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Agential Realism, Performative Understandings, and Social
Constructionism:
Giving our Living Relations to our Surroundings their Due
John Shotter
Abstract: As Karen Barad (2007) makes clear, the psychological ‘things’ that in the past we have named
as ‘thoughts’, ideas’, ‘theories’, ‘knowledge’, or ‘observations’, and studied as the outcomes of processes
hidden within the heads of individuals, are better talked of as emerging within material intra-actions
occurring in activities out in the world at large. In engaging in practices, within which we place the
“agential cuts” we make in different places at different times in the course of performing our actions, “we
do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things” (p.91), instead, we bring such
‘things’ into existence. In focussing on the felt performative dynamics unfolding within an experienced
phenomenon, we create a “condition of exteriority-within-phenomena” (p.139), she says. So, although we
talk in social constructionism of our understandings as coming into existence as a result of “forms of
negotiated understandings,” as a nameable practice, a negotiated understanding can only be seen as
having been at work in people’s performances after it has been achieved. In fact, many named topics of
study in psychological research can only be seen as having been at work in a person’s actions after they
have been performed. Indeed, as nameable ‘things’ they are often in fact foreshadowed in the very way in
which, prior to the conduct of our investigations, we commit ourselves to a particular way or ways of
looking into the phenomena before us. Something else altogether guides people in the performance of
their actions than the nameable things we claim to have discovered in our research. It is the nature of that
‘something else’, and how it can be publicly studied, that I want to explore below.
“A performative understanding of scientific practices, for example, takes account of the
fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather
from a direct material engagement with the world” (Barad, 2007, p.49).
“The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which presumes the
prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It
is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the
‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts
become meaningful” (Barad, 2007, p.139).
“We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because ‘we’
are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming” (Barad, 2007,
p.185).
Are any new movements of thought that go beyond Social Constructionism still possible? Are there yet
further steps to be taken? I think there are – many, in fact. A profound conceptual shift has been, and
currently still is, taking place in Social Theory (e.g., see the current work of Barad, 2003, 2007; Gendlin,
2002; Gergen, 2009; Ingold, 2008, 2011; Johnson, 1987, 2007; Sheets-Johnstone, 1992, 2009, 2011) to do
with re-situating ourselves as moving, embodied, spontaneously responsive, living beings immersed both
within, and as owing crucial aspects of our nature to a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines
or strands of unfolding, agential activity. If the above thinkers and writers are correct, and I think they
are, then we must radically re-think ourselves not only as having our nature in relation to our
surroundings, but also of our surroundings as having ‘their own say’, so to speak, in influencing both,
what opportunities for action are available to us at any one moment it time, as well as the opportunities
available to us to become this or that kind of person. In other words, if these developments are correct,
then we can no longer think of ourselves as the only organizing agencies at work in the larger world
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within which we live out our lives; other agencies than the ‘one’ we (mis)name as “I” are at work within
us, and all around us.
But more than that, much more. We can no longer take it that there is an already existing clear
and simple Cartesian subject/object cut between ourselves, as bounded, dynamic centres of awareness,
emotion, judgment, and action, organized into unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive
wholes, set constrastively against other such wholes and against our social and natural backgrounds (see
Geertz, 1983, p.59) – with all involved (ourselves and all the other things and beings around us)
occupying the two great neutral containers of space and time. We can no longer think of ourselves as
simply facing the task of discovering their nature, along with their laws of motion and/or combination,
with the aim of subjecting them to our aims and desires. As living beings, we come into the world moving,
and in so doing, continually come into one or another kind of contact with our surroundings. Indeed, as
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011) puts it, “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms
movement” (p.119, itals original). We thus find our bodies doing many things for us, as it were, without
our having ourselves to direct them within such doings1, and further, as a consequence of how we become
related to our surroundings within such movements, traces of their doings become inscribed in our
bodies and influence the shaping our actions in future encounters within our surroundings. As MerleauPonty (1964) puts it, my body is “a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way
except through it” (p.93, itals original).
The importance of our bodily
doings on the subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object cut
In the past, on the basis of the assumption of a clear and simple Cartesian subject/object cut, we have
thought of ourselves as primarily agential beings, able to do things by our self-instigated, or I-directed,
movements. We have thus aimed in our psychological inquiries at discovering ways to plan our activities
to bring off certain desired consequences. But if the world in which we live is a world in which the ‘things’
of importance to us are not fixed and finalized for all time, but are dynamically sustained stabilities within
a larger realm of continuing, flowing movement; and further, if we are not the only agencies at work in
such a world, then it becomes difficult, as we shall see, to differentiate within an occurring phenomenon
what aspects of it should be accounted objective and what subjective.
It is precisely within such a realm of unfolding, fluid, agential activities as this that Karen Barad’s
(2003, 2007) “agential realism” finds its point of purchase. For, as we will see, rather than with the more
familiar Cartesian cut – where we take the pre-existence of a simple split between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ for
granted – where, at any one moment within an unfolding phenomenon, that subject/object cut is placed,
what we count as being over against us, on the objective side of the cut, and what with us, on the
subjective side, is, she claims, up to us.
If she is correct, then this clearly raises the need for ways to study how we might make such
different placements of the cut. That is, we need to understand how we might come to select the
appropriate inner mental movements required to subjectively ‘go out’ towards our surroundings with
specific expectations ‘at the ready’, thus to attend to those ‘objective aspects’ within them upon which we
intend to act. Thus such cuts are “agential cuts” (Barad, 2007, p.175), in that at different points in time
with different ends in view, we can “enact” what we pick out for attention and action from within the
phenomena currently before us. Within speech phenomena, say, we can choose to pick out what counts
for us as social from what is individual, what counts for us as physical or physiological from what is
psychological, what is orderly and often repeated from what is unique and quite singular, and so on.
This shift of concern to events occurring much more on the subjective (agential) side of the
1
There is a whole body of research at the moment attributing to our “unconscious minds” (see, for example,
Vedantam, 2010) what I will attribute below simply to the spontaneous responsiveness of our living bodies, and our
living relations to our surroundings.
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Cartesian subject/object split is, thus, a major aspect of the profound conceptual shift of which Barad
(2007) speaks.
Central to it, and in line with the task of re-situating ourselves as spontaneously responsive
beings immersed within a somewhat ‘fluid’ reality, is the turn to a study of our felt experiences. In the
past, such experiences have be been thought of as utterly idiosyncratic and quite unamenable to scientific
investigation. Investigations into them have been dismissed as merely introspective, as requiring
‘observation’ of something wholly hidden within our individual selves, and thus lacking in any publicly
accessible features. This, however, is clearly not the case. In very large part, we continually show, i.e.,
express, what we are feeling in our actions. As Wundt and Jung noticed long ago, people’s reaction times
in responding with an association to certain words differed, and this led them to their development of the
word association test, with the claim by Freud (1966) “that these striking reactions were determined in
the most definite fashion by the subject’s complexes” (p.134), that is, by “groups of strongly emotional
thoughts and interests” (p.133).
Now it is not that I want to endorse Freud’s essential theoretical claims here – far from it. But I do
want to draw attention to the importance of Wundt’s, Jung’s, and Freud’s noticing of the qualitative nature
of these reactions, and the fact that they were in some way indicative of crucially important states of
affairs occurring within people, on the subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object split, in a way that
mattered to them. And clearly, as work in CA (Conversational Analysis) shows (see e.g., Atkinson, Maxwell
& Heritage, 1984; Nofsinger, 1991; Potter, 2007; Schegloff, 2007; Zimmerman, 2005), the expressive
variations occurring as we body forth our utterances – in such things as choice of words, emphases,
intonations, pausing, pacing, repeating, etc., etc. – are of crucial importance in providing listeners, not
with further factual information, but with orientation, with ways of relating themselves both to what is
said, as well as inter-relating events within what is said. For often, it is not at all obvious what the overall
situation is within which an utterance should be placed, if its sense its to be understood. Indeed, as
Zimmerman (2007) points out, our everyday communicative actions are often “designed with respect to
an oriented to, but specifically unarticulated, matter” (p.446) – as, for instance, when we show our care
for another in the compliments we give them, or show our respect or love2 for them in the tone of our
greeting.
Indeed, as we shall see below, when we turn to the issue of what is involved in working our way
through from an initially bewildering situation to resolving on a way forward within it, a conversational
interaction3 can be organized around a hoped for end that has not yet happened, but its relevance
nevertheless shapes or animates participants’ actions. As Garfinkel (1967) puts it, we make “use of
many... ‘seen but unnoticed’, expected, background features of everyday scenes” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.36, my
itals) in organizing the sequentially occurring fragments of the communicative expressions we experience
into understandings to which we can sensibly respond – that is, into performative understandings (Austin,
1962), i.e., into understandings which we show in our actions, but which are otherwise unarticulated and
exist only on the subjective side of the subject/object cut. “Demonstrably,” says Garfinkel (1967), people
are “responsive to this background, while at the same time [they are] at a loss to tell us specifically of
what their expectancies consist” (pp.36-37).
