Beyond consensual domains: Enactivism,social representations and third-order unities

Introduction

Enactivism as an approach to cultural anthropology has yet to find its footing. There are clear principles that both Enactivism and cultural anthropology share, including the view that the world does not exist as a “pregiven” entity; that there is no clean distinction between subject and object; and that there is no such thing as objective truth. At the same time, many scholars feel that Enactivism fails to provide the conceptual tools necessary to understand the cultural representations that exist outside of the mind of the individual, at least insofar as these representations are taken to exist independent of particular interactions between individuals.

This paper argues that an understanding of Enactivist’s approach to culture rooted in “third-order” entities is both faithful to key texts and opens up a number of new conceptual vistas to the Enactivist that have been closed off by prior interpretations. To start, the paper outlines the ways in which Enactivism and cultural anthropology can be seen to agree and conflict, with particular attention given to Wolfgang Wagner’s Social Representation Theory. Wagner’s view of social representations is the focus of this paper both because of its influence in the field and because of previous commentary on the supposed incompatibility of his view with Enactivism (Chryssides et al., 2009). It is this commentary that, this paper argues, has closed off important vistas to the Enactivist in terms of approaching culture and social meaning. In addition, although the paper focuses on social representations theory in order to clarify alternative interpretations, it is worth noting that the analysis is also of great use in applying Enactivist thinking to other fields such as discourse analysis and sociolinguistics (see, e.g. Graham & McKenna, 2000).

To follow, the article explains the central critique of previous articulations of the Enactivist approach to culture, which center around the approach’s perceived inability to account for what Wagner calls “holomorphisms,” or the shared understandings that guide the concerted actions of members of a social group. Wagner describes the holomorphic nature of social representations as arising as a result of social, public discourses and everyday encounters, with such representations constituting social objects and institutions that both describe the actions of actors and guide interactive behavior in order to maintain and reproduce social conditions (Wagner, 2005). Prior articulations of the Enactivist approach to culture have taken issue with this concept of “holomorphisms,” and in particular the supposition that these understandings constitute social objects and institutions that exist outside the minds of individuals.

The article then suggests that prior argumentation with respect to the incompatibility of Enactivism and Social Representation Theory stems from focusing too heavily on Maturana’s later writings. By focusing on Varela and Maturana’s co-authored papers that preceded Maturana’s independent analysis, we see that the Enactivist’s analysis of autopiesis and “third-order unities” is applicable to our understanding of culture. Just as the ‘individual organism’ results from the interaction of cells and organs, Varela and Maturana suggest that societies emerge from interactions of individuals. Through recognizing a society as a fundamentally distinct phenomenological domain from that of the individual, we are able to see how an Enactivist theory of culture can account for shared social meaning. At the same time, we will gain a better understanding of the common principles that Enactivists maintain unite all systems of life, from the most basic to the most complex.

One immediate objection to keep in mind is that, although these two theories may use the same terms, this does not necessarily mean that these terms have the same meaning in each theory. To address this objection, specific, precise examples are offered from theorists on both sides to illustrate their intended meaning. At times, the paper argues, the usage of similar terms illustrates a deeper agreement; other times, the same usage actually illustrates a deeper cleavage. Thus, it is these concrete instantiations of what are often broad concepts that allow the reader can gain a nuanced appreciation of how these theories overlap and, just as importantly, how they differ.

Social representations and Enactivism

Before exploring the tensions between Enactivism and cultural anthropology, it is worth comparing their fundamental principles. These core congruencies and incongruences help us to better understand Enactivism’s approach to living systems and motivate the exploration of the ways in which holomorphisms can also fit under the same rubric.

Wolfgang Wagner’s Social Representation Theory presents an edifying comparison for Enactivism, both because of the influence of his approach and the contrasts that have been drawn between the two. Wagner et al. (1999) contrast their Social Representation Theory with social cognition theory in general in light of what he takes to be the latter’s

juxtaposing the subject and the object, its reliance on a correspondence theory of truth which supposedly allows to determine a cognition's validity by comparing it with its object, its claim to universality of its findings, and its failure to truly take the social and cultural foundations of cognition into account.

