‘real presences’ meaning as living movement in a participatory world john shotter university of...

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DOI: 10.1177/09593543030134001 2003; 13; 435 Theory Psychology

John Shotter `Real Presences': Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World

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‘Real Presences’Meaning as Living Movement in a ParticipatoryWorld

John ShotterUniversity of New Hampshire

Abstract. In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them asworking in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of suchrepresentations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation interms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to beunderstood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our lan-guage does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our sponta-neous, living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses aroundus. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodilyactivity that ‘pre-dates’, so to speak, the ‘calculational’ processes wecurrently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realmwithin which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic orgestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurringbetween us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfoldingstructures of activity that we all participate in ‘shaping’, but to which weall must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is theagentic influence of these invisible but nonetheless felt ‘real presences’ thatI want to explore. Their influence can be felt as acting upon us in a waysimilar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus, within this sphereof physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others candirectly ‘call’ us into action, can issue us with ‘action-guiding advisories’,and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their ‘facial’ expres-sions or ‘tones’ of voice. Below I will explore how this—some would say,‘mystic’ (Levy-Bruhl)—form of participatory thought and understandingcan help us to understand the ‘inner’ nature of our social lives together, andthe part played by our expressive talk in their creation.

Key Words: emergence, gesture, meaning, participation, physiognomy,primordial, unfolding

Presence: an intangible spirit or mysterious influence felt to be present.(Webster’s)

meaning is a physiognomy. (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 568)

Theory & Psychology Copyright © 2003 Sage Publications. Vol. 13(4): 435–468[0959-3543(200308)13:4;435–468;033263]


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Below, I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity that liesbeyond the orderly, systematized or ‘computational’ or ‘calculational’ pro-cesses we currently think of as underlying our linguistic forms ofunderstanding—the realm of expressive bodily movements and changes. It isa realm of participatory, as distinct from masterful, activity in which, as weshall see, we must function just as much as respondents to activity occurringaround us, as free agents able ourselves to make events happen. In thisrealm, direct, non-interpretational, physiognomic or gestural forms of under-standing are possible. As a consequence of such direct, bodily expressedforms of responsive understanding, individuals can not only be taughteffective uses of new linguistic forms by those around them, but may alsothemselves, spontaneously, put those already learned to uniquely new uses,to signify particular and complex meanings in relation to particular andcomplex circumstances. Thus, among its many other characteristics, this is arealm of activity in which individuals may express meanings quite uniqueand particular to themselves—meanings related to their own unique attitudesand inclinations toward aspects of their surroundings often unnoticed by, orof no initial interest to, the others around them—and still have themnonetheless, to some extent at least, understood by those others. Indeed, wetalk of people within this sphere as expressing their own individual thoughtsand feelings, their wants and desires, their sufferings, and so on; we treattheir outer expressions as related in some way to an ‘inner’ realm of states,objects, events and processes. We talk of it as an ‘inner’ realm because we(mistakenly) take their self-expressive talk of states and objects, and so on,as working in just the same way as their factual talk about their outersurroundings, except that the states and objects, and so on, referred to areinvisible and seem to be ‘hidden’ inside them (Johnston, 1993; Mulhall,1990). But, as we shall see, if Wittgenstein is correct, rather than beingmerely expressive of our inner lives, our expressive talk is constitutive ofthem. It is, then, to this realm of spontaneously responsive, living bodilyinter-activity that I wish to draw attention. For, in our still Cartesian (Greekand Judeo-Christian)-influenced modes of intellectual inquiry, it has been allbut totally ignored, thus denying us access to that crucial sphere of activityfrom within which, as we shall see, all our higher, more self-consciouslyconducted forms of mental activities emerge, providentially,1 from lower,more spontaneously expressed forms.

Beyond the Cartesian World Picture to ‘the Primordial’

To turn first to the Cartesian still at work in our modes of inquiry: in hisDiscourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of

THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(4)436



Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1651, Descartes (1968) set out a character-ization of our ‘external world’, and a method for thinking about its nature,that has influenced our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and therelations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be:

. . . obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philoso-phers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes,and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were nowto create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, andif he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of thismatter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could everimagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preservingaction to nature, and let her act according to his established laws. (p. 62)

Also in establishing his method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excludedall our bodily activities, our bodily doings, sufferings, and respondings fromconsideration: ‘This “I”, that is, the mind, by which I am what I am, isentirely distinct from the body’ (p. 54).

Thus in Descartes’ view of our existence, we are self-conscious, self-contained and self-controlled subjects, that is, wilful but disengaged, disem-bodied and immaterial beings, set over against an objective, mechanicallystructured, external, material world. And in seeking knowledge of its nature,we must use methodical thought modeled on Euclid’s geometry. For it wasDescartes’ great belief that it was indeed possible to translate, methodically,all that was unknown into the realm of indisputable common knowledge.Starting from ‘what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly’ (p. 41) to hismind, and then proceeding by way of those ‘long chains of reasonings, quitesimple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach theirmost difficult demonstrations’ (p. 41), gave him cause to think ‘thateverything which can be encompassed by man’s knowledge is linked in thesame way’ (p. 41). In other words, we should seek to represent everythingtheoretically within a single order of connectedness. For by the use of sucha method, ‘there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach iteventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it’ (p. 41). Indeed, such amethod of reasoning—in which we must ‘borrow all the best from geometricanalysis and algebra’ (p. 42)—could, he suggested, lead us to the discoveryof God’s already established and eternal laws, ‘thereby mak[ing] ourselves,as it were, masters and possessors of nature’ (p. 78).

Many such Cartesian influences are still at work in our disciplines in thehuman and behavioral sciences. As a ‘form shaping ideology’ (Bakhtin,1984, p. 83), as a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977),2 or as a thoughtstyle’ (Fleck, 1979), they still, it seems to me, selectively determine both ouraims and the phenomena to which we attend in our inquiries in the humanand behavioral sciences. Oriented only toward what we see as objective in

SHOTTER: ‘REAL PRESENCES’ 437



our surroundings, we attend away from the ‘shaping’ influence of such abackground set of felt influences, of such spontaneously expressed responsesor inclinations in our inquiries.

But as Kuhn (1970) noted:

Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks ithas acquired answers to questions like the following: What are thefundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do theseinteract with each other and with the senses? What questions may legit-imately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed inseeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers . . . to questionslike these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that preparesand licences the student for professional practice. (pp. 4–5)

Thus all our professionally institutionalized inquiries proceed on the as-sumption that we already know how best to visualize and represent the basic,general nature of ourselves and our world, and not only how to choose therelevant elements of our study, but also how to link them together into asystematically interconnected unity of some kind. And further, in a stronglyrationalistic culture such as ours, even though, paradoxically, its generalcharacter, as an inert, mechanistically organized world, is already pre-determined, we are nonetheless obliged to present our views as having beenarrived at by deduction from the material represented. But to do this, wemust employ a writing style in which the most abstract philosophicalprinciples and concrete factual details must be melded into a unity of toneand viewpoint, a rhetorical style in which we as authors disappear, and inwhich objectivity as such is pervasive. It is a form of writing within whichwe claim that ‘the facts speak for themselves’.

However, in reality, the matter is otherwise. As Kant (1970) put it in1781, if we are to follow ‘the true path of a science’ (p. 17), then we mustfunction only as ‘an appointed judge who compels the witness to answerquestions which he himself has formulated’, and we must refuse to allowourselves ‘to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings’ (p. 20). But inseeking only mastery and in refusing to allow ourselves to be led by (to bespontaneously responsive to) nature in any way, we restrict ourselves toacting only in terms of our own wants, desires or reasons. To repeat, weignore an important source of knowledge: our spontaneous responsiveness tothe others and othernesses around us. In other words, the form-shapingideology implicitly at work in such a style of writing is, as Bakhtin (1984)terms it, one of a ‘monological’ kind. In transforming the world into arepresentation arrived at only as the result of deduction, we ‘inevitablytransform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction’(p. 83). We make ourselves ‘deaf to the other’s response’ (p. 293).

How might our disciplinary lives might change if we were to adopt a very




different ‘form-shaping ideology’ in our inquiries in the human and beha-vioral sciences? What if, rather than as Descartes’s self-centered and self-controlled, subjective minds, ‘standing’ (if that is the right word to apply tosuch disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, webegin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger,ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant partswithin such a whole, rather than seeking exclusively to be ‘masters andpossessors’ of it, we might also find ourselves subjected as respondents to‘its’ requirements as much as, if not more than, we can subject it to ours.If that were so, while still perhaps seeking mastery of some of its aspects—seeking to understand how we might use them as a means to our ownends—we would also need to seek another quite different kind ofunderstanding. We would need to understand ‘its’ expressions, respond to‘its’ calls, and so on. For, as an other or otherness to which we must,unavoidably, respond, we would need to develop forms of response in whichwe can collaborate or participate with ‘it’ in achieving our goals.

