In dark times, when the conditions for belonging weaken and the bonds that hold communities together begin to fray, our theories of mind and culture cannot remain neutral. They must help us understand how human worlds are sustained, how they collapse, and how the subtle drift from membership into abuse becomes possible. Enactivism, particularly in its culturally attuned form, offers conceptual tools for illuminating these dynamics. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s account of languaging, affect, and the relational grounding of human life, this presentation revisits enactive cultural psychology not simply as an explanatory framework but as a way of theorizing the vulnerabilities of social existence under conditions of strain.

Maturana’s work begins with a simple but unsettling insight: human beings do not live in a world of information, but in a world constituted through recursive, consensual coordination. Language does not transmit knowledge; it generates the conversational networks within which relational possibilities emerge. The quality of those relations determines whether we flourish in membership or become entangled in abusive, domination-based patterns that erode our humanity. With this in mind, I develop three interrelated claims.

1. Language Does Not Convey Understanding.

Maturana rejects the idea that language functions as a conduit for knowledge, truth, or skill. Instead, language structures the relational space in which learning may occur through lived experience. In dark times, when political and social crises are often framed as failures of information, this perspective invites us to look instead at the breakdown of relational domains: what falters is not the transfer of knowledge but the conditions for trust, mutual orientation, and social membership.

2. Experience Is Expressed, and Expression Is Inherently Risky.

Experience becomes available only through expression; there is no inner realm to which one has privileged access. Yet, expression is never safe. It exposes one to misunderstanding, dismissal, or punitive response—particularly in social environments shaped by fear, ressentiment, or ideological polarization. Maturana’s distinction between membership and abuse becomes especially salient here: in abusive relational domains, expressive acts are met not with coordination but with negation. Thus, self-understanding itself becomes precarious, sustained only to the extent that others respond in ways that allow expression to remain a viable practice.

3. Normativity Is Irreducible and Under Strain.

All cultural expression is normative, and our participation in cultural life depends on developing normative skills that orient us within shared practices. When the norms inherent in our practices erode or fragment, the consensual basis of our human world loosens. What Vygotsky called “higher mental functions” can be reinterpreted as the normative competencies that allow for responsible, humane coexistence—a fragile achievement that dark times place under increasing pressure.

By reframing enactive cultural psychology through Maturana’s lens, this presentation argues that theorizing in dark times requires attending not to information or cognition in isolation but to the conversational ecologies that sustain human worlds, and to the risks, failures, and possibilities embedded in our ongoing attempts to live together.