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Cartesian Change, Chiasmic Change:
The Power of Living Expression
John Shotter
University of New Hampshire
Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than
one might think. (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.527)
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo.
(Wittgenstein, 1980, p.57)
A theme, no less than a face, wears an expression . . . Yet there is no paradigm apart
from the theme itself. And yet again there is a paradigm apart from the theme: namely
the rhythm of our language, of our thinking and feeling. And the theme, moreover, is
a new part of our language; it become incorporated into it; we learn a new gesture.
(Wittgenstein, 1980, p.52)
You really could call it [i.e., a work of art], not exactly the expression of a feeling, but
at least the expression of feeling, or felt expression. And you could say too that in so
far as people understand it, they resonate in harmony with it, respond to it. You might
say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself. (Wittgenstein,
1980, p.58)
((meaning is a physiognomy)). (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568)
I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by
reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language conveys its
own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind . . . There is thus, either
in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech
the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.179)
My general concern in this paper is with understanding certain
kinds of change and the importance they might have in our lives. Thus
before proceeding any further, I must make some preliminary comments
about the kinds of change I mean. I have three comments to make. The
first is that I will not be concerned here with how something well-known
to us changes, that is, with changes of an orderly kind that can be ex-
plained in terms of principles, rules or conventions, with what we might
call ordinary changes. Instead, I want to consider changes that happen
unexpectedly, surprising changes, changes that strike us with amaze-
ment or wonder, extraordinary changes. Or, to put it another way, in-
Janus Head, 6(1), 6-29. Copyright © 2003 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
John Shotter 7
stead of changes taking place within a reality already well-known to us,
I want to focus on changes in the very character of what we take our
reality to be. In short, instead of changes of a quantitative and repeat-
able kind, I will be concerned with first-time, unique, irreversible changes,
novelties, changes of a qualitative kind.
My second introductory comment is that, in discussing change, I
want to emphasize something that, although quite ordinary and famil-
iar to us in an everyday sense, is nonetheless a new topic in relation to
modern Western thought. The new topic is simply that of “life,” the
properties, characteristics or aspects of living bodies, of organic forms as
enduring, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, structurizing structures. There
is, in other words, the creation of qualitatively new and distinct forms of
life in the meetings among those already existing. If we are to do justice
to “life’s” detailed characteristics and relationships, we must make some
radical changes in our current modes of intellectual inquiry (if not, in
fact, the whole nature of our social lives together).
Third, we must take into account what is already ‘there’ in the
background of our lives. Such an account is impossible to claim from
purely linguistic, structuralist or post-structuralist versions of social con-
structionism, which hold that deconstruction of all the shared or share-
able bases to our lives together can be carried ‘all the way down,’ so to
speak: “That there is nothing,” as Rorty (1989) puts it, “‘beneath’
socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human being”
(p.xiii). With its seeming radicalness, this claim has prevented social
constructionism from being taken seriously in many quarters. This is
because it is not radical enough. The ire it provokes comes from the fact
that Rorty’s, and other such purely linguistic or post-structuralist ver-
sions of social constructionism have left in place Descartes’ (1968) ac-
count of our background reality as “a chaos as disordered as the poets
could ever imagine” (p. 62). From this position, we are given no shared
guidance in our controversies with each other, nor do we have a basis for
deciding which claims among us are best adopted.
The centrality of living meetings: chiasmic interweavings
I do not wish to argue that there is in fact something definite al-
ready ‘there’ in us, as individual beings in the world, prior to any of the
meetings we may have with the others and othernesses around us, which
define and delimit the nature of those meetings. But I do want to claim
8 Janus Head
that something very special happens when living bodies interact with
their surroundings, and that we have not (explicitly) taken this into
account in our current forms of thought or institutional practices. The
resulting relations have not just a dialogically structured character, as I
once thought, but a chiasmic (or dynamically intertwined) structure.
What this means is tremendously difficult to articulate, so what I want
to do is simply draw out the implications of this notion of chiasmically
organized, dynamic relations.
As a first step, let us just note that when we look over a visual scene,
a landscape or another’s face, and our eyes flick and jump from one
point of fixation to the next, we nonetheless still see a seamless whole, a
‘something’ to which we can relate ourselves; and when we read a writ-
ten text made up of quite separate printed elements, we develop a sense
of all the elements as contributing toward or as playing a participant
part in a meaningful whole; and so on. And further, in such activities we
all more or less see the same whole, the same landscape, the same face,
the same story or set of technical instructions or whatever; and if there
are some disagreements over exactly what it is before us, we can make
use of what we do agree on to discuss the features we see differently. In
other words, in many temporally unfolding circumstances (but not in
all), there is something special in the sequencing of our activities, in
their temporal succession. If the separate elements we encounter seem
to unfold in a special way, not just haphazardly but according to a cer-
tain style, they give rise in all who encounter them a shared or at least
shareable background sense of meaning intelligible to others but prior to
any thought or deliberation (in essence, spontaneously).
This claim that our human activities are not just formless, that not
just anything can follow or be connected with anything, is clearly re-
lated to Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim that most of our activities
on investigation seem to have a “grammar” to them. And as he sees it, it
is their shared grammar that we must observe if our expressions and ut-
terances are to be intelligible to those around us. It is this and not the
constraints imposed on us externally by a physical reality that makes it
impossible for us just to talk as we please: “Grammar is not accountable
to any reality,” he claims, “it is grammatical rules that determine mean-
ing (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to
that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein, 1974, no.133, p.184).
