Definition of Comportment

What is Comportment?

The living as active, embedded and embodied relational beings have a “stance” towards the co-emergent environments they participate in co-creating. A stance is a type of disposition or comportment towards specific emergent possibilities for action (affordances). Such a comportment is a pre-reflective portrait of our world and worlding. Our comportment, or pre-reflective patterns of deeply embodied behavior, is our general bearing towards the things of our world – what our world relationally and co-emergently affords. It is how we show up to situations before we think about them. The stance, posture, and orientation precede explicit knowledge and deliberate choice – often it has an ontological quality that we do not ever put into words.

It is a key practical entry point into the question of worldmaking: if we want to understand how we or anyone is “of a world”, we need to pay attention to the comportment that world produces in us. An example: The comportment of someone for whom all beings are alive (an animist) will comport themselves differently when walking across the floor of a house from someone for whom the floor is inert material “stuff”. We learn modes of comportments before we learn anything about what they might mean (how our mothers hold us, how others first interact with us, etc.).