Abstract
“Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace,” writes Andy Clark in Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, a key text in the “situated cognition” movement in cognitive science.1 In early modern studies too, theorists such as Peter Stally-brass and Evelyn Tribble describe certain objects as having a cognitive life of their own, as “exograms” within external symbol systems which couple with and complement the distributed, context-ridden traces or “engrams” of the humoral body.2 Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing humoral psycho-physiology together with material culture studies. The aim is to sketch an integrative framework which spans early modern ideas and practices relating to brains, bodies, memory, and objects. Embodiment and environment, I’ll argue, were not (always) merely external influences on feeling, thinking, and remembering, but (in certain circumstances) partly constitutive of these activities.
My wannest thanks to Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan for organizing the wonderful conference at Chapel Hill, and for their editorial patience. I’m very grateful also for their suggestions, help, and enthusiasm to Mary Carruthers, Adrian Carton, Andy Clark, Lorraine Daston, David Hillman, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Eve Keller, Pamela Long, Doris McIlwain, Gail Paster, Kathy Rowe, P. A. Skantze, Pamela Smith, Mary Spongberg, Lyn Tribble, and Julian Yates.
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Notes
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 180.
Compare John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 207–237.
For the terms “exogram” and “external symbol system,” see Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 308–333;
John Sutton, “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” in D. Tofts, A. Jonson, and A. Cavallaro, eds, Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Sydney: Power Publications, 2002), 130–141. See section 4 below on Stallybrass and Tribble.
Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14 and 55 (quoting William Slatyer’s 1621 Palae-Albion), and in general 53–66.
Floyd-Wilson, 14 and 65, quoting Roger Ascham’s The Scolemaster (1570)
Sara Warneke’s Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (Leiden and New York: EJ. Brill, 1995), 132.
Daniel Woolf, “Memory and Historical Culture in Early Modern England,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1991), 283–308.
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 7–19. For a compatible argument, from a quite different feminist philosophical perspective, that social and other external influences on memory often support good remembering rather than merely introducing error, see Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Stephen J. Cowley, “Why Brains Matter: An Integrational Perspective on The Symbolic Species,” Language Sciences 24 (2002): 73–95, esp. 75.
Clark, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 154.
John Sutton, “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process,” in R. Menary, ed., The Extended Mind (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. B. Harris (London: Ernest Benn, 1967), 1.2.14-15, 1.2.11.
H. R. Woudhuysen, “Writing-Tables and Table-Books,” The Electronic British Library Journal (2004), articles 3, 3–4 and 7.
Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419, esp. 413.
John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham, 1980),
quoted by Rick Bowers, “John Marston at the ‘Mart of Woe’: the ‘Antonio’ plays,” in T. F. Wharton, ed., The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re-visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25–26, n. 10.
Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (1653), in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1662: reprinted New York and London: Garland, 1978), I.11.2, p. 33.
Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1662: reprinted New York and London: Garland, 1978), II.10.9, p. 105.
Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 25–49; Gail Kern Paster, “Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body,” in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 107–125.
John Marston, Antonio and Mellida: The First Part, ed. G. K. Hunter, (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 4.1.56-57.
John Trapp, Commentary … Upon the Books of Ezra (London, 1657), OED sv “sponge,” 4b.
T. Y. Levin, “Before the Beep: a short history of voice mail,” A. Cavallaro,*S. Davies*F. Dyson*A. Jonson, eds, Essays in Sound 2: Technophonia (Newtown, NSW, Australia: Contemporary Sound Arts, 1995).
Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–86.
Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables…,” 416–417; Katherine Rowe, “Remember Me: Technologies of Memory in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet,” in R. Burt and L. E. Boose, eds, Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD (London: Routledge, 2003), 37–55; Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 315–316.
Bob Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-industrial German Society,” in K. von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 17–32.
Evelyn Tribble, “The Chain of Memory: Distributed Cognition in Early Modern England,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 2 (2005), at http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?joumal_id=53.
Evelyn Tribble, “Distributing Cognition in the Globe,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 135–155, covering particular cognitive artifacts such as sides and plots, the physical environment of the theater, the social structure of the acting companies and the apprentice system, and the cognitive-poetic qualities of the memorizable texts. I discuss this case study in light of differing interpretations of the “extended mind” hypothesis in “Exograms and Inter-disciplinarity,” section 3.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” Yale Review 81.2 (1993): 35–50.
M. de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass, eds, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Clark, “Beyond the Flesh: Some Lessons from a Mole Cricket,” Artificial Life 11 (2005): 233–244.
Clark, “Memento’s Revenge: The Extended Mind, Extended,” R. Menary, ed., The Extended Mind (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–11.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds.”
G. Freeland and A. Corones, eds, 1543 And All That: Image and Word, Change and Continuity in the Proto-Scientific Evolution (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 117–150.
Clark, “Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More,” Theoria 20 (2005): 255–268.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7; The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 66.
Lina Perkins Wilder, “Toward a Shakespearean ‘Memory Theater’: Romeo, the Apothecary, and the Performance of Memory,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 156–175.
Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 112.
Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 131, 135.
Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair,” 485–488; for the parallel notion of an epidemiology of representations in cognitive anthropology, see Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: a naturalistic approach (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 26. Harris accepts that Stallybrass’s approach to clothes is sufficiently alert to the diachronic dimension.
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Sutton, J. (2007). Spongy Brains and Material Memories. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_2
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