John Shotter 9
Now to many, this may seem as outrageous a claim as the claim
that there is no prior, already fixed and categorized physical reality to
which to appeal in adjudicating the worth of our claims to truth. But it
at least has the implication that any person’s claim to others regarding
the nature of things and events must be couched in a certain shared style.
If the claim is not presented in a shared style, it will not be properly
understood by those who are addressed; the claim will be confusing and
misleading. In other words, though there may be no prior criteria to
which to appeal in judging the truth of a person’s claims – for their truth
must be investigated in terms of their entailments – there are criteria
immediately available as to their intelligibility in the context of their ut-
terance. These criteria arise out of the fact that all the elements involved
are mutually determining, interwoven, or inter-related with each other
in a certain way, in essence, according to a certain style or grammar.
But why should we call this kind of ‘mutual determination’
chiasmic? In choosing this term, I am following Merleau-Ponty (1968),
who called the second to last chapter of his book The Visible and Invisible
– Chapter 4, “The Intertwining - The Chiasm.” But in further elabora-
tion of the above comments (about the synthesis of our separate fixa-
tions on aspects of a visual scene into a complex visual whole), I also
want to mention the fact that both Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968) and
Gregory Bateson (1979) take the chiasmic nature of binocular vision as
paradigmatic of the special nature of our living relations to our sur-
roundings. To quote Bateson (1979):
The binocular image, which appears to be undivided, is in fact a
complex synthesis of information from the left front in the right
brain and a corresponding synthesis of material from the right front
in the left brain . . . From this elaborate arrangement, two sorts of
advantage accrue. The seer is able to improve resolution at edges
and contrasts; and better able to read when the print is small or the
illumination poor. More important, information about depth is
created . . . In principle, extra “depth” in some metaphoric sense is
to be expected whenever the information for the two descriptions is
differently collected or differently coded (pp. 68-70).
In other words, much more is happening here than the mere blending,
amalgamating or interweaving of separate constituents which remain
10 Janus Head
identifiably separate even when complexly interwoven. Something ut-
terly new and quite novel is being created. Indeed, something quite
radical is entailed, as we shall see, in the recognition of the fact that our
relations to our surroundings are not just simply relations of a causal
kind, or of a systematic, logical or rational kind either, but are living,
dynamic relations.
In fact, though it may seem surprising to say it, I don’t think we
have made a proper attempt at all – in either our ways of thinking and
talking, or in our institutional ways of relating ourselves practically to
the others and othernesses in our surroundings – to acknowledge the
fact of our livingness and the fact that we live in surroundings that are
also living. We still simply pre-suppose a non-living world of earth and
rocks, of oceans and gases, to which we must simply adapt or die, a
world which is just ‘there’ independently of our living participation
within it, and to which we relate, officially, in only a dead, mechanical
way.
The nearest we have gotten to taking seriously life and living being
is in our concern with “cognitive psychology” and a “philosophy of mind.”
But even here we have assimilated our “mental lives” to the activity of
digital computers, dead mechanisms.
Living expression
While extremely clever and ingenious, however, the computer model
of the mind is far from convincing. Most of us, despite the vehemence of
the arguments presented to us, still feel far from spontaneously com-
pelled, on entering our places of work in the morning, to greet our
computers as we greet our colleagues. Certain responsive and expressive
qualities still seem to be lacking in the movements of their ‘bodies.’ It
makes no sense at all to talk in this responsive and expressive way of
computers as having “bodies” at all.
Indeed, in everything that I will have to say below, I shall want,
either explicitly or implicitly, to assume the spontaneous, living, expres-
sive-responsiveness of our bodies, i.e., our ability to immediately and di-
rectly affect or ‘move’ the others around us, bodily, in a meaningful
fashion, and to be affected by them in the same way. And we can imme-
diately note here the chiasmically organized nature of the expressive-re-
sponsiveness of our bodies: for example, if I were speaking to you in
John Shotter 11
person, you could see my body moving in synchrony with the voicing of
my utterances, my hands in synchrony with my intoning of my words,
my eye movements with my pauses, and my facial expressions with cer-
tain of my linguistic emphases. I shall use the word ‘orchestration’ to
denote the unfolding structuring of these intricately timed, creative
intertwinings and interweavings of the many inter-related participant
parts or ‘bodily strands’ of our responsive-expressions.
But this term ‘orchestration’ – the attempt to capture in a form
of words the whole notion of the chiasmically organized expressive-re-
sponsiveness of our bodily movements – is just one of the new expressions
we will need as we begin, seriously, to focus on life and on the activities
of living beings. Indeed, as we proceed, I will need to introduce a whole
raft of radically new expressions for the nature of living responsive ex-
pressiveness.
Straightaway, let me add another: Instead of the kind of move-
ments or changes we are used to – in which a set of separate elements of
reality take up a sequence of different instantaneous configurations or
positions in place at different instants or moments of time – we must
recognize the existence of self-sustaining, living unities, enduring through
time. Such unities, rather than undergoing changes of place or position
in space, exhibit expressive or physiognomic changes, dynamic changes
within the boundaries of their growing and developing, self-sustaining
bodies, short-term changes (as in facial expressions and bodily gestures)
as well as long-term ones in overall style, which, as we will discover, are
expressive in some way of events of importance to their life. Indeed, al-
though such physiognomic events are bodily events occurring out in the
world observable to all, it is events of this physiognomic expressive kind
that we take as indicative of a living being’s ‘inner’ or ‘mental’ life.
