ABSTRACT: In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought, as logical structures, which require interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions, or principles, if their meaning is to be understood. However, in this article I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity - a realm of expressive bodily movements and changes - which lies beyond the orderly or 'calculational' modes of understanding we currently think of as our linguistic forms of understanding. It is a realm in which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding, manifested in responsive bodily activities, are possible. Central to our understandings within this sphere, is the notion of invisible but felt, "real presences" (Steiner, 1989): the idea that besides the visible objects in our surroundings, dynamic but relatively stable structures of inter-activity come into existence within these activities. Their influence can be felt as acting upon us in a way similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus within this sphere of physiognomic understandings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others can directly 'call' us into action, can issue us with 'action guiding advisories', and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their 'facial' expressions or 'tones' of voice. Below I will explore how this - some would say, 'mystic' (Levy-Bruhl) - form of participatory thought and understanding can provide us with just the kind of understanding we need if we are ever to understand the 'inner' nature of our social lives together and the part played by our expressive talk in their creation.

"Presence: an intangible spirit or mysterious influence felt to be present" (Websters)

"(meaning is a physiognomy)" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568).

Below, I want to explore a realm of understandable human activity that lies beyond the orderly, systematized, or 'computational' or 'calculational' modes of understanding we currently think of as our languaged or linguistic forms of understanding - the realm of expressive bodily movements and changes. It is a realm of participatory, as distinct from masterful, activity in which, as we shall see, we must function just as much as respondents to activity occurring around us, as free agents able ourselves to make events happen. In this realm, direct, non-interpretational, physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding are possible. As a consequence of such direct, bodily expressed forms of responsive understanding, individuals can not only be taught effective uses of new linguistic forms by those around them, but may also themselves, spontaneously, put those already learned to uniquely new uses, to signify particular and complex meanings in relation to particular and complex circumstances. Thus, among its many other characteristics, this is a realm of activity in which individuals may express meanings quite unique and particular to themselves - meanings related to their own unique attitudes and inclinations toward aspects of their surroundings often unnoticed by, or of no initial interest to, the others around them - and still have them nonetheless, to some extent at least, still understood by those others. Indeed, we talk of people within this sphere as expressing their own individual thoughts and feelings, their wants and desires, their sufferings, and so on; we treat their outer expressions as related in some way to an 'inner' realm of states, objects, events, and processes. We talk of it as an 'inner' realm because we (mistakenly) take their self-expressive talk of states and objects, etc., as working in just the same way as their factual talk about their outer surroundings, except that the states and objects, etc., referred to are invisible and seem to be 'hidden' inside them (Mulhall, 1990; Johnston, 1993). But, as we shall see, if Wittgenstein is correct, rather than being merely expressive of our inner lives, our expressive talk is constitutive of them. It is, then, to this realm of spontaneously responsive, living bodily inter-activity that I wish to draw attention. For, in our still Cartesian (Greek and Judeo-Christian) influenced modes of intellectual inquiry, it has been all but totally ignored, thus denying us access to that crucial sphere of activity from within which, as we shall see, all our higher, more self-consciously conducted forms of mental activities emerge, providentially⁽¹⁾, from lower, more spontaneously expressed forms.
 

To turn first to the Cartesian still at work in our modes of inquiry: In his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1651, Descartes (1968) set out a characterization of our "external world," and a method for thinking about its nature, that has influenced our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and the relations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be "obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philosophers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws" (p.62). Also in establishing his method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excluded all our bodily activities, our bodily doings, sufferings, and respondings from consideration: "This 'I', that is, the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body," he said (p.54).

Thus in Descartes's (1968) view of our existence, we are self-conscious, self-contained, and self-controlled subjects, i.e., wilful but disengaged, disembodied, and immaterial beings, set over against an objective, mechanically-structured, external, material world. And in seeking knowledge of its nature, we must use methodical thought modeled on Euclid's geometry. For it was Descartes's great belief that it was indeed possible to translate, methodically, all that was unknown into the realm of indisputable common knowledge. Starting from "what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly" (p.41) to his mind, and then proceeding by way of those "long chains of reasonings, quite simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difficult demonstrations" (p.41), gave him cause to think, he said, "that everything which can be encompassed by man's knowledge is linked in the same way" (p.41). In other words, we should seek to represent everything theoretically within a single order of connectedness. For by the use of such a method, "there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it" (p.41). Indeed, such a method of reasoning - in which we must "borrow all the best from geometric analysis and algebra" (p.42) - could, he suggested, lead us to the discovery of God's already established and eternal laws, "thereby mak[ing] ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature" (p.78).

Many such Cartesian influences are still at work in our disciplines in the human and behavioral sciences. As a "form shaping ideology" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.83), as a "structure of feeling⁽²⁾" (Williams, 1977), or as a thought style" (Fleck, 1979), they still, it seems to me, selectively determine both our aims and the phenomena to which we attend in our inquiries in the human and behavioral sciences. Oriented only toward what we see as objective in our surroundings, we attend away from the 'shaping' influence of such a background set of felt influences, of such spontaneously expressed responses or inclinations in our inquiries.

But as Kuhn (1970) noted: "Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers... to questions like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licences the student for professional practice" (pp.4-5). Thus all our professionally institutionalized inquiries proceed on the assumption that we already know how best to visualize and represent the basic, general nature of ourselves and our world, and not only how to choose the relevant elements of our study, but also how to link them together into a systematically interconnected unity of some kind. And further, in a strongly rationalistic culture such as our's - even though, paradoxically, its general character, as an inert, mechanistically organized world, is already predetermined - we are nonetheless obliged to present our views as having been arrived at by deduction from the material represented. But to do this, we must employ a writing style in which the most abstract philosophical principles and concrete factual details must be melded into a unity of tone and viewpoint, a rhetorical style in which we as authors disappear, and in which objectivity as such is pervasive. It is a form of writing within which we claim that "the facts speak for themselves."

However, in reality, the matter is otherwise. As Kant (1970) put it in 1781, if we are to follow "the true path of a science" (p.17), then we must function only as "an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated,"and we must refuse to allow ourselves "to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings" (p.20). But in seeking only mastery and in refusing to allow ourselves to be led by (to be spontaneously responsive to) nature in any way, we restrict ourselves to acting only in terms of our own wants, desires, or reasons. To repeat, we ignore an importance source of knowledge: our spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. In other words, the form shaping ideology implicitly at work in such a style of writing is, as Bakhtin (1984) terms it, one of a monological kind. In transforming the world into a representation arrived at only as the result of deduction, we "inevitably transform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction" (p.83). We make ourselves "deaf to the other's response" (p.293).

How might our disciplinary lives might change if we were to adopt a very different "form shaping ideology" in our inquiries in the human and behavioral sciences? What if, rather than as Descartes's self-centered and self-controlled, subjective minds, 'standing' (if that is the right word to apply to such disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, we begin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger, ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant parts within such a whole, rather than seeking exclusively to be "masters and possessors" of it, we might also find ourselves subjected as respondents to 'its' requirements as much as, if not more than, we can subject it to our's. If that were so, while still perhaps seeking mastery of some of its aspects - seeking to understand how we might use them as a means to our own ends - we would also need to seek another quite different kind of understanding. We would need to understand 'its' expressions, respond to 'its' calls, and so on. For, as an other or otherness to which we must, unavoidably, respond, we would need to develop forms of response in which we can collaborate or participate in with 'it' in achieving our goals.

