If the science is willing to allow that cognition can be embodied, embedded, enacted and/or extended then cognition is, or can be, some or all of these things. If it is not willing allow this, then they cannot.
If cognition isn’t at least embodied WTF are we taking about?
Controversial view expressed in Offbeat Magazine. There is much to say for this view but I can think of plausible counter-arguments to do with the inherent dynamism of tradition which New Orleans is the instantiation par excellence.
Music in New Orleans is indeed inextricable from the city’s lifestyle.
“In the 6th Ward, 7th Ward, 9th Ward you see kids on the step banging on boxes, and they’ve got horns with no valves in them,” said Ferdinand. “But they’re playing traditional music, because they grew up in it. This is not something that people can pick up and learn out of a book. It’s life. It’s real life.”
Here is Simon Critchley talking at Cornell. Love Critchley’s scathing take on Bono at about 50 mins in.
What Bowie describes is a Büchnerian world of terror. The first line, “Silhouettes and shadows watch the revolution,” describes the languor and disappointment of a post-revolutionary situation. In an allusion to Eddie Cochran’s posthumously released 1960 hit, there are no longer “three steps to heaven.” All that remains are “Big heads and drums—full speed and pagan.” “So, where’s the moral?” Bowie asks. “People have their fingers broken.” In the final verse of “Part 2,” Bowie concludes,
Children round the world
Put camel shit on the walls
They’re making carpets on treadmills
Or garbage sorting.So, where’s the moral in all this camel shit? Pop stars, like the dreadful Bono, are meant to morph into slimmer versions of Salman Rushdie and mouth liberal platitudes about the state of the world and what we can do to put it right. But here Bowie gives the lie to such liberal complacency by exposing it to a simple, visceral critique. The inexpensive carpets that we use to furnish our home are made by those living in camel-shit huts. Rather than amuse ourselves by playing with some fraudulent political agenda, Bowie simply declares that “It’s no game.” Shit is serious.
The next track on Scary Monsters, “Up the Hill Backwards,” begins, “The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom, and the possibilities it seems to offer.” Like Lucile’s cry at the end of Danton’s Death, this line sounds like Edmund Burke’s conservative critique of the French Revolution. But adapting Celan’s logic, this is no homage to any monarchy or any yesterday, apart from the majesty of the absurd, which is the world of human beings. Such is poetry in Celan’s sense, Bowie’s poetry.
Bowie, carrot-topped and androgynous, seemed less like a pop star than some cosmic John the Baptist sent to earth with news of the apocalypse, or the Rapture, or both.
Bowie was not the first example of rock star as existential alien (Robert Johnson, Elvis, Jim Morrison and Syd Barrett all preceded him), but he was the first to cast himself as an actual extra-terrestrial. Bowie-as-Ziggy seemed savagely intelligent as well as sexually charismatic, projecting the kind of mystique that now seems exotic in an age of ten-a-penny slebs who devalue their cult-of-personality currency with tweets and selfies, or nice boys next door like Coldplay or Mumford & Sons.
When Bowie later left LA for Europe, swapping coke and the occult for booze, coffee, fags and krautrock, he began to incorporate more spiritual lyrical ideas.
“Station to Station is the railway journey suggested by the opening synthesized locomotive noise,” Critchely observes. “But it is also the stations of the via dolorosa of Jesus in Jerusalem from Gethsemane to Calvary. Bowie’s lyric, steeped in Kabbalistic esotericism, concerns the passage between the divine and the human and the possible divinity of the human, which is Christ’s Passion.”
The Art’s Filthy Lesson (Extract)
After Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, he said, “Before I was shot, I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.” Bowie’s acute ten-word commentary on Warhol’s statement, in the eponymous song from Hunky Dory in 1971, is deadly accurate: “Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels. Bowie repeatedly mobilizes this Warholian aesthetic.
The inability to distinguish Andy Warhol from the silver screen morphs into Bowie’s continual sense of himself being stuck inside his own movie. Such is the conceit of “Life on Mars?,” which begins with the “girl with the mousy hair,” who is “hooked to the silver screen.” But in the final verse, the movie’s screenwriter is revealed as Bowie himself or his persona, although we can’t tell them apart at all:
“But the film is a saddening bore
‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again.”
