Giorgi Vachnadze (Stand with Ukraine & Palestine)

Read our new publication on our site (link below), Nick Houde’s “A Deviant Chain” argues that human cognition is inseparable from physiology and technics: the mind is not a sealed inner faculty but a historically evolved coupling of bodies, gestures, tools, and shared symbolic practices that stabilize “mental models” for navigating uncertainty. Drawing on active inference and cognitive niche construction, Houde uses André Leroi-Gourhan’s chaîne opératoire (and its later elaborations via taskscape thinking) to show how multi-step technical practices encode and transmit cultural assumptions, planning, and value-laden modes of inference across generations, such that landscapes become “epistemic” through repeated, embodied work. The essay then pivots to Sylvia Wynter’s account of a “third event” in human evolution—symbolic/ritual invention associated with Blombos Cave—where narrativity (homo narrans) enables a partial emancipation from “adaptive truths” that naturalize social categories, opening an “epistemic enablement” to realize fictions otherwise foreclosed. Houde closes by reading the artwork Deviant Chain (Stefan Maier with collaborators) as a concrete experiment in re-sculpting the physiological scaffold of language—lowering a simulated larynx to generate alien phonemic affordances and using WaveNet to iterate “speculative phonemes”—thereby demonstrating how different anatomies could yield different semantic trajectories, and posing the posthuman question of whether cognition may migrate into new hosts and new freedoms beyond the human niche.