Now the quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explanations; we seek sure-fire ways in which we can intervene in ongoing activities causally, i.e., in a one-way, mechanical cause and effect fashion, to influence their outcome in predictable ways. Or, to put it another way, we seek to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar. The desire to understand, however - as a matter of understanding how to respond to the uniquely expressive physiognomic aspects of our surroundings, for this once and never to be repeated time - is much harder to describe. It is not a matter of something happening to us intellectually. In what follows, I will try to explicate it in practical, Wittgensteinian terms, in which "a philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about'" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123), and in which an understanding enables one to say and to act in a way one can justify to others, that "Now I know how to go on" (no. 154). In other words, such a form of understanding is something that we show, manifest, or display in our everyday practical activities when, for instance, we tell someone that we have understood their spoken street directions, how to follow a cooking recipe, how to execute a piece of carpentry, or how to play a piece of music well, or in telling someone else what another has told us, or of what we have read in a book. Rather than precise factual information, in such a form of understanding we gain an orientation, a sense of where and how we are 'placed' in relation to the others are us within the landscape of possibilities within we are all acting. We might call them orientational-understandings. But, to repeat, such understandings - which have, I suggest, a relationally-responsive form to contrast them with the representational-referential forms much more familiar to us in our intellectual lives - do not make themselves readily available to us in our intellectual reflections. Just as our understanding of questions posed to us is expressed in our answers to them, so is our relationally-responsive understanding of other events occurring around us manifested or displayed in the responses we give to them.

As George Mead (1934) puts it: "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, my emphasis). Prior to our conscious awareness of our actions as having meaning, prior to our establishing of any social conventions, our acting in accord with the rule-like requirements of our surrounding circumstances is something we do - difficult though it may be to accept the fact - spontaneously, without choice. It is as if there is an extra voice, an authoritative voice, situated in our surroundings, 'telling' us what next to do. In his investigations into the question, "How am I able to obey a rule?," Wittgenstein (1953) describes our acting according to a rule as follows: "When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly (no.219). It is as if we hear the 'voice' of the rule and "... we do what it tells us" (no.223). So that when we see a series of numbers, we see it in a certain way, "...algebraically, and as a segment of an expansion... we look to the rule for instruction and do something, without appealing to any thing else for guidance" (no.228)⁽³⁾.

Thus, the turn I want to take here, toward accepting ourselves as primarily living bodies, related directly to our surroundings by our spontaneous responsiveness to them, is more than just the turn away from treating ourselves as disembodied minds, related only indirectly to our surroundings by inner, mental representations of it. It is also a turn away from the focus on thoughts and beliefs as being central to our intellectual lives, toward a central focus on our spontaneously performed activities and practices. In other words, to repeat, it is a turn toward a participative and dialogically-structured world in which meanings arise inevitably and inexorably in people's living, responsive reactions to the 'callings' of events occurring around them. As such, it is a turn in which few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclinations, the disciplinary resources upon which we draw in our intellectual inquiries - shaped as they still are by an unidentified and thus remitting Cartesianism - can remain unchanged. Indeed, as I will argue in a moment, we will need a new kind of understanding of a new world, a world that might be called the precursor world to Descartes's external world. We need to know, as participants within it, our way around inside of what is variously called "the Background" (Searle, 1983; Wittgenstein, 1980), or the "primordial" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968). I call it a precursor world, as we shall find ourselves (as a perhaps unexpected consequence of our turn to such a participative world) already involved in executing spontaneously within it, precursors to, or, in Wittgenstein's (1981, no.541) terms, "prototypes" of, all our later, more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.
 

Central to the exploration I want to conduct below, then, is a very special phenomenon that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically-structured, living, embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us - when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against them, and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement with them. It is here, 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, that a very special kind of understanding of this special phenomenon becomes available to us. The phenomenon in question is the creation within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in the situation at that moment of distinctive, dynamically changing forms, an emerging sequence of changes (or differencings') each one with its own unique 'shape' which, although invisible, is felt by all involved as participants within it in the same way. We can find a model for such felt forms in, say, the 3-D shapes, the 'spirals', 'pyamids', or whatever, that we see organized in depth before us as we scan over particular 2-D random-dot-stereograms. (Another paradigm, of course, is that of 'seeing' meaning in the array of print spread out before us on this page.) While we may scan our two eyes over the 2-D stereogram before us as we please, the dots are arranged on the page in such a way that they present us with their own unique binocular 'requirements' if we are to see the '3-D spiral' or whatever that is invisibly present within them as we scan over them. So, although we may all look over the dots as we please, they are arranged on the page in such a way that, like a camera with automatic focus, in one direction we can only find a common binocular focus at this distance, in another direction only at that distance, in another only at another distance, and so on. Thus we will all see precisely the same 'spiral'. Further, our embodied sense of it as a 3-D form will not emerge in an instant, but only in the unfolding temporal course of our visual involvement with the special patterning of the dots on the 2-D page⁽⁵⁾. But to see it, must let 'it', the 'spiral' to be, control our looking. And just as the 3-D 'spiral', say, that we see stretching out in depth before us, is located neither 'on' the page, nor 'in' our heads, but 'out' in the space between us and the page, so are all the felt dynamic forms in question here. They only have their being within our living involvements with our surroundings.

William James (1981), in his famous "The Stream of Thought" chapter, discussed in a similar way the nature of such dynamic forms, and pointed out a number of mistakes we tend to make if, in fact, our thinking has such a character. We fail, he suggested, to register "the transitive parts" of the stream and succumb to an "undue emphasizing of [its] substantive parts [i.e., its resting-places]" (p.237). Indeed, in so doing, we tend to confuse "the thoughts themselves... and the things of which they are aware... [But, while] the things are discrete and discontinuous... their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie " (p.233). In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the stream of thought as "in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all⁽⁶⁾" (p.246). And I want to suggest the same here, except that, instead of the momentary dynamic stabilities in question being in a stream of thought in people's heads, they occur out within the larger flow of inter-activity within which we and they are all responsively involved.

Clearly such forms, then, apart from their moment-by-moment emergence within the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, have no substantial existence in themselves. Yet, in being 'out there' as distinctive othernesses in their own right, partially but not wholly responsive to our actions, such forms have the character of "real presences" (Steiner, 1989). While invisible as such, they are not 'nothings', they are 'somethings' with, nonetheless, a felt presence. Understanding their nature affords us a not only a sense of 'who' the others around us 'are', but also of 'where they are coming from', how we are 'placed' in relation to them, and of how we might 'go on' with them in the future. It is a kind of understanding we express by saying that we feel 'on a footing' with them. In short, more than merely a sense of an other's nature in itself, we come to a sense of their expressions as occurring in relation to a landscape of possibilities, in fact, in relation to "a world." As an example of just such a world, present to us for a brief moment in a person's utterance, Wittgenstein (1980) asks us to consider a circumstance in which the word "Farewell!" is uttered in a certain plaintive tone of voice. "'A whole world of pain is contained in these words'," he comments. "How can it be contained in them?," he asks. "It is bound up with them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow" (p.52).

