Real Presences' Meaning As Living Movement in A Participatory World John Shotter University of New Hampshire

Theory & Psychology
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`Real Presences': Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World

John Shotter
Theory Psychology 2003; 13; 435
DOI: 10.1177/09593543030134001
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Real Presences
Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory
World
John Shotter
University of New Hampshire
Abstract. In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as
working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such
representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in
terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be
understood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our language does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous, living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses around
us. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodily
activity that pre-dates, so to speak, the calculational processes we
currently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realm
within which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic or
gestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurring
between us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfolding
structures of activity that we all participate in shaping, but to which we
all must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is the
agentic influence of these invisible but nonetheless felt real presences that
I want to explore. Their influence can be felt as acting upon us in a way
similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus, within this sphere
of physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others can
directly call us into action, can issue us with action-guiding advisories,
and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their facial expressions or tones of voice. Below I will explore how thissome would say,
mystic (Levy-Bruhl)form of participatory thought and understanding
can help us to understand the inner nature of our social lives together, and
the 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.

(Websters)
meaning is a physiognomy. (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 568)
Theory & Psychology Copyright 2003 Sage Publications. Vol. 13(4): 435468
[0959-3543(200308)13:4;435468;033263]
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Below, I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity that lies

beyond the orderly, systematized or computational or calculational processes we currently think of as underlying our linguistic forms of
understandingthe realm of expressive bodily movements and changes. It is
a realm of participatory, as distinct from masterful, activity in which, as we
shall see, we must function just as much as respondents to activity occurring
around us, as free agents able ourselves to make events happen. In this
realm, direct, non-interpretational, physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding are possible. As a consequence of such direct, bodily expressed
forms of responsive understanding, individuals can not only be taught
effective uses of new linguistic forms by those around them, but may also
themselves, spontaneously, put those already learned to uniquely new uses,
to signify particular and complex meanings in relation to particular and
complex circumstances. Thus, among its many other characteristics, this is a
realm of activity in which individuals may express meanings quite unique
and particular to themselvesmeanings related to their own unique attitudes
and inclinations toward aspects of their surroundings often unnoticed by, or
of no initial interest to, the others around themand still have them
nonetheless, to some extent at least, understood by those others. Indeed, we
talk of people within this sphere as expressing their own individual thoughts
and feelings, their wants and desires, their sufferings, and so on; we treat
their 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 outer
surroundings, except that the states and objects, and so on, referred to are
invisible and seem to be hidden inside them (Johnston, 1993; Mulhall,
1990). But, as we shall see, if Wittgenstein is correct, rather than being
merely expressive of our inner lives, our expressive talk is constitutive of
them. It is, then, to this realm of spontaneously responsive, living bodily
inter-activity that I wish to draw attention. For, in our still Cartesian (Greek
and Judeo-Christian)-influenced modes of intellectual inquiry, it has been all
but totally ignored, thus denying us access to that crucial sphere of activity
from within which, as we shall see, all our higher, more self-consciously
conducted 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 his
Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting Ones Reason and of
SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES
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Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1651, Descartes (1968) set out a characterization of our external world, and a method for thinking about its nature,
that has influenced our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and the
relations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be:
. . . obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philosophers 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 now
to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and
if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this
matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever
imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving
action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws. (p. 62)
Also in establishing his method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excluded

all our bodily activities, our bodily doings, sufferings, and respondings from
consideration: This I, that is, the mind, by which I am what I am, is
entirely distinct from the body (p. 54).
Thus in Descartes view of our existence, we are self-conscious, selfcontained and self-controlled subjects, that is, wilful but disengaged, disembodied and immaterial beings, set over against an objective, mechanically
structured, external, material world. And in seeking knowledge of its nature,
we must use methodical thought modeled on Euclids geometry. For it was
Descartes 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 his
mind, and then proceeding by way of those long chains of reasonings, quite
simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their
most difficult demonstrations (p. 41), gave him cause to think that
everything which can be encompassed by mans knowledge is linked in the
same way (p. 41). In other words, we should seek to represent everything
theoretically within a single order of connectedness. For by the use of such
a method, there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it
eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it (p. 41). Indeed, such a
method of reasoningin which we must borrow all the best from geometric
analysis and algebra (p. 42)could, he suggested, lead us to the discovery
of Gods 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 the
human and behavioral sciences. As a form shaping ideology (Bakhtin,
1984, p. 83), as a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977),2 or as a thought
style (Fleck, 1979), they still, it seems to me, selectively determine both our
aims and the phenomena to which we attend in our inquiries in the human
and behavioral sciences. Oriented only toward what we see as objective in
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our surroundings, we attend away from the shaping influence of such a

background set of felt influences, of such spontaneously expressed responses
or inclinations in our inquiries.
But as Kuhn (1970) noted:
Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it
has acquired answers to questions like the following: What are the
fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these
interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in
seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers . . . to questions
like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares
and licences the student for professional practice. (pp. 45)
Thus all our professionally institutionalized inquiries proceed on the assumption 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 the
relevant elements of our study, but also how to link them together into a
systematically interconnected unity of some kind. And further, in a strongly
rationalistic culture such as ours, even though, paradoxically, its general
character, as an inert, mechanistically organized world, is already predetermined, we are nonetheless obliged to present our views as having been
arrived at by deduction from the material represented. But to do this, we
must employ a writing style in which the most abstract philosophical
principles and concrete factual details must be melded into a unity of tone
and viewpoint, a rhetorical style in which we as authors disappear, and in
which objectivity as such is pervasive. It is a form of writing within which
we claim that the facts speak for themselves.
However, in reality, the matter is otherwise. As Kant (1970) put it in
1781, if we are to follow the true path of a science (p. 17), then we must
function only as an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer
questions which he himself has formulated, and we must refuse to allow
ourselves to be kept, as it were, in natures leading-strings (p. 20). But in
seeking only mastery and in refusing to allow ourselves to be led by (to be
spontaneously responsive to) nature in any way, we restrict ourselves to
acting only in terms of our own wants, desires or reasons. To repeat, we
ignore an important source of knowledge: our spontaneous responsiveness to
the others and othernesses around us. In other words, the form-shaping
ideology 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 a
representation arrived at only as the result of deduction, we inevitably
transform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction
(p. 83). We make ourselves deaf to the others response (p. 293).
How might our disciplinary lives might change if we were to adopt a very
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different form-shaping ideology in our inquiries in the human and behavioral sciences? What if, rather than as Descartess self-centered and selfcontrolled, subjective minds, standing (if that is the right word to apply to
such disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, we
begin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger,
ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant parts
within such a whole, rather than seeking exclusively to be masters and
possessors 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 own
endswe would also need to seek another quite different kind of
understanding. 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 which
we can collaborate or participate with it in achieving our goals.
Now the quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explanations: we seek sure-fire procedures for intervening in ongoing activities
causally, that is, in a one-way, mechanical cause-and-effect fashion, to
influence 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,
howeveras a matter of understanding how to respond to the uniquely
expressive physiognomic aspects of our surroundings, for this once and
never to be repeated timeis much harder to describe. It is not a matter of
something happening to us intellectually. In what follows, I will try to
explicate it in practical, Wittgensteinian terms, in which a philosophical
problem has the form: I dont know my way about (Wittgenstein, 1953,
no. 123), and in which an understanding enables one to say and to act in a
way one can justify to others that [n]ow I know how to go on (no. 154). In
other 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 how
to play a piece of music well, or in telling someone else what another has
told us, or of what we have read in a book. Rather than precise factual
information, in such a form of understanding we gain an orientation, a sense
of where and how we are placed in relation to the others are around us
within the landscape of possibilities within which we are all acting. We
might call them orientational understandings. But, to repeat, such
understandingswhich have, I suggest, a relationally responsive form to
contrast them with the representational-referential forms much more familiar to us in our intellectual livesdo not make themselves readily available
to us in our intellectual reflections. Just as our understanding of questions
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posed to us is expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationally

responsive understanding of other events occurring around us manifested or
displayed in the responses we give to them.
As George Mead (1934) puts it:
The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the
emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or
adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first
organism the meaning it has. (pp. 7778, my emphasis)
Prior to our conscious awareness of our actions as having meaning, prior to

our establishing of any social conventions, our acting in accord with the
rule-like requirements of our surrounding circumstances is something we do
spontaneously, without choicedifficult though it may be to accept the fact.
It is as if there is an extra voice, an authoritative voice, situated in our
surroundings, telling us what to do next. In his investigations into the
question How am I able to obey a rule?, Wittgenstein (1953) describes our
acting 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 rule
and we do what it tells us (no. 223). So that when we see a series of
numbers, we see it in a certain way, algebraically, and as a segment of an
expansion . . . we look to the rule for instruction and do something, without
appealing to any thing else for guidance (no. 228).3
Thus, the turn I want to take here, toward accepting ourselves as primarily
living bodies, related directly to our surroundings by our spontaneous
responsiveness to them, is more than just the turn away from treating
ourselves as disembodied minds, related only indirectly to our surroundings
by inner, mental representations of it. It is also a turn away from the focus on
thoughts and beliefs as being central to our intellectual lives, toward a
central focus on our spontaneously performed activities and practices. In
other words, to repeat, it is a turn toward a participative and dialogically
structured world in which meanings arise inevitably and inexorably in
peoples living, responsive reactions to the callings of events occurring
around them. As such, it is a turn in which few of our current disciplinary
attitudes and inclinations, the disciplinary resources upon which we draw in
our intellectual inquiriesshaped as they still are by an unidentified and
thus remitting Cartesianismcan remain unchanged. Indeed, as I will argue
in a moment, we will need a new kind of understanding of a new world, a
world that might be called the precursor to Descartes external world. We
need to know, as participants within it, our way around inside what is
variously called the Background (Searle, 1983; Wittgenstein, 1980), or the
primordial (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968). I call it a precursor world, as we
shall find ourselves (as a perhaps unexpected consequence of our turn to
such a participative world) already involved in executing spontaneously
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within it precursors to, or, in Wittgensteins (1981, no. 541) terms, prototypes of, all our later, more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.
Real Presences in the Indivisible Unity of a Participatory

World
Central to the exploration I want to conduct below, then, is a very special
phenomenon that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive,
dialogically structured, living, embodied relations with the others and
othernesses around uswhen we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively,
over against them, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement
with them. It is here, in the intricate orchestration of the interplay
occurring between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward those
others (or othernesses) and their equally responsive incoming expressions
toward us that a very special kind of understanding of this special phenomenon becomes available to us. The phenomenon in question is the creation,
within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in the
situation at that moment, of distinctive, dynamically changing forms, an
emerging sequence of changes (or differencings) each one with its own
unique shape that, although invisible, is felt by all involved as participants
within 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 organized
in 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 of
print spread out before us on this page.) While we may scan our two eyes
over the 2-D stereogram before us as we please, the dots are arranged on the
page 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 invisibly
present within them as we scan over them. So, although we may all look
over 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 a
common binocular focus at this distance, in another direction only at that
distance, in another only at another distance, and so on. Thus we will all see
precisely the same spiral. Further, our embodied sense of it as a 3-D form
will not emerge in an instant, but only in the unfolding temporal course of
our visual involvement with the special patterning of the dots on the 2-D
page.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 us
is located neither on the page, nor in our heads, but out in the space
between us and the page, so are all the felt dynamic forms in question here.
They only have their being within our living involvements with our
surroundings.
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William James (1981), in his famous The Stream of Thought chapter,

discussed in a similar way the nature of such dynamic forms, and pointed
out a number of mistakes we tend to make if, in fact, our thinking has such
a character. We fail, he suggested, to register the transitive parts of the
stream 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 and
goings and contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks them
than they break the time and space in which they lie. (p. 233)
In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the

stream of thought as in very large measure constituted of feelings of
tendency, 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 momentary
dynamic stabilities in question being in a stream of thought in peoples
heads, they occur out within the larger flow of inter-activity within which we
and they are all responsively involved.
Clearly such forms, then, apart from their moment-by-moment emergence
within the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, have no
substantial existence in themselves. Yet, in being out there as distinctive
othernesses in their own right, partially but not wholly responsive to our
actions, such forms have the character of real presences (Steiner, 1989).
While invisible as such, they are not nothings; they are somethings with
a 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 saying
that we feel on a footing with them. In short, more than merely a sense of
an others nature in itself, we come to a sense of their expressions as
occurring in relation to a landscape of possibilities, in fact in relation to a
world. As an example of just such a world, present to us for a brief moment
in a persons utterance, Wittgenstein (1980) asks us to consider a circumstance in which the word Farewell! is uttered in a certain plaintive tone of
voice. 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. The
words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow (p. 52).
While Steiner (1984, 1989) talks of the emergence in such circumstances
of a real presence, others suggest that this phenomenonthe emergence of
an active it with its own requirements within the dialogically structured
activities occurring between people, an agentic third partyis quite
general. Gadamer (1989), for instance, puts it thus: In genuine dialogue
something emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself
(p. 462). For Gadamer, that something is often a tradition to which we
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belong, within which we participate, where belonging is brought about by

traditions addressing us (p. 463). For Bakhtin (1986), this something is
termed both a superaddressee . . . whose absolutely just responsive understanding 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 an
invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the
dialogue (partners). . . . The aforementioned third party is not any mystical
or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the
world, he can be expressed as such)he is a constitutive aspect of the
whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it. (pp.
126127)
Such a third agency is at work in all dialogically structured activities. The

utterance of even a single word is, Bakhtin (1986) suggests, a drama in
which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed
outside 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 a
consciously noticeable event, then, it appears to usif not as an already
witnessed and judged eventas a noticing that we could, potentially at least,
share with others. Thus, to talk of something as being consciousness in this
wayas something witnessable with othersis 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 knowing
together with others or joint-knowing.
It is the existence of such its, such real presences as agencies, to which
we must be answerably responsive, that makes our lives within a participatory reality quite distinct from life within a neutral or inert world of an
external, 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, subjected
to or compelled by their requirements. We can no longer treat such a world
as this as an inert, voiceless object. But we must also, as we shall see, think
differently of voices and language, of the importance of our bodily expressions.
In making sense of Steiners, Gadamers and Bakhtins claims that agentlike, authoritative somethings emerge to influence us within our dialogically structured activities, we should not think of such activities as being
solely and simply a matter of people exchanging well-defined words with
each other. When Gadamer, for instance, talks of dialogue or conversation, a
very different notion of language is at work in what he has to say than the
notions of language we currently take for granted. Indeed, for him, there is
no such thing as language. At least, not if we think of it as a shared
systematic structure of rule-governed linguistic forms, in which language
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users gain a competency that they then apply in performing appropriate

