An exploratory ‘undergrowth’ draft... an account of the kind: ‘and then there’s this... and then there’s this... and this, and this’... not written in its present form for publication... it has now crept up to approx 35,000 words long

SPONTANEOUS RESPONSIVENESS, CHIASMIC RELATIONS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS:

INSIDE THE REALM OF LIVING EXPRESSION

John Shotter

Department of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH 03824-3586

Abstract: Our ways of talking are not just simply a matter of representing, or picturing a state of affairs, so that how others act in relation to what we say is up to them, a matter always of interpretation. Rather, an important aspect of people’s verbal communication is their voicing (as 1^st-person agents) of certain expressions. Expressions are living bodily movements (physiognomic changes within our bodies as a whole rather than simple a change of the position of our bodies in space) which, in working as elaborations of our natural, spontaneously expressed responses to events occurring around us, work to communicate in a gestural fashion. Parents make use such expressions, and their children’s spontaneous responses to them, in teaching them the practices instituted in their society, so that they become trained into spontaneously responding to the expressions of those around us in a con(withness)-scientia(knowing) manner, in shared or sharable ways. Such bodily expressions are connected with bodily feelings in such a way that all ‘feelings’ (unless one has learned to suppress them) have their characteristic expressions. Having been trained into responding to other’s expressions con-scientia, i.e., in ways which can be witnessably known by others, we can go on, as 1^st-persons, to express our own unique feelings in non-rule-governed ways that the others around us can begin to respond to – the beginnings of new and unique language-games, within which we can express our own ‘inner lives’ to each other. In this view, any rules emerging in our meetings with the others around us are not basic to us understanding each other, but are used in a regulatory fashion to sustain accountable social institutions.

“But a certain kind of associated or joint life when brought into being has an unexpected by-product – the formation of those peculiar acquired dispositions, attitudes, which are termed mind” (Dewey, 1917, p.272).

“The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain processes: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.412).

“... consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.11).

There are two quite distinct accounts of the nature of our relation to language and meaning. One we might call the Cartesian, externalist account, in which language is seen as being a self-contained, objective system that mediates (in terms of referential representations) between individual human subjects and an objective world – with the world being thought of as an ‘external’ world known to subjects only in terms of the representations appearing ‘inside’ them. Indeed, in this account, we shall find the prevalence of a very general view that everything – every “thing” – is made up of self-contained elementary parts which, in not being intrinsically linked in themselves to other parts, are only related to them by the imposition of an extraneous force or influence of some kind. This is the classical modernist account; it is a static account in which the concepts of ‘picture’, and ‘picturing’ play a central part (Capek, 1961; Heidegger, 1977). The other account is a dynamic one in which, rather than static shapes, patterns, or forms, certain kinds of expressive responsive movements play a central role. In contrast, we can call this account – here linked mainly with the work of Wittgenstein, Dewey, Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and Merleau-Ponty – an internalist account, in that overall it is inclined toward the view that we, and our surroundings, are all indivisibly related to each other. Indeed, in this approach – in contrast to the Cartesian, externalist approach – we only have our being as living beings within a whole complex of other living relations (an ecology). Thus, rather than as self-contained elementary beings (atoms), we are participant parts in a larger living whole and we owe the character of our being to our participant relations within it.

              For some long time now, a form of inquiry known as scientific psychology, modeling itself on the modes of inquiry adopted in the natural sciences, has attempted to probe into the supposedly hidden workings of the individual human mind. In this paper I want to explore the quite drastic changes required in our whole approach to behavioral and social inquiry, and into the nature of our ‘inner lives’ in our social life together, if we were instead to take as our central focus, the spontaneous, bodily felt and expressed, responsive understandings occurring between us in our meetings out in the world with each other. In other words, I want to explore the question of what might be involved in making the shift from static, externalist accounts of our mental activities, to dynamic, internalist ones?

              In the first part of this paper I will discuss the very special, but often, rationally ignored nature of the singular and often fleeting expressive-responsive events occurring in the meetings between us as living beings, and the others and othernesses in our surroundings. While constituted as living wholes or unities ourselves, in our meetings we momentarily constitute between us uniquely new such living unities, and the expressive events occurring within this sphere of activity can reflexively act back upon us to influence our further activities within it. Thus central within these spheres of activity, within these meetings – among a number of other radical changes in many of our most basic concepts – is a changed concept of movement or motion. Currently, we think of movement as occurring when unchanging matter moves through unchanging space to give rise to a new ‘state of affairs’, to a new static ‘configuration’ of a set of separately existing, externally related elementary parts. We can call this locomotive movement. Here, we will be interested in physiognomic changes, changes within indivisible living wholes which, due to the internal, dynamically unfolding, living relations between their participant parts, preserve their identity as the growing and developing unities they are. This changed conception of movement will also lead us, as we shall see, to a changed concept of space, a changed concept of our surroundings: we will no longer be able to see space as merely a neutral container for our locomotions. Our surroundings too will become expressive of meanings to us; they will come to be seen as exerting ‘calls’ upon us to which – like the calls of another person – we must be answerable (Bakhtin, 1993), as well as providing a constitutive environment within which, as a background, our embedded expressions have their own, unique meanings.

              Inattention in the past, both to our ineradicable embedding in the ceaseless flow of spontaneously occurring, reciprocally responsive activity between us and the others and othernesses around us, and to the expressive nature of this activity, has enticed us into compensating for its unnoticed influence by the invention of theories about, i.e., picturing, the workings of mysterious, hidden ‘inner’ mental entities we suppose responsible for being able to mean things to each other. Here, however, we will not take this speculative route. Instead, following Wittgenstein (1953), the essence of our investigation will be that, “we do not seek to learn anything new by it,” rather, “we want to understand something that is already in plain view” (no.89). For it is not some new information, some new knowledge, that we seek, but a new orientation. We need to re-train ourselves in the ways that we ourselves spontaneously respond to events occurring around us. For, if it is the importance of how our spontaneously responsive activities are expressive, in a gestural fashion, of our own unique relations to our surrounding circumstances, and also, how the others around us respond to them, that we have so far ignored and/or misunderstood, then our new task is to bring these previously unnoticed aspects of being in the world with the others and othernesses around us into witnessable awareness.

              Indeed, this focus on fleeting events occurring in meetings between people and the others or othernesses around them, will set the scene for the exploration of a new dialogical or chiasmic approach to our understanding of the role of consciousness in human activity, an approach influenced by Toulmin’s (1982) account of its etymology in con (with)- scientia (knowing) in Roman Law , i.e., in a witnessable or witnessing knowing along with others. As he sees it, for the last 350 years, since Descartes’s time, a string of practical, concrete terms, all having unproblematic, everyday uses – whether as verbs (“Do you mind?”), as adverbs (“Did you do that consciously?”), as adjectives (“That was a thoughtful act on your part!”) – “have been converted... into so many broad and general abstract nouns, which have then been construed as names for the most personal, private flux of sensory inputs, kinesthetic sensations, and so on” (p.53). And during the last century, “consciousness” has been the leading candidate “for naming the essentially ‘interior’ aspects of our mental life and activities” (p.54). Thus in this shift both inward and away from the social to the individual, “a 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” (p.54). And once this had occurred, we began to formulate such questions as: “What is consciousness?” Where, in doing so, we confront ourselves with “one of the greatest sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it” (Wittgenstein, 1965, p.1).

              We shall look elsewhere, with a quite different aim in mind, for an understanding of why our talk of consciousness, and of being consciously aware of things, etc., is of importance to us. Indeed, we shall return the role of such talk in public life from which, if Toulmin is right, it long ago originated, and in which it still has important parts to play. Indeed, here Bakhtin’s (1984) claim, that “a person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (p.287), will be central. In other words, we shall explore some of its many different roles within the dialogically- or chiasmically-structured meetings occurring between us and the others and othernesses around us.

              This chiasmic or dialogical approach to consciousness – to the extent that it affords us an understanding of how shared or sharable ways of acting emerge in our meetings with each other – will link with Wittgenstein’s (1953) grammatical approach to the problem of what is being expressed when we say that we are acting consciously as opposed to unconsciously. As such, it will emphasize the complexly interwoven or intertwined (chiasmic) and diverse nature of such expressive activities (movements). Indeed, especially central in such an account, will be the sequential or temporal ways in which individuals can influence those with whom they are involved or engaged – through the arousal of anticipations and expectations within those others by their own unique expressive responsive movements – thus to communicate to them the character of their relatedness both to their immediate and historical-cultural surroundings. For, as we shall see, it is in the ‘orchestrated contours’ of the dynamic unfolding of their spontaneous responsiveness to their surroundings, in the sequentially unfolding nature of their 1^st-person living expressions, that they can display their own unique ‘inner’ lives to the others around them (Johnston, 1993; Mulhall, 1990). Indeed, it is only ‘from within’ the living interplay occurring between them and the others around them, that they can communicate to them what they ‘think’ and ‘feel’ about their common surroundings.

              Thus, instead of a single simple answer to the problem as to what consciousness is, such a grammatical account of consciousness – couched in terms of the anticipations and expectations of how next to ‘go on’ in practice when following another’s actions – will emphasize how a person’s deeds are intertwined in with other activities and events occurring both before and after any such deed in question. It is this focus on the ceaseless ‘becoming’ of living activity, and its expressiveness arising out of its intertwining in with, or its chiasmic relations to, its surroundings – that Wittgenstein (1953) points to in his comment that “understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think” (no.527) – that will require us, as we shall see, to question many of the very basic background assumptions in terms of which we currently conduct our intellectual inquiries. Indeed, if the self-deceptive nature of our attempts to explain consciousness, on the basis of the assumption that it is a private inner theater of some strange kind (Baars, 1997), is not already clear, I hope it will become clear. Rather than resembling an inner movie theater or television set – upon which one day we hope to display a picture, a ‘blueprint’ of its own ‘inner workings’, its own ‘production studios’, ‘editing rooms’, ‘scheduling conferences’, ‘market research projects’, and so on – we shall find our ‘inner lives’ as presenting us with just the same vagaries and mysteries as our ‘outer lives’. Instead of two worlds, the non-linguistic and the linguistic, with one full of things and objects and the other full of thought, ideas, propositions, etc., all thought of as representations ‘picturing’ the things in the other world (Stewart, 1996), we shall take it that (as Virginia Woolf is reputed to have said) “one of the damned things is enough.”

The analytic task: description not justification

In this approach to the problem of consciousness, then, consciousness is being treated as a special elaboration of that kind of awareness of, and sensitivity to, their surroundings exhibited by all living beings in their (growing and developing) responsive behavior in relation to their ‘worlds’ (v. Üexkull, 1957). Indeed, as we noted above, Toulmin (1982) sees the term “consciousness” as denoting a vast family of usages and idioms, ranging all the way from those which express only a minimal notion of being ‘awake’ and ‘sensible’ or reactive to one’s surroundings , through simply being attentive to events, on to being able to articulate accounts of one’s actions, to a final fourth aspect of being able to act jointly with others in the light of a plan or project shared with them. It is this final aspect, he argues, to which the original sense of the term “consciousness” corresponds; although they are all – sensibility, attentiveness, and articulateness – included in it, “their true historical ancestor appears to be the juridical sense of ‘conscious’, ‘consciously’, and ‘consciousness’ – concerned with the polled knowledge of several collaborating agents – and the whole family of terms derives originally from the Latin word conscientia, or ‘knowing together’” (p.65). And it is in this sense that I will explore the special character of those activities in which we act consciously. So, although we might use the word “consciousness,” theoretically, as the name of a supposed special ‘inner space or chamber’, a sensorium, an actually existing private movie theater inside our heads somewhere in which inner representations of an outer reality are continuously available to us (sometimes, as Descartes desired, clearly and distinctly displayed), I will not indulge in such theorizing (Baars, 1997). To the extent that some aspects of our human awareness is a witnessed or witnessable awareness, an awareness we do, or in fact can, share with others, I shall seek a very different account of consciousness, as something that is exhibited or displayed out in the world to those others.

              Yet, this does not mean that we shall find talk of people as having their own unique ‘inner’ lives as redundant or mistaken. Indeed, quite the opposite. To the extent that all our practical activities together are somewhat problematic, even the simple act of trying to tell someone a fact or to impart some information to them is an “interactional achievement” (Schegloff, 1995). Thus, if we are to intertwine our individual actions in with those of others in achieving a joint project, we need them to talk to us of what, uniquely, they are trying to do, what they are currently thinking, what they perceive, feel, etc., not because we want them to report to us on mysterious occurrences within them, but because their expressions are of use to us in our guiding of our living relations to them and to the others and other othernesses around us. So, while much of our 1^st-person talk about our own unique ‘inner lives’ is a poetic or metaphorical extension of 3^rd-person terms first learned in relation to events occurring out in the world between us, we shall find that, nonetheless, without a capacity to outwardly express aspects of our own inner feelings with respect to our surroundings, many of our joint achievements would be impossible. Only if we already share a set of constitutive expectancies and anticipations with the others around us as to what next they might do, expectations aroused spontaneously in response to their present expressions, can we hope to go on with them, without confusion and misunderstanding, to conduct our more self-consciously entertained projects – like trying to answer the question: “What is consciousness?” Thus in what follows, I shall treat consciousness, con-scientia, withness-knowing, as a constitutive condition making certain of our achievements possible , a condition to be clarified by bringing to witnessable awareness what in fact we are expressing in our (many in fact different) uses of the word “consciousness.” In other words, following Wittgenstein (1953), instead of seeking observable, general causes, in seeking to understand our spontaneously responsive relations to the surrounding conditions making conscious behavior possible, here, in this circumstance, we are seeking its localized reasons.

              While it might seem irrefutable to us as professional academic intellectuals, while seated at our desks preparing ourselves for our more public performances, that our thinking goes on ‘inside’ our heads, is it in fact so? As Wittgenstein (1980) remarks, “I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing” (p.17). For the fact is, even while all alone, we are engaged in our writing in a loop of activity, going out from our fingers moving a pen on paper, or on a keyboard producing letters on a screen, while continually monitoring the incoming result of these expressive activities ‘out there’ to make sure they meet criteria of con-scientia, public criteria of intelligibility – for our task in our writing, is to produce a knowing witnessable by the others around us . Thus, in this view, then, consciousness is expressed in our spontaneous, living, embodied responses to events occurring in our surroundings, it is expressed in the special shared or sharable way in which they sequentially unfold, such that each distinctive move made in the temporal sequence is of such a kind that surrounding others can spontaneously respond to it in an already shared manner. We visibly express this differential attentiveness to the different possible responses of the others around us at different moments in our activities, in a certain stance that we take to our surroundings, a stance that we acquire or can acquire with respect to some (but not to all) of our activities; it is a stance that is apparent to others when they “look into [a person’s] face, and see the consciousness in it” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.220). Indeed, we can see it for that matter, when we look into the fine structure of the unfolding of any of a person’s activities and can see in them the continual attempt to exert adjustive or corrective modifications to what has been achieved so far, so as to meet public criteria of intelligibility in their execution.

              Expressing ourselves in such shared or shareable ways, however, is not always easy; it is something we must aim at as an achievement. And quite often, we can fail in it – as Descartes’s worries about the difficulties confronting us if we are to arrive at certainty illustrates. To achieve shared understandings with others, we must go through a number of developmental circumstances. As young individuals, we must learn the kind of active, living, spontaneous responsiveness to the words of others, such that, to begin with, they can influence our behavior, but later, to influence both their behavior, and what is most crucial, our own in the same spontaneous fashion (Bakhtin, 1986; Vygotsky, 1986, Shotter, 1984, 1993). It is as we display more complex possibilities of sharable forms of expression, and thus the possibility of living more complicated inner lives, that our conscious lives develop and become refined and elaborated.

              Indeed, we can even come to act in such a way that, if challenged as to the appropriateness of our acts by those around us, we can verbally account to them for what we have done or are doing (Shotter, 1984), i.e., they can relate their own individual actions to “our [publicly shared] acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.204). In other words, more than being merely able to share our awareness with others, we become able, verbally, to account for what we are aware of, i.e., to justify it, after the fact, both to others and to ourselves (Mills, 1940; Scott and Lyman, 1968; Shotter, 1984), thus to exhibit a reflexive self-awareness of it. However, we must note here the advanced nature of this possibility. Such a conceptual use of verbal expressions comes at the end of establishing a “language-game,” when we can ask whether a word is “ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home” (no.116), not at its beginning. Being able verbally to adduce a justifiable account, to give a conceptual representation of our aim in our actions, is not to give a precise practical account of what is actually going on with us and within us when acting consciously, con-scientia.

