In February and March 2020, I visited the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, one of the LCE’s collaboration partners, hosted by Richard Menary. A very productive dialogue started that I will trace through three books I read during my stay in Sydney.
Briohny Doyle, The Island Will Sink (Melbourne: Brow Books, 2016).
Tasmania sinks in this near-future narrative. We follow the events through the eyes of a filmmaker, who not only works towards a fully immersive cinema, and also lives in a house which records his feelings and thoughts, as a kind of external memory. Doyle’s book provides a fictional treatment of the notion of the extended mind, where thoughts and feelings emerge in interaction with devices such as notebooks, smartphones, or indeed film cameras and editing. Creative technologies, such as film-making and writing, might take a particular role in the extended mind, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to discuss my thoughts on this with Marcelle Freiman (English and Creative Writing) and Karen Pearlman (Film Studies). For extended exchanges on creativity, collaboration and the extended mind, I would like to thank John Sutton (Cognitive Sciences).
David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (Chatto and Windus, 1978).
Malouf reimagines the exile of the poet Ovid at the fringes of the Roman empire. Ovid, a model of urbane sophistication, is fascinated by a wolf child from the wilderness and begins to rethink the different metamorphoses between nature and culture. In many ways, Ovid, and through him Malouf, addresses the issue of enculturation, where seemingly ‘natural’ cognitive capacities are learnt through social interaction, ‘cultural’ technologies, and the role of expertise in these exchanges. At Macquarie, I participated in workshop on Murray Smith’s “Naturalised Aesthetics” (organized by Robert Sinnerbrink, Philosophy) where we discussed the move towards a “third culture” between the sciences and humanities and the role of film studies, philosophy and literary studies in this context. The Culture and Cognition reading group (organized by Alexander Gillette, Philosophy) discussed my article on designer environments through enculturation notions about the interface between nature and culture.
Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat (first published 1842).
The issue of how Gogol’s Overcoat is “made” is a famous reference point for Russian formalism, but it also informed a series of meetings between Richard Menary (Philosophy) and me. We opened a dialogue between the literary traditions of formalism and narratology, and philosophical approaches in the extended mind, enculturation and the co-evolution between culture and cognition. Gogol’s strange story about a poor government official’s need for a new overcoat questions assumptions about narrative, thought and language, and its literary style, “artificial in the best sense of the word”, according to Boris Eichenbaum, might inspire new enquiries into these matters.
Unfortunately, I had to leave because of the situation with the corona-virus before I could give the planned lecture on the topics of creativity, literature and the extended mind that I was preparing during my stay. An inspiring and productive exchange has been set going over the weeks I was at Macquarie University, however, and I look forward to continuing it across multiple formats with Macquarie and together with the LCE group.