Now the quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explana-tions: we seek sure-fire procedures for intervening in ongoing activitiescausally, that is, in a one-way, mechanical cause-and-effect fashion, toinfluence their outcome in a predictable manner. Or, to put it another way,we seek to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar. The desire to understand,however—as a matter of understanding how to respond to the uniquelyexpressive physiognomic aspects of our surroundings, for this once andnever to be repeated time—is much harder to describe. It is not a matter ofsomething happening to us intellectually. In what follows, I will try toexplicate it in practical, Wittgensteinian terms, in which ‘a philosophicalproblem has the form: “I don’t know my way about” ’ (Wittgenstein, 1953,no. 123), and in which an understanding enables one to say and to act in away one can justify to others that ‘[n]ow I know how to go on’ (no. 154). Inother words, such a form of understanding is something that we show,manifest or display in our everyday practical activities when, for instance,we tell someone that we have understood his or her spoken street directions,how to follow a cooking recipe, how to execute a piece of carpentry, or howto play a piece of music well, or in telling someone else what another hastold us, or of what we have read in a book. Rather than precise factualinformation, in such a form of understanding we gain an orientation, a senseof where and how we are ‘placed’ in relation to the others are around uswithin the landscape of possibilities within which we are all acting. Wemight call them orientational understandings. But, to repeat, suchunderstandings—which have, I suggest, a relationally responsive form tocontrast them with the representational-referential forms much more famil-iar to us in our intellectual lives—do not make themselves readily availableto us in our intellectual reflections. Just as our understanding of questions




posed to us is expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationallyresponsive understanding of other events occurring around us manifested ordisplayed in the responses we give to them.

As George Mead (1934) puts it:

The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before theemergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act oradjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the firstorganism the meaning it has. (pp. 77–78, my emphasis)

Prior to our conscious awareness of our actions as having meaning, prior toour establishing of any social conventions, our acting in accord with therule-like requirements of our surrounding circumstances is something we dospontaneously, without choice—difficult though it may be to accept the fact.It is as if there is an extra voice, an authoritative voice, situated in oursurroundings, ‘telling’ us what to do next. In his investigations into thequestion ‘How am I able to obey a rule?’, Wittgenstein (1953) describes ouracting according to a rule as follows: ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose.I obey the rule blindly’ (no. 219). It is as if we hear the ‘voice’ of the ruleand ‘we do what it tells us’ (no. 223). So that when we see a series ofnumbers, we see it in a certain way, ‘algebraically, and as a segment of anexpansion . . . we look to the rule for instruction and do something, withoutappealing to any thing else for guidance’ (no. 228).3

Thus, the turn I want to take here, toward accepting ourselves as primarilyliving bodies, related directly to our surroundings by our spontaneousresponsiveness to them, is more than just the turn away from treatingourselves as disembodied minds, related only indirectly to our surroundingsby inner, mental representations of it. It is also a turn away from the focus onthoughts and beliefs as being central to our intellectual lives, toward acentral focus on our spontaneously performed activities and practices. Inother words, to repeat, it is a turn toward a participative and dialogicallystructured world in which meanings arise inevitably and inexorably inpeople’s living, responsive reactions to the ‘callings’ of events occurringaround them. As such, it is a turn in which few of our current disciplinaryattitudes and inclinations, the disciplinary resources upon which we draw inour intellectual inquiries—shaped as they still are by an unidentified andthus remitting Cartesianism—can remain unchanged. Indeed, as I will arguein a moment, we will need a new kind of understanding of a new world, aworld that might be called the precursor to Descartes’ external world. Weneed to know, as participants within it, our way around inside what isvariously called ‘the Background’ (Searle, 1983; Wittgenstein, 1980), or the‘primordial’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968). I call it a precursor world, as weshall find ourselves (as a perhaps unexpected consequence of our turn tosuch a participative world) already involved in executing spontaneously




within it precursors to, or, in Wittgenstein’s (1981, no. 541) terms, ‘proto-types’ of, all our later, more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.

‘Real Presences’ in the Indivisible Unity of a ParticipatoryWorld

Central to the exploration I want to conduct below, then, is a very specialphenomenon that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive,dialogically structured, living, embodied relations with the others andothernesses around us—when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively,over against them, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvementwith them. It is here, in the intricate ‘orchestration’ of the interplayoccurring between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward thoseothers (or othernesses) and their equally responsive incoming expressionstoward us that a very special kind of understanding of this special phenome-non becomes available to us. The phenomenon in question is the creation,within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in thesituation at that moment, of distinctive, dynamically changing forms, anemerging sequence of changes (or ‘differencings’) each one with its ownunique ‘shape’ that, although invisible, is felt by all involved as participantswithin it in the same way. We can find a model for such felt forms in, say,the 3-D shapes, the ‘spirals’, ‘pyramids’, or whatever, that we see organizedin depth before us as we scan over particular 2-D random-dot stereograms.(Another paradigm, of course, is that of ‘seeing’ meaning in the array ofprint spread out before us on this page.) While we may scan our two eyesover the 2-D stereogram before us as we please, the dots are arranged on thepage in such a way that they present us with their own unique binocular‘requirements’ if we are to see the ‘3-D spiral’ or whatever that is invisiblypresent within them as we scan over them. So, although we may all lookover the dots as we please, they are arranged on the page in such a way that,like a camera with automatic focus, in one direction we can only find acommon binocular focus at this distance, in another direction only at thatdistance, in another only at another distance, and so on. Thus we will all seeprecisely the same ‘spiral’. Further, our embodied sense of it as a 3-D formwill not emerge in an instant, but only in the unfolding temporal course ofour visual involvement with the special patterning of the dots on the 2-Dpage.4 But to see it we must let ‘it’, the ‘spiral’ to be, control our looking.And just as the 3-D ‘spiral’, say, that we see stretching out in depth before usis located neither ‘on’ the page, nor ‘in’ our heads, but ‘out’ in the spacebetween us and the page, so are all the felt dynamic forms in question here.They only have their being within our living involvements with oursurroundings.




William James (1981), in his famous ‘The Stream of Thought’ chapter,discussed in a similar way the nature of such dynamic forms, and pointedout a number of mistakes we tend to make if, in fact, our thinking has sucha character. We fail, he suggested, to register ‘the transitive parts’ of thestream and succumb to an ‘undue emphasizing of [its] substantive parts [i.e.its resting-places]’ (p. 237). Indeed, in so doing, we tend to confuse

. . . the thoughts themselves . . . and the things of which they are aware. . . .[But, while] the things are discrete and discontinuous . . . their comings andgoings and contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks themthan they break the time and space in which they lie. (p. 233)

In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within thestream of thought as ‘in very large measure constituted of feelings oftendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all’ (p. 246).5

And I want to suggest the same here, except that, instead of the momentarydynamic stabilities in question being in a stream of thought in people’sheads, they occur out within the larger flow of inter-activity within which weand they are all responsively involved.

Clearly such forms, then, apart from their moment-by-moment emergencewithin the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, have nosubstantial existence in themselves. Yet, in being ‘out there’ as distinctiveothernesses in their own right, partially but not wholly responsive to ouractions, such forms have the character of ‘real presences’ (Steiner, 1989).While invisible as such, they are not ‘nothings’; they are ‘somethings’ witha felt presence. Understanding their nature affords us not only a sense of‘who’ the others around us ‘are’, but also of ‘where they are coming from’,of how we are ‘placed’ in relation to them, and of how we might ‘go on’with them in the future. It is a kind of understanding we express by sayingthat we feel ‘on a footing’ with them. In short, more than merely a sense ofan other’s nature in itself, we come to a sense of their expressions asoccurring in relation to a landscape of possibilities, in fact in relation to ‘aworld’. As an example of just such a world, present to us for a brief momentin a person’s utterance, Wittgenstein (1980) asks us to consider a circum-stance in which the word ‘Farewell!’ is uttered in a certain plaintive tone ofvoice. ‘A whole world of pain is contained in these words’, he comments.‘How can it be contained in them?,’ he asks. ‘It is bound up with them. Thewords are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow’ (p. 52).

