 191–2, 194 Descartes, R., 96 Descriptive Sketches (Wordsworth), 155–6, 157, 160 Desnos, Robert, 179–80 Dessin automatique (Masson), Plate 13 Dewey, John, 28, 41, 53, 247–9, 249 Di Bello, Patrizia, 77 diachronicity, 101–3 Dickens, Charles, 32, 72, 73, 75–6 dimensionality, 121 directionality, 134 distance, 56 distant reading, 12n distributed cognition, ix, 1–2, 24, 27 4E cognition, ix, 3–9, 24, 209; see also embedded cognition; embodied cognition; enactive cognition; extended cognition and the cognitive turn, 10–17 socially distributed cognition, 7–9, 72 distributed neural activity, 48 distributed ontology, 98, 103, 106–7 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 73 Donald, Merlin, 20 dreaming, 51, 178, 193 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 197, 198 duration, 134, 150–1 dynamic groups, 201–2 Easterlin, Nancy, 19–20 Eclipse of Reason (Horkheimer), 233, 248 ecocognition, 30

edge of thought, 44 Edwards, Elizabeth, 138 Edwards Paul, 146 egocentric speech, 237–8 Elemente der Psychophysik (Fechner), 31n Eliot, George Daniel Deronda, 31n, 50–1, 52, 55, 74–5 ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, 49 The Lifted Veil, 43, 44–5, 46–7, 55 Middlemarch, 23, 49, 55–9 pathetic fallacy, 198 realism, 26 relationship with George Henry Lewes, 50 vision, 32, 74–5 Eliot, T. S., 28, 37, 154 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 161–3 Elle garde son secret (Ernst), Plate 15 embedded cognition, 3–4, 4–5, 8, 113 fiction, 23, 72, 195, 199 poetry, 92–3 embedded cognitive agency, 52 embedded minds, 23, 52 embedded self, 34 embedded worlds, 110 embodied action, 63–4 embodied acts, 210 embodied approach to language, 240 embodied cognition, 3, 5, 12–13, 14, 79, 113 cerebral life, 49 common sense, 169 empathy, 83–6, 88 and ethics, 233n fiction, 164, 165, 199, 205, 206 lyric, 86–7, 88–90 metaphors, 214–15 New Poems (Rilke), 124–31 tactile values, 81–3, 88, 91, 92 embodied communication, 203 embodied experience, 122–3, 131 embodied life, 28 Embodied Mind, The (Varela, Thompson and Rosch), 63–4 embodied perception, 90–3 embodied self, 34 embodied subjectivity, 164 embodied subjects, 156 embodied-enactive view of painting, 114–24 emergence, 203 Emigrants, The (Sebald), 146–7 emotional interaction, 250 emotions, 7, 29, 165, 215 empathy, 83–6, 88 enactive cognition, 6–7, 79, 113, 170 definition, 152–3 life and mind, 29 mental imagery, 216, 219



in dex   285

mind unbound, 53 modernist walking: autopoiesis, 161–3, 164, 165, 166, 167; freedom and fluid self, 163–9 readers and narrative, 20–1 Romantic walking: autopoiesis, 156–9; road as cognitive agent, 159–60; and the sensorimotor subject, 154–6 Swann’s Way (Proust), 96–8: analogical worlds, 105–12; spatiotemporal couplings, 98–105 see also autopoietic enactivism; sensorimotor enactivism enactive communication, 203 enactive embodiment, 90–3, 114–24 enactive objectivity, 138 enactive perception, 63–4 fiction, 72–7 moving-image technologies, 64–8: touch, 69–71 Engels, Friedrich, 27 epistemic actions, 20n epistemological realism, 27 epistemology, 56n époque des sommeils, 179 Epstein, Richard, 112 Erewhon (Butler), 54 Ernst, Max, 182–3, 184, 185 Elle garde son secret, Plate 15 Untitled, Plate 14 érotique-voilée, 144 ‘Escalade’ (Symons), 89 Espasmo-graffisme, 181 Esrock, Ellen, 86 ethics, 232–5, 241, 243, 250 Evans, Mary Ann see Eliot, George evolution, 25, 29 experience, 33 cognitive, 27 collective, 196n embodied, 122–3, 131 experiment, 49, 53 explosante-fixe, 144, 150 extended cognition, 4–5, 8, 30, 44, 113, 117, 195 New Poems (Rilke), 124–31 Swann’s Way (Proust), 96–8: analogical worlds, 105–12; spatiotemporal couplings, 98–105 see also extended mind extended mind, 19–20, 21–2, 31 artist’s sketchbook, 171–3 Daniel Deronda (Eliot, G.), 50–1 Erewhon (Butler), 54 The Lifted Veil (Eliot, G.), 43, 44–5, 46–7 Middlemarch (Eliot, G.), 49, 55–9