In its analysis, Social Representation Theorists draw no clear distinction between the subject and objects. For instance, on the topic of an individual’s relation to his or her cultural identity, Wagner and others write that

constructing one’s cultural identity is a situated process of meaning making where personal life history and the representations of others meet. This process goes beyond the personal decision of “being British” or “being foreign” or any other easy dichotomy; rather, it is an ongoing process that involves a multitude of representations an individual might hold in various everyday interactions. (Howarth, Wolfgang, Magnusson, & Sammut, 2014, p. 83)

The lack of duality between subject and object is also central to Enactivist thinking, albeit on the biophysical level, as it views the ‘objects’ of our thinking as essentially an extension of our minds. Francisco Varela and other Enactivists take much of their inspiration in this regard from the work of Merleau-Ponty, who they quote as saying that “Perception is not a science of the world…it is the background from which all acts stand out…The world is inseparable from the subject…and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself specifies (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, pp. 3–4).” Along similar lines, Varela et al. invoke Merleau-Ponty’s analysis that “the properties of the object and the intentions of the subject…are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole” (p. 174). To illustrate this non-duality, Merleau-Ponty compares an organism interacting with its environment to a keyboard “which moves itself in such a way as to offer – and according to variable rhythms – such or such of its keys to the in itself monotonous action of an external hammer” (Varela et al., 1991, p. 174).

The fact that Enactivist analysis applies to the biophysical level, while the social representation theorist speaks of the cultural is important, for it is this exact gap that scholars have tried to bridge (see, e.g. Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007, 2012). Although Maturana later went on to write extensively on culture, and in particular language, his early work with Varela that was foundational to the Enactivist approach dealt primarily with the biophysics of cells’, organs’, and organisms’ interactions with their environments. However, the manner in which an organism processes its environment from a biophysical standpoint may share certain characteristics with how it processes its environment from a standpoint of “meaning”; in fact, as will be seen through this article, this is the exact argument that the Enactivist makes.

In addition to arguing for the essential codependence of subject and object, Social Representation Theory rejects a theory of truth in which cognitions’ validity are determined by “comparing” them to their objects. For instance, when discussing the veil as a multi-faceted and nuanced experience for women in the Middle East, Wagner takes as a starting point “that the veil is a lived, situated, social experience and can be a means of asserting identity and even resistance.” (Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli, & Howarth, 2012, p. 523) There is no reified veil that is external to an individual’s minds that her experiences of it can be compared to. As such, when thinking about whether adherence to traditional ways is simply “false consciousness,” Wagner points out that “the decision of what is ‘false’ and what is ‘correct’ consciousness cannot be imposed from the outside position of the researcher or by Western politicians; this is a political decision for those concerned” (Wagner et al., 2012, p. 527).

Enactivism also rejects the correspondence theorist’s belief that the validity of cognition can be determined by “comparing it with its object.” In fact, one of the driving forces behind Enactivism is the explicit rejection of the philosophical tendency to view the mind as a mirror of nature. Specifically, Varela et al. describe three tenets of the philosophical view that Enactivism stands in contrast to as follows:

(1) the world is a pregiven; (2) our cognition is of this world – even if only to a partial extent, and (3) the way in which we cognize the pregiven world is to represent its features and then act on the basis of these representations. (1999, p. 135)

Social Representation Theorists and Enactivists also make no claim to the “universality” of their findings. An interesting illustration of this principle is seen in each approach’s analysis of color. In the context of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, or Hindutva, Wagner and Sen write of how colors “began to be endowed with different sociopolitical significance.” The significance of the color saffron has its origins in the Vedic ages

when it was associated with fire (Agni) worship and it was customary for sages to carry fire when they moved from one ashram to another. This is conjectured to be why the safe symbol of the saffron flag was created, which are seen atop most Sikh and Hindu temples. (Sen &Wagner, 2009, pp. 313–314)

Similar themes are seen in Varela et al.’s analysis of color perception (Varela et al., 1991, pp. 157–171), again from the biophysical perspective. Color, they argue, is far from being a universal feature of the world: it is not the case that “if some area looks whiter than another, it [is] because more light is reflected from the area,” or “if some area looks green, it [is] because the area reflects predominantly middle-wave light” (p. 160). In fact, there is simply “no one-to-one relationships between light flux at various wavelengths and the colors we perceive areas to have” (p. 160). Thus, they conclude, color is similar to our other conceptual categories in that they “are not to be found in some pregiven world that is independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities…they depend upon our biological and cultural history” (p. 171). Here again, the Enactivist would point to the similarities between its analysis of the biophysics of culture perception and the social creation of color’s meaning as suggesting that the underlying principles at work were the same.

