Cognition and the City: Cognitive Ecology and the Paris Commune of 1871

Abstract

By investigating flows of energy, matter and information during the Siege and Commune of Paris from 1870 to 1871 this analysis attempts to show how human cognition intersects with its environment to form self-organizing , complex adaptive systems. While traditional explanations of the Commune have generally revolved around Marxist analysis, it is possible to analyse the events of 1871 as transformations in the urban and cognitive ecology of the city. Specifically, utilizing the perspectives of Material Engagement Theory and distributed cognition , this paper explores the ways in which cultural materials feedback into cognitive processes to shape social activity. Changes in Paris’ urban ecology produced selection mechanisms which facilitated Parisians organising around different institutional settings. Radical clubs, vigilance committees and worker’s cooperatives were able to provide stability in a rapidly degrading urban environment, and thus a point of departure for new forms of social organisation to emerge. To facilitate this process, Parisians modified their environments, both within and outside of these institutional settings, in ways that altered the flow of information through the city and provided new ways of engaging in a revolutionary context. Parisians utilised material artefacts such as rifles, flags and bodily decorations in order to distribute cognition, enabling collective revolutionary action . This paper shows that the most important feature of urban environments is the ability to facilitate individual and collective adaptation to ecologies dominated by the physical and cognitive presence of their own species. In this view, cities are understood as selection driven adaptive landscapes, co-evolutionary structures that emerge to facilitate and sustain dense human habitation through the material organization of cognition. The transformations in Paris’ urban ecology led to Parisians reconfiguring their cognitive environments, precipitating the development of radical social institutions . Artefacts, circulating in human ecologies, function to entangle human cognition and behaviour into coherent environmental relationships. Thus, human societies do not fundamentally break from the natural world but are part of a developmental continuum with evolutionary and ecological dynamics.