Enacting Enaction-Enaction Enacted: Experiments With and Through Enactive Ontologies

Over the last three decades the enactive approach to life, mind and nature has exerted an impressive amount of influence across a broad range of disciplines and varied research topics. At the core of the enactive approach is a thorough rejection of a number of modernist ideals and tenets; from anthropocentrism, determinism and reductionism to a host of deeply entrenched dualisms found across academia and beyond. This work brings this rejection of certain modernist tenets – qua ‘enactive matters of concern’ – into dialogue with Bruno Latour’s analysis of modernity. This is done primarily as a means to explore, to think-with and through, how and where certain enactive theorists not only reject these modernist tenets but also often reproduce them. Drawing from work in science and technology studies (STS), feminist science studies and anthropology, this work then attempts to ‘bring to light’ the different contrasting worlds enacted by certain enactive theorists. It explores how, in and through the development of ‘autopoietic enactivism’, these contrasting worlds are enacted in relation to key aspects of modernist thought and practice.