While Steiner (1984, 1989) talks of the emergence in such circumstancesof a ‘real presence’, others suggest that this phenomenon—the emergence ofan active ‘it’ with its own requirements within the dialogically structuredactivities occurring between people, an agentic ‘third party’—is quitegeneral. Gadamer (1989), for instance, puts it thus: ‘In genuine dialoguesomething emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself’(p. 462). For Gadamer, that ‘something’ is often a tradition to which we




belong, within which we participate, where ‘belonging is brought about bytradition’s addressing us’ (p. 463). For Bakhtin (1986), this ‘something’ istermed both a ‘superaddressee . . . whose absolutely just responsive under-standing is presumed’ (p. 126) in our voicing of our utterances, as well as‘the witness and the judge’ (p. 137). ‘Each dialogue takes place’, he says:

. . . as if against a background of the responsive understanding of aninvisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in thedialogue (partners). . . . The aforementioned third party is not any mysticalor metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of theworld, he can be expressed as such)—he is a constitutive aspect of thewhole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it. (pp.126–127)

Such a third agency is at work in all dialogically structured activities. Theutterance of even a single word is, Bakhtin (1986) suggests, ‘a drama inwhich three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performedoutside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author’ (p. 122).Thus, even when we are in fact all alone, once an event becomes aconsciously noticeable event, then, it appears to us—if not as an alreadywitnessed and judged event—as a noticing that we could, potentially at least,share with others. Thus, to talk of something as being ‘consciousness’ in thisway—as something witnessable with others—is to go back, as Toulmin(1982) suggests, to the origins of the word ‘consciousness’ in Roman Law,in which con (with) and scientia (knowing)6 refer to the notion of knowingtogether with others or joint-knowing.

It is the existence of such ‘its’, such real presences as agencies, to whichwe must be answerably responsive, that makes our lives within a partici-patory reality quite distinct from life within a neutral or inert world of anexternal, objective kind. Like a grammar or a syntax, we experience such‘its’ as external authorities to which we must be responsive and responsible.We cannot wish them away. Indeed, we feel ourselves coerced by, subjectedto or compelled by ‘their’ requirements. We can no longer treat such a worldas this as an inert, voiceless object. But we must also, as we shall see, thinkdifferently of voices and language, of the importance of our bodily expres-sions.

In making sense of Steiner’s, Gadamer’s and Bakhtin’s claims that agent-like, authoritative ‘somethings’ emerge to influence us within our dialog-ically structured activities, we should not think of such activities as beingsolely and simply a matter of people exchanging well-defined words witheach other. When Gadamer, for instance, talks of dialogue or conversation, avery different notion of language is at work in what he has to say than thenotions of language we currently take for granted. Indeed, for him, there isno such thing as language. At least, not if we think of it as a sharedsystematic structure of rule-governed linguistic forms, in which language




users gain a competency that they then apply in performing appropriatesentence structures on given occasions. ‘Language’, as he sees it:

. . . is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it dependsthe fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man asfor no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature.. . . Thus, that language is originally human means at the same time thatman’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic. (Gadamer, 1989,p. 443)

In other words, of everything toward which our understanding can bedirected we can say that ‘being that can be understood is language’ (p. 474).Or, to put it another way, more than merely reflecting on something alreadygiven, it is ‘the coming into language of a totality of meaning’ (p. 474) thatmakes our first-time understandings possible. Such original understandingsare not ‘a methodic activity of the subject’, not something that we ourselvesdo deliberately and impose on our surroundings; they are ‘something that thething itself [as a real presence] does and which thought “suffers” ’(p. 474).

But in making this claim, rather than an objective stance, in which aperson and his or her language are two separate entities in an externalrelation to each other, Gadamer is taking a participatory stance towardlanguage: ‘language is a medium in which I and world meet or, rather,manifest their original belonging together’ (p. 474). In such a participatorystance, ‘I’, ‘my world’ and ‘my language’ are all internally related partici-pant parts of a larger, indivisible, dynamic whole, a ceaseless stream ofongoing activity, of understandable-being in motion. Thus the ‘parts’ inquestion are not at all physically distinct or separable parts as such, butdistinctions of function or of role being played, that is, they are participantparts, in relation to the conduct of the whole stream of activity within whichthey have their existence, that is, the ‘world’ as a ‘real presence’:

Coming to an understanding through human conversation is no differentfrom the understanding that occurs between animals. But human languagemust be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguisticcommunication, ‘world’ is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in lan-guage places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputedobject set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden bynone and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another. (p. 446)

At any one moment, the participant parts of a ‘real presence’ within such astream of activity owe not just their character, but their very existence, bothto each other, and to their relations to the ‘parts’ of the presence at someearlier point in time—as well as, so to speak, ‘pointing toward’ or ‘callingfor’ a range of next possible ‘parts’.

Unlike a mechanical assemblage constructed of objective parts that retaintheir character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of themechanism or not, such an ongoing stream, as an indivisible unity, is quite




different. Like the growth of a living organism, which is a living unity fromits very inception, it is held together as such from within by the fact that allits parts depend on their inner relations with each other to sustain them inexistence as the parts they are. They are all, thus, intrinsically or reciprocallyimplicated in each other. Hence, when a change in the dynamic relationsoccurs in one region of the unfolding stream, the whole is affected. Andchanges produced within the whole—along with the ‘feelings of tendency’available to individual participants within it—‘point beyond’ or ‘outside’themselves, so to speak, to aspects of the whole of which they are only apart. We thus find ourselves, intrinsically and automatically, at any onemoment, oriented both toward past events in our surroundings as well astoward others yet to come.

As subjects of the implicit Cartesianism in our academic traditions,however, things are different. Used to thinking of ourselves as disembodiedminds, we treat ourselves as influenced by the isolated, neutral objectsaround us, either in a cause-and-effect way, or cognitively, by how werepresent them to ourselves. The possibility of our responding to agenticpresences in our surroundings is quite foreign to such a style of thought.Thus when we talk of inner representations as being central to our in-tellectual and mental lives, we think of them only as passive objects ofthought having a certain logical structure to them, such that, if the thingrepresented is composed of many parts, so must its representation be. Hence,the fittingness of such structures to the circumstances represented cannot bea matter of an immediate correspondence; they do not ‘speak for them-selves’. Nor does their relation to the larger background within which theyhave their being play any immediate part in our understanding of theirnature. It all is a matter of deliberation, of argument and interpretationamong us as theorists.

But things are quite different when considered from within the indivisiblestream of responsive inter-action within which we (and they) are embeddedas participant parts. There we may suggest, as James (1981) suggests withrespect to the stream of thought, that ‘it is nothing jointed; it flows . . . [suchthat] the transition between the thought of one object and the thought ofanother is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a breakin the wood’ (pp. 233–234). And just as James affirms that ‘the chain ofconsciousness is a sequence of differents’, so we can agree with Bateson(1972) that what matters to us is a shift in bodily activity or energy, theoccurrence of a ‘difference that makes a difference’ (p. 453). We may alsonote something similar to James (1981) when he remarks:

Into the awareness of thunder itself the awareness of the previous silencecreeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is notthunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite




different from what it would be were the thunder the continuation ofprevious thunder. (p. 234)

Once ‘in touch’, so to speak, with a real presence, while only an aspect of itmay at any one moment occupy our focal attention, all of it as an indivisiblewhole is, nonetheless, spontaneously ‘there’ available to us, with what is inthe background for us giving what is central to our attention its character.

A Precursor World to the Cartesian World: The ‘Primordial’or the ‘Background’

There is something very special, then, not just about our dialogicallystructured embedding within the ceaselessly ongoing, indivisible stream ofspontaneously mutually responsive, bodily inter-activity, but also about the‘differences that make a difference’ to us from within that embedding. Here,following Wittgenstein (1980), I want to explore how such difference-making events, along with the spontaneously responsive reactions theyoccasion, can, for example, function as ‘the origin and primitive form of thelanguage game’ (p. 31), where what he means by the word ‘primitive’ here,he notes elsewhere, is that ‘this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that alanguage-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinkingand not the result of thought’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 541). In other words,unlike those actions we do deliberately, when we are in a one-way,monologic relation to our surroundings, in which our inner experiencesshape our outer expressions, on some occasions at least, when we enter intospontaneously responsive, dialogically structured relations with our sur-roundings, the case is reversed: our outer expressions shape our innerexperiences, and on these occasions our outer expressions are to an extentshaped by our outer circumstances. In other words, our expressions aresometimes expressive of our relations to our surroundings. But to repeat, thisis not always the case. It only occurs, as Volosinov (1986) points out, when‘the immediate social situation and the broader social milieu whollydetermine—and determine from within, so to speak—the structure of anutterance’ (p. 86). When this is the case:

. . . the location of the organizing and formative center [of an utterance] isnot within [the person] but outside. It is not experience that organizesexpression, but the other way around—expression organizes experience.Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity ofdirection. (p. 85)

And we can note, recalling Mead’s (1934) remark above, that meaning isspontaneously present in the social act before the emergence of conscious-ness or awareness of meaning occurs, that this all occurs spontaneously. Inother words, as these workers all in their own ways point out, we canexecute original meaningful acts from within our embedding in an ongoing




stream of spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity, without our beingconsciously or planfully aware of so doing.

