Malafouris, L. & C. Renfrew. The Cognitive Life of Things TRANSCRIPCION
Malafouris, L. & C. Renfrew. The Cognitive Life of Things TRANSCRIPCION
Malafouris, L. & C. Renfrew. The Cognitive Life of Things TRANSCRIPCION
metallurgist and historian of materials Cyril Stanley Smith, points out in his Matter
Versus Materials [t]hrough most of history, matter has been a concern of
metaphysics more than physics, and materials of neither (1968, 638). To a large
extent philosophy and the cognitive sciences remain oblivious to the medium that
envelops and shapes humanity and epistemically agnostic of its properties and
active role in human life and evolution.
Apparently, this common attitude and implicit stance to the world of things needs to
change, and in fact, it has been changing, especially during the last decades. It is
now widely recognized by many disciplines that in ways that we have yet fully to
understand, material culture shapes the manner in which people act, perceive and
think. As a consequence, it is becoming of paramount importance to come up with
new cross-disciplinary synergies, capable of transforming our understanding of the
relation and co-evolution of brains, bodies and things.
Moreover, granted the particularities of the task ahead of us, one could suggest
that it is inevitable, and maybe also advisable, that archaeology, given its natural
preoccupation with the material medium and the long-term, should carry the
principal burden of such a transformation. Bear in mind that, although this is a
novel and challenging a task it remains nonetheless well rooted in the history of
archaeological discourse and practice. To take just a single characteristic example,
one could refer to the work of Andr Leroi- Gourhan, pointing out decades ago the
uniquely human phenomenon of exteriorization of the organs involved in the
carrying out of technics (1993 [1964], 258). For Leroi-Gourhan, human evolution
has been oriented towards placing outside what in the rest of the animal world is
achieved inside (Leroi-Gourhan 1993 [1964], 235). His early insights on the
freeing of tools and on the operational synergy of tool and gesture can certainly
be seen to anticipate many subsequent philosophical arguments on the extended
and distributed character of human cognition that can be found underlying most
chapters of this volume.
Moving to another distinctive example one which in fact furnished the inspiration
for the title of this book Ajurn Appadurais (1986) The Social Life of Things was
probably the first explicit attempt to battle the prevailing tendency to limit
conceptions of the social to interactions between persons, rather than between
persons and things. Appadurais book pointed out the various unnoticed ways in
which things, like persons, have social lives. It thus introduced the biographical
dimension of artefacts (Kopytoff 1986; Gosden & Marshall 1999; Hoskins 1998;
2006) which has proven very influential among archaeologists and anthropologists.
The stimulus offered by that book was soon followed by a number of other
influential works in the archaeology (e.g. Buchli 2004; DeMarrais et al. 2004;
Gosden 1994; 2004; 2005; Jones 2004; Knappett 2002; 2005; Meskell 2005; Miller
2005a,b; Olsen 2003; Preucel 2006; Renfrew & Scarre 1998; Tilley 1994; Thomas
1996; 2004; Wylie 2002) and anthropology of material culture (Appadurai 2006;
Hutchins 1995; Hoskins 1998; Henare et al. 2007; Ingold 2007a; 2008a,b; Sperber
2007).
The contribution of those early archaeological and anthropological studies in
bringing about the animate character of the mundane artefact and in helping us
understand what do objects want (Gosden 2005) is undeniable. Nonetheless, an
argument can be made that these first attempts to reveal the material core of the
social universe have often undermined the active nature of material culture by
placing the social over the material. As a result, things, very often become a mere
passive substratum for the social to project or imprint itself upon (see also
discussion for a symmetric archaeology: Webmoor & Witmore 2008; Webmoor
2007; Shanks 2007). Thus, for instance, Appadurais focus on the intimate linkages
between commodities and sociality, successful as it may have been in revealing
the dynamic and transactional character of things-in-motion (Appadurai 1986, 5),
nonetheless kept that motion a prisoner of some closed social universe. But surely
this motion must have some effect or leakage to the human mind. Even Alfred
Gells subsequent famous treatment of object-agency and extended selfhood fails
to consider the huge implications that the proposed isomorphy of structure
between mind or consciousness and the material world holds for the study of mind.
