Header Image: SAR (to write / to grow - ancient Sumerian)digital image, 2024, courtesy of Soft Turns

¹See gallery44.org/events/reading-group-thinking-through-the-milieu

preliminary reflections on artistic research

Weiyi Chang

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Collective reading constituted a vital part of Soft Turns’ residency at Gallery 44. Over 18 months, the artists have generously hosted a series of reading groups, Thinking through the milieu, inviting the public to take part in their research process and to contribute their own knowledge, interests and concerns.¹ Since its inception, the reading group has drawn a semi-regular audience of thinkers and collaborators, who have demonstrated not only a critical engagement with the readings but also with the fluid, indeterminate and sometimes circuitous process of artistic research.

This essay began as an attempt to synthesize, as an attendee, several discrete themes that have arisen over the course of the reading group and their social, ethical and cultural implications: the Expanded Mind theory of cognition; cognitive hierarchies and their role as arbiters of moral status; the moral and ethical status of more-than-human objects and creatures; recent theories of plant ethics vis-a-vis the concept of flourishing. Underlying these thematics emerged a set of questions: What repercussions might the Extended Mind theory bear on the moral status of more-than-human entities insofar as they constitute a part of a cognitive system? On what grounds might a more-than-human entity be said to possess moral status, other than cognitive grounds? Is it possible to develop a non-hierarchical, internally cohesive ethical theory that is cognitively agnostic? And how might redefining the grounds of our moral obligations towards more-than-human entities lend itself to a radical rethinking of our relationships with each other, with the creatures with whom we coexist, with the very land and waters we inhabit?

The questions above lie beyond the scope of this essay, each one constituting a philosophical subdiscipline in itself.² Instead, I offer a preliminary sketch of the theoretical horizon articulated by Soft Turns throughout their reading group, refracted through my own political, ethical and intellectual background and concerns.

In tandem with these questions emerges another, more self-reflexive one, namely, the nature of writing itself. As Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic write, “Paper can be like a conversation partner, but with the enhancement that the words do not dissolve into the air.”³ The idea of writing as a conversation with oneself highlights the duality and duplicity of writing, its constitution and revelation of both interiority and exteriority. Writing’s duality requires stepping outside of oneself and observing the patterns and processes of thought that, in other circumstances, may be obfuscated or imperceptible.

Writing, whether it occurs on the horizontal plane of the page or the vertical plane of the screen, subjugates the amorphous, diaphanous clouds of thought that comprise the mental realm to the orderly arena of the page, with its time honoured rules about grammar, sentence and paragraph construction, its rigid constraints on punctuation, tense and tone, its linearity and causal relations, its collective, embedded histories. Putting pen to paper, or hands to keyboard, is perhaps the exemplary instance of externalized cognition; writing is inextricable from the action of thought. On the page, ideas are circumscribed in words and sentences and paragraphs that can be rearranged, deleted, scratched out, reworded for clarity and precision, or transformed into wholly novel uses of language and thus meaning; through the act of writing, thoughts are not merely recorded but come into being.

²The first essay I wrote under the auspices of Gallery 44’s Writer-in-Residence program, chiseled in the stony flesh of the planet, takes up questions regarding the moral status of plants vis-a-vis their cognitive capacity: “Lacking the physiological mechanisms believed to be required for basic levels of cognition and thought, plants were relegated to the status of automatons, incapable of intelligence or complex decision-making, driven entirely by genetically ingrained instincts … This assumption justified plants’ negligible moral value, which allowed them to be readily exploited and extracted in the pursuit of capitalist accumulation.”

³Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic, “Writing as Thinking,” Review of General Psychology 12, no. 1 (2008), pp. 12.

⁴Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998), 8.

The material experimentation undertaken by artists likewise constitutes a kind of cognitive extension, substituting the pen with, for example, the camera or even the arrangement of objects and subjects that comprise a photographic composition. In the case of Soft Turns, their approach to artistic and material research often embraces the processual rhythms of more-than-human entities, engaging the more-than-human in a dynamic act of collective cognition.

