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

Theory & Psychology
http://tap.sagepub.com `Real Presences': Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World

John Shotter Theory Psychology 2003; 13; 435 DOI: 10.1177/09593543030134001 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/4/435
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Real Presences
Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World John Shotter
University of New Hampshire
Abstract. In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our language does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous, living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodily activity that pre-dates, so to speak, the calculational processes we currently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realm within which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurring between us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfolding structures of activity that we all participate in shaping, but to which we all must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is the agentic inuence of these invisible but nonetheless felt real presences that I want to explore. Their inuence can be felt as acting upon us in a way similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus, within this sphere of physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others can directly call us into action, can issue us with action-guiding advisories, and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their facial expressions or tones of voice. Below I will explore how thissome would say, mystic (L evy-Bruhl)form of participatory thought and understanding can help us to understand the inner nature of our social lives together, and the part played by our expressive talk in their creation. Key Words: emergence, gesture, meaning, participation, physiognomy, primordial, unfolding
Presence: an intangible spirit or mysterious inuence felt to be present. (Websters) meaning is a physiognomy. (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 568)
Theory & Psychology Copyright 2003 Sage Publications. Vol. 13(4): 435468 [0959-3543(200308)13:4;435468;033263]
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Below, I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity that lies beyond the orderly, systematized or computational or calculational processes we currently think of as underlying our linguistic forms of understandingthe realm of expressive bodily movements and changes. It is a realm of participatory, as distinct from masterful, activity in which, as we shall see, we must function just as much as respondents to activity occurring around us, as free agents able ourselves to make events happen. In this realm, direct, non-interpretational, physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding are possible. As a consequence of such direct, bodily expressed forms of responsive understanding, individuals can not only be taught effective uses of new linguistic forms by those around them, but may also themselves, spontaneously, put those already learned to uniquely new uses, to signify particular and complex meanings in relation to particular and complex circumstances. Thus, among its many other characteristics, this is a realm of activity in which individuals may express meanings quite unique and particular to themselvesmeanings related to their own unique attitudes and inclinations toward aspects of their surroundings often unnoticed by, or of no initial interest to, the others around themand still have them nonetheless, to some extent at least, understood by those others. Indeed, we talk of people within this sphere as expressing their own individual thoughts and feelings, their wants and desires, their sufferings, and so on; we treat their outer expressions as related in some way to an inner realm of states, objects, events and processes. We talk of it as an inner realm because we (mistakenly) take their self-expressive talk of states and objects, and so on, as working in just the same way as their factual talk about their outer surroundings, except that the states and objects, and so on, referred to are invisible and seem to be hidden inside them (Johnston, 1993; Mulhall, 1990). But, as we shall see, if Wittgenstein is correct, rather than being merely expressive of our inner lives, our expressive talk is constitutive of them. It is, then, to this realm of spontaneously responsive, living bodily inter-activity that I wish to draw attention. For, in our still Cartesian (Greek and Judeo-Christian)-inuenced 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 rst 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 characterization of our external world, and a method for thinking about its nature, that has inuenced our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and the relations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be:
. . . obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philosophers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws. (p. 62)
Also in establishing his method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excluded all our bodily activities, our bodily doings, sufferings, and respondings from consideration: This I, that is, the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body (p. 54). Thus in Descartes view of our existence, we are self-conscious, selfcontained and self-controlled subjects, that is, wilful but disengaged, disembodied and immaterial beings, set over against an objective, mechanically structured, external, material world. And in seeking knowledge of its nature, we must use methodical thought modeled on Euclids geometry. For it was Descartes great belief that it was indeed possible to translate, methodically, all that was unknown into the realm of indisputable common knowledge. Starting from what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly (p. 41) to his mind, and then proceeding by way of those long chains of reasonings, quite simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difcult 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 inuences 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 inuence of such a background set of felt inuences, of such spontaneously expressed responses or inclinations in our inquiries. But as Kuhn (1970) noted:
Effective research scarcely begins before a scientic community thinks it has acquired answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers . . . to questions like these are rmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licences the student for professional practice. (pp. 45)
Thus all our professionally institutionalized inquiries proceed on the assumption that we already know how best to visualize and represent the basic, general nature of ourselves and our world, and not only how to choose the relevant elements of our study, but also how to link them together into a systematically interconnected unity of some kind. And further, in a strongly rationalistic culture such as ours, even though, paradoxically, its general character, as an inert, mechanistically organized world, is already predetermined, we are nonetheless obliged to present our views as having been arrived at by deduction from the material represented. But to do this, we must employ a writing style in which the most abstract philosophical principles and concrete factual details must be melded into a unity of tone and viewpoint, a rhetorical style in which we as authors disappear, and in which objectivity as such is pervasive. It is a form of writing within which we claim that the facts speak for themselves. However, in reality, the matter is otherwise. As Kant (1970) put it in 1781, if we are to follow the true path of a science (p. 17), then we must function only as an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated, and we must refuse to allow ourselves to be kept, as it were, in natures leading-strings (p. 20). But in seeking only mastery and in refusing to allow ourselves to be led by (to be spontaneously responsive to) nature in any way, we restrict ourselves to acting only in terms of our own wants, desires or reasons. To repeat, we ignore an important source of knowledge: our spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. In other words, the form-shaping ideology implicitly at work in such a style of writing is, as Bakhtin (1984) terms it, one of a monological kind. In transforming the world into a representation arrived at only as the result of deduction, we inevitably transform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction (p. 83). We make ourselves deaf to the others response (p. 293). How might our disciplinary lives might change if we were to adopt a very
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different form-shaping ideology in our inquiries in the human and behavioral sciences? What if, rather than as Descartess self-centered and selfcontrolled, subjective minds, standing (if that is the right word to apply to such disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, we begin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger, ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant parts within such a whole, rather than seeking exclusively to be masters and possessors of it, we might also nd ourselves subjected as respondents to its requirements as much as, if not more than, we can subject it to ours. If that were so, while still perhaps seeking mastery of some of its aspects seeking to understand how we might use them as a means to our own endswe would also need to seek another quite different kind of understanding. We would need to understand its expressions, respond to its calls, and so on. For, as an other or otherness to which we must, unavoidably, respond, we would need to develop forms of response in which we can collaborate or participate with it in achieving our goals. Now the quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explanations: we seek sure-re procedures for intervening in ongoing activities causally, that is, in a one-way, mechanical cause-and-effect fashion, to inuence their outcome in a predictable manner. Or, to put it another way, we seek to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar. The desire to understand, howeveras a matter of understanding how to respond to the uniquely expressive physiognomic aspects of our surroundings, for this once and never to be repeated timeis much harder to describe. It is not a matter of something happening to us intellectually. In what follows, I will try to explicate it in practical, Wittgensteinian terms, in which a philosophical problem has the form: I dont know my way about (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 123), and in which an understanding enables one to say and to act in a way one can justify to others that [n]ow I know how to go on (no. 154). In other words, such a form of understanding is something that we show, manifest or display in our everyday practical activities when, for instance, we tell someone that we have understood his or her spoken street directions, how to follow a cooking recipe, how to execute a piece of carpentry, or how to play a piece of music well, or in telling someone else what another has told us, or of what we have read in a book. Rather than precise factual information, in such a form of understanding we gain an orientation, a sense of where and how we are placed in relation to the others are around us within the landscape of possibilities within which we are all acting. We might call them orientational understandings. But, to repeat, such understandingswhich have, I suggest, a relationally responsive form to contrast them with the representational-referential forms much more familiar to us in our intellectual livesdo not make themselves readily available to us in our intellectual reections. Just as our understanding of questions