Along with these new notions, there are a number of others:
Having emphasized our spontaneous responsiveness to each other’s bodily
expressions – the fact that as gestures (of either an indicatory or mimetic
kind) they directly call out bodily responses without our having first to
‘work out’ how to respond – we need to distinguish between first-per-
son and third-person uses of such expressions: people can, at the mo-
ment of their use, tell us something about themselves, about their own
unique ‘inner worlds of consciousness’ (see Shotter, 1984, Ch.9), or
they can use them to refer to events out in the world shared between us.
12 Janus Head
Further, I must emphasize the occasional or occasioned nature of
the events of importance to us – the fact that they only happen in “meet-
ings,” and as such, owe their unique character (their physiognomy) to
the unique meetings within which they occur.
What is formed in such meetings, we shall find, is itself like the
momentary creation of a new, living, organic unity which is self-sustain-
ing as long as all those participating in it – as long as all its ‘participant
parts’ – sustain their spontaneously responsive, dialogically-structured
relations to each other. Once they cease their ‘living relations’ to each
other, the unity of their meeting disappears. But while ‘it’ lives, such meet-
ings grow and take time to develop, to refine and to articulate them-
selves, just as any other living organism.
But, to return once again to what seems to be the most unusual
concern I want to introduce here: the chiasmic organization of such
meetings, the complex, dynamically intertwined character of the living
unities to which they give rise, cannot be wholly captured in subjective
nor in objective terms; neither are they wholly orderly nor wholly disor-
derly; nor need they in fact be constituted wholly from living compo-
nents but may incorporate dead and inert parts in certain regions too.
For these reasons, such living unities are best called primordial,
not in the sense of being old or being located in the distant past, far
from it, but in the sense of being the more richly intertwined origin or
source from out of which we can differentiate our more focal concerns
(our concerns with language and speech, for instance) – while at the
same time also attending to the developing web or network of
chiasmically intertwined relations, usually ignored in the background,
within which our focal concerns actually have their being.
We can also call such meetings primordial in the sense that they
are the basic units, the starting points, the living contexts within which
we can situate everything that we take to be of importance to us in our
inquiries below. This claim has resonances with Wittgenstein’s (1980)
claim that “the origin and primitive form of the language game is a
reaction” (p.31). What he means by the word “primitive” here, he notes
elsewhere, is that “this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-
game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not
the result of thought” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.541). But it has reso-
nances also with Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) search for a new, non-meta-
physical starting point for philosophical inquiry: “If it is true,” he says,
John Shotter 13
“that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence
it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence
everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided
themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been
distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over,’ that
offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ both existence
and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them”
(p.131). Indeed, as we continue, we shall find that many of our central,
taken-for-granted concepts – especially those of space, time, matter, and
motion (Capek, 1961) – will need re-consideration. All these issues and
more will arise within my discussion of the new topic in Western thought
– of life and living beings.
The classical world: a static pictorial world configured in terms of a set of
separate ‘elements of reality’
Why have we failed to acknowledge the distinct nature of life and living
processes? Because, I think, to extent that we have attempted at all, we
have attempted to take account of life and living processes by trying to
formulate scientific theories of them. But this failure is not an intrinsic
weakness or deficiency within the very idea of forms of inquiry aimed at
achieving publicly shared and tested understandings. Rather, for rea-
sons which will become apparent very shortly, it has to do with the
requirement that such inquires into the nature of life and living pro-
cesses be conducted in terms of theoretical representations of them. As
Hertz (1954) put it, it is a process in which, “in endeavoring . . . to
draw inferences as to the future from the past, we always adopt the
following process. We form for ourselves images or symbols of external
objects; and the form that we give them is such that the necessary con-
sequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary
consequents in nature of the things pictured” (p.1).
What Hertz sets out in detail here, then, are the general features of
scientific theories. They are concerned with establishing repetitive pat-
terns in formal structures, where the formal structures in question are
set out in terms of instantaneous configurations of separately existing
elements, which change by being reconfigured, instant-by-instant, into
new configurations according to formal rules, laws or principles. But it
is impossible to do justice to living beings and living activities within
such constraints.
14 Janus Head
For what we (or most of us) sense as distinct in life and in living
phenomena has to do with what is directly manifest in unfolding tem-
poral relations occurring in events of a physiognomic expressive kind, and
not at all to do with what can be argued from concatenations of instan-
taneous configurations of an otherwise unrelated collection of particles.
Life is something that immediately ‘strikes’ us as such, not something
some of us have accepted as an opinion, supported by arguments. In-
deed, all the approaches that count for us as scientific approaches to
these problems inevitably allow only for what I am calling a Cartesian
notion of change: a conception of change that inevitably, despite all our
best intentions, ‘captures’ and ‘re-colonizes’ all our new ideas, and sets
them back yet again within the old, dead and static world that we have
tried to leave behind. For embedded in our everyday ways of talking and
conducting our relations with each other and the rest of our surround-
ings, there are certain abstractions, certain concepts of which we must
now ‘cure’ ourselves, particularly, as I indicated above, those concepts of
space, time, matter and motion, inherited by us from the Greeks, but
sharpened up for scientific purposes in the 17th century, particularly by
Descartes.
Wittgenstein’s (1953) plaintive remark in this respect is well-known:
“A picture held us captive,” he lamented, “and we could not get outside
it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably” (no.115).
