Abstract: How can we learn something general, something that we can carry across to other circumstances, from something rare, unrepeatable, unique, fleeting, and utterly particular? Why do we value unique works of art so much? Why are Wittgenstein's "reminders" so useful? Something very special emerges over time in the spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive and responsive relations occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses in our surroundings: invisible, but very real "presences" can emerge in these dynamically unfolding relations which can teach us new "ways of going on."

One central theme running through the whole of my talk here today, is to do with how we might come to know a unique other or otherness as unique, as who or what they are in themselves, to 'enter into' their world, to acknowledge and respect the otherness of the other. Or, to put it another way, how is it possible for a person (or a company, or whatever) to express their own unique individuality within a language made up, seemingly, of only a limited number of repeatable forms... or, for a work of art, to teach us a new way of looking at, or listening to, the world around us, a new way or style of looking or listening, a new sensibility?

This is connected with another, with how we might understand change: We are very used to talking of change as something that can be explained in terms of principles, rules, or conventions, of changes taking place within a reality already well-known to us, with what we might call ordinary changes. Instead, I want to talk about surprising changes, changes that happen unexpectedly, changes that strike us with amazement or wonder, extraordinary changes, changes in the very character of what we take our reality to be. In short, instead of changes of a quantitative and repeatable kind, I want to talk about first-time, unique, irreversible changes, novelties, changes of a qualitative kind.

This leads me on to a third topic, one that seems to me an utterly new topic in that - although it is quite well-known and familiar to us in an everyday sense - it has not yet aroused in us any distinctive acknowledgment of its very special nature. This new topic is simply "life" or "livingness," the properties, characteristics, or aspects of living bodies, of organic forms as enduring, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, structurizing structures.

A fourth topic - arising out of the special nature of living things - is that everything of importance to us, here at this conference, occurs in meetings of one kind or another. Something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin to respond to each other (more happens than them merely having an impact on one another). As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it: "our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different" (no.284). But more than this, there is in such meetings the creation of qualitatively new, quite novel and distinct forms of life, which are more than merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing. Elsewhere (Shotter, 1980, 1984) I have discussed this under the heading of "joint action," and more recently (Shotter, 1993a&b) as "dialogically-structured" activity, but here I want to go a step further and talk of it as "chiasmically-structured" activity, following Merleau-Ponty's (1968) account of its nature in his last book. In just a moment, we will find that the notion of "real presences" and that of the "chiasmic structuring" of our socially created realities, are directly connected. -- But just to give a hint here of their relation, let me remind you that Bateson (1979), in Mind and Nature, noted that the chaismic interweaving of our visual relating to our surroundings through our two eyes, gave rise to the presence of depth in our looking.

Given these all these themes so far, let me try to sum up their influence by saying that, running through everything I have to say here today, will be a focus on spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive and responsive activity:

• -spontaneous, because it is immediate and not pre-mediated;
• -living, in that it has its existence only in a continuous responsive and adjustive relation with events occurring in its surroundings;
• -bodily, in that it is not hidden inside individual people's heads;
• -expressive, in that it is a kind of activity that moves others to respond to it;
• -and responsive, in that it occurs spontaneously in response to events having their source in the activities of the others and othernesses in its surroundings.

Now all these new foci of concern - understanding the unique otherness of the other; the power of extraordinary changes; the special nature of the "livingness" of some entities; the chiasmic structuring of living meetings; and the power of our living expressions - arouse for me, one more concern, a concern that seems to me to be of the utmost importance. It is to do with our taking into account what must be 'already there' in the background to our meetings, to make it possible for us to 'go on' with each other, to 'follow' each other without being misled, becoming disoriented or confused.

Now all here can agree, I think, that there are no prior justifications to which to appeal for one's claims as to it is appropriate to say or not as to the nature of a particular, given situation. But to claim that there can be no shared background structure of feeling, no shared tendencies to respond to the other's expressions, no shared anticipations of the moves that they might make - even if the background in question is one without a long history, but is only created at that moment of meeting, when one living being acknowledges the presence of another - would be to claim that there is no shared basis at all in terms of which to form any agreements, nothing which is constitutive at all of shared, practical 'ways of going on'. Thus to claim, as Rorty (1989) does, "that there is nothing 'beneath' socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human being" (p.xiii) - without, at the same time, alluding to the spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive and responsive activities that are constitutive of our shared 'ways of going on' in our relationships - is to claim that the deconstruction of all the shared or sharable bases to our lives together, can be carried on 'all the way down', so to speak.

As I see it, the ire that this provokes comes from the fact that this purely linguistic version of social constructionism, and other post-structuralist versions, are not radical enough. They have left in place Descartes's (1968) account of our background reality as "a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine" (p.xx), a vision of our spontaneously responsive social relations to each other as similar to those of dust particles in Brownian movement. And this of course gives us no shared guidance at all in our controversies with each other as which of each other's claims to adopt for the best.

