Interactive Time Travel

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Interactive Time-Travel: On the

Intersubjective Retro-
modulation of Intentions
Article in Journal of Consciousness Studies January 2015
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Ezequiel Di Paolo
Interactive Time-Travel
On the Intersubjective
Retro-modulation of Intentions
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013
Abstract: The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of

social interaction can sometimes be paradoxical. I argue that in these
situations it may sometimes be possible to conceive of individual acts
that can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively. This could hap-
pen when the relational patterns in social interaction literally alter
the virtual structure of a participants past corporeal intentions result-
ing in an odd experience of having intended something all along with-
out knowing it. I propose that this possibility should be interpreted as
more than just a narrowly epistemic phenomenon. Examining this
claim involves clarifying the enactive perspective on intentionality,
which I do here. The enactive approach rejects the model of a causal
relation between intention and action for one of an intrinsic qualita-
tive relation between the two as facets of sense-making. I develop this
idea and compare it with Merleau-Pontys Fundierung model of the
mutual relation between corporeal and reflexive intentionality to
show that co-regulated moves/affections during social interaction
may modulate both arcs of this relation, creating the possibility of a
re-signification that alters not the actuality but the virtual tendencies
that preceded the social act.
Correspondence:
Ezequiel Di Paolo, Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Spain; Univer-
sity of the Basque Country, Spain; Centre for Computational Neuroscience and
Robotics, University of Sussex, UK. Email: ezequiel.dipaolo@ehu.es
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, No. 12, 2015, pp. 4974

50 E. DI PAOLO
1. Introduction: Back to the Past

In this essay I examine a counter-intuitive relation between intentions
and acts performed during social interaction. In an exploratory effort
to push the logic of some enactive ideas, I want to consider in particu-
lar the question of whether a context of participatory sense-making
could allow us to conceive of the possibility that some individual acts
can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively, and that this could
occur when the relational patterns in the interaction process literally
alters the virtual structure of an individuals past intentions. The result
would be a peculiar experience of having intended something all
along without being aware of it, but it may be more than merely an
epistemic phenomenon.
Let us first consider some broad relevant aspects before attempting

to confront this question.

Contemporary accounts of social understanding do not often put
enough emphasis on the fact that our comprehension of other people
follows a time-extended hermeneutic process. As a social encounter
unfolds, new cues help us refine judgments about the actions and
expressions of others. If, in addition, we are not merely observers but
find ourselves immersed in a social interaction, the hermeneutic pro-
cess does not fully begin and end in each individual participant but is
mutually sustained through intersecting acts of interpretation. The
interactive moves, questions, or demands posed to us can clarify our
own actions and intentions as well as those of other participants. And
underneath all this interpretive activity there lie intercorporeal pro-
cesses of coordination, breakdown, and recovery that sustain the
interaction as a distinct relational pattern also extended in time.
This process, called participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di
Paolo, 2007), describes the various ways in which interactors mutu-
ally modulate affect and cognition, including not only classical
interpretive acts where other persons figure as content of my cogni-
tion, but also attitudes towards the shared world (see, for example,
Gallagher, 2009), and a theme of this essay towards the self.
If, following Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are primarily lived rather
than inhabited, and if through their pre-personal intentional arc they
are the means and the reason for our being-in-the-world, and the mode
of our understanding of the world is, reversibly, the means of our
self-understanding, then it follows that neither the world is fully
opaque nor are we self-transparent. Indeed, we come to know the
body through the world, through the reversible acts by which we are
touched by what we touch and visible to that we intend to see. And
INTERACTIVE TIME-TRAVEL 51
important in what follows our bodies are often moved by the world
even when we do not intend to move.
That this self-understanding can often be radically enhanced while
engaging with others is not news. As participatory sense-making
works by modulating interpretive attitudes towards both the other and
myself, the meaning of events, moves, and utterances remains open as
their place in the interactive organization is negotiated. There is,
through this open temporality, an element of retroactivity at play,
which is applicable, because of my self-opaqueness, not only to the
intentions of others but also to my own. Making sense in participation
has a wide temporal focus, and therefore meaning does not emerge in
discrete packages but is always unfinished as other participants and
the interaction patterns themselves re-signify my acts.

The epistemic determination of my own intentions through the acts
of others has perhaps been under-studied in traditional approaches to

social cognition. The possibility is also located at a significant dis-
tance from the non-interactive stance of phenomenological attempts
to describe the experience of the other from a self-enclosed sphere of
immanence. Yet this kind of co-authorship pervades our everyday
lives. Heinrich von Kleist has long ago turned it into useful counsel.
For our ideas to become clear, he advised, we should simply find a lis-
tener and start talking without a script the interactive act affording
through our own self-perception and the attitude of the other enough
richness for clarifying our own thoughts (von Kleist, 1951).
Notice, however, that if there is a sense of retroactivity in this exam-
ple it could be interpreted as narrowly epistemic (i.e. we pick up new
information about ourselves that was simply there). Accordingly, our
ideas are pregnant but not absent, our intentions obscure, but pre-
existing the act in order to furnish it with motive, norms, and condi-
tions of satisfaction. Notice, also, how the interactive situation is
reduced to the mere presence of a minimally active interpreting other.
This narrow epistemic interpretation could easily be accommo-
dated within a causal view of the relation of intention and action, a
view with Cartesian roots and still dominant in cognitive science and a
good part of philosophy of mind. Accordingly, actions gain their sta-
tus by being the outcome of a special kind of cause, a mental event of
some sort, usually a desire-belief combination, or an intention or goal.
The modern variants of such a view, pace the self-transparency sug-
gested by its Cartesian origin, are nevertheless able to accommodate
an imperfect degree of self-knowledge and therefore could accept a
form of narrow epistemic retrospection by which our motivations
become increasingly clear to ourselves, typically in a passage from
52 E. DI PAOLO
sub-personal to personal-level representations. The presence of oth-

ers in this story is a mere trigger, a perspectival shift on our own
actions providing additional information or the occasion to reconsider
our own motives.
In contrast with this causal view, we find implied in some contem-
porary approaches to embodied cognition, notably the enactive
approach, a notion of intentions-in-action, i.e. a qualitative distinction
linking acts and intentions together in a totality of sense-making (Di
Paolo, 2005; Thompson, 2007). The act is a systemic whole to which
purposes naturally belong, as do its more or less skilful overt and
introvert facets. Its grounding is the precarious, self-constituted
nature of the body, its intrinsic norms as a living system, and its incor-
porated norms as a cognitive and social being. Intention is indeed to

be found in action as one of its facets if we conceive of action not as
mere movement, but as explicitly involving a network of normative

