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SPONTANEOUS RESPONSIVENESS, CHIASMIC RELATIONS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS:

INSIDE THE REALM OF LIVING EXPRESSION

The growth of consciousness: from the role of regularities to first-time, first-person expressions

Abstract: Our ways of talking are not just simply a matter of representing, or picturinga state of affairs, so that how others act in relation to what we say is up to them, amatter always of interpretation. Rather, an important aspect of people’s verbalcommunication is their voicing (as 1 -person agents) of certain expressions. Expressionsst

are living bodily movements (physiognomic changes within our bodies as a wholerather than simple a change of the position of our bodies in space) which, in working aselaborations of our natural, spontaneously expressed responses to events occurringaround us, work to communicate in a gestural fashion. Parents make use suchexpressions, and their children’s spontaneous responses to them, in teaching them thepractices instituted in their society, so that they become trained into spontaneouslyresponding to the expressions of those around us in a con(withness)-scientia(knowing)manner, in shared or sharable ways. Such bodily expressions are connected with bodilyfeelings in such a way that all ‘feelings’ (unless one has learned to suppress them) havetheir characteristic expressions. Having been trained into responding to other’sexpressions con-scientia, i.e., in ways which can be witnessably known by others, we cango on, as 1 -persons, to express our own unique feelings in non-rule-governed waysst

that the others around us can begin to respond to – the beginnings of new and uniquelanguage-games, within which we can express our own ‘inner lives’ to each other. In thisview, any rules emerging in our meetings with the others around us are not basic to usunderstanding each other, but are used in a regulatory fashion to sustain accountablesocial institutions.

“But a certain kind of associated or joint life when brought into being has an unexpectedby-product – the formation of those peculiar acquired dispositions, attitudes, which aretermed mind” (Dewey, 1917, p.272).

“The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain processes: howdoes it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?”(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.412).

“... consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the materialembodiment of signs” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.11).

“It is more productive to conceive of the mind as a virtuality than as a framework, as adynamism than as a structure” (Benveniste, 1971, p.63).

There are two quite distinct accounts of the nature of our relation to language and meaning. One wemight call the Cartesian, externalist account, in which language is seen as being a self-contained,objective system that mediates (in terms of referential representations) between individual humansubjects and an objective world – with the world being thought of as an ‘external’ world known tosubjects only in terms of the representations appearing ‘inside’ them. Indeed, in this account, we shallfind the prevalence of a very general view that everything – every “thing” – is made up of self-containedelementary parts which, in not being intrinsically linked in themselves to other parts, are only related tothem by the imposition of an extraneous force or influence of some kind. This is the classical modernistaccount; it is a static account in which the concepts of ‘picture’, and ‘picturing’ play a central part (Capek,1961; Heidegger, 1977), and in which the idea of an orderly language system is privileged over theassumed disorderly activity of speaking.

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The other account is a dynamic one in which, rather than static shapes, patterns, or forms,certain kinds of expressive responsive, bodily movements play a central role, i.e., what we callexpressions. In this account of language, speaking a language is privileged over language as an objectivesystem of norms. Indeed, in this account, language is not seen as a separate, self-contained, finishedsystem, but as a dynamically sustained and still developing system. Thus speech is not primarily seen asexpressing, or as being shaped or governed by, an already constituted language, but as an activity inwhich people are not only responsively gesturing, in a living, bodily fashion, toward events that haveoccurred or are occurring in their surroundings, but in which they are also continually correcting eachother in the course of its usage, thus to sustain its integrity, as well as continually updating it to copewithin changes in their surroundings that they have brought about by their own past activities. This inthis view, language is not simply a system for giving shared expression to already clearly conceivedsignifications, but as giving a way of formulating such shared or sharable significations from within foryet another first time. In this view then, language can be understood neither synchronically ordiachronically, but must be understood as a system still in the making. Thus, instead of the alreadyexisting linguistic system being at the centre of our inquiries, as in the Cartesian account outlined above,“interactive moments” of actual language use, our living communicative expressions, will come to occupythe centre of our attention.

In contrast to the externalist account outlined above, we can call this account – here linkedmainly with the work of Wittgenstein, Dewey, Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and Merleau-Ponty – aninternalist account, in that overall it is inclined toward the view that we and our surroundings are allindivisibly related to each other, and that all our uses of language occur from within the context of theseindivisible relations. Indeed, in this approach – in contrast to the Cartesian, externalist approach – weonly have our being as living beings within a whole complex of other living relations (an ecology). Thus,rather than as self-contained elementary beings (atoms), we are participant parts in a larger living wholeand we owe the character of our being to our participant relations within it.

For some long time now, a form of inquiry known as scientific psychology, modeling itself on themodes of inquiry adopted in the natural sciences, has attempted to probe into the supposedly hiddenworkings of the individual human mind. In this paper I want to explore the quite drastic changesrequired in our whole approach to behavioral and social inquiry, and into the nature of our ‘inner lives’in our social life together, if we were instead to take as our central focus, the spontaneous, bodily felt andexpressed, responsive understandings occurring between us in our meetings out in the world with eachother. In other words, I want to explore the question of what might be involved in making the shift fromstatic, externalist accounts of our mental activities, to dynamic, internalist ones?

In the first part of this paper I will discuss the very special, but often, rationally ignored natureof the singular and often fleeting expressive-responsive events occurring in the meetings between us asliving beings, and the others and othernesses in our surroundings. While constituted as living wholes orunities ourselves, in our meetings we momentarily constitute between us uniquely new such livingunities, and the expressive events occurring within this sphere of activity can reflexively act back uponus to influence our further activities within it. Thus central within these spheres of activity, within thesemeetings – among a number of other radical changes in many of our most basic concepts – is a changedconcept of movement or motion. Currently, we think of movement as occurring when unchanging mattermoves through unchanging space to give rise to a new ‘state of affairs’, to a new static ‘configuration’ of aset of separately existing, externally related elementary parts. We can call this locomotive movement.Here, we will be interested in physiognomic changes, changes within indivisible living wholes which, dueto the internal, dynamically unfolding, living relations between their participant parts, preserve theiridentity as the growing and developing unities they are. This changed conception of movement will alsolead us, as we shall see, to a changed concept of space, a changed concept of our surroundings: we will nolonger be able to see space as merely a neutral container for our locomotions. Our surroundings too willbecome expressive of meanings to us; they will come to be seen as exerting ‘calls’ upon us to which – likethe calls of another person – we must be answerable (Bakhtin, 1993), as well as providing a constitutiveenvironment within which, as a background, our embedded expressions have their own, uniquemeanings.

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Inattention in the past, both to our ineradicable embedding in the ceaseless flow ofspontaneously occurring, reciprocally responsive activity between us and the others and othernessesaround us, and to the expressive nature of this activity, has enticed us into compensating for itsunnoticed influence by the invention of theories about, i.e., picturing, the workings of mysterious, hidden‘inner’ mental entities we suppose responsible for being able to mean things to each other. Here,however, we will not take this speculative route. Instead, following Wittgenstein (1953), the essence ofour investigation will be that, “we do not seek to learn anything new by it,” rather, “we want tounderstand something that is already in plain view” (no.89). For it is not some new information, somenew knowledge, that we seek, but a new orientation. We need to re-train ourselves in the ways that weourselves spontaneously respond to events occurring around us. For, if it is the importance of how ourspontaneously responsive activities are expressive, in a gestural fashion, of our own unique relations toour surrounding circumstances, and also, how the others around us respond to them, that we have so farignored and/or misunderstood, then our new task is to bring these previously unnoticed aspects ofbeing in the world with the others and othernesses around us into witnessable awareness.

Indeed, this focus on fleeting events occurring in meetings between people and the others orothernesses around them, will set the scene for the exploration of a new dialogical or chiasmic approach1

to our understanding of the role of consciousness in human activity, an approach influenced by Toulmin’s(1982) account of its etymology in con (with)- scientia (knowing) in Roman Law , i.e., in a witnessable or2

witnessing knowing along with others. As he sees it, for the last 350 years, since Descartes’s time, astring of practical, concrete terms, all having unproblematic, everyday uses – whether as verbs (“Do youmind?”), as adverbs (“Did you do that consciously?”), as adjectives (“That was a thoughtful act on yourpart!”) – “have been converted... into so many broad and general abstract nouns, which have then beenconstrued as names for the most personal, private flux of sensory inputs, kinesthetic sensations, and soon” (p.53). And during the last century, “consciousness” has been the leading candidate “for naming theessentially ‘interior’ aspects of our mental life and activities” (p.54). Thus in this shift both inward andaway from the social to the individual, “a family of words whose historic use and sense had to do withthe public articulation of shared plans and intentions has been taken over into philosophical theory asproviding a name for the most private and unshared aspects of mental life” (p.54). And once this hadoccurred, we began to formulate such questions as: “What is consciousness?” Where, in doing so, weconfront ourselves with “one of the greatest sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makesus look for a thing that corresponds to it” (Wittgenstein, 1965, p.1).

We shall look elsewhere, with a quite different aim in mind, for an understanding of why ourtalk of consciousness, and of being consciously aware of things, etc., is of importance to us. Indeed, weshall return the role of such talk in public life from which, if Toulmin is right, it long ago originated, andin which it still has important parts to play. Indeed, here Bakhtin’s (1984) claim, that “a person has nointernal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looksinto the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (p.287), will be central. In other words, we shallexplore some of its many different roles within the dialogically- or chiasmically-structured meetingsoccurring between us and the others and othernesses around us.

This chiasmic or dialogical approach to consciousness – to the extent that it affords us anunderstanding of how shared or sharable ways of acting emerge in our meetings with each other – willlink with Wittgenstein’s (1953) grammatical approach to the problem of what is being expressed whenwe say that we are acting consciously as opposed to unconsciously. As such, it will emphasize thecomplexly interwoven or intertwined (chiasmic) and diverse nature of such expressive activities(movements). Indeed, especially central in such an account, will be the sequential or temporal ways inwhich individuals can influence those with whom they are involved or engaged – through the arousal ofanticipations and expectations within those others by their own unique expressive responsivemovements – thus to communicate to them the character of their relatedness both to their immediateand historical-cultural surroundings. For, as we shall see, it is in the ‘orchestrated contours’ of thedynamic unfolding of their spontaneous responsiveness to their surroundings, in the sequentiallyunfolding nature of their 1 -person living expressions, that they can display their own unique ‘inner’ livesst

to the others around them (Johnston, 1993; Mulhall, 1990). Indeed, it is only ‘from within’ the livinginterplay occurring between them and the others around them, that they can communicate to them what

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they ‘think’ and ‘feel’ about their common surroundings.

Thus, instead of a single simple answer to the problem as to what consciousness is, such agrammatical account of consciousness – couched in terms of the anticipations and expectations of hownext to ‘go on’ in practice when following another’s actions – will emphasize how a person’s deeds areintertwined in with other activities and events occurring both before and after any such deed inquestion. It is this focus on the ceaseless ‘becoming’ of living activity, and its expressiveness arising out ofits intertwining in with, or its chiasmic relations to, its surroundings – that Wittgenstein (1953) points toin his comment that “understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music3

than one might think” (no.527) – that will require us, as we shall see, to question many of the very basicbackground assumptions in terms of which we currently conduct our intellectual inquiries. Indeed, if theself-deceptive nature of our attempts to explain consciousness, on the basis of the assumption that it is aprivate inner theater of some strange kind (Baars, 1997), is not already clear, I hope it will become clear.Rather than resembling an inner movie theater or television set – upon which one day we hope todisplay a picture, a ‘blueprint’ of its own ‘inner workings’, its own ‘production studios’, ‘editing rooms’,‘scheduling conferences’, ‘market research projects’, and so on – we shall find our ‘inner lives’ aspresenting us with just the same vagaries and mysteries as our ‘outer lives’. Instead of two worlds, thenon-linguistic and the linguistic, with one full of things and objects and the other full of thought, ideas,propositions, etc., all thought of as representations ‘picturing’ the things in the other world (Stewart,1996), we shall take it that (as Virginia Woolf is reputed to have said) “one of the damned things isenough.”

The analytic task: description not justification

In this approach to the problem of consciousness, then, consciousness is being treated as a specialelaboration of that kind of awareness of, and sensitivity to, their surroundings exhibited by all livingbeings in their (growing and developing) responsive behavior in relation to their ‘worlds’ (v. Üexkull,1957). Indeed, as we noted above, Toulmin (1982) sees the term “consciousness” as denoting a vastfamily of usages and idioms, ranging all the way from those which express only a minimal notion ofbeing ‘awake’ and ‘sensible’ or reactive to one’s surroundings , through simply being attentive to events,4

on to being able to articulate accounts of one’s actions, to a final fourth aspect of being able to act jointlywith others in the light of a plan or project shared with them. It is this final aspect, he argues, to which theoriginal sense of the term “consciousness” corresponds; although they are all – sensibility, attentiveness,and articulateness – included in it, “their true historical ancestor appears to be the juridical sense of‘conscious’, ‘consciously’, and ‘consciousness’ – concerned with the polled knowledge of severalcollaborating agents – and the whole family of terms derives originally from the Latin word conscientia,or ‘knowing together’” (p.65). And it is in this sense that I will explore the special character of thoseactivities in which we act consciously. So, although we might use the word “consciousness,” theoretically,as the name of a supposed special ‘inner space or chamber’, a sensorium, an actually existing privatemovie theater inside our heads somewhere in which inner representations of an outer reality arecontinuously available to us (sometimes, as Descartes desired, clearly and distinctly displayed), I will notindulge in such theorizing (Baars, 1997). To the extent that some aspects of our human awareness is awitnessed or witnessable awareness, an awareness we do, or in fact can, share with others, I shall seek avery different account of consciousness, as something that is exhibited or displayed out in the world tothose others.

Yet, this does not mean that we shall find talk of people as having their own unique ‘inner’ livesas redundant or mistaken. Indeed, quite the opposite. To the extent that all our practical activitiestogether are somewhat problematic, even the simple act of trying to tell someone a fact or to impartsome information to them is an “interactional achievement” (Schegloff, 1995). Thus, if we are tointertwine our individual actions in with those of others in achieving a joint project, we need them to talkto us of what, uniquely, they are trying to do, what they are currently thinking, what they perceive, feel,etc., not because we want them to report to us on mysterious occurrences within them, but because theirexpressions are of use to us in our guiding of our living relations to them and to the others and otherothernesses around us. So, while much of our 1 -person talk about our own unique ‘inner lives’ is ast

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poetic or metaphorical extension of 3 -person terms first learned in relation to events occurring out inrd

the world between us, we shall find that, nonetheless, without a capacity to outwardly express aspects ofour own inner feelings with respect to our surroundings, many of our joint achievements would beimpossible. Only if we already share a set of constitutive expectancies and anticipations with the othersaround us as to what next they might do, expectations aroused spontaneously in response to theirpresent expressions, can we hope to go on with them, without confusion and misunderstanding, toconduct our more self-consciously entertained projects – like trying to answer the question: “What isconsciousness?” Thus in what follows, I shall treat consciousness, con-scientia, withness-knowing, as aconstitutive condition making certain of our achievements possible , a condition to be clarified by5

bringing to witnessable awareness what in fact we are expressing in our (many in fact different) uses ofthe word “consciousness.” In other words, following Wittgenstein (1953), instead of seeking observable,general causes, in seeking to understand our spontaneously responsive relations to the surroundingconditions making conscious behavior possible, here, in this circumstance, we are seeking its localizedreasons.

While it might seem irrefutable to us as professional academic intellectuals, while seated at ourdesks preparing ourselves for our more public performances, that our thinking goes on ‘inside’ ourheads, is it in fact so? As Wittgenstein (1980) remarks, “I really do think with my pen, because my headoften knows nothing about what my hand is writing” (p.17). For the fact is, even while all alone, we areengaged in our writing in a loop of activity, going out from our fingers moving a pen on paper, or on akeyboard producing letters on a screen, while continually monitoring the incoming result of theseexpressive activities ‘out there’ to make sure they meet criteria of con-scientia, public criteria ofintelligibility – for our task in our writing, is to produce a knowing witnessable by the others around us .6

Thus, in this view, then, consciousness is expressed in our spontaneous, living, embodied responses toevents occurring in our surroundings, it is expressed in the special shared or sharable way in which theysequentially unfold, such that each distinctive move made in the temporal sequence is of such a kind thatsurrounding others can spontaneously respond to it in an already shared manner. We visibly expressthis differential attentiveness to the different possible responses of the others around us at differentmoments in our activities, in a certain stance that we take to our surroundings, a stance that we acquireor can acquire with respect to some (but not to all) of our activities; it is a stance that is apparent toothers when they “look into [a person’s] face, and see the consciousness in it” (Wittgenstein, 1981,no.220). Indeed, we can see it for that matter, when we look into the fine structure of the unfolding ofany of a person’s activities and can see in them the continual attempt to exert adjustive or correctivemodifications to what has been achieved so far, so as to meet public criteria of intelligibility in theirexecution.

Expressing ourselves in such shared or shareable ways, however, is not always easy; it issomething we must aim at as an achievement. And quite often, we can fail in it – as Descartes’s worriesabout the difficulties confronting us if we are to arrive at certainty illustrates. To achieve sharedunderstandings with others, we must go through a number of developmental circumstances. As youngindividuals, we must learn the kind of active, living, spontaneous responsiveness to the words of others,such that to begin with, they can influence our behavior, but later, we can spontaneously influence boththeir behavior, and what is most crucial, our own (Bakhtin, 1986; Vygotsky, 1986, Shotter, 1984, 1993). Itis as we display more complex possibilities of sharable forms of expression, and thus the possibility ofliving more complicated inner lives, that our conscious lives develop and become refined and elaborated.

Indeed, we can even come to act in such a way that, if challenged as to the appropriateness ofour acts by those around us, we can verbally account to them for what we have done or are doing(Shotter, 1984), i.e., they can relate their own individual actions to “our [publicly shared] acting, whichlies at the bottom of the language-game” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.204). In other words, more than beingmerely able to share our awareness with others, we become able, verbally, to account for what we areaware of, i.e., to justify it, after the fact, both to others and to ourselves (Mills, 1940; Scott and Lyman,1968; Shotter, 1984), thus to exhibit a reflexive self-awareness of it. However, we must note here theadvanced nature of this possibility. Such a conceptual use of verbal expressions comes at the end ofestablishing a “language-game,” when we can ask whether a word is “ever actually used in this way inthe language-game which is its original home” (no.116), not at its beginning. Being able verbally to

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adduce a justifiable account, to give a conceptual representation of our aim in our actions, is not to give aprecise practical account of what is actually going on with us and within us when acting consciously, con-scientia.