Another, perhaps unexpected consequence of our embedding in such aceaseless flow of living activity is that the complex self-initiated acts weperform consciously and deliberately later in life, that is, not unthinkinglyand impulsively in response to circumstances, but in ways intelligible andjustifiable to the others around us, as in, say, the conduct of a piece ofmathematical reasoning, we can build up from an ‘orchestrated’ sequence ofmore simple acts we first execute spontaneously. In other words, we canoften look back to find precursors to our supposed, current, inner mentalcapacities in our earlier outer activities. This possibility, as is well known, isexplicitly claimed to be the case by Vygotsky (1986). ‘The general law ofdevelopment’, he suggests:

. . . says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a veryadvanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has beenused and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject afunction to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it.(p. 168)7

But if we are to study how this is possible, what we must investigate isour embedding in this spontaneous flow of meaningful activity, ‘before theemergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs’, to repeatMead’s phrase above. But how? For it would seem that all our scholarlytraining, which orients us toward a set of already determined fundamentalentities and the relations between them, and the questions that may be askedabout them, steers us out onto the scene much too late, and then leads us tolook in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude. We only arrive on thescene after we have passed our exams and adopted into our heads certainalready agreed (often Cartesian-inspired) versions of what is occurring out inthe world between us. But then, not content with that, we look backwardtoward already existing actualities and past accomplishments to find a causalpattern in them, seeing them as mechanisms external to ourselves, ratherthan looking forward, toward the new possibilities provided to us fromwithin our present relational involvements. And we do all this with thewrong attitude. For we seek a static, dead picture, a theoretical representa-tion of a state of affairs, rather than a living sense of our circumstances as anactive, authoritative and action-guiding agency in our lives. In other words,our investigations have an ‘after the fact’ and a ‘beside the point’ quality tothem.8

Such a set of Cartesian orientations, such an objective stance, as we havealready seen, misleads us into ignoring the unique, interwoven and recipro-cal nature of our immediate, living, mindful but thoughtless, bodily inter-actions, and the felt ways of making sense occurring between us even now,in the present moment—between, for example, me as a writer now and you




as a later reader. It is within such present ‘interactive moments’, if we cancall them that, that such spontaneously occurring, pre-intellectual precursorsto our later deliberations make their appearance. It is also within suchmoments that our responsiveness to our surroundings is in some wayexpressive of our surroundings—as when, for instance, I deliberately ‘lookinto space’, or turn to nod and smile, on meeting a stranger on the street.Indeed, it is within such moments, as we have already noted, that certain‘real presences’ can, like actual others around us, ‘call’ us to action, canissue ‘action-guiding advisories’, and can ‘witness and judge’ what we dowith their ‘facial’ and ‘vocal’ expressions. This is the force of both Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) and Wittgenstein’s (1953) suggestion that meaning in oureveryday life activities is a physiognomy, which is to say, that just as aperson, as a living, indivisible unity, is corporeally alive and present in everyone of their expressions, in their smiles and frowns, their looks of puzzle-ment and understanding, so ‘real presences’ are manifested, literally, in thesame way, not behind, but in appearances. And just as a person’s friendly orhostile facial expression, which, although changing in its responsiveness tous, sets the overall ‘style’ of our emotional-valuative relation with thatperson by remaining on his or her face during our unfolding involvementtogether, so the physiognomy, the ‘face’, of an event in our surroundingsalso sets the overall ‘style’ of relation to it in the same way.

Our implicit Cartesianism—with its emphasis on finished (neutral, geo-metrical) forms and patterns rather than on ‘styles’ of living movement—hasled us to ignore the expressive aspect both of our own activities and of theother activities around us, present in their ongoing, emerging ‘shape’ as theyunfold in a spontaneous, dialogically structured responsiveness to theircircumstances. It has been, so to speak, left as an absent-presence in thebackground to our lives, rationally unacknowledged but nonetheless still atwork in our (thus self-deceptive) thinking. But as Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty remind us, this more primordial form of understanding, althoughusually left as unnoticed background, has not actually been left behind in ourhigher forms of mental activity. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) sees it:

Thought and expression, then, are simultaneously constituted, when ourcultural store is put at the service of this unknown law, as our bodysuddenly lends itself to some new gesture. The spoken word is a genuinegesture, and contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture containsits. This is what makes communication possible. In order that I mayunderstand the words of another person, it is clear that his vocabulary andsyntax must be ‘already known’ to me. But that does not mean that wordsdo their work by arousing in me ‘representations’ associated with them,and which in aggregate eventually produce in me the original ‘representa-tion’ of the speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not ‘representa-tions’ or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being andwith the ‘world’ at which he directs his aim. (p. 183, my emphasis)




Thus, for Merleau-Ponty here, the world within which we experienceourselves as speaking is not a neutral world toward which we can act as welike, but a world in which events possess, as Bakhtin (1993) puts it, a‘compellently actual “face” ’ (p. 45). It is a world that variously obliges us toact in certain ways, that witnesses our acts, and, in so doing, judges them as‘answers’ to ‘its questions’, the aims which we must satisfy in meeting ‘its’requirements in our acts.

In attempting to describe the nature of what I have above called theprecursor world, and to relate it to the more familiar Cartesian world of ourintellectual inquiries, I have had to resort to quite a number of poetic imagesand metaphors: talk of faces and voices, of agents and influences, oflandscapes and horizons, gaps and openings, and so on. Why is this? Whyisn’t a more neutral technical account possible? Some comments by Searle(1983) might be helpful here. He notes in his discussion of what he calls the‘Background’ that:

. . . there is a real difficulty in finding ordinary language terms to describethe Background: one speaks vaguely of ‘practices’, ‘capacities’, and‘stances’ or one speaks suggestively but misleadingly of ‘assumptions’ and‘presuppositions’. These latter terms must be literally wrong, because theyimply the apparatus of representation with its propositional contents,logical relations, truth values, directions of fit, etc. . . . The fact that wehave no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question andthe fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought toarouse our interest. . . . There simply is no first-order vocabulary for theBackground, because the Background has no Intentionality. As the pre-condition of Intentionality, the Background is as invisible to Intentionalityas the eye which sees is invisible to itself. (pp. 156–157)

Wittgenstein (1969) too notes the very basic nature of our ways of acting.While we might give reasons for some of our actions, we cannot givereasons for them all. Giving grounds does comes to an end sometime: ‘Butthe end is not an ungrounded proposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting’(no. 110). When we are embedded within the background flow of mutuallyresponsive activity, there are certain ways in which we simply act—not onthe basis of reasons, but blindly, in response to the requirements of ourjointly shared circumstances. But how can such a jointly shared commonsense be acquired?

Gestural Understanding: Understanding Expressions

Words, as we know, can be used to ‘instruct’ us, to command us, to ‘call’us spontaneously to respond in certain ways, to specify further otherwisevague and ambiguous circumstances. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it: ‘our




experimental study proved that it was the functional use of the word, or anyother sign, as a means of focusing one’s attention, selecting distinctivefeatures and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role inconcept formation’ (p. 106, my emphases). ‘Learning to direct one’s ownmental processes with the aid of words or signs is an integral part of theprocess of concept formation’ (p. 108, my emphasis). But how might weunderstand this power of our utterances? What might Vygotsky mean by histerm ‘the functional use of words’? How is it possible to direct one’s ownmental processes by the use of words? Why is what occurs spontaneouslyso crucial here? How can what occurs spontaneously and bodily be thesource of what later we come to do deliberately and intellectually? The keyto understanding what is occurring here is in understanding the gesturalnature of both our own and other people’s expressive movements, alongwith the gestures that the things around us afford or allow us to make towardthem.

Gestures can have both an indicative meaning (gesturing toward some-thing) and a mimetic meaning (a showing or manifesting of something in thecontoured shape of the gesture). Our facial expressions, our tones of voice,our bodily postures, are all spontaneously responsive to, and can thus beuniquely expressive of, ourselves or our circumstances in both mimetic andindicatory ways. Kundera (1992) gives the following example:

The woman might have been sixty or sixty-five. I was watching her from adeck chair by the pool of my health club . . . she kept looking up at theyoung life guard in sweat pants who was teaching her to swim. . . . [Onleaving] she walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, sheturned her head, smiled, and waved at him. At that instant I felt a pang inmy heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl!. . . The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for asecond in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And thenthe word Agnes entered my mind. I had never known a woman by thatname. (pp. 3–4)

What a strange perception! But nonetheless, a true possibility in ourphysiognomic understandings of certain expressive events in our surround-ings. With regard to music, Wittgenstein (1981) remarks that, ‘if a theme, aphrase, suddenly means something to you, you don’t have to be able toexplain it. Just this gesture has been made accessible to you’ (no. 158)—avery particular and very precise, but still perhaps vague, ‘feeling oftendency’ (James) has been opened up as a point of departure, a horizon, anopening for a whole world of next possible actions and events.

