Mindshapes and Handscapes, #1.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Gestures Towards the Subject of Design

3. Gestures as Agents of Change: Four Remarks

4. From Landscape to Handscape

5. Discussion: Mimetic Awareness and Meaning

6. Conclusion

The essay that follows will be published in four installments; this installment, the first, contains section 1.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

Mindshapes and Handscapes

1. Introduction

As living beings, we are continuously in contact with an outside world that pushes, pulls, stretches, warms, freezes, torments, and caresses our bodies. Our being is embodied, and through such embodied existence, we interface with the physical environment around us. This seemingly simple notion is—I believe—the most overlooked, yet unavoidable truth of any future philosophy. (Paans 2024b: p. 131)

The conception of philosophy as it came down to us from the Greeks pushed our thinking in certain directions.[i] It is not difficult to see that the blueprint of Western thought lies in Plato and Aristotle. Its categories, distinctions and basic concepts find their origin in their works and culture of thinking. The disdain for the body and the senses—so diligently practiced throughout Medieval times, and subsequently canonized by Cartesian doubt—led us to this point. Whatever is not digital yet can be digitized; whatever is now manual can be automated; what is now natural can be technologically reproduced; and all that is solid melts into air. How is this not a philosophy of disdain? Embodiment is the victim, its evolutionary refinement at the same time overlooked and underestimated; its adaptive potential and capacity for absorbing and producing knowledge axiomatized, formalized, and ultimately disfigured on the rack of the mechanistic worldview.

Our thinking about epistemology has suffered similarly. We have been thinking about knowledge as a set of statements, or at best statements about practices. But should we not invert this picture? Knowledge, for the better part of our evolutionary history, was intimately connected to doing. Knowing-how has primacy over knowing-that. Otherwise put, when knowledge was transmitted between tribe members, kin, or between generations, it was knowing-what which is important. One must know what to do and not to do; what is important and what is not. If we remove ourselves one step from this immersion in knowledge-how and knowledge-what, we could claim that this is actually knowledge-that: a set of statements about real-world practices. But this move is exactly the fundamental mistake of intellectualism: the practitioner did not have a self-conscious attitude for speaking about her knowledge-what as knowledge-that. Things simply had their reasons, either grounded in myth or in the unforgiving lessons of practice. Things were—with an ironclad certainty. The stubbornness of tradition can be easily explained by this feature: one should not alter the design of a hut or canoe, as climate and local circumstances have refined their physical forms over the generations. Each detail, no matter how inconspicuous, has its use. Woe to those who deviate. Their boats sink, their houses do not survive the winter. They drown, or die of starvation or cold.

Knowledge, in such circumstances, does not appear as a collection of facts; instead, it is present throughout the environment as a series of self-evident truths. To the trained eye, the environment appears as a painter’s canvas, with each detail assuming its place in the larger whole. In short, knowledge appears as a field of practice, rather than as a collection of assertions. Knowledge is inherently integrative, rather than atomistic. The idea of knowledge as justified true belief is not tested in the halls of academia, but in the rough-and-tumble of everyday practice.

In such circumstances, practice shapes the mind: it creates an attitude towards the world that is deeply responsive and observant. Yet, modernity, with its dreams of control and disembodiment seems to have lost this intimate connection. It dreams of disentangling us from nature, of creating synthetic life.

But have we really lost the innate capacities of our minded bodies? Have we severed the intimate connection between knowing and doing? The answer is: of course not. We’ve pushed it aside, brushed over it, accorded it a place in the periphery of intellectual life, and we tolerate it merely. But that does not diminish its efficacy. Moreover, we can reclaim its potential in a new setting. At least to me, this seems a moral imperative: to utilize the full functional potential of our bodies, instead of succumbing to the utilitarian demands placed upon it. In a traditional Marxist sense, one must act to resist such influences. If at one point in time, ideology was a form of crude political propaganda, by now its has evolved into a subtle, subterranean influence that undermines and debilitates our embodied life. And there is no better way to accomplish this gesture of resistance than through creative action.

Over the course of centuries, we have altered the landscape of the earth. Indeed, the word “scape,” present in the Germanic languages as schaffen (German), skapen (Norwegian), schaffen/scheppen (Dutch), indicates this: that which is scaped is created, but simultaneously allows for new possibilities to be realized. The German verb schaffen means roughly to accomplish something, or to make it. In Dutch, the conjugate verb verschaffen means to provide a possibility. The Norwegian verb skapen has the connotation of actively making something, of determining its shape. One would use the word to indicate a formative influence. In this word, the connection of form and possibility is already latent.

