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Enactive Cultural Psychology for Dummies

Theo Verheggen

Word count body text: 7925

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Enactive Cultural Psychology for Dummies

ABSTRACT

Enactivism has become a rather successful epistemology in biology,

cybernetics, and cognitive science, but as of yet not so much in social or

cultural psychology and other social sciences. The enactivist framework

radically challenges any epistemology that uses concepts which would

somehow instruct or coerce individuals into action, such as representations,

cultural forces, or mediating tools. According to enactivists, such concepts

violate the fundamental operating of the human physiology, including the

nervous system, as an operationally closed system. Enactivism can

nonetheless provide a concise theory of meaning production,

communication, and cultural practices; which acknowledges the particular

operating of the human physiology but which is also radically social from

the outset. To see how this is the case, without becoming paradoxical or

solipsistic, we here introduce the key ideas in enactive thought, tailored to

social and cultural psychology and the social sciences. We call this

framework Enactive Cultural Psychology.

KEY WORDS

Enactivism, psychology, epistemology, mind-body, cognition, theory of

meaning, culture

BODY TEXT

Inside our bodies, there are no words and meanings. All the operations

within the confines of our skin are physico-chemical and deterministic. If

we would have the proper tools, we could present a coherent historical

account of all the chains of reactions in the physico-chemical milieu inside

of us. Never would we find a word or an idea to be part of such a causal

chain.

At the same time, as humans, we live in a world that is chock full of

meaning, language, and ideas. It is almost impossible to think of an

encounter with other humans that is not somehow communicative. We have

ideas about others, about ourselves in relation to others, we exchange

glances, we approach or avoid others actively, and perhaps we talk to them.

In everyday situations, then, we register and produce relations to other

people.

One of the big questions in psychology is how the biological operating of

the individual human body is related to people’s functioning in a social

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world, amidst knowledge, meanings, ideas, and amidst other minds. How

can ideas arouse physiological reactions in our bodies? How can changes in

our physiology affect our states of mind? And how can we communicate

about similar ideas, given our different individual minds and bodies?

The typical way to tackle these questions in mainstream psychology is by

cutting off knowledge from physiology to begin with. After all, there are no

meanings to be found in our molecules and glands, so meanings must occur

somewhere beyond our physiology. Most often it is assumed that individual

physiology, mind, knowledge, and “the social” belong to different levels of

reality. That is, some phenomena are believed to emerge from complex

interactions at other levels: complex brain activity gives rise to mental

phenomena, for instance, and social facts result from complex interactions

between individual people.

The task would be, then, to understand what mechanisms underlie the

formation of emergent properties out of lower-level phenomena, and to

understand how the different-level phenomena interact. Moreover, a third-

person perspective (the objective perspective of the scientist) is typically

applied to describe the ascending order of complexity in full, all the way up

from molecules via minds to societies.

These assumptions have introduced at least two fascinating problems to

psychology.

1. In order to account for the relation between knowledge and

physiology – often refracted as the relation between mind and body –

one has to assume that knowledge can instruct the body into action.

Usually, it is believed that the individual mind somehow succeeds in

decoding meaningful messages into physical activity and action. But

how exactly does this happen?

2. In order to comprehend how people can understand meanings at

all, and therefore can understand each other, one has to assume that

at least some meanings are similar for every member of the group.

They serve as a shared body of reference which ensures that we can

understand things in a similar way, or that we can learn to

understand things in a similar way. But given the fact that we cannot

directly tap into the experiences of other people, how can we still

establish that our experiences, meanings, knowledge, and so on are

similar to those of others?

The first problem is not yet resolved in psychology. We still do not know

how the mind would steer and instruct the brain and the rest of the body.

Current advances in neuropsychology reveal that classes of experiences are

related to the stimulation of particular areas in the brain. We know, for

instance, some of the areas that are involved in motor programs, in semantic

retrieval tasks or in mathematical operations, and we know that some

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neuron clusters are involved in the automatic copying of the actions of

others.

Yet, we do not know where very specific meanings, such as the sentence

that you are now reading, are mapped onto the brain. And we do not know

where to punch the brain in order to get the precise representation “5+3=8”.

Moreover, since not a single brain wiring is identical to another, it remains

unclear how a detailed brain topology in one subject could account for

meanings and experiences that appear to be shared by others.

How, then, can we be sure that some meanings are indeed shared by others?

If we ask people, we cannot be certain that their experiences and

understandings coincide with our own. Some experiences, such as those

involving feelings, art, and humor, are even notoriously difficult to

articulate in spoken language.

Presupposing some meanings to be already similar or shared, as do for

instance social representationalist accounts, begs the question of how

meanings can become similar or shared. Assuming, on the other hand, that

external meanings are similar to different people because those meanings

were appropriated or internalized in the same manner (as for instance

suggested by Vygotsky, 1978), still needs to account for the sameness of the

appropriation. Alternatively, arguing that gene-like cultural information

nests itself in our minds (originally suggested by Dawkins, 1976), brings us

back to problem 1. And claiming that shared meanings were inborn, as

perhaps some evolutionary psychologist would suggest, really does not

account for the enormous cultural variety and flexibility of meanings

worldwide. Unfortunately, therefore, the second problem above is not yet

resolved in psychology either.