sentence structures on given occasions. Language, as he sees it:
. . . is not just one of mans possessions in the world; rather, on it depends
the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as
for 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 that
mans being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic. (Gadamer, 1989,
p. 443)
In other words, of everything toward which our understanding can be

directed 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 already
given, it is the coming into language of a totality of meaning (p. 474) that
makes our first-time understandings possible. Such original understandings
are not a methodic activity of the subject, not something that we ourselves
do deliberately and impose on our surroundings; they are something that the
thing itself [as a real presence] does and which thought suffers
(p. 474).
But in making this claim, rather than an objective stance, in which a
person and his or her language are two separate entities in an external
relation to each other, Gadamer is taking a participatory stance toward
language: language is a medium in which I and world meet or, rather,
manifest their original belonging together (p. 474). In such a participatory
stance, I, my world and my language are all internally related participant parts of a larger, indivisible, dynamic whole, a ceaseless stream of
ongoing activity, of understandable-being in motion. Thus the parts in
question are not at all physically distinct or separable parts as such, but
distinctions of function or of role being played, that is, they are participant
parts, in relation to the conduct of the whole stream of activity within which
they have their existence, that is, the world as a real presence:
Coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different
from the understanding that occurs between animals. But human language
must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic
communication, world is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed
object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by
none 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 a
stream of activity owe not just their character, but their very existence, both
to each other, and to their relations to the parts of the presence at some
earlier point in timeas well as, so to speak, pointing toward or calling
for a range of next possible parts.
Unlike a mechanical assemblage constructed of objective parts that retain
their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the
mechanism or not, such an ongoing stream, as an indivisible unity, is quite
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different. Like the growth of a living organism, which is a living unity from
its very inception, it is held together as such from within by the fact that all
its parts depend on their inner relations with each other to sustain them in
existence as the parts they are. They are all, thus, intrinsically or reciprocally
implicated in each other. Hence, when a change in the dynamic relations
occurs in one region of the unfolding stream, the whole is affected. And
changes produced within the wholealong with the feelings of tendency
available to individual participants within itpoint beyond or outside
themselves, so to speak, to aspects of the whole of which they are only a
part. We thus find ourselves, intrinsically and automatically, at any one
moment, oriented both toward past events in our surroundings as well as
toward others yet to come.
As subjects of the implicit Cartesianism in our academic traditions,
however, things are different. Used to thinking of ourselves as disembodied
minds, we treat ourselves as influenced by the isolated, neutral objects
around us, either in a cause-and-effect way, or cognitively, by how we
represent them to ourselves. The possibility of our responding to agentic
presences in our surroundings is quite foreign to such a style of thought.
Thus when we talk of inner representations as being central to our intellectual and mental lives, we think of them only as passive objects of
thought having a certain logical structure to them, such that, if the thing
represented is composed of many parts, so must its representation be. Hence,
the fittingness of such structures to the circumstances represented cannot be
a matter of an immediate correspondence; they do not speak for themselves. Nor does their relation to the larger background within which they
have their being play any immediate part in our understanding of their
nature. It all is a matter of deliberation, of argument and interpretation
among us as theorists.
But things are quite different when considered from within the indivisible
stream of responsive inter-action within which we (and they) are embedded
as participant parts. There we may suggest, as James (1981) suggests with
respect to the stream of thought, that it is nothing jointed; it flows . . . [such
that] the transition between the thought of one object and the thought of
another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break
in the wood (pp. 233234). And just as James affirms that the chain of
consciousness 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, the
occurrence of a difference that makes a difference (p. 453). We may also
note something similar to James (1981) when he remarks:
Into the awareness of thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence
creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not
thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.
Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite
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different from what it would be were the thunder the continuation of

previous thunder. (p. 234)
Once in touch, so to speak, with a real presence, while only an aspect of it

may at any one moment occupy our focal attention, all of it as an indivisible
whole is, nonetheless, spontaneously there available to us, with what is in
the 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 dialogically
structured embedding within the ceaselessly ongoing, indivisible stream of
spontaneously 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 differencemaking events, along with the spontaneously responsive reactions they
occasion, can, for example, function as the origin and primitive form of the
language 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 a
language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking
and 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 experiences
shape our outer expressions, on some occasions at least, when we enter into
spontaneously responsive, dialogically structured relations with our surroundings, the case is reversed: our outer expressions shape our inner
experiences, and on these occasions our outer expressions are to an extent
shaped by our outer circumstances. In other words, our expressions are
sometimes expressive of our relations to our surroundings. But to repeat, this
is not always the case. It only occurs, as Volosinov (1986) points out, when
the immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly
determineand determine from within, so to speakthe structure of an
utterance (p. 86). When this is the case:
. . . the location of the organizing and formative center [of an utterance] is
not within [the person] but outside. It is not experience that organizes
expression, but the other way aroundexpression organizes experience.
Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of
direction. (p. 85)
And we can note, recalling Meads (1934) remark above, that meaning is
spontaneously present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, that this all occurs spontaneously. In
other words, as these workers all in their own ways point out, we can
execute original meaningful acts from within our embedding in an ongoing
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stream of spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity, without our being

consciously or planfully aware of so doing.
Another, perhaps unexpected consequence of our embedding in such a
ceaseless flow of living activity is that the complex self-initiated acts we
perform consciously and deliberately later in life, that is, not unthinkingly
and impulsively in response to circumstances, but in ways intelligible and
justifiable to the others around us, as in, say, the conduct of a piece of
mathematical reasoning, we can build up from an orchestrated sequence of
more simple acts we first execute spontaneously. In other words, we can
often look back to find precursors to our supposed, current, inner mental
capacities in our earlier outer activities. This possibility, as is well known, is
explicitly claimed to be the case by Vygotsky (1986). The general law of
development, he suggests:
. . . says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very
advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been
used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a
function 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 is

our embedding in this spontaneous flow of meaningful activity, before the
emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, to repeat
Meads phrase above. But how? For it would seem that all our scholarly
training, which orients us toward a set of already determined fundamental
entities and the relations between them, and the questions that may be asked
about them, steers us out onto the scene much too late, and then leads us to
look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude. We only arrive on the
scene after we have passed our exams and adopted into our heads certain
already agreed (often Cartesian-inspired) versions of what is occurring out in
the world between us. But then, not content with that, we look backward
toward already existing actualities and past accomplishments to find a causal
pattern in them, seeing them as mechanisms external to ourselves, rather
than looking forward, toward the new possibilities provided to us from
within our present relational involvements. And we do all this with the
wrong attitude. For we seek a static, dead picture, a theoretical representation of a state of affairs, rather than a living sense of our circumstances as an
active, authoritative and action-guiding agency in our lives. In other words,
our investigations have an after the fact and a beside the point quality to
them.8
Such a set of Cartesian orientations, such an objective stance, as we have
already seen, misleads us into ignoring the unique, interwoven and reciprocal nature of our immediate, living, mindful but thoughtless, bodily interactions, and the felt ways of making sense occurring between us even now,
in the present momentbetween, for example, me as a writer now and you
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as a later reader. It is within such present interactive moments, if we can

