Feb. 5, 2026, 4 p.m. UTC // Feb. 5, 2026, 4 p.m. in UTC
In the enactive approach to cognitive science, life is understood as an adaptive process of self-production and self-distinction, in which organisms individuate themselves through the ongoing regulation of their relations with the environment. In humans, self-individuation can be (given the right socio-material conditions) an open-ended process of becoming that unfolds across our deeply entangled biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic dimensions of embodiment. Yet this process does not unfold in a vacuum: self-individuation always takes place within concrete situations populated by other bodies and their horizons, which shape our open-ended becoming. In this presentation, I focus on a particular horizonal aspect of situations that is frequently overlooked in the enactive literature: the atmospheres that always envelop our being-in-the-world. While the enactive approach has primarily focused on discrete sensorimotor interactions, it has tended to overlook the pathic, receptive dimension of embodiment through which we are continuously attuned to the affective qualities of our environments. I argue that affective atmospheres play a constitutive role in human self-individuation, as they pre-reflexively modulate our openness to the world. As horizonal aspects of situations, atmospheres can open new sources of potentiality that enrich human becoming, but they can also constrain it by limiting the creative exploration of the environment. In this way, the affective atmosphere of places is not a secondary dimension, but a structuring component of processes of human self-individuation.
