The Heterocosmic Self: Analogy, Temporality and Structural Couplings in Proust’s Swann’s Way

The idea of a distribution of the mind into the world has been largely considered as an empowering of the mind’s domain, an enlargement of its cognitive territory (a cognitive positivity). Experientially, however, it might generate a feeling of disconcerting fluidity or even an anxiety of groundlessness (an ontological concern), especially if we apply the idea of distribution to the self. What if we consider the self too as unbounded, extended and constantly constituted by ever-changing structural couplings with the world? This chapter focuses on the consequences of this question as explored by Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. If extended and enactive frameworks can provide important insights on Proust’s literary endeavour, Proust’s devious use of analogies and his focus on analogical experiences as tell-tale markers of the extended self can offer back to cognitive science new avenues of research about phenomenological and ontological aspects related to extended or enactive models of mind, memory, self and cognition.

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

The chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and Max Horkheimer’s with the work of American pragmatist John Dewey to suggest a productive path not taken by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s as they considered the empirical study of human beings’ ‘mimetic’, i.e. pre-conscious and visceral interactions with others and with the world. Their analyses suggests positive ways of re-thinking the relation between norms and ‘primary intersubjectivity’ if we abandon their unnecessarily stark distinction between mimetic and goal-oriented forms of behaviour. The result is an understanding of how the basis of primary subjectivity, imitation, is itself necessarily distributed and ethically inflected, adding a 5th E to embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition.

Surrealism, Chance and the Extended Mind

This chapter discusses how the Surrealists engaged with techniques like automatic drawing, the exquisite corpse, collage, frottage and decalcomania, and how this might be interpreted in the context of theories of distributed cognition, enactivism, embodiment, and the extended mind. The Surrealists’ use of ‘objective chance’ was driven by a belief in the existence of an unconscious state of mind which could only be accessed obliquely, by using techniques which bypassed both artistic skill and conscious thought. ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’. This question is posed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) as an introduction to the concept of the extended mind, but it could just as well be the very question the Surrealists were trying to address in their search for a universal truth, the key to which they believed to be the unconscious mind as defined by Freud.

Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle

The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and Berenson’s theorisation of ‘tactile values’, this essay argues for the importance of ideas of embodied perception to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature, and suggests we can find in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism a colourful thread that needs to be woven into the history of what might now be called embodied cognition. To recognize this is to change our understanding of modernist visualities. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is called on to help 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.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Victorian and modernist studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by Peter Garratt reflects on current research, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area, and the role and potential of distributed cognition in studies of Victorian culture and modernism.

Walking, Identity and Visual Perception in Romantic and Modernist Literature

This chapter considers enactivist theories of cognition and perception in relation to aspects of Romantic and Modernist literature, in particular how walking relates to visual perception and the representation of the visual field (sensorimotor enactivism); and how movement and visuality inflect ideas of subjectivity, identity and consciousness (autopoietic enactivism). It draws on Alva Noë’s account of sensorimotor enactivism in Action in Perception (2004), on Evan Thompson’s account of autopoietic enactivism in Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (2007), and on Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1993), to argue that, while Romantic poetry tends to an affirmative account of unconstrained walking in a rural environment, facilitating identity-enhancing interaction, Modernist literature shows a marked duality in its representation of urban walking. In T.S. Eliot’s poetry, walking constrained by an oppressive urban environment threatens to fragment identity, implying dysfunctional forms of distributed cognition. However, although women’s urban walking in the Modernist period has often been seen to be constrained by gendered power structures, Virginia Woolf’s writing at times celebrates the aesthetic and sensory pleasures of urban walking, leading to more affirmative versions of dispersed identity.

Distributed Cognition and the Phenomenology of Modernist Painting and Poetry (Rilke and Cézanne)

Contemporary views of consciousness, long anticipated by phenomenology, suggest that cognition includes a distribution across motoric and perceptual experience and is in important ways interwoven with the surrounding environment. This paper takes up implications for aesthetics, demonstrating how such an understanding of consciousness is expressed in analogous ways in modern poetry and painting, particularly in works that have been the object of phenomenological study. An aesthetics of embodied cognition can illuminate the common resources of vital human intentionality in artworks across different media, including Cézanne’s painting and Rilke’s poetry and poetics, and both can be conceived not only as aesthetic but as cognitive artefacts. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that philosophy, visual art, and poetry share a common aim and the poetic inspiration Rilke took from Cézanne and other visual artists can be better understood by considering art and literature from a cognitive standpoint.

Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition

Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing objectively to be perceived, only perspectives on objects. This thesis is expressed through evocations of space and movement that, the chapter argues, promote and depend on readerly cognition in which embodied and enactive imagining is central. In these same passages, however, the equivocations underlying the whole perspectivist enterprise are exposed: the supposed discovery of a new extra-textual moral reality through philosophical agility is undermined by rhetorical structures that turn out to merely simulate movement, and so ask readers’ imaginations not to be too enactive. This equivocation has important consequences for readers’ engagement with the interplay of rhetorical form and conceptual content. Cognitive analysis thus gets us to the heart of a grand paradox of Nietzschean philosophy – absolute assertion of the relativity of language – while also shedding light on current questions about action-based distributed cognition as an intellectual force.

Distributed Cognition and the Humanities

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nature of cognition, and considers what the arts and humanities, in turn, offer to philosophy and cognitive science.

The Victorian Extended Mind: George Eliot, Psychology and the Bounds of Cognition

The modern identification of the mind with the brain has its roots in the intellectual traditions of the nineteenth century. Isolating the brain as the seat of mental experience, and as the organ of the mind, emerged in the empirical work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim and became a central, normative assumption of Romantic and Victorian culture, cutting across literary and psychological discourses. Less understood, however, is the extent to which novelists and critics thought seriously about the mind as a distributed phenomenon – or what might be described as Victorian extended cognition. Focusing on George Eliot, and exploring relevant aspects of nineteenth-century psychology, this chapter seeks to recover just that. At issue is the idea that mid-Victorian writing and culture did not always think of the mind as sealed hermetically in the head, a point developed through readings of such texts as The Lifted Veil and Middlemarch which show how Eliot’s fiction intuitively probes some defining claims in 4E cognitive theories.