photographic objectivity, 134–41: Henri Bergson, 148–51; and melancholy, 145–8, 150; and Surrealism, 141–5, 150 The Physiology of Common Life (Lewes), 51–2 selfhood, 95–6 Surrealist art, 180 technology-as-tool model, 63 Victorian psychology, 47–9 ‘extended mind, The’ (Clark and Chalmers), 44–5, 95, 99–100, 134 external horizons, 121–2 ‘Eye and mind’ (Merleau-Ponty), 91, 114–15 fantascopes, 68 Faraday, Michael, 67, 68 Fauconnier, G., 106 Fechner, Gustav, 31n feedback loops, 140–1, 144 feeling, 52, 82, 83 fiction, 22–3, 26–7, 62, 72–7, 166, 192–4 fictional narrative, 38–9 Flanagan, Owen, 102 flocking behaviour, 203 Florence, Hercules, 136 Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (Berenson), 33, 81–2 fluid self, 163–9 focalisation, 224 Foglia, Lucia, 216 ‘For a Picture of Watteau’ (Symons), 88–9 form, 86, 87 Frankfurt School, 28, 232, 233, 234, 239 free indirect discourse (FID), 196–7 freedom, 163–9, 184 Freud, Sigmund, 29–30 frottage, 184, 185 Elle garde son secret (Ernst), Plate 15 Gall, Franz Joseph, 46 Gallagher, Shaun, 234, 245 gender, 163 genealogical perspectivism, 227 genealogy, 212, 229 Géricault, Théodore, Plate 10, Plate 11, 173–4, 175 German Romanticism, 169 Gess, Nicola, 240 Geuss, Raymond, 245 Gibson, J. J., 215 Goldstein, Kurt, 241 Grant, Kim, 186 graphology, 242 Greenberg, Clement, 131–2 Groos, Karl, 85 group formations, 203–4 group identity, 203

286 group mind, 55; see also collective mind group mind hypothesis, 8 groups, 201–2 Guermantes Way (Proust), 107 Guitare, bec à gaz, flacon (Picasso), Plate 12 Habermas, Jürgen, 233 habit, 52, 97, 98, 99, 100–1, 106 Hammond, Adam, 190 Handling of Words, The (Lee), 33, 86–7 handwriting, 242 haptic perception, 62 Hard Times (Dickens), 73 Harrell, Fox, 110 Haystack series (Monet), 124 Hegel, G. W. F., 127 Heidegger, Martin, 113–14, 123, 124, 132, 235 Hekkert, P., 175 Heller, Dieter, 66 Herman, David, 20–1, 22, 195, 199 heterocosmic self, 97, 103–4, 106, 109 heterophenomenology, 194 history, 53 Hofstadter, Douglas, 34, 97 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 19 Holland, Norman, 14 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 61, 137 holographic images, 108–9 Honneth, Axel, 234, 235, 245 horizontal modularity, 35, 140 Horkheimer, Max, 41, 232, 233, 235, 247–50 Horner, William, 68 ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’ (Eliot, G.), 49 Hugnet, Georges, 186–7 Portrait automatique de l’automate d’Albert-leGrand, Plate 16 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), 221, 222 human evolution, 25 human-technological coupling, 54; see also coupled systems Hurley, Susan, 140–1, 144 Husserl, E., 109, 111, 121–2, 123 Hutchins, Edwin, 1, 176 identity, 95, 96, 153, 157, 158–9, 168 group identity, 203 imagery, 216–17, 218 images, 179 literary, 125 imagination, 26–7, 83, 250 ‘imaginative woman, An’ (Hardy), 139 imitation, 244, 245 immersive objectivity, 134, 145, 148, 150 impressionism, 81 phenomenological, 91–3

