The world1 is given to us – ‘us’ being those to whom the world appears (‘the world’ being always ‘a world’, a specification of an ostensible universal world for an embodied and situated subjectivity, that is, an individual or collective self). The givenness of the world (Husserl 1983, 1989) is one of the most fundamental points of departure in phenomenology. It is a phenomenological postulate not only because it belongs to the corpus of ideas generated within this tradition of thought but, most relevantly, because it is formulated through phenomenological practices. I – ‘I’ being any embodied subjectivity to whom the phenomenon ‘world’2 appears – observe the world (in an ideal case) without the mediation of any presupposition, any knowledge, any preference, any goal other than observing it or, even better, letting it disclose itself to me3, and I realise, first of all and to begin with, that the world is simply there – actually ‘here’, where I am. This first observation, this first expression of the phenomenon ‘world’ reveals one of the two sides of its givenness, and furthermore of the givenness of any phenomenon. This first side can be outlined with the help of the concept of the ‘gift’: the world is a gift to us, we are gifted with the world – and so with all the phenomena we encounter4. The term ‘gift’ and the act of ‘being gifted’ are intended to describe one of the basic traits of how we encounter the world. It happens in the same way as when we receive a present: we don’t do anything – and we haven’t done anything in order to be gifted – and something is suddenly, unexpectedly there for us. ‘Passivity’ is a constitutive element of the gift: our passivity – the passivity of the receiver – and also the passivity of the gift itself: we are gifted and the gift is gifted to us.
The second side of the givenness of the world refers to an insight achieved in a posterior moment of the phenomenological observation: the world, as any other phenomenon, appears as ‘co-constituted’. This insight is in conflict with the first, and questions the ostensible passivity: phenomena are the result of actions of constitution. This conflict would be wrongly resolved by attempting to demonstrate and impose one of these insights against the other thus postulating their incompatibility, since both can be affirmed to be true – both are the result of genuine methodical observations. Givenness and co-constitution have to coexist, and this coexistence allows for the formulation of interesting research questions, such as: How it is possible that the world appears as being gifted if it arises as co-constituted? Or, what kind of processes of co-constitution enable the emergence of a world as being given?
Nevertheless, the upsurge of the world first and foremost as given implies the potentiality of certain problems. The first is the occlusion of its co-constituted nature. The second, and most relevant for this paper, is the possible interpretation of the givenness of any phenomenon in a radical realist way. This interpretation leads to the affirmation that the world is as it itself appears, that is, that the world is in and of itself as it appears, independently of any actions performed by those to whom it appears. This radical realist interpretation leads to a twofold objectification of the world. On the one hand it leads to the affirmation that the world is absolutely independent from any subjectivity, and therefore ‘objective’; on the other, that the world is an object, that is, a clearly contoured entity endowed with intrinsic and stables meanings. If the world is considered to be an object, the intention of transforming it would take this consideration as its point of departure and consequently treat the world through procedures of design and/or engineering. Accordingly, the world to be transformed would be treated as a defective or problematic object to be optimised. The inadequacy of this approach is evidenced, for example, in regard to climate change or social justice. The attempts to ‘resolve these problems’ – that is, to substitute the object’s problematic state or even the problematic object with an unproblematic one – can only increase these ‘crises’ – an alternative concept to ‘problem’ – since it addresses them in a way that misunderstands their nature. The current evolution of both issues confirms this hypothesis.