However, although people are at a loss in giving a name to their ‘background expectancies’, this is
not to say that they cannot allude at all to the nature of what they show, display, or manifest in their
actions. In fact, the task of characterizing what it is that people show in the ‘unfolding movements’ of their
expressions, is in fact quite easy. For something that we continually notice among our own and other
people’s expression of their experiences, is similarities – some of our experiences seem to have, so to
speak, a very similar ‘music’ to them as theirs, such that on hearing a friend recount an experience, we
2
A matter so nicely expressed in the lyrics of Louie Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World: “I see friends
shaking hands saying ‘how do you do’. They’re really saying I love you.”
3
Soon we shall have cause to question the use of the prefix ‘inter-‘, for we will find that, once we move to a
view of reality as an indivisible, dynamically unfolding whole, within which ourselves are immersed, we will need to
replace it everywhere with the prefix ‘intra-‘, for all our inquiries will be ‘from within’ our ineradicable immersion
within such a ceaselessly flowing reality.
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find it ‘arousing’ or ‘occasioning’4 (Adato, 1980; Nofsinger, 1991) experiences within us that are felt to be
of a similar kind (even though, factually, they may be very different). Hence our use of metaphors and
other images in our giving some kind of voice to the felt experiences to which we try to give intelligible
linguistic expression. For a new experience can often ‘remind’ us of a past experience with a similar
unfolding time-course to it, with a similar set of what Stern (2004, 2010) calls “vitality affects” to it.
This, then, is my concern in this article: to explore ways in which we might study, in a systematic
and disciplined manner, not only people’s performative understandings of each other’s communicative or
performative expressions, but also the kind of agential doings that go into the ‘shaping’ of such
expressions. For it is in the agential ‘movements’, in the ‘efforts’ we make in the course of our expressions
in our efforts to ‘get them right’ – that is, to repeat, in the word choices we make, in our emphases,
intonations, etc. – that we ‘show’ the recipients of our expressions how they should orient themselves
towards them. But that is not always easy, for our expressions can never be fully explicit; ambiguities and
indeterminacies within them need to be resolved ‘on the hoof’, so to speak. Doing this, it needs to be
emphasized, does not entail a process of problem-solving, nor can they be illuminated by any explanatory
investigations of a scientific kind, for they are not difficulties of a general kind 5. They are bewilderments
and confusions occurring in specific situations, in relation to specific circumstances. They have the form,
as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it of “‘I don’t know my way about’” (no.123), and in our resolution of them,
rather than claiming that we have now understood something in general, we declare, “‘Now I can go on’...
[where] it is particular circumstances,” Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, “which justify me in saying I can go
on” (no.154).
If we are to face up to having to conduct our inquiries from within our immersion in a ‘fluid’ and,
on occasions, ‘turbulent’ reality, then, at least the following six issues will, I think, be of importance to us
in their conduct: 1) We will need to make use of noticings, rather than mere observations, i.e., to respond
to differences that make a difference that matters to us in some way, that change how we orient or relate
ourselves to our surroundings; 2) performative expressions, that is, our need to publicly express in some
way – preferably verbal – the nature of the felt movements within which we are involved such that we can
provide performative understandings of them to other practitioners; 3) crucial in our doing this will be
our use of sensed similarities in expressing their nature – the use of metaphorical and other more poetic
forms of expression; 4) the aim of our inquiries will not be to solve problems, but to overcome difficulties
of orientation, i.e., to find ways of ‘going on’ together with the others around us within a practice; 5) given
the unusual nature of this aim (the need to focus on what is only shown but not explicitly articulated in
our acting) certain reminders will play a central role in helping us to stay oriented towards this aim in our
inquiries; and finally, 6) as an aspect of what is involved in making our inquiries from within the midst of
complexity, from within inexhaustibly complicated forms of life, we need to accept that agential cuts may,
at any one moment in time, be made in many different ways within the same phenomenon.
Thus, taken all together, the shift we require if we to re-situate and to re-relate ourselves as
spontaneously responsive, living, embodied beings to our agentially active surroundings, is not simply a
profound shift, as Barad (2003, 2007) in her agential realism suggests, but is, as we shall see, a quite
startling one. For it is a shift from taking, not simply our bodily movements out in the world as more
important to us than our thinkings; our (subjective) performative understandings as more basic than our
(objective) representational ones; and what our heads go on inside of (i.e., our surroundings) as more
important than what goes on inside our heads, but a quite a range of other also unexpected reversals of
what in the past we have taken as basic to whom we are, and how best we should conduct inquiries as to
our relations to our surroundings from within those self-same relations, is required.
What has limited us, I think, following Wittgenstein (1953), are the expectations aroused in us by
4
This is a most important term, for the very nature of a performative understanding is such that it
‘occasions’, i.e., establishes a situation that ‘calls for’, responses of a certain kind from those within that situation.
5
There are thus, two kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one. There are those we can formulate
as problems to which we can seek rational solutions, but we also often confront difficulties of orientation in which need
to seek to resolve the lack of clarity we face – just as we need to fixate and focus our eyes on a movement we have
observed in the bushes, in order to we if it is a bird.
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our use of certain words: when we talk, for instance, of the meaning of an utterance – as SAE [Standard
Average European] users of a “things” and “substances,” noun-based language (Whorf, 1956) – we can
very easily (mis)lead ourselves into expecting the existence of, and thus searching for, a ‘some-thing’ that
is the word’s meaning, as if both ‘it’ and the utterance already co-exist as objects within the realm of our
investigations. Whereas, as we shall see, what we call, or name, as an utterance’s ‘meaning’ can only be
seen as having been at work in a person’s speakings after they have been performed. Something else
altogether is guiding a person’s speech in its performance. It is the nature of that ‘something else’, and
how it can be publicly studied, that I want to explore below.
The primacy of performative understandings in guiding us in performing our
actions
‘Background’ and ‘foreground’ in our understandings
It was John Austin (1962) in his book, How to Do Things with Words6, who first drew our attention to what
he called performative utterances, those utterances which, although they may take the form of typical
indicative sentences, i.e., sentences to do with constating, ‘describing’ or ‘reporting’ something factual,
are, or are a part of, “doing an action” (p.5), e.g., the saying of “I bet you $10 it will rain tomorrow,” or in
the marriage ceremony of “I (name), take you (name) to be my (husband/wife), etc., etc.” But as he notes,
such utterances do “not describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state
that I am doing it; it is to do it” (p.6). And further, although the uttering of the words is a, or even the
leading incident in the performing of the act, it is hardly ever “the sole thing necessary if the act is to be
deemed to have been performed” (p.8): both its surrounding circumstances “should be in some way, or
ways, appropriate” (p.8) and the speaker “should also perform certain other actions” (p.8). And yet
further, our relations to the others involved in the doings should be appropriately involved if the doings
are not to be done in bad faith, so to speak. Thus if our performative utterances are not to be “unhappy” or
“infelicitous,” as Austin terms it, if all that is expected of them by their recipients is to be delivered, then
those involved “must actually so conduct themselves subsequently (p.15), they are committed to act in a
certain way, or ways, in the future by what currently they are doing now.
But we must add here, especially because it will be of central importance later, is that whenever
we say that we can or could do something, or could have done something, Austin (1970) asks, “is there an
if in the offing?” (p,205). He asks this in the context of discussing ethical claims, and wonders whether it is
the case that ‘could have done something’ simply means ‘I could have done it if I had chosen to’? And
Austin goes on to extend the meaning of ‘I can’ to ‘I can, if I try’. In other words, he separates the
psychological and physical activities involved in the doing of an action from the intention or desire to
perform it, by showing us that not only do with ‘pick out’ classes of actions by our choice of adverbial
expressions, but also “the internal machinery of doing actions” (p.193). For if we are to succeed in doing
something, “we have to pay (some) attention to what we are doing and to take (some) care to guard
against (likely) dangers: we may need to use judgment or tact: we must exercise sufficient control over
our bodily parts: and so on. Inattention, carelessness, errors of judgement, tactlessness, clumsiness, all
these and others are ills (with attendant excuses) which affect one specific stage in the machinery of
action, the executive stage, the stage where we muff it. But there are many other departments in the
business too, each of which is to be traced and mapped through its cluster of verbs and adverbs” (p.193).
We thus find that our performances do not involve a simple straightforward implementation of a
nameable intention or desire; they involve tryings guided by an inner sensing of the ‘requirements’ of
whatever situation we happen to be it. And what we show in our utterances (and in other forms of
expression) are our sensings of is of a dynamic, relational nature in that needs, in fact, to be played out in
time, for it consists in the expectations such utterances engender, or ‘occasion’7 within their recipients –
along with the obligations taken on by their speakers. And this is why they cannot be objectively theorized
6
William James lectures in Harvard, 1955.