in dex impressionist painting, 80, 88 impressionist poetry, 81, 88–90 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) see Guermantes Way (Proust); Swann’s Way (Proust) indeterminacy, 138 industrialisation, 27–8 industrial revolution, 25 Inner Experience and Neuroscience (Price and Barrell), 194n insects, 201 interactive perception in fiction, 72–7 moving-image technologies, 65–8: importance of touch, 69–71 interdependence, 50 ‘intermental’ thought, 23 intersubjective interaction, 153 intersubjective relations, 165 inverted intentionality, 35, 119 inward turn, 22–3 James, Henry, 22, 26–7, 41 James, William, 102 James-Lange theory, 85 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 76–7 Johnson, M., 3, 127, 214 joint attention, 223, 224 Joyce, James, 22 ‘The Dead’, 199–200, 200–1 Keen, Suzanne, 23 Kertész, André, 137 Klee, Paul, 119 knowledge, 63, 64, 157, 172 kosmotheoros, 111–12 Kosslyn, Steven, 108 Kracauer, Siegfried, 136, 137, 138 Krauss, Rosalind, 138–9 Kroeber, Karl, 158 ‘La Nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse’ (anon.), Plate 6 La Révolution surréaliste, 142 Lacan, J., 11 Lakoff, G., 3, 127, 214 language, 131, 132 aphasics, 40 joint attention, 223 linguistic studies, 35 linguistic turn, 11 mental imagining, 125 On the Genealogy of Morality (GM, Nietzsche), 212, 215–16, 217, 228 Thought and Language (Vygotsky), 235–9 Walter Benjamin, 240, 241–3 Lawrence, D. H., 189



in dex   287

Le Temps, 107 Lear, Jonathan, 234 Lee, Vernon literature, 86–7 painting, 83–6 Leibniz, G., 106 Lessing, G. E., 131 Lewes, George Henry The Physiology of Common Life, 51–2 Problems of Life and Mind, 47, 49, 53–4, 56, 59 relationship with George Eliot, 50 Lewis, P., 110 liberty see freedom life, 166, 167 cerebral, 48–9 embodied, 28 lifeworld, 123 Lifted Veil, The (Eliot, G.), 43, 44–5, 46–7, 55 linguistic studies, 35 linguistic turn, 11 Lipps, Theodor, 85 literary form, 86–7 literary images, 125 literary interpretation, 19–20 literary satire, 54 literary studies, 22–3, 35, 37 literary writing, 210 literature, 22–3, 165, 166; see also modernist literature; novels Lodge, David, 22 Lomas, David, 185 London Nights (Symons), 89 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ (Eliot, T. S.), 161–3 Luther, Martin, 228 lyric poetry, 87, 88–90 Mach, Ernst, 136 machines, 54 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 229 Mad Love (Breton), 143 magique-circonstancielle, 144 Magnus, Albert, 186–7 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28 Manifeste du Surréalisme (Breton), 142, 172, 177–9 Marx, Karl, 27 Masson, André, 180–1 Dessin automatique, Plate 13 materials, 175–6 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 35, 148–50 Matthews, J. H., 174, 180, 182, 185 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 199n melancholy, 145–8, 150 Melville, S., 169 memes, 11 memetics, 29

memory, 50, 106, 107–8, 109–10, 148–9, 150 mental (cognitive) bloat, 30n, 45 mental imagery, 216–17, 218 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 33, 35, 130 art and cognition, 172, 175 embodied experience, 131, 156 enactive embodiment, 90–3, 114–24 imagery, 179 kosmotheoros, 111–12 painter’s body, 173 phenomenology, 132 metaphor processing, 217 metaphors, 125, 127, 210, 214–15, 222, 226, 230 metempsychosis, 110 metonymic expansion, 137 Middlemarch (Eliot, G.), 23, 49, 55–9 mimesis, 169 mind collective, 23, 55, 58, 208 communal, 201 embedded, 23, 52 group mind hypothesis, 8 received (non-distributed) view of, 2 reduction to brain, 46–8 social, 72 socially distributed, 32 supersized, 43 Surreal, 176–82 unbound, 50–4 wandering, 51 see also extended mind mind-world loops, 140–1, 144 Miró, Joan, 141 ‘Modern fiction’ (Woolf), 166 modern painting, 114–24, 131–2 modernism, 39, 169, 170, 218 modernist literature, 22, 35–6, 189–90 qualia and fiction, 192–4 qualia and truth, 190–2 relationality and responsibility, 207–8 typology of qualia, 194–6: circulating, 200–6; projecting, 196–7; responding, 197–200 modernist walking autopoiesis, 161–3, 164, 165, 166, 167 freedom and fluid self, 163–9 Moholy-Nagy, László, 136 Molyneux’s problem, 71 Monet, Claude, 124 moods, 7 moral space, 246 morality, 212; see also ethics motoric action, 115 movement, 64, 215 moving-image technologies, 63, 64–8 importance of touch, 69–71

