Blurring ontological boundaries: The transactional nature of material engagement

Abstract

The target article provides valuable reflections regarding the study of cognition-in-the-world and proposes a methodology that could help researchers unravel the structure and temporal unfolding of lived experience. In this commentary, we discuss the authors' commitment to the enactive notion of sense-making as the activity of an autonomous system that brings forth a meaningful world to maintain its self-constituted identity. From Material Engagement Theory, we hold that defending such a notion leads to unnecessary ontological asymmetries that obscure the fundamental role of materiality for cognition. On the one hand, we argue that the relationship of close intertwinement and co-constitution that unites organism and environment makes it untenable to characterise cognition as being driven by individuals. In our view, cognition arises from the dynamic encounter between brains, bodies and culture. On the other hand, we suggest that organism and environment should not be seen as separate ontological categories that come to interact with each other but as two terms of a transactional process of continuous becoming. Consistently, we propose to consider meaning as emerging from the in-between space that material engagement creates rather than from the activity of an organism.

In the target article, Poizat et al. (2023) propose the foundations of a theoretical and methodological framework for studying cognition-in-the-world. They start from a distributed perspective that conceives cognition as a relational phenomenon – as the emergent product of the encounter between brain, body and world, in and through practice. This definition is broadly congruent with contemporary perspectives of cognition (e.g. ecological, embodied, embedded, enactive and extended perspectives) that question orthodox representationalist stances. Insofar as the course-of-experience framework could contribute to the theoretical development of current perspectives of cognition and the carrying out of empirical studies, the authors' effort is to be commended.

Nevertheless, we would like to draw attention to the fact that two competing hypotheses about cognition coexist in the text: one transactional and the other enactivist. According to the first of these, mainly sketched at the beginning of the article, ‘cognitive phenomena are outcomes emerging from the orchestration of elements of distributed cultural-cognitive systems, embodied and embedded in practice (...) Practice is (...) the thinking processes themselves’ (Poizat et al., 2023, p. 109-110). From such a perspective, the authors argue that no unit of analysis other than practice as a whole would be sensible for studying cognition. There is a strong hypothesis, then, that studying cognition is tantamount to studying the characteristics of the confluence of brain, body and world, these being elements that cannot be ontologically distinguished from one another. Transactionally speaking, cognition is the continuous process by which brain, body and world co-constitute each other, giving rise to particular socio-material dynamics. The second understanding of cognition in the text is based on a less strong hypothesis: cognition is the way in which an organism (i.e. an autonomous system) in interaction with its environment (i.e. structurally coupled to the environment) brings forth or enacts a meaningful world for itself. In this definition, which is evidently based on enactivism, the organism is differentiated from its environment and asymmetrical to it.

The transactional and enactivist hypotheses differ in the relative importance they assign to the organism. Thus, in the transactional hypothesis, the organism is only one of the terms that participates in the process of cognitive becoming and contributes to the transactional relation in a way that is symmetrical to how other human and non-human agents (e.g. other people or things) do. In the enactivist hypothesis, anchored in the notion of autopoiesis, the organism is a self-organising system that defines the dynamics of the structural coupling with its environment according to the specific goals it generates. In other words, for enactivism, sense-making requires the activity of the organism as an agent (e.g. Di Paolo, 2016).

We will not dwell here on the similarities and differences between the ways of understanding the organism–environment relationship in enactive perspectives and other theories, such as ecological psychology. First, because there are currently heated debates on this issue, with people arguing for the convergence or complementarity of these perspectives and others opposing this possibility (see, for instance, Heft, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2021; McKinney, 2020; Popova & Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2020; Ryan & Gallagher, 2020; Travieso et al., 2020). Second, because it would be more productive to analyse why the authors of the target article needed to resort to the enactive definition of cognition as an organism-driven sense-making process and what potentially inconvenient consequences follow from this. The ensuing analysis draws primarily on the premises of Material Engagement Theory (henceforth MET; Malafouris, 2004, 2013; 2019a, 2020; 2021a; 2021b), to which the authors of the target article refer in their text.

The need to adopt an ‘individual-oriented approach’ (Poizat et al., 2023) arises, in the target article, in opposition to socio-cultural perspectives that conceive of culture as an abstract set of socially organised activities. According to the authors, these perspectives approach practices globally, thus losing sight of the concrete aspects at play. Following Poizat et al. (2023), the solution is to consider socially organised activities as well as ‘individual cognitive constructs’ and the first-person lived experience. We agree that perspectives that understand culture as a set of values, social representations or symbolic meanings tend to describe practices in an abstract manner and often end up offering top-down explanations (i.e. social values or meanings determine behavioural performance). We are also concerned with the need to provide a more concrete explanation of culture, focusing on what people do when they engage in socio-material practices (e.g. practice-based and sensorimotor accounts of culture, see Bourdieu, 1977; Ingold, 1996/2001; Soliman & Glenberg, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017). However, we believe that the emphasis on the individual (i) does not adequately address the lack of concreteness and (ii) provides an ill-fitting description of practices.

The main reason is that socio-material practices are distributed systems that bring together a coalition of human and non-human agents that co-determine and co-constitute each other (Malafouris, 2008a, 2013, 2018), establishing push-and-pull relationships that bring about new modes of acting and thinking (Ransom, 2019). More precisely, Malafouris argues that in real-life situations, perceiving, thinking, doing and making are co-defined so that they are inseparable from each other (Malafouris, 2019a). Thus, while focusing on individual experience might provide researchers with specific data about subjects’ lived experiences, it would also detract from the description of the transactional nature of the brain–body–world meeting that the authors are interested in unravelling, as stated in the introduction of the target article. From the perspective of MET, cognition is situated in the relational space that reunites organism and environment during material engagement (i.e. in the action itself) (Malafouris, 2004; 2021b). In other words, for MET, the influence of materiality on cognition far exceeds external scaffolding: as materiality envelops our everyday thinking and experience, it mediates and constitutes our ways of being and developing in the world (Malafouris, 2008b).

