TY - JOUR
T1 - Minds in and out of time
T2 - Memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance
AU - Tribble, Evelyn B.
AU - Sutton, John
PY - 2012/8/1
Y1 - 2012/8/1
N2 - Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare's King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life.
AB - Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare's King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84865263176&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/0950236X.2012.696485
DO - 10.1080/0950236X.2012.696485
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84865263176
VL - 26
SP - 587
EP - 607
JO - Textual Practice
JF - Textual Practice
SN - 0950-236X
IS - 4
ER -