and material relations, notably the bodys self-constitution and its
interactions with the world and others (I expand this idea in the next
section). Understanding intentions-in-action demands a wider focus
than that of individual mental states causing an act. Even though this
notion has been articulated in modern terminology using systemic
concepts such as operational closure and so on, the idea is hardly new
and finds notable precursors, among others, in Merleau-Pontys cor-
poreal intentionality and Hegels prioritizing of ongoing practical
activity.
The latter developed a sophisticated notion of retrospectivity for
intentions-in-action. One particular form of activity intersub-
jectively mediated self-reflection precipitates forms of self-knowl-
edge that can have a transformative effect on action (Taylor, 1985).1
For Hegel in the fifth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977),
the unfolding in time of the act brings on the dimensions of
expressivity and public accessibility that retrospectively reveal, partly
through its consequences, partly through the norms and practices
embodied in the reaction and interpretation of others, what must have
been intended. Actions disclose intentions as much to others as to the
agent herself, who may normally be the best authority on what she
[1] One could speculate that the experiential roots that motivate the causal story have been
influenced by taking these crystallized forms of reflective self-knowledge as given: not as
the achievement of a full body activity but instead as so-called inner mental states, moti-
vations, desires, and goals. As self-explicitation gives the appearance of a separation
between such mental states from other facets of the act to which they still bear an inner
relation, it is not a big leap to posit that this relation is one of causality (an answer to a
why-question) between an intention reflectively disengaged from other parts of the act,
i.e. the acts effective or expressive world coupling.
intended but not always the most reliable one (Pippin, 2010). The
interpretation of this disclosure is a temporally extended process
always open to some degree of negotiation, as we shall see, particu-
larly in live interactive situations.
Asking how best to interpret the intersubjective retrospective deter-
mination of intentions in Hegel, Laitinen (2004) describes as
epistemic the possibility of a retrospective awareness, justification,
and appropriation of our intentions-in-action. He finds this epistemic
sense unproblematic as it simply involves an achieved reflection on
our past actions and motivations and so any notion of retrospection
is limited to the (not necessarily trivial) explicitation of motives. For
the enactive, non-causal notion of intentions-in-action this reflexivity
would in itself constitute a change to our acts and our intentions. The
passage from corporeal to reflective intentionality, as I discuss below,
is a non-trivial achievement that certainly cannot be arranged into a

simple causal chain. Nevertheless, for Laitinen this is quite unlike a
radically ontological sense of determination that would conceive of
intentions as constituted retroactively not just retrospectively
after the (f)act and via an intersubjective exchange of some form. The
latter sense seems absurd because, to put it bluntly, you just cant
travel back in time.
Laitinens analysis is useful because it speaks its common sense
rather loudly: intentions are conceived as actualized events and their
temporal course implies that they should occur no later than the
action, even though they need not be extinguished or remain
unchanged as the action unfolds. It is only our reflective powers that
are allowed a backward gaze on anything we may have missed about
our intentions, even though it must have been unquestionably there.
Here again it is intentions that grant the act its status by specifying its
conditions of satisfaction like in the causal view. While Hegel did not
hold this causal view as we have said, Laitinens point is that the tem-
porality constraint applies to his perspective as well. In other words,
in both causal and enactive-like outlooks, it seems simply impossible
for the act to precede intentions short of divesting the act of its status
as such. Were this order not to be observed, annoying complications
would arise, such as for instance the possibility of conveniently
recasting whatever event or deed as an intended act.
There are reasons to question this conception of the time-course,
efficacy, and determinacy of intentions. In what follows, I consider an
alternative perspective of intention-in-action, informed by a reversal
that conceives the pre-intentional situation as richer, not poorer, than
the intentional one. I also draw on dynamical ideas of virtuality and
54 E. DI PAOLO
Merleau-Pontys relation of Fundierung between corporeal and

reflexive intentionality. The description is supported by the concepts
of autonomy and sense-making developed in enactive theory (Varela,
Thompson and Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo, Rohde and
De Jaegher, 2010; McGann, De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2013).
However, what allows the reinstatement of the possibility of an
intersubjective retroactive determination of intentions in more than a
narrow epistemic sense is the new factor briefly introduced above: the
autonomy of social interaction. This under-studied situation allows
acts to have conditions of satisfaction within the organization of inter-
active dynamics because social interaction itself is norm-generating.
A person can engage in such acts in ways that are not directly intended
and, in some extreme cases, actually opposed to a previous explicit

individual intention. Nevertheless such acts and their intentions-in-
action could be retroactively owned by the participants. It is not

always the case, however, that interactive situations will produce a
radical retroactive determination of individual intentions. This is
rather one possibility in a variety of forms of modulation of intentions
and coordination of individual and social action.
2. Enacting Intentions
As a first step, we should examine whether an intention-in-action is
best conceived as a simple actual event. In the causal view this must be
the case because it is after all its efficacy in determining the conditions
and motivations for action that compels it not to post-date the act
itself. Here the enactive notions of autonomy, adaptivity, and sense-
making can help delineate a different conception of intentions. I turn
now to a brief explanation of these terms.
For the enactive approach, an autonomous system is an operation-
ally closed organization, whereby precarious processes form a net-
work via two conditions: 1) each process in the network is enabled by
at least another process in the network, and 2) each process in the net-
work is an enabling condition for at least another process in the net-
work2 (Di Paolo, 2005; 2009; Di Paolo and Thompson, 2014;
Thompson, 2007). The outcome of the operation of all these processes
is the sustaining of the closed organization in time, its systemic iden-
tity. This closure is organizational, not interactional, which means of
course that there are dependencies and influences on processes
[2] An enabling condition is more than a condition of dependence or a contextual factor. It is a

necessary condition without which the enabled process cannot occur (see De Jaegher, Di
Paolo and Gallagher, 2010, for a discussion and application of this term).
outside the autonomous system. The classical example is a living

organism where autonomy corresponds to autopoiesis or material
self-production (Varela, 1979). The precarious nature of this organi-
zation (precarious because without the networked co-dependencies,
the component processes would disappear) introduces, following
Hans Jonas (1966), a relation of needful freedom with the world. The
system is in constant flux, avoiding the fate of each of its passing
material configurations by never fully coinciding with them, by
changing from one to the next, a feat that requires resources from the
world. We see here a tension basic to all forms of life. On the one
hand, an organism sustains itself as a distinct entity and for this reason
it must severely regulate the effects of the external world on its own
organization. On the other, it can only remain alive by depending on

the right sort of exchanges with the environment. It must, in other
words, be both closed and open to the world in an existence that is

