minds and artefacts

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Mon, 07 Jul 97 23:23:09 EDT

A few notes in continuation of the minds and artifacts
discussion, in which I take particular interest because of both
my recent Latourian turn and my general commitment to seeing
units of analysis defined in terms of the full systems needed for
the actual execution of the processes of interest.

A typo in my last posting: it was meant to read "parthenogenesis"
, in case anyone might have thought it should have been
"pathogenesis". My mischief was to raise the issue of units of
analysis springing up from our traditions and desires without a
grounding in material systems, as in Athena-Mind sprung full-
blown from the brow of Zeus, without a proper biological
parentage, Olympian or not!

Chuck Bazerman makes the case for minds vs. artifacts, that we
participate differently in activity. His definition of what
matters for him about a notion of mind seems to me to sum up
rather well all the traditions and metaphors that make me so
reluctant to embrace this view.

A place from which we sense and judge -- but there is no such
place, if we want a material mind, with spatial-temporal
properties and extension, beyond the bare metaphor, then it is
not a small place behind our eyes and between our ears, but a
rather large system that passes well outside the skin and through
which passes the circuit of differences that make a difference
(as in Bateson's man-axe-tree-axe-man circuit discussed here
several times before, or my elaborations on it to close the
circuit of efference/afference at a point necessarily in the
environment, outside the organism).

And again with reflexivity and the irrealis principle of mediated
meaning making (that we can interpose or overlay an imaginary
symbolic on top of perceptual immediacy or between stimulus and
response): it is not "my mind" that is doing this, but _I_ am
doing it. It has always struck me as oddly self-alienated to take
advantage of language's means of displacing agency ( I did it. It
was done by me. It was done by my will. My Will did it. My Mind
did it.) to reify the Homunculus. Do we really mean to say: "I
did it by means of my mind." ? and if so, must we not equally say
"by means of ..." _all_ the elements which must conspire if "it"
is to get done? including the instrumental axe, the immobile and
cuttable tree, the absence of lightening hitting the axe, etc.?
Activity is a process of a system that is not the same as what is
usually meant by either a mind, or an organism, simply as such
and without the rest.

Similarly with matters of who or what 'directs' judgments and
actions. If the system of relevance for perception, and for
effector action, extends beyond the organism, so also presumably
must that for judgment, reflection, affect, etc.

And finally 'motives, goals, motivated orientation' -- always at
the heart of what to me is the desire for a particular version of
Free-Will -- and where my worry, often voiced here in other
contexts, is not that one can't usefully bring in some such
notion in the analysis of human behavior and social activity, but
with the notion of its autonomy, that it originates internally,
that once originated it has some sort of inertia independent of
'external' conditions, etc. And, to come full circle, that it is
the sort of thing that can have "a place", can be somewhere, can
be at all, "in" "the mind".

So, for me, meanings get made, and only get made, in complex
material systems, that include human organisms/bodies _and_ other
participants, in interaction -- but they do not get made "by" or
"in" minds. Not unless we want to give the name Minds to systems
quite unlike what traditionally have been associated with this
term, or extend notions like Cognition to the behavior of systems
also quite unlike what the traditional semantics of the term (and
the language) allow.

So in such a view, what happens to the argument that my body, the
axe, the tree, and a lot of the local ecosystem, participate
'very differently' in the activity of Felling-the-tree? There is
still a lot left to the argument, surely, but perhaps not as much
left of the point of making the argument in the first place.

And if "I" do the various meaning/feeling/acting things that
happen in this activity, then perhaps "I" am also not strictly
speaking an agency only of my own brain or body, but an aspect of
some more extended system?

A system in time, indeed a system that helps to make time, a
system of processes that have/make temporal
extension/duration/interval on various scales. And that, as
material objects _isolated_ from their constituting processes on
all scales (itself a really risky move, abetted by our cultural
preference for the Thing-y way of using language), bear in
themselves the marks of past events (an event is a process
regarded as a thing, losing its temporal dynamics and with it the
scale of that dynamics) as artifacts of material culture. But as
participants with no reality apart from participation in the
constituting processes on all scales, are themselves in a way
temporally extended entities (a semantic compromise), so that the
axe, or the sword, does not so much simply embody its history and
bear the marks of the cultural practices that produced it, as
they index the on-going processes, on many time-scales, in which
they and we and others participate, and through which we are all
co-constituted.

So it is not just the discourses of "mind" that need to be
unravelled here to think newly, but also those of "artifact". Our
traditions and biases have perhaps come too far toward taking as
real and fundamental only a present moment, only an isolated
material object, only a notion of event as at-a-moment and out-
of-stream. And when we do try to re-place these back into their
constituting processes and dynamics and ecological contexts, we
still take things one scale at a time, so that processes become
singular rather than being always themselves constituted as part
of systems of interdependent processes on all possible scales.

I realize this can be pretty radically difficult to think. But I
really believe these issues are at the heart of what makes, not
minds different from artifacts, but some kinds of complex systems
of processes in which we and the rest participate different from
other process complexes in which meaning, affect, and action (vs.
motion) do not take place.

JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU