Co-being, Transistence and Embodied Agency

Subject and Frame

§1. Subject

Aesthesys is a methodology of human participation. Its subject is how a person remains sensitive to what is happening, discerns the situation, determines the direction of action, and changes their own mode of participation when the previous one no longer fits the situation.

The initial problem of Aesthesys is not a lack of information or of means of action. People today have an ever-growing number of tools that let them acquire knowledge, make decisions and carry out intentions faster. The development of artificial intelligence makes this especially visible: more and more of the operations between intention and result can be handed over to a technical system.

Another question therefore becomes central: what enables a person not only to reach a set goal, but also to notice when the very setting of the goal, the way of acting or the mode of participation needs to change?

Aesthesys brings together three things: the concepts through which it organizes and describes practice; bodily practices in which philosophical distinctions become testable experience; and a question that has become practical only now — what happens to human participation when part of the work of discernment can be handed over to a technical system.

Aesthesys argues against four assumptions: the human being as an isolated subject; agency as control; the body that “knows the right answer”; automatism as something to be got rid of.

The concepts of Aesthesys are not of equal rank. The document is built as a sequence of parts: foundation, access to what is happening, significance, one’s own move, time, relations with the other, development. They are connected by one core loop of human participation (section 15). The event perspective (section 4A) describes change relative to observation, and the cycle of embodying meaning (section 28) describes the long-term becoming of form. These are different scales of consideration, not competing algorithms. Each section opens with a thesis; the main theses are collected in section 29.

§2. The Boundary of Knowledge

Aesthesys makes no claim about how reality is structured in itself. It builds a working ontology of human participation from within human experience.

A working ontology is a scheme for organizing practice, not a description of the world as a whole.⁴ As a philosophical assumption, it is judged by its internal coherence and its fruitfulness for understanding participation. Claims about the effects of specific practices and about the transfer of capacities have a different, empirical status: they require observation and testing.

There is no position available to a human being from which the world could be observed outside of all participation.

We know the world from within what is happening, not from a position free of the conditions of observation. This points to the position of the knower, but it does not narrow the object of knowledge to the knower’s experiences: attention can take in the whole situation available to observation, including the person themselves as one of its participants. One’s own position in the world, too, is accessible only partially — from a particular perspective, not as a whole (section 21).

We should therefore distinguish the perspective of observation from the field of what is observed. The former is always located within the world; the latter is not limited by the surface of the body. The body sets the conditions of access, but it is not the boundary of the world to which attention is directed.

Some propositions of Aesthesys, above all those concerning the connection between perception and action, are formulated as research hypotheses. They are not presented as established facts and are subject to testing.

The same boundary runs between people: the experience of another person is not directly accessible (section 20).

The AESTHESYS methodology organises the inquiry into human participation, but does not replace specialised professional expertise. The effects of particular practices and the transfer of the capacities they develop are assessed through observable results, rather than inferred from the internal coherence of the philosophical model.

Part I. Foundation

§3. Co-being, Inclusion and Participation

A person exists not as an isolated subject but as included in co-being. Inclusion is inevitable; participation is not.

The usual model of action presupposes an already existing separate individual who perceives the external world and then enters into interaction with it.

For many practical tasks this model is sufficient. As a basic model of human life, it is not.

A person does not first appear as a finished subject who then acquires language, relationships, cultural forms, motor skills and ways of thinking. All of this takes shape in the process of participation.

The separate individual is not the basic unit but a relatively stable form within a wider process. Co-being describes how a person is already included in what is happening; an event (section 4A) describes how, within this inclusion, a change becomes discernible.

Co-being is a mode of being in which a person is always already included in what is happening.

Inclusion is inevitable. As long as a person exists, they are conditioned by the situation and are themselves one of its conditions.

Participation is a stronger concept. It arises where what is happening is accessible to a person for perception, discernment and responsiveness, and where the person is able to influence how the situation continues. Participation has two interconnected sides: the accessibility of what is happening — presence (section 7) — and the capacity to influence its continuation — agency (section 16).

A person can be physically and causally included in a situation and yet be almost absent from it as a participant. The opposite of participation is not isolation but absence: the extreme pole of participation itself.

The established form of participation with which a person enters a situation is called their mode of participation. It is the mode of participation that changes in practice.

Co-being does not mean dissolving into one’s environment or into a collective. Individuality, boundaries, autonomy and responsibility remain. Autonomy is understood not as independence from the world but as the capacity to determine oneself within a situation whose conditions are never created by one person alone.

Co-being exists in solitude too. The body, space, objects, language, memory, habits, gravity, cultural norms, past decisions and the expected future are still included in the situation. Solitude is not the absence of participation: one can participate fully in a situation where no one else is present.

Co-being is wider than interpersonal relationships.

§4. Situation

A person is part of the situation and at the same time someone capable of changing it.

In Aesthesys, the situation is not a background against which a person acts.

It includes everything that at a given moment conditions the possible course of events: participants, space, the body, objects, forces, constraints, previous events, social rules, skills, intentions, memory and the available means of action.

Action cannot be fully reduced either to inner intention or to external circumstances. It arises from their current relation.

A situation is always concrete. There is no abstract freedom of action. There is a field of possibilities accessible from a given configuration.

