Post-structuralist theories of power have fundamentally challenged the classical humanistic conception of the subject as a self-transparent, rational, and autonomous origin of meaning and action. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault (1982, 1991) reconceptualized subjectivity not as a pre-given essence but as an effect of historically specific power–knowledge relations. Power is therefore not simply repressive or external to the subject but productive: it constitutes subjects by shaping what can be thought, said, and done within particular regimes of facts and truth. The subject thus appears not as the foundation of social order or critique but as one of its contingent outcomes. This move toward a post-humanist, de-subjectivised understanding of power (Rose, 1999; Butler, 1997) situates human agency within broader assemblages of discourse, practice, and material relations. New Materialism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Barad, 2007) and Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2004) further emphasize that power emerges through heterogeneous human and non-human networks that co-constitute action and meaning. These decentered perspectives offer valuable insights but also generate dilemmas for critical social psychology. From a posthuman standpoint, agency is both expanded (to non-human entities and material environments) and reduced, as the idea of a sovereign human subject is replaced by relational, centreless agency constituted through networks of power (Foucault, 1977, 1982). If subjectivity itself is produced through power, notions of emancipation and critique become difficult to sustain: emancipation and critique of what, and for whom? (Allen, 2016). To deny human agency altogether risks rendering analyses of power either incoherent or pointless. Post-human theories therefore raise fundamental questions about the status of agency and subjectivity, particularly whether and how a first-person perspective can be accommodated within these frameworks.

Subject-scientific approaches highlight that any notion of power presupposes meaningful and effective possibilities for action from a first-person perspective (Holzkamp, 2013; Schraube, 2013; Højholt & Schraube, 2016; Nissen, 2012; Parietti, 2022; Busch-Jensen, 2025). Even if a person’s actions affect millions, it makes little sense to describe them as powerful if they neither choose nor endorse those actions. In other words, power cannot be adequately identified without attention to people’s first-person perspectives. Subject-science and post-humanist theory resonate insofar as both recognize the emergent and relational character of action: power is not a fixed possession but arises through alignments, translations, and stabilizations in networks. Yet they differ substantially, as subject-scientific approaches foreground lived, first-person experiences of power, whereas post-human theories tend to describe power from a third-person perspective of assemblages, discourses, and material relations. Reconciling these views remains a challenge that invites debate.

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.

Loneliness and ressentiment are not merely individual emotional disturbances but socially and politically charged affective formations that acquire heightened relevance in what Arendt called “dark times.” In contemporary individualized and globalized societies, loneliness reflects a withdrawal of social resonance, while ressentiment represents the moralized expression of unresolved injury, humiliation and perceived powerlessness. As Kersten, Neu und Vogel (2024) argue, ressentiment arises precisely when experiences of social injury cannot be directed toward their real causes. Instead, emotional wounds become internalized and transformed through projection, value falsification, reality distortion, victimization. These mechanisms convert a personal experience of injury into a worldview of pervasive bitterness and antagonism — a transformation that not only affects subjective experience but also threatens democratic coexistence.

Loneliness functions differently yet converges with ressentiment in crucial ways. It is not simply the absence of social contact but a state of emotional disconnection intensified by digital mediation, social fragmentation and the erosion of shared lifeworlds. Kersten et al. emphasize that loneliness and ressentiment form a “correlative, though not causal” relationship (Kersten et al., 2024, p. 87): loneliness sediments feelings of exclusion and insignificance, while ressentiment can emerge as a compensatory moral response — turning deprivation into indignation and antagonistic affect. In this sense, loneliness provides the ground upon which ressentiment can crystallize, particularly when social bonds weaken and individuals lack meaningful recognition.

Contemporary psychology often treats emotions as internal states to be regulated, controlled or optimized. Yet emotions must not be reduced to internal states to be regulated. Critical psychology — especially in Holzkamp’s (1983) subject-scientific tradition — conceptualizes emotions as meaningful articulations of a subject’s inner state (Befindlichkeit) as an evaluation of the environment/social situation. Difficult feelings are not failures of self-management; they are experiential indicators of restricted possibilities for action. This perspective reframes loneliness and ressentiment as expressions of structural contradictions rather than personal deficiencies. The central question thus becomes: What does it mean to rationally investigate one’s own difficult feelings under conditions of neoliberal individualization?

