Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies

"COGNITIVE ECOLOGY" is a fruitful model for Shakespearean studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, (1) we use the term "cognitive ecology" to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive lines of engagement with early modern literary and historical studies. (2) The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition. (3) The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark's Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others. (4) The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins's ethnography of navigation, Cognition in the Wild, (5) and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman. (6) These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kinesthetic, sensory, interpersonal, historical, political, cultural, technological; indeed, each dimension in this necessarily partial list is itself wildly heterogeneous. Many cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains, hooking up in both temporary and more enduring ways with other people and with certain things--artifacts, media, technologies, or institutions--each with its own history and tendencies. In other words, this is a system-level mode of analysis. System here is not to be seen at the relatively abstract level of Michel Foucault's opisteme or even Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, but instead as dynamic, material, and non-localizable. In this view system "cannot be understood in its development or function as strictly localized within one level of analysis." (7) In a dynamic model of system, no one element can be identified as the unit of analysis. Rather, thought is distributed across insides (internal mechanisms constraining attention, perception, and memory); objects (artifacts and environments); and people (social systems). Because our practices of remembering or decision-making in cultural settings always involve the coordination of many disparate resources at once, we cannot assign any general analytic priority to one of these dimensions. (8) The integrative label "cognitive ecology" particularly highlights the point that disparate but tightly interconnected elements within any such culturally specific setting operate in a complementary balance that shifts over time. Although firmly grounded in contemporary sciences of mind, cognitive ecology thus has little in common with the rigid rationalist logicism of classical forms of cognitivism. Thinking is not the product of stable and determinate internal structures. Communication and action are not the mere expressions of the real cognitive processes in the head, but are thinking or remembering in action. A raft of loosely allied movements in the situated, embodied, and distributed cognitive sciences reject the individualist "classical sandwich," by which "mind" stolidly mediates between input and output, perception and action, instead studying more-or-less intelligent practices in their cultural-historical settings. …