Though it remains to be argued that Enactivism has the conceptual tools to adequately address shared social meaning, it is clear that it shares many core assumptions with a cultural anthropologist such as Wagner. First, subject and object are seen as intrinsically intertwined. What’s more, not only is there no distinction between she who is cognizing and the object of her cognition, but there is not even a question of “correspondence” because the brain itself is what creates and is entangled in the production (or “enaction”) of that world. Lastly, there is no talk of universality of individual or societal meaning, because, says the Enactivist, the cognitive operations required to generate cognitive categories are fundamentally of two kinds, “one is universal for our species and the other is culture specific” (Varela et al., 1991, p. 170). It is to the Enactivist’s analysis of culture-specific cognitions that we now turn.

Consensual domains and social interactions

Before arguing that a satisfactory Enactivist account of culture must utilize the lens of third-order unities, it is worth briefly exploring how others have approached the issue and where they have fallen short. Prior efforts to articulate the Enactivist approach to social cognition and culture have done so primarily through the lens of “consensual domains” that are created by individual organisms. Varela and other Enactivist scholars define consensual domains as “enacted by systems in a history of mutually triggered structural changes” (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007, p. 17), where ‘systems’ in this context refer to individual organisms or human beings. Specifically, writes De Jaegher et al., social interaction is “two or more autonomous agents co-regulating their coupling with the effect that their autonomy is not destroyed and their relational dynamics acquire an autonomy of their own” (De Jaegher, Di Paolo, & Gallagher, 2010, p. 1). The key features of these interactions between individuals are that they trigger structural changes in each other, which can take place through language and behavior imitation, while the autonomy and identity of each individual persists throughout. The social realities that are created by these consensual domains lead to

consensual coordination of action…which results in structural changes in each of the interacting systems, while at the same time the organization or identity of those systems is maintained (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, p. 197).

Enactivists are challenged in explaining these background assumptions because they have previously attempted to embed social meaning either in the minds of individuals or in the “fleeting” interactions between them, while social representation theories maintain that “social psychological phenomena and processes can only be properly understood if they are seen as being embedded in historical, cultural and macro social conditions” (Wagner et al., 1999). This has led many to believe that Enactivism is as incompatible with social representation theory as other theories of social cognition because of its supposed “methodological individualism,” since—to Wagner—social representations do not exist “within minds,” but “across minds, resembling a canopy being woven by people’s concerted talk and actions” (Wagner et al., 1999).

In order for Enactivism to successfully account for meaning and norms that exist outside the mind of the individual or the context of a fleeting interaction, we must more closely examine what Varela and his colleagues write with respect to higher-level metacellular unities, or third-order unities.

Third-order unities

Varela articulates the Enactivist’s basic approach to supra-individual level meaning in the following passage:

Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness (Varela, 1996, p. 209).

To the Enactivist, a living system is any closed system that maintains its internal organization—which the Enactivist considers the system’s identity—over time. Specifically, what defines living systems in the Enactivist’s view is their capacity to “maintain their identity in spite of the fluctuations which affect them” (Rudrauf, Lutz, Cosmelli, Lachaux, & Van Quyen, 2003, p. 25). At root, this process of identity maintenance can be described as a “process…of ‘being autonomous’.” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 25). When it consistently produces and maintains its own identity, it appears to observers as a “system whole,” a “total, closed, complete, full, stable, self-contained system” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 25). These living systems do change over time, of course, but underneath these “continuous structural changes” there is an “organizational invariance” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 25). Thus living systems, whether they are cells, organs, individuals or societies, strive to maintain their internal organization in the face of environmental processes possessing the potential to disrupt them.

When a living system loses its identity, and its internal organization is altered and/or its boundary with the external world breaks down, it ceases to exist as a unity. A living system’s identity “emerges and persists within the bounded system through a continuous and circular or recurrent process,” in which “specific organizational relations…are continuously regenerating through the internal production of their substratum components…in the correct functional, dynamical and spatial distribution” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 25). A core feature of a living system is a “minimal distinction between an interior and an exterior,” which can guarantee “the continuous dynamical, mechanic generation of the stable ‘internal coherence’ of an autonomous system” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 27). Without this boundary, be it a cell membrane or the skin on our bodies, the dynamic interactions of the component parts cease, and the unique features of the living system evaporate.

