Published in TRACEY | journal
Drawing Knowledge
May 2012
Drawing and Visualisation Research
DRAWING COGNITION: AN
EMBODIED PROCESS OF
EXPERIMENT AND
ORGANISATION
Leon Pierre Cooley a
Kingston University,
leonpierrecooley@hotmail.com
a
Drawing practice mobilises bio-affective, cognitive processes that
determine and experiment with critical elements with a field of
perception. This paper discusses the links between the theory of
‘autopoiesis’ and ‘embodied cognition’ within cognitive science and
drawing practice, specifically discussing the relation between
experimental gestures, discipline and outcomes in such practice. It
suggest drawing practice, be understood to embody the principles of
‘autopoeisis’, and as such, mobilises both non-determining and
determining cognitive procedures; thought to be synonymous with
experimental and disciplined practices respectively. Moreover, the
paper argues drawing to be a modality of ‘embodied cognition’ wherein
experimental gestures of such modes reveal the temporal, mobile and
heterogeneous conditions of the life-world structure. Autopoietic and
embodied, experimental drawing gestures the primacy of the a-signified
affect that exceeds representation, returning both discipline and
outcome oriented practice to the heterogeneous world from which they
proceed.
www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/
sota/tracey/
tracey@lboro.ac.uk
TRACEY | journal: Drawing Knowledge 2012
This paper proposes drawing practice be thought as an extended embodied mode of
cognition that becomes constituent to the emergence of subjectivity. It underlines the
reciprocal and co-producing dynamic between experimental approaches and discipline,
enquiring into the emergence of creative gestures, constraints and outcomes through an
enquiry into cognitive science and continental philosophy. Specifically, it will highlight
concepts within the neuro-cognitive hypotheses of Stephen Harnad and Francisco Varela
and the philosophy of Jean Francoise Lyotard mapping each across to the critical elements
of experimentation, discipline and outcome within drawing practice and the interdependence of all these elements to one another. Exploring Harnad’s (1995) concept of
‘Categorical Perception’ and Varela’s (1972) hypothesis of ‘Autopoieisis’ and ‘Embodied
Cognition’, we relate these to Lyotard’s concept of ‘the Differend’ (1988), attempting to
think drawing practice through these theoretical and philosophical frameworks.
To begin with then, we will discuss key concepts within Harnad’s (1995) hypothesis of
‘Categorical Perception’ that he argues enable object determination and meaning in
relation to sensory information (pg 16) for his means, Harnad discusses two cognitive
functions, named ‘Warping’ and ‘Iconicity’ that he proposes are key mechanisms within our
sub-personal cognitive operations. He explains, ‘sensory information undergoes a
“warping”’, that enhances the process of categorization (Harnad, p13). Here, ‘Warping’ is
thought to manipulate information so to fit it into a priori object categories. According to
Harnad, warping consists in ‘compressing’ objects to fit ‘within category’ by simultaneously
amplifying similar and non-similar characteristics assigning them respectively to ‘within
category’ and ‘between-category’ domains ‘so that members of categories look more alike
and non-members more different’ (ibid). Objects identified as similar to previously
identified objects have their similitude enhanced or magnified increasing their ‘within
category’ signal. This process, Harnad claims, results, in effective and an accelerated
cognition of an organized, structured milieu, for after we categorize objects we begin to see
them more in terms of their object category and less in terms of their indeterminateness.
He explains, ‘members of the same category look more alike and members of different
categories look more different’ (Harnad 1995, p13). According to Harnad, it appears
heterogeneous elements are assigned to a ‘between category’ category, in what seems to
be an attempt to categorize, in a general way, elements that resist categorization.
