JOINT ACTION, DIALOGICALLY-STRUCTURED RELATIONS, CHIASMIC RELATIONS, and ENTANGLEMENT.
John Shotter (web site: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds)
“If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it 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” (From Merleau-Ponty, Ch.4 The Intertwining - the Chiasm, 1968, p.130).
Entanglement: “When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representation, enter into a temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described as before, viz., by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics” (Erwin Schroedinger, “Discussion of probability relations between separated systems,” Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc, 31, p.555, 1935).
Notes on ‘living beings’:
1. Style, identity, developmental continuity
● Living bodies, organic forms are enduring, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, self-structurizing structures.
● They change internally by growth and differentiation into more internally complex forms, while retaining their identity as the identifiable individuals they are.
● In other words, there is always a kind of developmental continuity involved in the unfolding of all living activities.
● Thus, the earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least the style of what is to come later – thus we can respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion.
● In other words, all living activities give rise to what we might call identity preserving changes or deformations – as T.S. Eliot puts it: “In my beginning is my end.”
● The Cartesian world, you realize, is a dead world, a world of mechanical movement, a world of forces and impacts in which movement is thought of as a change in the spatial configuration of a set of separately existing parts – which, in their changes, they can ‘wear out’!
● Living movement, living change taking place in time, confronts us, we shall find, with some quite new phenomena, needing some quite different concepts, if we are not simply to assimilate it to Cartesian forms of change – our sense of the ‘style’ of what is to come!
2. Internal relations:
● Even the most complex of ‘man-made’ systems, machines for instance, are constructed piece by piece from objective parts; that is, from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the system or not.
● But whole people as natural systems are certainly not constructed piece by piece; on the contrary, they grow.
● They develop from simple individuals into richly structured ones in such a way that their ‘parts’ at any one moment in time owe not just their character but their very existence both to one another and to their relations with the ‘parts’ of the system at some earlier point in time – their history is just as important as their logic in their growth
● Because of this it is impossible to picture natural systems in spatial diagrams. As Capek (1965, p.162) remarks, “any spatial symbol contemplated at a given moment is complete, i.e., all its parts are given at once, simultaneously, in contrast with the temporal reality which by its very nature is incomplete and whose ‘parts’ – if we are justified in using such a thoroughly inadequate term – are by definition successive, i.e., nonsimultaneous” (in Shotter, 1984, pp.42-43).
● All changes ‘gesture’ or ‘point’ beyond themselves (Brentano -intentionality).
Meetings (events occurring within joint actions):
● Something very special can occur on those occasions when two or more of us approach each other bodily, face-to-face, and engage in a meeting, in a joint action or dialogically-structured encounter.
● When someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for a person’s acts are partly ‘shaped’ by being responsive to the acts of the others around them – this is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins (“joint action” - Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b).
● Our actions are neither yours nor mine; they are truly ‘ours’.
● Such activity is not simply action (for it is not done by individuals; and cannot be explained by giving people’s reasons).
● Nor is it simply behavior (to be explained as a regularity in terms of its causal principles).
● It constitutes a distinct, third sphere of activity with its own distinctive properties.
● This third sphere of activity involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or embodied form of practical-moral (Bernstein, 1983) understanding, which, in being constitutive of people’s social and personal identities, is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us.
● What is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex ‘orchestration’ 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 the borders or margins.
● Activities in this sphere lack specificity; they are only partially determined.
● They are a complex ‘orchestration’ of many different kinds of influences.
● They are just as much material as mental.
● They are just as much felt as thought, and thought as felt.
● Their intertwined, complex nature 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.
● They are also non-locatable - they are ‘spread out’ among all those participating in them.
● They are neither ‘inside’ people, but nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in that space where inside and outside are one.
● Nor is there a separate before and after (Bergson), neither an agent nor an effect, but only a meaningful whole which cannot divide itself into separable parts.
● But, as living activities, they have a ‘style’ and ‘point’ beyond themselves toward both events in their surroundings, and what can come next in the future.
“How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see an action” (Z. no.567)... (cf also 1980, II, no.629).
● Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice - while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so - that is their central defining feature
● And: it is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity interesting... for at least two reasons:
● 1) to do with practical investigations into how people actually do manage to ‘work things out’, and the part played by the ways of talking we interweave into the many different spheres of practical activity occurring between us.
● But also 2) for how we might refine and elaborate these spheres of activity, and how we might extend them into novel spheres as yet unknown to us.