§4A. The Event as the Basic Unit of Consideration

In the event perspective, the basic unit of consideration is the change that is taking place — not a figure of a subject separated from the world in advance, who then acts upon an external object. This is a way of describing participation, not a claim about the primary substance of the world.

before → change → after

(relative to observation)

This “before” and “after” denote a distinction available to the observer, not two exhaustive or absolutely motionless states of the world. We discern change from within our own position in what is happening: what was accessible to observation before, what changed, and what became different. Along with this, we need to clarify our own role in the event without making our own “I” the sole centre of the description.

People, objects, norms, technologies, and material and social constraints enter what is happening in different causal roles. A causal contribution as such is not identical to human agency: an object or a rule can change the possible continuation of a situation without making a move of its own in the sense of section 16. Observing an event, we distinguish conditions, the contribution of intention, the action of habit, the interaction of participants, and changes that no one’s design foresaw.

Agency should not be automatically attributed to the grammatical or psychological subject. In a concrete event, one has to find out where and to what extent a person’s capacity for a move of their own manifests itself, what was accessible to their discernment, and what the limits of their influence and their responsibility are. This does not mean that the capacity for agency is created by observation or that it requires a conscious decision every time (section 16). Agency is not assumed. It is located.

Ergativity serves here as a methodological analogy: in a typical ergative construction, the agent of a transitive action is specially marked relative to the unmarked participant; for Aesthesys this is a hint to consider the change first, and then the agent’s place within it. Linguistic structure proves neither the psychological nor the ontological organization of the world. The image of the middle voice also helps us see that a person not only changes what is happening but is also changed within it.

§5. The Body and Embodiedness

The body is the place of participation: visible and tangible for others, felt from within by the person themselves.

In Aesthesys, embodiedness does not mean a special return to the body.

A person never exists outside the body. Even ignoring bodily sensations is a particular bodily way of being in a situation.

Embodiedness is the bodily character of any inclusion and any participation. It is always there; what differs is its range.

The range of embodiedness is determined not by the amount of attention directed to the body but by the number of bodily differences and ways of acting that are actually available to a person. The more differences are bodily accessible, and the more ways of acting can be realized without excess effort, the wider the real field of choice.

The range of embodiedness is the basis on which the other capacities of Aesthesys become available in action.

The body is included in the situation and responds to it before what is happening receives a verbal description. Breathing, muscle tone, the distribution of weight, the direction of attention, distance and the speed of reaction change.

This makes bodily sensation important, but not the only source of information.

Accordingly, the bodily perspective is not the same as attention closed in on the sensations inside the skin (provisionally, the skinesphere). The body makes participation possible from a particular position, while attention also turns to external objects, other people, joint actions, processes and their changes. In the field of attention, one can see oneself-in-the-world, and not only the world-in-oneself.

A bodily reaction can reproduce old experience, an automatism, or a way of protecting oneself that arose in a different situation. A person can also misinterpret their own sensations.

Aesthesys does not oppose the body to thinking and does not claim that the body “knows the right answer”. The work is built on comparing sensation, action, knowledge and reflection.

§6. Bodily Conditionedness

Bodily conditions are not an obstacle between a person and freedom, but that through which freedom takes on a concrete form.

Any action is performed by a concrete body.

Its anatomy, mass, age, strength, mobility, sensory capacities, experience, skills, fatigue and history change the field of possible action.⁶

A person moves with the body they have now, and at the same time relies on it. This has a polemical consequence.

In an ontology of participation, there is no need to start from a normative “complete body” relative to which other bodies are described as deficient.

There are different bodily configurations and different fields of action.

Two arms and two legs are one configuration. Two arms and one leg are another. The absence of a tail is also a characteristic of the human body, but it is not usually described as a deficit, because a tail is not part of the cultural norm of human completeness.

A deficit is not a property of the body in itself. It arises in the relation between body and environment: a staircase makes a limitation out of what a ramp makes simply a configuration.

At the level of Aesthesys, the concept of disability is replaced by the concept of a concrete configuration of bodily possibilities.

This does not abolish the medical, social and legal concept of disability where it is needed to describe a condition, to provide assistance or to protect rights.

It only means that deficit is not taken as the basic ontological description of a human being.

Part II. Access to What Is Happening

§7. Presence

Presence is the degree to which a situation is accessible for participation.

Participation has two sides: the accessibility of what is happening and the capacity to influence its continuation. Presence describes the first side; agency describes the second.

Presence is the degree to which what is happening is accessible to a person for perception, discernment and responsiveness. Responsiveness here means responsive engagement: the capacity to notice one’s own position within the configuration of the situation and to discern possible ways of relating to it, without yet choosing or carrying out a move of one’s own. A situation may call for action, a pause, holding one’s position or non-intervention; the choice and carrying out of one’s own move belong to agency, in connection with meaning (sections 13, 16–16A).

Full presence is not a permanent ideal state. What matters is the capacity to restore access to the situation when it diminishes.

Presence, aisthesis, acuity of discernment and aliveness are related but distinct: presence is the accessibility of the situation now; aisthesis is the capacity to discern; acuity is the resolution of this discernment; aliveness is the quality of participation over time.

The possibility of responsiveness does not turn presence into an obligation to act. A person can be attentive to changing conditions, to distance, to support and to a possible moment of intervention without making a decision immediately. Presence makes these differences accessible; agency describes the possibility of choosing, carrying out or holding back one’s own move. These are two interconnected sides of participation, not successive psychological stages.