7
See footnote 4.
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in any general terms at all. Indeed, it is difficult to think of our performative understandings as being
representative of any well defined, self-contained ‘thing’ or ‘things’ as such. If any ‘thinking’ is involved at
all in acting in relation to a performative understanding, is not only or even primarily a cognitive process,
but inevitably involves, as Austin (1970) makes clear above, acting into a unique current situation in such
a way as to satisfy expectations that cannot, in any demonstrable fashion, be connected with it. Indeed, as
we will see later, when it comes to our ‘enter into’ our more emotion expressions to at least partially
control their expression, it is in terms of the ‘stages’, etc., that Austin identifies above.
No wonder that we think of such influences, to the extent that they exert an organizing function
in what we foreground in our actions, as constituting in some way the “background” to our more
consciously performed actions8. Without this multi-stranded, embodied “background” (perceptual)
understanding of the specific field of possibilities within which, in each changing moment, we are
embedded, we would not only lack all orientation, but in not knowing “where we are,” we would also,
literally “not know what to do next.”
In other words, performative understandings are not to do with facts or information, but with
what kind of context we are in, with the ‘requirements’ our current surroundings exert on us to respond
within them in appropriate ways, as well as with the opportunities for action they afford (Gibson, 1979)
us – they involve, then, a kind of knowing that shows up in our readinesses to respond in certain ways,
spontaneously, according to the anticipations embodied in our approach, attitude, or stance towards the
particular circumstances we happen to find ourselves in.
Talking in this way, however, of ‘background’ and ‘foreground’, is inappropriate; it (mis)leads us
into treating them as pre-existing conditions of our actions, whereas, the distinction is an outcome of our
actions; we need, rather, to attend to the unfolding dynamics at work in their performance, and the
varying ways in which we can enact a subject/object split. For instance, while holding a stick in our hand
while in dark room, say, there are two very different ways in which we might relate ourselves to it. We
could move our fingers over the stick to feel its length, its thickness, its surface texture, its weight, and so
on; but we could also grasp it firmly and use it (if it is long enough and light enough) to sense obstacles
ahead of us as we try to find our way about within the room. Indeed, for that matter, if we feel over our
left index finger with the tip of our right index finger, we can feel the left finger’s nail, its knuckle joints, its
scars and other differing skin qualities, and then, if we gradually make the left index finger active and the
right passive, the objective qualities of the right will come into awareness – although when both are
equally active/passive the situation seems to be indeterminate, with no one finger existing as the object
for the other. In both these cases, the different placing of the subject/object cut occurs as a result of our
relating, or to our being related, to what we count as our surroundings in a different manner. In other
words, relating ourselves to what counts for us an ‘object’ in our surroundings is not a matter of our
simply discovering it to be so, it is a matter of our doing something; it is we who, in our agential
movements in relation to our surroundings, bring forth an objective ‘it’ into existence as such.
Thus, rather than talking of our agential activities as being ‘in the background’, a more
appropriate vocabulary can be found, I think, in Polanyi’s (1967) account of what he called the functional
structure of tacit knowing. As he put it: “in an act of tacit knowing we attend from something for attending
to something else,” so that as our eyes flit and fixate as we scan over the different features in an other’s
face, we attend “from the features to the face, and thus may be unable to specify the features.... We are
attending from these elementary movements to the achievement of their joint purpose, and hence are
usually unable to specify these elementary acts” (p.10) – for in our daily affairs, it is the face, not the
features, nor the eye movements we make, that matters to us.
The value of Polanyi’s terminology, however, is that it directs our attention towards the agential
8
Searle (1983), for instance, comments about such a background as influencing what we conscious
foreground, thus: “The Background is ‘preintentional’ in the sense that though not a form or forms of Intentionality, it
is nonetheless a precondition or set of preconditions of Intentionality” (p.143)
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doings of our bodies, and to the fact that, although it can easily seem that we are unaware of them, that
cannot possibly be the case. If we were, then we would be utterly disoriented as to ‘where’ at any one
moment we are, and as to ‘what’ was before us. Our awareness of them is thus, of a qualitatively very
different kind from our awareness of ‘something’ as existing for us in our surroundings. The qualitatively
distinct, dynamically unfolding feelings they engender within us, guide us as we move about in the world
by providing us. not only with transitional understandings as to ‘where’ we are currently placed in
achieving a resolution of the ambiguity we face, but also with action guiding anticipations as to where we
might go next (Shotter, 2005).
Again, as Polanyi (1967) puts it: “Physiologists long ago established that the way we see an object
is determined by our awareness of certain efforts [my itals] inside our body, efforts which we cannot feel
in themselves. We are aware [my itals] of these things going on inside our body in terms of the position,
size, shape and motion of an object, to which we are attending. In other words we are attending from
these internal processes to the qualities of things outside. These qualities are what those internal
processes mean to us” (pp.13-14). They present themselves to us as performative understandings,
working to provide us, not only with a sense of the objective situation we are currently ‘in’, but also with a
subjective sense of what other possibilities are available to us in picking out further ‘objects’ for attention.
But it is when we turn to events happening within our immersion in the process of speech
communication that Polanyi’s terminology comes especially into its own. For here we can find the
operation of something like a “prosthetic-tool-text ambiguity” (Shotter, 1993, pp.117-118), a dynamic
shifting occurring within a fraction of a second, within which aspects of utterances which are at one
moment between being treated as agential, as doing something, as performatives, as a saying, are treated
the next as an objective done thing, as something said, .
Resolving ambiguities, indeterminacies, and fluidities in understanding speech
If asked to reflect upon the process of speaking, we do not usually comment on the physical noises we
make or upon the physiological efforts involved; we, so to speak, ‘see through’ the speech we use ‘from’
what we say, either ‘to’ its effects, or ‘to’ its meanings. Consequently, we fail to notice its prosthetic
functioning, the way in which we ‘extend’ the material ‘reach’ of our selves out into the world around us
‘though’ the ways of relating ourselves to the others around us that it ‘affords’ (Gibson, 1979); they remain
‘invisible’ to us. We fail to notice them because, like the blind person ‘seeing’ their surroundings ‘through’
the sweeping movements of their long canes, we act ‘through’ the bodily movements occurring in our own
and other people’s utterances in ‘making sense’ of them – but, as Polanyi (1967) makes clear, bodily
movements, and bodily awarenesses, are involved nonetheless.
Voloshinov (1986) is quite explicit about this: “Let us emphasize this point: not only can
experience be outwardly expressed through the agency of the sign... but also, aside from this outward
expression (for others), experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs.
Outside that material there is no experience as such... What, then, is the sign material of the psyche? Any
organic activity or process: breathing , blood circulation, movements of the body, articulation, inner
speech, mimetic motions, reaction to external stimuli (e.g., light stimuli) and so forth. In short, anything
and everything occurring within the organism can become the material of experience, since everything can
acquire semiotic significance, can become expressive" (pp.28-29).
It is easy to forget the ineradicable materiality of the activities involved here, and to act as if there
is a material break in the flow of activity involved, a crossing over from one qualitative realm of activity to
another of a qualitatively very different kind, from res extensa to res cogitans as Descartes (1968)
described it. But this is to mistake the different distinguishings we may enact on the subjective side of the
Cartesian cut – as in our different ways of relating ourselves to a stick, discussed above – as being
representative of already existing differences on the objective side.
In our relations to linguistic signs, then, we can see them, I think, as possessing what might be
called a ‘prosthetic-tool-text ambiguity’, the three different aspects each becoming visible according to the
different ‘directions’ of our view: Acting towards the future, prospectively, in our saying of an utterance,
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we attempt to use it both prosthetically, as a device ‘through’ which to express our meanings, but also as a
tool-like means to ‘move’ other people – in Austin’s terms, to both constate a fact of some kind, and to do
something within the being of another person. Indeed, in this prosthetic-tool function of speech, our
words in their speaking, work on the others and othernesses in our surroundings to specify them further.
Retrospectively, however, the pattern of already spoken words remains ‘on hand’, so to speak, as like a
‘text’, constituting a given aspect of the situation between ourselves and our interlocutors, into which
they (as well as we) must direct their/our speech.
Prosthetically, then, our words (or wordings) may reside ‘on the side of the agent’, on the
subjective side of the subject/object cut, and from our “dwelling” (Polanyi, 1967) in them over time, we
can learn how to extend our bodily movements and sensitivities through the instrumental means they
provide to ‘reach into’ spheres of experience otherwise unavailable to us. In this mode, they do not have
any content in themselves, but become ‘transparent’ – blind people do not feel their sticks vibrating in the
palms of their hands; nor do they have to infer as if solving a problem that the terrain ahead of them is
rough; they experience it directly as rough ‘through’ their stick-assisted ‘way’ of investigating it as they
move around within it; furthermore, the knowledge they obtain in that way can be complete and not
fragmentary, for any ‘gaps’ in it can be further investigated as is required. In a similar way, by acting
prosthetically ‘through’ our words, e.g., in telling things to or asking things of other people, we can also
discover much of what counts for them as the ‘inner landscape’ within which they live their lives.
