How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement
I was recently introduced to Malafouris’ work through an interdisciplinary reading group, and was so intrigued that I immediately bought and read the book. Malafouris is a cognitive archaeologist, and has become dissatisfied with how archaeology treats material artifacts as traces of human minds. For nonarchaeologists, let’s set this up with a case that Malafouris treats later in the book, and one that readers of this blog will find familiar: The origins of Sumerian writing.
According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, archaeologists had long found clay “tokens” in their digs of ancient Mesopotamia. These tokens were small (they would easily fit in a palm) and regularly shaped, initially in simple shapes such as balls, tetrahedrons, and cylinders, and eventually in more elaborate shapes. Sometimes the more elaborate shapes were pierced. Occasionally they were found inside “envelopes,” or hollow balls, sort of like piñatas.
Archaeologists spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what these tokens were. Were they game pieces? Toys? Materials used in worship?
Eventually, Schmandt-Besserat realized that some envelopes had impressions on the outside, and those impressions matched the tokens inside the envelope. Based on this insight and much more investigation, she developed a theory: The tokens were counters, used to track debt. They were a hacked-together accounting system, probably carrying on an earlier innovation of using pebbles or seeds for correspondence counting. To keep debts together, Sumerians began putting them in clay envelopes. But they found it useful to see what was in the envelope before breaking it, so they began to impress each token on the outside of the envelope before dropping it in. And soon they realized that if the impressions were on the outside, they didn’t really need to put tokens on the inside — so they invented the tablet and began imitating these impressions with a stylus. Writing had emerged, perhaps for the first time in the world (although some believe it emerged first in Egypt).
We are now highly literate, and often when we are faced with a problem, we reach for a textual solution. So it’s worth remembering that for about 98% of our time as a species, we didn’t have writing. It’s not easy to remember that — after all, parents read to their children shortly after they are born, and sometimes even when they are in the womb, and we are born into a world suffused with texts. So it’s hard for us to imagine worlds without writing, and it’s hard not to project our cognitive experiences onto the archaeological materials we find. Malafouris’ mission in this book is to sketch out an interdisciplinary analytical framework — Material Engagement Theory (MET) — that can help us rethink the boundaries of the mind by examining materiality in cognitive terms (p.2). His central question is: “How do things shape the mind?” (p.2).
He draws on some of the people you would expect — Hutchins, Clark, Latour — to address this question by “taking material culture seriously” by “being systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of things in the enactment and constitution of human cognition” (p.8). To do this, he takes a dialectical approach, but with “some important differences”: “minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities,” and thus, “we need a way to penetrate the specific cultural, social, and developmental dynamics through which these connections are effected and sustained, as well as an efficient way to describe the cognitive properties that arise from the co-constitution of people and things” (p.9). Hence MET.
In fact, he argues, in general archaeologists have ignored mind-world interaction (p.12); the problem is that they then assume they know how the mind works, yielding an implicitly internalist account. In contrast, he argues, understanding material culture leads to understanding the human mind and vice versa (p.13).
MET questions Cartesianism and contests “the artificial line between persons and things, or between mind and the material world,” which (among other things) has “blinded philosophy and the cognitive sciences to the pervasive, diachronic influence, and the transformative potential, of things in human life and cognition” p.15). Thus, even if modern-day archaeologists take a relational viewpoint, they can’t or won’t follow the implications or understand how these implications work out in practice (p.15).
Malafouris introduces the notion of material semiosis: “the material sign does not primarily embody a communicative or representational logic but an enactive one. For material semiosis meaning is not a product of representation; it is a product or process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains” (p.18).
MET “seeks to describe and explain long-term change, particularly the processes by which human cognitive abilities grow, transform, and change.” Unlike conventional cognitive archaeology, it “is not concerned with the task of associating specific human abilities with specific time periods and pre-fixed evolutionary stages.” Instead, “MET primarily asks about the what, the why, and the how — for example: What is symbolic thinking? Why and how did symbolism emerge? What forms of signification count as symbolic meta-representational thinking?” (p.38). He argues that human beings inherit, not a mind, but the ability to develop a mind (p.42; cf. Leontiev).
MET is interested in metaplasticity: an analytic unit that integrates different temporalities (p.43). In this understanding, “the brain is as much a cultural artifact as a biological entity,” one that “emerges as a dynamic co-evolutionary process of deep enculturation and material engagement” rather than a biological constant (p.45). Metaplasticity, he says, may be the locus of human uniqueness (p.46). (NB, Leontiev or Vygotsky might argue that to reach full potential, the mind must integrate the right cultural tools; in contrast, Bakhtin might argue for heteroglossia, in which different cultural tools enable different potentialities and understandings.) MET is interested in “mechanisms that mediate those plastic changes, not at the level of the individual, but at the systemic level of enculturation and social practice” (p.50).
MET has three working hypotheses:
- the extended mind
- the enacted sign
- material agency (p.51).
He elaborates on these in Ch.4-6.
In Ch.4, on the extended mind, Malafouris considers the case of Linear B. Here, he argues that cognition was enacted through the tablets (p.68); he raises the question of how they were thnking rather than what they were thinking (p.69) — that is, he reads Linear B through a distributed cognition approach. In this reading, he argues for a “constitutive intertwining of cognition with material culture” in which “material culture is potentially co-extensive and consubstantial with mind” (p.77, his emphasis). He argues that, in examining “the material remains of the Linear B script, we are not simply looking at a disembodied system of signs. We are looking, instead, at a temporal sequence of relationally constituted embodied processes encompassing reciprocal and culturally orchestrated interactions among humans, situated tool use, and space” (p.78). Linear B provides an “extended reorganization of the cognitive system,” not just a memory aid but a reconstruction (p.81; cf. Salomon on khipu).