              Indeed, in the view of consciousness that I want to advance here, rather than the concepts we can draw on in explaining (in the sense of justifying) our actions, in terms of their objects, aims, or point, being the source of our awareness as to what we are doing in our acting, they emerge as a consequence of it. Our awareness of what we are doing in our actions arises out of the shared ways of acting spontaneously into which we have been trained, and out of our different ways of expressing that intricate awareness in different circumstances – which, as Wittgenstein (1953, p.217) notes, is displayed in such questions, say, as “Why did you look at me at that word, were you thinking of...?,” which is asked in response to a “reaction at a certain moment,” and where “it makes a difference whether you refer to this or to that moment.” Thus the analytic task we face here is of quite a different kind. It is to specify concretely, step by step, the actual unfolding of the orchestrated sequence of self-directed acts – of remembering, imagining, looking, judging, valuing, selecting, linking, acting, inner speech and outer communication, etc. – that go into the organization of a complex judgment or course of action (Vygotsky, 1986). But to this is not easy. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks with respect to the particular problem as to whether “... there [is] such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions and feelings?” “Yes there is,” he replies, “and some can learn this knowledge. [But] what is most difficult here is to put all this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words” (p.227). For, the attempt to articulate explicitly what is involved in such a judgment, depends, as we shall see, not only on our being able to respond, directly and immediately to events occurring around us, but also on our being able spontaneously to do it in a way shared with the others in our social group, i.e., normatively. That is, we must be able to inter-relate, interweave, or interlink (in a chiasmic fashion) a selected set of the individual events we encounter into a unitary whole in more or less the same way as those around us do, a unitary whole with its own unique identity or style, so to speak. And to understand how all this might be possible for us, will require us, in its turn, to re-think many of our very basic concepts to do with what we take to be the fundamental nature of our world, especially, as we shall see, the very basic concepts of space and time, and the nature of what we take to be the ‘stuff’ or the ‘matter’ of our inquiries (Capek, 1961).

Bringing life back in: the centrality of our living, spontaneously responsive, bodily activity

To turn first, then, to the nature of the first-time, fleeting events spontaneously occurring in our meetings: Gradually, investigators have begun to comment on the (previously unnoticed) importance of the living bodily activities spontaneously occurring between us, and on the meaningful part they play prior to our conscious awareness of them as meaningful. Garfinkel (1967), for instance, remarks in this respect, on the fact that our everyday activities, our meetings with the others and othernesses around us, take place against a whole set of “expected background features of everyday scenes” which are “seen but unnoticed” (p.31), i.e., such expected features are seen in the sense of being spontaneously responded to, as indicative of this rather than that kind of life-as-usual event, but, just because they are as anticipated, are not picked out for explicit comment. Indeed, in the same vein, he lists a whole set of taken-for-granted features of our common talk – “the occasionality of expressions, the specific vagueness of references, the retrospective-prospective sense of a present occurrence, the waiting for something later to see what was meant before” – as furnishing “a background of seen but unnoticed features of common discourse” (p.41). However, although not consciously remarked on, if listeners do not spontaneously allow such features to pass as routinely understandable, as Garfinkel showed in his ‘experiments’, speakers immediately express moral indignation: “Departures from such usages call forth immediate attempts to restore a right state of affairs” (p.42). As Garfinkel remarks, these background features of social life are continuously seen, but not usually noticed, and as such, often go unnoticed in our academic inquiries also.

              Why are these spontaneous expressive reactions so easily ignored? Why do we fail to be struck by their importance ? Because, I suggest, oriented toward seeking the general, hidden, lawful inner ‘mechanisms’ we suppose responsible for our outer (seemingly orderly and visible) behaviors, we think such expressions are too trivial and too fleeting to be of importance. But in doing this, we make no clear and strong distinctions between lifeless assemblies of externally related parts, which retain their structure irrespective of their context of existence, and organic, agentic unities of internally related parts, which owe their continued existence to their ‘fittingness’ within their circumstances. Indeed, it is as if life as something special in itself, as something sui generis, as something existing only in the special nature of the internal relations between the constituent parts of a unique living whole – intertwined relations of both a spatial and temporal kind – has been completely dismissed from our deliberations. As a result, both the inherent ‘directionality’ of temporally unfolding activities – their ‘movement’ from a certain past toward a limited range of possible futures (to speak metaphorically, for both these terms spatialize time ) – and their inevitable gestural expressiveness in ‘pointing from this past toward that kind of future’, has been ignored. But if this form of gestural expressiveness is so pervasive and influential in our inquiries in this manner, why have we failed to notice this? Why do we still feel we can approach living phenomena in same causal-mechanistic manner as dead ones? Because, it would seem, from the ancient Greeks till now, we have operated as self-controlled thinkers, as workers in a purely cognitive realm of disembodied, essentially geometric forms, and we have only turned to act in the actual world of concrete events after our development of a theoretical structure to guide us in our actions within it. As Kant put it in 1787, we must approach nature “in order to be taught by it.” But, he went on, “[reason] must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated,” and to refuses “to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings” (Kant, 1970, p.20). In other words, although we have wanted to learn from nature, we have not been interested in hearing nature’s own ‘voice’, we have not allowed ‘it’ to teach us of itself (Shotter a, in press). We have willfully sought answers only to questions of our own formulation, questions formulated only in terms of the objective aspects of the things and events occurring around us.

              Our resistance to being kept in nature’s “leading strings” has, however, led us to make the major mistake of assuming that we exist in the world only as individual, self-contained, cognitively functioning, subjective minds, immersed in a world of purely objective events occurring around us . In taking just this willful stance and this stance alone toward our inquiries, we have, like all good modern epistemologists, followed Descartes in seeing the world around us as ‘furnished’ only with separately existing, self-contained, neutral objects . Thus other people (whether dead or alive) appear to us just as all the other objects around us appear to us – as entities having a certain size, shape, color, weight, moving at a certain velocity, and so forth, and can also be taken as means to our own ends. As a consequence, whether we see something as a living thing or not, is not a matter of our immediate bodily response to it, but a cognitive matter, something we have to ‘work out’, as Descartes did so many years ago: “If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves... Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind” (Descartes, 1968, p.21) . Any sense that the movements of the people (and other living things) on the square – their spontaneously responsive and expressive movements – are in some way of an utterly distinct kind from the movements of the non-living entities there, has been expunged from consideration. Indeed, even in our thinking about logic and mathematics, in our thoughts about calculation and computation, and in other spheres of scientific inquiry in which theoretical schematisms are central (see Doyle, 1997; Fisher, 1998; Rotman, 1993), we seem to have misled ourselves in thinking that we can exclude the part(s) played by our own spontaneously expressive bodily responses in accounting for the role of such schematisms in our lives.

              But there is something very basic about living, embodied expression and the way in which they gesture toward, so to speak, the unitary style of what is to come in our relations to the others and othernesses around us. It is, for instance, often remarked by babies differentially respond to expressions of expressions of pleasure (smiles, etc.) and anger (frowns, and suchlike) manifested not only in the facial expressions, tones or voice, and other unfolding bodily movements of those around them, long before they can discriminate between triangles and squares (Koffka, 1924). Indeed, even one’s pet animals spontaneously respond to one’s own expressions of interest or concern regarding surrounding events .

              Thus, perhaps, it is with such phenomena that we can begin our acknowledgment of the importance of such living movements. For, what if, as Wittgenstein (1953) suggests, “our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (no.284)? What if our reactions, not only to embodied human expression, but to the results of embodied human expression, are of a quite different kind to our reactions to ‘mute’ shapes, forms, or patterns? What if in our daily transactions with the world around us, and in our more academic inquiries, we are in fact continuously and spontaneously acting differently, not only toward living and dead things, but also toward the living and dead aspects in our own embodied activities and products, while failing to notice this? What if, in the responsive intertwining of our activities in with events in their surroundings, there is an intricate and subtle orchestrated interplay between their active aspects (in which we act on our surroundings) and their passive aspects (in which we responsively follow the expressive ‘calls’ coming to us from our surroundings)? If all this were so, might we not in fact be deceiving ourselves in attempting to encompass all our meaningful relations with our surroundings within the category of subject-object relations? Might there not be something of unique importance in the temporal sequencing of the unfolding (or unfolded) movements of a pen on paper or of a brush on canvas to which we in fact attach (currently unnoticed) significance, or in the slight variations of tone, pitch, or pacing as we utter our words, or even in this piece here, written as it has been on a mechanical word processor, in my patterning of just these word-forms on the paper before you, and not others? If all this is the case, then while it might seem to be the case that in our active use of words we are making repetitive use of the same forms, this cannot be so. For all our words have a unique use, a use unique to the particular momentary setting within which we happen to find ourselves, a setting passively constituted for us in our spontaneous responsiveness to what is occurring in our surroundings. And it is in our unique intertwining of our utterances with features in their surroundings, that this unique use is expressed.

              This is why I suggested above, that in seeking the kind of descriptive terms required in our investigations of events occurring in our meetings, we could not proceed in conceptual terms, in terms based in regularities with currency only within already established language-games. Instead, we must work in terms of beginnings, in terms of events occurring “for ‘another first time’” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.9), unique, fleeting events which ‘set the scene’, so to speak, for what else might occur within a meeting. Wittgenstein (1980) captures this concern in the following set of remarks: “The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [quoting Goethe]” (p.31). “The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word,” he notes (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.218). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?” he asks, (Wittgenstein, 1981). “Presumably 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” (no.541). In all these remarks, he is drawing our attention to the possible role in our lives of the unique, spontaneous, bodily responses we have to the expressions of others or to events occurring around us. And he is concerned here with our understanding of them, not as instances of a type, but with our beginning the kind of understandings that are unique to the circumstances of their occurrence: understandings to do with unique individuals and the unique events occurring in their unique lives.

              Indeed, it is at this point that we can begin to draw a distinction between aspects of our expressions related to what we can call our ‘outer lives’ and those related to what, metaphorically, we call our ‘inner lives’, i.e., between those aspects of our expressions which relate to features in our surroundings visible to all, and those aspects of our expressions which, as first-persons, are distinctive just of our own unique relations to our circumstances, which, at the time of their expression, are invisible to others. It is at this point too, that we must note the key gestural role of our bodily expressions, and that they may be either of an indicative kind, in that they ‘point beyond themselves’ to something in their surroundings, or are of a mimetic kind, in being responsively ‘shaped’ by such influences. Their gestural role is crucial in what follows, as such activity is inherently meaningful, prior to, or independently of, our having learned any rules of interpretation. Indeed, Mead (1934) puts this aspect of the matter well in his remark that: “the mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78). It is in those aspects of our expressions in which we speak, in spontaneous continuous response to our lived relations to our surroundings (in how we ‘contour’ their pausing, pacing, intonation, word choice, etc., in their ‘stylistic variations’), that we express our own unique ‘inner lives’ to those around us. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it: “The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside – in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” (p.93, emphasis in original).

              This emphasis on our intrinsic, spontaneous, living, expressive responsiveness to events in our surroundings, and thus our ineradicable relatedness to them, is, thus, crucial. In thinking that we only see certain circumstances – whether in outer or ‘inner’ seeing – as meaningful because of our subjective interpretations of them according to learned rules or conventions, we have completely ignored the possibility that this more basic form of gestural expression might be spontaneously at work in them. This has led us also to ignore the presence in our socially intelligible living activities, of what others have called the system of “background expectancies and anticipations” in terms of which we respond to some aspects of people’s everyday activities in a normative manner, i.e., as routinely intelligible or not (e.g., Mills, 1940; Garfinkel, 1967; Scott and Lyman, 1968; Searle, 1983, 1995). And this in turn, is to ignore the temporally unfolding nature of our living expressions and how – by becoming engaged in the unfolding movement of an other’s expressions – we can be spontaneously ‘moved’ by them in ways we share with the others around us.

              In the next section below, I will explore further the ineradicable ‘dynamic’, ‘developing’, ‘formative’, or ‘structurizing’ nature of such spontaneously responsive living activities, and how, due to their always ‘in motion’ nature, it is impossible to describe their nature in terms of instantaneous static structures. But here, I would like to end this section simply by noting that what is expressed in this form of living activity is not hidden somewhere ‘behind’ it, but is expressed or exhibited directly within it, in its unfolding appearances. While the ‘what’ in question is invisible, it is sensed as a “presence,” not as something neutral, as merely objective, but as something that, like another person, can exert ‘calls’ on us (Shotter b, in press). Whatever I turn toward, I turn toward with both a history of my past meetings with it and range of anticipations as how it might next appear to me. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it. “It is true that the lamp has a back, that the cube has another side. But this formula: “It is true,” does not correspond to what is given me in perception. Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences. I grasp the unseen side as present, and I do not affirm that the back of the lamp exists in the same sense that I say the solution of a problem exists. The hidden side is present in its own way. It is in my vicinity [the vicinity of my body]” (p.14). Thus, to repeat, it is the function of this form of expression to ‘set the scene’, so to speak, for all our more self-conscious, cognitive forms of understanding. Such expressions ‘call out’ from us, a moment-by-moment changing, spontaneously responsive attitude or stance, a stance appropriate to our inter-relating all the specific events we encounter in a particular circumstance into a unitary whole, and to do so in more or less the same way or style as the others around us do. Lacking access to that spontaneous way or style of relating ‘items’ into a unique whole, thus to give them their (felt) sense, we would be unable to participate in routine exchanges with the others around us.

Living responsiveness, the dialogical, and the chiasmic

The focal importance of these spontaneously used and expected styles of expression is most obvious, perhaps, in the research field of Conversational Analysis (CA). There, the central analytic concepts of “adjacency pair” and “conditional relevance” take it for granted that “given the first [item in a sequenced pair of conversational items], the second is expectable; upon its occurrence it can be seen to be the second item to the first; upon its nonoccurrence it can be seen to be officially absent...” (Schegloff, 1972, p.364). In other words, there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in a flow of living activity. Each moment has within it a ‘carry over’ from the past and a quite specific anticipation of the future . Indeed, in Saussure’s (1911) claim that “... in language there are only differences ” (p.120), makes it clear that it is the differences occurring from moment to moment in the sequential unfolding of speech events over time that speech is made into speech. Or, in other words, it is in the intrinsic or inherent relations existing between such events that, what we perceive as a person’s meaningful vocal expressions, have their being. Thus the voiced flow of people’s utterances is such that during any conversational engagement, at the moment when one speaker finishes their turn at talk, a shaped and vectored sense of what appropriately might next be said, is shared amongst all participants alike. And they must speak as it requires, if their speech is to be perceived as ‘fitting’, and not as disorienting by other participants – the recipient of a question feels a compellent need to reply with an answer to it.

              Bakhtin (1986) also makes a very similar comment: “Each rejoinder [in a dialogue], regardless of how brief and abrupt, has a specific quality of completion that expresses a particular position of the speaker, to which one may respond or assume, with respect to it, a responsive position... But at the same time rejoinders are all linked to one another. And the sort of relations that exist among rejoinders of dialogue – relations between question and answer, assertion and objection, suggestion and acceptance, order and execution, and so forth – are impossible among units of language (words and sentences), either in the system of language (in vertical cross section) or within utterances (on the horizontal plane)” (p.72).

              Bakhtin (1986), however, goes on to remark on an aspect of conversational exchanges not stressed by conversational analysts, that: “an utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)” (pp.119-120).

              Displayed here above, then, are a number of important, and in fact, quite remarkable features of expressive human activity that we not usually given a sufficiently adequate treatment in contemporary social theory: the special internally related but always incomplete structure of its temporal unfolding, and thus its capacity to ‘call for’ further action; and the always uniquely creative and evaluative nature of that further action, with its dialogical or chiasmic, i.e., interwoven, relation to its surroundings. I will turn first to the uniquely creative character of the chiasmic or dialogical intertwinings occurring in the moment of a meeting between two or more living activities, but I will reserve discussion of the special nature of their continued temporal unfolding for a later section.

