The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver
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Opportunities to collect or to own surpassed and reshaped the metaphors that had long stood as models for the mind, just as mental models subsequently surpassed and reshaped the collections upon which they were based. Libraries, museums, cabinets, dressing tables, workshops, gardens, paper, desks, account books, and offices (Exhibits 1, 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 24, and 27) formed especially dense sites of the practical glossing of theory; collecting emerged as a performance of the root workings of intellection, the mind finding itself in place. And, as I have suggested, the reverse will prove to be true as well: theories were founded upon arrangements of things in space.
The dialectical to-and-fro between material models and conceptual resources, the chicken-and-egg reflexivity of source and target,75 is prevalent enough in the literature that it marks a kind of keynote. It may even suggest a unified field of thought. Graham Richards, for instance, argues that only the trope of “mental machinery” makes a prehistory of psychology possible. Before George Henry Lewes and J. S. Mill, William James and Sigmund Freud, there was no science of psychology, no category under which to file books, no heading in a commonplace index; there was, however, a consistent strain of metaphorical, mechanistic modeling of the mind. Psychology, Richards remarks, is what makes thinking itself an object of thought, and it proceeds, in this early phase, by erecting material models in order to subject them to conceptual work. “The only thing that can be known about the soul or the human,” writes one authority on the subject, “are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time.”76 By shifting conceptual relationships onto material models, the intellect makes itself its own subject; the reflexivity afforded by metaphors of mind—metaphors that displace cognitive processes into observable models—offers a way of gathering up the materials of a field that did not yet recognize itself as such.77 So, too, commenting generally on the tendency of “social structures” materially to “reproduce” themselves, Pierre Bourdieu locates the central engine whereby folk models of mind witness themselves in their environments, and environments re-emerge as folk models. “The mental structures which construct the world of objects,” writes Bourdieu, “are constructed in the practice of a world of objects constructed according to the same structures.” This is what he calls the habitus, a space of being structured to an experience, and this, too, is managed by a metaphorical commerce. Coordinating living space and living mind is, for Bourdieu, overseen by the continual flux of equivocally bidirectional metaphors; metaphor is, in this sense, the basic medium of the mind, what governs the passage from material to ideal and back again. “The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects,” Bourdieu concludes, “which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.”78
Libraries, cabinets, and museums hold a special place in the history of metaphor because they are themselves designed as source domains. In this special case—in the special case of the metaphor for mind—the metaphor’s semiotic vector doubles back on itself, the target domain shaping its particular, idiosyncratic sources in all their patterns and products. The cabinet, the museum, the library, and so on are therefore not to be confused as a single metaphor. They offer distinct source domains developed in consultation with developing, existentially felt models of the intellect. We might think of these as environments—except that “environment” suggests a space or habitat distinct from the observer who stands within it, when anyone standing outside the system would argue that person and space evolve together. Environment is a lousy word.79 Better, then, to call these “ecologies,” studies of habitation or home.80 It is the nature of an ecology that it evolves just like any network.81 Changes in a part kick off responses in others. In a cognitive ecology, we would say that the tools of thought evolve along with the thinker, and vice versa. The hitch, the trick of the Enlightenment, is that these ecologies nurture theories of detachment; the mind witnesses itself in a series of innovations founded upon difference.
Thinkers of the seventeenth century are often accused of having installed, at the very core of the new epistemology, a strange break between mind and matter, subject and object. Indeed, many of the names most commonly mentioned in histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, fairly or unfairly, have become labels for certain kinds of dualism. Although an important countertradition exists,82 Gilbert Ryle traces the “dogma of the ghost in the machine” to René Descartes, making him stand for the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans; Rorty blames the tradition flowing from Descartes to Locke for showing that “mind was imaginable apart from body”; Steven Pinker is just one of many people who blame Locke for making mainstream the doctrine of the blank slate, even though he knows that the attribution is false.83 But there is a paradox here; these dualisms are founded on a more profound entanglement. The very distinction between subject and object, self and property, is elaborated in and through the embeddedness of intellect in its material surroundings. The development of the critical distinction between mind and matter, the dualist distinction that is the glory and achievement of the empiricist moment, was itself accomplished in the messy flow of cognitive activity through embedded practices—a heuristic abstraction from curatorial habits. There is, in Timothy Morton’s recent formulation, no thought that is not an ecological thought.84 There is nothing in the mind, no, not even in the empiricist mind, which was not first in the sensorium.
The Design of the Book
The reflexivity between minds and collections is the subject of this book—and it immediately raises a question of method. We in general think of the Enlightenment as articulating a false distinction between subject and object, thinker and thought, whereas later literary movements—Romanticism especially—represented an attempted return to a nostalgic organicism. This is why environmentalist criticism, or ecocriticism, often launches its project of establishing more fully ecological modes of thinking by returning to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others of the High Romantic moment. The mind is not a mirror, the argument runs, that merely reflects whatever it sees; it is a lamp, which illuminates the very things it beholds. We are not collections of experiences but Aeolian harps, whose strings are plucked by the winds of Nature. One set of metaphors is replaced by another, which would seem to be more attuned to the effects that environments have upon the people through which they move, and vice versa. In a coarse-grained sense, this is certainly true; this is after all the story Romanticism tells about itself. The one who toils and troubles with his books—who murders to dissect, Wordsworth reminds us—will “surely grow double”; he will split himself into mind and body, self and other. We are meant, on the contrary, to come forth “into the light of things,” to “let Nature be [our] teacher.”85 And a turn to metaphors that eschew distinctions between mind and matter, person and thing would seem to go a long way toward erasing the divisions installed by the metaphor theory of language in the first place.
But a fine-grained analysis tells a different story; the Romantic turn may indeed have hardened up distinctions between self and other, subject and Nature. Wordsworth’s argument in “The Tables Turned” is that the man in his study is profoundly disconnected from things—like the “freshening lustre” of the sun, or the “sweet … music” of the woodland linnet. But a perverse reader might note that the scholar’s entanglements present the very problem to begin with. He is so deep in his reading, so embedded in his books, that he neglects what Wordsworth takes to be the world’s ebb and flow. Paradoxes abound; the reader is type and figure of the man who murders to dissect, thereby signaling a radical split from a living ecology, but he is nevertheless up to his elbows in gore in pursuit of the nature of things (see Exhibit 20), and this surely signals a different set of profound investments. The man in his study is himself capable of the sorts of turns of phrase that would certainly signal the kind of monism Wordsworth might have approved. It is he who asks Wordsworth to “drink the spirit breathed” from the authors of books, kicking off Wordsworth’s exhortation in the first place. There is a fine echo, here, of embodied practice, of ideas as the echoes of carnal engagement, for the scholar’s request hears the haptic memory of “spirit” in what is “breathed”;