Indeed, in the view of consciousness that I want to advance here, rather than the concepts wecan draw on in explaining (in the sense of justifying) our actions, in terms of their objects, aims, or point,being the source of our awareness as to what we are doing in our acting, they emerge as a consequence ofit. Our awareness of what we are doing in our actions arises out of the shared ways of actingspontaneously into which we have been trained, and out of our different ways of expressing thatintricate awareness in different circumstances – which, as Wittgenstein (1953, p.217) notes, is displayedin such questions, say, as “Why did you look at me at that word, were you thinking of...?,” which is askedin response to a “reaction at a certain moment,” and where “it makes a difference whether you refer tothis or to that moment.” Thus the analytic task we face here is of quite a different kind. It is to specifyconcretely, step by step, the actual unfolding of the orchestrated sequence of self-directed acts – ofremembering, imagining, looking, judging, valuing, selecting, linking, acting, inner speech and outercommunication, etc. – that go into the organization of a complex judgment or course of action (Vygotsky,1986). But to this is not easy. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks with respect to the particular problem asto whether “... there [is] such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions andfeelings?” “Yes there is,” he replies, “and some can learn this knowledge. [But] what is most difficult hereis to put all this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words” (p.227). For, the attempt toarticulate explicitly what is involved in such a judgment, depends, as we shall see, not only on our beingable to respond, directly and immediately to events occurring around us, but also on our being ablespontaneously to do it in a way shared with the others in our social group, i.e., normatively. That is, wemust be able to inter-relate, interweave, or interlink (in a chiasmic fashion) a selected set of theindividual events we encounter into a unitary whole in more or less the same way as those around us do,a unitary whole with its own unique identity or style, so to speak. And to understand how all this mightbe possible for us, will require us, in its turn, to re-think many of our very basic concepts to do with whatwe take to be the fundamental nature of our world, especially, as we shall see, the very basic concepts ofspace and time, and the nature of what we take to be the ‘stuff’ or the ‘matter’ of our inquiries (Capek,1961).

Bringing life back in: the centrality of our living, spontaneously responsive, bodily activity

To turn first, then, to the nature of the first-time, fleeting events spontaneously occurring in ourmeetings: Gradually, investigators have begun to comment on the (previously unnoticed) importance ofthe living bodily activities spontaneously occurring between us, and on the meaningful part they playprior to our conscious awareness of them as meaningful. Garfinkel (1967), for instance, remarks in thisrespect, on the fact that our everyday activities, our meetings with the others and othernesses around us,take place against a whole set of “expected background features of everyday scenes” which are “seen butunnoticed” (p.31), i.e., such expected features are seen in the sense of being spontaneously responded to,as indicative of this rather than that kind of life-as-usual event, but, just because they are as anticipated,are not picked out for explicit comment. Indeed, in the same vein, he lists a whole set of taken-for-granted features of our common talk – “the occasionality of expressions, the specific vagueness ofreferences, the retrospective-prospective sense of a present occurrence, the waiting for something laterto see what was meant before” – as furnishing “a background of seen but unnoticed features of commondiscourse” (p.41). However, although not consciously remarked on, if listeners do not spontaneouslyallow such features to pass as routinely understandable, as Garfinkel showed in his ‘experiments’,speakers immediately express moral indignation: “Departures from such usages call forth immediateattempts to restore a right state of affairs” (p.42). As Garfinkel remarks, these background features ofsocial life are continuously seen, but not usually noticed, and as such, often go unnoticed in our academicinquiries also.

Why are these spontaneous expressive reactions so easily ignored? Why do we fail to be struckby their importance ? Because, I suggest, oriented toward seeking the general, hidden, lawful inner7

‘mechanisms’ we suppose responsible for our outer (seemingly orderly and visible) behaviors, we think

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such expressions are too trivial and too fleeting to be of importance. But in doing this, we make no clearand strong distinctions between lifeless assemblies of externally related parts, which retain theirstructure irrespective of their context of existence, and organic, agentic unities of internally relatedparts, which owe their continued existence to their ‘fittingness’ within their circumstances. Indeed, it isas if life as something special in itself, as something sui generis, as something existing only in the specialnature of the internal relations between the constituent parts of a unique living whole – intertwinedrelations of both a spatial and temporal kind – has been completely dismissed from our deliberations. Asa result, both the inherent ‘directionality’ of temporally unfolding activities – their ‘movement’ from acertain past toward a limited range of possible futures (to speak metaphorically, for both these termsspatialize time ) – and their inevitable gestural expressiveness in ‘pointing from this past toward that8

kind of future’, has been ignored. But if this form of gestural expressiveness is so pervasive andinfluential in our inquiries in this manner, why have we failed to notice this? Why do we still feel we canapproach living phenomena in same causal-mechanistic manner as dead ones? Because, it would seem,from the ancient Greeks till now, we have operated as self-controlled thinkers, as workers in a purelycognitive realm of disembodied, essentially geometric forms, and we have only turned to act in the actualworld of concrete events after our development of a theoretical structure to guide us in our actionswithin it. As Kant put it in 1787, we must approach nature “in order to be taught by it.” But, he went on,“[reason] must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacherchooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himselfhas formulated,” and to refuses “to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings” (Kant, 1970, p.20). Inother words, although we have wanted to learn from nature, we have not been interested in hearingnature’s own ‘voice’, we have not allowed ‘it’ to teach us of itself (Shotter a, in press). We have willfullysought answers only to questions of our own formulation, questions formulated only in terms of theobjective aspects of the things and events occurring around us.

Our resistance to being kept in nature’s “leading strings” has, however, led us to make the majormistake of assuming that we exist in the world only as individual, self-contained, cognitively functioning,subjective minds, immersed in a world of purely objective events occurring around us . In taking just this9

willful stance and this stance alone toward our inquiries, we have, like all good modern epistemologists,followed Descartes in seeing the world around us as ‘furnished’ only with separately existing, self-contained, neutral objects . Thus other people (whether dead or alive) appear to us just as all the other10

objects around us appear to us – as entities having a certain size, shape, color, weight, moving at acertain velocity, and so forth, and can also be taken as means to our own ends. As a consequence,whether we see something as a living thing or not, is not a matter of our immediate bodily response to it,but a cognitive matter, something we have to ‘work out’, as Descartes did so many years ago: “If I lookout of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that Isee the men themselves... Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? Ijudge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact graspedsolely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind” (Descartes, 1968, p.21) . Any sense that the11

movements of the people (and other living things) on the square – their spontaneously responsive andexpressive movements – are in some way of an utterly distinct kind from the movements of the non-living entities there, has been expunged from consideration. Indeed, even in our thinking about logic andmathematics, in our thoughts about calculation and computation, and in other spheres of scientificinquiry in which theoretical schematisms are central (see Doyle, 1997; Fisher, 1998; Rotman, 1993), weseem to have misled ourselves in thinking that we can exclude the part(s) played by our ownspontaneously expressive bodily responses in accounting for the role of such schematisms in our lives.

But there is something very basic about living, embodied expression and the way in which theygesture toward, so to speak, the unitary style of what is to come in our relations to the others andothernesses around us. It is, for instance, often remarked by babies differentially respond to expressionsof expressions of pleasure (smiles, etc.) and anger (frowns, and suchlike) manifested not only in thefacial expressions, tones or voice, and other unfolding bodily movements of those around them, longbefore they can discriminate between triangles and squares (Koffka, 1924). Indeed, even one’s petanimals spontaneously respond to one’s own expressions of interest or concern regarding surroundingevents . 12

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Thus, perhaps, it is with such phenomena that we can begin our acknowledgment of the13

importance of such living movements. For, what if, as Wittgenstein (1953) suggests, “our attitude towhat is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (no.284)? What if ourreactions, not only to embodied human expression, but to the results of embodied human expression, areof a quite different kind to our reactions to ‘mute’ shapes, forms, or patterns? What if in our dailytransactions with the world around us, and in our more academic inquiries, we are in fact continuouslyand spontaneously acting differently, not only toward living and dead things, but also toward the livingand dead aspects in our own embodied activities and products, while failing to notice this? What if, in theresponsive intertwining of our activities in with events in their surroundings, there is an intricate andsubtle orchestrated interplay between their active aspects (in which we act on our surroundings) andtheir passive aspects (in which we responsively follow the expressive ‘calls’ coming to us from oursurroundings)? If all this were so, might we not in fact be deceiving ourselves in attempting toencompass all our meaningful relations with our surroundings within the category of subject-objectrelations? Might there not be something of unique importance in the temporal sequencing of theunfolding (or unfolded) movements of a pen on paper or of a brush on canvas to which we in fact attach(currently unnoticed) significance, or in the slight variations of tone, pitch, or pacing as we utter ourwords, or even in this piece here, written as it has been on a mechanical word processor, in mypatterning of just these word-forms on the paper before you, and not others? If all this is the case, thenwhile it might seem to be the case that in our active use of words we are making repetitive use of thesame forms, this cannot be so. For all our words have a unique use, a use unique to the particularmomentary setting within which we happen to find ourselves, a setting passively constituted for us inour spontaneous responsiveness to what is occurring in our surroundings. And it is in our uniqueintertwining of our utterances with features in their surroundings, that this unique use is expressed.

This is why I suggested above, that in seeking the kind of descriptive terms required in ourinvestigations of events occurring in our meetings, we could not proceed in conceptual terms, in termsbased in regularities with currency only within already established language-games. Instead, we mustwork in terms of beginnings, in terms of events occurring “for ‘another first time’” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.9),unique, fleeting events which ‘set the scene’, so to speak, for what else might occur within a meeting.Wittgenstein (1980) captures this concern in the following set of remarks: “The origin and the primitiveform of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language -I want to say - is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [quoting Goethe]” (p.31). “The primitivereaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word,” he notes (Wittgenstein,1953, p.218). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?” he asks, (Wittgenstein, 1981).“Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is theprototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (no.541). In all these remarks, he is drawingour attention to the possible role in our lives of the unique, spontaneous, bodily responses we have tothe expressions of others or to events occurring around us. And he is concerned here with ourunderstanding of them, not as instances of a type, but with our beginning the kind of understandings thatare unique to the circumstances of their occurrence: understandings to do with unique individuals andthe unique events occurring in their unique lives.

Indeed, it is at this point that we can begin to draw a distinction between aspects of ourexpressions related to what we can call our ‘outer lives’ and those related to what, metaphorically, wecall our ‘inner lives’, i.e., between those aspects of our expressions which relate to features in oursurroundings visible to all, and those aspects of our expressions which, as first-persons, are distinctivejust of our own unique relations to our circumstances, which, at the time of their expression, are invisibleto others. It is at this point too, that we must note the key gestural role of our bodily expressions, andthat they may be either of an indicative kind, in that they ‘point beyond themselves’ to something in theirsurroundings, or are of a mimetic kind, in being responsively ‘shaped’ by such influences. Their gesturalrole is crucial in what follows, as such activity is inherently meaningful, prior to, or independently of, ourhaving learned any rules of interpretation. Indeed, Mead (1934) puts this aspect of the matter well in hisremark that: “the mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence ofconsciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organismgives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78). It is in those aspects of ourexpressions in which we speak, in spontaneous continuous response to our lived relations to our

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surroundings (in how we ‘contour’ their pausing, pacing, intonation, word choice, etc., in their ‘stylisticvariations’), that we express our own unique ‘inner lives’ to those around us. As Voloshinov (1986) putsit: “The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside – in the social milieusurrounding the individual being” (p.93, emphasis in original).

This emphasis on our intrinsic, spontaneous, living, expressive responsiveness to events in oursurroundings, and thus our ineradicable relatedness to them, is, thus, crucial. In thinking that we onlysee certain circumstances – whether in outer or ‘inner’ seeing – as meaningful because of our subjectiveinterpretations of them according to learned rules or conventions, we have completely ignored thepossibility that this more basic form of gestural expression might be spontaneously at work in them. Thishas led us also to ignore the presence in our socially intelligible living activities, of what others havecalled the system of “background expectancies and anticipations” in terms of which we respond to someaspects of people’s everyday activities in a normative manner, i.e., as routinely intelligible or not (e.g.,Mills, 1940; Garfinkel, 1967; Scott and Lyman, 1968; Searle, 1983, 1995). And this in turn, is to ignorethe temporally unfolding nature of our living expressions and how – by becoming engaged in theunfolding movement of an other’s expressions – we can be spontaneously ‘moved’ by them in ways weshare with the others around us.

In the next section below, I will explore further the ineradicable ‘dynamic’, ‘developing’,‘formative’, or ‘structurizing’ nature of such spontaneously responsive living activities, and how, due totheir always ‘in motion’ nature, it is impossible to describe their nature in terms of instantaneous staticstructures. But here, I would like to end this section simply by noting that what is expressed in this formof living activity is not hidden somewhere ‘behind’ it, but is expressed or exhibited directly within it, inits unfolding appearances. While the ‘what’ in question is invisible, it is sensed as a “presence,” not assomething neutral, as merely objective, but as something that, like another person, can exert ‘calls’ on us(Shotter b, in press). Whatever I turn toward, I turn toward with both a history of my past meetings withit and range of anticipations as how it might next appear to me. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it. “It istrue that the lamp has a back, that the cube has another side. But this formula: “It is true,” does notcorrespond to what is given me in perception. Perception does not give me truths like geometry butpresences. I grasp the unseen side as present, and I do not affirm that the back of the lamp exists in thesame sense that I say the solution of a problem exists. The hidden side is present in its own way. It is inmy vicinity [the vicinity of my body]” (p.14). Thus, to repeat, it is the function of this form of expressionto ‘set the scene’, so to speak, for all our more self-conscious, cognitive forms of understanding. Suchexpressions ‘call out’ from us, a moment-by-moment changing, spontaneously responsive attitude orstance, a stance appropriate to our inter-relating all the specific events we encounter in a particularcircumstance into a unitary whole, and to do so in more or less the same way or style as the othersaround us do. Lacking access to that spontaneous way or style of relating ‘items’ into a unique whole,thus to give them their (felt) sense, we would be unable to participate in routine exchanges with theothers around us.

Living responsiveness, the dialogical, and the chiasmic

The focal importance of these spontaneously used and expected styles of expression is most obvious,perhaps, in the research field of Conversational Analysis (CA). There, the central analytic concepts of“adjacency pair” and “conditional relevance” take it for granted that “given the first [item in a14

sequenced pair of conversational items], the second is expectable; upon its occurrence it can be seen tobe the second item to the first; upon its nonoccurrence it can be seen to be officially absent...” (Schegloff,1972, p.364). In other words, there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in a flow of living activity. Eachmoment has within it a ‘carry over’ from the past and a quite specific anticipation of the future . Indeed,15

in Saussure’s (1911) claim that “... in language there are only differences ” (p.120), makes it clear that it16

is the differences occurring from moment to moment in the sequential unfolding of speech events overtime that speech is made into speech. Or, in other words, it is in the intrinsic or inherent relationsexisting between such events that what we perceive as a person’s meaningful vocal expressions havetheir being. Thus the voiced flow of people’s utterances is such that during any conversationalengagement, at the moment when one speaker finishes their turn at talk, a shaped and vectored sense of

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what appropriately might next be said, is shared amongst all participants alike. And they must speak as itrequires, if their speech is to be perceived as ‘fitting’, and not as disorienting by other participants – therecipient of a question feels a compellent need to reply with an answer to it. Bakhtin (1986) also makes avery similar comment: “Each rejoinder [in a dialogue], regardless of how brief and abrupt, has a specificquality of completion that expresses a particular position of the speaker, to which one may respond orassume, with respect to it, a responsive position... But at the same time rejoinders are all linked to oneanother. And the sort of relations that exist among rejoinders of dialogue – relations between questionand answer, assertion and objection, suggestion and acceptance, order and execution, and so forth – areimpossible among units of language (words and sentences), either in the system of language (in verticalcross section) or within utterances (on the horizontal plane)” (p.72).

Bakhtin, however, goes on to remark on an aspect of conversational exchanges not stressed byconversational analysts, that: “an utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of somethingalready existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existedbefore, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value(the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)” (pp.119-120).

Displayed here above, then, are a number of important, and in fact, quite remarkable features ofexpressive human activity that we not usually given a sufficiently adequate treatment in contemporarysocial theory: the special internally related but always incomplete structure of its temporal unfolding, andthus its capacity to ‘call for’ further action; and the always uniquely creative and evaluative nature of thatfurther action, with its dialogical or chiasmic, i.e., interwoven, relation to its surroundings. I will turn firstto the uniquely creative character of the chiasmic or dialogical intertwinings occurring in the moment ofa meeting between two or more living activities, but I will reserve discussion of the special nature oftheir continued temporal unfolding for a later section.

A special kind of poiesis or creative activity occurs in the boundary zone between two or moreliving activities upon their meeting and mingling with each other. Such creative activity cannot betreated simply as action (for it is not done by individuals, and thus it cannot be explained by givingindividual people’s reasons), nor is it simply behavior (to be explained in terms of mechanicalregularities according to a causal law or principle). It constitutes a distinct, third sphere of activity withits own quite distinctive, even strange, properties. In line with our terminology so far, we can call it adialogically- or chiasmically-structured activity.

Bakhtin makes a number of important remarks about features of activity in this sphere. We canfirst note his comment that, “dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to thepurely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional-syntactic). They arepossible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects... ‘Hunger, cold!’ – one utteranceof a single speaking subject. ‘Hunger!’ – ‘Cold!’ – two dialogically correlated utterances of two differentsubjects: here dialogic relations appear that did not exist in the former case” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.117-118). While in the first case, the utterance of the word ‘cold’ simply modifies the first, in the second,according to its surroundings and the positions and relations between the two subjects, the expression‘Cold!’ could be an expression of sympathy (‘And you’re cold as well!’), of competition (‘While you’rehungry I’m cold!’), of disagreement (“Cold, not hunger, is what we’re complaining about!’), and so on.

Thus, for Bakhtin (1993), “what underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not aprinciple as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of one’s own participation inunitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot be adequately expressed in theoretical terms, but can onlybe described and participatively experienced. Here lies the point of origin of the answerable deed and ofall the categories of the concrete, once-occurrent, and compellent ought” (p.40). In other words, in ameeting in which dialogically-structured activity occurs, a ‘reality’ or ‘space’ is constructed between theparticipants which is experienced as a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’) with its own (ethical) demands andrequirements, its own compulsions : “Each dialogue takes place as if against a background of the17

responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in thedialogue (partners)... The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being... – he isa constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it” (Bakhtin,

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1986, pp.126-127). Although invisible, the event of the meeting, ‘its’ reality – expressed in theparticipant’s spontaneously responsive reactions, not only to each other, but also to their surroundings –becomes itself an agency, able to exert a moving, shaping, or formative influence on the activities ofthose participating within it. And we grasp the nature of these shaping influences, not as passive andneutral objects, but as “real presences” (Steiner, 1989), as agencies toward which we adopt an“evaluative attitude” which we exhibit in the “style” or the “expressive aspect” of our utterances (Bakhtin,1986, p.84).