Thus the kind of progress he sought was of a kind quite different
from what many still see as scientific progress – if, that is, it must be
conducted in pictorial terms. But it can be said that he still sought en-
lightenment (in Kant’s 1784 sense) as a process that releases us from a
state of ‘immaturity,’ in which we are led by the authority of someone
else’s opinions, when the use of our own capacity to reason is called for.
To release us from our ‘bewitchment’ by Cartesian opinions, as to the
proper ‘foundations’ for our claims to truth, he sought to re-introduce
us, not to “any new information, but [to remind us of] what we have
always known” (no.109). This is done, not by training us in any new
“methods” of science, but by provoking us into adopting a “new atti-
tude” toward our surroundings – where, by a “new attitude,” I mean a
new way of relating or orienting ourselves toward the others and
othernesses around us. Rather than distancing ourselves from them, with
the aim of mastering and possessing them, our new task is that of being
participants in a larger whole.
John Shotter 15
In his new task, then, Wittgenstein (1953) saw enlightenment as
simply noticing and acknowledging – and offering for our acknowledg-
ment – a whole range of inter-connected phenomena that had not be-
fore been noticed. And one thing he brought to our notice is that there
is something very special about living, human bodies. In exploring the
question: “What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things,
can feel?” (no.283), he went on (here and in other explorations) to fix on
our spontaneous, unthinking, bodily reactions to events occurring around
us as basic, our being ‘struck’ by something, as the crucial points of
departure for the new philosophical methods he wanted to introduce to
us – methods aimed at releasing us, as mentioned above, from authori-
ties external and prior to those relevant in the circumstances of our cur-
rent involvement. What should we notice about the difference for us
between dead and living things? “Our attitude to what is alive and to
what is dead,” he notes, “is not the same. All our reactions are different”
(no.284).
And they are really different. Here, Wittgenstein’s (1953) insis-
tence on the primacy of our spontaneous, unthinking responses to events
occurring around us comes to the fore. Whether we see something as a
living thing or not was not, for Descartes, a matter of our immediate
bodily response to it, but a cognitive matter, something we had to ‘work
out.’ As he suggested: “If I look out of the window and see men crossing
the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the
men themselves . . . Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which
could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something
which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by
the faculty of judgment which is in my mind” (Descartes, 1968, p.21).
1
Wittgenstein’s insistence that we begin with our actual reactions and
responses to events, not with speculations and theories that must “let
the use of words teach you their meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.220),
allows us at last to begin to respond adequately to living events, to living
activities.
In a moment, then, I want to explore further the new beginnings
offered us by Wittgenstein. But before I do, I must go a little more
deeply into the Cartesian concepts still unnoticed and unremittingly
active in the background of everything we currently do and say, not only
in our everyday activities but also in our intellectual inquiries, even when
we think of ourselves as being especially vigilant. Their influence is so
16 Janus Head
pervasive that I think it is impossible to bring them all to light in an
article as brief as this. Let me here highlight the one I take to be central.
Promising deep and effective knowledge of the natural world, Descartes’
philosophy held out the great hope that:
. . . knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars,
the heavens, and all other bodies that surround us . . . we should be
able to utilize them for all the uses to which they are suited and
thus render ourselves masters and possessors of nature (Descartes,
1968, p.74).
Instead of being victims, we could, he suggested, become masters of our
fates.
Prior to Descartes, everything in the cosmos was characterized by
greater or lesser degrees of value, of perfection according to a hierarchical
scheme with matter at its foot and God at its summit. By excluding
values and reducing everything tangible to matter in motion according
to mathematically expressible laws, Descartes destroyed the older no-
tions of the cosmos. God is no longer present in the world, nor for that
matter is man, in the sense of having any obvious place assigned there
for his own self. As a mind, quite separate from the world as matter, the
role of man himself can only be that of dominating his surroundings
and becoming master and possessor of the natural world, utilizing it for
all the uses to which it is suited. And that world itself, containing as it
does only matter in lawful and orderly motion, becomes, as we shall see,
both a timeless and lifeless place.
If we are ever to study ourselves without emasculating ourselves in
the process -without destroying our own ability to transform ourselves -
it is Descartes’s account of our being in the world (his ontology) and the
accounts of how we came to know its nature (his epistemology) that we
must replace. For though we may have had quite a number of very new
thoughts about the creative, constructive nature of our relations to the
others and othernesses around us, it is still in terms of the same basic
concepts of space and time, and of matter and motion inherited from
Descartes that we have been trying to express these new thoughts.
We can get a sense of what these basic concepts are from Descartes’
own account of our world in his view. He sets it out as follows:
John Shotter 17
In order to put these truths in a less crude light and to be able
to say more freely what I think about them, without being obliged
to accept or to refute what are accepted opinions among philoso-
phers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their
disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world,
if God were to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough mat-
ter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly
the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disor-
dered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more
than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and to let her act
according to his established laws (Descartes, 1968, p.62).
In other words, Descartes sets out here, not a living world, not a grow-
ing or developing world, existing in the cosmos as a complex, internally
inter-related, indivisible unity with continuously emergent, uniquely
new aspects and characteristics, but a world made up of a fixed number
of separately existing particles of matter in motion, which, at any chosen
instant in time, can simply take on a new configuration.