Thus, it is in the unfolding movement of one’s expressions, as one’sattention moves over one’s circumstances, that it is possible for one’sexpressions to ‘display’ or ‘manifest’ in a mimetic fashion the contours, so




to speak, of what they are meant to be expressive of. Wittgenstein (1981)describes this phenomenon thus:

A poet’s words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connectedwith the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with theway in which, conformable to this use, we can let our thoughts roam upand down in the familiar surroundings of the words. (no. 155)

Merleau-Ponty (1962) also describes this same possibility thus:

Speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accom-plishes it. . . . Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of aproblem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationshipwith known ones. . . . In understanding others, the problem is alwaysindeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectivelyto light as convergent. . . . There is, then, a taking up of others’ thoughtthrough speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according toothers which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words mustfinally be induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, theirconceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from theirgestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And, as in a foreigncountry, I begin to understand the meaning of words from their place in acontext of action, and by taking part in communal life—in the same way anas yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses tome at least a certain ‘style’ . . . which is the first draft of its meaning. Ibegin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existentialmanner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. . . . There isthus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks orwrites, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected byintellectualism. (p. 179)

Just as in a Marcel Marceau mime, in which we ‘see’ how at first he isoverwhelmed by his imprisonment by an impassable, massive, immoveableobject, and how in his ‘creative stumbling up against it’ he eventually findsa ‘passage’ out of it, so we too can sense the initial ‘contours’ of a‘something’ in a person’s ‘style’ of speech or writing.

Indeed, in a way very close to Wittgenstein’s earlier remark that ‘a wholeworld of pain’ may be contained in a single word, Merleau-Ponty (1962)goes on to remark that:

. . . the word, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of ‘singing’ theworld. . . . The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonantsin another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent somany arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea,but several ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises and in thelast resort to live it. . . . We may speak several languages, but one of themalways remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilatea language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expressesone’s own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once. . . . Strictlyspeaking, therefore, there are no conventional signs. (pp. 187–188)




It is, then, in the spontaneous way in which we respond initially to thegestural meaning of an utterance that we ‘set the scene’ or establish the‘grammar’, so to speak, within which our further, more detailed determiningof its meaning takes place. And language continues to be constitutive of ourmodes of being in this way, even during those moments when we supposeourselves only to be making intellectual and conceptual use of it. This is sobecause our utterances in their expression never cease to arouse spontaneousresponses, both in our listeners and in ourselves. Indeed, because:

. . . any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communicationof a particular sphere . . . utterances are not indifferent to one another, andare not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another.. . . Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds ofresponsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speechcommunication. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91)

And these kinds of responsive reactions are ‘there’ in the ‘tone’ of ourutterances, even in the structure of our written sentences, working theirinfluence upon us, whether we recognize the fact or not.9

But how might such immediate, unthinking responses function as thesource of our higher mental abilities, in which we seem able to reverse, so tospeak, the direction of the formative influences at work in shaping ourconduct—so that instead of us acting spontaneously as our circumstancesrequire, we can act toward our circumstances deliberately, as we ourselvesrequire? As Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) work in this sphere shows, the role ofthe others around us in effecting this transition within us is crucial. I willreview what he has to say in the following two areas: in the sphere of whathe calls internalization in the development of pointing, and in the sphere ofplay. (Although his comments, in Chapter 8, on the pre-history of writingare also highly relevant, in the interests of space, I will leave thenunmentioned.)

Pointing

A very young child may attempt, but fail, to grasp an object. The importantevent is when the young child’s caretaker comes to the aid of the child,responding to his or her movements as indicative of something. Then, ‘thechild’s unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he [orshe] seeks but from another person’ (p. 56). We can think of this as the firststep in a three-part process. The second stage occurs when the child is ableto inter-relate his or her movement to the whole situation—within whichboth the adult and the object are embedded. At this point, the child’smovement may change from an object-oriented to a person-oriented move-ment, a movement used to establish a relation with them. As a result of thischange, a final stage is reached in which ‘the movement itself is physicallysimplified, and what results is the form of pointing that we may call a true




gesture’ (p. 56). But it only becomes so when the child deliberately directs ittoward others, and is recognized by those others as a gesture addressed tothem. Vygotsky calls this three-part process internalization. The designationis, however, only partially appropriate. For it is not the case, as he claims,that ‘an external activity [outside an individual] is reconstructed and beginsto occur internally [within the individual]’ (pp. 56–57). It is a case of anactivity that was at first related only externally to the whole situation withinwhich child, object and adult are all embedded becoming internally relatedto it, becoming a ‘participant part’ within it. The relevant activity does notwholly disappear inside the person. What originated as a relationallyresponsive understanding of a gesture in fact remains so. What changes is itsuse, its functional meaning, as the sphere in which it is embedded as agesture is enlarged.

Play

In discussing play, Vygotsky (1978) makes many of the points already madeabove regarding joint action and dialogically structured action, or thosemade by Gadamer (1989) in discussing play. But he also finds children’splay to be a crucial sphere in which various prototypical or precursoractivities occur spontaneously, prior to our ‘appropriation’ of them into therealm of our more deliberately performed activities. ‘It is here’, he says, inthe sphere of play, ‘that the child learns to act in a cognitive, rather than anexternally visual, realm by relying on internal tendencies and motives andnot on incentives supplied by external things’ (p. 96).10 Thus in play, ‘apiece of wood begins to be a doll and a stick becomes a horse’ (p. 97). Thisis not because either the piece of wood or the stick looks like a doll or ahorse, but because they each in their own way allow or afford the child theopportunity to express certain appropriate responsive inclinations towardthem in their play—the piece of wood can be ‘laid’ in a bed ‘to rest’, thestick can be ‘ridden’, legs-astride, as a hobby-horse, and so on. In doing this,the child is doing what is impossible for younger children: that is, the childis not reacting directly as the visual field around him or her requires, but isseparating a field of meaning from the visual field. Indeed, the child movesfrom a situation in which an object directly calls for a certain meaningfulaction—like a bell ‘demanding’ to be rung—to one in which he or she can,to an extent, impose a meaning on a situation, and act toward it as thatmeaning requires. So although, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, ‘every perceptionis a stimulus to action . . . in play, things lose their determining force’(p. 96).

In play a child spontaneously makes use of his ability to separate meaningfrom an object without knowing he is doing it, just as he does not know heis speaking in prose but talks without paying attention to the words.(p. 99)




This does not, however, mean that in play anything can mean anything forthe child. The chosen plaything must afford the appropriate gesture and be asite of application for it. Things that do not admit of the appropriate gesturalstructure are absolutely rejected by the child. For example, ‘any stick canbecome a horse but . . . a postcard cannot be a horse for a child’ (p. 98). Inplay, then, something very special is happening: not only is there a break-upof the primary unity of sensory-motor processes in the separation of the fieldof meaning from the visual field, but they are also re-constituted into a newunity with a reversal of the usual direction of influence. Whereas a particularmovement in the visual field usually calls out a certain reaction in the child(i.e. action dominates meaning), in play, the child, in his or her gesturalmovements toward objects, begins to impose his or her own meanings onelements in the visual field (i.e. meaning comes to dominate action). In sucha process, uncontrolled, impulsive responses are transformed into con-sidered, voluntary ones.

In the realm of play, then, ‘what is most important is the utilization of theplaything and the possibility of executing a representational [or indicatory]gesture with it’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 108). So, although any stick the childcan sit astride can become a horse, objects not affording that possibilitycannot. What matters is that ‘the objects admit the appropriate gesture andcan function as a point of application for it. Hence, things with which thisgestural structure cannot be performed are absolutely rejected by children’(p. 109).