Although there has been a continued call for the integration of biology,

psychology, socio-cultural studies, evolutionary science, cognitive science,

and neuroscience, we still lack a model that can convincingly incorporate all

these different approaches to reality. Moreover, we also lack a clear

understanding of the causal relations that are believed to exist between the

phenomena that these different scientific disciplines dedicate themselves to.

The two problems posed above continue to haunt psychologists,

neurobiologists and cultural scientists alike.

Enactive accounts of cognition and human functioning (e.g. Hutto, 2005;

Noë, 2010; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991) argue that

these problems arise from the traditional epistemological (dualistic) starting

points in mainstream psychology and other disciplines. Enactivism radically

rethinks the relation between our biological functioning and our meaningful

operating as expressive agents in social settings. It furthermore argues that

one single (third-person) frame of reference does not suffice to fully

describe both physiological, psychological, and social phenomena.

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Enactivism demonstrates how the particular way in which living systems are

organized anatomically and operate physically – in clear contradistinction to

non-living systems – gives rise to the phenomena we refer to as meaning

and cognition. Stated differently, enactivism explains how meaning is

biologically possible. Meanings are not private mental achievements, it

appears, but instead intrinsically social phenomena from the outset.

We will give a brief outline of the key points in the enactive epistemology

to begin with.

1. The remarkable identity of living systems

When defining a living system, such as an elephant, it does not suffice to

enumerate all the features and behaviors that we observe. Saying that it is a

large and heavy structure with four broad legs, two giant ears, two ivory

tusks, a long trunk, and a relatively tiny tail does not yet define a living

elephant. It could also define a dead one. Saying that it moves slowly, and

that it uses its trunk to spray water and to move objects could still define a

sophisticated radio-graphically controlled robot resembling an elephant.

Defining a system as a living system requires us to recognize that such a

system in a sense defines itself. It continuously renews its components (e.g.

cells) and the relations between them, such that within a certain period of

time almost all of the material components of the living body have been

regenerated while their positions and functions in that body have been

preserved. Another way of stating this is that a living system constantly

produces and preserves its own structure and organization.

In addition, the ongoing physico-chemical operations within the living body

constitute a closed organizational unity. That is, the self-creating (or

“autopoietic”) dynamics of the living system include the ongoing

regeneration of its own borders. For that reason, the self-creating dynamics

of the living system are circular and contained within a closed

organizational circuit.[1]

One consequence of this viewpoint is that a non-living system can be fully

described by an observer (i.e. from a third-person perspective) in terms of

the system’s features and functions. In doing so, the observer can

distinguish the non-living system as a unity, which is set off from a

background. A living system, however, needs to be described also in terms

of its self-referential organization and operations. That is, an observer has to

acknowledge that a living system defines itself as a unity, irrespective of the

distinctions that the observer makes.

Francisco Varela (1992) points to an intriguing phenomenon in this respect:

“In defining what it [the living system] is as unity, in the very same

movement it defines what remains exterior to it, that is to say, its

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surrounding environment.” This surrounding environment is, however, not

equal to the environment as an observer would perceive it.

The environment for the living system is brought forth by the living system

itself. It entails those physico-chemical events that are necessary for the

continuation of the living system’s self-referential organization, and that by

the same token are external to that very organization. Examples of such

events are perturbations, metabolism, or exchanges of energy at the borders

of the system.

Varela (ibid.) prefers to speak of “world” for the living system, to

distinguish it from the system’s environment in the eyes of an observer. The

living system and its world are intricately and reciprocally coupled: the

living system brings forth – or enacts – both its own identity and thereby

also its own “exterior,”[2], or world.

To the extent that elements in, and relations to this world contribute to the

continuation and integrity of the living system, they are “significant” for the

system. Consequently, in a formal sense and from the perspective of the

living system, significance is defined in close relation to the maintenance of

its self-referential organization. Moreover, since the living system is a

dynamic system, its world and what is significant are constantly in flux as

well.

2. Non-interchangeable viewpoints

When a living system succeeds in maintaining the integrity of its own

circular dynamics, an observer may at the very same time register that the

system moves in an environment and also that it interacts with its

environment. For example, an amoeba may be observed to move away from

phenol or another poison chemical in its environment. The external observer

may thus rightfully conclude that the living system “flees” from a hostile

environment.

However, in terms of the circular dynamics of the living system itself,

another explanation holds: due to a physico-chemical change of states at its

borders, subsequent physico-chemical changes occurred elsewhere in the

living system. The net result of all these changes will bring about a new

internal balance such that the integrity of the living system will be

maintained. In other words, the changes will be such that the system keeps

on living.

A first rather simple conclusion to draw is that the relational description of

the observer (i.e. a description in terms of the system as a unit in relation to

its surrounding environment) must not be confused with a description in

terms of what happens in the physiology of the living system. For the

ongoing circular dynamics that make-up the living system, there is no

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“fleeing” and there is no “hostile environment”. All there is, is the

maintenance of some internal physico-chemical balances.