Only when the flow of activity mediated by their use breaks down, is interrupted in some way, or
they are otherwise ‘separated out’ from it in some way – just as when a tool is damaged (to use
Heidegger’s example), or there is no connection between our activity and the state of the instrument – do
we become aware of them as “nameable instruments” as such. But then they then become unsuitable for
use as "ready-to-hand" equipment, and become conspicuous as "present-to-hand" things or objects
(Heidegger, 1967, pp. 102-103), i.e., from being transparent in their use, they become opaque – and as
such, will only have meaning for us if placed within an interpretative schema, a conceptual or theoretical
framework. But in being severed from the flow of activity within which they have their ‘life’, they will lose
what unique performative functions they had at different particular moments in that flow and simply take
on simply ‘one size fits all’ conventional meanings.
This, then, is where Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) insistence on seeing such events as entailing an
intra- rather than an inter-action becomes crucial. She would say that our experiment with the
movements of our two-index-fingers above, the blind person’s experience of way-finding with their use of
a cane, our ‘moving’ of others by our performative use of words, and so on, do not involve inter-actions,
for that is to assume the separate pre-existence of the ‘things’ that become related only as they inter-act.
Whereas, clearly, if our assumption above of a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing strands of
unfolding, agential activity is correct, ‘they’ (if this pronoun can now be used at all) are already related.
Thus, rather than in the more familiar Cartesian cut, which takes the pre-existence of a cut between
‘subject’ and ‘object’ for granted, as she sees it, as she sees it, at different moments I time, different
“agential cuts” (Barad, 2007) can occur, which enact “a resolution within [a] phenomenon of the inherent
ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy [existing within a ‘fluid’ reality]” (p.139). Within an intraaction, which aspect within an ongoing flow of activity is ‘subjective’ (i.e., agentially active) at any one
time, and which ‘objective’ (i.e., acted upon), can thus be made determinate in different ways at different
moments in time. Consquently, “relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge
through specific intra-actions. Crucially, then, intra-actions enact agential-separability – the condition of
exteriority-within-phenomena” (p.139).
In other words, as she see it, what we count as ‘subject’ and what ‘object’ at any one moment in
time are, so to speak, determinative of each other, or reciprocally determined; they are “relata,” and as
such, they cannot be identified as individually bounded entities outside of the particular ongoing intraactive activity within which they have their being, nor need they always stay on the same side of the
subject/object cut as that intra-activity unfolds.
We can, perhaps, bring Barad’s stratospheric, although both very accurate and much needed
terminology here, down to earth with an everyday example. As Wolf (1990) has observed, even babies in
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their first year of life, in their fleetingly distinct responses in their movements in relation to their
surroundings – in their smiles and concentration as they totter forward, in their seeking of social
connection as they stop to scan the room, in their directing of a carer’s attention in their pointing at
something – show or express in quick succession many different ways of relating to, or attitudes towards,
their surroundings. In Barad’s (2007) terms, they enact agential cuts in many different ways within their
activities9. As Wolf (1990) notes: “We know that these envelopes of experience are observable, vivid, and
differentially provocative ways of being, not merely private fluctuations in internal states” (p.184), and
we can see this in the following transcript, in which Wolf describes what she observes in the play of a
normally developing, 4:0 years old boy, J, in a middle-class American family:
“J. is playing with a puppet theater and a set of small figures, including the members of a family, a
cat, and a pirate. (The transcript is marked to indicate which roles J. is taking at each point when
he speaks.)
(J. knocks down some of the trees in the theater.)
J.: [narrator] And all the trees fell down.
J.: [cat character, to clown] Put your legs down.
J.: [pirate character, stalking in, threatening voice] I am the pirate.
J.: [speaking as himself to the observer] See his sword? Is he really a pirate?
Observer: Yeah.
J.: [speaking as himself to the observer] Are you telling the truth?
Observer: Yeah.
J.: [speaking as himself] Not really. Just in here.
J.: [cat character, scratching pirate] Scratch, scratch, scratch.
J.: [pirate character] Don’t you dare.
(J. has the figures continue to fight.)
J.: [man character] Don’t kill me, don’t kill me... and don’t kill any of my friends either” (p.196, my
itals).
The episode lasts for no more than 10 to 15 seconds, yet within it, J. is by turns, the organizing stagemanager and formulating narrator of the events; the scrappy, aggressive characters – the cat, pirate, and
the man; as well as a young boy frankly indicating the reality status of the plastic pirate. And Wolf goes on
to remark, that while J.’s different utterances may be seen merely as a part of a conventional way to play,
they may also be seen as a way of him talking over the question – ‘Is he really a pirate?’ – with himself. If
this is so, then his rapidly shifting orientations towards it can be seen as providing him with different
performative understandings, i.e., with different transitional understandings and action guiding
anticipations as to ‘where’, as he makes his way towards the resolution of it he seeks.
In this connection it is worth commenting that Austin later came to see that no clear existential
distinction could be drawn between constative and performative utterances, only in terms of the latter
doing something; we are doing something in all our utterances: “Now this contrast surely, if we look back
on it,” he says (Austin, 1970), “is unsatisfactory. Of course statements are liable to be assessed in this
matter of their correspondence or failure to correspond with facts, that is, as being true of false. But they
are also liable to infelicity every bit as much as are performative utterances” (pp.247-248)10 – clearly, our
stating something to someone also does something to them. To repeat Voloshinov’s (1986) point above,
they all involve us in direct material engagements with the others and othernesses all around us.
9
Many other examples can be found in Gopnik (2009), in which she also recounts event in which even very
young children perform, i.e., show, in their actions subtle expressions and understandings of relational phenomena,
not just in anticipating what might happen next if a current action were to continue, but also in imagining what would
happen if other conditions prevailed. Thus, as she notes, although “some psychologists and philosophers argue that
most of what is significant about human nature is determined by our genes” (p.7), the fact is, “we [can] change our
surroundings and [consequently] our surroundings can change us” (p.8) – and this gives us a very different picture of
the nature of “evolutionary psychology” (p.7), she suggests, than the traditional one.
10
“Performative Utterances” was transcribed from a talk deliver in the UK on the BBC in 1956.
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Dynamics within the felt experiences of acting within an ever-unfolding,
ever-developing, fluid reality
Searle (1983) discusses the famous case in James (1890, vol.2, pp.489ff), in which a patient with his eyes
closed is asked to raise an anaesthetised arm, whilst unknown to him it held to prevent him from moving
it; the patient is surprised to find when he opens his eyes that his arm has not moved. “We can say of the
patient,” remarks Searle, “that his experience is one of trying but failing” (p.89) – although he tried, he
failed, to use Searle’s terminology, to achieve a “prior intention” as he lacked all awareness of the
relations between “intentions in action” and their “conditions of satisfaction.” And this relates to the
topics I want to explore further in this section: these are, the dynamic unfolding of our agential
experiences as we perform our actions; our awareness of the efforts we are making and of whether they
are being successful or not; and what we use in judging whether, in the course of trying to resolve the
indeterminacies and ambiguities inherent in orienting ourselves in relation to our surroundings, we are
being successful or not.
Now it is not as if the idea of our living our lives while embedded in the turbulent flow of a quite a
number of intermingling activities has not been previously broached in psychology. Its origins can found
in writings, some of which are now at least a hundred years old (e.g., see James, 1890, 1909/1996; Dewey
1938/2008; Bergson, 1911, 1946/2002), but aspects of it have also appeared in more recent writings also
(e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953, 1969; Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986; Voloshinov, 1986, 1987; and Merleau-Ponty,
1962, 1964, to mention only a few), and even more recently, in Gergen (2009). I will review some of these
and their connection with the idea of performative understandings in the sections below, beginning with
William James (1890).
James and the pre-conceptual nature of performative understandings
Long ago, in the course of his notoriously introspective “study of the mind from within” (p.224), William
James (1890) objected to our inveterate “habit of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of
simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they
reveal” (p.231). And he went on to claim that, phenomenologically, “consciousness... does not appear to
itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the
first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most
naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of
subjective life” (p.239, itals in original).
But its flow is not uniform: “What strikes us first is [the] different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s
life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings... The resting-places are usually
occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the
mind for an indefinite time... the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic,
that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest... It
then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive
part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the
transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another” (p.243).
