Metaplasticity rendered visible in paint: How matter ‘matters’ in the lifeworld of Human action.

Abstract

Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more carefully attending to the variety of ways in which human artefacts, institutions, and cultural developments extend, shape and alter human cognition over time. Material Engagement Theory (MET) in particular has set out to map, explore and understand the relational nature of mind and material world as can be read through cultural artefacts. Within the context of MET, the neurological concept of metaplasticity has been expanded to include the affective domains of technology, materials, and things in the neurological development and architecture of the plastic human mind; a 'transactional' relationship between a plastic mind and a plastic material world that are correlated at the ontological level. The challenges of mapping this metaplasticity of mind lie in understanding how the mind and material culture should be understood in relation to the constantly changing lifeworlds of humans over time; the ecological, social, technological and environmental contexts that form the historical specificity of cognitive development. This paper explores how the historical specificity of metaplasticity can be made tangible through the study of material culture, focusing upon the particular activity of oil painting. It will be argued that paintings can provide clues to the historical specificity of the mind that crosses the lifeworld of human action; the technological, phenomenological, philosophical, material, and social conditions underpinning the creation of a painted mark. Drawing from a range of sources that have a root within a Deleuzian process philosophy, the paper builds an account of painting that can be read as expressing the encultured and historical manipulation of paint as an expressive material in itself; an action rendered visible that express the historical emergence of mind.

Toward an Enactive Conception of Productive Practices: Beyond Material Agency

“…MET has indeed attended to other aspects such as enactive signification and its emphasis on embodied activity (e.g., Froese, 2019;Malafouris, 2013, 2016, Overmann, 2019Parisi, 2019;Prezioso & Alessandroni, 2022;Poulsgaard, 2019;Walls, 2019;Woodward, 2019). One exception is Ransom (2019) who briefly discusses the dynamic and asymmetrical relationality of agency and the self-constitution of bodies in the enactive literature, and highlights the potential of MET further engaging these and other ideas in 4E approaches.…”

Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology

“…It is worth noting that radical enactive approaches in cognitive archaeology do not exclusively apply to the study of cognitive transformations in early human prehistory but extend also to more recent contexts. Specifically, a significant part of material engagement theory, which can be made compatible with RECA, has been formulated through examples of semiotic and cognitive transformations in Mycenaean and near eastern cultures (e.g.,Malafouris 2012, as well as used in the context of art history(Woodward 2019) and ethnography (Walls in press). The higher preservation of this material record indeed allows a better reconstruction of trajectories of cognitive changes scaffolded by artifacts than the Paleolithic record.…”

Cultural evolutionary psychology is still evolutionary psychology

“…Consequently, culture cannot be conceived as a disembodied code of operations and algorithms; rather, it implies the socially negotiated alteration of such structures, and the creation of new affordances for cognitive transformation that are inherited by the new generations (see the concept of a “landscape of affordances” in Rietveld & Kuverstein 2014 and in Rietveld et al 2018). Within this view, cognitive evolution is intended as a metaplastic trajectory, whereby the mind emerges only at the nexus of neural and cultural plasticity, and does not identify an autonomous level for natural selection (Aston 2019; Iliopoulos & Garofoli 2016; Malafouris 2010; Roberts 2016; Woodward 2019).…”