Asif A. Ghazanfar and Daniel Y. Takahashi, ‘The evolution of speech: vision, rhythm, cooperation’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 543-53.

Ghazanfar and Takahashi examine some key characteristics of human speech: rhythmic vocal acoustics, the coordination of these with rhythmic facial motions, and turn-taking. They find similarities and contrasts with the way other primates communicate with one another. The evolution of language is treated as separate from the evolution of speech in order to focus on these cross-species qualities. The authors acknowledge that the question of language bears on their interests, and vice versa.
      For some reason, despite the sidelining of language, this made me think about drama, which depends on rhythms of voice and body (the flow of syntax, metrical forms, coordinated movements and expressions), and which is built so often on turn-taking (it’s so much easier for the audience when speakers don’t overlap one another). I thought of excess: verse drama, different formal structures, and the exaggerated turn-taking that some kinds of scene depict. I also thought of degeneration, or regression – opposites of evolution – where literary speech falls short of these long-learned ideals. Failures of rhythm and turn-taking might complement – but might be independent of – a descent into linguistic incoherence.

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I have observed before that I always think of Shakespeare and Beckett in this blog. Here too. In the mad scenes of King Lear, the King, his Fool, and Edgar (as Poor Tom) weave strange, incoherent speeches into one another. In Titus Andronicus Marcus has to speak at, to, with, for, over – other prepositions would work too – his voiceless niece, and his ability to engage and respond seems compromised as a result.
      Beckett sees to go even further, contorting his actors’ bodies so that their speech and movement are at odds (most famously in Not I), and altering the dynamics of turn-taking (in
Krapp’s Last Tape, for example). Throughout Waiting for Godot there is a feeling that the characters are displaying the characteristics of evolved speech, but that they are now vestigial, not really suited to a strange world and what has happened to its words. Lucky’s outburst, where turn-taking breaks down and where also the link between words and facial expression is hard to sustain, feels curiously timely. Didi and Gogo try to ask and answer questions, to collaborate in speech, but it does not lead anywhere.
      Literature depends on language, obviously. But if we allow Ghazanfar and Takahashi to isolate speech as a phenomenon of sound and body, then we might see writers doing the same, revealing a major degeneration in characters and their societies by having these basics, rhythm and turn-taking, turn towards the nightmarish.

In a post a while back, I wrote about kinesic intelligence and Guillemette Bolens’s The Style of Gestures, and I credited the phrase (if you look carefully) to Ellen Spolsky’s article ‘Reading Kinesis in Pictures’, Poetics Today, 17 (1996), 157-80. At an we discussed this article, and one sentence is still on my mind:

The foundational assumption of a cognitively responsible theory of interpretation is the assumption of modularity that I mentioned earlier: having many ways of knowing provides the species with a variety of ways of responding to a varied and changing world. (p. 174)

The question is: how to be ‘cognitively responsible’. (I take ‘cognitively’ here at least partly to mean ‘in relation to theories of cognition’.) For Spolsky, this means facing up to the conclusions drawn in Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind (1983), i.e. (in brief) that the things the mind does are best thought of as modular, in that they are discrete in function, evolution, neural architecture, and so on. They interact of course, but sometimes (as in optical illusions) their separateness can cause us interesting problems. For Spolsky, this is part of a larger interdisciplinary theory, in which modularity of mind (and the potential for inconsistencies between the modules’ information) comes together with the importance of indeterminacy in literary theory and the philosophical scepticism that animates .
      Being cognitively responsibly for Spolsky, then, means assessing the available scholarship and any other evidence you can handle, and making a committing decision. In her work this releases a lot of energy. For me, though, being responsible seems to require being prudent (or do I just mean wary or non-committal?). Cognitive science is a changing discipline with many schools and factions arguing their corners. I don’t feel qualified to arbitrate much of the time. Some take modularity to an extreme – the appealingly named ‘’. Others might emphasise interactions between systems that are more than the sum of their parts, with the links in a network being as characteristic and crucial as the nodes.

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The role of hindsight is unclear. After another 18 years Spolsky’s commitment may appear to have been a better or worse call, but does that really make it a wise strategy or not? My solution is to engage with emerging ideas but (whenever I remember) to futureproof what I say about cognitive science – to allow for the possibility that the orthodox view may or may not change. In hedging my bets I am trying to be true to the contours of another discipline as they apply now and at other times. But it may make it harder to create the kind of energetic synthesis Spolsky achieves in her essay. After all, I did just attend a conference that was partly inspired – via Guillemette Bolens – by her work.