Thus, in the Cartesian-cut vocabulary we have been using above, we might say that the moving,
transitive parts are more on the subjective, performative side of the cut, whilst the relatively stable,
substantive parts are more on the objective side. But like Barad (2003, 2007), James (1890) also points
out that our experiences from within the flow are not at all like bounded entities with clear beginnings
and endings, but are, as he puts it, “feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at
all” (p.254) – for even as they occur, they are on the way to somewhere else – yet, nevertheless, such
feelings can function, he says, as “signs of direction in thought of which we have an acutely discriminative
sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (p.253).
It is James’ noting of the fact that we have an acutely discriminative sense of such feelings of
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tendency, that I particularly want to highlight here. And that, in the course of performing our actions, and
trying to get them right, we are clearly conscious in a very immediate fashion of exercising that
discriminative sense in ‘shaping’, so to speak, the direction and movement of the flow of inner mental
activity involved, even when we lack an ‘inner show’ of in what these transitions consist.
Further also, in complaining that “the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very
smallest part of our minds as they actually live,” James (1890) went on to point out that it is the “free
water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is
steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and
remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The
significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, – or
rather that is fused into one with it” (p.255). If we try to ‘arrest’ such transitional feelings and to treat
them as a nameable, self-contained ‘thing’, then not only do we lose the precise feelings of tendency, but
also our sense, the ‘halo’ of the relational field of other possible connections, to which they give rise.
What is occurring then, in the course of our trying to express something, and the expression of it
we finally achieve, can be two quite different things, needing two quite different vocabularies – as Ryle
(1949) pointed out long ago, in distinguishing between task-verbs and achievement-verbs: “We very
often borrow achievement verbs,” he said, “to signify the performance of the corresponding task
activities” (p.143). Thus, we must be careful not to (mis)describe unfinished, still ongoing things
(processes) in terms of already finished and completed things (products).
Well aware of this – after all, he described it as “the psychologist’s fallacy” in his Principles
(James, 1890, I, pp.196-197) – he went on in later work (influenced by Bergson) to distinguish between
our intellectual understandings of things in terms of concepts, and our living understanding of them in
our everyday practical activities: “The essence of life,” he again pointed out (James, 1909/2004), “is its
continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of
making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein. With such arrests
our concepts may be made congruent. But these concepts are not parts of reality, not real positions taken
by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and you can no more dip up the substance of
reality with them than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed” (p.253).
Or at least, if we insist on well-defined, explanatory concepts – rather than merely descriptive,
vague, prospective concepts, such as Wittgenstein’s (1953) “language-games,” and “forms of life,” say, or
Barad’s (2007) notions of “agential cuts,” or Austin’s notion of “performative utterances,” which work
merely to draw our attention to occurrences that we might not otherwise notice – then “we cut out and
fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed... Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest
exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality;
independence excludes relativity; ‘mine’ excludes ‘yours’; this connexion excludes that connexion – and so
on indefinitely” (pp.253-254). We can only avoid these exclusions if, instead of continually turning away
from our surroundings to think about them, we turn instead to look out into them more attentively, to
notice the distinctions people show us as making in their actions, with the more vague but descriptive
concepts like those mentioned above to guide us in what we attend to in our lookings.
Bakhtin and the ‘real unit’ in speech communication: the utterance
Although there is a lot of talk in linguistics of “speech,” and the “speech flow,” and talk of our speech
being, says Bakhtin (1986), “basically divided into sentences, which in turn can be broken down into
phrases and words...” (p.70), such terms when conventionally used are, as he points out, imprecise and
indefinite. Apart from continually providing examples of the use of linguistic terms, precise definitions are
few and far between. In a very literal sense, those using such terms do not know ‘what they are talking
about’. Very much in line with Barad’s anti-representationalist ontology in her agential realism, the real
unit of speech communication for Bakhtin (1986) is the utterance. As he points out, within the speech
flow, it has a clear beginning and a clear end: “The utterance is not a conventional unit, but a real unit,
clearly delimited by the change of speaking subjects, which ends by relinquishing the floor to the other, as
if a silent dixit, perceived by the listeners (as a sign) that the speaker has finished” (pp.71-72). Within the
intra-actions occurring within our dialogic relations with each other, as Barad (2007) puts it, the reality
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we experience within a dialogue “composed not of things-in-themselves or of things-behind-phenomena
but of things-in-phenomena” (p.140).
As a consequence, “like Leibniz’s monad,” Bakhtin (1986) points out, each utterance “reflects the
speech process, others’ utterances, and, above all, preceding links in the chain (sometimes close and
sometimes – in areas of cultural communication – very distant)” (p.93). Thus each individual utterance
thus has its own unique relational function within the speech flow according to its ‘place’ within a
dialogue as a whole; performatively, each utterance orients listeners very precisely towards anticipating
what next is likely to occur within the flow of speech communication 11.
Thus there is something very special about our speakings, about our embodied expressions of
them, and about the dialogically-structured nature of the speech flow within which they occur: “The word
in living conversation,” says Bakhtin (1981), “is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word;
it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an
atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet
been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any
living dialogue” (p.280). “If we anticipate nothing from the word, if we know ahead of time everything it
can say,” says Bakhtin (1986), especially if it is a well defined term representing a theoretical object, “it
departs from the dialogue and is reified” (p.122) – it fails when uttered to provide at the moment of its
utterance an appropriate sense of what, within the reality of an actual practice, what might next occur.
Indeed, unique performative understandings appropriate to the situation of their occurrence – or
as Bakhtin (1986) calls them, “responsive understandings” (p.68) – are continually created within it: if we
feel an utterance to be a greeting then we return it as a greeting, if we feel it to be question we give an
answer to it, and so on. Yet we, as individuals, do not (for the most part) have to ‘work out’ with what kind
of utterance we were addressed; we cannot be said ourselves to have cognitively brought about the
understandings occurring within us. Such unique and particular understandings just happen within us;
they emerge, and the entangled nature of their emergence cannot easily be untangled. This is because the
separate components or units into which they would need to be ‘analysed’ by anyone attempting such a
disentanglement do not exist as such in themselves, they are determined by those within the unfolding
process according to the contingencies of the moment.
Dewey: beginning inquiries from within our bewilderments
Dewey (1938/2008) makes a similar point about the nature of our everyday experiences: While
psychological theory takes “a singular object or event for the subject matter of its analysis,” he says. “In
actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a
special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world – a situation... [which is experienced as]
a whole in virtue of its immediate pervasive quality. [And] when we describe it from its psychological
side, we have to say that the situation as a qualitative whole is sensed or felt” (pp.72-73).
But further, the pervasively qualitative character of a situation we inhabit, then, not only “binds
all constituents into a whole but is also unique; it constitutes in each situation an individual situation,
indivisible and unduplicable” (p.74). It is the uniqueness or singularity of this pervasive quality that is of
crucial importance to us in our inquiries. For, just as Wittgenstein (1953) points out, that when we try to
study the meaning of our words outside of their use within a “language-game,” we lose precisely what we
meant within the place and at the time of saying them, so Dewey (1938/2008) also argues in a similar
fashion: “Discourse that is not controlled by reference to a situation is not discourse... A universe of
experience is a precondition of a universe of discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way
to determine the relevancy, weight, or coherence of any designated distinction or elation” (p. 74).
11
A paradigm instance of the precision and power of such expectations at work was in the famous grilling
on BBC TV on 13th May, 1997, of Michael Howard, then Home Secretary in the current government by a Jeremy
Paxman, in which he asked Mr Howard the same question 12 times. The audience could hear him quite clearly failing
to answer that question 12 times.
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Thus for Dewey, our “sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole” (p.76) is a pre-condition
for us to come to a precise grasp of any problem we face as the problem it is – in short, “in ordinary
language, a problem must be felt before it can be stated” (p. 76). And our need to satisfy a pervasive
bodily felt tension, a unique sense of ‘things not yet being quite right’, is thus at work both in motivating,
and in guiding, our inquiries from their beginning to their end. “It is,” says Dewey (1938/2008), “of the
very nature of the indeterminate situation which evokes inquiry to be questionable; or, in terms of
actuality instead of potentiality, to be uncertain, unsettled, disturbed. The peculiar quality of what
pervades the given materials, constituting them as a situation, is not just uncertainty at large; it is a
unique doubtfulness which makes that situation to be just and only the situation it is. It is this unique
quality that not only evokes the particular inquiry engaged in but that exercises control over its special
procedures” (p.109, my itals). It is “this quality enables us to keep thinking about one problem without
our having constantly to stop to ask ourselves what it is after all that we are thinking about. We are aware
of it not by itself but as the background, the thread, and the directive clue in what we do expressly think
of. For the latter things are its distinctions and relations" (Dewey, 1930/1960, p.182).
Thus strangely, if this is the case, instead of beginning our inquiries by trying to form systematic
theories or conceptual frameworks – which as Dewey sees it are so “fixed in advance that the very things
which are genuinely decisive in the problem in hand and its solution, are completely overlooked” (p.76) –
we should begin our inquiries by being prepared to go ‘into’ our perplexities and uncertainties, ‘into’ our
feelings of disquiet at what we already know, ‘into’ our confusions and bewilderments. And this is where
our descriptive concepts have a crucial role to play, for in guiding what we look for and pay attention to,
they can direct and organise our explorations in such a way that we can begin to ‘find our way about’
within them, and thus the guidance we need in overcoming our disquiets.