Therefore, what occurs in the physiology of the organism and what occurs

in the eyes of an observer requires two fundamentally different viewpoints

to describe. It is not simply the case that the relational descriptions of an

observer are about more complex phenomena within the same frame of

reference. Her descriptions are not about properties that emerge out of the

complex physiology of the organism under scrutiny. Instead, her

interpretation occurs in a (third-person) relational perspective in which the

living system is described as a unit in relation to its environment; whereas

the description of events in the living system’s circular dynamics pertains to

a very different viewpoint “from within,” so to say. We will refer to the

latter as the operational perspective.

What changes, then, in going from physiology to meaning is not some sort

of complexity level in reality, but instead the entire viewpoint from which

events are described. What we see in one perspective cannot be observed in

the other. We cannot focus on the integrity of the living system’s circular

dynamics when describing how that system behaves in an environment. We

cannot focus on the system’s interactions with an environment when

describing how it maintains its circular organization as a living system. This

is a seminal point in enactive epistemology.

A second conclusion, and another key point in enactivism is as follows: It

cannot be said that the environment determines the internal states of the

living system. A chemical element may affect the border (e.g. the cell wall)

of a living system. Yet, physico-chemical chain reactions that follow upon

this perturbation are completely determined by the anatomy and material

make-up of the living system – they are not determined by the features of

the perturbing element.

Enactivists therefore state that a living system is a structure determined

system (as are all physical systems): its internal states are fully determined

by its own physiological constitution. For instance, whether a 10kg weight

crushes a living system does not follow from the objective properties of the

weight. It follows from the particular anatomy and physiology of the living

system, whether ant or elephant. We must therefore conclude that elements

that are external to the circular organization of a living system can perturb

the system’s internal balances, but they cannot determine the future states of

that system.

3. Coupling

As living systems, humans are structure determined systems too. Although

their organization and operations are much more complex than those of

amoebae, their internal dynamics are just the same determined within the

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confines of their self-referential organizational unity. As we will explain in

more detail below, this is also true for the components that integrate a

human body, including the brain and the extended nervous system. Their

internal dynamics may become perturbed but never determined or instructed

from outside.

Even if we hold that a ray of light or a wave of sound are “data” in a sense,

what they establish is a perturbation of the cells in our skin, our eyes, or our

eardrums. These changes are followed by physico-chemical chain reactions

in our physiology which are not instructed by the properties of the light or

the air waves, but are fully determined by our very own physiological make-

up. In other words, there is no in-formation going from the outside to the

inside, and the body (including the brain) above all responds to itself.

It is therefore wrong to say that the brain receives information from the

person’s environment, upon which the body responds or something like that.

The metaphor of in-formation is biologically untenable. To some (e.g.

Chryssides et al., 2009; Kreppner, 1999), it may appear that we now end up

with a theory that is completely solipsistic; one in which communication

and the exchange of ideas have become altogether impossible. Fortunately,

that is not the case.

We have just seen that, as a consequence of maintaining its circular

dynamics, a living system continuously enacts a domain of significance (a

world) for itself. We have also seen that for an external observer, this course

of events appears as a system that is constantly interacting with its

environment. Partially as a result of the living system’s behavior, the

environment changes continually, triggering changes in behavior of the

living system, resulting in changes in the environment, and so on.

This ongoing interaction of living system and environment (only to be

established in the eyes of an observer) can acquire a stable character, as is

for instance the case when a living system dwells in a given environment.

This “stability” is not a fixed state, however, but rather a situation in which

both the dynamics of the living system and those of the environment

constantly trigger changes in each other’s material make-up (or structure).

This can result in a recurrent[3] coupling, also referred to as a “structural

coupling”. In a structural coupling, the living system and its environment

change together in a certain direction or drift – like a foot in a shoe.

A structural coupling may also occur between two living systems. The

systems then again trigger structural changes in each other. And this may

again result in a recurrent course of interactions as a result of which the

systems change together in a certain direction. As long as the organizational

integrity of both systems is maintained, the structural coupling may last.

From her relational perspective, an observer – perhaps ignorant of the

circular dynamics in each living system that give rise to the structural

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coupling between the systems and to the direction in which they are moving

together – may conclude that both systems communicate. However, we have

seen that this communication cannot be understood in terms of one system

instructing the other what to do. Communication must be understood in

terms of the mutual triggering (not determining) of changes in each other.

To use a metaphor, communication is a dance in which the interacting

partners invite each other into a course of coupled interactions.

But of course this is not how we understand communication in a colloquial

sense. We expect it to involve words or other symbolic bearers of meaning.

To understand how words and meanings are still a dance between partners,

instead of bits of information to be internalized individually, we first need a

short excursion into the nervous system.

3.1 Recursivity in the nervous system

First and foremost, the functioning of a nervous system is fully subordinate

to the maintenance of the system’s circular organization and integrity.

Operations in the nervous system are possible as long as that integrity is

secured.