Another position that can be taken in relation to the givenness of the world discloses the possibility of a different path5. The given world can be addressed as a common point of departure – instead of as a point of arrival or an end point – not for elaborating a complex analysis and elucidation of the world, that is, for the production of discursive artefacts in relation to the world – artefacts to be added to the world as its explanation – but rather for enabling a radical transformation of the appearing world by virtue of its very processes of emergence. ‘Phenomenological reduction’ (Marion 2002) – the practice of reflection conceived and proposed by Husserl and redefined repeatedly by himself and other phenomenologists until today – enables reflection to be intertwined with the process of enactment of worlds – plural – and therefore the given world to be disclosed as one possible actualisation of this process. The given world appears as possible, as only one possible world among many others that become present as such by disclosing the spontaneously given world through its re-duction – that is, through leading (‘-duction’, from ducere, to lead) it back (‘re-’) – to its dynamics of emergence. The given world appears as one actualisation of the process of sense-making emerging out of the interaction of embodied living systems with their surroundings – the surroundings that acquire expression for their living beings as given worlds, as ‘lifeworlds’ – due to the specific ways in which this interaction is performed6. Action – instead of passivity – is the decisive element for the emergence of worlds. Actions conducted by living bodies – embodied living systems, or more precisely, systems (systemically organised matter) embedded in those processes of embodiment that they co-enable – in interaction – in dynamic structural coupling7 – with other living and non-living units. Accordingly, the world – this very given world – cannot be seen, realised, and conceptualised as an object ‘such that I have in my possession the law of its making’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962. p. xii), and the bodies appear as the necessary enabling conditions for those worlds to emerge within which they unfold. Acting bodies are the dynamics that enable higher-order dynamics – worlds – to come to be, enabling in turn the arising of these very bodies as subjectivities to whom bodies – the own ones and the others – as well as their worlds appear. Bodies lived as pre-thematic, operative bodies: bodies acting without being attentively aware of themselves – before being constituted as the phenomenon ‘body’ – but sensed as world-constituent dynamics8. These bodies – our bodies, ‘us’ being human living beings9 – can mobilise their ‘operative intentionality’10 in order to perform a specific form of reflection that brings to expression – always in a limited way, since the resistance of matter embodied through infinite histories of iterations is, probably, insuperable – the world in its emergence and therefore other possible worlds. Or formulated differently: our bodies – us-as-bodies – can perform a specific disposition of their skills – can act in a specific way – in order to realise a radical form of reduction as one function of a variety of sense-making that I call aesthetic sense-making.
I conceive aesthetic sense-making basically as a variety of thinking, understanding ‘thinking’ in the way it is defined by the enactive approach to cognition, that is, as a process of ‘sense-making’. The enactive approach fulfils a radical redefinition of cognition by conflating it with the dynamics that bring forth and sustain life. ‘Varela [...] reformulates Maturana’s proposition, “living is a process of cognition”, as the proposition “living is sense-making”.’ (Thompson 2007, p. 157) This quote summarises the core of the enactivist concept of cognition by acknowledging the continuity between enactivism and one of its main theoretical references: the theory of autopoiesis. Instead of conceiving cognition as an epiphenomenon of biological life restricted to certain living beings – principally (if not exclusively) humans – the enactive approach postulates that cognition is the very process of signification of the physicochemical surroundings of the living systems – and simultaneously of the physicochemical living systems’ selves – performed by the spontaneous unfolding of the living systems’ inner constitutive processes in structural coupling with their surroundings. Our surroundings – ‘us’, again, being any kind of embodied living system – become significant for us, that is, they acquire a specific value or valence for us, due to the specific ways in which we operate with them, which is essentially conditioned by the way in which we are organised as a specific type of living system. Life itself – biological life, self-organised matter, matter acquiring autonomy11 exclusively by its own organisation – embodies enabling conditions for sense to emerge: sense, before any meaning is constituted. Operative life – life itself silently operating – induces differences, generates vectors, lays down paths, transforms in the most subtle way ‘the environments of the living systems into the environments for the living systems’ in and through the silent performances of ‘selfless selves’ (Varela 1991). Operative life enacts sense: not yet articulations of symbolic objects but, before that and as its condition of possibility, as the operative presence of the viability of our actions12.
I situate aesthetics as aesthetic sense-making – aesthetics thus as a variety of cognition, as a form of thinking – in this sphere of action: the operative – meaning silent, signless, anonymous, an-iconic, not object-directed but directed towards the constitutive dynamics of selves and worlds – action of skilful bodies. Bodies thus moved principally by their most fundamental connective dynamics: sensorimotor13 and emotional14 dynamics – the intimate connection between noticing, moving, and feeling that constitutes the intentional action of sensing, to be defined as the operative substrate of its object-related counterpart: perception. Aesthetic sense-making thus as one of the most fundamental dynamics of sense-making: the sense-centred15 mobilisation of operative intentionality that allows its reflection16 through aesthetic research practices.
