"Certainly, we still wish to capture in our arts the invisible currents that rule our lives..." (Brook, 1968, p.45).

"[It is] the 'otherness' which enters us and makes us other" (Steiner, 1989, p.188).
 

But to analyze it in this way is to fail to grasp the uncanny or extra-ordinary nature of what occurs, or can occur, in certain of our displays. Indeed, it is to fail to grasp the crucial element of aletheia - the working of the god-like agency Lethe, the god of oblivion, who can lead us to be forgetful of the merely mundane - at work in all such explanations. For the rules or principles proposed are not mere empty, mechanical forms (themselves requiring interpretation by us, individually), but are themselves god-ideas, invisible but real "presences" issuing their own commands to us, to which we all must be answerable in the same way. Our modernist modes of inquiry, especially as developed by Descartes, in functioning only in relation to an external, mechanistic world, miss just those influences at work 'within' of our lived or living worlds. Aimed at mastery rather than at understanding, they function to keep us at a distance from the things around us. Thus, rather than 'entering into' a display's world and becoming a witness to the nature of its Being, its original otherness, we aim simply at using it for our own ends; rather than celebrating it, we think of manipulation; rather than loving it, we evaluate it for its worth or gain to us; and so on.

In what follows below, I want to explore what has been lost (or seemingly lost, because of it having become rationally invisible to us, so to speak) in our debilitated, modernist notion of cultural representations. I want also to explore, not only how we might regain a sense of the uncanny power that can be exerted on us by at least some of the displays we encounter, but also of how that power is still at work in fact, unnoticed, in many of our modes of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, to go further, I want to suggest that that uncanny effect, along with the (often unwarranted and misleading) persuasive power of many scientific claims, is due to something very special in the nature of living expression that is not properly acknowledged in our current forms of inquiry: its capacity within the dynamic, spontaneously responsive relations unfolding between itself and those encountering it to give rise to "real presences" (Steiner, 1989) - that is, it can give rise to an invisible but nonetheless real agency which, so to speak, has a 'life of its own' and as such can exert its own 'demands' and 'judgments' on our reactions to it. Rather than our having to interpret it to understand what its meaning might be for us, we find 'it', so to speak, 'telling' us its meaning, as if we are answerable to 'it', not it to us.

We have tended to miss the peculiar nature of this phenomenon. This, as I shall show, is due to the somewhat mechanical and geometrical, cognitive and willful presuppositions at work in the Cartesian inspired forms of evaluation we currently apply in our attempts to understand how our own human expressions might exert their force upon us. As a consequence, we have ignored our own embodied, spontaneous, living responsiveness to the activities of the others and othernesses in our surroundings. Indeed, we have ignored more, much more. We have totally failed to recognize the existence of a third realm of dialogically-structured realm of joint human activity - which is quite distinct from either action which can be explained in terms of reasons, or behavior which can be explained in terms of causes, the other two realms of activity that have so far occupied our attention in the social disciplines; and how it is in this realm of activity and in this realm only that such agentic presences are created.

Specifically in what follows then, I want first to try to give a brief example of an invisible real presence which, to speak paradoxically, can become visible to us in a visual display, but only if we can let 'it' instruct us in how to see it - I am speaking here of the 3-D stereograms that many of us having frustratingly tried to see 'in' certain specially created 2-D random-dot displays. There is a deep parallel here, as both Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Bateson (1979) bring out, between the two slightly different points of view of the two eyes brought together in binocular vision to create the presence of the mysterious third dimension of depth, a unified space of three dimensions, and the nature of dialogically-structured activity and the creation also in such activity of the sense of an indivisible 'space' with some depth or depths to it. This preliminary foray will lead into a detailed account of the special nature of dialogically-structured activities, particularly drawing on the work of Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. The major shift entailed by their work, is a shift from the Cartesian focus on ideas, concepts, representations, and other inner mental paraphernalia, to a focus on events occurring out in the bodily enactment of socially shared practices. I want then to turn to the special nature of real presences, and to explore some of the background literature in which the notion of presence has been discussed in literature (Steiner), philosophy (Cassirer), anthrology (Levy-Bruhl), and rhetoric (Perelman, and Rosenfield). Then finally, I want to discuss some of the consequences of a revitalized notion of presence for the conduct of academic inquiries, particular for those in the sciences.

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As I intimated above, the phenomenon of a real presence is something very special that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically-structured, living, embodied relations with an other or otherness in our surroundings - when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against them at a distance from them, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement with them. Then, it is in the intricate 'orchestrated movement' occurring in the unfolding, contingent or paired⁽¹⁾ interplay, between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward this other or otherness and their equally responsive, complementary expressions incoming toward us, that a very special kind of felt understanding becomes available to us. We can begin to get a palpable sense of their 'inner nature' or the 'character of their lives'. In other words, the indivisible whole sensed here, is not an independent spatial form with all its parts present-at-once, but a dynamic form, a shaped movement, temporally unfolding moment by moment only within the interplay, and dependent on the occurrence of the appropriate interplay for its existence.

We can find a model for such felt forms in the 3-D 'heart' that we can see marked out in depth before us as we scan over the 2-D random-dot-stereogram on the page below (Fig.1). (Another paradigm, of course, is that of 'seeing' meaning in the array of print spread out before us on this page.) While we may move our two eyes over the page before us as we please, the dots are arranged on the page in such a way that they can be said to have a set of 'unique requirements' of their own. The principle behind their arrangement lies in what is called the "wall paper" effect, discovered by Sir David Brewster [1781-1868], the inventor of the stereoscope. He noticed that Victorian wallpaper printed with a repeating pattern would jump to a new plane of depth if he looked at it with crossed eyes: for then, instead of both eyes focusing and converging on the same piece of pattern, while one eye focused on one piece of pattern the other focused on the next (or even the next but one) in the repeating cycle. Thus here, our eyes are working like a camera with an automatic focus device: as we look in one direction toward the display we can find a convergent focus at this distance, in another direction at that distance, in another at another distance, and so on. So that as we continue to look over the display on the page before us, we gain in the course of our surveying or scanning it, a felt sense of a heart-shaped form before us - a felt sense that is identical for everyone, an embodied awareness that is shaped by the 'way' the display, so to speak, 'calls' us to 'look over' it, if we are to sustain the sense of a unitary object before us.
 

Indeed, it is as if we must almost 'feel over' what is before us with our eyes, place by place, just as we must in feeling something with our fingers. 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, no 'things' as such reveal themselves to us instantaneously, as mere passive observers of them; seeing requires an active looking from us. Indeed, if we are to see the heart in Fig.1 - and this is not easy to do - we must let 'it', the 3-D heart-to-be in the distribution of dots, control our looking.