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posed to us is expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationally responsive understanding of other events occurring around us manifested or displayed in the responses we give to them. As George Mead (1934) puts it:
The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the rst 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 choicedifcult though it may be to accept the fact. It is as if there is an extra voice, an authoritative voice, situated in our surroundings, telling us what to do next. In his investigations into the question How am I able to obey a rule?, Wittgenstein (1953) describes our acting according to a rule as follows: When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly (no. 219). It is as if we hear the voice of the rule and we do what it tells us (no. 223). So that when we see a series of numbers, we see it in a certain way, algebraically, and as a segment of an expansion . . . we look to the rule for instruction and do something, without appealing to any thing else for guidance (no. 228).3 Thus, the turn I want to take here, toward accepting ourselves as primarily living bodies, related directly to our surroundings by our spontaneous responsiveness to them, is more than just the turn away from treating ourselves as disembodied minds, related only indirectly to our surroundings by inner, mental representations of it. It is also a turn away from the focus on thoughts and beliefs as being central to our intellectual lives, toward a central focus on our spontaneously performed activities and practices. In other words, to repeat, it is a turn toward a participative and dialogically structured world in which meanings arise inevitably and inexorably in peoples living, responsive reactions to the callings of events occurring around them. As such, it is a turn in which few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclinations, the disciplinary resources upon which we draw in our intellectual inquiriesshaped as they still are by an unidentied and thus remitting Cartesianismcan remain unchanged. Indeed, as I will argue in a moment, we will need a new kind of understanding of a new world, a world that might be called the precursor to Descartes external world. We need to know, as participants within it, our way around inside what is variously called the Background (Searle, 1983; Wittgenstein, 1980), or the primordial (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968). I call it a precursor world, as we shall nd ourselves (as a perhaps unexpected consequence of our turn to such a participative world) already involved in executing spontaneously
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within it precursors to, or, in Wittgensteins (1981, no. 541) terms, prototypes of, all our later, more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.
Real Presences in the Indivisible Unity of a Participatory World Central to the exploration I want to conduct below, then, is a very special phenomenon that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically structured, living, embodied relations with the others and othernesses around uswhen we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against them, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement with them. It is here, in the intricate orchestration of the interplay occurring between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward those others (or othernesses) and their equally responsive incoming expressions toward us that a very special kind of understanding of this special phenomenon becomes available to us. The phenomenon in question is the creation, within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in the situation at that moment, of distinctive, dynamically changing forms, an emerging sequence of changes (or differencings) each one with its own unique shape that, although invisible, is felt by all involved as participants within it in the same way. We can nd 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 nd 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 ow of thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie. (p. 233)
In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the stream of thought as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all (p. 246).5 And I want to suggest the same here, except that, instead of the momentary dynamic stabilities in question being in a stream of thought in peoples heads, they occur out within the larger ow 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 ow of activity in which they subsist, have no substantial existence in themselves. Yet, in being out there as distinctive othernesses in their own right, partially but not wholly responsive to our actions, such forms have the character of real presences (Steiner, 1989). While invisible as such, they are not nothings; they are somethings with a felt presence. Understanding their nature affords us not only a sense of who the others around us are, but also of where they are coming from, of how we are placed in relation to them, and of how we might go on with them in the future. It is a kind of understanding we express by saying that we feel on a footing with them. In short, more than merely a sense of an others nature in itself, we come to a sense of their expressions as occurring in relation to a landscape of possibilities, in fact in relation to a world. As an example of just such a world, present to us for a brief moment in a persons utterance, Wittgenstein (1980) asks us to consider a circumstance in which the word Farewell! is uttered in a certain plaintive tone of voice. A whole world of pain is contained in these words, he comments. How can it be contained in them?, he asks. It is bound up with them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow (p. 52). While Steiner (1984, 1989) talks of the emergence in such circumstances of a real presence, others suggest that this phenomenonthe emergence of an active it with its own requirements within the dialogically structured activities occurring between people, an agentic third partyis quite general. Gadamer (1989), for instance, puts it thus: In genuine dialogue something emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself (p. 462). For Gadamer, that something is often a tradition to which we
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belong, within which we participate, where belonging is brought about by traditions addressing us (p. 463). For Bakhtin (1986), this something is termed both a superaddressee . . . whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed (p. 126) in our voicing of our utterances, as well as the witness and the judge (p. 137). Each dialogue takes place, he says:
. . . as if against a background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners). . . . The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such)he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it. (pp. 126127)
Such a third agency is at work in all dialogically structured activities. The utterance of even a single word is, Bakhtin (1986) suggests, a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author (p. 122). Thus, even when we are in fact all alone, once an event becomes a consciously noticeable event, then, it appears to usif not as an already witnessed and judged eventas a noticing that we could, potentially at least, share with others. Thus, to talk of something as being consciousness in this wayas something witnessable with othersis to go back, as Toulmin (1982) suggests, to the origins of the word consciousness in Roman Law, in which con (with) and scientia (knowing)6 refer to the notion of knowing together with others or joint-knowing. It is the existence of such its, such real presences as agencies, to which we must be answerably responsive, that makes our lives within a participatory reality quite distinct from life within a neutral or inert world of an external, objective kind. Like a grammar or a syntax, we experience such its as external authorities to which we must be responsive and responsible. We cannot wish them away. Indeed, we feel ourselves coerced by, subjected to or compelled by their requirements. We can no longer treat such a world as this as an inert, voiceless object. But we must also, as we shall see, think differently of voices and language, of the importance of our bodily expressions. In making sense of Steiners, Gadamers and Bakhtins claims that agentlike, authoritative somethings emerge to inuence us within our dialogically structured activities, we should not think of such activities as being solely and simply a matter of people exchanging well-dened words with each other. When Gadamer, for instance, talks of dialogue or conversation, a very different notion of language is at work in what he has to say than the notions of language we currently take for granted. Indeed, for him, there is no such thing as language. At least, not if we think of it as a shared systematic structure of rule-governed linguistic forms, in which language
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users gain a competency that they then apply in performing appropriate sentence structures on given occasions. Language, as he sees it:
. . . is not just one of mans possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature. . . . Thus, that language is originally human means at the same time that mans being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 443)
In other words, of everything toward which our understanding can be directed we can say that being that can be understood is language (p. 474). Or, to put it another way, more than merely reecting on something already given, it is the coming into language of a totality of meaning (p. 474) that makes our rst-time understandings possible. Such original understandings are not a methodic activity of the subject, not something that we ourselves do deliberately and impose on our surroundings; they are something that the thing itself [as a real presence] does and which thought suffers (p. 474). But in making this claim, rather than an objective stance, in which a person and his or her language are two separate entities in an external relation to each other, Gadamer is taking a participatory stance toward language: language is a medium in which I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together (p. 474). In such a participatory stance, I, my world and my language are all internally related participant parts of a larger, indivisible, dynamic whole, a ceaseless stream of ongoing activity, of understandable-being in motion. Thus the parts in question are not at all physically distinct or separable parts as such, but distinctions of function or of role being played, that is, they are participant parts, in relation to the conduct of the whole stream of activity within which they have their existence, that is, the world as a real presence:
Coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals. But human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, world is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another. (p. 446)
At any one moment, the participant parts of a real presence within such a stream of activity owe not just their character, but their very existence, both to each other, and to their relations to the parts of the presence at some earlier point in timeas well as, so to speak, pointing toward or calling for a range of next possible parts. Unlike a mechanical assemblage constructed of objective parts that retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the mechanism or not, such an ongoing stream, as an indivisible unity, is quite
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different. Like the growth of a living organism, which is a living unity from its very inception, it is held together as such from within by the fact that all its parts depend on their inner relations with each other to sustain them in existence as the parts they are. They are all, thus, intrinsically or reciprocally implicated in each other. Hence, when a change in the dynamic relations occurs in one region of the unfolding stream, the whole is affected. And changes produced within the wholealong with the feelings of tendency available to individual participants within itpoint beyond or outside themselves, so to speak, to aspects of the whole of which they are only a part. We thus nd 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 inuenced by the isolated, neutral objects around us, either in a cause-and-effect way, or cognitively, by how we represent them to ourselves. The possibility of our responding to agentic presences in our surroundings is quite foreign to such a style of thought. Thus when we talk of inner representations as being central to our intellectual and mental lives, we think of them only as passive objects of thought having a certain logical structure to them, such that, if the thing represented is composed of many parts, so must its representation be. Hence, the ttingness of such structures to the circumstances represented cannot be a matter of an immediate correspondence; they do not speak for themselves. Nor does their relation to the larger background within which they have their being play any immediate part in our understanding of their nature. It all is a matter of deliberation, of argument and interpretation among us as theorists. But things are quite different when considered from within the indivisible stream of responsive inter-action within which we (and they) are embedded as participant parts. There we may suggest, as James (1981) suggests with respect to the stream of thought, that it is nothing jointed; it ows . . . [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 afrms that the chain of consciousness is a sequence of differents, so we can agree with Bateson (1972) that what matters to us is a shift in bodily activity or energy, the occurrence of a difference that makes a difference (p. 453). We may also note something similar to James (1981) when he remarks:
Into the awareness of thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite
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different from what it would be were the thunder the continuation of previous thunder. (p. 234)
Once in touch, so to speak, with a real presence, while only an aspect of it may at any one moment occupy our focal attention, all of it as an indivisible whole is, nonetheless, spontaneously there available to us, with what is in the background for us giving what is central to our attention its character. A Precursor World to the Cartesian World: The Primordial or the Background There is something very special, then, not just about our dialogically structured embedding within the ceaselessly ongoing, indivisible stream of spontaneously mutually responsive, bodily inter-activity, but also about the differences that make a difference to us from within that embedding. Here, following Wittgenstein (1980), I want to explore how such differencemaking events, along with the spontaneously responsive reactions they occasion, can, for example, function as the origin and primitive form of the language game (p. 31), where what he means by the word primitive here, he notes elsewhere, is that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 541). In other words, unlike those actions we do deliberately, when we are in a one-way, monologic relation to our surroundings, in which our inner experiences shape our outer expressions, on some occasions at least, when we enter into spontaneously responsive, dialogically structured relations with our surroundings, the case is reversed: our outer expressions shape our inner experiences, and on these occasions our outer expressions are to an extent shaped by our outer circumstances. In other words, our expressions are sometimes expressive of our relations to our surroundings. But to repeat, this is not always the case. It only occurs, as Volo sinov (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 rst gives experience its form and specicity of direction. (p. 85)
And we can note, recalling Meads (1934) remark above, that meaning is spontaneously present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, that this all occurs spontaneously. In other words, as these workers all in their own ways point out, we can execute original meaningful acts from within our embedding in an ongoing
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stream of spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity, without our being consciously or planfully aware of so doing. Another, perhaps unexpected consequence of our embedding in such a ceaseless ow 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 justiable 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 rst execute spontaneously. In other words, we can often look back to nd 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 rst 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 ow of meaningful activity, before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, to repeat Meads phrase above. But how? For it would seem that all our scholarly training, which orients us toward a set of already determined fundamental entities and the relations between them, and the questions that may be asked about them, steers us out onto the scene much too late, and then leads us to look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude. We only arrive on the scene after we have passed our exams and adopted into our heads certain already agreed (often Cartesian-inspired) versions of what is occurring out in the world between us. But then, not content with that, we look backward toward already existing actualities and past accomplishments to nd a causal pattern in them, seeing them as mechanisms external to ourselves, rather than looking forward, toward the new possibilities provided to us from within our present relational involvements. And we do all this with the wrong attitude. For we seek a static, dead picture, a theoretical representation of a state of affairs, rather than a living sense of our circumstances as an active, authoritative and action-guiding agency in our lives. In other words, our investigations have an after the fact and a beside the point quality to them.8 Such a set of Cartesian orientations, such an objective stance, as we have already seen, misleads us into ignoring the unique, interwoven and reciprocal nature of our immediate, living, mindful but thoughtless, bodily interactions, and the felt ways of making sense occurring between us even now, in the present momentbetween, for example, me as a writer now and you
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as a later reader. It is within such present interactive moments, if we can call them that, that such spontaneously occurring, pre-intellectual precursors to our later deliberations make their appearance. It is also within such moments that our responsiveness to our surroundings is in some way expressive of our surroundingsas when, for instance, I deliberately look into space, or turn to nod and smile, on meeting a stranger on the street. Indeed, it is within such moments, as we have already noted, that certain real presences can, like actual others around us, call us to action, can issue action-guiding advisories, and can witness and judge what we do with their facial and vocal expressions. This is the force of both MerleauPontys (1962) and Wittgensteins (1953) suggestion that meaning in our everyday life activities is a physiognomy, which is to say, that just as a person, as a living, indivisible unity, is corporeally alive and present in every one of their expressions, in their smiles and frowns, their looks of puzzlement and understanding, so real presences are manifested, literally, in the same way, not behind, but in appearances. And just as a persons friendly or hostile facial expression, which, although changing in its responsiveness to us, sets the overall style of our emotional-valuative relation with that person by remaining on his or her face during our unfolding involvement together, so the physiognomy, the face, of an event in our surroundings also sets the overall style of relation to it in the same way. Our implicit Cartesianismwith its emphasis on nished (neutral, geometrical) forms and patterns rather than on styles of living movementhas led us to ignore the expressive aspect both of our own activities and of the other activities around us, present in their ongoing, emerging shape as they unfold in a spontaneous, dialogically structured responsiveness to their circumstances. It has been, so to speak, left as an absent-presence in the background to our lives, rationally unacknowledged but nonetheless still at work in our (thus self-deceptive) thinking. But as Bakhtin and MerleauPonty remind us, this more primordial form of understanding, although usually left as unnoticed background, has not actually been left behind in our higher forms of mental activity. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) sees it:
Thought and expression, then, are simultaneously constituted, when our cultural store is put at the service of this unknown law, as our body suddenly lends itself to some new gesture. The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its. This is what makes communication possible. In order that I may understand the words of another person, it is clear that his vocabulary and syntax must be already known to me. But that does not mean that words do their work by arousing in me representations associated with them, and which in aggregate eventually produce in me the original representation of the speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not representations or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being and with the world at which he directs his aim. (p. 183, my emphasis)
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Thus, for Merleau-Ponty here, the world within which we experience ourselves as speaking is not a neutral world toward which we can act as we like, but a world in which events possess, as Bakhtin (1993) puts it, a compellently actual face (p. 45). It is a world that variously obliges us to act in certain ways, that witnesses our acts, and, in so doing, judges them as answers to its questions, the aims which we must satisfy in meeting its requirements in our acts. In attempting to describe the nature of what I have above called the precursor world, and to relate it to the more familiar Cartesian world of our intellectual inquiries, I have had to resort to quite a number of poetic images and metaphors: talk of faces and voices, of agents and inuences, 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 difculty in nding 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 t, etc. . . . The fact that we have no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question and the fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought to arouse our interest. . . . There simply is no rst-order vocabulary for the Background, because the Background has no Intentionality. As the precondition of Intentionality, the Background is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye which sees is invisible to itself. (pp. 156157)
Wittgenstein (1969) too notes the very basic nature of our ways of acting. While we might give reasons for some of our actions, we cannot give reasons for them all. Giving grounds does comes to an end sometime: But the end is not an ungrounded proposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting (no. 110). When we are embedded within the background ow of mutually responsive activity, there are certain ways in which we simply actnot on the basis of reasons, but blindly, in response to the requirements of our jointly shared circumstances. But how can such a jointly shared common sense be acquired?
Gestural Understanding: Understanding Expressions Words, as we know, can be used to instruct us, to command us, to call us spontaneously to respond in certain ways, to specify further otherwise vague and ambiguous circumstances. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it: our
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experimental study proved that it was the functional use of the word, or any other sign, as a means of focusing ones attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation (p. 106, my emphases). Learning to direct ones own mental processes with the aid of words or signs is an integral part of the process of concept formation (p. 108, my emphasis). But how might we understand this power of our utterances? What might Vygotsky mean by his term the functional use of words? How is it possible to direct ones own mental processes by the use of words? Why is what occurs spontaneously so crucial here? How can what occurs spontaneously and bodily be the source of what later we come to do deliberately and intellectually? The key to understanding what is occurring here is in understanding the gestural nature of both our own and other peoples expressive movements, along with the gestures that the things around us afford or allow us to make toward them. Gestures can have both an indicative meaning (gesturing toward something) and a mimetic meaning (a showing or manifesting of something in the contoured shape of the gesture). Our facial expressions, our tones of voice, our bodily postures, are all spontaneously responsive to, and can thus be uniquely expressive of, ourselves or our circumstances in both mimetic and indicatory ways. Kundera (1992) gives the following example:
The woman might have been sixty or sixty-ve. I was watching her from a deck chair by the pool of my health club . . . she kept looking up at the young life guard in sweat pants who was teaching her to swim. . . . [On leaving] she walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the life guard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved at him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! . . . The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. I had never known a woman by that name. (pp. 34)
What a strange perception! But nonetheless, a true possibility in our physiognomic understandings of certain expressive events in our surroundings. With regard to music, Wittgenstein (1981) remarks that, if a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you, you dont have to be able to explain it. Just this gesture has been made accessible to you (no. 158)a very particular and very precise, but still perhaps vague, feeling of tendency (James) has been opened up as a point of departure, a horizon, an opening for a whole world of next possible actions and events. Thus, it is in the unfolding movement of ones expressions, as ones attention moves over ones circumstances, that it is possible for ones expressions to display or manifest in a mimetic fashion the contours, so
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to speak, of what they are meant to be expressive of. Wittgenstein (1981) describes this phenomenon thus:
A poets words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformable to this use, we can let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words. (no. 155)
Merleau-Ponty (1962) also describes this same possibility thus:

Speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it. . . . Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of a problem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationship with known ones. . . . In understanding others, the problem is always indeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectively to light as convergent. . . . There is, then, a taking up of others thought through speech, a reection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must nally 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 rst 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 rst he is overwhelmed by his imprisonment by an impassable, massive, immoveable object, and how in his creative stumbling up against it he eventually nds a passage out of it, so we too can sense the initial contours of a something in a persons style of speech or writing. Indeed, in a way very close to Wittgensteins earlier remark that a whole world of pain may be contained in a single word, Merleau-Ponty (1962) goes on to remark that:
. . . the word, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of singing the world. . . . The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea, but several ways for the human body to sing the worlds praises and in the last resort to live it. . . . We may speak several languages, but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses ones own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once. . . . Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no conventional signs. (pp. 187188)
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It is, then, in the spontaneous way in which we respond initially to the gestural meaning of an utterance that we set the scene or establish the grammar, so to speak, within which our further, more detailed determining of its meaning takes place. And language continues to be constitutive of our modes of being in this way, even during those moments when we suppose ourselves only to be making intellectual and conceptual use of it. This is so because our utterances in their expression never cease to arouse spontaneous responses, both in our listeners and in ourselves. Indeed, because:
. . . any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere . . . utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufcient; they are aware of and mutually reect one another. . . . Therefore, each kind of utterance is lled 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 inuence 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 inuences at work in shaping our conductso that instead of us acting spontaneously as our circumstances require, we can act toward our circumstances deliberately, as we ourselves require? As Vygotskys (1978, 1986) work in this sphere shows, the role of the others around us in effecting this transition within us is crucial. I will review what he has to say in the following two areas: in the sphere of what he calls internalization in the development of pointing, and in the sphere of play. (Although his comments, in Chapter 8, on the pre-history of writing are also highly relevant, in the interests of space, I will leave then unmentioned.) Pointing A very young child may attempt, but fail, to grasp an object. The important event is when the young childs caretaker comes to the aid of the child, responding to his or her movements as indicative of something. Then, the childs unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he [or she] seeks but from another person (p. 56). We can think of this as the rst step in a three-part process. The second stage occurs when the child is able to inter-relate his or her movement to the whole situationwithin which both the adult and the object are embedded. At this point, the childs movement may change from an object-oriented to a person-oriented movement, a movement used to establish a relation with them. As a result of this change, a nal stage is reached in which the movement itself is physically simplied, and what results is the form of pointing that we may call a true
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gesture (p. 56). But it only becomes so when the child deliberately directs it toward others, and is recognized by those others as a gesture addressed to them. Vygotsky calls this three-part process internalization. The designation is, however, only partially appropriate. For it is not the case, as he claims, that an external activity [outside an individual] is reconstructed and begins to occur internally [within the individual] (pp. 5657). It is a case of an activity that was at rst 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 nds 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 eld around him or her requires, but is separating a eld of meaning from the visual eld. Indeed, the child moves from a situation in which an object directly calls for a certain meaningful actionlike a bell demanding to be rungto one in which he or she can, to an extent, impose a meaning on a situation, and act toward it as that meaning requires. So although, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, every perception is a stimulus to action . . . in play, things lose their determining force (p. 96).