Extremely powerful metaphors, such as Gells description of the Kula exchange
system as a form of cognition where internal and outside transactions have
fused together (1998, 2312) are left hanging somehow in a parallel
anthropological universe. Yet, as far as the study of mind as an extended and
distributed phenomenon is concerned, the distance between Gells example of
New Zealand Maori meeting houses (1998) and Ottos notebook from the famous
Clark & Chalmers paper (1998) discussed below, is closer than one might think.
Arguably an important dimension of the ontology of things was left untouched: that
is, the relationship or interface between cognition and material culture. But as long
as we fail to pay proper attention to this crucial domain of human phenomenology,
the much advocated return to things will remain only partially realized. It was our
strong conviction of the importance of the cognitive dimension of this interaction
that motivated our efforts for some years now to establish a new theoretical
foundations that could help us overcome the numerous problems and pitfalls that
common-sense ideas about minds and things encompass. Material Engagement
Theory (MET) (Malafouris 2004; 2005; Renfrew 2004; 2006; 2007), which forms
the basis for this volume, represents our ongoing attempt to reddress the balance
of the cognitive equation by bringing materiality into the cognitive fold. The present
publication is part of this ongoing project of Material Engagement. The purpose of
this interdisciplinary volume, which derives from a symposium that took place in the
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge (79 April 2006), is to
further our understanding of minds and things by placing its focus explicitly upon
the cognitive efficacy and the dynamics of past and present material culture. What
do things do for the mind? How is human thought built into and executed through
things? What is the role of the brain in our embodied engagements with things?
What kind of relationships and what types of interactions can be used to describe
the vital connections between brains, bodies and things? Are things component
it a new name for the old Aristotelian hylomorphic syntheton of matter and form?
How does this term, i.e. material culture, relate to other similar terms we use to
describe the world of material things? As Carl Knappett observes in his contribution
(this volume), our tendency to use these terms interchangeably often does not
allow us to glimpse a more nuanced vision of their subtle differentiations. For
instance, the inalienable, ambiguous and unquantifiable character of things can
be contrasted with the alienable, named and quantifiable character of objects
(Gosden 2004, 389; cf. also the growing literature of so-called thing theory: e.g.
Brown 2001; 2003; Mitchell 2005; Schwenger 2006). Consider one specific
example: the term artefact. Obviously artefact implies some kind of human
intervention, planning or intentional modification. But, and returning to Ingolds wet
stone mentioned above, one could ask: Is having been moved and placed on our
desk sufficient modification to call this stone an artefact? If it is not, would there be
a difference if we had use the stone instead as a paper weight? These questions
may sound trivial and removed from the reality of current archaeological problems,
but consider a classical example with huge archaeological implications, i.e. the
Acheulean handaxe. When and how did this thing become an artefact? (see
Malafouris this volume; cf. Sperber 2007, also Ingold 1998).
We suggest that the way to proceed in tackling those issues is by shifting our
attention away from the sphere of isolated and fixed categories (objects, artefacts
etc.) to the sphere of the fluid and relational transactions or relations between
people and things.
