Drawing as thinking : an enquiry into the act of drawing as embodied extension of mind.
Loading...
Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis opposes the theory of ‘drawing as expression’ - the idea that a drawing is nothing but a
post hoc exteriorisation of a prior mental process. A counter-hypothesis is investigated instead - that
the physical act of sketching is itself a thought process and that the new thought processes which it
facilitates would be impossible or severely impaired if it were absent.
The conceptual framework for this investigation and the evidence for its hypothesis derive from
three fields: firstly theories of the extended mind and embodied thinking from philosophy and
cognitive science, secondly theories of drawing practice, and thirdly practitioners’ critical reflection
on the significance of drawing in their own practice.
The fluidity, multidimensionality and indeterminacy of the cognitive processes typical for openended
domains like planning, design and the arts tend to flummox the dominant – computational –
approach in cognitive science. Theories of the extended mind and embodied thinking present an
alternative which can handle these features comfortably.
Theories of embodied thinking, which hail from diverse disciplines – including philosophy, cognitive
science and artificial intelligence – argue that cognition is not independent of the body, but enabled
by embodied activity embedded in the environment. Extended mind theory suggests that certain active
features of the environment actually constitute integral parts of human cognition. In such cases, the
human organism is inextricably linked with an external entity in a two way interaction, creating a
coupled system of which each part counts as fully cognitive. Clark uses the term ‘scaffolding’ to
denote a broad class of cases in which such external structure is co-opted, annexed and exploited,
thereby allowing us to achieve some goal which would otherwise be beyond us.
This leads to the central question of this thesis: can the act of drawing be understood with the help
of theories of embodied thinking and the extended mind, and if so, how? A second, related
question is how the example of drawing helps extend these theories. From this perspective design
thinking and reasoning is to a large extent embedded in the act of drawing. Drawing, as a form of
scaffolding, filters or guides perceptual, affective and cognitive attention and behaviour in ways
only available to brains coupled with pencils and other drawing materials. (External representations
can for instance be extended in space, rotated, manipulated, rearranged and interacted with in ways
that internal representations cannot).
The theories of drawing practice studied for this research came mainly from art theory, design theory
and empirical studies of how drawing contributes to the cognitive process. Clark and Karmiloff-
Smith suggest that knowledge stored in some proprietary representational format often needs to be
redescribed in some other, more suitable format to become accessible to other types of
representations and processes. A key role that drawing is found to play in multiple contexts (design,
fine art, mathematics, etc.) is to draw to the surface implicit, previously unarticulated information
for use by other procedures and the whole cognitive system.
Sketching plays many other roles in promoting the cognitive operations needed to tackle design
problems, which are often so complex that individual reason would quickly be overwhelmed in the
absence of environmental offloading. Sketching can compensate for limitations in human memory
and information processing capacity, can help identify aspects of concern, relationships and
patterns, as well as help maintain focus and generate new knowledge.
The South African artist William Kentridge’s critical reflections on the significance of drawing in
his own practice support extended mind theory. His reflections alert us to the materiality of the
creative process and dovetail with recent attempts by philosophers and other theorists to explain
creativity. In drawing cognition appears as a dynamic, multidimensional phenomenon in which
explicit, implicit and tacit information all work together in an ensemble distributed across brain,
body and world while utilising variable physical, technological and social resources. Because
drawing is an activity which emphasises ‘generic’ aspects of creativity, studying it sheds light on
many other forms of problem solving by humans. This echoes Kentridge’s suggestion that drawing,
as a slow motion form of thinking, offers a paradigm for illuminating thinking in general.
Drawing proves to be a good context for exploring questions about where cognitive processes
reside. By extending cognition beyond the brain and into the world, we come to appreciate that
external drawing processes in a cognitive system are at least as important as ‘internal’ ones, and that
the marks on paper form an integral part of the apparatus responsible for the shape and flow of
thoughts and ideas.
Description
M.A. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.
Keywords
Drawing, Psychology of., Philosophy of mind., Thought and thinking in art., Theses -- Philosophy.