Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language 2018001231, 9780262038164

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Making Introductions
1.1 Letter of Invitation
1.2 The Continuity between Life and Language
1.3 This Book Is about Bodies (and Also about Language)
I Bodies
2 Living Bodies
2.1 What Kind of Bodies?
2.2 Reframing the Sciences of the Mind
2.3 Two Senses of Embodiment
2.4 From Self-Individuation to Meaning
3 Enacted Bodies
3.1 Feelings of Agency
3.2 Animal Bodies
3.3 Sensorimotor Networks and Habits
3.4 Sensorimotor Agency
4 Intersubjective Bodies
4.1 Intercorporeality
4.2 The Autonomy of Social Interactions
4.3 Participatory Sense-Making
4.4 Readiness to Interact
4.5 Participatory Sense-Making in Practice
4.6 Not One, Not Two
5 Entanglement and Historicity
5.1 Billions of Different Bodies
5.2 A Recapitulation
II Linguistic Bodies
6 Dialectics: A Tool for Enactivists
6.1 Language as a Concrete Totality
6.2 Dialectics and the Enactive Approach
6.3 The Abstract and the Concrete
6.4 Dialectics in Psychology and the Study of Language
6.5 Dialectical Motifs
7 From Participatory Sense-Making …
7.1 Toward a Constitutive Theory of Language
7.2 Choosing a Starting Point
7.3 A Dialectical Model, First Part
7.4 The Model So Far
8 … to Linguistic Bodies
8.1 A Dialectical Model, Continued
8.2 The Objectifying Attitude Emerges
8.3 Linguistic Bodies Are Unfinished
III Living as Linguistic Bodies
9 Becoming Linguistic Bodies
9.1 Linguistic Experience
9.2 The Autonomies of Linguistic Bodies and Communities
9.3 Abiding and Engaging
9.4 Perpetual Becoming
9.5 Better Questions
10 Autistic Linguistic Bodies
10.1 Not Afraid of Experiencing Autism
10.2 Powers and Sensitivities in Autistic Sense-Making
10.3 Two Hypotheses
10.4 Strengthening Participation
11 Enacting Language “as We Know It”
11.1 Language Emerging
11.2 Grammaticalizing
11.3 Symbolizing and Sensitizing
11.4 Gesturing
11.5 Reading and Writing
12 Making Better Sense
12.1 Choose Life. Choose Language.
12.2 Linguistic Vulnerabilities and Ethical Agency
12.3 Microaggressions
12.4 Institutional Speaking and Ideology
12.5 Ethics of Participation
Glossary
Notes
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Linguistic Bodies

Linguistic Bodies The Continuity between Life and Language

Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Sans Std and ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. author. | Cuffari, Elena Clare author. | De Jaegher, Hanne author. Title: Linguistic bodies : the continuity between life and language / Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001231 | ISBN 9780262038164 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Philosophy. | Language and languages. Classification: LCC P106 .L53965 2018 | DDC 400--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001231 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Verena, Giorgos and Kato, Floris and Colette

Contents

Acknowledgments xi 1

Making Introductions  1 1.1 Letter of Invitation  1 1.2 The Continuity between Life and Language  3 1.3 This Book Is about Bodies (and Also about Language)  6

I Bodies 11 2

3

4

Living Bodies  13 2.1 What Kind of Bodies?  13 2.2 Reframing the Sciences of the Mind  15 2.3 Two Senses of Embodiment  18 2.4 From Self-Individuation to Meaning  22 2.4.1 Living as Caring  22 2.4.2 Autonomy 23 2.4.3 Sense-Making and Agency  32 2.4.4 Life’s Primordial Tension  37 Enacted Bodies  43 3.1 Feelings of Agency  43 3.2 Animal Bodies  44 3.3 Sensorimotor Networks and Habits  46 3.4 Sensorimotor Agency  48 Intersubjective Bodies  61 4.1 Intercorporeality 61 4.2 The Autonomy of Social Interactions  64 4.3 Participatory Sense-Making  73 4.4 Readiness to Interact  75 4.5 Participatory Sense-Making in Practice  81 4.6 Not One, Not Two  83

viii Contents

5

Entanglement and Historicity  87 5.1 Billions of Different Bodies  87 5.2 A Recapitulation  97

II

Linguistic Bodies  103

6

Dialectics: A Tool for Enactivists  105 6.1 Language as a Concrete Totality  105 6.2 Dialectics and the Enactive Approach  107 6.3 The Abstract and the Concrete  111 6.4 Dialectics in Psychology and the Study of Language  116 6.4.1 The Complicated Real Life of Language  116 6.4.2 The Bakhtin Circle  118 6.4.3 Merleau-Ponty 121 6.4.4 Tran Duc Thao  123 6.4.5 Psychology 125 6.5 Dialectical Motifs  129 From Participatory Sense-Making …  131 7.1 Toward a Constitutive Theory of Language  131 7.2 Choosing a Starting Point  136 7.3 A Dialectical Model, First Part  138 7.3.1 The Primordial Tension of Participatory Sense-Making 139 7.3.2 Social Agency  145 7.3.3 Coordination of Social Acts: Going Meta  152 7.3.4 Normativity of Social Acts  157 7.4 The Model So Far  159 … to Linguistic Bodies  165 8.1 A Dialectical Model, Continued  165 8.1.1 Community of Interactors  166 8.1.2 Dialogue and Mutual Recognition  171 8.1.3 Participation Genres  179 8.1.4 Reported Utterances  186 8.1.5 Linguistic Bodies  191 8.2 The Objectifying Attitude Emerges  198 8.3 Linguistic Bodies Are Unfinished  209

7

8

III Living as Linguistic Bodies  213 9

Becoming Linguistic Bodies  215 9.1 Linguistic Experience  215

Contents ix

9.2 The Autonomies of Linguistic Bodies and Communities  219 9.2.1 (Not Quite Like) Plants and Soil  219 9.2.2 (Not Quite) Private Speech  223 9.3 Abiding and Engaging  229 9.3.1 Mess-Positive Methodology  230 9.3.2 Making Sense in the Mess  237 9.3.3 Social Learning in Real Life  244 9.4 Perpetual Becoming  250 9.4.1 Languaging Is Acquiring  250 9.4.2 Acquiring Is Self-Making  253 9.5 Better Questions  258 10 Autistic Linguistic Bodies  261 10.1 Not Afraid of Experiencing Autism  261 10.2 Powers and Sensitivities in Autistic Sense-Making  262 10.3 Two Hypotheses 264 10.3.1 Under- and Overshooting Interactive Regulation  265 10.3.2 Braiding Utterances Differently  269 10.4 Strengthening Participation 276 11 Enacting Language “as We Know It”  279 11.1 Language Emerging 279 11.2 Grammaticalizing 281 11.3 Symbolizing and Sensitizing  293 11.4 Gesturing 298 11.5 Reading and Writing  302 12 Making Better Sense  309 12.1 Choose Life. Choose Language.  309 12.2 Linguistic Vulnerabilities and Ethical Agency  310 12.3 Microaggressions 314 12.4 Institutional Speaking and Ideology  319 12.5 Ethics of Participation  322 Glossary 329 Notes 335 Bibliography 353 Index 399

Acknowledgments A A

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© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Nowhere is the polyphony of voices behind each single linguistic act more felicitous an idea than in the writing of a book like this. Not only because it is a coauthored book, but because behind our own intermingling voices there are echoes of so many friends and colleagues that have helped the ideas in this book develop and continue to evolve. Our work has been nurtured in conversations and discussions with colleagues, students, and audiences at various meetings. In particular, we wish to thank Tom Froese, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Sanneke de Haan, Daniel D. Hutto, Thomas Wiben Jensen, Mark Johnson, Joanna RączaszekLeonardi, Daniel Shartin, Jürgen Streeck, Henry Theriault, Kristin Waters, and Tiara Yahnian. For reading and commenting on different parts of this book, we are especially grateful to Thomas Buhrmann, Julian D. Kiverstein, Charles Lassiter, Marek McGann, Yanna Popova, and Evan Thompson. Thanks again to Thomas Buhrmann for helping with the cover design. For their support and inspiration, we thank our families: Verena Fischer, George and Niketas Fourlas, Jack, Lisa, Peter, and Madeline Cuffari, as well as Doran, Tasmin, and Karsten Osterhold. We are thankful for the support of a Faculty Mini-Grant from Worcester State University, and the accountability provided by the Faculty Writing Group. The central chapters (7 and 8) of this book are a significant expansion and development of ideas that first appeared in the following open-access publication: Cuffari, E., Di Paolo, E. A., & De Jaegher, H. (2015). From participatory sense-making to language: There and back again. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14(4), 1089–1125. That piece of work was the result of a collaboration made possible thanks to the funding and environment provided by the interdisciplinary Marie-Curie Initial Training Network TESIS: Toward an Embodied Science

xii Acknowledgments

of InterSubjectivity (2011–2015, FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, no: 264828). To the coordinators of this network, and the colleagues and friends in all of its 13 research nodes, our sincere thanks. We hope this book will be seen as an example of how the combination of vision, bold ideas, community spirit, and human interaction will continue to bear fruit even after a project’s official end date. Foresightful funding bodies should never lose sight of this fact.

1  Making Introductions Chapter Making

1 Introductions

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

1.1  Letter of Invitation You, dear reader, are a linguistic body. On some days you wake up with a to-do list already assembling itself, propelling your feet to the floor. Other times, perhaps, you arise leisurely into an unplanned morning. Always, you have choices to make. You check messages. You are intimately connected with the activities of others, be they the drivers of the cars that surround you on your way to work or a sibling across the country who calls late at night for advice. You ride tides of emotions: shouting headlines, outrage in the streets, tension at the kitchen sink, infectious joy. Sometimes you are inundated by demands. You, too, seek explanations, reasons for things. You talk to yourself, in the voice of a parent or a friend. You talk to yourself without words. You, our reader, being the sort of linguistic body that you are, maybe have some passing or more than passing interest in philosophy, or another field like psychology, anthropology, religion studies. You have been told some of these things about yourself before. Since at least Aristotle, humans have been telling each other that they are special because they have language. Zoon logon ekhon and all that. Certain thinkers resist the possessive anthropocentric formulation; instead of saying humans have language, they say humans are in language. Yes, humans are animals that speak. Yes, language, as a system, as a history, as a practice, in its multiplicity, always precedes us. But we are saying something else. We are not approaching you as a member of a species. We are not appealing to the highest or outermost layer of skills by which you manifest your evolutionary stage. Nor are we trying to make contact with pure transcendence. We prefer not to assume you face tasks as a computational system does. We write to you as particular linguistic bodies addressing other particular linguistic bodies. We are trying to figure out how to begin, with you.

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We are asking ourselves what might have moved you to acquire and open this book. Of course, we can’t know the answer to that for certain. We have to go by what our work leads us to think about linguistic bodies in general, and what we can’t help but assume about the more specific subsets that you, as our reader, may fall into. What might we already say, at this early moment, about what linguistic bodies are? First, they are bodies. You are bodies. Yes, bodies. Organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective. As a linguistic body, which, as we’ll explain, exists as a process of navigating and blending social and personal orders, you bear a simultaneous relation of distancing and ongoing orientation toward your own sensorimotor and organic dimensions. You enact your bodies through a special kind of agency. As a linguistic body, you are made up of utterances and relations between utterances. Your linguistic agency consists in orchestrating and ordering these utterances. We will talk a lot more about utterances as the book goes on. They are acts. They are embodied, material patterns enacted by organic and sensorimotor bodies. They unfold in space and time. They have consequences. Unlike other acts, utterances have an inherently dialogic structure. This means that they orient and position people—speakers, hearers, characters—vis-à-vis one another and situations. Utterances engender recognition and interpretation. They are acts that demand, and create, participants. Like you. You have grown up in a milieu of utterances. (We presume to know this much about you, at least.) You have always worked at navigating them, at keeping your head above water, as it were. You individuated yourself out of waves of utterances flowing all around you. You still do. This is the paradox of being a linguistic body: you must make yourself out of others. For reasons we will develop, you are responsive to these special acts of other linguistic bodies. You yourself must act likewise. But also differently. In your own voice, your own style—the style that you have borrowed, bent, hammered together, or slowly absorbed. This is how your story as a linguistic body begins and ends: by incorporating utterances, making them part of your process of relating to and enacting the dimensions of your being as bodies, and by resisting the perpetual pull to incarnate others, to stray too far from the course that you are charting for yourself. There are billions of different ways to be a linguistic body. You have the one that you are figuring out, living out. We have realized in the course of writing this book that there is not much that we can say about how this ought to happen. The way that it does happen, inevitably, is that every

Making Introductions 

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body participates. We mean this in a couple of ways. Perhaps most basically, we start from the tenet of participatory sense-making, which explains how one’s cognition and meaning-making involve the activity of others. Other forms of sense-making, then, not just language, can be coauthored. We also mean that each of your bodies—your organic body, your sensorimotor body, your intersubjective body—is active and on scene, participating, whenever and wherever you go. This is not just a trivial (-seeming) issue of needing eyes to read, arms and legs to move, or a complex vocal apparatus to speak. The dynamic and intricate entanglement of adaptive, metabolic, physiological, emotional, and intercorporeal dimensions of bodily existence explains how and why things matter to us and generates many of the productive tensions that fuel our sense-making. So, participation of our bodies, and participation with others, is a given for linguistic bodies. Every body participates. What we want for linguistic bodies, what we think makes them thrive, is critical participation: selfconsciously choosing and actively questioning and changing the frames of discourse (i.e., the ways we constitute ourselves in utterances). This ethicsas-practice is realized in keeping ourselves open to our own unfinished becoming—in other words, in learning. We offer this work as an exercise in critical participation. For it to be so, we need you to be a part of it. We invite you to participate in the different styles, paces, and densities that follow as you trek a dynamic terrain alongside us. We invite you to incorporate some of what you find here. This means adapting your practice of linguistic agency, the flow of self-directed utterances by which you maintain your self, to accommodate some of our utterances. In taking them into your own frames and dialogues, you will change them. You will change yourself, and us. 1.2  The Continuity between Life and Language These are exciting times for the sciences of the mind. One of the reasons for this is the explosion of novel technologies, sophisticated models, and analytic tools that allow the study of bodies in action, increasingly outside the lab, in the real world of people, noises, street signs, moving traffic, and changing weather, at work, manipulating tools, making art, and engaging in live interactions. In theoretical and philosophical terms, this attention to bodies-in-action is evidenced by the dramatic increase of discussions, debates, publications, conferences, and research projects concerned with embodied cognition.

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But this turn toward the mind as embodied is not a novelty. Breakthroughs started around the mid-1980s with the parallel rise of behaviorbased robotics and cognitive linguistics. Historians of science may find this fact curious. It is as if each of these disciplines, concerned as they are with the two extremes that encompass all but the entire range of animal and human minds, were part of a strategic anti-Cartesian pincer movement. With hindsight, we may wonder if the simultaneous recuperation of the situated, dynamic body in areas as distant as insect behavior and metaphor use might not have been set in motion by a rejection of views that have run their course, a feeling that in order to study real minds, we must start looking for newer horizons. Three decades later, it is fair to wonder if we are in possession of a coherent way of thinking about minds in all their manifestations from an allencompassing embodied perspective. One reason why this is still an open question stems from skepticism about whether embodied theories can explain “higher” forms of human cognition such as language and thinking. Human mental activity (complex decision making, mathematics, planning, etc.) is supposed to only be approachable via representationalist theories of cognition. It is common to think that insofar as the lessons of embodiment teach us anything, it is that computational explanations of the mind must be constrained by paying attention to the human body—but no more than this. We find problems with this way of looking at things (we discuss them in the first part of the book, Bodies). It is true, however, that skeptical attitudes remain viable if no embodied theory attempts to go all the way, from sensorimotor coordination to language and other human cognitive skills, not to mention accounting for the normativity of ideal relations and symbolic thought. Our motivation in this book is to demonstrate that such an endeavor is possible. We want to show that embodied explanations can cover the distance between sensorimotor skills and language by providing a coherent, naturalistic, nonrepresentationalist framework from which specific proposals may be derived. But to show this, we must first recognize that the categorical gap between sensorimotor life and the life of language is not only big, but also largely uncharted. It is difficult, but not impossible, to look at theories of sensorimotor engagement as they are today and imagine how concepts like dynamics, couplings, coordination, environmental situatedness, affordances, and so on might be developed into ideas we can use to explain linguistic phenomena. Some important work has done precisely this, as we discuss later. But, to put it in plain terms, can we go from dynamic embodied processes to grounding ideas such as grammar,

Making Introductions 

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utterances, signs, symbols, etc.? There is a gap between these vocabularies. One of our goals is to fill in this gap. Cognitive linguistics, in the work of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Rafael Núñez, and others, has shown this is a distance worth thinking about—that there is much to be gained by taking embodiment seriously. Bodily constraints, processes, structures, habits, and relations to the world provide us with a rich set of phenomena and ideas that help us better explain, clarify, and extend the understanding of language and thought. We find this work inspiring. At the same time, we think that more is needed. In our opinion, a key to unlocking even further the potentialities of cognitive linguistics is to change the way we think about bodies. The rich, complex, and controversial idea of the body seems tacitly taken for granted in these debates. In particular, for much of cognitive linguistics, the body plays a role of universal constraint—something that explains widespread aspects of how we use and understand language, engendering the concise claim: language is embodied. We rather think that the best approach to begin to unfold the missing categories between bodies and language is to reverse this formula and to propose that human bodies are linguistic, that we are linguistic bodies. This formula, deliberately stated in the plural, sets us on a different path of inquiry, one pregnant with internal tensions. What can this possibly mean, that we are linguistic bodies? If it means bodies capable of using language, the phrase seems overblown. If it means that our bodies are the product of language, that idea just simply doesn’t ring true and seems to flirt with some kind of antinaturalism or mind-body dualism. Perhaps the difficulty is that bodies are not taken seriously enough. They are either impoverished (reduced to factual structures and constraints), or mystified. Either way, real, concrete bodies fail to be properly theorized by the sciences of the mind. Research on embodied cognition often takes the form of bringing some hitherto neglected aspect of the human body into otherwise traditional computational explanations of the mind, and looking at the body empirically, as a source of constraints and reality checks. Sometimes the factual body, with its inherent temporalities, anatomy, and neurophysiology, can inspire novel explanations, but these largely remain computational and representational in kind. This way of using the body in cognitive science seems not meant to question the frame of assumptions that guide its explanations. In part, the reason for this state of affairs is that we have not done enough to question what bodies are. What do we know about them and how should we treat this received knowledge? Perhaps it is not possible to

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pick and choose isolated aspects of real bodies in an abstract manner to fit our explanatory preferences. Bodies are inherently complex, convoluted, in flux, of-a-piece, and self-contradictory. In selecting one aspect out of a living body we can hardly avoid pulling the threads to many others, so that we are ultimately compelled to take the entire creature into account, with its relations to the world and its history. In this, bodies seem quite different from machines. We need to elucidate these intricacies, using principles that can orient us toward a better understanding. We have to let bodies tell us their story. We need a theory of bodies. This need has driven traditions like phenomenology and pragmatism, and we can find guidance and inspiration in the work of thinkers such as John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mark Johnson, Maxine SheetsJohnstone, Eugene Gendlin, Richard Shusterman, and others. The enactive approach is a research endeavor that can answer this need for a theory of bodies. Proponents of enactive perspectives, such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, and others, put forward the idea that there is a deep continuity between life and mind, a postulate in resonance with the work of thinkers such as Hans Jonas and Helmuth Plessner. Living bodies in action, for these thinkers, realize this continuity. The explanatory principles that help us study the organization of life are continuous with those that help us understand the mind, without reducing the latter to the former. The continuity between life and mind is a guiding statement for a nonreductive naturalism that takes our experience as concrete human beings seriously, without dualisms. Our mission is to extend and go deeper into this continuity, rooting it more firmly in the concreteness of material and social relations, revealing new categories when needed, unraveling the complexity and interdependence in enactive concepts that we have so far treated as solid and selfstanding. In this way, our goal is to contribute to a theory of bodies, in particular, providing the elements that will allow us to say what linguistic bodies are. 1.3  This Book Is about Bodies (and Also about Language) The thing about bodies: we cannot separate what they are from what they do. Bodies are animated by flows of matter, open-ended, innumerable relational possibilities, potentialities, and virtualities. They also have points of view, commitments, personal experiences, joys, grievances, life projects. They change the world they live in. Bodies make history together.

Making Introductions 

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To do justice to this complexity, we spend the first part of the book theorizing about bodies. We recapitulate the main developments of enaction and find newer roots and implications. In the second and third parts of the book, we look at bodies of a particular kind, and we develop the concept of linguistic bodies as a form of embodiment that redefines the games bodies play. We cannot be satisfied with intuitive notions about bodies, vaguely comprising their organic, physiological, and anatomical aspects and boundaries. Bodies are better conceived as processes, practices, and networks of relations; they have more in common with hurricanes than with statues. A critical discussion of what they are should also be guided by their experiential dimension, meaning both what we learn from phenomenology and what we know about the efforts, labor, pains, and joys of concrete practices. To cover this ground in detail we introduce concepts such as autonomy, adaptivity, sense-making, agency, and participatory sense-making, setting up the required technical vocabulary for the rest of the book. Looking at this conjunction of ideas along the organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective dimensions of bodies, we can better see real bodies in all their struggles and contradictions. Elaborating current theory, we establish crisper connections to lines of thought less commonly associated with enactive approaches such as the ontology of individuation in the work of Gilbert Simondon. As a result of this exercise, we will learn to see bodies as multiples, as plural products of history, as invested in a world they care about, and giving flesh to myriad viable forms of life. The universal human body does not exist; we should begin to phase it out of our theories. In this, we depart from previous work that has used bodies as universal templates for explaining the mind. Bodies are unfinished, always becoming. Linguistic bodies, particularly so. They are always constituting themselves through their activities in linguistic communities. For this reason, we will pursue a constitutive approach to language, conceiving it not simply as a set of sophisticated skills for communication, expression, and so on, but as defining of humanness. Alongside this constitutive view, we adopt the perspective that language is not a static entity, manifested as a set of rules, vocabularies, nor even a series of communication events. Language is a living stream of activity in the sociomaterial world of practices and history. Language is a field of struggle, transformation, criticism, of human enaction. A guiding assumption is that the problem of understanding language is the problem of explicating the co-emergence of certain patterns of social organization and certain forms of embodied agency. This assumption

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compels us to put our magnifying glass on social interactions—the locus where these different orders of magnitude meet—not because all linguistic phenomena necessarily occur in them, but because it is there that we will find linguistic bodies concretely engaging the living streams of language. Our approach to intersubjectivity, therefore, is both embodied and interactive. In this, it differs from purely subjective-focused approaches that concentrate sociality within individual mental attitudes such as empathy or shared intentional states. To us, interactive situations present a richer, more complex set of possibilities out of which trust, empathy, and mutual recognition can emerge (as can their opposites and troubles). There is no primacy of the first person in the plural, a fundamental we-ness that we somehow carry with us from birth. This is a dangerous reduction of the social to a strictly subjectivist perspective. We associate it with a tendency to qualify attributes of the mind (like attention, perception, action, emotion, intentionality) with terms like shared, joint, mutual, collective, or the prefix co-. We think this is a symptom of not truly embracing the social and material dimensions of our bodies. The key to our sociality is not in our heads or in our genes, but out there in the world. Putting these ideas together, we spend the book’s central part, Linguistic Bodies, elaborating the categories we need to describe linguistic bodies from an enactive perspective. After looking at the various relations between existing enactive concepts, we extend them to be able to describe how linguistic bodies are constituted. In this way, we hope to demonstrate that for human beings, the continuity between life and mind is in fact a continuity between life and language. This state of affairs, and the goals of this book, are schematically represented in figure 1.1.

Autonomy

Agency

Sensorimotor agency

Adaptivity

Sense-making

Social interaction

Participatory sense-making

Linguistic bodies

Figure 1.1 The continuity between life and language. A depiction of key, mutually relating enactive concepts spanning the organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective dimensions of embodiment. Our task is to contribute to the development of the missing categories (circles) toward the right end of the figure.

Making Introductions 

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Our approach to continuity is not about reducing language to a way of interacting; neither is it a deflationary strategy. We introduce a dialectical method that will precisely show that it is possible to construct new categories out of previous ones without deflating or reducing language. Starting from the general and relatively abstract situation of embodied agents acting and making sense together during social interactions, we will see how each move toward a concept of linguistic agency in turn affects and even redefines the previous moves (something we attempt to convey by the open arcs in the figure). From this starting point, we build a model that takes us from sensemaking and social interactions to more sophisticated kinds of social agency, eventually to dialogues, interpersonal recognition, social selfcontrol, and the braiding of utterance flows. We will see that our linguistic agency is a particular form of autonomous becoming, with powers and sensitivities to the linguistic actions of others, past, present, and future. We will also discuss how a realm of ideality emerges from embodied and linguistic practices, one with its own grounded normativity. In all these developments, the tensions that start with our initial dialectical situation undergo changes and become differentially expressed, but they never entirely disappear. As a consequence, linguistic bodies remain unfinished, always becoming, even in adulthood, and navigating a sea of meaning-engendering and person-constituting utterances and relations, not all produced by them. Linguistic bodies are self-contradictory, social products and personal achievements, sustaining displaced relations to themselves, committing to choices and abiding in potentiality, coupling flows of self- and other-directed utterances. In the last part of this book, Living as Linguistic Bodies, we apply the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, and autism. We also look at phenomena in language “as we know it,” including grammar, symbolizing, gesturing, and reading and writing. And finally, we explore some of the ethical aspects directly entailed by the concept of linguistic bodies. In a chapter on becoming linguistic bodies, we see that language development is not about acquiring certain skills but about being immersed in interactions. As much as babies and toddlers and children work to become linguistic bodies, they are always participants in linguistic engagements. By means of projections and completions, their acts are lifted by the whirlwind of messy real-life interactions, becoming in the process coauthored linguistic acts. Conversely, parents also become different linguistic bodies by participating in these same engagements. With this perspective, we can

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rethink what goes on in autistic linguistic bodies and their surroundings. We provide hypotheses that may help us understand different kinds of linguistic agencies and their asymmetric relations in real interactions. We can also learn to see language “as we know it” from a different perspective, as complex processes of sedimentation and spontaneity that must be enacted in each case, rather than followed as rules. Symbols are joint enactments that project new trajectories for collaborative sense-making. We can even see the acts of writing and reading texts as forms of participatory engagements, where our constitution as flows of utterances affords opening up to a text or narrator. We do not end the book at this point, with broad enactive accounts of symbols or grammar, because we don’t think this is only an academic exercise. We are, by approaching language as a living stream of material activities and agencies, compelled to consider linguistic bodies in their full, ethical being and becoming. Living bodies bring forth their shared worlds of significance and material relations, whether as individual organisms, as groups and communities, as niche-constructing populations, or as part of evolving ecosystems and geosystems. It is only with the appearance of the critical and person-constituting powers of linguistic bodies that questions of what kinds of worlds we are building, for whom, and under what constraints and possibilities, first become issues in the history of life. For this reason, linguistic agency is always a form of ethical agency. Out of the perpetual tension that defines the mode of existence of linguistic bodies, we are compelled to make choices, and we have the potential to exercise critical capabilities because we collectively participate in language.

I Bodies

2  Living Bodies Chapter Living

2 Bodies

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2.1  What Kind of Bodies? Our first task is to clarify various conceptions of embodiment to help us articulate the idea of linguistic bodies. What kind of body concept should we consider relevant for language? The first obvious candidate would be the biological body as a product of evolution. This body is often abstracted as a functional, universal body: what seems relevant about it is the emergence, development, and good functioning of the right parts for language to work (brain regions, speech and hearing apparatuses, facial and gestural expressivity, etc.). There is, in contrast, a notion of situated whole bodies, structured anatomically and habitually into recognizable patterns of action, which in turn influence the sort of linguistic behavior they are capable of. This notion of the situated body in action, represented for instance by cognitive linguistics, goes beyond the cognitivist focus on functional organs, but shares its functionalist premises: how the general, universal body works helps us understand how language works. Then there is the phenomenological body, which breaks free from the exclusively functionalist domain. Here we have a speaking/spoken-to body that lives through the experience of language as enmeshing the lifeworld. The phenomenological body experiences others and exists in a world of desires, suspicions, caring, envy, love, (dis)trust, respect, authority, and mutual gazing. Despite claims regarding the intersubjective constitution of human experience, many phenomenological analyses are limited in that they remain focused on the individual subject, positioned center stage and intentionally confronting her world, and not as a material and living part of it, a part that can be rained on, bitten by insects, pushed and shoved by a crowd, loved and educated by others, or sent to prison, a body whose intentional arc can easily be thwarted by a slippery wet floor.

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Cultural psychology, in contrast, sees bodies as active, as doing things together in the world with a view of language to match this activity, not merely in terms of communication but as structuring practices, thought, rituals, places, and institutions. This is a properly social conception of embodiment as powers, which, through development, pass on from social practices to an individual via the incorporation of skills and in turn flow back into social practices. Moreover, this notion of embodiment has the advantage of coupling the history of living, developing individuals and the history of their sociocultural-historical-material embedding. This is also true of several criticisms coming from feminist and gender studies. Human bodies are no longer universal blueprints, whose very universality is their strong theoretical suit (as in cognitive linguistics), but they are historical, gendered, stylized, politicized, with varying forms of ableness, powers, and sensitivities. Yet, insofar as they are actual living material bodies, subject to disease, compelled to work for a living, to eat, breathe, sweat, feel pain, and give birth, these bodies also escape the abstract textualization within which different postmodernist and poststructuralist accounts have tried to contain them. So, again, what kind of body? How should we make sense of these different perspectives? We may start by acknowledging that there is something true and useful in each conception of the body, even the functionalist view of body parts, which as a whole sharply contrasts with our own enactive views. But selectively picking what is relatively true to each view will only lead us to a feeble pluralism lacking a theoretical core. We need a theoretical articulation that can lead from an understanding of the interconnections and contradictions awaiting resolution between the different types of embodiment, to a concept of linguistic bodies. In hopes of providing just such a core, in this chapter we focus on the notion of embodiment in cognitive science as it has developed over the last few decades and particularly on an enactive conception of the continuity between life and mind. We expand on these ideas in the two chapters that follow. Much of the vocabulary that we need for the other parts of this book is introduced in these chapters. The conceptual articulation needed to describe basic forms of embodiment provides us with tools to express the interrelations between several often disconnected notions of human bodies, from the materiality of metabolism, to the life of sensorimotor animate agents, to bodies as shaped by a field of intersubjective relations and a world of social practice, norms, and institutions. This conceptual toolkit—in particular, the enactive concepts of autonomy, sense-making, agency, sensitivity, mastery, social interaction,

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and participatory sense-making—will help us establish links between otherwise seemingly incommensurate conceptions of human bodies. 2.2  Reframing the Sciences of the Mind A resilient picture animates scientific and philosophical thinking about the mind (and implicitly about bodies). To know anything about the world— this picture tells us—a cognitive agent must acquire, evaluate, and manipulate an effective inner rendering of the world. Filtered through the senses and imperfectly constructed out of ambiguous information, this rendering should be sufficiently useful to allow the agent to act and to survive. Affect and cognition, the mind and meaningful experience, all belong strictly to the inner realm of the individual agent. Her environmental situation, her own activities, her social world, all must somehow find suitable delegates within her inner realm if she is to truly know them and be able to choose an appropriate course of action according to her desires and beliefs. What goes on outside this inner realm are manifestations, imperfect, optional traces of this inner life; they betray the presence of a mind, at most facilitating or expressing its activity, but in this way of thinking they do not constitute it. This picture and its implications, discussed by Charles Taylor (2005), is shared by those working after the cognitivist revolution of the 1950s and by the behaviorists they sought to overthrow. The latter accepted external manifestations as the only part of the mind accessible to scientific inquiry and were happy to forgo any hope of studying meaning or subjectivity. For cognitivists, instead, the sciences of the mind must explain how the passage from the outside to the inside takes place and what goes on within the agent—typically in her brain—once she is in possession of a reliable inner semblance of the world; whether this takes the form of a mental image, a physical symbol, or a probabilistic model, it does not really alter the overall picture. It is as if things must be seen in the mind’s eye first and to do so, these semblances must be subjected to some sort of processing, typically inferential, logical, or formal in kind, so that once translated in this way they can be appreciated by an inner agency. Within such an epistemic frame, cleanly separating the inner realm where cognition occurs from the outer realm where the agent must act, it is legitimate to ask functional questions such as how the passage between realms is achieved and how particular cognitive processes operate in the inner realm. In short, these are predominantly questions about the way the mind works, not so much about what it is.

