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 1st-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 1st-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 1st-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 1st-person talk about
our own unique ‘inner lives’ is a poetic or metaphorical extension of 3rd-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 1st-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 1st-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 1st-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 R