Once we 'see' the 'object' in the display, we 'see' it, not by finally being able to 'work it out' as one might solve a problem, not by imposing this or that particular interpretation on it, but in terms of a quite specific range of spontaneously occurring, bodily reactions and anticipatory responses - for instance, we see the near parts of the 'object' at a distance near to us and the far parts as far from us, not just as large and small as in a 2-D display. And this is a crucial point, for when we do 'see' it, we locate 'it' neither 'on' the page, nor 'in' our heads, but in fact 'out' in the space between us and the page, out in the world. For that is where, dynamically, the different 2-D views from my two eyes cohere into a 3-D unity, just as a real object that I caress with my hand is 'out there' too. But to repeat, the 'heart' is not a real object but an invisible presence, present only in the unfolding temporal course of our visual involvement with the special patterning of the dots on the 2-D page. 'It' emerges and is only 'there' in our orchestrated interaction with the whole distribution of the dots on the page. But once in possession of the appropriate 'way of looking', we can 'look from' one part of the display - having allowed it to 'call out' a certain response from us - while 'looking toward' another with a certain adjustive anticipation, and so on, and so on (Shotter, 1996a). Indeed, it is just as if each element we encounter and respond to 'tells us' how to prepare ourselves to 'go out to meet' the next, so that, as it were, we can turn toward it with our hand already raised to shake its hand. Thus it is that our bodies create in us a qualitatively new set of relational dimensions, joining retrospective experience to prospective anticipations.

Finally in this section, I would like briefly to consider Tucker's (2001) phenomenological account of "presence," which he connects with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969) and Perelman's (1982) claim, that presence is best understood as a "Standing-Out-Ness" of an entity or object that would otherwise be passed by unnoticed in the background. Tucker develops his account from an initial consideration of the treatment of the figure-ground oscillation in ambiguous figures - as in the well known Vase-Faces figure - by Gestalt psychologists. He begins by noting that in the oscillation between figure and ground, "the figure, by virtue of its grasp upon our attention, comes to possess important qualities lacking in our interpretation of the ground" (p.403, my emphasis). He then goes on to conclude, thus, that "presence is the property given by a speaker to a particular semantic 'shape' at the expense of the available others" (p.411).

As I see it, however, his account fails as an account of presence in at least the three following features: (1) The "real presences" of our concern, as we shall see more clearly later below, are objectively invisible. Apart from their momentary emergence within the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, they have no substantial existence in themselves at all. (2) Further, as we shall also see below, a "presence" is uniquely itself, and presents itself to us as such, as a 'something' independent of our wishes and opinions, of our beliefs and desires. Our task is not that of interpretation, but a matter first of acknowledgment, of orienting ourselves appropriately toward 'it'. (3) Then, a presence can exert its own unique 'calls' upon us and we must be answerable to it. As Steiner (1989) puts it: "The authentic experience of understanding, when we are spoken to by another human being or by a poem, is one of responding responsibility. We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological" (p.8). A presence, although invisible, is like another personage in our lives, a living agency, a being 'who', more than merely psychological, as Tucker (2001) claims, can exert moral and spiritual influences upon us.

(1521 words)

Above I suggested that it is in the realm of dialogically-structured activity, and only in this realm, that such agentic presences as I have outlined above can be created. So what is so special about this realm? Well one thing that is special about it, is that it is a corporeal not a cognitive phenomenon; it comes into existence only in our living responses to what we treat as living expression. As Wittgenstein (1953) notes: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different" (no. 284). While we can come to an understanding of a dead form in terms of objective, explanatory theories representing the sequence of events supposed to have caused it, a quite different form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us in our engagement with what we treat as the expressions of living things. They can 'call out' spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite impossible for forms which do not seem to us to be the products or outcomes of living expression.

A classic example of such an event in this realm is Vico's (1964) account of the emergence of a first possible "sensory topic." While modern theories of knowledge begin with something already present to the mind - e.g., Descartes begins with clear and distinct ideas - Vico begins by asking how it is that the mind comes to have anything stable present to it at all. For the minds of the first men were "little better than the minds of beasts, [in] which each new sensation cancels the last one" (para. 703). How do human beings manage to create and establish within the flow of experience between them a shared 'stopping place' (topos), an 'is', within the flow of sensation that can be 'found again'? How can a shared anchor point be established? For Vico, it is not a matter of 'seeing' in common, but of 'feeling' in common, with the giving of a shared significance to shared feelings in shared circumstances.

In paras.374-399 of the New Science, Vico discusses what he calls the "civil history" of the saying that it was "from Jove that the muse began." Taking it seriously, he suggests that it was from a fear of thunder that the first sensory topic - and the first great "Imaginative Universal," i.e., the god Jove - was established. For, in everyone within a social group being startled in the same way, the opportunity arose for them all to act responsively in common, to run in a state of fear into the caves to shelter from the thunder. Although the source of the great sounds in the sky might be invisible, the fact that all respond to it in the same way, as if, metaphorically, they were the angry words of a giant being, provides, we could say, a moment of common reference to a "presence" shared between them. For, as Vico points out, this kind of fear, the fear of thunder, is not like one's fear of an immediately obvious dangerous event. There is no such immediately obvious practical response to thunder, its meaning is unclear. It is "not a fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves," says Vico (para.382). To this extent, it is a kind of fear which seems to point beyond the thunder. When people hear it, they become confused and disoriented, they move hesitatingly and with concern for each other - the thunder's presence is the mute explanation of their actions. And often, "when men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and cannot explain them by analogy," says Vico (axiom, para.180), "they attribute their own nature to them."

Thus at this point: "The first theological poets created the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in the act of hurling the lightening bolt; an image so popular, disturbing and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared, revered and worshiped it in frightful religions" (para.379). The fable of Jove, the first great "imaginary universal," lends form to, and is rooted in, the "sensory topic" established in that first startling moment in peoples's shared responses to thunder. In all spontaneously responding to thunder as if to big words, they are acting imaginatively - but, "in their robust ignorance, [they] did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination," says Vico (para. 376)⁽²⁾. In other words, the initial beginnings of a people's "common sense" (Vico - sensus communis), their attributing of a shared meaning to shared events, began to emerge spontaneously, in specific contexts in relation to specific concrete events. The sensuous topos established here is a totality linking thunder, with shared fears at the limits of one's being, and with recognizing the existence of similar such feelings in others through shared bodily responsive activities. It was created, not out of a heterogeneous amalgam of elements held together externally, within a systematic framework of thought, but by developing a totality of specific relations, existing just for a moment between a group of people, from within, by internal articulation. Thus, just as other complex living wholes, like oak trees, grow or develop from origins in simple living wholes, like acorns, so the complex image of Jove is developed from a sensory topic in which it is possible to 're-feel' everything present at those times when 'Jove' is active. And while such feelings are gradually articulated into more specific forms of symbolic expression - into rituals and ceremonies, etc. - the originally inarticulate feelings remain on hand as 'standards', so to speak, against which the more explicit forms of response may be judged, i.e., sensed, as to their adequacy or not.