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Much has been said about why this picture is unsatisfactory, how it puts too much emphasis on intellectual, problem-oriented, and individual aspects of mental life and how it perpetuates a dualistic way of thinking that it is supposed to overcome. Yet even those openly critical of it can find it difficult to shake off its influence. What started out as a hypothesis that could allow for a way of transcending the self-imposed limitations of behaviorism, in other words, as a theoretical possibility whose benefits must be tested (e.g., Craik 1943), eventually evolved into a tacitly accepted characterization of the mind, a definition of the object of research. Jerome Bruner (1990) lamented that the study of meaning soon turned into the study of how agents process information within a cognitive architecture, first as a methodological option, later by definition. In this way, for many today, working within a functionalist framework is less a matter of selecting a methodology suitable to a particular problem than a logical necessity. Not to do it is not merely a poor choice, it is just wrongheaded since cognition is that natural phenomenon that can only be studied in this way. The influence of this framing is pervasive; it lives in the language researchers use. Consider how possible alternative answers to a concrete question are circumscribed by this way of thinking. For example, in a study on language, intentions, and interactions we read: “The recording of spontaneous interactions provides us with an opportunity to examine whether participants make inferences about what others are thinking, feeling, and wishing or, instead, resist making such inferences” (Duranti 2015, 180). The alternative to making inferences about the mental states of others during spontaneous interaction is not simply not making inferences, but rather inhibiting oneself from making them, actively resisting them, as if in their natural state our brains were wild computers ready to engage in calculations by default, come what may. In this way, the epistemic frame remains untouched by experimental observations that could otherwise be used to examine it. The question “If participants do not make inferences, what else could be going on?” is not given a proper shot. If we accept that this situation is undesirable—even for those who support the functionalist approach since, one would imagine, it is preferable to justify a theoretical choice as better compared to its alternatives, rather than choosing it by default—then we need to reframe the way we approach the study of the mind. A likely candidate emerges from a persistent line of criticism that foregrounds the role of embodiment in cognition. Putting real bodies center stage invites us to rethink how the inner and outer realms are linked, even defined, or whether they exist at all. At least such has been the expectation generated by research on embodied cognition:

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that it would provide a view of the mind not as the detached manipulation of information traveling from the outside into the inside of an agent but as the actions of engaged, living, material bodies situated in the concrete, historical, and social world. Yet even embodied perspectives, buttressed by a wealth of empirical evidence and by innovative theoretical proposals, often find themselves absorbed within the functionalist epistemic frame. They do not usually pose frame-changing questions. Insofar as they do, for instance, by showing widespread examples of sophisticated performances explainable, say, in terms of couplings between body and world, as synergistic coordination patterns and skillful engagements rather than as instances of information processing, these performances are deemed less than properly cognitive. The fact that these are often better explanations, not just possible alternatives to cognitivist explanations, is thus rendered of little relevance again by appealing to the circular logic of the functionalist epistemic frame. If they are not instances of subpersonal information processing, they are not cognitive. At most, they are supportive of properly cognitive engagements, and in important ways they can constrain them. This is the stance of embodied functionalism: the situated body helps in the realization of cognitive work, by facilitating or performing computations, formatting representations in the brain, or manipulating the environment to simplify a computational task (Kiverstein 2012). A good part of embodied cognitive science these days belongs to this renovated school of functionalism. The missed opportunity to question the epistemic frame of cognitive science has been lamented by Shaun Gallagher, who compares the situation to the invasion of the body snatchers (Gallagher 2015a; see also Gallagher 2017). Enter the enactive approach, a perspective that feeds substantially on “embodied” critiques of traditional cognitive science but seeks to construct an alternative framework, one that is more open to scrutiny. The very picture of the mind as world reconstruction is the motivating contrast against which the first systematic expression of enactive ideas was articulated in 1991 by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch with the publication of The Embodied Mind. World reconstruction, according to the authors, is a poor description of what living, embodied agents predominantly do. On the contrary, organisms, as self-organized, precarious autonomous systems, bring forth a world by enacting a history of couplings with their environment and with others. To bring forth a world means to enact dimensions of meaning and significance through the living body in action and through multiple kinds of physiological, sensorimotor, and

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interpersonal couplings. The mind is what occurs in these enactments and not what goes on in the head. Enactive theory has seen active developments since the publication of The Embodied Mind, branching into various areas of application in psychology, psychotherapy, neuroscience, social science, artificial intelligence, situated computing, and robotics.1 In the following sections, we discuss some of the main enactive ideas and notice in what ways they question the functionalist framing of the mind and help us in our goals of understanding bodies as processual, relational, and situated. We will limit ourselves in this and the next two chapters to clarifying what enactivists mean when they speak of bodies and how this concept leads to the formulation of questions beyond the functionalist frame, questions about the nature of meaning, agency, and autonomy, and questions about the role played by patterns of social participation in shaping and constituting our being and doing in the world. This will lay down the building blocks for the approach to linguistic bodies we will take in this book. 2.3  Two Senses of Embodiment In the context of cognitive science,2 it became clear in the 1980s that a lack of appreciation of how bodies actually operate was holding back research. This was the beginning of the embodied turn. In robotics, the design of sensors and effectors enabling suitable sensorimotor loops proved that an understanding of the dynamics and situatedness of moving bodies paved the road toward robust behavior in real-world environments, rather than the heavy logical programming of the 1970s.3 In the then incipient field of human-computer interaction, it became apparent that for a computer program to interact intelligently with a user, a deeper appreciation of timing, interactive patterns, context, and embodied relations was needed, since these directly affect personal experience.4 Around the same time, researchers in cognitive linguistics openly recognized the influence of bodily habits, movements, and constraints on the construction and use of metaphors, linguistic structures and motifs, and mathematical concepts.5 These developments generated copious debates. In the 1990s, progress in processing power and nature-inspired computation (e.g., genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, neural networks) opened up a new set of conceptual possibilities by permitting the design and study of sensorimotor flows in actual and simulated robots. This research often questioned accepted wisdom and a different picture of cognition as intrinsically embodied began to emerge in convergence with dynamical6 and situated

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perspectives in neuroscience, neurobehavioral studies of coordination, developmental psychology, and cognitive anthropology.7 Cognition was less about maintaining and manipulating internal representations and more about engaging in complex, multi-timescale couplings involving the dynamics of world, body, and brain.8 How should these and related developments be interpreted as a whole? In many cases it is clear that postulating the right kind of bodily structures, sensitivities, and capabilities leads to viable, often preferable, explanations of cognitive phenomena by providing new sources of causal support. Bodies enrich the spectrum of explanatory possibilities. Brains could be freed from having to perform overly complex calculations because bodily processes made them unnecessary. Embodied functionalism maintains that this is the main contribution of the embodied turn: bodies and bodily engagement with the social and material environment support neural computations and sometimes even replace them by instantiating them outside the skull.9 Taken case by case, there is nothing wrong with this explanatory strategy and there is indeed much to be learned from studying how bodies are causally involved in cognitive processes. Taken as a whole, the view forces us, as we have said, to accept that this is all there is to embodiment: a larger causal structure for building functionalist explanations. The framing of a commerce between an inner and an outer realm remains untouched by this interpretation. The “inner” may now include extraneural processes in the body, and even their extension in extrabodily support. For the enactive approach, in contrast, the embodied turn offers an opportunity to bring together various strands of criticism of the functionalist/ computational paradigm. But in addition, enactive ideas also permit theorizing about concrete bodies, bodies that live and labor, suffering bodies, subject to disease, pains, and joys, and that must attend to constitutive needs for food, shelter, sex, relating to others, and so on. With equal footing in complex systems thinking in biology and neuroscience, on the one hand, and existential and phenomenological traditions, on the other, enactivists propose a different set of guiding metaphors. Rather than picturing minds and bodies as machines, without any explicit principle of individuation other than external ascriptions of identity by convention, the enactive approach thinks in terms of situated, precarious networks of material circular processes. Traditional distinctions (body/ mind, agent/environment, subject/object, self/other, inner/outer, etc.) emerge from these networks not as dichotomous gulfs but as codefining, cooriginating, codeveloping pairs, intimately linked, yet differentiated.

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A new opportunity arises to return to key neglected questions. What is an agent? How is it constituted as such out of a network of material relations, as having a perspective, as being the center of activity in the world, as having a life story? What changes and what is conserved in the history of relations between a developing agent and its world (including other agents)? Why is life subjectively experienced as a field of cares, of meanings, and of concerns? And what kind of processes and events are implied by such experiences? If cognitive science is not to patently disregard its subject matter, there is a pressing need to answer such questions. The logic of the machine is impervious to this need. The enactive perspective proposes a different logic in which living bodies are more concrete than machines. They are more deeply rooted in active materiality,10 less stationary in their dynamics, and less restricted to functioning in prespecified ways. Bodies also develop in deeply contingent ways, such that to be embodied is always already to be different from other bodies. Bodily processes operate and self-organize historically, rather than function. Only in stationary conditions may they momentarily resemble machines, with approximately well-defined functional aims. Otherwise, living bodies undergo transits between metastable conditions, between engagements with the world, between meaningful concerns or microworlds. We go from activities such as cooking to activities such as commuting to work or answering a phone call. Even when involved in a clearly defined task, say preparing a meal in the kitchen, an embodied agent is always open to new possibilities, to unforeseen solicitations and serendipitous or creative deviations. A living body is always already virtually transiting into other activities. Machines are specifically conceived not to be like this; they serve clearly defined, externally given purposes instead. If performing multiple functions, machines can often transit from one to the next without inertia. Bodies resemble machines only as an exception. To think of bodies and minds as machines is like approaching the study of ellipses through the special case of the circle, or the nature of motion through the special case of a particle at rest. The key insight of the enactive approach is to conceive of mental life as the ongoing meaningful engagement between precariously constituted embodied agents and the worlds of significance they bring forth in their self-asserting activity. Life has no guarantees; it is unceasing individuation: production and distinction. Put differently, the dilemmas of existing as a living organism are the dilemmas of regulating constitutive and relational processes according to norms and meanings that connect, in a circular

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manner, with the organism itself as a concrete, fragile assembly of selfsustaining material flows and as a historically embedded form of life. These are quite compressed statements that we will unfold in the following sections. But they already entail important differences when compared with the functionalist framing of the mind sciences. In particular, enactivists look for answers to key questions such as what makes a system cognitive, what makes it an agent, etc., not in the nature of an informational commerce between conventional inner/outer boundaries but in terms of interactions between processes that constitute the agent (including its shifting boundaries) and processes that regulate coupling to other systems. Existence as an agent is unwarranted and so, precisely for this reason, events are meaningful for the agent itself, who has a stake in them and must engage the world so as to stave off its own dissolution as a form of life (by which we mean as a living organism, but also as the historically situated form of life it embodies, as an animal, a person, a social actor, and so on). Meaning is therefore a result of acting in the world as a body. It is constituted enactively, being posited and justified by doings, moves, and changes in the world according to how they are evaluated from the perspective of precarious self-constitution. In this picture, mental activity is essentially circular and not a question of matching an external situation to internal representations. Meaningful acts both constitute and affirm the precarious existence of the agent who performs them; each act emerges from and is oriented toward a mode of being in the world different from other modes of existence, such as that of the machine. Cognition is not about transposing a world of predefined significance into the inside of an agent. It is about agents moving within the world and singly or collectively changing it in ways that are significant according to the forms of life they enact. To start discussing these ideas, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991, 206) describe enaction—the bringing forth of worlds of significance—as operating through multiple levels of interconnected networks. Originally, these networks were mainly conceived of as sensorimotor (i.e., as processes of agent-environment coupling mediated by cycles of codefined sensor and motor activities and neural dynamics). Sensorimotor networks, however, are not separated from other processes, in particular those that constitute the organism as a living being (metabolic networks, immune networks, etc.) and those formed out of sustained relations with other agents. These links are not incidental, nor merely causal. In later work Thompson and Varela (2001, 424) describe these networks more explicitly as “the ‘cycles of operation’ that constitute the agent’s life.” Three dimensions of operation are distinguished in the case of humans and higher primates. These

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dimensions are characterized by complex circular causality within each of them and complex interactions between them. The first dimension (which we discuss next) comprises the cycles of regulation that sustain the entire body as a living organism. The second dimension (discussed in chapter 3) comprises cycles of sensorimotor coupling between the whole organism and environmental processes such as those involved in action, perception, and emotion. And the third dimension (discussed in chapter 4, and further elaborated in the rest of the book) comprises cycles of intersubjectivity. We now draw on these cycles to explain the kind of bodies enactive theory targets. As we will see in part II, these key aspects of embodiment both afford and undergo radical transformation in the case of linguistic bodies. 2.4  From Self-Individuation to Meaning 2.4.1  Living as Caring In daily life, in conjunction with the routines we set in motion, the people we meet, the events we perceive, in conjunction with the world as it presents itself to us, there is always the experience of our bodily presence in the world. We see ourselves as centers of activities and perspectives and our bodies as the bearers of sensitivities and powers with which we attune to a world that surrounds us and that we care about. There is, in other words, an experience of being-in-the-world, which is at the same time an experience of our bodies. The experience of existing as embodied creatures can take different forms, often difficult to disentangle without some method to help us grasp its structure. All these experiential forms are, however, underscored by a constant conjunction that none of them can escape: they are always simultaneously experiences of our bodies and experiences of our world involvement. Moreover, the basic relation in this conjunction is a relation of caring, concern, meaning, sense, or value, whichever term is more appropriate depending on the particular experience we are considering—a relation of investment in a situation, its history, and its possible outcomes. Basic forms of self-affection, of how bodies are present to themselves and move themselves, reveal some of our most fundamental relations to the world. We feel hunger and thirst; we can feel energetic or exhausted; while breathing we feel one of several rhythms of tension and release that populate our bodies. We can sometimes feel sick and weak, disconnected from our world, in dire need or uncontrollable excess. To understand the basic phenomenality of living bodies, we must understand their operation at its most fundamental, what they are and their hold

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on the world. Organisms actively and continuously produce a distinction between themselves and their environment where none existed before they appeared and where none will remain after they are gone. They achieve this through an ongoing process of self-individuation. The relations between self-individuating bodies and their world are the substance from which everything mental emerges—the dynamic matter of the mind. Thus, mental phenomena do not belong to a realm separate from materiality, but are rooted in the concrete relations between organisms and the worlds they inhabit and transform. Organisms are unfinished, historical, processual entities. They partake individually and collectively of flows of active matter and energy and of operational and historical transformation, production, and destruction of processes in the world. They are part of the world as well as being in the world. This conception of life and mind owes much to thinkers who, in their different ways and for different motives, sought to articulate alternatives to the dualistic thinking that has dominated Western philosophy since Descartes. We find it in Hegel’s concept of life, according to which the Kantian account of living bodies as self-organized natural purposes is interpreted not as a regulative principle (an epistemological shortcut), but as the embodiment of self-contradiction (Michelini 2012; see also Kreines 2008; Pinkard 2012). The needs and desires of an organism form an indivisible whole with its identity, making living bodies inextricably bound up with what they lack or have in excess to sustain themselves. This view is reminiscent of Gilbert Simondon’s account of individuation in organisms as an unfinished process of transduction from metastable matter, rich in potentialities, to more organized active matter that keeps individuation going in search of new sources of metastability and potentiality (Simondon 2005). Again, similar ideas are evoked by Hans Jonas’s description of metabolism as bearing a relation of needful freedom to its material configurations, on which it depends, but to the fate of which it is not attached thanks to ongoing transformation afforded by new flows of matter, energy, and interactions (Jonas 1966, 1968). New concepts and new vocabularies are required to unpack this conception of life in scientific terms. At its core is the enactive concept of autonomy. 2.4.2 Autonomy The key attribute of bodies qua living is their self-individuation—that is, the process by which they make themselves distinct from their immediate surroundings. This ongoing process occurs under precarious conditions

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(i.e., without guarantees), and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, in conditions where fluctuations can be unpredictably amplified, events resonate at multiple timescales, and complex spatiotemporal patterns emerge and become sustained over long periods. Self-individuation establishes an important difference between living bodies and other objects of study in science that are typically “individuated” by observers following some convention. Criteria for choosing what to call a system can include aspects of convenience, the applicability of technical tools, perceptual biases, stability under the timescale of observation, or just tacit conventions within a research tradition. This also applies to organic bodies as objects of study: depending on the interest, they can be characterized in terms of anatomical structures or physiology, or as bundles of sensors, effectors, and neuromuscular tissues. In contrast, self-individuation is explained through the idea of autonomy. This is a technical concept in the enactive approach, and its connections to other uses of this term (e.g., personal autonomy) are complex in that the technical definition can refer to different phenomena depending on the dimension of embodiment we are considering. At the level of material selfindividuation, the concept of autonomy applies to biochemical processes. At other levels, as we see in chapters 3 and 4, the same technical concept is applied to other phenomena. Autonomy was initially conceived as a generalization of autopoiesis (Varela 1979). According to this idea living systems are a set of biochemical processes of material and energetic exchanges and transformations, which is organized as a network of mutually enabling relations. As the result, the organization is sustained over time through the operation of its constitutive processes (self-production) and a concrete unity is constituted in the spatial domain (self-distinction). The concept of autopoiesis describes the formal relations of flows of matter and energy by which Jonas characterized metabolism as well as the process of self-individuation related by Simondon (although see DiFrisco 2014). Autopoiesis is an example of another formal concept: operational closure (Di Paolo and Thompson 2014). The idea that some kind of closure characterizes the organization of living systems was intuitively described by Kant, as we have mentioned, and later elaborated by Hegel, who combined it with Aristotelian elements (e.g., the notion of privation). Organisms are natural purposes, whose teleology is immanent: they follow purposes and norms that are their own. The relations between parts and whole in an organism are circular means-end relations, relations of closure. The individual parts of a tree, its roots, branches, and leaves, depend not only on the whole but

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on each other for their ongoing generation and regeneration. They form a network of mutually enabling dependencies. Similar ideas of circularity or closure of inner dependencies inform other abstract approaches to describing living systems (Gánti 2003; Rosen 1991; see Moreno and Mossio 2015 for further discussion). Varela (1979) expanded the idea of autonomy beyond autopoiesis, seeing it as the same relation of closure in the operation of processes, but applicable not only to biochemical transformations. He argued that a similar organizational logic was at play, for example, in the animal’s immune and nervous systems, and he hinted at the application of the concept of autonomy beyond living systems, for instance to communication networks. In a way, he was already suggesting that different self-individuating or selfenabling networks of processes can intersect in a single organism. Since we will use the concept of autonomy throughout the book let us provide a technical definition (see figure 2.1). An autonomous system is defined as an operationally closed and precarious system. This means that among the conditions enabling the operation of any constituent process in the system (a black circle in the figure) there will always be one or more processes that also belong to the system. In addition, every process in the system is an enabling condition for at least one other constituent process, thus forming a closed network of enabling relations (black arrows) (Di  Paolo 2009). This means that all of the processes that make up the system are enabled by other processes in the system. In other words, no process in an autonomous system is freestanding and self-sufficient. This is what defines the network (some circles are painted black because they have incoming and outgoing arrows to other black circles). An observer in a laboratory only needs to determine if the topological arrangement between enabling relations holds or not in order to decide whether she is in the presence of an operationally closed system. Processes that do not belong to this network (external processes, represented as gray circles) can also enable processes within the network, but they remain external because they themselves do not depend for their operation on processes in the system (this is represented by the dashed arrows). Thus, for example, plants depend on sunlight because photosynthesis is enabled by its regular supply but the sun exists independently of plants. In the same way, external processes may rely for their operation on constituent processes in the system but do not themselves enable any of them and are therefore not part of the operationally closed network. The relation of closure obtains under precarious conditions. This means that, in the absence of the internal enabling relations,

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Figure 2.1 Operational closure. Schematic relation between processes (circles) forming an operationally closed network of enabling relations (black arrows and circles). Each black circle has enabling arrows coming in and going out that connect it to other black circles. Gray circles indicate processes that do not belong to the operationally closed network. Enabling relations may also exist between black and gray circles (dashed arrows). Those arrows either arrive at or come out of gray circles, but not both. The thin arrows represent enabling relations between external processes. While this is a rather static representation of closure, the concept of autonomy reminds us that these circles in fact represent precarious dynamic processes and the arrows may represent complex relations of intensity extended over many timescales. Copyright Ezequiel Di Paolo, 2013. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US.

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isolated constituent processes will tend to run down or extinguish in an otherwise equivalent physical situation. There are a few things to notice about this definition. One is that it describes a network of enabling relations, not just influences. Thus, any constitutive process in the autonomous system operates thanks to other constitutive processes as well as processes in the environment. And every constitutive process enables the operation of other processes in the autonomous system as well as other processes in its environment. Enabling relations can be complex and extended over various timescales. They could take the form of thresholds that should not be crossed (e.g., blood sugar levels in mammals), or deadlines that should be kept (the time we can go on living before dehydration becomes fatal), or continuous causal influences (blood circulation). In formal terms, there can be enabling relations between the autonomous system and its environment but these links are not circular. Within the autonomous system the enabling relations are circular. There can be, of course, other kinds of influences between autonomous system and environment apart from enabling ones. And sometimes, these other influences may be circular. In this picture, the boundaries between an autonomous system and its environment emerge not as a matter of convention but as a result of how an autonomous system is organized. We must acknowledge that, in this abstract formulation, this definition of autonomy lacks specificity, notably with respect to aspects of timescales and the nature of the processes involved. Concrete cases in biology would seemingly challenge, if not the spirit, at least the letter of this formal definition (which is a problem for a technical definition). Looking at some of these challenges can help us be precise about how the definition should be applied in concrete situations. For instance, operational closure in the case of single cells is often broadly described as the encapsulation of metabolic reactions in a semipermeable membrane. Due to the spatial containment and conditional transit of chemicals that the cellular membrane offers to the reactions going on inside the cell, their products do not diffuse freely into space and can be used for further reactions and catalysis. At the same time, chemicals that could stop or slow down metabolic reactions are kept outside the inner cellular space. Because the metabolic reactions produce elements that contribute to the repair of the membrane, and since both kinds of processes are precarious, we have a clear case of operational closure. The membrane confinement and selectivity are chemically enabled by metabolic reactions and the metabolic reactions are topologically enabled by the membrane. If

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these relations are broken, the autonomous, autopoietic system ceases to exist as such. But there is more to this story. For instance, the membrane of the cells of certain marine algae may be artificially destroyed. And yet the organelles in the cell’s interior organize themselves into a swirling pattern in a matter of minutes and form a provisional film of lipids that helps keep them together. Then they start generating the elements of a new membrane, which is fully in place after a few hours (Kim et al. 2001). This means that the above story about enabling relations must always be qualified in concrete terms as a network of conditions of intensity embedded in a temporal domain. Thus, we must understand these relations, not as involving static, once-and-for-all, conditions (process A enables process B), but as made up of complex temporal and intensity conditions such as speeds, deadlines, rhythms, timescales, thresholds, etc., as we have already suggested. One may also critique the notion that the environment may be so clearly distinguished from the autonomous system as the domain where enabling conditions (not general causal dependencies) flow in one direction or the other, but never circularly. There are many examples of “extended physiology” (Turner 2000) that seem to contradict this idea. Underwater breathing by insects and spiders is enabled by the trapping of small air bubbles in the hair of the abdomen. These bubbles function like external gills as the partial pressure of oxygen within the bubble, diminished by respiration, equilibrates with that of the water as the external oxygen flows in. Air bubbles are precarious physical processes; they are enabled by physiological/anatomical structures (the thin hairs that prevent them from collapsing). And they in turn enable physiological processes (respiration) in an environment where they could not happen otherwise. Technically, the bubbles should be part of the operationally closed network of the insect self-individuation. Depending on the context we may choose to describe this as an extended organism, or as an organism that temporarily incorporates an external process into its own constitution. In this way, the definition of autonomy requires and invites further precision as demanded by each concrete case in which we apply it. Other situations involving the active modifications of the environment by behavioral means may be even more challenging. Weddell seals in the Antarctic (Castellini et al. 1992) protect themselves from extreme weather conditions by swimming underwater for extended periods. In this environment, they also fish for food. But they must breathe, so they periodically resurface through a breathing hole. In winter, due to the freezing temperature and the accumulation of ice, the hole can rapidly reduce in

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size, so the seal spends a lot of time trimming the hole open with its teeth. A breathing hole is a precarious relational process enabled by the behavior of the seal, who in turn can subsist by finding food and protection underwater thanks to the maintenance of the breathing hole. Again, we find that technically, there is a relation of operational closure involving “environmental” processes as well as metabolic/physiological/behavioral ones. And again, depending on the explanatory aims, we may choose to consider the entire seal-breathing-hole system as operationally closed, or take the ensemble as a case of incorporation or perhaps better as an intimate form of niche construction (since the ensemble does not inherit the spatiality and mobility of the body, incorporation is an inaccurate term in this case). The choices are suggested by the concrete phenomena as well as our interest in them. These examples are useful and they will serve when the technical concept of autonomy is applied in other parts of this book. They indicate concrete ways in which we should shake off preconceptions about defining bodies purely by convention or tradition or as independent of how they relate to their environments. We use formal definitions as tools for thinking, not as ways of abstractly capturing once and for all the phenomena of interest in analytic fashion. As we can already see in these cases, the definition is helpful even, or especially, when it seems to be challenged by concrete situations. Concreteness guides us into making appropriate interpretations of the terms of the definition, or amending those terms, eventually even rejecting them if necessary. The interplay between the definition and concrete cases tracks the living concept of autonomy. At the same time, the definition is a tool to help the concept move. For this to work, we must always remain clear about our explanatory aims while being sensitive to the phenomenon itself. What the previous examples show is that we cannot divorce the notion of autonomy from complex relations involving time and intensity and linkages between various systems. The phrase “enabling relations” in the definition should therefore not be taken abstractly but understood as involving concrete material and temporal conditions. Precisely because the temporal dimension makes explicit the possibility of change, we must also acknowledge that, in changing, relations between organism and environment can become constitutive processes for one or the other. They can become incorporated. These changes can sometimes be reversible or they can be cumulative and lead to potentially irreversible transformations. To different extents, organisms are always historical.

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Historicity can be seen more clearly if we think of organisms as processes of development embedded within self-maintaining, or at least largely selfregulating, ecological conditions. Contextualizing the self-individuation of an organism both in time and in its larger embedding allows us to see that other self-maintaining cycles are realized in ways that intersect the logic of metabolism. As discussed by Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio (2015), through these larger self-maintaining cycles we can conceive of development and reproduction as processes that fit an organizational explanatory strategy. For this, we must look not only at the autonomy of the single living organism, but at its embedding in space and time. Reproduction can be understood as part of a time-extended self-maintaining process involving the organizational and material overlap between two generations of autonomous organisms. The process of reproduction may have originated in the early history of life in the logic of metabolism as a way of managing over time the unbalanced rates of production and decay or elimination of components. If decay rates are faster than production rates, metabolism grinds to a halt. But if production rates are faster, there may be a window of time before the growing cell bursts in which a division strategy may compensate the accumulated imbalance (simple versions of this idea have been investigated in formal and chemical models of protocells; see Hanczyc and Szostak 2004 and Zepik et al. 2001). Once reproduction is established as a strategy, the self-maintaining character of its larger organization is manifested in the appearance during development of processes that make sense not within the logic of a self-individuating body, but in the logic of the production of another body with a capability for its own self-individuation. Such processes include the compartmentalization and repair of genetic material and in complex organisms the differentiation of cells into somatic and germ lines, the rhythms of reproductive cycles, sexual behavior, parental care, and so on. In a similar move, looking at the autonomy of self-individuation at a larger scale, we can make sense of the contribution of organisms to other cycles of regulation. Ecosystems may also be considered as self-maintaining, self-organizing networks of relations between evolving populations and their overlapping milieus (e.g., Levin 2005; Solé and Bascompte 2006). They are constituted by regulated matter and energy cycles, flows through food webs, the management of spatial relations at different scales, and the interaction of multiple rhythms. Different processes that constitute ecosystems can be said to be constrained or enabled by larger cycles of regulation spanning populations of different species, physicochemical processes, geographic features, and so on, which can be interpreted as functionally linked

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to the system as a whole (Nunes-Neto et al. 2014). The bodies of organisms are “intersected” by the logic of these larger biogeochemical relational networks, for instance, via participation in trophic chains and processes of niche construction and ecological inheritance (Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Laland et al. 2016). These relations constrain the realization of metabolic and reproductive processes and present various changing trade-offs (interspecies competition and dispersal, parasitic vs. symbiotic interactions, etc.) that living bodies must constantly regulate. Eventually, through individual or evolutionary adaptations, persistent ecological relations become part of the conditions on which the developing organism depends. In the case of human beings about 10 to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells are harbored in each body, primarily in the gut, biofluids, and the skin. This number is estimated to be about the same or even a few times higher than the amount of (genetically) human cells in the body. These colonies form the microbiota that permit and regulate many biological functions but that can also lead to various kinds of disorders (Cho and Blaser 2012). The autonomy of concrete living bodies is therefore constituted through multiple loops of closure at different scales, often involving the interaction between different species (Bosch and McFall-Ngai 2011). The development of living bodies in this complex, shifting context must be appreciated as a process necessitating multiple resources (genetic, environmental, energetic, material, spatial, interactions within and between communities and species, social and parental care, etc.), none of which is in full control (Oyama 2000; Oyama et al. 2001) but all of which relate through the logic of autonomous self-individuation. There is therefore an intimate connection between a developing body and its associated milieu, a relation of mutual definition and historical codetermination (Levins and Lewontin 1985). Such intricate intersections between the autonomy of metabolic self-individuation and other self-maintaining organizations (reproductive cycles, symbiosis, ecosystems) will in general involve precarious balances and ongoing regulations of conflicts: parent-offspring conflicts, conflicts between coevolving species. The stages (sometimes the battlegrounds) of such conflicts are developing bodies and their codefined milieus. What we want to highlight, apart from the fact that there is nothing simple about the idea of living bodies, is our use of formal definitions, such as the definition of autonomy. The possibility of holding on to a definition allows us to refine its interpretation through systematic confrontation with the complexities of concrete living bodies. It is a good sign that the definition of autonomy is able to move in this way from the abstract to

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the concrete, from a formal condition of operational closure as depicted in figure 2.1 to its applications to particular cases, gaining significance in the process. 2.4.3  Sense-Making and Agency The autonomy of self-individuating bodies is the expression in modern terminology of the Kantian intrinsic teleology of organisms. But it is also, following Jonas, the expression of a kind of subjectivity or “concern.” According to Merleau-Ponty, to live entails an adjustment to vital norms (Merleau-Ponty 1942/1963). This purposiveness of organisms is immanent: unlike that of a machine, it is not provided externally, heteronomously. Insofar as the purposiveness of living bodies is manifested in an ongoing entre-deux with their coemerging environment, their teleology is also one of relations of significance for those bodies. The relation between an organism and its world is polar: “In establishing a pole of internal identity in relation to the environment, the autopoietic process brings forth, in the same stroke, what counts as other, the organism’s world” (Thompson 2007, 153). Identity and alterity are materially (not just formally) codefined. A subset of the myriad forms of coupling with the environment constitutes the organism’s world—that is, those engagements that are appreciated as meaningful by the organism. Nothing occurs in this world that is not significant and in relation to which the organism positions itself (even in the particular case of indifference, which is also a position). Varela in his later writings describes this projective relation to the world as a relation of sense-making (Varela 1991, 1997; Weber and Varela 2002). Following Jonas, the idea is to establish a direct entailment from autopoiesis to the emergence of a world of significance. The impact of an event or situation in the world on the operation of the autopoietic system affects the living body. The presence or absence of nutrients, for instance, has a direct effect on how autopoiesis operates. It affects autopoiesis as a dynamic process, which is how the autopoietic system “evaluates” the environmental situation as nutrient-rich or nutrient-poor. Strictly speaking, however, this occurs while the organism is still autopoietic, or else it dies. This means that it is not the condition of being autopoietic as such that can “tell the difference” between a situation that is risky or convenient for the organism. The extreme alternative of being alive or being dead is too blunt a measuring instrument of vital norms. Such norms must somehow be accessible (situations must be accordingly discernible) by the organism itself. For this, autopoiesis must be realized adaptively. Adaptivity (Di  Paolo 2005) is what enables living bodies

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to distinguish a situation as a risk or an opportunity, to tell the difference between good and better, bad and worse. Adaptivity breaks the symmetry of circular time entailed by the ongoing renewal of autonomy; an adaptive system is time-oriented. It is able to operate differentially depending on whether the system is approaching its own boundary of viability (i.e., in cases where it confronts a risky situation or reaches a dangerous state). Adaptivity is a form of self-relating: what occurs within the organism and in its relations to the environment and other organisms is conditioned by how well or how badly its self-individuation is operating. In this sense, adaptivity works on the virtual field that surrounds the current configuration of the organism-environment system (Di  Paolo 2015; Di  Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran 2017). The autonomous system must be responsive to whether or not tendencies in its own states approach the boundary of viability. If the crossing of this boundary is actualized, it is too late. The system must make use of its capacities to modulate the coupling with the environment by altering the virtual field in the vicinity of the current states (modifying the direction of the negative tendencies).11 Sense-making is the capacity of an autonomous system to adaptively regulate its operation and its relation to the environment depending on the virtual consequences for its own viability as a form of life. Being a sense-maker implies an ongoing (often imperfect and variable) tuning to the world and a readiness for action. Through the combination of material and precarious self-individuation and adaptive regulation of the relations to the environment, sense-making naturalizes the concept of vital norms and lies at the core of every form of action, perception, emotion, and cognition, since in no instance of these is the basic structure of concern or caring ever absent. This is constitutively what distinguishes mental life from other material and relational processes. In other words, through the relations between precarious autonomy, adaptivity, and sense-making, the core aspect of mind is naturalized. This is a pivotal point in enactive theory and one that has been the object of some criticism. It is worth taking a brief detour and considering some of these worries to help clarify what is at stake and avoid misunderstandings further on. Hutto and Myin (2013, 34ff.) dislike the terminology, though not necessarily the nonrepresentational framing of the concept of sensemaking, preferring to use the more austere alternative basic minds to target a similar idea (see also Hutto and Myin 2017, 75ff.). The problem they see in terms like sense, significance, meaning, etc., is that they may mislead and direct our attention to potential elements in our story that act as carriers of meaning or vehicles of content, an idea they reject (as we do). This is

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an important point, but as we stress in this section, we steer clear of such reductive interpretations of sense-making by insisting that its enactment is a condition that applies to concrete whole engagements between organisms and environment, not to any particular part of this whole. Despite the potential for a functionalist interpretation that we do not intend, we think it is important to extend our vocabulary and use terms like sense, significance, value, and meaning naturalistically at this basic level. Language is after all the place where dualistic preconceptions are sedimented. It is the duty of any innovative approach, like Hutto and Myin’s and like our own, to disturb this ground, in this case for two important reasons. First, once grounded operationally, notions of meaning, sense, and significance share their core defining features with those instances belonging to more complex, socially mediated and human contexts in which the same terms are used. There is an important conceptual continuity that must be stressed. (One could reverse the criticism: by staying shy of applying such intentional terms to basic minds, Hutto and Myin risk misleading their readers into thinking they defend a dualistic perspective. When they ban this terminology, they might imply that basic minds are somewhat less-than-real minds.) Second, there is an ethical dimension (that we explore later in the book) entailed by our theory that we think is as important as its coherence and empirical value. Accordingly, if living organisms are autonomous sense-makers that behave in relation to vital norms, this implies that they are recipients of ethical concern. This must be reflected and not occluded by the language we use to talk about them. Thus, there is an important ethical difference between saying that we have interfered in the world of significance of an organism, that our actions are affectively evaluated by the lifeform, and stating much more neutrally that we have altered the “intentional directedness” of a basic mind. Other criticisms share similar concerns (again mostly grounded on sedimented uses of language that we challenge)—for example, in the case of the applicability of terms like normativity at the organismic level (e.g., HerasEscribano et al. 2015) or the related worry about a tendency toward interpreting biological phenomena anthropomorphically (Villalobos and Ward 2016). Again, these concerns point to conceptual issues as much as to communication strategies. The latter are important for the reasons we have just stated. The conceptual issues seem less concerned with the logic of the enactive theory than with its ontological status. Unlike enactivists, Villalobos and Ward seem to advocate a rather inert version of materialism. They ban intentionality and teleology from scientific discourse save as heuristics and shortcuts. In this they are indeed followers of a Kantian project we believe