Indicatory and Mimic Gestures

Here, then, in both these realms, we can see the elements of a crucialdevelopmental process, in which indicatory and mimetic gestures come toplay a central role. While Vygotsky (1986) sees all the major psychologicalfunctions—such as sensing and acting, perceiving, attending, remembering,thinking, acting, speaking, and so on—as forming an indivisible whole, asoperating ‘in an uninterrupted connection with one another’ (p. 1), and asrooted in the most basic or elementary adaptive responses of the living,human being, he also sees development as consisting in the re-constitutionof such wholes. In development:

. . . they are characterized by a new integration and co-relation of theirparts. The whole and its parts develop parallel to each other and together.We shall call the first structures elementary; they are psychological wholes,conditioned chiefly by biological determinants. The latter structures [alsoindivisible wholes] which emerge in the process of cultural developmentare called higher structures. . . . The initial stage is followed by that firststructure’s destruction, reconstruction, and transition structures of thehigher type. Unlike the direct reactive processes, these latter structures areconstructed on the basis of the use of signs and tools; these new formations




unite both direct and indirect means of adaptation. (Vygotsky, 1978,p. 124)11

The spontaneously responsive role of speech in effecting this transforma-tion is crucial. At first, the child begins to exhibit a future orientation andplanning (and an understanding of the role of others in their actions) bycalling in an other for help. Often, others will do little else than say to thechild: ‘Stop . . . look at this . . . listen to that . . .’, to create functionalbarriers to immediately impulsive activity, that is, to transform or meta-morphose an old unity into a new one by bringing to the child’s attention apreviously unnoticed relation already existing within it. The new, morecomplexly structured unity, the new indivisible whole within which the childhas his or her being, is formed by an internal articulation in the old. Later,the child will incorporate the functional speech forms provided by othersinto his or her own activities, so that speech, which at first followed oraccompanied the activities and reflected their difficulties, moves more andmore to the turning (choice) points within them, and to their beginnings. Inincorporating the living, bodily expressions of others into his or her ownactions, expressions that can exert both an indicative and a mimetic gesturalpower on the child, the child can transform his or her own behavior; he orshe becomes orchestrated according to the gestural powers of others. Butwhat is the character of the setting within which this can occur? What is sospecial about our immersion in our surroundings in what I have called theprecursor world to our being in an external, objective world as self-contained, Cartesian subjectivities?

‘Real Presences’ in the Dynamic, Open, MultidimensionalWorld of Spontaneously Responsive Joint Action

Our Cartesian inclinations make it difficult for us to orient ourselves withinsuch a precursor world. To talk of our surroundings as issuing us with‘action-guiding advisories’, of them as having a ‘face’, and of findingourselves as if ‘judged’ as to whether we are treating them in terms of theirrequirements (not ours), is quite foreign to us. The idea of meaning being aphysiognomy, of the mimetic or indicatory expressions of living humanbeings as gesturing precisely to something in their surroundings beyondthemselves, is also utterly alien to us. But nonetheless, we will misleadourselves if we mis-characterize this precursor world in terms suited to ourown, self-conscious, deliberately executed mental functions aimed at mas-tery, that is, if we try to analyze it in Cartesian terms. Aware of the dangersof such mis-descriptions, Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes that modern philoso-phy ‘prejudges what it will find’ (p. 130). To overcome this tendency, hesuggests that philosophy:




. . . once again . . . must recommence everything, reject the instrumentsreflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locuswhere they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have notyet been ‘worked over,’ that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’and ‘object,’ both existence and essence, and hence give philosophyresources to redefine them. (p. 130)

And this, I think, is precisely the importance of all the writers I havementioned so far in this paper. They all in their own different ways provideus with the resources we need to come to an understanding—a relationallyresponsive, living understanding—of ‘the primordial’, the precursor world towhat previously we took to be the ‘external world’ as set out by Descartes.So let us turn to the task of specifying that locus in which subject and object,existence and essence, have not yet been distinguished, that realm of activitythat has not yet been worked over in experience. What might such a realm belike? Can we specify its details?

In our past studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great realms ofactivity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our agencyto control, to be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on action, onevents for which we as individuals take responsibility, and explain in termsof our reasons. And, as already outlined, we have treated the world aroundus not only as a dead world of mechanisms, but as an external worldconsisting in an assemblage of externally related, objective parts. That is, wehave treated it as a world ‘over there’, as existentially separate from us, inthat we owe nothing of the character of our own existence to it. Further, intreating it as an assemblage of externally related, objective parts, we haveseen it as a structure of self-contained parts all existentially separate fromeach other, that is, which exist as the separate entities they are whether theyare a part of a larger mechanism or not. In other words, both these realms ofactivity are thought of as being built up our of separate elements of reality,so to speak; the idea of an invisible whole made up of participant parts isutterly inimical to their nature.

But a dialogically structured real presence, having its existence onlywithin the inter-activity occurring in joint action,12 cannot be understoodexternally in this way. (1) In being responsively ‘shaped’ in relation to theunique circumstances of its occurrence, such activity cannot be explainedsimply as a naturally occurring regularity, as a ‘just happening’ event ofbehavior, in terms of causal laws or principles insensitive to the context oftheir application. (2) Nor can it be understood wholly as a case of individualhuman action, for, in occurring only in the intertwining of people’s sponta-neous responses to each other and to their surroundings, it cannot beexplained by giving any person’s reasons or justifications for his or herindividual actions. What is produced in such responsively interwoven,dialogically structured activity is a strange third realm of always ongoing




and always unfinished activity of its own unique kind. Indeed, it is preciselyits lack of a precisely determined order, and its openness to being furtherspecified or determined by those involved in it, in practice—while usuallyremaining unaware of their having done so—that is its central definingfeature. Or, to put it another way, as the character of people’s circumstancesis a matter of their on-the-spot judgments, joint action can only be under-stood from within one’s involvements in it. It is precisely this that makesthis sphere of activity interesting, for at least the following reasons:

• It means that the primordial, precursor world of spontaneous, relationallyresponsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action, constitutes a third,dynamic realm of activity of its own kind, sui generis, quite distinct fromthe other two realms of behavior and action.

• It is not a static realm of things and substances, a mere static ‘container’ ofactivities.

• The activities constituting it are all internally related activities, that is,their ‘parts’ at any one moment owe not just their character but their veryexistence both to each other and to their relations with the ‘parts’ of thesystem at some earlier point in time—hence their history is just asimportant as their logic in understanding their nature.

• It thus constitutes in each of its occurrences a unitary, indivisible realm ofactivity.

• As a person with one or another kind of subjectivity, we are all ‘partici-pant parts’ in, and of, such an indivisible realm.

• We are embedded in it, and my activity only has the character it has inrelation to yours, in relation to your responses to mine.

• Thus this realm is constitutive of people’s social and personal identities,and is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available tous, which have their being within it.

• Unlike the realms of reasons and causes, which are externally related tothe realms of human activity they explain, the realm of joint action canonly be participatively experienced or lived through—and described assuch:

What underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not aprinciple as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment ofone’s own participation in unitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot beadequately expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described andparticipatively experienced. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 40)

• Such descriptions though, if they work to draw attention to relationsbetween our activities and features in their surroundings—if, that is, theyalso work as ‘participant parts’ in and of such a realm—can play the partof explanations, that is, they can work to refine, elaborate or extend ourways of relating ourselves to our circumstances.




To emphasize the ‘primordial’ or ‘precursor’ nature of this realm of activity,its importance as an ‘origin’ or ‘source’ of prototypes for our more well-defined activities, I will outline some of its further characteristics:

• In lacking specificity, the activities produced in such dialogical exchangesare a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences—as Bakhtin(1981, p. 272) remarks, at work in every utterance are both ‘centripetal’tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the bordersor margins.

• This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: they haveneither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completelystable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor afully objective character—hence their primordial nature.

• They are also non-locatable, in that they are ‘spread out’ or ‘distributed’amongst all those participating in them: that is, a real presence is adistributed structure, constituted in and by contributions from manydifferent participants or participations.

In other words, as Rommetveit (1985) puts it:. . . human discourse takes place in and deals with a pluralistic, onlyfragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world. Vagueness,ambiguity, and incompleteness—but hence also versatility, flexibility, andnegotiability—must for that reason be dealt with as inherent and theoret-ically essential characteristics of ordinary language. (p. 183)

Thus, in such still open circumstances, ‘even apparently simple objects andevents remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realitiesuntil they are talked about’ (p. 193). And how, ultimately, we do in fact talkin relation to our circumstances, and relate our circumstances to our talk,strongly influences our next possible actions within them.

Merleau-Ponty (1964), in discussing the child’s relations with others,describes the nature of this initial phase of development as follows:

There is a first phase, which we call pre-communication, in which there isnot one individual but an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated grouplife . . . [such that] the first me is . . . unaware of itself in its absolutedifference . . . and lives as easily in others as it does in itself. (p. 119)

Thus our task in development is not that of learning how to gain access toother minds, to some thing hidden right inside them, but is that ofdifferentiating which of all the activity occurring in us has its origins in us,and which in them. Indeed, we must renounce the classical Cartesianprejudice in which the psyche is a private sequence of ‘states of mind’ thecannot be seen from the outside. We can ‘see’ the character of an other’sconsciousness displayed in the details of his or her spontaneously responsiveconduct toward the world—as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: ‘Nothing ishidden’ (no. 435). But where, so to speak, is it to be seen?