§8. Aisthesis

Aisthesis is the capacity to discern what is happening without leaving participation.

Aisthesis is Greek for sensation, perception: the capacity to feel and to discern. The name Aesthesys comes from this word.

This is not about cultivating pleasant sensations or aestheticizing everyday life.

Everything that is actually present in a situation is subject to discernment: pleasure, tension, beauty, boredom, resistance, aversion, uncertainty.

The practice of butoh is of interest to Aesthesys precisely because it works not only with expanding the range of movement but also with changing the body schema itself and the habitual ways of perceiving the body.²

Aisthesis is not a midpoint between complete absorption in a situation and detached observation of it. It joins what is usually kept apart: the inclusion that the observer lacks and the discernment that the absorbed person lacks.

§9. Acuity of Discernment

A difference that a person does not discern can regulate movement but cannot directly become a ground for choice.

Between aisthesis and agency there is a connection that Aesthesys treats as a working hypothesis.

If a person does not feel the difference between two levels of pressure, rhythm, weight, distance or tension, that difference is practically unavailable to them as a parameter of choice. The body can respond to it reflexively, as in the micro-corrections of balance, but one can choose only among what has been discerned.

Discernment here is not necessarily reflective and not necessarily verbal: a difference can be available to the body before it receives a name.

The word “directly” matters. An instrument can make the indiscernible discernible: a thermometer makes available a difference in temperature that a person does not feel. Instruments expand the field of available differences (section 27).

Acuity of discernment is the resolution of perception: the capacity to notice weaker, earlier or finer changes in what is happening. It expands not all sensory regulation, but the field of differences available for choice.

Higher resolution potentially increases the number of differences that can become grounds for action. It does not guarantee good decisions: what has been discerned still has to be weighed and embodied.

The research model of Aesthesys distinguishes three levels: first a person notices that there is a difference, then perceives the relations and structure of differences, and then translates what has been perceived precisely into action.

The connection between the resolution of perception and agency is a research hypothesis of Aesthesys, not an established scientific fact.

§10. Aliveness

Aliveness is the degree to which participation remains sensitive to change.

Aliveness is not determined by the amount of movement or by emotional intensity.

A person can barely move outwardly and yet notice very fine changes in the situation — and, conversely, high activity can consist entirely of repetitive automatisms.

The signs of aliveness are interest, the capacity to notice differences, the possibility of surprise and a readiness to correct one’s way of acting.

In this model, boredom has diagnostic value.

It may arise not because objectively nothing is happening, but because what is happening has stopped producing new differences for attention. Experience becomes too predictable.

From this point of view, boredom may indicate that a mode of participation has become too closed or too well mastered.

§11. The Other

The other is what does not fit into the existing mode of participation. With it comes the possibility of change.

Reproducing what is already known is not enough for change.

In a situation one constantly meets the other — what is not fully determined by the existing mode of participation and therefore calls for a response.

The other may be a person, but the concept is not limited to that. The other may be a change in one’s own body, the resistance of a material, an unfamiliar taste, fatigue, a new idea, an unexpected event, a change in the environment, or a result of one’s own action that a person did not anticipate.

“The other” here is not a separate philosophical substance but a functional distinction.

If what is happening is fully recognized as already familiar and receives a ready-made response, the mode of participation is preserved.

If something appears that does not fit into it, a mismatch arises — and with it the possibility of change.

A mismatch can go unnoticed — then the compressed loop of automatism continues to reproduce itself. A noticed mismatch can open the loop and make its elements available again to discernment and choice (section 15).

§12. The Point of Contact

The point of contact is the place where different sources of conditions begin jointly to determine what is possible next.

Perception by itself is not yet contact. Contact arises when what is encountered becomes a condition of further action and a difference begins to have consequences.

In other words, the point of contact is the place where a difference begins to change the situation. The encounter does not belong entirely to one side: each side brings its own conditions, but the continuation that arises need not coincide with anyone’s intention.

A wall becomes contact when its resistance changes movement. A person’s response becomes contact when it changes the field of possible response. A partner’s weight becomes contact when it begins to organize the movement of another body.

A look, a conversation, a text, an object, a surface, a taste, the resistance of a material, another person’s decision or one’s own unexpected state can become a point of contact — if what is encountered changes what is possible next.

Contact does not require a second will — it requires a second source of conditions. A wall, gravity, water, material, a partner — anything can be the second side of contact. Softness or tension against the same motionless wall gives different continuations, and neither was wholly contained in the intention.

The point of contact is one of the places where an emergent event arises: what happens in contact can receive a continuation that neither side determined in advance.

The experience of contact improvisation is useful here: the movement of a pair is not necessarily the sum of two decisions made in advance. It can arise from the current distribution of weight, momentum, support and direction, and from the reactions of both participants.¹

Emergence in Aesthesys does not require the idea of a shared consciousness or a collective subject. It is enough to recognize that interaction sometimes produces a result that cannot be reduced to a single intention.

Part III. Significance

§13. Meaning

Meaning is what gives possible continuations unequal significance.

What has been discerned is not enough for choice: the discerned continuations still have to be weighed. Meaning weighs them.

Meaning does not exist only in formulations. It takes form in actions, relationships, habits, the body, objects, the organization of time and the institutions people create.