While Steiner (1984, 1989) talks of the emergence in such circumstances of a "real presence," others suggest that this phenomenon - the emergence of an active 'it' with its our requirements within the dialogically-structured activities occurring between people, an agentic 'third party' - is quite general. Gadamer (1989), for instance, puts it thus: "In genuine dialogue something emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself" (p.462). For Gadamer, that 'something' is often a tradition to which we belong, within which we participate, where "belonging is brought about by tradition's addressing us" (p.463). For Bakhtin (1986), this 'something' is termed both a "superaddressee..., whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed" (p.126) in our voicing of our utterances, as well as "the witness and the judge" (p.137). "Each dialogue takes place," he says, "as if against a background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners)... The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such) - he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it" (p.126-127). Such a third agency is at work in all dialogically-structured activities. The utterance of even a single word is, Bakhtin (1986) suggests, "a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author" (p.122). Thus, even when we are in fact all alone, once an event becomes a consciously noticeable event, then, it appears to us - if not as an already witnessed and judged event - as a noticing that we could, potentially at least, share with others. Thus, to talk of something as being "consciousness" is this way - as something witnessable with others - is to go back, as Toulmin (1982) suggests, to the origins of the word "consciousness" in con (with) and scientia (knowing) in Roman Law⁽⁸⁾, to the notion of knowing together with others or joint-knowing.

It is the existence of such 'its', such real presences as agencies, to which we must be answerably responsive, that makes our lives within a participatory reality quite distinct from life within a neutral or inert world of an external, objective kind. Like a grammar or a syntax, we experience such 'its' as external authorities to which we must be responsive and responsible. We cannot wish them away. Indeed, we feel ourselves coerced by, subjected to, or compelled 'their' requirements. We can no longer treat such a world as this, as an inert, voiceless object. But we must also, as we shall see, think of voices and language, of the importance of our bodily expressions, differently too.

In making sense of Steiner's, Gadamer's, and Bakhtin's claims, that agent-like, authoritative 'somethings' emerge to influence us within our dialogically-structured activities, we should not think of such activities as being solely and simply a matter of people exchanging well-defined words with each other. When Gadamer, for instance, talks of dialogue or conversation, a very different notion of language is at work in what he has to say than the notions of language we currently take for granted. Indeed for him, there is no such thing as language. At least, not if we think of it as a shared systematic structure of rule-governed linguistic forms, in which language users gain a competency, which they then apply in performing appropriate sentence structures on given occasions. "Language," as he sees it, "is not just one of man's possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature... Thus, that language is originally human means at the same time that man's being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic" (Gadamer, 1989, p.443). In other words, of everything toward which our understanding can be directed we can say, that "being that can be understood is language" (p.474). Or, to put it another way, more than merely reflecting on something already given, it is "the coming into language of a totality of meaning" (p.474) that makes our first-time understandings possible. Such original understandings are not "a methodic activity of the subject," not something that we ourselves do deliberately and impose on our surroundings; it is "something that the thing itself [as a real presence] does and which thought 'suffers'" (p.474).

But in making this claim, rather than an objective stance, in which a person and his or her language are two separate entities in an external relation to each other, Gadamer (1989) is taking a participatory stance toward language: "language is a medium in which I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together" (p.474). In such a participatory stance, "I," "my world," and "my language," are all internally related participant parts of a larger, indivisible, dynamic whole, a ceaseless stream of ongoing activity, of understandable-being in motion. Thus the 'parts' in question are not at all physically distinct or separable parts as such, but distinctions of function or of part being played, i.e., they are participant parts, in relation to the conduct of the whole stream of activity within which they have their existence, i.e., the "world" as a "real presence:"

"Coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals. But human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, "world' is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another" (p.446).

Unlike a mechanical assemblage constructed of objective parts, which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the mechanism or not, such an ongoing stream, as an indivisible unity, is quite different. Like the growth of a living organism, which is a living unity from its very inception, it is held together as such from within by the fact that all its parts depend on their inner relations with each other to sustain them in existence as the parts they are. They are all thus, intrinsically or reciprocally implicated in each other. Hence, when a change in the dynamic relations occurs in one region of the unfolding stream, the whole is affected. And changes produced within the whole - along with the "feelings of tendency" available to individual participants within it - 'point beyond' or 'outside' themselves, so to speak, to aspects of the whole of which they are only a part. We thus find ourselves, intrinsically and automatically, at any one moment, both oriented toward past events in our surroundings as well as toward others yet to come.

As subjects of the implicit Cartesianism in our academic traditions, however, things are different. Used to thinking of ourselves as disembodied minds, we treat ourselves as influenced by the isolated, neutral objects around us, either in a cause and effect way, or cognitively, by how we represent them to ourselves. The possibility of our responding to agentic presences in our surroundings, is quite foreign to such a style of thought. Thus when we talk of inner representations as being central to our intellectual and mental lives, we think of them only as passive objects of thought having a certain logical structure to them, such that, if the thing represented is composed of many parts, so must its representation. Hence, the fittingness of such structures to the circumstances represented cannot be a matter of an immediate correspondence; they do not 'speak for themselves'. Nor does their relation to the larger background within which they have their being play any immediate part in our understanding of their nature. It all is a matter of deliberation, of argument and interpretation among us as theorists.

But things are quite different when considered from within the indivisible stream of responsive inter-action within which we (and they) are embedded as participant parts. There, just as James (1981) suggests with respect to the stream of thought, that "it is noting jointed; it flows... [such that] the transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood" (pp.233-234), so we can suggest something similar. And just as James (1981) affirms that "the chain of consciousness is a sequence of differents," so we can agree with Bateson (1972), that what matters to us is a shift in bodily activity or energy, the occurrence of a "difference that makes a difference" (p.453). Thus, just as James (1981) notes that: "Into the awareness of thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder the continuation of previous thunder" (p.234), so can we note something similar. That once 'in touch', so to speak, with a real presence, while only an aspect of it may at any one moment occupy our focal attention, all of it as an indivisible whole is, nonetheless, spontaneously 'there' available to us, with what is in the background for us giving what is central to our attention its character.
 

There is something very special, then, not just about our dialogically-structured embedding within the ceaselessly ongoing, indivisible stream of spontaneously mutually responsive, bodily inter-activity, but about the "differences that make a difference" to us from within that embedding. Here, following Wittgenstein (1980), I want to explore how such difference-making events, along with the spontaneously responsive reactions they occasion, can, for example, function as "the origin and primitive form of the language game" (p.31). Where, what he means by the word "primitive" here, he notes elsewhere, is 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). In other words, unlike those actions we do deliberately, when we are in a one-way, monologic relation to our surroundings, in which our inner experience shape our outer expressions, on some occasions at least, when we enter into spontaneously responsive, dialogically-structured relations with our surroundings, the case is reversed: our outer expressions shape our inner experiences, and, on some occasions at least, our outer expressions are to an extent shaped by our outer circumstances. In other words, our expressions are sometimes expressive of our relations to our surroundings. But to repeat, this is not always the case. It only occurs, as Voloshinov (1986) points out, when "the immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine - and determine from within, so to speak - the structure of an utterance" (p.86). When this is the case, "the location of the organizing and formative center [of an utterance] is not within [the person] but outside. It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction" (p.85). And we can note, recalling Mead's (1934) remark above, that meaning is spontaneously present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, that this all occurs spontaneously. In other words, as these workers all in their own ways point out, we can execute original meaningful acts from within our embedding in an ongoing stream of spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity, without our being consciously or planfully aware of so doing.