Now, as I have already intimated above, it is only in the two-way, orchestrated interplay occurring in those embodied, living, spontaneously responsive relations, occurring between our own outgoing expressions toward an other or otherness and their incoming expressions toward us, that this special kind of practical understanding becomes available to us. In it, to repeat, we grasp the nature of these others and othernesses, not as passive and neutral objects, but as real, agentic presences, to which we must be responsive and toward which we must adopt an "evaluative attitude" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.84). But such understandings - which we can call relationally-responsive understandings to contrast them with those of a representational-referential kind that currently are much more familiar to us in our intellectual lives - do not occur in all our interactions. As we shall see more fully below, they occur only in those circumstances in which expressions and their perception (Cassirer, 1957, Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968) are at issue. From now on, I will call this the realm of the dialogical.

We can outline some of its relevant features as follows: As embodied living beings, we cannot escape from being spontaneously responsive, both to those around us (others) and to other aspects (othernesses) of our surroundings. Thus, in meetings or encounters with others of our kind, instead of one person first acting deliberately and individually, independently of the other, and the other then replying individually and independently of the first, both act in the responsive presence of the other. And they do this straightaway, bodily, in a 'living' way, without having first '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 partly 'shaped' by the acts of the others around them. Indeed, they all act in within the mutually responsive 'atmosphere' of each other's activities. This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical, of dialogically-structured activities, begins⁽³⁾.

Within this realm of jointly constituted activity, none of our actions are truly your's or mine alone; they are our's. Those acting within this realm, act participatively within it as a "collective-we;" as such, their joint actions are distributed amongst them. No actions are self-contained. Indeed, all the theoretical concepts usually pertaining to inner lives of individuals - such as utterances, thoughts, ideas, meanings, understandings, even intentions, and especially ethical issue - need to be reconsidered in this light. As Bahktin (1986) remarks with respect to the notion of an idea, the idea, dialogically, "is not a subjective individual-psychological formation... in a person's head; no, the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective - the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogical communion between consciousnesses. The idea is a live event played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses" (p.88). Ethically too, in the context of our participant within a collective-we, we find ourselves with certain obligations to 'our' joint affairs: only if 'you' respond to 'me' in a way sensitive to the relations between your actions and mine can 'we' act together to sustain ourselves as a 'collective-we'. And further, if I sense you as not being sensitive in that way, then I feel immediately offended in an ethical way - I feel that you lack respect for 'our' affairs.

Someone who has scrutinized the nature of our obligations to each other in our interactions quite deeply, and what happens when we fail to meet them, is Goffman (1967). He points out the special nature of conversational talk. Although we can become deeply immersed in solitary, unsociable tasks, "talk is unique [in that it] creates for the participants a world and a reality that has other participants in it. Joint spontaneous involvement is a unio mystico, a socialized trance... Conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf... it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains" (pp. 113-114). Indeed, it is such that, spontaneously, "the individual participant in a conversation finds that he and the others are locked together by involvement obligations with respect to it" (p.115, my emphasis)⁽⁴⁾. The rest of this chapter could be devoted to the intricate nature of these obligations, what occurs when they are fulfilled, and when they are transgressed (see Goffman's account). Here, I will add only this comment: that central to such joint spontaneous involvements, is the generation amongst the participants of not only a shared and sustained but developing focus of attention, but also a firm sense of reality. "And this kind of feeling is not a trivial thing,..." adds Goffman (1967). "When an incident occurs and spontaneous involvement is threatened, then reality is threatened. Unless the disturbance is checked, unless the interactants regain their proper involvement, the illusion of reality will be shattered, the minute social system that is brought into being with each encounter will be disorganized, and the participants will feel unruled, unreal, and anomic" (p.135).

What is produced, then, in such spontaneous conversational or dialogical exchanges is something very intricate. In fact, it is a very complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences - 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 their margins or borders. Indeed, within such exchanges we can find occurring spontaneously, pre-intellectual precursors to our later deliberations. Thus we will mislead ourselves if we mis-characterize this precursor world in our usually taken for granted philosophical categories. Aware of this danger, Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes, that modern philosophy "prejudges what it will find" (p.130). To overcome this tendency, he suggests that philosophy "once again... must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been "worked over," that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both "subject" and "object," both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them" (p.130). In other words, we must install ourselves in what he, Bakhtin, and Wittgenstein, all call "the primordial." We must develop a sense of what it is like to live in the precursor world, to what previously we took to be the "external world" as set out by Descartes. How might it be characterized?

Well first, let us note what was mentioned above, that because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, such activity cannot be accounted simply as action (for it is not done by any individuals alone, thus it cannot be explained by their reasons). Nor can be accounted simply as behavior (as a causal regularity), for as a human activity, it still has intentionality⁽⁵⁾, i.e., it is such that it seems "to point to', 'to contain', 'to mean', 'to be a means to', or, in short, 'to be related to something other than or beyond itself' - even if that something might not exist. As a consequence of these two properties, the 'dialogical reality' or 'dialogical space' participants construct between them is experienced, not only as an 'external reality', but also as a 'third agency' (an 'it') with, as Goffman outlines above, its own (ethical) demands and requirements. "The word," as Bakhtin (1986) remarks, "is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio)" (p.122).

Also, as already noted above, this third sphere of dialogically-structured activity involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or embodied form of understanding which I have term a relationally-responsive understanding. Richard Bernstein (1983), however, calls it a practical-moral understanding and equates with Aristotle's notion of phronesis - a form of practical understanding and reasoning which is not disinterested and detached from people's being, but is constitutive of who they are, their social and personal identities, and is prior to and determinative of all our other ways of knowing. In other words, these are not understandings of a situation, which allow it to be linked to realities already known to us, but new, first-time understandings which are formative for us of what counts as the significant, stable, and reiterated forms within that flow.

