Enactychism: Enacting chance in creative material engagement

Abstract

This paper reflects on the meaning of chance and the impact that the occurrence of ‘accidents’ have in the creative process. I draw insights from two main sources: material engagement theory and the art of ceramics. In particular, based on observations from my comparative anthropological study of creativity in pottery making I present a process-oriented enactivist vision of chance as a meaningful coincidence where flow and form diverge from the norm and give rise to creative gesture. First, I introduce the notion of enactychism (blending ‘enactivism’ and the Peircean concept of ‘tychism’ from the Greek word ‘tyche’ for ‘chance’) as a means to conceptualise the relationship between chance, agency and materiality. Then, I explore the relationship between chance and creative gesture and propose ways for tracking the operation of chance in action.

Accidental Thinking: A Model of Serendipity’s Cognitive Processes

“…However, to date, the role of serendipity has been neglected in the psychological literature (although see Bandura's APA presidential address;Bandura, 1982), particularly in theories of cognition (although see Arfini et al, 2018, for an important exception). This is perhaps because its emergent and messy nature requires a shift away from the individual and internal cognitive processes that are traditionally associated with this discipline (as argued by Malafouris, 2023). However, the underlying processes of noticing and extracting useful information from the environment, processing it and monitoring the outcome have recognisable cognitive correlates.…”

Enacting chance and the space of possibilities

“…Foremost is the importance of taking plurality as the common ground since the volume focuses on the intersections between philosophical, psychological, and cognitive aspects of discovering, exploiting, and generating chance. It should also be noted that the exploration of chance itself opens new opportunities within disciplinary boundaries, something that becomes clear in each of the articles to follow, where the explanatory power of enactivism is assessed as a method to which we can compare predictive processing as a theory of cognition (Gallagher, 2023), with which we can evaluate the limits of data science (Martinez-Ordaz, 2023), and that is useful in multiple ways for reframing our approaches to creative cognition (Feiten et al, 2023;Malafouris, 2023). Layering the lenses of enactivism and chance offers, that is, multiple possibilities for a deeper understanding of how we engage uncertainty in the everyday, and how that engagement can, in turn, lead to the generation of new possibilities for enaction.…”