Meaning provides the criterion of choice. Meaning and transistence are connected but do not coincide: meaning makes possible continuations unequal in significance, while transistence denotes the vector of becoming here and now (section 17).

This vector exists whether or not a person is aware of its direction and whether or not it accords with what matters to them. Becoming may move towards what matters, away from it, or gradually change the criteria of significance themselves.

Choice can change the direction of transistence, but does not create becoming out of nothing. A change in the situation and the consequences of an embodied form can refine or change the very criterion of what is significant. Such a revision is not always a decision made consciously in advance: it may become discernible gradually (sections 27–28).

Part IV. One’s Own Move

§14. Direction

From every point a multiplicity of moves is open. An error makes sense only within a task we are able to conceive — not in the evaluation of a life.

An option is a conceivable possibility. A move is a possibility actually available to this participant from this configuration.

At every moment there are many possible continuations of the situation. They are neither equivalent nor infinite. Their composition depends on the body, the environment, skills, resources, relationships, actions already taken and many other circumstances.

But as long as an action has not taken place, the possibility of direction remains.

All previous moves have led to the present configuration — and to the possibility of becoming aware of oneself within it. This is where choice begins. Choice is the concrete point at which the vector of becoming receives a possible continuation.

The concept of error retains its sense relative to a concrete criterion. One can make a mistake in a calculation, break a rule, fail to reach a set goal, misjudge a situation. It is important to distinguish such errors.

But a position is not a move. A present that has already happened cannot be made not to have happened.

A person may acknowledge errors in previous actions, regret their consequences and bear responsibility for them. The practical question of agency concerns what remains possible from the present configuration. Evaluating the past does not replace discerning an available next move.

The practical question concerns not the correction of being as such, but the next move: what is possible from this point?

§15. The Core Loop

What is encountered does not yet determine the continuation. Between contact and action a pause may open — and in it one’s own move arises.

The core loop of Aesthesys

situation → contact → noticing → pause → orientation → discernment → weighing → choice → action → consequence → new situation…

In practical materials the unfolded loop is called Notice → Pause → Orient → Discern → Choose → Act; weighing is part of Choose. Weighing is not necessarily reasoning: a person can discern bodily that this distance is right and that one is not. The choice and carrying out of one’s own move can take the form of proportionate restraint — for example, not adding extra effort to a movement that is already unfolding (section 16A).

A pause is not necessarily a stop in time, but a break in automatic continuation. In learning it is explicit. In mastered action it shrinks almost to zero, and the steps happen practically simultaneously and without inner verbal commentary.

If what is encountered fits into the established form, the loop runs in compressed form: discernments take place but do not need to become available to choice each time. This is automatism (section 18). A noticed mismatch — an encounter with the other (section 11) — can open the compressed loop and make its elements available again to discernment and choice.

The other concepts are not steps of the loop but its properties:

• presence — how far what is happening is accessible to the loop;
• acuity of discernment — the resolution of available discernment;
• meaning — what weighs the discerned continuations;
• agency — the capacity to open automatic continuation and carry out a move;
• automatism — a compressed loop, useful as long as the situation fits it;
• existence — the established form from which the next turn begins;
• transistence — the vector of becoming here and now, which manifests itself and is refined in the turns of the loop.

Learning first unfolds an action and makes it discernible; then the action compresses into a skill (section 24).

This is not a rigid algorithm but a working model for distinguishing stages that may overlap in real action.

The core loop shows a way of discerning human participation; it does not prescribe an order for every event. The scheme “before → change → after” (section 4A) is a perspective for observing an event, not another loop of action. The cycle of embodying meaning (section 28) considers the longer becoming of form. These descriptions belong to different scales of one and the same happening.

§16. Agency

Agency is the capacity to participate in changing a situation while retaining the possibility of self-determination, without presupposing full control over what is happening.

Agency is the second side of participation: the capacity to influence the continuation of a situation (section 3). This capacity can develop and be sustained, but its manifestation, scale and limits in a concrete event depend each time on conditions and require discernment (section 4A). In the core loop, agency makes it possible to open automatic continuation and carry out one’s own move; not every carrying out presupposes a verbal choice.

Aesthesys distinguishes agency from control. Control is one of the modes of agency, but not the only one.

In the controlling mode, a person formulates a result and organizes its achievement step by step. This mode is necessary and is not denied.

But there are situations in which the result cannot or need not be determined in advance. Then the improvisational mode comes into play: the capacity to notice changes, respond to them and at the same time bring in one’s own direction. Contact improvisation is a clear practical model of this mode.¹

There is also a receptive mode, especially visible in butoh: a person creates conditions under which the very way of moving can change under the influence of an image, attention and bodily state.^{2, 7} In this case, conscious intention ceases to be the only source of action.

The controlling, the improvisational and the receptive are three modes of a single agency, and all of them are bodily. This allows us to speak of embodied agency.

Embodied agency is agency whose field is set by a concrete bodily configuration and whose modes — control, improvisation, reception — are different ways of bodily participation.

Agency is not determined by the number of conceivable options. It depends on the range of actually available moves and on the capacity to change one’s move when the situation changes. Acuity of discernment and the range of embodiedness expand not the list of options but the number of available moves.

§16A. Subtle Agency

Subtle agency is the capacity to find the place, the moment and the measure of one’s own participation within a concrete process. It is not the same as force of impact and does not seek to increase control over every outcome.