Accordingly, we believe that a concrete description of cognition as called for by the authors in their text could only be achieved by analysing the structural and dynamic features of the brain–body–environment network as it is articulated in the practices themselves. In a recent case study, for example, Aston (2020) explored the relationship between Cycladic marble sculpting and the development of the social organisation at the sites of Dhaskalio and Kavos on the island of Keros, concluding that the semiotics of value that organised the intersubjective exchanges emerged through the making and using of Cycladic figurines. For instance, the author hypothesises that material engagement with marble figurines brought forth new ways of directing attention, perceiving the body, and identifying and differentiating self and other (p. 595) (see also Aston, 2021, for an analysis of how automobiles transform the flows of energy-matter across different timescales). Similarly, through observations in a nursery school, Alessandroni (2021a) described the pragmatic benefits that children gain when they begin to use objects (e.g. soothers, cups and bibs) according to their cultural function. For example, when children begin to materially engage with objects in canonical ways (e.g. using a cup for drinking water), they become able to extend functional behaviours to new exemplars of classes (i.e. they can also drink water from cups they have not used in advance), align their action with the requirements of school activities more effectively, offer objects to other children for them to use canonically and play with others' intentions with and through materiality. Interestingly, the development of canonical uses in nursery school follows a trajectory distinct from that of other types of uses and is effectively promoted by myriad communicative strategies that adults (i.e. teachers) deploy when interacting (see Alessandroni, 2021b, for an empirical study in this regard). Finally, in a recent article, Malafouris (2019b) proposed a situated model for understanding the causal efficacy of materiality on mental health. Specifically, he argued that the diminishing capacities for memory, interaction and communication that characterise people who have dementia are not only the result of neurological factors but also of radical changes in material ecologies that take place under situations such as the transition from home to care home. This is because interacting in a familiar affordance space such as the home environment (which may be disrupted in cases of dementia) contributes to the construction of self-identity and a sense of stability. In line with this observation, Malafouris proposes further studying how people with dementia think with and through things (rather than about things). For example, the author notes that objects embody memories thanks to their form and the history of uses that people have performed with them, making them powerful tools to elicit the re-enactment of certain forms of material engagement. This has significant practical consequences. In the author’s words, ‘things provide a durable network of material signification, transposable dispositions and bodily habits which can be harnessed to enhance cognitive abilities or compensate for memory loss when biological memory is damaged’ (Malafouris, 2019b, p. 198). All these studies investigate socio-material practices by emphasising the transactional nature of the brain–body–world encounter rather than privileging individual experience.

Another drawback of assuming the enactive hypothesis involves bearing an ontological differentiation between the organism whose activity guides the sense-making process and the environment, with which the former is structurally coupled. While enactivism clearly distances itself from the intellectualist tradition according to which skilled action follows the contemplation of propositions in the mind (for a discussion, see Ryle, 1949), it maintains an ontological distinction between agent and tool. As Paolucci (2021) pointed out, ‘one of the main theses of enactivism is that the living organism, in order to survive and build its internal autonomy, creates a distinction between itself and the environment in which it is embedded’ (p. 10). This assumption may create the mistaken impression that the existence of an agent is relatively independent of the existence of materiality. However, this is not the case. In the cognitive ecologies we live in, mental processes, social processes, material processes and bodies are intimately intertwined (Hutchins, 2010). Moreover, this occurs from the very beginning of life: the first interactions between adults and babies do not happen in a vacuum but in and through a material world that adults actively try to bring to children through communicative strategies (e.g. showing and giving gestures, demonstrations of object uses and bodily adjustments) (Alessandroni et al., 2021a). By virtue of this, the agent could neither pre-exist nor be independent of materiality but acquires its character as such in and through the material engagement it sustains with things (see Malafouris, 2019a).

From this perspective, MET argues that cognition is not a property of the individual but an emergent result of the brain–body–environment system. Cognition is thing-ing, namely, thinking and feeling with and through things (Malafouris, 2014; 2019a, 2020; 2021b). Thus, if cognitive processes such as intentionality, meaning-making, memory or conceptual thinking were located somewhere, that place would be the transactional space that organism and environment form during material engagement. Accordingly, we disagree with the suggestion that practices become meaningful to an actor (Poizat et al., 2023 section ‘Identifying signs, their components, and their local dynamics’). Practices become meaningful in and for the extended cognitive system that the organism, others and things come to form during material engagement. In sum, even if enactivism assumes that a fluid and dynamic link between an organism and its environment may be established, it does not concur with the more substantial anti-localisationist thesis advocated by MET, which we believe best describes the nature of situated cognition.

All in all, our commentary invites reflection on the continuing need to consider the individual as the centre of cognition and the potential utility of blurring the ontological boundaries between organism and environment for the study of socio-material practices. As Heft (2020) stated, ‘enaction theory while recognising the tight interdependencies within the organismic system seems to underplay the interdependencies of an organism-environment system’ (p. 11). By contrast, in MET, cognition is not just world-involving: the world actively participates in shaping how cognition (literally) takes place, on a par with the organism and other organisms, with no clear ontological boundaries between them. Adhering to the more robust transactional hypothesis, MET argues that the dynamics of the distributed system that brings together organisms and their environment (whether it be material or social) cannot be reduced to the properties of any of its constituent parts. We believe that a discussion of the issues raised here could enrich the proposal put forward by the authors in the target article and collaborate in unravelling the constitutive character of materiality for cognition.