              A special kind of poiesis or creative activity occurs in the boundary zone between two or more living activities upon their meeting and mingling with each other. Such creative activity cannot be treated simply as action (for it is not done by individuals, and thus it cannot be explained by giving individual people’s reasons), nor is it simply behavior (to be explained in terms of mechanical regularities according to a causal law or principle). It constitutes a distinct, third sphere of activity with its own quite distinctive, even strange, properties. In line with our terminology so far, we can call it a dialogically- or chiasmically-structured activity.

              Bakhtin makes a number of important remarks about features of activity in this sphere. We can first note his comment that, “dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional-syntactic). They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects... ‘Hunger, cold!’ – one utterance of a single speaking subject. ‘Hunger!’ – ‘Cold!’ – two dialogically correlated utterances of two different subjects: here dialogic relations appear that did not exist in the former case” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.117-118). While in the first case, the utterance of the word ‘cold’ simply modifies the first, in the second, according to its surroundings and the positions and relations between the two subjects, the expression ‘Cold!’ could be an expression of sympathy (‘And you’re cold as well!’), of competition (‘While you’re hungry I’m cold!’), of disagreement (“Cold, not hunger, is what we’re complaining about!’), and so on.

              Thus, for Bakhtin (1993), “what underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not a principle as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of one’s 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. Here lies the point of origin of the answerable deed and of all the categories of the concrete, once-occurrent, and compellent ought” (p.40). In other words, in a meeting in which dialogically-structured activity occurs, a ‘reality’ or ‘space’ is constructed between the participants which is experienced as a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’) with its own (ethical) demands and requirements, its own compulsions : “Each dialogue takes place 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... – he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.126-127). Although invisible, the event of the meeting, ‘its’ reality – expressed in the participant’s spontaneously responsive reactions, not only to each other, but also to their surroundings – becomes itself an agency, able to exert a moving, shaping, or formative influence on the activities of those participating within it. And we grasp the nature of these shaping influences, not as passive and neutral objects, but as “real presences” (Steiner, 1989), as agencies toward which we adopt an “evaluative attitude” which we exhibit in the “style” or the “expressive aspect” of our utterances (Bakhtin, 1986, p.84).

              Participants responsively express their relation to their circumstances in, among other registers, the intonation of their utterances. Thus, in the continuously unfolding flow of dialogically-structured activity occurring in the active meeting of two or more living human beings, a uniquely structured, still ongoing, i.e., never-to-be-finished, dynamic unity is formed. “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses,... combine but are not merged in the unity of the event,” notes Bakhtin (1984, p.6); and to emphasize the special, non-fused, or internally well-articulated character of the unity in question, he goes on to characterize it, “not as an innate one-and-only, but as a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples” (p.289). But how might we begin to make sense of some of Bakhtin’s claims here? What does it mean to say that a unity of unmerged twos and multiples is created?

              Well, we can first note that, given the fact of their spontaneous living responsiveness to each other’s bodily activities, the activity occurring in the boundary zone of a meeting, while not a simply blending or synthesis, an averaging out of all the participant’s activities, is still nonetheless a unity. For, at this level, what we might call ‘primordial-expressive’ level of their joint activity, it is not a matter of one person first acting individually and independently of an other, and then a second replying, individually and independently of the first; all the participants act jointly, as a collective-we. They do it bodily, in an immediate ‘living’ way, without first having ‘to work out’ how to respond to each other. This means that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for one person’s acts are always partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of the others around them – and this is where all the strangeness of the chiasmic or dialogical begins (see Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b). In this expressive sphere, our actions are neither yours nor mine; they are truly ‘ours’ as a collective unity.

              What is produced in such dialogically-structured meetings, then, is a very complex and intricate intertwining of not wholly reconcilable, mutually influencing movements – with, as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins. This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. Yet further, to the extent that the temporal unfolding of intertwined activity in this realm is shared in by all, it is non-locatable. It is neither ‘inside’ people, but nor is it simply ‘outside’ of them. It is ‘spread out’ or distributed amongst all those participating in it. Indeed, to the extent that it is undifferentiated as to whose it is, we could say that they all have their being ‘within’ it.

              In other words, at this primordial-expressive level, taken all together, people, their activities on meeting, and the surroundings of their resulting interactions , all constitute a dynamically unfolding, internally inter-related, meaningful whole which cannot be divided into separable, externally related parts. Although we tend to think of space and time as two absolutely distinct ‘container’ realms, which became fused in Einstein’s space-time, we now need, perhaps, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) suggests, to “recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install [ourselves] in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over’, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object’, both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them” (p.130). Indeed, we might suggest that it is precisely the lack of any finalized order, and thus their openness to being further specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice, that is one of the central defining characteristics of the intertwined activities occurring in such meetings. But yet, people cannot just go on to act as they please, for, as we have already noted, it is as if there is a third, collective-agency within the circumstances of their meeting, and all involved in ‘it’ must answer to ‘its’ calls if they are to remain ‘in’ interaction with each other.

              But from whence does this strange dialogically-structured, dispersed agency, this grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense), emerge? Due to the impossibility of being able to trace the overall outcome of any exchange back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, we can see why, although it is a joint product of all their activities, all those involved in it treat it as an ‘external world’, as in fact an unmoveable and unresponsive ‘third being’ in relation to their actions. But how are all the influences that go into its formation inter-linked with each other to form such an integrated and unique unity?

              Here, in perhaps what is a surprising move if we are still thinking in conceptual terms rather than in terms of my bodily relations to my surroundings, we can take some comments both by Merleau-Ponty and by Bateson on binocular vision as indicative of what might be involved in the formation of such unities. Both writers, in their own different ways, note that “the binocular perception is not made up of two monocular perceptions surmounted; it is of another order. The monocular images are not in the same sense that the things perceived with both eyes is... they are pre-things and it is the thing” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.7) . Bateson (1979) too notes that “the difference between the information provided by the one retina and that provided by the other is itself information of a different logical type. From this sort of information, the seer adds (sic) an extra dimension to seeing” (p.80). We achieve a currently inexplicable and quite amazing ‘synthesis’, i.e., intertwining, of fragments of information, gathered from here and there, at different moments in time, to constitute for ourselves the dimension of depth. As our two eyes work together in looking over the visual scene before us (like an autofocus camera), first finding a common fixation and focus on this point and at that distance, then on that point and at this distance, and so on, and so on, the continuously unfolding sequence of ‘looks’, darting hither and thither, back and forth, over what is before us, results eventually in our seeing of a unified and indivisible visual scene.

              But it is not just a neutral scene, that happens to have a third, relational dimension of depth added into it. What we call the scene’s depth is related to my bodily concerns and orientation, it is a scene in which my possible movements are immediately available to me. Hence, without having to work it out, I have an immediate sense of what is within and out of my reach, of what is near and what is far. In fact, even more, I have an immediate evaluative sense – as Bakhtin noted – of how my moves within it might matter to me, for it presents me with a shaped and vectored sense of how at that moment, given my bodily position in relation to my surroundings, I might spontaneously respond to them. This is especially apparent when, say, in driving on a multilane highway we sustain a continually updated sense of where next we might possibly go, but also, where clearly we must not go.

              With this paradigm in mind, while acknowledging the inexplicable nature of such bodily intertwinings or syntheses, I want to suggest that we can treat people’s 1st-person expressions, their spontaneous voicing of their utterances in conversations, as contributing to the constitution of such complex syntheses in the same way. For, just as the two different, moment-by-moment changing views of a landscape before us, given us by our two different eyes are not merged into a blurred two-dimensional image, but intricately intertwined to create for us a sense of depth – a metaphorically so-called third-dimension – so the different voices speaking from different momentary positions in a shared ‘space’ can also give us a sense of that space as having some ‘depth’, a sense of it has allowing for different ‘places’ and ‘positions’, also.

              Indeed, although such metaphorical talk of this kind, of our conversations as occurring in ‘spaces’ with degrees of ‘depth’ to them, may appear quite arbitrary and utterly baseless (Johnston, 1993), we shall nonetheless find that there are good expressive reasons why it makes sense to talk of the ‘inner reality’ of a conversation as constituting a ‘landscape’ of possible places to ‘go on’ to, and of ‘mental or discursive movements’ that one might make within it. For there is a kind of understanding spontaneously at work in our conversational activities when we use already well-known words poetically or metaphorically in utterly new – and apparently arbitrary – ways which, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no.122). It is a practical, bodily responsive kind of spontaneous understanding that, to contrast it with the “representational-referential” forms of understanding more familiar to us in our intellectual and individual dealings with our surroundings, we might call a “relationally-responsive” kind of understanding. While we shall also find this kind of relational understanding of importance in relation to our more general philosophical concerns with the workings of language, what is of most importance to us, is that it is just this kind of understanding that opens up to us the quite unique and idiosyncratic concerns of those nearest and dearest to us, that gives us access to their ‘inner’ lives. As Johnston (1993) notes, it is not that these 1^st-person expressions are accurately linked to a mysterious inner realm which would not otherwise see the light of day, “the account has a use quite independently of whether or not it accurately reproduces some supposed inner event” (p.14). Irrespective of whether certain ‘inner events’ are accurately ‘depicted’ in a person’s outer speech, what their 1^st-person avowals tell us, is what their anticipations and expectations are as to how we should ‘go on’ with them, how we respond to them, how we should treat them. Whether we ourselves can actually ‘see’ the (perhaps previously quite unforseen) connections a friend is now making between certain circumstances in her surroundings, by spontaneously expressing herself in the way that she does, she is allowing us to relate ourselves to her and her circumstances in ways that would otherwise be quite impossible. She grimaces. But until she says, “I’m puzzled,” “I’m in pain,” “I feel dizzy,” “I don’t like that music,” “That’s a very ugly dog,” or whatever, we remain disoriented as to how to respond to her grimace.

              But if we are to better understand the workings of such a kind of understanding, its non-representational, non-pictorial or non-visual nature, and its role in ‘setting the scene’ for the development of uniquely new understandings, we must first explore why it is that we have seem to have eradicated it completely from our inquiries. How is it, if such a form of understanding plays such a central role in our lives, that we seem to have devised methods of inquiry which seem not to have any need of it?

‘Seeing connections’ and ‘getting it’

As we turn away from the world of our everyday, practical, personal affairs, and turn as professional academics to the Cartesian-Kantian world of theoretical reason in our intellectual inquiries, it is precisely the sphere of responsive bodily expression that we also turn away from. As a disembodied, self-contained mind, willfully oriented only to seeing static shapes or forms, I do not find myself ‘called’, so to speak, into any particular relations with these pictorial shapes; I do not find them immediately and directly ‘pointing beyond’ themselves to anything else in their surroundings; they are open to interpretation. Why is it that it is precisely within this inert world that we, as professional academics feel compelled to situate ourselves? We do so, I want to suggest, because ever since Descartes, we feel ourselves committed essentially to a Euclidean-Newtonian, geometric form of reasoning, in which at a certain instant in time, everything of relevance to our ‘getting it’, to our ‘seeing a connection’, is all visually present to us at once (all ‘on the same page’, so to speak). In his search for a secure method for the attainment of certain knowledge, Descartes (1968) as we know, thought that it could be found in the use of “those long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers use to teach their most difficult demonstrations” (p.41). Thus, even when we are not actually conducting mathematical proofs, we must still work as if we had to satisfy a similar rigor, and connect our claims into an unbroken sequence, with each undeniable step following from a previous undeniable step. This seems to reduce our reasoning to a mechanical process, one of merely matching shapes or forms (suitably scaled, topologically) for their congruence. But does it? Is the crucial role of our trained, spontaneous responses to the 1^st-person expressions of others, eradicated from our lives in this form of reasoning? From whence does our confidence in this kind of reasoning issue?

              Fisher (1998) studies how Descartes sets out his step-by-step method for the achievement of certainty in his first major work, the Regulae, or Rules for the Direction of the Intellect – it depends, as we shall see, on our having certain kinds of what he calls “feelings” or “experiences.” In setting the scene for his account, Fisher begins with Socrates’s claim (in the Theaetetus) that “philosophy begins in wonder” (not in fear, as some might claim), and with the importance of phenomena that ‘strike’ us. He then turns to some remarks of Wittgenstein’s in the Brown Book, to do with our being struck by what is unfamiliar to us. For both Descartes and Wittgenstein suggest that we do not have an experience, as such, of the ordinary: “Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity,” says Wittgenstein (1965, p.127). “By a feeling or experience here,” says Fisher (1998), “we mean that we have a definable moment of a special kind that might be noticed, remembered, formulated in description, something discrete within the flow of time, something clear, self-contained, separable from what came before and after... a patch of experience, a this with its own duration and quality” (p.20). Next, Fisher suggests, it is within such memorable and feelingful moments, that an experience of “seeing connections” can occur : “Being struck by something is exactly the opposite of being struck dumb. The tie between wonder and learning is clear in the moment when after long confusion and study you suddenly say, ‘Now I get it!’... the moment of ‘getting it’ is extremely clear in mathematics. In an instant, unexpectedly, the answer is seen for the first time, and all that was a puzzle of unrelated facts up to that instant turns into clarity and order” (p.21). Given such moments of ‘getting it’, Descartes’s achievement, Fisher suggests, was to “design a way to make sure that every necessary fact is visually present to the mind at the moment when [a] next step [in one’s reasoning] is being weighed and that, as in chess, pieces that have been made inactive have been removed from sight” (p.61). Each methodical step sets the stage for such an instantaneous act of ‘seeing’, we complete it with confidence and move on to arrange the next. And in his Regulae, Descartes set out a set of simple exercises for coming to a recognition of what such a certainty feels like; they gave one a feel for “what one step looks like, what adequate symbolism is at any given moment, what the distinction between relevant and irrelevant details feels like, but above all, what the feeling of ‘getting it’, of crossing the small gap of the unknown is like” (Fisher, 1998, p.66).

              We can now, perhaps, see the importance of static pictures, of diagrams, of configurations or states of affairs in this way of thinking; and how change, as such, comes to be represented within it as a sequence of discontinuous instants in which everything present at one moment is simply reshuffled in an instant into a new configuration. Indeed, as we shall see below, it is this way of thinking which has authorized the whole structuralist approach to language as an arbitrary system of signs working to represent thoughts (or objects of thought) by “the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made in the mass of thought” (Saussure, 1959, p.120), and in almost all other spheres of the human sciences, in which we mislead ourselves into thinking that “if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to rules” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.81). We can also see, how easy it is, in this way of thinking, to talk of consciousness as simply a completely enclosed ‘inner space’ in which this kind of thinking occurs, or, for consciousness to be a realm within which purely configurational changes in representational forms can occur mechanically. For, “what is eliminated [in this way of thinking] is,” Fisher claims, “the use of memory within thought, replaced by a deep use of the visual” (pp.61-62). Clearly, we confront a much more difficult mental task if, in trying to work out how best to deal with a complex circumstance, we must also re-view and re-connect past material into our current circumstances.

              In a moment, I will question whether memory has in fact been eliminated, as Fisher suggests, but let me first explore how the problem of sequence and succession, of the sequential ‘shaping’ of an utterance, is encompassed within such a static, spatialized form of thought. For, as we have seen, static styles of thought can only represent change as sequence of discrete steps, of jumps from one static configuration to another – thus misleading us into treating living change as merely changes of position in an otherwise unchanging world. Saussure’s (1959) account of syntax, and Chomsky’s (1972) elaboration of it – to show how it is possible for a speaker, operating within a finite system of rules, to make, “in the terminology Wilhelm von Humboldt used in the 1830's, ... infinite use of finite means” (p.17) – is paradigmatic here. For surely, if talking meaningfully is a matter of shaping one’s utterances in an appropriate matter, according to an unambiguous set of rules, then it must be possible to picture or represent their patterning in such a way that they can be paired with patterns arrived at by the kind of formal reasoning discussed by Fisher above, thus to discover what these rules are. This was Saussure’s (1959) goal in his structuralist or formalistic approach to “the mechanism of language” (p.127), he wanted to capture the grammar of a language in a timeless (synchronic) static structure.

              To see why Saussure thought this an adequate aim, we must explore the preliminary assumptions he makes in setting the scene for his investigations. While we have based ourselves in our spontaneous, bodily responses to events occurring around us, Saussure begins with ratiocination. So, although it may very well seem that he is making a number of very similar claims to those we have explored above, the differences are in fact enormous.

              For him, while “other sciences work with objects that are given in advance... not linguistics... Far from it being the object that antedates the viewpoint, it would seem that [in linguistics] it is the viewpoint that creates the object” (p.8). Thus “the linguistic entity is not accurately defined until it is delimited, i.e., separated from everything that surrounds it” (p.103), for what is merely ‘accidental’ variation – according to the norms of native speakers – must be distinguished from what is properly systematic. Only after this has been done, it is then possible to construct language as a “system of pure values” (p.111), both “on the plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B) ” (p.112). Thus, in Saussures’s (1959) terms: “A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign” (p.120). In other words, it is because the objective sequence of differences (of values) in the objective system of signifiers, runs parallel to an objective sequence of differences (of values) in the signified, that B can represent A. But the world of difference that separates Saussure from everything we have explored above, is acknowledged by Saussure in his comment that, “very few linguists suspect that the intervention of the factor of time creates difficulties peculiar to linguistics and opens to their science two divergent paths” (p.79). “Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic” (p.81).

              In other words, like Fisher above, Saussure’s account seeks to give us a view with everything of relevance all present to us in an instant. But he fails to acknowledge that he sneaks time and temporality back into his thought in his procedure for delimiting linguistic units: “to divide the chain, we must call in meanings,” he says, for “when we know the meaning and function that must be attributed to each part of the chain, we see the parts detach themselves from each other and the shapeless ribbon break up into segments” (Saussure, 1959, pp.103-104). And it is here that the enormous difference between Saussure’s static approach to language, in terms of rational or reasoned relations of “values” within externally constructed systems of differences, and the dynamic approach in terms of spontaneously responsiveness, living, embodied relations (in Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) becomes apparent. It is only because we are in fact already competent users of language, sensitive to its grammatical character that we can – on the basis of a belief that there must be a mechanical, rule-governed system at work in causing us to talk as we do – begin to find such an ‘after the fact’ and ‘beside the point’ system in it. Thus, as Voloshinov (1986) very correctly emphasizes, while structuralists claim that “the system of language is an objective fact external to and independent of any individual consciousness. Actually, represented as a system of self-identical, immutable norms, it can be perceived in this way only by the individual consciousness and from the point of view of that consciousness” (p.65). In fact, from a strictly objective point of view (one that leaves out our responsiveness to its meanings), we can only see the unceasing flow of interactive movement issuing from and within the meeting of persons; within that unceasing flow of activity, no objective system of normative forms as such, is or ever can be apparent. To repeat, although all human expressions may seem to have, at an instant, a delimited, i.e., fixed, ‘outer’ visible form, to the extent that they are inevitably ‘participant parts’ in a successively unfolding movement, over or through time, they are ineradicable tinged, so to speak, with (in spatial terms!) where ‘they have been’ and what they are ‘headed’.

              In a similar manner, we can ask of Fisher, has memory in fact been eliminated in Cartesian forms of thought? Is the temporal and the historical truly absent in such a form of reasoning? Are the objects of thought in this way of thinking simply the inert objects they are taken to be? What if, like faces, such objects also ‘looked at us’, what if they had a physiognomy (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.181), an ‘inner’ life, a range of different ways of expressing their identity, so that we felt both that we had to be answerable to them in some direct and immediate way, but could not always be answerable to them in the same way?

              As we are trained, step by step, in building up our mathematical skills or skills in logic, we must develop certain sensitivities, certain bodily inclinations to respond immediately and spontaneously in certain mathematically or logically appropriate ways to certain symbols on the page or on the blackboard before us, i.e., to ‘see’ them as presenting us with certain kinds of questions, etc. So, although it may seem that memory has been eliminated in this form of step by step, configurational or representational reasoning, it hasn’t. While it has been eliminated in those aspects of the process we conduct consciously, in which we act accountably, it hasn’t in those aspects of the process involving our spontaneous bodily responses to the marks of human expression on the paper before us. For it is those marks into which (some of us) have, slowly and laboriously, been trained into ‘seeing as’ expressions with crucial mathematical or logical meanings. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1978) notes about such symbolic marks: “Symbols appear to be of their nature unsatisfied... 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). In other words, we are back again in the realm of the physiognomic, in the realm of embodied expression . How might we outline the dimensions of such a realm? We shall find the realm of the temporal unfolding of dynamically intertwined unities crucial.

The primacy of the unceasing temporal flow of living activity:

dynamizing space rather than spatializing time

Let us here, then, return to the problem of the constitution of an unmerged, intertwined unity from a continuous succession of distinct bodily involvements, and to the paradigm example we used there of binocular vision. But in considering seeing with two eyes, we were not, perhaps, getting just a little ahead of ourselves, and moving prematurely to a higher level of complexity before considering seeing ‘something’ with just one eye? Seeing with two eyes, allowed us too easily still to remain in the realm only of the spatial. If we consider what is involved, even with one eye, in scanning over a face and seeing it – with all its changing expressions – as the same face, only now as a smiling face, now as frowning, now as sad, as welcoming, as threatening, and so on, we clearly still meet the same problem as before: How is it possible for us to join together all the different fragments, collected at different moments in time as the eye jumps from one fixation to the next, into a coherent dynamic whole, into ‘seeing’ not just a person’s face as static configurations, but into a way of seeing ‘them’ that is expressive of their character, of who they are?

              That seeing a person’s face as a face is an achievement in which it is possible to fail, is shown by Sacks’s (1985) Dr P. Although Dr P. knew perfectly well what eyes, noses, chins, etc., were intellectually, he could not spontaneously recognize people’s faces as such, let alone, as uniquely their face; thus it was that he mistook his wife’s face for his hat. His failure was not in recognizing static forms – as Sacks’s testing showed – his abilities in that sphere were superlative. His failure was of a physiognomic kind, a failure not only of spontaneous judgment in the visio-spatial sphere , but also a failure of spontaneous bodily response to human expression. He looked over Sacks’s face, “as if noting (even studying) [its] individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its chnaging expressions, ‘me’, as a whole... there was a teasing strangeness, some failure of interplay between gaze and expression” (p.8). Situated visually, as he was, in a realm only of shapes and forms arrayed only spatially, Dr P. lacked the capacity to respond spontaneously, not only to faces as faces, but also to their expressions – to comfort a person’s sadness or assuage their anger. A face presented Dr P., just like any other spatial shape, merely with an occasion for a methodical interpretation – or misinterpretation, just as he misinterpreted his foot for his shoe! Like Descartes’s automatons seen from across the street, visually, other people’s facial expressions ‘told’ him nothing; they ‘called’ nothing from him; they were not charged, so to speak, with any mnemonic sense of being related to a previous momentary configuration, or with any anticipation of their next possible contours. He did not see people’s facial expressions in relation to their surroundings, both spatial and temporal. As Sacks (1985) put it: “Visually, [Dr P.] was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions... He could speak about things, but did not see them face-to-face” (p.13). In lacking ‘life’ for him, they lacked the capacity to call out from him, spontaneously, a living response.

              As our account of Fisher’s (1998) work above shows, thinking only pictorially or spatially leads us to forget the enormous difference between mere static juxtaposition and the dynamic succession present in the ceaseless unfolding of living forms. For static styles of thought can only encompass change as a series of discrete steps, of jumps from one static configuration to another – thus misleading us into treating living change as merely changes of position in an unchanged world, or as the simply moving from one place to another on an unchanging landscape rather than as a pulsational flow of indivisible activity. In other words, to live within a disconnected sequence of instants, with no way of organizing them into a living unitary whole with a past that can be updated and with a future that can be anticipated, would be to live in a motionless, timeless, ever repeating present moment, in which one was continually born anew. And this would be to live without any sense at all of having a life.

              Yet, in his study of the classical picture of physical reality, Capek (1961) notes the baffling tendency, even with the new forms of thought required by relativity and quantum physics before us, to nonetheless revert back to the classical, timeless picture, the purely spatial structure, in our attempts to make sense of not only other spheres of activity in our lives, but also of relativity and quantum theory themselves. “Classical physics cannot be forgotten,” says Capek, “even though its prestige no longer survives. It cannot be forgotten not only because it remains valid at the macrophysical level, that is, for our daily experience; not only because it is being taught for that reason in high schools and in basic undergraduate course; but also because its principles are embodied in the present structure of the average human intellect or in what is usually called ‘common sense’ ” (pp.xii-xiii). It is, he points out, the ‘view’ of the world – and as we have seen, its pictorial quality is one of its most significant features – embodied in Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. It is the view that “the universe is a pack of cards, that is, an aggregate of distinct entities persisting through time without any intrinsic change” (Capek, 1961, p.127).

              But, in such a world as this, essentially a timeless world of discrete, atomic particles of matter in motion , an in fact lifeless world, growing old, having a history, evolution, the emergence of uniquely new forms, unique first-time events, genuine creatively, novelty, are all impossible. Also impossible in such a world, are any non-substantial influences on our behavior: for us to act, bodily, on the basis of merely “seeing connections” between aspects of things in our surroundings, would be for us to act, in this world, in terms of merely subjective, non-substantial, or ‘magical’ influences on our behavior – a crucial omission, as we shall see. What is required to allow for the possibility of life and living beings? What is it that makes living things special?

              While dead, mechanical systems, i.e., mechanisms and machines, are constructed piece by piece from objective parts, that is, from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the system or not, living beings have an utterly different genesis. Mechanical systems do not function as such until the last part is put in place, and they can be then be ‘switched on’. All their parts thus exist in external relations to each other, and they require ‘glue’ or ‘nuts and bolts’ (some third entities) to hold any two of them together, if their overall structure is to endure. By contrast, living beings are clearly not constructed piece by piece, and only ‘switched on’ once complete. On the contrary, they grow. And furthermore, they grow from simple, already living individuals – created in a meeting between two other, already mature individuals – into more richly structured ones by internal articulation, in such a way that their ‘parts’ at any one moment in time owe not just their character but their very existence both to one another, and to their relations with the ‘parts’ of the system at some earlier point in time. In other words, their history is just as important as their momentary spatial structure in their growth, and because of this, it is impossible to picture natural systems in spatial diagrams. As Capek (1965) remarks with respect to a temporal reality, while “any spatial symbol contemplated at a given moment is complete, i.e., all its parts are given at once, simultaneously, in contrast with the temporal reality which by its very nature is incomplete and whose ‘parts’ – if we are justified in using such a thoroughly inadequate term – are by definition successive, i.e., nonsimultaneous” (p.162). There is always ‘more to come’ of living beings, or, differently put, at any one moment they are always ‘on the way to becoming genuinely other than they are’, i.e., other in an utterly novel way, a way which takes the irreversibility of time seriously. The intrinsic simultaneity of a spatial diagram, the way in which its spatializes time, suggests that the successive moments of a movement all already co-exist as places in the ‘container’ of time – with some as yet unoccupied – and that the directionality of a momentary event – from a particular past toward a limited range of possible futures – is not a real aspect of its nature.

              But if time is a mere appearance and succession an illusion, where does the illusion of succession come from? If Wittgenstein (1953) is right, and all our reactions to what is alive are different to what is dead, if we treat certain activities (metaphorically) as having ‘directionality’, that is, as possessing an inevitable gestural expressiveness in ‘pointing’ from this past toward that kind of future’ in such a way that, spontaneously, we act in anticipation of such a set of possibilities, it is from these ineradicable reactions that the reality of succession strikes us. The sui generis nature of life seems unavoidable. Indeed, as we put it above, life seems to have its being in the special nature of the internal relations existing between the constituent ‘parts’ of a living whole, in the intertwining of both spatially and temporally related ‘parts’ – and now, perhaps, we can see why Capek (1961) notes the inadequacy of the term ‘parts’, for such a term can only be used to make a momentary perceptual (indexical) distinction within a context, and can have no fixed or substantial reference. While we might think that there is a ‘something’ there to refer to in our use of the word ‘part’, in reality the ‘parts’ of an indivisible whole all, so to speak, ‘leak’ into each other, each intrinsically ‘points to’ or ‘calls for’ its neighbor. Their relations to the other ‘parts’ around them are a part of their nature. But more than this. For it is not just a matter of the relevant relations ‘stretching over time’ as well as space – to talk in that way is again to spatialize time and to think of change as merely changes of configuration or shape in an otherwise unchanging world. It is a matter of the continual, irrevocable “emergence of novelties” in the “irreversibility of becoming” (Capek, 1961, p.347). Thus the ‘parts’ of a living whole are always ‘on the way’ to becoming other than what at-any-one-moment they are – at each moment they are just as much separated or distinguished from each other as related to each other by the qualitative differences apparent at each moment in their unfolding emergence, which, as Capek makes clear, cannot be pictured. But there is yet more. In the midst of the continual emergence of novelty, living wholes retain or sustain their identity; they unify within themselves, chiasmically, a complex multiplicity of diverse influences. Thus, there are at least these reasons why the dynamical patterns apparent in the qualitative differences we feel between successive moments, in the unfolding meetings between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us, are invisible to us: they are unique, first-time, novel events, but they also exist on the very edge of being, primarily in the realm of becoming.

              As a consequence, rather than in terms of static, merely structured wholes, we need to think in dynamic terms of structurizing wholes, growing and developing wholes which consist only of internally related ‘parts’, which owe their existence to their role in the dynamics of the whole, but which have no independent existence otherwise. Thinking only pictorially or spatially leads us to forget the enormous difference between mere static juxtapositions and the dynamic succession present in the ceaseless, intertwined unfolding of living forms.

              Alive to the difficulty of describing the nature of such an unfolding intertwined (metaphorical) ‘flow’, William James (1890) describes the realm of our conscious experience as “a sequence of differents” (p.230). And he explains what he means by this in describing our experience of a clap of thunder: “Into the awareness of the thunder itself the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (p.240). What James is emphasizing here, is the fact that our concrete conscious experience is a successively articulated whole, which, in seeming paradox, both remains a whole despite it being successively differentiated and still differentiable into parts, and remains articulated and further articulable into parts despite its dynamic wholeness. Indeed, to add seeming paradox to seeming paradox, even when a dynamic stability is achieved, if it is to not to be merely a ‘static frozen moment’ but a ‘dynamic flowing stability’ (a vortex or eddy), then the changes within it cannot be changes in configuration – for the relations between all its component regions must all remain the same, or else it is not recognizable as ‘the same’ stability from one moment to the next. “There must be an irreducible, qualitative difference between its successive phases for it to be recognizable as a stability within a flow ; each phase must be novel in some respect by contrast with the phase preceding it” (Shotter, 1984, p.197). Indeed, it is their continual novelty that relates them to one another as perceptually distinguishable aspects (but not of course as physically isolable parts) of the same flowing totality.

              It is this focus on the ceaseless ‘becoming’ of living activity, and its expressiveness arising out of its intertwining in with, or its chiasmic relations to, its surroundings – that Wittgenstein (1953) points to in his comment that “understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think” (no.527) – that will require us, as we shall see, to question many of the very basic background assumptions in terms of which we currently conduct our intellectual inquiries. As Whitehead (1975) notes, “... a pattern need not endure in undifferentiated sameness through time. The pattern may essentially be one of aesthetic contrasts requiring a lapse of time for its unfolding. A tune is an example of such a pattern. Thus the endurance of the pattern now means the reiteration of its succession of contrasts... [W]hen we translate this notion into the abstractions of physics, it at once becomes the technical notion of ‘vibration’. This vibration is not the vibratory locomotion: it is the vibration of organic deformation” (p.162).