Participants responsively express their relation to their circumstances in, among other registers,the intonation of their utterances. Thus, in the continuously unfolding flow of dialogically-structuredactivity occurring in the active meeting of two or more living human beings, a uniquely structured, stillongoing, i.e., never-to-be-finished, dynamic unity is formed. “A plurality of independent and unmergedvoices and consciousnesses,... combine but are not merged in the unity of the event,” notes Bakhtin (1984,p.6); and to emphasize the special, non-fused, or internally well-articulated character of the unity inquestion, he goes on to characterize it, “not as an innate one-and-only, but as a dialogic concordance ofunmerged twos and multiples” (p.289). But how might we begin to make sense of some of Bakhtin’sclaims here? What does it mean to say that a unity of unmerged twos and multiples is created?

Well, we can first note that, given the fact of their spontaneous living responsiveness to eachother’s bodily activities, the activity occurring in the boundary zone of a meeting, while not a simplyblending or synthesis, an averaging out of all the participant’s activities, is still nonetheless a unity. For,at this level, what we might call ‘primordial-expressive’ level of their joint activity, it is not a matter ofone person first acting individually and independently of an other, and then a second replying,individually and independently of the first; all the participants act jointly, as a collective-we. They do itbodily, in an immediate ‘living’ way, without first having ‘to work out’ how to respond to each other. Thismeans that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for oneperson’s acts are always partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of the others around them – and this is where all thestrangeness of the chiasmic or dialogical begins (see Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b). In thisexpressive sphere, our actions are neither yours nor mine; they are truly ‘ours’ as a collective unity.

What is produced in such dialogically-structured meetings, then, is a very complex and intricateintertwining of not wholly reconcilable, mutually influencing movements – with, as Bakhtin (1981)remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins. This makes it verydifficult for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderlystructure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective norfully objective character. Yet further, to the extent that the temporal unfolding of intertwined activity inthis realm is shared in by all, it is non-locatable. It is neither ‘inside’ people, but nor is it simply ‘outside’of them. It is ‘spread out’ or distributed amongst all those participating in it. Indeed, to the extent that itis undifferentiated as to whose it is, we could say that they all have their being ‘within’ it.

In other words, at this primordial-expressive level, taken all together, people, their activities onmeeting, and the surroundings of their resulting interactions , all constitute a dynamically unfolding,18

internally inter-related, meaningful whole which cannot be divided into separable, externally relatedparts. Although we tend to think of space and time as two absolutely distinct ‘container’ realms, whichbecame fused in Einstein’s space-time, we now need, perhaps, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) suggests, to“recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, andinstall [ourselves] in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yetbeen ‘worked over’, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object’, both existence andessence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them” (p.130). Indeed, we might suggest that itis precisely the lack of any finalized order, and thus their openness to being further specified ordetermined by those involved in them, in practice, that is one of the central defining characteristics ofthe intertwined activities occurring in such meetings. But yet, people cannot just go on to act as theyplease, for, as we have already noted, it is as if there is a third, collective-agency within the circumstancesof their meeting, and all involved in ‘it’ must answer to ‘its’ calls if they are to remain ‘in’ interaction witheach other.

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But from whence does this strange dialogically-structured, dispersed agency, this grammar (inWittgenstein’s sense), emerge? Due to the impossibility of being able to trace the overall outcome of anyexchange back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, we can see why, although it is a jointproduct of all their activities, all those involved in it treat it as an ‘external world’, as in fact anunmoveable and unresponsive ‘third being’ in relation to their actions. But how are all the influencesthat go into its formation inter-linked with each other to form such an integrated and unique unity?

Here, in perhaps what is a surprising move if we are still thinking in conceptual terms ratherthan in terms of my bodily relations to my surroundings, we can take some comments both by Merleau-Ponty and by Bateson on binocular vision as indicative of what might be involved in the formation of suchunities. Both writers, in their own different ways, note that “the binocular perception is not made up oftwo monocular perceptions surmounted; it is of another order. The monocular images are not in thesame sense that the things perceived with both eyes is... they are pre-things and it is the thing” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.7) . Bateson (1979) too notes that “the difference between the information provided by19

the one retina and that provided by the other is itself information of a different logical type. From thissort of information, the seer adds (sic) an extra dimension to seeing” (p.80). We achieve a currentlyinexplicable and quite amazing ‘synthesis’, i.e., intertwining, of fragments of information, gathered fromhere and these, at different moments in time, to constitute for ourselves the dimension of depth. As ourtwo eyes work together in looking over the visual scene before us (like an autofocus camera), firstfinding a common fixation and focus on this point at that distance, then on that point at this distance, andso on, and so on, the continuously unfolding sequence of ‘looks’, darting hither and thither, back andforth, over what is before us, results eventually in our seeing of a unified and indivisible visual scene.

But it is not just a neutral scene that happens to have a third, relational dimension of depthadded into it. What we call the scene’s depth is related to my bodily concerns and orientation, it is ascene in which my possible movements are immediately available to me. Hence, without having to workit out, I have an immediate sense of what is within and out of reach, of what is near and what is far. Infact, even more, I have an immediate evaluative sense – as Bakhtin noted – of how my moves within itmight matter to me, for it presents me with a shaped and vectored sense of how at that moment, givenmy bodily position in relation to my surroundings, I might spontaneously respond to them. This isespecially apparent when, say, in driving on a multilane highway we sustain a continually updated senseof where next we might possibly go, but also, clearly must not go.

With this paradigm in mind, while acknowledging the inexplicable nature of such bodilyintertwinings or syntheses, I want to suggest that we can treat people’s 1st-person expressions, theirspontaneous voicing of their utterances in conversations, as contributing to the constitution of suchcomplex syntheses in the same way. For, just as the two different, moment-by-moment changing viewsof a landscape before us, given us by our two different eyes are not merged into a blurred two-dimensional image, but intricately intertwined to create for us a sense of depth – a metaphorically so-called third-dimension – so the different voices speaking from different momentary positions in a shared‘space’ can also give us a sense of that space as having some ‘depth’, a sense of it has allowing fordifferent ‘places’ and ‘positions’, also.

Indeed, although such metaphorical talk of this kind, of our conversations as occurring in‘spaces’ with degrees of ‘depth’ to them, may appear quite arbitrary and utterly baseless (Johnston,1993), we shall nonetheless find that there are good expressive reasons why it makes sense to talk of the‘inner reality’ of a conversation as constituting a ‘landscape’ of possible places to ‘go on’ to, and of‘mental or discursive movements’ that one might make within it. For there is a kind of understandingspontaneously at work in our conversational activities when we use already well-known wordspoetically or metaphorically in utterly new – and apparently arbitrary – ways which, in Wittgenstein’s(1953) terms, “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no.122). It is a practical, bodily responsive kind ofspontaneous understanding that, to contrast it with the “representational-referential” forms ofunderstanding more familiar to us in our intellectual and individual dealings with our surroundings, wemight call a “relationally-responsive” kind of understanding. While we shall find this kind of relationalunderstanding of importance in relation to our more general philosophical concerns with the workingsof language, it is just this kind of understanding that opens up to us the quite unique and idiosyncratic

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concerns of those nearest and dearest to us, that gives us access to their ‘inner’ lives. As Johnston (1993)notes, it is not that these 1 -person expressions are accurately linked to a mysterious inner realm whichst

would not otherwise see the light of day, “the account has a use quite independently of whether or not itaccurately reproduces some supposed inner event” (p.14). Irrespective of whether certain ‘inner events’are accurately ‘depicted’ in a person’s outer speech, what their 1 -person avowals tell us, is what theirst

anticipations and expectations are as to how we should ‘go on’ with them, how we respond to them, howwe should treat them. Whether we ourselves can actually ‘see’ the (perhaps previously quite unforseen)connections a friend is now making between certain circumstances in her surroundings, byspontaneously expressing herself in the way that she does, she is allowing us to relate ourselves to herand her circumstances in ways that would otherwise be quite impossible. She grimaces. But until shesays, “I’m puzzled,” “I’m in pain,” “I feel dizzy,” “I don’t like that music,” “That’s a very ugly dog,” orwhatever, we remain disoriented as to how to respond to her grimace.

But if we are to better understand the workings of such a kind of understanding, its non-representational, non-pictorial or non-visual nature, and its role in ‘setting the scene’ for thedevelopment of uniquely new understandings, we must first explore why it is that we have seem to haveeradicated it completely from our inquiries. How is it, if such a form of understanding plays such acentral role in our lives, that we seem to have devised methods of inquiry which seem not to have anyneed of it?

‘Seeing connections’ and ‘getting it’

As we turn away from the world of our everyday, practical, personal affairs, and turn as professionalacademics to the Cartesian-Kantian world of theoretical reason in our intellectual inquiries, it isprecisely the sphere of responsive bodily expression that we also turn away from. As a disembodied,self-contained mind, willfully oriented only to seeing static shapes or forms, I do not find myself ‘called’,so to speak, into any particular relations with these pictorial shapes; I do not find them immediately anddirectly ‘pointing beyond’ themselves to anything else in their surroundings; they are open tointerpretation. Why is it that it is precisely within this inert world that we, as professional academics feelcompelled to situate ourselves? We do so, I want to suggest, because ever since Descartes, we feelourselves committed essentially to a Euclidean-Newtonian, geometric form of reasoning, in which at acertain instant in time, everything of relevance to our ‘getting it’, to our ‘seeing a connection’, is allvisually present to us at once (all ‘on the same page’, so to speak). In his search for a secure method forthe attainment of certain knowledge, Descartes (1968) as we know, thought that it could be found in theuse of “those long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers use to teach their mostdifficult demonstrations” (p.41). Thus, even when we are not actually conducting mathematical proofs,we must still work as if we had to satisfy a similar rigor, and connect our claims into an unbrokensequence, with each undeniable step following from a previous undeniable step. This seems to reduceour reasoning to a mechanical process, one of merely matching shapes or forms (suitably scaled,topologically) for their congruence. But does it? Is the crucial role of our trained, spontaneous responsesto the 1 -person expressions of others, eradicated from our lives in this form of reasoning? Fromst

whence does our confidence in this kind of reasoning issue?

Fisher (1998) studies how Descartes sets out his step-by-step method for the achievement ofcertainty in his first major work, the Regulae, or Rules for the Direction of the Intellect – it depends, as weshall see, on our having certain kinds of what he calls “feelings” or “experiences.” In setting the scene forhis account, Fisher begins with Socrates’s claim (in the Theaetetus) that “philosophy begins in wonder”(not in fear, as some might claim), and with the importance of phenomena that ‘strike’ us. He then turnsto some remarks of Wittgenstein’s in the Brown Book, to do with our being struck by what is unfamiliarto us. For both Descartes and Wittgenstein suggest that we do not have an experience, as such, of theordinary: “Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity,” says Wittgenstein (1965,p.127). “By a feeling or experience here,” says Fisher (1998), “we mean that we have a definable momentof a special kind that might be noticed, remembered, formulated in description, something discretewithin the flow of time, something clear, self-contained, separable from what came before and after... apatch of experience, a this with its own duration and quality” (p.20). Next, Fisher suggests, it is within

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such memorable and feelingful moments, that an experience of “seeing connections” can occur : “Being20

struck by something is exactly the opposite of being struck dumb. The tie between wonder and learningis clear in the moment when after long confusion and study you suddenly say, ‘Now I get it!’... themoment of ‘getting it’ is extremely clear in mathematics. In an instant, unexpectedly, the answer is seenfor the first time, and all that was a puzzle of unrelated facts up to that instant turns into clarity andorder” (p.21). Given such moments of ‘getting it’, Descartes’s achievement, Fisher suggests, was to“design a way to make sure that every necessary fact is visually present to the mind at the moment when[a] next step [in one’s reasoning] is being weighed and that, as in chess, pieces that have been madeinactive have been removed from sight” (p.61). Each methodical step sets the stage for such aninstantaneous act of ‘seeing’, we complete it with confidence and move on to arrange the next. And in hisRegulae, Descartes set out a set of simple exercises for coming to a recognition of what such a certaintyfeels like; they gave one a feel for “what one step looks like, what adequate symbolism is at any givenmoment, what the distinction between relevant and irrelevant details feels like, but above all, what thefeeling of ‘getting it’, of crossing the small gap of the unknown is like” (Fisher, 1998, p.66).

We can now, perhaps, see the importance of static pictures, of diagrams, of configurations orstates of affairs in this way of thinking; and how change, as such, comes to be represented within it as asequence of discontinuous instants in which everything present at one moment is simply reshuffled in aninstant into a new configuration. Indeed, as we shall see below, it is this way of thinking which hasauthorized the whole structuralist approach to language as an arbitrary system of signs working torepresent thoughts (or objects of thought) by “the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with asmany cuts made in the mass of thought” (Saussure, 1959, p.120), and in almost all other spheres of thehuman sciences, in which we mislead ourselves into thinking that “if anyone utters a sentence and meansor understands it he is operating a calculus according to rules” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.81). We can alsosee, how easy it is, in this way of thinking, to talk of consciousness as simply a completely enclosed ‘innerspace’ in which this kind of thinking occurs, or, for consciousness to be a realm within which purelyconfigurational changes in representational forms can occur mechanically. For, “what is eliminated [inthis way of thinking] is,” Fisher claims, “the use of memory within thought, replaced by a deep use of thevisual” (pp.61-62). Clearly, we confront a much more difficult mental task if, in trying to work out howbest to deal with a complex circumstance, we must also re-view and re-connect past material into ourcurrent circumstances.

In a moment, I will question whether memory has in fact been eliminated, as Fisher suggests,but let me first explore how the problem of sequence and succession, of the sequential ‘shaping’ of anutterance, is encompassed within such a static, spatialized form of thought. For, as we have seen, staticstyles of thought can only represent change as sequence of discrete steps, of jumps from one staticconfiguration to another – thus misleading us into treating living change as merely changes of position inan otherwise unchanging world. Saussure’s (1959) account of syntax, and Chomsky’s (1972) elaborationof it – to show how it is possible for a speaker, operating within a finite system of rules, to make, “in theterminology Wilhelm von Humboldt used in the 1830's, ... infinite use of finite means” (p.17) – isparadigmatic here. For surely, if talking meaningfully is a matter of shaping one’s utterances in anappropriate matter, according to an unambiguous set of rules, then it must be possible to picture orrepresent their patterning in such a way that they can be paired with patterns arrived at by the kind offormal reasoning discussed by Fisher above, thus to discover what these rules are. This was Saussure’s(1959) goal in his structuralist or formalistic approach to “the mechanism of language” (p.127), hewanted to capture the grammar of a language in a timeless (synchronic) static structure.

To see why Saussure thought this an adequate aim, we must explore the preliminaryassumptions he makes in setting the scene for his investigations. While we have based ourselves in ourspontaneous, bodily responses to events occurring around us, Saussure begins with ratiocination. So,although it may very well seem that he is making a number of very similar claims to those we haveexplored above, the differences are in fact enormous.

For him, while “other sciences work with objects that are given in advance... not linguistics... Farfrom it being the object that antedates the viewpoint, it would seem that [in linguistics] it is theviewpoint that creates the object” (p.8). Thus “the linguistic entity is not accurately defined until it is

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delimited, i.e., separated from everything that surrounds it” (p.103), for what is merely ‘accidental’variation – according to the norms of native speakers – must be distinguished from what is properlysystematic. Only after this has been done, it is then possible to construct language as a “system of purevalues” (p.111), both “on the plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B) ”21

(p.112). Thus, in Saussures’s (1959) terms: “A linguistic system is a series of differences of soundcombined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signswith as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values; and this system servesas the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign” (p.120). In otherwords, it is because the objective sequence of differences (of values) in the objective system of signifiers,runs parallel to objective sequence of differences (of values) in the signified, that B can represent A. Butthe world of difference that separates Saussure from everything we have explored above, isacknowledged by Saussure in his comment that, “very few linguists suspect that the intervention of thefactor of time creates difficulties peculiar to linguistics and opens to their science two divergent paths”(p.79). “Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to dowith evolution is diachronic” (p.81).

In other words, like Fisher above, Saussure’s account seeks to give us a view with everything ofrelevance all present to us in an instant. But he fails to acknowledge that he sneaks time and temporalityback into his thought in his procedure for delimiting linguistic units: “to divide the chain, we must call inmeanings,” he says, for “when we know the meaning and function that must be attributed to each part ofthe chain, we see the parts detach themselves from each other and the shapeless ribbon break up intosegments” (Saussure, 1959, pp.103-104). And it is here that the enormous difference between Saussure’sstatic approach to language, in terms of rational or reasoned relations of “values” within externallyconstructed systems of differences, and the dynamic approach in terms of spontaneously responsiveness, living, embodied relations (in Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) becomesapparent. It is only because we are in fact already competent users of language, sensitive to itsgrammatical character that we can – on the basis of a belief that there must be a mechanical, rule-governed system at work in causing us to talk as we do – begin to find such an ‘after the fact’ and ‘besidethe point’ system in it. Thus, as Voloshinov (1986) very correctly emphasizes, while structuralists claimthat “the system of language is an objective fact external to and independent of any individualconsciousness. Actually, represented as a system of self-identical, immutable norms, it can be perceivedin this way only by the individual consciousness and from the point of view of that consciousness” (p.65).In fact, from a strictly objective point of view (one that leaves out our responsiveness to its meanings),we can only see the unceasing flow of interactive movement issuing from and within the meeting ofpersons; within that unceasing flow of activity, no objective system of normative forms as such, is or evercan be apparent. To repeat, although all human expressions may seem to have, at an instant, a delimited,i.e., fixed, ‘outer’ visible form, to the extent that they are inevitably ‘participant parts’ in a successivelyunfolding movement, over or through time, they are ineradicable tinged, so to speak, with (in spatialterms!) where ‘they have been’ and what they are ‘headed’.

In a similar manner, we can ask of Fisher, has memory in fact been eliminated in Cartesian formsof thought? Is the temporal and the historical truly absent in such a form of reasoning? Are the objects ofthought in this way of thinking simply the inert objects they are taken to be? What if, like faces, suchobjects also ‘looked at us’, what if they had a physiognomy (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.181), an ‘inner’ life, arange of different ways of expressing their identity, so that we felt both that we had to be answerable tothem in some direct and immediate way, but could not always be answerable to them in the same way?

As we are trained, step by step, in building up our mathematical skills or skills in logic, we mustdevelop certain sensitivities, certain bodily inclinations to respond immediately and spontaneously incertain mathematically or logically appropriate ways to certain symbols on the page or on theblackboard before us, i.e., to ‘see’ them as presenting us with certain kinds of questions, etc. So, althoughit may seem that memory has been eliminated in this form of step by step, configurational orrepresentational reasoning, it hasn’t. While it has been eliminated in those aspects of the process weconduct consciously, in which we act accountably, it hasn’t in those aspects of the process involving ourspontaneous bodily responses to the marks of human expression on the paper before us. For it is thosemarks into which (some of us) have, slowly and laboriously, been trained into ‘seeing as’ expressions

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with crucial mathematical or logical meanings. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1978) notes about suchsymbolic marks: “Symbols appear to be of their nature unsatisfied... The proposition seems set overagainst us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. – It seems to demand that reality be compared with it”(p.132). In other words, we are back again in the realm of the physiognomic, in the realm of embodiedexpression . How might we outline the dimensions of such a realm? We shall find the realm of the22

temporal unfolding of dynamically intertwined unities crucial.