In play a child spontaneously makes use of his ability to separate meaning from an object without knowing he is doing it, just as he does not know he is speaking in prose but talks without paying attention to the words. (p. 99)
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This does not, however, mean that in play anything can mean anything for the child. The chosen plaything must afford the appropriate gesture and be a site of application for it. Things that do not admit of the appropriate gestural structure are absolutely rejected by the child. For example, any stick can become a horse but . . . a postcard cannot be a horse for a child (p. 98). In play, then, something very special is happening: not only is there a break-up of the primary unity of sensory-motor processes in the separation of the eld of meaning from the visual eld, but they are also re-constituted into a new unity with a reversal of the usual direction of inuence. Whereas a particular movement in the visual eld 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 eld (i.e. meaning comes to dominate action). In such a process, uncontrolled, impulsive responses are transformed into considered, voluntary ones. In the realm of play, then, what is most important is the utilization of the plaything and the possibility of executing a representational [or indicatory] gesture with it (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 108). So, although any stick the child can sit astride can become a horse, objects not affording that possibility cannot. What matters is that the objects admit the appropriate gesture and can function as a point of application for it. Hence, things with which this gestural structure cannot be performed are absolutely rejected by children (p. 109). Indicatory and Mimic Gestures Here, then, in both these realms, we can see the elements of a crucial developmental process, in which indicatory and mimetic gestures come to play a central role. While Vygotsky (1986) sees all the major psychological functionssuch as sensing and acting, perceiving, attending, remembering, thinking, acting, speaking, and so onas forming an indivisible whole, as operating in an uninterrupted connection with one another (p. 1), and as rooted in the most basic or elementary adaptive responses of the living, human being, he also sees development as consisting in the re-constitution of such wholes. In development:
. . . they are characterized by a new integration and co-relation of their parts. The whole and its parts develop parallel to each other and together. We shall call the rst structures elementary; they are psychological wholes, conditioned chiey 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 rst structures destruction, reconstruction, and transition structures of the higher type. Unlike the direct reactive processes, these latter structures are constructed on the basis of the use of signs and tools; these new formations
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unite both direct and indirect means of adaptation. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 124)11
The spontaneously responsive role of speech in effecting this transformation is crucial. At rst, the child begins to exhibit a future orientation and planning (and an understanding of the role of others in their actions) by calling in an other for help. Often, others will do little else than say to the child: Stop . . . look at this . . . listen to that . . ., to create functional barriers to immediately impulsive activity, that is, to transform or metamorphose an old unity into a new one by bringing to the childs attention a previously unnoticed relation already existing within it. The new, more complexly structured unity, the new indivisible whole within which the child has his or her being, is formed by an internal articulation in the old. Later, the child will incorporate the functional speech forms provided by others into his or her own activities, so that speech, which at rst followed or accompanied the activities and reected their difculties, moves more and more to the turning (choice) points within them, and to their beginnings. In incorporating the living, bodily expressions of others into his or her own actions, expressions that can exert both an indicative and a mimetic gestural power on the child, the child can transform his or her own behavior; he or she becomes orchestrated according to the gestural powers of others. But what is the character of the setting within which this can occur? What is so special about our immersion in our surroundings in what I have called the precursor world to our being in an external, objective world as selfcontained, Cartesian subjectivities?