The ‘move’ to an orchestrated, indivisible world of ‘invisible presences’
In other words, as I mentioned above, to the extent that it contains
nothing else but a limited set of particles of matter in orderly motion,
such a world is both lifeless (as matter cannot be created ex nihilo), and,
because it is possible for such a limited amount of matter to reappear in
the same configuration – to repeat itself, so to speak – a timeless place.
Indeed, in such a world, as Laplace (1886) realized, an intellect that was
vast enough could, by knowing the position and velocities of all these
basic particles, “embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest
bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; [and as result]
nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would
be present to its eyes.” In such a world as this, all change would only be
of a quantitative nature, changes of configuration; there can be no quali-
tative changes, no creation of novelty, no unique, first-time occurrences,
no events which could, like works of art (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.58),
have their unique meaning in themselves.
Here, then, we have a basic set of concepts – of space and time, and
of matter and motion – in terms of which we in fact conduct almost all
18 Janus Head
our daily enterprises. This is the picture currently holding us captive, for
this is what lies in our language and what we repeat to ourselves inexo-
rably, in our ordinary daily activities, in our institutional and adminis-
trative practices, and in our intellectual inquiries. Indeed, it is a picture
of the world as a picture (a ‘pointillist’ picture, in fact) – “we are indicat-
ing by the very choice of the word its most significant feature: its picto-
rial character” (Capek, 1961).
2
Indeed, we can now see why those versions of social construction-
ism that leave this Cartesian picture in place raise so much anxiety over
their deconstruction of everything that seems fixed and solid within it.
3
For a background that has been decomposed into “a chaos as disordered
as the poets could ever imagine,” cannot exert any structured or guiding
influence of a shared kind on those immersed in it.
But notice its origins, note Descartes’ relation to his surroundings
within which he fashions this ‘view’: he fashions it as a thinker, and as a
deliberate, self-conscious actor. He is not a participant in any ongoing
practical action, concerned to engage with and make himself under-
stood in the action to the others around him; he never acts spontane-
ously, in responsive reaction to events occurring around him; he is act-
ing alone, deliberately concerned with being the master and possessor of
nature.
Indeed, whatever the movements of those he observed “crossing the
square,” he is unmoved or untouched by them. Should one of them
turn to catch sight of him at his window, how would he react, how
would he respond? For the meeting of people’s eyes, our eyes with those
of animals . . . the spontaneous “interplay of gaze and expression” (Sacks,
1985, p.8) . . . is something very basic in our lives. Spontaneously, we
sense ourselves in contact with more than just a dead body in motion;
we have become involved with a being that has a soul, an ‘inner life’;
and we know straightaway if they have that same attitude toward us. As
Goffman (1967) points out, our’s and other people’s sense of offence is
direct and immediate if we feel those around us are not properly honor-
ing their “involvement obligations.” “My attitude towards him,” says
Wittgenstein (1953), “is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the
opinion that he has a soul” (p.178).
If we attend, then, to the kind of meeting occurring between
Descartes and his surroundings, the relations between them, we find
them somewhat distant. The surroundings that concern him are ‘over
John Shotter 19
there’; it is an ‘external world’; he is not himself a participant within it.
He is merely thinking of himself as ‘viewing’ it. Thus in this ‘thought-
view,’
4
space holds a privileged place, and it is treated as an immutable,
unchanging, homogeneous, causally inert, empty ‘container,’ a place in
which separate ‘particles’ of matter may occupy different ‘positions.’ Time
is secondary to space, and often thought of as a fourth, ‘spatial’ dimen-
sion. As such, it too is an empty, neutral, unchanging ‘container.’ While
instants of time are differentiated by their succession, time is prior to
change: changes occur in time. As unchanging containers, both space
and time are there for things to happen in them. The only changeable
stuff is matter, not within itself, but in its location; it may change its
position in space. Hence, our feeling that what is of central importance
for us are static structures or our linguistic representations or our ways of
picturing such structures in language in making sense between us of
what counts for us as a world.
But let us note again that this kind of world is not the world that
contains us as active participants within it, the world in which we, along
with the others and othernesses around us, have our being within a
dynamic interplay. It is, to repeat, the world of an individual who has
withdrawn himself from such shared participatory involvements, and
who has turned himself instead only toward the aims of mastery and
possession. Thus for such an individual, this is an ‘external world,’ a
world in which time has been ‘spatialized’ as merely another spatial
dimension, as an already existing dimension of reality in which the fu-
ture positions of the particles making up a configurations ‘await,’ so to
speak, occupation. It is thus ‘natural’ in such a reality to think of mo-
tion as following a path in space, a space which is ‘there’ both before and
after the motion.
But in the dynamic time of life and living, in irreversible time in
which things grow and develop, internally articulate and refine them-
selves, flower, blossom, and reproduce themselves in others of their kind,
and then die, in this kind of time, movement and motion cannot simply
be a change in position in a pre-existing space. Motion is to do with the
creation of novelty; it is physiognomic in that it is an “organic deforma-
tion” (Whitehead, 1975, p.160), or “coherent deformation” (Merleau-
Ponty, 1964, p.91), a qualitative change within a living whole. And
what is special about such living wholes – even such entities as paint-
ings, pieces of music or written texts – is that just like the other persons
20 Janus Head
around us, they can have agency, that is, they can exert an influence on
us through their expressions; not the direct impact of a physical force,
but the kind of influence another can exert on us by, for instance, calling
our name, the kind of influence that plays upon our inescapable respon-
siveness as living beings to events of concern to us occurring in our sur-
roundings. It is in this kind of world in which we live and participate.