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to have been superseded. At the basis of their views lies a mechanistic take on material systems as state-determined. Nothing resembling proper intentionality or normativity is supposed to emerge from state-determined systems. Living organisms might enjoy phenomenal experience (it is unclear how or why), but only for those who can use language and are able to express their experience meaningfully as part of their systemic operations would this phenomenality be truly intentional and teleological. Without such linguistic support, experiences are thought to exist along a parallel track to how organisms operate, in other words, they are epiphenomenal; hence the dualism of such positions. The problem with the mechanistic ontology underlying this line of argument is that in many senses it needs to catch up with the understanding of active material systems in contemporary physics. The argument of state determinism works for integrable formal systems (mathematical models whose equations can be solved analytically or are numerically stable). Such models are suitable for situations of near thermodynamic equilibrium and for systems with a low number of well-behaved interactions. The models produced on this basis are approximate and the approximations fail, often dramatically, when applied to systems far from equilibrium that behave chaotically (technically, nonintegrable systems, with emergent constraints, amplification of fluctuations, and nonergodic, i.e., path-dependent dynamics). Complex systems like these, full of indeterminacies and entangled with their surroundings, are the kind of systems organisms on Earth actually are (e.g., Juarrero 1999; Pattee 1973; see also Rosen 1991). In contrast to classic state determinism, the enactive perspective is driven by a conception of active, open materiality that rejects hylomorphism.12 We can thus theorize about teleology and intentionality in organisms as naturalized properties of active material systems in interaction, not as an observer’s opinions. These concrete systemic properties cohere not with the presence or absence of conscious experience (the existence of which we take as given) but, more precisely, with the structure of experience after we put it to phenomenological scrutiny, something that would remain mysterious otherwise. We should say that our short response to these critical views in no way suggests that the debate is closed since we are well aware that the enactive story is not problem-free. For instance, Nathaniel Barrett (2017) raises an interesting concern in pointing out that the vital norms arising from selfindividuation are proscriptive norms (i.e., avoiding situations that make the organism inviable). We would still need to understand how positive norms emerge in the enactive story. This is a good point that we believe we will partly answer in the next section and subsequent discussions about

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intersubjectivity and language. Once we consider agency as an active regulation of the tensions between different negative tendencies, the actions of the agent will also be guided by positive norms that emerge dialectically out of opposing negative ones (vital norms entail opting between competing alternatives, not between the presence or absence of a single option). But the details of this response will need to be worked out. After this brief critical interlude, we come back to sense-making in terms of what it entails. A sense-maker relates to its own world in terms of significance. However, sense-making is not an act of “adding meaning” to a physical coupling with the environment, as if the latter was a vehicle of information that must be communicated to the agent. Quite the opposite: information, in the functionalist view, implies an already interpreted and prejudged frame of reference whereas sense-making is precisely the ongoing activity of selecting, modifying, and even constructing such frames, by and for the autonomous sense-maker. Meaning and related concepts (value, significance, etc.) apply only to the whole situated organism in relation to its associated milieu, which itself coemerges with the individuation and activities of organisms. To think that meaning resides in one part of a coupled organism-environment system is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness (like thinking the speed of a car can be located inside its engine). Moreover, sense-making does not “add” anything to the rich coupling with the environment, it “subtracts” from it by monitoring and responding to only a small and relevant subset of all the influences that impinge on the organism, a subset out of which the organism constitutes itself as a sensemaker.13 Some environmental influences may have crucial consequences for the organism and still lie beyond its sense-making capabilities (e.g., the presence of ionizing radiation, for which there is no organic compensatory regulation, or the too subtle clues left by a well-camouflaged predator). With these theoretical tools, autonomy and sense-making, we propose a naturalized concept of agency, something the sciences of the mind in the functionalist frame have so far failed to achieve (for a related conception of agency in terms of far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems, see Juarrero 1999). Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde (2009) propose that natural agents may be provisionally characterized by three basic requirements and that these requirements can lead to a definition (which, as discussed in Di Paolo et al. 2017, turns out to reveal the inner relations between the apparently separate requirements). The first requirement is self-individuation: agents are individuating entities distinct from their environments. The second requirement is interactional asymmetry: agents, in some circumstances, are capable of modulating their coupling with the environment—that is, of

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changing the conditions that affect how they relate to their surroundings (when we close our eyes or change our body posture, the dynamics describing how we are coupled to the environment are altered; these are examples of modulations caused by our bodies). The third requirement is normativity: agents modulate their coupling with the environment following certain norms that belong to or have been adopted by the agent itself. These requirements are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for calling a system an agent. The requirements are met by an autonomous, sense-making system able to adaptively regulate the parameters and conditions of its coupling to the environment (Di  Paolo et al. 2017). Autonomy guarantees self-individuation, adaptivity guarantees adjustment to vital norms, and sense-making enacted on the relations to the environment guarantees interactional asymmetry (see figure 2.2 for a representation of this concept). The condition of being an agent does not depend on demonstrating complex dynamics, nor does it ultimately rely on the success of following a particular norm. Acts can fail. Agency depends on the action of adaptive regulation originating in the autonomous system and applied to the conditions of the coupling with the environment; it may succeed or fail and it may result in complex or simple dynamics. Thus the difference between someone falling off a cliff and a diver jumping from it may be hard to measure in terms of overall dynamics, sources of energy that animate the movements, and other criteria. But in one case there is an enactment aimed at modifying the relation between the organism and the environment (approaching the edge of the cliff, changing posture, tensing leg muscles to jump forward) and in the other there is not. One is indeed an act, a time-delimited regulation of the coupling, the other is simply something that occurs in the unregulated coupling (see Di Paolo et al. 2017 for further discussion). 2.4.4  Life’s Primordial Tension In surveying these ideas, autonomy, sense-making, and agency, we should remember the starting point in the theory of autopoiesis. Recent developments have moved enactive theory in a direction that emerges out of this theory but is not fully compatible with some of its implications. In fact, defenders of the more classic interpretation of autopoiesis (e.g., Villalobos 2013) criticize the enactive conception of life; they think it is more coherent to ground sense-making not in precarious autonomy, as enactivists do, but in the realm of functional descriptions provided by the observer. This is again the Kantian view. A prokaryotic organism is not really engaging

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Autonomy

Agency

Figure 2.2 Iconic representations of autonomy and agency. The symbol on the left is adapted from Maturana and Varela (1987). A circle closing on itself with an arrow indicates the condition of operational closure in an autonomous system. The wavy line represents the environment of that system and the arrows represent the two-way coupling between system and environment. This iconic representation does not highlight the intimate dialectics between self-production and self-distinction since the autonomous entity is in fact “made of” environmental couplings (flows of active matter and energy). This is better represented in the central diagram, where some environmental flows contribute to the closure of the system while others are actively rejected. For simplicity, we will keep using and adapting the original representation, bearing in mind that we must avoid thinking of autonomous system and associated milieu as cleanly separated as this symbol suggests. An agent is an autonomous system capable of regulating its coupling with the environment according to its own vital norms. This is represented on the right by adding arrows that depend on the state of the system and affect the arrows representing the coupling with the environment, including the matter and energy flows that contribute to self-individuation (gray lines).

meaningfully with its environment; it just looks as if it does. However, the seeds of a (more Hegelian) enactive perspective are contained in the very notion of autopoiesis, once this notion is interpreted dialectically. If we recall, autopoiesis in the original definition implies the joint conditions of self-production and self-distinction (Maturana and Varela 1980, 79). A network of processes is self-producing because, through their operation, these processes regenerate the same network of enabling relations. It is selfdistinguishing because it actively creates a topological arrangement that shields some of its processes from direct external influences and keeps the network distinct from its environment. The motivation for this characterization of living systems was Maturana and Varela’s dissatisfaction with

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definitions of life of the “shopping list” kind. Life has been (and in many circles still is) defined as the capacity of some systems to self-reproduce, be sensitive to their environments, grow, develop, etc. These definitions are theoretically poor because they simply accumulate a set of abstract aspects that are empirically observed in living systems until the set can be said to universally characterize all known forms of life. The strategy of finding out what is important by what is common is never capable by itself of illuminating the way the object of study relates to itself and to other phenomena. In other words, a list does not furnish us with an account of how items connect causally and conceptually or whether their significance changes once they are placed in concrete relations. In addition, as we have said, such approaches are often biased by conventional stances toward the question of individuation, which in the case of living systems is precisely the phenomenon one seeks to explain. The idea of autopoiesis is a move in the right direction in that it postulates a notion that (the theory claims) epistemically organizes all the phenomena of a living system. However, isn’t the definition of autopoiesis also a “shopping list,” only shorter? Isn’t it the “sum” of self-production plus self-distinction? What are the relations between these two ideas? It is clear that they are causally connected in empirical cases of living beings, but one can equally conceive of situations in which one condition is causally separate from the other and both would obtain.14 What is then their conceptual relation? If one implies the other, then it should suffice to use that one for defining autopoiesis. If not, then, are they conditions external to each other, a two-item list? Anticipating what we plan to do for the case of linguistic bodies in chapters 7 and 8, this issue can be resolved if we look at it dialectically (Di Paolo 2018). It is important to look at the problem in some detail, since the situation recurs at different levels, whenever there is a tension or contradiction between a living body’s openness to the world and its need to make itself distinct from it, both of which are constitutive of what it is to be a body at any level. Let us consider again the two conditions of autopoiesis (self-production and self-distinction). What does each on its own imply for the relation between organism and environment? Self-production entails establishing the conditions by which flows of matter and energy present in the environment can be used in the regeneration of the metabolic processes. The ideal environmental relation that best facilitates self-production corresponds to circumstances in which every possible encounter of the organism with the external world produces a positive

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contribution and none produces a negative contribution. This ideal condition for self-production would be one of total openness, the exact opposite of distinction. Every possible flow of matter and energy is taken advantage of. No other relation with the environment would facilitate self-production on its own more than this one if it were possible. Conversely, the relation with the environment that most ideally realizes self-distinction would be a relation of absolute robustness to any environmental influence—that is, perfectly shielded boundaries protecting the system, so that no coupling with the environment could possibly put at risk the condition of being a distinct unity, simply because no interaction with the world would have any effect on the system. But of course, in total isolation, self-production would be impossible. The relation with the environment that ideally realizes one of the two conditions for autopoiesis is effectively a negation of the other condition. Resolving the constitutive tension between the circumstances that would separately satisfy self-production and self-distinction is precisely not a question of finding a compromise between them, an intermediate point of semi-openness to the environment. Instead, the solution implies a superseding of this tension that involves selective opening and selective rejection of material flows—in other words, an adaptive regulation of what goes in and what stays out. In these circumstances the tension between production and distinction is managed in the temporal domain by a basic form of sense-making at the boundaries with the environment. A dialectical overcoming of the primordial tension in autopoiesis is given by none other than the concept of agency. The physical and functional boundaries of the living body (membrane, immune system, DNA repair, and so on) must be active so as to satisfy its own production and its own distinction. But this can only be done precariously because each of the two principles at play in living bodies, on their own, would be realized more reliably by moving in a direction that compromises the other principle in the long term. We come back to the picture of living bodies as involving a constitutive self-contradiction (Hegel) and suffering/enjoying a needful freedom (Jonas). Even though we started our exposition with autopoiesis and selfindividuation and continued with adaptivity, sense-making, and agency, this progression may give the false impression that each new concept is added as an option on top of the previous ones. Coming full circle, we see that in concrete forms of life it is agency that enables self-individuation. Moreover, agency is not something that merely helps the organism, but the realization of concrete autopoiesis is shaped by the capabilities and engagements of the organism as an agent that allow it to navigate its primordial

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tension. The two concepts, agency and self-individuation, separable only as an abstract exercise, are historically codetermined in concrete living bodies. This tension is inherent in their veering between full static individuation (death) and the instability of undirected change (also death). This is why equilibrium and homeostasis, concepts often used to describe organic processes, must always be taken with reference to a temporal dimension of change, innovation, and decay. The key operation of a living body is its ongoing self-differentiation, a constant swerve away from the moment-to-moment local tendencies inherent in its material processes both in the temporal sense given by selfproduction (nutrients are metabolized, i.e., transformed into parts of the system, thus compensating for decay, satisfying lacks, neutralizing excesses) and in the spatial sense given by self-distinction (the actively conserved differences and gradients between interiority and exteriority). For Simondon, self-individuation is precisely the avoidance of full stability by ongoing renewal of metastable states rich in potentialities (what he calls the preindividual, which is carried along with the self-individuating body as a reservoir of potentialities). For Jonas, metabolism implies ongoing transitions from one material configuration to the next, thus avoiding equilibrium, except in death. The tension described in these views is manifested at all levels with the result that living systems are rendered intrinsically active, selfdifferentiating, and restless. The primordial tension between an organism’s distinctiveness and its opening to the world is inherent in living bodies. As we will see in the following chapters, this tension reemerges in different guises as we consider other dimensions of embodiment. It is a version of this tension that drives the passage to a concept of linguistic bodies. In a way, we can arrive at an understanding of living bodies as navigating this ever-present tension because the enactive ideas that help us get there have left behind the framing of cognitivism and embodied functionalism. In particular, as we have indicated, the enactive conception of living bodies foregrounds their temporality and materiality in ways that are all but excluded by functionalism. What matters in a functional description is form (i.e., the organization of information processing). But form is precisely what is always changing in living systems, its “stability” in fact having an expiration date due to the precariousness of all living processes. Durable form must be actively sustained by the ongoing enactments of living bodies as agents. In other words, form helps explain agency as much as agency helps explain form in a frame of inherent temporal and material conditions. Depending on the conditions of operation of the living body, dynamical and functional

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explanations may or may not be applicable. Sometimes these explanations make sense, but other times they do not, and certainly not all of the time. The enactive perspective may help formulate the conditions of validity of particular functional and dynamical explanations of cognition. Autonomy, sense-making, and agency have been described in terms of the organization of material processes. Here, unlike in the case of functionalism, materiality is fundamental for these notions not to become trivial. It is because of precariousness and material open-endedness in the spatial and temporal dimensions of self-individuation that the condition of autonomy is never truly warranted except as an ongoing, time-constrained and timeoriented operation of the system as a whole, in particular in terms of its enactments as an agent in the world. It is time-constrained in terms of the conditions that must be met for the self-renewal and self-assertion of ongoing individuation, leading to the circularities and rhythms of life. It is timeoriented in terms of the temporal asymmetry introduced by adaptivity and sense-making, which are always rooted in a past-future oriented present. We cannot extricate time, matter, and form from each other in the concepts of autonomy, sense-making, and agency, without losing their conceptual coherence. They are concrete concepts. The paradox is only apparent, but it is noteworthy that the explicit temporal dimensions and the unwieldy aspects of materiality of living bodies that the enactive approach fully embraces place this perspective in a much better position to account for the experience of being alive. Thanks to temporality and materiality, enactive ideas can ground the concernful affect, caring attitudes, and meaningful engagements that underscore embodied experience. The move toward concrete materiality and the move toward an understanding of embodied subjectivity run in the same direction.

3  Enacted Bodies Chapter Enacted

3 Bodies

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

3.1  Feelings of Agency If we again pay attention to our daily experience, we will realize that the account provided in chapter 2 cannot be the whole story. After all, if sensemaking were grounded only in our ongoing viability as organic bodies, all that we should care about would be our condition of remaining alive. We indeed care about our ongoing survival, but not only this. Much of our caring about what we do and how we relate to the world takes the form of experiencing our efficacy as agents and the place we occupy in our surroundings. For instance, we may experience a feeling of flow in our activities in situations when we are coping skillfully with whatever we are doing, effortlessly enacting well-coordinated movements and switching from one task to the next. Or we may experience breakdowns, obstacles and barriers to our actions, hesitations about what to do next, or maybe a general feeling of things not going smoothly. We experience ourselves joyfully capable of undertaking a demanding task or frustrated as a situation overwhelms us and curtails our projects. This is underpinned by our sensitivities to a world where risks, opportunities, obstacles, affordances, etc., present themselves not so much, or not directly, in relation to our survival as organic bodies but in relation to the life of action, perception, and emotion that emerges from engaging the world. The world is experienced as a field of possibilities because of the directedness of our bodies. We are oriented toward the world, and through its solicitations or through our own mobilization, or a combination of both, we continuously project an intentional arc (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012) that seeks the resolution of a tension. Without thinking too much about it, or without thinking at all, we adjust our visual focus toward an object of interest, turn our heads to the source of an unusual sound, seek the optimal distance for looking at the computer screen, attempt to find a comfortable

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path if we are moving or a comfortable position if we are still, and try to clear the working environment of whatever interferes with the flow of our activities. Associated with this sensorimotor life there is a normativity that is not fully specified by meeting the condition of organic self-individuation. For instance, we care about an action taking the right amount of time so that other actions that depend on it can also be performed. We care about being in tune with our environment in terms of its affordances and solicitations, as well as in terms of our motivations. We also care about dealing with obstacles, finding a good path toward a goal, and about doing something right, in a fluid, efficient, and elegant manner, even if our biological needs could be satisfied otherwise. Moreover, accompanying all of these sensorimotor experiences, we also experience ourselves as being the agents of such engagements with the world. We sense the difference when our bodies are mobilized on their own by bringing together the elements from which an act emerges, in contrast to other movements of our bodies that are not our “own” in this same way (e.g., the displacement we feel on an accelerating vehicle, the tumbling we are subjected to by breaking waves in the sea, the support we feel when somebody helps us move if we are unwell or injured, and so on). This sense of agency (e.g., Gallagher 2012; Marcel 2003) is an intimate, subtle, and complex part of our embodied being, but it seems to belong to a realm of sensorimotor subjectivity not entirely describable by the relation between organic self-individuation and the basic affectivity of organic sense-making. We should not be surprised by this. If we look at the history of living beings, we cannot escape the fact that there is a massive diversity of forms of agency and associated worlds of significance (the Umwelten described by Jakob von Uexküll in 1934). Several major transitions in complexity can be observed in the history of life. They include transitions from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and from unicellular to transiently aggregative or durable multicellular forms of life. We will expect different living organizations to realize different forms of operational closure and different kinds of adaptive regulation of their coupling with their codefined environments (see, e.g., Margulis et al. 2011; Rosslenbroich 2014). 3.2  Animal Bodies A landmark in the history of life is the emergence of animal bodies and, within this class, those with nervous systems capable of significant amounts

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of plasticity. At this level of organization, in the case of moving animals capable of learning,1 we can distinguish major changes in how bodily autonomy is realized. These transitions cohere with aspects of embodied experience. A characteristic feature of animal bodies is that they are capable of selfdirected mobility through regulated tissue contraction and relaxation. This regulation is performed thanks to the activity of nerve cells that directly or indirectly sense and modulate the contraction and relaxation of muscles, connecting tissue, tendons, etc., that integrate with bones to form flexible yet dynamically robust networked structures combining tension and compression at multiple scales, from the cellular packing of epithelial tissue to the whole musculoskeletal system. The fractal integration of these structures follows the principle of tensional integrity or tensegrity (Turvey 2007) in such a way that elements of compression (e.g., bones) are flexibly positioned relative to one another by elements of tension such as tendons and muscles. Forces and stresses propagate robustly through the whole system according to mechanical deformations and, conversely, the selected activation (contracting or tensing) of muscle groups enables the whole structure to dynamically flow from one metastable equilibrium position to the next without needing to control the stages of movement. A simple movement like raising an arm is, in normal circumstances, never produced in isolation of the rest of the body. It relies on a series of preparatory synergies (e.g., compensatory balancing on the opposite side of the body if one is standing) and causes the whole body to reaccommodate through the mechanical propagation of tensions feeding back sensory signals to the nervous system through spindles that follow the stress lines in connective and muscular tissues (Turvey and Fonseca 2009) and other proprioceptive and external sensory activities that the movement provokes. Everyday actions such as walking or standing still, reaching for an object, pointing, opening doors, etc., are the result of many processes in the body interacting over a multiplicity of interdependent scales involving loops of proprioception, acoustic, haptic, and optic flows, and contextual regulation of breathing and balance. Paying attention to this basic organization of animal bodies should help us dispel the common perspective according to which the body is like a puppet controlled by the brain (see Turvey and Fonseca 2009; Van Orden et al. 2012). In addition, this view fits with the notion of a core animal sensorimotor organization (Keijzer 2015) that privileges the idea that early nervous systems evolved to coordinate body mobility rather than to process external sensory inputs. Because this organization is never entirely

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superseded, sensitivities to the external environment are always to some degree integrated with body self-sensing or self-affection. On the one hand, we have the dynamic organization and material properties of muscles, tendons, and bones. On the other hand, we have the nervous system as primarily involved in bodily regulation and bodily sensing. Both of these facts help us leave behind two pervasive myths about animal bodies. One, to repeat, is the idea that the body is entirely controlled by the brain, when in fact it is itself a closed system of synergies (including neural synergies) from which movements emerge through ongoing coordination and dynamic (re)assembling. The second pervasive myth is that the coupling of sensors and effectors with the environment should be conceptualized as inputs and outputs. Instead, sensorimotor coupling is better understood as one of the several dimensions in which bodies and environments influence each other, specifically as a dimension where perturbations are induced into an ongoing flow of nervous activity, itself also coupled with other systems in the body. To sense the world or to act on it therefore always involves mediation through the activity of the body. 3.3  Sensorimotor Networks and Habits The first mention of enaction as a history of couplings that bring forth a world referred to the activity of “sensorimotor networks” (Varela et al. 1991, 206). These networks present two kinds of circular organization. The first is the sensorimotor loop as a circular process that occurs in the ongoing activity of a self-moving agent. Motor and sensory activities in the selfmoving body are codetermined as each motor change provokes an alteration in the configuration of the body within its environment, thus leading to changes in the activity of sensors. In turn, sensory changes perturb the ceaseless activity of the nervous system and can trigger the body to move and to act. This again causes sensory activity to be altered as the body moves and acts, forming an ongoing loop. In tune with philosophical criticisms of stimulus-response thinking (Dewey 1896; Merleau-Ponty 1942/1963), the study of sensorimotor flows (championed in the field of autonomous robotics; see Harvey et al. 2005 and Pfeifer and Scheier 1999) breaks with the linear sense-model-plan-act or perception-cognition-action models of cognitivism—the “sandwich” view of cognition, in the words of Susan Hurley (1998). The second circularity is the closure of the nervous system itself: nervous activity depends on, and at the same time drives, other nervous activity like never-ending ripples in an excitable medium. (Here we should not

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forget to think of this closure as coupled with the dynamic tensegrity of the musculoskeletal system as well as with the environment.) The selfinduction of neural patterns is manifested most clearly in long-range correlations as well as multiple couplings and coordination between neural oscillations across different timescales, which subtly change during the microgenesis of cognitive activity (say, visual-object recognition).2 Neural activity as such never reaches a state of equilibrium, but instead transits between metastable states sometimes durable enough to be considered quasi-stationary, other times too chaotic, transient, and open-ended. The closure of the nervous system is also evidenced in the self-structuring of the intrinsic activity of neural populations even in the absence of specific stimulation or the performance of a cognitive task, the so-called default mode that is manifested in brain-imaging studies during those moments when we are not doing anything in particular.3 The next move in an enactive story is to propose a naturalized account of how these sensorimotor and neural loops are grounded in the autonomy and sense-making activity of the organism. But here we face a problem. If the normativity of agency must be ultimately grounded in organismic self-individuation, why would agents ever care about norms that are not directly or indirectly relevant to biological survival? Why care, for instance, about whether we reach for the glass of water with an agile or clumsy movement, provided we can drink the water we need when we are thirsty? Why is it, in contrast, that people often seem invested in certain behaviors (e.g., smoking) that do not contribute to, and indeed can damage, the viability of the organic body? The key to these questions is to recognize that a living body is the locus of different kinds of autonomous organization. One of these, found in complex multicellular forms of life, is precisely the organization of sensorimotor and “neuronal” (or functionally similar) closure that leads to an autonomy realized in a domain that is different from the autonomy of biochemical self-individuation. Neural and sensorimotor loops seem a natural locus to look for forms of autonomy that could ground a wider set of vital norms. What new kind of autonomous entity might such organized patterns of sensorimotor and neuromusculoskeletal loops afford? Habits, for instance, have been proposed as an example of self-sustaining functional and relational patterns involving the organic body, sensorimotor activity, and the environment. These patterns take, so to speak, a life of their own and in so doing ground a different form of normativity: norms of the sensorimotor kind (Di  Paolo 2005, 2009; Egbert and Barandiaran 2014).4 The

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self-reinforcing organization of habitual patterns of behavior can therefore induce forms of discrimination between good and bad moves, comfortable and uncomfortable positions, environmental obstacles and opportunities, but this time with respect to the self-individuation of the sensorimotor patterns themselves. Although this does not immediately answer all the questions, habits—conceived organically not as automatisms but as autonomous, ecological systems—can help us think about questions such as why we reach for the glass with a certain style or why people find it hard to quit smoking. 3.4  Sensorimotor Agency Habits are interesting because they show self-individuation that simultaneously involves the sensorimotor, neural, musculoskeletal, and environmental domains. This suggests that we may apply the logic that links adaptive autopoiesis and sense-making to the relation between self-sustained plastic sensorimotor patterns and experiential concerns “beyond” issues of organic survival. The idea has been elaborated into an enactive approach of sensorimotor agency by Di  Paolo et al. (2017). Looking past the single habit, sensorimotor agency depends on the broader integration of acts, powers, and sensitivities, into historically structured networks of sensorimotor schemes and activities. The proposal is that the processes that individuate a sensorimotor agent are acts themselves. An agent’s acts constitute and reassert a new kind of agency, one that is enabled and constrained, but underdetermined, by biological autonomy. Let us summarize some aspects of this idea by considering the fine-grained organization of action and perception. The idea that sensorimotor engagements involve a regulation of the covariation between the sensory and motor activity is part of an important historical tradition of motor theories of perception (see, e.g., Scheerer 1984). Continuing this tradition, Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë elaborated in 2001 a sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience strongly based on enactive ideas and well supported by empirical evidence. Accordingly, perceptual experience is constituted by the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies— that is, an agent’s skill at using and regulating correlations between sensory and motor activities. Thus, for example, an object such as a smoking pipe is perceived as voluminous since, thanks to our bodily know-how, a visual engagement with it is not a summation of different views from different angles but an autocorrelated flow of sensorimotor covariations that correspond to the coupling between object and body. Similarly, if we grasp the

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pipe and explore it haptically, we do not perceive independent points of contact with our fingers, but we feel a volume that corresponds to a single object because of how sensations correlate with our moves. Moreover, we perceive its surface as curved and smooth only as a result of sliding our fingers over it. There is no tactile volume or surface as such that we perceive independently of how our hands and fingers move. However, these perceptual experiences are not mental reconstructions of the information gathered by sensory inputs. They are a direct effect of the sensorimotor patterns that emerge during the active and skillful engagement with the object. Haptically perceived surfaces and volumes are not to be found in the immediate stimulation patterns in our fingers, nor in a mental model, but in the hand that actively touches and is touched by the object. This is a world-involving account of action and perception (Di Paolo 2014; Di Paolo et al. 2017). In such accounts the explanatory role of the world exceeds that of being a source of information to be processed by the agent. The world can mobilize the agent, solicit responses, and provoke changes and breakdowns in its engagements, and, as we will see, be co-constitutive of the ongoing sensorimotor regularities that an agent masters. An environment as a source of information does not suffice to account for this variety of ways in which the world is involved in action and perception, both causally and constitutively. The notion of sensorimotor contingencies is an example of worldinvolving phenomena. In fact, there is more than one notion at play. Buhrmann and colleagues (2013) identified four kinds of sensorimotor contingencies and defined them in dynamical systems terms. First, we have general regularities that correspond to structures of the body and of the environment without yet taking into account any activity performed by the agent—this is called the sensorimotor environment. All animals with a given body plan, in similar surroundings, would be subject to the same general regularities in their sensorimotor environment (e.g., the way a point sound source induces different sensory activity in the ears as a function of the relative orientation of the head). Then we have regularities in how the agent inhabits an environment, the way it moves in it, the spaces it occupies, and so on—this is the sensorimotor habitat. Two animals with similar bodies in a similar situation would have the same sensorimotor environment. But, depending on, say, their learning experience, they could inhabit different sensorimotor habitats; they could tend to behave differently in similar circumstances. On exploring a table with our hands, some of us prefer to slide our fingers along the border, others prefer to move the full hand on the surface or tap on it repeatedly; same sensorimotor environments, different

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sensorimotor habitats. Another meaning of sensorimotor contingencies corresponds to task-related sensorimotor regularities that an agent deploys as part of an action, for instance, feeling the shape of the pipe by moving the fingers in the right way—these are sensorimotor coordination patterns. Finally, we have assemblages of several sensorimotor coordination patterns normatively arranged in ways that make a difference in how we perform a whole action, for instance, different ways of grasping a pipe, looking at it, and feeling its smoothness, bringing it closer to the nose to smell it, taking more or less time in doing so, with more or less focus, etc.—these are sensorimotor schemes. The four types of sensorimotor contingencies are relevant for explaining perceptual experience. But it is the latter, sensorimotor schemes, that help us clarify the meaning of mastery. The concept of sensorimotor schemes is analogous to the notion of schemes introduced by Jean Piaget in this theory of equilibration (Piaget 1975). For Piaget, a scheme corresponds to a string or cycle of coordination patterns. Thus for instance, a baby drinking from a milk bottle engages her environment through a cyclic scheme with roughly three coordination patterns: suckling the bottle, swallowing milk, and breathing air. All of these coordination patterns involve a coming together of elements of the body and elements of the environment, and all take the form of a sensorimotor correlation or synergy between these elements. In addition, it is important that these coordination patterns cohere as a whole for the overall scheme to be repeated; thus, they must be well timed with respect to each other (drinking too much milk can delay breathing and provoke choking). In other words, as we have defined them, what makes a sensorimotor scheme is a normative, mutual fit between coordination patterns. The link between sensorimotor coordination and schemes permits the elaboration of a dynamical systems version of Piaget’s theory of equilibration (Di Paolo et al. 2014, 2017). Schemes are shaped by experience through processes of assimilation and accommodation to environmental structures, processes, and events, which are driven by breakdowns and plastic responses to them. Here a breakdown may relate to the organic norms but also to norms originating in the organization of the schemes themselves. For Piaget this organization was primarily circular, but not exclusively so. This permitted him to see circular and rhythmic sensorimotor processes, such as a baby breastfeeding, as embodying a norm in themselves (the repetition of the scheme) in addition to the biological norms implied in the activity (e.g., nutrition). The embodying of the sensorimotor norm is dynamic, namely, an array of several coordination patterns bearing the right relations

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to one another so they are able to return to the starting point and reinitiate the cycle once more. With respect to this returning condition, some events in the environment or in the body can count as obstacles or lacunae—that is, a particular coordination pattern may be disrupted because of an environmental impediment or it may lead to an incorrect transition to the rest of the cycle respectively. Equilibration obtains when such obstacles and lacunae are overcome by a plastic change in the sensorimotor schemes, including the possibility of fully novel schemes emerging out of the differentiation of preexisting ones. This is indeed the process involved in the baby’s transition from breastfeeding to drinking milk from the bottle for the first time. The notion of mastery proposed by O’Regan and Noë in their sensorimotor approach to perception has been interpreted (by critics and on occasion by the authors themselves) as involving some kind of representational knowledge. Accordingly, mastery, for instance of the coordination patterns underlying the hand movements in perceiving a pipe or the patterns that make up the scheme for drinking milk, is based on past sensorimotor experience that modulates current expectations even before a particular movement is enacted. And this experience, the interpretation goes, must be stored in the form of representations,5 backsliding into a functionalist conception of perception and action. Instead of following this conservative option, it is possible to use the dynamical interpretation of equilibration in and between sensorimotor schemes to interpret the idea of mastery in nonrepresentational, world-involving terms. Mastery in this view is both the accumulated organization of mutually equilibrated schemes and the capacity of the agent to keep equilibrating in the face of changing environmental and bodily conditions. Like the coordination patterns that make up a particular sensorimotor scheme, schemes themselves are never quite enacted in isolation but as part of larger sets of concrete activities. Through existing equilibrated relations with other schemes, the initiation of a particular enactment (e.g., a feeling of thirst as we see a glass of water within reach on the desk) can simultaneously inhibit alternative or incompatible schemes (moving away from the desk) and preactivate several subsequent options for what to do immediately after (leaning forward, reaching for the glass, lifting it while keeping it vertically oriented, bringing it to the mouth, drinking). The existence of established, equilibrated relations between schemes and the available resources for actively maintaining and plastically transforming these relations are what counts as an agent’s mastery of her sensorimotor world—that is, the fit of each particular scheme to the task as well as the fit between

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schemes involved in an activity (past and future acts, acts that are inhibited, acts that are performed to support other acts, etc.). The adequacy of this sensorimotor organization to a particular activity and situation counts as the level of bodily skillfulness or mastery. This level can in fact be measured using dynamical systems techniques looking at correlations between movements at various timescales (fractions of a second, seconds, tens of seconds, minutes, etc.; see Van Orden et al. 2011 and Dotov et al. 2010). At no point in this dynamical story is it necessary to invoke representations of any kind, neither in the classic sense nor as predictive models. The necessary know-how lies in the material-organic way bodies work and in the way environments are organized partly as a consequence of previous activities. We can go even further and offer an account of sensorimotor agency and subjectivity based on these ideas. Who, after all, is enacting this mastery of sensorimotor contingencies? And out of the many possible and viable engagements afforded by the environment, why enact this particular one at this moment? If perceptual experience is also the experience of a perceiving subject, with interests and motives, this experience cannot be constituted only by the mastery of sensorimotor regularities but requires in addition an account of a sensorimotor self. Evan Thompson already noticed this when he argued that O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor theory “needs to be underwritten by an enactive account of selfhood or agency in terms of autonomous systems. Second, it needs to enrich its account of subjectivity to include pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness” (Thompson 2005, 417). But—and here we come back to the crux of the problem—if we look for the locus of agency and sense-making only at the level of autonomy of the organic body, we will be unable to account for the normative dimension of sensorimotor engagements. This normative dimension is certainly constrained by organic viability, but it is underdetermined by it. The dynamical account of mastery as past and ongoing equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes already suggests a solution to the problem of sensorimotor selfhood. Sensorimotor schemes organize themselves into several kinds of relations of support, priming, inhibition, and so on. They form a network of relations. Each enacted scheme is linked in various ways to other neighboring schemes, the action possibilities surrounding our current act, that become inhibited, preactivated, or in some other way virtually present. A form of sensorimotor autonomy can emerge at this level, very much like the self-reinforcing single habit, but involving networks of schemes instead, connected by multiple precarious links with different degrees of

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strength and plasticity. This is the proposal developed by Di Paolo and colleagues (2017), who argue that this network of relations can meet the three necessary requirements for agency (chapter 2) and thus be considered a sensorimotor body. The enactment of a sensorimotor scheme (picking up the glass to drink from it) is simultaneously the reaffirmation of a set of relations to many other schemes (maintaining a certain body posture and orientation, displacing the glass in the air neither too slowly nor too fast, preparing to continue typing as soon as I am done drinking, and so forth). These relations ultimately form a closed network that is reasserted by every successful act and challenged by breakdowns, through spreading processes of mutual equilibration between schemes. Once we can show that the conditions of precarious individuation can also obtain at the sensorimotor level, it is possible to apply an argument analogous to the one we presented in chapter 2 regarding the links between sense-making and the individuation of the organic body. A self-sustaining closed network of equilibrating relations among sensorimotor schemes fulfills the three requirements for agency: it is self-individuated as an autonomous system, it regularly induces asymmetric modulations of the dynamic coupling with the environment, and these modulations are normative (i.e., they are regulations) with norms that correspond to the viability of the sensorimotor network itself. We represent this idea in a diagram that extends the description of agency in figure 2.2. This is shown in figure 3.1, where we compare basic or minimal agency with sensorimotor agency (a closure that obtains at the level of relations between actual and virtual sensorimotor schemes, darker circle). Notice how the idea of sensorimotor agency transforms our conception of bodies. We are not only speaking here of organic bodies, but also about their relational and self-individuating modes of operation in the world. Sensorimotor bodies are made up of networks of relations between precariously equilibrated sensorimotor schemes, of organized enactments. This is crucial for our later understanding of linguistic bodies. We may now come back to the question of whether our experience coheres with this new body concept. If we follow this account, then sensorimotor aspects of embodied experience are grounded, not only or not mainly on strictly organic norms, but on sensorimotor norms. These are norms that establish how well a given act coheres with other acts, with the current situation and overall, with the particular, historically developed sensorimotor style of the agent (the way she walks and carries herself, the way she leans against a wall, lights up a cigarette and defiantly looks around, etc.). Thus it is acts themselves that