              What we have found here, then, with our focus on the sequential unfolding of living activity, is a quite different realm of experience from that which is apparent to us, in an instant, visually. Instead of seeing only static spatial shapes and forms, substantial and objective things ‘over there’ subjectively perceived by us as ‘in here’ (in some coded or rule-regulated form), we can also be influenced, spontaneously and responsively, as well as unconsciously and involuntarily, by a temporal succession of unfolding, directionally vectored events. Indeed, just as we all can be spontaneously ‘moved’ by a piece of music being played in a concert hall to an extent in the same way, while listening to its sequential unfolding over a period of time, so we can also be ‘moved’ to an extent in the same way, in responding sequentially to any aspect of human expression, visually apprehended expression included. In this respect, with regard to our ‘looking over’ a painting, Merleau-Ponty (1964) remarks: “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (p.164). Rather than looking at it, I look beyond it, or through it, to see other things in my world in its light; it is, would could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it gives me a way of looking. In other words, what we have here is a circumstance in which – as described above in the discussion of binocular vision – is an unfolding temporal ‘movement’ in which, as we actively look outwards toward a point in the painting, we already find our living body moving on to fixate on another point, and so on. And in actively exploring it, by moving over its features and experiencing their relations to ourselves, we can come to experience it as having hidden ‘depths’, or to go further, we can begin to examine the tensions, say, between features within the work, thus to suggest that it has a ‘life of its own’. Either way, in actively exploring it as a manifestation of living expression (and not simple as a configuration of static and dead forms), we can find ourselves spontaneously ‘moved’ by it in a responsive way. But in what responsive way?

              It is here that we realize there are two ways of looking at something: while I might capture the static spatial shape of something in an instant as an ‘objective observer’, if I stop to dwell on what is before me, to respond to it in different ways, from different angles, with different interests in mind, and begin, so to speak, to enter into a relationship with it, then something quite different happens. Merleau-Ponty (1968) describes the process of ‘looking’ involved thus: “The look...envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory – I do not look at a chaos, but at things – so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command” (p.133). Rather than simply looking at a ‘thing’, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, for ‘it’ is a guiding-agent in my looking. In other words, as soon as we enter into an unfolding, living, embodied relation with an aspect of our surroundings, into what might be called a “participatory” relationship with that something (Levy-Bruhl, 1926; Bakhtin, 1993), even when that aspect is an inanimate object, a word-form printed on a page, say, then we find ourselves in a situation in which an “invisible presence” appears in the situation between us and it, and demands, grammatically, that we respond to it in a certain way (Shotter, in press). As Wittgenstein (1953) notes that in many situations “meaning is a physiognomy” (no.568). It is as if, ‘on the face of it’, our words posses the rules of grammar within themselves. Hence Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark: “The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning.... how are these feelings manifested among us? – By the way we choose and value words” (p.218). The words we use, our utterances, human expressions, ‘call out’ specific spontaneous responses from us, orienting responses that ‘set the scene’, so to speak, the unitary style for what may happen next within it. So let us now turn to what all this might tell us further about the realm of human expression, and the nature of conscious human activity.

Expression and the realm of con-scientia

Until now, in accord with the Kantian requirement, we have set ourselves in our academic investigations unresponsively and willfully over against the others and othernesses around us. We have functioned as individual subjects, with all else around set over against us as inert objects, and we have probed them only mechanically with the aim of settling amongst us speculative theoretical questions raised by other individuals like ourselves. But if we were to drop this Kantian dictate, and allow ourselves to enter into mutually responsive, dialogically-structured, living, embodied relations with them, thus to be kept, to an extent, in their “leading-strings,” then we could open ourselves up to a realm of influences which have mostly gone unnoticed in serious academic circles (although not in artistic ones) up till now. If instead of relating ourselves to them in this one-sided, mechanistic manner, we were to go out toward them, so to speak, as if ready to shake their hands, then we would find ourselves acting in ways that are responsive or answerable to them. Then, as Merleau-Ponty put it above, instead merely looking at ‘things’, at shapes, forms, or patterns, we would find ourselves coming to act, and to think, according to, or with, those others. As themselves forms of life, or as expressive of a form of life, they have a gestural or physiognomic dimension to them, which actively ‘calls’ on us to respond to them, spontaneously, in a characteristic fashion. And to that extent, they can function as just as much as ourselves as agents in giving shape to our actions. In other words, instead of there being only an “about-ness,” i.e., representational, dimension to our thought and talk, we would find a whole new “with-ness,” i.e., a relational or constitutive, dimension to our thought and talk opening up to us. In this new expressive dimension, people’s utterances would be seen as working, not to represent (picture) facts or information about already well-known objects, but to ‘set the scene’ of our meetings, so to speak, thus to orient or constitute us bodily in such a way that we are inclined, spontaneously, to respond to what happens around us in a certain style or way rather than others.

              Indeed, once inside this gestural realm of expressive human activity, we should note its extent, for, as we have already seen above, its ‘life’ extends way beyond our being merely responsive to moving forms or to forms in motion. As Bakhtin (1993) remarks, even in looking over a seemingly inert object, “no object, no relation, is given... as something totally on hand... Insofar as I am actually experiencing an object,... it is given to me within a certain event-unity, in which the moments of what-is-given and what-is-to-be-achieved, of what-is and what-ought-to-be, of being and value, are inseparable. All these abstract categories are here constituent moments of a certain, living, concrete, and palpable (intuitable) once-occurrent whole – an event” (p.32). In other words, the expressions to which we are responsive, are themselves intrinsically responsively related to those aspects of our surroundings that matter to us in some way. They are not arbitrary (as has been assumed in Structuralism). “Expression-utterance is determined by the actual conditions of the given utterance – above all, by its immediate social situation” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.85, original emphasis). Thus, in being taken as gestures, as immediately and directly pointing beyond themselves to something else in their surroundings, they can be understood as being expressive of our (supposed ‘inner’) feelings. Voloshinov (1986) discusses “the extremely subtle and complex set of possibilities for intoning an experience” of hunger: “one can apprehend one’s hunger apologetically, irritably, angrily, indignantly, etc... which way the intoning of the inner sensation of hunger will go depends upon the hungry person’s social standing as well as upon the immediate circumstances of the experience” (p.87). This is of crucial importance. For, although in the past we have taken it that our feelings are hidden away privately within us, completely enclosed within our minds as merely subjective emotions, this is not the case. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “... nothing is concealed.... nothing is hidden” (no.435).

              The fact is, “the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is expression of them, i.e., facial expression, gestures, of feeling” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.513). We do not just see facial contortions, hear the cries and disturbed breathing, “and make an inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. – Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. This is essential to what we call ‘emotion’” (Wittgenstein, 1980, II, no.570). Indeed, we can go further. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) points out, “I know unquestionably that the man over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eyes’ grasp of the scene” (p.169) . When we see others looking, we stop to gawk also – something that matters must be happening. This is the power of expressions: they do not just passively represent a circumstance beyond themselves as a dead picture needing interpretation; they have ‘life’ of their own. Not only do they actively ‘call’ on us to respond to them in a characteristic fashion, but in ‘pointing beyond themselves’, so to speak, they expectantly orient us toward, bodily prepare us for, the occurrence of something not yet visible in our surroundings. It is in this sense that we can say that they are expressive of invisible but “real presences,” agentic presences at work in an individual’s own world shaping their conduct. But whether we talk here of such presences as being indicative of events occurring in the ‘inner realm’ of their ‘mind’, or out in their ‘world of consciousness’, i.e., out in what the world is like for them , it makes metaphorical sense to talk of them as not being out in the public world for all to view. This is not because they are spatially hidden ‘inside’ a mysterious container somewhere whose walls obscure our view of its contents, but because they are simply not visible as spatially arrayed objects ‘out there’ at all – indeed, to the extent that they only have their being within our living involvements with the others and othernesses around us, they are neither ‘in here (this place)’ nor ‘out there (that place)’; they have their momentary being only within the concerted interplay sequentially unfolding in the time-space of our jointly developing involvements.

              Thus, as already mentioned above, the importance of inner-talk in people’s lives, is not that they make use of it to give us 3^rd-person, retrospective reports on events that occurred in the inner private workspace of their minds, but that they use it prospectively, as 1^st-persons, to tell us something about themselves that – at the moment of telling – helps us to relate ourselves to their unique ‘world of consciousness’ (see Ch.9 in Shotter, 1984). They use it to express their feelings. “I think your ideas for the new curriculum need modification,” says a colleague to me; or “I feel confused, are you following Wittgenstein there or not?” asks another. To both, I do not respond by asking “How do you know that that’s what you think, or, that it’s confusion you feel?” My colleagues have a perfect right to express themselves to me in this way, and I have a duty to take them seriously and respond accordingly. Because they cannot justify their expressions here, “does not mean [that they] use [these words] without right” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.289). Such expressions are a part of our intertwining our individual actions in with those of others within a coherent collective project. Thus, as Johnston (1993) points out, “the notion of the Inner... expresses our relation to each other and a particular way of understanding human action... [W]e are interested in people’s utterances not as reports on mysterious occurrences about which we are for some reason curious, but as expressions of what the individuals feel” (p.28, my emphasis). Indeed, we use such 1st-person ‘inner-talk’ in countless different ways to express and to navigate many different aspects of our living relations to the others and othernesses around us, as well as in our own ‘inner’ dialogues, in which we conduct ‘meetings’ between different expressive ‘voicings’.

              We can find here, then, in the nature of our 1^st-person, living, expressive activities, the beginnings of a whole new approach to the nature of consciousness, to the realm of con-scientia (witnessable knowing along with others). Crucial to it, is Capek’s (1961) account of our only having our being only as a participant part within an irreversibly unfolding, indivisible, dynamic time-space unity, and our need – if we are to inter-coordinate our activities in with those around us – to give precise expression to the unique feelings of the yet-to-be-achieved toward which we are oriented (see note 25). For, as we noted above, as a complex intertwining of not wholly reconcilable influences still unfinalized, such a dynamic unity is open to being further specified by the acts of those who, as participant parts, are involved in it; and this further specification, further inner articulation, is possible only if participants spontaneously understand, i.e., sense how to be answerable to, each other’s bodily expressions.

              Let us explore such spontaneous intertwinings further by considering meetings that start with a hand-shake: Two people walk up to each other, each with their hands outstretched, returning each other’s smile, ready to actively meet the other’s hand in such a way as to spontaneously coordinate their own outgoing hand movements with those coming in from the other. In the course of becoming trained into such a ritual, we gradually come to incorporate into our outgoing, responsive movements as we approach the other, the anticipated character of the other’s responsive movements to our’s, and they likewise. So that, as we both meet, we do not need to deliberately pull each other’s hand up and down, but our interaction occurs unthinkingly and spontaneously, without our at all having ‘to work out’ how to do it. As Fingarette (1967) remarks: “Normally we do not notice the subtlety and amazing complexity of this coordinated ‘ritual’ act. This subtlety becomes very evident, however, if one has had to learn the ceremony only from a book of instructions, or if one is a foreigner from a non-handshaking culture,” and he adds, “nor normally do we notice that the ‘ritual’ has ‘life’ in it, that we are ‘present’ to each other, at least to some minimal extent” (p.168).

              In dwelling further on the ritual unfolding of the mutual handshake, a number of connected issues become apparent. As we have already seen, meaningful relations exist in the unfolding structure of our activities prior to our consciousness of them . Thus a vigorously enjoined handshake, or one unresponsively endured, sets the scene for the whole style of the relationship yet to come, whether it is to be friendly, formal, reluctant, hostile, etc. But at a much more subtle level, I remember it being recorded somewhere, that Helen Keller – being deaf and blind, and not wanting to feel over people’s faces on meeting them – was able to recognize people individually from their characteristic handshakes up to two years after having first met them. But this, of course, is hardly different from hearing people recognizing the physiognomy of friend’s voices over the telephone. These examples relate to Fingarette’s remark above, that the character of an other’s form of life becomes, to an extent, ‘present’ to us in a handshake. It is constituted, or becomes present to us, in the “specific variability” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.69), in a “coherent deformation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.54), or within an “organic deformation” (Whithead, 1975, p.160), within the relevant medium of communication – be it in the rhythms of a handshake, in the intonations of a voice, or in the interplay of ‘looks’ as a we glance toward another’s face. We can feel its presence in the slight ‘differencings’ occurring between our own outgoing anticipatory movements toward the other and the responses coming back to us from them as a result.

              And of course, as we enter into living relations with the others around us of a more complexly textured, mutually responsive kind, than those occurring within the simple up-and-down movement of the handshake, we will find them showing or expressing more complex aspects of their character to us; their identity or character will become apparent to us ‘in’ the temporal organization of their movements in their chiasmic intertwining in with our’s. Indeed, it is at this point that the importance of the ‘musicality’ (Johnston, 1993) of the ‘ritual’ or ‘institutional’ nature of our expressions, of our verbal utterances, can be brought out. For, although we may respond directly to many gestural expressions in a way not mediated by any rules of interpretation, once a continuously shared, rhythmic flow of activity has been established, as in a handshake, then many aspects of an other’s character may be revealed within that flow which would not otherwise be apparent to us. Thus, within the rhythmic flow of the intertwined bodily activities occasioned by the repetitive structure in our voiced forms of speech, they are constituted for us in, as we have seen, the “specific variability” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.68) within the responsive expression of these forms. Thus, once we have learned to speak, Merleau-Ponty (1964) points out, “the words and turns of phrase needed to bring my significative intention to expression recommend themselves to me, when I am speaking,... by a certain style of speaking from which they arise and according to which they are organized without my having to represent them to myself. There is a ‘languagely’ [‘langagiège’] meaning of language which effects the mediation between my as yet unspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought. Organized signs have their immanent meaning, which does not arise from the ‘I think’ but from the ‘I am able to’” (p.88). In other words, just as in my turning a corner and beginning to walk up some stairs, I immediately adjust my gait and begin to move my body quite differently in spontaneous answer to my changed relations to my surroundings, so also with the ‘movements’ I make in the ‘inner landscape’, the ‘inscape’, of my talk or thought. The felt meanings of my movements are constituted for me, not by an “intentionality of consciousness,” but by my body’s “corporeal intentionality.”

              As Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes it: “I have a rigorous awareness of the bearing of my gestures or of the spatiality of my body which allows me to maintain relationships with the world without thematically representing to myself the objects I am going to grasp or the relationships of size between my body and the avenues offered me by the world... [M]y consciousness of my body immediately signifies a certain landscape about me,... in the same fashion... the spoken word (the one I utter or the one I hear) is pregnant with a meaning which can be read in the very texture of the linguistic gesture (to the point that a hesitation, an alteration of the voice, or the choice of a certain syntax suffices to modify it), and yet is never contained in that gesture...” (p.89).

              As Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a them in music than one might think... Why just this pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say ‘Because I know what it’s all about’. But what is it about? I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern)” (no.527).

              In other words, prior to any ‘I think’, prior to any ‘inner mental activity’, but just because ‘I am able to’ move around bodily within the world with others who are responsive to me as I am responsive to them, whose voiced expressions can move me as mine can move them, so words spontaneously suggest themselves to me as I act, just as actions suggest themselves to me as I talk. Thus, just as in my experience of others as in my experience of speech or the perceived world, “I inevitable grasp my body,” says Merleau-Ponty (1964), “as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it” (p.93).

              Above, then, we have focused on the way our own spontaneous responsiveness as living bodies ourselves, when intertwined in with embodied, living expressions of others as they successively unfold over a period of time, gives rise to a ‘shaped movement’ shared by all those involved in interaction with each other. And how, within the expectable, rhythmic, back-and-forth unfolding of a sequence of conventionalized gestural and mimetic forms, we can find ourselves directed and instructed in such a way, that we are immediately inclined to respond to what happens around us in certain ways rather than others. This suggests to us a quite different account of consciousness – of con-scientia, of witnessable knowing along with others – than that bequeathed us in our Cartesian heritage, an account within which Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of there being a ‘grammar’ at work in those of our utterances intelligible to others, is crucial. For, as we have seen, in the intricately ‘orchestrated’ interplay occurring between our own outgoing, responsive activity toward the others and othernesses around us, and the activity coming back from them toward us as a result – for even inert objects radiate energy toward us differentially according to our direction of approach toward them – special dialogically-structured or chiasmically created entities emerge which can exert an agentic influence on us. Dynamically changing forms or shapes of movement emerge in the sequence of differents or differencings, each with its own unique ‘shape’ which, although invisible, is felt by all participants involved in it in the same way, i.e., as a ‘pulsing’ or ‘beating’ of the same ‘heart’, so to speak, or of all as being animated by or being participants in the same ‘form of life’ – where all the feelings involved have their characteristic expressions. Thus it is possible for children to be “brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.6). In other words, as we shall see, if there are any rules as such involved in activities of this kind, the rules in question are an emergent outcome, not the basis, of our being able to understand each other’s expressions. Rather than a basis for our activities, such rules are each time afresh an accomplishment of them.

