Cognitive culture studies

Front matter

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Cognitive Culture Studies Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 1 10/05/18 13:48

Título Cognitive Culture Studies Autor Peter Hanenberg Coleção ECC – Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura Culture, Translation and Cognition © Universidade Católica Editora © Peter Hanenberg Revisão editorial Francisco Silva Pereira Capa Ana Luísa Bolsa | 4 ELEMENTOS Paginação acentográfico Impressão e acabamento Sersilito – Empresa Gráfica, Lda. Depósito legal 441177/18 Tiragem 200 exemplares Data maio 2018 ISBN 9789725406038 ISBN e-Book 9789725406045 Universidade Católica Editora Palma de Cima 1649‑023 Lisboa Tel. (351) 217 214 020 | Fax. (351) 217 214 029 uce@uceditora.ucp.pt | www.uceditora.ucp.pt HANENBERG, Peter Cognitive culture studies / Peter Hanenberg. – Lisboa : Universidade Católica Editora, 2018. – 120 p. ; 23 cm. – (Estudos de comunicação e cultura. Culture, translation and cognition). – ISBN 9789725406038 I – Tít. II – Col.

Chapter II: “My Favourite Things”

The proximal term of tacit knowledge The title of this chapter might remind some readers of the famous John Coltrane whose LP with the same title was one of the great Jazz events in the early sixties. Maybe others will remember instead the musical “The Sound of Music” composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein from the late fifties, maybe even in its Portuguese adaptation on stage some few years ago. Or some others might even remember both pieces of music – or should I say the unit that Coltrane built upon the Rodgers-Hammerstein original. And if one remembers any adaptation of the melody, one might even hear it, somehow like being in an inner ear. When I chose the title, I tried to link attention to it with some other experience that I supposed might be familiar to the reader. And now by remembering some moments of the underlying musical experience, I tried to reinforce this linking – even for those who even might not have thought on it before. Actually, I was trying to support the arguments that I am going to develop by a previous aesthetic experience – and of course my intention is to transfer some of the good musical mood to what I am going to develop.

Even before I started arguing, I already occupied the reader’s brain by the repetition or by the revocation of a former auditory experience, that – as I said – some might even have heard inside their mind. “My favourite things” is one of those music pieces that we all recognize as something experienced before and that – once in our inner ear – is hard to forget. One might be “hearing” “My favourite things” even when this chapter is finished, rethinking the title or some of its arguments, for instance, or even just by chance, at night, when the reader is preparing to go to bed. Tomorrow, “My favourite things” will occur less frequently, maybe one will somehow forget it again, until the moment you meet the music or the title of my paper again.

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“My Favourite Things”

“My favourite things” is part of our tacit knowledge. I will have to explain what this means. Of course, its content, the melody itself is not tacit knowledge, but it is knowledge (I know the melody) and it is memory (I remember the melody). When they occur, knowledge and memory are an explicit content that we can attend to or not. But “My favourite things” is tacit in the way it came up to the mind: as the auditory sensation produced by the quotation of a music title. What is behind this way of coming out to hear a melody just by reading three words? And why can one not forget the melody since I started to draw attention on it? One can’t help hearing the melody – and when one is a Jazz- Fan he will even feel the vibration of Coltrane’s saxophone. Listening to Coltrane’s piece, we easily recognize the original melody from the musical – even though we might not be able to say how and what exactly makes us identify it as being simultaneously the same and different. Music specialists will do the job more easily, but they will not be able to explain the unspecialized recognition and why it lasts longer then the stimuli that make it work. One of the key points in “My favourite things” is repetition. Already the original melody is widely based on the effect of repetition and serial enumeration. In repeating the central themes of the melody, Coltrane is even more radical in using this iterative principle, building the fascinating tension of his piece by a continuous oscillation between repetition and variation. I would like to stress the general point of this argument in a twofold way: First I would argue that repetition and recognition are key-issues not only in “My favourite things” but in music in general. Music without repetition and recognition would just be noise. And: Music that is just repetition and recognition without any variation is nothing but boring, pimba as we call it in Portuguese. Patrick Colm Hogan has built up an interesting Guide for Humanists to Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (Holms 2003), precisely starting with John Coltrane’s example. The point is that the effect of repetition and recognition is not only structurally relevant for music: it is for cognition at all. Our brain is constructed in a way that the cultural environment that it is exposed to shapes and sets up the structure through which the brain will attend the environment, trying to develop and maintain a coherent correspondence between the mental structure and the world experienced outside. This is valid not only in a short term perspective like priming your attention to my arguments through a musical experience. Instead it stands for the general plasticity of our brain, as shown in chapter I.