Moreover, ‘Warping’, Harnad (1995) suggests, aids ‘symbolic labels’ that when combined
into ‘symbol strings’ constitute propositions about objects’ (ibid). To this end, Harnad
(1995) explains, the meaning assigned to objects ‘may be “grounded” in the [cognitive]
systems capacity to pick out…the object categories that the propositions were about’
(Harnad 1995, p20). This process appears to suggest that the strengthening of symbolic
signals will render aspects of sensory information increasingly determinate and thus,
amounts to sensory information becoming classified under a general system of
categorization that accelerates cognition. Conversely then, we might think if such a process
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is disrupted, cognition will decelerate creating an incoherence and unstable perceptual
event.
‘Warping’ and the strength of sensory signaling are thought to be further assisted by a
second mechanism defined by Harnad as ‘iconicity’ (ibid). ‘Iconicity’, is the function where
sensory elements ‘pop out’ of the milieu due to prior categorization – a type of subpersonal referential process of elements already latent with specific meaning. The more
fluent the categorization the greater the effect of ‘iconicity’: the greater the effect of
‘iconicity’ the more fluent recognition.
Overall, Harnad seems to suggest, these mechanisms provide the bedrock for fabricating a
coherent percept of world and object determination without which meaningful relations
would be impossible. Yet, at the same time, such a model lends itself to a concept of
cognition as a narrowing down of perception, inhibiting the vision of new forms and
realizing of new relations. A question is then raised, as to how to negotiate the alternation
between the cognitive mechanisms producing ‘categorical perception’ and an expanding
perception of ever renewed sensation and relations to the world? Exploring this question,
we suggest, reveals similar concerns central to understanding the relation between
experimental drawing and drawing as discipline and outcome.
Without the determining behaviours of ‘Categorical Perception’, ‘Warping’ and ‘Iconicity’,
we might suggest, life is unable to structure perception, nor stabilize experience, yet,
conversely, life does adapt very well to the new elements within a changing milieu. A binary
operation is somehow negotiated from moment to moment, as life and world unfold in a
dynamic relation over time. As is already noted, association with sensory elements, might
occur, by a ‘production of ’ or ‘seeing’ similarity. At the same time, in some way, we
manage to experience difference and the ‘new’ without a too much disruption of
subjectivity. Here then a more fluid model of cognition must be considered, if we are to
think a relation between determinate and creative cognitions, especially if we add time and
movement to the process of cognition. A necessary addition to the problem if we consider
drawing practice is a mobile and temporal cognitive event. Moving on then from Harnad,
we turn to Francisco Varela’s (1973) hypothesis of ‘autopoiesis’ and begin to think
cognition in more mobile terms considering ways to negotiate the problem of determination
and change.
With his concepts of autopoiesis and embodied cognition, Francisco Varela begins to
conceive how a dynamic, temporal life-world becomes coherent, self-organized, identity
producing and receptive to new and critical elements within the milieu. According to his
bio-cognitive theory, the autopoietic system is ‘organized as a network of processes of
production of components’ that ‘constitute a concrete unity in space’ through ‘specifying
the topological domain of its realization as such a network’, (Varela 1979, cited Rudrauf et
al 2003, p26). The feature of this system is that it produces itself through an internal
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organizational logic, itself the product of operational procedures, coping with and emerging
from dynamic, temporal conditions: procedures necessary for a stable existence and
continuity of identity. The salient features in this system are ‘circularity, self-referential
logic and organizational or operational closure that [together] maintain stability, unity and
autonomy whilst adapting to a changing milieu (Rudrauf et al 2003, p27). The key
operational procedure of these features is ‘closure’ that is thought to be the operation
underpinning the autopoietic system, as Varela explains, “The whole is not the sum of its
parts; it is the organizational closure of its parts” (Varela and Goguen, 1977). ‘Closure’
according to Varela, is then essential for coherence and cognitive stability, without which a
living system ‘is no longer in its domain of viability, and therefore dies’ (Rudrauf et al 2003,
p28).
Operational closure is thought to be the internal programmed logic of the autopoietic
system, yet, such a system, temporal and mobile, is requires procedures that enable it to
adapt and reorganize to an ever changing, dynamic condition of possibility. A double
operation of stability and transition emerges then through a mechanism of recurrent,
sensori-motor coupling between the system and critical elements within the milieu. The
survival, wholeness and continuity of a system, Varela explains ‘is not separable from its
interaction domains’ (Varela 1980a cited Rudrauf et al 2003, p28).