The ‘unconscious’ nature of rules and grammar

Thus, what is important about the rule-governed or normative nature of our use of language, is not that we can mean things with words because there are already clear, well-formulated rules in existence somewhere determining our speech – for, as we have seen above, our responsive expressions, in spontaneously calling out responses from those around us, are inherently meaningful without our needing to follow rules or laws. If the above account is correct, it is because we can sense within our dynamically unfolding relations with others, a set of shared presences, a set of shared constitutive expectancies, and it is these that allow us to sequentially coordinate our activities in with their’s. What is important about rules, or the statement of rules, is that by our explicit appeals to them we can stabilize our concerted activities and establish them as social institutions between us. For in such appeals, by drawing people’s attention to their departures from expectations, we can call transgressors to account for themselves, to repair their transgressions, to correct their mistakes, and so on. We can draw their attention to what is ‘there’ as a felt real presence for all proper participants in a social institution. Indeed, it is just because we can establish shared, rule-governed, expressive practices each time afresh in our meetings with the others around us, that we can come to communicate in unconfused and non-misleading ways with them, not only in reference to stable aspects of our shared world, but also in reference to fleeting, only-once-occurring events in our shared circumstances. For the rule-governed aspects of our linguistic activities provide a ceaselessly unfolding background flow of both shared activity, and shared constitutive anticipations and expectations, in terms of which certain specific variations (Voloshinov), spontaneously occurring, become expressive in a physiognomic or gestural manner, thus to be responsively and relationally understood in the same terms (Bakhtin).

              Intrinsic in our everyday exchanges, then, is the agentic influence of real presences, generating at each unfolding moment within participants, a felt sense of expectation as to what might happen next. Whether written on tablets of stone or not, it is not codified statements or propositional formulations of rules or laws that determine our actions. Indeed, as we shall see, codified statements or propositional formulations of rules cannot, as merely static spatially arrayed forms, be in and of themselves constitutive of meaning. For they cannot in and of themselves ‘tell’ us how they should be applied. They cannot, in and of themselves, prospectively, give us a sense and direction into the future. Strictly, they can only be regulative in an ‘after the fact’, retrospective manner, by providing corrective constraints in our attempts to maintain certain shared forms of contingent expectations in our organizing of the sequentially ordered interactional activities occurring between us: whiles answers must follow questions, hellos must come before good-byes, and when they don’t, we ask each other please to put things right. And it is Wittgenstein’s (1953) achievement to make it clear to us, that the kind of ‘rightness’ here cannot inhere in a flawless mechanical repetition of an identical spatially arrayed form; it is a matter of being able to do many different things in many different situations, all of which can be dynamically judged by or accounted by participants within a socially instituted activity (a language-game), as doing the same thing – a judgment that, in the end, one just makes spontaneously as one does, due to one’s internal relations as a living participant part in a larger living whole. Indeed, it was just this kind of ‘participatory’ thinking that characterized the mental lives of ancient and so-called ‘primitive’ peoples (Cassirer, 1956; Frankfort et al, 1949; Levy-Bruhl, 1926), right through to the Alchemists of medieval times. So why have we become so fixated on rules, on codes and codifications of supposed ‘right’ ways of acting?

              As we have already seen, it was Descartes (1968) who was one of the main architects of the modern, dead, mechanical world of inherently unrelated, separate parts, overseen by God as its external director. And it is our acceptance of Descartes’s formulation of his “new world” – in which God is supposed to have created a whole chaotic aggregate of quite separate particles of matter which he then let “act according to his established laws” (see note 10) – that misleads us into expecting orderliness in human affairs to appear only as a consequence of the external imposition (by an agency of some kind) of a set of rules or laws. The intrinsic emergence of orderliness, as the consequence of a further specification, refinement, growth, or development within an already ordered, dynamically unfolding living whole is, of course, impossible within such a mechanically structured world of only externally related entities. But Descartes did not see God as entirely absent from influencing our actions down here on earth, for it is his (sic) perfection that is the guarantee of Descartes’s claim that, as a general rule, “the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true” (p.54). But he “could not hold [such a certainty] from myself; it remained that it must have been put into me by a being whose nature was truly more perfect than mine and which even had in itself all the perfections of which I could only have any idea, that is to say, in a single word, which was God” (p.55).

              In other words, one’s spontaneous responsiveness to the directly felt presence of another agency from oneself, as providing a sense of rightness in shaping how one should act, came to be replaced in modern times by the entirely speculative, theoretical claim that God imposes laws in nature just as a king imposes laws in his [sic] kingdom – the spontaneously and dynamically emerging pluralistic organization of the ancient world gave way to the deliberately imposed order by a single external director. And along with this transition, as Toulmin (1982) points out, mind and consciousness traveled inward, and became to thought of as the single central source of influence shaping human activity in an otherwise dead and inert, mechanically structured, material world.

              But as we saw above in the discussion of Fisher’s (1998) account of Descartes’s Regulae, our spontaneous responsiveness to what “the what the feeling of ‘getting it’... is like” (p.66), is still crucial, and still at the heart of our conducting of our everyday affairs with each other. However, although we rely on these constitutive anticipations and expectations in coordinating our everyday routine relations with each other, they are to repeat Garfinkel’s (1967) phrasing here, usually “seen but unnoticed” (p.31). If they are noticed at all, they are only noticed in their absence. Thus, “for the member [of a social group] the organizational hows of these accomplishments are unproblematic, are known vaguely, and are known only in the doing which is done skillfully, reliably, uniformly, with enormous standardization and as an unaccountable matter” (p.10). In other words, they are unconscious – but not, I must hasten to add, in the Freudian sense of having once been conscious, but which have now inaccessible to the inner movie theater of the mind due to having been repressed. They are unconscious in Toulmin’s (1982) sense of not being conscientia, of not being witnessably known by us along with the others around us. But clearly, in the sense of our being manifestly attentive, and thus responsive, to such expressions, and also in the sense of being to an extent able, partially, to articulate their nature if things are not as we expect, we are not (we could say) wholly insensible to their nature. Although perhaps “imponderable,” as we have seen above, it is on the basis of our sensitivity to the “evidence” before us that we express “bewilderment, consternation,... confusion, ... anxiety, shame, guilt, and indignation” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.38), and claim to the others around us that our perplexed and unclear responses to their actions are thus justified.

              Thus our task here is plain. It is to call attention to how we do in fact routinely accomplish shared, non-misleading understandings – especially in telling each other of unique events in our own ‘inner lives’ – and to how we achieve such accomplishments “for ‘another first time’” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.9), from “‘in the midst’ of witnessed actual settings... [Whilst recognizing at the same time] that witnessed settings have an accomplished sense, an accomplished facticity, an accomplished objectivity, and accomplished familiarity, [and] an accomplished accountability” (p.10), and thus cannot in any way be taken as an already given basis for our investigations.

              It is the expressive or gestural aspects of our responsive bodily movements that make them so special and give them such a crucial role in our communicating with each other: while still to an extent vague and lacking precise articulation, the others around us (and we ourselves ) can respond to it immediately and directly without being necessary for us to first learn rules or any other previously agreed criteria as to how to act in response to it. Indeed, as parents, we rely on our children responding in this spontaneous way to our expressions in teaching them the contingently intertwined (and thus seemingly orderly) linguistically structured practices we think of, philosophically, as rule-governed practices. Relying on the directionality inherent in the temporally unfolding of living activities, we utter at certain crucial moments in the course of this teaching, along with a whole set of exaggerated facial expressions and other bodily gestures, such verbal expressions as ‘Stop!’, ‘Look’, ‘Listen’, ‘Look at that’, ‘Listen to this’, ‘Do like this’, ‘Do it like that’, and so on. The crucial nature of the moment of utterance cannot be over emphasized: in coming at a particular moment in the already ongoing flow of contingently intertwined activity occurring between them and us, in pointing in their gestural expressiveness from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’, our children’s activities allow us to intervene at that moment, and in doing so, to point them toward ‘another kind of future’, toward seeing a connection between events of a previously unnoticed kind . And it is within such a process as this that our children can “grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88).

              For Wittgenstein (1953), then, to suggest that there is a describable style, or a characteristic set of spontaneous constitutive anticipations at work in a person’s responsive expressions when meeting others from their group, and that it is this that links all their activities together and gives them their unity and identity as the activities of a social group, is what he means when he claims to be investigating the grammatical influences, the grammatical ‘rules’, at work in their meetings. But these grammatical rules do not consist in a set of already cognitively known rules in each of the individual heads of each of its members (as Saussure and Chomsky seem to suggest). But as we saw above, in Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) account of corporeal intentionality, it is a certain style of speaking that becomes incorporated (literally) into a person’s living, bodily relations to her surroundings. Thus, just as tennis players – after hours of coaching and practice – come to embody certain tendencies and inclinations to act, spontaneously and immediately, in relation not only to an other player’s particular shot and position on the court, but also to what has gone before as well as to what is to come, so speakers also spontaneously select an utterance according to their embodied feelings as to its momentary role in the concrete unfolding of their surrounding circumstances . Recall here Mead’s (1934) remark, that the mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, in people’s spontaneous living responses to each other’s expressive gestures. In other words, rather than as representations of rules governing the logical sequencing of forms, the grammars at work in our meetings have their being in a dynamic set of dialogically-structured or chiasmically created unique presences which are spontaneously created in the intertwining of our living activities, which can then act back to exert a unique agentic influence upon what we do in their presence, a felt influence to which we give expression. It is in this sense that there is a particular grammar at work in each linguistic situation we inhabit (rather than there being purely and simply a grammar of our language as a whole); and it is in this sense that such a grammar, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “tells us what kind of object anything is” (no.373, my emphasis), i.e., it influences us spontaneously and bodily just as the voice of another influences us.

              Thus, as he sees it, just as certain developmental trajectories have an expected structure to them, just as certain rhythms or rhymes carry over a mnemonic past into an anticipated future, just as all living bodily activity has an indivisible temporality to it such that, in every moment, there is a sense of ‘where next’ the activity is headed, so the grammar, the character or identity of the joint action occurring in our meetings, ‘sets the scene’ for all that can occur within them. Hence Wittgenstein’s (1978) claim that “grammar is not accountable to any reality. It is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (no.133, p.184); “grammar... only describes and in no way explains the use of signs,” he suggests (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.496). Hence, it is not at all a wondrous miracle that there happens to be a harmony between thought and reality, as Einstein once suggested , but, “like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of a language” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.55). For, in an intricate way, the reasons for the grammars and sub-grammars in a peoples’s forms of life, are to be found not only in the history and culture of their language-game entwined forms of life, but also in the selective attention they pay within them to certain “extremely general facts of nature,” notes Wittgenstein (1953, (p.56) . We are spontaneously responsive to, and thus in our utterances expressive of, all those features in our surroundings to which we are in some way sensitive. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: “If things were quite different from what they actually are – if there were for instance no characteristic expressions of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception and exception rule; or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency – this would make our normal language-games lose their point” (no.142).

              It is this, then, that is so difficult for us to grasp: rather than our everyday, unscientific reality being, as Descartes put it, “a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine,” without God’s “established laws” to keep it orderly, the fact seems to be that even without an executive director, it is already pretty orderly. Indeed, we might go so far as to note that even some very lowly organisms – ants, bees, termites, etc. – pull off some amazing feats of social collaboration quite without any signs of conscientia, i.e., of a witnessable knowing together of the nature of their own activities. And as Vico (1968) remarks (not without irony one feels): “First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next the little house and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this is the order of all progress from the first origins” (para. 22). In other words, it was the gradual dynamic emergence of more and more organized human societies within a more and more well articulated common and collective sense of the people that made the refined expression of ideas by intellectuals possible, not the other way around. Indeed, as he sees it, “the conceit of the scholars, who will have it that what they know must have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting [the principles of our new science of history] from the philosophers. So, for the purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world” (para.330). We must, Vico suggests, start with the mute, corporeal poets who, with their vast “corporeal imagination” (para. 376), created in their bodily ways of responding to thunder as the ‘words’ of a great being in the sky, “the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove...” (para. 379). So, if we are (as Merleau-Ponty suggests) “to recommence everything... and to install [ourselves] in... experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over’,” then, I suggest, we must be prepared to re-think the whole nature of both what we call our ‘inner lives’, and the already ordered nature of our social lives together, in corporeal terms. This is the task of the next section.

1^st-person expressions in the conduct of our public lives

As we have seen above, our dialogically-structured meetings with each other begin with certain responsive bodily reactions or characteristic expressions. As we continue such meetings further and go on from within them to establish with those we meet, a shared situation, we come to sense within them the emergent presence of an overarching third agency, an agency that issues ‘felt callings’ to all involved to observe a certain shared style in their actions, to act in accord with a shared set of constitutive expectations and anticipations. Due to the retentions from the past and the protensions stretching into the future in all our responsive living bodily activities, even at a very elementary level – as Mead (1934) intimates in his suggestion that we can see in a dog fight “a conversation of gestures” (p.63), where the meaning of one’s dog posture is in the other dog’s tendency to respond to it – we can find ourselves establishing spontaneously in our meetings a shared style of acting. But within our meeting, we can do more than simply responding to each other, we can also be expressively responsive to other events in our surroundings, and give the others around us the opportunity to be responsive to our own idiosyncratic reactions. Being able in this way to establish between us common ways of acting, certain practices of a gestural and mimetic kind, which in always pointing beyond themselves to other possibly sharable aspects of our joint surroundings, allows us not only to spontaneously anticipate each other’s next possible actions, but to go on to establish between us (as an accomplishment) a common world ‘out there’.

              Thus with regard to our ‘outer lives’, with regard to things and events visibly existing out there in the world around us for all to witness, we can draw on such a set of established gestural and mimetic practices to direct each other’s attention to them, to type or classify them, interconnect them, and so on. Indeed, such practices can evidently be developed which will allow us to make 3^rd-person, external observer claims of such a kind about states of affairs in the world around us (usually referring to visual configurations), that others around us can then check out for their truth and accuracy. Given all that we have already responsively come to share with them, as we have seen above, to the extent that we can stabilize and institutionalize a speech genre (Bakhtin, 1986) or a language-game (Wittgenstein, 1953) amongst us, then we can all come to act in accord with each other’s constitutive background expectations and anticipations. New arrivals into the group, to participate ultimately as full members, would need to be trained into such a set of expectations. It is such a training as this, in an array of embodied, spontaneously responsive, understandings, that holds all the actions of a group or community as belonging together, as being in some way all actions of the same kind.

              But to repeat the point made above, we cannot conduct this kind of teaching by stating rules and principles to each other, “if a person has not yet got the concepts, [we] teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. – ... I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on,” says Wittgenstein (1953, no.208). “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.139) – for it is in ‘calling out’ particular spontaneous bodily responses from us to, that they can exert a constitutive influence on us, and ‘tell’ us of the kind of anticipations regulated by the rules. Thus, in teaching someone (a child or an adult) a number series, we say such things as “Here, ‘this’ is the ‘right continuation’, and here ‘this’, and so-on and such-and-such. But “what ‘such-and-such’ is I can only show in examples. That is, I teach him to continue a series..., without using any expression of the ‘law of the series’; rather, I am forming a substratum [i.e., background] for the meaning of algebraic rules or what is like them. [And within this substratum or background] he must go on like this without a reason. Not, however, because he cannot yet grasp the reason but because – in this system – there is no reason. (‘The chain of reasons comes to an end’) And the like this (in ‘go on like this’) is signified by a number, a value. For at this level the expression of the rule is explained by the value, not the value by the rule. For just where one says ‘But don’t you see...? the rule is no use, it is what is explained, not what does the explaining” (Wittgenstein, 1981, nos.300, 301, 302).

              But let us now note, that without the unique individualized understandings occurring at crucial moments in our particular exchanges with our children (and others), our attempts to train them to be active participants in the shared forms of responsive expression prevalent in our culture, would be impossible. Indeed, at many junctures in our relations with others, certain 1^st-person expressions expressive of our ‘inner lives’ are clearly required if we are to sustain our 3^rd-person talk about events out in the world between us. For example: A theater director says to an actor: “Say it like this (intones an utterance), not like that (intones the utterance again, differently). I want you to offer your uncertainty to her as a gift, not as an accusation.” In saying this, the director refers to that precise moment in time when a male actor was uttering a particular word to his female co-actor. “It makes a difference whether you refer to this or to that moment... The language-game ‘I mean (or meant) this’ (subsequent explanation of a word) is quite different from this one: ‘I thought of ... as I said it’,” notes Wittgenstein (1953, p.217).