Real Presences in the Dynamic, Open, Multidimensional World of Spontaneously Responsive Joint Action Our Cartesian inclinations make it difcult for us to orient ourselves within such a precursor world. To talk of our surroundings as issuing us with action-guiding advisories, of them as having a face, and of nding ourselves as if judged as to whether we are treating them in terms of their requirements (not ours), is quite foreign to us. The idea of meaning being a physiognomy, of the mimetic or indicatory expressions of living human beings as gesturing precisely to something in their surroundings beyond themselves, is also utterly alien to us. But nonetheless, we will mislead ourselves if we mis-characterize this precursor world in terms suited to our own, self-conscious, deliberately executed mental functions aimed at mastery, that is, if we try to analyze it in Cartesian terms. Aware of the dangers of such mis-descriptions, Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes that modern philosophy prejudges what it will nd (p. 130). To overcome this tendency, he suggests that philosophy:
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. . . once again . . . must recommence everything, reject the instruments reection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been worked over, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both subject and object, both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redene them. (p. 130)
And this, I think, is precisely the importance of all the writers I have mentioned so far in this paper. They all in their own different ways provide us with the resources we need to come to an understandinga relationally responsive, living understandingof the primordial, the precursor world to what previously we took to be the external world as set out by Descartes. So let us turn to the task of specifying that locus in which subject and object, existence and essence, have not yet been distinguished, that realm of activity that has not yet been worked over in experience. What might such a realm be like? Can we specify its details? In our past studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great realms of activity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our agency to control, to be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on action, on events for which we as individuals take responsibility, and explain in terms of our reasons. And, as already outlined, we have treated the world around us not only as a dead world of mechanisms, but as an external world consisting in an assemblage of externally related, objective parts. That is, we have treated it as a world over there, as existentially separate from us, in that we owe nothing of the character of our own existence to it. Further, in treating it as an assemblage of externally related, objective parts, we have seen it as a structure of self-contained parts all existentially separate from each other, that is, which exist as the separate entities they are whether they are a part of a larger mechanism or not. In other words, both these realms of activity are thought of as being built up our of separate elements of reality, so to speak; the idea of an invisible whole made up of participant parts is utterly inimical to their nature. But a dialogically structured real presence, having its existence only within the inter-activity occurring in joint action,12 cannot be understood externally in this way. (1) In being responsively shaped in relation to the unique circumstances of its occurrence, such activity cannot be explained simply as a naturally occurring regularity, as a just happening event of behavior, in terms of causal laws or principles insensitive to the context of their application. (2) Nor can it be understood wholly as a case of individual human action, for, in occurring only in the intertwining of peoples spontaneous responses to each other and to their surroundings, it cannot be explained by giving any persons reasons or justications for his or her individual actions. What is produced in such responsively interwoven, dialogically structured activity is a strange third realm of always ongoing
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and always unnished activity of its own unique kind. Indeed, it is precisely its lack of a precisely determined order, and its openness to being further specied or determined by those involved in it, in practicewhile usually remaining unaware of their having done sothat is its central dening feature. Or, to put it another way, as the character of peoples circumstances is a matter of their on-the-spot judgments, joint action can only be understood from within ones involvements in it. It is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity interesting, for at least the following reasons: It means that the primordial, precursor world of spontaneous, relationally responsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action, constitutes a third, dynamic realm of activity of its own kind, sui generis, quite distinct from the other two realms of behavior and action. It is not a static realm of things and substances, a mere static container of activities. The activities constituting it are all internally related activities, that is, their parts at any one moment owe not just their character but their very existence both to each other and to their relations with the parts of the system at some earlier point in timehence their history is just as important as their logic in understanding their nature. It thus constitutes in each of its occurrences a unitary, indivisible realm of activity. As a person with one or another kind of subjectivity, we are all participant parts in, and of, such an indivisible realm. We are embedded in it, and my activity only has the character it has in relation to yours, in relation to your responses to mine. Thus this realm is constitutive of peoples social and personal identities, and is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us, which have their being within it. Unlike the realms of reasons and causes, which are externally related to the realms of human activity they explain, the realm of joint action can only be participatively experienced or lived throughand described as such:
What underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not a principle as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of ones own participation in unitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot be adequately expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described and participatively experienced. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 40)
Such descriptions though, if they work to draw attention to relations between our activities and features in their surroundingsif, that is, they also work as participant parts in and of such a realmcan play the part of explanations, that is, they can work to rene, 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 welldened activities, I will outline some of its further characteristics: In lacking specicity, the activities produced in such dialogical exchanges are a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable inuencesas Bakhtin (1981, p. 272) remarks, at work in every utterance are both centripetal tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as centrifugal ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins. This makes it very difcult for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor a fully objective characterhence their primordial nature. They are also non-locatable, in that they are spread out or distributed amongst all those participating in them: that is, a real presence is a distributed structure, constituted in and by contributions from many different participants or participations. In other words, as Rommetveit (1985) puts it:
. . . human discourse takes place in and deals with a pluralistic, only fragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world. Vagueness, ambiguity, and incompletenessbut hence also versatility, exibility, and negotiabilitymust for that reason be dealt with as inherent and theoretically essential characteristics of ordinary language. (p. 183)
Thus, in such still open circumstances, even apparently simple objects and events remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about (p. 193). And how, ultimately, we do in fact talk in relation to our circumstances, and relate our circumstances to our talk, strongly inuences 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 rst phase, which we call pre-communication, in which there is not one individual but an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life . . . [such that] the rst me is . . . unaware of itself in its absolute difference . . . and lives as easily in others as it does in itself. (p. 119)
Thus our task in development is not that of learning how to gain access to other minds, to some thing hidden right inside them, but is that of differentiating which of all the activity occurring in us has its origins in us, and which in them. Indeed, we must renounce the classical Cartesian prejudice in which the psyche is a private sequence of states of mind the cannot be seen from the outside. We can see the character of an others consciousness displayed in the details of his or her spontaneously responsive conduct toward the worldas Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: Nothing is hidden (no. 435). But where, so to speak, is it to be seen?
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Although the words we utter may, technically, be repetitions of, as Volo sinov (1986) calls them, normatively identical forms, and although we may consciously struggle to choose just the right word-forms to t our own plans and intentions, there is still, nonetheless, a realm of spontaneous responsiveness at work inuencing their unfolding expression, as we bodily voice forth our utterances into the world around us. We do not voice them in a predetermined manner; indeed, how could we ever achieve such a perfect uniformity? It is in the specic variability (Volo sinov, 1986, p. 69) that such forms afford us, as we utter them in spontaneous response to features in our surrounding circumstances, that we expressunconsciously and involuntarilywhat others understand as our inner thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, moods, desires, and so on: that is, our orientational-understandings, as I called them above, of where and how we are placed in relation to the world of our our utterances. Thus, it is in an utterances unique expressive intonationwhat is usually ignored in our more systematic inquiries into the linguistic forms of our language and language usethat we reveal aspects of our inner lives to those around us. As Bakhtin (1986) notes:
Both the word and the sentence as linguistic units are devoid of expressive intonation. . . . [E]xpressive intonation belongs to the utterance and not to the word. . . . [E]xpression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under conditions of the real situation articulated by the individual utterance. (pp. 85, 86, 88)
And it is just this aspect of our utterances, the way in which their spontaneously responsive, moment-by-moment, unfolding expressive intonation reveals the shape of our relations to the others and othernesses in our circumstances, that usually we cannot and do not self-consciously control.13 We cannot control our utterances ahead of time, as in their uniqueness, their immediate responsiveness to the present moment, we cannot anticipate their form. Nonetheless, although unpredictable, we nd that these shapes are there as real but invisible presences whether we like it or not. We cannot wish them away. Nor can we wholly avoid responding to them in some wayeven if it is to continually dismiss them when noticed with the criticism that they are subjective, merely anecdotal or not generally the case. And such invisible but real presences make themselves felt in our lives not just in terms of what we talk of as other peoples inner lives, but in other important spheres of our being too. It is in terms of the shape of the invisible presences unfolding over timein music and dance, in our reading of a text, in our surveying of a work of art, a painting, a sculpture, as we move up close and back away, and orchestrate our own relations to it according to its requirementsthat we gain a sense not so much of their personal inner lives, as of what they meant their expressions to mean to us, the nature of their shared, public projects. And clearly, such felt, real, living
