Porous Embodiment and Poetic Knowledge: An Emergent Dialogue Between a Puppetry Artist and a Neuroscientist Open Access

Marina: From our conversations, I became aware that I use the words embodiment and consciousness interchangeably, where both are expansive. Those two words are inseparable in my mind. How does neuroscience imagine/conceptualize embodiment and consciousness?

Leonard: Many neuroscientists approach questions of the basis of consciousness with a focus on the content of our thoughts. Your question aligns with a broader perspective in cognitive science, neurobiology, and physiology that would also consider what’s happening in our brains that may not directly create the content of our thoughts. When you think of consciousness, are you also thinking of those aspects that we might commonly consider as unconscious, such as the tone of our skeletal muscles or the signals emanating from our viscera (the volume and rate of your breathing, the intensity and rhythm of your beating heart, or the pressure in your blood vessels)? There is a whole lot of processing in our bodies that doesn’t typically rise to the content of our thoughts—at least, not in a persistent way. If we are thinking about embodiment and consciousness interchangeably, then we are enfolding all of what embodiment conveys, including what neuroscientists think of as unconscious neural processing. In this way of thinking, consciousness is not just the content of thought or those thoughts that could come out in the form of verbal language, but the whole thing.

Marina: Setting our conceptual framework is helpful, as what is and isn’t included in “the whole thing” by a field, discipline, and/or practitioner can be a point of tension between the arts and sciences. What is irremovable from this discourse is the ongoing colonial genocide, epistemicide [1], and ecocide [2] that now reaches every part of the planet. How we define “thought” holds significant implications for our collaboration, for questions of justice and ethics [3,4], and for how we will shape the framework of our inquiry, research, and outcomes.

Would you permit discarding all hierarchies of intelligence? That a plant holds consciousness? That all animals are intelligent (not only those selected by scientific research ethics boards)? That consciousness is not limited to the presence of neurons and is present in all life and matter—soil, stone, water (Fig. 1)? That intelligence, embodiment, and thought are not bound to rationalism and logic? That affective subjectivity is present in all science [5] ? Can our shared inquiry question normative post-Enlightenment knowledge hierarchies (roughly termed Western) that have shaped modernity and the European philosophical tradition [6–8] ? These questions matter for what kinds of outcomes we might set and expect in a research inquiry where art and science are engaged as co-constitutive, anti-oppressive, and equal partners.

Leonard: These are great questions! I wish I could assert that modern neuroscience has at least a foothold on viable answers. Sadly, we are a long way from understanding consciousness in the material terms (biological cells, neural signals, neurotransmitters, biochemical cascades, etc.) that neuroscientists are most comfortable making the object of their studies. Even among scholars of the mind (cognitive neuroscientists, natural philosophers, neurophilosophers, psychologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists), there is little agreement about the nature of consciousness and the stuff of mind (with all due respect to William Clifford) [9].

I am open to the possibility of a kind of consciousness that is not wholly based on the operations of neurons and supporting glial cells in nervous systems. My bias would be that if such consciousness does exist without neurons and glia (e.g., in forest canopies and the rich soil below or in artificial neural networks), then it is likely a consciousness that is quite different from our own. As such, we should be careful not to anthropomorphize or otherwise impart the more familiar subjective experience of our own cognitive faculties onto species (natural or synthetic) that experience consciousness differently.

Marina: I echo the ethical urgency to mind the gap between self and other: to not collapse that which is untranslatable between worlds [10]. So, too, do I think of Leslie Marmon Silko, who spoke [11] of how the rule against personifying nature was instituted in the 18th–19th centuries as part of the European ideological mandate to elevate and separate “the human” from all else. This helped enable the processes of colonial dispossession—of land theft—by banning reverence for and worship of the spirituality—the personhood—of the living earth.

Leonard: Your questions make me wonder about the consciousness that you create and impart into your puppets. How does that work for you?

Marina: There isn’t unanimous agreement between puppetry/performance artists about the nature of animacy [12] —i.e., are we “pretending” at bringing an object into the illusion of life, or are we listening for and giving form to something akin to what Mohawk and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts described as relational, place-based aliveness [13]? Proceeding carefully—without appropriation of any Indigenous place-based cosmogony that I do not belong to—my perception of this clarified when I was sitting in the puppet studio at UConn in 2010. As I was feeling the push and pull between myself and the material I was sculpting, a sudden thought came into my mind: “Because it is and so am I.” The material held agency that I was in service to on its own terms. I now understand this as a form of personhood not limited to the human. Some years later, this understanding allowed me to encounter (through devised puppetry performance) the personhood(s) of my own life-long chronic illness/disability [14]. This insight shapes all my artistic work, teaching, and scholarship. In its challenge to the hierarchy of intelligence reified within “Western” scientific thought, puppetry can be an emancipatory, embodied practice, contributing to what Aimé Césaire described as “poetic knowledge” [15,16].