The key feature of the Enactivist idea of a living system is that it maintains its internal organization over time, and this central process of “self-production” of identity is called “autopiesis” (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 26). A living system “continuously produces itself through the production of its own components in the topological distribution that the ongoing global process constrains, and that the components require to maintain the relations that define them (p. 27).” In this way, the cell maintains and regenerates its component parts, and the individual her organs (at least as long as she maintains her individuality) and, as fleshed out below, a society reinforces certain characteristic behavioral and linguistic norms among individuals. It is this interaction between an organization and its environment is what the Enactivist refers to as “structural coupling.” To the Enactivist, we cannot speak of an entities’ identity without also speaking of its surroundings, for its identity is formed in relation to its environment. Self-production, or autopiesis, is a contextually bound activity; the “organizational closure” of an entity, within its boundaries, thus “specifies the domain of interaction of the system with its surroundings, conditioning its possible ways of coupling with the environment” (p. 28).

To the Enactivist, a system’s identity is the delicate balance and interdependence of functions of the organelles that constitute a cell, the tissues that constitute organs, and the systems of organs that constitute a body. The dynamic interaction of these component parts maintain and support each other in a specific relation, and determine how the entity on the whole will respond and react to, and be coupled with, its environment. On these various levels of living systems, the intricate and dynamic interactions of component parts lead to emergent properties—from the coordination of a living cell to the coordination of a human society—that the component parts alone lack, and that define the entity’s “attitudes” and “behaviors” in its environment (p. 30).

While Varela and Maturana’s joint writings—which formed the foundation of Enactivism—focus on the multi-faceted concept of autopiesis, it is also relevant to note that in his later work, Maturana shifted his focus almost primarily to language (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2012, p. 13). His later writings also shifted from discussing language in the context of the biology of cognition into more of a discussion of its social role, and it is this later work that Baerveldt and Verheggen base their articulation of the Enactivist approach to culture (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2012, p. 13). In contrast, the articulation of an Enactivist approach to culture contained in this article builds primarily on Maturana’s earlier work with Varela, and as such also does not centrally feature Maturana’s view of the predominant role of emotion (and in particular intimacy) in giving rise to our humanity (Maturana & Verden-Zoller, 1996).

It is with these principles in mind that Varela and Maturana write that both organisms and societies can be described as “metasystems” that consist of “aggregates of autonomous unities that can be cellular or metacellular” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 198). Although the degree of dependency of the cellular components of an organism is significantly higher than the degree of dependency of individual organisms on human (or other animal) societies, human societies also maintain their internal “coherence and harmony” due to the “ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic) operation defines” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 199) As such, in Maturana and Varela’s view, human social systems are “metasystems of components with maximum autonomy, i.e., components with many dimensions of independent existence” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 198).

The independence of individual humans notwithstanding, third-order entities—just like second order entities—“generate a particular internal phenomenology, namely, one in which the individual ontogenies of all the participating organisms occur fundamentally as part of the network of co-ontogenies that they bring about in constituting third-order unities.” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 193) Maturana and Varela illustrate this point by discussing the case of social insects such as termites, as well as the case of wolves (Maturana & Varela, 1984, pp. 184–190). Wolves, they write, are capable of forming a wolf pack by “by adopting different postures (showing their teeth, dropping their ears, wagging their tails)” that “is capable of following, harassing, and killing a large moose, a feat that could not be achieved by a single individual (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 190)” In this way, “this interaction enables them to generate a new realm of phenomena that isolated individuals cannot generate” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 190).

With these core principles in mind, we can now discuss the core characteristics of human social life, or as the Enactivist would put it, “life in third-order couplings” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 189).

The Enactivist account of culture

From the Tree of Knowledge (1984) and Varela and Maturana’s other writings, one can glean four key features of the Enactivist approach to culture, which each bear close resemblance to that of the Social Representation Theorist.

Social and cultural meanings are not located in the mind of the individual, but instead are enacted at the interface of interactions.

In The Embodied Mind, Varela et al. ask speculatively:

Where is the locus of cultural knowledge such as folktales, names for fishes, jokes – is it in the mind of the individual? In the rules of society? In cultural artifacts? How can we account for the variation found across time and across informants? Great leverage for anthropological theory might be obtained by considering the knowledge to be found in the interface between mind, society, and culture rather than in one or even in all of them. (Varela et al., 1991, pp. 178–179)

From these passages and others it is clear that what Varela, as well as Wagner, see as ‘emergent properties’ in living systems—whether it be the meaning of social gestures, our sense of self, or the presence of life within a cell—are not static within those systems, but dynamic properties of interactions.