This argument
highlights the inter-dependent dynamic between life and world, proposing the mind or
cognition of an organism is structured through ‘coupling to’ and critical elements with a
milieu. For Varela, life and world are utterly co-dependent, seen in ‘the circular habitual
patterns’ of coupling between elements within the life-world system is made up of a
‘binding chain, each link of which conditions and is conditioned by each other’ (Varela
1993).
For Varela, the history of bio-cognitive ‘coupling’, patterns of movement, regulation and
physiology of organic systems reciprocally structure one another through a dynamic, codependent relation. He argues, these processes repeat themselves at each level of
organic structure from the local cellular and neuronal behaviour to global affects and
modes of cognition, suggesting “animality invents a mode of being which is inseparable
from movement, going towards, seeking in movement” (Varela and Depraz 2000 cited in
Rudrauf et al, 2003, p35). The term ‘animality’ suggests the instinctual, non-reflexive
character of autopoiesis foregrounding the primacy of sensori-motor processes, a primacy
that is itself understood as ‘affect’. For Varela, this understanding of sensori-motor
processes as affect is fundamental to his understanding of the production subjectivity. The
sensori-motor affective process Varela explains is ‘‘affect-emotion in the self-movement of
the flow, of the temporal stream of consciousness” (Varela and Dupraz 2000). The
affective process is conceived to stimulate both, an historic pattern of recurrent sensorimotor processes and cause perturbations to these patterns that stimulate an enhanced
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awareness of the phenomenological situation1. The identity of the system is sustained and
adapted through the affective processes: hence, affect becomes the ‘frontier’ between the
so-called ‘realm of objectivity and subjectivity’ (Rudrauf et al, 2003, p53). Affect is the
material from which subjectivity both retains continuity and produces itself anew.
For Varela, an organic system is both organizationally closed yet, dynamically adaptive to
new and known perturbations to it, creating ongoing interaction and cognitive coupling to
information from within the life-world domain (ibid). A double operation occurs both of
stable-closure and adaptive-opening that together constitutes autopoiesis proper. For
Varela, the structure, contents and process of cognition emerges out of the
phenomenological conditions, as much as it does out of the historic neuronal patterns,
challenging the traditional cognitive scientific models of ‘input-output’ Computationalism or
Connectionism. Harnad’s ‘Categorical Perception’ is attributed to the latter model and
reminds us to consider how these models might work alongside one another, at least in
some aspects. For example, we can imagine Harnad’s ‘Warping’, Iconicity and his
hypothesis in general, demonstrates ‘operational closure’.
However, both
Computationalism and Connectionism still advance the more representationalist notion of
an independently structured world with apriori meanings, that is inputted into an
independently structured neural processing unit that goes onto animate flesh and bones.
Such representationalist models underplay the influence of affects and their importance to
the biodynamic situation and the production of subjectivity2. These last concerns are what
drives Varela’s project and are key to understanding how drawing might be thought a mode
of embodied cognition. Returning to the concept of autopoiesis, we can begin to think
drawing practice as an extension of the operations of cognition for ‘living systems’.
Especially where the autopoietic system emerges out of the embodied ‘situatedness’ of the
event. Furthermore, we can suggest drawing specializes in exploring the ‘situatedness’
using a range of determinate and creative signs and gestures, both representational and asignifying, habitual and new. Thought in this way, we can begin to understand how drawing
transforms matter and subjectivity through critically organizing affective (aesthetic) biocognitive processes via mark marking and movement?