In Ch.5, he examines the semiotic dimension of MET, which goes beyond representation (p.89). He argues that “material semiosis” is enactive, not the product of representation so much as the process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains (p.90). Unlike Peirce’s account of semiosis, Malafouris is concerned with how the sign emerges (p.96): He argues that “the material sign, in most cases, does not stand for a concept but rather substantiates a concept,” i.e., instantiation (p.97). “Indeed, a material sign as an expressive sign does not refer to something existing separately from it, but is a constitutive part of what it expresses and which otherwise cannot be known. It operates on the principle of participation rather than that of symbolic equivalency” (p.97). He illustrates his points with the Sumerian tokens I mentioned earlier in this review, specifically examining how the concept of numbers emerged from number sense (the sense that two tokens are more than one, for instance) (p.112). These tokens, he argues, were “enactive material proto-signs,” and when they were pressed onto clay envelopes, “two additional semiotic properties became active within this extended cognitive system”: indexicality (the tokens were physically connected with their impressions) and iconicity (the 3D tokens became 2D markings) (p.114). And
One could argue that … the vague structure of a very difficult and inherently meaningless conceptual process (counting), by being integrated via projection with the stable material structure of the clay tokens, was gradually transformed into an easier perceptual and semiotic problem. However, perceptual problems can be directly manipulated and manually resolved in real time and space. Thus, the process of counting, as an embodied and mediated act, became meaningful. The clay tokens brought forth the numbers by making the manipulation of their properties visible and tangible. (pp.114-115)
That is, the tokens transformed and simplified the problem of numbers, “thereby enabling the building of neural connections that otherwise couldn’t be built” (p.116). More importantly, “it takes care of a part of the problem by itself, thus becoming an inseparable part of what is now an extended system of numerical cognition reaching beyond the brain and into the world” (p.116). Malafouris concludes that “Meaning does not reside in the material sign; it emerges from the various parameters of its performance and usage as these are actualized in the process of engagement. … Meaning is the temporally emergent property of material engagement, the ongoing blending between the mental and the physical. In the case of material signs, we do not read meaningful symbols; we meaningfully engage meaningless symbols” (p.117). Those who follow this blog may see the relevance of this line of thought to the question that Vygotsky and Leontiev addressed: are tools and signs separate, or can they be collapsed? Vygotsky (at least during his instrumental period) saw a sharp distinction between the two, while Leontiev collapsed the two into a single category of mediators, mediators oriented to the category of activity. I think what Malafouris offers here is a collapsed view, more similar to Leontiev’s, but with a genuine attempted account of semiosis.
In Chapter 6, we get to material agency. Malafouris takes a Leontievan view here: “If there is such a thing as human agency, then there is material agency; there is no way human and material agency can be disentangled” (p.119, his emphasis). That is, agency and intentionality are “properties of material engagement” rather than of humans or things alone (p.119). Drawing on Latour’s sociotechnical graphs (STGs), he argues that (a) the medium is the message; (b) closure involves network before meaning; and (c) we can’t reduce an engagement to a single prime mover (or agent) (pp.126-130). MET argues for material agency without resorting to anthropomorphism (p.130). Drawing from Dreyfus, he distinguishes between “R-intentionality” (i.e., representationally mediated intentionality) and “G-intentionality” (i.e., gestalt intentionality) (p.142) — which I think is parallel to Latour’s discussion of intentionality using guns as an example. “In the case of ‘G-intentionality’ the line between human intention and material affordance becomes all the more difficult to draw,” he says (p.143): “the mediational potential of a certain artifact shapes … the nature of human intentions” (p.143). However, Malafouris disagrees with Latour’s solution of bypassing existing language games (p.145), instead arguing that we “follow Gell and adopt an anthropological perspective” (p.146).
With this background, Malafouris brings us to the next section: “Marking the Mental: Where Brain, Body, and Culture Conflate.” Chapter 7 focuses on knapping, which Malafouris argues is a cognitive act (p.164): we can “see early stone tools as enactive cognitive prostheses capable of transforming and extending the cognitive architecture of our hominin ancestors” (p.164). This means questioning the conventional belief that the finished artifact was the intended one — the finished artefact fallacy (p.171). He quotes Davidson and Noble, who proposed that the Acheulian hand axe was actually “the unintended residual core left after successive removal of flakes” (p.171). In Chapter 8, he discusses early marks and lines in objects such as ochre pieces and ostrich egg shells, sugggesting that “these early marks and lines do not externalize anything but the very process of externalization” (p.180) — that is, these marks did not necessarily begin as representations. Instead, mark making was “an active prosthetic perceptual means of making sense. That is, marks will be treated as enactive projections” (p.180). They are like scribbles that eventually self-organize (p.193).
In Chapter 9, Malafouris considers agency in pottery-making. He claims that Latour “rediscovered” mediation as developed by Vygotsky and activity theorists (p.221 — I’m pretty sure this is not correct, since Latour doesn’t cite the Vygotsky Circle and his notion of mediation is quite different). He draws on Law and Mol when discussing agency in pottery, in which “the purity of action has been lost” because the body is situated within the material action of pottery making (p.221).
Overall, I found this book to be really insightful, and it give me some conceptual tools for thinking through issues I’ve been trying to disentange. Specifically, I appreciated how this account helped me to think further through tool vs sign mediation and why I have reservations about semiotic explanations of mediation. And I really appreciated the illustrative cases.
On the other hand, I wanted to see more discussion of how the antecedent theories (ANT, distributed and enactive cognition, Vygotskian theory) interacted so that I could understand what he was and wasn’t incorporating into MET.
If you’re interested in semiosis, materiality, distributed cognition, and similar topics, definitely pick this book up.
(2003)
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