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presences, although quite invisible to our eyes, may nonetheless exert a powerful inuence in shaping, from the outside, so to speak, our actions. Recall here Merleau-Pontys comments above about feeling his way into the existential character of a piece of philosophical writing by voicing to himself the tone and accent of the philosopher. Indeed, in a great range of very different circumstancesin a good conversation; in driving or in any other movement in which we must navigate our own motions in immediate relation to those around us; in viewing a painting; or especially in reading a bookwhen we are immersed in living relations with our surroundings, then the compellently actual face of that presence is an agentic inuence 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 L evy-Bruhl (1926) noted as a characteristic of primitive or inferior peoples. He called it participatory thinking because in it, crucially, certain entitiesnames, pictures, totems, and so onthat we would simply think of as neutral images or representations having only an arbitrary or conventional relation to what they happen to stand for, are taken as having mystic properties due to the fact that every picture, every reproduction participates in the nature, properties, life of that of which it is the image (p. 79). L evy-Bruhls sensitive characterization of the nature of participatory thinking, although offered as an account of a primitive way of thinking, is so positively relevant in every detail to our task of familiarizing ourselves with our responsive understanding of real presences that I will quote it at length:
The collective representations14 of primitives . . . differ profoundly from our ideas or concepts, nor are they their equivalent either. On the one hand, . . . they have not their logical character. On the other hand, not being genuine representations, in the strict sense of the term, they express, or rather imply, not only that the primitive actually has an image of the object in his mind, and thinks it is real, but also that he has some hope or fear connected with it, that some denite inuence emanates from it, or is exercised upon it. This inuence is a virtue, an occult power which varies with objects and circumstances, but is always real to the primitive and forms and integral part of his representation. . . . [T]o express in a word the general peculiarity of the[se] collective representations . . . I should say that this mental activity was a mystic one . . . [this does not refer] to the religious mysticism of our communities, which is something entirely different, but [applies] in the strictly dened sense in which mystic implies belief in forces and inuences which, although imperceptible to the sense, are nevertheless real. (pp. 3738, all emphases and additions mine)
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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, as words say, stand for thingsas actually participating in the life of those things they stand for. But if Rommetveit (1985) is correct, and (to repeat) even apparently simple objects and events remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about (p. 193), then, in a very important sense, our words and other expressions do participate crucially in the nature, properties, life of which [they are] the image. Why we have found this difcult to accept is that in our current (still Greek- and Cartesian-inuenced) modes of inquiry, in pursuit of a theoretical objectivity, we have sought a supposed xed and nalized (eternal) reality hidden behind appearances. We have worked in terms of inner theoretical representations of outer phenomena that we have striven to prove true. But participatory perception works quite differently. In physiognomic terms, the perception of and response to expression is not the perception of something hidden behind appearances, but a matter of spontaneously responding to something manifested or displayed in them. Thus what is before us at any one moment is not a mere thing, a mere inert object, requiring a choice from us as to how we are going to respond to it, but an authentic, unique living presence, incarnate in the unfolding activity within which we are ourselves participants. It is a presence sensed in the responsive movement of appearances as they unfold before us as we responsively relate ourselves to their requirements. Thus, just as the depth we see as we scan over the scene before uswhether it is a real 3-D scene or a 2-D random-dot stereogramis a third relational dimension derived from the other two, and is in fact in itself invisible, so the presence of depth in a conversation is spontaneously constituted in the sensed relational dimensions participants display in their utterances. Either what I call depth, says Merleau-Ponty (1964), is nothing, or it is my participation . . . in the being of space beyond every [particular] point of view (p. 173, translators addition). The depths, one might say, are made available to us in the surfaces.
Conclusion: Mastery or Understanding? I began this paper by exploring how our lives might change if, rather than as self-centered Cartesian beings, seeking mastery by acting in a thoughtful but unresponsive manner toward our surroundings, we were to treat ourselves more as participant parts of a larger, ongoing, dynamic, indivisible realm of living activity. This led on to the suggestion that, when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us and we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically structured, living, embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us, then, and only
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then, certain very special phenomena can occur. Then we can nd 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 inuence on us and thus (at least partially) structure our actions. In such circumstances as these, as Johnston (1993) puts it:
[t]he idea of the Inner is a feature of our everyday discourse and a part of the psychological concepts we all share. . . . [I]t expresses our relation to others as experiencing beings: as beings with an Inner, we treat their noninformational utterances as expressions of experiences (and not as meaningless). . . . Thus talk of an Inner brings into play a distinctive array of concepts and expresses the fact that we relate to other human beings in a way we do not relate to machines or even to other animals. (p. 223)
In other words, crucial to the shift to the participatory forms of thought explored above is a shift away from a dead, mechanistically organized world, toward a world conceived of as an indivisible living unity. It is the strangely unnoticed elimination of the life of mutually responsive living bodies from our academic forms of inquiry that I have sought to rectify. But how might the reintroduction of our spontaneous living involvements with each other affect the character of our intellectual inquiries into our social lives together? The implications are, in fact, enormous.15 As I intimated above, very few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclinations can be retained unchanged. But due to limitations in space, I can touch on only a few here. I will do this by returning to a difference I introduced briey 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 difculty, he suggests:
. . . is not that of nding 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 difculty 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
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look over a painting or a sculpture in an art gallery. We should respond to it from up close, from a distance, from this angle and that, until we can begin to gain a shaped and vectored sense of the space of possibilities it opens up to us in the responses it calls from us. And we should do this in collaboration with the others involved with us in the practice in question. The difference between the two approaches can be set out in terms of their steps, and the orientational understandings associated with each such step. In the classical tradition, the sequence of steps we take in our inquiries can be set out as follows. We begin by orienting toward any newness or strangeness we encounter as a problem to be solved. We then go on to treat it as an entity that can be analyzed into a set of already well-known elements.16 We then search for an order or pattern amongst them, hypothesize a causal agency responsible for that order (call it, say, a mystic entity like the Mind), and then go on to nd further evidence for the existence of this mystic thing we call the Mind. Indeed, we then begin to develop further theories as to its nature, and, in terms of such theories, we attempt, indirectly, to manipulate the Minds operations, to produce what we see as outcomes advantageous to us. But we only call such theories solutions to our problem if they enable usas the experts proposing themto achieve seeming mastery over the phenomena represented within them. The sequence of steps we follow in gaining an orientational understanding goes like this. We begin by treating the disorienting othernesses we encounter as radically unknown to uswe approach them, not like Kants appointed judge, but with care, respect and anxiety. We enter into dialogically structured, reciprocally responsive relations with them. In so doing, we must be (at least partially) answerable to their calls, just as they must be (partially) answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay between us and them, an it, a real presence, appears between us, produced neither solely by us nor by the othernesses, an it within which both we and they have our being. The it is our it, an it in which we can all share in common. Like a persons facial expression, which, with its smile, gestures us to approach, or, with its scowl, repels us, it has a similar directive or instructive physiognomyand we can thus develop a sensibility of, or sensitivity to, its nature. And as we continue our commerce with the othernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of our familiarity with the inner shape or character of the real presence created between us. And as we dwell on, or within, its nature, we can gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspectsthe prospects it offers us for going on with it. We come to feel at home with it, to know our way around within it, in the way we nd our way around inside towns or houses familiar to us. Thus what we gain here, rather than a solution, rather than further information, is a shaped and vectored sense of how to go on in relation to the otherness concerned. In other words, we understand how to see the invisible face, to hear the silent voice, and to be answerable to the mute
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judgments of the presences in our living relations with the world around usreal inuences 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 renement, 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; specically 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 dening these elements as a structure: as a set, with specic internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also dening 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 specic hierarchies. (p. 132) Thus, structures of feeling can be dened as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available (pp. 133134). For example, as Wittgenstein (1978) notes, even about such a seeming neutral thing as a proposition: The proposition seems set over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it.It seems to demand that reality be compared with it (p. 132). See Shotter (1996), where this phenomenon is discussed at length. The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acute discriminatory sense, though no denite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever (James, 1981, p. 244). Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that tendencies are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all (p. 246). Etymologically, of course, the term consciousness is a knowledge word. This is evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we
3.