inherently discriminatory.
Francisco Varela saw in this basic tension a link between autonomy
and sense-making, i.e. the organisms relation to the world in terms of
concern and value (Varela, 1991; 1997; Weber and Varela, 2002). The
autonomous organism is capable of evaluating a given interaction
with the world as beneficial or not for its own continuation. In other
words, the maintenance of systemic identity is a source of intrinsic
normativity: eat food, avoid poison, etc. The problem is that the condi-
tion of closure of a living system is in itself binary, not graded. The
network of process relations is either closed or not, and as a conse-
quence it cannot serve directly as a source of graded values (this is
better or worse than that) to filter through encounters with the world.
Some form of mediation is missing in this picture, something that can
link actual states with the tendencies and capacities involved in evalu-
ating the consequences for the systems own viability. Sense-making
requires not only an autonomous organization but also an adaptive
one (Di Paolo, 2005). Adaptivity is the capability of an autonomous
system to respond to tendencies in the trajectories of its states and its
relations to the world, such that when these tendencies approach the
boundary of its own viability the system modulates its coupling with
the world in a way that tends to avert the crossing of this boundary.
Adaptive responses thus permit the regulation of states before the
breakdown of closure (death) has occurred. Such responses can suc-
ceed or fail, which is crucial as this makes adaptivity a graded prop-
erty that naturalizes sense-making in the systems organization.
Relevant to our discussion is the fact that adaptivity works on the
virtual field that surrounds the current dynamical configuration of the
56 E. DI PAOLO
agentworld system. In two senses: first, the agent must be responsive

to whether or not tendencies approach the boundary of viability if
the crossing of this boundary is actualized, it is simply too late; sec-
ond, it must make use of its capacities to modulate the constraints of
the coupling with the world by introducing changes that alter the vir-
tual field around the current states (modifying the direction of the neg-
ative tendencies).
What exactly do we mean by a virtual field? The notion of the vir-
tual in the current context follows from the metaphysical tradition of
granting a real ontological status to capacities and tendencies, espe-
cially those in the neighbourhood of current actual states. This tradi-
tion includes Aristotles notion of potentiality, Spinozas concept of
affect, and related (but not identical) usages of the term virtual by
Bergson and Deleuze. For our purposes, we additionally use the rich
conceptual resources of dynamical systems theory to speak of trajec-

tories, traces, and tendencies. In a few words, in this tradition, the vir-
tual is that which is real but not actual, such as the glasss capacity to
hold liquids or the tendency of liquid water to become solid at freezing
temperatures. Such capacities and tendencies need not be currently
actualized (the glass is empty and in principle could remain empty for-
ever but its capacity is still real). Notably, these capacities and tenden-
cies are always relational, unlike the properties of an object that
belong to it in all contexts (e.g. water is composed by H2O molecules).
Hence, virtual capacities and tendencies can be potentially infinite in
number (the glass can be used as a paperweight or a doorstop, water
also has a tendency to slow down high-energy neutrons inside a
nuclear reactor). This doesnt mean that we can manipulate circum-
stances so that any object could acquire any arbitrary capacity or ten-
dency (the glass hasnt got the tendency to slow down fast neutrons,
and liquid water makes a rather ineffective paperweight and door-
stop). Actualization of virtual capacities and tendencies occurs always
as an event, or a doing, or an act as we shall see. These actualizations
are situated in history, have duration, and so forth.
By speaking of fields we want to focus on the structured situ-
atedness of virtual tendencies and capacities, i.e. not just any non-
actualized counterfactual, but those that neighbour a current state of
affairs. This structured field can be studied by examining the dynami-
cal landscape around a current trajectory (this landscape in itself need
not be fixed in time). Such fields have been investigated in many sim-
ulation models of embodied cognition to different degrees of explicit-
ness. It is common in such models to artificially travel back and forth
along a recorded behavioural trajectory and manipulate circumstances
and re-run the model to ask what-if questions in order to systemati-

cally map a virtual field (e.g. Beer, 2003; Iizuka and Di Paolo, 2007;
see also footnote 4) or to attempt to produce exhaustive maps of
sensorimotor possibilities (Buhrmann, Di Paolo and Barandiaran,
2013).
Adaptivity entails complex aspects of temporality, such as directed-
ness, minimal granularity, and historicity. The phases of an adaptive
event, i.e. the actualization of virtual tendencies and capacities, bear a
qualitative resemblance to the phases of an act proposed by Langer
(1967) (onset, acceleration, consummation, and cadence; see Di
Paolo, 2005, p. 444). In other words, sense-making, which even in its
most basic forms implies adaptivity, always occurs in a thick here-
and-now. By this I mean that, given the current situation, not only the
actualized states matter to the sense-maker but also the virtual traces
and tendencies that surround these states, whether they become actu-
alized or simply modified but not necessarily actualized in the course
of events.
From a dynamical systems vantage point, this is no surprise. Let us
consider three widespread characteristics that become obvious when
agents are considered in dynamical terms. 1) The current state of a
system reflects a history of changes that the system has undergone
over time. In this way, past events are brought to bear on the current
situation and so the accumulation of experience allows the agent to
discriminate between different contexts when exposed to identical
sensory perturbations. 2) The behaviour of the agent as a dynamical
system depends on its limit sets, i.e. the macro-configuration of states
that need not be actually ever visited by the system. Since through
continued coupling with the environment the agent is able to reach
different areas of state space, from different initial conditions the
agent may then follow different tendencies as determined by the
attracting and repelling sets. Experience can therefore tune those limit
sets globally such that the agents movement through state space cor-
responds to the desired response that a given situation solicits. 3)
Future tendencies depend on how the agents dynamics moves
towards the limit set in whose basin it finds itself; asymptotic states
need not ever be reached (actualized) or even known, but they never-
theless exert an influence in these tendencies.
One by one, these properties bear a correspondence with three key
aspects of Merleau-Pontys notion of motor intentionality (Burhmann,
Di Paolo and Barandiaran, 2013; Burhmann and Di Paolo, 2014). 1)
The accumulation of experience serves to discriminate, with increas-
ing specificity, situations that solicit a particular response (separation
58 E. DI PAOLO
of traces). 2) Experience also allows a person to incrementally refine

her dispositions to respond to these solicitations (tuning of tendencies
by altering limit sets). 3) A response to a situation takes the form of
movement toward the completion of a Gestalt (maximum grip) or
equilibrium towards which the body tends without the need to men-
tally represent this optimum, as when finding the right distance to
admire a painting (dynamics in a basis of attraction).
In the enactive analysis, making sense of a situation i.e. evaluat-
ing its relevance to the sustaining of a precarious identity and
responding accordingly requires by definition both sensitivity to
and modulation of the virtual field of possibilities. The sensitivity and
capacity for modulation are present in all forms of life with large vari-
ations in complexity and refinement. For the average person, it is not