But certain clarifications are in order before we proceed. As mentioned, things, like
minds, are hard to define. The thingness of things is a highly unsettled and
ontologically fluid state. One could say that things exist in a constant state of
ontological deprivation. They remain fluid, formless and plastic; waiting to take the
shape of our cognitive projections which inevitably vary in different times and
places. Thus, no precise and closed definition of things should be expected. But
this luck of analytic precision about necessary and sufficient conditions is not,
however, a reason to abandon our current enterprise. On the contrary,
methodologically speaking, it can offer a tactical advantage well fitted to our
purpose in this book, which is to refine our conceptual tools and categories. For
one thing, a common-sense understanding of these terms is sufficient to identify
the target of our investigation and to serve our theoretical purposes. For another,
the lack of analytic closure enables us, when necessary, to transgress or violate
some of our common-sense assumptions about what minds and things are, and
about how they relate and connect to each other. More importantly, this can help us
highlight the key problem of the meaning of minds and things. This problem arises
because we keep seeing minds and things as separate categories. A common
thread that runs through and unites most chapters in this book is that minds and
things are in fact continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and
independent entities. By knowing what things are, and how they become what they
are, you gain an understanding about what minds are and how they become what
they are and vice versa. Unfortunately, the possibility of such an ontological
coalition, or, in fact, co-extension of the mental with the physical has been all but
ignored. In this book we seek to encourage attention to the complex cognitive
ecologies, by which, as Hutchins discusses (this volume) cultural things
domesticate the embodied imagination. Inside these cognitive ecologies all of the
elements and relations potentially interact with one another and... each is part of
the environment for all of the others.
Obviously then, if a more precise definition or delineation of minds and things is to
be sought, this will have to come at the end of our investigation. For the present we
suggest that there are two principal ways in which the meaning of the term
cognitive life of things can be understood.
Firstly, and ontologically speaking, things can be said to have a cognitive life
insofar as things are constantly implicated in networks, or better meshworks (1) of
material engagement. More simply, things have a cognitive life because minds
have a material life. Thus, very often, what we call an object is part of what we call
a subject. In short, things are us or can become us (cf. symmetrical archaeology:
e.g. Webmoor & Witmore 2008). Things have a cognitive life because intelligence
exists primarily as an enactive relation between and among people and things, not
as a within-intracranial representation (Gosden this volume). In that sense, the
cognitive life of things denotes the mode of being of the active mind which is to be
contrasted with objecthood as the mode of being of the passive mind. The way to
understand this is by starting to see materials, objects and artefacts as gradations
or ontological moments in the cognitive life of things. This means very simply that
the cognitive life of a thing can be that of an object (via objectification) or an
artefact (via intentional use and/or modification). The above process, of course, is
far from linear and fixed, although it may seem so in a given context and portion of
spacetime that characterizes their historical conception, production and
consumption. For instance, any artefact can become a thing in a different context.
As Goodwin nicely illustrates discussing the processes through which
archaeologists makes sense of their findings, situations in which an actor
encounters a thing in the world and is faced with the task of classifying it,
determining What kind of thing is that?, are central to the cognitive life of things
(this volume). It is amongst these fine distinctions between thing, object, and
artefact that the meaning of the cognitive life of things can be found, that is, as a
process that characterizes and allows for the passage and interaction between the
states of thingness and objecthood.
Which brings us to the second major sense in which the term cognitive life of
things can be understood: as with the term Material Agency (Malafouris 2008c;
Knappett & Malafouris 2008a,b) it acts as a wake-up call. That is, it is introduced to
counteract the prevailing assumption that only humans have cognitive lives, or
agency (see also Knappett this volume). As mentioned previously, Appadurai used
the notion social life of things to express, but also stimulate, a kind of
methodological fetishism, i.e. a return to the things themselves as socially alive and
active in a primary sense (1986, 5). We believe that if we are to develop a
discourse able to penetrate the mutual constitution of cognition and material
culture, and thus radically reconfigure our image of the boundaries between
persons and things, then a kind of methodological fetishism is perhaps the
necessary pre-condition. Such a methodological fetishism will enable us to think
about interfaces in terms of mutual permeability and binding rather than separation
(cf. Ingold 2008a). The cognitive life of things embodies the spirit of such
methodological fetishism, essential in undertaking this key task of recasting the
boundaries of mind. We do not animate things by putting a spirit in matter; instead
we seek to discover the spirit of matter (see also Pels 1998, 91).
Having set out the basic conceptual and theoretical background of this book let us
now turn to some key issues about archaeology and the extended mind that seem
to underline and connect all the chapters of this book.