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Agency

Sensorimotor agency

Figure 3.1 Sensorimotor agency. The depiction of agency shown in figure 2.2 is reproduced on the left. This is modified on the right to show closure at the level of sensorimotor acts (larger circle). The straight arrows again indicate coupling with the environment, this time represented as a wavy line encircling the agent. Actual engagements are represented with darker shades of gray, virtual engagements with a lighter shade. Sensorimotor agency occurs as a closure at the level of regulatory acts (actual and virtual).

constitute a sensorimotor agent (see also Korsgaard 2009 and Langer 1967) and define a sensorimotor body. In addition, the reassertion of a sensorimotor identity that occurs with every act is at the basis of our sense of agency in a way that circumvents various problems of representational accounts and coheres with the complex phenomenology of this sense. Accordingly, whether an act or an event affirms or challenges our sensorimotor identity is immediately felt as its consequences propagate throughout the network of relations between schemes. We do not need to represent or in any way model this fact in order to tell whether an act is our own or not. Pathologies of the sense of agency may be explained according to this same idea (Buhrmann and Di Paolo 2017). As a result of a history of mutual equilibration, schemes in the sensorimotor network form clusters and develop into what we may call activities or microworlds (Varela 1992, 1999a). These clusters (see figure 3.2) correspond to regional skills, sensitivities, and norms that together make up a cognitive ecology of practices (Hutchins 2008, 2010). The structure of these clusters of schemes can be studied but they require detailed observation

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in (semi)naturalistic situations. For example, neuroethologist John Fentress has applied similar ideas to the study of nested webs of behavior in rodents where “each act fits into the context of others,” forming rich interconnections such that “tugs on any one strand will have ramifications elsewhere, while preserving the web’s overall structure” (Fentress 1983, 939, 941). Similarly, Michael Arbib speaks of networks of interdependent schemes where “each finds meaning only in relation to others” (Arbib et al. 1998, 44). The bottom row of figure 3.2 shows a subregion of a hypothetical network of sensorimotor schemes. This representation can be useful, for instance, in following changes in skill during development (Di Paolo et al. 2017). Nodes represent sensorimotor schemes, and links their relations. The representation can help us see, as in this case, the difference between structural relations at the developmental scale (e.g., schemes that when enacted strengthen the support structures of other schemes) and functional relations at the behavioral scale (e.g., when one scheme is currently activated we can represent which other schemes are primed and which are inhibited or incompatible). Sensorimotor networks change in time as schemes become further equilibrated or fade away and disappear due to lack of use, injury, or alterations to the environment (this is represented by the size of the nodes; the bigger the node the more stable the scheme). They also change as structural and functional links emerge or disappear and as whole activity clusters merge or differentiate. The evolving structure of networks of schemes is coherent with views in psychology that avoid thinking of the isolated act in abstraction and instead advocate the relevance of social and environmental situatedness as strong determinants of sets of relevant behaviors. Such are the cases of activity theory (Leont’ev 1978) in Soviet psychology and behavior setting theory (Barker 1968; Schoggen 1989) in ecological psychology. The socially and environmentally mediated enactment of daily activities, such as preparing meals, holding meetings, repairing artifacts, caring for a sick person, etc., is punctuated by shifts from one microworld to another, sometimes happening smoothly, sometimes as a result of breakdowns or changes in our situation. What about the brain? It is definitely a crucial actor in the enactive story. But the view of the brain that emerges from this picture is not, as we have said, that of a controller overseeing every detail of sensorimotor activity. The brain is an excitable medium that enables the closing of multiple sensorimotor loops as well as the regulation and amplification of complex nonequilibrium neural dynamics. It regulates the transitions between enacted schemes, and contributes to the context of these transitions by

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a

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Figure 3.2 Sensorimotor schemes and their relations at increasingly larger scales. (a) Diagram of a sensorimotor scheme for drinking from a milk bottle composed of three sequential coordination patterns (e.g., A×A′) each supported by processes and structures on the agent side (A) and on the environmental side (A′). (b) Four sensorimotor schemes (S1 to S4) bearing horizontal relations (thick gray connecting lines) signifying frequent adjacent enactments and vertical relations (dashed black arrows) indicating the stabilization of a precarious support condition in the body or in the environment for the enactment of other schemes. Below: A partial view of a hypothetical sensorimotor network where the schemes in (b) are included in a larger cluster. Nodes represent sensorimotor schemes and links their structural (c) and functional relations (d). They are arranged into three clusters corresponding to strongly codependent schemes (corresponding to kinds of activity). In (c) links indicate structural relations between the enactment of a scheme and the supporting bodily and environmental condition in other schemes (links are generally unidirectional but for simplicity this is not shown). In (d) the functional connectivity at a particular moment is shown. The currently active scheme is shown in black. Its activation makes transitions to other schemes more likely (thicker solid lines) or less likely (thicker dashed lines). Through transitional links some neighboring schemes already become preactivated or inhibited (shown here as a change in shade), which in turn may lead to modulation of their own transitional links. Figures adapted from Di Paolo et al. (2017). Copyright © 2017 Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. Barandiaran, with permission.

preactivating or inhibiting other schemes directly or indirectly via the ongoing dynamics of the nonneural body. Different theories of brain function fit this picture. For instance, the coordination dynamics and transitions between metastable states proposed by J. Scott Kelso and colleagues (see Kelso 1995, 2009, 2016; Kelso, Dumas, and Tognoli 2013; Tognoli and Kelso 2014) fit the idea of neural activity being responsible for setting the collective parameters that define global aspects of neural and bodily flow without needing to actively specify or control every aspect of the processes that make up an action. Thus, for example, once a scheme is activated, adaptive reactions to perturbations can occur very fast. For instance, Kelso et al. (1984) asked participants to pronounce one of two phonemes, either /baeb/ or /baez/. Toward the closing of the vocalization, a force was externally applied to the jaw provoking a displacement. This was compensated within 5 to 10 milliseconds, which is faster than the brain could have calculated a new sensorimotor configuration. In this short time, the lower lip moves to a new configuration that preserves the intended vocalization. Rather than processing incoming

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information in order to articulate an adaptive response (there is no time for that), brain and body are poised in a critical state appropriate to the current context and whose stable outcomes are sensorimotor synergies that correspond to the relevant behavioral options (in this case, the two phonemes). The analogy would be an array of falling dominoes configured in such a way that once it gets started the wave of falling pieces will reach the same end despite external perturbations. The brain helps set up this critical configuration but does not need to control its ensuing flow. This is seen in other cases of ultrafast cognition (Wallot and Van Orden 2012). The metastable brain-body-environment system is critically poised in such a way that the resolution of a task requires no “overseer” but instead flows from the dynamic configuration. As a result, the agent compensates for perturbations or makes split-second decisions so quickly that no time is left for any “neural processing” of the cognitivist kind. Another compatible perspective on the brain was proposed by Francisco Varela to account for transitions between microworlds and involves the shifting dynamics of long-range temporal synchronization between neural assemblies (Varela 1992, 1995). Accordingly, moments of active sensorimotor engagement (say, the visual recognition of an image) involve the synchronous long-range coordination across many frequency bands of different assemblies of neural populations (Varela et al. 2001), while transitions between enacted schemes, moments of breakdown, hesitation, or simply the moments without an active sensorimotor engagement are characterized by open, high-dimensional dynamical states that are rich in potentialities and that eventually give rise to new coherent dynamics (new intentions, scheme preactivations, transitions between activity genres or microworlds). The broadly compatible views of coordination dynamics and emergence and destruction of time-bound neural assemblies must be read in light of the embeddedness of brain processes in the active body and environmental context. A good metaphor that prevents us from forgetting this has been provided by Thomas Fuchs (2011, 2018), who calls the brain “a mediating organ”—that is, a system that facilitates the closing of multiple loops of engagements between the agent and the world. The idea of mastery is thus further refined. It involves the brain without a doubt, but it does not reside within the brain in the form of stored representations or neurally implemented models. This will be important when we consider the mastery of language in parts II and III. Mastery is a property of the whole situated sensorimotor body (and sometimes distributed across bodies as we discuss in chapter 7). It comprises not only the

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sensitivities and powers offered by a generic network of equilibrated/ing schemes, but more specifically the contextual sensitivities and powers of microidentities enacting a microworld or behavioral genre (e.g., preparing a meal, sorting through old photographs, installing a new operating system in the computer, participating in a bicycle race). These activity clusters are formed historically and to an important extent idiosyncratically, subject to the particular life experiences of each developing sensorimotor body under the direct influence of local environments that have also been produced as a result of previous activity by sensorimotor agents. Thus, plastic sensorimotor bodies are always historically coupled to places, situations, and changing landscapes, and so they are shaped accordingly, neither universally nor uniformly, but not randomly either. Sensitivities, as we use the term later in the book, are underpinned by the situated mastery of capabilities for engagement, skills and powers for action and perception, and ways of grasping a situation in its historical dimension. We also imply the experiential and affective dimension, the flow of emotional episodes, and the sense of agency. Thus, we can be sensitive to the presence of an irritating electrical humming while we are working and, at the same time, we can be sensitive to the fact that our work is not progressing as much as we had hoped, which in turn brings out an affective state of frustration. The importance of the material and temporal substrates of sensorimotor bodies must not be overlooked. The life of the sensorimotor agent emerges first as anchored in the organic body and depends on engaging with a complex temporality of flows of active matter not only to sustain the living body but also a sensorimotor way of life. Its rhythms include rapid and sufficiently frequent storing of energy and renewal of tissues for sustained and prolonged periods of activity punctuated by periods of rest, and the satisfaction of material and energetic needs according to developmental stage, intensity and timing of activities, and so on. These rhythms emerge from the circularities of the multiple autonomies involved and their forms of adaptivity. They result in a coupling of the cycles of sensorimotor life and the oriented time of the past-future axis of sense-making, agency, and mastery. The coupling of multiple cyclic and linear temporalities creates the multilayered history of sensorimotor bodies. But these are only the enabling aspects of materiality. More intimately, sensorimotor agency is literally embedded in the world as a process extending across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Its constituents are relations sustained between sensorimotor engagements (actual and potential), which, as ensembles of coordination patterns, always involve the world as

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much as the body. World-involving explanations highlight the transactional nature of agent-environment relations (Dewey and Bentley 1946), whereby acts/meanings emerge not only out of placing the right bodily and environmental conditions, as it were, “next to each other,” but through an intimate and mutually transformative intertwining of body and milieu. There is no breathing without air. Air does not “inform” the lungs of the presence of oxygen but actual oxygen must be absorbed and eventually transferred into the bloodstream for claiming that breathing has taken place; air then emerges transformed from this transaction. The same with all acts, even those that involve the regulation of virtual relations; they always rely on organic and environmental support structures coming together and mutually transforming each other. We may for convenience talk about skills and know-how as properties of particular bodies and picture their agency and subjectivity as bounded by the contours of organic bodies. But these conventions are easily dismantled. When we think or talk about a person we know, we do not picture an organic body the way it looks while lying on an operating table, but a body-in-the-world, a way of moving, gesturing, making sounds, a style of doing things, of holding things, of being annoyed by things, and of making things happen. This activity is carried around with this person’s organic body, but it is also very much present in what surrounds this body and could not happen or make sense if we were to sufficiently alter these surroundings. A sensorimotor agent is then a dynamic, fluid body, a “cloud” or “whirlwind” of activity, which is no less concrete for not always taking the shape of the same semisolid object. Quite the contrary, it is more concrete than any “inert” matter in that it is rooted in ongoing dynamic relations. Sensorimotor bodies are enmeshed in their situation and their history and, as we will see in the next chapter, in a web of social encounters and relations. The difficulty is precisely in conceiving of them abstractly, separate from their activity. This makes it harder, but not impossible, to theorize sensorimotor bodies. They can be too idiosyncratic and contextdependent, holding a continuity across moments but transiting between activity genres that may be radically different and would each deserve a dedicated investigation.

4  Intersubjective Bodies Chapter Intersubjective

4 Bodies

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

4.1 Intercorporeality We have spent some time in the last two chapters describing what enactivists have to say about the organic and sensorimotor dimensions of human bodies. These dimensions are relevant if we are concerned with an embodied approach to language. They tend to be downplayed or restricted to functional explanatory roles (e.g., the role of brain structures in supporting the computational machinery of language, Berwick and Chomsky 2016, or the role of anatomical and sensorimotor patterns in the semantic shaping of metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The suspicion is that at most the contributions of embodied subjectivity to an understanding of language are limited to constraining theories, a sort of reality check on theoretical proposals that must be “implemented” in organic and sensorimotor bodies. We disagree with this idea that turns the “embodied” aspects of a theory of language into a mere adjectival modifier for an otherwise fundamentally disembodied account. We agree that the organic and sensorimotor dimensions of embodiment cannot tell us the whole story. In fact, so far we have only considered the organic and sensorimotor organization and the concomitant subjective experience of a single individual agent; this is obviously not enough to seriously ground the social dimension of language. Nevertheless, these dimensions of embodiment play constitutive roles in the phenomena, capabilities, and sensitivities of everyday interactive and linguistic activities. This claim will become clearer in the following sections and chapters. Still, relevant as they are for thinking about language, we need to address the insufficiency of the organic and sensorimotor bodies and so we must return once more to lived experience. The core structure of caring that we associate with organic, self-individuating, and precarious bodies and the capabilities and sensitivities that are part of the experience of sensorimotor

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bodies do not exhaust the phenomenology of being human. From birth our experience is fundamentally an experience of relating to other bodies. We inhabit a world of others. The bodies we encounter there are not given to us as objects of contemplation but as powers of interpellation that can look at us or ignore us, question us or support us, move us and respond to us, smile, cry, and just be alongside us in sharing a world of concerns and activities. Not only do we care about our organic viability and about our sensorimotor grasp of the world, but we also care about other people, some of whom may be unrelated to our goals as organic and sensorimotor subjects. We care about their emotions and their actions in ways that open us up to a universe of experiences whose core aspect is our relations in the shared world. Thus, the regard of others can provoke excitement and joy as well as fear and apprehension. Participation in social activities happens naturally from birth and weighs on our existence as persons to the point that social exclusion is painful to suffer as well as to watch others suffer. The mere observation of another person engaged in some activity that does not include us draws us in and realigns our perspective as we embody concerns that are not immediately our own, and thus we partially reinhabit the world through the eyes and hands of another body. In short, we sense other bodies (human and animal) very differently from the way we perceive objects. Indeed, there is something antisocial in seeming to even speak of “sensing other bodies” when, for humans, beingwith is primordial. We see (touch and smell) them in their materiality and at the same time sense their own powers and sensitivities, and their vulnerabilities and blind spots. These powers and sensitivities are not merely objects of our perception, they also have a hold on us as we are drawn by them into a different portion of the world, one that can fascinate us: “We may watch the salto mortale of an aerial acrobat with a mixture of fascination, tension and anxiety. Our lived body reaches toward and ‘conjoins’ with the acrobat’s swinging movements—we may even be prompted to comovements. For a moment, we might not even distinguish his movements from our own anymore” (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, 474). The bodies of others become displaced centers of vectors and fields for me, ambiguously present together with those of my own body. In this way, when we are surrounded by others, for instance at a party, we find our attention, acts, and affects ambiguously switching between those of our own, such as finding something to drink because we are thirsty, and those of others as they capture our interest or curiosity. For example, why is that friend so seriously picking up six bottles of beer? Why are those two

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speaking so intently, after months of silence? And we lean or head in that direction. We are spontaneously pulled one way or another, as if by our own navigation, without much reflection. As Kym Maclaren describes it, drawing on Merleau-Ponty: “Intercorporeality is this bodily perception of another body—a perception which consists not in an intellectual grasp of something that is other to us, but in a bodily mirroring, or a bodily resuming (reprendre), of an intentionality that we inhabit over there” (Maclaren 2002, 190, emphasis in original). Intercorporeality does not pop up as if by magic but depends on synergies that occur between bodies in moment-to-moment encounters, particularly during social interactions, but not only then. Our experiences of other people, even when we observe them remotely, are grounded on embodied intersubjectivity, and are thus an inherently social aspect of personal experience, as opposed to a rationalization that internally supplements the image of the other with inferences about their presumed mindedness. We experience others by directly touching them and being touched by them, as in a handshake, and by in general moving and living through the coordination and miscoordination patterns between our bodies as they interact, the same way our different senses are always already integrated as our own—that is, not as accumulative independent pieces of evidence, but as internally related parts in unity or synergy. Merleau-Ponty (1968, 142) asks: “Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each?” In one case, a unity of sensorimotor subjectivity, a synergy within the organism is what allows us to know our actions as ours, our touch and our vision as unified in concrete experience through their mutual reversibilities (we see our hands touching and being touched, we touch what is also visible to us) and only exceptionally abstracted one from the other (e.g., in the lab). In the other case, it is a unity of participation, a synergy among different organisms, of bodies interacting, that through concordant intercorporeal operation and mutual reversibility (i.e., through a practical concrete experience of interaction) leaves no room for skepticism about others as minded creatures like ourselves. The experiential structures of moment-to-moment participation with other bodies cannot be derived solely from organic or sensorimotor experiences; they constitute a different dimension of embodiment. Moreover, these participatory experiences resignify the organic and sensorimotor world. The ever-present openness to engage in interaction and common activities with others emerges from the remnants of past interactions and practices inhabiting our changed environments and also our bodies and constituting, in the sociological and phenomenological terms of Alfred

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Schutz (1967), a lifeworld. A readiness to interact orients our bodies in a participatory attitude, which reveals the lifeworld, the commonsense lived reality of the social world, as given. We are thus confronted with environments full of objects, artifacts, tools, consumables, places, shelters, clothing, ornaments, weapons, machines, as well as norms, rituals, and practices embodied in these and in our relations within a community and with nonhuman lifeforms and ecosystems. All of these relations arise, without exception, as the metastable outcome of a history of encounters between participatory practices and materiality. All of them contribute to inscribing in the organic and sensorimotor bodies a range of techniques of care, nutrition, health, skills, habits, and so on that shape the organic and sensorimotor dimensions of embodiment following patterns along developmental and historical timescales. In short, human bodies always already inhabit an intercorporeal dimension of experience, one that is historically structured in the shape of a lifeworld into which we are born but that is neither fixed nor independent of our activity. On the contrary, the lifeworld relies both on nonhuman materiality and on practices of participation, and it is here, in the momentto-moment layer of participatory activity where social norms crystallize, that we must begin our search for an enactive understanding of the intersubjective dimension of human bodies. 4.2  The Autonomy of Social Interactions Let us reconsider the operational aspects of agency in the context of the lifeworld. As organic and sensorimotor bodies, human agents regulate their coupling with their environments and engage with traces of the activity of other human and nonhuman agents, which accumulate as patterns of a mutually shaped history. A collective dimension thus contributes to the path-dependent transformations undergone by agents who make sense and act in the shared world. This historical aspect, however, could be seen only as a cumulative effect, leaving unchanged the fundamental property of agency: the asymmetric regulation of the coupling with the world by the self-constituted agent (see chapter 2). But this is not the end of the story. A different domain is opened up as human bodies engage in a mutual, concurrent, joint regulation of their couplings with the world and each other. As this happens in concrete, moment-to-moment practices, new situations emerge in these couplings that could not have occurred otherwise. These situations include relational and dynamic phenomena such as coordination and miscoordination of

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actions and moves, as well as the possibility of complementary and conflicting acts, rhythms, and timings. These situations also include relational patterns that become dynamically self-dependent—that is, sustained in time but underdetermined by the action of the agents engaged in mutual coupling. Social encounters with other bodies are sometimes marked by the emergence of a new phenomenal domain, one that (temporarily) establishes its own horizon and conditions of continued existence. This does not always happen when two or more people coincide in time and space, but when it does happen we refer to this with the term social interaction. This is in accordance with existing uses of this term for instance in social science (Goffman 1967; Kendon 1990; Sacks 1992) and in developmental psychology (Stern 1977; Jaffe et al. 2001; Schaffer 1984; Fogel 1993). In most of these usages, social interaction connotes an active engagement of dynamic complexity. Interactions are often described as “taking a life of their own” (Goffman 1967, 113) and sometimes as forming complex systems,1 which matches our experiences of interacting with people and the openness these interactions imply. How many times do we experience interactions as unpredictable, shifting in mood, aims, levels of intimacy, and so on, without any of the participants seeking or intending any of these changes? Still, we do not find many attempts to fully define social interaction and characterize its dynamical organization. The enactive concept of autonomy can be used for elaborating a definition. We must recall that it is possible to apply this concept to different domains, not only to the self-individuation of an organism. Accordingly, social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced). (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 493)

There are a few things to notice about this definition. First, the notion of autonomy as operational closure introduced previously is used here to describe the participants in an interaction (as living and animate bodies) as well as the relational patterns of the encounter. By relational patterns we mean processes involved in all kinds of physical, biological, psychological, and historical dimensions that we can use to describe the changing conditions in how participants relate to one another. Thus, variables like interpersonal distance, relative body orientation, absolute and relative

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timing, rhythm and intensities of movements and acts, all the way to relations between bodily skills, strength, vitality, affects, intentions, plans, age, gender, social status, and so on, are part of the relational patterns of an interactive encounter. We propose that the experience of interactions “taking a life of their own” corresponds to the emergence of operational closure (i.e., autonomy) in the domain of these dynamic relational patterns. The patterns, in this way, organize themselves and sustain their dynamic relations by responding to changes as an autonomous system does, as perturbations, breakdowns, and recoveries of certain dynamic relations, which as a consequence drift historically in ways not fully under the control of the participants. We are not here describing those systems of social reproduction, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus—that is, dynamic patterns that structure practices and are in turn structured by them, forming self-reproducing and active social relations that overcome the oppositions between agentbased and structural accounts. These dynamic, community-level processes will play an important role later (chapters 8–11). Social interactions do indeed relate intimately to patterns of social reproduction, but what characterizes the former is their self-production as relational patterns in the activity of embodied agents who encounter one another—in other words, their basic autonomy here and now. Social interactions are self-organized (Dale et al. 2014). Their autonomy is instantiated at a faster timescale than that of the habitus in the coregulated patterns of coupling between participants, relevant objects, and sociomaterial context. It is, however, a basic form of autonomy, similar perhaps to the autonomy of autocatalytic sets of chemical reactions. A social interaction is a self-sustaining dynamic pattern in which forms of coordination mutually enable one another while keeping certain relations invariant, much like chemical reactions whose products help catalyze other reactions and are catalyzed by their products in return. By coordination we mean “the non-accidental correlation between the behaviours of two or more systems that are in sustained coupling, or have been coupled in the past, or have been coupled to another, common, system” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 490). Coordination between coupled dynamical systems is found in many areas typically, but not only, in the form of different kinds of entrainment of rhythmic patterns across different spatial and temporal scales. This is observed in a variety of mechanical and biochemical systems and in collective animal behavior (such as the flashing synchronization of fireflies, duetting in tropical songbirds, or the complex flocking of starlings). Coordination phenomena have been studied in

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physics, chemistry, and biology (see, e.g., Kuramoto 1984; Winfree 2001; Jirsa and Kelso 2004). The coordination of interpersonal variables during interaction has been and still is the object of extensive research.2 While coordinating factors may be external, we must highlight that spontaneous coordinated order in coupled systems is a widespread emergent and relational phenomenon both in complex and relatively simple situations. In such cases, no external coordinator is needed and no part of any of the systems involved must be especially designed to produce global coordination. No orchestrator, internal or external, is required. A social interaction involving two autonomous agents may be depicted using diagrams similar to the figures in the previous chapters. Figure 4.1 shows two autonomous agents that regulate their own coupling with the environment as well as their mutual coupling. This is generally the case in an interactive encounter where individual acts introduce changes in the coupling between the participants, and between participants and their environment. This is what we mean by coregulation. We see two representations emphasizing different aspects of the interactive situation (basic agents at the top, sensorimotor agents at the bottom). Operational closure obtains in the self-dependence of the coregulatory patterns, which in the sensorimotor case are part of the network of sensorimotor schemes that individuates the agent (chapter 3). Two types of loops can be appreciated in the top case (they also exist for the sensorimotor case but, for convenience, these have not been drawn): cycles implicating a single agent and cycles implicating both agents. Through the condition of operational closure, interactions can thus be identified as distinct from other patterns of relating to the world that may be occurring simultaneously. It is unclear whether the autonomy of interactions can go further than this basic closed organization, whether it may develop active forms of functional self-distinction, and so on, like actual living systems do (let alone regulate its own coupling to its environment like agents do). It seems unlikely, though some functional complexity is sometimes observed in interactions—for instance, the spontaneous emergence of a division of labor when engaged in a common practical task. (This can be observed even in very simple interactions, as shown by a study of how two people turning a crank together spontaneously specialize in accelerating and halting its movement; Reed et al. 2006.) Social interactions are dependent on the more functionally integrated organic and sensorimotor autonomy of their participants but, as a self-organized pattern, interactive autonomy seems to be of a more basic kind.

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Figure 4.1 Social interaction. Two schematic depictions of coregulated activity during the interaction between two autonomous agents. Top: Coregulation of couplings in basic agents. Horizontal arrows indicate the coupling between each agent and its environment (wavy lines) and between them. The curved arrows represent the regulation each agent makes on its own couplings and on the other’s. Bottom: Coregulated coupling in sensorimotor agents. The straight arrows again represent couplings with the environment and between the agents, but now the closure of the regulatory curved arrows is represented explicitly.

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The autonomy of interactive patterns is vividly confirmed by experiences of interactions that frustrate the intentions of all the participants involved, who feel unable to steer the direction of social engagement. Interpersonal coordination can emerge even against a well-defined individual intention not to coordinate (Schmidt and O’Brien 1997; Issartel et al. 2007). Consider for example how telephone conversations with a friend or relative can prolong themselves even after we have started to say goodbye. A lastsecond comment, sending regards to somebody, can respark the conversation even if we didn’t intend for this to happen (it’s only polite for the other party to respond with a bit of news about the person we mentioned and for us to listen and make a comment, and so on). Or consider interactions that escalate agonistically without anybody’s intent, especially in cases when the participants attempt to avoid repeating previous negative patterns and therefore tread carefully in ways that precisely summon the negative patterns. Escalations of this kind, such as a family quarrel, can occur through nobody’s fault but that of the relation between attitudes, mismatched perceptions, acts, and timing. Another classic example is the short-lived “corridor dance” we sometimes experience when somebody is walking in the opposite direction to ours along a narrow corridor. Here we each engage in a lateral displacement, not in order to sustain an interactive encounter, but in order to break it. But when these moves are coordinated and we end up in front of each other again, the original situation of mutual obstruction reemerges, sustaining the relational pattern. Think also of a group of people moving together, say they are exiting a cinema and heading toward a known destination. The group may be engrossed in a lively conversation and unexpectedly they all stop walking, each participant responding to what she perceives the group to be doing. Without abandoning the conversation and equally unexpectedly the group may at some point reinitiate movement.3 An interactive encounter can then be seen as an excitable medium. It is charged with potentialities and may undergo changes in its modes of stability as a consequence of the actions and moves of the participants, whether they intend these changes or not, but also as the result of the physical and social situation in which the interaction is taking place. It may be affected by external events, the history of the participants, the place, traditions, and so on. Certain moves and events will drain the interactive medium of its dynamic potential and the encounter will grind to a halt—for example, an awkward silence, conversation topics exhausted, followed by individuals moving out of the interaction. Other moves and events will select a particular path among the metastable potentialities and the interaction must then

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run its course along a newly individuated path before a different choice can be made. A posed question cannot be entirely withdrawn as if it never happened. Attempts to change the ensuing flow are resisted by the relational dynamics and the interactive moment can be frustrating to participants who do not wish to join in. In this way, we can distinguish between different qualitative phases of an interaction: modes and moments of openness to different options and modes and moments of commitment to an individuated flow. An illustration of the excitable nature of interactions as dynamic media is the phenomenon of the Flogsta scream. Supposedly, during the exam period, at around 10:00 p.m. in Uppsala and other Swedish cities, university students can be heard collectively screaming from balconies and windows. A single person wails out of a window, triggering a collective howl that can go on for minutes, with its own rhythms and turn-taking. To describe what is going on, one can postulate a buildup of “potential for screaming” as the right time of the night draws near. This buildup is released at a critical point triggered by a singular event, a first scream (which probably will not work if the timing is off) inducing a wave of transduction in the collective medium of interacting bodies, to put it in Simondonian terms, that for a while reverberates in a self-intensifying and self-sustaining loop, under no particular individual’s control, and then eventually dies out. Part of the interest and potential for affective release in this kind of activity is that the whole collective interaction is anonymous since it is hard to determine who is producing which sounds or where they are coming from. This also happens in documented collective phenomena that follow similar patterns of buildup, trigger, transduction, self-affirmation, slowing down, and coda, such as rhythmic applause (Néda et al. 2000). Finally, some moves can amplify the range of potential choices and create new possibilities that cannot be predicted, as when interactions suddenly switch genres or move radically between styles, participants, forms of engagement, and so on (a conversation turns into a dispute turns into a fight turns into a cathartic embrace). These examples should clarify what is meant by the autonomy of the relational patterns of a social interaction. Social interaction is not the mere copresence of two or more embodied agents (they may just stand there and ignore each other), nor is it just the presence of a mutual coupling between these bodies (such as the transfer of body heat, or merely noticing each other). The definition of social interaction relies on two strong conditions. Condition 1: there is a coregulated coupling, which originates as a series of dynamic processes that become self-sustaining (autonomous) in

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the relational domain. This is important because this condition allows us to speak of events and properties as belonging to the interaction or being external to it. This is the condition that individuates the interaction out of many other concurrently existing relations between its participants and the world. Condition 2: the participants are and remain autonomous. They do not lose the possibility of exerting their powers on the interaction pattern or acting so as to attempt to change it or terminate it. This does not mean that interactions always unfold according to individual intentions—as we have seen, this would contradict the first condition that says that interaction patterns have autonomy. To speak of a social interaction is to speak about relational patterns and individual participants as equiprimordial. Too much emphasis on the autonomy of relational patterns, such that individuals are subordinated to them, ignores the second condition of social interaction, which demands the sustained autonomy of the participants. Similarly, too much emphasis on the individual determinants of a social encounter (intentions, brain mechanisms for interpreting the actions and intentions of others, etc.) misses the role played by the self-determining aspects of the interactive dynamics. It will be important to keep this in mind when we present our dialectical model of linguistic bodies in chapters 7 and 8. Social interactions are vulnerable. And so are their participants. The latter are vulnerable insofar as they are embodied agents and, as we have discussed in the previous chapters, their autonomy, both organic and sensorimotor, is an ongoing achievement under precarious conditions. As selforganizing material systems, bodies are always at risk from within and from without. Similarly, social interactions, as we have defined them, are also vulnerable to disruptions, breakdowns, and cessation both from within and from without. The latter can involve anything, including loud noises, interruptions, distancing, failures of technology, and so on. As to internal vulnerability, the ever-present possibility of unrecoverable breakdowns is one of the most obvious threats. For instance, in interactions involving some kind of coordinated timing among the participants, the operation of turntaking can rupture, as in the simultaneous onset of two turns at talk or by one participant interrupting the other’s turn. These ruptures can be in the service of activities at hand or can go against them; they can be recovered, or sometimes not. A subtler and yet most intriguing vulnerability of interaction has to do with engagement. Spontaneous involvement, for instance in a conversation—something Erving Goffman (1967, 113) calls unio mystico— is both a highly valued experience and a social norm, but the reality

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of an interaction is that participants often drift toward disengagement. External preoccupations, as well as participants’ consciousness of their own performance or that of the other, or concern about the unfolding of the interaction, regularly hamper the unio mystico. Dialogic phenomenologist Martin Buber (1958) also observes that we do not sustain the “I/Thou” mode of immediate relation to the other; while the I/Thou encounter is primordial, these meetings are transient. Our contemporary objectivizing ways of sorting out the world around us pull us perpetually to the derivative but still relational “I/It” mode of subject-object engagement. For Goffman, the social system of encounter is thus inherently ambiguous (at least in Western societies), as “spontaneous ‘normal’ involvement seems to be the exception and alienation of some kind the statistical rule” (Goffman 1967, 134). Precariousness and vulnerability are not “unfortunate” empirical aspects of how autonomous systems (individuals and interactive patterns) are realized in the real world. They are constitutive of this autonomy and without them the concept of autonomy would be empty. We must remember that autonomy implies self-individuation under precarious conditions (see chapter 2), whereby component processes form a network of enabling relations and mutually sustain themselves only in the presence of this organization. In other words, there cannot be autonomy, at whatever level, without vulnerability. Not all social encounters become interactive ones since we do not always enter into autonomous relational patterns involving other people. In fact, several everyday encounters, such as buying a ticket at a train station or waving good morning to a neighbor, do not often result in the self-sustaining dynamic engagement that we have described as the autonomy of social interactions. Occasionally they do. This means that there is an interactive potential in such encounters, even if they are frequently actualized in more or less standard, almost “scriptlike” patterns. A case in point is that of talking on the phone to a call-center employee, when they cold-call us or we call them because of a problem. Such interactions can feel exasperating and not only because they are unsolicited or happen in the context of having to deal with an urgent problem. The reason for this can be attributed to the highly regulated use of language and time imposed on workers at a call center through training and ongoing evaluation (including standardized salutations, questions to go through, not to mention pressure to resolve the interaction within a given time and move on to the next one in the queue; Cameron 2000). In addition, unlike the person at home, the callcenter worker must go through dozens of these conversations every hour,

