According to the Google search engine, this blog’s title contains the first and only use of the word ‘transcognited’. In our information-overloaded world, it feels like a small achievement to have made something up that nobody else has made up previously. It’s an empty one though, unless the innovation has a meaning, preferably a useful one. In this case, my first line of defence is that the neologism acquires its meaning from the application of pre-existing linguistic rules to the raw material of pre-existing words. A ‘transcognited orchid’ is simply an orchid that has become the object of transcognition.
‘Transcognition’ is not a common word either. I don’t think it has found its way into the dictionaries yet. It does appear, along with its adjectival variant, in the titles of a small number of publications. Their authors may have invented the term independently, assembling the pre-existing building blocks of ‘trans-‘ and ‘cognition’. I have not read Robert Goodwin’s Transcognitive Spirituality and I merely glanced at ThriveUnion’s YouTube video, Transcognition: How to Change You, but both seem to deal with people shifting from one ‘way of knowing’ to another. Graeme Sullivan’s “Artistic Thinking as Transcognitive Practice: A Reconciliation of the Process-Product Dichotomy” presents a different case. It appears in the academic journal Visual Arts Research and positions itself as a contribution to debates in the field of art education. It’s an interesting article which wrestles – with some difficulty – with the emergence of art from the entanglement of multiple agents (human, non-human and non-living). A couple of weeks after reading it I happened across Andrew Pickering’s “Being in an Environment: A Performative Perspective” which addresses a similar problem space for scientific and technological endeavours.
Transcognitive Practice’s transcognition is “a process where the ‘self’ and ‘others’ are parallel and necessary agents of mind that inform each other through analysis and critique.” In Being in an Environment, Pickering denotes his very similar concept with the poetic phrase ‘dances of agency’. Processes like these have sometimes been described as ‘dialectic’, although admittedly, the implication of a two-way conversation very much oversimplifies the case as we now understand it. Does the new complexity warrant a neologism that moves the act of cogniting from an agent or two to a ‘theatre’ in which multiple entangled agents perform? Perhaps. My ‘transcognition’ is more prosaic in its origin. It refers to systems of cognition (ways of knowing, for those who prefer the colloquial form) moving from one place to another, from Africa, Asia, Europe and other parts of the Americas to the West Indian Islands, where they are applied, by choice or through necessity, to a context other than the one in which they were first developed. Unlike ‘spiritual’ transcognition, which involves people moving between knowledge systems it involves knowledge systems moving with people, as well as people moving knowledge between systems. It does relate to the meaning of transcognition as transformative entanglement in so far as this is an expected consequence of the process.
The transcognited plant developed as a response to some problems of regional and disciplinary categories. The territory in which the people, knowledge and knowledge systems of my research move is primarily Atlantic. These days, Atlantic History is a large and complex field. In 2009, David Armitage proposed a typology for it, presumably as a helpful organisational tool. He divided it into 1) the Circum-Atlantic, 2) the Trans-Atlantic and 3) the Cis-Atlantic. His definitions of these categories can seem confusing to anyone faced with the actual complexity of the Atlantic space, and also to anyone trying to derive his intended meanings from the prefixes ‘circum-‘, ‘trans-‘ and ‘cis-‘. Armitage’s Circum-Atlantic histories involve the movement of people, things and ideas within the Atlantic space; his Trans-Atlantic histories compare (or perhaps contrast, or even entangle?) identifiable groups with one another; his Cis-Atlantic histories home in on particular sites in the Atlantic world, situating them within a network of Atlantic relationships.
The question was, which one had I got? If it seemed like all of them at once, did that suggest a lack of direction that might become immobilising? Or did it simply mean that I understood my problem space accurately? My Atlantic history is also a history of people-plant relations. My notes on Armitage’s article say, “it’s a Cis-Atlantic history from the point of view of the plants and a Circum-Atlantic history from the point of view of the people”. It’s also a Trans-Atlantic history since the ‘people’ side of the relationship did not act as a block but related to plants quite differently. I eventually made the decision to take the plants, the life-forms being known, as the centre of the history I would be writing. This settled the ‘Armitage question’ although it is not necessarily an easy shift to perform and it certainly isn’t inconsequential. Formally, it positions all systems of transcognition and acts of transcogniting in peripheral roles and produces at its centre the transcognited plant. It will be interesting to see what I can make of that.
Addendum: The title of this blog involves transcognited orchids because I managed to persuade myself that ‘orchid’ and ‘transcognited’ nearly, sort-of, almost rhyme. I didn’t expect that orchids would actually play a particularly important part in my research. It turns out I may have been mistaken, so perhaps the choice was fortuitous.
References:
Armitage, David. “Three Concepts of Atlantic History.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Goodwin, Robert. Transcognitive Spirituality: Shaping the New Paradigm at the Interface of Consciousness and Reality. 2nd edition. Kindle, 2019.
Pickering, Andrew. “Being in an Environment: A Performative Perspective.” [In Fr]. Natures Sciences Sociétés 21, no. 1 (2013): 77-83.
Sullivan, Graeme. “Artistic Thinking as Transcognitive Practice: A Reconciliation of the Process-Product Dichotomy.” Visual Arts Research 27, no. 1 (2001): 2-12.
ThriveUnion. Transcognition: How To Change You. YouTube. 2019.