The psychodynamic tradition suggests that defense mechanisms transform unbearable feelings into socially acceptable rationalizations. The dynamic unconsciousness therefore does not simply suppress feelings — it reorganizes them, aligning private suffering with socially available narratives. Ressentiment thus becomes not merely an emotional reaction but an ideological form.

Hochschild’s research on the American Right illustrates this dynamic empirically. In Strangers in Their Own Land, she describes how “empathy walls” inhibit mutual understanding and how a “deep story” of betrayal, effort and moral deservedness organizes affective experience among white working-class conservatives (2016). Her informants express loneliness as abandonment by political elites and ressentiment toward those perceived as receiving unfair advantages. Crucially, this affective constellation persists even when objective evidence contradicts these beliefs — an observation mirroring Kersten et al.’s description of value falsification and projection. Hochschild notes that the emotional logic of ressentiment can override rational analysis and becomes a political identity anchored in shared grievance.

Schäfer und Zürn (2021) describe a similar dynamic in the context of democratic regression. They argue that affective polarization, loss of trust, and the perception of cultural displacement create fertile ground for anti-democratic tendencies. Loneliness appears here as a structural condition of atomized societies; ressentiment as its political crystallization. Both are intensified by global economic inequalities, cultural anxieties and rapid social transformations. These analyses underline that loneliness and ressentiment are not merely psychological; they are political emotions shaped by transformations in the social fabric.

Applebaum (2020) likewise shows how authoritarian movements mobilize ressentiment by framing social change as existential threat, and by converting diffuse anxiety into moralized blame. Authoritarian leaders promise relief from loneliness by offering belonging within a tightly bounded collective identity, and relief from ressentiment by providing symbolic enemies. In dark times, such affective strategies can be more powerful than rational argumentation.

Against this background, the psychological question deepens: How do subjects relate to their own difficult feelings — loneliness, resentment, fear, shame — when these feelings are embedded in structures they cannot easily change? This is where Holzkamp’s concept of action potency (Handlungsfähigkeit) becomes crucial (1983). The struggle for agency under conditions of uncertainty, overload and contradictory demands expresses itself as fear of contingency and the desire to maintain control. Freud would describe the transformation of these difficult emotions into cultural productivity as sublimation, though such productivity can also reinforce a split between thinking and feeling, leaving embodied affect unaddressed. Through their integration into social accepted action, they reproduce exactly the same oppressive societal structures that affect emotional suffering.

Meta-subjectivity, in Holzkamp’s (1983) formulation, denotes the capacity to take a reflective distance from one’s immediate experience. Osterkamp (2008) further conceptualizes this shift as a movement toward a “Metaperspectivity,” (Metastandpunkt) enabling subjects to understand emotions as socially mediated rather than purely personal reactions. This resonates with Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s ekstasis, and Foucault’s decentering of the subject, each marking a methodological suspension that allows experience to be seen anew. Translating meta-subjectivity into practice reframing difficult emotions—shame, anger, hurt, and fear—not as deficits but as potential starting points for agency. Within critical psychology, emotions articulate a subject’s evaluative relation to their world (Holzkamp, 1983), meaning that difficult feelings reflect constrained possibilities for action rather than individual shortcomings. When explored collectively, these emotions become epistemic resources that illuminate how people experience structural limitations and openings.

Meta-subjectivity allows to move from statements like “I am angry” to the decentered formulation: “There is anger present—what does this reveal about my position in this situation?” This shift initiates what Osterkamp and Huck (2006) describe as social self-clarification (soziale Selbstverständigung): a collective clarification of situations, meanings, and interests that enables shared agency. Such reflective distancing does not diminish the reality of difficult emotions; instead, it transforms them into resources for understanding one’s embeddedness in social relations and for expanding action horizons. Meta-subjectivity therefore functions as both a psychological and political practice—opening spaces in which emotions can support rather than hinder the struggle for greater action potency.

This decentering can transform emotions from reflexive reactions into shared objects of inquiry, opening a “standpoint of trans-determination” from which new forms of agency can emerge. In participatory settings, this ecstasy can take the form of utopian imagination and collective action — not escapism, but anticipatory politics. Empowerment here is not a technocratic tool for strengthening individuals; it is a process of understanding and transforming the structural constraints on action.

In dark times, when loneliness isolates and ressentiment polarizes, gaining meta-subjectivity can guide practices cultivate the emotional and epistemic conditions for democratic life and social change.