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One of the simplest ways of shaping structures is repetition. A repeated input will cause the notion of familiarity that by itself will lead to a certain agreement between the inner mental world and the world outside. That what one sees, hears and feels first and repeatedly, will have a lasting impact on what one thinks and what one likes. In his book on The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely asks himself and the reader: Could it be that we made arbitrary decisions at some point in the past (like the goslings that adopted Lorenz as their parent) and have built our lives on them ever since, assuming that the original decisions were wise? Is that how we chose our careers, our spouses, the clothes we wear, and the way we style our hair? Were they smart decisions in the first place? Or were they partially random first imprints that have run wild? (Ariely 2009, loc. 861-864) And further in his book: “Perhaps it’s time to inventory th[ese] imprints and anchors in our own life.” (Ariely 2009, loc. 879).

This is the issue of tacit knowledge. Maybe our inclination to music (a quite useless thing, by the way) has to do with this “tacit power” of experiencing the interaction of repetition, melody or structure shaping and variation. As your music expectation is anchored by referring to a certain theme, chord or tonality, our brain is anchored to certain experience-based structures that aim at maintaining themselves through variation. In music we experience this interaction of repetition and variation as such – without any further reference (that is why we practice music without having any practical interest). Another important point is that our brain selects certain stimuli and lets them make sense, while others are not attended. When you are listening to music you don’t even hear you neighbour snore. Our brain does the same: such stimuli that do not find correspondence in your mental structure are rolled out, neglected or forgotten. You even do not notice that they are there (but your neighbour might, as he is sleeping and thus in a different structure than you). Bruce Wexler writes: Such processes are so common that they seem only natural, and the excess of input beyond processing capacity makes them necessary. Two points, however, are of current relevance. First, since these internal structures select and value sensory input that is consistent with them, they create an exaggerated sense Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 32 10/05/18 13:48

“My Favourite Things” of agreement between the internal and external worlds. Second, since internal structures shape perceptual experience to be consistent with the structures themselves, they limit further alteration of brain structure by environmental input. (Wexler 2006: 155) Tacit knowledge emerges from the permanent effort of our brain to find a proximal relation between its own structure and its environment. Even distance is a means to shape proximity, in the sense that it establishes such relation. Therefore, distance and proximity are not opposed in a cognitive sense, as both describe a relation to the self. Distance not linked to the self would not make any sense. Distress and conflict emerge, instead, when no relation can be established from the individual brain to its environment. Thus, the opposite of proximity would be displacement.

So far, we have used two terms to describe the phenomenon that we are dealing with: imprinting and anchoring, two metaphors that try to describe how the environment acts upon our mind and shapes its structure in a way that is unknown to us but relevant to all we know. This is what I call tacit knowledge, first defined by Michael Polanyi in the famous sentence: “We can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 2009: 4).

In the following, I will present some further kind of tacit knowledge deriving from the basic principle described before, trying to show the importance of this term to distinguish between proximity and displacement. A certain type of tacit knowledge might be found in what Richard Nisbett called a Geography of Thought (Nisbett 2003). The basic point in this geography of thought is the observation again, that cultural environment plays a certain role in the way we think. Nisbettʼs main thesis is “that indoctrination into distinctive habits of thought from birth could result in very large cultural differences in habits of thought” (Nisbett 2003, xvi). His findings seem to prove that mind did not just develop evolutionarily and thus as the same for all mankind, but that geographical, social and cultural conditions lead to different practices and beliefs and thus to different kinds of thinking, individually, in the scope of a lifetime; collectively, in the form of different cultures. His argument is a long-term one, but still it is not in the sense of evolution, but of history. The main difference he tries to prove occurs between “Asians” and “Westerners”, namely based on the distinction between classical China and classical Greece. “The ecologies of ancient Greece and China were drastically different Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 33 10/05/18 13:48

