Mind & Life Europe Podcast

Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studies, and eventually, both found themselves stretching out well beyond the confines of their original dissertation topics: Bruno, as one of the world’s preeminent historians of systems thinking, second-order cybernetics, and the Gaia hypothesis; and Martin, as a scholar of emergence, jazz improvisation, neuroplasticity, metaphor, hypermedia, and even the game of chess. Both are colourful examples of the many risks and rewards of interdisciplinary praxis, and of the necessity to lay down a path in walking.

One would be hard pressed to summarise such an eclectic and far-reaching conversation. Interspersed with many a story, our conversation took us through the finer points of agency and autopoiesis, metaphor and meaning, systems theory and jazz improvisation, jagged ontologies and cognitive multiplicities, boundaries and permeability, epistemic humility and surrender. Both bring a high degree of precision to their thinking, supremely attentive to how words and concepts, meaning and cognition, are constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and co-constructed. Above all, they are excellent tour guides to the history of the enactive approach as well as its ethical potential, helping to tease out alternatives to the models of top-down control, sovereignty, and competition. Whether through jazz improvisation or the study of certain intellectual movements, they both have essential insights to offer on how to not let cooperation become co-optation, as William Irwin Thompson put it.

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and a Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His writings explore critical ecologies of narrative, systems theory, posthumanism, and Gaia theory. His most recent books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Previous monographs include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). More here: brunoclarke.net.

An independent scholar since 2002, Martin E. Rosenberg (U. Michigan 1990) wrote his dissertation on the cultural work across the arts of the scientific concept of “self-organization” or “emergence.” His article “Portals in Duchamp and Pynchon” (1994) was probably the first to explore the aesthetic and political implications of The Embodied Mind (1991). Having addressed the cognitive and scientific epistemological implications of the game of chess, he similarly addresses emergent cognitive behaviors visible in jazz improvisation, and, more generally, how environment and culture affect cognition. He has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French and Hungarian. Originally trained at the Berklee College of Music with 40 compositions to his credit, he performed until recently in the Pittsburgh area. More here: https://webplus.academia.edu/MartinERosenberg.

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All of our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
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Speaking with Andrea Hiott was very much akin to moving through a dynamic constellation of ideas and watching that constellation shapeshift in real time. Hers is an intellect that dwells in paradox, that embraces movement, and that does not shy away from friction. Almost immediately, one is struck by her unbounded curiosity and refreshing humility, as well as the astonishing breadth of her thinking. She is one of those thinkers who pushes us to hear familiar words anew, and reengage with descriptions of our world in a generative, non-reductive way. As you’ll hear in the beginning of the conversation, her work stretches across phenomenology, neuroscience, 4E cognitive science, urban planning, care ethics, and more, and she has elaborated a constellatory approach to thinking and being, which we explore, and at times enact, throughout our conversation.

An important concept in Andrea’s work is what she calls way-making, which, in many respects, is a kindred approach to the enactive style of thinking. One of the central concerns in the way-making modality is how we can be specific and rigorous in our sense-making, while also keeping the horizon open and emergent. We need both: science that is rigorous about its protocol, agents who are clear about their positions and responsibility, and a space that is beyond representation and assessments, as well as a self-understanding that is inseparable from the environment.

Way-making has a great deal to do with how we use our attention and what affordances that attention allows in our environments, and therefore with what matters to us and how we care. For her, caring is inseparable from movement. As she says, “the body mattering is caring towards,” and “the mattering is the body coming into being.” In this context, real power comes not from the sort of representational clout we witness in the world everyday, but from the very precariousness that generates our conditions for sentience. So, she asks throughout the conversation, what does it mean to live in a world that attacks this precariousness? How can we persist in a world in which multiple forms of ‘caring towards’ are in vehement competition with each other? How can we generate regularities and affordances that encourage and amplify caring?

The conversation ends on a hopeful note, and not because we don’t acknowledge the many perversions of power in our world today, but because, as Andrea says, we are forever bound to each other, through our mattering and caring, and moments of disorientation are in fact opportunities for new forms of communication and agency.

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Andrea Hiott is a philosopher, author, and educator whose work moves across neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and embodied cognition. She has been working towards the navigational approach to cognition since 2017. She holds advanced degrees in philosophy and neuroscience from the University of Georgia, Humboldt Universität Berlin, and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and is currently a graduate researcher in the philosophy faculty (Phenomenology and Psychiatry) at Universität Heidelberg. Her thesis presents the navigational approach. She is a part-time professor at various schools and universities, serves on the board for three foundations, and has worked as a ghostwriter for over a decade. Andrea is also a ‘philosopher founder’ of Making Ways and the Love & Philosophy project. Making Ways is a multimedia care collective and international community dedicated to philosophical inquiry across the usual bounds between disciplines, institutions, and ways of living.