the same to walk a straight course stepping along the curb at street
level or stepping along the border of the terrace of a tall building, even
if the sensorimotor trajectories that should be actualized are nearly
identical. For the average pigeon the two situations are similar. This is
because both are differently sensitive to risks and have different
capacities to respond to them.
Act and intention are not separable but they correspond to different
aspects of sense-making. The latter is an operation on virtual fields
whose consequences are both actual and virtual, which involves a pro-
cess of actualization with overt and introvert phases. Therefore, I pro-
pose to use the term intention to describe the virtual configuration
surrounding the current situation including the agents tendencies and
capacities and how this configuration relates to the agents self-sus-
tained identity. I propose to use the term action to describe any actual-
ization process that ensues in the context of an intention and which
tends to modify the virtual configuration in ways that avert risks and
exploit opportunities for the agents viability. This of course includes
overt behaviour but it also includes actualized bodily self-affection,
feelings, and any form of introvert explicitation of intentions. To per-
sonally experience ones own intention and to get to know it, in this
sense, is already part of an act. We can call this part of the act its mani-
fested intentionality.
This is quite different from the causal model of intentions. Never-
theless, the temporal thickness of sense-making and its relation to vir-
tuality can be described concretely both dynamically and phenomeno-
logically and studied empirically and through models. There is no
magic involved.
In summary, to intend and to act in enactive terms are respectively
the virtual and the actualized aspects of an agents active engagement
with the virtual field that surrounds a current situation, with the aim of
making sense of this virtual field and changing it by modulating actual
states. This virtual field is never fully exhausted as we have said, nor,
crucially for our discussion, forever fixed.
3. In the Thick of It
According to our proposal, it is misleading then to conceive of an
intention as an event on a par with a movement, or a physiological
change those are already processes of actualization and therefore
parts of an act. This conception, needed for the causal view, often goes
together with another habitual assumption that we should also ques-
tion. This is the assumption that the undetermined intentional situa-
tion is poorer than the determined one, as if the state prior to a formed
intention were empty. Here I propose a Bergsonian reversal of less

for more (Bergson, 1934; Deleuze, 1991). For Bergson there is more
artifice in the idea of nothingness than in the idea of something, disor-
der has more content than order, and so on. This is because we com-
monly misconceive the wild original state as a deprived one through
an act of imagining the current state and subsequently emptying it of
its content. In other words, we exercise a suppression of the current
state of affairs (being, order, determinateness, etc.) without the corre-
sponding substitution for something else and proceed to fill in in its
stead a theoretically void state for which we have never had any direct
experience or evidence. We then proceed to elevate the artificially cre-
ated situation to the status of a primordial state of affairs.
There are two intimately related senses in which a primordial state,
one that presumably is not determined or ordered, should be con-
ceived as being more than the ordered or determined state. One sense
points to the additional epistemic effort that is required to conceive of
the primordial state and to the unavoidable relation of this conception
to the actual current state. If we look at the room and want to imagine
how it was before we moved into the house, we proceed to mentally
empty it of furniture, an operation that involves more than mere look-
ing at what it is. But the result is not some primordial emptiness but a
relative one, the room-empty-of-furniture, as opposed to the room
empty of light, air, radio waves, wallpaper, etc. The other sense in
which the primordial state is more follows from the realization of
this relative aspect of any conception of emptiness. Through this rela-
tivity we realize that what was there before the order or determination
that we are interested in was an inexhaustible infinite of other pro-
cesses, events, and even orders and determinations that had escaped
60 E. DI PAOLO
us (how many of us sincerely think first of radio waves when we try to

imagine an empty room?).
The richer, undetermined situation constrains its future determina-
tions but does not provide any certainties about them. For Bergson, a
truly novel event is one for which its possibility, formulated positively
as the possibility of a specific actuality and not negatively as a general
absence of impossibility, is conceivable for the first time only with
that very actuality. The novel event retroactively writes itself in the
past as having been specifically possible, even perhaps to be
expected because with hindsight that possibility coheres with what-
ever we knew about the past state of affairs. The specific and positive
possibility of Hamlet cannot be said to have existed before Shake-
speare conceived and wrote the play, as if someone examining possi-

ble combinations of themes, characters, and plots could have come up
with a conception of Hamlet before Hamlet without conceiving the

play in that very act. We can only say that Hamlet was not impossible
before Shakespeare, i.e. that there were no impediments to its concep-
tion, and even that statement can only be made after the fact and not
before, short of conceiving of Hamlet (actualizing it).
For our purposes, the main implication of taking the Bergsonian
view is that the underdetermined intentional configuration, even when
we are not engaged in any overt activity, however vaguely specified,
is not an empty landscape as is typically conceived in causal theories
but instead a rich and largely undefined, but not ineffectual, reservoir
of traces, tendencies, capacities, risks, and opportunities for
sense-making.
What is the relation between this undetermined intentional reser-
voir and those reflectively crystallized and therefore determined
intentions that pervade the Cartesian mode of causal thinking? Here it
would not be correct to simply propose that the determined intentions
correspond to what we have called manifested intentionality because
they are actualized in some form (a stance, a feeling, or some explicit
awareness), while the underdetermined reservoir corresponds to the
virtual configuration of tendencies, capacities, etc. Intentions are
often manifested in pre-reflective, implicit forms, and the misconcep-
tion of the causal view is to neglect those at the expense of explicitly
manifested (sometimes even propositional) intentions. It is in how
these two forms of intentionality and their actualized manifestations
relate where we must explore the consequences of the Bergsonian
reversal of less for more.
We can take the richer (because less determined) intentionality as
corporeal in correspondence to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the
tacit cogito, the pre-reflective, bodily founding term of expressive,

reflective subjectivity (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). He describes the
relation between the two forms of intentionality (corporeal and reflec-
tive) using the Husserlian term Fundierung. On the one hand, we have
what he calls the founding term: the primordial, pre-reflective, inten-
tionality of the lived body (i.e. the Bergsonian reservoir, the Jonasian
self-concern of life, the enactive core forms of sense-making). On the
other, we have the founded forms of reflective consciousness. The
two forms stand in a mutual but asymmetric relation.
The founding term is primary in the sense that the founded term is
presented as a determination or a making explicit of the founding term,
which prevents the founded term from ever fully absorbing the found-
ing term; and yet the founding term is not primary in the empirical sense
and the founded is not merely derived from it, since it is only through
the founded that the founding appears. (Ibid., p. 414)

