The concrete life of artifacts: normative sensorimotor environments beyond immediate action

The enactive approach conceives cognitive agency as a dynamic process that emerges from agent-environment interactions. While enaction acknowledges that the environment plays a crucial role in the constitution of sensorimotor agency, where agents coordinate with, assimilate, and accommodate the material structures that enable the execution of an action, it has yet to articulate a positive account of its role beyond the immediate execution of an action. To address this gap, I propose a conception of the environment that moves beyond the timescale of individual actions and focuses on tools and artifacts as fundamental for human sensorimotor agency. I argue that there is a mutual dependency between human sensorimotor agents and artifacts that cannot be analyzed in terms of individual skillful use. Artifacts derive their functionality and material persistence from human collective practices and material organizations that constitute a shared form of life. In turn, the functionality of tools normatively shapes individual sensorimotor agency within this form of life. This mutual dependency, where the functionality of tools is constituted and normatively constrains the constitution and maintenance of sensorimotor agency, unfolds through three core processes: (1) the social transmission, refinement, and transformation of the skills necessary for tool use, which I argue is constitutive of a tool’s functionality; (2) the increasingly specialized design and fabrication of artifacts, labeled concretization by Gilbert Simondon, which materially imposes a correct way of using them; and (3) the integration of artifact production within broader socio-material networks. Such an integration deepens interdependencies between human practices and object production, and impose on humans the demand of surveilling and repairing the material environment they inhabit. This framework situates enactive sensorimotor agency within a larger, socially and materially interwoven context.