From interaction to transaction: The primacy of movement and the event as irreducible unit

Abstract

The target article presents an alternative view on cognition through the lens of human practice, which is experienced from within by practitioners and through their course-of-experience. It pays specific heed to micro-phenomenological and semiotic aspects that the situated cognition literature has not in general attended to. However, the proposed framework can be read as reducing events to self-identical actors, organisms, environment, or signs, which impedes the goal of overcoming the body-mind Cartesian dualism. This commentary focuses on two issues. First, experiencing, as event, needs to be analyzed by means of categories that retain the its evental qualities. This cannot be done by attempting to breathe life into people and things through enaction. Second, human life and any of its parts, as irreducibly transactional phenomena, are essentially and originarily social.