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doing their best to stay within script and control their affect. The result is that the social encounter is so constrained that it cannot take a life of its own in the same way a conversation between friends could. If the encounter is overregulated by external rules no spontaneous interaction is likely to emerge. Based on what we have just described the enactive approach makes explicit a necessary tension between individual participants on the one hand, and the interaction as a process on the other—a tension that forms a leitmotif for the main argument of this book. If one of the participants completely dominates the encounter, we are not dealing with a social interaction (it would be like someone interacting with an object, not with another subject). Imagine a couple dance: one cannot lead unless the other assumes the role of follower (as tango dancers know well, this is a very active role), and if one participant does not contribute and remains passive, it would be like carrying a doll across the dance floor (as far as that would even be possible). Thus, not only is the interaction process autonomous in terms of its internal organization, it also depends, crucially, on the autonomy of the individuals participating in it. Social interactions require both interactional and individual autonomy. 4.3  Participatory Sense-Making What is the impact of social interactions on the participants’ sense-making? In socially interactive situations, the patterns of relational coordination affect individual sense-making. Participants are constantly engaged in sense-making activity, which is essentially embodied in action. Thus, the participants’ activities of sense-making can themselves become coordinated by the interaction patterns. If the regulation of social coupling that makes up the interaction takes place through coordination of body movements, expressions, actions, perceptions, and so on, which are also constitutive of individual sense-making, then embodied agents also coordinate their sense-making in social interactions. Sense-making activities can become interdependent. This is what we call participatory sense-making: “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sensemaking processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 497). Participatory sense-making describes social understanding in its most general form. It can involve many different activities during social interaction (and also outside social interaction, as we will see) and it applies both

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to how participants make sense of each other and of the world together. Such a general concept is not restricted to specific forms of human interaction, say a conversation. Rather, since it is defined in systemic terms, it applies in general across species too and for the whole gamut of interactive possibilities. The concept does specify, however, something that goes beyond the simple conjoining of sense-making and a social situation. It is not merely sense-making about something social (e.g., the expressions of another person, or their hidden motives) but it is sense-making performed socially, enacted as a shared practice. This implies sense-making that is perturbed, enabled, modulated, regulated, or even constituted by what goes on in the interaction (the activity of other participants or the interactive patterns or both). The various possibilities by which the interactive context can influence sense-making define a spectrum of degrees of participation. On one end of the scale, we find cases where sense-making remains largely an individual activity that is at most modulated by the existence of coordination in interaction. Say a toddler is playing with toys that her mother is putting in front of her while speaking on the phone to another person. At the other end of the spectrum, where participation is highest, we find the sophisticated cases where we fully and directly participate in a joint process of sense-making and the whole sense-making activity becomes a shared one. An example might be a mother and toddler playing together, jointly coordinating actions, and creating meaning (e.g., make-believe scenarios, made-up dialogues, and so on). Participatory sense-making includes the passages between interactive coordination, breakdowns, and recovery of coordination. Several examples of such patterns exist, some involving breakdowns induced externally (e.g., a poor-quality communication line can induce misunderstandings but also ripple into subsequent interactive moves) or internally (e.g., a move that unwittingly may be interpreted as a rejection or induce some unintended negative affect in some of the participants). The recovery from such coordination breakdowns involves a mutual accommodation between the participants that, if successful, moves the interaction forward into a new state of coordination. New social understanding often occurs during these interactive events: we understand each other and what we are doing better or differently; we have gone through the breakdown together and survive its threat to the interactive encounter. Given the vulnerability of interactions and of individual sense-makers, breakdowns are unavoidable. But this is precisely what drives participatory sense-making. Without breakdowns, without the constant risk of misunderstanding or worse, there would be no participatory sense-making (i.e.,

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no social understanding) at all. As we said before, precariousness is basic to individual autonomy and sense-making. When sense-makers engage in social interaction, it is the intertwining vulnerabilities of interaction and participants that make possible the ongoing and various transformations of sense-making. This does not mean that actual breakdown must be present in each and every interaction, but that without the possibility and risk of breakdown, there is no participatory sense-making. Breakdowns are not mere obstacles to social understanding that must be overcome, but lie at its root, even when interactions go smoothly (we come back to this point in chapters 7 and 8). In this way, a shared know-how is jointly constructed between the participants. This shared know-how does not amount to the sum of the individuals’ know-hows nor does it strictly “belong” to any of the participants. It involves instead the practice of coordinating sensorimotor schemes together, navigating breakdowns, and it belongs to the system the participants bring forth together: the dyad, the group, the family, the community, and so on. It may at first seem as if participatory sense-making is at best a clarification regarding the processes that support social understanding, namely that during interactive situations these processes are participatory and not locked inside the individual mind. Some may suspect that if we were to return to the spectatorial situation, more traditional individual mindreading will be at play, as if mindreading were the rule and participatory sensemaking the exception. We do not think this is the case. On the contrary, empirical evidence and experiential insights suggest, as we will see next, that the kind of cognitive and affective activity we engage in during social interactions is developmentally and ontologically primary, and that social understanding in the absence of interaction (the spectatorial situation) is derived from it. 4.4  Readiness to Interact It is well known from developmental psychology and neuroscience that social interaction and the social world in general influence, facilitate, and enable several individual cognitive and affective capabilities, social and nonsocial (Trevarthen and Aitken 2001; Reddy 2008). For instance, severe social deprivations during development can result in abnormal brain function, delayed development of skills, and sociocognitive difficulties (e.g., Meaney 2001; D’Angiulli et al. 2012; Lipina and Posner 2012). What this suggests is that in the case of humans at least, there are probably very few

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cognitive capabilities that are not in some way influenced by social experience. This is particularly true of so-called higher mental functions (reasoning, planning, complex decision making), which are widely accepted to develop through processes of socialization involving all kinds of interactive encounters, but particularly interactions between infants and caregivers (Vygotsky 1978; Fogel 1993; Hobson 2002; Rogoff 2003). Proficiency at understanding the social world, even as a spectator, is underpinned by a person’s developmental history of interactive experiences. The resources, powers, and sensitivities we bring forth during a spectatorial situation (e.g., understanding characters in a film or novel) are shaped by interactive know-how, and may indeed be part of the same skill set we use in interactive situations. (Witness the urge to shout at the protagonist in a movie when they do something particularly stupid or risky.) Advances in social neuroscience—for instance, hyperscanning techniques that simultaneously record brain activity in two participants—permit the study of increasingly interaction-like or actually interactive situations. Two people are placed in a situation where they can perform relatively free movements in response to each other, such as imitation of free hand movements, finger tapping, game playing, or joint music performance. It is possible under these conditions to record neural activity in both participants, using electroencephalogram (EEG) and other techniques, as the interaction unfolds (for reviews see Babiloni and Astolfi 2014; Hari et al. 2015). As in the cases of ultrafast cognition mentioned in chapter 3, the synchronization of brain activity during social interactions suggests that the spectatorial notion of the brain as the seat of modeling and inferences regarding the actions of others is at best very limited during actual social encounters. To see this we must recall that the cognitivist conception of how the brain functions as a sophisticated computer relies on reducing the world to sensory input signals carrying information (the opposite of what we have called world involvement). But the crucial assumption for this idea to work is that the brain processes such signals without its function being unpredictably altered by them. This can happen if brain, body, and world are assumed to be nearly decomposable systems as suggested by Herbert Simon in the 1970s. The components of such a system are coupled to each other but the way they function is mostly determined independently by the inner workings of each component. This is a strong assumption for biological systems, but a common one. According to Simon (1969/1996, 204), a nearly decomposable system “[separates] the high-frequency dynamics of a hierarchy—involving the internal structure of the components—from the low-frequency dynamics—involving interactions among components.”

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But this precisely is not the case during interbrain synchronization in live interactions, where, on the contrary, evidence shows a deep entanglement of brain and interaction dynamics across a range of timescales. Using dual EEG scanning during an imitation task with interactors visibly moving their hands freely and allowing spontaneous synchrony and turn-taking, Dumas et al. (2010) found interbrain phase synchronization in the alphamu (8–12 Hz), beta (13–30 Hz), and gamma (31–48 Hz) bands. In comparison the hand movements unfolded at a typical frequency of about 4 Hz (normal for hand movements). How can these slow social interaction patterns affect neural oscillation phase in two distinct brains at frequencies more than one order of magnitude faster than the interactive movements themselves? The evidence suggests that patterns of social interaction produce an entanglement between the bodies of the participants. By entanglement we mean the presence of deep correlations between processes at multiple timescales in each body, making the coupled systems impossible to analyze in isolation. Within each brain, the wave of influence across various temporal and spatial scales may travel from low to high frequencies via variations in neuronal excitability. These top-down effects have been associated with different cognitive phenomena, notably with the control of attention (e.g., Buschman and Miller 2007), an interaction-relevant skill. Interbrain synchronization at high frequencies may be due to high-to-low frequency integration and low-to-high frequency enslavement, with the difference that, instead of slow neural oscillations, the slowest processes “at the top of the hierarchy” are the emergent rhythms of social interaction (e.g., the movements of the hands, the taking of turns, and so on). At least at certain periods during a social interaction the brain-bodies of the participants seem to form an entangled system, which is the precise opposite of a nearly decomposable one. Their bodies (brains included) are at moments inextricably in tune across a range of several timescales, including scales much faster than the interaction patterns themselves. This interpretation casts doubt on the applicability of the individualist, spectatorial story about reading other people’s minds. Instead, it is in line with calls to investigate the braided coordination of neural, behavioral, and social processes (Dumas et al. 2014; Hari and Kujala 2009; Kelso et al. 2013). In this context, the idea that our social skills are developmentally dependent on and even contemporaneously constituted by interactive skills has been formulated as the interactive brain hypothesis (Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2012). Accordingly, processes of social interaction play enabling and constitutive roles both in the development and in the ongoing operation of body

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and brain mechanisms involved in social cognition, whether a person is engaged in an interactive situation or not. The hypothesis is in agreement with the findings of dual scanning experiments in two-person neuroscience, according to a review of the field (Hari et al. 2015; see also the discussion in De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Adolphs 2016). One of its implications is that a history of interaction, which begins arguably even before we are born, shapes our bodies into bodies that are always ready to interact. Readiness to interact is the default mode with which we approach any situation, whether others are present or not. In the case of social interactions, the hypothesis is probably not so controversial. But if a person is not interacting with another, the idea is less obvious. Consider, however, that most explanations of what goes on during a spectatorial situation involve some kind of inner inferencing or simulation regarding the observed behavior of other people. This so-called mindreading capability has been much discussed and is often assumed to be a more complex, but nevertheless strictly individual cognitive skill that develops from applying general inferencing mechanisms to the social world. Past social experience thus enters into the functioning of mindreading processes mainly as context or as stored information. However, if we examine the socalled developmental precursors of mindreading (Baron-Cohen 1995), we find that interactive skills and social experience play much stronger roles than often assumed. For instance, understanding the attention of others is generally believed to develop from experiences of joint attention at the end of the first year. But Vasu Reddy (2008) has shown that infants as young as two months old can understand when the attention of adults is oriented toward them or not, and can react with coyness and even try to reengage adults’ attention if they are momentarily distracted. Other versions of mindreading as a form of embodied simulation rely on the wealth of findings in mirror neuron research (Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011; Gallese 2014). Mirror neurons fire not only when performing an action, such as grasping an object, but also when a similar action is observed being performed by another. This property has been proposed to underlie an embodied understanding of the actions of others. Evidence suggests, however, that the activity and function of the human mirror system adapt plastically to a history of experiences even in adults (Catmur et al. 2011; Calvo-Merino et al. 2006; see Cook et al. 2014 for a review). The changes are stronger when the presented stimulus and the required response are contingently timed during training. Di Paolo and De Jaegher (2012) suggest these are precisely the contingencies that are found in situations of social interaction. In this way, the activity of mirror neurons is

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shaped by a history of interactive experiences, which suggests that contributing to participation in interactions may be their primary function, other possible roles during spectatorial understanding deriving from it. It would seem that at least in the case of humans (and possibly other species with rich social interactions and plastic sensorimotor capabilities), the network of sensorimotor schemes that make up the sensorimotor body is shaped and intimately oriented toward engaging in interactive encounters; in short, as the human sensorimotor body develops, it does so as an intersubjective body. Our readiness to interact as an ever-present and developmentally early disposition to engage the world interactively lends support to this interpretation. This disposition, of course, varies with the perceived potential for actual interactions to take place, but is present even in situations that afford no interaction, such as seeing a person at a distance, watching a video, or even looking at a photo of another person. (Even if we do not want to interact for some reason, or need to take a rest from interacting—the difficulty of extricating ourselves from an ongoing engagement attests to a general social orientation.) Observing a picture of a person gazing at us is not the same as observing a real person gazing at us. The image, understood as an image, still elicits a readiness to interact, less intense—though not fully absent—than observing a real person who could actually, and not just virtually, be looking at us. Readiness to interact tracks the time-varying social and ecological context and is strongly modulated, not only by the presence of real or virtual others, but also by preexisting social significance and sensitivity to the potential for interactive engagement. These properties are evidenced in the factors affecting the excitability of motor neurons and muscles that indicate preparatory movements. A study by Sartori et al. (2011) shows how video stimuli (not an actual interaction) can elicit a covert disposition to respond to a social gesture contextually. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation and recording motor-evoked potentials in the hand muscles of participants during the passive observation of a video sequence, this study demonstrates two important aspects of readiness to interact: (1) its varying time course and (2) the significance of the social context. The video shows a person extending her arm to grasp either an apple with the whole hand or an almond with a precision grip, then moving the object to a plate and following this action by extending the arm with an open hand toward the viewer. In some cases, another object is present in the direction of the extended hand but out of reach and the gesture can be interpreted as asking the viewer to hand over the object (either an almond or an apple). Motor-evoked potentials in the participant’s hand are measured.

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Their amplitude in different muscle groups indicates a disposition to imitate the observed grip during the first part of the video (the grasping). This is followed, when an out-of-reach object is present, by a disposition toward executing the grip corresponding to the out-of-reach object in the second part, in preparation for potentially handing over the object (i.e., a complementary act). If instead of an outstretched arm, the viewer is shown an arrow indicating the out-of-reach object (and no person in view), the covert action of the hand is significantly lower than if shown the social gesture, and not distinguishable from the case when the objects are shown by themselves with no arrow. This suggests that the change from imitative to complementary action dispositions is contingent on directly perceiving the social gesture toward an object and not likely to be mediated by inferential mechanisms (arrows being familiar indexical pointers and the idea of grasping already given by the context, the suggestion of a grasping response should not be difficult to infer and yet the embodied response does not occur if the social gesture is absent). We may conclude that it is not the observation of social events, but the actual participation in them that is at the root of the contextual sensitivities we use for understanding the behavior of others even in relatively passive and spectatorial circumstances, as shown in the experiment by Sartori and colleagues. In other words, there is a deep social influence on our sensorimotor bodies that goes beyond the mere accumulation of socially relevant information. Readiness to interact can play, in the context of social understanding, a role analogous to the mastery of sensorimotor regularities that we have discussed earlier in the case of sensorimotor agency. But there is an important difference. By engaging with them, objects are, for the most part, perceptually determined. Other persons, instead, remain to some extent indeterminable and it is precisely this indeterminacy that helps us recognize and interact with them as autonomous. The usefulness of participatory sense-making as a concept therefore transcends the situation of live interactions and helps us understand social skills across timescales ranging from the microgenesis of interactive moves to patterns of interpersonal relations and developmental processes. The underlying reason for this, which is relevant for the rest of our discussions in this book, is that many, if not most, cognitive and affective capabilities of human bodies are rooted in intersubjective experience and social interaction.

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4.5  Participatory Sense-Making in Practice Participatory sense-making was proposed as a response to individualistic approaches to social cognition in cognitive science and neuroscience. The concept has resonated across disciplines and has found numerous applications. Mentioning some of these here may be helpful for grasping more concretely some implications of the idea. Participatory sense-making can contribute to person-based approaches to mental health by foregrounding intersubjective aspects of the lived experience of patients and their social milieu and activities. Psychopathologies are then understood as specific difficulties and differences in practices of sense-making, including those enacted with others. In autism, for example, different ways of sense-making are linked with particular characteristics of interpersonal coordination and of the sensorimotor body (e.g., sensory hyper- or hyposensitivities, difficulties with timing and integrating movement and perception, muscle tone differences, rigid posture; see Donnellan, Hill, and Leary 2013). Taking an enactive perspective entails asking why something means something for someone, in the particular historical and interactive situation. One upshot of this for autism is that behaviors that may in classic accounts be considered inappropriate or be treated away, such as restricted interests, stimming (self-stimulatory behaviors such as rocking back and forth), or echolalia, are seen in terms of the meaning they have for the person in the context (a topic we return to in chapter 10). An enactive approach takes as a starting point what is at stake for a person in the concrete interactive situation (De Jaegher 2013). Aspects of substance addiction and schizophrenia (Zautra 2015; Fuchs 2015; Maiese 2016) can similarly be reconceptualized by focusing on the bodily, participatory practices by which a person makes sense of her world and locating the intervening factors at this level (as opposed to restricting research and intervention to neurobiological factors). Of note is also that looking at disability, disorder, or handicap through an enactive lens forces us to understand differences not always as symptoms or lacks but as ways of meaningfully engaging with the world (even if behavior, actions, or meanings seem strange to other people). This lends support to specific patient-centered forms of care and intervention, ranging from embodied and interactive kinds of therapy to self-advocacy movements (Zeiler 2014; Samaritter and Payne 2016). The study of music and music teaching is another domain of application for participatory sense-making. In contrast to individualistic and sociocultural approaches, music can be understood “in its whole complexity” as a

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socially embedded interactive practice (Loaiza 2016, 10; see also Matyja and Schiavio 2013 as well as Moran 2014). On such an understanding, music making and enjoyment are conceived as “open-ended processes of highly specialized joint creation of social-life, whereby complex personal identities grow and are fluidly interlaced with the enaction of intricate musical (sonic-kinetic) worlds” (Loaiza 2016, 10). Teaching music then becomes a matter of student and teacher “participat[ing] in (musical) learning processes through circular and contingent patterns of action and perception that continuously shape and renew [their] coupling,” in which they “[reach] out to each other and [draw] themselves together through their mutual care for being-and-becoming musical” (van der Schyff et al. 2016, 91, 94, emphasis in original). Applying this to teaching how to play the piano, Laroche and Kaddouch (2014) illustrate ways teacher and student can jointly pull the student’s skills forward by scaffolding his improvisations, starting at his level of experience, in a careful interplay between student and teacher’s skills in the moment. More broadly, taking this perspective on education supports the view that learning transforms people, from reaching into the constitution of their sensorimotor bodies, to affecting the ways they engage with each other and the world. An enactive approach to learning aims to develop a critical attitude in student and teacher, and finds a forebear in Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy (Freire 1996a, 1996b; Kincheloe 2008; hooks 1994; see also chapters 9 and 12). It can also give rise to novel insights into what goes on in here-and-now learning situations. For example, in a study of mathematical understanding in primary school students, Jo Towers and Lyndon C. Martin (2015) show how learning can be truly collaborative. They found a way to capture that “whilst … understanding was emerging from the actions of particular individuals, it was the ways in which these ideas were picked up, worked with, and developed by the group that was leading to the observed growth”—that is, the learning (Towers and Martin 2015, 2). In a simple and elegant innovation in methodology, they show three students working out a math problem together, coordinating their moves, drawings, thoughts, and utterances to the extent that, at times, they resemble a jointly spoken monologue. Similar shifts have been proposed by other authors. Van der Schyff et al. (2016) suggest that because the enactive approach embraces more primordial ways of knowing and being, bringing participatory practices to music education enhances the joint exploration of possibility, imagination, and relationality during learning in ways that standard information-conferring approaches do not. In the context of transformative learning views of education (whereby the development of reflective attitudes leads to a shift of perspective in the overall person),

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Maiese (2017) suggests that through its affective framing, the concept of participatory sense-making is better suited to account for the neurobiological and personal transformation in the process of learning (see also Begg 2013; Rossi et al. 2013; van den Berg 2013). In a study of teaching style in primary schools in northern Italy, Francesca Coin (2016, 2017) evaluated teachers’ attitudes and beliefs concerning the practice of education. She categorized these attitudes and beliefs as transmissive, constructivist, and enactive according to an extensive questionnaire examining their views on teaching, learning, and the class. Whereas only 20% of teachers self-describe as adopting an enactive perspective (with 9% describing their approach as transmissive and 67% as constructivist), test scores for pupils of the enactive group are significantly higher both in native and immigrant groups (showing a more marked difference in groups with a high number, 10 or more, of immigrant pupils). Coin admits that this study should be extended beyond the self-ascription of teaching style into an evaluation of actual practices (teachers confront practical and institutional limitations when it comes to putting their ideas to work), but suggests that a tendency toward promoting increased participation and peer collaboration may nevertheless result just from the attitudes of teachers adopting an enactive style. These and other examples indicate that many applications of enactive ideas are found outside the strictly academic sector, where people deal hands-on with the complexities of interacting with each other in real-world situations, in education, management and organization, and different forms of therapy. This is no surprise, of course. What is surprising is that, while practitioners in these areas find the enactive ideas intuitive, the scientific background available for them is often still a cognitivist one, focusing on mental representations computed by individual subjects. When enactive ideas are taken up by practitioners, the often unacknowledged humane aspects of interacting with each other suddenly find a scientific backing, as when physical therapists propose to enactively reground their field, making clear why it is important to go beyond merely instrumental interactions with patients (think of carrying the doll across the dance floor), and instead engage in dynamic, lived-body, transformative interactions (Øberg, Normann, and Gallagher 2015). 4.6  Not One, Not Two We must emphasize that, despite the rejection of methodological individualism, the enactive approach must not be construed as a form of interactionism (e.g., Bohl and van den Bos 2012). Social interaction as a concept

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plays a pivotal role in helping us understand the irreducibly participatory dimension of human sense-making, but social interaction as we have defined it fundamentally involves the continued autonomy of its participants. The centrality of social interaction obliges us to take the individual embodied agent seriously (as is well illustrated in the uptake of enactive ideas just described). This entre-deux between individual and interactive orders characterizes our approach (Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2017; a theme that will continue in part II). As we saw in our discussion of readiness to interact, the bodies of participants in social interactions are shaped by interactive experiences into a form of agency predisposed to social engagements, whether these are available in the moment or not. A historical pattern of codefining moments traces the path of intersubjective bodies as they develop in and through social encounters and relations. This is a path not only constrained by the precariousness and restlessness of growing organic and sensorimotor bodies, but also by the excitability and vulnerability of social interactions, with their paradoxical entanglements, their amplification and resignification of individual acts, their periods of openness and their periods of stability from which it is hard to escape. All of these aspects pertain to the materiality and multiplicity of scales of intersubjective bodies. Moreover, as occurs in the other dimensions of embodiment, intersubjective bodies participate in sustaining and reproducing broader social patterns beyond the interactive encounter. Since the frequency, recursion, and style of social interactions are bound by the nested constraints of locality, familiarity, power relations, and intergenerational asymmetries, interactive encounters never occur in a context-free manner, but are situated within conditions they themselves help create as participants move nonuniformly from one encounter to the next. Thus, interactions occur differently within the contexts of family, colleagues, friends, communities, and so on. Self-affirming patterns at these various levels, best exemplified by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, are dynamic and down-regulate the notyet-individuated aspects of intersubjective bodies according to the logic of the habitus’ larger-scale self-affirmation and reproduction, with the result that bodies and encounters contribute to sustaining these patterns. (The play between self-sustaining patterns at different scales here is analogous to the way biological reproduction affects the normativity and organization of the organic body, as we discussed in chapter 2.) Thus, in and around the bodies of interactors and the enactments of social interactions various sources of normativity are at play and sometimes in tension: the norms of

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the embodied individual participants, the emerging norms of the interactive dynamics, and the larger norms of the habitus. With their fundamental disposition toward participation in social interactions and larger group and community patterns as the core mode in which their agency is realized, intersubjective bodies make sense of the world and of other people through processes of mutual equilibration, recoveries from breakdowns, and regulation of misunderstanding and conflict (i.e., participatory sense-making). These are world-involving processes because sensorimotor agents are included, but they are a fortiori world-involving in interactive situations. This must be taken into consideration in addition to the support structures in the environment that shape the skills and mastery deployed by any sensorimotor agent. Bodies in interaction are at the same time more constrained and more open than sensorimotor bodies that have not developed interactively. They are more constrained because of the additional determination of their agency induced by the social world; developing bodies find in the social world new sources of obstacles and lacunae that restrict their viable possibilities for equilibration. But at the same time, partly through contingent action on the part of others (as in cases of mother-infant interaction we discuss in chapter 9) but also in open-ended interactions of all kinds, these restrictions orient the network of sensorimotor skills and sensitivities toward the complexities of the social world and these socially shaped skills (for partial acts, for coregulation, for working together, for understanding others) begin to pervade the world as a whole. This is the reason why human experience is intercorporeal. The “cloud” or “whirlwind” of activity surrounding organic bodies as they become sensorimotor agents includes most of the time social encounters (with other “whirlwinds”), and even when it does not, the virtual traces of these encounters impinge on our actions. To care about the world and our place in it means, as intersubjective bodies, to care about how we relate to others.

5  Entanglement and Historicity Chapter Entanglement

and

5 Historicity

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

5.1  Billions of Different Bodies The foregoing discussion of the dimensions of embodiment should make it clear that we are not talking about three neatly separated realms. The space defined by each dimension is described by orbits, as it were, around a particular type of autonomy and its corresponding domain of viability and normativity. The linkage between these concepts is the recurring motif that connects different types of material self-individuation with experience and meaning. We first have the autonomy of metabolic and physiological selfindividuation that defines the organic dimension of embodiment. This is followed by the autonomy of sensorimotor closure, in action-perception loops and in mutually supporting sensorimotor schemes; these define the dimension of agency in which sensorimotor bodies are enacted into existence. Then we have the closed loops of social interactions, transindividual synergies, and social relations; these define an intersubjective domain for human bodies. Each kind of autonomy implies an ongoing precarious individuation entailing normative regulation of the coupling between an active, unfinished, time-extended body and its associated milieu. There is a progression at play here certainly, but not necessarily a historical one. It invites us to posit a sort of hierarchy either in terms of complexity or in terms of what is more or less fundamental. The progression would seem to go in this order: organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective. We must first have a living body in order to even conceive of a self-enacted sensorimotor body. And we must have both an organic and a sensorimotor agent to establish the space of relations with other bodies that make intercorporeality possible. That seems clear enough. This linear picture, however, is patently lacking. Once again we can look at experience and empirical evidence to see that the dimensions of

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embodiment are not so clearly distinct, nor superimposed one on top of the other, but they interpenetrate in complex enabling and constraining relations. We have already mentioned that sensorimotor autonomy, for instance in the case of habits, can be at odds with organic autonomy (smoking, sugar addiction, high-risk sports, etc.). It would seem that what counts as adaptive for the sensorimotor subject is not necessarily always adaptive for the living body. Similarly, a passionate emotional episode of rage or infatuation toward another person can literally make us forget about eating or sleeping. Such conflicts between dimensions of embodiment tell us that their relations are complex and nonlinear, that each dimension is indeed a space of “free” possibilities, but a space constrained at the borders, like a wide corridor inside which some freedoms exist but not the freedom to pass through a solid wall. If we smoke ourselves to death or decide that life is not worth living without a loved one, we may end up crossing the barrier of biological viability in ways that cannot be reversed. While there are degrees of freedom in each dimension, evidence shows that they are highly entangled, sometimes in nonobvious ways. For example, it has been shown that social interactions with those close to us can modulate physical pain (House et al. 1988; Turk et al. 1992; Krahé et al. 2013). Kind marital relationships can make a spouse’s wounded tissues heal faster, while hostile relations can slow the healing down (Kiecolt-Glaser et al. 2005; Gouin et al. 2010). Many “biological traits” of our organic bodies are the result of epigenetic processes where recurrent environmental variations, social interactions, and lifestyles play a major role. The interindividual variation in the composition of the immune system is up to a point the result of our genes, which account for about 20% to 40% of the variation. The remaining 60% to 80% is due to age and environmental factors, one of the most significant of which is cohabitation (Liston et al. 2016). The shared environment and practices of cohabiting individuals tend to bring their immune profiles to similar equilibrium points. This may be due to a convergence of microbiomes (stronger for families and individuals in a relationship), the transmission of pathogens, shared behaviors, diets, and lifestyles. Even significant morphological traits such as the shape of our skulls and the strength of our teeth are dependent on social practices such as food production. Following the epigenetic functional approach to craniology first articulated by Melvin L. Moss (Moss and Young 1960), researchers study the changes in cranial morphology as a consequence of changes in masticatory stress and overall workload on the head and neck that are brought about in transitions from hunting and gathering to farming and

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the consequent consumption of softer foods and a more sedentary lifestyle (Sardi et al. 2006; Paschetta et al. 2010). Complex entanglement is also to be found in the relations between the sensorimotor and the intersubjective worlds. Despite the massive reduction in sensorimotor autonomy suffered in cases of Locked-in Syndrome (LiS; a condition in which patients are conscious but in a state of almost complete immobility and loss of verbal communication), qualityof-life reports show that many patients care mostly about their integrity as persons in relation to other people. A significant proportion of LiS patients describe their quality of life as relatively good, using active coping strategies, avoiding depressive states, and showing surprising psychosocial adjustment. The strongest predictor of this adjustment is good social support, a possibility boosted by the introduction of communication technologies that permit patients to engage in active social life (Bruno et al. 2011; Lulé et al. 2009). There is a converse side to this evidence. If the intersubjective world can sometimes redeem a loss of sensorimotor autonomy, many sensorimotor and physiological processes can in turn be affected negatively by intersubjective conditions. There is little doubt that social structures, norms, and attitudes toward factors such as class, gender, and ethnicity influence mental and organic health even to the level of physiological and sensorimotor processes. As Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins put it: At the individual level our physiology is a socialized physiology. The time course of blood pressure or serum glucose with age; the integrity of the epithelial interfaces between the insides and outsides of our bodies; the ways in which we perceive distance or pattern; the availability of our immune systems for confronting invasions by other organisms; the formation and disruption of linkages in our brains are all variably dependent on class position, the nature of work, the social status of our ethnicity, the commodities that circulate in our society and the techniques of their production. (Lewontin and Levins 1997, 90)

But do these social and economic factors entail a specific intersubjective dimension or are the influences more indirect (for instance, through regular exposure to toxins in hazardous jobs or the stress generated by working conditions)? These are complex issues. Technological changes over the last few hundred years have resulted in dramatic increases in physiological health markers such as height and body size, particularly in the West, in a process economists refer to as technophysio evolution (Fogel and Costa 1997). But the operating factors in this analysis relate more to the degree of control over the environment than to intersubjectivity and

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interpersonal relations. Evidence suggests, however, that intersubjective factors do play an important, perhaps major role once we look in more detail at how overall average changes in health and physiology are actually distributed within a society. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett summarize years of quantitative research showing that in industrialized countries it is not the absolute average income but the relative income inequality that best correlates with a series of social and personal ills. The latter include life expectancy, teenage pregnancy rates, infant mortality, learning difficulties, obesity, and drug abuse (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). Several explanations advanced by the authors point to factors that manifest themselves in the quality of social interactive experiences: status anxiety, snobbery, shame, resentment, lack of recognition, racial prejudice, sexism, abuse, physical and symbolic violence, and so on. Routine exposure to any of these experiences creates a sustained climate of tension and fear that can lead to various somatic manifestations, notably stress-related disorders (mainly in the segments of the population directly or indirectly “targeted” by social abuse, but not only in those). Systematic intersubjective stress, evidence suggests, negatively affects sensorimotor and organic bodies. Judith Herman (1997) introduces the concept of “complex posttraumatic stress disorder” (CPTSD) for people with “a history of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period (months to years). Examples include hostages, prisoners of war, concentration-camp survivors, survivors of some religious cults, [and] also those subjected to totalitarian systems in sexual and domestic life, including survivors of domestic battering, childhood physical or sexual abuse, and organized sexual exploitation” (p. 121). Interesting, from a perspective of autonomy, is that this CPTSD is essentially rooted in experiences of losses of power. This violation of the intersubjective body ramifies through to the sensorimotor and organic bodies. One of the main diagnoses for survivors of childhood abuse is “somatization disorder” (p. 123). This is a testimony from a somatization disorder patient that Herman diagnoses with CPTSD: “I lived in a hell on earth … I could not breathe, I had spasms when I attempted to swallow food, my heart pounded in my chest, I had numbness in my face and St. Vitus Dance when I went to bed. I had migraine headaches, and the blood vessels above my right eye were so taut that I could not close that eye” (p. 127). Entanglement is evidenced across many timescales, especially developmental ones. Such is the case of the effects of socioeconomic status on cognitive and affective function (D’Angiulli et al. 2012; Hackman and Farah

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2009; Lipina and Posner 2012) or the well-studied case of maternal grooming in rats, the lack of which interferes with normal development of stress signal regulators in offspring, which grow up to be highly susceptible to prolonged stress episodes and consequently display poor grooming behavior toward the next generation (Meaney 2001). In humans also, the negative effects of systematic intersubjective stress can extend beyond a given body’s lifetime, finding expression transgenerationally. Drawing primarily on concepts and explanations from weathering and epigenetics, Shannon Sullivan cites the case of the persistent disparity in preterm birth rates in the United States between African American and white women, a phenomenon with causes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes as “unknown” and presenting “an area for intense research” (Sullivan 2013, 195).1 While some scholars search for a “pre-term gene,” Sullivan posits that a lifetime of ongoing chronic stress directly stemming from treatment as a subperson in a white-dominated culture means that women of color begin pregnancies with a high allostatic load. Disproportionate stress levels of women weathered by racism and sexism lead to early labor (cortisol is responsible for labor induction), while babies who survive preterm birth are at higher risk for a lifetime of health problems (p. 198). This vicious cycle gathers greater momentum, Sullivan notes, when one considers that the uterus provides “the most powerful environment” for indirect epigenetic inheritance (p. 202). “The extra cortisol that a pregnant female produces when she is stressed … changes some of the epigenetic markers on the fetus’s DNA,” leading to a sort of “fetal post-traumatic stress disorder” in which that newborn organism becomes hyper-responsive to stressful events. Assuming that the sociomaterial environment the baby grows up in is similar to that of her mother, or not different enough to reset her “stress axis,” it is likely that as an adult she will be more vulnerable to “psychological difficulties, including actual PTSD” (p. 202). And so the wheel turns. Further evidence for entanglement is found in the relations between sociocultural nutritional habits and their epigenetic effects on gene expression (Landecker 2011). Sometimes specific links can be postulated, as in the modulation of the amplitude of alpha rhythms in the brain by slow gastric basal rhythms in the gut (Richter et al. 2017). This finding suggests possible routes for gut-brain-sensorimotor coupling that could support the proposed linkages between states of the gut microbiota and affective states such as depression and anxiety (e.g., Mayer et al. 2014). Entanglement between the dimensions of embodiment does not mean full determination between dimensions. It can mean biases or constraints