288

in dex

Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 163–8 muscle sense, 70 Muybridge, Eadweard, 136 Nadja (Breton), 142–4, 146 narrative, 21 narrative perspective, 224 narrative worldmaking, 21–2 nationalism, 190 natural born cyborgs, 4 Naville, Pierre, 184 neuroscience, 9, 46, 210 cognitive, 18 Inner Experience and Neuroscience (Price and Barrell), 194n New Poems (Rilke), 124–31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 209–11 Human, All Too Human, 221, 222 On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), 39–40, 211–13: cognitive realism, 230–1; contra distributed cognition, 222–9; pro distributed cognition, 213–22 Will to Power (Wille zur Macht), 209 Noë, Alva art, 35 dimensionality, 121 enactive embodiment, 85–6, 116 habit, 52, 100–1 Out of Our Heads, 53 perception, 17, 56, 57 phenomenology, 132 presence, 55 sensorimotor contingency, 156 sensorimotor enactivism, 155, 162, 163 sensory knowledge, 64 touch, 69, 70–1, 90, 92 vision, 32 visual perception, 62, 174–5 non-distributed view of mind, 2 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch), 18 Novalis, 169, 176 novels, 22–3, 26, 72–7; see also fiction; literature; modernist literature Old Wives’ Tale, The (Bennett), 196–7 On the Genealogy of Morality (GM, Nietzsche), 39–40, 211–13 cognitive realism, 230–1 contra distributed cognition, 222–9 pro distributed cognition, 213–22 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 25 ‘On the Road’ (Symons), 88 Onan (Dalí), 181 optic flow, 32 optical deception, 66 optical devices, 32

optical illusions, 67–8 optical physiology, 65–8 optical technologies, 61–3 moving-image technologies, 63, 64–8: importance of touch, 69–71 O’Regan, J. K., 64, 92, 216 Out of Our Heads (Noë), 53 Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (ed. Zunshine), 19 Paget, Violet see Lee, Vernon painter’s body, 173–6 painting, 80, 88, 92, 131–2, 169, 179 embodied empathy, 83–6 embodied-enactive view of, 114–24 Surrealism, 174–6 tactile values, 81–3 Palmer, Alan, 23, 32, 55, 72 ‘Panther, Der’ (‘The Panther’, Rilke), 125–6, 128 Paris Salon, 120 participatory sense-making, 9, 21 Passage to India, A (Forster), 190 pathetic fallacy, 197–8 perception, 17, 55–9, 135 embodied, 90–3 haptic, 62 importance of touch to, 69–71 photography, 135, 149–50 relation to motoric action, 115–16 and subjectivity, 164–5 see also aesthetic perception; enactive perception; interactive perception perceptual mimesis, 125 persistence-of-vision devices, 62–3, 65–8, 72–3 importance of touch, 69–71 perspective, 141, 224 perspectivism, 212, 227, 228 phantasmascopes, 68 phantasms, 110 phenakistiscope, Plate 1, 68 phenomenological impressionism, 91–3 phenomenology, 6, 10–11, 113, 121, 132–3, 209 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 115, 117, 118, 123 photogenic drawing, 136 photographic model, 62 photographic objectivity, 134–41 and melancholy, 145–8, 150 and Surrealism, 141–5, 150 photographic realism, 82 photography, 35–6, 134, 135–6, 148–51 phrenology, 46–8 Physiology of Common Life, The (Lewes), 51–2 physiology of vision, 66–8, 75