‘WITHNESS-THINKING’ AND ‘ABOUTNESS-THINKING’
“Thus Hienroth observes properly: that my [i.e., Goethe’s] faculty of thinking is “objectively active [gegenständliches Denken]”, whereby he means to say that my thinking does not separate itself from its objects; that the elements of the objects, the concrete intuitions (Anschauungen) enter into that thinking and are most inwardly permeated by it in form; that my way of seeing (anschauen) is itself a thinking, my thinking a way of seeing - a procedure said friend does not wish to deny his approbation” (Goethe, HA, 13: 37, quoted in Brady, p.97).
As I see it, abstract and general theories are of little help to each of us in the unique living of our unique lives together, either as ordinary people or as professional practitioners. While the specific words of another person, uttered as a ‘reminder’ at a timely moment as to the character of our next step within an ongoing practical activity, can be a crucial influence in its development and refinement. Thus, following Goethe, while resonating also with Wittgenstein and Bakhtin, we can outline a distinction between ‘withness-thinking’ and ‘aboutness-thinking’ as follows:
● Withness (dialogic)-thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’.
● It is a meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of ‘skins’ or of two kinds of ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty), such that they come into ‘touch’ with each other.
● They both touch and are touched, and in the relations between their outgoing touching and resultant incoming, responsive touches of the other, the sense of a ‘touching’ or ‘moving’ difference emerges.
● In the interplay of living movements intertwining with each other, new possibilities of relation are engendered, new interconnections are made, new ‘shapes’ of experience can emerge.
● It gives rise, not to a ‘seeing’, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor to an interpretation (a representation), for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions.
● Neither is it merely a feeling, for carries with it as it unfolds a bodily sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to one’s momentary placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction.
● For it gives rise to a ‘shaped’ and ‘vectored’ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings – engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do.
● In short, we are spontaneously ‘moved’ toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking.
● Aboutness (monologic)-thinking, however, is unresponsive to another’s expressions; it works simply in terms of a thinker’s ‘theoretical pictures’ – but, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to interpret it, and to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action.
● Thus, in aboutness-thinking, “(in its extreme pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness... Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.293).
● In other words, it works simply in terms of ‘pictures’, thus, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action – “The cat sat on the mat, the mat was red, the cats was black – get the picture?” “Yes, so what?”
Thinking ‘with’ an other’s voice, with their utterances, in mind: Here, then, we can begin to see another way in which what we call ‘theory’ can be an influence in, literally, ‘instructing’ us in our practical actions out in the world of our everyday, practical affairs. Instead of turning away from them, and burying ourselves in thought in an attempt to fit them into an appropriate theoretical scheme in order to respond to them later, in its terms, we can turn ourselves responsively toward them immediately. Indeed, we can begin an intensive, i.e., in detail, and extensive, exploratory interaction with them, approaching them this way and that way... ‘moved’ to act in this way and that in accord with the beneficial ‘reminders’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.127) issued by others to us, as a result of their explorations. In other words, seeing with another’s words in mind can itself be a thoughtful, feelingful, way of seeing, while thinking with another’s words in mind can also be a feelingful, seeingful, way of thinking – a way of seeing and thinking that brings one into a close and personal, living contact with one’s surroundings, with their subtle but mattering details. This is a style of seeingful and feelingful thought that can be of help to us in our practical daily affairs, and in further explorations of our own human lives together – in ordinary interpersonal communication, psychotherapy, intercultural communication, management, administration, government, etc., and, in fact, in science, in understanding how ‘aboutness (monolgical)-thinking’ actually works.
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The distinction between ‘action’ and ‘behavior’ in scientific Psychology: “... It is only because people themselves know whether they intended their activity or not, and whether they achieved what they meant to achieve, that they are able to answer such questions; beings unable to distinguish between what they intended and what just happened would find such questions quite senseless.
Besides being crucial in everyday life, though, such a distinction is crucial in the conduct of science, absolutely crucial: it is only because we can sense, when acting in accord with theories of what the world might be like, whether the results of our actions accord with or depart from the expectations engendered by the theories, that we can ever put such theories to empirical test — this is the only way of establishing the nature of a theory̓s purchase on reality. If people were unable to distinguish between what happened as a result of their intentional activity and what just happened, by itself, there would be no basis for scientific inquiries at all. Thus, no other more fundamental basis for deciding the truth of empirical matters exists; nor will one ever be found — not as some have proposed, in the organizational complexity of matter — for how could it ever be established as a true basis?” (Shotter, 1975, p.86).
References:
Brady, R.H. (1998) The idea in nature: rereading Goethe's organics. In D. Seamon and A. Zajonc (Eds.) Goethe's Way of Science: a Phenomenology of Nature, pp.83-111. Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Shotter, J. (1975) Images of Man in Psychological Research. London: Methuen.