Enactive individuation: technics, temporality and affect in digital design and fabrication

Abstract

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design. This enactive framework is in part developed through the Material Engagement Theory (MET) put forward by Lambros Malafouris, in part from the phenomenologically inspired philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Both advance temporality, technics and technique as key to understanding human creative imagination and their work can support each other in different ways; Stiegler allows for a theorisation of digital tools largely missing from the cognitive archaeology of Malafouris, whilst Malafouris provides a cognitive theory to further develop key ideas in Stiegler's philosophy. Bringing their work together through Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, I develop the concept of enactive individuation and apply this to the analysis of a case of robotic design and fabrication from my fieldwork with digital architects and engineers. This case allows for further exploration of how enactivism might productively be extended into the digital realm by underscoring the explorative engagement at heart of even highly systematic work with computers and software.

Understanding the hermeneutics of digital materiality in contemporary architectural modelling: a material engagement perspective

“…In line with MET and PP, we see mind as essentially coextensive with technics and matter (see also Poulsgaard and Malafouris 2017;Poulsgaard 2019Poulsgaard , 2020. Mind is an emergent and relational process.…”

“…Following this, we have approached the relation between software and architect with what anthropologist Don Ihde (1993:3) has called an "instrumental realism," taking the correlate between technology and people as the starting point for understanding creativity in digital architectural design. This approach has been further developed via the framework of MET (Malafouris 2013a(Malafouris , 2014(Malafouris , 2015(Malafouris , 2019Poulsgaard and Malafouris 2017;Poulsgaard 2019Poulsgaard , 2020Walls and Malafouris 2016), which sees creativity and mind as situated and enactive, dependent on material engagement and shifting interactional dynamics.…”

“…Here, we draw on the work of Material Engagement Theory (MET) (Malafouris 2013a(Malafouris , 2014(Malafouris , 2015(Malafouris , 2019Poulsgaard and Malafouris 2017;Poulsgaard 2019Poulsgaard , 2020Walls and Malafouris 2016) to argue that digital design tools have their own materiality, which comes to facilitate architects' creative work through their intrinsic predisposition to variation. We define the concept of digital materiality (Poulsgaard 2020) to describe the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate and shape creative agency in digital modelling.…”

Mark Making and Human Becoming

“…In that sense the mark making process is not a symptom or index of achieving humanity (becoming human) but an actual part of the ongoing process of human becoming. This is the reason why, so far as the understanding human origins is concerned, the potential transformations in design thinking brought about, in the past, by the reductive/additive logic of MSA engravings, have the same epistemic value with any potential transformations, brought about in the present, for instance, by the associative logic of digital drawing and parametric design used in contemporary architecture (Poulsgaard and Malafouris 2017 , 2020 ; Poulsgaard 2019 ). None of the two transformations in human creative evolution can claim any special temporal or ontological proximity to the generative processes by which humans become.…”

Simondon and enaction: the articulation of life, subjectivity, and technics

“…Simondon may come to constitute a solid complementary alternative to phenomenology as a philosophical pillar of enaction. Moreover, there is no doubt that, philosophically speaking, combining Simondon’s concept of individuation with the enactive approach, as in Poulsgaard’s (2019)“enactive individuation” formula, opens up stimulating prospects (see also Di Paolo, 2018; Di Paolo, Cuffari, & De Jaegher, 2018).…”