4. 5.
6.
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to make of the prex 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 ux of sensory inputs that is seemingly neither con-, since each individually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since the sensory ux 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: rst, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; rst, 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 ags, as if they were texts. The process can be reversed, so that the text appears as a ag. Rortys texts, with his drum-beat of wes, seek to enrol us, his readers, in their literary march. (p. 173) 10. Children initially experience objects in their surroundings as gesturally expressive or physiognomically to such an extent that, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, a very young child concludes that things dictate to the child what he must do: a door demands to be opened and closed, a staircase to be climbed, a bell to be rung (p. 96). 11. Passage from the unedited translation of Tool and Symbol, quoted by JohnSteiner and Souberman, in their Afterword to Vygotsky (1978). 12. I have set out the properties of joint action extensively elsewhere also (Shotter, 1980, 1984). 13. But in those circumstances where a form is already present, we do sometimes control them: One thing that is immensely important in teaching, notes
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Wittgenstein (1966), is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions (p. 2). Goffman (1959) also notes the importance of the distinction between expressions given and those given off, and how people are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable (p. 19), so that sometimes, to create an impression, we attempt also to control our gestures and facial expressions. But when we do, our expressions lose their wholistic quality as true expression and become caricatures, that is, false expressions of our relations to our surroundings. 14. By collective representations L evy-Bruhl (a student of Durkheim) means those notions which, in being collective . . . force themselves on the individual (p. 25); they are, we might say, an aspect of the individuals background or everyday common-sense understanding of his or her world. 15. Some of them are explored in Katz and Shotter (1996a, 1996b), Shotter and Katz (1996) and Shotter and Gustavsen (1999). But these are mere beginnings. A whole very different approach to cognitive psychologyin which our inner lives are structured in terms of agentic voices and other agentic inuences (see, e.g., Wertsch, 1991, and Wolf, 1990)is clearly a possibility. 16. It is at this stage, the stage of analysis into separate elements, that lifewhich is in the internal relations between the participant parts of a living wholeis eliminated! References Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogical imagination (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevskys poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V.W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Lianpov, Trans.; M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. London: Paladin. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on method and other writings (F.E. Sutcliffe, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fleck, L. (1979). Genesis and development of a scientic fact (T.J. Trenn & R.K. Merton, Eds.; F. Bradley & T.J. Trenn, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed.). New York: Continum. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self. In The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday. James, W. (1981). The principles of psychology (F.H. Burkhardt, General Ed.; F. Bowers, Textual Ed.; I.K. Skrupskelis, Associate Ed.; Vol. 1). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnston, P. (1993). Wittgenstein: Rethinking the inner. London: Routledge. Kant, I. (1970). Critique of pure reason (N. Kemp Smith, Trans.). London: Macmillan/St Martins Press.
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Katz, A.M., & Shotter, J. (1996a). Hearing the patients voice: Toward a social poetics in diagnostic interviews. Social Science and Medicine, 46, 919931. Katz, A.M., & Shotter, J. (1996b). Resonances from within the practice: Social poetics in a mentorship program. Concepts and Transformation, 2, 97105. Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The structure of scientic revolutions (2nd enlarged ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kundera, M. (1992). Immortality (L. Asher, Trans.). New York: HarperCollins. L evy-Bruhl, L. (1926). How natives think (L.A. Clare, Trans.). London: Allen & Unwin. Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The childs relations with others (W. Cobb, Trans.). In The primacy of perception, and other essays (J.M. Edie, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (C. Lefort, Ed.; A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mulhall, S. (1990). On being in the world: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on seeing aspects. London/New York: Routledge. Rommetveit, R. (1985). Language acquisition as increasing linguistic structuring of experience and symbolic behaviour control. In J.V. Wertsch (Ed.), Culture, communication and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shotter, J. (1980). Action, joint action, and intentionality. In M. Brenner (Ed.), The structure of action. Oxford: Blackwell. Shotter, J. (1984). Social accountability and selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell. Shotter, J. (1993). Cultural politics of everyday life: Social constructionism, rhetoric, and knowing of the third kind. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Shotter, J. (1996). Now I can go on: Wittgenstein and our embeddedness in the hurly-burly of life. Human Studies, 19, 123. Shotter, J., & Gustavsen, B. (1999). The role of dialogue conferences: Doing from within our lives together what we cannot do apart. Stockholm: Center for Advanced Studies in Leadership, Stockholm School of Economics. Shotter, J., & Katz, A.M. (1996). Articulating a practice from within the practice itself: Establishing formative dialogues by the use of a social poetics. Concepts and Transformations, 2, 7195. Steiner, G. (1984). Critic/reader. In George Steiner: A reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Toulmin, S. (1982) The genealogy of consciousness. In P.F. Secord (Ed.), Explaining human behavior: Consciousness, human action, and social structure. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Volo sinov, V.N. (1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief (C. Barrett, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On certainty (G.E.M. Anscombe & G.H. von Wright, Eds.; D. Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Philosophical grammar (R. Rhees, Ed.; A. Kenny, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value (P. Winch, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1981). Zettel (2nd ed.; G.E.M. Anscombe & G.H. von Wright, Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wolf, D.P. (1990). Being in several minds: Voices and versions of the self in early childhood. In D. Cicchetti & M. Beegly (Eds.), The self in transition. Chicago, IL/ New York: University of Chicago Press. John Shotter is Professor of Interpersonal Relations in the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Social Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind (Open University, 1993) and Conversational Realities: The Construction of Life through Language (Sage, 1993). Address: Department of Communication, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3586, USA. [email jds@hypatia.unh.edu]

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

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

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Theory & Psychology

http://tap.sagepub.com `Real Presences': Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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SHOTTER: REAL PRESENCES

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