Generally, the nervous system connects a living system’s sensory surfaces

with its motor surfaces. Varela (1992) estimates that in humans there is a

ratio of about 10 sensory neurons on 1 motor neuron. In addition, about

100,000 mediating interneurons in this ratio connect the sensory and motor

surfaces in an enormous varied and deeply interconnected way.

The manifold interconnectedness of neurons implies a variety in the

possible responses to sensory activity. A great many different signal routes

and intensities are now possible between sensory cells and motor cells. This

in turn implies that the behavioral repertoire of the living system has

expanded dramatically; relative to a situation in which there are no

mediating interneurons, or relative to a situation in which neurons are absent

altogether (as in flowers, for instance, where adaptation fully results from

metabolic changes).

The architecture of the nervous system is such that couplings of neurons can

be reciprocal, which allows for feedback interactions (Figure 1). In this

manner, and particularly on the scale of clusters of neurons, the nervous

system can interact with its own states. That is, the nervous system can treat

its own states as “input” for further operations in the nervous system,

leading to new states that it can interact with, and so on. Such recursive

feedback mechanisms also allow for modulation of the default relations

between neurons and those between surfaces: a wide range of intermediate

states becomes possible in this way.

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As the above ratios made clear, through its many interneurons the nervous

system is above all connected to itself. Most of its perturbations therefore

stem from the nervous system’s own states; relatively speaking only a few

changes follow from externally perturbed sensory cells. Like the living

system as a whole, the nervous system as a whole is operationally closed.

And like the living system as a whole, the future states of the nervous

system as a whole cannot be determined by local activity, only perturbed.

FIGURE 1. Recursive operations / Modulation. The arrows represent neurons and the

direction in which their electric signal travels along the axon. The knots represent synaptic

areas. Due to the recursive loops (the lighter arrows), in which the current state of the

nervous system becomes input for its further states, modulation of the relations between

neurons is possible.

To an external observer, the internal modulation of the relations between

sensory and motor surfaces may appear as a precise coordination of the

living system’s behavior in its environment. However, the same proceeding

from the viewpoint of the nervous system reveals a mere maintenance of

internal physico-chemical balances in order to preserve its own closed

circular organization, and thereby that of the living system as a whole.

3.2 Higher order coordination of actions

Now let us assume that a structural coupling occurs between two living

systems endowed with an extensive nervous system. We have already seen

that structurally coupled living systems mutually trigger changes in one

another, so that they change or dance or drift in the same direction.

The presence of a nervous system implies an expansion of the possible

states of a living system. Therefore, the dance between the two systems can

become particularly complex. From the perspective of an observer, each

system coordinates its behavior with respect to the behavior of the other

system in a complex fashion (Figure 2).

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FIGURE 2. Structural coupling between living systems with a nervous system. The

dance between the two living systems can become particularly complex because the

number of possible states of each system has expanded dramatically. [Figure inspired on

the drawings in Maturana and Varela (1998, p. 180).]

In addition, and most importantly, since the nervous system allows for

recursive operations it can interact with its own states, which are

(structurally) coupled with the interactions the living system has with

another system. Or stated once more from the perspective of an observer:

each living system can coordinate its own actions with respect to the dance

(i.e. the underlying structural coupling) it performs with another living

system.

These mutual coordinations of the second order may again become

structurally coupled, allowing for third order coordinations of actions, and

so on in a virtually endless recursive manner (Figure 3).

FIGURE 3. Recursive interactions between living systems. When living systems are

endowed with an extensive nervous system they can interact with their interactions with

other systems. This can give rise to another coupling of a higher order, with which a system

can interact, and so on.

Formally stated, only in second or higher order interactions occurs

“meaning”: Instead of the actual coordination of actions of the first order,

the second order coordination orients the participants toward that first order

coordination. In other words, the second order coordination of actions is

about the first order coordination of actions. A second order coordination of

actions is therefore meaningful.

To see how this is the case, think of two dogs. They growl and move

aggressively at a close distance of one another but they do not attack.

Gregory Bateson (1972) recognized that in some sense their behavior is

linguistic. By acting as if they were fighting, it appears that the animals

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communicate “Go away” or perhaps “Let’s pretend we are fighting; this is

play.”

In Bateson’s (1972) own words, the latter “message” looks something like

this: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those

actions for which they stand would denote” (p. 180). Communicating that

message requires the dogs to mutually coordinate their behaviors in a

recursive, second order sense: instead of actually fighting, they coordinate

something “about” fighting. That meaning is danced out, so to speak, rather

than an internalized piece of information.

Of course, we cannot assess whether dogs really communicate meaning this

way. However, humans have developed the extensive ability to recursively

interact with the states generated in them through mutual interaction.

Enactivism contends that second order coordinations are linguistic

operations. Maturana and Varela (1998, p. 210) refer to the process of

second order coordination of actions as “languaging”. This does not

necessarily mean that spoken or written language in the colloquial sense is

involved. Rather, it refers to linguistic operations in which one course of

interactions refers to another.

4. A new phenomenal domain

Linguistic interactions, i.e. recursive interactions of a second or higher

order, comprise a new domain of possible interactions for the participants.