              The precise character of the expression, in other words, is constitutive of the precise character of the speaker’s experience, not the other way around. So although it might seem that rules, laws, and principles are at the basis of our learning to express ourselves, and that when we do we are always talking about an already existing state of mind hidden within our heads somewhere, this is not always so. On very many important occasions we spontaneously give expression to a felt sense, a shaped and vectored sense, of our own momentary ‘position’ in a ‘movement’ in which we are involved with the others around us. And here, in expressing ourselves in this way, says Wittgenstein (1980, I), “our language is an extension of [a] more primitive [natural kind of] behavior” – as in the “many natural kinds of behavior towards others human beings” (no.151), such as when we turn immediately toward others when they grimace, writhe, or shout out in pain.

              Our 1^st-person expressions are crucial, then, not only in initially establishing but also in sustaining our shared forms of life. Indeed, they are not only crucial in our teaching of our infants to be participants in the language intertwined practices of our social group, but in fact in almost all our ordinary everyday interactions. People want to know what we are doing in what we are saying. Just the simple matter of trying to tell another person something, as we all know, can often result in one’s intentions, beliefs, thoughts, etc., being questioned, before the other can orient toward the information on offer: A: “There’s a good movie on tonight.” B: “Why are you telling me this?” A: “I thought we might go together.” Was A offering merely information, or an invitation? And in the example below, is B trying to show how much more clever they are than A, or is B genuinely being sympathetic and trying to help? A: “I don’t know how to reply to his letter.” B: “Look there are a whole lot of things you could say.” A: “Are you implying I’m incompetent? When I say I don’t know how to reply, it’s because I can see too many ways, not none at all.” B: “Im sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you. I really do understand the dilemma you face. I faced it myself last year. Can I tell you what I did then? It seemed work” A: “OK then.”

              As Schegloff (1995) remarks about people coping with circumstances such as these: “Especially (but not exclusively) in conversation, talk is constructed and attended by its recipients for the action or actions it may be doing. Even if we consider only declarative-type utterances, because there is no limit to the utterables that can be informative and/or true, the informativeness or truth of an utterance is, by itself, no warrant or grounds for having uttered it or for having uttered it at a particular juncture in an occasion. There is virtually always an issue (for participants and, accordingly, for professional analysts) of what is getting done by its production in some particular here-and-now ” (p.187). In other words, the problem of what is meant by what is said cannot any longer be pursued as a matter of words being said to have unequivocal ‘literal’ meanings in themselves – to repeat, the meaning of our words is to be found in their use in a particular context of use .

              What people are doing in what they are saying, is particularly crucial in circumstances in which individuals are trying to discuss, not so much actual new discoveries, but the making of new discoveries. For they cannot at first refer to those aspects of their putative discovery which are obviously ‘out there’ witnessable by all, for such features, clearly, are not yet ‘out there’ to be witnessed as such. They can only begin to introduce their discoveries by expressing their own ‘inner feelings’, i.e., their own responsive relations to what might be ‘out there’, their ‘approach’, the relations it is necessary to adopt to one’s surroundings for the features in question to become visible. Our 1^st-person ‘inner-talk’, then, is important to us in establishing our 3^rd-person ‘outer-talk’ – that talk to do with phenomena, and with criteria justifying the use of such talk, that are visible to all – whenever it is necessary for us to negotiate or to develop a meaning with the others around us.

              As Ochs, Jacoby, and Gonzales (1994) illustrate in their studies of young physicists, being instructed by their principal investigator (PI) in giving conference presentations of their still-in-progress research, the special nature of the “scientific dramas” (p.152) presented by all involved, work to “pull the interlocutors into the world of physical entities” (p.164). To give just one small example, along with a whole set of other expressive activities, including especially gestures toward blackboard diagrams, bodily postures and facial expressions, the PI tells a student that: “Y- you’re saying he::re that [pointing to a point ‘b’ on a diagram] this point (0.5 sec pause) corresponds to the absence [Student turns to board] of a domain structure. If I go below in temperature [PI’s finger now on ‘g’ in the diagram, while looking at the student], (0.2 sec pause, while student vertical head-shakes in agreement) the domain structure is gone” (p.165, my simplification of the original transcript). As Ochs et al (1994) remark, such talk as this amongst research physicists is utterly commonplace and unproblematic. Clearly, to the extent that such talk is not interpreted literally, it is made sense of figuratively: “Like an actor who has assumed a [fictitious, narrative] character, the physicist laminates the identity of the physical construct onto his or her own identity. The result is that the physicist-as-constructed-subject and the physical-entity-as-constructed-object become intertwined; the boundaries that might otherwise distinguish them become indistinct. The ‘I’ or the ‘you’ is both subject and object, animate and inanimate, with the identity of the physicist in the here-and-now world of ongoing interaction being backgrounded, and the anthropomorphized identity of physical encounters being foregrounded” (pp.166-167).

              Clearly, then, our 1^st-person ‘inner-talk’ of importance to us in not just those spheres of our lives in which we want to tell other personal things about ourselves, but in all those spheres of our lives involving publicly observable objects too. Without our being able to express our feelings, without being able to express the ‘point’ of our actions – their ‘movement’ from this past toward that kind of future – many aspects of our everyday personal relationships would become impossible for us also.

              While I might say to someone “I love you” as a 3^rd-person retrospective report on my inner sensings of certain bodily occurrences happening within in me in the past and in the present (my pounding heart beats, my light-headedness, my overflowing hormones, etc. – in which case I should more properly say: “The evidence seems to point to the fact that I must be in a state of love with you”) – such a 3^rd-person report would not work to develop my personal relations with my addressee. Instead, it would invite the reply: “So? What does all that have to do with me? How should I interpret such a report as that?” Only as a 1^st-person expression oriented toward occasioning an immediate spontaneous responsive understanding within them would it matter to them; only then it would be an indicator of my future commitments toward them (Shotter, 1993, pp.2-3).

              In other words, only expressions uttered in a spontaneous manner, in the expectation of an actively shared, spontaneously responsive understanding by one’s addressee, can be expressions of our ‘inner feelings’, expressions of what we are conscious of. For, as we have seen, what is ‘in’ our consciousness is not so much inside us, as ‘in’ the temporal unfolding of our intertwined relations to the others and othernesses around us in our surroundings. In other words, the aspects of things and events ‘within’ the realm of con-scientia, ‘within’ the complex, chiasmically structured realm of withnessable knowing along with others, are those aspects to which we spontaneously respond in the course of the sequential unfolding of those of our involvements we share with those others; it is are spontaneous responses to these aspects that the others around us takes as expressive of our inner feelings. And they need these expressions if they are to understand what we are doing in what we are saying.

1^st-person expressions and our ‘inner lives’

But sometimes, we do want to express ourselves to others ‘out of the blue’, so to speak, we want to tell them of our own personal thoughts and feelings, we want them to orient toward something unique and special to us, not clearly visible to all in the public sphere. And we want to do this, not as providing orientational clarification in the course of an already ongoing exchange, but by way of initiating something uniquely new. I want to try to convey to my doctor, for example, the precise nature of the pain I’m feeling so she can better diagnose my ailment.

              As we noted above, there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in a flow of living activity. People’s expressive responsive relations to each other are such that each moment in any such flow ‘carries’ with it a quite specific set of constitutive retentions and protensions, a set of constitutive anticipations and expectations appropriate to a specific developmental history, or an orientation with “an aetiology and a prognosis” (Hanson, 1958, p.21) to it. Thus, once we have learned the basic vocabularies of our basic social institutions, once we have reached a high level of skill in the use of words, then our words become are such that on their utterance – even though we can still maintain that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language ” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.43) – we can have the feeling, to repeat Wittgenstein’s (1953) already quoted remark above, “that [the word] has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning” (p.218). When this occurs, as we noted earlier, then we are inclined to expect, by the way we choose and value words in our expressions of them, that our utterances will spontaneously incline those around us to respond to us in a quite specific manner; we will expect our expressions to ‘call out’ quite specific responses from those about us, thus to orient them, to set both ‘the scene’ and ‘the style’, so to speak, for what may happen next within it.

              So, although we can all in learning the basic vocabulary of our common language be oriented through the appropriate use of 1^st-person expressions to take notice, as 3^rd-persons, of objective criteria ‘out there’ visible to everyone, it is not difficult for us then to adapt these terms to our own idiosyncratic uses. For example, as Johnston (1993), an individual may take a word such as “‘throbbing’ which was originally used in connection with something that can be seen to be pulsating and uses it when no pulsating motion is visible” (p.25). But when they do, of course, the relationship between their utterance and the responsive understandings expected in their listeners, is quite different from what is expected in the case of giving outer, 3^rd-person descriptions. “In this case the relationship is criterial: the individual’s pain is characterized as being of a particular type because of the words she uses, and the words she uses are the ‘right’ ones because she endorses them as such” (p.25). She has a 1^st-person right to give expression to her pain, and if it seems to her that that the unfolding ‘shape’ of her feelings are best captured, metaphorically, by the word ‘throbbing’, then we others around her who already know what throbbing is like must take her seriously, and to treat her as in fact experiencing in her ‘inner life’ the rhythmic pulsing of her pain. And if I were to do the same, what I would be doing, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes, “is not, of course to identify my sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end of the language-game: it is the beginning” (no.290). But if I were to get it wrong, if I say my pain is a throbbing one, and I miss out the crucial diagnostic clue that it only throbs when pressure is applied, not otherwise, then the responsibility still mine. Like the orientational clarifications discussed above, my right to express myself is a part of what is involved in people giving each other practical guidance in particular participatory relationships.

              In other words, in my 1^st-person expressions, I am not here in fact giving anything like a 3^rd-person description of, or a report on, my inner states of mind, which could (if the need arose) be checked for its accuracy, but doing something like expressing a 1^st-person appeal to those around me for help or for sympathy or suchlike. And we choose the words we do in which to express such relational initiatives, because in the circumstances of their use, in their gestural expressiveness, they ‘point’ for us ‘from this past toward that kind of future’. Thus, as Johnston (1993) remarks, in this context, the context of our ‘inner-talk’, the “use of a word does not involve learning rules; rather it builds on a natural reaction,” and, on the basis of the embodied responses to the events occurring around us into which we have been trained, we “go on spontaneously to develop new possibilities of self-expression” (p.25).

              Wittgenstein (1980, I) explores just such a situation in discussing an occasion in which I tell the others around me, that ‘today, I have the feeling that everything is unreal!’ “But why do I choose the word ‘unreality’ to express it?,” he asks, “... I choose it because of its meaning. But I surely did not learn to use the word to mean: a feeling. No; but I learned to use it with a particular meaning and now I use it spontaneously like this...” (no.125). But in saying this, I do not use it as a simile for my feeling; my feeling remains indeterminate until expressed in this way; indeed, I might attempt to articulate it further by saying ‘it feels not just intriguingly unreal, but really unreal; I’m truly disoriented’. But to repeat, it is my right to do this, to take what is – if it ever were possible to scan a person’s brain states, would be found in reality to be – a vague and incomplete state of affairs, and to give it a form for which I am prepared to take responsibility (Shotter, 1984). And until I finally succeed in specifying it clearly to those around me, it remains vague and ambiguous both to them, and to me.

              Thus as we learn more and more how to talk of events occurring out in the world around us in terms intelligible to all the others around us, so we can come to give spontaneous expression to our own individual ‘feelings’ in similar such terms – for, to repeat Wittgenstein’s (1981) remark quoted above, “the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is an expression of them” (no.513), just as there are “characteristic expression[s] of pain, of fear, of joy” (no.142). In other words, the world of consciousness, of con-scientia, the world in which we know that there are certain things that we know, the realm of withnessable knowing along with others, is primarily not a world of shared visual forms, but a world of shared feelings, a world in which all involved share in the temporal unfolding of a succession of directionally vectored events. Thus, finding ourselves in a particular circumstance, thinking a certain thought, imagining a particular visual scene, responding to a philosophical claim by a colleague, to greeting by a friend, etc., or whatever, we find that such an event spontaneously ‘calls out’ from us a particular linguistic response, and we spontaneously express our response in such expressions as: ‘Amazing’; ‘Unreal’, ‘Hectic’, ‘Cool’, ‘It’s like Socrates in the Meno all over again’, ‘Your account is simply not right, it completely misses the connections I outlined a moment ago’, and so on.

              But if I were to utter such expressions, I would not be describing an already existing inner state of my mind – so that someone could say to me, “what evidence have you got to show us that you are telling us the truth here?” I am telling someone of the possible future directions my actions in the situation might take, something that I have a perfect right to do (as long as, at the same time, I am committing myself to them also). Because I cannot justify my expressions here, “does not mean [that I] use [these words] without right” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.289). The fact is, that my unique circumstances ‘call for’, ‘invite’, ‘allow’, or ‘afford’ me a certain ‘gestural expression’ toward them, and we spontaneously express what our feelings incline us to express. Thus here, both for ourselves and others, “expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.85).

              In other words, because of the intrinsic intertwining of feeling and expression – i.e., because of both the characteristic expression of certain feelings and the characteristic feeling of certain expressions – and, because of the spontaneous responsiveness of the others around us to our expressions, there is a good chance that those around us will feel as we feel, be inclined as we are inclined; and it is from such reactions that new language games can begin.

              But such feelings of inclination, such felt understandings emerging in the shared, contingent unfolding interplay of responsive expressions occurring between us and the others and othernesses in our surroundings, although “real presences” to participants, are quite invisible to outsiders – and thus unavoidably vulnerable to those who want see “the facts.” Such inclinations toward the future, from the past, existing only in time, can never be rendered objectively visible. Hence, outsiders can easily deny the force of such background social or intersubjective influences, the presence of the “real presences” bodily felt by participants in the unfolding interplay of expressive responsive activities between them; such presences lack evidential proof (they say).

              But what have those ‘outsiders’ in fact to say to us? How should we respond to their words? Is there a shareable sense, a common way of sensing, how we others should actually take their claims? When a theorist says to us: “Consciousness is the private arena within which we live our lives” (Baars, 2000, p.40), some of us at least don’t know straight away how to respond to such a claim. We find is puzzling, disorienting, we want immediately to reply: “But I thought I lived out in the world with others.” Baars then would, I imagine, go on to clarify his claim in certain specific ways, suggestions that, in fact, all that is available to us in our ‘minds’, are representations and our interpretations of them. But like an Escher drawing, like a Derridian deferred structure, that can never quite be grasped as a stable whole, we can never quite grasp what it is precisely that those who make such claims as Baars want to say to us. For at some point they seem to want to deny, and to want us precisely to understand that they deny, the force of the very background social or intersubjective influences making their denials intelligible as such to us. If we do have some partially clear sense of what it is they are trying to say to us, (as far as they are concerned) that can only be due to some mysterious inner operations of the mind that – one-day in the future – their discoveries will explain to us. Intellectual vertigo ensues. For if there is no way in which we can all share in a set of direct and spontaneous ways of relating ourselves both to each other and our surroundings, but we are all of necessity entrapped in an unending play of inner representations and their interpretations, with no (in principle?) possibility of achieving stability between us – albeit, of a dynamic kind – then their claims seem futile. If all our talk is representational, and all representations are open to interpretation, how could our talk ever work to establish stable forms of life amongst us? The trouble is, that whilst those of us who disagree with Baars might not be able to definitively argue against his claims, we just do not know what practically follows from them being true – how might it matter in our lives?

              This, however, I would claim is not the case with the Wittgensteinain accounts offered here. Although, on the one hand, it is still perfectly reasonable for us to talk of the world of consciousness as not being publicly visible and seemingly different for each of us, on the other, we have taken Wittgenstein’s (1953) claim – that when we represent a state of affairs by the use of a sentence, that although we do not, seemingly, know how we do it, the fact is that “nothing is concealed.... nothing is hidden” (no.435) – seriously. And his work, I think, can matter, if not in our scientific lives then in our everyday lives, by making a difference in how we respond to and attend to events in our surroundings.

