Abstract
Ecological psychology (EP) and the enactive approach (EA) may benefit from a more focused view of lived temporality and the underlying temporal multiscalar nature of human living. We propose multiscalar temporality (MT) as a framework that complements EP and EA, and moves beyond their current conceptualisation of timescales and inter-scale relationships in organism-environment dynamical systems. MT brings into focus the wide ranging and meshwork-like interdependencies at play in human living and the questions concerning how agents are intimately entangled in such meshworks, utilising them as resources for skilful living. We develop a conceptual toolkit that highlights temporality: Firstly, we address lived temporality. We use a case study from psychotherapy to show how a person’s skilful engagement with the world is best described as adaptive harnessing of interdependencies of constraints residing across a wide range of timescales. We call this skill time-ranging. Secondly, the case study provides a proof of concept of the integration of an idiographic approach to human conversing and a more general theory of emergent organisation rooted in theoretical biology. We introduce the existing concept of constraint closure from theoretical biology and scale it up to human interactivity. The detailed conceptualisation of constraint interdependencies constitutes the backbone of the proposal. Thirdly, we present a heuristic mapping of what we call organising frames. The mapping guides the conceptualisation of the emergence of inter-scale relationships and serves as an epistemic tool that brings together nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Finally, we combine new ideas with re-interpretations of existing EP and EA concepts and elaborate on the need of a fresh new look at the implicit and sometimes missing conceptualisations of temporality in the EP and EA literature.
Highlights
We present a conceptual model of multiscalar temporality (MT), which brings a more nuanced understanding of the temporal dynamics of human living and a richer interpretational frame for both ecological psychology and the enactive approach
The case study shows how the framework of MT allows us to single out particular instances of constraining action for purposes of analysis whilst taking seriously the necessity of building a bigger picture that does justice to the interdependencies crisscrossing the boundaries of brains, bodies, and environment
Rather than standing alone as a seemingly abstract theorisation, the framework speaks of aspects of lived temporality just as they appear in the experience of psychotherapy and in everyday life: persons converse in the shops, write their memoirs, or make works of art, with a spontaneous sense of deep temporality and the self-reflexivity brought forth by time-ranging
Summary
We present a conceptual model of multiscalar temporality (MT), which brings a more nuanced understanding of the temporal dynamics of human living and a richer interpretational frame for both ecological psychology and the enactive approach (hereafter EP and EA, respectively). In the process of psychotherapy, we examine the interplay between temporal ranges pertaining to Alice’s self-narrative, the sociality of an interpersonal relation that maintains a legacy of childhood experiences, the therapist’s own expertise as a time-ranger – sedimented through participation in institutional practices – and the basic commonalities of the two individuals’ sensorimotor coupling in conversation Given this entangled whole, a crucial empirical question remains: how do we map such complex multiscalar interdependencies? We do not scale-up in the conventional sense of going from “small to large” (e.g., from cell to tissue, to organ, to organism, etc.) or from “fast to slow”; instead, we use the mapping of organising frames (Figure 1) to go from general to specific What this means, starting from the basic life frame, is that we go from a wide range of metabolic and evolutionary networks of constraint interdependencies into narrower frames that manifest deeper entanglements at “mid-range” timescales – timescales of everyday human living. The therapists asks two questions (“it becomes something that has happened to another”) and (“it is as if you disconnected”), that functions as interpretational frames for Alice’s interoception, so that they contribute to her self-reflexive understanding of how the horizontal stretch of temporality curls into a present body-with-a-history
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