Varela’s theory of autopoiesis allows us to consider the notion that drawing when practiced
is part of a larger life-world system of perceptual organization. This notion can be further
established through Varela’s associated theory of ‘Embodied Cognition’. This concept
advances the idea that the production of subjectivity is a symbiotic process and a result of
Varela attempted to synthesize phenomenology with cognitive science resulting in the development of neuro-phenomenology. A
research programme that continues today through the work of Evan Thompson and the Rudrauf et al Laboratoire de Neurosciences
Cognitives et Imagerie Cerebrale, Paris.
1
The notion of ‘situatedness’ in Varela’s work attempted to unite both bio-neurological methods with phenomenology, particularly with
the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleu-Ponty. These philosophers helped Varela begin to explain the emergence of the self as
subjectivity and the ego in relation to time, continuity and change.
2
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neuro-biophysical procedures co-conditioned by critical elements within the milieu.
According to Varela, subjectivity emerges from dynamical processes that situates ‘mind’
within an inter-dependent network of body-brain-milieu relations rather than in the brain
alone (Rudrauf et al, 2003).
Subjectification is thus the result of embodied bioneurological processes shaped by the phenomenological ‘situatedness’. The production of
subjectivity, or the sense of selfhood of the autopoietic system, emerges from numerous
reciprocal, embodied, ‘closed-open’ operational procedures within and across the
embodied body-brain-milieu domain. We suggest drawing practice, is then another
operational procedure within this domain: a modality of thought and an operation of
biophysical cognition deploying topological processes and identifying critical elements in a
specified domain: a procedure both constrained by discipline, method and strategy as well
as, specializing in creative couplings and experimental processing of sensory information.
Thought alongside the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ and ‘embodied cognition’, we begin to see
drawing practice as an extension of cognitive embodiment and constituent in the
production of subjectivity, as conceived by Varela. Along these lines, we also suggest
drawing as discipline and as outcome corresponds to ‘operational closure procedures’ of
an embodied cognitive event and experimentation to the open-adapting operation.
Operational processes constrained by organizational closure habitually construct a unified
continuity understood as identity (Rudrauf et al, 2003). Might the discipline of drawing
practice, be understood as a type of habitual continuity or process of identity production?
And if so, does discipline restrict the frequency of experimental events and narrow down
the infinite possibilities of new gesturing experiment creates? Similar questions can also
be asked of the function of outcomes within drawing practice, as outcomes require
qualification and measurement - a type of tool for identifying productivity. In this way, does
outcome perpetuate the logic of productivity and measurement: functioning as a type of
categorical perception, accelerating meaning, determination, and representation? Are
experimental events calibrated by such logics? Moreover, does outcome perception belong
to a generalizing process, wherein affects are categorized epistemologically, serving the
unifying and productive power of embodied systems that inevitably narrows down any
experimental events? This narrowing down might explain how the agency of experimental
gestures is often subjectivised by ‘iconic,’ symbolic, referential or signifying frames. What
then is the relation between discipline, experimentation and outcome, if discipline overcodes new critical elements with known, determinate, iconic referents? How is
experimentation to gesture new sensation outside of a generalized perception made up of
iconic, representational material? These questions identify the difficult and obscured
relation between experimentation, representation and measurement, consistency and
change; critical dynamics in both embodied cognition and drawing practice and yet are
features that are logically incongruent and discontinuous to one another.
Experimental approaches appear to create or increase moments of difference and form
new relations that expand or adapt our static understanding of things.
Yet,
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TRACEY | journal: Drawing Knowledge 2012
experimentation is also constrained by the tendency toward determination or, in
autopoietic terms ‘operational closure’. The inevitable constraint of experimental contents
thus shape and limit the appearance of new possibility and heterogeneous gestures. Jean
Francoise Lyotard (1988) discusses this tension between heterogeneity and representation
and names it ‘the Differend’. He explains ‘the Differend’ is that ‘unstable state and the
instant…wherein something which must be able to be put into a phrase cannot yet
be...signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling’ (Lyotard 19988, p13). ‘The Differend’,
gestures the exclusion that is exercised on affects that exceed dominant signifying
regimes: zones of exclusion outside the valorized symbolic. A zone that cannot be
presented yet is felt, troubling the relation between sensation and understanding,
destabilizing the process of iconic determinacy. Ordinarily, so Lyotard claims, we are
presented with the ‘matter-phrase’, at the level of sensation, and typically initiate a ‘phrase
regimen’ wherein matter becomes form, form becomes name. He explains,
‘In order to endow the matter phrase with an objective referential value, a
supplement needs to be brought in by means of a second quasi-phrase, the form
phrase (Lyotard 1988: p64).