To scape or to form something is to shape it. But this relation is not unidirectional. The tool shapes its user in turn. Likewise, ideas shape our minds, hence recurring and formative mental schemata are thought-shapers (Hanna & Paans, 2021). Likewise, thoughts themselves are shaped by other thoughts, preconceptions or the templates through which our thoughts are schematized. Once more, we should not constrain our view too much here. To think is not merely to contemplate. As we have seen, practice, thought, and knowledge are intimately connected. To know is to practice.

Likewise, many forms of thinking occur in practice. They do not originate from some point in the mind as pure thoughts dislodged from physical reality. To conceive of thinking in this way traps us in what has been called intellectualism: the mistaken viewpoint which holds that thinking only happens in the head or brain. Try to explain that to the dancer, the musician, the painter, the architect. The hand, the feet, the body – they all think. One must, as Nietzsche put it, dance with concepts. Only then can one render them effective. If we mobilize concepts, knowledge becomes a field of action—no longer confined to the rigid, mechanistic taxonomy of the determining judgement, the concept undergoes an organic development—whereby it grows, develops and acquires depth. Hegel realized this, and once more tried to pin the concept down. But how immensely did the words fail him! Each notion had to be reworked, refined and put to new use. Yet, not through the word, but through the gesture, we can also investigate meaning, by tracing, drawing and actively (indeed, non-conceptually) embodying and enacting an idea. “The whole being of a gesture lies in what it says” contends H.G. Gadamer in his essay on image and gesture (Gadamer, 1998: p. 79). Indeed: the gesture is what it is, and yet, it is not tautological. In its visual presence, it points beyond itself to a reality that it does not directly represent, but of which it is a part, and which, through it, shimmers through and reveals itself. The gesture is an entrance towards a mode of engagement, just like language. However, it allows for new engagements that surpass the scope of language, fully including the expressive and the non-conceptual. In so far as the gesture “says” something, it does not utilize spoken or written language – its presence suffices.

Notably architectural design provides multiple examples of such gradualist conceptual development, freely blending conceptual and non-conceptual contents. The architectural drawing leaves traces of a thinking process, but its tracing and exploring activity, acted out through the body on sketching paper or a digital screen, is a mode of epistemic enactment (Paans and Pasel 2020). Why is that line displayed this way rather than that? Why are these villages located in such-and-such a way? What is this strange ridge in the landscape? Such questions are explored and answered through the tip of the pen, the mobility of the hand, which feeds directly into the capacity for deliberative reasoning. Never was the connection between the head and the hand so intimate as in sketching.

The “handscape” is the environment of clues, affordances, hints, creative motives, and free associations that architectural designers develop once they start sketching. It represents the intimate connection between the body and the lived space it inhabits and creatively expands. Through the handscape, one learns to think with the hand and dance with the mind. In turn, this changes how we arrive at knowledge:

Knowledge is not given to us in a sudden illumination of the mind; to know is to strive, to work. We learn that this chipped stone can serve to cut and to chop; that stone, blunted, can serve to grind.… Once we see what we can do with a broken branch, a chipped stone, a bone or steel knife, we figure out what falling rocks, streaming water, the roots of trees do by themselves. (Lingis, 2018: p. 448)

“Figuring out”: the term itself speaks volumes. It is through figuration that knowledge assumes shape, and that we progress from hunch or intuition to proto-concept and clarity at last. Only through working, that is, acting, through the body, do we acquire knowledge. As Kant put it, through such activity, we pose questions to nature. We interrogate it, probe it and make our concerns felt. In return, we expect nature to respond—sometimes foolishly, as we presume we have a right to know. Nevertheless, we should also take the liberty of interpreting “nature” as physical reality in the broad sense, as became customary during the 19^th century. It is through engagement and striving that we know. The demonstrative nature of knowledge so vividly depicted in the Meno is the basis for architectural design, and other forms of knowledge as well. What it demands is attunement—a refined sense of engagement with the subject matter. It demands a process of sensing, teasing out possibilities, trying different pathways, and thinking in different modalities.

NOTE

[i] The original version of this essay was published in Dimensions: Journal of Architectural Knowledge 6.3 (2024) under the title “Handscapes: Gestures as Agents of Change and Mimetic Awareness,” and is available online at URL = <https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/dak-2023-0614/html?srsltid=AfmBOopPlLbw5QHvLD5cA4Q-JkOj5x383rsJdc0ha8uEv7UpiNgVawuh>.

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