A person can act forcefully when the situation demands it, and remain active when their own move takes the form of a pause, waiting, refraining from intervention or changing their position within the situation. But outward inaction proves nothing by itself: it may be a loss of participation, an inability to act, or an automatic continuation of a previous form.

Restraint becomes a move when it is a response to the situation that is available to the person — even if bodily, instantaneous and wordless — and not merely the result of dropping out of what is happening. Restraint remains one’s own move as long as it is sensitive to the situation: when conditions change, the person is able to change the way they refrain from intervening as well. If the absence of action reproduces itself regardless of what is happening, it may be an automatic continuation of a previous form (section 18). From the mere outward absence of movement, one cannot establish whether such a move has taken place. Subtle agency includes sensitivity to change, differentiation of conditions, timing, proportion of effort, and responsiveness — the capacity to retune action in response to the situation.

This description is not a new mandatory algorithm of action. It emphasizes that the precision of participation depends not only on intention but also on the relations in which action becomes possible.

The location of agency becomes clearer when the actual limits of action are distinguished.

A manager loses an important client. They cannot undo the other party’s decision, but can clarify the circumstances, examine their own errors, change the offer or reallocate resources. Agency is located in these available moves, rather than in a demand to retain the client at any cost.

A conflict arises in a relationship. A person is responsible for their own words and actions, and can state a boundary, propose a conversation or end the interaction. They do not determine the other person’s inner experience or control their response.

Sometimes the continuation depends on information or a decision from another party. Waiting with a clear condition for the next action can then be an appropriate move. Outwardly, it may look no different from passivity; the distinction lies in retained access to the situation, one’s own direction, and the capacity to respond when conditions change.

In other circumstances, a precise move requires rapid and forceful intervention. Subtle agency does not prescribe a low intensity of action. It concerns the precision of its place, timing and measure.

Not more agency. Better placed agency.

Part V. Time

§17. Existence and Transistence

A stable form is sustained by constant change. Transistence is the vector of becoming here and now: it can bend and need not be conscious.

A human life is at once determinate and unfinished. Aesthesys distinguishes these two aspects as existence and transistence.

Existence is being in an already established form. It is the body with its current possibilities, the language one has mastered, formed skills, relationships, habits, social roles, decisions made and the forms of life a person has created. Each next turn of the loop begins from this form.

The word “existence” is understood here more narrowly than in the philosophy of existence: the openness of being has been given a concept of its own.

Transistence is the vector of becoming.⁵ It is not one fixed arrow running through a whole life, but directedness here and now. It can bend, and it is always there: becoming is directed somewhere, whether a person is aware of it or not. In a sequence of actions this vector manifests itself, takes form, is refined and can be revised. The loop does not produce transistence out of nothing: through the loop, direction is embodied and changes.

The next form is not known in advance, but the possible continuations are not of equal value — it is meaning that makes them unequal (section 13). Direction is measured not by an external norm but by its relation to what is significant for the person: becoming can bring them closer to it or take them further away.

This is not about an objectively predetermined fate or a metaphysical destiny.

Existence and transistence are not two stages. A person does not first exist and then begin to change. The very stability of their being is constantly sustained by change.

A good bodily model of this relation is Steve Paxton’s Small Dance: outwardly motionless standing exists thanks to continuous micro-corrections of balance.¹ Stability, in this case, does not oppose change. It is produced by it.

Ideokinesis shows direction within visible stillness: an image of movement along a line changes the organization of posture without voluntary effort.

Transistence is not described as movement from a point A known in advance to a point B known in advance. Its structure is closer to:

A → …

The next moment is conditioned by the present but not fully contained in it. The ellipsis does not mean indifference among all possible continuations.

Freedom is not the absence of conditionedness, but the capacity to continue, refine and revise one’s direction within it.

Without the possibility of revision, following one’s own direction itself becomes an automatism.

§18. Automatism

Automatism is necessary. The problem arises when a compressed loop goes on reproducing itself after it has stopped fitting the situation.

Automatism is the way in which what has already taken shape continues to reproduce itself. This connects it with existence. In the core loop, automatism is a compressed, stabilized loop of action whose intermediate discernments do not need to become available to choice each time (section 15). Riding a bicycle or the Small Dance is full of the finest discernments, but these discernments do not pass through choice.

Without automatism, every action would require full conscious control.

A mastered skill becomes a form that frees attention for other tasks. In this sense, automatism is the result of learning and change that have already taken place.

The problem arises not at the moment of automatization, but later — when the situation changes and the form stays the same.

Aesthesys does not set itself the task of “getting rid of automatisms”. The task is to notice the moment of mismatch between the form of action and what is happening.

The roles here are distinct. A noticed mismatch gives occasion to open the compressed loop, and agency makes it possible to open it. Meaning makes it possible to weigh continuations. Transistence makes it possible to connect choice with direction.

Practice should help to open automatism when it stops fitting the situation and the direction.

Technical systems to which a person hands over action work in the same way: they free attention and carry the same risk (section 27).

§19. Present, Past and Future

The past and the future act only through the present organization of participation.

A person always acts in the present.

The past is available as memory, a bodily trace, a habit, a consequence, a created form. The future is available as expectation, project, fear, hope, direction and a field of the possible. Both the past and the future affect action now.