2.  A society is created by individual people or animals, while at the same time acting as a constraint on the behavior of the individual.

As outlined above, the “identity” of a system—whether a cell, organism, or society—consists of the organization, activities and relations of its component parts. For a human society, a third-order unity, its “internal coherence” is mechanistically generated by the individuals within that society, and when those individuals fail to maintain that stability, the distinction between interior and exterior collapses, the metasystem is no longer closed, and the society ceases to produce its identity, or in other words, ceases to exist.

Although the human social system “amplifies the individual creativity of its components,” it also places constraints upon them like any other unity must in order to maintain internal coherence and identity. On the one extreme, Varela and Maturana discuss the example of Spartan society, which they consider an “impaired human social system” because it “depersonalized” its components by strictly enforcing “mechanisms of stabilization in all the behavioral dimensions” of its members (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 199). In less drastic examples, however, where individuals have more autonomy, they are still limited by “cultural behavior,” which is defined as the “‘transgenerational stability of behavioral patterns ontogenically acquired in the communicative dynamics of a social environment” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 201). These behaviors “give a certain continuity to the history of a group, beyond the particular history of the participating individuals” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 201). As such, the unique interactions and relations between group members is essential to a group’s identity, and a society will only be preserved insofar as its cultural behaviors and language persist over time.

Wagner and other Social Representation Theorists make similar points in discussing individual effects on societal meanings and vice versa. “Everyday thinking and acting is always situated in a social setting,” Wagner writes

It is the persons present, the temporal and local frame of the situation, and the task at hand that determine the expectations of the people as to what action may be required. This multitude of possible combinations and situation constraints constitutes the arena of everyday knowledge, thinking and acting. (Wagner, 2007, p. 9)

Varela and Maturana see language as a “condition sine qua non for the experience of what we call mind” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 231), and as such it’s not surprising that they see human societies as dependent upon it. On one level, language is essential to the preservation of our sense of self. “In the network of linguistic interactions in which we move,” they write, “we maintain an ongoing descriptive recursion which we call the ‘I’. It enables us to conserve our linguistic operational coherence and our adaptation in the domain of language” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 231). Beyond the individual level, the linguistic domains that individual humans generate are “central to the operation of a human social system” (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 199).

The role of language in maintaining the identity of a society is further elaborated upon when they write,

The living system, at every level, is organized to generate internal regularities. The same occurs in social coupling through language in the network of conversations which language generates and which, through their closure, constitute the unity of a particular human society. (Maturana & Varela, 1984, p. 232)

Social Representation theory is also fundamentally rooted in the communication practices of individuals. As Jodelet writes,

The interactive production of social representations and their linguistic nature has led to a focus on the discursive basis of their formation, properties and effects on the construction of social reality, daily life practices, everyday common sense, personal and community identity. (Jodelet, 2008, p. 424)

At the same time, one point of tension between the Social Representation Theorist and the Enactivist may concern the ontological status of these representations. Specifically, while the Social Representation Theorist may come to think of our shared ideas as a somewhat independent conceptual schemata that an individual interacts with, the Enactivist will always insist that our shared meanings are rooted in our sensitive, perceptual, “in-moving” bodies, and are enacted at the interface of interactions. This point emerges quite cleanly from the Enactivist’s biophysical focus: the same interactions that give rise to the cell and the respiratory system, from a “third-order” view, are the ones that give rise to our shared meanings and communicative practices. When looked at in isolation, these systems of meaning may seem self-sustaining and distinct from the individuals in a given society; however, to the Enactivist, the meanings that emerge from our language are simply the clearest, most visible manifestation of the continuous, contingent, perpetually in-motion process of autopiesis and identity-making.