The conflation of life with a movie conspires with the trope of repetition to evoke a melancholic sense of being both bored and trapped. One becomes an actor in one’s own movie. This is my sense of Bowie’s much-misunderstood lines in “Quicksand”:
“I’m living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality.”
Bowie displays an acute awareness of Himmler’s understanding of National Socialism as political artifice, as an artistic and especially architectural construction, as well as a cinematic spectacle. Hitler, in the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, was ein Film aus Deutschland, a film from Germany. As Bowie put it, Hitler was the first pop star. But being stuck inside a movie evokes not elation but depression and a Major Tom–like inaction:
“I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore.”
In “Five Years,” after having received the news that the Earth will soon die, Bowie sings, “And it was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor.” Similarly, in one of my all-time favorite Bowie songs, “The Secret Life of Arabia” (outrageously and ferociously covered by the late, great Billy Mackenzie with the British Electric Foundation), Bowie sings,
“You must see the movie
The sand in my eyes
I walk though a desert song
When the heroine dies.”
The world is a film set, and the movie that’s being shot might well be called Melancholia. One of Bowie’s best and bleakest songs, “Candidate,” begins with a statement of explicit pretense, “We’ll pretend we’re walking home,” and is followed by the line, “My set is amazing, it even smells like a street.”
Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion. Bowie’s world is like a dystopian version of The Truman Show, the sick place of the world that is forcefully expressed in the ruined, violent cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs” and more subtly in the desolate soundscapes of “Warszawa” and “Neuköln.” To borrow Iggy Pop’s idiom from Lust for Life (itself borrowed from Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might well be its implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger who rides through the city’s ripped backside, under a bright and hollow sky.
That woman had a devious mind that was only predictable when she scented an opportunity to vanquish her husband.
. . .
Because it was Saturday, Levy Pants had ceased its assaults upon the concept of free enterprise for the weekend.
. . .
“You’re kneeling on Rex’s grave!” Ignatius shouted. “Now tell me what you and that debauched McCarthyite have been doing? You probably belong to some secret political cell. No wonder I’ve been bombarded with those witch hunt pamphlets. No wonder I was trailed last night. Where is that Battaglia matchmaker. Where is she? She must be lashed. This whole thing is a coup against me, a vicious scheme to get me out of the way. My God! That bird was doubtlessly trained by a band of fascists. They’ll try anything.”
The very excellent Jack Weinstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education — If the paywall has kicked in a pdf can be downloaded here. Jack has of course contributed to Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith and has a forthcoming symposium on his recent book to be published in C+T.
Here is the intro to Roger Frantz’ chapter.
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Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a polymath with several of his key concepts and theories either having modern counterparts and/or “enjoying” empirical support. Smith wrote about the origin and proper use of language, grammar, the history of astronomy and ancient physics, moral philosophy, music, dance, and poetry, and; economics. Despite the very wide variety of topics there was, in my estimation, a common themes. One such theme is connections or inter-personal relations between and among people.
Smith’s most famous book, at least to economists, is the Wealth of Nations (WN). In it, Smith discusses many things including the workings of a private market. A market is the exchange of things in which various motives influence market activity. In WN the motivation to engage in market activity is to improve your own economic conditions. What is exchanged is money for goods and services. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) the motivation is the pleasure received from mutual sympathy. Smith says that:
nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance (Smith, 1969, p. 13).
What is “exchanged” is personal sentiments and moral judgments.
One common theme in Smith’s writings is the connections and interpersonal relations among people. Four questions related to the common theme in Smith’s writings are explored in this paper. First, why is language developed? Second, what is the purpose of good communication? Third, why are Newton’s writings considered of extraordinary importance? Fourth, what is the role of sympathy in human affairs?
Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015
This article considers recent trends in government towards openness and transparency, particularly with respect to the publication of open data, in the context of Michael Oakeshott’s ideas of the nature of the state and the conditions for civility. It is argued that certain aspects of open data have pushed back against a trend towards the imposition of government goals upon its citizens, an imposition often justified in terms reminiscent of Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will. Oakeshott’s view of the state is contrasted with Rousseau’s, and the two frameworks used to locate recent innovations in digital government. Of these, only open data is supportive of civil association.
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.
manwithoutqualities 