If we take our conversational exchanges as a paradigm for all such exchanges, it is easy to see that, although they may be as first-time formative events quite specific in one sense - in being responsively shaped in accord with a specific set of occasioning circumstances - they are also still always open to further inner articulation. In other other words, in being unfinished, all such activities within this realm lack a finalized specificity. They are ever only partially specified. Indeed, they remain a complex mixture of many different kinds of influence. This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: for they have neither fully orderly nor fully disorderly, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. Spatially too they are not easy to identify, for they are non-locatable in the sense that they are 'spread out' or 'distributed' amongst all those participating in them; neither are they wholly 'inside' people, nor are they wholly 'outside' them. They have their being in that space between them, where what is 'outside' is also partially 'inside', and vise-versa. Temporally also, we run up against similar problems, for as Bergson (1965) points out with respect to the nature of a flow of activity, "real time has no instants." There are no separate 'befores' and 'afters' in a flow of activity; each moment has within it a 'carry over' from the past and a quite specific anticipation of the future - just as the recipient of a question feels a compellent need to reply with an answer to it.

In short, the flow of activity within this third realm of dialogically-structured activity, is an indivisible whole, meaningful in different ways at different moments for all those who are participants within it, but which cannot be divided into separable parts - observable as such by an non-participant outsider - and still retain its identity as the whole that it is. Indeed, it is precisely its lack of any pre-determined order, and thus its openness to being specified or determined just by those involved within it, in practice - while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so - that is its central defining feature. It is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity so rhetorically interesting, for at least these three reasons: (1) we can study how people do in fact manage in the face of all the vagueness present to 'work things out', and to established agreed forms of life in practice; (2) we can also study the part played by the ways of talking we interweave into the many different spheres of practical activity occurring between us, and how they determine their outcomes in different ways; but (3) we can also study how, from beginnings in new, first-time reactions, we might refine, elaborate, and develop the spheres of activity already existing between us, into novel ways as yet unknown to us. "The origin and 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, 'inthe beginning was the deed' [Goethe]" (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.31).

Like Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein also takes it that western philosophers have (mostly) come onto the human scene far too late in the day, and they have then looked in the wrong direction for the wrong thing. In treating human beings as already as self-conscious intellectuals, they have looked backward and inward, seeking supposedly already existing, single, sovereign centers of influence at work hidden within them as individuals - centers which can be expressed in terms of rules, systems, or principles. In wanted to come on the scene much earlier, Wittgenstein (1980) suggested that "when you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there" (p.65). With regard to language, he remarked: "I want to regard man... as an animal... As a creature in a primitive state... Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination" (Wittgenstein, 1969, no. 475). "But what is the word 'primitive' meant to say here?" he asks, "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" (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.541). And, one might add, this sort of behavior, people's initial spontaneous bodily responses to the events around them, constitute prototypes for ways of seeing, hearing, touching, etc., ways of valuing, and most importantly, styles of expression.

In other words, prior to individual people acting willfully and intellectually, like Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein also wants to consider people's activities in a similar precursor world, a sphere in which people act unthinkingly, in spontaneous response to the events occurring around them. And furthermore, rather than looking inward and backward to seek their supposed hidden intentions or thoughts, he wants to look outward and forward, toward how people create and establish between them, in their spontaneous and non-deliberate acts now, ways of "going on', the beginnings of new "forms of life" within which they can later come to act willfully and intellectually⁽⁶⁾. It is in the realm of these precursor activities that the notion of "real presences" has its point and purchase. As "transitional" entities, with only a partial, fleeting existence, they can only exist as possible candidates for later conceptualization. To attempt to conceptualize such "presences" clearly and completely would be to distort their "living" nature.

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The case I am making here, as to what it is that what makes the notion of display so special, is that at work in those displays that powerfully touch or move us, are what I have called above, following Steiner (1984, 1989), "real presences." This claim, however, is not at all new. As Tucker (2001), whom I mentioned above, points out, it was Perelman (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969; Perelman, 1982) who re-introduced American rhetorical scholars to the notion of presence, i.e., to the agentic power of unnoticed or imperceptible images, after its eradication from modern thought by Descartes's rationalism. As is already clear, I am critical of Tucker's account in terms of "standing-out-ness" - and by implication of Perelman's - as both are, as I see it, individualistic and psychological. They fail to take the very special nature of the realm of dialogically-structured activities into account. The nearest to it that Perelman (1982) comes, as far as I can tell, is when he counsels that: "Presence acts directly on our sensibility.... it is important not to identify presence as we conceive it, which is presence to consciousness, with effective presence" (p.35). I take this to mean that presence has a direct, spontaneous, bodily effect on us, bypassing our intellect - although Perelman does not elaborate on this, and moves straight on in his article to various techniques of expression possibly productive of presence. I will, therefore, not pursue Perelman's account further here. Instead, I will focus on three other writers who, I feel, have made important contributions to the notion of presence, in ways that are compatible with it as a dialogical phenomenon: Levy-Bruhl, Steiner, and Rosenfield⁽⁷⁾.

In anthropology, Levy-Bruhl (1926) noted that "primitive" or "inferior" peoples (as he called them) seemed to go in for a kind of thinking he called "participatory thinking." He called it this because, in it, certain entities - a name, a picture, a totem, etc. - which we would simply think of as a neutral image or representation of something having only an arbitrary or conventional relation to what it is they happen to stand for, were taken as "'participat[ing]' in the nature, properties, life of that of which it is the image" (p.79).

Levy-Bruhl's (1926) sensitive characterization of the nature of participatory thinking, although offered as an account of a 'primitive' way of thinking, is so positively relevant in every detail to our task of familiarizing ourselves with our own responsive understanding of real presences - which he calls "collective representations"⁽⁸⁾ - that I will quote it at length: "The collective representations of primitives... differ profoundly from our ideas or concepts... [in] not being genuine representations, in the strict sense of the term, they express, or rather imply, not only that the primitive actually has an image of the object in his mind, and thinks it is real, but also that he has some hope or fear connected with it, that some definite influence emanates from it, or is exercised upon it... If I were to express in a word the general peculiarity of the collective representations which play so important a part in the mental activity of undeveloped peoples, I should say that this mental activity was a mystic one... in which 'mystic' implies belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible to the sense, are nevertheless real" (pp.37-38, all emphases mine).

Levy-Bruhl calls the kind of thinking involved here, participatory thinking, and not merely linked, associative, or representational thinking, because the participation in question "is not to be understood as a share - as if the portrait [or a word], for example, involved a fraction of the whole of the properties or the life which the model possesses. Primitive mentality sees no difficulty in the belief that such life and properties exist in the original and in its reproduction at one and the same time" (pp.79-80). While we might laugh at these misguided primitives for treating certain things as actually participating in the life of the things they stand for, instead of merely being neutral things, related to them only by convention, perhaps we should think again. For, as we only too well know, even apparently simple events and objects can remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as socially agreed reality until talked about - as the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials should remind us. In these cases, the words and other expressions of the participants participated crucially in the nature of lives "of which [they were] the image."