The ‘agency’ of real but invisible presences
But how shall we talk of it, how shall we – not picture it or view it, for that
again will lead us back into all the difficulties of timelessness we must
avoid – but express a sense of it in some way? And what does it mean to
say that such a world is populated with agencies over an above the indi-
vidual agencies of the individual people around us? How can something
like a text – that seems to be a dead thing in itself – exert an invisible
influence upon us? What does it mean to talk of the real but invisible
presences influencing the style of our lives at the moment, to talk, say, of
the current ‘grammar’ of our language, or of what it is like to have to
live, currently, in what we might call ‘the age of money’?
Well, strangely, there is no shortage of familiar, everyday activities
which only take place over time, to which we can refer as paradigms for
orienting ourselves to what is entailed in identifying the nature of felt
understandings, what it is to have a shaped and vectored sense of a circum-
stance without in fact having a visual or pictorial image of it. Consider,
for instance, the simple activity of another’s question to us; or that of
reading and understanding a piece of writing; or, to take Wittgenstein’s
example, listening with understanding to a piece of music.
Let us first consider a piece of music, a simple melody unfolding in
time: The first point to make is about its successive nature, and the sharp
distinction between the internal relations involved in an unfolding tem-
poral succession and the external relations constituting a structure formed
by juxtaposing a set of parts in space. As long as its ‘movement’ contin-
ues, the musical expression remains incomplete. At each particular mo-
ment a new tone is added to the previous ones, or more accurately, each
new moment is constituted by the creation of a new musical quality. A
picture, a spatial array contemplated at any given instant is complete; it
is a static structure with all its parts given at once, simultaneously. Our
experience listening to a piece of music is very different. In spite of the
John Shotter 21
irreducible individuality of each new tone, its quality is ‘tinged’ or ‘col-
ored’ by the whole preceding musical context into which it ‘strikes,’ and
which in turn, it retroactively changes by contributing to the emer-
gence of a new musical quality.
The ‘building’ or ‘construction’ of a musical phrase over time is
thus very different from the construction of a structure in space. Even
the most complex of ‘man-made’ systems, machines for instance, are
constructed piece by piece from objective parts; that is, from parts which
retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts
of the system or not. This is what is meant by saying they are static
structures constructed from externally related parts. Such structures only
have their character when they are complete: we put in the last engine
part, switch on, and drive away; any attempt to drive a car before all its
parts have been installed is courting disaster. But in something like a
piece of music, all its ‘participant parts’ have a living relation with each
other; that is, as we noted above, they constitute a dynamically emerging
or growing structure, a structurizing structure one might say. As such, they
develop from simple, already living individuals, into richly structured
ones. They do not have to wait until they are complete before they can
express themselves. They develop in such a way that their ‘parts’ (if we
are still justified in using such a term) at any one moment in time owe
not just their character but their very existence both to one another and
to their relations with the ‘parts’ of the whole at some earlier point in
time. In other words, their history – where they have come from and
where they have been headed – is just as important as the instantaneous
logic of their growth.
Consider again a piece of music: as we have noted, while the indi-
vidual tones are not externally related units from which the melody is
additively built, their individuality is not simply absorbed or dissolved
in the undifferentiated unity of the musical whole. Each individual tone
matters and makes a difference while being related to the whole. Thus,
the musical phrase is a successively differentiated whole which remains a
whole in spite of its successive character and which remains differenti-
ated in spite of its dynamic wholeness. In other words, as a dynamic
whole, it resists description in terms of any one single order of connected-
ness; hence my comment above that we might designate such living
wholes as primordial, in the sense of being the richly intertwined origins
or sources from out of which we can differentiate our more ordered con-
22 Janus Head
cerns. Yet, we are able to attend to the web of chiasmically intertwined
relations within which the constituent parts have their being.
The pressure to form theoretical pictures (as in Hertz’s account of the
proper way of proceeding in science) leads us to forget the essential
difference between the juxtaposition of parts in space and the unfolding
succession of qualities in time. It also leads us to reduce the differences
between the past, present and future to simple differences of position:
‘past’ events being symbolized by positions lying to the left of the point
representing the ‘present,’ while ‘future’ events lie to the right of the
same point on an already existing ‘time line’ drawn in space.
Above I raised the question of what it is for something, seemingly
dead in itself, to nonetheless have agency, in the sense of it being able to
give shape to our actions over and beyond the shape that we alone might
give them.
To get a handle on what is at issue here, let me ask you to consider
two preliminary orienting pieces of material: one is George Mead’s (1934)
claim that: “The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act be-
fore the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs.
The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture
of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp. 77-78). I quote this to
make the point, already made by Wittgenstein above, that meaning
begins with our spontaneous responsive reactions. Such reactions can be
thought of as beginning a sequential process of differentiation, of speci-
fication, of making something within a still undifferentiated array of
possibilities clear and distinct while still, of course, embedded within
that same array. To appreciate what is at stake here, consider reading an
article on social constructionism and coming across a sentence express-
ing this rhetorical question: “What are the differences between AA’s and
BB’s versions of social constructionism, considering that AA developed
his version with an American background as an objection to experimen-
tal social psychology, while BB developed his in a British context, not
only in objection to the experimental approach to developmental psy-
chology, but also in objection to the whole idea that human behavior
could ever be likened merely to computation and understood in formal
terms?”