Another, perhaps unexpected consequence of our embedding in such a ceaseless flow of living activity, is that the complex self-initiated acts we perform consciously and deliberately later in life, i.e., not unthinkingly and impulsively in response to circumstances, but in ways intelligible and justifiable to the others around us, as in, say, the conduct of a piece of mathematical reasoning, we can build up from an 'orchestrated' sequence of more simple acts we first execute spontaneously. In other words, we can often look back to find precursors to our supposed, current, inner mental capacities, in our earlier outer activities. This possibility, as is well-known, is explicitly claimed to be the case by Vygotsky (1986). "The general law of development," he suggests, "says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it⁽⁹⁾" (p.168).

But if we are to study how this is possible, it is our embedding in this spontaneous flow of meaningful activity, "before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs," to repeat Mead's phrase above, that we must investigate. But how? For it would seem that all our scholarly training, which orients us toward a set of already determined fundamental entities and the relations between them, and the questions that may be asked about them, steers us out onto the scene much too late, and then leads us to look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude. We only arrive on the scene after we have passed our exams and adopted certain already agreed (often Cartesian-inspired) versions of what is occurring out in the world between us into our heads. But then, not content with that, we look backward toward already existing actualities and past accomplishments to find a causal pattern in them, seeing them as mechanisms external to ourselves. Rather than looking forward, toward the new possibilities provided to us from within our present relational involvements. And we do all this with the wrong attitude. For we seek a static, dead picture, a theoretical representation of a state of affairs, rather than a living sense of our circumstances as an active, authoritative and action-guiding agency in our lives. In other words, our investigations have an 'after the fact' and a 'beside the point' quality to them⁽¹⁰⁾.

Such a set of Cartesian orientations, such an objective stance, as we have already seen, misleads us into ignoring the unique, interwoven, and reciprocal nature of our immediate, living, mindful but thoughtless, bodily interactions, and the felt ways of making sense, occurring between us even now, in the present moment - between, for example, me as a writer now and you as a later reader. It is within such present "interactive moments," if we can call them that, that such spontaneously occurring, pre-intellectual precursors to our later deliberations make their appearance. It is also within such moments that our responsiveness to our surroundings is in some way expressive of our surroundings - as when, for instance, I deliberately 'look into space', or turn to nod and smile, on meeting a stranger on the street. Indeed, it is within such moments, as we have already noted, that certain "real presences" can, like actual others around us, 'call' us to action, can issue 'action guiding advisories', and can 'witness and judge' what we do with their 'facial' and 'vocal' expressions. This is the force of both Merleau-Ponty's (1962) and Wittgenstein's (1953) suggestion that meaning in our everyday life activities is a physiognomy, which is to say, that just as a person, as a living, indivisible unity, is corporeally alive and present in every one of their expressions, in their smiles and frowns, their looks of puzzlement and understanding, so "real presences" are manifested, literally, in the same way, not behind, but in appearances. And just as a person's friendly or hostile facial expression, which, although changing in its responsiveness to us, sets to the overall 'style' of our emotional-valuative relation with them by remaining on their face during our unfolding involvement with them, so the physiognomy, the 'face', of an event in our surroundings, also sets the overall 'style' of relation to it in the same way.

It is the expressive aspect both of our own activities, and of the other activities around us, which is present in their ongoing, emerging 'shape' as they unfold in a spontaneous, dialogically-structured responsiveness with their circumstances, that our implicit Cartesianism - with its emphasis both on finished (neutral, geometrical) forms and patterns rather than 'styles' of living movement, and on - has led us to ignore. It has been, so to speak, left as an absent-presence in the background to our lives, rationally unacknowledged but nonetheless still at work at work in our (thus self-deceptive) thinking. But as Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty remind us, this more primordial form of understanding, although usually left unnoticed background, has not actually been left behind in our higher forms of mental activity. "There is," as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it, "... a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism" (p.179). Intellectually, we focus on the conceptual meaning of an utterance, but this, he suggests, is formed "by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech" (p.179). Thus, as he sees it:

"Thought and expression, then, are simultaneously constituted, when our cultural store is put at the service of this unknown law, as our body suddenly lends itself to some new gesture. The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its. This is what makes communication possible. In order that I may understand the words of another person, it is clear that his vocabulary and syntax must be 'already known' to me. But that does not mean that words do their work by arousing in me 'representations' associated with them, and which in aggregate eventually produce in me the original 'representation' of the speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not 'representations' or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being and with the 'world' at which he directs his aim" (p.183, my emphasis).

It attempting to describe the nature of what I have above called the precursor world, and to relate it to the more familiar Cartesian world of our intellectual inquiries, I have had to resort to quite a number of poetic images and metaphors: talk of faces and voices, of agents and influences, of landscapes and horizons, gaps and openings, and so on. Why is this? Why isn't a more neutral technical account possible? Some comments of Searle (1983) might be helpful here. He notes in his discussion of what he calls the "Background," that "there is a real difficulty in finding ordinary language terms to describe the Background: one speaks vaguely of 'practices', 'capacities', and 'stances' or one speaks suggestively but misleadingly of 'assumptions' and 'presuppositions'. These latter terms must be literally wrong, because they imply the apparatus of representation with its propositional contents, logical relations, truth values, directions of fit, etc... The fact that we have no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question and the fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought to arouse our interest... There simply is no first-order vocabulary for the Background, because the Background has no Intentionality. As the precondition of Intentionality, the Background is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye which sees is invisible to itself" (pp.156-157). Wittgenstein (1969) too notes the very basic nature of our ways of acting. While we might give reasons for some of our actions, we cannot give reasons for them all. Giving grounds does comes to an end sometime: "But the end is not an ungrounded proposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting" (no.110). When we are embedded within the background flow of mutually responsive activity, there are certain ways in which we simply act - not on the basis of reasons, but blindly, as our circumstances - 'our', in the sense not just of your's and mine separately, but in the sense of those circumstances we share in common - as our jointly shared circumstances require. But how can such a jointly shared common sense be acquired?

Words, as we know, can be used to 'instruct' us, to command us, to 'call' us spontaneously to respond in certain ways, to specify otherwise vague and ambiguous circumstances further. As Vygotsky (1986) puts it: "our experimental study proved that it was the functional use of the word, or any other sign, as a means of focusing one's attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation" (p.106, my emphases). "Learning to direct one's own mental processes with the aid of words or signs is an integral part of the process of concept formation" (p.108, my emphasis). But how might we understand this power of our utterances? What might Vygotsky mean by his term, "the functional use of words"? How is it possible to direct one's own mental processes by the use of words? Why is what occurs spontaneously so crucial here? How can what occurs spontaneously and bodily be the source of what later we come to do deliberately and intellectually? The key to understanding what is occurring here, is in understanding the gestural nature of both our own and other people's expressive movements, along with the gestures that the things around us, afford or allow us to make toward them.

Gestures can have both an indicative meaning (gesturing toward something) and a mimetic meaning (a showing or manifesting of something in the contoured shape of the gesture). Our facial expressions, our tones of voice, our bodily postures, are all spontaneously responsive to, and can thus be uniquely expressive of ourselves or our circumstances in both mimetic and indicatory ways. Kundera (1992) gives the following example: "The woman might have been sixty or sixty-five. I was watching her from a deck chair by the pool of my health club... she kept looking up at the young life guard in sweat pants who was teaching her to swim.... [On leaving] she walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the life guard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved at him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl!... The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. I had never known a woman by that name" (pp.3-4).

What a strange perception! But nonetheless, a true possibility in our physiognomic understandings of certain expressive events in our surroundings. With regard to music, Wittgenstein (1981) remarks that, "if a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you, you don't have to be able to explain it. Just this gesture has been made accessible to you" (no.158) - a very particular and very precise, but still perhaps vague, "feeling of tendency" (James) has been opened up as a point of departure, a horizon, a opening for a whole world of next possible actions and events.