This because "primitive man," says Levy-Bruhl (1926), "lives and acts in an environment of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic attributes. He perceives their objective reality mingled with another reality. He feels himself surrounded by an infinity of imperceptible entities, nearly always invisible to sight, and always redoubtable" (p.65). But we do too.

Perhaps the most obvious sphere in which real but invisible presences make themselves felt to us, intermingled in with our objective perceptions of a circumstance before us - besides, perhaps, our sense of 'openings' as well as of 'spaces to avoid' while driving on interstates or motorways - is in our reading of texts. George Steiner (1984, 1989) has discussed this issue extensively. He begins by noting the difference between a critic's and a reader's approach to a text. A critic "is an epistemologist" (p.67), one who 'steps back' from an object "in order to perceive it better" (p.68). For a reader , however, texts "are not 'objects' even in a special 'aesthetic' category, but 'presences', 'presentments' whose existential 'thereness' (Heidegger's word) relates less to the organic, as it does in Aristotelian and Romantic poets and theories of art, than it does to the transubstantial" (p.85). In other words, what Steiner wants to suggest in his use of the term "real presence," is that "the reader proceeds as if the text was the housing of forces and meanings, of meanings of meaning, whose lodging within the executive verbal form was one of 'incarnation'. He reads as if - a conditionality which defines the 'provisional' temper of his pursuit - the singular presence of the life of meaning in the text and work of art was 'a real presence' irreducible to analytic summation and resistant to judgment in the sense in which the critic can and must judge" (p.85). Indeed, just like Levy-Bruhl's so-called primitives, we read if the circumstances, events, and people participating in them, are all really 'there' present to us, not because of an imaginative effort on our part to conjure them up in all their detail, but because they all express their lives in some way, if not actually within the textual forms, at least in our reading of them.

How is this possible? Because, to repeat, prior to us seeing the world around us in terms of stable and static forms, we understand it from within our inescapable embedding within a ceaseless two-way flow of spontaneously responsive, living activity. And again to repeat, it is in the intricate 'orchestrated' interplay occurring between our outgoing expressions and the complementary expressions coming back to us from others, that such "real presences" make their presence felt. Indeed, as Steiner (1989) suggests, "the energy that is music puts us into felt relation to the energy that is life; it puts us in a relation of experienced immediacy with the abstractly and verbally inexpressible but wholly palpable, primary fact of being" (p.196)⁽⁹⁾. But the crucial point here is, "that these categories [music, and musical kinds of events in music] need to be lived before they can be experienced" (p.6), and this goes for all the events of our concern here, events occurring in our encounters with displays of any kind.

Rosenfield (1980) too, like Steiner, in bringing the special nature of a "presence" to our attention, emphasizes that a presence is not simply a self-contained object. While an observer "may confer praise on something by claiming it praiseworthy according to his [or her] standards. When value dwells in the object, it 'cries out' for recognition and remains recognition-demanding regardless of any praise heaped on it; for in inviting awareness it makes a claim on the witness to acknowledge (or belittle) the kinship witness and object share" (p.135). In other words, what Rosenfield draws to our attention here, is that a presence is a being in its own right. But he goes further, for he also notes that "'being does not submit to human interrogation... Being is not the 'answer' to a question, but... it is rather a 'gift', a 'favor' which is bestowed on man. If Being is grasped at all it is because Being reveals itself on its own initiative... although of course man must be open to this revelation" (p.136)⁽¹⁰⁾. If we are not open in this way, if we cannot open ourselves to a spontaneous involvement with the others and othernesses around us, but try to contrive our involvements, then, as Rosenfield (1980) notes, "we remain time-bound and condemned to live only in anticipation of the future. And such a state both hides the present and obstructs our encounter with what is" (p.137). But if we can, so to speak, 'go out' toward what is before us with "a beholding wonder... an admiring gratitude... our response to Being's revelation in such circumstances is to reach out as if to "shake hands" with the aletheia disclosing itself as good and decent and lovely in our lives" (p.138).

Finally, let us with Rosenfield (1980) ask here, "what transforms the bystander into a beholder?" (p.141), what makes it possible for us, in Goffman's phrase, to enter into a "conjoint spontaneous involvement" with the others and othernesses around us? And we can answer with him, "a human capacity to appreciate life itself as life appears in the world" (p.141), to let it simply present 'itself' to us. To do that, we have to allow ourselves to approach the other as a 'living' other, as a being with whom we can 'enter into' a mutually responsive, dialogically-structured relation. Then, as Rosenfield points out, to let something be in this way, we must renounce our desire to dominate or to possess it, we must be prepared to let it express itself to us by allowing ourselves to follow it leads. If we can, then, we can achieve and understanding which "Spinoza refers to... as knowledge of the third kind" (Rosenfield, 1980, p.141)⁽¹¹⁾.

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In this section, because the sphere of science is, perhaps, the last place one might expect the notion of "real presences" to play a role, still less a central role, I want to explore the important part such presences in fact do play in this sphere. We can begin with Hanson's (1958) Wittgensteinian critique of the misrepresentation by philosophers of microphysics. Why is it so misrepresented, he asks? Because, he replies, "they have regarded as paradigms of inquiry not unsettled, dynamic, research sciences like microphysics, but finished planetary systems, planetary mechanics, optics, electromagnetism and classical thermodynamics" (p.1). If one is to capture what is at stake in understanding the conduct of inquiry in such as yet unfinished spheres of research - and in fact, as we shall see, in understanding our conduct of inquiry in all such unfinished spheres of social life at large - we shall find that, as Hanson puts it, "the issue is not theory-using, but theory finding... Let us examine not how observation, facts and data are built up into general systems of physical explanation, but how these systems are built into our observations, and our appreciation of facts and data" (p.3).