The statement “the body is always in the present” does not mean that the body carries no past or does not prepare for the future. It means that the past and the future exist as an extension of the present, not as a separate category.

Transistence, too, exists only in the present — as current directedness.

Kazuo Ohno’s works are especially interesting here as an example of how the memory and image of an absent person can organize movement in the present.³

Part VI. With the Other

§20. The Experience of the Other

The experience of another person is not directly accessible: sensitivity does not give one the right to claim to know it from within.

One can hear another person’s speech, see their actions, notice changes in their breathing or muscle tone, feel physical contact and observe one’s own reaction. On this basis, one can make assumptions about their state.

But an assumption remains an assumption. Touch makes the other a bodily fact of my situation, but it does not open up their inner experience.

The understanding of another person is built through observation, contact, interpretation and testing in communication.

The fact that the whole observable world can be present in the field of attention does not remove this limitation. Access to another person’s actions and their consequences is not the same as direct knowledge of their experience, motive or inner perspective.

§21. Message

Everyone is already a message. The reading belongs to the other.

A person enters another’s situation even before any intentional communication.

This does not mean that everyone is constantly and consciously communicating something. A person’s very inclusion already influences the situation.

Posture, distance, speed, gaze, breathing, clothing, silence, the way of occupying space and the way of responding become part of what is happening, regardless of whether they were chosen as a message.

A person’s very inclusion can be read by another as a message; participation is a particular, more definite form of this inclusion. Even a person who is almost absent from a situation as a participant can influence it, and their detachment can become an object of interpretation. A message does not require an intention to communicate anything.

How a message is read is not decided by the one who carries it. One can change one’s own mode of participation, but the reading remains with the other.

Since a message arises regardless of intention, the question is not whether to communicate, but how accessible to a person is the situation of which they are already a part — that is, it is a question of presence (section 7).

Presence here denotes not the message itself but the accessibility of the situation to the person: how far they are able to notice what is happening and change their mode of participation. A message can be read by another even when the person’s own participation is almost inaccessible to them.

§22. Touch

Touch bears witness to the existence of the other: the other becomes a bodily fact of my situation.

This concerns any physical touch, not only conscious or attentive touch. A blow bears witness too, as does a medical manipulation, as does an accidental collision. The quality of contact is a separate question.

In touch, I do not gain access to the other’s inner experience (section 20). But I meet something that has a surface, temperature, mass, movement, tone and resistance.

Witnessing is not yet recognition. Attention does not create witnessing, but it raises its resolution and quality. Attentive touch is not a separate concept, but contact at a higher resolution.

Everyone is already a message: my existence enters the other’s situation. Touch bears witness to the existence of the other: their existence enters my situation. These are two sides of co-being. Both preserve the epistemic boundary: the reading of the message belongs to the other, and witnessing gives no access to the other’s inner experience.

Touch is reciprocal by its very physics: one cannot touch without being touched. That is why it is at once an independent human capacity and a model of contact in general: entering into contact, feeling the response, regulating pressure, distance and direction, preserving one’s own choice.

Usually a person experiences touch as “I touch”. Contact Practice teaches one to experience “I touch” and “I am touched” at the same time.

The more finely a person discerns contact, the more moves are available in it. Developed touch is an additional channel of perception and action.

§23. Agency in Contact

Agency in contact is the capacity to act within a relationship without appropriating control over the other side.

This concerns one-to-one contact — from the position of each participant. A person’s direct control is limited to their own side of participation.

We can see the other’s actions, feel their consequences, speak with them, propose a change, negotiate. Through our actions we can change their situation and even their physical position or state. But their inner experience and the authorship of their own move are not directly accessible to us. One’s own mode of participation remains open to change — and with it, the conditions under which the contact continues change.

In contact dance, if a partner creates contact that is too rigid or tense, one does not have to respond in kind. One can soften one’s own side of the contact, or change direction or distance. Sometimes this changes the whole dance. If not, the contact can be ended.

Physical touch makes this principle literal: the pressure, distance and direction of one’s own side remain at one’s disposal even when the other side is beyond one’s control.

Agency in contact consists not in the ability to determine the other’s behaviour, but in the ability to change one’s own mode of participation and to answer for its continuation.

One’s side of participation includes all the means available to a person: body, word, status, power, resources. Sides differ in scope and in the cost of exit: for one party, ending the contact is a decision; for the other, a loss. The larger the side, the more strongly its movements change the other’s field of possibilities — and the greater the responsibility for this.

This protects the principle “change your side of the contact” from the naive idea that all contacts are symmetrical.

Agency in contact has a limit: the other retains their own agency. They may respond differently than expected, keep the previous way of interacting, or leave the contact.

That is precisely why contact remains an open situation.

If its form ceases to be acceptable, three basic actions are possible: change one’s own participation, propose a change in the interaction, or end the contact.

Part VII. Development

§24. Practice

Practice is consciously organized transistence.

Transistence happens constantly. Practice does not create becoming as a special state. It makes certain aspects of this process accessible to attention and reflection.

A practice situation makes it possible to single out one’s own mode of participation for a time and to explore it: to unfold the compressed loop (section 15) and make its steps explicit.

Learning is a slow loop: act → reflect → rebuild → practise again. First it makes an action unfolded and discernible; then the action compresses into a skill. Practice is needed not to keep the loop unfolded forever, but so that a person can unfold it again when the situation has changed. Reflection is fundamental for development, learning and the reproducibility of the method, but it does not have to accompany every act of embodied agency. Aesthesys develops capacities that should become bodily available before they receive a verbal description.