– in ways that led to different economic, political, and social arrangements.” (Nisbett 2003: 32) Focusing on different things will produce different understandings about the nature of the world. Different worldviews will in turn reinforce differential attention and social practices. The different worldviews will also prompt differences in perception and reasoning processes – which will tend to reinforce worldviews. (Nisbett 2003: 38) I do not want to discuss now whether the differences pointed out for Westerners and Asians are convincing or not. But it seems quite clear that Nisbett’s theory highlights the importance of the environment for the way we think. We are familiar with this finding in two other circumstances. The first point is history – or what we might call a non-evolutionary evolution of mental processes. I argue that it is worthwhile to look at cognition not only in its structural conditions but in its concrete historical establishment. We could then recover such concepts like ‘Discourse’ in the sense of Michel Foucault, ‘paradigm’ in the sense of Thomas Kuhn or ‘Denkstil’ and ‘Denkkollektiv’ in the sense of Ludwik Fleck as specific forms of proximity built up by certain groups in time. We could consider those concepts as the historical establishment of a tacit knowledge assuring proximity to those who are in and displacement to those who are not.

But let me come back to a second point that is much more closely related to the question of geography of thought and thus to the construction of cultural proximity. Quoting Nisbett before, I used a word as polemical as Discourse, Paradigm and Denkstil. I am referring to the word “mentality” or “mentalities”. Again, I would like to ask: What is the cognitive status of mentality? Is it just an airy idea or is there something behind that could account for a condition for cognitive processes? Riccardo Viale and Andrea Pozzali who have studied the “Cognitive Aspects of Tacit Knowledge and Cultural Diversity”, actually claim that in addition to the universal principles, “the child also assimilates culture-based schemes and principles that determine the development of cognitive styles valid only at local level” (Viale & Pozzali 2007: 238). Those cultural-based schemes and principles give “rise to profound differences between various cultural areas in terms of the cognitive style” in what they call “Implicit Cognitive Rules”.

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“My Favourite Things”

This is the point where applied sciences like Intercultural Management start their research. Let me just give one example, maybe the most striking and most famous one: Geert Hofstede’s research on international differences in work-related values, which was mentioned in the previous chapter. One of his recent books speaks of Cultures and Organizations as the Software of the Mind (Hofstede & Hofstede 2005). Of course, Hofstede’s work is not cognitive research – it is mainly based on statistics and inquiries in the context of multinational corporations. But his research reveals interesting data exactly on the issue of cultural motivated differences in the way people think – differences that might even be measurable. Though the statistic finding does not prove any evidence on cognitive processes, it might help to indicate where we have to look for such differences in the way people think and act. Maybe we should have some doubts on the national approach behind his research – and maybe we are not willing to accept his idea that national ways of thinking and national values “should be considered given facts, as hard as a country´s geographic position or its weather” (Hofstede & Hofstede 2005: 13). But the dimensions of national cultures he studies could be a short description of the areas in which tacit knowledge is particularly relevant. These dimensions are the following: the indexes of Power Distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance and Long- or Short-Term-Orientation.