This brings me to my final theme: Having focused on the importance of events occurring in our meetings, it is necessary to focus on the nature of people's initial stance or initial attitude as they approach each other in such meetings. For these 'set the scene', so to speak, the 'relational dimensions', the 'style', the 'way of going on' for how participants will react to everything occurring within the event of their meeting. It clearly makes an enormous difference if we approach another person on meeting them with a clenched fist ready to strike, or with an open hand ready to shake their's. [Performance of rhythms... of temporal sequencings... ***/ ***\ ***/ ***??] Indeed, in many temporally unfolding circumstances (but not in all), there is something special in the sequencing of our activities, in their temporal succession. If the separate elements we encounter seem to unfold in a special way, not just haphazardly but according to a certain style, they give rise in all who encounter them, prior to any thought or deliberation on their part, i.e., spontaneously, a shared or at least shareable background sense in terms of which all our individual actions in such circumstances, can have meanings intelligible to others.

This claim, that our human activities are not just formless, that not just anything can follow or be connected with anything, is clearly connected with Wittgenstein's (1953, 1974) claim, that most of our activities on investigation seem to have a "grammar" to them. And as he sees it, it is their shared grammar that we must observe if our expressions and utterances are to be intelligible to those around us. It is this - not the constraints imposed on us externally by a physical reality - that makes it impossible for us just to talk as we please. "Grammar is not accountable to any reality," he claims, "it is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary" (Wittgenstein, 1974, no.133, p.184). Bakhtin (1986) expresses a similar notion in his claim that "the word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet but a trio)" (p.122) - three, not just two, active agencies are at work in shaping an utterance.

But in saying this, Wittgenstein is, I think, using the word 'meaning' here in a special practical sense, not to do with us having a special, conscious experience of something meaning something in our heads, but to do with - as we all now like to say - 'going on'. It is a sense of the notion of meaning well expressed, I think, by George Mead (1934) is his claim 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). But this is just to repeat the point already made by Wittgenstein above, that meaning begins with our spontaneously responsive, bodily reactions to each other in our meetings with each other.

Here, then, if we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement with them - due to the expressive, responsiveness of the living bodies involved in such meetings - a very different form of understanding becomes available to us in our relationships with living things than with dead things. This ongoing, practical understanding of how to 'go on' in the interaction, arises in the intricate 'orchestration' of the interplay occurring between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward those others (or othernesses) and their equally responsive incoming expressions toward us. In that interplay at each moment, as in a dance, or a hand-shake, or an orchestral symphony, distinctive, dynamically changing forms emerge, in which all involved are, so to speak, 'participant parts'. The uniquely distinctive forms emerge in an unfolding sequence of changes (or differencings'), each differencing giving rise to a uniquely 'shaped' circumstance which, although invisible, is felt by all who are involved as participants within it in the same way.

But what is the nature of the interplays involved here? They are dialogically-structured or chiasmically-structured; they are a 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. Indeed, 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. And to the extent that it is has a temporally unfolding pattern to it -- ***/ ***\ ***/ ***?? -- it gives rise to a 'grammar', to a structure of feeling to do with 'ways of going on'.

In other words, most importantly, the invisible forms created in the interplay of living activity between us are neither wholly alive (as self-maintaining organisms) not wholly dead (as self-contained, inert objects) - taking my lead from George Steiner (1989) I will call these invisible forms "Real Presences." (Elsewhere, following Bakhtin (1986), I have called these understandings relationally-responsive understandings, to contrast them with the representational-referential understandings more familiar to us in our traditional intellectual dealings.) And what is of crucial importance about a "real presence" or a "relationally-responsive" understanding is, not that you 'get the picture', so to speak, but that it 'calls' you to respond in a certain way: a greeting with a greeting; a question with an answer; a request with a compliance, etc... In short, a real presence, although invisible, has agency, and can exert the force of an agent upon us.

To give an example of what I mean here, consider the simple exercise of looking at the person next to you either mutually or instrumentally, i.e., either focusing on the pigmentation in one of their eyes, or looking at 'them'. Those looked at instrumentally experience themselves as objects, and if they attend to the looker's eyes, they will notice the fixity, the stone faced nature of the look.

Oliver Sacks's (1985) case of Dr P. - the case of the man who mistook his wife's face for a hat - is a case in point here. Dr P. looked at Sacks not so much stony faced as if scanning him... there was, says Sacks, "some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression" (p.8). The case of Dr P. is important because it demonstrates so very well the crucial role of our spontaneous, living, bodily, responsiveness to our surroundings in providing us with a shaped and vectored orientational sense of how, practically, to 'go on' within them. Dr P., trying like a good Cartesian to calculate it out, sometimes got it wrong - hence, a hat shaped entity at the height of the hat-stand he remembered placing his hat on when he first enter Sacks's consulting room... an understandable mistake for a Cartesian.