As is well known, the first time novices look down a microscope at a cell structure, they find it difficult to know what to see. Hanson discusses looking at an X-ray tube (he supplies an illustration of just such a tube viewed as if from the cathode end). "Would Sir Lawrence Bragg and an Eskimo baby," he asks, "see the same thing when looking at an X-ray tube? Yes, and no. Yes - they are visually aware of the same object. No - the ways in which they are visually aware are profoundly different. Seeing is not only the having of a visual experience; it is also the way in which the visual experience is had" (p.15). The appropriate aspects of an entity are brought out, and made determinate, i.e., specified, in the context of expressions (talk and other gestures) within which it appears. As Wittgenstein (1981) puts it: "My relation to the appearances here is part of my concept" (no.543). But the context as such need not be set out explicitly; indeed, it cannot be; it must be 'displayed' in how I 'orchestrate' my performance it, my interweaving of my pointing with my words, the precise vocabulary from which I choose my terms, the questions I phrase, the answers I accept, the timing of my actions to complement those of others, and so on, and so on.

Hanson begins his discussion by remarking that what is involved here, is not as is so often assumed a matter of interpretation⁽¹²⁾. Following Wittgenstein (1953), he points out that a mere interpretation made after the fact of observing a 'something' will not do the work required of it: it will not provide us with the way of seeing required to orient us toward the different aspects of our surroundings as we might meet them in practice. Further, as he points out: "To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is an experiential state. The different ways [in which various ambiguous figures] are seen are not due to different thoughts lying behind visual reactions. What could 'spontaneous' mean if these reactions are not spontaneous? When the [ambiguous figure of a] staircase 'goes into reverse' it does so spontaneously. One does not think anything special..." (p.11, my additions). So if it is not a matter of interpretation, how might we capture this aspect of our seeing?

Hanson tries to capture this aspect of the display in question by suggesting that "seeing is a 'theory-laden' undertaking" (p.19). But he immediately remarks on the inadequacy of this terms, for it seems to suggest that the kind of 'seeing' in question is merely a seeing in the visual sphere, i.e., a matter of 'seeing as', of seeing something as an exemplar of something already well-known to us. Rather, the task is to capture the kind of constitutive 'seeing' we manifest - as mentioned above - in our actual, practical performances within the settings of a research science, the seeing of unfinished entities not yet well known to us. To capture this kind of seeing, Hanson proposes the term "seeing-that," by which he means that, to see that something is the case, is to see that if certain things were done, or were to happen, to the object before one's eyes, certain other things would result. As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, a kind of understanding is involved "which consists in 'seeing connections'" (no.122). It is a kind of seeing with "an aetiology and a prognosis" (Hanson, 1958, p.21) - both the seeing of an object (in terms of visible forms), mingled in with a felt sense of it as an agent (with invisible powers) in its own right. In other words, what Hanson is alluding to here is, it seems to me, precisely what we have tried to capture above in the notion of a "real presence."

Jacoby (this volume) and in other work (Ochs, Jacoby & Gonzales, 1994), shows how the 'orchestrated' responsive performances of graduate student research physicists can still nonetheless 'display' the felt presence of a 'something' not yet (scientifically) stabilized and finished as a reputable 'finding'. She describes in rich detail how - in their gestured relations toward their overhead-projected diagrams, and in the timing of their talk about them, and so on - they create in concert with their colleagues "liminal worlds," which enable all concerned "to understand physical worlds which are not directly accessible to their perceptual abilities" (p.163). Such worlds are liminal worlds in that they appear "to hover between the representational world of the visual display and the constructed world it indexes" (Ochs et al, 1994, p.164); thus, in being still indeterminate, they are not simply open to yet further specification, but they 'invite' or 'call' for they own further responsive shaping. But how might that further responsive shaping be done, and be done especially in an non-misleading way in which all can share?

Interestingly, it seems to be done by the physicists in question talking within such liminal worlds, once created, in terms of certain personified agencies. Seemingly spontaneously, such agencies come into existence in their own right, with their own demands and their own requirements that the physicists who create them must respect, in the dialogical spaces the physicists create between them. These agencies are given voice in such utterances as: "I'm in the paramagnetic state...," "... why am I breaking into domains...?" "... you're inside a barrier and all you're doing is fluctuating inside that barrier on that time scale," "When I come down I'm in the domain state...," and so on. In other words, like Levy-Bruhl's primitives, the physicists here treat any special such entity of which they speak, as if a "definite influence emanates from it, or is exercised upon it," and they talk with a "belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible to the sense, are nevertheless real." Thus strangely, although seeming to be vague and imprecise, given the "situated" or "indigenous" nature of an audience's responses to it, such a form of communication - because of the power of the "real presences" displayed in it to move all involved, spontaneously, in the same way - can be made as precise as necessary both to progress and to criticize the research in hand. So, although the physicists concerned do not yet know what they are talking 'about' - for they have not yet completed their investigations - they are nonetheless able in their talk entwined performances in relation to their projected diagrams and suchlike, to create a shared sense of the "real presences" at work between them.

The point can be generalized: in all the claims made by scientists (in whatever field they might operate), intermingled in with the objective and mechanical realm of phenomena they describe in their claims, another unnoticed realm of invisible agencies. And it is these invisible agencies which are in fact responsible for bringing off the results of the mechanisms they suppose. Or, to put the issue in other words: accounts of natural processes couched solely in terms of natural laws, principles, or rules, fail to account for how purely mechanical impacts, in the context of an inert void, could ever give rise - in the face of the second law of thermodynamics - to (self-sustaining) organic, living unities or wholes; agencies are needed.

Thus, before ending this section, I would like to outline (very briefly, due to space limitations) the direction taken by some of those who have noticed this need for hidden agencies in our current sciences, and the clandestine moves that have been made to hide this fact. We can find an early recognition of this in Marx and Engels (1977). In a section of The German Ideology, they outline there three "tricks" for the construction of the "illusion" of "ruling ideas" - the illusion that it is not a certain class of people controlling our lives, but a certain set of ideas controlling us all equally. The tricks are only too familiar. First we collect decontextualized and depersonalized data, next we find a pattern in the data, we then suggest a new concept - self-esteem, emotional IQ, need for achievement, etc. - responsible (as an agency) for the pattern so observed. For Marx and Engels, the agency in question was Hegel's "Spirit of History." We can, however, find an exactly similar process at work in, say, Chomsky's (1957, pp.11-17) original account of "a general method for selecting a grammar for each language, given a corpus of sentences of this language" (p.11).

