Abstract
We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal inter-identities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilize and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them.
Highlights
Interpersonal relationships have a certain stickiness to them
We extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and IIIs
We lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Dreyfus, 2002; Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018), though employing it within a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable self-producing personal identities. We extend this to an account of coenhabiting, a joint process that facilitates the individuation of interpersonal inter-identities through tending toward a co-optimal grip
Summary
Interpersonal relationships have a certain stickiness to them. With help from some observations of social life, in this article, we probe into this stickiness to unravel its underlying dynamics. We lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Dreyfus, 2002; Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018), though employing it within a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable self-producing personal identities We extend this to an account of coenhabiting, a joint process that facilitates the individuation of interpersonal inter-identities through tending toward a co-optimal grip. Before concluding, we point toward some corollaries of the main account: firstly, what we refer to as trans-situational concerns, i.e., the beginnings of an account of how the dynamics that underwrite the emergence of interpersonal inter-identities continue to shape various modes of individual sense-making even when apart from realtime reciprocal interactions; and secondly, we characterize the embodied subject as being multiply animated, i.e., something that lives through the identities it manifests in relationship with others, but is lived through by them and the larger entities that give those identities shape, e.g., the trans-individual habitus that operate at more distributed spatiotemporal scales than the interpersonal inter-identities accounted for here (Bourdieu, 1977)
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