in dex   289

Piaget, Jean, 237–8 Picasso, Pablo, 174 Guitare, bec à gaz, flacon, Plate 12 Pick, Daniel, 65–6 Plateau, Joseph, 68 Poe, Edgar Allan, 135–6, 138, 139 poetry, 35, 37, 81, 87, 88–90, 131, 132, 169 porous qualia, 194–6 circulating, 200–6 projecting, 196–7 responding, 197–200 Portrait automatique de l’automate d’Albert-le-Grand, Plate 16 portraits, 138 postmodern deconstructionism, 11–13 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 158–9 presence, 55–9 primary intersubjectivity, 232–3, 234 Principles of Art, The (Collingwood), 82–3 Principles of Psychology (James), 102 Principles of Psychology (Spencer), 47–8, 56–7 Problems of Life and Mind (Lewes), 47, 49, 53–4, 56, 59 problem-solving, 31–2 Professor, The (Brontë), 74 projecting, 196–7, 196n Proust, Marcel Swann’s Way, 34, 96–8: analogical worlds, 105–12; spatiotemporal couplings, 98–105 Proust as a Philosopher (Beistegui), 106 Psychodiagnistik (Rorschach), 185 psychological enlargement, 43 psychological processes, 239–40 psychology, 47–9, 85 punctum, photographs, 137, 138 Purkyně, Jan Evangelista, 65 qualia and fiction, 192–4 and truth, 190–2 typology, 194–6: circulating, 200–6; projecting, 196–7; responding, 197–200 Raft of the Medusa (Géricault), Plate 10, Plate 11, 173–4 Ramalingam, Chitra, 67 Ray, Man, 142 rayographs, 142 readers, 20–1, 87, 217, 218, 224–5, 226 reading, 12n, 23, 33, 86, 109–10, 217 Readings, B., 169 realisation, 81–2, 83, 84 realism, 26–7 cognitive, 192, 193, 212–13, 214, 230 epistemological, 27 photographic, 82

received view of mind, 2 recognition, 219 reflection, 154 reflexivity, 169 relationality, 206–7 representation, 153, 169 representational painting, 179 representationalism, 25, 115–16, 164 responding, 197–200 responsibility, 207 retentional trajectories, 109 Reverdy, Pierre, 177–8 rhetoric, 212, 222, 228 rhythm, 198–9, 202–3, 205–6 Riis, Jacob, 137 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 34, 35, 120, 132 Duino Elegies, 197, 198 New Poems, 124–31 Rodenbach, George, 135, 145n Bruges-la-Morte, Plate 8, 35, 145–6 Roget, P. M., 66 Romains, Jules, 189 Romantic poetry, 35, 37 Romantic walking and autopoiesis, 156–9 road as cognitive agent, 159–60 and the sensorimotor subject, 154–6 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 168 Rorschach, Hermann, 185 Rosch, E., 154, 168–9, 169 Ruskin, John, 197–8 Ryan, L., 126 Rylance, Rick, 23 Sackville-West, Edward, 197, 198 Scarry, E., 125 Schmarsow, August, 85 Schwitters, Kurt, 182 scientific revolution, 25 Sebald, W. G., 135 Austerlitz, Plate 9, 36, 147–8 The Emigrants, 146–7 self, 34 and body, 162 and brain, 46 fluid, 163–9 and identity, 95–6 neural localisation, 47 Swann’s Way (Proust), 97: analogical worlds, 105–12; spatiotemporal couplings, 98– 105 selfhood, 157 Selous, Edmund, 201, 203 Senses and the Intellect, The (Baine), 48–9, 70 sensorimotor contingency, 156 sensorimotor embodiment, 220

290

in dex

sensorimotor enactivism, 6, 37, 49, 55, 115, 153, 155, 162 sensorimotor knowledge, 64 sensorimotor subjectivity, 155, 157, 159 sensorimotor subjects, 154–6 shared memory, 50 Shattuck, R., 108 She Keeps Her Secret (Ernst), Plate 15 sight, 70 dissociation of touch and, 80–1 see also vision sketching, 175 sleep, 98, 100, 101–3, 104 social manifestation hypothesis, 8 social minds, 72 social positioning, 165–6 social processes, 239–40 socially distributed cognition, 7–9, 72 socially distributed minds, 32 socially embedded minds, 23 socially extended cognition, 50 Socratic ‘midwifery’, 29 solarisation, 142 Solnit, Rebecca, 156–7, 159 somatic markers, 7 space, 25, 27 ‘Spanische Tänzerin’ (‘Spanish Dancer’, Rilke), 126–7 Spasmographism, 181 spatial metaphors, 222 spatiality, 134 spatiotemporal couplings, 98–105 Spencer, Herbert, 47–8, 56–7 Spies, Werner, 176, 182, 183, 184 Spolsky, Ellen, 14 Spurzheim, Johann, 46 starlings, 203 stereoscopes, 61, 107, 108 still life, 119 Still Life with Apples (Cézanne), Plate 4, 120 story recipients see readers storytelling, 21 ‘Street haunting’ (Woolf), 168 structural couplings, 97, 105, 160 Stubbs, Jeremy, 185 studium, photographs, 137 subjective objectivity, 138 subjectivity, 155, 157, 159, 164–5 substance dualism, 2 superimposition, 106–7 superorganisms, 201 supersized mind, 43 Surreal mind, 176–82 Surrealism, 30, 38, 171–88 automatism, 172–3, 175, 178, 179–82: and chance, 182–7