The entities interacted with in this domain are not physical but instead

relational: They refer to lower-order interactions, as we have just seen.

Other phenomena that can only occur in this relational domain include the

distinction of objects and self-consciousness. In short the logic goes like this

(for a more detailed account see Maturana, Mpodozis and Letelier [1995]):

By recursively interacting with a first order interaction, that first order

interaction is distinguished as a unity to interact with. This is essentially

what constitutes an object for a living system. Subsequently, by recursively

interacting with the distinguishing of objects, we distinguish the act of

observing (i.e. the act of making distinctions, or the act of making

descriptions, or the act of attributing meaning). And by recursively

interacting with the act of observing, we distinguish the observer. The next

recursion leads to self-consciousness.

Thus, for enactivists, not even objects exist outside our operating in

linguistic interactions (see also Maturana, 1988, 9.iv). This claim does of

course not imply that outside our languaging there is no physical reality.

The point is that we cannot know such a reality. It is made up of what Searle

(1995) refers to as “brute facts” and what Wagner (1996) calls

“somethings”. These only become objects for us when they are invested

with meaning, elaborated upon, talked about, and so on.

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For social representationalists such as Wagner (1996, 1998; see also Wagner

& Hayes, 2005), the object, the social representation, and the social

elaboration process are all identical. This is not unlike the enactivist stance,

in which both an “object” and a “representation” would be classes of higher

order coordinations of actions and thereby necessarily enacted between

individuals. However, social representationalism also holds that

representations contain information about an object, about the way an object

should be treated, or about the way others perceive and value an object. As

such, these so-called “holomorphic representations” (Wagner & Hayes,

2005, p. 278) ensure that people can communicate about objects and

understand them in a similar manner. People are believed to share the same

holomorphic representations to this end. The radical point of enactivism is

that the concept of information-laden representations violates the non-

instructable nature of structure determined living systems. Similarity in

understanding does not result from the same or similar instruction through

internalized representations, but from being engaged in the same courses of

structural coupling – or dances.

In sum: object, meaning, representation, mind, self-consciousness, and so

forth all refer to classes of higher-order interactions. They do not emerge

from the relations between neurons or other biomaterial units in the physical

space in which the circular dynamics of the individual living system occur.

Although being involved in higher order interactions is still an embodied

affair – and therefore perturbs the ongoing circular dynamics of the

interaction partners – what the linguistic interaction is about remains

unrepresented in the physiology of the interacting partners. Compare:

Whether the dogs in Bateson’s example truly fight or enact a sham fight

cannot be discriminated in the physiology of the animals. The meaning of

the fight can only be enacted between them by means of a recursive

interaction.

We therefore conclude at this point: Whatever the living system can be

observed to do in recursive interactions with others, what these interactions

communicate cannot be explained in terms of what happens in the system’s

physiology.[4]

4.1 Orthogonal coupling

Although events in the domain of linguistic interactions and events in the

physico-chemical domain of physiology are operationally unrelated, they

are not unrelated altogether. If an observer is able to switch her perspectives

on the living system – in this case a human individual – she can establish

that for a very specific person there is a co-occurrence between the

particular way in which this human individual operates in his environment

(the way in which he walks and talks, for instance), and the particular

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operating of this specific person’s nervous system (or for that matter, of his

physiology as a whole).

Like all other components of the body, the nervous system contributes at the

same time to maintaining the circular dynamics of the living system as well

as to the expressive behavior of the living system in its environment.[5] The

nervous system is not a fixed set of wires and cables that determine its

possible states. Rather, it is a plastic structure whose malleability is above

all derived from the electrochemical traffic at the synapses (Maturana &

Varela, 1998, pp. 167-168). Repeated actions/behavior may increase the

activity of some neurons firing, which affects the responsiveness of some

synaptic areas. This may lead to an increased chance that firing will reoccur

in the clusters of neurons involved. Likewise, absence of firing may

decrease the likelihood of future signal transfers.

For every person, therefore, and dependent on his very specific ontogeny,

there will be a unique structural congruence between the plasticity of the

nervous system and the person’s behavioral repertoire. To be sure, this

uniqueness is constrained by phylogeny. Particular areas in the brain serve

particular functions, for instance. Yet, that evolutionary established

topology is relatively general. The specific functioning of the nervous

system (and of the body in general) can only be understood per individual,

and only in relation to that person’s history of repeated behavior. We will

refer to that history (ontogeny) as “training”.

Through the body, events in the two different phenomenal domains become

coupled. By means of training in relation to an environment the body

acquires a specific behavioral repertoire. At the same time, the plasticity of

the nervous system (as well as among others the tone of some muscles and

the form of the skeleton) changes in concordance with the enacted

behavioral repertoire. The proper metaphor to describe this co-evolving is

once again a dance between physiology and behavior. Or indeed again: a

person’s physiological functioning and his behavioral repertoire are

structurally coupled.

