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Real Presences' Meaning As Living Movement in A Participatory World John Shotter University of New Hampshire PDF
Real Presences' Meaning As Living Movement in A Participatory World John Shotter University of New Hampshire PDF
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John Shotter
University of New Hampshire
Theory & Psychology Copyright 2003 Sage Publications. Vol. 13(4): 435468
[0959-3543(200308)13:4;435468;033263]
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
Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1651, Descartes (1968) set out a character-
ization of our external world, and a method for thinking about its nature,
that has influenced our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and the
relations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be:
. . . obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philoso-
phers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes,
and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were 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)
within it precursors to, or, in Wittgensteins (1981, no. 541) terms, proto-
types of, all our later, more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.
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 in-
tellectual 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 them-
selves. 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
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 difference-
making 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 sur-
roundings, 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 conscious-
ness 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
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?
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 some-
thing) 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)
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 move-
ment, 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
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)
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 con-
sidered, 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).
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 sponta-
neous 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
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 under-
stood 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 partici-
pant 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)
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
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 non-
informational utterances as expressions of experiences (and not as mean-
ingless). . . . 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 inclina-
tions 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
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 inter-
locking 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)
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).
3. 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).
4. See Shotter (1996), where this phenomenon is discussed at length.
5. The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction
in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acute 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).
6. 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
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 ex-
pressive or physiognomically to such an extent that, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it,
a very young child concludes that things dictate to the child what he must do:
a door demands to be opened and closed, a staircase to be climbed, a bell to be
rung (p. 96).
11. Passage from the unedited translation of Tool and Symbol, quoted by John-
Steiner and Souberman, in their Afterword to Vygotsky (1978).
12. I have set out the properties of joint action extensively elsewhere also (Shotter,
1980, 1984).
13. But in those circumstances where a form is already present, we do sometimes
control them: One thing that is immensely important in teaching, notes
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