              Take our responsiveness to other people: although our responsive understanding of a person’s feelings is based on evidence out in the world between them and us, it is not in fact scientific evidence, evidence of a publicly observable kind that can be seen by all involved in a photographic instant by both participants and disinterested, external observers alike. It is in fact “imponderable evidence” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.228), in that it “includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone” (p.228). But although it is not evidence of a scientific kind, that is not to say that it is thus impossible to develop ‘expert judgment’ as to the genuineness of expressions of feeling. Indeed, suggests Wittgenstein (1953), to the question: “Can one learn this knowledge?,” we can reply: “Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’... What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments” (p.227). That is, one cannot set out an objective check-list procedure that can be mechanically implemented, but one can get to know a friend’s character, the voice, their mannerisms, their style, the physiognomy of their being in the world, so we can go further, and gain a sense of right and wrong action, and so on.

              So, although the events of importance to us cannot all be seen ‘out there’ in an instant – thus to prove or falsify a hypothesis – as our living relationships with those around us unfold and are realized over time, and as a person reveals more and more of their ‘inner lives’ to us in their responsive expressions, we can check out our first judgments against later ones, and gradually come, so to speak, to know in fact what it is like to be them (Nagel, 1974) .The alien otherness of the other can become familiar to us as itself.

              In our daily affairs, unlike in one-shot, mechanistically-structured, scientific experiments – which do not allow for the retentions and protensions in living events to stretch over into adjacent events – we can allow events to develop further and come to a further understanding of them from within our continuous contact with that development. And it is from within such involvements as these that we find our use of the term ‘inner’ perfectly intelligible, because it is expressive of a realm of events and relations between events very different from the realm of facts and objects, the realm of the actual that we refer to in our ‘outer-talk’. We use it because, amongst other reasons, it is to an extent expressive for us of what is not yet actual, it expresses the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminacy, the incomplete and unfinished character that is a crucial to all living activity; the fact that, inevitably, there will be yet more activity to follow – as if issuing already fully formed from a hidden source – activity with a certain style to it, yet never wholly predictable.

              Above, we have mentioned the value of works of art to us a number of times: that although unique, in fact precisely because of its uniqueness, a work of art can ‘instruct’ us in a way or style of relating ourselves to our surroundings. And I would like to end this section with some comments by other writers: Wittgenstein (198) notes with respect to a work of art: “And you could say too that in so far as people understand it [a work of art], they resonate in harmony with it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself. Just as, when I pay someone a visit, I don’t just want to make him have feelings of such and such a sort; what I mainly want is to visit him....” (p.58). And Steiner (1989) suggests, “the streets of our cities are different after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh (p.164)... It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueducts wear walking-shoes after Paul Klee” (p.188). Or, as Paul Klee himself remarked: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me... I was there listening...” (Quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.167).

              But to talk here of our having gained access to something ‘inner’ is intelligible both as an act of ‘enter into’ a new world as if through a gate, or door, or through some other ‘means of access’, and further, once ‘inside’, it is not a matter of us interpreting what we see in a particular way, but of our really seeing “that aqueducts wear-walking shoes,” and ducking down to avoid them as we anticipate them rushing past us. Although perhaps rare, such once-off unique events can – as in a trauma and in psychotherapy, as in meeting a single special person, as in reading a certain article , and so on – nonetheless be ‘turning points’ in our lives, affecting the whole style of what is then next to ensue. But the new ‘inner space’ we will have moved into, is not at all full of things hidden inside a mysterious, private, inner sensorium, a separate Platonic world whose contents only we ourselves can view with some mysterious inner eye, but which only be known by other indirectly, through inference from what is available to them in their outer, objective observations of us and our behavior. I am myself, and what it is like to be can be grasped by others in just the same way that they can get a grasp of what it is like to be Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, not by looking and talking at me, but by looking and talking with me. The terms ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are, thus, not at all being used here to make any spatial or geographical distinctions, but expressive, physiognomic ones – ‘inner’ things can matter to us, physiognomically ‘move’ us, in our lives in a way that ‘outer’ things cannot.

Conclusions: 1^st-person ‘inner-talk’, conscientia, and the world of consciousness

We began our explorations here by noting the centrality in our lives together of our spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive, responsiveness. We also drew on Toulmin’s (1982) etymological account of the term “consciousness,” and its conceptual genealogy in encompassing a sequence of refinements or elaborations beginning with our basic reactivity, running through attentiveness and articulateness, to our final achievement of conscientia, witnessable knowing along with others – what we might call our consciousness of being conscious (Jaynes, 1976). As he made clear, almost all of us now – as good Cartesians – seem to feel certain that this ‘inner arena’ must contain the basic elements of everything that is influential in our giving shape to our lives. But as we have seen above, our achievement of consciousness, of conscientia, i.e., of witnessable knowing along with others, is just that, a continuing achievement. And furthermore, prior to its achievement, we rely on much more primitive set of capacities to influence each other’s behavior and to achieve a degree of intelligible communication with each other (capacities clearly shared by many lower animals). Indeed, as we have seen, simply being able to respond to each other in an unconfused or non-bewildered way is a necessary prelude to the achievement of a finally shared understanding. The classical idea, that we can communicate because an already shared set of rules or conventions, or an already shared framework of knowledge or of beliefs, seems simply to be untenable. As we have seen above, at many junctures in our relations with others, if we are to sustain our 3^rd-person, objective talk about events out in the world between us, our use of 1^st-person expressions to display crucial aspects of our own unique ‘inner lives’ is very necessary. Talk about what is ‘out there’ is not that easy.

              Rather than us all living in an already stable world of fully formed objects, we must assume that we all live out our lives within a chiasmically-ordered, i.e, pluralistically intertwined, world that is only partially shared, and known only fragmentarily, by all those participating in it. Indeed, rather than our talk being about such a world around us, the view that we have arrived here, is that any real state of affairs is to an extent enigmatic, and remains so until its ‘reality’ is achieved in our conversational relations with each other. As Sampson (1993) so nicely puts it: “Our conversations both express and presuppose a reality which, in expressing and presupposing, we help to create” (p.108) – for, in being responsive to our present circumstances the protensions in each of our expressions reach out, providentially, toward yet further possibilities for still not yet finished the future. Hence the inherent vagueness and incompleteness in all our talk, and hence also, the necessity for our being able to negotiate (in the sense of navigate) its meaning in the ongoing course of its use.

              If we are to understand our abilities to communicate with each other, even about ‘facts’, never mind our own unique personal lives, we need a much more dynamic, creative account of how it is that we can establish stable forms of understanding between us than we possess at the moment.

              That has been my aim in the responsive expressive approach I have set out here. In this approach, what we talk of as people’s ‘inner’ lives is neither so private or so inner, nor so logical or so systematic and scientifically structured, as has been assumed past. Indeed, rather than functioning mechanically and systematically hidden away inside our individual heads somewhere as a peculiar, mechanism of the mind, our ‘inner lives’ manifest in their functioning all the same expressive, gestural, and responsive characteristics influencing our transactions out in the world between us and the others and othernesses around us. Central to this focus on living bodily expressive responsiveness, is the claim that the meaning of whatever we are saying or doing is the tendency it arouses in others (or ourselves) to respond to it, because there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in any flow of living activity. Every moment has an anticipatory ‘carry over’ within it from the past into the future. To this extent, in responding to people’s expressions, we treat them as having an inevitable gestural expressiveness, as ‘pointing’ from this past toward that kind of future’, and we act toward them, spontaneously, in anticipation of such a set of possibilities. Thus, what seems to me so crucial in all of this is that this structure of responsiveness is always already ‘there’ in the ongoing ‘livingness’, so to speak, at work in all our meeting, in all our activities together.

              But once we move into a mechanically-structured world of only externally related parts, our role as participant parts within an internally related, dynamically unfolding and still developing indivisible unified but chiasmically-structured whole, is rendered rationally invisible. This is the tragic mistake of Cartesianism, and the source of many of the paradoxes of the modern age: like the gap between mind and body, the gap between an aggregate of separate atomic individuals and their inter-connection with each other into a unified community, seems unbridgeable – unless, we can assume that in some way, in some primitive form, that connectivity already exists. And that is precisely what we have assumed here.

              As a consequence, we can come to see a whole swath of issues in a new light: In our studies of language, once we move away from the idea of words as objects, as a realm of inert word shaped forms, having meaning only in terms of them being configured to stand in a picturing, paralleling, or representing relation to another similar such realm of component material objects, to that of words as utterances, as spontaneous bodily expressions of people’s feelings, then we can begin to see our inner, mental activity in a new, dialogical or conversational light. Instead of an iterated mechanical process, working only by matching forms in terms of the one operation of ‘same’ or ‘not same’, we can begin to understand our conduct of own ‘inner lives’ in very similar terms to our understanding of our dialogically-structured or chiasmically-structured relations to the others and othernesses about us out in the world. As we have already seen, the relations between two or more voices in a dialogue, cannot be grasped in mechanical, causal, formal, logical, or any other systematic terms, the dynamic creation of novelty is inevitably present, just as is the sustaining also of a dynamic stability.

              Thus our inner lives have a hidden character, not because of being a ‘something’ that, while common to all of us, just happens to be hidden away from view enclosed within us, but because neither we nor they can look into our inner lives ahead of time – not only are our ‘inner’ lives are uniquely and individually ours, they are also our responsibility to realize and to express. Indeed, it is central to the ethical nature of our social lives together that we all, each and individually, have the right to express our feelings and to expect the others around us to respond to our expressions, and to take them seriously, if, that is, we take on the responsibility of expressing ourselves in ways spontaneously responsive to the ways the others around us express themselves too.

              Perhaps one the most important consequences of the whole approach outlined above, is the light it throws on why artistic creativity and the art objects resulting from it, play such an important role in our lives. Or, to put the issue in some other ways: We have seen above how it is possible to come to know a unique, alien other or otherness as unique, as who or what they are in themselves, to ‘enter into’ their world, to acknowledge and respect the otherness of their otherness. We have also seen how it is possible for a person, a work of art, a bat (Nagel, 1974), or whatever, to express their own unique individuality to us, and for us within a language made up, seemingly, of only a limited number of repeatable forms, to express the nature of that individuality – its otherness. Indeed, we can go further, to suggest that if we can, in our creative stumbling around, so to speak, make attempt after attempt to express our sense of the ‘presence’ of a ‘something there’ awaiting expression, then in each responded to attempt dwells the providential possibility for a next ‘failed’ attempt . Yet, in our Cartesian failure to express the final whole truth of the affair, we nonetheless still can teach each other new ways of looking at, or listening to, the world around us, new ways or styles of looking or listening, new sensibilities.

              Indeed, an example here is the possibility of understanding change in a new way: We are very used to talking of change as something that can be explained in terms of principles, rules, or conventions, of changes taking place within a reality already well-known to us, with what we might call ordinary changes. Now, perhaps, although rare, we can also talk about the importance of surprising changes, changes that happen unexpectedly, changes that strike us with amazement or wonder, extraordinary changes, changes in the very character of what we take our reality to be. For, as we have seen, instead of changes of a quantitative and repeatable kind, our focus has been on first-time, unique, irreversible changes, novelties, changes of a qualitative kind.

              But by far the most important consequence of this paper – perhaps it is better to say, the most important event within it – is the focus on a topic that strangely seems to me to be an utterly new topic (in that it has not yet aroused in us as academics and intellectual any distinctive acknowledgment of its very special nature). This new topic is simply “life” or “livingness,” the properties, characteristics, or aspects of living bodies, of organic forms as enduring, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, structurizing structures. Arising out of this, is the acknowledgment of the importance of events occurring in meetings of one kind or another. Something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin to respond to each other (more happens than them merely having an impact on one another). For in such meetings, there is the creation of qualitatively new, quite novel and distinct forms of life, which are more than merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing. The “dialogically-structured,” or “chiasmically-structured” forms of activity that can emerge in such meetings, can give rise to qualitatively new forms of order, forms of order which cannot be grasped in terms of those already well-known to us (mathematical, logical, rational, etc.) – quite new ground needs to be charted here.

              But what seems to be crucial here, is that in fact we can we learn something quite general, something that we can carry across to other circumstances, from something rare, unrepeatable, unique, fleeting, and utterly particular. This is the value of unique works of art for us. This why Wittgenstein’s “reminders” are so useful. Something very special emerges over time in the spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive and responsive relations occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses in our surroundings: invisible, but very real “presences” can emerge in these dynamically unfolding relations which can teach us new “ways of going on” with each other.

              Let me begin to draw this article to a close, then, with a quotation from Merleau-Ponty (1962), which seems to me to express the character of this gestural, constitutive aspect of our bodily expressiveness so very well: “There is, then,” he says, “a taking up of others’ thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must be finally be induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And as, in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in the context of action, and by taking part in a communal life... [While] I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language conveys its own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind. A school of music or painting which is at first not understood, eventually, by its own action, creates its own public... 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). But all this – our changed sensibilities, the gradual creation of a new public, the slow changes of our cultural forms – all occur unconsciously, without conscientia. For such a form of witnessable knowing along with others, knowing what it is that we know, is only possible once a certain way or style of acting has been established or instituted in which an appropriate language game can have its home.

              The world of consciousness, then, the world of con-scientia, of witnessable knowing along with others, which until now we have to be the central ‘inner arena’ in which we must be able to find all the basic elements of importance giving shape to our lives, seems to have been displaced. Instead of asking what goes on inside our heads, we must now ask, what is it that our heads go on inside of? For at any one moment, the world of consciousness would seem to be embedded in that invisible world of chiasmically structured, unfolding dynamical patterns, apparent to us all in the qualitative differences we each individually feel between successive moments as the meetings between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us unfold. But, to the extent that we have our being just as much ‘inside’ it (as participant parts internally related to ‘it’ as a whole), as ‘it’ has its being ‘inside’ us. In other words, the physiognomic changes (movements) taking place out in the larger, dynamically unfolding, living world within we all have our being together, is felt by all of us, individually, in the same way, according to the same style.

              The kind of knowing we all share then, is not so much to do with a knowledge of facts as to do with knowing what to expect, a knowing of ‘what goes with, or follows from, what’. So even though we cannot know ahead of time what the others around us will say or do, when their turn comes to speak or act, although they then will have a 1^st-person right to express uniquely what they feel to be of importance to them, they will ‘display’ in the unfolding ‘contours’ of their intertwined and ‘orchestrated’ expression of their feelings, their ‘inner’ feelings to those around them. And the others around them, in being responsively ‘moved’ by the ‘contoured’ expressions, will feel their feelings according to same shared way or style. It is our embedding in this shared, continuously ingoing background world of spontaneously responsive expression, that makes the world of consciousness, the world of witnessable knowing along with others, con-scientia, a sharable world, for only from within our embedding in it can we share with them certain patterns of contingent anticipations and anticipations occurring in the sequentially structured activities unfolding between us.

              In the approach to our inquiries into the nature of our ‘inner’ lives that I have been taking here, then, our focus on the way in which our spontaneously responsive, bodily activities are expressive, both of our feelings and of our relations to events occurring out in the world between us and around us, has led us toward seeing the function of our inner-talk as being quite different from that of giving reports on the states of a supposed inner mind-thing existing hidden within us somewhere. Although such inner-talk has misled us philosophically in our grand attempts to arrive at a general account of our being in the world, in our more particular everyday affairs – in orienting us toward what is not-yet-existing but what must be among the possibilities that will occur in the future activities of the individuals around us (if, that is, they are to act as the members of our social group are required to act, if they are to be and to remain members) – it plays a clear and crucial role. So, although as 1^st-persons we may use a word without justification, without the right to make such a use of words (see Wittgenstein, 1953, no.289 again), without such usages most of what we do in our unique personal relations with each other would be impossible.

              But what is amazing in all of this, is not so much our consciousness – its incomprehensible strangeness and mystery depends only on its stark contrast with the mechanistic background provided us in our Cartesian heritage. It is amazing as the only feature of life and living left over in that otherwise dead realm. But all current attempts to explain consciousness while ignoring the amazingness of life, strike me as utterly futile. It is life and the ordinary everyday livingness of things that strike me as so truly wonderous. A whole realm of unexplored activity awaits us.

Notes:

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