The primacy of the unceasing temporal flow of living activity: dynamizing space rather than spatializing time

Let us here, then, return to the problem of the constitution of an unmerged, intertwined unity from acontinuous succession of distinct bodily involvements, and to the paradigm example we used there ofbinocular vision. But in considering seeing with two eyes, we were not, perhaps, getting just a littleahead of ourselves, and moving prematurely to a higher level of complexity before considering seeing‘something’ with just one eye? Seeing with two eyes, allowed us too easily still to remain in the realmonly of the spatial. If we consider what is involved, even with one eye, in scanning over a face and seeingit – with all its changing expressions – as the same face, only now as a smiling face, now as frowning, nowas sad, as welcoming, as threatening, and so on, we clearly still meet the same problem as before: How isit possible for us to join together all the different fragments, collected at different moments in time as theeye jumps from one fixation to the next, into a coherent dynamic whole, into ‘seeing’ not just a person’sface as static configurations, but into a way of seeing ‘them’ that is expressive of their character, of whothey are?

That seeing a person’s face as a face is an achievement in which it is possible to fail, is shown bySacks’s (1985) Dr P. Although Dr P. knew perfectly well what eyes, noses, chins, etc., were intellectually,he could not spontaneously recognize people’s faces as such, let alone, as uniquely their face; thus it wasthat he mistook his wife’s face for his hat. His failure was not in recognizing static forms – as Sacks’stesting showed – his abilities in that sphere were superlative. His failure was of a physiognomic kind, afailure not only of spontaneous judgment in the visio-spatial sphere , but also a failure of spontaneous23

bodily response to human expression. He looked over Sacks’s face, “as if noting (even studying) [its]individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its chnaging expressions, ‘me’, as a whole... there was ateasing strangeness, some failure of interplay between gaze and expression” (p.8). Situated visually, ashe was, in a realm only of shapes and forms arrayed only spatially, Dr P. lacked the capacity to respondspontaneously, not only to faces as faces, but also to their expressions – to comfort a person’s sadness orassuage their anger. A face presented Dr P., just like any other spatial shape, merely with an occasion fora methodical interpretation – or misinterpretation, just as he misinterpreted his foot for his shoe! LikeDescartes’s automatons seen from across the street, visually, other people’s facial expressions ‘told’ himnothing; they ‘called’ nothing from him; they were not charged, so to speak, with any mnemonic sense ofbeing related to a previous momentary configuration, or with any anticipation of their next possiblecontours. He did not see people’s facial expressions in relation to their surroundings, both spatial andtemporal. As Sacks (1985) put it: “Visually, [Dr P.] was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions... He couldspeak about things, but did not see them face-to-face” (p.13). In lacking ‘life’ for him, they lacked thecapacity to call out from him, spontaneously, a living response.

As our account of Fisher’s (1998) work above shows, thinking only pictorially or spatially leadsus to forget the enormous difference between mere static juxtaposition and the dynamic successionpresent in the ceaseless unfolding of living forms. For static styles of thought can only encompass changeas a series of discrete steps, of jumps from one static configuration to another – thus misleading us intotreating living change as merely changes of position in an unchanged world, or as the simply movingfrom one place to another on an unchanging landscape rather than as a pulsational flow of indivisibleactivity. In other words, to live within a disconnected sequence of instants, with no way of organizingthem into a living unitary whole with a past that can be updated and with a future that can beanticipated, would be to live in a motionless, timeless, ever repeating present moment, in which one wascontinually born anew. And this would be to live without any sense at all of having a life.

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Yet, in his study of the classical picture of physical reality, Capek (1961) notes the bafflingtendency, even with the new forms of thought required by relativity and quantum physics before us, tononetheless revert back to the classical, timeless picture, the purely spatial structure, in our attempts tomake sense of not only other spheres of activity in our lives, but also of relativity and quantum theorythemselves. “Classical physics cannot be forgotten,” says Capek, “even though its prestige no longersurvives. It cannot be forgotten not only because it remains valid at the macrophysical level, that is, forour daily experience; not only because it is being taught for that reason in high schools and in basicundergraduate course; but also because its principles are embodied in the present structure of theaverage human intellect or in what is usually called ‘common sense’ ” (pp.xii-xiii). It is, he points out, the24

‘view’ of the world – and as we have seen, its pictorial quality is one of its most significant features –25

embodied in Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. It is the view that “the universe is a pack ofcards, that is, an aggregate of distinct entities persisting through time without any intrinsic change”(Capek, 1961, p.127).

But, in such a world as this, essentially a timeless world of discrete, atomic particles of matter inmotion , an in fact lifeless world, growing old, having a history, evolution, the emergence of uniquely26

new forms, unique first-time events, genuine creatively, novelty, are all impossible. Also impossible insuch a world, are any non-substantial influences on our behavior: for us to act, bodily, on the basis ofmerely “seeing connections” between aspects of things in our surroundings, would be for us to act, inthis world, in terms of merely subjective, non-substantial, or ‘magical’ influences on our behavior – acrucial omission, as we shall see. What is required to allow for the possibility of life and living beings?What is it that makes living things special?

While dead, mechanical systems, i.e., mechanisms and machines, are constructed piece by piecefrom objective parts, that is, from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whetherthey are parts of the system or not, living beings have an utterly different genesis. Mechanical systems donot function as such until the last part is put in place, and they can be then be ‘switched on’. All theirparts thus exist in external relations to each other, and they require ‘glue’ or ‘nuts and bolts’ (some thirdentities) to hold any two of them together, if their overall structure is to endure. By contrast, livingbeings are clearly not constructed piece by piece, and only ‘switched on’ once complete. On the contrary,they grow. And furthermore, they grow from simple, already living individuals – created in a meetingbetween two other, already mature individuals – into more richly structured ones by internalarticulation, in such a way that their ‘parts’ at any one moment in time owe not just their character buttheir very existence both to one another, and to their relations with the ‘parts’ of the system at someearlier point in time. In other words, their history is just as important as their momentary spatialstructure in their growth, and because of this, it is impossible to picture natural systems in spatialdiagrams. As Capek (1965) remarks with respect to a temporal reality, while “any spatial symbolcontemplated at a given moment is complete, i.e., all its parts are given at once, simultaneously, incontrast with the temporal reality which by its very nature is incomplete and whose ‘parts’ – if we arejustified in using such a thoroughly inadequate term – are by definition successive, i.e., nonsimultaneous”(p.162). There is always ‘more to come’ of living beings, or, differently put, at any one moment they arealways ‘on the way to becoming genuinely other than they are’, i.e., other in an utterly novel way, a waywhich takes the irreversibility of time seriously. The intrinsic simultaneity of a spatial diagram, the wayin which its spatializes time, suggests that the successive moments of a movement all already co-exist asplaces in the ‘container’ of time – with some as yet unoccupied – and that the directionality of amomentary event – from a particular past toward a limited range of possible futures – is not a realaspect of its nature.

But if time is a mere appearance and succession an illusion, where does the illusion ofsuccession come from? If Wittgenstein (1953) is right, and all our reactions to what is alive are differentto what is dead, if we treat certain activities (metaphorically) as having ‘directionality’, that is, aspossessing an inevitable gestural expressiveness in ‘pointing’ from this past toward that kind of future’ insuch a way that, spontaneously, we act in anticipation of such a set of possibilities, it is from theseineradicable reactions that the reality of succession strikes us. The sui generis nature of life seemsunavoidable. Indeed, as we put it above, life seems to have its being in the special nature of the internalrelations existing between the constituent ‘parts’ of a living whole, in the intertwining of both spatially

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and temporally related ‘parts’ – and now, perhaps, we can see why Capek (1961) notes the inadequacyof the term ‘parts’, for such a term can only be used to make a momentary perceptual (indexical)distinction within a context, and can have no fixed or substantial reference. While we might think thatthere is a ‘something’ there to refer to in our use of the word ‘part’, in reality the ‘parts’ of an indivisiblewhole all, so to speak, ‘leak’ into each other, each intrinsically ‘points to’ or ‘calls for’ its neighbor. Theirrelations to the other ‘parts’ around them are a part of their nature. But more than this. For it is not just amatter of the relevant relations ‘stretching over time’ as well as space – to talk in that way is again tospatialize time and to think of change as merely changes of configuration or shape in an otherwiseunchanging world. It is a matter of the continual, irrevocable “emergence of novelties” in the“irreversibility of becoming” (Capek, 1961, p.347). Thus the ‘parts’ of a living whole are always ‘on theway’ to becoming other than what at-any-one-moment they are – at each moment they are just as muchseparated or distinguished from each other as related to each other by the qualitative differencesapparent at each moment in their unfolding emergence, which, as Capek makes clear, cannot be pictured.But there is yet more. In the midst of the continual emergence of novelty, living wholes retain or sustaintheir identity; they unify within themselves, chiasmically, a complex multiplicity of diverse influences.Thus, there are at least these reasons why the dynamical patterns apparent in the qualitative differenceswe feel between successive moments, in the unfolding meetings between ourselves and the others andothernesses around us, are invisible to us: they are unique, first-time, novel events, but they also exist onthe very edge of being, primarily in the realm of becoming.

As a consequence, rather than in terms of static, merely structured wholes, we need to think indynamic terms of structurizing wholes, growing and developing wholes which consist only of internallyrelated ‘parts’, which owe their existence to their role in the dynamics of the whole, but which have noindependent existence otherwise. Thinking only pictorially or spatially leads us to forget the enormousdifference between mere static juxtapositions and the dynamic succession present in the ceaseless,intertwined unfolding of living forms.

Alive to the difficulty of describing the nature of such an unfolding intertwined (metaphorical)‘flow’, William James (1890) describes the realm of our conscious experience as “a sequence ofdifferents” (p.230). And he explains what he means by this in describing our experience of a clap of27

thunder: “Into the awareness of the thunder itself the previous silence creeps and continues; for what wehear when thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (p.240). What James is emphasizing here, is the fact that our concrete conscious experience is asuccessively articulated whole, which, in seeming paradox, both remains a whole despite it beingsuccessively differentiated and still differentiable into parts, and remains articulated and furtherarticulable into parts despite its dynamic wholeness. Indeed, to add seeming paradox to seemingparadox, even when a dynamic stability is achieved, if it is to not to be merely a ‘static frozen moment’but a ‘dynamic flowing stability’ (a vortex or eddy), then the changes within it cannot be changes inconfiguration – for the relations between all its component regions must all remain the same, or else it isnot recognizable as ‘the same’ stability from one moment to the next. “There must be an irreducible,qualitative difference between its successive phases for it to be recognizable as a stability within a flow ;28

each phase must be novel in some respect by contrast with the phase preceding it” (Shotter, 1984,p.197). Indeed, it is their continual novelty that relates them to one another as perceptuallydistinguishable aspects (but not of course as physically isolable parts) of the same flowing totality.

It is this focus on the ceaseless ‘becoming’ of living activity, and its expressiveness arising out ofits intertwining in with, or its chiasmic relations to, its surroundings – that Wittgenstein (1953) points toin his comment that “understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music29

than one might think” (no.527) – that will require us, as we shall see, to question many of the very basicbackground assumptions in terms of which we currently conduct our intellectual inquiries. AsWhitehead (1975) notes, “... a pattern need not endure in undifferentiated sameness through time. Thepattern may essentially be one of aesthetic contrasts requiring a lapse of time for its unfolding. A tune isan example of such a pattern. Thus the endurance of the pattern now means the reiteration of itssuccession of contrasts... [W]hen we translate this notion into the abstractions of physics, it at oncebecomes the technical notion of ‘vibration’. This vibration is not the vibratory locomotion: it is thevibration of organic deformation” (p.162).

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What we have found here, then, with our focus on the sequential unfolding of living activity, is aquite different realm of experience from that which is apparent to us, in an instant, visually. Instead ofseeing only static spatial shapes and forms, substantial and objective things ‘over there’ subjectivelyperceived by us as ‘in here’ (in some coded or rule-regulated form), we can also be influenced,spontaneously and responsively, as well as unconsciously and involuntarily, by a temporal succession ofunfolding, directionally vectored events. Indeed, just as we all can be spontaneously ‘moved’ by a pieceof music being played in a concert hall to an extent in the same way, while listening to its sequentialunfolding over a period of time, so we can also be ‘moved’ to an extent in the same way, in respondingsequentially to any aspect of human expression, visually apprehended expression included. In thisrespect, with regard to our ‘looking over’ a painting, Merleau-Ponty (1964) remarks: “I would be at greatpains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix itin its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see accordingto it, or with it, than that I see it” (p.164). Rather than looking at it, I look beyond it, or through it, to seeother things in my world in its light; it is, would could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; itgives me a way of looking. In other words, what we have here is a circumstance in which – as describedabove in the discussion of binocular vision – is an unfolding temporal ‘movement’ in which, as weactively look outwards toward a point in the painting, we already find our living body moving on tofixate on another point, and so on. And in actively exploring it, by moving over its features andexperiencing their relations to ourselves, we can come to experience it as having hidden ‘depths’, or to gofurther, we can begin to examine the tensions, say, between features within the work, thus to suggest thatit has a ‘life of its own’. Either way, in actively exploring it as a manifestation of living expression (andnot simple as a configuration of static and dead forms), we can find ourselves spontaneously ‘moved’ byit in a responsive way. But in what responsive way?

It is here that we realize there are two ways of looking at something: while I might capture thestatic spatial shape of something in an instant as an ‘objective observer’, if I stop to dwell on what isbefore me, to respond to it in different ways, from different angles, with different interests in mind, andbegin, so to speak, to enter into a relationship with it, then something quite different happens. Merleau-Ponty (1968) describes the process of ‘looking’ involved thus: “The look...envelops, palpates, espousesthe visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though itknew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yetthe views taken are not desultory – I do not look at a chaos, but at things – so that finally one cannot sayif it is the look or if it is the things that command” (p.133). Rather than simply looking at a ‘thing’, itwould perhaps be more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, for ‘it’ is a guiding-agent inmy looking. In other words, as soon as we enter into an unfolding, living, embodied relation with anaspect of our surroundings, into what might be called a “participatory” relationship with that something(Levy-Bruhl, 1926; Bakhtin, 1993), even when that aspect is an inanimate object, a word-form printed ona page, say, then we find ourselves in a situation in which an “invisible presence” appears in the situationbetween us and it, and demands, grammatically, that we respond to it in a certain way (Shotter, inpress). As Wittgenstein (1953) notes that in many situations “meaning is a physiognomy” (no.568). It isas if, ‘on the face of it’, our words posses the rules of grammar within themselves. Hence Wittgenstein’s(1953) remark: “The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning intoitself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning.... how are these feelings manifested among us? – By theway we choose and value words” (p.218). The words we use, our utterances, human expressions, ‘callout’ specific spontaneous responses from us, orienting responses that ‘set the scene’, so to speak, theunitary style for what may happen next within it. So let us now turn to what all this might tell us furtherabout the realm of human expression, and the nature of conscious human activity.

Expression and the realm of con-scientia

Until now, in accord with the Kantian requirement, we have set ourselves in our academic investigationsunresponsively and willfully over against the others and othernesses around us. We have functioned asindividual subjects, with all else around set over against us as inert objects, and we have probed themonly mechanically with the aim of settling amongst us speculative theoretical questions raised by otherindividuals like ourselves. But if we were to drop this Kantian dictate, and allow ourselves to enter into

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mutually responsive, dialogically-structured, living, embodied relations with them, thus to be kept, to anextent, in their “leading-strings,” then we could open ourselves up to a realm of influences which havemostly gone unnoticed in serious academic circles (although not in artistic ones) up till now. If instead ofrelating ourselves to them in this one-sided, mechanistic manner, we were to go out toward them, so tospeak, as if ready to shake their hands, then we would find ourselves acting in ways that are responsiveor answerable to them. Then, as Merleau-Ponty put it above, instead merely looking at ‘things’, at shapes,forms, or patterns, we would find ourselves coming to act, and to think, according to, or with, thoseothers. As themselves forms of life, or as expressive of a form of life, they have a gestural orphysiognomic dimension to them, which actively ‘calls’ on us to respond to them, spontaneously, in acharacteristic fashion. And to that extent, they can function as just as much as ourselves as agents ingiving shape to our actions. In other words, instead of there being only an “about-ness,” i.e.,representational, dimension to our thought and talk, we would find a whole new “with-ness,” i.e., arelational or constitutive, dimension to our thought and talk opening up to us. In this new expressivedimension, people’s utterances would be seen as working, not to represent (picture) facts or informationabout already well-known objects, but to ‘set the scene’ of our meetings, so to speak, thus to orient orconstitute us bodily in such a way that we are inclined, spontaneously, to respond to what happensaround us in a certain style or way rather than others.

Indeed, once inside this gestural realm of expressive human activity, we should note its extent,for, as we have already seen above, its ‘life’ extends way beyond our being merely responsive to movingforms or to forms in motion. As Bakhtin (1993) remarks, even in looking over a seemingly inert object,“no object, no relation, is given... as something totally on hand... Insofar as I am actually experiencing anobject,... it is given to me within a certain event-unity, in which the moments of what-is-given and what-is-to-be-achieved, of what-is and what-ought-to-be, of being and value, are inseparable. All these abstractcategories are here constituent moments of a certain, living, concrete, and palpable (intuitable) once-occurrent whole – an event” (p.32). In other words, the expressions to which we are responsive, arethemselves intrinsically responsively related to those aspects of our surroundings that matter to us insome way. They are not arbitrary (as has been assumed in Structuralism). “Expression-utterance isdetermined by the actual conditions of the given utterance – above all, by its immediate social situation”(Voloshinov, 1986, p.85, original emphasis). Thus, in being taken as gestures, as immediately anddirectly pointing beyond themselves to something else in their surroundings, they can be understood asbeing expressive of our (supposed ‘inner’) feelings. Voloshinov (1986) discusses “the extremely subtleand complex set of possibilities for intoning an experience” of hunger: “one can apprehend one’s hungerapologetically, irritably, angrily, indignantly, etc... which way the intoning of the inner sensation ofhunger will go depends upon the hungry person’s social standing as well as upon the immediatecircumstances of the experience” (p.87). This is of crucial importance. For, although in the past we havetaken it that our feelings are hidden away privately within us, completely enclosed within our minds asmerely subjective emotions, this is not the case. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “... nothing isconcealed.... nothing is hidden” (no.435).