Thus, it is in the unfolding movement of one's expressions, as one's attention moves over one's circumstances, that it is possible for one's expressions to 'display' or 'manifest' in a mimetic fashion the contours, so to speak, of what they are meant to be expressive of. Wittgenstein (1981) describes this phenomenon thus: "A poet's words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformable to this use, we can let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words" (no.155). Merleau-Ponty (1962) also describes this same possibility thus: "Speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it... Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of a problem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationship with known ones... In understanding others, the problem is always indeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectively to light as convergent... There is, then, a taking up of other' thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must finally be induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from their gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And, as in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words from their place in a context of action, and by taking part in communal life - in the same way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain 'style'... which is the first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher... There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism" (p.179). Just as in a Marcel Marceau mine, in which we 'see' how at first he is overwhelmed by his imprisonment by an impassable, massive, immoveable object, and how in his 'creative stumbling up against it' he eventually finds a 'passage' out of it, so we too can sense the initial 'contours' of a 'something' in a person's 'style' of speech or writing.

Indeed, in a way very closely to Wittgenstein's earlier remark, that "a whole world of pain" may be contained in a single word, Merleau-Ponty (1962) goes on to remark that, "... the word, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world... The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea, but several ways for the human body to sing the world's praises and in the last resort to live it... We may speak several languages, but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once... Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no conventional signs..." (pp. 187-188).

It is, then, in the spontaneous way in which we respond initially to the gestural meaning of an utterance that we 'set the scene' or establish the 'grammar', so to speak, within which our further, more detailed determining of its meaning takes place. And language continues to be constitutive of our modes of being in this way, even during those moments when we suppose ourselves only to be making intellectual and conceptual use of it. This is so because our utterances in their expression never cease to arouse spontaneous responses, both in our listeners and in ourselves. Indeed, because "any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere... utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another... Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.91). And these kinds of responsive reactions are 'there' in the 'tone' of our utterances, even in the structure of our written sentences, working their influence upon us, whether we recognize the fact or not⁽¹¹⁾.

But how might such immediate, unthinking responses function as the source of our higher mental abilities, in which we seem able to reverse, so to speak, the direction of the formative influences at work in shaping our conduct - so that instead of us acting spontaneously as our circumstances require, we can act toward our circumstances deliberately, as we ourselves require? As Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) work in this sphere shows, the role of the others around us in effecting this transition within us is crucial. I will review what he has to say in the following two areas: in the sphere of what he calls internalization in the development of pointing, and in the sphere of play - although his comments in Chapter 8, on the pre-history of writing are also highly relevant, in the interests of space, I will leave then unmentioned.

Pointing: A very young child may attempt, but fail, to grasp an object. The important event is when the young child's caretaker comes to the aid of the child, responding to his or her movements as indicative of something. Then, "the child's unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he [or she] seeks but from another person" (p.56). We can think of this as the first step in a three part process. The second stage occurs when the child is able to inter-relate his or her movement to the whole situation - within which both the adult and the object are embedded. At this point, the child's movement may change from an object-oriented to a person-oriented movement, a movement used to establish a relation with them. As a result of this change, a final stage is reached in which "the movement itself is physically simplified, and what results is the form of pointing that we may call a true gesture" (p.56). But it only becomes so when the child deliberately directs it toward others, and is recognized by those others as a gesture addressed to them. Vygotsky calls this three part process, internalization. The designation is, however, only partially appropriate. For it is not the case, as he claims, that "an external activity [outside an individual] is reconstructed and begins to occur internally [within the individual]" (pp.56-57). It is a case of an activity - that was at first related only externally to the whole situation within which child, object, and adult are all embedded - becoming internally related to it, becoming a 'participant part' within it. The relevant activity does not wholly disappear inside the person. What originated as a relationally-responsive understanding of a gesture in fact remains so. What changes is its use, its functional meaning, as the sphere in which it is embedded as a gesture, is enlarged.

Play: In discussing play, Vygotsky (1978) makes many of the points already made above regarding joint action and dialogically-structured action, or those made by Gadamer (1989) in discussing play. But he also finds children's play to be a crucial sphere in which various prototypical or precursor activities occur spontaneously, prior to our 'appropriation' of them into the realm of our more deliberately performed activities. "It is here," he says, "[in the sphere of play] that the child learns to act in a cognitive, rather than an externally visual, realm by relying on internal tendencies and motives and not on incentives supplied by external things⁽¹²⁾" (p.96). Thus in play, "a piece of wood begins to be a doll and a stick becomes a horse" (p.97). This is not because either the piece of wood or the stick looks like a doll or a horse, but because they each in their own way allow or afford the child, the opportunity to express certain appropriate responsive inclinations toward them in their play - the piece of wood can be 'laid' in a bed 'to rest', the stick can be 'ridden', legs-astride, as a hobby-horse, etc. In doing this, the child is doing what is impossible for younger children: that is, he or she is not reacting directly as the visual field around them requires, but is separating a field of meaning from the visual field. Indeed, the child moves from a situation in which an object directly calls for a certain meaningful action - like a bell 'demanding' to be rung - to one in which the child can, to an extent, impose a meaning on a situation, and act toward it as that meaning requires. So although, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, "every perception is a stimulus to action... [I]n play, things lose their determining force" (p.96). "In play a child spontaneously makes use of his ability to separate meaning from an object without knowing he is doing it, just as he does not know he is speaking in prose but talks without paying attention to the words" (p.99).

This does not, however, mean that in play, anything can mean anything for the child. The chosen plaything must afford the appropriate gesture and be a site of application for it. Things which do not admit of the appropriate gestural structure are absolutely rejected by the child. For example, "any stick can become a horse but...a postcard cannot be a horse for a child" (p.98). In play, then, something very special is happening, not only is there a break up of the primary unity of sensory-motor processes in the separation of the field of meaning from the visual field, but there is also re-constituted into a new unity with a reversal of the usual direction of influence. Whereas, a particular movement in the visual field usually calls out a certain reaction in the child (i.e., action dominates meaning), in play, the child in his or her gestural movements toward objects, begins to impose their own meanings on elements in the visual field (i.e., meaning comes to dominate action). In such a process, uncontrolled, impulsive responses are transformed into considered, voluntary ones.

In the realm of play, then, "what is most important is the utilization of the plaything and the possibility of executing a representational [or indicatory] gesture with it" (p.108). So, although any stick the child can sit astride can become a horse, objects not affording that possibility cannot. What matters is that "the objects admit the appropriate gesture and can function as a point of application for it. Hence, things with which this gestural structure cannot be performed are absolutely rejected by children" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.109).

Here, then, we can see the elements of a crucial developmental process, in which indicatory and mimetic gestures come to play a central role. While Vygotsky (1986) sees all the major psychological functions - such as sensing and acting, perceiving, attending, remembering, thinking, acting, speaking, etc. - as forming an indivisible whole, as operating "in an uninterrupted connection with one another" (p.1), and as rooted in the most basic or elementary adaptive responses of the living, human being. He also sees development as consisting in the re-constitution of such wholes. In development, "they are characterized by a new integration and co-relation of their parts. The whole and its parts develop parallel to each other and together. We shall call the first structures elementary; they are psychological wholes, conditioned chiefly by biological determinants. The latter structures [also indivisible wholes] which emerge in the process of cultural development are called higher structures... The initial stage is followed by that first structure's destruction, reconstruction, and transition structures of the higher type. Unlike the direct reactive processes, these latter structures are constructed on the basis of the use of signs and tools; these new formations unite both direct and indirect means of adaptation" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.124)⁽¹³⁾.