call them that, that such spontaneously occurring, pre-intellectual precursors
to our later deliberations make their appearance. It is also within such
moments that our responsiveness to our surroundings is in some way
expressive of our surroundingsas when, for instance, I deliberately look
into 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, can
issue action-guiding advisories, and can witness and judge what we do
with their facial and vocal expressions. This is the force of both MerleauPontys (1962) and Wittgensteins (1953) suggestion that meaning in our
everyday life activities is a physiognomy, which is to say, that just as a
person, as a living, indivisible unity, is corporeally alive and present in every
one of their expressions, in their smiles and frowns, their looks of puzzlement and understanding, so real presences are manifested, literally, in the
same way, not behind, but in appearances. And just as a persons friendly or
hostile facial expression, which, although changing in its responsiveness to
us, sets the overall style of our emotional-valuative relation with that
person by remaining on his or her face during our unfolding involvement
together, so the physiognomy, the face, of an event in our surroundings
also sets the overall style of relation to it in the same way.
Our implicit Cartesianismwith its emphasis on finished (neutral, geometrical) forms and patterns rather than on styles of living movementhas
led us to ignore the expressive aspect both of our own activities and of the
other activities around us, present in their ongoing, emerging shape as they
unfold in a spontaneous, dialogically structured responsiveness to their
circumstances. It has been, so to speak, left as an absent-presence in the
background to our lives, rationally unacknowledged but nonetheless still at
work in our (thus self-deceptive) thinking. But as Bakhtin and MerleauPonty remind us, this more primordial form of understanding, although
usually left as unnoticed background, has not actually been left behind in our
higher forms of mental activity. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) sees it:
Thought and expression, then, are simultaneously constituted, when our
cultural store is put at the service of this unknown law, as our body
suddenly lends itself to some new gesture. The spoken word is a genuine
gesture, and contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains
its. This is what makes communication possible. In order that I may
understand the words of another person, it is clear that his vocabulary and
syntax must be already known to me. But that does not mean that words
do their work by arousing in me representations associated with them,
and which in aggregate eventually produce in me the original representation of the speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not representations or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being and
with the world at which he directs his aim. (p. 183, my emphasis)
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Thus, for Merleau-Ponty here, the world within which we experience

ourselves as speaking is not a neutral world toward which we can act as we
like, 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 to
act 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 the
precursor world, and to relate it to the more familiar Cartesian world of our
intellectual inquiries, I have had to resort to quite a number of poetic images
and metaphors: talk of faces and voices, of agents and influences, of
landscapes and horizons, gaps and openings, and so on. Why is this? Why
isnt 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 describe
the 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 they
imply the apparatus of representation with its propositional contents,
logical relations, truth values, directions of fit, etc. . . . The fact that we
have no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question and
the fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought to
arouse our interest. . . . There simply is no first-order vocabulary for the
Background, because the Background has no Intentionality. As the precondition of Intentionality, the Background is as invisible to Intentionality
as the eye which sees is invisible to itself. (pp. 156157)
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 give
reasons for them all. Giving grounds does comes to an end sometime: But
the end is not an ungrounded proposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting
(no. 110). When we are embedded within the background flow of mutually
responsive activity, there are certain ways in which we simply actnot on
the basis of reasons, but blindly, in response to the requirements of our
jointly shared circumstances. But how can such a jointly shared common
sense 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 otherwise
vague and ambiguous circumstances. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it: our
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experimental study proved that it was the functional use of the word, or any
other sign, as a means of focusing ones attention, selecting distinctive
features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in
concept formation (p. 106, my emphases). Learning to direct ones own
mental processes with the aid of words or signs is an integral part of the
process of concept formation (p. 108, my emphasis). But how might we
understand this power of our utterances? What might Vygotsky mean by his
term the functional use of words? How is it possible to direct ones own
mental processes by the use of words? Why is what occurs spontaneously
so crucial here? How can what occurs spontaneously and bodily be the
source of what later we come to do deliberately and intellectually? The key
to understanding what is occurring here is in understanding the gestural
nature of both our own and other peoples expressive movements, along
with the gestures that the things around us afford or allow us to make toward
them.
Gestures can have both an indicative meaning (gesturing toward something) and a mimetic meaning (a showing or manifesting of something in the
contoured shape of the gesture). Our facial expressions, our tones of voice,
our bodily postures, are all spontaneously responsive to, and can thus be
uniquely expressive of, ourselves or our circumstances in both mimetic and
indicatory ways. Kundera (1992) gives the following example:
The woman might have been sixty or sixty-five. I was watching her from a
deck chair by the pool of my health club . . . she kept looking up at the
young life guard in sweat pants who was teaching her to swim. . . . [On
leaving] she walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the life
guard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she
turned her head, smiled, and waved at him. At that instant I felt a pang in
my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl!
. . . The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a
second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then
the word Agnes entered my mind. I had never known a woman by that
name. (pp. 34)
What a strange perception! But nonetheless, a true possibility in our

physiognomic understandings of certain expressive events in our surroundings. With regard to music, Wittgenstein (1981) remarks that, if a theme, a
phrase, suddenly means something to you, you dont have to be able to
explain it. Just this gesture has been made accessible to you (no. 158)a
very particular and very precise, but still perhaps vague, feeling of
tendency (James) has been opened up as a point of departure, a horizon, an
opening for a whole world of next possible actions and events.
Thus, it is in the unfolding movement of ones expressions, as ones
attention moves over ones circumstances, that it is possible for ones
expressions to display or manifest in a mimetic fashion the contours, so
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to speak, of what they are meant to be expressive of. Wittgenstein (1981)

describes this phenomenon thus:
A poets words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected
with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the
way in which, conformable to this use, we can let our thoughts roam up
and 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 accomplishes it. . . . Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of a
problem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationship
with known ones. . . . In understanding others, the problem is always
indeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectively
to light as convergent. . . . There is, then, a taking up of others thought
through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to
others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must
finally be induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their
conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from their
gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And, as in a foreign
country, I begin to understand the meaning of words from their place in a
context of action, and by taking part in communal lifein the same way an
as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to
me at least a certain style . . . which is the first draft of its meaning. I
begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential
manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. . . . There is
thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or
writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by
intellectualism. (p. 179)
Just as in a Marcel Marceau mime, in which we see how at first he is

overwhelmed by his imprisonment by an impassable, massive, immoveable
object, and how in his creative stumbling up against it he eventually finds
a passage out of it, so we too can sense the initial contours of a
something in a persons style of speech or writing.
Indeed, in a way very close to Wittgensteins earlier remark that a whole
world 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 the
world. . . . The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonants
in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so
many arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea,
but several ways for the human body to sing the worlds praises and in the
last resort to live it. . . . We may speak several languages, but one of them
always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate
a language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses
ones own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once. . . . Strictly
speaking, therefore, there are no conventional signs. (pp. 187188)
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It is, then, in the spontaneous way in which we respond initially to the