But to grasp this further, let me return to the example of binocular vision: Just as we don't actually see leftness and rightness as objective features of our surroundings, we don't 'see' depth as such either - in that sense, it is invisible - we see in depth. Depth is constitutive of how we see the world before us and of the possibilities for bodily motion it affords us. Hence I can't practically expect to reach the back of this hall in 'one bound'. As we look out over the scene before us, we achieve an amazing, and currently quite inexplicable, 'synthesis', i.e., a chiasmic intertwining, of fragments of information, gathered from here and these, at different moments in time, to constitute for ourselves the "relational 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 at that distance, then on that point 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 both a unified and indivisible visual scene 'out there', and a sense 'in here' of how we are placed within it. I call 'depth' a relational dimension for, simply, it is to do with seeing relations between things - and we when we call a conversation or a piece of writing 'deep' we use the word, I think, in the same way, to indicate the fact that we are in a circumstance with many cross connections present within it.

But even with something as simple as looking over a visual scene, a picture, a painting, a sculpture, and art object of any kind, there are different styles of looking, different bodily ways of using your eyes, and 'orchestrating' into those movements, other basic bodily capacities - we can move up closer to the painting or further away, adopt a new angle, pause for a moment to make a comparison (in fact or from memory), we can stop to ask a friend's opinion or to recall a text's account, and so on, and so on. And if in these movements we open ourselves to the 'calls' coming to us from the object as look over it, we find ourselves not so much looking at it - as in our instrumental looking at our neighbor - as looking according to it. Then, over time, as I 'dwell with' the work of art, between it and myself, a real presence emerges with 'its' own requirements, with 'its' own calls to which I - if I am to do the work 'justice', to 'dwell with it' responsibly. When we 'look over' or 'look with' a picture in this way, "I would be at great pains," says Merleau-Ponty (1964), "to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it" (p.164). Rather than looking at it, I look beyond it, or through it, to see other things in my world in its light; it is, would could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it gives me a way of looking. Thus, as Steiner (1989) suggests, "the streets of our cities are different after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh (p.164)... It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueducts wear-walking shoes after Paul Klee" (p.188). Or, as Paul Klee himself remarked: "In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me... I was there listening..." (Quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.167).

Thus, just as paintings can 'instruct' us in a possible style or way of looking, a possible way of relating ourselves visually to our surroundings, so can an appropriate piece of text can also 'instruct' us in different possible styles or ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings as well, as can another's voice. Indeed, just as we all can be spontaneously 'moved' by a piece of music being played in a concert hall, to some extent at least in the same way, while listening to its sequential unfolding over a period of time, so we can also all be 'moved', to a similar shared extent, in responding sequentially to any aspect of human expression - for, to repeat, what is at issue here is not the 'seeing' of a finalized form or pattern, but the intertwining of one's own living, bodily responsiveness with influences from something other than ourselves to create a "real presence" between us, an influence that can instruct us in a new, possible way of going on. This is the way that those of you who read Wittgenstein can - if you take the appropriate dialogical stance or attitude to his texts - experience his voice, not as giving us new information we till then lacked, but as giving us orientation, helping find our 'way about' when we didn't know 'how to go on', helping us in this or that practical situation to make a connection we might not otherwise make.

So, what I have been dwelling on here - besides all the other points I tried to make about the importance of our spontaneous living bodily expressive responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us - is the importance of a certain attitude or stance: that of entering into a living, dialogically-structured or chaismically-structured relation with something before us that disturbs or puzzles us, rather than trying to 'solve' it as a 'problem', and how allowing ourselves to enter into such a relation can allow an other or otherness to teach us something utterly novel, something that we could not learn in any other way.

Thus, to end in a way that I hope captures and expresses something of what I have been trying to express above, I would like to use four inter-related quotations from Wittgenstein. The first is to do with a characteristic difficulty that often occurs in our inquiries:

"... the difficulty - I might say- is not that of finding [a] solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. "We have already said everything. - Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!" This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it. The difficulty here is: to stop" (1981, no.314).

"Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing a man who thinks he is unobserved performing an everyday activity. Let us imagine a theater; the curtain goes up and we see the man alone in a room, walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc.,... We should be observing something more wonderful than anything a playwright could arrange to be acted or spoken on the stage: life itself. -- But then we do see this everyday without it making the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view" (1980a, p.4).

"You really could call [a work of art], not exactly the expression of a feeling, but at least the expression of feeling, or felt expression. And you could say too that in so far as people understand it, they resonate in harmony with it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself" (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.58).

"I know my way about in a room: that is, without needing a moment's reflection, I can find the door, open and shut it, use any piece of furniture, I don't have to look for the table, the books, the chest of drawers or think what can be done with them. That I know my way around will come out in the freedom with which I move about in the room. It will also be manifested in an absence of astonishment or doubt..." (1980b, I, no.295).

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bateson, G. (1979) Mind in Nature: a Necessary Unity. London: E.P. Dutton.

Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The eye and the mind. In The Primacy of Perception and other Essays. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.

Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, O. (1985) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Duckworth.

Shotter, J. (1980) Action, joint action, and intentionality. M. Brenner (Ed.) The Structure of Action . Oxford: Blackwell, pp.28-65..

Shotter, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shotter, J. (1993) Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: Sage.

Steiner, G. (1989) Real Presences. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1974) Philosophical Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980a) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.