The fact is, “the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is expression of them, i.e., facialexpression, gestures, of feeling” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.513). We do not just see facial contortions, hearthe cries and disturbed breathing, “and make an inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. Wedescribe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any otherdescription of the features. – Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. This is essential towhat we call ‘emotion’” (Wittgenstein, 1980, II, no.570). Indeed, we can go further. As Merleau-Ponty(1964) points out, “I know unquestionably that the man over there sees, that my sensible world is alsohis, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eyes’ grasp of the scene” (p.169) . When we see30

others looking, we stop to gawk also – something that matters must be happening. This is the power ofexpressions: they do not just passively represent a circumstance beyond themselves as a dead pictureneeding interpretation; they have ‘life’ of their own. Not only do they actively ‘call’ on us to respond tothem in a characteristic fashion, but in ‘pointing beyond themselves’, so to speak, they expectantly orientus toward, bodily prepare us for, the occurrence of something not yet visible in our surroundings. It is inthis sense that we can say that they are expressive of invisible but “real presences,” agentic presences atwork in an individual’s own world shaping their conduct. But whether we talk here of such presences asbeing indicative of events occurring in the ‘inner realm’ of their ‘mind’, or out in their ‘world of

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consciousness’, i.e., out in what the world is like for them , it makes metaphorical sense to talk of them31

as not being out in the public world for all to view. This is not because they are spatially hidden ‘inside’ amysterious container somewhere whose walls obscure our view of its contents, but because they aresimply not visible as spatially arrayed objects ‘out there’ at all – indeed, to the extent that they only havetheir being within our living involvements with the others and othernesses around us, they are neither‘in here (this place)’ nor ‘out there (that place)’; they have their momentary being only within theconcerted interplay sequentially unfolding in the time-space of our jointly developing involvements.32

Thus, as already mentioned above, the importance of inner-talk in people’s lives, is not that theymake use of it to give us 3 -person, retrospective reports on events that occurred in the inner privaterd

workspace of their minds, but that they use it prospectively, as 1 -persons, to tell us something aboutst

themselves that – at the moment of telling – helps us to relate ourselves to their unique ‘world ofconsciousness’ (see Ch.9 in Shotter, 1984). They use it to express their feelings. “I think your ideas forthe new curriculum need modification,” says a colleague to me; or “I feel confused, are you followingWittgenstein there or not?” asks another. To both, I do not respond by asking “How do you know thatthat’s what you think, or, that it’s confusion you feel?” My colleagues have a perfect right to expressthemselves to me in this way, and I have a duty to take them seriously and respond accordingly. Becausethey cannot justify their expressions here, “does not mean [that they] use [these words] without right”(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.289). Such expressions are a part of our intertwining our individual actions inwith those of others within a coherent collective project. Thus, as Johnston (1993) points out, “the notionof the Inner... expresses our relation to each other and a particular way of understanding human action...[W]e are interested in people’s utterances not as reports on mysterious occurrences about which we arefor some reason curious, but as expressions of what the individuals feel” (p.28, my emphasis). Indeed, weuse such 1st-person ‘inner-talk’ in countless different ways to express and to navigate many differentaspects of our living relations to the others and othernesses around us, as well as in our own ‘inner’dialogues, in which we conduct ‘meetings’ between different expressive ‘voicings’.

We can find here, then, in the nature of our 1 -person, living, expressive activities, thest

beginnings of a whole new approach to the nature of consciousness, to the realm of con-scientia(witnessable knowing along with others). Crucial to it, is Capek’s (1961) account of our only having ourbeing only as a participant part within an irreversibly unfolding, indivisible, dynamic time-space unity,and our need – if we are to inter-coordinate our activities in with those around us – to give preciseexpression to the unique feelings of the yet-to-be-achieved toward which we are oriented (see note 25).For, as we noted above, as a complex intertwining of not wholly reconcilable influences still unfinalized,such a dynamic unity is open to being further specified by the acts of those who, as participant parts, areinvolved in it; and this further specification, further inner articulation, is possible only if participantsspontaneously understand, i.e., sense how to be answerable to, each other’s bodily expressions.

Let us explore such spontaneous intertwinings further by considering meetings that start with ahand-shake: Two people walk up to each other, each with their hands outstretched, returning eachother’s smile, ready to actively meet the other’s hand in such a way as to spontaneously coordinate theirown outgoing hand movements with those coming in from the other. In the course of becoming trainedinto such a ritual, we gradually come to incorporate into our outgoing, responsive movements as weapproach the other, the anticipated character of the other’s responsive movements to our’s, and theylikewise. So that, as we both meet, we do not need to deliberately pull each other’s hand up and down,but our interaction occurs unthinkingly and spontaneously, without our at all having ‘to work out’ howto do it. As Fingarette (1967) remarks: “Normally we do not notice the subtlety and amazing complexityof this coordinated ‘ritual’ act. This subtlety becomes very evident, however, if one has had to learn theceremony only from a book of instructions, or if one is a foreigner from a non-handshaking culture,” andhe adds, “nor normally do we notice that the ‘ritual’ has ‘life’ in it, that we are ‘present’ to each other, atleast to some minimal extent” (p.168).

In dwelling further on the ritual unfolding of the mutual handshake, a number of connectedissues become apparent. As we have already seen, meaningful relations exist in the unfolding structureof our activities prior to our consciousness of them . Thus a vigorously enjoined handshake, or one33

unresponsively endured, sets the scene for the whole style of the relationship yet to come, whether it is

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to be friendly, formal, reluctant, hostile, etc. But at a much more subtle level, I remember it beingrecorded somewhere, that Helen Keller – being deaf and blind, and not wanting to feel over people’sfaces on meeting them – was able to recognize people individually from their characteristic handshakesup to two years after having first met them. But this, of course, is hardly different from hearing peoplerecognizing the physiognomy of friend’s voices over the telephone. These examples relate to Fingarette’sremark above, that the character of an other’s form of life becomes, to an extent, ‘present’ to us in ahandshake. It is constituted, or becomes present to us, in the “specific variability” (Voloshinov, 1986,p.69), in a “coherent deformation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.54), or within an “organic deformation”(Whithead, 1975, p.160), within the relevant medium of communication – be it in the rhythms of ahandshake, in the intonations of a voice, or in the interplay of ‘looks’ as a we glance toward another’sface. We can feel its presence in the slight ‘differencings’ occurring between our own outgoinganticipatory movements toward the other and the responses coming back to us from them as a result.

And of course, as we enter into living relations with the others around us of a more complexlytextured, mutually responsive kind, than those occurring within the simple up-and-down movement ofthe handshake, we will find them showing or expressing more complex aspects of their character to us;their identity or character will become apparent to us ‘in’ the temporal organization of their movementsin their chiasmic intertwining in with our’s. Indeed, it is at this point that the importance of the‘musicality’ (Johnston, 1993) of the ‘ritual’ or ‘institutional’ nature of our expressions, of our verbalutterances, can be brought out. For, although we may respond directly to many gestural expressions in away not mediated by any rules of interpretation, once a continuously shared, rhythmic flow of activityhas been established, as in a handshake, then many aspects of an other’s character may be revealedwithin that flow which would not otherwise be apparent to us. Thus, within the rhythmic flow of theintertwined bodily activities occasioned by the repetitive structure in our voiced forms of speech, theyare constituted for us in, as we have seen, the “specific variability” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.68) within theresponsive expression of these forms. Thus, once we have learned to speak, Merleau-Ponty (1964)points out, “the words and turns of phrase needed to bring my significative intention to expressionrecommend themselves to me, when I am speaking,... by a certain style of speaking from which they ariseand according to which they are organized without my having to represent them to myself. There is a‘languagely’ [‘langagiège’] meaning of language which effects the mediation between my as yetunspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teachme my thought. Organized signs have their immanent meaning, which does not arise from the ‘I think’but from the ‘I am able to’” (p.88). In other words, just as in my turning a corner and beginning to walkup some stairs, I immediately adjust my gait and begin to move my body quite differently in spontaneousanswer to my changed relations to my surroundings, so also with the ‘movements’ I make in the ‘innerlandscape’, the ‘inscape’, of my talk or thought. The felt meanings of my movements are constituted forme, not by an “intentionality of consciousness,” but by my body’s “corporeal intentionality.” As Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes it: “I have a rigorous awareness of the bearing of my gestures or of the spatialityof my body which allows me to maintain relationships with the world without thematically representingto myself the objects I am going to grasp or the relationships of size between my body and the avenuesoffered me by the world... [M]y consciousness of my body immediately signifies a certain landscapeabout me,... in the same fashion... the spoken word (the one I utter or the one I hear) is pregnant with ameaning which can be read in the very texture of the linguistic gesture (to the point that a hesitation, analteration of the voice, or the choice of a certain syntax suffices to modify it), and yet is never containedin that gesture...” (p.89).

As Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a themin music than one might think... Why just this pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would liketo say ‘Because I know what it’s all about’. But what is it about? I should not be able to say. In order to‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the samepattern)” (no.527).

In other words, prior to any ‘I think’, prior to any ‘inner mental activity’, but just because ‘I amable to’ move around bodily within the world with others, who are responsive to me as I am responsiveto them, whose voiced expressions can move me as mine can move them, so words spontaneouslysuggest themselves to me as I act, just as actions suggest themselves to me as I talk. Thus, just as in my

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experience of others as in my experience of speech or the perceived world, “I inevitable grasp my body,”says Merleau-Ponty (1964), “as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other wayexcept through it” (p.93).

Above, then, we have focused on the way our own spontaneous responsiveness as living bodiesourselves, when intertwined in with embodied, living expressions of others as they successively unfoldover a period of time, gives rise to a ‘shaped movement’ shared by all those involved in interaction witheach other. And how, within the expectable, rhythmic, back-and-forth unfolding of a sequence ofconventionalized gestural and mimetic forms, we can find ourselves directed and instructed in such away, that we are immediately inclined to respond to what happens around us in certain ways rather thanothers. This suggests to us a quite different account of consciousness – of con-scientia, of witnessableknowing along with others – than that bequeathed us in our Cartesian heritage, an account within whichWittgenstein’s (1953) notion of there being a ‘grammar’ at work in those of our utterances intelligible toothers, is crucial. For, as we have seen, in the intricately ‘orchestrated’ interplay occurring between ourown outgoing, responsive activity toward the others and othernesses around us, and the activity comingback from them toward us as a result – for even inert objects radiate energy toward us differentiallyaccording to our direction of approach toward them – special dialogically-structured or chiasmicallycreated entities emerge which can exert an agentic influence on us. Dynamically changing forms orshapes of movement emerge in the sequence of differents or differencings, each with its own unique‘shape’ which, although invisible, is felt by all participants involved in it in the same way, i.e., as a‘pulsing’ or ‘beating’ of the same ‘heart’, so to speak, or of all as being animated by or being participantsin the same ‘form of life’ – where all the feelings involved have their characteristic expressions. Thus it ispossible for children to be “brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and toreact in this way to the words of others” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.6). In other words, as we shall see, ifthere are any rules as such involved in activities of this kind, the rules in question are an emergentoutcome, not the basis, of our being able to understand each other’s expressions. Rather than a basis forour activities, such rules are each time afresh an accomplishment of them.

The ‘unconscious’ nature of rules and grammar

Thus, what is important about the rule-governed or normative nature of our use of language, is not thatwe can mean things with words because there are already clear, well-formulated rules in existencesomewhere determining our speech – for, as we have seen above, our responsive expressions, inspontaneously calling out responses from those around us, are inherently meaningful without ourneeding to follow rules or laws. If the above account is correct, it is because we can sense within ourdynamically unfolding relations with others, a set of shared presences, a set of shared constitutiveexpectancies, and it is these that allow us to sequentially coordinate our activities in with their’s. What isimportant about rules, or the statement of rules, is that by our explicit appeals to them we can stabilizeour concerted activities and establish them as social institutions between us. For in such appeals, bydrawing people’s attention to their departures from expectations, we can call transgressors to accountfor themselves, to repair their transgressions, to correct their mistakes, and so on. We can draw theirattention to what is ‘there’ as a felt real presence for all proper participants in a social institution. Indeed,it is just because we can establish shared, rule-governed, expressive practices each time afresh in ourmeetings with the others around us, that we can come to communicate in unconfused and non-misleading ways with them, not only in reference to stable aspects of our shared world, but also inreference to fleeting, only-once-occurring events in our shared circumstances. For the rule-governedaspects of our linguistic activities provide a ceaselessly unfolding background flow of both sharedactivity, and shared constitutive anticipations and expectations, in terms of which certain specificvariations (Voloshinov), spontaneously occurring, become expressive in a physiognomic or gesturalmanner, thus to be responsively and relationally understood in the same terms (Bakhtin).

Intrinsic in our everyday exchanges, then, is the agentic influence of real presences, generating ateach unfolding moment within participants, a felt sense of expectation as to what might happen next.Whether written on tablets of stone or not, it is not codified statements or propositional formulations ofrules or laws that determine our actions. Indeed, as we shall see, codified statements or propositional

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formulations of rules cannot, as merely static spatially arrayed forms, be in and of themselvesconstitutive of meaning. For they cannot in and of themselves ‘tell’ us how they should be applied. Theycannot, in and of themselves, prospectively, give us a sense and direction into the future. Strictly, theycan only be regulative in an ‘after the fact’, retrospective manner, by providing corrective constraints inour attempts to maintain certain shared forms of contingent expectations in our organizing of thesequentially ordered interactional activities occurring between us: whiles answers must followquestions, hellos must come before good-byes, and when they don’t, we ask each other please to putthings right. And it is Wittgenstein’s (1953) achievement to make it clear to us, that the kind of‘rightness’ here cannot inhere in a flawless mechanical repetition of an identical spatially arrayed form;it is a matter of being able to do many different things in many different situations, all of which can bedynamically judged by or accounted by participants within a socially instituted activity (a language-game), as doing the same thing – a judgment that, in the end, one just makes spontaneously as one does,due to one’s internal relations as a living participant part in a larger living whole. Indeed, it was just thiskind of ‘participatory’ thinking that characterized the mental lives of ancient and so-called ‘primitive’peoples (Cassirer, 1956; Frankfort et al, 1949; Levy-Bruhl, 1926), right through to the Alchemists ofmedieval times. So why have we become so fixated on rules, on codes and codifications of supposed‘right’ ways of acting?

As we have already seen, it was Descartes (1968) who was one of the main architects of themodern, dead, mechanical world of inherently unrelated, separate parts, overseen by God as its externaldirector. And it is our acceptance of Descartes’s formulation of his “new world” – in which God issupposed to have created a whole chaotic aggregate of quite separate particles of matter which he thenlet “act according to his established laws” (see note 10) – that misleads us into expecting orderliness inhuman affairs to appear only as a consequence of the external imposition (by an agency of some kind) ofa set of rules or laws. The intrinsic emergence of orderliness, as the consequence of a furtherspecification, refinement, growth, or development within an already ordered, dynamically unfoldingliving whole is, of course, impossible within such a mechanically structured world of only externallyrelated entities. But Descartes did not see God as entirely absent from influencing our actions down hereon earth, for it is his (sic) perfection that is the guarantee of Descartes’s claim that, as a general rule, “thethings we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true” (p.54). But he “could not hold [such acertainty] from myself; it remained that it must have been put into me by a being whose nature was trulymore perfect than mine and which even had in itself all the perfections of which I could only have anyidea, that is to say, in a single word, which was God” (p.55).

In other words, one’s spontaneous responsiveness to the directly felt presence of anotheragency from oneself, as providing a sense of rightness in shaping how one should act, came to bereplaced in modern times by the entirely speculative, theoretical claim that God imposes laws in naturejust as a king imposes laws in his [sic] kingdom – the spontaneously and dynamically emergingpluralistic organization of the ancient world gave way to the deliberately imposed order by a singleexternal director. And along with this transition, as Toulmin (1982) points out, mind and consciousnesstraveled inward, and became to thought of as the single central source of influence shaping humanactivity in an otherwise dead and inert, mechanically structured, material world.

But as we saw above in the discussion of Fisher’s (1998) account of Descartes’s Regulae, ourspontaneous responsiveness to what “the what the feeling of ‘getting it’... is like” (p.66), is still crucial,and still at the heart of our conducting of our everyday affairs with each other. However, although werely on these constitutive anticipations and expectations in coordinating our everyday routine relationswith each other, they are to repeat Garfinkel’s (1967) phrasing here, usually “seen but unnoticed” (p.31).If they are noticed at all, they are only noticed in their absence. Thus, “for the member [of a social group]the organizational hows of these accomplishments are unproblematic, are known vaguely, and areknown only in the doing which is done skillfully, reliably, uniformly, with enormous standardization andas an unaccountable matter” (p.10). In other words, they are unconscious – but not, I must hasten to add,in the Freudian sense of having once been conscious, but which have now inaccessible to the inner movietheater of the mind due to having been repressed. They are unconscious in Toulmin’s (1982) sense ofnot being conscientia, of not being witnessably known by us along with the others around us. But clearly,in the sense of our being manifestly attentive, and thus responsive, to such expressions, and also in the

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sense of being to an extent able, partially, to articulate their nature if things are not as we expect, we arenot (we could say) wholly insensible to their nature. Although perhaps “imponderable,” as we have seenabove, it is on the basis of our sensitivity to the “evidence” before us that we express “bewilderment,consternation,... confusion, ... anxiety, shame, guilt, and indignation” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.38), and claim tothe others around us that our perplexed and unclear responses to their actions are thus justified.

Thus our task here is plain. It is to call attention to how we do in fact routinely accomplishshared, non-misleading understandings – especially in telling each other of unique events in our own‘inner lives’ – and to how we achieve such accomplishments “for ‘another first time’” (Garfinkel, 1967,p.9), from “‘in the midst’ of witnessed actual settings... [Whilst recognizing at the same time] thatwitnessed settings have an accomplished sense, an accomplished facticity, an accomplished objectivity,and accomplished familiarity, [and] an accomplished accountability” (p.10), and thus cannot in any waybe taken as an already given basis for our investigations.

It is the expressive or gestural aspects of our responsive bodily movements that make them sospecial and give them such a crucial role in our communicating with each other: while still to an extentvague and lacking precise articulation, the others around us (and we ourselves ) can respond to it34

immediately and directly without being necessary for us to first learn rules or any other previouslyagreed criteria as to how to act in response to it. Indeed, as parents, we rely on our children respondingin this spontaneous way to our expressions in teaching them the contingently intertwined (and thusseemingly orderly) linguistically structured practices we think of, philosophically, as rule-governedpractices. Relying on the directionality inherent in the temporally unfolding of living activities, we utterat certain crucial moments in the course of this teaching, along with a whole set of exaggerated facialexpressions and other bodily gestures, such verbal expressions as ‘Stop!’, ‘Look’, ‘Listen’, ‘Look at that’,‘Listen to this’, ‘Do like this’, ‘Do it like that’, and so on. The crucial nature of the moment of utterancecannot be over emphasized: in coming at a particular moment in the already ongoing flow ofcontingently intertwined activity occurring between them and us, in pointing in their gesturalexpressiveness from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’, our children’s activities allow us to interveneat that moment, and in doing so, to point them toward ‘another kind of future’, toward seeing aconnection between events of a previously unnoticed kind . And it is within such a process as this that35

our children can “grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88).