At the nub of this book, as well as of the material engagement approach itself, lies
the so-called hypothesis of the extended mind. In fact, what we call the cognitive
life of things would make little sense and would be of limited cross-disciplinary
value and applicability were it not for the philosophical background of current
theorizing about the extended, distributed and embodied mind. A key question to
ask then, is what exactly is the Extended Mind Hypothesis, and how precisely does
it relate with the perspectives advanced and the examples discussed in this book?
Put simply, the extended mind is a new, radical and much contested thesis over the
minds location. A useful way to illustrate this thesis, is to place it against the divide
between, what are known in recent philosophy of mind as internalism and
externalism (see e.g. Wilson 2004; Wheeler 2005; Clark 1997; 2007; 2008a,b;
Clark & Chalmers 1998; Adams & Aizawa 2007). Very briefly, internalism is the
position which sees the content of mental states as determined by features of the
subject without resource to external, non-biological conditions. The
methodological implication of this is that cognition can be studied independently of
any consideration of the external environment, the body or the material world.
Internalism can be contrasted with the view of externalism which recognizes that
the content of a mental state is in part determined by elements of the external
world, and thus, that cognition cannot be studied independently of the external
environment (social or technological). The extended-mind thesis takes the
externalist outlook a step further by arguing that not only the mental content but
also the mental process (or at least part of it) can be external to the subject. This
To illustrate this principle let us use the case of memory in Clark & Chalmerss
(1998) original example of Otto and Inga. Both Inga and Otto want to visit MOMA in
New York but they forget where the museum is. Inga stops, consults her memory,
after a moment or two remembers the museums location and goes on her way
there. But Otto is an Alzheimer patient. He, thus, keeps all necessary information
(in our case the museums address) in a notebook, which he carries around
everywhere he goes, so he can look it up whenever needed. In contrast to Inga,
then, Otto needs to consult his notebook, rather than his biological memory, to find
the museums address. It would not be an exaggeration then to say that for Otto,
his notebook plays a special, constitutive role in his ability to remember. Thus, the
following question confronts us: Should we see Ottos notebook as an instrument
or substitute of his memory system or as, literally, a part of Ottos mind and self
(Clark & Chalmers 1998)? Or to put it another way, so far as the function of
memory as a cognitive process is concerned, what is the difference between the
two cases of Otto and Inga?
There are many different ways to answer this question, and many potential pitfalls
in any attempt to spread the operations of mind beyond skin and skull. One
fundamental issue relevant to the parity principle which is addressed explicitly in
the chapter by Michael Wheeler (this volume) but also taken up in many other
chapters, concerns the question of deciding what the benchmarks are by which
parity of causal contribution is to be judged? Wheeler suggests that the wrong way
to answer this question is first to fix the benchmarks for what it is to count as a
proper part of a cognitive system and then look to see if any external elements
meet those benchmarks. In other words, first to take the properties of the brain as
the yardstick of what is to count as cognitive and then see whether there are things
that manifest those properties. This strategy, although useful in some respects,
must be wrong because it deprives us of the ability to discover whatever unique
properties might differentiate the cognitive life of things from the cognitive life, lets
say, of neurons.
To understand better this problem consider again the case of memory. This time let
us use the example of a Mycenaean Linear B clay tablet (Ventris & Chadwick
1973) as a prototypical exographic device and cognitive artefact. One way to read
the parity principle is the following: If exograms, that is, Linear B tablets, act as
engrams do, then exograms count as parts of memory. At a certain level this might
appear precisely the point that the extended mind and the material-engagement
approach are making. But such a simplistic isomorphic reading of the parity
believe things that it would never otherwise come to believe or imagine. Religious
artefacts, for example, enable us to use basic biological skills of perception and
manipulation to penetrate absent, abstract or non-existent cognitive domains that
we would otherwise find impassable. This is the way, according to Clark, that mere
things come to participate richly in our cognitive life, as parts of the extended
circuitry of human thought.
