Enactive Cultural Psychology for Dummies

Theo Verheggen
Open Universiteit Nederland
&

Cor Baerveldt
University of Alberta

2010

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
18
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
19
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
20
 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

21
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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