Another sphere of inquiry in which this precisely issue has been raised, is in biology and evolutionary theory. Here I will mention just the work of Keller (1995, 2002), although clearly, the work of many others is relevant here too (see especially, Doyle, 1997). As Evelyn Fox Keller (2002) remarks: "What Darwin brought to biology, at least as we interpret it in the twentieth century, is a way of thinking about the living world as a gas phenomenon, as a composite of autonomous individuals characterized by an internal notion of fitting, engaged in interactions very much like those in the competitive world of Adam Smith" (p.38). What such a view fails to allow, is any process of "internal development," i.e., development by internal articulation from an already organized but simple organic whole to a more richly differentiated whole. "Darwin himself contributed, perhaps more than any other thinker," Keller remarks, "to the erasure of the relational dimensions of the world" (p.38), to the erasure of that kind of understanding which consists in seeing connections. In the rhetoric of Neo-Darwinian evolution, the necessities of blind chance and the elimination of those unfitted, seem sufficient to account for the development of those fitted to their surroundings. But if this is the case, how did entities able to hold themselves together as themselves develop, entities able to sustain their own distinct identities in the face of perturbations from the self-same surroundings selecting them for their fittingness? Again, the formative or organizing power of an agency is in fact missing from the theory; it is supplied rhetorically in the metaphor of the "survival of the fittest."

In the sphere of DNA research too, Keller (1995) also raises similar problems. As she sees it, the introduction by Watson and Crick of the metaphor of "information" into the repertoire of biological discourse, "was a stroke of genius" (p.18). For, in the move of "the collapsing of information with program and instruction [they] vastly fortified the concept of gene action" (p.19). But to attribute to genes the capacity to issue and to follow instructions, to talk of DNA as providing the program for synthesizing protein molecules is, again, to talk of genes, not simple as mechanical objects, but as agencies. As Keller (1995) notes, the tendency for this slippage or carry over to occur in biology was noted some time ago by Schroedinger (1944), the distinguished physicist. About the very notion of a code-script he comments: "the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power - or, to use another simile, they are architect's plan and builder's craft - in one" (p.23).

I will not labor the point any further here, except to note that those in Cultural Studies would do well to read the chapter by Raymond Williams (1977) called "Structures of feeling," in which he makes a whole set of similar points with regards to our attempts to understand the dynamic, unfinished character of social structures in terms of static, finished concepts. He begins by noting that: "In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense... institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes" (p.128). If we are to deal with social experiences still in process, with changes of meanings and values that are actively lived and felt, with changes which are experienced as "changes of presence" (p.132), then such changes can be defined, Williams claims, as "changes in structures of feeling" (p.132). Where by this term, he means to refer to "social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available" (pp.133-134).

Bewitched or charmed by the methods of science, "we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in grasping one comprehensive essence (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.444)⁽¹³⁾. As a consequence, as professionals trained into a discipline, we have sought, and often still do seek, regularities, patterns, or orderliness, which we than proceed to try to express in terms of general rules, laws, or principles. Only if we can do this, do we feel that we have properly understood a particular phenomenon. We have, Wittgenstein (1965) notes, "a craving for generality" (p.18), while at the same time a "contemptuous attitude towards the particular case" (p.18) - with "generality" functioning here as a god-idea to be embraced, and "particularity" as a devil-idea to be avoided. Rorty (1989) also notes our compulsive need, as he puts it, to "eternalize" or "divinize" the ideology of the day, in our attempts to find a foundation for our investigations and inquiries, somewhere "beyond history and institutions" (p.198). I have attempted a comprehensive exploration of these issues with respect to our attempts to understand linguistic meaning in Shotter (forthcoming).

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There is something very special about works of art, performances of human expression: we expect them to touch us, to move us, to deliver up to us new meanings or new meaning potentials, new possible understandings of a circumstance that we cannot attain in any other way. But more than that, we expect them to be momentous, we expect them to contain moments that touch us so deeply that we can gain an unforgettable inner resource from them, something to which we can return to draw upon time and again. What, then, after all the explorations undertaken here, can we say about what is special in the nature of a living, human 'display'?

Let us begin by noting the 'liminal' nature of the human realities within which they have their role. Although to be sure, in these so-called postmodern times, when little is stable and can be taken for granted as of shared value, less and less of our interactions with each other now take place in a stable, well established and well known world. More and more they occur in a pluralistic, only fragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world. Indeed, we might argue that in such circumstances, what can be 'displayed' or made 'manifest' as of value, will be treated as such. Hence the emerging importance of the topic in these times. But I will not embark on that argument here. Instead, I will simply note that in such circumstances, "even apparently simple objects and events remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about" (Rommetveit, 1985, p.193). But the talk involved in doing this, in making what is enigmatic more specific, cannot be 'about-ness' or representational talk; it is not a matter of simple introducing us to something already well-known to us. What is required is relationally-responsive talk, "with-ness' talk, talk that is intermingled with and shaped by our responsiveness as we talk, to the unique but still unnoticed "real presences" at work as agencies in the shared circumstances of our lives. Or, to put the matter more generally, in terms not just of talk, but in terms of all our other forms of expression: we need 'displays' which move us spontaneously to respond in ways shaped by "the invisible currents that rule our lives..." (Brook, 1968, p.45) - monuments, plays, paintings, staged-protests, and many other such 'expressions' all provide displays which make in some way the invisible visible to us.

Although by their very nature vague and incomplete, such events provide us with new beginnings. They are unique first-time events, events in which poiesis can occur. They are events in which the creative emergence between us of something utterly original and unique to the circumstances of their occurrence can occur, the making, creating, the bringing something new into existence, rather than merely discovering already existing things is involved. But perhaps here we are being too grand. For every instance of us being able to 'go on' in our practical lives, in each new circumstance we meet, is a small act of this kind. And many of our uses of language too, no matter how mundane, need to have an aspect of the poetic in them - if, that is, we want to be 'awake' to the uniquely new potentials before us in the routine of our lives. For what poetic uses of language can do is, by juxtaposing words in unusual combinations, cause us to pause, to cease our current projects for a moment, to put reality on 'freeze-frame', so to speak, and to look over the circumstances before us in a new light.

Central to their capacity to do this, to induce new forms of understanding in us, is - to repeat what has been almost a mantra throughout this chapter - their ability to provoke new embodied responses from us, new reactions form which "more complicated forms can develop." But more than just being momentarily moved by a displayed event is often required. Besides being merely poetic, our displays must also be dramatic. More than merely touching on a 'something' and then moving on, as we do in our daily routines, we must somehow make the connections between the invisible currents 'shaping' our lives also visible to ourselves in some way. We must, as in an artistic presentation or performance, embed them in an unfolding drama in some way⁽¹⁴⁾. For what is done in an unfolding drama, is to foreground and make sensibly graspable the whole shape or whole character of what, nonetheless, still remains invisible - its presence as a unitary whole is portrayed or displayed in the performance or display (just as Marcel Marceau 'shows' us all the outlines of an invisible wall in his hand movements as he struggles to find an opening in it). If one is primordial enough (in one's stance) and original enough (in one's words), then one can not only express the fleeting presence of new possibilities merely glimpsed at in such a way that others cannot only glimpse them too, but one can dwell on them long enough to make them items of public discussion and attention. But to do that, we must describe them in memorable ways, in ways that enable everyone else to notice and dwell on them too.