This process excludes elements of sensation that are non-quantifiable and nonrepresentational. Such aspects of experience and feeling cannot be phrased and begin to
delimit the habitual gestures and signifying chains.
For Lyotard, ‘The differend’ characterizes ‘what remains to be phrased’, and calls for
events ‘to institute idioms which do not yet exist’ (Lyotard 1988, p13). At stake, is the
ability ‘to bear witness’ to an elements non-referential affects, by directing our attention
back towards the plane of matter at the level of sensation (ibid). This philosophy appears
somewhat synonymous with Varela’s theory of affects and its perturbation to subjectivity.
Lyotard suggests indeterminate experience opens subjectivity up to new relations between
critical elements within the situated event, wherein the necessity for ‘new rules for forming
and linking phrases’ is immediately ‘disclosed by the feeling’ (Lyotard 1988, p13). At this
level of matter, numerous arrangements of sensory information are felt yet cannot be
phrased in their entirety. An accelerated cognitive procedure is disturbed by an affective
event that exceeds conceptualization, returning attention to the matter-phrase and as such
increasing the force of affect further. We might conceive this as direct, kineasthetic
perception or ‘embodied cognition’; a form of thinking that remains non-signified. The
affective experience exceeding representation must then require creative responses to
gesture new couplings and experimental marks and relations to create new forms. Already
suggesting drawing itself be an extension of embodied cognition, we can now envision how
experimental drawing attempts to gesture the affective dimension that exceeds the
referential concept. To this end, between Lyotard’s concept of ‘the Differend’ and Varela’s
hypothesis we see the primacy of affect and experimental gestures of heterogeneous
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elements, in the dynamic, adapting life-world network. This primacy, we suggest, leads us
to think experimentation might precede determinate procedures. Applying this logic to
drawing practice, we also suggest that drawing as discipline and outcome emerge from the
gestures and postures experimental drawing creates. The primacy of affects call for new
couplings and signifying motives that must also form new relations to the known signifying
regime, re-ordering the entire system in each new formation. New experimental gestures
embody the dynamic relation between mark making and heterogeneity; each mark,
gesturing the existence of a processual affective life-world domain more commonly
understood as creativity. Thinking about drawing practice in this way, highlights the
necessary condition of experiment in drawing and advances the notion that drawing
practice and more essentially creativity itself, is more a mode of thought that synthesizes
both bio-affective and cognitive processes in a single aesthetic event.
At stake in experimentation, is the degree to which embodied processes form new
subjectivity or are habituated to dominant referential systems. Sense impression, feeling
tone and affective contents, are on the edge of forming new relations and new couplings to
elements within the temporal and mobile life-world domain. An embodied drawing practice
enhances this creative modality, releasing a relay of affects across the topological domain
that exceed representation, and in so doing, returns subjectivity to the heterogeneous
plane at each moment of mark making: a return requiring experimental phrasing, postures
and strategies for new subjectivication. No doubt, the force of dominant referential
systems and the tendency for operational closure stalls and constrains this process.
However, extending embodied cognition through creative techniques like that of drawing
practice, turns us towards new elements infinitely emerging within the reciprocal relation
between organism and milieu.