gestural meaning of an utterance that we set the scene or establish the
grammar, so to speak, within which our further, more detailed determining
of its meaning takes place. And language continues to be constitutive of our
modes of being in this way, even during those moments when we suppose
ourselves only to be making intellectual and conceptual use of it. This is so
because our utterances in their expression never cease to arouse spontaneous
responses, both in our listeners and in ourselves. Indeed, because:
. . . any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication
of a particular sphere . . . utterances are not indifferent to one another, and
are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another.
. . . Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of
responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech
communication. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91)
And these kinds of responsive reactions are there in the tone of our
utterances, even in the structure of our written sentences, working their
influence upon us, whether we recognize the fact or not.9
But how might such immediate, unthinking responses function as the
source of our higher mental abilities, in which we seem able to reverse, so to
speak, the direction of the formative influences at work in shaping our
conductso that instead of us acting spontaneously as our circumstances
require, we can act toward our circumstances deliberately, as we ourselves
require? As Vygotskys (1978, 1986) work in this sphere shows, the role of
the others around us in effecting this transition within us is crucial. I will
review what he has to say in the following two areas: in the sphere of what
he calls internalization in the development of pointing, and in the sphere of
play. (Although his comments, in Chapter 8, on the pre-history of writing
are also highly relevant, in the interests of space, I will leave then
unmentioned.)
Pointing
A very young child may attempt, but fail, to grasp an object. The important
event is when the young childs caretaker comes to the aid of the child,
responding to his or her movements as indicative of something. Then, the
childs unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he [or
she] seeks but from another person (p. 56). We can think of this as the first
step in a three-part process. The second stage occurs when the child is able
to inter-relate his or her movement to the whole situationwithin which
both the adult and the object are embedded. At this point, the childs
movement may change from an object-oriented to a person-oriented movement, a movement used to establish a relation with them. As a result of this
change, a final stage is reached in which the movement itself is physically
simplified, and what results is the form of pointing that we may call a true
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gesture (p. 56). But it only becomes so when the child deliberately directs it
toward others, and is recognized by those others as a gesture addressed to
them. Vygotsky calls this three-part process internalization. The designation
is, however, only partially appropriate. For it is not the case, as he claims,
that an external activity [outside an individual] is reconstructed and begins
to occur internally [within the individual] (pp. 5657). It is a case of an
activity that was at first related only externally to the whole situation within
which child, object and adult are all embedded becoming internally related
to it, becoming a participant part within it. The relevant activity does not
wholly disappear inside the person. What originated as a relationally
responsive understanding of a gesture in fact remains so. What changes is its
use, its functional meaning, as the sphere in which it is embedded as a
gesture is enlarged.
Play
In discussing play, Vygotsky (1978) makes many of the points already made
above regarding joint action and dialogically structured action, or those
made by Gadamer (1989) in discussing play. But he also finds childrens
play to be a crucial sphere in which various prototypical or precursor
activities occur spontaneously, prior to our appropriation of them into the
realm of our more deliberately performed activities. It is here, he says, in
the sphere of play, that the child learns to act in a cognitive, rather than an
externally visual, realm by relying on internal tendencies and motives and
not on incentives supplied by external things (p. 96).10 Thus in play, a
piece of wood begins to be a doll and a stick becomes a horse (p. 97). This
is not because either the piece of wood or the stick looks like a doll or a
horse, but because they each in their own way allow or afford the child the
opportunity to express certain appropriate responsive inclinations toward
them in their playthe piece of wood can be laid in a bed to rest, the
stick 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 child
is not reacting directly as the visual field around him or her requires, but is
separating a field of meaning from the visual field. Indeed, the child moves
from a situation in which an object directly calls for a certain meaningful
actionlike a bell demanding to be rungto one in which he or she can,
to an extent, impose a meaning on a situation, and act toward it as that
meaning requires. So although, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, every perception
is 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 meaning
from an object without knowing he is doing it, just as he does not know he
is speaking in prose but talks without paying attention to the words.
(p. 99)
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This does not, however, mean that in play anything can mean anything for
the child. The chosen plaything must afford the appropriate gesture and be a
site of application for it. Things that do not admit of the appropriate gestural
structure are absolutely rejected by the child. For example, any stick can
become a horse but . . . a postcard cannot be a horse for a child (p. 98). In
play, then, something very special is happening: not only is there a break-up
of the primary unity of sensory-motor processes in the separation of the field
of meaning from the visual field, but they are also re-constituted into a new
unity with a reversal of the usual direction of influence. Whereas a particular
movement 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 gestural
movements toward objects, begins to impose his or her own meanings on
elements in the visual field (i.e. meaning comes to dominate action). In such
a process, uncontrolled, impulsive responses are transformed into considered, voluntary ones.
In the realm of play, then, what is most important is the utilization of the
plaything and the possibility of executing a representational [or indicatory]
gesture with it (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 108). So, although any stick the child
can sit astride can become a horse, objects not affording that possibility
cannot. What matters is that the objects admit the appropriate gesture and
can function as a point of application for it. Hence, things with which this
gestural 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 crucial
developmental process, in which indicatory and mimetic gestures come to
play a central role. While Vygotsky (1986) sees all the major psychological
functionssuch as sensing and acting, perceiving, attending, remembering,
thinking, acting, speaking, and so onas forming an indivisible whole, as
operating in an uninterrupted connection with one another (p. 1), and as
rooted in the most basic or elementary adaptive responses of the living,
human being, he also sees development as consisting in the re-constitution
of such wholes. In development:
. . . they are characterized by a new integration and co-relation of their
parts. 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 [also
indivisible wholes] which emerge in the process of cultural development
are called higher structures. . . . The initial stage is followed by that first
structures destruction, reconstruction, and transition structures of the
higher type. Unlike the direct reactive processes, these latter structures are
constructed on the basis of the use of signs and tools; these new formations
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unite both direct and indirect means of adaptation. (Vygotsky, 1978,

p. 124)11
The spontaneously responsive role of speech in effecting this transformation is crucial. At first, the child begins to exhibit a future orientation and
planning (and an understanding of the role of others in their actions) by
calling in an other for help. Often, others will do little else than say to the
child: Stop . . . look at this . . . listen to that . . ., to create functional
barriers to immediately impulsive activity, that is, to transform or metamorphose an old unity into a new one by bringing to the childs attention a
previously unnoticed relation already existing within it. The new, more
complexly structured unity, the new indivisible whole within which the child
has his or her being, is formed by an internal articulation in the old. Later,
the child will incorporate the functional speech forms provided by others
into his or her own activities, so that speech, which at first followed or
accompanied the activities and reflected their difficulties, moves more and
more to the turning (choice) points within them, and to their beginnings. In
incorporating the living, bodily expressions of others into his or her own
actions, expressions that can exert both an indicative and a mimetic gestural
power on the child, the child can transform his or her own behavior; he or
she becomes orchestrated according to the gestural powers of others. But
what is the character of the setting within which this can occur? What is so
special about our immersion in our surroundings in what I have called the
precursor world to our being in an external, objective world as selfcontained, Cartesian subjectivities?
Real Presences in the Dynamic, Open, Multidimensional