If this is the case, what is it, primarily, that we are trying to do in our inquiries? For the task we
face seems, in fact, to be the reverse of problem-solving. Solving problems involves ‘working out’ an
unknown quantity by the use of its orderly relations with already well-known ones. But in our daily
affairs, before being able to do this, it looks as if we need to proceed, hermeneutically, to form a unitary
whole from a sequence of fragmentary experiences. For here, it is as if the ‘solution’ to the problem works
to bring the ‘data’ constituting it to light. If this is so, then, as Dewey (1938/2008) puts it, inquiry is not,
primarily a matter of problem-solving, but is “the controlled or directed transformation of an
indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to
convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (p.108). In short, as we saw above,
rather than the solution to a problem, we are seeking to resolve what we at first encounter as an
indeterminate, ambiguous, or bewildering situation by our active inquiries within it – conducted in the
course of our living, engaged, attentive movements within it.
Gergen and what we are constructing in our social constructions
A crucial social constructionist tenet, as Gergen (1985) stated it some time ago, is that “the terms in which
the world is understood are social artifacts, products of historically situated interchanges among people”
(p.267), and this, clearly put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of language. And in early versions
of Social Constructionism, there was much talk of language as a thing or entity in its own right, i.e.,
‘language’ was used as a proper rather than as a common noun. For instance, in discussing the
implications of Derrida’s (1977) claim, that there is nothing outside the text, Gergen (1991) wrote:
“language is a system unto itself. Words derive their capacity to create a seeming world of essences from
the properties of the system. This system of language (or of sense-making) preexists the individual; it is
‘always already’ there, available for social usage... If it is sensible, it has already been said. The most one
can do is to rearrange the sayables” (p.107), and he continued, “words are not mirrorlike reflections of
reality, but expressions of group convention” (p.119).
This led to many followers into espousing what I will call here, a linguistic version of social
constructionism – a version in which many engaged in constructionist research, still took the study of the
social construction of linguistic representations (portrayals, explanations, descriptions), as well as a
search for the social conventions or their rules of use, as their primary tasks. And although he later drew
attention to the performative and the notion of a performative psychology (Gergen, 1999) – by noting that
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“dance, poetry, drama, stand-up comedy and multi media... [could all expand] the range of professional
expression in significant ways” (p.188) – it was still done in a way that left much social constructionist
research, in the terms being employed here, still able happily to operate largely on the objective side of
the subject/object cut.
However, the sometimes acknowledged background to much of Gergen’s thinking has been, for
really quite some time, his situating of it in somewhat fluid circumstances. In his early Social Psychology
as History paper (Gergen,1973), for instance, he noted that: “Unlike the natural sciences, [social
psychology] deals with facts that are largely nonrepeatable and which fluctuate markedly over time.
Principles of human interaction cannot be readily developed over time because the facts on which they
are based do not remain stable” (p.310). Indeed, in the introduction to a volume collecting his early works
together (Gergen, 1993), he commented: “The vast body of psychological theory to which my [early]
studies were directed seemed strangely alien – mechanical, lifeless and all too coherent. Most problematic
was the romance with fixedness, with a view of human action as reliably determined by a relatively fixed
set of internal dispositions, mechanisms or structures... [Whereas] I was struck with the degree to which
my own actions were embedded within local and ever-changing contexts” (pp.xi-xii).
In other words, Gergen took it then, as he has done so, off and on, ever since, that ontologically,
the very nature of the realities within which we live our lives and have our identities, are of an unstable
and continually changing, fluid nature. If there are any stabilities within them, they are of a dynamic kind,
like the eddies and vortices occurring within the ceaseless flow of intermingling streams of activities.
However, an often quoted statement of his in the social constructionist literature is his claim that
“constructionism is ontologically mute. Whatever is, simply is. There is no foundational description to be
made about an ‘out there’ as opposed to an ‘in here’, about experience or material. Once we attempt to
articulate ‘what there is’, however, we enter the world of discourse... The adequacy of any word or
arrangement of words to ‘capture reality as it is’ is a matter of local convention” (Gergen, 1994, pp.72-73).
But in his recent book, Relational Being, he is anything but mute about the general nature of the
reality within which we live and have our being: It is very clearly not made up of separate, nameable and
discoverable elements in arrangements according to discoverable rules or laws; he explicitly foregrounds
what he had previously left in the background. Taking baseball as an example, he says (Gergen, 2009):
“What we traditionally view as ‘independent’ elements – the man with the bat, the bags, the men in the
field – are not truly independent. They are all mutually defining... Alone they would [all] be virtually
without meaning. It is when we bring all these elements into a mutually defining relationship that we can
speak about ‘playing baseball’. Let us then speak of the baseball game as a confluence, a form of life in this
case that is constituted by an array of mutually defining ‘entities’” (p.54), i.e., an entangled flowing
together of different unfolding strands of activity.
Indeed, now explicitly following Austin (1962), he notes that when people use mental state words
in their discourse – seeking forgiveness by saying “I feel bad about what happened,” for instance – “their
words are actions within a relationship, and in this sense, equivalent to the remainder of the body in
motion – lips, eye movements, gestures, posture, and so on. The spoken language is but one component of
a full social performance. Our words are notes within orchestrated patterns of action. Without the full
coordination of words and action, relational life turns strange” (Gergen, 2009, p.73) – it in fact they cease
to be relational and again become individualistic, or in Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) terms, they cease to be
dialogical and become monlogical.
But not only does he now see our utterances as doings, but also many of our other froms of
expression: “The emotions can properly be viewed as relational performances. They are forms of action
that acquire their intelligibility within relationships, and they gain their value from their social use. It is
not that we ‘feel emotions’ so much as we do them. And this doing is only intelligible within a particular
tradition of relationship” (Gergen, 2009, p.102). And to the extent that we can become aware of the inner
movements of feeling involved, and their intra-relations to the unfolding circumstances of their
expression, we can enter into their doing, to control our doing of them in different ways; their expression
can become “a crafted achievement” (p.103). For, as in the unfolding emergence of all of our expressions,
we can come to use the acute discriminative awareness available to us to ‘shape’ the form of their
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expression. As Gergen (2009) puts it, “what is taking place in these, instances is a partial performance.
You are engaged in ‘doing the emotion’, but simply without using the full array of words and gestures that
are common to [the usual, spontaneous, uncontolled] public performance” (p.106). Without saying it out
loud, so to speak, Gergen is here, I think, espousing a form of agential realism, for, in acting on the
subjective side of the subject/object cut, we can resolve on a way or ways of relating ourselves to our
surroundings that are more conducive in the long term to better relations with those around us.
From spontaneous bodily responses to I-directed actions
Above, then, in the writings of Searle, James, Bakhtin, Dewey, and Gergen, we can find a considerable body
of work already exploring aspects of intra-active phenomena on the performative or subjective side of the
subject/object cut, drawing our attention to many noticeable facets of people’s performative
understandings and expressions that they show us in the actions out in the world at large. In particular, I
would like to highlight James’s drawing of our attention to the fact that, clearly, we show an ‘acute
discriminative awareness’ of ‘feelings of tendency’ in performing our expressions; Bakhtin for the fact
that we voice our utterances with a very precise expectation as to how those to whom they are addressed
should respond (answer) to them; Dewey for the fact that a pervasive, uniquely qualitative sense of even
a bewildering situations can work to organize our efforts in resolving how to ‘go on’ within it; and Gergen
for showing that even our expression of an emotion can become a doing of ours – a ‘crafted achievement’
– if we can, within a confluent, dialogic intra-twining of different strands of activity with others, resolve
on a word-guided way to express it.
Intra-twining words into our performances: I-directed movements
As we have seen above, the trajectory leading from a felt difficulty to be overcome, from a felt tension
requiring satisfaction, can involve quite a number of different exploratory steps before a satisfaction. Just
as in bringing our eyes to a common point of fixation and focus as we switch from a far to a near view, it
entails the resolution of what is at first for us an indeterminate situation. We are usually, however, quite
unaware of this. We are not conscious of the nature of these efforts in making a determinate sense of our
otherwise indeterminate surroundings – what we experience in our bodies are events in our
surroundings that we attend to from our bodies. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it, “consciousness is... not
a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’... Sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationship
with objects... Movement is not thought about movement, and bodily space is not space thought of or
represented” (p.137, my itals). And these ways of gaining orientation are not biologically or genetically
given. Our later ability to say explicitly, “This is an X (but not a Y),” and to relate to it accordingly, requires
our already having come to know earlier, implicitly in our bodily activities, what X-ness and Y-ness is. And
this capacity to orient towards the ‘what-ness of things’ in our surroundings in the same manner as those
around us, and to judge that this is indeed an X and not a Y, is not something we can learn at first on our
own. We learn it implicitly from those who care for us as we grow into the culture of those around us
when young; we learn it as they sense as our ‘needs’, and the other unsatisfied tensions and incipient
intentions we show ourselves as trying to execute, as they feed, comfort, play, and otherwise actively
intra-act with us.
