Rhythms, Valence and Melody of Life

Although the points of tension between autonomist enactivism and active inference have been discussed recently, it seems to me that by approaching the whole through the question of lived time, we can detect a promising theoretical bridge. My hypothesis is that autonomist enactivism is essentially structured around a retentional conception of dynamic organization (past/present and thus, “historicity”) and that active inference does symmetrically the same by privileging a protentional dynamic organization (future/present and thus, “contingency”). My strategy will consist in observing the tipping point from a static phenomenology to a genetic phenomenology, within which affect plays a determining role in structuring, in a new way, the living present. I will try to bring out the importance of the relation that affect has with movement in order to justify the constitution of ecological “rhythms” and “tempos” that seem to me to be at the source of any valential formation; that is to say, at the initial point of a meaning that we can suppose and hope is transversal to living organisms, whatever their type or their degree of complex.