It is noteworthy that Merleau-Ponty has grouped together both deter-
mination and explicitation as marking the passage from bodily to
reflective intentionality, weakening in this way an ontological/
epistemic distinction. The reason for this is that the entity that
becomes determined is precisely the new form of epistemological
appropriation or clarity that we obtain as we query our partially
expressed, partially known bodily engagements with the world. A vir-
tual configuration which is actualized only in a pre-reflective mode
(body intentionality) becomes determined as an object of experience
or knowledge through an act of sense-making. The epistemic appro-
priation is the becoming explicit of the virtual configuration, which so
far had only be actualized implicitly in the body. Merleau-Ponty also
sees this process as one that cannot fully absorb the multiple and
concrete pre-reflective bodily projects, i.e. again a Bergsonian notion
of determination as impoverishment.
The Fundierung relation between the two forms of intentionality
can also be appreciated in the relation between bodily being-in-the-
world (practically oriented, skilful, adaptive) and explicit acts
uncritically conceived in the classical sense as discrete events with
clear boundaries and conditions of satisfaction (I decide to close the
window, I get up and close it, it is now closed). The relation is there-
fore relevant to our purposes, as neither acts nor intentions should be
seen as discrete, causally linked events, but as time-extended aspects
of bodily being-in-the-world. We should note that, via Merleau-
Pontys breaching of the epistemic/ontological divide in the case of
the Fundierung relation, we can already start to doubt whether any
62 E. DI PAOLO
reasonable sense of retroactive determination of intentions must nec-

essarily be only narrowly epistemic (i.e. obtaining knowledge without
significantly altering the thing we are cognizing about). Such a nar-
row sense is of course possible (e.g. a suitable a posteriori narrative
that makes explicit my then implicit body intentionality), but the anal-
ysis up to this point indicates the possibility that it could in some cases
be more than that.
Note also that Merleau-Ponty grants bodily intentionality a found-
ing priority but not an empirical (causal) one. The founded term in the
relation can feed back into the founding undercurrent by the sedimen-
tation of practices, the learning of new skills, and so on (Ravaisson,
1838/2008). This is possible because each act can alter its own foun-
dations (not merely reveal them), and it is only when those alterations
predispose the body to repetitions that a habit establishes itself in this
particular mode of relation to the world. The related terms are there-
fore continuously modulated by the relation they sustain as the act
of walking and the laying down of the proverbial enactive path.
What this tells us is that even if we dont conceive of intentions and
acts as discrete, casually linked events there is an inner logic that
relates both terms as aspects of corporeal intentionality. The inner
relation flows both ways, so that the intentional aspect the rich
intentional reservoir is permeable to modification by actualized
action.
We reach then a more sophisticated perspective on the problem. 1)
The efficacy of intentions involves elements of the virtual as well as
actualized manifestations. 2) The original state prior to a determined
intention (the core intentionality of precarious, concernful life) is
already intentional in a rich sense, and so the body is capable of
engaging in action before specific intentions reach their full determi-
nation. 3) The relation between bodily intentionality and its explicita-
tion/determination, be it in the form of explicit acts or reflective
consciousness, is mutual (leaving intentional aspects open to ongoing
alteration by the very acts they found).
One can argue that even within this perspective a strong ontological
retroactivity of intentions is still inconceivable since the act, however
undetermined, must have certain conditions for it to count as such, and
these must cohere with its intention, however undetermined. This may
but need not happen strictly prior to the overt act but apparently it
could never happen after the act, because the act itself is an actualiza-
tion of the intention. This argument, which makes sense from a meth-
odological individualistic standpoint, loses its strength as we regard
the process of social interaction.
4. The Tentative Intersubjective Present

Social interaction is not merely a co-presence or even the occasional
mutual influence between two or more autonomous sense-makers. It
is an engagement, the dynamical mode that occurs when the co-regu-
lation of the mutual coupling between the participants acquires itself a
form of autonomy (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; see also, for
example, Goffman, 1963, for a classical statement of the same point).
Interactions have a life of their own and their constituent processes are
patterns of coordination, breakdown, and recovery of coordination.
Interactive acts are therefore social acts: their initiation, completion,
conditions of satisfaction, and motivations span the participants
involved. Moreover, these acts play a role in sustaining the interaction
without necessarily being individually intended for such a role.

The regulation of interactive turns, for instance, is mostly co-

authored and often finely attuned to context. Gestures and utterances
sustain a coordination that is not individually determined, let alone
explicitly intended, but emerges from a co-regulation that moves the
interaction forward. Listeners can back-channel with nods and short
utterances (uhuh, right, mhm) and so skip turns, show interest,
and fuel the speakers flow (see, for example, Goodwin, 1986;
Bavelas, Coates and Johnson, 2000). Interpersonal distance is negoti-
ated according to context and degree of acquaintance (Hall, 1966). If
two people are asked to turn a heavy horizontal crank to a desired
position from opposite sides of a table (without any other means of
communication) functional roles emerge after a while, whereby one of
them invests more energy in starting the movement of the crank and
the other in braking it (Reed et al., 2006). All of this is done uncon-
sciously like many other examples of coordination and we only take
notice when something breaks down. For instance, if the flow of an
interaction is artificially tampered with, other things staying the same,
the result is frustrating and immediately noticeable even for young
babies (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). Many bodily movements and
attitudes are regulated during interaction not necessarily following an
individual pre-existing intention, but as the joint enactment of interac-
tive skills. This means that social interactions can, and often do, take
unexpected turns; they are open and can generate novel situations
without anybody involved foreseeing them.
Corporeal coordination satisfies norms and motivations although
not always those of the individual, who nevertheless can be sensitive
to something going wrong when a breakdown occurs. Interactive
norms belong to a shared space of meaning, a source of co-regulated
64 E. DI PAOLO
heteronomy which cannot be individually owned since the success,

failure, and repair of the co-regulation necessitates the coordinated
moves of several participants. This is what is sometimes experienced
as the pull of an interaction, the falling into relational patterns that
are not necessarily anybodys intention (phone conversations that
start trailing off at the moment of saying goodbye but still take a long
time to end, the estranged relation between parent and teenager that
keeps turning sour precisely as a result of each party being over-care-
ful not to revisit past confrontations, and the mundane dance of the
narrow corridor that keeps two people walking in opposite directions
engaged in interaction precisely because they attempt to get out of it).
This pull of the interaction, its heteronomy, can sometimes contrast
with individual intentions and this is the primordial tension of partici-

patory sense-making. It is not a tension between the different inten-
tions of the various participants, but a tension between individual and

interactional autonomies (Cuffari, Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2014).
Nor is it the same as the basic tension of needful freedom of the
organic body, but it does have similar aspects. An agent engaged in
interaction must constantly navigate an uncertain landscape, not only
because other autonomous agents are involved, but also because the
relational patterns of interaction have a tendency to sustain them-
selves and therefore can, so to speak, get under our skins.
Social interaction is a space of participatory sense-making (orienta-
tion, joint action, joint perception, shared interpretation, etc.) where
mere moves can be converted into acts as they enter into the economy
of co-regulated interactive activity. This largely unreflective activity
belongs to a synergy of bodily intentionalities. The other can move my
body thanks to the attunement tendencies of my intercorporeal skills
(think of the immediate reorientation of sense-making that occurs
when, unexpectedly, a voice calls out your name). In either soliciting
or signifying our bodily responses, we co-author acts of social coordi-
nation. Such acts fulfil conditions of motivation and normativity not
necessarily obtained within any participant (and yet inexistent with-
out the participants). Since such co-authored acts still involve my
body, they can modulate my bodily intentionality, opening the possi-
bility of inviting in me a response of acceptance or rejection.
A way of seeing this is to consider again Merleau-Pontys
Fundierung model. The interactive situations described above pro-
vide enough evidence of bodies modulating each others corporeal
intentionality (as when maximal grip is jointly attained in the case of
unconscious adjustments to interpersonal distance). In contrast, other
models require access to the other to be always in a mode more related
to the founded form of intentionality (e.g. Husserl in Cartesian Medi-

