The Primordial Scene of Social Life:

Our Spontaneously Responsive, Bodily Activity

1) Dialogically-structured events: One consideration that is crucial to the approach I shall take, is Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984, 1986) claim that our living relations to the others and othernesses around us are structured neither in cause and effect terms, nor in terms of sign to meaning, but dialogically, i.e., in relationally-responsive terms, in terms of a circumstance or situation ‘calling for’ or ‘motivating’ a response from us. As he puts it with respect to our verbal utterances: "Language lives only in the dialogical interaction of those who make use of it...Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object, [these] relationships in and of themselves [are] devoid of any dialogical element. They must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become positions of various subjects expressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relations might arise among them. ‘Life is good’, ‘Life is not good’. We have before us two judgments... Between these two judgements there exists a specific logical relation: one is the negation of the other. But between them there are not and cannot be any dialogic relationships; they do not argue with each other in any way.... Both these judgments must be embodied, if a dialogic relationship is to arise between them and toward them" (p.183). Thus, when these two judgments are expressed in two utterances by two different individuals, one in response to the other, then they can give rise to disagreement, to contradiction, to controversy, and so on; then they are constitutive of one or another kind of relationship between the people concerned. Indeed, more than that, as we shall see, a unified world containing the two individuals concerned also begins to come into existence, a world able to function as a context in which such a disagreement, contradiction, or controversy can make sense.

2) A third realm of activity that is neither behavior nor action: The dialogical is thus born in the space between the living, bodily expressions of one individual and the spontaneous bodily responses to them by an other. Rather than occurring in an instant, however, such dialogicallystructured activity develops over time. In being neither simply caused by an external (stimulus) event (behavior), nor due to the reasons or motives of an individual (action), it falls into a special, third category of activity, exhibiting an intertwined, multidimensional complexity. Its unfolding ‘shape’ owes its character to its continually changing responsive relations to its surroundings as people sequentially ‘answer’ spontaneously to the ‘calls’ coming to them in turn from within their different involvements with their surroundings.

3) Our ineradicable involvement with our surroundings: We are always involved in the world around us in one way or another. Not to be involved, not to be oriented toward our surroundings, but to be totally disconnected from them, is not, as living beings, an option for us.

4) Meaning is present in the social act before any conscious awareness of meaning occurs: Given that whatever an individual does in response to their surroundings, is both ‘expressive’ of their attitude or orientation to them, as well as ‘calling out’ an other’s response. The relation of such "expression-summoned bodily responsiveness," if we can call it that, to us later being able to express meanings to each other, is well expressed by Mead (1934). He notes that: "The mechanism of meaning is...present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has" (pp 77-78). In other words, long before anything occurs in our heads, in our conscious experience, we can find in the very structure of our responsive bodily activities, the precursors or prototypes for what later we shall talk of in mental or cognitive terms.

5) The joint production of enthymemic structures: This gives rise to another consideration of great importance – although it may seem very strange indeed to bring it in at this point. It is the importance of the enthymeme or enthymemic structures. In rhetoric, an enthymeme – like the two utterances mentioned above: ‘Life is good’ and ‘Life is bad’ – consists in only two propositions, and lacks the ‘middle term’ which joins them; if the two utterances are to be accepted as jointly making sense, then the middle term (the contextualizing world) must be implicitly and creatively supplied by all those involved. Put otherwise, an enthymeme or enthymematic structure occurs when a speaker or performer says or does something that an other who witnesses it responds to in such a way that both performer and audience agree to the resulting joint outcome (Bitzer, 1959). I mention the importance of enthymemic structures in the light of the following comment by Voloshinov (1987): "Whatever kind it be, the behavioral utterance always joins the participants in the situation together as co-participants who know, understand, and evaluate the situation in a like manner.... Thus, the extraverbal situation is far from being merely the external cause of an utterance – it does not operate on the utterance from the outside, as if it were a mechanical force. Rather, the situation enters into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import. Consequently, a behavioral utterance as a meaningful whole is comprised of two parts: (1) the part realized or actualized in words and (2) the assumed part. On this basis, the behavior utterance can be liken to an enthymeme" (p.100)^4.

6) Unities of unmerged consciousnesses: But how are the ‘middle terms’ of enthymemes created? This question leads me on to a fourth consideration: As we have seen, dialogically structured, living activity cannot be described in merely causal terms, nor can it be understood logically or rationally, in terms of people’s reasons for so acting. It seems to be an utterly distinct, and very strange third kind of activity, in which the individual activities involved, although they may be very different from each other, nonetheless form, for a moment, a single, true unity of internally related parts. Like the complex unity produced in the stranding and intertwining of the different instruments in an orchestra playing a symphony; with each playing its own part in a responsive relation to all the others playing their part, a dialogically-structured unity is, as Bakhtin (1984) oxymoronically puts it, "a unity of unmerged consciousnesses or voices."