The point that Hofstede tries to make, is that people think and act differently in or better on the basis of these issues. The “software of the mind” works differently if a certain index is higher or lower – leading to different outcomes and realities. Tacit knowledge in the sense of mentalities seems to work efficiently in the area of power (and resistance), in the struggle between Individualism and Collectivism, in gender questions, timeprojection (as concerning memory and future projects) and when certainty and uncertainty are at stake. I would suggest that we should take these statistic findings seriously, because they describe a quite widespread area of differ - ences in thinking and behaviour that are broader than the individual and smaller than mankind, defining a proximity that each individual may not be aware of. But there is one important point, as I said before, where we should doubt Hofstede’s research, namely in his tacit apology of national differences. Hofstede’s research dates from the late 1970s and that means that his data is quite out of date – in spite of recent research undertaken to confirm the former findings. Some thirty years further in the process of globalization national differences somehow seem to vanish. Today’s culture seems much more Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 35 10/05/18 13:48 determined by hybridism and liquidity then by any certainty. Following Zygmunt Bauman we may characterize our contemporary culture by “the ‘overvaluation’ […] of the individual liberated from the constraints imposed by a dense network of social bonds” (Bauman 2004: 96). But this liberation causes a new challenge to the individual: an increasing mismatch between the acquired mental structures and the hybrid environment. A huge amount of “incongruities introduced by significant changes in the environment, produce distress and dysfunction”, as Bruce Wexler (Wexler 2006: 170) argues. This is especially relevant for emigrants, as Wexler explains: Even when they make the effort, their neurobiological development is out of synchrony with the opportunities for skill and role development in the new culture. There is no match in their new environments for the knowledge and skills they developed in their original environments. (Wexler 2006: 236) Somehow like the difference between noise and music, the mismatch between mind structure and environment means a challenge that might not be easy to act on: displacement.

Also new media and their challenges to the concept of identity stimulate a new view on tacit knowledge. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that the ‘windowed style’ of World Wide Web “privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity” (Bolter & Grusin 2000, 31) and “that the unity of our selves is fractured” (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 257) by the media culture in which we live. The “remediated”, the “virtual”, the “networked” Self are three main forms how digital media reshape our culture’s definitions of the self. The so- -called “Second life” is an ultimate attempt to separate body, mind and world in autonomous entities sent out on their own. My avatar moves through the virtual world and his own appearance as a well-defined body can even counteract all what I am in real world: I can be thick or thin, tall or small, brave or coward – and even male or female. Imagine, my female avatar looking for a female fitness-studio in “Second life”. What should I answer then, when another avatar asks me: “But are you really a woman?” (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 263). The argument is deep in two senses: first, because we can virtually separate body and mind in a way that my separated body is exposed to experiences that my real body-mind-unit never could achieve. The point is that there is no mind at all in virtual reality; my avatar is without mind – and thus without tacit Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 36 10/05/18 13:48

“My Favourite Things” knowledge. Is there any proximity in second live? Isn’t second live the institutionalization of displacement? Tacit knowledge – and that is the second sense – is, where I am really not a woman – and I am referring to gender, not to sex which would be just a body question that my avatar might answer on his or her own. As nation and identity my Self is in trouble: hybrid, fluid, remediated: as if it were “not concerned to give a faithful or consistent representation” (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 265) of itself.

The point is that this tacit conditioning of all my thinking is not just accidental and arbitrary. On the contrary: it is based on a general principle and a specific set of cultural configurations. The principle has been described by Leonard Talmy in the fore-mentioned theory towards a cognitive semantics. As quoted before, Talmy’s main argument is “that there has evolved in the human species an innately determined brain system whose principal function is the acquisition, exercise, and imparting of culture” (Talmy 2003: II, 373). This so-called Cognitive Culture System “directs the individual, particularly the developing child, to preferentially attend to and observe certain aspects of the behaviour of the people most directly interacting with that individual, and to assess these observations for certain kinds of regularities, patterns, and norms” (Talmy 2003: II, 378f.). Further on in life, the “cognitive culture system can conclude that there are incompatibilities or conflicts between the patterns in two or more different groups assessed as relevant to the self” (Talmy 2003: II, 380), so that it might resolve “focusing on one pattern to the relative exclusion of the other patterns, developing a distinctive blend of two or more of the patterns, and developing psychologically compartmentalized forms of each of the patterns” (Talmy 2003: II, 381). But there is one thing that the cognitive culture system cannot do: it cannot abstain from the development of patterns and norms. You can be against certain patterns or norms, but you will need other patterns and norms to do so. And certainly, you can change your mind concerning certain patterns and norms but you will do it on the basis of other patterns and norms. And normally you will simply not know which patterns and norms you are referring to, because they seem so natural to you that you would take them to be universal right and reason.