While we hold the question ‘in mind,’ so to speak, as ‘point of
orientation’ as we mentally assemble the landscape within which we are
going to attempt to answer it, without being able to articulate its influ-
John Shotter 23
ence, we keep ‘hearing its voice’ and ‘answering to’ its calls. It works as
both a provocation and a guide. In the jargon I have been using cur-
rently, it provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of the landscape
in which we must make our ‘moves’ if we are to respond to the ques-
tioner as he or she already anticipates and expects. For there is in the
very asking of the question in those terms a veritable grammar deter-
mining what will count as an acceptable answer or not. In other words,
prior to us having any clear conscious awareness of the events in our
surroundings exerting specific, describable influences on our conduct,
such influences are there (as Mead puts it) “before the emergence of
consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs,” and we crucially need to
take note of this.
But this is not easy. As I have already suggested, such agentic influ-
ences, although very real, are often invisible. To give one last example of
how, nonetheless, we are very familiar with such phenomena, let me say
a few words about stereophonic listening: Listening to current stereo
recordings of an orchestra playing in a hall on a system with “surround
sound,” it is not just that the violins sound as if they are coming from
the left, where they were originally located, and the violas, cellos and
double basses as if from the right, but one hears much more. The re-
cording sounds as if the orchestra is playing in a hall in which the sounds
bounce off the walls and ceiling; there is a sense of space around the in-
struments. Rather than simply coming just from the left loud speaker,
the sound of the violins comes from both speakers, but in a subtly cor-
related way so that the phase differences between the sound waves meet-
ing between the left and right speakers display complex interference
patterns simulating, not just the violins coming from the left, but com-
ing from the left in a concert hall.
5
The hall, and its size and general volume, is of course invisible, but
its spatial extent is nonetheless ‘there’ in our hearing of the music. Our
seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and body orientation (or
near-far, up-down, right-left, etc) are all there complexly and dynami-
cally intertwined in our sense of our relation to our surroundings. In-
deed, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) notes with respect to the nature of our
chiasmically organized perception of our surroundings: “Since the same
body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world. It
is a marvel too little noticed that every movement of my eyes -- even
more, every displacement of my body -- has its place in the same visible
24 Janus Head
universe that I itemize and explore with them, as, conversely, every vi-
sion takes place somewhere in the tactile space. There is double and
crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the
visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one.
The two parts are total parts and yet are not superposable” (p.134). In
other words, to repeat the point made above, the complex dynamic re-
alities which here we are calling chiasmically organized are not consti-
tuted from causally related parts, nor from any rationally related parts
either, nor are they formed by any kind of mixing or blending or averag-
ing we can imagine. Here, in the very emergence of the new concept of
chiasmic relations is the very emergence of a uniquely novel quality into
our thinking of a previously unencountered kind.
Conclusions
What I have been arguing then is that previous accounts of social
constructionism have been nowhere near radical enough. Embedded in
the background against which many of the arguments in their support
where formulated, is an unexamined Cartesianism. So, although the theo-
ries and metatheoretical suppositions proposed seemed to overcome its
self-contained individualism – the idea that all that was important to
our mental lives was contained within the heads of individual people –
it did not overcome the idea of our social realities being composed of a
limited set of separate “elements of reality.” Hence, in many versions of
social constructionism, it seems as if there are no prior connections or
relations between the elements that might go into a construction, thus
‘anything goes.’ Thus advocates of this approach, instead of looking for
prior justifications for the worth of their claims – that, for instance, we
should study the concrete details of our actual practices rather than
seeking to discover principles on which they are (or might be) based –
set out their pragmatic advantages (e.g. Rorty, 1989).
We can agree that there are no prior justifications with which to
appeal for one’s claims to worth. But to agree that there is no prior
shared background structure of feelings of anticipation and tendency,
even if that background is one without a long history but created at that
moment of meeting when one living being acknowledges the presence
of another, would be to agree that there is no shared basis of judgement
to form agreements. Indeed, though such a form of social construction-
John Shotter 25
ism might seem to overcome individualism, it does not overcome the
“possessive individualism” (Macpherson, 1962) central to the current
rise of conservative politics: “Its possessive quality is found in its concep-
tion of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or
capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (p.3). As is perhaps obvi-
ous, this relates to Descartes’ notion of persons as self-contained think-
ers who are not spontaneously inter-related via their spontaneous, living
bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses around them; with
his conception of the aims of inquiry as mastery; as well as with his
conception of reality as separate elements in, so to speak, Brownian
movement in relation to each other (a society, in other words, of anony-
mous strangers).
But what exactly is the reality in which we live? Like St Augustine
when asked about time, we know perfectly well in our everyday prac-
tices what it is, most of the time, or else we would spend even more of
our time in chaos and confusion than we do. It is only when we try to
formulate its nature that we run into trouble.
But now, due to recent understandings from Wittgenstein, Bakhtin,
Merleau-Ponty and others, we know some of the causes of our self-gen-
erated confusion. In our studies of language, for instance, as long as our
attention is shifted from our actual experience of “words in their speak-
ing” to the patterns of “already spoken words,” the static shapes and
forms we put down on a page – whenever we shift our attention from
our lived experience of a temporally forming whole to its static represen-
tation – such self-generated confusion is inevitable.