A practice is mastered not when a person performs it well under specially organized conditions, but when the capacity being developed stops depending on the supports on which it was formed and becomes available in new situations.

Tea, a facilitator, a room, an app, music, a group, instructions — these are means. Means differ in function: a support should in time become unnecessary; an instrument should not. A good piano should not make a musician independent of the piano.

If the purpose of a means is to form a transferable capacity, the success of the means shows in the decreasing dependence of that capacity on the original means. Practice should not produce dependence on a ritual, a facilitator, a space or a device.

One and the same thing can be both a support and a value in its own right. Tea practice should make sensory discernment available without tea, but it should not make a person independent of tea as a cultural art.

Nor should practice turn into an unchanging form. Any successful practice becomes automatized over time. The capacity to revise practice is part of the methodology itself.⁴

Practice can change the angle of attention: from exclusively inner monitoring to observing the whole situation, including the relations between oneself, the other, an object and the shared process. It develops not a habit of constantly looking at oneself, but the capacity to remain included and to discern what is happening more precisely.

§25. The Practices of Aesthesys

The practices differ in form but are united by a common question: in what way is a person participating now, and what happens when this way becomes accessible to discernment?

Aesthesys is not defined by a single technique and is not a container for other people’s practices. It uses various disciplines as material for its own methodology, organized into three practices.

Tea Practice

It uses Chinese tea: work with taste, smell, temperature, time, rhythm, touch, proprioception and other sensory differences. Its philosophical focus is aisthesis and acuity of discernment: the capacity to notice more differences without losing participation (sections 8–9).

Contact Practice

It uses contact improvisation, partner work, principles of manual work (bodywork), and work with weight, support, pressure, distance, boundaries and touch. Its focus is the point of contact, mutual conditioning, and agency within a relationship with another source of conditions (sections 12, 20–23).

Mute Practice

It uses silence while active interaction continues, movement and performance, and other restrictions on habitual ways of communicating. Its focus is the exploration of communicative automatisms and of the dependence of participation on habitual forms of language; the possibility it opens is the invention of new ways of interacting (sections 18, 21).

Small Dance, butoh, ideokinesis, breathing and other disciplines remain important sources and tools within these practices, but they do not form a separate catalogue.

§26. Everyday Life

Everyday life is the place where a capacity is transferred and tested.

Special practices create intensified learning situations. Sometimes a person practises deliberately. Most of the time they simply live.

Aesthesys should not turn all of life into practice. Everyday life is not a training task but life itself, in which it is tested whether a capacity has transferred.

A few micro-principles:

• Receive First — first receive the touch of an object, then apply force.
• Release Last — let go of an object only after its weight has really been taken by another support or hand.
• Minimum Force — look for the minimum effort sufficient for the action.
• Own Tempo — notice the external rhythm, be able to enter it and leave it while keeping one’s own sense of time.

These are not reminders to be mindful. Their task is to expand, bodily, the range of available ways of acting.

§27. Aesthesys and Artificial Intelligence

Technology can expand the field of available action and thought. Agency diminishes when a person stops being the author of the direction of their own participation.

Artificial intelligence changes not only tools but also the way people participate in activity.

Here one needs to distinguish delegating action from delegating participation. While handing over operations and even part of the work of discernment, a person can remain a participant: notice changes in the situation, determine the significance of differences, keep their own criteria and accept responsibility for the direction. Conversely, while formally keeping the final confirmation for themselves, a person can in fact grant the system the right to determine what to act for and by what criteria.

Work at different levels can be handed over to a system: operations, a considerable part of the production of differences — finding discrepancies, comparing concepts, detecting contradictions, looking for counterarguments, analysing options, classification — and even preliminary evaluations. This by itself does not destroy agency, and it can expand it.

Another question remains critical: who determines which differences matter and where to continue moving?

The boundary runs not around discernment as such, but around the authorship of direction and of the criteria for its revision.

The author of a direction is not the one who produced every element of the decision alone, but the one who recognizes the direction as their own, answers for its continuation and retains the capacity to revise the criteria by which it was chosen. Direction always takes shape in co-being.

A technical system to which work has been handed over can be seen as an automatism moved outside. It frees attention just as a mastered skill does, and it carries a similar risk: the form goes on reproducing itself although the situation has changed. If, together with the operations, a person has handed over criteria and direction to the system, they do not necessarily lose the possibility of noticing a mismatch, but they risk losing the authorship of its revision.

The principle of means applies to technology (section 24). As a source of criteria, AI should become less and less necessary: a person develops their own criterion. As an instrument, it may become more and more needed — just as the piano is for a musician. Instruments also expand the field of available differences (section 9).

The task is not to resist automation but to preserve the capacity to notice one’s own way of interacting with it and to change it when necessary.

Conclusion

§28. The Embodiment of Meaning

Human life is a process of embodying meanings.

It is not enough to ask what values a person declares. It is more important to ask how they are embodied.

Freedom can exist as a word and at the same time have almost no form in everyday life. Care can be a conviction and not show itself in the way one makes contact.

Embodiment is the turning of what is significant into a mode of participation. Unlike embodiedness (section 5), which belongs to any inclusion, the embodiment of meaning may or may not take place.