I understand puppetry animation as the joining and emergence of worlds through the puppet’s material body, my particular embodiment, and the audience. The puppet’s world is channeled through the breath, the bodymind [17,18], the imagination of the animator (performer), and the materiality of the puppet’s body [19]. The vivid, imaginative specificity needed to animate a puppet’s world invokes dreams, histories, and feelings. Everything is alive and embodied: breath, memory, image, feeling. The bodies of the animator and puppet become porous and permeable, allowing access to experience much beyond cognitive knowledge, blurring the bodymind boundary between self and other, past and present. (Here, I’m not referring to the transhumanist imaginaries that ignore the rubbings of earth and flesh while seeking seamless human-machine techno-ableist fusions.) Regarding how we attempt to define “the whole thing” (of embodiment and consciousness), there is a kind of permeability of the flesh that puppetry performance can give access to: where past, present, and future exist together. What I wonder is how neuroscience would approach researching such porousness?

Leonard: I’m eager to consider your question. But first, if I may, say more about “breath.” What do you mean by the puppet’s world being channeled through the breath of the animator?

Marina: Breath is at the center of all performance. All emotion, imagery, and thought that is being invoked during a scene by the animator has to affect their breath and then be transferred to be lived by the puppet. Breath is both autonomic (i.e., “unconscious”) and guided by us “consciously.” The art of puppetry animation, however, is not in controlling one’s breath: It’s quite the opposite. The art is learning how to ride your own breath, listening to where it wants to go while being influenced and guided by the imagery, feeling, and action of a scene. “We move the puppet and in a way the puppet moves us. … That’s when you become really good” [20]. The breath is key to the porousness.

Leonard: The blurring of the boundaries between body and mind is exactly what I’ve found so fascinating in your artistry. This fascination has struck me both when your performance has involved a puppet that bears a somewhat familiar body—with a face, trunk, and limbs (Fig. 2)—as well as when your performance has featured a puppet that is more abstract and much less familiar (Color Image B). Somehow, you have managed to permeate both kinds of bodies with consciousness that is at the same time relatable and yet mysterious.

So how would neuroscience approach researching such permeability and porousness? A good place to start would be an exploration of the states of body and mind of the animator. Using the available tools of cognitive neuroscience, one might characterize dominant electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms or regional brain activity (e.g., with functional magnetic resonance imaging) during different phases of puppet animation. It would be fascinating to see how such (albeit, limited) means for assessing the neural correlates of consciousness and bodymind activities reflect the flow of your breath into the materiality of the puppet’s body. One might also monitor your visceral physiology (depth and rate of breathing, heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure) during performance. I would wonder whether there might be neurophysiological correlates of the porousness and permeability of your bodymind relations when your consciousness is most fluid and expansive. For example, is your premotor cortex processing signals related to the intentions of the movements you are imparting into the bodies of your puppets? More generally, how are these states impacted by the bodily movements of your puppet and its potentialities? Are you manifesting the emotion and feeling that your audience is recognizing in your performance? And speaking of your audience, it would be equally interesting to explore how your audience experiences your performances. Might they too experience similar bodymind states through the observed and embodied representation of the personhood revealed through the gestures and postures of your puppets? The brain’s networks of mirror motor neurons that seem to encode movement intention—whether generated in one’s own consciousness or in response to the observed behavior of another body—could be an important mediator of the porousness we are discussing.

Marina: First, I must thank you for the compliment you gifted me, as the dance between relatability and mystery is in many ways the heart of my work. Like water, this shifting space between transparency and opacity [21–23] is how I understand the nature of the expansive notions of embodiment, consciousness, and personhood that we opened our conversation with. It informs my understanding of ethics, consent, disability, and relation: relation, the immeasurable patterns of interconnection between all life and matter; relation, “a link without dominance, [that] requires a certain lack of transparency, a mutual unintelligibility, a fog” [24]. This is partly why poetic knowledge resists the dominant systems of knowledge and rubs with friction against the demands for clarity, linearity, measurability, and control. Second, I find your questions and suggestions for how to structure neuroscientific inquiry alongside puppetry animation exciting and intriguing! Could it be done without reification, keeping puppetry animations’ insurgent poetic power? Imagine gathering a small group of professional puppetry artists alongside a group of medical students or clinicians, engaging in a multi-session process of puppetry animation, and seeing what happens to the animators’ nervous systems, heart rates, motor imagery, and more during the performances. What changes, shifts, traces in the nervous system can be observed from the practice of this art form? What would it take to bring such a research study into existence?

Leonard: Much courage! (And maybe a small exploratory grant.) Such a research program should be grounded in our conviction that we do indeed have much to learn from one another about mind, bodies, movement, attunement, and the porous embodiment of consciousness, as well as how this relates to the complexity of the human brain (Fig. 3). I hope we can continue to transcend the colonial boundaries of our disciplines and approach these questions with humility and wonder.