But culture, patterns and norms are not universal and they cannot be taken for granted. They are – as Talmy showed – a matter of “acquisition, exercise, and imparting”. Culture is not for granted: it is a matter of sharing experiences and intentions, and a matter of learning and teaching. That is why culture can Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 37 10/05/18 13:48 be changed, that is why culture can be lost, and that is why we need to know more about its tacit power on our thinking and acting. “My Favourite Things” – the tacit knowledge, next to me and connecting me to my environment: I have already mentioned how perception and conception work together in the way we think. For this intimate relation between perception and conception, Leonard Talmy suggested the intuitive term of “ception” (Talmy 2003: I, 139-175). Ception counts on the inseparable relation between what happens in our brain (through the stimuli given by eyes, ears and other notions) and the world constituted as such which is simultaneously the origin of the stimuli. Ception is where proximity and distance build an inseparable unit. In this sense, a certain “transposition of meaning away from us” (Polanyi 2009: 14) is present to some extent in all tacit knowing. That is why Polanyi writes that “wherever some process in our body gives rise to consciousness in us, our tacit knowing of the process will make sense of it in terms of an experience to which we are attending” (Polanyi 2009: 15). And further: “[…] the process of education by which the human mind is brought into existence is a major exercise of these powers of understanding. The growing mind recreates the whole conceptual framework and all the rules of reasoning bequeathed to it by its culture.” (Polanyi 2009: 45f.) This recreation of the conceptual framework and rules of reasoning will establish a certain way of thinking – and it will be present in further ceptions, experiences, understandings, adjustments, decisions and acts. Once again: the argument does not want to claim the idea of a static determinism or an unchangeable fate. But it wants to emphasize the relatedness and embeddedness of our thinking concerning the tacit conceptual frameworks and rules established by culture and through education.

Tacit knowledge is the knowledge next to me that I even do not recognize as being knowledge at all. It is the structure shaped by education and former experience that makes up my mind and that I try to bring in correspondence with the new experiences that I make. Try to forget it – you will not be able to. As you are not able to forget “My favourite things”. Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 38 10/05/18 13:48

Chapter III Warburg and Jolles: a cognitive approach to the art of viewing and the art of reading The following reflection is based on two assumptions that might be controversial. The first assumption is about Pathosformel [pathos formula] and Sprachgebärde [language gesture], the two fundamental terms in Warburg’s art of viewing art, who first used the term in his 1906 writing on Dürer and the Italian antiquity (Warburg 1992), and in André Jolles’ art of reading literature, developed mainly in his book on Einfache Formen from 1930. My first thesis is that these two terms can be compared and that they – phenomenologically taken – refer to the same concept. In further research this reflection might even be extended to Panofskyʼs concept of “type” and to Ernst Robert Curtius’ notion of “topos”.5 My second and main thesis is that this concept can be explained (and explored) by some of the recent theories developed in Cognitive Studies. In this sense I will simultaneously deal with Warburg and apply a Warburgian interest in joining insights from the so-called Culture Studies and the so-called sciences.

The interesting point about Pathosformel and Sprachgebärde is that they seem to exist before concretization in the arts and even before their concrete meaning. Oscillating between a morphological pre-existence and its meaningful appearance, their floating experience is a challenge both to history and eter - nity, to universalism and cultural relativism. Whenever one deals with Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne-Atlas-Project one can observe this challenge in action: The fact that the project is only bequeathed in vague drafts and ambiguous 5 From the perspective of a methodological challenge, a comparison of Pathosformel, Topos and Type has been developed by Pfisterer (2003). See also the fundamental findings in Wuttke (1996).

Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 39 10/05/18 13:48 representations only highlights the permanent entanglement of its observer between “I do not really understand what it means” and “There is something about it”.

Intuitiveness as the anticipation of its meaning is what really delights our interest in Jolles and Warburg and their concepts of Sprachgebärde and Pathosformel. I will try to offer now some theoretical approaches from cognitive studies that might help us understand both: the terms Sprachgebärde and Pathosformel, as well as our interest in them.