Aesthetic sense-making as a disposition of bodily skills in action: aesthetic action. To begin with, ‘sensorimotor’ skills: the intertwinement of the activity of sensible cells and organs with those which allow movement. Our abilities to orientate ourselves and shape space and time by establishing lines of tension and vectors with and through our surroundings, and positioning our body accordingly, simultaneously following and anticipating. But also our capacities to notice what touches our membrane – the semipermeable membrane that combines the functions of delimitation and openness that allow us to navigate spheres of selfhoodness and otherness. And on this basis, our skills in generating the first relational valences: feeling, and emotions that tinge the self-world with enigmatic, vague, but decided and decisive values. First significations: the world – and with it, us – incipiently taking shape, or better, constantly modulating the process from which all shapes will emerge. Basic dynamics of sensing: the sensuous, sensitive, and sensible substrate of any sense(-making). Anonymous and an-iconic sense. Silent, formless valences – silence here as the absence of form. Sense not yet expressed in and through any medium of shaping – Formgebung – and presentation: no names, no images, no sounds, no smells – no intentional objects yet, but the flow of their coming to be conditioned by the necessary and temporary neutralisation of other skills. To begin with, our capacity to set a goal, a target: our ability to act teleologically. A necessary suspension of our ability to differentiate certain objects and constitute them as goals, as targets for action, and consequently subordinating other actions as means. A temporary suspension also of logic-based action, of the organisation of language-based objects – propositions – as building blocks for the construction of logical truths. Thus the provisional neutralisation of the mobilisation of sedimented knowledge as a basic condition for the production of new knowledge – aesthetic thinking, therefore, not as productive but as destabilising, disruptive, and transformative, as proposed below. And finally, the provisional withdrawal from activating our capacity of will: the necessary power to mobilise our whole body for accomplishing the above-mentioned tasks: construction towards predefined ends.
What results from this disposition of bodily skills is the spontaneous performance of sensitive organic matter. ‘Spontaneity’ as an alternative to ‘passivity’: bodies in action moved by the most basic dynamics of their own enactive matter, by the most fundamental form of mind – by the ‘originary’ or ‘primary consciousness’ (as part of the quote cited later) – ‘mind’ being (a performance of sensitive) life itself. Receptive bodies, ‘reception’ being not the result of the absence of action but the source – simultaneously, or in a kind of micro-temporal feedback loop – and consequence of the above-described disposition of bodily skills. Aesthetic attentiveness and aesthetic awareness – again as simultaneous or micro-circularly related functions of aesthetically acting bodies – enabling aesthetic action and noticing its results – from resultare, ‘to spring forward’ – which are nothing but the worlds enacted by these bodies, or more precisely, the flow of world-constitution, the potential worlds in their own upsurging: ‘the core of primary signification around which the acts of naming and expression take shape’.17
And furthermore (not that far, but rather being an aspect of it): aesthetic reflection. A specific form of reflection that instead of referring to a past event and coming or bending back to it through language-based analysis and logical construction, simply ‘gives back’, shows, presents what touches the aesthetically attentive and aware bodies. Not ‘reflecting on’ but simply ‘reflecting (it)’: aesthetically acting bodies activating the reflective agency of autonomously organised organic matter, similar to the way in which the inorganic matter of a mirror reflects light. Aesthetic reflection can be understood as a radical – from radix, ‘roots’ – form of phenomenological reduction since it allows for contact with the above-mentioned ‘core of primary signification’. Aesthetic reflection not being an activity categorically differentiated from aesthetic action, aesthetic attention and aesthetic awareness, but as an aspect, a function, of aesthetic sense-making. Nevertheless, aesthetic reflection presents a singularity: it is the hinge that dynamically connects the deployment of operative intentionality with the sphere of the signs and thus of object intentionality. Like a mirror, the aesthetically reflective body converts a signless process into objects. The operative interaction between bodies and their surroundings achieves form through the activation of a medium18. The body itself can become a medium19 through a mobilisation of its movement as a dynamic sign, or an articulation of signs, to be sensed/perceived20 from its exteriority and/or by itself. The convergence of bodily skills with other human trajectories of articulation provides different media for reflection, such as language, visuality, or aurality21. In all these cases the articulation of signs is characterised by an ambiguity regarding both their generation and their status as objects. An ambiguity that expresses the transitory character of this form of reflection. In relation to the ambiguity of their generation, reflexive objects arise through a subtle and always specific combination of emergence and production. Ideally, aesthetic reflection participates in the very process of emergence of the sense that it expresses – or even more ideally, that expresses itself through aesthetic reflection – and allows these very processes to generate signs. The resultant reflection is then an emergent presence. Nevertheless, the intention or will to reflect might be voluntarily or involuntarily activated, and acts of production can also be performed. In this case these acts should intervene as minimally as possible in order to allow for a spontaneous deployment of the reflexive agencies of aesthetic action. In phenomenological terms, production needs to be ‘bracketed’22 to a certain extent. The ambiguity of the tangible results of aesthetic reflection in relation to their objectual status responds to a similar logic. On the one hand the results of aesthetic reflection – even when constituted in the medium of the moving body – acquire a certain degree of individualisation, a specific contour, a differentiation in relation to their surroundings that allows them to be perceived, and is evidence that intentional acts of perception have been involved in their generation – probably as constitutive dynamics of the act of production. On the other hand – as in the case of production – the objectedness of aesthetic reflection should be reduced to a necessary minimum in order for its own reflexive agencies to unfold. The results of aesthetic reflection should establish conditions for engaging with the very processes of sense-making that enabled their appearance, and that are brought to phenomenal life through this variety of reflection. These quasi-objects are aimed to be reflecting and reflexive presences: presences that perform their agency of showing in a way that allows a reflexive engagement with the processes they participate in. Accordingly, contact with these quasi-objects occurs not only though perception – and hence through object-intentionality – but also and most relevantly through sensing, the kind of action involved in sense-making, or more accurately that enables and conditions the emergence of sense – and hence through the mobilisation of operative intentionality. In order to fulfil this twofold function, aesthetic reflections need to acquire a minimal objectedness, and simultaneously keep alive the dynamics that they present.