What later we come to do consciously, then, as an I-directed action, emerges as selection from
within a background melee of spontaneously responsive bodily movements, to which our attention has
been drawn by the actions and utterances of those around us. As Vygotsky (1962) puts it: “All the higher
psychic functions are mediated processes, and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them.
The mediating sign is incorporated in their structure as an indispensable, indeed the central, part of the
total process. In concept formation that sign is the word, which at first plays the role of means in forming
the concept but later becomes its symbol” (1962, p.56)12, as such, “it is the functional use of the word, or
any other sign, as means of focussing one’s attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and
synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation...Words and other signs are those means
12
This paragraph is missing in the 1986 translation.
-16-
that direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution of the
problem confronting us” (1986, pp.106-107)13.
But how can words do this? Clearly, they don’t in themselves; they only do so within the course of
a whole lot of other expressive activities, such as facial and bodily gestures, lookings, pointings, showings,
tones of voice, and so on. But what seems to be crucial in our utterance of words as such – and
remarkable that we can do so many different things using the same words – is not that they are repeatable
patterns within an otherwise unrepeatable melee of chaotic events is, but that they arouse in us the
sensing of
13
This paragraph is missing in the 1962 translation.
-17-
similarities, similarities in the agential nature of our bodily doings (Luntley, 2001). This is not to deny that
patterns can be found on the objective side of the subject/object cut; but it is to deny that their preexistence out there is the basis for us seeing/sensing similarities on the subjective, performative side of
the cut. What we appear to be sensing on the performative, agential side of the cut are the similarities
(and differences) between the expected results of our outgoing activities towards our surroundings, and
their incoming actual results. “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities,” says
Wittgenstein (1953), “than ‘family resemblances’ ” (no.67), where here, of course, we are already aware
that those amongst whom we see similarities are already related as a family.
In fact, it is important here, not to talk of patterns as being basic, as this again can mislead us into
thinking that our task is to represent something that already exists out in the world as a separate and
completed thing. For the fact is that, the unfolding time-course of an activity, although possessing its own
quite unique ‘time-shape’ at any one moment, can remain open to yet further inner articulation. and as
such is always, as Bakhtin (1986) points out, unfinished. It is this openness that is lost if a similarity is
completed as a pattern.
To see this, consider the fact that little is more familiar to us than our recognition of a previously
heard tune – even if we cannot give a name to it, we know we have heard it before; even in a different key,
it arouses in us a felt recognition of ‘something previously experienced’; indeed, just the first few notes
can often ‘remind’ us of the whole of it. And as we noted above, we can find some of our experiences
‘occasioning’ others felt to have a similar unfolding time-course to them, to such an extent that no matter
how indeterminate a circumstance is for us, it can usually ‘call up’ within us a form of expression – a
gesture, a facial expression, a tone of voice, a metaphor, or some other form of (poetic) expression that
alludes to it – even though it cannot be named (if it could, of course, then it would not be the unique and
unrepeatable circumstance it is). Thus, the move from a spontaneous response of our bodies to an Idirected movement – from our movements occurring spontaneously to our performing our actions as
‘crafted achievements’– is achieved by our making use of the directive function of words to perform a
word-guided way of expressing it.
The need to use everyday, non-technical words that can serve us all
Now it is not as if there is not already a great deal of work in academic psychology focussing on our
performative expressions and activities (e.g., Denzin, 2001; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). And within the
sphere of Qualitative Research, it is clearly alive and well, and flourishing. However, if it mentions the
Cartesian subject/object cut at all, either it is critical of it, or it simply seeks to avoid it in doing what
results in a shared experience amongst all those involved in the activity. As Denzin (2001) puts it, very
much in line with the agential realist assumptions adopted here: “Viewing culture as a complex
performative process, it seeks to understand how people enact and construct meaning in their daily
lives... The reflexive interview helps us create dialogic relationships... [which] in turn, allow us to enact an
ethic of care and empowerment” (p.43). And in enacting such an ethic, it is also assumed “that words and
language have a material presence in the world; that words have effects on people. Words matter” (p.24).
Yet difficulties remain. In the course of his article, Denzin refers to Anna Deavere Smith’s (1993)
work – whose aim as a performance artist is trying to create from interview material, “something that is
like poetry... [for in] that poetic moment is where ‘character’ lives” (p.xxxi) and the ‘inner landscape’ of a
person’s life can become apparent to all. Yet still seemingly unresolvable and painful tensions remain in
the USA in questions of race, gender, and identity. The trouble seems to be, he quotes her as saying, “a
lack of words... we do not have a language that serves us as a group” (p. xii, my itals). The tensions arise
out of the Cartesian inspired belief that our inner lives are private and idiosyncratic, so that as a
consequence, “only a man can speak for a man, a woman for a woman, a Black person for all Black people’
(p.xxix), and so on. Yet, the fact that Smith can ‘move’ those in her audience to her plays to ‘feel’ what it is
like to be the person she has interviewed, to experience their tryings as they make efforts to cope with the
difficulties they face in their lives, belies these beliefs. We can ‘enter into’ the inner lives of others because
of what they show us in their living of them.
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This is why I reviewed (all to briefly) the work of the writers mentioned above, not for any
explanatory concepts that they might offer us, but for the showings occurring in people’s actions to which
they drew our attention – and most crucially also, for the vocabulary in terms of which they did so. For we
need ways to word or activities that can serve us as a group, words that we can all use to draw each
other’s attention to what would otherwise go unnoticed in our actions, and also, most importantly, words
that, by ‘re-minding’ us of the unfolding trajectories of our own tryings and doings in times past, can give
us access to the inner tryings and doings of others.
And this is why also I have focussed on the importance of the subject/object cut: because, as I
pointed out above, as SAE users, we feel an almost unavoidable urge to talk of our subjective awarenesses
in terms of objectively existing things; it is very difficult for us to do otherwise (see Billig’s (2009) account
of the pervasive nominalization and passivization at work even in Critical Discourse Analysis that is
critical of it). As Wittgenstein (1980) remarked: “As long as there continues to be is a verb ‘to be’ that
looks as if it functions in the same way as ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’, as long as we still have the adjectives
‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’, as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc., etc.,
people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something
which no explanation seems capable of clearing up” (p.15). It is a form of talk that biasses us towards
talking only of what, so to speak, can be seen to exist. Whereas, if we are to operate on the performative
side of the subject/object cut, then a quite different use of words is required: to relate to the invisible
unfoldings in time of our as yet unfinished tryings.
Thus our expressive task in the performative sphere is to craft an unfolding sequence of signs (of
words) whose internal articulation mimics or matches in some way, the contours of the unfolding timecourse of a person’s experience, the time-course of the efforts we are making and of whether they are
being successful or not; and what we use in judging whether, in the course of trying to resolve the
indeterminacies and ambiguities inherent in orienting ourselves in relation to our surroundings, we are
being successful or not. As we saw above, just as we recognize a tune as something already familiar to us,
so we can find ourselves ‘moved’ in a similar fashion by people’s other expressive activities. This is not to
deny that patterns can be found on the objective side of the subject/object cut; but it is to deny that their
pre-existence is the basis for us seeing/sensing similarities on the subjective side of the cut. In fact, the
reverse is the case, for as we have seen, our sensing of similarities is the basis for our capacity to see and
to make patterns. And it is our sensing of the "specific variability" (Voloshinov, 1984, p.69) in our uses of
sign from expected similarities (in ‘diffractions’ in Barad's (2007) sense) that can give us a sense of the
'singularity' of each new situation facing us – our sense of its uniqueness arising within our encounters as
we move around within it.
Thus strangely, the task of expressing the nature of, the ‘sensed shape’ of the felt 'movements'
occurring within us, as we respond to what we notice people showing in their actions, is not as difficult as
it might at first sight seem. The movements of feeling occurring in our present experiences continually
arouse remembered similarities. And our expressive task is to craft an unfolding sequence of signs (of
voiced words) whose articulation – in their intoning, pacing, word choice, etc. – mimics or matches in
some way, the contours of the unfolding time-course of an experience, a task which elsewhere I have
characterized as entailing with-ness as opposed to about-ness speaking and writing (Shotter, 2010, 2011).