For Wittgenstein (1953), then, to suggest that there is a describable style, or a characteristic setof spontaneous constitutive anticipations at work in a person’s responsive expressions when meetingothers from their group, and that it is this that links all their activities together and gives them their unityand identity as the activities of a social group, is what he means when he claims to be investigating thegrammatical influences, the grammatical ‘rules’, at work in their meetings. But these grammatical rulesdo not consist in a set of already cognitively known rules in each of the individual heads of each of itsmembers (as Saussure and Chomsky seem to suggest). But as we saw above, in Merleau-Ponty’s (1964)account of corporeal intentionality, it is a certain style of speaking that becomes incorporated (literally)into a person’s living, bodily relations to her surroundings. Thus, just as tennis players – after hours ofcoaching and practice – come to embody certain tendencies and inclinations to act, spontaneously andimmediately, in relation not only to an other player’s particular shot and position on the court, but alsoto what has gone before as well as to what is to come, so speakers also spontaneously select an utteranceaccording to their embodied feelings as to its momentary role in the concrete unfolding of theirsurrounding circumstances . Recall here Mead’s (1934) remark, that the mechanism of meaning is36

present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs, inpeople’s spontaneous living responses to each other’s expressive gestures. In other words, rather than asrepresentations of rules governing the logical sequencing of forms, the grammars at work in ourmeetings have their being in a dynamic set of dialogically-structured or chiasmically created uniquepresences which are spontaneously created in the intertwining of our living activities, which can then actback to exert a unique agentic influence upon what we do in their presence, a felt influence to which wegive expression. It is in this sense that there is a particular grammar at work in each linguistic situationwe inhabit (rather than there being purely and simply a grammar of our language as a whole); and it isin this sense that such a grammar, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “tells us what kind of object anythingis” (no.373, my emphasis), i.e., it influences us spontaneously and bodily just as the voice of another

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influences us.

Thus, as he sees it, just as certain developmental trajectories have an expected structure tothem, just as certain rhythms or rhymes carry over a mnemonic past into an anticipated future, just as allliving bodily activity has an indivisible temporality to it such that, in every moment, there is a sense of‘where next’ the activity is headed, so the grammar, the character or identity of the joint action occurringin our meetings, ‘sets the scene’ for all that can occur within them. Hence Wittgenstein’s (1978) claimthat “grammar is not accountable to any reality. It is grammatical rules that determine meaning(constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (no.133,p.184); “grammar... only describes and in no way explains the use of signs,” he suggests (Wittgenstein,1953, no.496). Hence, it is not at all a wondrous miracle that there happens to be a harmony betweenthought and reality, as Einstein once suggested , but, “like everything metaphysical the harmony37

between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of a language” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.55).For, in an intricate way, the reasons for the grammars and sub-grammars in a peoples’s forms of life, areto be found not only in the history and culture of their language-game entwined forms of life, but also inthe selective attention they pay within them to certain “extremely general facts of nature,” notesWittgenstein (1953, (p.56) . We are spontaneously responsive to, and thus in our utterances expressive38

of, all those features in our surroundings to which we are in some way sensitive. Indeed, as Wittgenstein(1953) remarks: “If things were quite different from what they actually are – if there were for instanceno characteristic expressions of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception and exception rule; or ifboth became phenomena of roughly equal frequency – this would make our normal language-games losetheir point” (no.142).

It is this, then, that is so difficult for us to grasp: rather than our everyday, unscientific realitybeing, as Descartes put it, “a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine,” without God’s“established laws” to keep it orderly, the fact seems to be that even without an executive director, it isalready pretty orderly. Indeed, we might go so far as to note that even some very lowly organisms – ants,bees, termites, etc. – pull off some amazing feats of social collaboration quite without any signs ofconscientia, i.e., of a witnessable knowing together of the nature of their own activities. And as Vico(1968) remarks (not without irony one feels): “First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next thelittle house and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this is the order of allprogress from the first origins” (para. 22). In other words, it was the gradual dynamic emergence ofmore and more organized human societies within a more and more well articulated common andcollective sense of the people that made the refined expression of ideas by intellectuals possible, not theother way around. Indeed, as he sees it, “the conceit of the scholars, who will have it that what they knowmust have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting [theprinciples of our new science of history] from the philosophers. So, for the purposes of this inquiry, wemust reckon as if there were no books in the world” (para.330). We must, Vico suggests, start with themute, corporeal poets who, with their vast “corporeal imagination” (para. 376), created in their bodilyways of responding to thunder as the ‘words’ of a great being in the sky, “the first divine fable, thegreatest they ever created: that of Jove...” (para. 379). So, if we are (as Merleau-Ponty suggests) “torecommence everything... and to install [ourselves] in... experiences that have not yet been ‘workedover’,” then, I suggest, we must be prepared to re-think the whole nature of both what we call our ‘innerlives’, and the already ordered nature of our social lives together, in corporeal terms. This is the task ofthe next section.

1 -person expressions in the conduct of our public livesst

As we have seen above, our dialogically-structured meetings with each other begin with certainresponsive bodily reactions or characteristic expressions. As we continue such meetings further and goon from within them to establish with those we meet, a shared situation, we come to sense within themthe emergent presence of an overarching third agency, an agency that issues ‘felt callings’ to all involvedto observe a certain shared style in their actions, to act in accord with a shared set of constitutiveexpectations and anticipations. Due to the retentions from the past and the protensions stretching intothe future in all our responsive living bodily activities, even at a very elementary level – as Mead (1934)

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intimates in his suggestion that we can see in a dog fight “a conversation of gestures” (p.63), where themeaning of one’s dog posture is in the other dog’s tendency to respond to it – we can find ourselvesestablishing spontaneously in our meetings a shared style of acting. But within our meeting, we can domore than simply responding to each other, we can also be expressively responsive to other events inour surroundings, and give the others around us the opportunity to be responsive to our ownidiosyncratic reactions. Being able in this way to establish between us common ways of acting, certainpractices of a gestural and mimetic kind, which in always pointing beyond themselves to other possiblysharable aspects of our joint surroundings, allows us not only to spontaneously anticipate each other’snext possible actions, but to go on to establish between us (as an accomplishment) a common world ‘outthere’.

Thus with regard to our ‘outer lives’, with regard to things and events visibly existing out therein the world around us for all to witness, we can draw on such a set of established gestural and mimeticpractices to direct each other’s attention to them, to type or classify them, interconnect them, and so on.Indeed, such practices can evidently be developed which will allow us to make 3 -person, externalrd

observer claims of such a kind about states of affairs in the world around us (usually referring to visualconfigurations), that others around us can then check out for their truth and accuracy. Given all that wehave already responsively come to share with them, as we have seen above, to the extent that we canstabilize and institutionalize a speech genre (Bakhtin, 1986) or a language-game (Wittgenstein, 1953)amongst us, then we can all come to act in accord with each other’s constitutive backgroundexpectations and anticipations. New arrivals into the group, to participate ultimately as full members,would need to be trained into such a set of expectations. It is such a training as this, in an array ofembodied, spontaneously responsive, understandings, that holds all the actions of a group or communityas belonging together, as being in some way all actions of the same kind.

But to repeat the point made above, we cannot conduct this kind of teaching by stating rules andprinciples to each other, “if a person has not yet got the concepts, [we] teach him to use the words bymeans of examples and by practice. – ... I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions ofagreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on,”says Wittgenstein (1953, no.208). “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing apractice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (Wittgenstein, 1969,no.139) – for it is in ‘calling out’ particular spontaneous bodily responses from us to, that they can exerta constitutive influence on us, and ‘tell’ us of the kind of anticipations regulated by the rules. Thus, inteaching someone (a child or an adult) a number series, we say such things as “Here, ‘this’ is the ‘rightcontinuation’, and here ‘this’, and so-on and such-and-such. But “what ‘such-and-such’ is I can only showin examples. That is, I teach him to continue a series..., without using any expression of the ‘law of theseries’; rather, I am forming a substratum [i.e., background] for the meaning of algebraic rules or what islike them. [And within this substratum or background] he must go on like this without a reason. Not,however, because he cannot yet grasp the reason but because – in this system – there is no reason. (‘Thechain of reasons comes to an end’) And the like this (in ‘go on like this’) is signified by a number, a value.For at this level the expression of the rule is explained by the value, not the value by the rule. For justwhere one says ‘But don’t you see...? the rule is no use, it is what is explained, not what does theexplaining” (Wittgenstein, 1981, nos.300, 301, 302).

But let us now note, that without the unique individualized understandings occurring at crucialmoments in our particular exchanges with our children (and others), our attempts to train them to beactive participants in the shared forms of responsive expression prevalent in our culture, would beimpossible. Indeed, at many junctures in our relations with others, certain 1 -person expressionsst

expressive of our ‘inner lives’ are clearly required if we are to sustain our 3 -person talk about eventsrd

out in the world between us. For example: A theater director says to an actor: “Say it like this (intones anutterance), not like that (intones the utterance again, differently). I want you to offer your uncertainty toher as a gift, not as an accusation.” In saying this, the director refers to that precise moment in time whena male actor was uttering a particular word to his female co-actor. “It makes a difference whether yourefer to this or to that moment... The language-game ‘I mean (or meant) this’ (subsequent explanation ofa word) is quite different from this one: ‘I thought of ... as I said it’,” notes Wittgenstein (1953, p.217).

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The precise character of the expression, in other words, is constitutive of the precise characterof the speaker’s experience, not the other way around. So although it might seem that rules, laws, andprinciples are at the basis of our learning to express ourselves, and that when we do we are alwaystalking about an already existing state of mind hidden within our heads somewhere, this is not alwaysso. On very many important occasions we spontaneously we give expression to a felt sense, a shaped andvectored sense, of our own momentary ‘position’ in a ‘movement’ in which we are involved with theothers around us. And here, in expressing ourselves in this way, says Wittgenstein (1980, I), “ourlanguage is an extension of [a] more primitive [natural kind of] behavior” – as in the “many natural kindsof behavior towards others human beings” (no.151), such as when we turn immediately toward otherswhen they grimace, writhe, or shout out in pain.

Our 1 -person expressions are crucial, then, not only in initially establishing but also inst

sustaining our shared forms of life. Indeed, they are not only crucial in our teaching of our infants to beparticipants in the language intertwined practices of our social group, but in fact in almost all ourordinary everyday interactions. People want to know what we are doing in what we are saying. Just thesimple matter of trying to tell another person something, as we all know, can often result in one’sintentions, beliefs, thoughts, etc., being questioned, before the other can orient toward the informationon offer: A: “There’s a good movie on tonight.” B: “Why are you telling me this?” A: “I thought we mightgo together.” Was A offering merely information, or an invitation? And in the example below, is B tryingto show how much more clever they are than A, or is B genuinely being sympathetic and trying to help?A: “I don’t know how to reply to his letter.” B: “Look there are a whole lot of things you could say.” A:“Are you implying incompetent. When I say I don’t know how to reply, it’s because I can see too manyway, not none at all.” B: “Im sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you. I really do understand the dilemma youface. I faced it myself last year. Can I tell you what I did then. It seemed work” A: “OK then.” As Schegloff (1995) remarks about people coping with circumstances such as these: “Especially (but not exclusively)in conversation, talk is constructed and attended by its recipients for the action or actions it may bedoing. Even if we consider only declarative-type utterances, because there is no limit to the utterablesthat can be informative and/or true, the informativeness or truth of an utterance is, by itself, no warrantor grounds for having uttered it or for having uttered it at a particular juncture in an occasion. There isvirtually always an issue (for participants and, accordingly, for professional analysts) of what is getting

done by its production in some particular here-and-now ” (p.187). In other words, the problem of39

what is meant by what is said cannot any longer be pursued as a matter of words being said tohave unequivocal ‘literal’ meanings in themselves – to repeat, the meaning of our words is to be

found in their use in a particular context of use .40

What people are doing in what they are saying, is particularly crucial in circumstances in whichindividuals are trying to discuss, not so much actual new discoveries, but the making of new discoveries.For they cannot at first refer to those aspects of their putative discovery which are obviously ‘out there’witnessable by all, for such features, clearly, are not yet ‘out there’ to be witnessed as such. They can onlybegin to introduce their discoveries by expressing their own ‘inner feelings’, i.e., their own responsiverelations to what might be ‘out there’, their ‘approach’, the relations it is necessary to adopt to one’ssurroundings for the features in question to become visible. Our 1 -person ‘inner-talk’, then, isst

important to us in establishing our 3 -person ‘outer-talk’ – that talk to do with phenomena, and withrd

criteria justifying the use of such talk, that are visible to all – whenever it is necessary for us to negotiateor to develop a meaning with the others around us.

As Ochs, Jacoby, and Gonzales (1994) illustrate in their studies of young physicists, beinginstructed by their principal investigator (PI) in giving conference presentations of their still-in-progressresearch, the special nature of the “scientific dramas” (p.152) presented by all involved, work to “pull theinterlocutors into the world of physical entities” (p.164). To give just one small example, along with awhole set of other expressive activities, including especially gestures toward blackboard diagrams,bodily postures and facial expressions, the PI tells a student that: “Y- you’re saying he::re that [pointingto a point ‘b’ on a diagram] this point (0.5 sec pause) corresponds to the absence [Student turns toboard] of a domain structure. If I go below in temperature [PI’s finger now on ‘g’ in the diagram, whilelooking at the student], (0.2 sec pause, while student vertical head-shakes in agreement) the domainstructure is gone” (p.165, my simplification of the original transcript). As Ochs et al (1994) remark, such

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talk as this amongst research physicists is utterly commonplace and unproblematic. Clearly, to the extentthat such talk is not interpreted literally, it is made sense of figuratively: “Like an actor who has assumeda [fictitious, narrative] character, the physicist laminates the identity of the physical construct onto his orher own identity. The result is that the physicist-as-constructed-subject and the physical-entity-as-constructed-object become intertwined; the boundaries that might otherwise distinguish them becomeindistinct. The ‘I’ or the ‘you’ is both subject and object, animate and inanimate, with the identity of thephysicist in the here-and-now world of ongoing interaction being backgrounded, and theanthropomorphized identity of physical encounters being foregrounded” (pp.166-167).

Clearly, then, our 1 -person ‘inner-talk’ of importance to us in not just those spheres of our livesst

in which we want to tell other personal things about ourselves, but in all those spheres of our livesinvolving publicly observable objects too. Without our being able to express our feelings, without beingable to express the ‘point’ of our actions – their ‘movement’ from this past toward that kind of future –many aspects of our everyday personal relationships would become impossible for us also. While I mightsay to someone “I love you” as a 3 -person retrospective report on my inner sensings of certain bodilyrd

occurrences happening within in me in the past and in the present (my pounding heart beats, my light-headedness, my overflowing hormones, etc. – in which case I should more properly say: “The evidenceseems to point to the fact that I must be in a state of love with you”) – such a 3 -person report would notrd

work to develop my personal relations with my addressee. Instead, it would invite the reply: “So? Whatdoes all that have to do with me? How should I interpret such a report as that?” Only as a 1 -personst

expression oriented toward occasioning an immediate spontaneous responsive understanding withinthem would it matter to them; only then it would be an indicator of my future commitments towardthem (Shotter, 1993, pp.2-3). In other words, only expressions uttered in a spontaneous manner, in theexpectation of an actively shared, spontaneously responsive understanding by one’s addressee, can beexpressions of our ‘inner feelings’, expressions of what we are conscious of. For, as we have seen, what is‘in’ our consciousness is not so much inside us, as ‘in’ the temporal unfolding of our intertwined relationsto the others and othernesses around us in our surroundings. In other words, the aspects of things andevents ‘within’ the realm of con-scientia, ‘within’ the complex, chiasmically structured realm ofwithnessable knowing along with others, are those aspects to which we spontaneously respond in thecourse of the sequential unfolding of those of our involvements we share with those others; it is arespontaneous responses to these aspects that the others around us takes as expressive of our innerfeelings. And they need these expressions if they are to understand what we are doing in what we aresaying.

1 -person expressions and our ‘inner lives’st

But sometimes, we do want to express ourselves to others ‘out of the blue’, so to speak, we want to tellthem of our own personal thoughts and feelings, we want them to orient toward something unique andspecial to us, not clearly visible to all in the public sphere. And we want to do this, not as providingorientational clarification in the course of an already ongoing exchange, but by way of initiatingsomething uniquely new. I want to try to convey to my doctor, for example, the precise nature of the painI’m feeling so she can better diagnose my ailment.

As we noted above, there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in a flow of living activity.People’s expressive responsive relations to each other are such that each moment in any such flow‘carries’ with it a quite specific set of constitutive retentions and protensions, a set of constitutiveanticipations and expectations appropriate to a specific developmental history, or an orientation with“an aetiology and a prognosis” (Hanson, 1958, p.21) to it. Thus, once we have learned the basicvocabularies of our basic social institutions, once we have reached a high level of skill in the use ofwards, then our words become are such that on their utterance – even though we can still maintain that“the meaning of a word is its use in the language ” (Wittgesntein, 1953, no.43) – we can have the feeling,41

to repeat Wittgenstein’s (1953) already quoted remark above, “that [the word] has taken up its meaninginto itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning” (p.218). When this occurs, as we noted earlier, thenwe are inclined to expect, by the way we choose and value words in our expressions of them, that ourutterances will spontaneously incline those around us to respond to us in a quite specific manner; we

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will expect our expressions to ‘call out’ quite specific responses from those about us, thus to orient them,to set both ‘the scene’ and ‘the style’, so to speak, for what may happen next within it.

So, although we can all in learning the basic vocabulary of our common language be orientedthrough the appropriate use of 1 -person expressions to take notice, as 3 -persons, of objective criteriast rd

‘out there’ visible to everyone, it is not difficult for us then to adapt these terms to our own idiosyncraticuses. For example, as Johnston (1993), an individual may take a word such as “‘throbbing’ which wasoriginally used in connection with something that can be seen to be pulsating and uses it when nopulsating motion is visible” (p.25). But when they do, of course, the relationship between their utteranceand the responsive understandings expected in their listeners, is quite different from what is expected inthe case of giving outer, 3 -person descriptions. “In this case the relationship is criterial: the individual’srd

pain is characterized as being of a particular type because of the words she uses, and the words she usesare the ‘right’ ones because she endorses them as such” (p.25). She has a 1 -person right to givest

expression to her pain, and if it seems to her that that the unfolding ‘shape’ of her feelings are bestcaptured, metaphorically, by the word ‘throbbing’, then we others around her who already know whatthrobbing is like must take her seriously, and to treat her as in fact experiencing in her ‘inner life’ therhythmic pulsing of her pain. And if I were to do the same, what I would be doing, as Wittgenstein (1953)notes, “is not, of course to identify my sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is notthe end of the language-game: it is the beginning” (no.290). But if I were to get it wrong, if I say my painis a throbbing one, and I miss out the crucial diagnostic clue that it only throbs when pressure is applied,not otherwise, then the responsibility still mine. Like the orientational clarifications discussed above, myright to express myself is a part of what is involved in people giving each other practical guidance inparticular participatory relationships.