World of Spontaneously Responsive Joint Action
Our Cartesian inclinations make it difficult for us to orient ourselves within
such a precursor world. To talk of our surroundings as issuing us with
action-guiding advisories, of them as having a face, and of finding
ourselves as if judged as to whether we are treating them in terms of their
requirements (not ours), is quite foreign to us. The idea of meaning being a
physiognomy, of the mimetic or indicatory expressions of living human
beings as gesturing precisely to something in their surroundings beyond
themselves, is also utterly alien to us. But nonetheless, we will mislead
ourselves if we mis-characterize this precursor world in terms suited to our
own, self-conscious, deliberately executed mental functions aimed at mastery, that is, if we try to analyze it in Cartesian terms. Aware of the dangers
of such mis-descriptions, Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes that modern philosophy prejudges what it will find (p. 130). To overcome this tendency, he
suggests that philosophy:
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. . . once again . . . must recommence everything, reject the instruments

reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus
where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not
yet been worked over, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both subject
and object, both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy
resources to redefine them. (p. 130)
And this, I think, is precisely the importance of all the writers I have
mentioned so far in this paper. They all in their own different ways provide
us with the resources we need to come to an understandinga relationally
responsive, living understandingof the primordial, the precursor world to
what 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 activity
that has not yet been worked over in experience. What might such a realm be
like? Can we specify its details?
In our past studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great realms of
activity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our agency
to control, to be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on action, on
events for which we as individuals take responsibility, and explain in terms
of our reasons. And, as already outlined, we have treated the world around
us not only as a dead world of mechanisms, but as an external world
consisting in an assemblage of externally related, objective parts. That is, we
have treated it as a world over there, as existentially separate from us, in
that we owe nothing of the character of our own existence to it. Further, in
treating it as an assemblage of externally related, objective parts, we have
seen it as a structure of self-contained parts all existentially separate from
each other, that is, which exist as the separate entities they are whether they
are a part of a larger mechanism or not. In other words, both these realms of
activity 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 is
utterly inimical to their nature.
But a dialogically structured real presence, having its existence only
within the inter-activity occurring in joint action,12 cannot be understood
externally in this way. (1) In being responsively shaped in relation to the
unique circumstances of its occurrence, such activity cannot be explained
simply as a naturally occurring regularity, as a just happening event of
behavior, in terms of causal laws or principles insensitive to the context of
their application. (2) Nor can it be understood wholly as a case of individual
human action, for, in occurring only in the intertwining of peoples spontaneous responses to each other and to their surroundings, it cannot be
explained by giving any persons reasons or justifications for his or her
individual actions. What is produced in such responsively interwoven,
dialogically structured activity is a strange third realm of always ongoing
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and always unfinished activity of its own unique kind. Indeed, it is precisely
its lack of a precisely determined order, and its openness to being further
specified or determined by those involved in it, in practicewhile usually
remaining unaware of their having done sothat is its central defining
feature. Or, to put it another way, as the character of peoples circumstances
is a matter of their on-the-spot judgments, joint action can only be understood from within ones involvements in it. It is precisely this that makes
this sphere of activity interesting, for at least the following reasons:
It means that the primordial, precursor world of spontaneous, relationally
responsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action, constitutes a third,
dynamic realm of activity of its own kind, sui generis, quite distinct from
the other two realms of behavior and action.
It is not a static realm of things and substances, a mere static container of
activities.
The activities constituting it are all internally related activities, that is,
their parts at any one moment owe not just their character but their very
existence both to each other and to their relations with the parts of the
system at some earlier point in timehence their history is just as
important as their logic in understanding their nature.
It thus constitutes in each of its occurrences a unitary, indivisible realm of
activity.
As a person with one or another kind of subjectivity, we are all participant parts in, and of, such an indivisible realm.
We are embedded in it, and my activity only has the character it has in
relation to yours, in relation to your responses to mine.
Thus this realm is constitutive of peoples social and personal identities,
and is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to
us, which have their being within it.
Unlike the realms of reasons and causes, which are externally related to
the realms of human activity they explain, the realm of joint action can
only be participatively experienced or lived throughand described as
such:
What underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not a
principle as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of
ones own participation in unitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot be
adequately expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described and
participatively experienced. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 40)
Such descriptions though, if they work to draw attention to relations

between our activities and features in their surroundingsif, that is, they
also work as participant parts in and of such a realmcan play the part
of explanations, that is, they can work to refine, elaborate or extend our
ways of relating ourselves to our circumstances.
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To emphasize the primordial or precursor nature of this realm of activity,

its importance as an origin or source of prototypes for our more welldefined activities, I will outline some of its further characteristics:
In lacking specificity, the activities produced in such dialogical exchanges
are a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influencesas 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 borders
or margins.
This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: they have
neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely
stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor a
fully objective characterhence 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 a
distributed structure, constituted in and by contributions from many
different participants or participations.
In other words, as Rommetveit (1985) puts it:
. . . human discourse takes place in and deals with a pluralistic, only
fragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world. Vagueness,
ambiguity, and incompletenessbut hence also versatility, flexibility, and
negotiabilitymust for that reason be dealt with as inherent and theoretically essential characteristics of ordinary language. (p. 183)
Thus, in such still open circumstances, even apparently simple objects and
events remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities
until they are talked about (p. 193). And how, ultimately, we do in fact talk
in 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 childs 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 is
not one individual but an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group
life . . . [such that] the first me is . . . unaware of itself in its absolute
difference . . . 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 to
other minds, to some thing hidden right inside them, but is that of
differentiating which of all the activity occurring in us has its origins in us,
and which in them. Indeed, we must renounce the classical Cartesian
prejudice in which the psyche is a private sequence of states of mind the
cannot be seen from the outside. We can see the character of an others
consciousness displayed in the details of his or her spontaneously responsive
conduct toward the worldas Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: Nothing is
hidden (no. 435). But where, so to speak, is it to be seen?
459
Although the words we utter may, technically, be repetitions of, as

Volosinov (1986) calls them, normatively identical forms, and although we
may consciously struggle to choose just the right word-forms to fit our own
plans and intentions, there is still, nonetheless, a realm of spontaneous
responsiveness at work influencing their unfolding expression, as we bodily
voice forth our utterances into the world around us. We do not voice them in
a predetermined manner; indeed, how could we ever achieve such a perfect
uniformity? It is in the specific variability (Volosinov, 1986, p. 69) that
such forms afford us, as we utter them in spontaneous response to features in
our surrounding circumstances, that we expressunconsciously and
involuntarilywhat 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 the
world of our our utterances. Thus, it is in an utterances unique expressive
intonationwhat is usually ignored in our more systematic inquiries into
the linguistic forms of our language and language usethat we reveal
aspects of our inner lives to those around us. As Bakhtin (1986) notes:
Both the word and the sentence as linguistic units are devoid of expressive
intonation. . . . [E]xpressive intonation belongs to the utterance and not to
the word. . . . [E]xpression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates
at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under
conditions 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 their
spontaneously responsive, moment-by-moment, unfolding expressive intonation reveals the shape of our relations to the others and othernesses in
our circumstances, that usually we cannot and do not self-consciously
control.13 We cannot control our utterances ahead of time, as in their
uniqueness, their immediate responsiveness to the present moment, we
cannot 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 cannot
wish them away. Nor can we wholly avoid responding to them in some
wayeven if it is to continually dismiss them when noticed with the
criticism that they are subjective, merely anecdotal or not generally the
case. And such invisible but real presences make themselves felt in our
lives not just in terms of what we talk of as other peoples inner lives, but in
other important spheres of our being too. It is in terms of the shape of the
invisible presences unfolding over timein music and dance, in our reading
of a text, in our surveying of a work of art, a painting, a sculpture, as we
move up close and back away, and orchestrate our own relations to it
according to its requirementsthat we gain a sense not so much of their
personal 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
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presences, although quite invisible to our eyes, may nonetheless exert a