In a complementary way, Edwin Hutchins (this volume; 2005) shows in his paper,
that physical relations, even those realized in the modern sophisticated hi-tech
environment of a modern flight copckit, can become proxies for conceptual
relations, or, what he calls, material anchors for conceptual blends (Hutchins
2005). These physical relations and interactions between the body and cultural
artefacts should not be taken as mere indications of internal and invisible mental
processes, they should rather be taken themselves as an important form of
thinking. This is also why for Hutchins Goodwin also makes a similar argument
(this volume) the understanding of the cognitive life of things, requires, above
all, that we understand the full range of commitment of our embodied engagements
with things. It is these embodied engagements and not the isolated brain which
creates mechanisms for reasoning, for imagination, for Aha! insight and for
abstraction. Cultural things provide the mediational means to domesticate the
embodied imagination.
At this point, a further potential problem with the extended-mind hypothesis should
be discussed. This possible drawback with the extended-mind thesis is that it
remains overwhelmingly computational. Although active externalism has
drastically expanded the territory of mind into the material world, it fails to move
beyond its computational heritage: minds are being recognized and reconfigured
as dynamic embodied machineries, but remain, above all problem-solving
machines. The computational system is now wide and extends beyond the limits
of the organismic boundary (e.g. Wilson 2004, 165), but still, it remains a
computational system. Things are simply the long-neglected parts of our problem
-solving economies and computational routines. Seen from such an angle, the
cognitive life of things remains primarily a computational life (Wheeler 2005; Wilson
2004). Things emerge as genuine parts of extended but nonetheless problemsolving regimes (see Clark 2008a, 47). Or, put in evolutionary time, things are
simply a good and efficient way to promote fluid and efficient problem-solving and
adaptive response. But, one could ask, why this over-emphasis on the
transformative power of non-neural structures to the human problem-solving
capacities? The answer is simple: because this is primarily what a human mind
supposedly does at least this is what a big part of contemporary philosophy and
cognitive science thinks that it does.
We suggest that such a narrow focus is deeply problematic leaving a lingering
ghost within the machine (Gosden this volume). In order to overcome this residual
cognitivism a temporal, agentive and affective dimension must be added to the
initial spatial metaphor of an inner mind that is being extended in the outside world.
We need to look at the ways in which things inhabit space and explore interartefactual relations and object/thing communities (Knappett this volume). As Chris
Gosden rightly points out, a notion of mind, even when extended, is not helpful if it
does not takes under serious consideration the sensual, affective and emotional
aspects of human intelligent behaviour. Things have a strong affective response.
The recent collection of autobiographical stories on the evocative nature of things
by Sherry Turkle (2007) nicely illustrates that the true power of everyday objects
and things lie in their ability to become our emotional companions as much as they
become our intellectual anchors. When it comes to object relations and material
engagement, thought and feeling are inseparable. For Turkle things, above all, are
companions in life experience that can take multiple and fluid roles (2007, 56).
Moreover, as archaeology and anthropology can amply testify, things are not
simply tokens or surrogates in some external or internal problem-solving activity.
Things also, if not primarily, act as material agents to be seen, exchanged,
deposited, owned, valued, priced, manipulated, feared, fetishized, revered,
ridiculed etc. The sensual properties and aesthetic experience of things are key
elements here (e.g. Gosden 2004; 2005; Jones 2007; Renfrew 2003; Thomas &
Pinney 2001). Thus these elements should be foregrounded rather than become
subsumed under the information-processing and problem-solving ideals of what
was for many decades the dominant way of thinking about human mind in
philosophy, archaeology and cognitive science If the idiosyncratic abilities of
objects, past or present, to make us forget and remember, guide our everyday
action, channel and signify social experience, and sustain our embodied routines,
are to become understood, then our modern representational or computational
preoccupations should be resisted if not entirely by-passed.
