Not Within the Subject: Affective Co-Emergence
What we commonly call “experience” does not originate in a subject sealed off from the world, nor does it arrive fully formed from an “outside.” Our lived experience takes shape relationally, through the movement by which what is encountered is felt, registered, and transformed. While it is tempting to think that what appears in consciousness originates and takes its shape there, the subject, though the locus of this experience, is never its sole author.
Most accounts of personhood get pulled between two positions, neither of which is sufficient. One reduces it to subjectivity as something assembled from the outside in: a product of language, discourse, and the power regimes that shape our lives. The other reaches for the Self as something more essential, prior to all of that, untouched by discourse.
Both positions capture something real. Subjectivity is indeed produced through semiotic and institutional processes that format experience and distribute identities. At the same time, there are dimensions of experience, notably the archetypal, that do not reduce to these processes and cannot be fully accounted for in discursive terms alone. When taken in isolation, each position reaches its limit. A purely constructed subject leaves unexplained the emergence of lived experience in its fullness, while an appeal to the Self risks reintroducing a center that cannot be adequately grounded.
Here I propose a more comprehensive account of the emergence of personhood as experience, arguing that consciousness, meaning, and subjectivity do not originate in isolated subjects, but arise through dynamic relational processes in which bodies, human and non-human, mutually affect and are affected. In this framework, experience unfolds through cycles of felt articulation, relational incubation, and reintegration, through which subjectivity is continuously formed and transformed. While language and symbolic structures participate in these processes, affect is the primary modality through which they unfold. It is this modality that the sections that follow take up directly.
Subjectivity as Stratification
We do not arrive into experience as neutral or unformed beings. By the time we begin to reflect on ourselves, we are already positioned: named, categorized, and inscribed within a network of meanings that precedes us. Subjectivity, in this sense, is not an inherent property of the individual, but the result of ongoing processes of subjectivation: the production and reproduction of a sense of "I" through semiotic, institutional, and affective regimes.
These regimes operate through a multiplicity of channels: language, ideology, cultural narratives, intergenerational inheritances, technological apparatuses, and social diagrams that together format experience and distribute identities. They provide the logics, or coordinates, through which we come to recognize ourselves in terms such as: “I am this, I belong here, and I must act in this way.” These identifications rarely appear as imposed or constructed; they are lived as natural, often as necessary, inescapable, or incontestable. Yet, far from being neutral or inert, they chart and delimit what can be perceived, felt, and articulated.
Subjectivity, then, is not simply a “dictionary of our being,” but an organizing operation that structures experience according to pre-established distinctions and hierarchies. It functions through a logic of selection and exclusion, amplifying certain possibilities while shadowing others. In this sense, it can be understood as a stratification: a stabilization of fluid processes into relatively fixed configurations (identities, roles, narratives) that provide a functional, if provisional, coherence at the cost of flexibility. These configurations do not remain abstract; they are constantly enacted and reinforced in the most immediate forms of relation to self and other.
At the level of the everyday, these stratifications are maintained and reinforced through what we usually call “ego narratives”: the ongoing, often repetitive stories we tell about who we are. These narratives function as operators that mediate perception, ethics, and choices, guiding attention and shaping interpretation. Over time, they can become self-reinforcing loops, narrowing the field of experience and reducing the capacity for variation. Ultimately, they can become a form of capture: a recursive and implicitly claustrophobic tightening of subjectivity around a limited set of possibilities.
This stratification, like all other stratifications, is neither final nor ever complete. The possible spectrum of experience continuously exceeds what attempts to contain it. In fact, moments of disjunction, where one's lived reality no longer aligns with one's assigned identity, are not anomalies, but indications of this excess. They reveal the limits of subjectivity as a sole account of experience in its totality.
Affective Co-Emergence
Starting from the position that consciousness and meaning do not originate within an isolated subject, i.e. that the subject is not the perimeter of its own experience, what we call experience necessarily takes shape in a relational field: an ongoing interplay of bodies that affect and are affected. Subjectivity is itself one of these bodies: a dense, self-organizing locus of relational capacity, but neither fully coincident with the field nor separable from it.