Link to Andrea's paper we discuss in the episode: "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating."

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If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!

All of our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
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Welcome back, dear listeners. In Season 4 of The Enactive Fold, we are "Empowering through Caring." You can learn more about our 2026-2027 programming theme on our website.

If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!

This trailer was produced by Jonny Drury, and our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
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Stephen Nachmanovitch is widely known as a musical improviser, and wise teacher of improvisation. But his is an improvisation not separate from life; it is more that of a Zen master’s, tuning into the microscopic contingencies of everyday life, probing life itself as the ground for creativity and wonder. His earliest beginnings as a scientist, and later a student of psychology and scholar of William Blake, have afforded him a uniquely integrative view on the power of play and permeability, on the Pythagorean mysteries of the human mind. Most of all, he was a student of the great systems thinker Gregory Bateson, a presence one can feel when speaking with Stephen, whether through his recounting of anecdotes, his love of silence and patterns, or his generous, playful ways of relating.

This conversation was perhaps a bit unusual for those who know Stephen’s work well: it didn’t so much focus on his two masterful books, Free Play and The Art of Is, as on the many resonances between his existential understanding of improvisation and the central questions that animate the enactive approach: Why is creativity a key feature of living organisms? Are humans born improvisers? What makes it such that computers can’t play? What makes improvisation an eminently ethical exercise in equality, and a template for democracy? Are there limits to improvisation as a tool for living well in society? How do we navigate the many tensions inherent in improvisation, between agency and letting be, between the safety of a temenos and the boundarilessness of interdependence? How do we more finely tune our semi-permeable membranes, discerning when to open and when to close? Where can we look for those “Pythagorean hippies” (as Bateson called them) who are able to see, before the rest of us, the patterns that connect all of life?

True to his mentor’s aphorism, “there are no things, only relationships,” this conversation was a generous exercise of relationality, humility, creativity, and wisdom.

Dr Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and at the intersections of multimedia, performing arts, ecology, and philosophy. He is the author of two books on the creative process, Free Play and The Art of Is. Born in 1950, he graduated in 1971 from Harvard with a degree in psychology and in 1975 from the University of California, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. He has taught and lectured in many countries on creativity and the spiritual, social, and ethical underpinnings of art, and on Bateson’s ecology of mind. Since the 1970s he has been a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola, and electric violin. He has presented lectures, master classes and workshops at many universities and conservatories, and has had numerous appearances on radio, television, and at music and theatre festivals. He has collaborated with other artists in media including music, dance, theatre, and film, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology. He has published articles in many fields since 1966 and has created computer software including The World Music Menu and Visual Music Tone Painter. He has been a Buddhist practitioner for decades and his Buddhist and musical practices inform each other. He is currently performing, recording, teaching, and writing. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For more about Stephen’s work: www.imaginaryliberation.com | www.freeplay.com | https://youtu.be/t0bS-CcOYbQ
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Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.”

Although we didn’t have the benefit of being immersed in the materiality of their art, speaking to Himali and David nonetheless revealed the dizzying scope and depth of their art-making, and the ethical-epistemological questions that drive much of their work. One could call their work multimodal and polychronological, a collaboration of disciplines and a commingling of scales; but perhaps more to the point, it strikes one as eminently enactive. Through the unusual forms it inhabits - whether performance, installation, or both - it manages to probe such archetypal matters as presence, love, doubt, mutuality, materiality, subjectivity, reenchantment, climate grief, futurity, anticoloniality, truth, and the archive—but in ways that subtly upend our usual affordances and habits of mind. Our conversation was similarly wide-ranging: we discussed how a serious consideration of something as simple as salt reveals unbidden layers of colonial history and power relations; how “sitting with the drift,” or embracing illegibility and doubt, can constitute viable epistemologies; how archival history is never really a depoliticized affair; how past, present, and future can work in ways that are completely nonlinear; how love can be a powerful technology of knowing that helps us think about regenerative futures; and how art can occasion important perceptual shifts, when other modes of communication fail. The conversation was nothing short of an anthem for the necessity of art in times such as these, and a speculative ode to futures we’ve yet to imagine.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love.

david soin tappeser is an artist, drummer and composer based between London and New Delhi. his practice explores socio-eco-spiritual-tempo-somatic dimensions of sound. his performances and compositions use rhythm as their primary medium. they explore intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference while thinking about environmental destruction and sociopolitical fissures.

Full recordings of Subcontinenment are available here and here.
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