tations, 1960) and in modern cognitivist versions even in a reflective
or inferential mode. Such access is possible, but the interactive situa-
tion shows it is not primordial (see also Gallagher, 2008), and that
instead an understanding between bodies can obtain without founded
intentionality mediating it. Undoubtedly, thanks to the Fundierung
relation, there can be an effect on reflective, avowed intentionality in
each participant, and conversely there is a route for founded inten-
tionality to filter through and modulate the dance of the bodies. In
addition, and even more radically, during social interaction bodies can
literally move each other.
The Fundierung model could still be seen as remaining too much
within the sphere of immanent intentionality, although it is Merleau-

Pontys goal to transcend it by providing an alternative ontological
grounding for intersubjectivity, language, and thought. Interactive

(and ultimately communal) intervention in the founded/founding rela-
tions between corporeal and reflective intentionality alter the possibil-
ities of expression and sedimentation between these forms and can
help explain a subjects integration into a culture. But the synergic
movement of bodies affecting each other in coordinated interactional
structures fit even better with Merleau-Pontys reversibility model
(1968). Accordingly, interactive coordination (and breakdowns)
would most immediately affect the pre-personal layers of reversible
seeing, touching, perceiving that reverse not just within a unitary
body, but also between bodies. The handshake too is reversible
Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is
possible within each? (ibid., p. 142). Thus, there are at least two loci
for direct interactive intervention which do not pass through the
Husserlian sphere of ownness (or its representational cognitivist off-
spring) but nevertheless affect it: one locus is on both mediating arcs
of the Fundierung relation within a single body and another locus lies
in the direct and pre-personal mutual movement/affection between
bodies.3
The co-authored passage of determination/explicitation between a
social act and my own intentions as a participant in a social interaction
may sometimes take the shape of an internal resolution of a potential
breakdown by seeking in the virtual possibilities of my bodily
intentionality those whose determination cohere with the social act I
participate in. Consider for instance the act of giving. A single person
[3] See also the relevant discussion on the passage between the Fundierung and reversibility
models in the case of Merleau-Pontys thinking about language in Dillon (1988).
66 E. DI PAOLO
cannot carry it to completion. This act involves an initiation by one

party, the giver or receiver, who orients the others sense-making
(usually through an offer or a request) and can only be completed by a
conjugate and appropriately timed action (handing in/receiving).
However, in the flow of an ongoing interaction, individual moves may
be re-signified by subsequent responses. My open hand gesture to
facilitate a turn switch in a conversation may be contextually inter-
preted by the other as a request for an object I have been repeatedly
referring to, and responded to as such in a context-appropriate matter,
for instance, placing the object in my hand. It is only at this point, after
my interactive act has had its effect on the other, that out of the rich-
ness of the virtual configuration of tendencies, capacities, etc. a clear
intention may be crystallized and appropriated (I was asking for that

object). This intention is installed into my possibilities for personal
sense-making by the others completion of my interactive gesture

which turns it into a jointly performed act. It does not alter the actual
past, but its virtual configuration, in other words its meaning.
How could this happen? Consider an intention-in-action in its
intensive aspects, for instance, what we could call a commitment to
the execution of the act, to its specific properties, timing, effective and
expressive qualities, consequences, and so on. What is this commit-
ment prior to the execution of the act if not the sense the body makes
of the virtual field of local (situated) counterfactual possibilities, i.e.
the virtual neighbourhood of my situation marked by recent traces and
current tendencies? In other words, the intensity given by how
strongly I intend my action to be this or that way, how committed I am
to it, depends on details of my world-situatedness such that alternative
configurations of this situatedness may or may not alter my action
the less they do so, the more intense my intention is.4
Now, this commitment may or may not be expressed in the act itself,
but it does make a real difference as the act is subjected to hermeneutic
[4] In an illustration of the value of minimal models of embodied cognition as facilitators of

intuitions, it turns out that this notion of commitment can in fact be measured in dynamical
simulation models of minimal cognition. When a simulated agent must make a choice
between alternative behaviours, it is possible to systematically gauge the effect of varia-
tions (say in the environment or the body) on the final choice made by the agent. One can
explore this effect over time and find counter-intuitively that commitment to a choice is
not a monotonic quantity that increases progressively as the time for execution approaches
but that instead it can fluctuate in complex ways (Beer, 2003). Alternatively, one can
freeze time just before the simulated agent has made its choice and ask the question
what if things had been slightly different? and then quantify the effect of changes to the
environment on the decision the larger the effect, the less the connation or the commit-
ment to the action that is nevertheless actualized (Iizuka and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo and
Iizuka, 2008).
interpretation or as it concatenates with other acts or as I resist or give

in to factors that tend to deviate me from my goal. The virtual configu-
ration prior to the acts execution marks the subsequent actuality of
the act itself and its consequences.
Lets come back to the interactive situation in which parts of my
acts are moves in the social encounter, in accordance with an interac-
tive normativity that I follow as long as I remain in the interaction but
that may not be my own and may not even be explicit to me. It is in this
situation that the consequences of my moves can sometimes be quite
unrelated to the intensity of any prior intention. A thing said in pass-
ing, a wince, or a movement that may not yet be a gesture can acquire a
momentous importance, which is reflected back to me through the
others moves, attitudes, and expressions. It may reveal something

about myself that perhaps I dont hurry to deny (as in the hand-
gesture-turned-request example above). I may then own such conse-

quences of my interactive moves make them properly my act. This
happens by confronting the virtual configuration of my intention prior
to the execution of my interactive gesture with a novel event, e.g. the
others response which re-shapes my gesture as a partial social act
(remember that virtual capacities and tendencies are relational here
they are being put into a novel relation). The novel event alters my
past virtual configuration by inserting specific possibilities into it that
at most could only have been said not to be impossible at the time but
which did not exist at such. This past virtual configuration is now dif-
ferent from the sense I had initially made out of it, and different in a
way that coheres with having intended to perform the social act in the
first place.
This kind of retroactivity will not necessarily happen in social inter-
action, but it can happen. If it does there is a sense in which the virtual
configuration that defined the intensity of my intention in the past has
been altered (increased or decreased) through the participation of
others.
It is difficult to venture an opinion on how widespread and frequent
this phenomenon might be because the cases in which it can be identi-
fied rely on a person somehow retaining some awareness of some odd
change in her intentions, i.e. retaining some trace of the un-trans-
formed intentional state prior to the act and its retroactive modulation.
This would be a case of imperfect retroactivity. Perhaps these infre-
quent occurrences are the only cases where social interactions have
this retroactive effect, and the phenomenon could be a mere curiosity,
which is nevertheless informative of the various forms in which social
interaction can affect intentionality in participatory sense-making.
68 E. DI PAOLO
But it is conceivable that the phenomenon could be frequent and wide-