Drawing practice is then thought to be an extended embodied cognition that occurs as part
of a network of operational procedures within the autopoietic system in general. The
principle of operational closure within autopoiesis underpins constraint, determination and
coupling to known elements within the sensory domain. Yet, the existential conditions of
temporality, mobility and affects necessarily disrupt such procedures and any tendency for
stasis, determination and fixedness requiring new relations to and assemblages of
heterogeneous elements. Drawing practice, alternating between closure and creativity,
habit and indetermination, is subject to both processes, yet, as a creative practice
producing affects and feelings not yet ‘phrased’, naturally disrupts ‘closure’ and
determination. This disruption reveals that experimental postures precede structures and
frameworks synonymous with disciplines and outcomes. Drawing practice releases
momentary affects and feelings, new marks, gestures and relations all occurring within an
embodied event. This event always exceeds discipline, returning the referent and signifier
to the temporal, heterogeneous, indeterminate plane of matter, from which a restructuring
around new marks and new affects form new relations to one another. To this end,
experimentation, discipline and outcome as elements in drawing practice, sustain one
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another in such ways that characterize an autopoietic system – a closed-open system of
adaptation and renewal. How drawing practice enhances either the experimental or closed
aspect of the system is due to the practitioner and the constraints of practice, however, the
nature of creativity necessarily returns ‘closed’ procedures back to affects and
heterogeneity that require experimental gestures and embodiment.
We have discussed the work of Stephen Harnad, to illustrate how some cognitive
operations may determine experience and limit possibility for creative practice and new
forms of subjectivity. We have also discussed the concepts of autopoiesis and embodied
cognition in the work of Francisco Varela and, in so doing, revealed that both determinate
and adaptive processes are necessary for sustaining a life-world unity within a temporal,
ever-changing context. To understand some of the problems that lie between determinate
and adaptive processes, we discussed Jean Francoise Lyotard’s concept of the ‘Differend’
and proposed any new element within a life-world domain is felt and exceeds signification,
hence seek new gestural forms. We have seen how Lyotard’s ‘Differend’ is consistent with
Varela’s model of embodied cognition, in that both propose, affects ground and structure
new forms of subjectivity and representation. Finally, we discussed drawing practice in
relation to these theories and, in so doing, explored the relation between affects,
heterogeneity, experimental approaches, discipline, outcomes, mark making, gesturing and
creativity in drawing practice. Concluding that an embodied drawing practice returns
determinate processes to the level of matter and heterogeneity because known
representation cannot embody new relations to new elements in such a practice.
Moreover, such processes produce new forms of subjectivity running circuits of affects,
new gesture and expanded cognition across the life-world domain. In short, we propose
drawing is an embodied event that at its most fundamental is an experimental mode of
cognition, subjectivity and thought.
Linking aspects of drawing to aspects of cognition begins to help us understand drawing,
not just as a tool for cognition but as a mobilized operational, embodied process, that is
part of a bigger organizing system. Non-conceptual processing is actualized through the
body that results in a tracing out of subjectivity. Drawing becomes a performative event of
sentience and sensory perception expanding or narrowing down understanding. In this
sense, drawing is re-conceived to be a biophysical method of thought. This notion raises
interesting questions about the types of outcomes we seek from drawing and begins to
outline the immanence of the experimental gestures that always exceed outcomes and in
exceeding them, returns a now limited outcome measure back to the practice of
experimental gesturing. As such, drawing in its very action calls for experimental
approaches, foregrounding the often hidden yet innate creativity at play in everyday
cognition.
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Harnad, S et al. 1995, Learned Categorical Perception in Neural Nets: Implications for symbol grounding.
Symbol Processors and Connectionist Network Models in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Modelling: Steps Toward Principle Integration. Academic Press.
Lyotard F, 1983, The Differend, Phrases in Dispute. Translated from French by. Georges Van Den Abbeele,
1988, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Rudrauf, D, Lutz A, Cosmelli D, Lachaux JP, Le Van Quyen M, 2003. From Autopoiesis to
Neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics of being in Biological
Research Journal, Vol 36, p21-59, 2003. Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie
Cerebrale, Paris. Available from ‘http://www.scielo.cl [accessed 14 September 2011]
Varela et al, 1999, The Embodied Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
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