Shotter Real Presences T&P

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Real Presences

Meaning as Living Movement in a ParticipatoryWorld

John ShotterUniversity of New Hampshire

Abstract. In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as

working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of suchrepresentations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation interms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to beunderstood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our lan-guage does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our sponta-neous, living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses aroundus. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodilyactivity that pre-dates, so to speak, the calculational processes wecurrently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realmwithin which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic orgestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurring

between us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfoldingstructures of activity in which we all participate in shaping, but to whichwe all must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is theagentic influence of these invisible but nonetheless felt real presences(Steiner, 1989) that I want to explore. Their influence can be felt as actingupon us in a way similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thuswithin this sphere of physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible butauthoritative others can directly call us into action, can issue us withaction-guiding advisories, and judge our subsequent actions accordinglywith their facial expressions or tones of voice. Below I will explore howthissome would say, mystic (Levy-Bruhl)form of participatory

thought and understanding can help us to understand the inner nature ofour social lives together, and the part played by our expressive talk in theircreation.

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(3): 359392[0959-3543(200306)13:3;359392;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 pro-

cesses we currently think of as underlying our linguistic forms of

understandingthe realm of expressive bodily movements and changes. It isa 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 under-

standing 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 andcomplex 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(Greekand 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

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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)

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 Descartess view of our existence, we are self-conscious, self-

contained and self-controlled subjects, that is, wilful but disengaged, disem-

bodied and immaterial beings, set over against an objective, mechanically

structured, external, material world. And in seeking knowledge of its nature,

we must use methodical thought modeled on Euclids geometry. For it was

Descartess 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 legit-

imately 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 as-

sumption that we already know how best to visualize and represent the basic,

general nature of ourselves and our world, and not only how to choose 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 pre-

determined, 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 importance 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 beha-

vioral sciences? What if, rather than as Descartess self-centered and self-

controlled, subjective minds, standing (if that is the right word to apply to

such disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, webegin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger,

ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant 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 explana-

tions: 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 we are all acting. We might call

them orientational understandings. But, to repeat, such understandings

which 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 posed to us is



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expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationally responsive under-

standing 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 next to do. 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 Descartess external world. We

need to know, as participants within it, our way around inside of 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, proto-

types 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 interplayoccurring 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 phenome-

non becomes available to us. The phenomenon in question is the creation,

within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in 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, isfeltby 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).5And 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 momentin a persons utterance, Wittgenstein (1980) asks us to consider a circum-

stance 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 oaktree 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 our 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 under-

standing is presumed (p. 126) in our voicing of our utterances, as well as

the witness and the judge (p. 137). Each dialogue takes place, he says,

. . . as if against a background of the responsive understanding of 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. Theutterance 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 is 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 partici-

patory 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 worldas 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 expres-

sions.

In making sense of Steiners, Gadamers and Bakhtins claims that agent-

like, authoritative somethings emerge to influence us within our dialog-

ically 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 worldat all. The world as world exists for man asfor no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature.

. . . Thus, that language is originally human means at the same time 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 alreadygiven, 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 ourselvesdo 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 externalrelation 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 partici-pant 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 participantparts, 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 linguisticcommunication, world is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in lan-

guage 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 someearlier 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 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 . . . [suchthat] the transition between the thought of one object and the thought of

another is no more a break in the thoughtthan 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 silencecreeps 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 indivisiblewhole 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 thedifferences 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 innerexperiences, and on these occasions our outer espressions 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



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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 scholarlytraining, 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, ratherthan 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 representa-

tion 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 recipro-

cal nature of our immediate, living, mindful but thoughtless, bodily inter-

actions, and the felt ways of making sense occurring between us even now,

in the present 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 wayexpressive 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 Merleau-

Pontys (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 everyone of their expressions, in their smiles and frowns, their looks of puzzle-

ment 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, geo-metrical) 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 at work in our (thus self-deceptive) thinking. But as Bakhtin and

Merleau-Ponty remind us, this more primordial form of understanding,

although usually left as unnoticed background, has not actually been leftbehind 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 wordsdo their work by arousing in me representations associated with them,

and which in aggregate eventually produce in me the original representa-

tion of the speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not representa-



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tions 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)

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 welike, but a world in which events possess, as Bakhtin (1993) puts it, a

compellently actual face (p. 45). It is a world that variously obliges us 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.

It 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 ourintellectual 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 wehave 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 pre-

condition 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: Butthe end is not an ungrounded proposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting

(no. 110). When we are embedded within the background flow of 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



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and ambiguous circumstances. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it: our experi-

mental 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 under-

standing 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 adeck 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 surround-

ings. 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 theway 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 accom-

plishes 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 closely to Wittgensteins earlier remark that awhole 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 assimilatea 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 supposeourselves 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 circumstancesrequire, we can act toward our circumstances deliberately, as we ourselves

require? As Vygotskys (1978, 1986) work in this sphere shows, the role ofthe 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 butfrom another person (p. 56). We can think of this as the firststep in a three-part process. The second stage occurs when the child is 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



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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 beginsto 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 therealm 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 anexternally 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 towardthem 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 childis 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 thatmeaning 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 meaningfrom 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 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).

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 asrooted 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 firststructures 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 transforma-

tion is crucial. At first, the child begins to exhibit a future orientation andplanning (and an understanding of the role of others in their actions) 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 met-

amorphose 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 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 intohis 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 theprecursor world to our being in an external, objective world as self-

contained, 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 withaction-guiding advisories, of them as having a face, and of finding

ourselves as if judged as to whether we are treating them in terms oftheir

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 mas-

tery, 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 philoso-

phy 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 philosophyresources 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 activitythat 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, wehave 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



23/34

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 definingfeature. 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 containerof 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 allparticipant parts in, and of, such an indivisible realm.

We are embedded in it, and my activity only has the character it has in

relation toyours, 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 assuch:

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 well-

defined activities, I will outline some of its further characteristics:

In lacking specificity, the activities produced in such dialogical exchangesare a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable 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 outwardtoward 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 com-

pletely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully sub-

jective 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 theoret-

ically 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 realitiesuntil 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 isnot 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 thecannot 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?



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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 bodilyvoice 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 expressiveintonationwhat 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 in-

tonation 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 cannotwish them away. Nor can we wholly avoid responding to them in some

wayeven if it is to continually dismiss them when noticed with thecriticism 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 to 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 representa-

tions 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 beinggenuine 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 entirelydifferent, 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)



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Modernist scientists may laugh at these misguided primitives who treat

certain neutral thingswhich such scientists see as simply standing for other

things, like, say, words 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 principleenigmatic 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 theoret-

ical 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 provetrue. 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 re-

sponding 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 areourselves participants. It is a presence sensed in the responsive movement of

appearances as they unfold before us as we responsively relate ourselves totheir 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 stereogram

is 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), isnothing, 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, asJohnston (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 thoughtexplored above is a shift away from a dead, mechanistically organizedworld, toward a world conceived of as an indivisible living unity. It is the

strangely unnoticed elimination of the life of mutually

Shotter Real Presences T&P

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