Figure 2: A series of 12 reflective notations (originally called ‘artifacts of notation’) realised in the project Contingent Agencies. For details see: https://contingentagencies.uni-ak.ac.at/N-Arteaga-20190517-1109-Venice/.
The performance of another kind of reflection – language-based, analytical, and propositional reflection – a posteriori on fulfilled processes of aesthetic reflection, allows the identification of the dispositions, media, technologies, procedures, tactics, and actions that enable the successful performance of these processes. This constructed reflection may lead to an outlining of aesthetic research practices. Sketches of practices provide the practitioner – the aesthetic researcher – with frameworks for action that might support and orientate future iterations and a progressive optimisation. Obviously, the description of a practice or a score for its performance does not substitute the practising, which due to its radical situatedness is always irreducible. The creation of pools of practices might be a genuine aesthetic approach to the question of a possible aesthetic research methodology. This proposal constitutes a topological rather than linear approach to methods, which implies the possibility of inhabiting a space of practices, and activating those that seem to be adequate and efficacious for disclosing a specific research topic under specific conditions and circumstances.
One component of the description or a score of a practice may be its name. The act of naming a practice – or even the practice of naming a practice – may generate a certain agency that, as the description or the score, but in a condensed form, supports, orients, and inspires the process of practising. In this sense, in 2020, I proposed one general denomination for all my aesthetic research practices, and I would like to suggest a new one here. These two denominations might shed light from another perspective on the concept of ‘aesthetic reflection’ that I am trying to outline. The first was ‘aesthetic practices of very slow observation’.23 The notion of ‘observation’ refers to the concepts of aesthetic attention and aesthetic awareness. The act of observing is understood here in relation to its etymology – ob-, ‘in front’, plus -servare, ‘watch, keep safe’ (from the root ser-, ‘to protect’).24 The practitioner faces their object – that which has been ‘thrown’ (-iacere) in front (ob-)25 of her, what appears to her as given, as gifted. She establishes an immediate and unmediated contact with it that generates a sphere of protected sensitive interaction – a sphere that allows the silent, non-hierarchical, and mutually conditioning unfolding of her active bodily skills and the object’s own agencies. And she does it ‘slowly’. Slowness does not indicate a measure of time here but rather an attitude towards it: slowness here implies allowing time to be shaped by the development of the observation itself – the inner time of the coexistence, the spontaneous time of the encounter. Slowness thus denominates the act of resigning from controlling time – as well as any aspect of the observation – in order for time itself to flow as an attribute of the modulation of the emergence of sense enabled by the subtle interaction between researcher and researched.26
The second denomination of my research practices that realises aesthetic sense-making, is ‘practices of reflective notation’. This name came about as a result of my deliberations on a recently concluded project – Contingent Agencies27 – and more specifically on the methodological approach developed in this framework. This approach basically consisted of the combination of two sets of practices – of notation and practices of reflection – conceived to inquire into the ways in which human and non-human agencies condition the emergence of atmospheres. In this context, ‘notation’ was originally proposed as a kind of practice intending to objectify a non-objectual issue – the relationship between agencies and atmospheres – whereas reflection was conceived as a second-order practice in relation to this subject matter, mediated and enabled through artefacts of notation.28 Although this initial conceptualisation is plausible, my own practice in this project disclosed another possible relationship between notation and reflection. Trying to practise notation as a variety of aesthetic action, I realised that the generation of articulated signs in relation to the investigated dynamics responded to the kind of reflection I described above. Notation was in fact a first form of reflection. Accordingly, the formulation ‘reflective notation’ expresses two complementary meanings. On the one hand it designates a non-representational variety of notation that consists in a spontaneous and inevitably partial expression of a phenomenon in its own process of coming to be. On the other hand, it refers to a kind of reflection that intends to show one dimension of the sense that emerges through the interaction between the researcher – the ‘reflector’ – and their object of inquiry: the very process of its phenomenal coming to be. This being the case, the formulation ‘reflexive notation’ could be acceptable in its reversal: ‘notational reflection’.