As it can be seen from the discussion so far, in this book, we have tried to
reformulate the question of human cognition in a manner that would probably have
puzzled most archaeologists, anthropologists and philosophers some decades
ago. Drawing on the hypothesis of the extended mind we have depicted human
cognitive processing as sometimes quite literally extending into the extraorganismic environment. As we saw, this is not simply the view, much more
compatible with common sense, of a cognitive agent that depends heavily on
organismically external props and tools. Instead it is the more radical idea that
human cognitive, affective and emotional states and/or processes, literally,
comprise elements in their surrounding environment; a view that even at this very
moment few people are willing to defend.
But why does it matter, for archaeology, where the boundaries of mind are being
drawn? How precisely does this relate to the study of material culture? What is it
that the emphasis of this book in the cognitive life of things has to offer in the ways
we understand the human past and its cultural variation? We want to end our
paper with some remarks on the implications of the perspective advanced in this
book for the future of archaeological thinking and the study of mind and material
culture. We are confident that, especially for the archaeology and anthropology of
mind, the focus on the cognitive life of things and the hypothesis of extended mind,
far from a simple terminological shift, carries with it major implications in terms of
how we go on to study human cognition past or present.
Here, in summary, are some of the envisaged transformative effects and
implications.
Starting at the level of method, one immediately obvious consequence, and
potential pay-off, as Wheeler also recognizes (this volume), is nothing less than a
reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape inhabited by the archaeology of mind.
Embracing and beginning to understand the cognitive life of things means that
archaeology no longer condemns material culture to a life outside of cognition
proper. As a consequence of that, past ways of thought need not just be expressed
in material culture, but now can also be seen as partly constituted by material
culture (see esp. Malafouriss discussion of the Acheulean handaxe, this volume).
Thus, past ways of thinking can be now studied in a more direct fashion with
material culture furnishing literally parts of (no longer functioning) minds (Wheeler
this volume). This puts material engagement at centre stage in the study of mind
and cognitive evolution. The archaeologist, thus, needs not be reduced to the
unhappy state of being a frustrated mentalist condemned to materialism (Knappett
2005, 169). Mind and matter are one. This stance also qualifies material culture as
an analytic object for cognitive science, warranting the use of methods and
experimental procedures once applied to internal mental phenomena for use upon
those that are external and beyond the skin. At the same time, a cognitive
archaeology that is no longer committed to an in-the-head ontology of mind is
better protected also from the recently emerging neurocentric attitudes.
This is particularly important in the developing field of neuroarchaeology where
there is a strong temptation to locate all that really matters in human cognitive
evolution inside the head (see Malafouris & Renfrew 2008; Malafouris 2008a;
2009; Renfrew et al. 2008). MET and the extended-mind thesis reminds us that the
role of brain-imaging, however convincing and enchanting as a statement about
the inner workings of the human brain it might be, should under no circumstances
be confused, as mainstream neuroscience often seem to suggest, with that of a
device able to delimit the realm of the truly cognitive.
Another transformative effect that the focus on the cognitive life of things has is
that it forces archaeology, and other disciplines, to take material culture seriously.
same time mental and physical (Malafouris 2008b). Of course, simply to speak
about dynamic connections and symbiotic relations is not, nowadays, saying or
assuming much. What is needed is a method that will enable us to penetrate the
specific dynamics through which these connections are effected and sustained as
well as an efficient way to describe the cognitive properties which arise from the
interaction of people and things. A change of focus and a new conceptual
vocabulary is required. In this book we propose that the cognitive life of things may
offer such a conceptual means for doing away with conventional ideas of mind and
replacing them with a new perspective that will enable us to think differently about
the place of the material world and of human embodiment within it.
Note
1. The idea of meshwork derives primarily from the philosophical materialism of Deleuze & Guattari
(1987) and their basic sense of rhizomatic thought. The concept of meshwork suggests a network
of heterogeneous elements that grow in unplanned directions as well as a partnership and
interaction with the material in morphogenetic production (see also Varela 1991). For extensive
discussion of the concept of meshwork see de Landa (n.d.); for its differences with the notion of
network as discussed especially in the context of Actor-Network theory (ANT) see especially Ingold
(2007a).