spread because the more effectively it functions the less noticeable it
is, making us literally unaware of how our intentional landscape might
be constantly modulated and reconstructed in social encounters unless
we were to undergo a complex process of self-examination.
Let us consider some examples. A clear mode, though I dont claim
it is the only or the main one, in which a retro-modulation of individ-
ual intentions can take place during social interactions is via an inter-
pretive move by another participant that recasts my own acts and
offers a novel significance that I make my own. These situations can
happen when participants share a long history of interaction and
mutual adjustment. De Jaegher describes an example:
a couple of days ago I was having dinner with my partner and a friend.
At some point, I was cutting some cheese for myself. I noticed my part-
ner looking at the cheese and thought I would offer him some, because it
looked like he might want some. When I did so, he accepted it. I asked
him whether he had wanted it while looking at the cheese before (i.e.
while I had noticed him looking at it and he had noticed me looking at
him and it), and he said that he had not really. The desire for cheese in
this case only crystallised at the point of accepting the slice from me.
This indicates that fresh intentions can sprout from interactions and that
what may often happen is that we back-track, newly emerged meaning
in hand, and stick this meaning onto our previous actions. It may have
looked like he wanted the cheese, since I noticed him looking at it
before, but in fact, the desire only took shape at the point of receiving it.
(De Jaegher, 2009, p. 549)
A similar example5 involves a tired couple at a party that has been
going on for a long time. Across the distance they regard each other
and at one point she raises her arm and with a finger touches her wrist
close to her watch to alleviate some discomfort. Interpreting her
move, he says: Youre right, its rather late and maybe we should
leave, to which, looking back at her watch, she readily agrees
realizing that she had been trying to convey the very message her part-
ner interpreted in her move. A third example is what reportedly hap-
pens occasionally between experienced tango dancers which they
describe as an experience of deep connection during the dance or as
dancing as one. The leader sees his moves interpreted correctly by
the follower before they even have a chance to start forming. This
could happen because the experienced follower is reading the
leaders body better or faster than he himself is. Before the founded
[5] I first heard Sanneke de Haan describe this example in a talk. The situation is a reworking
of an example by Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod.
layers of intentionality have even had a chance to form any notion or

intuition in the leader (e.g. we now move into this space, now it
feels as if leading this figure is right) the follower is already cohering
with his unexecuted moves (adopting a suitable stance to move into
the next figure, breathing in at the right second to ease the flow of her
next move, and so on) and so she facilitates (and invites) their enact-
ment, moving together as one body and incidentally calling into ques-
tion the very notion of leadership in a co-authored improvised
dance.
There is no backward causation in any of these examples but there
is a change in the virtuality of sense-making, a change in meaning. It is
an extra determination of the virtual dimension of the past, which is
changed by the further act of owning ones part in a social act. A deed
becomes an action because it does follow reasons, only not our know-
ingly avowed reasons but those practically accepted by my engage-

ment in the social interaction. To follow reasons in this context is
simply to say that the virtual configuration of capacities, intensities,
and tendencies in relation to the agents viability (i.e. its intentional
configuration) coheres with the actualization of some of this virtuality
in acts and experience, and tend to produce a change in the virtual
field which preserves viability.
The retroactive modulation of individual intentions described
above cannot be discarded as merely a narrow epistemological effect,
the revealing of some hidden information. To do this would be, as
Bergson said, to confound the absence of impossibility with the posi-
tive, but initially unknown, possibility of a specific outcome. The ret-
roactive modulation of intentions is a creative act, one of the many
forms of co-authoring conceivable in participatory sense-making, and
part of the unpredictability of social interaction. It is the act itself that
inscribes its own possibility in the past, a virtual possibility that was-
nt even seen by the agent herself, or, indistinctly, wasnt there as such
in a positive sense.
Wouldnt we be in danger of sliding into too liberal a view of inten-
tions, such that if we allow a strong sense of retroactivity at least in
some social situations we could eventually attempt to recast anything
as an intended act? The point is that, inexhaustible as virtual configu-
rations can be, they are not arbitrary. They are situated in history and
materiality and so, like liquid water making a poor paperweight, some
capacities, tendencies, or potentialities are simply not there. So the
answer is no. One could attempt to provide a narrative about dis-
avowed intentions in somebodys action and the issue could be
70 E. DI PAOLO
contentious. But, in principle, there would be clear cases in which we

could respond in the negative to such attempts.
The retro-modulation of intentions is not the same as the opportu-
nistic modulation of an act in course, as when I kneel down to pick up
a pen that fell to the floor and in the process I discover a coin nearby
and I decide to pick it up as well. This is simply a case of adapting my
coupling to the world by modulating the act itself. In the case of
retro-modulation of intentions the actual movements involved in the
act can remain unchanged but its significance changes thanks to how
it feeds into the interactive flow in an initially unexpected manner.
Similarly, the situation we describe differs from cases in which the
outcome of an action brings forth an unexpected result that happens to
also be desired but which I didnt specifically intend to obtain at this

point. The welcome effect makes me realize that I desire it now and
possibly that I had a desire for it before, but not an explicit one. But in
general we cannot say that the act was aimed at obtaining this effect. If
in some circumstances we could affirm this, it would still be a case of
realizing something I secretly intended, i.e. a narrowly epistemic ret-
rospection. In contrast, what occurs in participatory sense-making is
that individual acts run as it were along two braiding intentional paths,
those of the individuals involved and those of the interactive autono-
mous dynamics, and there is an ongoing tension and ambiguity
between these domains. The retroactive modulation of intentions is
simply one particularly unintuitive way in which this ambiguity can
get resolved. The event that triggers a retro-modulation of intentions
is not simply an unexpected consequence of my action on the other,
but an unresolved interactive tension that literally moves me to seek a
resolution in how my intentions, in their virtual aspects, are retroac-
tively coherent with the others response.
In summary, the retroactive and intercorporeal determination of an
individual intention is not just narrowly epistemic, even though it
involves phases of reflection, re-signification, and appropriation.
Here we reiterate that our departure point is twice removed from tradi-
tional analyses. Firstly, we start from a past state rich in virtual possi-
bilities for regulation, not a void, intention-less state. Secondly, we
consider the body as participant: its resources used in co-regulating
engagement in interaction. It is the heteronomy to which we submit
while we interact that (often literally) moves us. These moves them-
selves find a place within the multiple virtual tendencies that inform
and shape regulation and simultaneously, after the fact, change their
status from foreign into ours by becoming acts first and then inscrib-
ing an intention in the past.
5. Conclusion
If we accept the possibility that interactive processes can (sometimes)
play constitutive roles in social cognition and participatory forms of
sense-making in general (De Jaegher, Di Paolo and Gallagher, 2010),
then we must admit that it is possible for such processes to intervene in
the complex constraining relations between individual actions and
intentions. This possibility implies the definitive abandonment of the
linear-causal model of intentionality in favour of the enactive model
sketched above.
While this may look like a lost battle for the autonomy of individual
agency (we may be more determined even in our personal intentions
by our social world than we care to admit), the intersubjective modu-
lation of intentions that can take place in the thick, tentative present is
only a possibility, an opening by which the social can visibly or invisi-