The spontaneously responsive role of speech in effecting this transformation is crucial. At first, the child begins to exhibit a future orientation and planning (and an understanding of the role of others in their actions) by calling in an other for help. Often, others will do little else than say to the child: "Stop... look at this... listen to that...," to create functional barriers to immediately impulsive activity, i.e., to transform or metamorphose an old unity into a new one, by bringing into a previously unnoticed relation already existing within it, to the child's attention. The new more complexly structured unity, the new indivisible whole within the child has his or her being, is formed by an internal articulation in the old. Later, the child will incorporate the functional speech forms provided by others into his or her own activities, so that speech, which at first followed or accompanied the activities and reflected their difficulties, moves more and more to the turning (choice) points within them, and to their beginnings. In incorporating the living, bodily expressions of others into his or her own actions, expressions which can exert both an indicative and a mimetic gestural power on the child, the child can transform his or her own behavior; they become orchestrated according to the gestural powers of others. But what is the character of the setting within which this can occur? What is so special about our immersion in our surroundings in what I have called the precursor world to our being in an external, objective world as self-contained, Cartesian subjectivities?
 

Our Cartesian inclinations make it difficult for us to orient ourselves within such an precursor world. To talk of our surroundings as issuing us with 'action guiding advisories', of them as having a 'face', and of finding ourselves as if 'judged' as to whether we are treating them in terms of their requirements (not our's), is quite foreign to us. The idea of meaning being a physiognomy, of the mimetic or indicatory expressions of living human beings as gesturing precisely to something in their surroundings beyond themselves, is also utterly alien to us. But nonetheless, we will mislead ourselves if we mis-characterize this precursor world in terms suited to our own, self-conscious, deliberately executed, mental functions aimed at mastery, i.e., if we try to analyze it in Cartesian terms. Aware of the dangers of such mis-descriptions, 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).

And this, I think, is precisely the importance of all the writers I have mentioned so far in this paper. They all in their own different ways provide us with the resources we need to come to an understanding - a relationally-responsive, living understanding - of "the primordial," the precursor world to what previously we took to be the "external world" as set out by Descartes. So let us turn to the task of specifying that locus in which subject and object, existence and essence, have not yet been distinguished, that we realm of activity which has not yet been worked over in experience. What might such a realm be like? Can we specify its details?

In our past studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great realms of activity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our agency to control, to be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on action, on events for which we as individuals take responsibility, and explain in terms of our reasons. And, as already outlined, we have treated the world around us, not only as a dead world of mechanisms, but as an external world consisting in an assemblage of externally related, objective parts. That is, we have treated it as a world 'over there', as existentially separate from us, in that we owe nothing of the character of our own existence to it. Further, in treating it as an assemblage of externally related, objective parts, we have seen it as a structure of self-contained parts all existentially separate from each other, i.e., which exist as the separate entities they are whether they are a part of a larger mechanism or not. In other words, both these realms of activity are thought of as being built up our of separate elements of reality, so to speak; the idea of an invisible whole made up of participant parts is utterly inimical to their nature.

But a dialogically-structured real presence, having its existence only within the inter-activity occurring in joint action⁽¹⁴⁾, cannot be understood externally in this way. 1) In being responsively 'shaped' in relation to the unique circumstances of its occurrence, such activity cannot be explained simply as a naturally occurring regularity, as a 'just happening' event of behavior, in terms of causal laws or principles insensitive to the context of their application. 2) Nor can it be understood wholly as a case of individual human action, for, in occurring only in the intertwining of people's spontaneous responses to each other and to their surroundings, it cannot be explained by giving any person's reasons or justifications for their individual actions. What is produced in such responsively interwoven, dialogically-structured activity, is a strange, third realm of always ongoing and always unfinished activity of its own unique kind. Indeed, it is precisely its lack of a precisely determined order, and its openness to being further specified or determined by those involved in it, in practice - while usually remaining unaware of their having done so - that is its central defining feature. Or, to put it another way, as the character of people's circumstances are a matter of their on-the-spot judgments, joint action can only be understood from within one's involvements in it. It is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity interesting, for at least the following reasons:

• -It means that the primordial, precursor world of spontaneous, relationally-responsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action, constitutes a third, dynamic realm of activity of its own kind, sui generis, quite distinct from the other two realms of behavior and action.
• -It is not a static realm of things and substances, a mere static 'container' of activities.
• -The activities constituting it are all internally related activities, that is, their 'parts' at any one moment owe not just their character but their very existence both to each other and to their relations with the 'parts' of the system at some earlier point in time - hence their history is just as important as their logic in understanding their nature.
• -It thus constitutes in each of its occurrences, a unitary, indivisible realm of activity.
• -As a person with one or another kind of subjectivity, we are all "participant parts" in, and of, such an indivisible realm.
• -We are embedded in it, and my activity only has its character it has in relation to your's, in relation to your responses to mine.
• -Thus this realm is constitutive of people's social and personal identities, and is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us, which have their being within it.
• -Unlike the realms of reasons and causes, which are externally related to the realms of human activity they explain, the realm of joint action can only be participatively experienced or lived through - and described as such: "What underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not a principle as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of one's own participation in unitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot be adequately expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described and participatively experienced" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.40).
• -Such descriptions though, if they work to draw attention to relations between our activities and features in their surroundings - if, that is, they also work as "participant parts" in and of such a realm - can play the part of explanations, i.e., they can work to refine, elaborate, or extend our ways of relating ourselves to our circumstances.

• -In lacking specificity, the activities produced in such dialogical exchanges, are a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences - as Bakhtin (1981, p.272) remarks, in every utterance, 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, are at work.
• -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 - hence their primordial nature.
• -They are also non-locatable, in that they are 'spread out' or 'distributed' amongst all those participating in them, i.e., a real presence is a distributed structure, constituted in and by contributions from many different participants or participations.

Merleau-Ponty (1964), in discussing the child's relations with others, describes the nature this initial phase of development thus: "There is a first phase, which we call pre-communication, in which there is not one individual but an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life... [Such that] the first me is... unaware of itself in its absolute difference... and lives as easily in others as it does in itself" (p.119). Thus our task in development, is not that of learning how to gain access to other minds, to some thing hidden right inside them, but is that of differentiating which of all the activity occurring in us, has its origins in us, and which in them. Indeed, we must renounce the classical Cartesian prejudice in which the psyche is private sequence of "states of mind" which cannot be seen from the outside. We can 'see' the character of an other's consciousness displayed in the details of his or her spontaneously responsive conduct toward the world - as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: "Nothing is hidden" (no.435). But where, so to speak, is it to be seen?