As Billig (2009) makes very clear, we cannot avoid using nominalizations and passivizations – my
talk of performatives and agential cuts, of noticings and doings, and so on, all being cases in point – but
what we can try to avoid is the intentional use of a technical term in claiming that a hidden ‘thing’ exists
and is at work in producing the activities we can observe people performing, forms of talk and writing
that reduce, rather than enhance, the role of people’s own agency in shaping their actions. “We have been
long accustomed to using standard, academic ways of writing, formulating complex passive sentences and
linguistic edifices of technical nouns,” says Billig (2009). “With effort, we can try to avoid the standard
habits of academic writing. This will not be easy” (p.97). It will involve a deep change of attitude; it is so
difficult not to assume that ‘you know what I’m talking about’. What we must try to do is “to bring words
back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.116), for our everyday words
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can be adequate for all of us in a way that technical talk cannot 14.
Conclusions:
re-orienting ourselves in practice to a focus on performative understandings
“What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is
doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the
background against which we see an action” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.567).
Although it is now some forty-six years since Berger and Luckman (1966) published The Social
Construction of Reality, and some twenty-seven years since Gergen (1985) published The social
constructionist movement in modern psychology, as I see it, we are still being insufficiently radical in
acknowledging our own human involvements in configuring the whole background hurly-burly of human
activity, which, as Wittgenstein puts it above, determines the judgments, concepts and reactions available
to us for expression in our more deliberately chosen actions. We do not yet fully understand how the
particular embodied “background expectancies” (Garfinkel, 1967) – that I have called our orientational
attitudes above – can work in shaping our embodied, spontaneous, pre-conceptual responses (which in
turn determine for us the focus of our more deliberate investigations and other activities) come to be
formed. What has limited us, I think, are the expectations aroused in us by our use of certain words: we
talk, for instance, of the meaning of an utterance and – as SAE users of a “things” and “substances,” nounbased language (Whorf, 1956) – this can very easily (mis)led us into expecting the existence of, and thus
searching for, a ‘something else’ that is the word’s meaning, as if both ‘it’ and the utterance already coexist as objects within the realm of our investigations.
What then is the relation between agential realism and social constructionism? 15 In pivoting my
discussion around the Cartesian subject/object split, I have been suggesting that what is usually called the
inner world of our consciousness can, from within the dynamics of the agential cuts we enact within our
performative expressions, be directly materially related to what we usually call the outside world of
separate namable things. Thus we can, perhaps, see agential realism and social constructionism as two
sides of the same coin. But better, much better, is to hear what is said or written (in the course of our
trying to articulate what will show up in our attempts to implement them) as two different embodied
voices in a continuous, unending dialogical, and thus continually creative intra-relation with each other.
Within such a dialogue, one voice would be expressing the unfolding dynamical course of our experiences
in performing our actions, in intra-relation to the other voice expressing the nature and importance of the
outcomes they together achieve – that is, their properties; how they can be used instrumentally; how they
can also possess their own inner ‘workings’; how they can act back on how we relate to each other and to
our surroundings thus to change who we are to ourselves; and so on, and so on.
Work of this kind, then, involves our paying attention to dynamical, fleeting, and transitory
experiences, and then trying linguistically to articulate their nature. But our attempts to talk of transitory
things clearly makes us feel uneasy. Literally, we feel that ‘we don’t know what we are talking about’. It is
thus all too easy to attribute our difficulties yet again to failures in our knowledge, as if there are still to be
discovered facts that will clear up our puzzlement. And that is a danger here too. In giving names
(substantive nouns) to agential realism and social constructionism it is only too easy to think of them as
separate, well-boundaried things (as rule governed ‘game’-like things) whose properties need to be, and
can be, well defined (in text and methods books). But to the extent that they exist as nameable entities at
all – as prospective entities, still open to further development – they come into existence, and continue to
come into existence, in the course of our performing actions out in the world in relation to certain
14
I cannot help feeling a pang of ‘mea culpa’ as I write this.
15
As is, perhaps, already clear, the very posing of this question can very easily lead us, yet again, to assume
that ‘agential realism’, ‘social constructionism’, and the ‘relation’ between them, all exist as separate, identifiable, and
nameable ‘things’, unless we have strenuously taught ourselves to avoid such continual reifications.
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orienting attitudes, in relation to our different acquired ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings.
Thus, agential realism no more comes into existence by our actually enacting “agential cuts,” than
social constructionism comes into existence by our exercising “forms of negotiated understandings.” As
nameable practices, agential cuts and negotiated understandings can only be seen as having been at work
in people’s performances after they have been achieved. Our use of these terms is, in the final analysis,
parasitic on the emergent creativity of our trying activities, activities in which we are continually seeking
to resolve on an orientation toward being in yet another uniquely new situation. Text-book talk is often
the reverse of what is required if the learning of a practice is what is at issue.
It is the different orienting attitudes we adopt in the course of performing our actions – ‘seeing’
our situation in this way at one moment and in that way at another, like the little boy “J.” portrayed above
– that matters. And our learning to ‘see’ in both this way and that, involves our learning to do something,
not simply acquiring a new piece of information. It requires our to an extent displacing already existing,
deeply embodied practices and exploring new ways of orienting ourselves to our circumstances. To do
this, to become more well skilled in orienting ourselves with facility to whatever new surroundings we
might find ourselves in – involves, suggests Wittgenstein (1980), “a working on oneself... On one’s way of
seeing things. (And what one expects of them)” (p.16). And such work, as Billig (2009) pointed out, will
not be easy. A new attitude cannot be achieved in a flash of insight, it requires practice. In working more
on the subjective side of the subject/object cut, we will need to school ourselves in orienting towards the
performative (doing) functioning of our own and other people’s words (and other expressions), rather
than towards supposing them to have a representational (standing for) use – we will need continually to
be asking ourselves, as a person speaks or writes: What is that person doing in saying that? How are they
using that word, in this situation, here and now? What are we feeling as we experience them speaking?
And so on.
All this is quite revolutionary: Much of what we have taken as being basic to our inquiries, e.g.,
the variables whose effects in social life we seek to understand, such as race, ethnicity, culture, age, social
class; processes such as motivation, perception, cognition; things such as emotions, excuses, justifications,
and so on, and so on, we come to realize are all, in fact, after the fact outcomes of our inquiries. Further,
when in cognitive-neuroscience in particular we read such sentences as: “Empathy draws on these bodily
and limbic shifts in a process called ‘interoception’ in which we perceive inward... [where] interoception,
interpretation, and attribution are the proposed steps of empathy carried out by the pre-frontal region [of
the brain]” (Siegal, 2007, p.168), we must ask ourselves whether anything in this account actually relates
to phenomena in people’s everyday activities we call empathic (Frankfurt, 1998)? Also, could we ever
possibly apply these supposed ‘elements’ in actually helping someone deficient in empathy to come to
show empathy more in their daily practice, say, in nursing elderly patients – or is it the case that the
empathic conduct of an everyday practice needs to be learned by quite some other means than by
building it up, piece by piece, from objective elements, according to pre-established principles? To repeat
the point made above, all these nominalized ‘things’ are foreshadowed in the very way in which we prior
to the conduct of our investigations, commit ourselves to a particular way of looking at the matter – “the
decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made,” says Wittgenstein (1953), “and it was the very
one that we thought quite innocent” (no.308).
As Karen Barad (2007) makes clear, in our practices of seeking performative understandings,
processes that we have thought of and talked of in the past, i.e., named, as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’,
‘measuring’, ‘theorizing’, and ‘observing’, and studied as hidden processes occurring within the heads of
individuals, are in fact material practices of intra-action occurring out, within, and as a part of the world’s
becoming. In engaging in such practices, in focussing on and the felt performative dynamics unfolding
within an experienced phenomenon, “we do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing
things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about
phenomena – about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming. The point is not simply to
put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to
acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we too are part of
the world’s differential becoming” (p.91). Thus, as Denzin (2001) (and Gergen, 1973) noted above, our
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practices of inquiry have effects on people, and as Barad (2007) adds, on the world also, thus “which
practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word” (p.91).
Thus strangely, as a final comment, in enacting agential cuts, we must note that we divide
ourselves into aspects which do the sensing, and aspects of ourselves that are subjected to what is sensed.
Thus, although it is very easy to think of ourselves as consisting in an organization of the very particulars
(and their laws or rules of connection) we think of ourselves as having discovered, if the account I have
set out above of the performative aspects of our doings, then our ‘findings’ cannot be taken as ‘basic’ as we
often claim. While it is “amazing,” as G. Spencer Brown (1979) remarked a while ago, that we can divide
ourselves in this way – such that we can see aspects of both our own and the world’s ‘workings’ – as he
went on to say: “in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and
at least one other state which is seen... [thus] in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally
undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will
always partially elude itself” (p.105). If this is so, and I think it is, then we must relinquish the dream of
the very general results we seek in our inquiries, and be content with the limited, partial, and situated
results we can in fact obtain – which will in the end, I believe, perhaps surprisingly, turn out to be of far
greater practical use to us.
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