Friday October 23 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: Human sensorimotor agency heavily depends on the use of tools and artifacts. Enactive approaches to cognition have primarily addressed this dependency within the timescale of perception and action, where an agent masters a tool to act. They have characterized tool mastery as the enactment of sensorimotor agency, in which the agent coordinates with, and sometimes assimilates and accommodates the material structures that support such agency. However, enactivists have given less attention to the human-artifact relation on longer timescales: after the action has concluded, both agent and tools persist independently, and any ongoing mutual dependency cannot be understood as skillful tool use by an individual agent. This paper argues that tools and artifacts’ existence depends on collective systems that surpass instances of individual use, and that sustain tools’ functionality and material existence through three processes. First, the processes of teaching, reproducing, refining, and transforming skills necessary for tool mastery in social practices which, I argue, constitute a tool’s functionality. Second, the processes of design and fabrication of tools and artifacts in increasingly specialized ways –a process that Gilbert Simondon identified and labeled as concretization. Third, the processes of entanglement of artifact design and fabrication with broader processes of object production and human life, that create increasingly complex networks of interdependence that are hard to disentangle. These three processes not only sustain the collective systems on which artifacts’ existence depends but also impose material and normative constraints on the sensorimotor agency of individuals participating in a given form of life.