painting, 174–6 photographic objectivity, 135, 141–5, 150 Surrealist Mind, The (Matthews), 173, 178 Surrealist writing, 178–9 Swann’s Way (Proust), 34, 96–8 analogical worlds, 105–12 spatiotemporal couplings, 98–105 symbolist movement, 28 Symons, Arthur, 80–1, 87, 88–90, 92–3 synchronicity, 98–101, 103 tactile values, 81–3, 88, 91, 92 tactility, 61–2, 90; see also touch Tanguy, Yves, 186 Tanner lectures, 234 Tate, Gregory, 23 Taylor, Charles, 246 technological development, 27–8 technological innovations, 25–6, 108–9 technology, 54, 61; see also optical technologies technology-as-tool model, 63 temporality, 109; see also time Tetris, 231 thaumatropes, 67–8 ‘Thing-Poems’, 35 Thompson, E. autopoiesis, 164 enactivism, 152–3, 165 life and mind, 7, 166 moving-image technologies, 69 reflection, 154 self, 168–9 sensorimotor subjectivity, 155, 157, 159 sleep, 103 thought, 172, 178 edge of thought, 44 ‘intermental’ thought, 23 Thought and Language (Vygotsky), 235–9 time, 25, 27, 109, 134, 151 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 22, 197, 199n tools, 176, 184, 187 technology-as-tool model, 63 Torrance, S., 245 touch, 204–6 dissociation of sight and, 80–1 importance to perception, 69–71: in fiction, 72–7 see also tactility Troscianko, Emily, 22 Trotsky, Leo, 28–9 truth, 191–2, 248 Turner, M., 106 unconscious, 29–30, 36, 102 Untouchable (Mulk Raj Anand), 190



in dex   291

Van Hulle, Dirk, 22 Van Leeuwen, C., 175 Van Oort, R., 223 Varela, Francisco, 63–4, 109, 154, 164, 168–9, 169, 170, 232 Varga, Somogy, 234, 245 Verstijnen, I., 175 Victorian Glassworlds (Armstrong), 80 Victorian psychology, 47–9 Vidal, Fernando, 46, 47 Villette (Brontë), 73–4 ‘Violinist’s Tune, The’ (Kertész), Plate 5, 137 virtuality, 121 vision, 32, 64, 70–1 Cubism, 174–5 dissociation of touch and, 80–1 enactive model of, 70 in fiction, 72–7 Middlemarch (Eliot, G.), 55 optical technologies, 62–3 physiology of, 66–8, 75 relation to motoric action, 115–16 tactile values, 92 and tactility, 90 visual imagining, 216 visual technology see optical technologies Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 196, 197, 198–9, 200 Vygotsky, Lev, 28, 40–1, 249 Benjamin’s encounter with, 232, 233–5, 239–46 Thought and Language, 235–9 Wade, Nicholas, 66 walking, 35–6 and autopoiesis, 156–9, 161–3 and the sensorimotor subject, 154–6 wandering mind, 51 Waugh, Patricia, 22

Waves, The (Woolf), 202 Waytz, A., 99 West, Rebecca, 189 Wheatstone, Charles, 67 Wheeler, Michael, 44 Wheeler, William Morton, 201 Will to Power (Wille zur Macht, Nietzsche), 209 Wilson, R. A., 8, 201 women, 162, 163 Woolf, Virginia, 22, 37, 39, 189 ‘Modern fiction’, 166 Mrs Dalloway, 163–8 A Room of One’s Own, 168 ‘Street haunting’, 168 To the Lighthouse, 197, 199n The Voyage Out, 196, 197, 198–9, 200 The Waves, 202 The Years, 203–7 Wordsworth, W., 163 Descriptive Sketches, 155–6, 157, 160 The Prelude, 158–9 road as cognitive agent, 159–60 worldliness of the world, 123 writers, 86–7 writing, 20 automatic, 173 Friedrich Nietzsche, 210 George Eliot, 49 handwriting, 242 Surrealist, 178–9 and thinking, 226 and walking, 168 Years, The (Woolf), 203–7 zoetropes, Plate 2, Plate 3, 68, 69 zone of proximal development, 243–4 Zunshine, Lisa, 19