There are no bodies in a void. Bodies – embodied living systems, or more precisely autonomously organised organic matter performing their own process of embodiment – are always situated, orientated, or more precisely are constantly enabling their own orientation, their own situatedness. Let’s try nonetheless to envision this process outside the realist-representationalist paradigm and in radical enactivist terms. Bodies do not become orientated by finding their way through a predefined reality – and even less by transiting predefined paths – but by enabling the emergence of the world they inhabit, co-emerging themselves in mutual determination with this very world. Francisco Varela expressed this generative idea – rather a vision located at the core of the theory of autopoiesis – by translating Antonio Machado’s poem: ‘Wanderer, there is no path, you lay down a path in walking.’29 Action – always as interaction: the dynamic encounter of a specific foot’s movement with the unfolding of the agencies of a specific soil in contact with the unfolding of a myriad of other circumstantial agencies – preceding signification – a particular path; ‘preceding’ being not so much a temporal but a transcendental expression. Action as the condition of possibility of signification, or in enactivist terms, as the enabling condition for its co-emergence. Action – the spontaneous unfolding of the immanent dynamics of matter in contact with matter (contact maybe preceding action) – constantly (re)signifying its own domain of realisation. Not a generation ex nihilo – there are no bodies in a void – but the fundamental transformation of senseless surroundings and senseless organised organic matter into senseful worlds and selves; and once constituted, their continuous co-transformation.
This being the case, the formulation ‘sense-making’ as expression of the enactive concept of cognition may be misleading. Sense is not made – cannot be made, since it is not an object – but transformed through processes of emergence, that is, through specific dynamic connections between dynamic enabling conditions that facilitate the appearance of an event that can neither be reduced to any of its enabling conditions nor to their totality. Sense is not only not produced because it emerges but also because it is transformed, since the continuously emergent sense becomes incessantly one condition for its new emergence – another autonomous loop. Sense is thus not the outcome of a process of production designed and executed through the determination of causal relationships. Accordingly, and in a strict sense, cognition is not sense-making but the co-emergent transformation of sense.30
Aesthetic sense-making – as a radical variety of ‘sense-making’ (as clarified above) – is (a variety of) radical transformative thinking. Aesthetic sense-making participates in the above-described dynamics of emergence of sense in their most basic, pre-thematic, operative dimension. It is a variety of thinking that mobilises the basic bodily skills that enable sense to emerge and thus to be transformed in order to reflect this very flow of sense on the edge of its objectualisation, that is, of becoming phenomenal – that is, of becoming thematically present. In doing so, that is, in reflecting sense on the edge of becoming meaning, aesthetic sense-making participates in the transformative logic of the emergence of sense, and acquires a twofold, specific transformative function. On the one hand aesthetic thinking facilitates a simultaneous transformation of thinkers and thought issues, allowing an unfolding of the agencies of ‘intuitive evidences’.31 This type of phenomenon – similar to the objects of aesthetic reflection as described above – combines the power of the spontaneous and non-constructed with the potentialities disclosed through perception – put simply: the conjunction of the agencies of sensing (feeling and non-thematic noticing-moving) and seeing (taking the visual as representative of all perceptual modalities). On the other hand, intuitive evidences and the quasi-objectified results of aesthetic reflection destabilise sedimented meanings and disclose new intelligibilities, that is, possibilities of understanding intimately connected with the inner dynamics of life, as a reliable ground for the production of knowledge through other varieties of thinking.