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to the degrees of freedom in one dimension by processes in the others; it can mean temporary or enduring synergies between the dimensions. None of these possibilities goes against the idea that at the core of each dimension there is a form of autonomy. By contrast, a fully determining relation, say if our biology entirely determined our sensorimotor and social being, would imply that the idea of a separate autonomous dimension is lost. But do we then have many bodies, somewhat entangled but relatively disconnected from each other as long as their mutual constraints of viability are observed? Not quite. As we have seen in several examples, patterns that become conserved and self-asserted in one dimension often free up or add constraints in the others, to the point that, for instance, organic life may become constitutively (not just causally) dependent on behavioral and social skills (e.g., the incorporation of air bubbles in underwater insects, the niche construction by Weddell seals mentioned in chapter 2). Although processes of integration and codependency between the dimensions are conditional on context, history, the biology of the species, ecological and social setting, and so on, making a general assessment difficult, we may still point to some patterns and motifs. As we have suggested, in animal bodies, organic identity is in some sense more basic than the identity of sensorimotor and intersubjective bodies. The organism enables sensorimotor and intersubjective life, even if these dimensions are not fully determined by organismic normativity. This describes one “arc” of the relation between the biological and the sensorimotor and intersubjective dimensions. It is not the whole story. Once sensorimotor and intersubjective life are “at work,” they offer the living body new possibilities for the realization of its self-individuation, options that were not otherwise available. The ability to trap air bubbles and build underwater air domes allows the diving bell spider to feed on prey she finds in ponds and rivers, with consequences not only for her survival but for the organization of metabolic pathways, the immune system, and so forth. The realization of the organism is plastic to different degrees, not fixed like that of a machine, and for that reason the three dimensions relate in time through a history of mutually codetermined transformations. In other words, being a sensorimotor agent or living in a social world not only “helps” the organism to sustain its viability, it can actually change the way it is organized. This is seen in the case of all animal life since it entails a bodily organization (described in chapter 3: tensegrity, nervous system) aimed at the flexible and efficient production of context-sensitive, rapid movement of the whole creature. Matter and energy requirements for

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animals vary accordingly, not only in order to keep metabolism going, but also keeping a buffer of stored energy for extended periods of movement without nourishment. In species where the cycles of sensorimotor regulation become autonomous themselves (i.e., sensorimotor bodies), the emergent normativity at this level “has a say” in how metabolism is realized. The same happens through the emergence of intersubjective modes of life that lead to complex kinds of group living. Preferences in diet, changes of habitat, modifications to the environment, social divisions of labor, are not all, not always determined by organic normativity, but they do affect how each body is materially realized and organized. Through the organizational dependencies between dimensions that emerge in such cases, sensorimotor life and intersubjective life become reabsorbed into the constitution of the organic body. We no longer witness a purely organic body but one in which metabolic organization is constitutively sensorimotor and intersubjective. A second nature. The integration across the dimensions of embodiment does not imply an equivalence between the three kinds of bodies. In fact, integration is never perfect. Each dimension follows the logic of its own autonomy. The organic body depends on the mutual production and distinction of its material components, so that clothes, glasses, stents, and prostheses that are not dependent for their own fabrication and functionality on the user’s metabolism remain external to it. The sensorimotor body, by contrast, is constituted by relations between sensorimotor schemes, which always emerge out of the coordination of organismic and environmental supports. Thus, reliable absorption of extraorganic processes into the sensorimotor network alters the sensorimotor body. These processes can eventually become part of it, provided they enter into the mutual relations of closure at the sensorimotor level. For instance, the skillful handling of the blind person’s cane enables some sensorimotor schemes like walking without colliding with objects, which in the overall sensorimotor economy allow, among other things, acquiring and sustaining the mastery of the abilities needed for using the cane. External elements, such as the cane, that are able to support such schemes are accommodated by the sensorimotor network and become reliably available to other schemes as new sources of powers and sensitivities. While materially these elements are not constructed by metabolic processes, their use remains precarious because it depends on frequent enactments and equilibration when the corresponding skills are challenged (e.g., a change to a new, lighter cane, or one that must be held with a different grip). With experience, the presence of such

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absorbed elements can “diffuse” across sensorimotor relations and may be relied on for enactments and processes of equilibration in other schemes unrelated to the ones these external elements originally supported. When this happens, external elements form part of the processes that must be sustained in order to support and affirm a sensorimotor identity and so they become an integral part of it. The sensorimotor agent does not relate to these elements as objects or tools, but as an integral part of her identity. They become incorporated. Fundamental differences between the logic of each dimension of embodiment notwithstanding, organizational codependencies still exist. When integration is the case, organizational relations permeate across the dimensions. However, integration should clearly be seen as precarious, temporary, ongoing, and not necessarily always implying a reliable patterning across the bodily dimensions. Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be that of anchoring. The organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies do not fully coincide with each other, but they are anchored together—not to a solid, fully coherent floor and ever-stable center, but to a relatively softer process of path-dependent enactments. This process is affirmed as the anchor point with each concrete practice, each act of breathing, drinking from a glass, holding someone by the hand, laughing at a joke, or struggling at work. But at the same time the anchor point is tugged and moved, by a bit or by a lot, in each of these enactments and by the winds of circumstance. The moving center or anchor of our bodies can be experienced as the changing vantage point that comes to the fore in different situations. A moment of connection with a loved one, or a moment of grave loss, brings the full body to an anchor point in our intersubjective dimension, provoking physical joy or pain, sometimes tiredness and weakness, awkwardness in our movements, posture, and balance. Other times extreme hunger, fatigue, or illness makes our organic being more present and the world as a consequence more meaningfully directed toward the needs of the organism. This directedness, however, is never entirely free from sensorimotor or intersubjective concern, which eventually may displace our anchor point and make us consider our illness or pain from a perspective of relations to our social and physical environments, our life narratives, and so on (with redeeming effects or otherwise). The situation of serious illness has often been employed in literature as a reminder of human frailty and mortality. This is signified by the vulnerability of the organic body when it enters illness for reasons that are hard to fit into an economy of meaning. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the image of a friend’s sick body provokes the

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reflection in Hans Castorp that this body has declared independence by means of illness and that illness makes people more physical, turns them into only a body. To be independent means for the body to dislocate from the meaningful coordinates of a life narrative. Here, it should be clear, a body is synonymous with an organic body, which is not a passive thing, but by some excess of self-assertion transforms its autonomy into an independence almost uncoupled from the other dimensions. Havi Carel (2008) expresses this uncoupling as a tearing apart of the biological and the lived bodies. The rift can potentially be overcome by a creative reconciliation of the ill body and lived experience through compensations, adaptations, and a rich personal and intersubjective world. As we have seen, LiS patients, who could be considered an extreme case of the independence of the body (it ceases to respond to any commands to move), demonstrate through their positive quality of life assessments that if their personal and social worlds are available to them their bodily anchor can move into the intersubjective realm. The dimensions of embodiment intertwine unexpectedly even in such extreme circumstances. Illness is revealing of these complex relations. As Annemarie Mol and John Law (2004) put it, an illness is enacted in that it involves a series of practices (treatments, diets, schedules, etc.) and changes to lifestyle and social behavior that both regulate and are regulated by the physiological aspects of the disease. Bodies are then best described as these practices themselves rather than something we possess or something we are. This is in line with our enactive perspective in that the practices that constitute agency emerge dialectically out of the intrinsic tensions in self-individuation between bodily production and distinction discussed in chapter 2. Mol and Law recognize different manifestations of these tensions: “Regulating blood sugar tightly may be good for the arteries, the eyes and the neurons, but since it increases the risk of hypoglycaemia, it is bad for the brain” (p. 54). They conclude that “tight regulation is not good or bad for the body as a whole. It is good for some parts of the body and bad for others. Thus there are tensions, in both the body and people’s daily lives” and life choices (p. 55). As we have seen, the managing of these tensions is an ongoing process of engaging the world as agents that must confront choices and trade-offs; it is, in other words, a path-dependent process of sense-making. Whereas Mol and Law see this most manifestly in the sensorimotor and intersubjective dimensions, in our case, the same conclusion applies to organic bodies as well. Concrete metabolism is always already an agency, a form of doing.

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Since to enact bodies is a practice, and practices, in their materiality, continuously open up a series of possibilities and contingencies regarding how our bodies are anchored and how we manage the tensions within and between the dimensions of embodiment, it follows that human bodies should be highly diverse. The entanglement and moving anchoring of the three dimensions allow for multiple viable paths for developmental and circumstantial change. Human bodies are as varied as human minds (it could not be otherwise). Studies of variations in perception and cognition have revealed important variability in how the world is perceived, associated with local practices, kinds of interpersonal relations, landscape, and many other factors (including, of course, language). Seemingly similar actions such as observing a landscape or looking at a painting involve in fact very different cognitive and perceptual abilities depending on whether one has grown up in a culture where perception patterns are more holistic (typically East Asian cultures) or more analytic (typically Western cultures) (Nisbett and Miyamoto 2006). These differences are shaped during development (Duffy et al. 2009). Even well-defined tasks such as pronouncing meaningless syllables presented on a screen involve different skills and activate different brain regions depending on whether one’s mother tongue possesses a consistent orthography mapping graphemes to phonemes (e.g., Italian) or not (e.g., English) (Paulesu et al. 2000). In a sense, such cognitive engagements are not just performed differently, but to some extent they are not quite the same task depending on the historical path that an individual body has followed. The point generalizes to other skills and patterns of sense-making (especially those dependent on literacy; see Luria 1971 as well as Scribner and Cole 1981). Viewed at developmental timescales, the plastic entanglement between the dimensions of embodiment suggests the existence of multiple possibilities for body viability as well as for partial integration and regulation of conflicting norms and tendencies. Human bodies are not merely plastically shaped, but are actually defined by a history of enactments, each of which affirms or challenges in the short or in the long term the various kinds of autonomy involved. Each body is a path-dependent ongoing achievement, a history of adaptations and compensations, of incorporations and environmental modifications that span the three dimensions of embodiment. It is neither an object nor a subject (these dichotomous, static notions downplay the constitutive role of active world-involving engagements and ongoing operations of individuation), but a practice of embodiment that intertwines, following a sometimes idiosyncratic logic bringing together

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biology, personal history, milieu, cultural and economic embeddedness, class, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and so on. There are literally billions of different human bodies. We should beware of drawing general conclusions from their apparent universals. On the contrary, the richest lessons are to be found in particular bodies since each concrete history helps us better understand the myriad open-ended possibilities of the entangled dimensions of embodiment. The forms of autonomy and agency that we have described are not to be thought of as complete descriptions of a general abstract individual human body in the singular. Rather, they indicate the patterns, operations, and processes by which multiple bodies develop jointly, differentially, and historically in their sociomaterial milieu. Human diversity is itself a key datum that would seemingly crush any hopes for a scientific theory of bodies in that presumably such a theory should rely on abstracting universals from “mere” contingencies, tacitly conceived as unimportant. We know this is not the only possibility. Bodies, precisely thanks to the processes we have described in this first part of the book, grow, develop, and die in ongoing attunement to their circumstances. The particular paths they trace are indicative of processes that can be theorized, modeled, and studied scientifically. Human bodies are path-dependent, plastic, nonergodic, in short, historical. There is no true averaging of them. This may pose some problems only for some traditional scientific practices but it is not a problem for research in general, an issue that has already been brought to the attention of researchers in psychology and psychometrics (see, e.g., Molenaar 2004; Molenaar and Nesselroade 2014). 5.2  A Recapitulation When speaking of embodiment in the context of the mind and human sciences it is difficult to avoid certain intuitive images: the body’s anatomy, the way it moves in the world, its vulnerability, even its lived aspects. There is some truth in these images. But how should we connect them? Are they giving us the full picture? The opposite seems to be the case, at least if we consider how these images are put to use. If not selecting one aspect of the body at the expense of the others, discourse in science and philosophy persistently leans toward dichotomizing the body: the objective and the subjective body, the body and the mind, Körper and Leib, and so on. But this inevitably falls short of a theory of the body, even more of a theory of bodies.

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The approach that we have presented in the first part of this book, and that lays the groundwork for part II, is an attempt to avoid falling into such dichotomies. These emerge from a drive toward abstraction and generalization perhaps better suited to other topics broached in science. The one thing that seems absolutely certain about human bodies is that they are material, that they fit into the logic of evolutionary explanations like the bodies of other species, and that there is no reason we should not think of them the same way as other material entities studied by science. Indeed, this is a reasonable starting point; not only do we share it, but we want to take it to its profound conclusions. At the same time, we should be aware that there are no other systems in the known universe as complex and little understood as minded human bodies, and that the sciences that study complex systems are, relatively speaking, still in their infancy. Because we are confronted with nothing less than one of the most difficult problems scientists and philosophers have ever had to consider, we should be particularly vigilant when any form of knowledge presents itself as common sense. Seemingly obvious distinctions, like the dichotomies just mentioned, may be less indicative of useful intuitions than of how much we actually ignore about bodies. In particular, the dichotomies between body and mind, subject and object, matter and experience, tend to reproduce the entities-first, relations-later, snapshot metaphysics that lurks in the very language used to describe them. It is hard to shake off this inheritance; it is maybe impossible to accomplish a full ontological reboot, short of reinventing both language and science. Still, from our current vantage point, the production of knowledge can be steered into viable alternatives. This is what we are trying to do. It may be useful to summarize how the enactive conception of bodies differs from other ideas about the body. In the first place, we stop thinking of “the body” in the universal singular, using instead “bodies” in the particular plural: bodies as they are concretely realized in the world and together with other bodies. This opens the door to seeing their ongoing (self-)differentiation as one of their key properties. We find that the construction “the body” often acts as an obstacle beckoning most of the familiar disjunctive patterns of thought (the body vs. the world, the body vs. the mind) and hides the intricate complexity and diversity of bodies under a false universality (“the”) and singleness (“body”). Thus, the image the phrase invokes is that of an abstract, adult, healthy, isolated, nondescript, typically male, typically white body. If we speak of bodies, instead, we immediately connote relations and plurality, at least leaving the door open to think them. No body exists on

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its own, not even the body of the abandoned astronaut struggling to survive on a lifeless planet, since each body carries with it multiple centers of historically constituted otherness. Bodies must therefore be conceived from a processual and relational perspective that steers us into conceiving their engagements with other bodies and with the world not as something that comes after they are constituted but as part of their constitution. The problem is that this is the point where most critiques of essentialism stop. Bodies are extended in time, involve processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales, are open and have undefined boundaries. We must do more than just state this. The enactive perspective is useful for this task. With its cluster of ideas, describing the relations between life and mind and offering a nonreductionist and naturalistic approach to lived experience, our theory of bodies can move beyond a mere critique. Enactive ideas, however, are put to use in a particular mode of theorizing, one that works in accordance with certain ontological commitments. We propose that organizing principles, often described using dynamical systems terms, such as the idea of operational closure, fruitfully place bodily phenomena into an order or logic of sorts. This logic points to various developments that emerge from the concepts of autonomy, viability, precariousness, agency, and sense-making. But, at the same time, we must move beyond a formalism and make these ideas concrete by ongoing confrontation with experience and empirical work, which help us reconceive and reorient the activity of formalization, thus arriving at concrete, growing concepts, which our experiences animate and our formal definitions continue to track. The ongoing cycles of formalization-concretization follow from the one ontological commitment that distances our approach from functionalism and mechanicism, and even classic phenomenology: the rejection of hylomorphism. Here is where we seek a deeper meaning of materiality. Bodies are active and organized material processes and the consequences of this are profound. Their becoming is ongoing and they are concretely embedded in situations, in space and time, and in relations to other bodies, not incidentally but fundamentally. Their materiality permeates the formalizations we propose, notably in the notions of precariousness, openendedness, and temporality that concretize the concepts of autonomy, agency, sense-making, and social interaction. If this was not the case, these ideas would be empty, no more than mere formalisms that, with enough creative interpretive tweaking, could apply as much to human bodies as to thermostats. Making bodies concrete starts by rejecting any principled separation between form and matter and thinking instead of processes of

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active matter turning into material form, flowing and transforming themselves, coordinating different orders of magnitude, and sometimes reaching precariously organized metastable patterns (“forms”) open both to unpredictable influences and unpredictable fluctuations (“matter”). In this way we can avoid the failures of other approaches in explicating the experience of being embodied, of being in the world. If we stay on the formal plane and treat matter as no more than an implementation detail, we end up turning tensions and ambiguities operating in time into static dichotomies. Sometimes this happens unthinkingly by the mere use of the language of common sense. The active matter that makes up our bodies is not a contingency of implementation. It is what makes bodies precarious and self-individuating in the first place—what makes them alive and minded. It is attention to the concreteness of experience and the experience of concreteness that has made thinkers like Hans Jonas, Gilbert Simondon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Francisco Varela (in some cases turning against their own different departure points) recognize that real bodies, the bodies that we are, demand new forms of knowledge, new ontologies, and new sciences.2 Attention to experience has brought us to realize that we care about the world and that each of us has a particular concrete perspective on it. Advocates of multiple realizability, who remain on the formal end of things and scorn materiality, seem to forget that the first-person givenness of experience, the self-affection of bodies, may be many times instantiated, but cannot, by definition, be multiply realized. Only one of the billions of bodies alive in the world today is having this concrete, once occurring self-affecting experience, no matter how many are going through similar ones. By weaving the concrete materiality of bodies into our theories we have a chance of understanding these aspects at the core of all of our experiences. Rejecting hylomorphism also implies that whenever we posit boundaries we must do it by attending to the logic of the entities we are following. We must understand boundaries not as walls but as active zones of ontological flux and exchange. They inform us about the kind of self-individuation that gives rise to them and about how a system relates to the rest of its world. As it happens, these are never relations of full closure or separation. On the contrary, every process in a body is, in some way or another, a world-involving process. Everything occurs as exchanges between bodies and their worlds, in the form of metabolism, but also in the practices of agents and their production of a social reality they enact, the interwoven activities that make up what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels call the “language of real life” (1846/1976, 36). The world, especially the world created

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by bodies, does not just inform them, it constitutes them, which explains their open-ended participation in several cycles of autonomy at different scales, and their unfinished, precarious nature, without either of which nothing would have any meaning. What about linguistic bodies? Should we conceive of them as living in yet another dimension of embodiment? In some sense, perhaps. We turn to this question in the following chapters, where we put several of the key concepts presented in part I to work. As we will see, however, it is not a new dimension of embodiment that is inaugurated with language, but a radical alteration in how each and every dimension is enacted.

II  Linguistic Bodies

6  Dialectics: A Tool for Enactivists Chapter Dialectics:

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6.1  Language as a Concrete Totality Our aim in this book is to travel the conceptual distance between research in embodied cognition and studies of human language. As we said in chapter 1, there is a significant categorical gap between these domains. Embodied approaches to language have so far led only to general, though important, ideas such as the need to recognize language use and language structures as situated and constrained by our bodies, our environments, our experience, and our habits. We need more detailed categories to move further, categories that will help us understand what bodies do when they are “doing language.” We have dedicated the first part of the book to describing the enactive theory of bodies. In this second part, we turn to the task of elaborating the set of ideas that will lead to the concept of linguistic bodies. But first, we need to say a few words about the method of our inquiry. By now we should be used to debates about the role of language in human evolution, in human uniqueness, human intelligence, human consciousness, and so on. Many of these discussions, interesting as they are, tend to acknowledge the complexity of language, the neural, anatomical, psychological, social, historical, and technological factors at play in all kinds of linguistic behavior, while at the same time assuming a postulate of immanence: phenomena in language can be explained through reference to other phenomena in language. When such discussions seek those essential aspects of language that provide the crucial differential of humanness, the assumption of linguistic immanence renders the soughtafter features difficult to explain in evolutionary or historical terms. Thus, we have complexity and multifactorial accounts on the one hand, and a quest for essential, determining features on the other. These discussions follow a predictable pattern. Has such-and-such a theory identified the correct

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determining feature of language? Say we are talking about the ability for recursion, or displacement, or duality of patterning, or the skills involved in reported speech and dialogicity. A theory picks one of these elements as central, while acknowledging others as important (though ultimately keeping them backstage). An upsurge in academic literature production normally ensues with advocates of the theory defending its claims against a more or less standard set of criticisms. These include: the determining feature is not uniquely human or not found universally in humans; the determining feature is not properly defined, or admits several incompatible definitions; the determining feature lacks a convincing evolutionary account; the determining feature is not really more important than other features. And so on. The logic behind this style of theory-making is more or less like this. Language is acknowledged to be a complex adaptive system, too unwieldy to be understood directly as a whole. We need to pull out of its internal relations those aspects that play a central role (circumscribing in the abstracting process the phenomena of interest in keeping with the main thesis of the theory). Some of these central features, maybe even only one of them, provide us with the key that unlocks the connections between all the others and also the property that gives language its uniqueness. What this style of theorizing evidently misses is the possibility that, like many other complex totalities that have been shaped historically, language is not neatly organized in this way (i.e., with a central conceptual core from which its many aspects derive, or a single idea that unlocks all the rest). It is possible, likely we would say, that language is more like a giant rubber-band ball knotted in a mesh of many other rubber-band balls and that its own features connect among themselves and with features of other systems in complex networks of logical, causal, and historical relations calling for the joining of forces at several levels of inquiry, from genetics and neuroanatomy to the study of social interactions, history, technology, and socioeconomic organization. In this way, to select one notion as central (say recursion) is to ignore all the networked relations this particular feature of language has when it is not abstracted from the totality—that is, when it is at work concretely (e.g., recursion in the context of reported speech during dialogues between members of particular community). Once we drop the assumption of linguistic immanence, it is a genuine empirical question—one people do not often ask—whether it is not the node itself but its connections to linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena that make a feature theoretically interesting or important for understanding language. We believe that this is indeed the case.

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Another way to put this is the following: Language has no abstract, selfstanding theoretical center, but is instead a concrete open totality embedded in networks of material, biological, and sociocultural codetermining relations. It should then come as no surprise that language has been one of the most elusive and most unsteady objects of philosophical and scientific study. As Fredric Jameson (1974, 536) puts it: The starting point of this, as of any consequent approach to the dilemmas of linguistics today, lies in the construction of the basic object of study—namely Language itself, that infinitely unstable entity which expands and contracts under our very eyes as we attempt to pin it down, now causing us to conclude that there is nothing—gestures, commodities, sex, eating—which is not essentially language to its very core; and now on the contrary abruptly abandoning us in a desperate position for which language as such is nowhere to be found, since it is never wholly present in any single one of its “paroles” or utterances, suggesting that the whole debate revolves around an abstraction, or, in short, an imaginary entity.

We think that the instability of language as an object of study says as much about language itself as about the unsuitability of the analytic search for essential features and the use of a logical framework of sufficiency and necessity as a method of research. If language cannot be approached, as we suspect, using a theoretical strategy that postulates abstract central concepts that describe the core features of linguistic phenomena, what is the alternative? Should we just give up? No, we should find a different strategy. We should look for inspiration in examples of how the study of concrete totalities has been successfully performed in other areas of human knowledge. In the human sciences, the study of concrete, open, complex totalities has one important tradition that can serve as an alternative: dialectics. 6.2  Dialectics and the Enactive Approach Enactive thinking is nourished by a number of research traditions, as we have seen in part I. It weaves together insights and methods from phenomenology, organizational approaches to biology, embodied cognitive science and neuroscience, the sciences of complexity, and dynamical systems theory. Should we now add dialectical thinking to the list? Not quite. The fact is that, more or less explicitly acknowledged, enactive thought has always been populated by “dialectical moves.” If we take dialectics broadly and nondogmatically, as the thinking of opposites and circularities, of relations and tendencies, together with their countertendencies, and of

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transformation and becoming, then dialectics has been part of the enactive toolkit for quite some time (see Loader 2015). The original theory of autopoiesis, on which the enactive concept of autonomy is based, has itself a dialectical orientation in that its approach to the question of what makes up a living organism is explicitly contrasted with the trend to describe life as a list of abstract properties (reproduction, sensitivity, growth, etc.). Instead, autopoiesis is proposed as a concept from which the phenomenology of life can be derived as a set of internal relations between organic processes in codetermining relations with its environment. Such moves are typical of dialectical thinking. With the insistence on the subordination of biological phenomena to the condition of autopoiesis, however, the concept is not deployed dialectically and becomes fixed. The enactive approach accepts several of the starting assumptions of autopoietic theory, and then completes the opening dialectical move by developing the notion of autopoiesis as a result of the tendencies it sets in motion. We have described in chapter 2 the tensions inherent in autopoiesis (between self-production and self-distinction) and let their interplay generate new concepts, such as those of sense-making and agency. So we should not be surprised about the strong resonances enactivists find in ideas such as Hans Jonas’s needful freedom, Richard Lewontin’s organism/environment codetermination, Susan Oyama’s mutual enfolding of organismic and environmental processes, or Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical understanding of behavior (Varela et al. 1991, 198–200; Thompson 2007, 68–70; Di  Paolo 2005, 2009; Weber and Varela 2002). We should not be surprised either if we find enactivists frequently employing phrases such as “enabling constraint,” “codetermination,” “mutual specification,” or “precarious autonomy.” Sometimes these embedded dialectical themes are made explicit in the rejection of fixed dichotomies, as in Varela’s discussion of reversible dialectical structure/process pairs in a 1976 article called “Not One, Not Two” (further developed in Varela 1979), or in the claim that the enactive approach to intersubjectivity is “Neither individualistic, nor interactionist” (Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2017), or in the double negation of organismic self-individuation fighting against the operation of “components that paradoxically provide the very tendencies towards the dissolution of the same form” and turn life into a kind of restless “frustrated suicide” (Di Paolo 2009, 16). Many dialectical motifs in enactive theory have been approached using the language of dynamical systems theory as in cases of emergence and nonlinearity. It would be fair to ask why we need dialectics at all if dynamical explanations can provide quite powerful descriptions of the phenomena

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of interest. This seems like a fair point, but the alternative is false. We do not have two competing epistemological tools but two complementary ones. To be sure, some themes that before the use of dynamical systems techniques were described in dialectical terms (e.g., codetermination of organisms and environment, the transformation of quantity into quality) can today be captured mathematically (e.g., using coupled nonlinear differential equations, game-theoretic approaches to coevolution, computer models of niche construction), and the usefulness of this is undeniable. But it would be incorrect to conclude that the dynamical formulation replaces the dialectical one or that it makes it redundant. This is to confuse different explanatory aims. Just as dynamical systems approaches describe lawful, operational relations between systems and provide a rich vocabulary, with concepts such as coupling, metastability, and dynamical landscapes, so dialectical thinking is useful for tracking the changing relations between systems and the evolution of concepts themselves. Dialectics can set the stage for dynamical analysis, especially when studying processes and operations that by their very nature can be described mathematically only in partial or a posteriori terms. These are notably operations of becoming, transformation of relations, creation of novel configurations, changes of frame, and emergence of new variable sets. Dialectics can serve as a way of revealing the conceptual linkages between elements, such as those between parts of a whole, that are invisible in dynamical descriptions; it can also serve for understanding how the tensions between elements change over time. The use of dialectical thinking is also a way to avoid the dangers of reification that come from dynamical formalisms that sometimes can give the impression of being too neat and complete. Like all formalisms, dynamical models depend on a set of limiting conditions; they are valid only within those limits. With relatively simple systems this is often not an issue, but complex material systems with multiple relations will inevitably “escape” dynamical idealizations the moment seemingly innocuous interactions are amplified and start to play important roles in unforeseen ways. Being methodologically self-critical, dialectics can direct us to revisions of our assumptions and so can function as a way of understanding why such unexpected passages occur. Dynamical models can help us explore the consequences of particular dialectical moments, as when we describe certain tendencies that should be expected to arise from a situation, other things being equal. But dynamical models must fix constraints, laws of change, and variables—once the latter are selected “they are then treated as unitary ‘things’ whose only property is quantity” (Levins 1998, 394).

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Dialectics in turn can critically help us decide when the heterogeneity and internal structure of processes can no longer be captured under a single quantity, thus emphasizing “the provisional nature of the system and the transitory nature of the system’s model” (ibid.). Unlike other approaches, the enactive perspective takes the life-mind continuity seriously as a way to conceive of mental and biological phenomena not merely as causally connected, but as constitutively linked, without this implying a reduction of psychology to biology. A dialectical understanding of these relations therefore implies that as we move from active matter to life and to the realm of agency and sense-making, we simultaneously move into a sharper understanding of materiality, and also into an understanding of how active matter becomes transformed by mental phenomena. Accommodations occur at all scales. Not only do we have minds that are material and biological, but with minds, biology and materiality become minded, or partake of the complexities of the mind. This way of looking at life-mind continuity dialectically, as contrasting terms interpenetrate each other, differs from hierarchical approaches that focus on levels of causality. These approaches tend to restrict the links between the proposed “levels” (say, between biological and psychological phenomena) to a series of causal relations. For instance, information processing is implemented in the brain, so the brain is causally implicated in how information is processed, and cognition inherits several of these causal constraints, but is otherwise constitutively independent of them. With such moves, naturalism is acknowledged in the causal domain, while dualism persists in the constitutive domain. The enactive approach rejects constitutive dualism but is not satisfied with a claim that nothing differentiates the mental from the biological, or the biological from the physical. One alternative to make sense of these apparently contradictory sources of enactivist dissatisfaction is to do so dialectically, through an understanding of how concepts like autonomy permit both continuity and sharp changes and transformations that do not conceptually “unhook” new “levels” from older ones, but on the contrary, reshape all “levels” in accordance with the most recent innovations. Nothing is quite left behind in the enactive story. Minds are mental in ways that other biological phenomena are not, but they are also inherently lifelike and through their organic nature they obtain fundamental core aspects of their mode of existence, such as the structure of embodied caring. Similarly, minds are material in a fundamental sense of shaping and being shaped by far-from-equilibrium, open-ended, and nonergodic operations between material flows. Without the precarious materiality of bodies, there would be no meaning, and no minds.

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We can understand the enactive approach as resolving the classic contradiction between subjectivity and world that other approaches in philosophy of mind do not resolve (enhancing, instead, one term of the relation at the expense of the other). Subject and world do not meet as two readymade poles of being that must be put into some harmonious relation, in an operation that leaves the terms (and the relation) external to each other. There is a passage from world to subject and from subject to world. Enactivists “resolve” this passage by thematizing the third element between the static poles: bodies in action and their world-transforming practices. Thus the whole system is set in motion and ontological questions are neither reduced to epistemology nor severed from it. As we have seen in the first part, significance is enacted by bodies in the world, which are also bodies of the world. But this is nothing if not the dialectical transformation of a solid dichotomy into a fluid, dynamic, ongoing becoming of bodies in action. This is at the core of the original formulation of enactive ideas when it is said that enaction brings forth a world (Varela et al. 1991). In this sense, dialectics is, and has been since the start, one way of thinking enactively. 6.3  The Abstract and the Concrete Two enactive themes intimately connected with dialectical ideas are concreteness and becoming. Since the term dialectics is used varyingly, these ideas will help us describe the flavor of dialectics most suitable for our project. At the end of the last century Francisco Varela wrote about the reenchantment of the concrete, describing how the sciences of the mind were beginning to move away from disembodied general algorithmic intelligence (Varela 1992). Instead, the feats of everyday cognition, at the time studied only by a few people (e.g., Agre 1988; Lave 1988), gradually caught the attention of researchers in cognitive anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, AI, and robotics. A call had been launched to study “cognition in the wild” (Hutchins 1995), to consider the complexities of everyday sociomaterial engagements, the experience of living and interacting in the real world, stepping outside the lab and the boxes of functionalist theorizing. But how to study the concrete? How to think about it? Isn’t all thinking an abstraction? Typical conceptions suggest that the concrete is that which is closer to actual perceptions, to the facticity of the real world, while the abstract is that which is more general, that which, removed from the senses, indicates

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commonalities across actual instantiations. This is not the meaning we give to these terms here. There are several limitations to this common understanding, as philosopher Evald Ilyenkov argues (1960/2008). We prefer to think of abstraction and concretization as both material operations and epistemological attitudes. More precisely, we take abstraction to be synonymous with isolation, decontextualization, or separation from a set of relations (ab+trahere ‘to pull or draw away from, to remove’). This can apply to an idea as well as to a material object. We may take a feature of language, say recursion, and consider it in itself for what we understand it to be, isolated from its interactions with other features of language, or from language use. We may also take part of a car engine on its own, outside its context of interactions with other parts, its user, its milieu, and so on, and examine its properties. Both of these are operations of abstraction, one strictly conceptual, the other involving a perfectly perceivable material object. Concretization is equally applicable to both ideas and objects and involves the opposite move of examining something by considering it increasingly embedded within a network of relations. Even within their normal context, some objects of study remain relatively abstracted from their surroundings. Such is the case of a nearly decomposable system (Simon 1969/1996), whose couplings with other systems do not significantly affect its functions and operations. This tends to be the case with idealized machines, whose parts are not defined in terms of their relations to other parts. And yet even technical objects have a tendency to accumulate mutual dependencies between parts, to exploit superabundant functionalities as designs are improved (e.g., turning support elements into heat dissipation units), and to further immerse themselves in a set of conditional relations with their milieu, a process Gilbert Simondon (1958/2017) aptly calls concretization (con+crescere ‘to grow together’). Most natural systems are already the result of processes of concretization, often to the point that the relevant properties we identify in one of its parts are hardly ever intrinsic to it, but have become causally and constitutively relational. For this reason, concretization may also be understood as an embodiment (not a record) of history. We come to a first broad understanding of dialectics: it is a method of inquiry that moves thought from the abstract to the concrete. What does this method consist in? It is not about the blind application of a formula (thesis-antithesis-synthesis, negation of negation, etc.). Nor is it a procedure that takes place solely in the realm of ideas. It is an ongoing confrontation between patterns of thoughts and real situations. For this reason, we do not take dialectics as being about the battle of logical opposites,

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or about outright contradictions that must be superseded, or about quantity turning into quality. “These relationships are marvels, curiosities, or paradoxes. They enlighten only when one grasps them in our experience” (Merleau-Ponty 1973a, 203). Instead of any particular formula, we consider what Simondon in a short 1960 fragment describes as a dialectical situation (Simondon 2016). In such a situation there is a tension between unrealized potentialities and barriers to their realization. It is a metastable situation that may lead to a process of innovative resolution or individuation if met with appropriate material conditions and triggering events. Hence, when we analyze a situation dialectically, we care about finding the juxtaposition of tendencies and countertendencies, the ambivalences between barriers and potential flows, the overdeterminations that arise not just from two but from multiple internal and external, antagonistic and nonantagonistic conflicts and contradictions. This identification is the conceptually laden dialectical move, its more analytic side. This is followed by the empirically laden establishment of historically contingent events and configurations that move the dialectical situation toward emergent forms of individuation and the dynamic transformation of its tensions in one domain into tensions in another or tensions of a different kind, because as long as sources of potentialities remain available, a dialectical situation tends to move into a new, more concrete, dialectical situation.1 The interplay between thought, reality, and practice is neatly summarized by Henri Lefebvre: “Whenever there is conflict there may—but it is not inevitable—appear a solution which transforms the opposed terms and puts an end to the conflict by transcending them. It is up to analysis to determine this solution, up to experience to release it, and up to action to realize it. Sometimes there is no solution” (Lefebvre 1940/2009, 93). In practice, this means proceeding by a series of steps. First, a complex whole is presented, initially using a well-chosen starting point, an abstraction that captures something important about the actual whole. Second, since the abstract whole is not fully realized or totally determined, its dialectical situation must be revealed through an analysis of tensions in potentialities and barriers, tendencies and countertendencies, and so on. Third, a passage toward a new dialectical situation is described by presenting the empirically known conditions and events that are able to realize the potentialities in the original situation. In general, these actualities will be historically contingent. The steps are then repeated, keeping to a minimalist spirit to avoid jumping stages, and describing the progressive concretization of the whole with as much detail as required.