Although the words we utter may, technically, be repetitions of, as Voloshinov (1986) calls them, "normatively identical forms," and although we may consciously struggle to choose just the right word-forms to fit our own plans and intentions, there is still nonetheless, a realm of spontaneous responsiveness at work influencing their unfolding expression, as we bodily voice forth our utterances into the world around us. We do not voice them in a predetermined manner; indeed, how could we ever achieve such a perfect uniformity? It is in the "specific variability" (Voloshinov, 1986, p.69) that such forms afford us, as we utter them in spontaneous response to features in our surrounding circumstances, that we express - unconsciously and involuntarily - what others understand as our 'inner' thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, moods, desires, and so on, i.e., our orientational-understandings, as I called them above, of where and how we are placed in relation to the world of our our utterances. Thus, it is in an utterance's unique "expressive intonation" - what is usually ignored in our more systematic inquiries into the linguistic forms of our language and language use - that we reveal aspects of our 'inner' lives to those around us. As Bakhtin (1986) notes: "Both the word and the sentence as linguistic units are devoid of expressive intonation... expressive intonation belongs to the utterance and not to the word... expression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under conditions of the real situation articulated by the individual utterance" (p.85, p.86, p.88). And it is just this aspect of our utterances, the way in which their spontaneously responsive, moment by moment, unfolding expressive intonation reveals the 'shape' of our relations to the others and othernesses in our circumstances, that usually we cannot and do not self-consciously control⁽¹⁵⁾. We cannot control them ahead of time, as in their uniqueness, their immediate responsiveness to the present moment, we cannot anticipate their form.

Nonetheless, although unpredictable, we find that these 'shapes' are 'there' as real but invisible presences whether we like it or not. We cannot wish them away. Nor can we wholly avoid responding to them in some way - even if it is to continually dismiss them when noticed with the criticism that they are 'subjective', 'merely anecdotal', or 'not generally the case'. And such invisible but real presences make themselves felt in our lives, not just in terms of what we talk of as other people's inner lives, but in other important spheres of our lives too. It is in terms of the 'shape' of the invisible presences unfolding over time - in music and dance, in our reading of a text, in our surveying of a work of art, a painting, a sculpture, as we move up close and back away, and 'orchestrate' our own relations to it according to 'its' requirements - that we gain a sense, not so much of their personal inner lives, as a sense of what they meant their expressions to mean to us, the nature of their shared, public projects. And clearly, such felt, real, living presences, although quite invisible to our eyes, may nonetheless exert a powerful influence in shaping, from the outside, so to speak, our actions. Recall here Merleau-Ponty's comments above, about feeling his way into the existential character of a piece of philosophical writing by voicing to himself the tone and accent of the philosopher. Indeed, in a great range of very different circumstances - in a 'good' conversation, in driving or in any other movement in which we must 'navigate' our own motions in immediate relation to those around us, in viewing a painting, or especially in reading a book - when we are immersed in living relations to our surroundings, then the "compellently actual 'face'" of that presence is a agentic influence able to shape, at least partially, our responses to them.

But to speak in this way - in terms of invisible presences - is, of course, to indulge in what hard scientists, i.e., those who insist that only data collected from the dials of instruments (or numbers on questionnaire scales) can be accounted as real data, would call 'magical' or 'mystical' thinking. Indeed, it is the kind of thinking that Levy-Bruhl (1926) noted as a characteristic of 'primitive' or 'inferior' peoples. He called it "participatory thinking" because in it, crucially, certain entities - names, pictures, totems, etc. - which we would simply think of as neutral images or representations having only an arbitrary or conventional relation to what they happen to stand for, are taken as having mystic properties due to "the fact that every picture, every reproduction 'participates' 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 responsive understanding of real presences, that I will quote it at length:

"The collective representations⁽¹⁶⁾ of primitives... differ profoundly from our ideas or concepts, nor are they their equivalent either. One the on hand,... they have not their logical character. On the other hand, 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. This influence is a virtue, an occult power which varies with objects and circumstances, but is always real to the primitive and forms and integral part of his representation... [T]o express in a word the general peculiarity of the[se] collective representations... I should say that this mental activity was a mystic one... [this does not refer] to the religious mysticism of our communities, which is something entirely different, but [applies] in the strictly defined sense in which 'mystic' implies belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible to the sense, are nevertheless real" (pp.37-38, all emphases and additions mine).

Why we have found this difficult to accept, is that in our current (still Greek and Cartesian influenced) modes of inquiry, in pursuit of a theoretical objectivity, we have sought a supposed fixed and finalized (eternal) reality hidden behind appearances. We have worked in terms of inner theoretical representations of outer phenomena which we have striven to prove true. But participatory perception works quite differently. In physiognomic terms, the perception of and response to expression, is not the perception of something hidden behind appearances, but a matter of spontaneously responding to something manifested or displayed in them. Thus what is before us at any one moment is not a mere thing, a mere inert object, requiring a choice from us as to how we are going to respond to it, but an authentic, unique living presence, incarnate in the unfolding activity within which are ourselves participants. It is a presence sensed in the responsive movement of appearances as they unfold before us as we responsively relate ourselves to their requirements. Thus, just as the depth we see, as we scan over the scene before us - whether it is a real 3-D scene or a 2-D random dot stereogram - is a third relational dimension derived from the other two, and is in fact in itself invisible, so the presence of depth in a conversation is spontaneously constituted in the sensed relational dimensions participants display in their utterances. "Either what I call depth," says Merleau-Ponty (1964), "is nothing, or it is my participation... in the being of space beyond every [particular] point of view" (p.173, translator's addition). The depths, one might say, are made available to us in the surfaces.
 

I began this paper by exploring how our lives might change if, rather than as self-centered Cartesian beings, seeking mastery by acting in a thoughtful but unresponsive manner toward our surroundings, we were to treat ourselves more as 'participant parts' of a larger, ongoing, dynamic, indivisible realm of living activity. This led onto the suggestion that, when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us and we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically-structured, living, embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us, then, and only then, certain very special phenomena can occur. Then we can find ourselves in contact with invisible, but nonetheless very "real presences" that - due to their indicatory and mimetic effects on us - can, like another person issuing instructions and commands, exert a communicative influence on us and thus (at least partially) to structure our actions. In such circumstances as these, as Johnston (1993) puts it: "The idea of the Inner is a feature of our everyday discourse and a part of the psychological concepts we all share... [I]t expresses our relation to others as experiencing beings: as beings with an Inner, we treat their non-informational utterances as expressions of experiences (and not as meaningless)... Thus talk of an Inner brings into play a distinctive array of concepts and expresses the fact that we relate to other human beings in a way we do not relate to machines or even to other animals" (p.223).

In other words, crucial to the shift to the participatory forms of thought explored above, is a shift away from a dead, mechanistically organized world, toward a world conceived of as an indivisible living unity. It is the strangely unnoticed elimination of life of mutually responsive living bodies from our academic forms of inquiry, that I have sought to rectify.

But how might the reintroduction of our spontaneous living involvements with each other, affect the character of our intellectual inquiries into our social lives together? The implications are, in fact, enormous⁽¹⁷⁾. As I intimated above, very few of our current disciplinary attitudes and inclinations can be retained unchanged. But due to limitations in space, I can touch on only a few here. I will do this by returning to a difference I introduced briefly above, that between achieving an explanation and achieving a orientational-understanding of a situation's physiogomy, i.e., achieving an evaluative sense of where and how we are 'placed' or 'positioned' in relation to all the others and othernesses around us.

Finding ourselves disoriented, perhaps, by certain "compellent calls" from our surroundings, we feel an "overwhelming temptation," says Wittgenstein (1981), to treat our uncertainty as to how to respond to them as a "problem" requiring a "solution" in terms of an "explanation." But as he sees it, there is sometimes an alternative. "[T]he difficulty," he suggests, "is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it... 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" (no.314). In other words, when faced with a disorienting circumstance, a circumstance in which we do not know how 'to go on', instead of turning away from it, and burying ourselves deep in thought in an attempt to mentally and imaginatively construct a way to explain it in ways already familiar to us, we should stay in dialogue, so to speak, with it. We should look it over as we look over a painting or a sculpture in an art gallery. We should respond to it from up close, from a distance, from this angle and that, until we can begin to gain a shaped and vectored sense of the space of possibilities it opens up to us in the responses it 'calls' from us. And we should do this in collaboration with the others involved with us in the practice in question.