In other words, in my 1 -person expressions, I am not here in fact giving anything like a 3 -st rd

person description of, or a report on, my inner states of mind, which could (if the need arose) be checkedfor its accuracy, but doing something like expressing a 1 -person appeal to those around me for help orst

for sympathy or suchlike. And we choose the words we do in which to express such relational initiatives,because in the circumstances of their use, in their gestural expressiveness, they ‘point’ for us ‘from thispast toward that kind of future’. Thus, as Johnston (1993) remarks, in this context, the context of our‘inner-talk’, the “use of a word does not involve learning rules; rather it builds on a natural reaction,”and, on the basis of the embodied responses to the events occurring around us into which we have beentrained, we “go on spontaneously to develop new possibilities of self-expression” (p.25).

Wittgenstein (1980, I) explores just such a situation in discussing an occasion in which I tell theothers around me, that ‘today, I have the feeling that everything is unreal!’ “But why do I choose theword ‘unreality’ to express it?,” he asks, “... I choose it because of its meaning. But I surely did not learn touse the word to mean: a feeling. No; but I learned to use it with a particular meaning and now I use itspontaneously like this...” (no.125). But in saying this, I do not use it as a simile for my feeling; my feelingremains indeterminate until expressed in this way; indeed, I might attempt to articulate it further bysaying ‘it feels not just intriguingly unreal, but really unreal; I’m truly disoriented’. But to repeat, it is myright to do this, to take what is – if it ever were possible to scan a person’s brain states, would be foundin reality to be – a vague and incomplete state of affairs, and to give it a form for which I am prepared totake responsibility (Shotter, 1984). And until I finally succeed in specifying it clearly to those around me,it remains vague and ambiguous both to them, and to me.

Thus as we learn more and more how to talk of events occurring out in the world around us interms intelligible to all the others around us, so we can come to give spontaneous expression to our ownindividual ‘feelings’ in similar such terms – for, to repeat Wittgenstein’s (1981) remark quoted above,“the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is an expression of them” (no.513), just as there are“characteristic expression[s] of pain, of fear, of joy” (no.142). In other words, the world of consciousness,of con-scientia, the world in which we know that there are certain things that we know, the realm ofwithnessable knowing along with others, is primarily not a world of shared visual forms, but a world ofshared feelings, a world in which all involved share in the temporal unfolding of a succession ofdirectionally vectored events. Thus, finding ourselves in a particular circumstance, thinking a certainthought, imagining a particular visual scene, responding to a philosophical claim by a colleague, to

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greeting by a friend, etc., or whatever, we find that such an event spontaneously ‘calls out’ from us aparticular linguistic response, and we spontaneously express our response in such expressions as:‘Amazing’; ‘Unreal’, ‘Hectic’, ‘Cool’, ‘It’s like Socrates in the Meno all over again’, ‘Your account is simplynot right, it completely misses the connections I outlined a moment ago’, and so on.

But if I were to utter such expressions, I would not be describing an already existing inner stateof my mind – so that someone could say to me, “what evidence have you got to show us that you aretelling us the truth here?” I am telling someone of the possible future directions my actions in thesituation might take, something that I have a perfect right to do (as long as, at the same time, I amcommitting myself to them also). Because I cannot justify my expressions here, “does not mean [that I]use [these words] without right” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.289). The fact is, that my unique circumstances‘call for’, ‘invite’, ‘allow’, or ‘afford’ me a certain ‘gestural expression’ toward them, and wespontaneously express what our feelings incline us to express. Thus here, both for ourselves and others,“expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity ofdirection” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.85). In other words, because of the intrinsic intertwining of feeling andexpression – i.e., because of both the characteristic expression of certain feelings and the characteristicfeeling of certain expressions – and, because of the spontaneous responsiveness of the others around usto our expressions, there is a good chance that those around us will feel as we feel, be inclined as we areinclined; and it is from such reactions that new language games can begin. But such feelings ofinclination, such felt understandings emerging in the shared, contingent unfolding interplay ofresponsive expressions occurring between us and the others and othernesses in our surroundings,although “real presences” to participants, are quite invisible to outsiders – and thus unavoidablyvulnerable to those who want see “the facts.” Such inclinations toward the future, from the past, existingonly in time, can never be rendered visible. Hence they deny the force of such background social orintersubjective influences, of the “real presences” bodily felt by us in the unfolding interplay of expressiveresponsive activities between us; they lack evidential proof (they say).

But what have those ‘outsiders’ in fact to say to us? How should we respond to their words? Isthere a shareable sense, a common way of sensing, how we others should actually take their claims?When a theorist says to us: “Consciousness is the private arena within which we live our lives” (Baars,2000, p.40), some of us at least don’t know straight away how to respond to such a claim. We find ispuzzling, disorienting, we want immediately to reply: “But I thought I lived out in the world with others.”Baars then would, I imagine, go on to clarify his claim in certain specific ways, suggestions that, in fact, allthat is available to us in our ‘minds’, are representations and our interpretations of them. But like anEscher drawing, like a Derridian deferred structure, that can never quite be grasped as a stable whole, wecan never quite grasp what it is precisely that those who make such claims as Baars want to say to us.For at some point they seem to want to deny, and to want us precisely to understand that they deny, theforce of the very background social or intersubjective influences making their denials intelligible as suchto us. If we do have some partially clear sense of what it is they are trying to say to us, (as far as they areconcerned) that can only be due to some mysterious inner operations of the mind that – one-day in thefuture – their discoveries will explain to us. Intellectual vertigo ensues. For if there is no way in which wecan all share in a set of direct and spontaneous ways of relating ourselves both to each other and oursurroundings, but we are all of necessity entrapped in an unending play of inner representations andtheir interpretations, with no (in principle?) possibility of achieving stability between us – albeit, of adynamic kind – then their claims seem futile. If all our talk is representational, and all representationsare open to interpretation, how could our talk ever work to establish stable forms of life amongst us?The trouble is, that while those of us who disagree with Baars might not be able to definitively argueagainst his claims, we just do not know what practically follows from them being true – how might itmatter in our lives?

This, however, I would claim is not the case with the Wittgensteinain accounts offered here.Although, on the one hand, it is still perfectly reasonable for us to talk of the world of consciousness asnot being publicly visible and seemingly different for each of us, on the other, we have takenWittgenstein’s (1953) claim – that when we represent a state of affairs by the use of a sentence, thatalthough we do not, seemingly, know how we do it, the fact is that “nothing is concealed.... nothing ishidden” (no.435) – seriously. And his work, I think, can matter, if not in our scientific lives then in our

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everyday lives, by making a difference in how we respond to and attend to events in our surroundings.Take our responsiveness to other people: although our responsive understanding of a person’s feelingsis based on evidence out in the world between them and us, it is not in fact scientific evidence, evidence ofa publicly observable kind, that can be seen by all involved in a photographic instant, by bothparticipants and disinterested, external observers alike. It is in fact “imponderable evidence”(Wittgenstein, 1953, p.228), in that it “includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone” (p.228). Butalthough it is not evidence of a scientific kind, that is not to say that it is thus impossible to develop‘expert judgment’ as to the genuineness of expressions of feeling. Indeed, suggests Wittgenstein (1953),to the question: “Can one learn this knowledge?,” we can reply: “Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking acourse in it, but through ‘experience’... What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correctjudgments” (p.227). That is, one cannot set out an objective check-list procedure that can bemechanically implemented, but one can get to know a friend’s character, the voice, their mannerisms,their style, the physiognomy of their being in the world, so we can go further, and gain a sense of rightand wrong action, and so on. So, although the events of importance to us cannot all be seen ‘out there’ inan instant – thus to prove or falsify a hypothesis – as our living relationships with those around us unfoldand are realized over time, and as a person reveals more and more of their ‘inner lives’ to us in theirresponsive expressions, we can check out our first judgments against later ones, and gradually come, soto speak, to know in fact what it is like to be them (Nagel, 1974) .The alien otherness of the other can42

become familiar to us as itself.

In our daily affairs, unlike in one-shot, mechanistically-structured, scientific experiments –which do not allow for the retentions and protensions in living events to stretch over into adjacentevents – we can allow events to develop further and come to a further understanding of them fromwithin our continuous contact with that development. And it is from within such involvements as thesethat we find our use of the term ‘inner’ perfectly intelligible, because it is expressive of a realm of eventsand relations between events very different from the realm of facts and objects, the realm of the actualthat we refer to in our ‘outer-talk’. We use it because, amongst other reasons, it is to an extent expressivefor us of what is not yet actual, it expresses the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminacy, the incompleteand unfinished character that is a crucial to all living activity; the fact that, inevitably, there will be yetmore activity to follow – as if issuing already fully formed from a hidden source – activity with a certainstyle to it, yet never wholly predictable. Above, we have mentioned the value of works of art to us anumber of times: that although unique, in fact precisely because of its uniqueness, a work of art can‘instruct’ us in a way or style of relating ourselves to our surroundings. And I would like to end thissection with some comments by other writers: Wittgenstein (198) notes with respect to a work of art:“And you could say too that in so far as people understand it [a work of art], they resonate in harmonywith it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.Just as, when I pay someone a visit, I don’t just want to make him have feelings of such and such a sort;what I mainly want is to visit him....” (p.58). And Steiner (1989) suggests, “the streets of our cities aredifferent after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh(p.164)... It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueductswear walking-shoes after Paul Klee” (p.188). Or, as Paul Klee himself remarked: “In a forest, I have feltmany times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking atme, were speaking to me... I was there listening...” (Quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.167).

But to talk here of our having gained access to something ‘inner’ is intelligible both as an act of‘enter into’ a new world as if through a gate, or door, or through some other ‘means of access’, andfurther, once ‘inside’, it is not a matter of us interpreting what we see in a particular way, but of our reallyseeing “that aqueducts wear-walking shoes,” and ducking down to avoid them as we anticipate themrushing past us. Although perhaps rare, such once-off unique events can – as in a trauma and inpsychotherapy, as in meeting a single special person, as in reading a certain article , and so on –43

nonetheless be ‘turning points’ in our lives, affecting the whole style of what is then next to ensue. Butthe new ‘inner space’ we will have moved into, is not at all full of things hidden inside a mysterious,private, inner sensorium, a separate Platonic world whose contents only we ourselves can view withsome mysterious inner eye, but which only be known by other indirectly, through inference from what isavailable to them in their outer, objective observations of us and our behavior. I am myself, and what it islike to be can be grasped by others in just the same way that they can get a grasp of what it is like to be

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Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, not by looking and talking at me, but by looking and talking with me. The terms‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are, thus, not at all being used here to make any spatial or geographical distinctions,but expressive, physiognomic ones – ‘inner’ things can matter to us, physiognomically ‘move’ us, in ourlives in a way that ‘outer’ things cannot.

Conclusions: 1 -person ‘inner-talk’, conscientia, and the world of consciousnessst

We began our explorations here by noting the centrality in our lives together of our spontaneous, living,bodily, expressive, responsiveness. We also drew on Toulmin’s (1982) etymological account of the term“consciousness,” and its conceptual genealogy in encompassing a sequence of refinements orelaborations beginning with our basic reactivity, running through attentiveness and articulateness, toour final achievement of conscientia, witnessable knowing along with others – what we might call ourconsciousness of being conscious (Jaynes, 1976). As he made clear, almost all of us now – as good44

Cartesians – seem to feel certain that this ‘inner arena’ must contain the basic elements of everythingthat is influential in our giving shape to our lives. But as we have seen above, our achievement ofconsciousness, of conscientia, i.e., of witnessable knowing along with others, is just that, a continuingachievement. And furthermore, prior to its achievement, we rely on much more primitive set ofcapacities to influence each other’s behavior and to achieve a degree of intelligible communication witheach other (capacities clearly shared by many lower animals). Indeed, as we have seen, simply being ableto respond to each other in an unconfused or non-bewildered way is a necessary prelude to theachievement of a finally shared understanding. The classical idea, that we can communicate because analready shared set of rules or conventions, or an already shared framework of knowledge or of beliefs,seems simply to be untenable. As we have seen above, at many junctures in our relations with others, ifwe are to sustain our 3 -person, objective talk about events out in the world between us, our use of 1 -rd st

person expressions to display crucial aspects of our own unique ‘inner lives’ is very necessary. Talkabout what is ‘out there’ is not that easy.

Rather than being founded in the existence of already fixed and static (or stable) world ofobjects, we must assume that we live our lives within a chiasmically-ordered, i.e, pluralisticallyintertwined, world that is shared only partially, and known only fragmentarily, by all those participatingin it. Indeed, rather than our talk being about such a world around us, the view that we have arrivedhere, is that any real state of affairs is enigmatic and remains so until its reality is achieved in ourconversational relations with each other. As Sampson (1993) so nicely puts it: “Our conversations bothexpress and presuppose a reality which, in expressing and presupposing, we help to create” (p.108) –for, in being responsive to our present circumstances the protensions in each of our expressions reachout, providentially, toward yet further possibilities for still not yet finished the future. Hence the inherentvagueness and incompleteness in all our talk, and hence also, the necessity for our being able tonegotiate (in the sense of navigate) its meaning in the ingoing course of its use. If we are to understandour abilities to communicate with each other, even about ‘facts’, never mind our own unique personallives, we need a much more dynamic, creative account of how it is that we can establish stable forms ofunderstanding between us than we possess at the moment.

That has been my aim in the responsive expressive approach I have set out here. In thisapproach, what we talk of as people’s ‘inner’ lives is neither so private or so inner, nor so logical or sosystematic and scientifically structured, as has been assumed past. Indeed, rather than functioningmechanically and systematically hidden away inside our individual heads somewhere as a peculiar,mechanism of the mind, our ‘inner lives’ manifest in their functioning all the same expressive, gestural,and responsive characteristics influencing our transactions out in the world between us and the othersand othernesses around us. Central to this focus on living bodily expressive responsiveness, is the claimthat the meaning of whatever we are saying or doing is the tendency it arouses in others (or ourselves)to respond to it, because there are no separate ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ in any flow of living activity. Everymoment has an anticipatory ‘carry over’ within it from the past into the future. To this extent, inresponding to people’s expressions, we treat them as having an inevitable gestural expressiveness, as‘pointing’ from this past toward that kind of future’, and we act toward them, spontaneously, inanticipation of such a set of possibilities. This what seems to me so crucial in all of this: that this

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structure of responsiveness is always already ‘there’ in the ‘livingness’, so to speak, in all our meeting, inall our activities together. But once we move into a mechanically-structured world of only externallyrelated parts, our role as participant parts within an internally related, dynamically unfolding and stilldeveloping indivisible unified but chiasmically-structured whole, is rendered rationally invisible. This isthe tragic mistake of Cartesianism, and the source of the paradox of the modern age: like the gapbetween mind and body, the gap between an aggregate of separate atomic individuals and their inter-connection with each other into a unified community, seems unbridgeable – unless, we can assume thatin some way, in some primitive form, that connectivity already exists. This is what we have assumedhere.

As a consequence, we can come to see a whole swath of issues in a new light: In our studies oflanguage, once we move away from the idea of words as objects, as a realm of inert word shaped forms,having meaning only in terms of them being configured to stand in a picturing, paralleling, orrepresenting relation to another similar such realm of component material objects, to that of words asutterances, as spontaneous bodily expressions of people’s feelings, then we can begin to see our inner,mental activity in a new, dialogical or conversational light. Instead of an iterated mechanical process,working only by matching forms in terms of the one operation of ‘same’ or ‘not same’, we can begin tounderstand our conduct of own ‘inner lives’ in very similar terms to our understanding of ourdialogically-structured or chiasmically-structured relations to the others and othernesses about us out inthe world. As we have already seen, the relations between two or more voices in a dialogue, cannot begrasped in mechanical, causal, formal, logical, or any other systematic terms, the dynamic creation ofnovelty is inevitably present, just as is the sustaining also of a dynamic stability. Thus our inner liveshave a hidden character, not because of being a ‘something’ that, while common to all of us, just happensto be hidden away from view enclosed within us, but because others cannot look into our inner livesahead of time – our ‘inner’ lives are uniquely and individually ours. Indeed, it is central to the ethicalnature of our social lives together that we all, each and individually, have the right to express ourfeelings and to expect the others around us to respond to our expressions, and to take them seriously, if,that is, we take on the responsibility of expressing ourselves in ways spontaneously responsive to theways the others around us express themselves too.

Perhaps one the most important consequences of the whole approach, is the light it throws onwhy artistic creativity and the art objects resulting from it, play such an important role in our lives. Or, toput the issue in some other ways: We have seen above how it is possible to come to know a unique, alienother or otherness as unique, as who or what they are in themselves, to ‘enter into’ their world, toacknowledge and respect the otherness of their otherness. We have also seen how it is possible for aperson, a work of art, a bat (Nagel, 1974), or whatever, to express their own unique individuality to us,and for us within a language made up, seemingly, of only a limited number of repeatable forms, toexpress the nature of that individuality – its otherness. Indeed, we can go further, to suggest that if wecan, in our creative stumbling around, so to speak, make attempt after attempt to express our sense ofthe ‘presence’ of a ‘something there’ awaiting expression, then in each responded to attempt dwells theprovidential possibility for a next ‘failed’ attempt . Yet, in our Cartesian failure to express the final45

whole truth of the affair, we nonetheless still can teach each other new ways of looking at, or listening to,the world around us, new ways or styles of looking or listening, new sensibilities.

Indeed, an example here is the possibility of understanding change in anew way: We are veryused to talking of change as something that can be explained in terms of principles, rules, or conventions,of changes taking place within a reality already well-known to us, with what we might call ordinarychanges. Now, perhaps, although rare, we can also talk about the importance of surprising changes,changes that happen unexpectedly, changes that strike us with amazement or wonder, extraordinarychanges, changes in the very character of what we take our reality to be. For, as we have seen, instead ofchanges of a quantitative and repeatable kind, our focus has been on first-time, unique, irreversiblechanges, novelties, changes of a qualitative kind.

But by far the most important consequence of this paper – perhaps it is better to say, the mostimportant event within it – is the focus on a topic that strangely seems to me to be an utterly new topic(in that it has not yet aroused in us as academics and intellectual any distinctive acknowledgment of its

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very special nature). This new topic is simply “life” or “livingness,” the properties, characteristics, oraspects of living bodies, of organic forms as enduring, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, structurizingstructures. Arising out of this, is the acknowledgment of the importance of events occurring in meetingsof one kind or another. Something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin torespond to each other (more happens than them merely having an impact on one another). For in suchmeetings, there is the creation of qualitatively new, quite novel and distinct forms of life, which are morethan merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing. The “dialogically-structured,” or“chiasmically-structured” forms of activity that can emerge in such meetings, can give rise toqualitatively new forms of order, forms of order which cannot be grasped in terms of those already well-known to us (mathematical, logical, rational, etc.) – quite new ground needs to be charted here.

But what seems to be crucial here, is that in fact we can we learn something quite general,something that we can carry across to other circumstances, from something rare, unrepeatable, unique,fleeting, and utterly particular. This is the value of unique works of art for us. This why Wittgenstein’s“reminders” are so useful. Something very special emerges over time in the spontaneous, living, bodily,expressive and responsive relations occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses in oursurroundings: invisible, but very real “presences” can emerge in these dynamically unfolding relationswhich can teach us new “ways of going on” with each other.