powerful influence in shaping, from the outside, so to speak, our actions.
Recall here Merleau-Pontys comments above about feeling his way into the
existential character of a piece of philosophical writing by voicing to himself
the tone and accent of the philosopher. Indeed, in a great range of very
different circumstancesin a good conversation; in driving or in any other
movement in which we must navigate our own motions in immediate
relation to those around us; in viewing a painting; or especially in reading a
bookwhen we are immersed in living relations with our surroundings,
then the compellently actual face of that presence is an agentic influence
able to shape, at least partially, our responses to them.
But to speak in this wayin terms of invisible presencesis, of course,
to indulge in what hard scientists, that is, those who insist that only data
collected 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 a
characteristic of primitive or inferior peoples. He called it participatory
thinking because in it, crucially, certain entitiesnames, pictures, totems,
and so onthat we would simply think of as neutral images or representations having only an arbitrary or conventional relation to what they happen
to stand for, are taken as having mystic properties due to the fact that every
picture, every reproduction participates in the nature, properties, life of
that of which it is the image (p. 79).
Levy-Bruhls sensitive characterization of the nature of participatory
thinking, although offered as an account of a primitive way of thinking, is
so positively relevant in every detail to our task of familiarizing ourselves
with our responsive understanding of real presences that I will quote it at
length:
The collective representations14 of primitives . . . differ profoundly from
our ideas or concepts, nor are they their equivalent either. On the one hand,
. . . they have not their logical character. On the other hand, not being
genuine representations, in the strict sense of the term, they express, or
rather imply, not only that the primitive actually has an image of the object
in his mind, and thinks it is real, but also that he has some hope or fear
connected with it, that some definite influence emanates from it, or is
exercised upon it. This influence is a virtue, an occult power which varies
with objects and circumstances, but is always real to the primitive and
forms and integral part of his representation. . . . [T]o express in a word the
general peculiarity of the[se] collective representations . . . I should say that
this mental activity was a mystic one . . . [this does not refer] to the
religious mysticism of our communities, which is something entirely
different, but [applies] in the strictly defined sense in which mystic
implies belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible to
the sense, are nevertheless real. (pp. 3738, all emphases and additions
mine)
461
Modernist scientists may laugh at these misguided primitives who treat

certain neutral thingswhich such scientists see as simply standing for other
things, as words say, stand for thingsas actually participating in the life of
those things they stand for. But if Rommetveit (1985) is correct, and (to
repeat) even apparently simple objects and events remain in principle
enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about
(p. 193), then, in a very important sense, our words and other expressions do
participate crucially in the nature, properties, life of which [they are] the
image.
Why we have found this difficult to accept is that in our current (still
Greek- and Cartesian-influenced) modes of inquiry, in pursuit of a theoretical objectivity, we have sought a supposed fixed and finalized (eternal)
reality hidden behind appearances. We have worked in terms of inner
theoretical representations of outer phenomena that we have striven to prove
true. But participatory perception works quite differently. In physiognomic
terms, the perception of and response to expression is not the perception of
something hidden behind appearances, but a matter of spontaneously responding to something manifested or displayed in them. Thus what is before
us at any one moment is not a mere thing, a mere inert object, requiring a
choice 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 we
are ourselves participants. It is a presence sensed in the responsive movement of appearances as they unfold before us as we responsively relate
ourselves to their requirements. Thus, just as the depth we see as we scan
over the scene before uswhether it is a real 3-D scene or a 2-D random-dot
stereogramis a third relational dimension derived from the other two, and
is in fact in itself invisible, so the presence of depth in a conversation is
spontaneously constituted in the sensed relational dimensions participants
display in their utterances. Either what I call depth, says Merleau-Ponty
(1964), is nothing, or it is my participation . . . in the being of space beyond
every [particular] point of view (p. 173, translators 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 as
self-centered Cartesian beings, seeking mastery by acting in a thoughtful but
unresponsive manner toward our surroundings, we were to treat ourselves
more as participant parts of a larger, ongoing, dynamic, indivisible realm
of living activity. This led on to the suggestion that, when we cease to set
ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us
and we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically structured, living,
embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us, then, and only
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then, certain very special phenomena can occur. Then we can find ourselves
in contact with invisible but nonetheless very real presences thatdue to
their indicatory and mimetic effects on uscan, like another person issuing
instructions and commands, exert a communicative influence on us and thus
(at least partially) structure our actions. In such circumstances as these, as
Johnston (1993) puts it:
[t]he idea of the Inner is a feature of our everyday discourse and a part of
the psychological concepts we all share. . . . [I]t expresses our relation to
others as experiencing beings: as beings with an Inner, we treat their noninformational utterances as expressions of experiences (and not as meaningless). . . . Thus talk of an Inner brings into play a distinctive array of
concepts and expresses the fact that we relate to other human beings in a
way 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 thought

explored above is a shift away from a dead, mechanistically organized
world, toward a world conceived of as an indivisible living unity. It is the
strangely unnoticed elimination of the life of mutually responsive living
bodies from our academic forms of inquiry that I have sought to rectify.
But how might the reintroduction of our spontaneous living involvements
with each other affect the character of our intellectual inquiries into our
social lives together? The implications are, in fact, enormous.15 As I
intimated above, very few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclinations can be retained unchanged. But due to limitations in space, I can touch
on only a few here. I will do this by returning to a difference I introduced
briefly above: that between achieving an explanation and achieving an
orientational understanding of a situations physiogomy, that is, achieving
an evaluative sense of where and how we are placed or positioned in
relation to all the others and othernesses around us.
Finding ourselves disoriented, perhaps, by certain compellent calls from
our 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 is
sometimes an alternative. [T]he difficulty, he suggests:
. . . is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the
solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. . . . This
is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation,
whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right
place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get
beyond it. (no. 314)
In other words, when faced with a disorienting circumstance, a circumstance

in 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 and
imaginatively construct a way to explain it in ways already familiar to us, we
should, so to speak, stay in dialogue with it. We should look it over as we
463
look over a painting or a sculpture in an art gallery. We should respond to it