This process of externalized, active cognition is an example of what philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers call the Extended Mind. The Extended Mind hypothesis argues that the external (to the mind/brain) environment plays an active role in driving cognitive processes. The mind/brain couples with some external entity—such as pen and paper—to form a cognitive system in its own right. Together, the thinking, perceiving mind/brain conjoins with the external world in order to engage in epistemic actions, defined as actions that,

alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes such as recognition and search… Epistemic action … demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is … part of the cognitive process.⁴

The Extended Mind eschews Cartestian mind-body dualism in favour of an integrated, embodied approach to cognitive processes, whereby processing occurs not in the rarefied realm of the mind but rather in and through space, matter and time.

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Installation using found post-industrial beach rock (brick, tile, cement, asphalt, ceramic, rebar) and audio soundtrack of animal and bird sounds. Inspired by designs made with grade 2/3 students from Second Street Junior Middle School, Etobicoke. Commissioned for Shoalings, curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2023, courtesy of Soft Turns.

Traditionally, figures like Rene Descartes have intimately tied cognitive capabilities to a being’s moral status. Moral status is a core concept in ethical philosophy. An entity is said to have moral status if and only if, “it is for that being’s sake that the being should not be harmed, disrespected, or treated in some other morally problematic fashion.”⁵ To possess moral status is to possess certain rights. For Descartes, human beings are unique insofar as we possess the ability to reason, to use language, to engage in self-reflection, and other advanced, arguably exclusively human, cognitive activities; these features are the grounds upon which humans are accorded moral status and why other beings are not.

This cognition-led perspective lends itself to a hierarchical conception of species and entities, placing humans at the very top of a secular Great Chain of Being, followed by animals, plants and non-living things at the very bottom. Over the years, however, this approach has been challenged by a number of philosophers, who argue that more-than-human species—great apes, cetaceans, elephants, domesticated dogs and so on—also demonstrate cognitive abilities previously presumed to be uniquely human. If human cognition is not unique, then there is no reason why moral status ought to accrue to humans and not others.

Other philosophers have further extended Clark and Chalmers’ Extended Mind theory to go beyond the body and materiality to include social and environmental relationships as constitutive of cognition.⁶ Might collective reading also constitute a cognitive process? What sort of epistemic system might coalesce between subjects and how might this inform the moral status of the collective? And what of the epistemic system formed between the writer and the reader?

⁵ David DeGrazia and Joseph Millum, “Moral Status,” in A Theory of Bioethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 176.

⁶ Eros Moreira de Carvalho, “Socially extending the mind through social affordances,” in Automata's Inner Movie: Science and Philosophy of Mind, eds. Manual Curado and Steven S. Gouveia (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2019) 193-212.

Some have put forward other possible grounds of moral status: one popular alternative argues that sentience ought to be the grounds of moral status while another view, both more generous and more demanding in its approach, argues that all living beings are deserving of some measure of moral status. The utilitarian approach argues that the capacity to feel pain and to suffer is a sufficient condition for moral status. Where we draw the line to determine who and what possesses moral status, and to what degree, has significant social, cultural, legal and political consequences on our ways of being.

Even if we adopt a cognitive-based theory of moral status, how might the Extended Mind theory problematize these grounds? If I possess moral status by virtue of my cognitive abilities, and at least some of my cognitive abilities are distributed outside the body via this computer, does my computer too possess—at least insofar as it participates in epistemic action and thus deserves “epistemic credit”—some degree of moral status, even if temporally constrained to the time it participates in an epistemic action?