The difference between the two approaches can be set out in terms of their steps, and the orientational-understandings associated with each such step. In the classical tradition, the sequence of steps we take in our inquiries can be set out as follows: We begin by orienting toward any newness or strangeness we encounter, as a problem to be solved. We then go on to treat it as an entity that can be analyzed into a set of already well known elements⁽¹⁸⁾. We then search for an order or pattern amongst them, hypothesize a causal agency responsible for that order (call it, say, a mystic entity like "the Mind"), and then go on to find further evidence for the existence of this mystic thing we call "the Mind." Indeed, we then begin to develop further theories as to its nature, and, in terms of such theories, we attempt, indirectly, to manipulate the Mind's operations, to produce what we see as outcomes advantageous to us. But we only call such theories 'solutions' to our problem, if they enable us - as the experts proposing them - to achieve seeming mastery over the phenomena represented within them.

The sequence of steps we follow in gaining an orientational-understanding, goes like this: We begin by treating the disorienting othernesses we encounter as radically unknown to us - we approach them, not like Kant's "appointed judge," but with care, respect, and anxiety. We 'enter into' dialogically-structured, reciprocally responsive relations with them. In so doing, we must be (at least partially) 'answerable' to their calls, just as they must be (partially) answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay between us and them, an 'it', a real presence appears between us, produced neither solely by us nor by the othernesses, an 'it' within which both we and they have our being. The 'it' is our it, an 'it' in which we can all share in common. Like a person's facial expression, which with its smile gestures us to approach, or with its scowl repels us, 'it' has a similar 'directive' or 'instructive' physiognomy - and we can thus develop a sensibility of, or sensitivity to, 'its' nature. And as we continue our commerce with the othernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of our familiarity with the 'inner' shape or character of the real presence created between us. And as we 'dwell on', or 'within' its nature, we can gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects - the prospects 'it' offers us for 'going on' with it. We come to feel 'at home' with it, to 'know our way around' within it, in the way we find our way around inside towns or houses familiar to us. Thus what we gain here, rather than a solution, rather than further information, is a shaped and vectored sense of how 'to go on' in relation to the otherness concerned. In other words, we understand how to see the invisible 'face', to hear the silent 'voice', and to be 'answerable' to the mute judgements of the presences in our living relations with world around us - real influences which cannot be measured by any mechanical instruments, which only become available to us in our living, moving, responsive and responsible engagements with our surroundings.
 

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Notes:
 

1. See Shotter (1993, pp.68-70) for an account of "providential spaces," i.e., spaces not only open to further development by internal refinement, but with the provision of resources appropriate to certain such developments (but not others).

2. In this important chapter in his Marxism and Literature, Williams (1977) touches on most of the topics of this article. In discussing the nature of changes in social consciousness from, say, one generation to the next, he suggests that they are best characterized "as changes in structures of feeling" (p.132). By this terms he wants to signal that "we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs... .. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies" (p.132). Thus, "structures of feeling can be defined as 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).

3. For example, as Wittgenstein (1974) notes, even about such a seeming neutral thing as a proposition: "The proposition seems set over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. - It seems to demand that reality be compared with it" (p.132)⁽⁴⁾

4. Like Bakhtin (1986) and Voloshinov (1986), Wittgenstein (1978) also suggests (without ever using the term dialogical) that the basic way in which a proposition's sense is to be understood, is as in a dialogue: "The sense of a proposition (or a thought) isn't anything spiritual; it's what is given as an answer to a request for an explanation of the sense" (p.131). Indeed, although there is not space to pursue them here, there are clear parallels also between Bakhtin's (1986) notion of the superaddressee - "an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in [a] dialogue" (p.126) - as well as his discussion of answerability (Bakhtin, 1993).

5. Shotter (1996) where this phenomenon is discussed at length.

6. "The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acute discriminatory sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever" (James, 1981, p.244)... "Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that 'tendencies' are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all⁽⁷⁾

7. "The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acute discriminatory sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever" (p.244)... "Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that 'tendencies' are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure "

8. "Etymologically, of course, the term "consciousness" is a knowledge word. This is evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we to make of the prefix con- that precedes it? Look at the usage in Roman Law, and the answer will be easy enough. Two or more agents who act jointly - having formed a common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted their actions - are as a result conscientes. They act as they do knowing one another's plans: they are jointly knowing." (Toulmin, 1982, p.64). Toulmin traces how a whole family of words, "whose historic use and sense had to do with the public articulation of shared plans and intentions has been taken over into philosophical theory as providing a name for the most private and unshared aspects of mental life... The term "consciousness" has thus become the name for a flux of sensory inputs that is seemingly neither con-, since each individually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since the sensory flux is thought of as "buzzing and booming" rather than cognitively structured or interpreted " (p.54).

9. Another expression of this same point is: "An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people..., and then inside the child... All higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.57).

10. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: "The experimental method makes us think we have a the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by" (p.232). Instead of looking backwards for patterns and regularities from a position of uninvolvement, we need ways to investigate a circumstance from within as a participant involved within it.

11. See, for instance, in this connection, Billig's (1995) account of how Richard Rorty, in the rhetorical tone of his philosophical texts, displays in their small details - especially in his use of the word "we" - his nationalism. As Billig puts it: "It has become customary for cultural analysts to treat objects, such as flags, as if they were texts. The process can be reversed, so that the text appears as a flag. Rorty's texts, with his drum-beat of 'we's', seek to enrol 'us', his readers, in their literary march" (p.173).

12. Children initially experience objects in their surroundings as gesturally expressive or physiognomically to such an extent that, as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, "a very young child concludes that things dictate to the child what he must do: a door demands to be opened and closed, a staircase to be climbed, a bell to be rung" (p.96).

13. Passage from the unedited translation of "Tool and Symbol," quoted by John-Steiner and Souberman, in their Afterword to Vygotsky (1978).

14. I have set out the properties of joint action extensively elsewhere, also (Shotter, 1980, 1984).

15. But in those circumstances where a 'form' is already present, we do sometimes control them: "One thing that is immensely important in teaching," notes Wittgenstein (1966), "is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions" (p.2). Goffman (1959) also notes the importance of the distinction between "expressions given" and those "given off," and how people are "likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable" (p.19), so that sometimes, to create an "impression," we attempt also to control our gestures and facial expressions. But when we do, our expressions lose their wholistic quality as 'true' expression and become 'caricatures', i.e., false expressions of our relations to our surroundings.

16. By "collective representations," Levy-Bruhl (a student of Durkheim) 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 background or everyday common sense understanding of their world.

17. Some of them are explored in Katz and Shotter (1996a, 1996b), Shotter and Katz (1996) and Shotter and Gustavsen (1999). But these are mere beginnings. A whole very different approach to cognitive psychology - in which our inner lives are structured in terms of agentic voices and other agentic influences (see, for instance, Wolf, 1990, and Wertsch, 1991) - is clearly a possibility.

18. It is at this stage, the stage of analysis into separate elements, that life - which is in the internal relations between the participant parts of a living whole - is eliminated!