7) The binocular as an exemplar of an unmerged unity of sensory sources: But how can a unity be formed from unmerged constituents. Shouldn’t we more properly call it a mixture or an amalgam? Like splitting the atom, a contradiction in terms would seem to be involved. What could a living unity of unmerged entities or activities be like? As I mentioned above, Bateson (1979), draws on this example to point out the advantages of having two (or more) separate sources of information bearing on the same location out in our surroundings. He mentions two advantages: one is that we are able to achieve better visual resolution at edges and contrasts, i.e., to be more sensitive to change. But the second is even more important. From the spontaneous intertwining of the two monocular views from our two eyes, rather than a blurred and averaged, and still two-dimensional view, we become the beneficiaries of a three dimensional, binocular view of the scene before us. Indeed, from the slight variations between the different views from the two eyes, besides a left-right and an up-down dimension of relation between ourselves and our surroundings, a third inner or relational-dimension of near and far emerges. From the point at which our two eyes achieve a clear, focused, convergence, we gain a sense of depth. And this, as Bateson points out, is a dimension of a quite different logical type to the (dead) objective, external dimensions in terms of which grasp the character of our surroundings independently of ourselves. It is an inner living relationship to our surroundings which provides us, personally, with a more refined orientation toward them. The different arrival time of sounds at our left and right ears operates in the same way, to give us, not a merged echo effect, but the directionality of a sound. We may take these examples as paradigms for what can happen when two separate activities intertwine in a living, dialogically-structured relation to each other: further inner dimensions of relationship and connection, leading to more refined orientation to our surroundings, are produced. In short, our sensitivities to subtle variations in certain spheres of involvement – in painting (colors, shapes, shades, balances, etc.), in numbers (repetitive patterns, relations in an array, etc.), in skiing and sailing (a sensitivity to slight variations in conditions), and so on – increase. Merleau-Ponty (1962; 1964) also takes binocular vision as a paradigm for the special kind of creative, qualitative synthesis produced by our living bodies: "We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the synthesis, but the body..." (1962, p.232). Indeed, as I have already noted above, what is so difficult to accept with respect to such joint, dialogically-structured, activities, is that we as individuals have no inner sense of responsibility for them.

8) Seeing connections: This distinct third sphere of dialogically-structured activity – which is not individual action, nor mere externally caused behavior – involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous, embodied form of understanding which is constitutive of people’s social and personal identities. It is constitutive of them as a certain kind of person. I have called it a relationally-responsive form, to contrast it with the representational-referential form of understanding more familiar to us in our current philosophical discussions of knowledge and understanding. It consist in, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, "‘seeing connections’" (no.122). We might call it an (inner) orientational kind of knowing. For, once we ‘see’ the world around us in this way, we see more than merely inert objects before us; we see in terms of a whole set of spontaneously occurring, bodily reactions and anticipatory responses, a whole set of ‘calls’ to which we feel answerable in a certain way. It is a kind of spontaneous knowing manifested in our practical activities, again as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, in terms of us knowing our "way about" (no.123), in terms of us feeling ‘at home’ in our surroundings. It is thus a kind of knowing that is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us.

9) The primordial ‘stuff’ of knowledge: But the intertwining in which we are interested occurs among more than just two channels from the same sensory realm. But all my senses are at work in giving me around me a unified world. Applying what we have learned from the synthesis binocular vision to the problem of the unity of our senses, Merleau-Ponty (1962) remarks: "It cannot be understood in terms of their subsumption under a primary consciousness, but of their never ending integration into one knowing organism. The intersensory object is to the visual object what the visual object is to the monocular images of double vision, and the senses interact in perception as the two eyes collaborate in vision (pp.233-234). Thus in our primordial, perceptual relations to our surroundings, "... we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves as thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world, and about the motives we have and the means at our disposal for synthesizing it" (p.238). Thus perception is, Merleau-Ponty concludes, "a non-thetic [i.e., non-positing], pre-objective, pre-conscious experience. Let us therefore say, provisionally that there is a merely possible stuff of knowledge. From every point in the primordial field intentions move outwards, vacant and yet determinate; in realizing these intentions, analysis will arrive at the object of science, at sensation as a private phenomenon, and at the pure subject which posits both. These three terminal concepts are no nearer on the horizon of primordial experience. It is in the experience of the thing that the reflective ideal of positing thought will have its basis. Hence reflection does itself not grasp its full significance unless it refers to the unreflective fund of experience which it presupposes, upon which it draws, and which constitutes for it a kind of original past, a past which has never been present" (p.242)⁵.

10) The further specification of a circumstance by those involved within it: In short, activities in this third, primordial sphere lack specificity. They are a complex mixture of many different kinds of influences. This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice – while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so – that is their central defining feature. It is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity so interesting. It is interesting for how it illustrates the way in which, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it: "It is my body which gives significance not only to the natural object, but also to cultural objects like words," (p.235). Indeed, to repeat a segment already quoted above, the meaning of an utterance as we voice it "is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of "copy reality" spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.155). As we voice and otherwise body forth our utterances, there in the subtle details of the ‘shape’ of the unfolding flow of our expression, visible for all to see and audible for all to hear, are our moment-by-moment evaluations of ‘our inner worlds’.