Post scriptum 1: Aesthetic sense-making as anarcho-aesthetics
Aesthetic sense-making and the general enactivist concept of sense-making are based on one of the most fundamental anarchist concepts: self-organisation. These concepts of cognition realise this principle in its most radical way: the self-organisation of matter. There is no external power that determines the constitution of autonomous living systems – not even the power of supposed natural laws. It is not clear to me whether the spontaneity of organic matter can be understood as an equivalent to freedom. Clearly the concept of spontaneity diverges from certain concepts of ‘free will’ that respond to very different and even opposed human-centred principles and premises. Accordingly, if spontaneity could be equated with freedom, it would imply a reconceptualisation of the latter on a more-than-human basis. In any case, I understand aesthetic sense-making as a form of thinking based on an absolute respect for the spontaneous unfolding of the non-hierarchical self-organisation of the agents involved. Aesthetic sense-making – as shown in the case of aesthetic reflection – performs a radical acceptance of the course of sense that emerges from these processes, and therefore of the significances arising – of the world and of each of its enabling agencies. In this sense, aesthetic sense-making breaks with and deactivates the possibility of any normativity (to be) generated and imposed either conceptually or by means of any tradition or systemic power in relation to both epistemology or aesthetics.
Post scriptum 2: Justification
This paper draws on an initial hypothesis that the dominant power structures generated and institutionalised at all levels in the Global North, and disseminated worldwide through practices performed by and within private and public colonial-capitalist institutions, have one of their foundations in the hegemony of the realist-representationalist ontoepistemic paradigm. On this basis, this article posits the necessity of outlining radical alternatives that – beyond proposing divergent epistemologies – question the fundamental goals and structure of epistemology itself, and thus disclose dynamics of liberating disruption.
With the term ‘epistemology’, I refer to a specific approach to the relationship between living beings – in this case, mostly if not exclusively, humans – and their environments that allows the former to become aware of the latter so that these become operational for them. This approach is most clearly and systematically expressed in the philosophical discipline called ‘epistemology’.32 The keystone of this discipline is the concept of ‘knowledge’. In a nutshell, the concept is understood in this context as an artefact constructed, produced, and justified through a logical deployment of language, and that consequently takes the form of a proposition or set of propositions connected to reality through a relationship of ‘correspondence’. According to this principle, although the proposition or set of propositions are not the reality to which they refer, they correspond to it, that is, they are its justified true expression.33 This hegemonic concept of knowledge builds on a metaphysics whose most fundamental pillars are these: the existence of a mind-independent reality – that is, a reality existing in and of itself independently of the actions of those who relate to it; the consequently categorical distinction between reality and those who refer to and inhabit it; and the definition of ‘representation’ as the operation performed by those who operate in and with reality in order to establish an epistemic relation to it. ‘Representation’ is the hinge that connects this metaphysics with the epistemology that de- and prescribes how initial representations already expressed as propositions – ‘beliefs’ – are ‘elevated’ to the status of ‘knowledge’. Epistemology thus is based on an objective and objectified reality, that on the one hand is based on a concept of reality that, as mentioned above with the term ‘mind-independent’, exists in and of itself independently of the performances of any subjectivity. On the other hand, epistemology addresses reality as being an object or a set of objects, that is, as clearly contoured and stable units, endowed with intrinsic and fixed meanings. This is the concept of reality with which epistemology operates in order to define knowledge and the processes of its construction as its representational apprehension. Knowledge – as defined in epistemology – is the equivalent of reality as it is and thus as it must be seen and understood correctly by everyone, everywhere, and every time. Epistemology thus performs and embodies a fundamental violent gesture of control, domination, and oppression.
This being the case, alternatives can be developed by, firstly, conceiving reality as a meshwork of flows that continuously emerge out of the actions performed by situated and embodied living beings in continuous interaction with one another and with the agencies of non-living units; secondly, the focus can be set on concepts of ‘thinking’ not reduced and limited to the production of knowledge but rather conceived as transformative processes radically entangled with the processes of emergence of realities, and thus able to disclose them ‘from within’ as dynamics of unlimited possibilities. These alternatives can also involve extension of scope of the media through which the processes of thinking unfold, thus overcoming the restriction to language as the exclusive medium of thought. ‘Thinking’ can accordingly be outlined in ways that overcome the traditional categorical dichotomy between ‘experience’ and ‘knowledge’, and therefore between the sensitive and the cognitive. Following these lines of development, my option consists in outlining a variety of thinking that I call ‘aesthetic sense-making’ as a radical strategy for enabling, radically, free and sustainable lives in common.