Affect is a primary medium of this interplay, even the “currency” of this relational economy. I am not referring to affect as emotion in the psychological sense, but rather to the more fundamental capacity of bodies to register, transmit, and modulate intensities. Before thought, before language, there is already a configuration of forces at work.
And following this thread of reasoning, our definition of bodies cannot be restricted to organisms in the classic sense. Instead, we shift to a more expansive definition of a body as, fundamentally, any locus of relational capacity: anything that can affect and be affected within a field. A person, a room, a technological system, a memory, a gesture, a discourse: all function as bodies in this sense. The focus is no longer purely on their substance, but on their agency and participation in the circulation of affect.
And this move necessarily leads us to adopt a flat ontology, in the sense that no single body is more fundamental or “real” than another. “Flatness” here concerns status, not function, power, or mode of agency. Some bodies, archetypal templates among them, supply form and pull toward certain configurations rather than others; a room does not condition an encounter in the way an archetypal pattern does, just as a viral outbreak does not impact biography in the same way as grieving a loved one does, and so forth.
Within this affective-relational field, meaning does not pre-exist its articulation, but emerges through a cyclical process. A felt formation arises: vague, pre-conceptual, not yet stabilized. This formation enters into relation with other bodies within the field (whether human, material, or symbolic configurations) and is expressed, resisted, amplified, or modulated. What returns from this encounter is not identical to what emerged initially; it has been altered through relation and reintegrates as experience: more defined, but also transformed.
This cycle of felt articulation, relational modulation, and reintegration is not a secondary process layered onto experience; it is the very condition that governs experience and gives it form.
This cyclical movement can be understood as a later expression of a process described by Michael Fordham in the context of early infancy. In his formulation, the infant develops through repeated movements of de-integration and reintegration: moments in which the psyche loosens its organization in order to engage with what lies beyond it, followed by a reconstitution shaped by that encounter. Again, these early movements of the psyche are not autonomous. They too unfold within a relational field, structured primarily through the presence of the mother, whose response enables the infant's capacity to reintegrate.
What appears, at the level of adult experience, as the movement from felt articulation to articulated meaning follows a similar dynamic. A felt formation emerges, still fragile, and enters into relation with other bodies within the field. What returns is not a simple expression of what was already there, but a reconfiguration shaped by that encounter.
In this sense, the movement from felt meaning to experience can be approached as an adult analogue of Fordham's de-integration/reintegration cycles. The difference lies less in the structure of the process than in the site at which it occurs. While in infancy this site is primarily the mother, in adult life it is the broader field of experience itself: immanent life.
This parallel does point to an archetypal continuity. The role played by the mother in early development (receiving, modulating, and returning what emerges) finds a re-enactment in the way life, with its multiple forms and bodies, takes up and transforms what is articulated. This surprising resonance offers one way of understanding why “mother” and “life” so often mirror one another archetypally.
De-integration, in this light, is a possibility for transformation because it opens a window in which a configuration can loosen and enter into relation. Reintegration is not a return to a prior state, but the emergence of a new organization shaped by what has been encountered. What is lived, in adult experience, as uncertainty, openness, or disorientation can thus be understood as the continuation of a process that has no final form, only repeated movements of exposure and reconfiguration.
Assemblages and the More-than-Human
Now let's turn our attention to the agents, the players, the “stakeholders.” If meaning and subjectivity emerge through affective co-emergence, then the field in which this process unfolds cannot be restricted to the human. The relational field is not composed solely of subjects interacting with one another, but of heterogeneous assemblages (an archive, an inherited coat, the multispecies ecology of one's urban neighborhood, a gut microbiome, the lingering charge of a screen-lit night before) in which human and non-human bodies participate in the circulation of affect and, subsequently, in the construction of experience. The distinction between the human and the non-human is less foundational than it appears because, remember, what matters is not the nature of the entity, but its participation in the field of affective exchange. The same process that operates in interpersonal relations extends to environments, systems, and material forms; meaning is not located within a subject in isolation, nor contained within an object, but constantly emerges in the tensions and relations between them. This is a dynamic and recurring process: meaning forms, dissolves, and reforms as the intensities and signals shared between its agents shift and are redistributed. The subject remains the locus where these shifting intensities are gathered and synthesized into a single lived experience, even as none of them purely originate there.