In her book, Parallel Minds, materials scientist Laura Tripaldi takes up this line of thought in her analysis of the spider. Tripaldi argues that the spider’s web is not merely its home or a device through which it entraps nourishment; it is “an extension of its perceptual organs and its brain.”⁶ Citing a 2017 article by biologists Hilton Japyassù and Kevin Laland, Tripaldi says that the web is an instance of evolution outsourcing a part of the spider’s cognitive faculties to its environment, allowing the spider to use its web to orient itself in space and to transmit and receive sensory data from outside its body.

Tripaldi likens the relationship between the spider and its web to the human and its innumerable devices that are similarly designed to outsource core cognitive capabilities, such as memory storage, sensory perception and cognitive processing—e.g. the device you are using to read this essay. Tripaldi goes beyond seeing the material world as more than merely a set of tools through which we engage in cognitive activities. Instead, she argues in favour of a kind of intelligence embedded within the material world itself: “The ability of a material to construct and modify its own structure autonomously suggests a form of intelligence which, unlike the centralised form we are used to thinking about, is produced continuously within the dynamic fabric of chemical and physical relations between the elements that make up the material.”⁷

⁷ Laura Tripaldi, Parallel Minds: Discovering the intelligence of materials (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 145.

⁸ Ibid, 29.

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Tripaldi’s concept of intelligence can apply to almost anything: a thing is intelligent insofar as it is “flexible and able to enter into dialogue with their environment.” Intelligence is granted not by virtue of a thing’s innate characteristics, such as the existence of a brain or neural network, but rather by its actions in the world, which may be dynamic, lively, responsive and situated. What motivates Tripaldi to make this broad claim is to counteract the prevailing image of cognition that has elevated the human at the expense of all else, that has sanctioned cruelties upon the world and justified its abuse through appeals to morality. In effect, she is taking the inverse approach taken by other philosophers, assuming the cognitive-based theory of moral status as a given and lifting up everything else on the Great Chain of Being to meet that threshold.

We might argue that Tripaldi’s conception of intelligence is indiscriminate and overly vague; surely there is space to differentiate between the physio-mechanical reactions of, for example, silk threads and the intentional or purposive actions of a neurally-connected being, the latter indicative of some interest, desire or goal and thus interiority or self. Indeed, this latter position is taken up by numerous plant and environmental ethicists. Where and how we draw this line, however, and who is granted the authority to do so is an open question.

See https://www.gallery44.org/events/reading-group-thinking-through-the-milieu
The first essay I wrote under the auspices of Gallery 44’s Writer-in-Residence program, chiseled in the stony flesh of the planet, takes up questions regarding the moral status of plants vis-a-vis their cognitive capacity: “Lacking the physiological mechanisms believed to be required for basic levels of cognition and thought, plants were relegated to the status of automatons, incapable of intelligence or complex decision-making, driven entirely by genetically ingrained instincts … This assumption justified plants’ negligible moral value, which allowed them to be readily exploited and extracted in the pursuit of capitalist accumulation.”
Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic, “Writing as Thinking,” Review of General Psychology 12, no. 1 (2008), pp. 12.
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998), 8.
David DeGrazia and Joseph Millum, “Moral Status,” in A Theory of Bioethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 176.
Eros Moreira de Carvalho, “Socially extending the mind through social affordances,” in Automata's Inner Movie: Science and Philosophy of Mind, eds. Manual Curado and Steven S. Gouveia (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2019) 193-212.
Laura Tripaldi, Parallel Minds: Discovering the intelligence of materials (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 145.
Ibid, 29.

Weiyi Chang (she/her) is an independent writer and curator. Weiyi has curated exhibitions and programs in Canada, the United States, and Germany. Her art criticism and essays have been published in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Luma Quarterly and she has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Documenta 14, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and more. Weiyi's research lies at the intersections between ecology, environmental ethics, climate change, capitalism, and time.
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Weiyi was a 2019-20 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. She holds a MA in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) from the University of British Columbia and a BA (Honours) Major in Art History and Major in Philosophy from Western University.

preliminary reflections on artistic research

Weiyi Chang

‍

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