Although the words we utter may, technically, be repetitions of, asVolosinov (1986) calls them, ‘normatively identical forms’, and although wemay consciously struggle to choose just the right word-forms to fit our ownplans and intentions, there is still, nonetheless, a realm of spontaneousresponsiveness at work influencing their unfolding expression, as we bodilyvoice forth our utterances into the world around us. We do not voice them ina predetermined manner; indeed, how could we ever achieve such a perfectuniformity? It is in the ‘specific variability’ (Volosinov, 1986, p. 69) thatsuch forms afford us, as we utter them in spontaneous response to features inour surrounding circumstances, that we express—unconsciously andinvoluntarily—what others understand as our ‘inner’ thoughts, attitudes,beliefs, moods, desires, and so on: that is, our orientational-understandings,as I called them above, of where and how we are placed in relation to theworld of our our utterances. Thus, it is in an utterance’s unique ‘expressiveintonation’—what is usually ignored in our more systematic inquiries intothe linguistic forms of our language and language use—that we revealaspects of our ‘inner’ lives to those around us. As Bakhtin (1986) notes:

Both the word and the sentence as linguistic units are devoid of expressiveintonation. . . . [E]xpressive intonation belongs to the utterance and not tothe word. . . . [E]xpression does not inhere in the word itself. It originatesat the point of contact between the word and actual reality, underconditions of the real situation articulated by the individual utterance. (pp.85, 86, 88)

And it is just this aspect of our utterances, the way in which theirspontaneously responsive, moment-by-moment, unfolding expressive in-tonation reveals the ‘shape’ of our relations to the others and othernesses inour circumstances, that usually we cannot and do not self-consciouslycontrol.13 We cannot control our utterances ahead of time, as in theiruniqueness, their immediate responsiveness to the present moment, wecannot anticipate their form.

Nonetheless, although unpredictable, we find that these ‘shapes’ are‘there’ as real but invisible presences whether we like it or not. We cannotwish them away. Nor can we wholly avoid responding to them in someway—even if it is to continually dismiss them when noticed with thecriticism that they are ‘subjective’, ‘merely anecdotal’ or ‘not generally thecase’. And such invisible but real presences make themselves felt in ourlives not just in terms of what we talk of as other people’s inner lives, but inother important spheres of our being too. It is in terms of the ‘shape’ of theinvisible presences unfolding over time—in music and dance, in our readingof a text, in our surveying of a work of art, a painting, a sculpture, as wemove up close and back away, and ‘orchestrate’ our own relations to itaccording to ‘its’ requirements—that we gain a sense not so much of theirpersonal inner lives, as of what they meant their expressions to mean to us,the nature of their shared, public projects. And clearly, such felt, real, living




presences, although quite invisible to our eyes, may nonetheless exert apowerful influence in shaping, from the outside, so to speak, our actions.Recall here Merleau-Ponty’s comments above about feeling his way into theexistential character of a piece of philosophical writing by voicing to himselfthe tone and accent of the philosopher. Indeed, in a great range of verydifferent circumstances—in a ‘good’ conversation; in driving or in any othermovement in which we must ‘navigate’ our own motions in immediaterelation to those around us; in viewing a painting; or especially in reading abook—when we are immersed in living relations with our surroundings,then the ‘compellently actual “face” ’ of that presence is an agentic influenceable to shape, at least partially, our responses to them.

But to speak in this way—in terms of invisible presences—is, of course,to indulge in what hard scientists, that is, those who insist that only datacollected from the dials of instruments (or numbers on questionnaire scales)can be accounted as real data, would call ‘magical’ or ‘mystical’ thinking.Indeed, it is the kind of thinking that Levy-Bruhl (1926) noted as acharacteristic of ‘primitive’ or ‘inferior’ peoples. He called it ‘participatorythinking’ because in it, crucially, certain entities—names, pictures, totems,and so on—that we would simply think of as neutral images or representa-tions having only an arbitrary or conventional relation to what they happento stand for, are taken as having mystic properties due to ‘the fact that everypicture, every reproduction “participates” in the nature, properties, life ofthat of which it is the image’ (p. 79).

Levy-Bruhl’s sensitive characterization of the nature of participatorythinking, although offered as an account of a ‘primitive’ way of thinking, isso positively relevant in every detail to our task of familiarizing ourselveswith our responsive understanding of real presences that I will quote it atlength:

The collective representations14 of primitives . . . differ profoundly fromour ideas or concepts, nor are they their equivalent either. On the one hand,. . . they have not their logical character. On the other hand, not beinggenuine representations, in the strict sense of the term, they express, orrather imply, not only that the primitive actually has an image of the objectin his mind, and thinks it is real, but also that he has some hope or fearconnected with it, that some definite influence emanates from it, or isexercised upon it. This influence is a virtue, an occult power which varieswith objects and circumstances, but is always real to the primitive andforms and integral part of his representation. . . . [T]o express in a word thegeneral peculiarity of the[se] collective representations . . . I should say thatthis mental activity was a mystic one . . . [this does not refer] to thereligious mysticism of our communities, which is something entirelydifferent, but [applies] in the strictly defined sense in which ‘mystic’implies belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible tothe sense, are nevertheless real. (pp. 37–38, all emphases and additionsmine)




Modernist scientists may laugh at these misguided primitives who treatcertain neutral things—which such scientists see as simply standing for otherthings, as words say, stand for things—as actually participating in the life ofthose things they stand for. But if Rommetveit (1985) is correct, and (torepeat) ‘even apparently simple objects and events remain in principleenigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about’(p. 193), then, in a very important sense, our words and other expressions doparticipate crucially in ‘the nature, properties, life of which [they are] theimage’.

Why we have found this difficult to accept is that in our current (stillGreek- and Cartesian-influenced) modes of inquiry, in pursuit of a theoret-ical objectivity, we have sought a supposed fixed and finalized (eternal)reality hidden behind appearances. We have worked in terms of innertheoretical representations of outer phenomena that we have striven to provetrue. But participatory perception works quite differently. In physiognomicterms, the perception of and response to expression is not the perception ofsomething hidden behind appearances, but a matter of spontaneously re-sponding to something manifested or displayed in them. Thus what is beforeus at any one moment is not a mere thing, a mere inert object, requiring achoice from us as to how we are going to respond to it, but an authentic,unique living presence, incarnate in the unfolding activity within which weare ourselves participants. It is a presence sensed in the responsive move-ment of appearances as they unfold before us as we responsively relateourselves to their requirements. Thus, just as the depth we see as we scanover the scene before us—whether it is a real 3-D scene or a 2-D random-dotstereogram—is a third relational dimension derived from the other two, andis in fact in itself invisible, so the presence of depth in a conversation isspontaneously constituted in the sensed relational dimensions participantsdisplay in their utterances. ‘Either what I call depth’, says Merleau-Ponty(1964), ‘is nothing, or it is my participation . . . in the being of space beyondevery [particular] point of view’ (p. 173, translator’s addition). The depths,one might say, are made available to us in the surfaces.

Conclusion: Mastery or Understanding?

I began this paper by exploring how our lives might change if, rather than asself-centered Cartesian beings, seeking mastery by acting in a thoughtful butunresponsive manner toward our surroundings, we were to treat ourselvesmore as ‘participant parts’ of a larger, ongoing, dynamic, indivisible realmof living activity. This led on to the suggestion that, when we cease to setourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around usand we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically structured, living,embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us, then, and only




then, certain very special phenomena can occur. Then we can find ourselvesin contact with invisible but nonetheless very ‘real presences’ that—due totheir indicatory and mimetic effects on us—can, like another person issuinginstructions and commands, exert a communicative influence on us and thus(at least partially) structure our actions. In such circumstances as these, asJohnston (1993) puts it:

[t]he idea of the Inner is a feature of our everyday discourse and a part ofthe psychological concepts we all share. . . . [I]t expresses our relation toothers as experiencing beings: as beings with an Inner, we treat their non-informational utterances as expressions of experiences (and not as mean-ingless). . . . Thus talk of an Inner brings into play a distinctive array ofconcepts and expresses the fact that we relate to other human beings in away we do not relate to machines or even to other animals. (p. 223)

In other words, crucial to the shift to the participatory forms of thoughtexplored above is a shift away from a dead, mechanistically organizedworld, toward a world conceived of as an indivisible living unity. It is thestrangely unnoticed elimination of the life of mutually responsive livingbodies from our academic forms of inquiry that I have sought to rectify.

But how might the reintroduction of our spontaneous living involvementswith each other affect the character of our intellectual inquiries into oursocial lives together? The implications are, in fact, enormous.15 As Iintimated above, very few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclina-tions can be retained unchanged. But due to limitations in space, I can touchon only a few here. I will do this by returning to a difference I introducedbriefly above: that between achieving an explanation and achieving anorientational understanding of a situation’s physiogomy, that is, achievingan evaluative sense of where and how we are ‘placed’ or ‘positioned’ inrelation to all the others and othernesses around us.

