Assembling the Brain: Disseminated and Confused Cognition at the Threshold of Ecological Relationality

The perspective of philosophical posthumanism and the new materialist strands allow a rethinking of cognitive processes beyond the locationist standpoint. Locationism, indeed, acknowledges cognition as being singularly localised: now in neurons, now in the brain, now in the body of an organism that holds logo-centred, individuated and autonomous rationalism. Rather, the proposal of an assemblage-brain, and more broadly of an assembled-cognition, leads towards a rethinking of cognitive processes. Cognition becomes an extended and spread conjunction of processes, which can be barely located, whilst being open on an intensive and relational plane. To what extent is it, however, possible to presume such an ecologisation of cognition? What is the threshold of such a process, in regards to relationality itself, and to the alterities that are not necessarily endowed with a nervous system, or – further – non-biological ones? In this article we advance the proposal to reconsider the embodied mind as being disseminated and confused, by overviewing some of the latest conceptualisations that offer an understanding of cognition as assembled in relations. Our proposal discusses mind processes as incessant and intensive exchanges amongst materialities. From a recursive, closed and neuro-centred event – a local property that is confined in an organ-organism, or concentrically prolonged from it – cognition extends beyond embodiment and the dualism that separates embodiness from a presupposed external; it assembles alterities, emerging as a necessarily ecological and plural process that overcomes the individual, and surpasses life as biologically individuated.