bly affect the individual. At no point have we eschewed individual
autonomy in our account. We need it in fact to establish the primordial
tension of participatory sense-making, which is key to our argument.
This primordial tension, to repeat, is not a tension between peoples
intentions, although this is the way that challenges to individual
autonomy or freedom are often discussed. According to Husserl in
Ideen II, (1989, p. 281 [268]), the other appears as a source of con-
straints, obligations, etc. But the ego is the one that fully determines
whether a demand or rule or thought or feeling external to it will be
appropriated or not. This radically autonomous ego is the sole arbiter
of how much of the social world is allowed in. It seems as if the only
way to be authentically an ego is to resist or scrutinize all external
influence. This sometimes finds an echo even in Heidegger (1927/
1962) despite his rejection of transcendental solipsism. Submitting to
others is often, for him, the road to conformity and inauthentic being,
a submission to the illusions of the One that only serves to saturate my
senses and hide from myself my own being-unto-death. At least on
some readings there seems to be in Heidegger too an element of indi-
vidual choice, a standing against, in the achievement of authentic
being (this in Being and Time; things look bleaker for the subject in his
later philosophy). It looks as if this freedom-asserting choice, like the
scrutinizing and appropriation of external influences in Husserl, is an
unconditioned self-achievement and is somehow not in itself enabled
by my being immersed in a social world. It is self-evident, however,
that I cannot get my tools for such an individual achievement, and
even any conception of individual autonomy to aim towards, except
from the social world, e.g. through mastering a language, engaging in
72 E. DI PAOLO
political activism, learning to meditate, or attending a class on Exis-

tentialism. The social world provides as much the illness of inauthen-
ticity as its remedy and this is clear in other passages in Heidegger.6
From our perspective, it should be clear that the enactive approach
does not conceive of authentic subjectivity as fully self-standing an
individual with overriding power and absolute responsibility for how
she is herself affected by the social and material world. Instead it sees
subjectivity as fragile and an ongoing achievement, which is nour-
ished as much as challenged by sociality and materiality. If subjectiv-
ity is embodied and if we mean by body something like the Jonasian,
enactive conception of the term, then not all social influences are fil-
tered through individual intentionality. Instead they often operate on
the bodys precarious existence and feed its needs (in both senses: sat-
isfying and perpetuating them) by altering it, moving it, and delimit-
ing it, but also by enabling its biology, scaffolding it, and accompany-
ing it.
The retroactive modulation of intentions in participatory sense-
making, whether rare and merely a conceptual marker in the logical
space of enactive theory or frequent and deserving of further study,
would always involve an individual gesture of acceptance and appro-
priation of this relational social flow. The result can empower our own
personal projects as well as constrain them.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Hanne De Jaegher, Elena Cuffari, and two anonymous
reviewers for comments that helped improve this paper. This work is
supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, TESIS:
Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity (FP7-PEO-
PLE-2010-ITN, 264828).
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Interactive Time-Travel: On the

Article in Journal of Consciousness Studies January 2015

Linguistic bodies: sense-making, social agency, and the life-mind

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Abstract: The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, No. 12, 2015, pp. 4974

1. Introduction: Back to the Past

Let us first consider some broad relevant aspects before attempting

to confront this question.

the interaction patterns themselves re-signify my acts.

of others has perhaps been under-studied in traditional approaches to

sub-personal to personal-level representations. The presence of oth-

porated norms as a cognitive and social being. Intention is indeed to

mere movement, but as explicitly involving a network of normative

is a non-trivial achievement that certainly cannot be arranged into a

Merleau-Pontys relation of Fundierung between corporeal and

and, in some extreme cases, actually opposed to a previous explicit

action could be retroactively owned by the participants. It is not

[2] An enabling condition is more than a condition of dependence or a contextual factor. It is a

outside the autonomous system. The classical example is a living

organization. On the other, it can only remain alive by depending on

words, be both closed and open to the world in an existence that is

agentworld system. In two senses: first, the agent must be responsive

conceptual resources of dynamical systems theory to speak of trajec-

and re-run the model to ask what-if questions in order to systemati-

of traces). 2) Experience also allows a person to incrementally refine

ations in complexity and refinement. For the average person, it is not

intention were empty. Here I propose a Bergsonian reversal of less

us (how many of us sincerely think first of radio waves when we try to

speare conceived and wrote the play, as if someone examining possi-

with a conception of Hamlet before Hamlet without conceiving the

tacit cogito, the pre-reflective, bodily founding term of expressive,

the founded that the founding appears. (Ibid., p. 414)

reasonable sense of retroactive determination of intentions must nec-

4. The Tentative Intersubjective Present

without necessarily being individually intended for such a role.

The regulation of interactive turns, for instance, is mostly co-

heteronomy which cannot be individually owned since the success,

with individual intentions and this is the primordial tension of partici-

tions of the various participants, but a tension between individual and

to the founded form of intentionality (e.g. Husserl in Cartesian Medi-

within the sphere of immanent intentionality, although it is Merleau-

grounding for intersubjectivity, language, and thought. Interactive

cannot carry it to completion. This act involves an initiation by one

intention may be crystallized and appropriated (I was asking for that

sense-making by the others completion of my interactive gesture

[4] In an illustration of the value of minimal models of embodied cognition as facilitators of

interpretation or as it concatenates with other acts or as I resist or give

others moves, attitudes, and expressions. It may reveal something

gesture-turned-request example above). I may then own such conse-

But it is conceivable that the phenomenon could be frequent and wide-

layers of intentionality have even had a chance to form any notion or

ingly avowed reasons but those practically accepted by my engage-

contentious. But, in principle, there would be clear cases in which we

also be desired but which I didnt specifically intend to obtain at this

only a possibility, an opening by which the social can visibly or invisi-

political activism, learning to meditate, or attending a class on Exis-

Buhrmann, T. & Di Paolo, E.A. (2014) Non-representational sensorimotor knowl-