Let me begin to draw this article to a close, then, with a quotation from Merleau-Ponty (1962),which seems to me to express the character of this gestural, constitutive aspect of our bodilyexpressiveness so very well: “There is, then,” he says, “a taking up of others’ thought through speech, areflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here themeaning of words must be finally be induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptualmeaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech.And as, in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in thecontext of action, and by taking part in a communal life... [While] I begin to understand a philosophy byfeeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact,every language conveys its own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind. A school ofmusic or painting which is at first not understood, eventually, by its own action, creates its own public...There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought inspeech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism” (p.179). But all this – our changedsensibilities, the gradual creation of a new public, the slow changes of our cultural forms – all occurunconsciously, without conscientia. For such a form of witnessable knowing along with others, knowingwhat it is that we know, is only possible once a certain way or style of acting has been established orinstituted in which an appropriate language game can have its home.

The world of consciousness, then, the world of con-scientia, of witnessable knowing along withothers, which until now we have to be the central ‘inner arena’ in which we must be able to find all thebasic elements of importance giving shape to our lives, seems to have been displaced. Instead of askingwhat goes on inside our heads, we must now ask, what is it that our heads go on inside of? For at any onemoment, the world of consciousness would seem to be embedded in that invisible world of chiasmicallystructured, unfolding dynamical patterns, apparent to us all in the qualitative differences we eachindividually feel between successive moments as the meetings between ourselves and the others andothernesses around us unfold. But, to the extent that we have our being just as much ‘inside’ it (asparticipant parts internally related to ‘it’ as a whole), as ‘it’ has its being ‘inside’ us. In other words, thephysiognomic changes (movements) taking place out in the larger, dynamically unfolding, living worldwithin we all have our being together, is felt by all of us, individually, in the same way, according to thesame style. The kind of knowing we all share then, is to do with a knowledge of facts, but with theknowing what to expect, a knowing of ‘what goes with, or follows from, what’. So even though we cannotknow ahead of time what the others around us will say or do, when their turn comes to speak or act,although they then will have a 1 -person right to express uniquely what they feel to be of importance tost

them, they will ‘display’ in the unfolding ‘contours’ of their intertwined and ‘orchestrated’ expression oftheir feelings, their ‘inner’ feelings to those around them. And the others around them, in beingresponsively ‘moved’ by the ‘contoured’ expressions, will feel their feelings according to same sharedway or style. It is our embedding in this shared, continuously ingoing background world of

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1. In using the term chiasmic, I am following the lead of Merleau-Ponty (1968) who entitles chapter 4 – in hisbook The Visible and the Invisible – “The Intertwining - The Chiasm.” I cannot pretend to say what “chiasmicor intertwined relations” in fact are. But what is clear, is that here is a sphere of living relations of a kind utterlydifferent from any so far familiar to us (such as causal or logical relations) and taken by us as basic in ourintellectual inquiries. All I can do here, is to begin their exploration.

2. “Etymologically, of course, the term “consciousness” is a knowledge word. This is evidenced by the Latinform, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we to make of the prefix con- that precedes it? Look at theusage in Roman Law, and the answer will be easy enough. Two or more agents who act jointly – having formeda common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted their actions – are as a result conscientes. They act asthey do knowing one another’s plans: they are jointly knowing.” (p.64). Toulmin traces how a whole family ofwords, “whose historic use and sense had to do with the public articulation of shared plans and intentions hasbeen taken over into philosophical theory as providing a name for the most private and unshared aspects ofmental life... The term “consciousness” has thus become the name for a flux of sensory inputs that is seeminglyneither con-, since each individually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since the sensory flux is thoughtof as “buzzing and booming” rather than cognitively structured or interpreted ” (p.54).

3. “Doesn’t the theme point to anything outside itself? Yes, it does! But that means: – it makes an impression onme which is connected with things in its surroundings” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.175).

4. “On this level, most higher animals lose and regain consciousness in the same ways, and in the samecircumstances (e.g., when struck on the head) as human beings” (Toulmin, 18982, pp.57-58).

5. See in relation to inquiries of this kind, Taylor’s (1995) discussion of “The validity of transcendentalarguments.” Such arguments work, he claims, “by pointing to what appear undeniable essential features ofexperience... [where] our having a sense of ourselves as embodied agents is a necessary condition of ourexperience having these features” (p.25). This, of course, is the point of Wittgenstein’s (1953) investigationsinto the “grammar” of our expressions, and the methods he invented for bringing our shared, spontaneousresponses to our situated use of words to witnessable light.

6. “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.580).

spontaneously responsive expression, that makes the world of consciousness, the world of witnessableknowing along with others, con-scientia, a sharable world, for only from within our embedding in it canwe share with them certain patterns of contingent anticipations and anticipations occurring in thesequentially structured activities unfolding between us.

In the approach to our inquiries into the nature of our ‘inner’ lives that I have been taking here,then, our focus on the way in which our spontaneously responsive, bodily activities are expressive, bothof our feelings and of our relations to events occurring out in the world between us and around us, hasled us toward seeing the function of our inner-talk as being quite different from that of giving reports onthe states of a supposed inner mind-thing existing hidden within us somewhere. However, although suchinner-talk has misled us philosophically in our grand attempts to arrive at a general account of our beingin the world, in our more particular everyday affairs – in orienting us toward what is not-yet-existing butwhat must be among the possibilities that will occur in the future activities of the individuals around us(if, that is, they are to act as the members of our social group are required to act, if they are to be and toremain members) – it plays a clear and crucial role. So, although as 1 -persons we “use a word withoutst

justification [that] does not mean [we] use it without right” (Wittgenstein, 18953, no.289), for withoutsuch usages, most of what we do in our unique personal relations with each other would be impossible.But what is amazing in all of this, is not our consciousness. Against the mechanistic background providedus in our Cartesian heritage, it is truly amazing as it is the only left over in that otherwise dead realm oflife and livingness. But all current attempts to explain consciousness while ignoring the amazingness oflife, strike me as utterly futile. It is life and the ordinary everyday livingness of things that strike me as sotruly wonderous.

Notes:

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7. Wittgenstein (1953) remarks that “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because oftheir simplicity and familiarity... The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that facthas at some time struck him. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking andmost powerful” (no.129). What presently is most striking to me, is our failure in our current forms of socialinquiry to draw any crucial distinctions between inanimate processes, and embodied, living activities.

8. See the discussion below of Capek’s (1961) arguments to do with taking temporality seriously.

9. Like Wittgenstein (1953), I want to suggest that ... unconscious influences at work in how we ‘go on’... wehave inherited from various classical concepts... (Capek, 1961).

10. In order, Descartes (1968) says, not to be “obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions amongphilosophers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes, and to speak only of whatwould happen in a new world, if God were now to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter tocompose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that hecreated a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usualpreserving action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws” (p.62). And, “instead of thespeculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a practical philosophy can be found by which... [we can] therebymake ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78).

11. “But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata...?” Says Wittgenstein (1953), “Say to yourself,

for example: ‘The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism’. And you will

either find these words become quite meaningless; or, you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny

feeling, or something of the sort” (no.420). Clearly, Descartes felt no such linguistic difficulties as these, as one

doesn’t in, so to speak, in talking solely to oneself.

12. “Animals come when their name is called. Just like human beings” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.67).

13. “Knowledge in the end is based on acknowledgment” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.378).

14. Clearly, as analytic resources, the terms “adjacency pair” and “conditional relevance” do not refer toanything objective. It is important not to reify them. They are “terms of art.” Like Wittgenstein’s (1953)introduction of “the ‘language-game’” (no.7), such terms work to specify “objects of comparison which aremeant to throw light on the facts of language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities”(no.130). They bring to analytic attention, deviations, variations, differences, etc., that seem to make adifference in the flow of interaction when we turn around to reflect on it. But as analytic devices, talk of such“entities” or “items” (if we were to yield to the temptation to reify them as in some way substantial) ascorresponding to something that plays a real part in people’s speech performances would be ‘after the fact’ – inthat they are introduced as a consequence of people having intelligibly responded to each other – and they are‘beside the point’ – in that as generalities, they in fact play no actual part as such in a participant’s particularperformance. As Voloshinov (1986) points out, a speaker's focus of attention is on the “concrete utterance he ismaking... What the speaker values is not that aspect of the form which is invariably identical in all instances ofits usage, despite the nature of those instances, but that aspect of the linguistic form because of which it canfigure in the given, concrete context... We can express it this way: what is important for the speaker about alinguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal but that it is an always changeable andadaptable sign... [And as for the task of understanding, that] does not at all amount to recognizing the linguisticform used by the speaker as the familiar, ‘that very same’, form... but rather to understanding it in a particular,concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding itsnovelty and not to recognizing its identity” (p.68).

15. Hanson (1958) notes that, to see something as a certain kind of thing, is not simply to be correct in ahypothesis as to what a thing is, for that as such is not adequate to the task of orienting one in practice to one’ssurroundings: To see what is before one’s eyes as a box, a staircase, a bird, an antelope, a bear, a face, a goblet,etc., is also “to see that, were certain things done to such objects before one’s eyes, certain other things wouldresult... an aetiology and a prognosis” (p.21), as Hanson puts it, is involved.

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16. The full quote is: “... in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generallyimplies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences withoutpositive terms” (Saussure, 1911, p.120). In other words, whatever the static ‘stuff’ might be from whichlanguage is made (by a person’s vocal chords, by the vibrating diaphragm of a loudspeaker, or by the changingresonances in a person’s mouth cavities from an external vibrator after throat cancer), it is in the sensibledifferences, and thus the relations occurring from moment to moment, in the dynamic unfolding of such asequence of events over time that speech is made into speech.

17. As Taylor (1991) points out, more than individuals merely coordinating their actions is involved here. Fromtheir embedding within the common “rhythming” of their activities, be it moving a piano, sawing with a two-person cross-cut saw, dancing, or participating in a conversation, the individuals involved become participantparts of “an integrated, nonindividual agent” (p.311, my emphasis). As such, they answer to the felt ‘demands’,so to speak, coming not from other individuals, but from the unfolding tempo of the jointly shared activitywithin which they are all involved. Indeed, to the extent that that tempo is expressive of an ‘inner’ realm ofmeaningful activity, and to the extent that all those involved in it ‘move’ in accord with it, they are all‘answerable’ so to speak, to ‘its’ own requirements.

18. Wittgenstein (1953), in discussing how the moment of expression is involved in an expression’s meaning,remarks: “What is happening now has significance – in these surroundings. The surroundings give it itssignificance” (no.583).

19. Wittgenstein (1953) also notes: “It is anything but a matter of course that we see ‘three-dimensionally’ withtwo eyes. If the two visual images are amalgamated, we might expect a blurred one to result” (p.213).

20. I return to this issue in a moment. Being struck by a similarity, suddenly “seeing connections,” is a crucialbut complex experience. Fisher does rather take it for granted.

21. And Saussure (1959) continues here, by providing a diagram of two distinctly separate but chaotic planes ofactivity, with the suggestion that “language works out its units between two shapeless masses. Visualize the airin contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken upinto a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union of coupling of thought with phonic substance”(p.112).

22. Although Rotman’s (1993) arguments are far too complex to summarize here, their flavor – and its closerelation the whole approach being adopted here – can be, perhaps, grasped in the following quotation. Indiscussing the back and forth oscillation between the “Person” who speaks informal mathematics, and the“mathematic Subject” who reads/writes rigorous mathematically correct forms, Rotman notes that:“Mathematicians (that is to say, mathematical Subjects) scribble down what they think and think about whatthey scribble, and they do this in such a way as makes it artificial to accord one of these activities any primacyor originating status... In all such cases the nature and status of what is newly signified depends in turn on yetearlier such interweavings of signifier and signified, and so on. From this it follows that, contrary to Brouwer’sand Husserl’s intuitionism, there is no prelinguistic mathematical meaning,... no freestanding signified notcaught up in mathematical signifiers. And likewise, contrary to Hilbert’s formalism (and indeed those post-structuralist accounts of discourse which seek to give absolute primacy to the signifier), there is no such thing asa pure signifier, no ‘meaningless mark on paper’ in relation to the mathematical Code...” (pp, 142-143). AsRotman shows, to replace the fantasy of a disembodied transcendental being, outside culture and history, as aGod-like source of mathematical realms, “by an insistence on the corporeality of the-one-who-counts is to startrewriting the connections between God, Number, [and] the Body” (p.11). It is to rewrite the connections in sucha way as to show how, rather than being mysteriously “preadapted to fit a world that knows nothing of them,they have themselves been extracted from what ever world mathematics has found and changed over the pastseveral thousand years” (p.141).

23. Although in the visio-temporal, as opposed to the visio-spatial sphere, he retained such an ability: “That’sKarl,” he would cry. “I know his movements, his body-music” (Sacks, 1985, p.17).

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24. Capek (1961) is not, of course, unique in this. Fleck (1979) for instance, also discusses the thought-style[Denkstil] of western science and the “I came, I saw, I conquered’ epistemology” (p.87) which it gives rise.While Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in ourlanguage and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (no.115). But what Capek notes is that, even thosewho were the innovators of such new movements of thought, still found it impossibly difficult to think throughall the implications of their own new ways of thinking. “The Cartesian ideal of explanation by figures andmotions remained the inspiring motive” (p.4) of many such workers.

25. Note here also Heidegger’s (1977) essay: The age of the world picture – “world picture, when understoodessentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture” (p.129).

26. See Descartes’s “new world... in imaginary space” mentioned in note 5.

27. Here, he is quoting, he says, from a Mr Shadworth Hodgson’s description.

28. As Wittgenstein (1980) notes: “Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life. And so too even to thehabitual character of life” (p.73).

29. “Doesn’t the theme point to anything outside itself? Yes, it does! But that means: – it makes an impressionon me which is connected with things in its surroundings” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.175).

30. “We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not to let anything in, but to send something out”(Wittgenstein, 1981, no.222).

31. If someone were to ask me, ‘What is it like to be you?’, I could reply in terms of: i) the ‘things’ I perceive inmy world; ii) the values I attach to them, how I perceive them, and the reactions I have towards them; iii) theopportunities for action and understanding they afford me; iv) the nature of my rights, duties, privileges andobligations in relation to the others around me; v) the ‘ground’ to which I appeal for the power and the authorityof these rights and duties; vi) the ‘horizon’ of my world, i.e., what is not actually at the moment ‘visible’ to mein my situation but to what I can point as being reasonable for me to expect in the future; and vii) I can qualifyall the above by remarking upon its precariousness, because they all depend upon my 1 -person right to speakst

and act, and have what I say or do taken seriously, and that is continually in contest.

32. As Capek (1961) notes, the term space-time implies the spatialization of time as merely a fourth dimensionof space. This, without arguing the point, give rise to a conception of change, not just as a discontinuoussequence of static instants, but also as simply an uncreative set of re-positionings of a basic set of elements.Instead, Capek argues, what we need is a dynamic notion of time-space, one in which each moment (not aninstant) has a ‘thickness’, so to speak, in that it provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of what – in itsindivisible dynamic continuity, i.e., in its flow – is likely next to emerge into existence as a novel creation. Inour privileging of space over time, however, we hide this creation of novelty from ourselves. For, although“succession is a real fact perceived in the concrete form of ‘not yet’ feeling, we spontaneously adopt [in ourverbal expressions of this feeling] a compromise solution: we claim that, although the future positions of themoving body exist now, they are still not yet occupied” (p.184). We ‘see’ the yet-to-be-achieved as somehowalready achieved, but in a Platonic space of ideas, or in some other such timeless space.

33. Indeed, as we saw above, due to the lack of relation between any individual’s intentions and the outcome ofjoint actions, meaning (as an action) seems to occur as something independent of our efforts as a kind ofaccompaniment of them. Hence our temptation to try to explain it as being due to a mysterious mechanismsomewhere inside our heads somewhere.

34. “That process... of responding to one’s self as another responds to it, taking part in one’s own conversation

with others, being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness of what one is saying to determine what

one is going to say thereafter – that is a process with which we are all familiar... We are finding out what we are

going to say, what we are going to do, by saying and doing, and in the process we are continually controlling the

process itself. In the conversation of gestures what we say calls out a certain response in another that in turn

changes our own action, so that we shift from what we started to do because of the reply the other makes. The

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conversation of gestures is the beginning of communication” (Mead, 1934, pp.140-141).

35. “In saying ‘When I heard this word, it meant... to me’ one refers to a point in time and to a way of using the

word... And the expression ‘I was then going to say...’ refers to a pont of time and an action. I speak of the

essential references of the utterance in order to distinguish them from other peculiarities of the expression we

use” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.175).

36. “When I make the stroke I do not, as a matter of fact, produce something absolutely new, and I never repeatsomething old. The stroke is literally manufactured out of the living visual and postural ‘schemata’ of themoment and their interrelations” (Bartlett, 1932, p.202). We may fancy that we are repeating a series ofmovements learned a long time before from a text-book or from a teacher. But motion study shows that in factwe build up the stroke afresh on a basis of the immediately preceding balance of postures and the momentaryneeds of the game. Every time we make it, it has its own characteristics” (ibid, p.204).

37. It is a famous aphorism of Einstein that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

38. “What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, areoften extremely general facts of nature: such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their greatgenerality” (Wittgenstein, 1953, footnote p.56).

39. Quite often, as Wittgenstein (1953) points out, that as we can see in the examples in this section, we are notoften puzzled and bewildered by people’s declarations about their inner states, their inner feelings, etc. It iswhen we make a statement or ask a question out of the blue’, so to speak. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulfbetween consciousness and brain processes arises when I “turn my attention in a particular way toward my ownconsciousness, and, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!.... But I did notutter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense”(no.412).

40. But note above (and below) Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark that we often have “the feeling that [a word] hastaken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning” (p.218).

41. In making this remark, Wittgenstein (1953) notes that it applies “for a large class of cases – though not forall” (no.43).

42. Nagel (1974), in his now classic article, What is it like to be a bat, set out the problem of consciousness asbeing that of specifying “how it is for the subject himself” (p.440), of specifying a body of facts “that embody aparticular point of view... [Where] the point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual.Rather it is a type” (p.441). It embodies what above I have been calling (following Merleau-Ponty) a style.

43. For me, the article was Hubert Dreyfus’s (1967) article: Why computer must have bodies in order to beintelligent.

44. If I were to say what it is like to be me, to be able to look out on the world and see a whole range of variousthings in it, to stop looking and to start thinking of this, of that, of something else, and so on, we are of coursenot surprised when almost all around us say “Me too.” And we all seem to feel certain – as good Cartesians –that this ‘inner arena’ must contain the basic elements of everything that is influential in our giving shape to ourlives.

45. Samuel Beckett talks somewhere of each attempt at writing to be a failure. All one can attempt to do is “tofail again, better.”

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