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The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and Berenson’s theorisation of ‘tactile values’, this essay argues for the importance of ideas of embodied perception to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature, and suggests we can find in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism a colourful thread that needs to be woven into the history of what might now be called embodied cognition. To recognize this is to change our understanding of modernist visualities. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is called on to help bridge, historically and conceptually, between the work of a group of aesthetes and decadents at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary framework of distributed cognition that is the basis for our project.

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Victorian and modernist studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by Peter Garratt reflects on current research, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area, and the role and potential of distributed cognition in studies of Victorian culture and modernism.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, current literature on embodied cognition is reviewed, and important themes drawn out. These themes—gesture, the embodied self, social interaction and joint action—are discussed as they appear in the broader literature and as they might be applied to studies of music, and in this way a broad theoretical model of embodied cognition in music is built up. In the second part, specific ethnographic moments from the authors’ fieldwork in India are discussed with reference to this theoretical framework. In the first, the embodied nature of a raga’s meaning is discussed; in the second, the somewhat different ways in which Indian classical music can be embodied as ‘abstract’ design are addressed.

This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.

This chapter discusses how the Surrealists engaged with techniques like automatic drawing, the exquisite corpse, collage, frottage and decalcomania, and how this might be interpreted in the context of theories of distributed cognition, enactivism, embodiment, and the extended mind. The Surrealists’ use of ‘objective chance’ was driven by a belief in the existence of an unconscious state of mind which could only be accessed obliquely, by using techniques which bypassed both artistic skill and conscious thought. ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’. This question is posed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) as an introduction to the concept of the extended mind, but it could just as well be the very question the Surrealists were trying to address in their search for a universal truth, the key to which they believed to be the unconscious mind as defined by Freud.

Canonical Western philosophers tend to acknowledge no value for the body. However, not all are contemptuous of the body; some of them invented materialism, the theory that everything in nature is body. Philosophy in the wake of Darwin has begun to create new ways of thinking about the body that martial arts train. Among these the chapter discusses work on somaesthetics, body phenomenology, and embodied cognition.

Chapter 3 describes how impossible puzzle films create paradoxical, incongruent or impossible narrative experiences. To understand the nature of the confusion these films create, this chapter adopts Leon Festinger’s original theory on the psychological state of cognitive dissonance (1957) and argues that the perplexing effects of impossible puzzle films can be understood as cognitive dissonances. These films strategically evoke and maintain dissonant cognitions in their viewers through internal incongruities (contradictions in their narration) and projected impossibilities (narrative structures or elements that disrupt the elementary knowledge, logic and schemas that viewers use to make sense of both real life and fiction). Along with more recent insights from embodied-cognitive sciences and narratology, cognitive dissonance theory offers us a tool to explain the effects that impossible puzzle films have on viewers.

Chapter 2 focuses on a cognitive approach as a pertinent method to address complex narratives’ ‘difficult’ viewing experiences. As it argues, complexity does not only lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaning-making routines. Noticing that some films pose more conspicuous impediments to sense-making efforts than others, this chapter differentiates movies in regard to their relative complexity in cognitive terms – that is, their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers. The cognitive approach will lead to reconsider the classificatory accuracy of existing concepts, such as the umbrella term of puzzle film. From there on, the chapter proposes more refined categories within the overarching division of narrative complexity, aiming to discern between different types of film that offer various degrees of complexity.

The Mechanism of Meaning (1963-1973; 1996) by artist-architect-poet-philosophers Arakawa and Madeline Gins, unfolds over more than eighty eight-foot high painted and collaged panels, using image, object and text together to produce an epic diagram of the mind as it works at problem solving and meaning making. At the core of this project is a mobilisation of impossibility, ambiguity, mistakes, frustrations, puns and illogicality that, in asking for a solution or movement and then denying it, self-reflexively sends the viewer-reader back to their own actions as meaning-making mechanisms in the manner of Zen koans and Dada jokes. Arakawa and Gins, working in a neo-Duchampian tradition, use ‘non-retinal’ resources to reconfigure perception and reason by problematising the visual and textual world through embedding it within a set of playfully illogical conceptual constructs, acting to bring back to perception those other, non-visual senses, whilst embedding them in a consideration of bodily experience brought forth by sightlessness and physical frustration. The Mechanism of Meaning uses its combination of visual, haptic and verbal to move between visible and invisible form, Garland argues, to provoke the viewer-reader into considering the active roles of the mind and of the other non-visual senses in reading, seeing and reasoning.