The first concept that must be mentioned is the concept of schemas and scripts, which Ernst H. Gombrich referred to in his Art and Illusion even before the cognitive turn that we are suggesting (Ettlinger 1992: 510). Schemas allow us to establish a meaningful contextual knowledge in a given situation, which means recognizing a single occurrence in its contextual relatedness. Schemas exist before the given experience and help us organize our perception, under - standing and behaviour. But schemas are grounded on experience as well and are thus permanently modelled and changed. We count on schemas to make sense of the world, but we do not simply depend on them as an everlasting predestination. There can be several types of “schema management” (as Peter Stockwell put it): schemas can be restructured or preserved, they can be reinforced or completed, disrupted or refreshed (Stockwell 2002: 80-81). But without them we hardly could make sense of what we perceive and experience. Some schemas even develop into scripts which define a sequence of expected behaviours for a certain situation. Entering a coffee shop we immediately know how to act (looking for a table, sitting down, asking for a coffee, paying and leaving again), though coffees and waiters and chairs and bills may be different from case to case. Those who have experienced the Lisbon Café A Brasileira, a Wiener Kaffeehaus and an American Starbucks know that scripts have a very limited validity – so that we sometimes leave the coffee shop quite disappointed by the coffee, the waiter, the chair or the bill. Art and literature widely build upon schemas and scripts – and so does our recognition of Pathosformel and Sprachgebärde. The fore-mentioned findings concerning mirror neurons might even help explain how we develop our schemas and scripts by mirroring each other’s mind. The so-called “theory of mind”, i.e., understanding others as intentional beings, with a mental existence much akin to our own, depends highly on the assumption of scripts and schemas, which allow us to theorize in an outreaching complex manner. Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 40 10/05/18 13:48

Warburg and Jolles Sprachgebärde and Pathosformel would be the impetus of scripts and schemas unfolding as a shared and contextual meaning. As such they would be simultaneously stable and dynamic, universal as a principle and historical in their unfolding. This first cognitive description could be a step forward in the analysis of their sophisticated and manifold experience in art. 6 There are still many doubts concerning theory of mind, mirror neurons and the perceptional and behavioural importance of schemas and scripts. But these doubts are no stronger than the effort to explain the mindful workings of the brain both as a common and an extraordinary experience.

A second theory from Cognitive Studies might suggest a further insight. Without contradiction to the former proposal, we might try to consider Sprachgebärde and Pathosformel as a way of conceptual integration, the so-called blending or “mental binding”, first developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier in their book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. The theory has been widely applied to the analysis of metaphor, but – as the title of the book suggests – its scope is much broader. In our interpretation, the Pathosformel would work like a “presentation space” which is blended with the (representation of the) referent in a way that generates meaning. Again, we could count on a certain stability, continuity and recognition on the one hand, as we could experience on the other hand singularity and innovation. Following a later development of conceptual blending (s. chapter VI) we could imagine a relevance space working in the process itself, once again like an orientation towards restructuring, preservation, reinforcement, refinement, disruption or refreshment. Observing the concrete case of Dürer’s “Tod des Orpheus”, we might understand how the antique tradition and the modern vision worked together in Dürer’s art. By joining the two attributes given by Warburg himself to the Pathosformel (“lebenskräftig”; full of life) and to Dürer’s own position in painting (“bodenständig”; down-to-earth), we acknowledge the process of conceptual integration as a concrete moment in history: Pathosformel and Dürer’s own position merge in the reinforced blend that gives rise to what we call the Renaissance. The blend would be what Warburg himself called the Einverseelung, (Warburg 2008: 3), a mental assimilation (figure 1). 6 Neuroaesthetics is the new discipline linking the long tradition of empathy in art theory to the observation of cognitive processes as in the case of mirror neurons. Such discussion must necessarily refer to Warburg's Pathosformel, as do David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese (2007: 75). Miolo_Cognitive Culture Studies_3as.indd 41 10/05/18 13:48