It is in this manner that both the plasticity of the nervous system, the

behavioral repertoire of the individual, and the environment in which the

individual operates all co-evolve in a certain direction or drift. In order to

denote that the coupling between a living system’s internal states and the

behavioral repertoire of that living system implies structural congruence

rather than mutual determination, Maturana (1988) refers to this coupling as

being orthogonal.

Orthogonal coupling means that there are no linear or causal relations

between elements in the operational domain and elements in the relational

domain. There is no causal relation between neuron activity and playing

soccer, for instance. Instead, there is an orthogonal relation between the

operating of the nervous system and the cultural practice: the more we play

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soccer, the more the plasticity of our nervous system will change. However,

exactly how it changes, depends on the nervous system itself. Conversely,

exactly how we improve our soccer skills, our knowledge, and our

appreciation of the game depends on the way in which we engage in the

cultural practice.

An observer can only give a historical account – i.e. an account in terms of a

training history – of how the physiology and the expressive behavioral

repertoire of a particular living system co-evolve. She cannot connect them

causally.

5. Cultural training: normativity and persistence

As already hinted at in the soccer example, in the case of humans, the notion

of training should be extended to “cultural training”. From the relational

point of view, human individuals are always situated within a community of

others. Both Wittgenstein and Vygotsky argued that already skilled others

evoke and correct our actions and expressions such that by continued

practice and correction we become skilled practitioners ourselves (see

Williams, 1999). Whether we learn to speak a language or learn to play

soccer, histories of repeated orientation of the individual in its social

environment are always involved. We call such histories of repeated

orientation “cultural training”.[6] The result is that we learn to move, speak,

feel, and so on, much like others around us do. This learning involved need

not be explicit and often occurs “on the fly,” by being engaged in cultural

practices with others.

There is a normativity to this cultural training, an “ought to,” which need

not be explicit either. The sheer adjusting to what others do, following the

examples that are set by others, and being corrected by others – such that

what a person does becomes congruent with what others already do – entails

a way of doing things properly (or not) within the community.

In many cultural practices, what is proper, or good, or just, and what is not,

is a qualitative judgment. It is non-propositional and unfixed because it is

defined in action. Nonetheless it is normative because it is immediately

clear to the skilled performers when someone’s moves and intentions lack

what it takes to dance a real tango, for instance. Real dancing only occurs

when the practitioner has acquired a feeling (literally) for the moves, the

partner, the music, and so on. Merely knowing what to do does not lead to a

skilled performance, which is again Wittgenstein’s point.

Whether we are dancing a proper tango, talking, walking, understanding

jokes, paying respect or reading literature; the trick is to do the right thing at

the right time in the right proportion, as Bourdieu (1990) pointed out in

relation to his notion of habitus. The difference with Bourdieu is that his

notion of habitus as a structuring structure (opus operatum) at least suggests

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that mediating collective schema’s need to be internalized in order to do that

trick. Enactivism holds that at no point there are mediating structures to

inform individuals, nor is the notion of internalization valid. All there is

instead are recursively interacting individuals.

As a result of the structural coupling between a person’s behavioral

repertoire and his physiological functioning, the behavioral repertoire

becomes persistent to some extent. The structure of the body (e.g. the

skeleton, the muscles, and the plasticity of the nervous system) changes in

relation to a particular history of cultural training. When the body grows

older and becomes less malleable, and also as a result of extensive training,

the enactment of behaviors becomes both automated and difficult to alter.

Just think of how hard it is to change a once acquired accent of speech, or

way of walking.

5.1 Styles

An observer may recognize styles (of speech, of moving, of dressing, of

thinking, and so on) in the persistent behavioral repertoires of an individual.

These styles may be very similar to those of already skilled group members

who perhaps provided the training environment, or who are similarly

involved in the prevailing cultural practices. Moreover, the often implicit

normativity that resides in established cultural practices also becomes

established – i.e. embodied – in the novice through his cultural training.

There is often no need to know in a reflexive or propositional sense how one

ought to behave. Skilled individuals already do it and feel it, in a fully

embodied sense.

It is thus possible to understand without any reference to propositional

knowledge, reflexive thinking, or even shared representations:

- how behavior can become styled,

- how different people can display similar persistent styles in

behavior,

- how behavior can be experienced as being proper, deviant, odd,

good, and so forth.

We suspect that feelings of identity, belonging, and authenticity originate

from the proper enactment of cultural practices. It is in this manner that

most people will experience a natural fit between their own behavioral

repertoire and the behavioral styles of close others. Identity is most of all

felt and enacted, rather than mentally constructed.

5.2 Explicit knowledge is still enacted

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To be sure, explicit knowledge and instruction in the colloquial sense (since

formally speaking, instructing others into action is impossible as we have

seen) form an important part of many training and schooling situations. A

question that therefore needs to be addressed is how explicit, written, or

otherwise representational knowledge fits into the enactive epistemology.

As forms of meaning, these are all recurrent higher order coordinations of

actions and we argued that these need to be enacted between people,

otherwise they cannot exist. But how is it that a written statement still needs

to be enacted by the individuals reading that statement? And how should,

for instance, the instructive nature of formal norms and laws be understood?