Finding ourselves disoriented, perhaps, by certain ‘compellent calls’ fromour surroundings, we feel an ‘overwhelming temptation’, says Wittgenstein(1981), to treat our uncertainty as to how to respond to them as a ‘problem’requiring a ‘solution’ in terms of an ‘explanation’. But as he sees it, there issometimes an alternative. ‘[T]he difficulty’, he suggests:

. . . is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as thesolution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. . . . Thisis connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation,whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the rightplace in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to getbeyond it. (no. 314)

In other words, when faced with a disorienting circumstance, a circumstancein which we do not know how ‘to go on’, instead of turning away from it,and burying ourselves deep in thought in an attempt to mentally andimaginatively construct a way to explain it in ways already familiar to us, weshould, so to speak, stay in dialogue with it. We should look it over as we




look over a painting or a sculpture in an art gallery. We should respond to itfrom up close, from a distance, from this angle and that, until we can beginto gain a shaped and vectored sense of the space of possibilities it opens upto us in the responses it ‘calls’ from us. And we should do this incollaboration with the others involved with us in the practice in question.

The difference between the two approaches can be set out in terms of theirsteps, and the orientational understandings associated with each such step. Inthe classical tradition, the sequence of steps we take in our inquiries can beset out as follows. We begin by orienting toward any newness or strangenesswe encounter as a problem to be solved. We then go on to treat it as an entitythat can be analyzed into a set of already well-known elements.16 We thensearch for an order or pattern amongst them, hypothesize a causal agencyresponsible for that order (call it, say, a mystic entity like ‘the Mind’), andthen go on to find further evidence for the existence of this mystic thing wecall ‘the Mind’. Indeed, we then begin to develop further theories as to itsnature, and, in terms of such theories, we attempt, indirectly, to manipulatethe Mind’s operations, to produce what we see as outcomes advantageous tous. But we only call such theories ‘solutions’ to our problem if they enableus—as the experts proposing them—to achieve seeming mastery over thephenomena represented within them.

The sequence of steps we follow in gaining an orientational understandinggoes like this. We begin by treating the disorienting othernesses weencounter as radically unknown to us—we approach them, not like Kant’s‘appointed judge’, but with care, respect and anxiety. We ‘enter into’dialogically structured, reciprocally responsive relations with them. In sodoing, we must be (at least partially) ‘answerable’ to their calls, just as theymust be (partially) answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay betweenus and them, an ‘it’, a real presence, appears between us, produced neithersolely by us nor by the othernesses, an ‘it’ within which both we and theyhave our being. The ‘it’ is our it, an ‘it’ in which we can all share incommon. Like a person’s facial expression, which, with its smile, gesturesus to approach, or, with its scowl, repels us, ‘it’ has a similar ‘directive’ or‘instructive’ physiognomy—and we can thus develop a sensibility of, orsensitivity to, ‘its’ nature. And as we continue our commerce with theothernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of our familiarity withthe ‘inner’ shape or character of the real presence created between us. Andas we ‘dwell on’, or ‘within’, its nature, we can gain a sense of the value ofits yet-to-be-achieved aspects—the prospects ‘it’ offers us for ‘going on’with it. We come to feel ‘at home’ with it, to ‘know our way around’ withinit, in the way we find our way around inside towns or houses familiar to us.Thus what we gain here, rather than a solution, rather than further informa-tion, is a shaped and vectored sense of how ‘to go on’ in relation to theotherness concerned. In other words, we understand how to see the invisible‘face’, to hear the silent ‘voice’, and to be ‘answerable’ to the mute




judgments of the presences in our living relations with the world aroundus—real influences that cannot be measured by any mechanical instruments,that only become available to us in our living, moving, responsive andresponsible engagements with our surroundings.

Notes

1. See Shotter (1993, pp. 68–70) for an account of ‘providential spaces,’ i.e.,spaces not only open to further development by internal refinement, but with theprovision of resources appropriate to certain such developments (but notothers).

2. In this important chapter in his Marxism and Literature, Williams (1977)touches on most of the topics of this article. In discussing the nature of changesin social consciousness from, say, one generation to the next, he suggests thatthey are best characterized ‘as changes in structures of feeling’ (p. 132). By thisterm he wants to signal that:

. . . we are concerned with meanings and values as they are activelylived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematicbeliefs. . . . We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse,restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness andrelationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt andfeeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a livingand inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once inter-locking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experiencestill in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken tobe private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis(though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominantcharacteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (p. 132)

Thus, ‘structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, asdistinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated andare more evidently and more immediately available’ (pp. 133–134).

3. For example, as Wittgenstein (1978) notes, even about such a seeming neutralthing as a proposition: ‘The proposition seems set over against us as a judge andwe feel answerable to it.—It seems to demand that reality be compared with it’(p. 132).

4. See Shotter (1996), where this phenomenon is discussed at length.5. ‘The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction

in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acute discriminatorysense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever’(James, 1981, p. 244). ‘Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples toshow, is that “tendencies” are not only descriptions from without, but that theyare among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within,and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings oftendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all’ (p. 246).

6. ‘Etymologically, of course, the term “consciousness” is a knowledge word. Thisis evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we




to make of the prefix con- that precedes it? Look at the usage in Roman Law,and the answer will be easy enough. Two or more agents who act jointly—having formed a common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted theiractions—are as a result conscientes. They act as they do knowing one another’splans: they are jointly knowing’ (Toulmin, 1982, p. 64). Toulmin traces how awhole family of words,

. . . whose historic use and sense had to do with the public articulationof shared plans and intentions has been taken over into philosophicaltheory as providing a name for the most private and unshared aspectsof mental life. . . . The term ‘consciousness’ has thus become the namefor a flux of sensory inputs that is seemingly neither con-, since eachindividually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since thesensory flux is thought of as ‘buzzing and booming’ rather thancognitively structured or interpreted. (p. 54)

7. Another expression of this same point is:

An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one.Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first,on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, betweenpeople . . . , and then inside the child. . . . All higher [mental] functionsoriginate as actual relations between human individuals. (Vygotsky,1978, p. 57)

8. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: ‘The experimental method makes us think wehave the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem andmethod pass one another by’ (p. 232). Instead of looking backwards for patternsand regularities from a position of uninvolvement, we need ways to investigatea circumstance from within as a participant involved within it.

9. See, for instance, in this connection, Billig’s (1995) account of how RichardRorty, in the rhetorical tone of his philosophical texts, displays in their smalldetails—especially in his use of the word ‘we’—his nationalism. As Billig putsit:

It has become customary for cultural analysts to treat objects, such asflags, as if they were texts. The process can be reversed, so that the textappears as a flag. Rorty’s texts, with his drum-beat of ‘we’s’, seek toenrol ‘us’, his readers, in their literary march. (p. 173)

10. Children initially experience objects in their surroundings as gesturally ex-pressive or physiognomically to such an extent that, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it,‘a very young child concludes that things dictate to the child what he must do:a door demands to be opened and closed, a staircase to be climbed, a bell to berung’ (p. 96).

11. Passage from the unedited translation of ‘Tool and Symbol’, quoted by John-Steiner and Souberman, in their ‘Afterword’ to Vygotsky (1978).

12. I have set out the properties of joint action extensively elsewhere also (Shotter,1980, 1984).

13. But in those circumstances where a ‘form’ is already present, we do sometimescontrol them: ‘One thing that is immensely important in teaching’, notes




Wittgenstein (1966), ‘is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions’ (p. 2).Goffman (1959) also notes the importance of the distinction between ‘expres-sions given’ and those ‘given off’, and how people are ‘likely to check up on themore controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable’ (p. 19),so that sometimes, to create an ‘impression’, we attempt also to control ourgestures and facial expressions. But when we do, our expressions lose theirwholistic quality as ‘true’ expression and become ‘caricatures’, that is, falseexpressions of our relations to our surroundings.

14. By ‘collective representations’ Levy-Bruhl (a student of Durkheim) means thosenotions which, in ‘being collective . . . force themselves on the individual’(p. 25); they are, we might say, an aspect of the individual’s background oreveryday common-sense understanding of his or her world.

15. Some of them are explored in Katz and Shotter (1996a, 1996b), Shotter andKatz (1996) and Shotter and Gustavsen (1999). But these are mere beginnings.A whole very different approach to cognitive psychology—in which our innerlives are structured in terms of agentic voices and other agentic influences (see,e.g., Wertsch, 1991, and Wolf, 1990)—is clearly a possibility.

16. It is at this stage, the stage of analysis into separate elements, that life—which isin the internal relations between the participant parts of a living whole—iseliminated!

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John Shotter is Professor of Interpersonal Relations in the Department ofCommunication, University of New Hampshire. He is the author of SocialAccountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Every-day Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind(Open University, 1993) and Conversational Realities: The Construction ofLife through Language (Sage, 1993). Address: Department of Commu-nication, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire,Durham, NH 03824-3586, USA. [email [email protected]]




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