Enactivism proposes an alternative to functionalism in embodied cognition by focusing on how organic, sensorimotor, and social bodies are individuated through their material precariousness. This chapter analyzes the concepts of autonomy, agency, and sense-making from a dialectical examination of autopoiesis. The requirements for an organism to simultaneously self-produce and self-distinguish involve contradictory potentialities and tendencies. Overcoming this dialectic leads to a more concrete concept of self-individuation as an open, unfinished process extended over time—the enactive concept of agency. Even the simplest life-forms are always already self-individuating as behaving agents that enact a world.
The author examines Alva Noë's use of the concept of style to describe how people access the world and form their selves, drawing on his earlier work in Action in Perception. Style is presented as an expansive, flexible concept that can be understood in enactive terms—as communal processes of form-taking that develop, entwine, and differentiate historically. This relational view of style as socially constituted does not conflict with its common use to describe the cohesive activity of individuals, objects, or places, but rather clarifies it.