And while the subject’s consciousness remains the center of intersecting and interacting affective fluxes, an often underdetected but always-present set of fluxes originates from a register that clearly cannot be reduced to discourse. It actually has a very different tonality, a different frequency: deeper, slower-moving, displaying a degree of autonomy and often a certain shimmer; felt more than known, never fully disclosed. It becomes perceptible only where the relational dynamics described above can be observed in the movement of lived experience. Transpersonal coaching provides such a site.
Affective Reconfiguration in Transpersonal Coaching
Transpersonal coaching is one form of practice in which these dynamics are directly engaged, and Open Awareness (OA), the held, liminal space at the center of the practice, is one of its key instruments.
What presents itself in a session is rarely a "problem" in the sense of something to be analyzed and resolved through argument. It is a configuration already in motion: a pattern of affects, bodily responses, narratives, and relational expectations that has stabilized to the point of repetition. These configurations surface first through language: a client's account of what is wrong, what has happened, what they believe about themselves, but beneath the account, something else is already active: a hesitation before certain words, a tightening in posture, a tone that does not align with the content being spoken. It is at this level of the unspoken and unarticulated that OA finds its entry point.
To enter OA is to widen and soften attention until it settles beneath the narrated self, into the affective field the narrative has been organizing and concealing. Nothing here is interpreted or corrected in the moment; it is simply held, given room to be present without immediately being resolved into meaning. This is anything but passivity. Holding a configuration in OA is itself an intervention, because a stratified, self-reinforcing pattern depends on not being met this way: on being narrated, argued with, or acted on, rather than simply attended to. Sustained attention of this kind is often enough to loosen what repetition has fixed.
What becomes possible within the radical receptivity of OA is differentiation and emergence. A contraction that felt total reveals itself as having gradations. A single wave of overwhelming intensity reveals itself as several distinct waves, each with its own shape and duration. A uniform disorientation reveals moments of heaviness alongside moments of openness. Alongside this differentiation of affect, symbolic material can surface: images, at times vivid to the point of feeling psychedelic, that were not consciously held before. Memories return and, in returning, consolidate into a form they hadn't had. The relative agentic weight of different participating bodies within the human/non-human affective network can also shift and be redistributed. At times the narrative itself begins to loosen and rewrite, not through interpretation, but as a consequence of the field it had been organizing starting to move again. None of this happens uniformly or in full each time; differentiation, symbolic emergence, redistributions of agency, memory, and narrative shift each occur to varying degrees, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes decisive.
This movement is not observation from a distance; it is the field itself beginning to move again, now that it has not been immediately captured back into narrative. What organizes it is not chosen by the client, nor produced by the coach; it draws, at least in part, on patterns that precede the session: the same kind of template at work in the Fordham parallel above, steeped in the numinous quality the Self carries. OA does not manufacture new form. It makes room for form that was already latent (affective, symbolic, mnemonic, narrative) to differentiate and emerge into view. New orientations emerge from this movement, not merely as conclusions reached through analysis, but as configurations that reconstitute themselves once given the conditions to do so.
Toward a Praxis of Co-Emergence
If a narrative is a stratification (a stable form imposed on something more continuous and mobile) and reconfiguring the relational affective field is the operation that loosens it, then this same operation is available wherever a narrative is caught in the act of forming, not after. This requires a specific discipline: noticing the interval between a felt intensity and its narration, before the second closes over the first. A contraction, felt as such, before it becomes "I always do this." A wave of feeling, tracked in its actual rise and recession, before it becomes "I am overwhelmed." The discipline is not in producing a better story once the old one has already closed. It is in catching the moment the story has not yet closed, where the felt formation is still differentiating, still available to something other than the account already prepared for it. The task, in a coaching room or beyond it, is not to resolve this movement into a stable form, but to remain in relation to it.