Each turn of the core loop ends in a consequence that becomes a condition of a new situation. A move may stabilize into a form, a form may settle into a habit, and a habit may enter existence, from which the next turn will begin. The life a person actually leads is made up of such possible but not predetermined continuations.

These forms are not final either. The situation changes, a mismatch arises, and a new embodiment may be needed.

The cycle of embodying meaning

meaning → embodiment → form → possible stabilization → change of conditions → possible mismatch → discernment → possible change of direction → new embodiment

This is a provisional, long-term scale for describing the becoming of form, not an inevitable sequence of stages. Transistence does not appear at a separate point of the cycle: it is present as the vector of becoming throughout (section 17). Unlike the event perspective (section 4A), the focus here is on the development of modes of participation over time; the core practical loop remains one (section 15).

§29. Definition of Aesthesys

Aesthesys is a methodology of conscious participation in human transistence.

It regards the human being as bodily conditioned and always included in co-being, able to discern the situation, change their own mode of participation, choose the direction of action and embody meanings in concrete form.

Its main propositions:

• Aesthesys makes no claim about how reality is structured in itself. It builds a working ontology of human participation from within human experience.
• The perspective of knowledge is always located within the world; the field of attention, however, is not confined to the boundaries of the body. One discerns oneself-in-the-world and what is happening around one.
• The event is the basic unit for considering change, not a claim about the first principle of the world. Causal influence is not identical to human agency: its manifestation and measure have to be found in the concrete situation. Agency is not assumed. It is located.
• A person exists not as an isolated subject but as included in co-being. Inclusion is inevitable; participation is not.
• The body is the place of participation: visible and tangible for others, felt from within by the person themselves.
• Presence is the accessibility of a situation for perception, discernment and responsiveness; it is not identical to choosing or carrying out a move.
• A difference that a person does not discern can regulate movement but cannot directly become a ground for choice.
• The point of contact is the place where different sources of conditions begin jointly to determine what is possible next.
• Meaning gives possible continuations unequal significance; the criteria of significance themselves can change in experience and be revised.
• From every point a multiplicity of moves is open. An error makes sense only within a task we are able to conceive — not in the evaluation of a life.
• What is encountered does not yet determine the continuation. Between contact and action a pause may open — and in it one’s own move arises.
• Agency is the capacity to participate in changing a situation while retaining the possibility of self-determination, without presupposing full control over what is happening.
• Subtle agency is the capacity to find the place, the moment and the measure of one’s own move, including restraint; the absence of movement does not by itself confirm agency.
• Embodied agency is agency whose field is set by a concrete bodily configuration and whose modes — control, improvisation, reception — are different ways of bodily participation.
• A stable form is sustained by constant change. Transistence is the vector of becoming here and now: it can bend and need not be conscious.
• Freedom is not the absence of conditionedness, but the capacity to continue, refine and revise one’s direction within it.
• The experience of another person is not directly accessible: sensitivity does not give one the right to claim to know it from within.
• Everyone is already a message. The reading belongs to the other.
• Touch bears witness to the existence of the other: the other becomes a bodily fact of my situation.
• Agency in contact is the capacity to act within a relationship without appropriating control over the other side.
• Practice is consciously organized transistence.
• A practice is mastered not when a person performs it well under specially organized conditions, but when the capacity being developed stops depending on the supports on which it was formed and becomes available in new situations.
• Everyday life is the place where a capacity is transferred and tested.
• Technology can expand the field of available action and thought. Agency diminishes when a person stops being the author of the direction of their own participation.
• Human life is a process of embodying meanings.

Notes

The event-first perspective and the ergative analogy are not psychological or historical-linguistic proof of a philosophical ontology: the limits of the analogy are set out in section 4A. The presumed effects of Tea, Contact and Mute, and the transferability of the capacities they develop, require separate empirical testing; they do not follow automatically from the coherence of the philosophical model.

1. Steve Paxton — Contact Improvisation, Small Dance, Material for the Spine; research into gravity, reflexes and improvisational action.
2. Tatsumi Hijikata — ankoku butoh, butoh-fu; work with image, language and the transformation of the body schema.
3. Kazuo Ohno — improvisation, memory, image and the presence of the past in present movement.
4. G. P. Shchedrovitsky and the Moscow Methodological Circle — activity, positionality, schemes, reflection and the reproducibility of method.
5. Sergei Datsyuk — the concept of transzistentsiya (трансзистенция) as one of the initial impulses for developing Aesthesys’s own concept of transistence.
6. Axis Syllabus and Frey Faust — anatomy, biomechanics, the physical conditions of movement and bodily conditionedness.
7. Nanako Kurihara — studies of Hijikata’s language and butoh-fu.

Sources

• Paxton, Steve. Material for the Spine; materials and interviews on Contact Improvisation and Small Dance.
• Hijikata, Tatsumi. Texts, records and materials of butoh-fu.
• Ohno, Kazuo; Ohno, Yoshito. Texts and archival materials on butoh, improvisation and memory.
• Shchedrovitsky, G. P. Works on system-thought-activity methodology.
• Datsyuk, Sergei. Works on transzistentsiya.
• Faust, Frey; Axis Syllabus International Research Community. Axis Syllabus materials.
• Kurihara, Nanako. Studies of Tatsumi Hijikata and the language of butoh.