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We have applied this method in chapter 2 to the idea of autopoiesis by revealing the opposed tendencies provided by each condition autopoietic systems must fulfill (self-distinction and self-production). Each condition is a barrier to the tendencies of the other, resulting in a dialectical situation. The actualization of the potentials of this situation is given by the material possibilities of biochemistry and the embedding of the formal notion of autopoiesis in an explicit temporal domain; the result is the enactive concept of agency. The new concept is a less abstract understanding of the initial whole (a formal, set-theoretic notion of the organism turns into a situated, dynamic concept of lived activity). Concretized concepts are what the method yields. The same moves can be applied to other kinds of agency and sense-making as we do in chapters 7 and 8. We should contrast dialectics with analyses that look at opposing demands as a problem of trade-offs. A dialectical situation is not a set of independent constraints externally imposed on a system and individually demanding different optimal conditions. Such cases are resolved by the search for some constrained global optimum, a middle ground, or a golden mean. Dialectical tensions, instead, originate within the system and the multiple relations that constitute it. Tensions emerge as the disharmony and contradictions of the tendencies of operation or potentialities for change between different parts, norms, or functions. When a passage out of a dialectical situation into another occurs, oppositions are transformed rather than equilibrated.2 In any case, dialectical tensions often take forms that are not easily resolved by golden-mean analysis. Typical dialectical motifs include the tensions between sedimented, past concretized structures and current, spontaneous activity, the tensions provoked by overdetermination of a part or property of a system by incommensurable functional or normative frameworks, tensions in spatial dimensions that become tensions in the temporal dimension (or vice versa), and generally, tensions between incompatible structures that cannot be meaningfully averaged and must be integrated as a novel organization (e.g., the enacted emergence of depth vision out of nonoverlapping 2D patterns of retinal stimulation in each eye). The dialectical method is useful for approaching the study of concrete totalities, as in the case of human language. These totalities are formed historically and dialectics is a way of progressively revealing how history has been captured or embodied in complex wholes. Does this mean that we should expect dialectics to reveal a reconstruction of historical events? Not exactly, not in the surface sense of a chronology. What emerges out of the dialectical method is a growing sense of the logic of historical changes.

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Each new stage describes a new frame of norms or laws of change. A new situation contains new principles that apply to historically preceding forms, which “begin to move according to laws characteristic of the new system of interaction in which they now function” (Ilyenkov 1960/2008, 209). The particular actualities that serve to move a dialectical situation forward do not need to arise precisely at the point in time when they are required. They may not be in place yet, meaning that the current situation must somehow be sustained in time until a dialectical resolution is made possible. Or they may have been in existence for some time as secondary aspects of the totality and only in the current situation are they integrated into a new role. Accordingly, the categories that emerge from a sequence of progressive dialectical moves do not appear in the same sequence as the specific phenomena they indicate appeared in history. At the time these phenomena appeared, maybe they did not yet fulfill the function of regulating the tensions of a dialectical situation. It is then “unfeasible,” even “wrong,” to let categories follow one another in the same sequence as their historical appearance (Marx 1973, 107). Dialectics presents them, rather, in terms of their relation to one another in the currently existing totality. The progression of categories from participatory sense-making to linguistic bodies in the following chapters partially embodies the history of human language but is not its sequential reconstruction. Our dialectical model does not address the question of how forms of social agency evolve historically or when they first appear. Nor is it a causal model. When we say that a specific form of social agency resolves or transforms the tensions created at the previous stage, we do not imply that the emergence of the behaviors and capacities that support this form is due to this function. Having said this, our model may ultimately contribute to the question of historical origins. First, there is a relation of necessity between a given dialectical situation and the tensions it creates. Second, there is a relation of sufficiency between the subsequent situation and the transformation of those tensions. The historical appearance of interactive or language-like behaviors is contingent on these relations of necessity and sufficiency; it is not causally determined by them, but depends on material constraints and contingent events. A new form of social agency may rely on behavioral capacities that exist already, or that emerge as a result of trying to manage tensions at the previous stage, or it may indeed never appear. Any of these could be the case. What is not contingent is that, given its appearance, a form of social agency enters into an intimate relation with preexisting forms of social agency and reshapes their “logic,” the way

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they relate to each other. These are the relations we intend to describe in our model.3 6.4  Dialectics in Psychology and the Study of Language Far from being the first to propose a dialectical approach to the study of language, with our model we are attempting to devolve to contemporary research a way of thinking that has not seen many recent instantiations, particularly in embodied cognitive science. Because of this, it is helpful to summarize some past approaches in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics that bring dialectical motifs to questions about language. 6.4.1  The Complicated Real Life of Language Certain themes recur in expositions of dialectical and Marxist accounts of language. Two texts that help establish the coordinates for these views on language are Raymond Williams’s (1977) Marxism and Literature and Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s (2005) A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Dialectical perspectives tend to criticize idealizations such as that of language as a selfstanding formal system of rules and meanings arbitrarily or conventionally related to practical activity in the world, or idealizations such as language existing as purely constituted and learned by individuals simply as the incorporation of particular skills. Several dialectical approaches recognize language as a totality, but one inherently embedded in human practices and the sociomaterial environment. For these reasons they see language as always already concretized into a “language of real life,” in sharp contrast to the abstracted, isolated (and as we will see, nonconstitutive) views of language as one additional cognitive capability or a formal lexicogrammatical system. Throughout the 20th century, many of these views were more at home in disciplines such as anthropology, semiotics, cultural criticism, literary studies, and political science, and did not progress much into the areas of psychology, embodied cognition, and language sciences. Similar critical and positive messages, however, have been independently advanced by contemporary perspectives that highlight the interactive, embodied, practical nature of linguistic engagement (e.g., integrationist linguistics and cognitive linguistics). Lecercle (2005) formulates some of these critical points as general theses that attempt to break from traditional assumptions concerning the relations between language, social practices, and subjectivity. Language is a social, historical, and material phenomenon that cannot be dissociated

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from political configurations and struggles. It also constantly interpellates and constructs subjective attitudes rather than simply being a vehicle for communicative intentions. This view contrasts with mythical pictures of language as the locus of communicative rationality (Habermas) or as following cooperative principles for pragmatic engagement (Grice). While both Habermas and Grice can be credited for placing the pragmatic situation of communicative action center stage, the contractual agreement regarding the conditions of communication (honesty, normativity, intelligibility, etc.) that their views presuppose divorces language from real and widespread agonistic phenomena such as debates, disputations, struggles, and so on and misses the subjectivizing force of language itself. The cooperative principle is belied by the complexity and conflicts of real communication, from which any theorizing about language should begin. The principle of the agon could be a more fruitful departure point, as Lecercle proposes, but we need not be committed to it either, provided we take up the task of understanding the multiple and complex forms social interactions can take, and see cooperative and noncooperative situations as emerging from interactive potentialities and constraints. The challenge for an embodied approach to language is not to dodge the task of explaining how the conditions for conversations come to be in place. By the time the conditions for Habermasian or Gricean communicative acts are met, the real, creative acts of engagement between people have already taken place. We should look at interactive dissonances as constitutive of linguistic actions, at the center of the risky business of communicating. Without the possibility, constant risk, and actual occurrence of conflicts and misunderstandings, there is no participatory sense-making of any kind, no communication; in fact, no reason for communication. Apart from the work of Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Valentin N. Voloshinov in the 1920s or the work of Tran Duc Thao and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1950s, relatively few isolated efforts have attempted to provide a dialectical analysis of language. For instance, in the 1960s, in a context dominated by structuralism, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1983) proposed a series of homologies between semiotics and economics. Elaborating concepts such as linguistic production, linguistic work, and linguistic capital, he analyzed how these ideas shed light on the production of subjectivity. In doing so, he adopted a constitutive view of language, which is a common theme running through practically all dialectical approaches (see also Taylor 2016). As Williams (1977, 21) puts it: “A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world.”

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Perhaps what is lacking in nondialectical perspectives is the realization that chained “acts of communication” do not by themselves constitute a dialogue. To understand what this means we turn to the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov. 6.4.2  The Bakhtin Circle The dialogic situation is at the center of the Bakhtin Circle (e.g., Bakhtin 1981, 1984, 1986; Voloshinov 1929/1973). And dialogues are anything but simple. Many levels of relationality are at play in real dialogues and multiple tensions can occur at all these levels and between them. There are relations between the participants, between their intentions and motivations, between their acts of mutual recognition as people and as entitled coparticipants. There are relations between their expressions and the context, temporality, and configuration in which the live interaction takes place. There are relations between the actual dialogue and its sociocultural framing in the form of life genres and speech genres. There are also relations between moves in a dialogue and self-directed talk. And then there are relations between one dialogue and other dialogues and between one utterance and another in the form of reported speech. Because of these relations, dialogues are more complex than the clean concatenation of communicative acts performed in turn. The proper study of language must start from such complex dialogic situations, and this choice leads us to observe and acknowledge the elements that become individuated by the (sometimes shifting) logic of all the relations just mentioned. Thus, a unit of signification in a dialogic context is not so much the word or even the sentence, but the utterance, the (spoken, gestural, expressive, performative, etc.) move that a turn-holder makes with the recognition and support of her audience. Utterances convey and refer, but also address, propose, enact, and reconfigure, all effectivities that are pertinent to their meaning but that are hardly present when we isolate spoken words, freeze them, and transcribe them in the form of a sentence. As we discuss in chapter 8, various other forms of social coregulation are entailed by the production and interpretation of utterances. To complicate things, utterances do not relate in a simple manner to a participant’s intentions. Both the interpretation and the production of utterances relate to acts of self-directed talk.4 These reflexive acts may propel a speaker in particular directions that are not quite or not exactly expressive of what they intend to say. This is confounded by the openendedness of utterances, whose signification is never fully an achieved fact since they are open to (re)interpretations, elaborations, and refractions by

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other participants that can conflict with the producer’s “original” intentions (assuming these are known or even defined) or reshape these intentions and produce new resonances with self-talk and other practical acts. This is what makes dialogues open-ended and utterances in a dialogue braided with each other. For Bakhtin, the concreteness of dialogues points again to a fundamental aspect of life and consciousness. In notes from 1961, he writes: The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin 1984, 293)

A few lines later he writes: “Dialectics is the abstract product of dialogue” (ibid.). This and other remarks have led commentators to construe Bakhtin as opposed to dialectics (e.g., Morson and Emerson 1990). Indeed, the dialogic principle that underlies consciousness and lived structures of thinking with others, is not quite captured by an encounter between already constituted entities whose contradictions must be superseded, nor does it entail monological streams that mutually negate each other. On the contrary, a dialogue establishes relations where emerging tensions become transformed but not necessarily overcome and, in the course of these transformations, the relata may become individuated as increasingly concrete meanings, concepts, social attitudes, and roles. This is compatible with the kind of nondogmatic approach to dialectics that Ilyenkov, Lefebvre, and Simondon defend, each in their own way. Perhaps the Bakhtinian dialogic principle is another expression of this style of dialectics (see also Gardiner 2000 for a useful comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s similar rejection of orthodox dialectics, to which we turn below). Our interpretation is supported by Bakhtin’s and Voloshinov’s remarks on the multiplicity of accents that struggle over linguistic signs. The latter always result from living linguistic activity as the “dynamic fusion of ‘formal element’ and ‘meaning’” (Williams 1977, 39). The contrast with the prevailing view may seem subtle, but it is crucial. Language predates the process of language acquisition by the child, but as a stream of activity, not as a ready-made object: In reifying the system of language and in viewing living language as if it were dead and alien, abstract objectivism makes language something external to the stream of verbal communication. This stream flows on, but language, like a ball,

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is tossed from generation to generation. In actual fact, however, language moves together with that stream and is inseparable from it. Language cannot properly be said to be handed down—it endures, but it endures as a continuous process of becoming. Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all, rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate. (Voloshinov 1929/1973, 81)

The stream of language is open, not only to intergenerational variations, but to the daily struggle over meanings. Signs and expressions, therefore, are the site of disputes between different evaluative accents that may come in forms such as expressive intonations, evaluations, connotations, and reevaluations. “In the alternating lines of a dialogue, the same word may figure in two mutually clashing contexts. … Actually, any real utterance, in one way or another or to one degree or another, makes a statement of agreement with or a negation of something” (ibid., 80). The picture of living disputations over meanings contrasts with the classic distinction between langue and parole, as if each of these terms designated some finished product, and this again reminds us of the tacit assumption of a cooperative principle underscoring human social interactions criticized by Lecercle. We see, on the contrary, conflicts over linguistic meaning all the time, from the struggle over gender neutrality in languages such as English, to the avoidance of originally “neutral” expressions whose racist or classist embedded biases were later recognized as such. We see disputations between dialects and speech forms linked to age groups, classes, subcultures, and so on, forms of languaging that play constitutive roles in defining the identity of such groups. Hence, the struggle over language is in a very real sense a struggle over group existence and recognition. Multiple varieties coexist in a given language, in what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, and these varieties create multiple dialectical situations (in strict Simondonian terms), mostly between different groups and the forces that tend toward fixing language conservatively (usually defenders of the status quo who frequently appeal to dictionaries and grammar books to buttress their arguments). The “active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralizing system of a unitary language. Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)” (Bakhtin 1981, 272). Our emphasis on these themes using dialectical terms is itself an evaluative accent that disputes the negative connotations of dogmatism and

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teleology that several commentators use to oppose progressive Bakhtinian dialogics to stale dialectics (fixing the dictionary entry for the second term and celebrating the open-endedness of the first). We think there is a progressive flavor of dialectics expressed in authors like Ilyenkov, Simondon, Lefebvre, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov. We also find this progressive sense in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 6.4.3 Merleau-Ponty Dialectical moves recur in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of expression and later in his ontology of reversibility and intercorporeality. Although his perspective on language evolved between the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 and his later work, with one unfinished manuscript entirely dedicated to language and truth (published posthumously as The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty 1973b; see also Merleau-Ponty 1964), one constant in his thought was the criticism of views of language as a formal, purely conventional system of signs and meanings. As was typical of his whole philosophy, Merleau-Ponty focused his discussion on the ambiguities lying in between posited dichotomies, and he often made these ambiguities emerge dialectically. Thus, between reductive, empirical accounts of language as grounded in natural signs and language as a set of arbitrary conventions, Merleau-Ponty proposed that gesture be viewed as an embodied expression of perceptual consciousness, which is neither purely arbitrary nor limited to “natural” meanings. The use of words is not added to thought but completes it, their sense “drawing from a gestural signification, which itself is immanent in speech” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, 184). It may seem strange to think of gestures as possessing immanent signification. After all, they are used to indicate relations in the perceivable world, often given directly to an observer at the same time as the act of gesturing. “The verbal gesture, however, intends a mental landscape that is not straightaway given to everyone, and it is precisely its function to communicate this landscape. But culture here offers what nature does not provide. Available significations, namely, previous acts of expression, establish a common world between speaking subjects to which current and new speech refers, just as gesture refers to the sensible world” (ibid., 192). Here we see a dialectical/circular move: previous acts of expression create a shared cultural dimension that sediments a space of significance, which in turn affects current and future acts of perception and gestural expression. It is because of this ongoing process that gestures, words, and expressions do not evolve arbitrarily. If we traced their history or pressed their

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conventionality (as in poetry) we would find their early emotional expression in their sound and physiognomy, in the form of acts of “singing the world” (ibid., 193). But in already instituted language these relations lie hidden, creating the appearance of a well-delineated, transparent system of mutually referring signs. Nevertheless, creative acts of expression continue to occur and reshape the cultural world. Lived language never dries up into a set of rules and dictionary entries; as we learn from Bakhtin and Voloshinov, it is a stream of living activity. This model of language as a moving equilibrium between past and present is still limited in that it sees perception as the founding act of individual consciousness (Dillon 1997, 196). Merleau-Ponty’s later work on language attempts to recapitulate the Husserlian restart of phenomenology through a theory of transcendental intersubjectivity and leads to a greater emphasis on the roles played by the community as much in instituting culture as in shaping acts of perception/ expression. We still do not see, however, a focus on the situation of social interaction as fundamentally establishing participatory acts of sensemaking and shared microworlds in which expressions become structured not only in terms of sedimented forms of interactive regulation, but also in dialogic utterances that express as much as they address, recognize, and perform. We find that perhaps in some sense, the active world of practice—the dialogic Bakhtinian principle—may be philosophically reconciled with the ontology of reversibility Merleau-Ponty expounds in his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968), although such comparative work remains to be done. Here dialectical thinking at its subtlest plays a leading role. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty rejects formulaic dialectical moves that rely on polarizing opposing relata, the structure of which is then imposed on experience. Instead, rather like the dialectical situations of Simondon, Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectic is a movement of selfrelation and self-mediation whereby tensions and changes operate prior to the reified, individuated relata. Thus, perception is a prereflective, subjectless reversible folding of the flesh, out of whose self-mediation subject and world coemerge. Following Dillon (1997), we see that the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished work leads into an analogy between the body/ world and linguistic expression, both conceived as self-mediating reversibilities of the flesh. Language reverses on itself by referring back to its own organization. Sedimented expressions get animated by being enacted together in particular situations, and as a whole they create novel significations that simultaneously affirm and renew established meanings in a dimension of ideality that emerges from intersubjectivity and world, but with its own norms (a topic we return to in chapters 8 and 11).

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6.4.4  Tran Duc Thao As is well known, since the early 1940s Merleau-Ponty had access to unpublished manuscripts and other documents at the Husserl Archives in Louvain. Together with Tran Duc Thao, who was then writing a dissertation on Husserl, he promoted a project to have a copy of the archives in Paris. The project floundered for political reasons and because of the restrictive conditions of wartime. In the end, Tran Duc Thao was entrusted with thousands of pages of Husserl’s manuscripts on more than one occasion and for some time both friends assumed responsibility for a sort of unofficial Paris branch of the archives (Van Breda 1992). While both philosophers were taken by Husserl’s unpublished reconfigurations of phenomenology, and in a sense saw their own task as continuing his foundational project, their breaks with Husserl took different directions. Merleau-Ponty moved toward ontology and metaphysics and Tran Duc Thao, just before returning to his native Vietnam in 1951, published a book defending the thesis that the contradictions of phenomenology could only be solved by dialectical materialism (Thao 1986). For Tran Duc Thao a science of human experience must take into account the origins of consciousness in practical activity. In the 1960s, this general thesis was elaborated in a series of articles on the origins of language, later published in book form (Thao 1984). These investigations look at the historical and developmental origins of language and consciousness following a series of dialectical “vignettes,” which were empirically motivated by findings on prehominid toolmaking. Like others, Tran Duc Thao finds the production of tools philosophically significant as an indicator of the changes from animal perception toward a simultaneous appearance of consciousness of self and of the world. Particularly relevant are the different kinds of Oldowan tools and the transitions to Acheulean tools that indicate the changes from direct tool manipulation to tool shaping and tool production, with an increasingly recursive and planned use of tools to modify and produce other tools. The assumption is that the origins of language and human consciousness are to be found in the organization of shared practices that tool production evidences, an idea that follows Engels’s labor theory of human origins (Woolfson 1982) and that others such as Feliks Mikhailov (1980) and Evald Ilyenkov (1960/2008) also defended around the same period. Tran Duc Thao picks one example of an organized early activity in prehominids: the group hunt. He assumes that a practice of reciprocal calls and gesturing toward spatial directions (for instance, the direction to track a prey) is already in place. Indicative gestures and calls, apart from being action cues, organize spatial cohesion and group displacement and regulate

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the attention of the participants. These gestures and calls reverberate within the group and synchronize their activity. Tran Duc Thao considers the tensions induced by the spatial constraints of distance on these vocalizations and gestures, examining the problem of the group member that lags behind and for whom the symmetry of reciprocal gesturing is broken. The others call him to rejoin them and indicate their direction of movement toward a target, but his reciprocal response is now powerless to affect the group, indicating only to him his condition as a lagger. His gesture is barely outlined and felt as a reverberation of the gestures by the others, only that it is one produced by himself, and so he calls himself into catching up with the group. The self-directed call and gesture bring about a form of individually enacted social regulation, the agent identifying his own gesture as originating in others and responding to it accordingly in a sporadic flash of self-relating consciousness. Tran Duc Thao suggests that the structure of the gesture itself changes. It no longer involves a circular movement of the hand/arm (an arc traced between catching the attention of the others and the direction of the indicated target; the sort of gesture seen when a unit commander calls soldiers to advance), but synthesizes into an abbreviated linear movement coming from the self (at once producer and receiver of the gesture) straight in the direction of indication. This dialectical transformation of the reciprocal gestures engenders the structure of lived experience and constitutes the simultaneous appearance of consciousness of the self and consciousness of the object, whose image is posited as external to the self. The straight-line gesture (as in pointing) is therefore ambiguously addressed to others and to the self. It generalizes the realm of indication to perceived objects different from the group’s current target, inducing an intentional focusing, at first sporadic, then disseminated in the collective, and finally available to the individual at any time. These dialectical situations help Tran Duc Thao achieve the task set by Merleau-Ponty: the tracking of original meanings that instituted language occludes with layers of sediment. “Meaning in its totality always seems to presuppose consciousness. We get the impression then of going in a circle: consciousness presupposes language and language, consciousness. We must begin by stating the problem starting with an absolutely original meaning, which appeared objectively in the language of real life before all consciousness in general … Such is precisely the meaning of the indicative gesture” (Thao 1984, 19). The original indicative gesture is a structure of group regulation and interaction. It therefore produces meaning all by itself. We could say that it is

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an early instance of singing the world. Its image is constituted by the sensorimotor tendencies of action and attention drawn by the movements of the arms and hands. The developed form of the gesture, by reverberating virtually between two deferred “instances” of the self (as initiator and receiver of the gesture), transforms the tendential sensorimotor image into an ideal image, an image of the object as external to the self. “The meaning thus constituted immediately obscures the sensori-motor image of the object, which appears in its objective externality, as independent of the subject. In this way the transition is made from animal perception, as simple sensori-motor perception, to the original form of consciousness: sense certainty, as the call to oneself toward the object as an object of work, or the intentional sighting of the ‘this here’” (Thao 1984, 23). The original indicative situation implies a shared group experience. As different groups that are far apart try to communicate with each other, their shared perceptual ground proves insufficient and syncretic indicative gestures that rely on perceptual sharing must adopt other forms to overcome ambiguity. Such new forms create new verbal syntheses that elaborate the “this here” through a predicative reformulation of the gesture/word. These elaborations allow the representation of asymmetrically perceivable, and eventually also past or future, situations as well as absent objects. Here again, the movement is dialectical in that a new form of interaction arises from the tensions created by the previous forms (the indicative gesture) when sociomaterial circumstances (split groups that must coordinate but do not share an immediate perceptual experience) stretch these forms to the limit and so elicit their development. 6.4.5 Psychology Dialectical passages and transformations populate important approaches in developmental psychology, such as the schools originating in the works of Lev Vygotsky in the former Soviet Union and of Henri Wallon in France during the first half of the twentieth century. The latter’s work was known to Merleau-Ponty and Tran Duc Thao, but apparently not Vygotsky’s. Several dialectical motifs would deserve mention in Vygotsky’s work (1978, 2012). We can only indicate some examples here. One of them resembles Tran Duc Thao’s passage from social to self-directed activity: the transition from interpersonal to personal skills for regulating and conducting action. The dialectics describes the reshaping of relations between child and world as the child makes use of the interactive skill of attitude shifting that accompanies the use of utterances in social interaction (we come back to these issues in chapters 8 and 9). In this way, the child learns to

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self-regulate her actions by adopting social attitudes toward the world and toward herself. This is typically manifested by resorting to self-directed utterances, a social skill put to personal use that in turn shapes a social dimension of the child’s growing personhood. This dialectical passage is also manifested in the relations between speech and thought, which become increasingly concretized (as self-talk grows less overt) without amalgamating the two sociocognitive processes. “Word meaning is a phenomenon of thought only insofar as thought is embodied in speech, and of speech only insofar as speech is connected with thought and illuminated by it. It is a phenomenon of verbal thought, of meaningful speech—a union of word and thought” (Vygotsky 2012, 225). In his book-length essay (unpublished in his lifetime) on “The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology,” Vygotsky (1997) shows that a desperate search for unifying explanatory principles make psychologists grab for any fashionable idea, no matter how unreliable. Instead, he argues for the need to build a science that reveals the laws of concrete psychological phenomena. For this, he draws on Spinoza for a nondualist conception of the thinking body but maintains that to successfully apply this conception to concrete psychology the dichotomy between matter and mind must be overcome through a historical analysis. It is necessary, he suggests, that a new foundation for psychology should take the Marxist approach to political economy as a model for its methodology (“we must create our own Das Kapital,” ibid., 330). According to Aleksei N. Leont’ev (1997, 19), dialectical thinking was characteristic of Vygotsky’s most creative work, lifting his own “thinking to a qualitatively new level.” Vygotsky’s historicism, Leont’ev continues, “is an attempt to apply Marx’s historical method in psychology.” According to this view, the determinants of human mental development are not to be found in biological ontogenesis or phylogenesis, nor in the mastery of ideas of the universal spirit embodied in culture, but in “human tool-mediated labor activity” (p. 21, original emphasis). Henri Wallon, whose early work was read by Vygotsky, also explicitly espoused dialectics as foundational for his approach to the social, cognitive, and emotional development in children (Wallon 1973; Zazzo 1975). The interplay between the interpersonal, the affective, and the cognitive dimensions often leads to crises whose dialectical resolution results in discontinuous phases of development, which sometimes may suffer setbacks as the original tensions reemerge (Wallon 1945/2015). For Wallon, the study of development must highlight the sources and effects of differences and tensions, leading to situations of disequilibrium, or at most to metastable states. Reality, he says, is “movement and transformation” (1945/2015,

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743). The structures of thinking in the developing child relate to her world with an “indispensable solidarity” that is perpetually in a process of realization. Between mind and reality, there is a dialectical relation: “There is no pre-established identity, nor a total reduction of one to the other, nor a radical exteriority, but a series of actions and reactions demonstrating the effort of the idea to embrace or modify the thing, and the resistance of the thing that compels it to change itself—this duel takes places at all levels, at the level of practical action, at the level of doctrine and scientific experimentation. Without these conflicts, knowledge stagnates” (Wallon 1945/2015, 743, authors’ translation). By the 1970s dialectics appeared in other instances of Western psychology. We have made reference to Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy (Freire 1996a, 1996b; we return to it in chapters 9 and 12), which is itself a deeply dialectical vision of education as a mutually transformative, ethical-critical social practice. Moved by similar social concerns but aimed at reorienting academic research, the work of Klaus F. Riegel was influential for a generation of developmental psychologists. He advocated the need to embrace a dialectical approach to lifetime development and even wrote a “Manifesto for Dialectical Psychology” (in Riegel 1976). Together with other researchers at the time, Riegel criticized psychology’s emphasis on the individual acquisition of traits and abilities and its obsession with balance and equilibrium, largely inherited from the work of Jean Piaget. The latter, according to Riegel, did indeed see the origins of cognitive development as arising from a dialectical situation (the sensorimotor dynamics of assimilation and accommodation) but, at subsequent stages, development gradually turned into the acquisition of progressively abstract logical operations, emphasizing nondialectical, static notions (the categories of identity, noncontradiction, and object permanence). Riegel and others (Buck-Morss 1975; Lawler 1975) criticized this Piagetian emphasis, contrasting it with the realities of interand intraindividual variations and dependencies on cultural embedding that occur in concrete development. These realities question the picture of stable, unified, increasingly rational stages. Riegel was deeply influenced by the works of Soviet psychologist Sergei L. Rubinstein, himself influenced by Vygotsky (Meacham 1999). According to Riegel the complexity of human development should not be simplified as that of a unitary, progressive process. Instead, it should be seen as an open and ongoing interaction with different dimensions of developmental and historical change, notably the inner-biological, the individual-psychological, the cultural-sociological, and the outer-physical dimensions. All of these operate at various scales and may enter into relations of synergy or dissonance, potentially leading

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to crises that may induce resolutions in any of the dimensions (Riegel 1976). Riegel applied this idea to the development of thinking, memory, aging, and language (Riegel 1979). Influenced by Riegel and systems theory, Adrienne Harris (1975) suggested that interactions between mothers and infants should be considered as constituting open dialectical systems, where different tensions play out, such as the tensions between flows and stops, between fluid and bounded frames, between analog and digital (structured) features of gesture and speech, and between conflicting demands for dominating and recognizing the perspective of others. Language acquisition, rather than being a question of individual output, is better understood as the co-constructed mastery of interactive situations. Riegel, along similar lines, proposed looking at the structure of mother-infant dialogues and their complexity in terms of relations between speakers and the reporting or expansion of utterances (Riegel 1979), going from nonverbal joint attention to demands and summons, exchanges, and complex dialogues. Influenced by the work of A. N. Leont’ev and his followers, a critical psychology school emerged in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. It was exemplified by the influential work of Klaus Holzkamp (1983) on the multiple concrete tensions encountered in everyday human practices and from which psychological research cannot be disentangled (see Tolman 1994). Learning, for example, is thus conceived not as the uncritical acquisition of facts and skills in an unchangeable context, but as an expansion of the power to act and transform the sociomaterial conditions that, in turn, influence practices and constrain action and the learning process. The ethical and political aspects of these dialectical relations, which are hidden or minimized by formal institutional education, have been the focus of subsequent work by Jean Lave and colleagues on the ethnography of situated learning and apprenticeship (e.g., Lave 2011). By the 1980s, however, explicit advocacies of dialectics in psychology became less visible in the English-speaking world, with some work celebrating and extending Riegel’s legacy (e.g., Broughton 1987); other examples included work in social psychology by Ivana Marková (1982, 1987) and in psychoanalysis by Jessica Benjamin (1988). The influence of Vygotsky became more pronounced, particularly in cultural psychology (in the work of researchers such as Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and James Wertsch). It is about this time that some dialectical themes reappear in the application of dynamical systems theory to development (in the work of Esther Thelen, Linda Smith, Kurt Fischer, and others). And this continues to this day. An active dialectical/critical strand can be found in the areas of cultural psychology, and the study of situated practices (e.g.,

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Jean Lave, Barbara Rogoff, Jaan Valsiner). The work of Wolff-Michael Roth (2016; Roth and Jornet 2017) is particularly interesting in the current context as he pulls together several strands of dialectical thought in psychology, including ideas from Bakhtin, Holzkamp, Ilyenkov, Leont’ev, and the late work of Vygotsky, and applies them to concrete problems in educational psychology. Another case worth mentioning is Edward S. Reed’s. He defended a dialectically informed interpretation of ecological psychology, according to which knowledge and practice are inseparable (Reed 1996). He also criticized the solipsism of mainstream psychology that locks interacting partners within their individual heads, as opposed to seeing their relation as primary and the changes they undergo as resulting from their relation. Reed’s (1995) ecological account of language learning recognizes the force of inherent tensions and contradictions in driving stages of language acquisition. An infant’s first gestural enactments of indicative activity, charitably interpreted, provoke parental complexification of utterances addressed to the child, leading to patterns of language use suited to a particular family context. Exposure to spheres other than the intimate family setting induces tensions in the language use of the growing child and destabilizes the indicative phase due to the lack of sufficiently shared ground with unfamiliar others. It eventually leads to a predicative phase (an idea that resonates at the developmental level with Tran Duc Thao’s analysis of the historical passage from indication to predication). We see Reed often performing dialectical moves of this kind (though not labeling them as such): new skills induce new opportunities and relations, which in turn induce new tensions and eventually make the configuration unstable, promoting a transition to yet a newer skill when the appropriate circumstances arise. Perspectives such as Reed’s are very much in resonance with our own and in particular with our interest in the processual, multiple-scale dynamics in the becoming of linguistic bodies (something we return to in chapter 9). 6.5  Dialectical Motifs A discussion of the role of dialectics in enactive thinking is probably, by definition, never quite over. Many of the issues we have discussed in this chapter may become clearer in their application. This is done in the next two chapters as we elaborate a dialectical model that will take us from participatory sense-making to linguistic bodies. It may be useful, as a summary and for future reference, to briefly list some of the dialectical motifs mentioned in this chapter together with some of the running themes that will resurface in the rest of the book:

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• Dialectics is to be understood nondogmatically: Simondon’s tension between potentialities and barriers, Bakhtin’s dialogic situation, MerleauPonty’s hyperdialectic of self-mediating relations. • We must avoid situations of balance and equilibrium involving already constituted entities as premises. It is preferable to posit situations of metastability, conflict, tensions, and constituting relations. • Tensions must be met by contingent sociomaterial conditions in order for a passage to a new situation to occur. These conditions do not necessarily mean a supersession of the original tensions, nor are they logically entailed by them (dialectics has no telos). • Dialectical situations can become chained to one another, the transformation of the tensions in one situation leading to tensions in the new one. They may also lead to recursiveness where new concretizations operate on older ones. • Dialectical situations can be used to describe historical transitions. They can also be used to elaborate the concretization of conceptual categories (this is how we apply the dialectical method in the next chapters). • Dialectical situations can obtain in the interactions between different orders of magnitude and different timescales (e.g., sensorimotor, interactive, collective). • Dialectical situations can result from an interplay of distances (spatial distances, distances of familiarity and intimacy, etc.) and temporalities (rhythms, entanglement of timescales). • Dialectical situations can result in circular relations between sedimentation and spontaneity, conservation and change. These motifs open the door to explaining the origins of ideality nondualistically through a constitutive view of language in which to participate in linguistic communities entails a transformation of the world and of our bodies. Linguistic encounters do not follow a principle of cooperation and therefore we must abandon it as a starting point, choosing instead the messiness and materiality of real-life social interactions.

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7.1  Toward a Constitutive Theory of Language Having considered the method we will apply in this chapter and the next, we return to the enactive account of bodies. The dimensions of embodiment can help us examine the broader properties and entanglements of living, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies, including the logic of what goes on in situations of social interaction, but there is so far nothing specifically linguistic about the kind of enactments we have discussed in part I, nor about the processes of sense-making involved. We are, for the moment, unable to distinguish the patterns of coordination and breakdown that may occur during dancing a tanda at the milonga from those that happen during an intimate conversation. What we have said about social interactions does indeed apply to both these situations, but in each there is a specificity that remains to be elaborated. Our goal is to develop this specificity for the case of behaviors in what we may call a linguistic register (leaving the possibly more difficult case of tango for another occasion). Put bluntly, how do we go from the dynamic processes that constitute organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies, and the synergies and coordination they enter into during social interactions, to a more specific discourse about utterances, dialogues, interpretation, signs, symbols, syntax, and so on? Our aim is to think this question through. The reward if we succeed in working out a suitable answer is significant: since all the concepts presented in part I are naturalized (in the nonreductionist sense in which enactivists understand naturalization), then explicating what goes on in linguistic engagements in terms of these concepts will also lead to a naturalization of the vocabulary used to describe the way language is enacted in real life. To achieve this goal, we must look more closely at what goes on in social interactions and during processes of participatory sense-making.