To see how this is the case, consider the following example. There is a note

on a table, saying “This is a table”. How can we understand this message?

And how can we assess it to be true or false?

A word, or a sentence, is not a row of letters that carries meaning in itself.

Words or sentences that actually make sense are always situated

expressions. They only make sense in the cultural context within which

those words are used. Thus, the sentence “This is a table” only makes sense

to us if we have learned, within our community, to use certain things as

tables.

The practice of using tables can quickly escape any pre-given definition in

terms of the features of a table: it need not be made of wood, it need not

have four legs, it need not have a leveled horizontal plane. All that it takes is

that people use something as a table.

Moreover, that use must be properly grasped in practice (c.f. Wittgenstein,

1978): some things are not a table because others show us that these things

should not be used as such. Therefore, a crate can be a table and the hood of

an expensive car cannot; or perhaps vice versa. Our understanding of what

is a table depends on the normative practices that are enacted by the

members of our community; it does not depend on those five letters t, a, b, l

and e, nor does it depend on pre-given definitions.

Consequently, in order to understand the written message “This is a table,”

and in order to assess the correctness of that statement, we cannot refer to

anything intrinsically instructive in the written note. Instead, the text on the

note orients us toward the object on which the note rests. We have to relate

this way of being oriented to our history of normative interactions with

objects that we commonly refer to as tables. If the note happens to rest on a

wooden surface supported by four wooden legs, we might be inclined to say

that indeed this is a table. If the note is placed on a car, we may be confused

(as our cultural practices are most probably such that we do not use cars as

tables). We then may find the statement wrong, or we might perhaps

consider the whole setting to be a piece of art. In both cases, however, the

meaning of the written text must be captured with reference to the

normative cultural practices that we have mastered.

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Our understanding is therefore not the result of an instructive process but

involves our grasping of the situation. Through our cultural training as

embodied beings, we have become immersed in and adjusted to the

normative practices of our group members. As skilled practitioners we have

acquired feeling (literally) for what is a proper performance of those

practices and what is not. Our grasping of the situation is therefore not

purely intellectual, but instead truly embodied and experiential.

In this sense, often even before we are able to give a formal explanation, we

get it that the car is now indeed a table; we capture what the written

sentence on the note is about; we have a feeling for using notes within our

community; and perhaps we grasp that the whole scene is a piece of art.

Something similar is true for reading a text. Making sense of the

propositions continually requires our normative orienting within the cultural

practices that we enact with others, such as using a particular language. In

the case of a reading novel we have to somehow relate to the style of the

author, to capture what she is trying to tell us. In the case of formal logic,

we still have to relate to the normative practices within which mathematical

operations have been agreed upon: 5+3=8, not 7. Indeed, even here it

requires an acquired feeling for the proper use of numbers. And when the

text represents a Law, a judge has to have a proper feeling for all the

circumstances involved in order to apply the Law properly. That feeling is

not something she was born with; it has been appropriated through

embodied practices.

It is this manner that written text, formulas, rules, the Law, abstract concepts

such as “honor,” newly invented words, and so on in themselves are not

instructive for our behaviors. They cannot be, we stated in the beginning,

because we are all structurally determined systems whose physiology cannot

be coerced into action. They must be grasped in relation to the normative

practices within which these concepts or propositions can only make sense.

5.3 Can words really hurt?

Having said all that, how can words still hurt? How can some ideas really

make us sick or excited? How can we understand this in terms of a

structural coupling between the dynamics of our nervous system and the

dynamics of our cultural training?

The answer is again that words can only hurt within the wider context of a

trained cultural practice. The word “idiot” may feel as an insult. Yet in

another social setting it may be funny, or even a pet name. How we will

respond to an expression in a given setting depends on the particular way in

which we have become experienced amidst and in relation to others. Our

response is not a purely cerebral firing of some neurons, but rather involves

19

our full, embodied, expressive being. Our grasping and responding are

therefore expressive styles in which pain, outrage, joy, excitement, and

other emotions and feelings[7] have been discounted already.

6. Social systems

Going from operationally closed living systems to individuals engaged in

normative cultural practices without having to either reify such practices or

cultural norms and values perhaps leaves the question how to conceive of

social systems and social institutions. Niklas Luhmann has argued that

autopoietic theory is indeed able to explain how social systems would

emerge from recursively interacting individuals.

Yet, as Whitaker (2001) concisely shows, for Maturana and Varela the

notion of autopoiesis does not apply to a perceived social system since it

does not directly generate the components through which it is realized.

Rather, it is the participants in the perceived social system who realize the

social system. Also Hejl (1984) has shown that in a strict sense social

systems are neither self-referential nor self-organizing.

There is no validity in—neither a need for—conceiving clubs, social service

offices, cultures, or societies as operative unities in themselves that

somehow exert influence on human individuals. Formally speaking, the

terms refer to distinctions that can be made in the domain of linguistic

interactions, in which still the only agents operant are human individuals as

autopoietic living systems. Phenomenologically speaking, the terms point to

distinguished domains of cultural practices.

