Abstract
The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming.
Highlights
It is curious that, with all the currently active schools of embodied cognitive science, there has not been much direct concern with the question of how we should think about bodies
I will briefly discuss Gilbert Simondon’s ontology of individuation, and in particular his remarks on neotenization. This will serve two purposes: 1) to highlight human becoming as part of a tendency towards socially mediated forms of potentiality, and 2) to bridge this insight with the theoretical apparatus of enactive theory
To put some of these ideas to the test, I will offer in the final section some reflections, using the film Blade Runner, on the plausibility of artificial human becoming
Summary
With all the currently active schools of embodied cognitive science, there has not been much direct concern with the question of how we should think about bodies. On the contrary, according to the enactive view, the different dimensions form an entangled stream of processes at multiple scales, an ongoing becoming whose structure is not exhausted by the cycles of metabolism or the path-dependent nature of development These enactive proposals converge with recent work on environmental epigenetics that shows that habits and sociomaterial stresses become molecularly embodied and affect gene expression (Landecker and Panofsky 2013). I will briefly discuss Gilbert Simondon’s ontology of individuation, and in particular his remarks on neotenization This will serve two purposes: 1) to highlight human becoming as part of a tendency towards socially mediated forms of potentiality, and 2) to bridge this insight with the theoretical apparatus of enactive theory. To put some of these ideas to the test, I will offer in the final section some reflections, using the film Blade Runner, on the plausibility of artificial human becoming
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