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Material Agency pp 37–55Cite as

Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Malafouris repeatedly insists that analysis must include simultaneous attention to material, social and cognitive dimensions, and my responses in this essay seek to show that this is possible. Our views contrast with certain other strands within material culture studies in which the social and the cognitive are decentred or excluded: one recent collection advertises that its constituent essays “signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material” (Miller, 2005: back cover).

  2. 2.

    Here I do not discuss one such radicalisation mentioned by Malafouris, the turn to ‘enactivism’ and to the work of Maturana and Varela. In another critical response to Malafouris, Mike Wheeler (forthcoming) argues that this tradition is in some tension with the extended mind hypothesis. Although I offer a different reading of Malafouris’ discussion of skills and embodied know-how below, my response is compatible with Wheeler’s and ends on a similar point.

  3. 3.

    Even in the response to critics quoted above, Donald’s way of articulating the complementarity between inner and outer resources is to characterise the “biological memory” with which symbols engage as “a creative, constructive, dynamic force” in sharp contrast to artefacts which “are static things” (1998b:184).

  4. 4.

    In Sutton (forthcoming, a) I build on this point and on more recent work by Andy Clark, to outline an extra twist by which cognitive technologies do not have to be external at all, but include a range of internalised representations and symbol systems which we have learned (historically and developmentally) to manage with both idiosyncratic and culturally specified techniques. Language is just one of these inner prostheses: in that essay, I look at the medieval and Renaissance arts of memory as a further case study which problematises Donald’s neat dichotomy between fluid engrams and stable exograms even further, and I suggest that the extended mind thesis can thus encourage us to develop ‘a deterritorialized cognitive science which deals with the propagation of deformed and reformatted representations, and which dissolves individuals into peculiar loci of coordination and coalescence among multiple structured media’.

  5. 5.

    I draw this Heideggerian sense of ‘assignment’ from Beth Preston’s rich account of cognition and tool use (Preston, 1998).

  6. 6.

    A distinct but equally rich parallel debate can be found in eighteenth-century studies, where (in the wake of earlier historical work on the vastly expanded cultures of consumption and commercialisation) scholars have for some time addressed the quite different ways in which “material culture formed identity through the ownership and display of luxurious possessions” (Benedict, 2007:193). For more on Enlightenment ‘it-narratives’ in relation to personal ads and wigs, for example, see respectively Lamb (2004) and Festa (2005). Benedict’s analysis of eighteenth-century “thing-poems” is particularly suggestive in demonstrating the pervasiveness of the work of purification, detaching subjects from objects and depsychologising things, at least in an elite culture in which the object “holds no memory, no allegiance, no partiality” (2007:202). A fuller treatment of the history of things from the perspective of the extended mind would seek better to trace historical links between these discussions of early modern and Enlightenment artefacts: the incomplete modern erasure of the mediating work of things counterbalances and drives the invention and maintenance of the ideal autonomous agent understood as a “distinct inner locus of final choice and control” (Clark, 2003; Latour, 1993; Schneewind, 1997:3–11).

  7. 7.

    It is not obvious which targets Malafouris has in mind here and I am not certain of this interpretation. Malafouris argues that we should not adopt “ready-made psychological models and classifications” derived from a (classical cognitivist) paradigm in which material culture is treated as “external and epiphenomenal to the mnemonic system proper” (2004:57). But he later suggests that the extended mind hypothesis “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” (2004:60). I will understand his emphasis as being on the earlier, more revisionary take on existing classifications.

  8. 8.

    On this point, intriguing and controversial suggestions in Donald’s and especially in Rowlands’ work (1999:123–9), about the increasingly vestigial role of episodic memory in a world full of exograms, might be countered by a social ontology of memory in which genuinely plural episodic or quasi-episodic, memories are held by groups or by plural subjects, rather than by collocations of individuals (Sutton, forthcoming, c, applying Gilbert, 2004 to the case of memory; compare Wilson, 2005; Tollefsen, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to the editors. Some of these ideas were first presented at the workshop ‘Extended Mind 2: just when you thought it was safe to go back in the head’ at the University of Hertfordshire in July 2006: my thanks to Richard Menary and all those who made comments and suggestions then. I also warmly acknowledge the contributions of Amanda Barnier, Ed Cooke, Doris McIlwain and Lyn Tribble, my collaborators on various parts of the developing framework outlined in this chapter.

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  1. Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia

    John Sutton

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Correspondence to John Sutton .

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Carl Knappett

  2. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Lambros Malafouris

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Sutton, J. (2008). Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory. In: Knappett, C., Malafouris, L. (eds) Material Agency. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8_3

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