While in the past it has been thought that critical argument and debate over theoretical matters has been central to the growth of knowledge, consideration of the power of 'display' shows that knowledge and understanding can grow in other quite different ways also: not just through our works of art, but through all those aspects of our expressions in which we mingle our representational talk of our shared circumstances as they are objectively in with our talk of them in terms of the "real presences" we feel to be at work as agencies within them. Indeed, Rorty's (1979) claim that in philosophy: "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions" (p.12), would seem to be justified. For it is the invisible presences at work in the more visible aspects of our texts, that work to shape and direct our urges and compulsions, our needs and wants an desires, as well as our judgments of worth, and the place we accord each particular judgment in the general scheme of values we apply in deciding what it is best to do those aspects of our lives we share with others. Thus, as Hanson (1958) notes, in finishing off his comments as to what seems to be important in scientific research: "The paradigm observer is not the man [or woman] who sees and reports what all normal observers see and report, but the [one] who sees in familiar objects what no one else has seen before" (p.30). But that can work too for us in this chapter: our task is to see in displays what no one has seen before, thus to show (display) why now, at this moment in history, the topic is a topic of such crucial importance.

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(Total approx 13,090 words = 42 pages)

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Notes:

1. Central to Jacoby's contribution to this volume, is the notion of "adjacency pairs," i.e., that fact that many utterances addressed by a speaker to a listener, spontaneously occasion in the listener a felt obligation, a "conditional relevance," to respond to the utterance in a certain, normatively "preferred" manner - a greeting with a return greeting, a question with an answer, a request with a compliance, and so on. But the preference here is not a matter of a participant's desires or wishes. The felt obligation is a presence with its own requirements, such that if one fails to respond in the preferred manner, one must offer an account (a justification or excuse) as to why one is acting in such an unexpected manner.

2. Here, as Mead (1934) suggests, "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" (Mead, 1934, pp 77-78).

3. See the accounts of "joint action" in Shotter (1980, 1984, 1993a and b).

4. To amplify this point a little: Goffman (1967) remarks that the individual "cannot act in order to satisfy these obligations, for such an effort would require him to shift his [sic] attention from the topic of the conversation to the problem of being spontaneously involved in it. Here, in a component of non-rational impulsiveness - not only tolerated but actually demanded - we find an important way in which the interactional order differs from other kinds of social order" (p.115).

5. It was Franz Brentano (1973) who, in 1874, was responsible for introducing the concept of intentionality into modern philosophy. .... (to be continued)

6. Perhaps we should acknowledge that Vico (1968), just as much as Wittgenstein, understood the ways in which our current ways of making sense (while undeniably revealing in all kinds of ways), are also concealing too. They both hide from us not only the processes which went into their own production, but also (because of the demand for clarity), the proper character of their own beginnings. Aware of just these difficulties, Vico suggests that we must undertake some prior preparations of ourselves, if we are to overcome them. To recognize the character of the kind of beginning points we need, we must change our attitudes in some way. To this end, Vico discusses two conceits, or borie, to which we as scholars (inexperienced as we are in a knowledge of practical activities) can fall victim:

"On the one hand, the conceit of nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no hope of getting the principles of our Science from the philologians. And on the other hand the conceit of 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 them from philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world" (para. 330).

Indeed, in his history, philosophers came last on the tree of knowledge: "First [were] the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this is the order of all progress from the first origins" (Vico, 1968, para.22). The kind of understanding we need might find the work of philosophers... less relevant the more advanced it is...

7. My original intention was to finish this section with an account taken from Cassirer's (1957) volume three of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Part I. The Expressive Function and the World of Expression, as he summarizes so well everything already mentioned. Space restrictions, however, made it impossible. Let me give the flavor of Cassirer's account, however, with the following quote: "The mythical consciousness does not deduce essence from appearance, it possesses - it has - the essence in the appearance. The essence does not recede behind the appearance but is manifested in it; it does not cloak itself in the appearance but in the appearance is given to itself. Here the phenomenon as it is given in any moment never has a character of mere representation, it is one of authentic presence: here a reality is not "actualized" through the mediation of the phenomenon but is present in full actuality in the phenomenon" (pp.67-68).

8. Levy-Bruhl was a student of Durkheim. By collective representations, he means, those notions which in "being collective, they force themselves on the individual" (p.25). They are, we might say, an aspect of the individual's shared background or everyday common sense understanding of their world.

9. Wittgenstein (1981) also remarks: "There is a strongly musical element in verbal language. (A sigh, the intonation of voice in a question, in an announcement, in longing; all the innumerable gestures made with the voice.)" (no.161). He also notes that understanding an utterance is like understanding a theme in music, in that both, so to speak, 'point to something outside themselves'. Music makes an impression on me, he says, connected with things in its surroundings - e.g., with our language and its intonations... If I say for example: Here it's as if a conclusion were being drawn, here as if something were being conformed, this is like an answer to what was said before, - then my understanding presupposes a familiarity with inferences, with confirmation, with answers" (no.175).

10. Here Rosenfield endnotes that he is quoting: J.D. Caputo, "Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, Part II," Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (October 1974): 64.

11. Rosenfield here cites: Spinoza, Ethics, part 5, propositions 32-33.

12. Here, we might note Tucker's (2001) claims, that the oscillations between one or another understanding of an ambiguous figure is a matter of "a conscious choice between two interpretations" (p.401).

13. It is worth repeating this quote in full here, for it illustrates the extent to which we are subject to an extensive sequence of interconnected compulsions: "We now have a theory, a 'dynamic theory' of the proposition; of language, but it does not present itself to us as a theory. For it is the characteristic thing about such a theory that it looks at a special clearly intuitive case and says: 'That shows how things are in every case; this case is the exemplar of all cases.' - 'Of course! It has to be like that' we say, and are satisfied. We have arrived at a form of expression that strikes us as obvious. But it is as if we had now seen something lying beneath the surface.

The tendency to generalize the case seems to have a strict justification in logic: here one seems completely justified in inferring: 'If one proposition is a picture, then any proposition must be a picture, for they must all be of the same nature'. For we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence" (Z, no.444).

14. As Ochs et al (1994) note: "Visual representations are treated [in their] collaborative interpretative activity as stages on which scientists dramatize understandings of their own and others' work" (p.152).