7. Return to the initial problems and consequences for doing

psychology

The enactive picture we have drawn is quite different from the classic

cognitive view. We have established that meanings and knowledge at no

point exist prior to the individuals’ physiology, not even in the case of a

written message. They do not enter the brain in order to be decoded. And

meanings do not instruct the body to perform actions, or to arouse emotions

and feelings. Hence, the first psychological problem in the beginning of this

paper (How can knowledge instruct the body into action?) turns out to be

based on bad epistemological assumptions.

With respect to the second question (How can we establish that we actually

share meanings such that we can really communicate?), we argued that

meanings are radically social from the outset. Strictly speaking we cannot

share the same meanings because of what was said directly above. Instead,

we constantly engage in normative practices with others by virtue of which

we can grasp a (recursive) interaction in a similar manner. We can never be

20

sure what others are experiencing; we can only try to capture what they

mean by being engaged in a similar manner in cultural practices. When we

feel that the behavior of others is somehow proper or inappropriate, we may

experience a form of understanding or confusion. In the case of art, humor,

and love that is in fact all that these phenomena are about – as explicit

instructions about art, humor, and love effectively kill them.

7.1 Concluding remarks

What we have done in this paper is describing, and the act of describing

is itself already a form of higher order coordination of actions. It

therefore fully takes place within the relational domain, even if we

describe what occurs in the operational domain. By consequence, these

latter descriptions can only be formal. We cannot tell what it is like to

have neurons firing and to maintain the integrity of the circular

dynamics in our bodies. Likewise, we cannot tell what it is like to be

engaged in first order coordinations of actions. In our opinion, this latter

assessment is very close to Heidegger’s (1927) Dasein (Being in the

World) – i.e. our unreflective presence in the world that is nonetheless

already adjusted (in our terminology “structurally coupled”) to that

world. Although Heidegger appeared to be weary of the term, one might

say that events in the operational domain as well as our being engaged in

first order coordinations remain unconscious for us.

We can establish how psychological phenomena are biologically

possible, but we cannot explain psychological phenomena in terms of

biology. The domains in which the phenomena under scrutiny occur are

orthogonally coupled, not linearly or causally. This implies, as we have

seen, that meaning cannot be found in the brain. It also entails, for

example, that the experience of free will – which clearly implies a sense

of self-consciousness – is orthogonally related to the deterministic

events in the physic-chemical space of our physiology. Therefore, to ask

how we can choose freely given the structural determinism of our

physiological bodies is to mix up two fundamentally different

perspectives on the same living system. Such a question implies a

category mistake. The notion of freedom is only valid with respect to

phenomena and events in the relational domain.

Mind and physiology do not simply pertain to different levels of

complexity within a single frame of reference. They are phenomena that

belong to fundamentally different perspectives on reality. Drawing lines

between them results in analogies and metaphors, not in establishing

causal mechanisms.

Since our physiology, including our brain, cannot be instructed by

elements that are external to its closed and circular organization, any

21

theory that introduces such elements to explain human behavior and

cognition is metaphorical. This means that concepts such as information,

memes, cultural forces, schemes, cultural models, representations,

mediating tools, norms, values, and so on cannot be invoked to explain

how human behavior and cognition evolve. Such concepts are

biologically invalid.

It should be psychology’s task to provide historical accounts of how

physiology and expressive styles co-evolve in concordance with the

expressive styles of close others. Such a psychology—which we call

Enactive Cultural Psychology—is radically social from the outset while

biologically valid at the same time.

FOOTNOTES

[1] One of the founding fathers of enactive thinking, Humberto Maturana,

distinguishes living systems form non-living systems in the following

manner (in Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 48): “The living organization is a

circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the

components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their

functioning is the very same organization that produces them.”

[2] It should be noted that “exterior” is a qualification that in fact can only

be established from the third person viewpoint of an observer. We therefore

put the term between quotation marks here.

[3] By “recurrent” (interaction) we mean a relatively stable dynamic in

which the current state of the system serves as “input” for future states of

the system.

[4] This can also be seen by recalling that a living system is structurally

determined: its internal states cannot be determined or instructed – only

perturbed – by elements that are external to its circular organization.

Consequently, the linguistic interactions that occur as recursive, higher

order coordinations of actions between living systems cannot determine or

instruct – only perturb – the systems’ physiological functioning, including

the operations of the nervous system.

[5] This can be assessed even though it would require a change of the a

priori perspective of the observer to actually describe both courses of

events.

[6] Elsewhere (e.g. Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012) we follow the

enactive terminology which speaks of “consensual coordination of actions”.

The term “consensual” does not imply mutual agreement, then, in the sense

of achieving intellectual consensus about something. Instead it connotes that

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the coordination of actions between living systems does not violate the

integrity of each system as a living system.

[7] Damasio (2003) has in this respect established empirically that our

feelings (in contradistinction to our emotions) are mapped onto the same

cortical areas as those involved in thought. This suggests a language-like

structure to feelings. Voestermans and Verheggen (2005) have suggested

that this finding allows for the styling of feelings, which will occur as a

result of training and normative correction within a community of already

skilled others.

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