This point is well articulated by Di Paolo and De Jaegher in their discussion of how the role that social interaction can play in cognition is “more than contextual.” They write, “interaction dynamics are not data to be decoded and stored by information-processing mechanisms. Rather, the dynamical processes of interaction are complex and can themselves enable socio-cognitive performance or even be a constitutive part of it (De Jaegher et al., 2010).” They then go on to articulate their “Interactive Brain Hypothesis” which proposes that “social interaction processes play enabling and constitutive roles in the development and in the ongoing operation of brain mechanisms involved in social cognition, whether the person is engaged in an interactive situation or not,” as “the neural mechanisms involved in social understanding acquire and sustain their current functionality thanks to past and present engagements in social interaction” (De Paolo & De Jaegher, 2012). In this way, even outside of interactions, social meanings are continuously constructed and enacted by the individual over time, in the Enactivist view, and do not form some type of “disembodied context” with which the individual interacts.

4. Although society does not have a “purpose,” as a unity it is oriented toward the reproduction of itself in the face of perturbations and other societies.

The very definition of a living system is one that continually produces itself, or maintains its identity and autonomy over time. As Varela’s student David Reudrauf puts it,

identity is always identity in time, and exists in relation to an environment with perturbations that must be compensated for. This process of recurrent stabilization, involving internal circular processes with matter and energy flux, as at the core of the dynamical persistence of the autonomy and wholeness of the system (Rudrauf et al., 2003, p. 28).

Interestingly, it is just these environmental perturbations that Wagner’s social representation theory is meant to describe. As he puts it, “a social representation emerges whenever a group's identity is threatened and when communicating the novel subverts social rules” (Wagner et al., 1999). A group’s identity is often challenged because it is “neither isolated from natural forces nor from other social groups” (Wagner et al., 1999). As such, “both natural events and other groups exert an influence either by suddenly disrupting the familiar course of practice or by initiating slow but nevertheless inevitable changes in the group’s natural and social environment” (Wagner et al., 1999). As a result, “the world and life of a group or society changes ever so slightly whenever a new representation takes over its function as an explicatory and epistemic device” (Sen and Wagner, 2005, p. 2.2).

One illustrative example discussed by Wagner is that of Germany’s National Democratic Party (NPD), an extremely right wing and racist political organization. Shortly before the 2006 world soccer championships, a large-scale campaign entitled “You are Germany” featured Gerald Asamoah, whose parents are of Ghanaian origin. This horrified and revolted the NPD since, as Wagner put it, “the possibility of Blacks being equally worthy and talented members of German society challenges the racists’ traditional ways of understanding human nature… the achievements and prominence of Germans of African origin pose a cognitive threat to the neo-Nazis” (Holtz & Wagner, 2009, p. 421). Faced with this challenging and unsettling evidence, NPD members are forced to react aggressively and delegitimize him “as a person lacking backbone…a kind of mercenary within the German soccer team,” while at the same time ignoring the fact that he has “lived in Germany since his childhood” and “considers himself a patriotic fully fledged German (Holtz & Wagner, 2009, p. 421).”

In these situations, for better and for worse, both Varela and Wagner would agree that the cultural and linguistic behaviors seen in societies that are confronted with other groups or their environments will be oriented toward the maintenance of the relationships and order that define the society itself.

Conclusion

Enactivism shares many core principles with cultural anthropology, including the lack of distinction between subject and object and the disbelief in an objective world as a pregiven entity. At the same time, one of the primary challenges to an Enactivist theory of culture has been how to account for “holomorphisms,” or shared social representations. Although Enactivists have conducted immensely interesting and important research on cellular and organismal phenomena, they have had less success in accounting for and explaining the normative background of interpersonal relationships and the effects of culture, and at least part of this limitation has been conceptual in nature.

This article has argued that Enactivism does provide the necessary conceptual tools to analyze and understand culture: through the lens of “third-order unities,” which constitute a distinct phenomenological level from the individual organism. From this supra-individual view, we see that the same Enactivist ideas about autopiesis and identity-production that apply to the cellular and organismal level of analysis also apply to the societal level. The identity of cells, organisms and societies is constituted by the relations of their components, and these unities constantly function in such a manner as to preserve their closure and their “selves.” With this conceptual grounding, we not only see how Enactivism can account for shared cultural representations, but we also obtain a clearer picture of the key principles of an Enactivist account of culture, including how societal meanings are generated, how humans create and are constrained by the meanings they create, and the essential role of language in the process. As Enactivism rapidly progresses as a coherent account of individual and cellular interactions, we are thus better positioned to explore how and where these insights apply at the level of societies. In doing so, we will become more aware of the extent to which fundamental principles can unify these seemingly disparate levels of analysis, which is one of the core motivations of Francisco Varela and his colleague’s groundbreaking work.