Juan M. Loaiza

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.

In this chapter we consider attention from an enactive-ecological perspective in which the organism-with-environment interdependencies that emerge in the process of living are fundamental and necessary for understanding cognition (Thompson 2010). While technological advances have often provided an impetus for empirical studies of attention, we propose, moreover, that such developments have enabled the facilitation of new highly participatory forms of musicking. In these types of technologically-mediated musical interactions, there is fertile ground for exploring attention within the types of organizational dynamics that emerge over time between group members within musical situations, especially those related to improvisation. We propose three enactive-ecological themes that we develop in terms of three ranges of timescales of attention modulation. The purpose of the three themes and associated timescales is to provide a way of making distinctions and disentangling processes while doing justice to the complex interdependencies of organizational dynamics (Gahrn-Andersen et al. 2019). Firstly, we consider the notion of habit which affirms the interdependencies between organism and environment as a fundamentally embodied process of identity generation (James and Loaiza 2020). Secondly, we consider the role of attention within social interactivity, whereby attention can be said to emerge within the processes of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). Finally, we propose that while attention has often been articulated through ocularcentric metaphors of focus or illumination, a more fruitful approach might involve articulating the speed, strength, or amplification of such dynamics as a processual, non-static paradigm. Technologically-mediated musical practices, particularly ones which involve improvisational modes of playing, offer not only an environment in which these ideas can be studied, but also provide participatory and experiential platforms for interdisciplinary research (Hayes 2019).

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (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 stabilise 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 towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise 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 towards 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.