from up close, from a distance, from this angle and that, until we can begin
to gain a shaped and vectored sense of the space of possibilities it opens up
to us in the responses it calls from us. And we should do this in
collaboration with the others involved with us in the practice in question.
The difference between the two approaches can be set out in terms of their
steps, and the orientational understandings associated with each such step. In
the classical tradition, the sequence of steps we take in our inquiries can be
set out as follows. We begin by orienting toward any newness or strangeness
we encounter as a problem to be solved. We then go on to treat it as an entity
that can be analyzed into a set of already well-known elements.16 We then
search for an order or pattern amongst them, hypothesize a causal agency
responsible for that order (call it, say, a mystic entity like the Mind), and
then go on to find further evidence for the existence of this mystic thing we
call the Mind. Indeed, we then begin to develop further theories as to its
nature, and, in terms of such theories, we attempt, indirectly, to manipulate
the Minds operations, to produce what we see as outcomes advantageous to
us. But we only call such theories solutions to our problem if they enable
usas the experts proposing themto achieve seeming mastery over the
phenomena represented within them.
The sequence of steps we follow in gaining an orientational understanding
goes like this. We begin by treating the disorienting othernesses we
encounter as radically unknown to uswe approach them, not like Kants
appointed judge, but with care, respect and anxiety. We enter into
dialogically structured, reciprocally responsive relations with them. In so
doing, we must be (at least partially) answerable to their calls, just as they
must be (partially) answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay between
us and them, an it, a real presence, appears between us, produced neither
solely by us nor by the othernesses, an it within which both we and they
have our being. The it is our it, an it in which we can all share in
common. Like a persons facial expression, which, with its smile, gestures
us to approach, or, with its scowl, repels us, it has a similar directive or
instructive physiognomyand we can thus develop a sensibility of, or
sensitivity to, its nature. And as we continue our commerce with the
othernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of our familiarity with
the inner shape or character of the real presence created between us. And
as we dwell on, or within, its nature, we can gain a sense of the value of
its yet-to-be-achieved aspectsthe prospects it offers us for going on
with it. We come to feel at home with it, to know our way around within
it, 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 information, is a shaped and vectored sense of how to go on in relation to the
otherness concerned. In other words, we understand how to see the invisible
face, to hear the silent voice, and to be answerable to the mute
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judgments of the presences in our living relations with the world around
usreal influences that cannot be measured by any mechanical instruments,
that only become available to us in our living, moving, responsive and
responsible engagements with our surroundings.
Notes
1. See Shotter (1993, pp. 6870) for an account of providential spaces, i.e.,
spaces not only open to further development by internal refinement, but with the
provision of resources appropriate to certain such developments (but not
others).
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 changes
in social consciousness from, say, one generation to the next, he suggests that
they are best characterized as changes in structures of feeling (p. 132). By this
term he wants to signal that:
. . . we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic
beliefs. . . . We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse,
restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and
relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and
feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living
and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a
structure: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience
still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to
be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis
(though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant
characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (p. 132)
3.
4.
5.
6.
Thus, structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as

distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and
are more evidently and more immediately available (pp. 133134).
For example, as Wittgenstein (1978) notes, even about such a seeming neutral
thing as a proposition: The proposition seems set over against us as a judge and
we feel answerable to it.It seems to demand that reality be compared with it
(p. 132).
See Shotter (1996), where this phenomenon is discussed at length.
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 discriminatory
sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever
(James, 1981, p. 244). Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to
show, is that tendencies are not only descriptions from without, but that they
are 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 of
tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all (p. 246).
Etymologically, of course, the term consciousness is a knowledge word. This
is evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we
465
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 their
actionsare as a result conscientes. They act as they do knowing one anothers
plans: they are jointly knowing (Toulmin, 1982, p. 64). Toulmin traces how a
whole family of words,
. . . whose historic use and sense had to do with the public articulation
of shared plans and intentions has been taken over into philosophical
theory as providing a name for the most private and unshared aspects
of mental life. . . . The term consciousness has thus become the name
for a flux of sensory inputs that is seemingly neither con-, since each
individually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since the
sensory flux is thought of as buzzing and booming rather than
cognitively 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 childs cultural development appears twice: first,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between
people . . . , and then inside the child. . . . All higher [mental] functions
originate as actual relations between human individuals. (Vygotsky,
1978, p. 57)
8. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: The experimental method makes us think we
have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and
method pass one another by (p. 232). Instead of looking backwards for patterns
and regularities from a position of uninvolvement, we need ways to investigate
a circumstance from within as a participant involved within it.
9. See, for instance, in this connection, Billigs (1995) account of how Richard
Rorty, in the rhetorical tone of his philosophical texts, displays in their small
detailsespecially in his use of the word wehis nationalism. As Billig puts
it:
It has become customary for cultural analysts to treat objects, such as
flags, as if they were texts. The process can be reversed, so that the text
appears as a flag. Rortys texts, with his drum-beat of wes, seek to
enrol us, his readers, in their literary march. (p. 173)
10. Children initially experience objects in their surroundings as gesturally expressive 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 be
rung (p. 96).
11. Passage from the unedited translation of Tool and Symbol, quoted by JohnSteiner 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 sometimes
control them: One thing that is immensely important in teaching, notes
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Wittgenstein (1966), is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions (p. 2).

Goffman (1959) also notes the importance of the distinction between expressions given and those given off, and how people are likely to check up on the
more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable (p. 19),
so that sometimes, to create an impression, we attempt also to control our
gestures and facial expressions. But when we do, our expressions lose their
wholistic quality as true expression and become caricatures, that is, false
expressions of our relations to our surroundings.
14. By collective representations Levy-Bruhl (a student of Durkheim) means those
notions which, in being collective . . . force themselves on the individual
(p. 25); they are, we might say, an aspect of the individuals background or
everyday common-sense understanding of his or her world.
15. Some of them are explored in Katz and Shotter (1996a, 1996b), Shotter and
Katz (1996) and Shotter and Gustavsen (1999). But these are mere beginnings.
A whole very different approach to cognitive psychologyin which our inner
lives 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 lifewhich is
in the internal relations between the participant parts of a living wholeis
eliminated!
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processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated
action. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and
religious belief (C. Barrett, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On certainty (G.E.M. Anscombe & G.H. von Wright, Eds.;
D. Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Philosophical grammar (R. Rhees, Ed.; A. Kenny, Trans.).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value (P. Winch, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
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John Shotter is Professor of Interpersonal Relations in the Department of
Communication, University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Social
Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind
(Open University, 1993) and Conversational Realities: The Construction of
Life through Language (Sage, 1993). Address: Department of Communication, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire,
Durham, NH 03824-3586, USA. [email jds@hypatia.unh.edu]

Real Presences' Meaning As Living Movement in A Participatory World John Shotter University of New Hampshire

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Real Presences' Meaning As Living Movement in A Participatory World John Shotter University of New Hampshire

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Theory & Psychology

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

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Presence: an intangible spirit or mysterious influence felt to be present.

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Below, I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity that lies

Beyond the Cartesian World Picture to the Primordial

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

Also in establishing his method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excluded

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our surroundings, we attend away from the shaping influence of such a

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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posed to us is expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationally

Prior to our conscious awareness of our actions as having meaning, prior to

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

Real Presences in the Indivisible Unity of a Participatory

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William James (1981), in his famous The Stream of Thought chapter,

In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

belong, within which we participate, where belonging is brought about by

Such a third agency is at work in all dialogically structured activities. The

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users gain a competency that they then apply in performing appropriate

In other words, of everything toward which our understanding can be

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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different from what it would be were the thunder the continuation of

Once in touch, so to speak, with a real presence, while only an aspect of it

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

stream of spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity, without our being

But if we are to study how this is possible, what we must investigate is

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as a later reader. It is within such present interactive moments, if we can

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

Thus, for Merleau-Ponty here, the world within which we experience

Gestural Understanding: Understanding Expressions

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What a strange perception! But nonetheless, a true possibility in our

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

to speak, of what they are meant to be expressive of. Wittgenstein (1981)

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

Just as in a Marcel Marceau mime, in which we see how at first he is

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It is, then, in the spontaneous way in which we respond initially to the

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

unite both direct and indirect means of adaptation. (Vygotsky, 1978,

Real Presences in the Dynamic, Open, Multidimensional

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. . . once again . . . must recommence everything, reject the instruments