Definition of Enaction

What is Enaction?

Way to understand a being's relation to their environment and how they co-create and co-enable each other. Developed from Cognitive Psychology.

Understands humans (or any other being) to be embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective.

Critical alternative to the classical view of human-world relation.

What does it mean to be alive?

Are we beings who just have bodies to move our “being” from one place to the next? Where is this sense of being located? Is it in our minds that is somewhere in our brains? 

Is creativity thus something that only happens in our heads? 

The classical approaches that say yes to these questions divide and separate what should be kept together. The mind, the body, activity, and the world are not separate things. Our body is not simply a container for our minds. And the world is no mere stage for our minds to direct our bodies upon.

We are always already underway—actively participating in a world as an embodied, extended, and embedded being. And it is the loop of this configuration of activity that creatively makes us, and it makes our world. We are, as Manchado put it so beautifully, always in the midst of “laying down a path in walking.”

We don’t simply have a world; we collaboratively enact one. Enaction denotes an approach to questions of life, meaning, mind, agency, and creativity that rejects reductive individualism in favor of a participatory adventure. Where we as embodied, extended, and embedded beings creatively make our worlds and our worlds make us in a delicate balance.

En-action: to be in and of the action that we co-make.

How Does Enaction Fit Into Creativity?

The active relation between our bodies + our actions + our environment creates our lived perspectival reality. We are en-acting what we experience, we are en-acting what is afforded us.

To talk of creativity, perspectivalism, and action is to ultimately talk about enaction. The prefix “en” signifies a “belonging to”  – thus, en-action is a belonging to, a being created by the activity. And we “belong” to it in the way it is co-creating us. 

Our bodies + action + environment are enactive – they are creatively coming from these things, and they are also creatively making them. The now classical example of this is from the poet Antonio Machado, who explains it as a “laying down a path in walking.” And what is being enacted is a landscape of affordances. The “path” of Machado’s poem is the landscape of affordances.

Thus, when we say “simply being alive is a profoundly creative act,” it is because “we” are enactively laying down a path in walking…

For more, navigate to our complete list of articles on embodied cognition for innovation.

See: Agency, Sense-Making, Individuation