The word “reality” is like any other word in our language, and as
such, we must learn to use it properly. In line with Wittgenstein’s (1953)
claim that we must “let the use of [your] words teach you their mean-
ing” (p.220), after having looked at the examples above to do with our
understanding of temporally unfolding phenomena, I want to argue
that if we want to hang on to the word reality, and I for one do, then it
must be used in totally new ways. Reality can no longer be restricted to
what we might call a purely ‘local’ meaning, for the nonlocal implica-
tions of the chiasmic ordering of our perceptual contacts with our sur-
roundings suggest that what happens in one region of space is inevitably
related with other, often very distant, regions of our lives – as, for in-
stance, when I remember a quote from Vico, and use its agency to guide
my present thought.
6
The chiasmic organization of our realities suggests
26 Janus Head
that the influences at work in them are related in ways that defy expla-
nation in terms of any currently known connections, interactions, fields,
pushes or pulls of a physical kind operating merely in space. There is a
‘wholeness’ about a chiasmically organized world that is totally alien to
older, mechanistic ways of thinking.
Disciplined to think logically, to think that geometry and arith-
metic and other forms of calculation are the only properly disciplined
modes of thought, we have given ourselves over to the authority of single,
hierarchically structured forms of disengaged thought. What might it
be to think in a disciplined but engaged fashion, in a way which follows
the contours, so to speak, of the shaped and vectored sense one has of
the particular situations in which one might find oneself embedded in
one’s meetings with others?
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1998), I have discussed different styles of writ-
ing, and in particular, Wittgenstein’s style. Among other devices, he
produces, we might say, a “montage of metaphors,” and in so doing,
brings together into a single work a number of different ‘pictures’ or
‘part pictures’ arranged so that they form a chiasmically organized whole.
In other words, we have here a sequence of images presented to us just as
those presented us in looking over a landscape or another person’s face.
While all remaining distinctly themselves, this sequence of abruptly al-
ternating scenes or images, the juxtaposing of discrete or contrasting
elements, a set of remarks that “are, as it were, a number of sketches of
landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved
journeyings” (p.ix), can create in us a ‘contoured’ sense of what that
landscape is. And this, in the examples I have presented here, is what I
have been trying to do too.
Like any dynamic whole, it will exhibit a synthesis of unity and
multiplicity, of continuity and discontinuity; but it cannot be the unity
of an undifferentiated, instantaneous spatial whole, nor can it be a plu-
rality of merely juxtaposed units. Further, although it has continuity, it
lacks continuity in the mathematical sense of infinite divisibility, but it
certainly doesn’t have the discontinuity of self-contained, rigid, atomic
particles. Its continuity is of a chronotopic kind, of a time-space kind,
but quite what that is remains, perhaps, open to further articulation. I
cannot claim here by any means to have given a definitive account of
chiasmically organized realities. I have made a small beginning with
what we might call a prospective concept – something that must of its
John Shotter 27
very nature remain eternally open to further articulation. But what I can
say for certain is that future notions of reality ought to be devoid of all
static, merely spatial forms, including even those which are subtly and
implicitly present on seemingly abstract mathematical notions (like chaos
and complexity theories).
The positive significance of our “turn to language” in social con-
structionism is not just in the way in which it has released us from the
need to give prior (foundational) justifications for all our claims, but in
the ways it has begun to orient us toward our experience of word use,
and in particular, toward our detailed sensing of the temporally unfold-
ing experience of the chiasmic interweaving of our voicing of our words
in with the events occurring at the moment of their voicing. This has led
some of us right away from abstract theorizing to the discovery of the
nonvisual dynamical patterns actually occurring with us as we speak and
listen. It has also alerted us to the need for forms of writing that create
such dynamically experienced patterns in our readers, structurally simi-
lar to those we actually experience in our acting, in our everyday prac-
tices. Thus, rather than merely gaining a sense of that reality over there
from a set of pictures that we might view in an art galley without ever
going out into the actual world at large, the nonvisual dynamical patterns
that we can come to embody, in following Wittgenstein’s methods, can
help us in actual fact to come to be more ‘at home’ in our own human
world.
Notes
1
“But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata...?” Says
Wittgenstein (1953), “Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over
there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.’ And
you will either find these words become quite meaningless; or, you will
produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the
sort” (no.420). Clearly, Descartes felt no such linguistic difficulties as
these, as one doesn’t, so to speak, in talking solely to oneself.
2
See also Heidegger (1977), “The age of the world picture.” As Heidegger
remarks here, the term “world picture, when understood essentially, does
not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as
a picture” (p.129).
3
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and vener-
28 Janus Head
able prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed one be-
come antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face . . . The real
conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men” (Marx,
MER, 475-76, quoted in Berman, 1982, p.21).
4
In actual vision, we do not see separate, independent, elements of reality;
in fact, in ‘pointillism,’ chaismic relations (of blending or intertwining)
emerge as we look over the points of paint to create a ‘luminous’ effects.
5
I owe this image to Peat (1990, pp.114-115).
6
Another implication of the ‘local’/’nonlocal’ distinction though, might
be our treatment of ethnic grievances. Minority groups in the United
States can easily use the Constitution to vociferously exert their ‘rights’.
A ‘local’ response to such grievances is to treat each one in isolation of,
seemingly, its own individual merits. A cacophany of competing griev-
ances results, with no common view of what kind of social contract,
what kind of infrastructure of justice there might be that could recon-
cile them equitably. American blacks are right to argue that they have
been systematically discriminated against, so are women, so are the poor.
A ‘nonlocal’ response would address all these grievances over time in a
way which would hold American society together through an infrastruc-
ture of justice that is neutral to all minority groups and mindful only of
equivalent disadvantage.
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