As I said in a previous post, I attended a fascinating event about embodiment and Dante’s Divine Comedy. It made me think a lot about the complex ways in which a reader needs to work to simulate bodily experience in this poem. One problem for us today is understanding the significance of postures and gestures across time; well-informed delegates debated whether a certain crossing of arms was a common way of praying in Dante’s Florence, or not. Readers of any era are challenged by the different kinds of bodies found in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The kind of bodily simulation I alluded to in that earlier post – understanding the prideful through enacting, inwardly, the submissive posture – is enriched but also estranged by the knowledge that these are very special bodies, different from the earthly ones with which we hold the book, and embody our own pride. Knowing other people is hard enough; nothing’s precisely the same however consistent the neural structures may be. Knowing these presences, who have gone beyond the brain, is even harder.
      I want to write about one particular aspect of this even though it juxtaposes poetry and science rather starkly. I’m not trying to offer a serious account of a great, great passage in Inferno. However I am trying to catch a few sparks that seem to me to fly from the combination.
      Vittorio Gallese talked about ‘echopraxis’ as an interesting facet of the field of ‘embodied simulation’. This is a disorder, caused by deterioration of the anterior frontal lobe, in which sufferers mirror the actions of other people – they cannot help themselves repeating actions. In his way of thinking, this internal replaying of others’ actions happens all the time; it contributes to our understanding of others, and our assessment of what is happening in the environment. In general, some ‘internal brakes’ prevent unruly repetitions, but under certain circumstances, these fail. So echopraxis is not a presence of an aberrant characteristic, but the absence of restraint.

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Rimini and her lover Paolo Malatesta, in the 5th canto of Inferno (where we meet the lustful), was raised at the conference in relation to imitation, but not (I think) explicitly to echopraxis. The point here is not to diagnose the disorder, absolutely not – but to see how motor resonance is something Dante thinks about deeply. Francesca explains how she and Paolo first kissed (with Mandelbaum’s translation, taken from the ‘Digital Dante’ site ).

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot – how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.

They suspected nothing; but anyone else might: reading romances with your husband’s brother is a misinterpretable act. Someone might get the right idea. In the canto the ensuing quasi-echopraxis seems like an excuse, up to a point.

Quando leggemmo il disiato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante

When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.”

The understatement, ‘that day we read no more’, alongside the sarcastic reference to Gallehault, veil the ten-year affair, leading to the deaths of both lovers, that is initiated by this kiss. Perhaps it is not veiled: here in the circle of the lustful, whirled around, Francesca and Paolo embody the consequences of the kiss. In relation to echopraxis, of course, the point is that the kiss in the book and the kiss in the world follow one from the other. Paolo’s trembling is a sign of significance but also of lowered boundaries. And so embodied simulation of literary gesture gains two of its most famous casualties.
      The bodily simulation is not finished. It turns out the Dante has been completely rapt in the story, responding perhaps, as it goes on, to the building eroticism. At the end, though, there is also an echoic response to a sigh of pity:

Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
l’altro piangea; sì che di pietade
io venni men così com’io morisse.

And while one spirit said these words to me,
the other wept, so that – because of pity –
I fainted, as if I had met my death.

Dante claims that the pitiful weeping is the response that carries him along with it. This could be read as a cover-up – the ‘death’ at the end might be the speaker succumbing to the sexual thrill of the story. Either way, or perhaps (best of all) in a combined response, Dante lets himself go, finds himself over-responding.
      Sin and imitation are related here and more broadly: there are lots of evil things to echo, and patchy mechanisms for avoiding them. Dante seems to me to explore this at an automatic, almost sub-personal level (in his characters at least; the scene itself seems dazzlingly considered).

I heard about a particularly interesting call for papers last week. It relates to a big new project called ‘A History of Distributed Cognition’. The project takes modern ideas about the way in which the mind is ‘not just brain based but is distributed across the brain, body and world’, and looks back into earlier cultures to explore ‘the historical expression of related notions’. You can find out about it here and it gets a mention in this interesting blog post.

There will be a series of four workshops, covering four eras: Early Greece to Late Antiquity, Medieval to Renaissance Culture, From the Enlightenment to Romanticism , and From Victorian Culture to Modernism. I am going to be involved in the second one. You can e-mail Miranda.Anderson@ed.ac.uk for more information or with any queries, and the deadline is October 31st. They welcome applications from scholars working on the history of philosophy, history of medicine, history of science, intellectual history, history of ideas, literary studies, history of art and archaeology.

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Another part of the project is a series of virtual seminars led by an impressive line-up:

1. ‘Distributed Cognition in the Continental & Analytical Traditions’, Prof Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)
2. ‘Embodied Cognition’, Prof Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis)
3. ‘The Extended Mind’, Prof Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh)
4. ‘Enactivism’, Prof Ezequiel di Paolo (Ikerbasque, San Sebastián)
5. ‘Emotions in the Body and World’, Prof Giovanna Colombetti (University of Exeter)
6. ‘Memory as a Test Case for Distributed Cognition’, Prof John Sutton (Macquarie University)
7. ‘The Phenomenological We’, Prof Dan Zahavi (Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen)
8: ‘Social Cognition’, Prof Deborah Tollefsen (University of Memphis)