Abstract
The artefactual environment is not just the passive, inert background against which the drama of human and non-human animal life plays out; but rather, the built environment plays an active role in the structure of agency. This is an insight that Lambros Malafouris (2013) has articulated in his framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET). I will discuss the enactive-embodied and dynamic approaches to cognition and action, emphasizing the ways that this approach leads to taking MET seriously by force of its own theoretical commitments. That is, material engagement is a natural development of these models of mind, specified to the particularities of the human historical situation. I will then discuss Theiner and Drain’s (2017) critique of HMA, in which they argue that we should replace material agency with materially-scaffolded agency. Scaffolded agency, however, is too weak of a conception of how material culture shapes agency, and is a notion continues to privilege the sense of agency as a mark of what genuinely constitutes agency proper. Drawing on Steward (2016) I propose a definition of material agency that emphasizes the idea that agency is a process, and I suggest that material agency is better captured by the phenomenological experience of flow (Vuorre and Metcalf 2016). This phenomenological understanding of material agency both responds to Theiner & Drain’s critique, and emphasizes the importance of investigating material culture phenomenologically.
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Notes
I will say, however, that many of their counter-arguments to Malafouris’ use of HEC could probably be defended if MET were to shift its focus from extended cognition to extensive cognition, as articulated by Hutto et al. (2014). This approach regards “minds as naturally extensive—the idea that cognitive activity always already entangles embodiment, action, and world-involving resources and does not restrict itself only to what is inside the individual organism” (10). Accordingly, cognition as a world-involving process is not a rarified or exceptional case. It is the rule, rather than the exception—an approach that I take to be much more in line with the general aims and commitments of MET. But this is an idea that requires much more defense and is outside of the scope of this article. Vaccari (2017), for instance, makes a critique of cognitive artifacts, but maintains that critiques of the traditional notion might not apply to Malafouris’ use of the concept within the framework of MET.
In fact, the German word Augenblick, or the brief passing glance of the eye, is translated as ‘moment’ in English versions of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1928/1964). Husserl’s choice of this word, which is interchangeably used alongside the English cognate Moment in everyday German, emphasizes the fact that even these incredibly narrow, seemingly indivisible sequences of time can be broken down into further moments of temporal flux. We might, for instance, be conventionally inclined to treat individual musical notes as the temporal atoms of a melodic sequence. But even these individual notes can be divided further (e.g. a half note could be divided into two sustained quarter notes, or four sustained eighth notes, and so on ad infinitum). A note itself is a diachronic phase situated within the horizons of the broader melodic event.
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Acknowledgements
This work has benefitted tremendously from the feedback of Mike Butler, Nicolle Brancazio, Marta Caravà, and Morgan Elbot. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful and insightful comments.
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Ransom, T.G. Process, habit, and flow: a phenomenological approach to material agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 19–37 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9541-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9541-z