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Social interactions lead us to think about linguistic enactments not only as governed by sociocultural-historical-material patterns, or as the result of individual cognitive abilities, but, in addition, as phenomena belonging to concrete encounters between people. Living language is directed, signified and resignified, vitalized, framed, and sculpted by the carnality of interactive engagements between real people in ways that cannot be fully determined nor fully predicted by the capabilities, intentions, and experiences they bring to the encounter, nor by the broader constraints of social norms, environmental situation, or grammar rules. The locus where language is enacted is the often neglected middle term between the individual mind and broader sociocultural patterns. Mainstream approaches to the study of language put the weight either on the biological and computational capabilities that enable the acquisition of linguistic competence or on the structures of language as a system of rules, norms, and historical and geographic changes. But language must be enacted to continue to exist in actuality, a fact that seems to be the unproblematic background to these approaches. Tacitly, it is as if nothing of what goes on in social interactions can fundamentally inform our understanding of language. Of course, these theories of language must somehow be “implemented” by real people and in real events of communication. But, like the body for cognitivist approaches to the computational mind, this detail influences small aspects of these theories. Or perhaps, as in the case of the body for embodied functionalism, social interactions do generate some constraints on language use, acquisition, and change, but nothing more. The first step toward understanding language in enactive terms is to invert this picture—the same way that we moved the picture of the body from periphery to center—and put social interactions, actual or virtual, right at the heart of our theoretical efforts. This is in accordance with perspectives that propose that to fully encompass the phenomena of language we must approach them in their situatedness within the context of concrete enactments.1 Social interactions are not merely places where the individual and cognitive meet the social and cultural. They are not encounters of preestablished orders. Social interactions, and the practices they underpin, are the kiln where both culture and cognition are forged; they are a source, not a meeting point. In Simondonian terms, they are where concrete operations of individual, psychic, and collective individuation take place. For an enactive study of language, the interactive engagement must be the starting point of any inquiry. It is in interactive encounters or in the solitary exercise of interactive skills (e.g., thinking, writing, talking to oneself) that linguistic

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labor occurs. Language patterns, habits, and norms form a system that needs the ongoing enactments of living bodies to be sustained, repaired, altered. Language as a system is the result of past and ongoing interactive labor. The middle stage between what goes on in the individual language user and the larger systemic and normative aspects of language is the stream of actual, lived, embodied languaging, which is the kind of enactment we want to conceptualize in this part of the book. What do bodies do when they are languaging? To answer this question, the dialectical model presented in this and the next chapter proposes new enactive categories to study language. We achieve this, however, only incompletely. The model is more a beginning and a prompt for further extensions and applications. We will not describe the full complexity of real languages, how they change, how they are learned, and so on. In fact, we will deliberately try to avoid using examples from real language until the last stages of the model, for two important methodological reasons. First, actual linguistic interactions concretize, subsume, and/or abbreviate several of the stages in the model in apparently straightforward acts, such as producing an utterance. Our intention is to discern conceptually the various regulative stages entailed by a linguistic act, and this demands bracketing our familiarity with language. Illustrating an intermediate form of social agency with examples from everyday language is often relatively easy but can unfortunately obscure the conceptual distinctions we intend to draw. The second reason is that, as in part I, the grounding of enactive categories proceeds through an operational approach, meaning that the elements that constitute a given concept do not magically include concepts we have not yet grounded. The categories remain open to subsequent scrutiny, criticism, and interpretive accommodations. These occur as the model develops but without jumping stages or abandoning the operationalization constraint. As explained in chapter 6, the model is not meant to describe the unfolding of historical stages in the evolution of human language or the development of linguistic skills. Our intention is to focus, instead, on the basic corporeal logic of what is involved in the activity of using and enacting language. In this way, we hope to extend the remit of enactive theory. The model will help us analyze some of the kinds of sense-making and social agency implied in languaging, not as a list of empirical observations, but following the dialectical method. Proceeding in this way, we fully encounter language “as we know it” in part III. Nevertheless, the model extends the enactive approach by providing accounts of relations of domination,

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recursion, reflexivity, self-control, genres of interaction, and the conditions of possibility for objectifying attitudes toward the world. The latter in particular are important if we are to rise to the challenge of truly understanding language enactively and not reduce it to a set of simpler embodied skills. In his book The Language Animal, Charles Taylor (2016) distinguishes between what he calls “enframing” and constitutive theories of language. The first conceives language as arising within the framework of human behavior as one more ability that fits this framework, as a natural add-on to other human skills.2 Constitutive theories, in contrast, see in language a breakthrough that repurposes human bodies, gives them new meanings and goals, and challenges the frame of nonlinguistic human life.3 The difference can be appreciated in terms of the kinds of powers and sensitivities a linguistic agent can bring to a situation. Not only does she react to language pragmatically, as a trained animal may find that the shapes on a sign indicate the way to go. Her understanding also involves, among other sensitivities, “a sensitivity to the issue of rightness” (Taylor 2016, 7), which is not about instrumental success. Her sensitivity to rightness makes her appreciate the shapes on the sign semantically and contextually—that is, it invokes virtual implications and embodied dispositions that constitute her know-how about the way these signs participate in a language. Our insistence on the enactive nature of all forms of meaning-making and on the continuity between life and mind may provoke suspicion that we are aiming for an enframing theory of language, one that develops linguistic capacities from other capacities, say interactive ones. This is not the case. The pattern should be familiar by now: as we have seen in part I, to postulate a continuity between life and mind is not to reduce one to the other, the way sensorimotor bodies are not reduced to organic bodies and intersubjective life is not reduced to sensorimotor life. Similarly, the goal is not to explicate languaging as the additive result of putting together a series of nonlinguistic behaviors. We are aiming for a constitutive approach instead, and so we are not “particularizing” general conceptions (e.g., of embodied social interaction) to deduce from them increasingly languagelike notions. Instead, we are subjecting enactive concepts to a dialectical treatment in order to explore the novelties that emerge not just at the end but at each step of the model. The sensitivity to the issue of rightness Taylor speaks about is deeply related to how we make sense of other people and the readiness to interact that underlies human sense-making. As Taylor posits, “ontogenetically” the “primordial” use of language is “to create, alter, and break connections between people” (2016, 261). It is the public and shared nature of symbols

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that makes them what they are and makes sensitivity to rightness grounded in sensitivity to the meanings and responses of others, or even more basically, in the possibility of their response (as Honneth 1995, Brandom 1998, and others have observed). But it is also our communion with people that gives rise to symbolic sensitivities and powers in the first place (we elaborate on this in chapter 11). Sensitivity to rightness is the mark of human meanings for Taylor, contrasted with instrumental significances (like a pragmatic or trained response to shapes on a sign) that can be grasped in a fully third-personal way. Human meanings require interpretation “from the inside” (p. 257). The challenge of coming to the right sort of constitutive approach thus involves linking up “inside” interpretation with sensitivity to rightness— that is, sensitivity to “outside” normativities or issues of correctness and judgment that necessarily presuppose a lifeworld built and shared with others. Taylor appears to take this link for granted, following Aristotle, Heidegger, and others in dividing the zoon logon ekhon from nonhuman animals on the basis of human self-consciousness and world-forming openness achieved through language (e.g., Heidegger 1995). The link, we suggest, is to be found in the primacy of second-personal engagement and in navigating individual-interactional and self-other tensions, from which we learn new means of making sense alone and together. A material foundation for this connection is established in the logic of incorporation presented in part I, where we see embodied normativity already operative for living and sensorimotor bodies. Our goal, then, is to elaborate a constitutive theory without risking dualism or discontinuity. In our model we posit a dialectical process through which shared normative horizons (i.e., conditions for the possibility of “rightness”) and a repertoire of responsive and regulatory acts (i.e., conditions for the possibility of “sensitivity” to the behaviors of ourselves and others during interactions) are generated. Note that a focus on interpersonal engagement need not downplay the relation between language and world; rather, we take this relation as a form of second-personal engagement. We do not presume this relation is “intensional”—cashed out in terms of denotations or connotations whereby language articulates forms of meaning in which the world is objectivized. In fact, language is first responsible for enhancing a relation of participation in the world, and of speaking to the world, and listening to it. In some cultures, this relation to the world has been encouraged, the world as bearer and addressee of messages, the world as Thou. In other cultures, as in contemporary Western societies, language is used to promote a relation to the world as an It, an impersonal world of objective facts. But the Thou

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is primordial and the It derivative, as Martin Buber (1958) has argued and others have stressed in the light of evidence from developmental psychology and phenomenological analysis (Reddy 2008; Fuchs 2012; Di  Paolo 2016). Hence our understanding of the relation of language to the world must be rooted in the social, relational world from which the concept, or rather the attitude, of Thou emerges (Stawarska 2009). We sing the world, pray to it, invoke, summon, utter incantations and protestations; all of this we do with language, and we do it before we can talk about the world (“before” is relative to the concretization of interactive categories we discuss below). Only at the end of a complex chain of transformations of embodied agency and sense-making can we understand relations of denotation between language and objects and settings, or the sensitivity to the issue of rightness. 7.2  Choosing a Starting Point In the case of an enactive conception of language, one would suppose that we should always begin with the linguistic givens of human experience. But these are too many and too complex and they relate in unclear ways to one another. The concrete “given” of human action and experience is the group and community life of historical transformations of the lifeworld, with its norms, rules, institutions, and relations evolving heterogeneously, at different paces, sometimes in unforeseeable directions. This is the world that is immediately out there for us since the day we are born and even during gestation. Language is an integral part of it. Language is like a mesh that fractally penetrates the lifeworld without ever covering it entirely, without fully determining it, and yet, given any phenomena of interest, language is always to be found infinitesimally close to it. So should our analysis start from the concrete lifeworld of human action and experience? Such a given is a totality and, for this reason, it has to be the direction our dialectical analysis must aim toward, even if we know that a full understanding is unreachable since the lifeworld is open-ended and subject to ongoing historical change. The most ubiquitous human given should be the goal, not the start, of our analysis. What is then the right starting point? If our approach were strictly Hegelian, our starting point must contain in nuce the fundamental relations that are at play in the totality, awaiting the opportunity to be deployed by the ongoing movement of thought. But this is not the case here, since at each stage we acknowledge the contingency and materiality of embodied agency, its history and its creativity, by making explicit the empirical

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interactions of our model (the concretization of dialectical situations we discussed in chapter 6). Thus, our starting point cannot be said to contain the whole by itself. Rather, its choice should be a matter of strategy; in a way it must prove felicitous, something to be confirmed as the model develops and coheres with phenomena. Our starting point must somehow anchor the totality, but it is not required to contain it, or to originate it. The most prevalent linguistic relations involve social interactions. If we expand them to include the embodied agency of participants, their sensemaking and constructive activities in their environments, we find that we are considering the most general situation of participatory sense-making as described in chapter 4. Choosing participatory sense-making as our point of departure could ring some alarm bells for those to whom the sociocultural-historicalmaterial embeddedness of human life is the first given of the lifeworld. We can never get from here to there without some kind of reductionist strategy, is what many worry about. But we choose interactive situations as our point of departure not because we think that language is a “subset” of interactive behavior, a particular to be deduced from it. Nor do the phenomena of language fall neatly within abstractions such as speaker, listener, sign, utterance, and so on. Instead, we propose that the interactive situation of participatory sense-making offers the best entry point into the categories we need to develop and describe for a deeply embodied approach to the study of language, one that eventually “links up” with other linguistic aspects and phenomena. Other manifestations of language not involving social interactions still presuppose them conceptually. This is true even when language confronts us “noninteractively,” when it interpellates and shapes us as subjects. Language does this, for instance, when we read a notice at the bus stop, follow street signs, listen to airport announcements, go through the resolution of a court case, fill out a tax form, scroll down through a software license agreement, examine the draft of a new institutional policy, or become mobilized by political slogans. All of these are linguistic situations that go beyond the comprehension of a text; they imply a background of norms, acceptable responses, conduct, attitudes, and ultimately ideology. The subject of enunciation in cases like these is not the corporeal agency of an other whom we can engage in the back-and-forth of coregulated interactions. In a sense, then, neither the interactive situation nor the embodied subject can assume priority over these forms of language, which can occur in the absence of the first and contribute to constitution of the second. And

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yet, in ways that must still be properly described, such cases conceptually presuppose interactive encounters between sense-makers, their experience, and their embodied skills in different forms of social agency (chapter 12). Hence, participatory sense-making, involving embodied agents in actual interaction, must be our starting point. To repeat, the choice of a starting point is strategic and must be appropriate for the model to work. In the first volume of Capital, Marx (1867/1976) did not choose the categories of money, profit, or interest rates to begin his analysis of the capitalist mode of production; he chose instead the exchange of commodities, which to some may have seemed an unlikely starting point (How do we get from here to banking and monopolies? Could someone following the same method today arrive at, say, high-frequency trading?). But he chose this as a starting point nevertheless, not because the whole of capitalism reduces to this particular concept, nor because the whole fully and cleanly emerges conceptually from it, but because this concept opens the door to understanding the rest as it embodies a primordial tension in human-human and human-world relations (the tension between use value and exchange value). In this way, by embodying a fundamental and pervasive kind of tension, the first term of any dialectical model must open the way for capturing the conceptual and empirical relations that must then be articulated to approach the concreteness of the totality under investigation. We should also mention that for the model to be maximally informative, we proceed with a minimal-assumption spirit and let the categories at each stage be defined not in terms of everyday notions concerning language (speech, words, signs, conversations) but as the minimally sufficient satisfaction of the demands of each particular dialectical situation. Sometimes the relation between the model’s categories and common terminology will be clear and straightforward, other times, as we have said in relation to our methodological constraints, we will have to resist getting ahead of ourselves and avoid conceiving of a concept in its most common manifestation in daily experience. The bracketing of our familiarity with language concerns only the model presented in this and the next chapter. In part III, we address the implications of the model for language “as we know it.” 7.3  A Dialectical Model, First Part The development of categories in the dialectical model is inseparable from the concrete relations we find in the human lifeworld. It is also inseparable

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from history and from cognitive and social development. These concrete relations and historical elements feed into the understanding of the transitions between the forms of social agency we analyze here. However, to repeat, the model itself does not describe a historical progression, it describes a conceptual ordering of categories for phenomena that have emerged during human evolutionary and social history. As we said in chapter 6, these may or may not have emerged in the same form or in the same order as if following a blueprint described by the model. In other words, the model is not purely abstract and devoid of any link to actual historical and social relations. But it is not a chronology either, nor meant to provide an account of the evolution or the development of social forms of agency and eventually languaging. It is instead a tool that provides guidance for studying the relations between the two domains: historical and conceptual. The model is a synthesis (not a summary or abridgment, but a conceptual synthesis) of the historical processes that take a social species, or a social individual, from nonlinguistic to linguistic forms of sense-making. We step into the dialectical expansion of the concept of participatory sense-making. Each subsection below describes a stage in the model. 7.3.1  The Primordial Tension of Participatory Sense-Making As discussed in chapter 4, participatory sense-making describes the situation in which the sense-making of two or more agents is mutually modulated as they engage in an interactive encounter. A social interaction is an autonomous self-sustaining network of processes in the space of relations between the participants, provided their autonomies as such are also sustained. Since this description is rather general, it applies to any kind of interactive engagement. Participatory sense-making can happen without sophistications such as the recognition of one agent by another agent. Basic situations like this are studied empirically: it has been shown that interactive dynamics are radically different and alter the action and perception of the participants in comparison with similar noninteractive situations, even if the participants ignore whether there is another person actually interacting with them (e.g., Auvray et al. 2009; Reed et al. 2006). From the perspective of an individual agent, basic participatory sense-making could be experienced as no more than a special sort of engagement with the world, one where the agent’s regulations are contingently thwarted, extended, challenged, or simply changed by the interaction dynamics, following certain enduring patterns. While most of the interactive encounters we sustain in real life involve an awareness of the presence of others, the

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concept of participatory sense-making, in the most general interpretation, does not require such an awareness and participatory sense-making may occur without it. Two forms of autonomy are at play in participatory sense-making: individual and interactional. Individual autonomy is given by the entangled integration of organic and sensorimotor agency. This means that it is already a complex interrelation between different embodied autonomies. But we will treat them under the general label of individual autonomy in the present context, relying for the moment on their sustained integration.4 The other kind of autonomy is different. It results from the sometimes fleeting, sometimes enduring patterns that self-organize and sustain the interactive encounter. It is as such not a form of autonomy anchored in the bodies of the participants but emerges out of the relations between these bodies and between their activities. We propose that the demands that govern the joint enactment of these two different kinds of autonomies—one individual, the other interactive— establish a primordial tension at the core of the concept of participatory sense-making. This tension is transformed and managed in different ways, as we will see in this model, but it never disappears entirely. It is important to notice that the primordial tension is not between the participants. For that we would need to assume that at this stage participants are able to recognize and understand each other as bearing conflicting intentions and this possibility only emerges later in our model. The primordial tension is more subtle and pervasive; it is in place even if others are not present as others or if there is no discord between intentions at all. All that agents are assumed to be sensitive to are the relational patterns that affect their own sense-making and that are affected by it. From the beginning, the primordial tension—describable only because we have defined social interaction in terms of autonomy—is not a tension between individuals but between an individual order and an interactive order. An individual agent acts and makes sense according to the norms she embodies. These norms, following what we said in part I, relate to the continuity of various forms of autonomous identity or forms of life intersecting an individual body. However, in an interactive situation these norms may be in conflict with the autonomous relational dynamics of the encounter. Sometimes in pursuit of an individual intention, the acts an agent performs during a social encounter fuel the interaction process, but through their effect on the social coupling they end up frustrating, in apparent paradox, the originally intended goal (e.g., the classic narrow-corridor example where two people walking in opposite directions get stuck by individually

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trying to get past each other). There is in the social encounter an interactive normativity, different from the embodied normativity of the participants. Regardless of how acts and events are evaluated by the participants (as successful or not, useful or not, etc.), they may or may not contribute to the self-sustaining logic that belongs to the social encounter. They may frustrate the interactive dynamics while succeeding in accomplishing an individual goal. A participant will sometimes perceive a mismatch between what she intends and what actually happens that in general contrasts with noninteractive situations. This mismatch, this form of heteronomy from the agent’s perspective, has its origins in the double normative dimension of participatory sense-making. The primordial tension originates in the material messiness of bodies and their world. Because of their materiality, it is not possible to neatly separate individual acts and interactive moves. Each act actualizes an event, what we call a move, which is more, not less, than an act. By this we mean that an act mobilizes matter, energy flows, and actual and virtual relations in ways that are not fully exhausted by their description in mental terms (intentions, goals, desires, sensitivities). Moves have direct implications for concrete material engagements and, when these implications involve modifications to objects, tools, surroundings, the unintended consequences of acts can reach beyond the immediate situation.5 An event in the world is what it is; there is no sense in which it can be said to be anything more or anything less than itself in its actual and virtual implications (it may be more or less than what we perceive of it, but that’s another matter). An act that is actualized by an individual agent, however, always entails an excess, insofar as it is also part of an event. There can be no pure acts in the material world. The excess is whatever is not part of the normative relations that constitute the act as such, but that is nevertheless part of the event occasioned by the act: the unintended sounds I make when I walk on the meadow, the bent blades of grass, the air I displace as I do this, and so on. These manifestations may lead to unintended consequences and may eventually find their way back into the agent’s sense-making (e.g., I notice my steps have left a trace others can track). With an act, the agent attempts to regulate a relation to the world, but in so doing, the agent is put at the mercy of the world because the open consequences of the act cannot be guaranteed not to turn against the actor. Each act is a material engagement as well as a form of sense-making; it is something that belongs both to the agent and to the world in that the world both enables and is affected by the act as its manifestations cascade

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into further consequences. The excess of the act is what allows it to be resignified by further acts. In a social interaction the excess of acts performed by the participants can become part of what makes the interaction sustain itself. As we have seen, the complex patterns of bodily coordination that can occur between participants in an interaction do not result, in general, from an explicit intention to coordinate. In fact, they can happen even if the participants are attempting to break a coordinated pattern (narrow-corridor situation again, self-sustaining telephone conversation endings). These coordination patterns arise out of the materiality of moves during coupling. Interactions are fueled by material relations whether we intend those relations to happen or not. Interactive autonomy depends on the possibility of shaping the unindividuated remainder of individual moves, which has been left unspecified by the agent’s own intentions and skills, and bringing this remainder into synergy with the logic of interactive operational closure. When this occurs, part of that remainder of the event occasioned by the act becomes individuated in the process and furthers the interactive encounter. We can put this in a different way. During an interaction, an act by a participant is a concrete act for that participant. It is concrete in its being part of her sense-making, ultimately part of her ongoing individuation as a living and sensorimotor agent. Concreteness is belonging to a network of determining relations. Some consequences of this act are less concrete: they involve aspects of the act that do not immediately relate to what the agent was hoping to achieve. They “float freely,” in a manner of speaking, like the air I displace when I move. But the normativity of the selfsustaining interaction can make these aspects concrete on a different plane of relations. During our encounter I may reach for a glass of water in such a way that I inadvertently introduce a break in our coordination, or I may gaze curiously toward the unshared environment (e.g., behind you in the case of a face-to-face interaction), and this can disrupt the fluidity of the interaction by giving a semblance of disinterest that is not meant as such. Dissonance ensues in the interaction because of situations like these. From the individual perspective it is as if something that is separate from the central meaning of an act receives a different meaning in the context of the interactive encounter because of its influence on the relational dynamics. This is a frequent experience in interactions, when something we do or say precipitates an unintended turn in the encounter. In more sophisticated cases we may go through this as an experience of being misinterpreted, in

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other cases we experience a certain friction or roughness in the interaction, an intensification of states of alertness or a certain weariness. We will say that when acts-moves satisfy both individual and interactive normativities, these domains are in synergy; otherwise, they are in dissonance. Both synergy and dissonance between interactive and individual normativity have implications for individual acts. These acts suffer a doubling of their nature: they are the acts of an individual agent, but they are also moves in an interactive encounter. In the case of dissonance, breakdowns occur and the space of opportunities for accommodating these breakdowns is where the participatory labor of (re)creating sense has to happen. These are sources of frustration that could not occur in solitary existence. In cases of synergy between individual and interactive normativity, acts acquire a magic power. They achieve more than I intend to. And I can achieve what I want with less, through the coordinated resonance of the act in the interactive domain. The opposite happens in cases of dissonance: simple solitary acts can sometimes become convoluted and awkward in an interactive situation. Notice that synergy and dissonance between interactive and individual normativity, as the terms are used in this context, do not refer to the presence or absence of coordination between the moves of the participants. A situation of interactive coordination may happen while there is dissonance between the two normative domains (once more, the narrow-corridor situation). Nor are dissonance or synergies, to repeat, to be understood as interpersonal—that is, between the individual participants. A typical situation of dissonance occurs when the intentions, perceptions, skills, and sensitivities of the participants are “aligned” but the interactive patterns frustrate these intentions anyway (a recurring fight between people, even when each of them has resolved to not let it happen again). Interactive dissonance can arise in subtle ways and need not be experienced as a major frustration of individual intentions but instead as a discomfort or difficulty in the flow of sensorimotor engagements. In a study of haptically coupled cooperating dyads rotating a heavy crank toward a target, Kyle Reed and colleagues (2006) investigated what is different if the movement is produced by one person alone or jointly by an interacting dyad. The experimental setup did not permit individuals to know in which condition they were being tested. Reed’s study shows an improvement in task performance in the dyadic condition. Completion of the task is faster when working together as a team than when acting individually.6 What’s interesting is that many participants report experiencing more difficulty in the interactive situation rather than more fluidity in reaching

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the goal, even if the goal is reached faster. The relational dynamics in this case are often felt as a hindrance to the individual agent’s projected action. Here again we see a dissonance between the interactive and the normative orders. How can joint performance be more efficient if participants experience this condition as interfering with their individual acts? The answer is that the coordination that brings about the increased efficiency cannot itself be something “aimed at” by individual acts. The participants are not aiming to coordinate (they are not even certain they are in the dyadic condition). Relational patterns interfere with what individuals intend to achieve, hence the experience of hindrance. Coordination occurs nevertheless, as in other cases, through interactive self-organization and to some extent interfering with what participants try to do, again showing a case of dissonance between interactive and individual normativity. Something is going rather well at the interactive level, making dyads more efficient at the cost of something being experienced as awkward or more difficult by individuals. If interactions are sustained, dissonance is to be expected at some point because the relational patterns that make up the encounter are precarious. But if dissonance is sustained, interactions eventually break down entirely. Sustained interactions occur because situations of synergy, once lost, may be recovered. Acts-moves that provoke tensions between the individual and interactive orders may be restituted by other acts-moves that restore synergy and confirm the double normativity as effectively asserting both individual agency and interactive engagement. The recovery of synergy may or may not occur spontaneously and interactions may simply never get off the ground unless there is a way of regulating synergy so that it is not a matter of pure luck. But the problem is that individual acts, being subject to individual embodied norms, do not guarantee synergy. Quite the opposite: because of their materiality, they are likely to break synergy eventually. No matter how much similarity and alignment the participants bring into the encounter, the only outcome that is guaranteed is that dissonance will emerge at some point. No amount of prosociality, sharing of cultural norms, environmental constraining, alignment of intentions, and so on, in short no amount of precoordination or tendencies to act so as to improve coordination, can guarantee sustained synergy. This is simply because all this prepping to do well at coordinating does not overcome the condition of autonomy in each participant. It is precisely individual autonomy that would be negated by subordinating action to a guaranteed synergy during social encounters, making them by definition no longer interactive. Relational autonomy would be maximized

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if synergy could be guaranteed, but this would mean that we would not be talking about a social interaction anymore. The definition of social interaction seems therefore to have an inherent contradiction. The autonomy of the social patterns would be enhanced if we eliminated the autonomy of the participants, and vice versa.7 Such is the primordial tension of participatory sense-making. Acts are regulatory for the embodied autonomy of the participants and at the same time they are moves in the interactive game. The tension is inherent in the concept itself, made flesh in the materiality of acts, and something we actually live through in everyday interactive experiences. The question is: How is the primordial tension managed? If the interactive order were to somehow impose a top-down synergy by forcing individual acts to fit with it, the autonomy of the participants would be eliminated. If a given participant were to impose synergy unilaterally following her own intentions, the autonomy of the relational pattern would be eliminated, as it would then be under the direction of this one participant. The problem has no solution unless a new factor enters into play: the notion of social agency as coregulation. By coregulation we mean that some acts are performed together—that is, their enactment requires the organization of individual sensorimotor coordination patterns into a jointly regulated sensorimotor scheme. Such acts, as we will see, become inherently social; those acts, among other things, seek to synergize interactive and individual normativity as part of their own conditions of satisfaction. 7.3.2  Social Agency A single agent on her own cannot reliably control the synergy between individual intentions and interactive normativity without eventually terminating the conditions for social interaction. Though her sense-making is affected by the interactive situation, a single agent remains bound by her embodied norms and for this reason can only attempt to regulate her own coupling with the world, not that of others. We have no reason to assume that the credit for sustaining ongoing interactions belongs to the normativity of individual agency. As we have said, we do not assume prosociality, nor would the problem be solved if we did. If a synergy between individual and interactive norms were to be orchestrated by the actions of a single agent, the result would be the elimination of the interactive autonomy, maybe also a threat to the autonomy of other participants. For example, a single agent could attempt this orchestration by forcing the exclusion from the interaction of individual acts that may lead to breakdowns, not

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allowing moves that could distract other participants or induce unintended responses. This would imply that the controlling agent must be able to know the intentions of others. Assuming this kind of regulation were even possible, compelling as a result individual acts and interactive dynamics into synergy, it is clear that the interaction patterns would no longer be heteronomous for the agent who, like a scriptwriter, controls the whole situation. Everything would be the result of her own intentions and actions. The social encounter would move along a predefined rail track; it would cease to be an interaction proper. To sustain the autonomy of the participants during social interactions, the regulation of the primordial tension must involve them all. The recovery from situations of dissonance requires a coregulation of the interactive coupling. Coregulation is directed at managing the mismatches between the individual sense-making of all participants and the patterns that emerge in the interactive dynamics. This is what we call social agency, a specific kind of participatory sense-making whereby the agents not only regulate their own couplings and influence other agents, but they also jointly regulate the mutual coupling following norms that pertain to the interactive situation, such as being sensitive to interactive breakdowns and attempting to recover from them jointly with other participants. Contrast social agency with individual agency, where the regulation of the coupling originates in a single agent and is aimed at satisfying only individual norms. It is possible for individual sense-making to be affected by the activity of others without this influence being a regulatory one. A mother places a shiny toy in front of an infant to catch his attention. In this way, the mother participates in the infant’s sense-making. However, the infant’s response to seeing the toy need not involve a coregulation that jointly achieves anything in response to the mother’s action. The infant could conceivably see a toy “popping up” in his field of vision. Social agency, by contrast, begets social acts (i.e., acts involving more than one participant in their execution). Consider the act of giving. This act can be initiated but cannot be completed by a single agent. Imagine that instead of placing the toy in front of the infant, the mother attempts to give it to him but holds on to it, encouragingly waiting for the infant to start an act that could be the beginning of an acceptance gesture. A tension in the flow of the interaction is created such that, at the mother’s insistence, the infant experiences a “pull” away from his immediate individual engagements (not currently focused on the toy). This can lead to a coregulatory move that eventually releases the interactive tension (the infant accepts the invitation to refocus attention and begins to participate in the joint act).

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We can see the difference between mutual influence and coregulation using the diagrammatic representation of sensorimotor schemes introduced in figure 3.2. This is shown in figure 7.1, where we see two sensorimotor schemes belonging to two participants in an interaction. A situation of mere influence is shown at the top where the scheme enacted by one participant has an effect on the environmental support of a particular sensorimotor coordination in the scheme of the other (e.g., bringing the toy into the infant’s visual field). Coregulation is shown at the bottom where the effect of a sensorimotor coordination in one agent has a more specific impact on how the other agent initiates or enacts a sensorimotor coordination (e.g., holding the toy close to the infant’s hand, prompting him to grab it). Consider two examples for the situations in figure 7.1. A situation of simple influence between agents is the case where two children, an older and a younger brother, are solving a jigsaw puzzle together. The older brother starts by systematically grouping pieces according to color. Although the younger brother may not yet see the point of this strategy, it so happens that his sense-making is influenced by the changes in the shared environment and he manages to spot two matching pieces in one of the same color heaps. The older brother is not directly helping regulate the specific perceptual act of the younger child but he has facilitated the likelihood of its success. As an example of coregulation, in contrast, let’s suppose that at dinner, the younger child is learning to stab a piece of food with a fork but only manages to move the food sideways around the plate. The older brother now helps him by orienting the fork in his brother’s hand vertically and, keeping it so oriented, the little child succeeds in pushing it downward into the food. Here the participation is more specific than in the previous case; it is a direct shaping by one agent of the initiation and enactment of a sensorimotor coordination by another. It crucially involves not only modifying the environment, but also intervening in the other agent’s enactments. To manage a dissonance between interactive and individual norms, participants can attempt to act socially, accepting that individual moves be also regulated by others. In this way, individual moves form part of a social act, provided such external regulation is “accepted” by the autonomous individual, as in the case of the child being helped by his older brother. Merely combining the acts of different participants does not guarantee coregulation. In fact, unlike the uncertainty an agent faces about the success of her own acts (obstacles and lacunae in her sensorimotor schemes), coregulated social acts are open problems with conditions of satisfaction

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Uʼ

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Figure 7.1 Differences between two kinds of participatory sense-making. At the top, two sensorimotor schemes are enacted by two interacting agents (left and right cycles; see figure 3.2). A sensorimotor coordination in one of the agents (A×A′, using the Piagetian convention where A indicates the support structures in the agent’s body and A′ the support structures in the environment) has an influence (black arrow) on the environmental support structure (U′) that enables a sensorimotor coordination in the other agent. Similarly, a sensorimotor coordination in the second agent (V×V′) has an effect on the environmental support (B′) for a sensorimotor coordination in the first agent. At the bottom we see a case of coregulation: the sensorimotor coordination of one agent (A×A′) impacts the regulated initiation of a sensorimotor coordination of the other (in the transition from W×W′ to U×U′) in one case, and the stabilization of the enactment of a sensorimotor coordination (B×B′) in the other case.

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that remain uncertain as they depend on the interactive configuration. Even in the absence of obstacles and lacunae, the autonomies of participants are vulnerably balanced when acts are coregulated (imagine that the child holding the fork reacts to the brother’s intervention by pulling it or twisting it in another direction, the combination of forces resulting in food flying off the plate). Social acts are open, not only in the sense that outcomes are not guaranteed as in all acts, but also in the sense that it may not be obvious to the participants what is going wrong when coregulation is frustrated despite the best efforts and conditions. Coregulation thus requires some amount of exploration. Participants may creatively explore fortuitous aspects of the embodied encounter, and its context and dynamics, arriving eventually at spontaneous social acts that achieve the required, but temporary, synergy of individual and interactive norms. (Recall the infant in the example above who completes the act of offering/receiving a toy for the first time.) Coregulation implies accepting a more direct participation by others in our sense-making without entirely giving up our agency. This is an apparent paradox. When this occurs, coregulation may still not succeed, but if this does not occur, social acts are just not possible. In accepting the possibility of yielding, partly and temporarily, our individual agency, we exert some influence on something we can control ourselves: our willingness to accept the participation of the other in constructing a joint social act. This occurs every time we accept an object offered to us or shake hands with someone. In a sense, a social act is the precise opposite of the attempt to establish synergy by orchestrating everyone’s moves, which we saw is doomed to fail (or turns a genuine interaction into something else). Coregulation is not only acting together but giving the interactive situation itself influence on our acts (regardless of whether we do this consciously or not). All of our acting requires a certain degree of letting things be. Admitting other agents into our acting is an opening in the space of individual embodied norms so that our acts may also partially be regulated according to interactive norms. This may or may not succeed in removing an interactive dissonance, but no other option can succeed. When coregulation succeeds, the ensuing social act embodies two different orders of norms. This is an empowerment brought about by participants increasing their individual vulnerability. Socially coregulated acts can manage the primordial tension of participatory sense-making, although their success is not guaranteed. In fact, once we look at the materiality of how coregulation may be achieved, we see that this solution begets its own transformed version of the primordial tension.

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Let us proceed by making the current formal situation a bit more concrete. As we have seen in chapter 3, the organization of sensorimotor bodies relies on processes of equilibration occurring at different strata, from the stability and transitions of sensorimotor coordination patterns forming a sensorimotor scheme, to the plastic accommodation to obstacles and lacunae as new situations arise, to the mutual equilibration between different schemes, and the organization of a whole network of schemes forming clusters of activity (figure 3.2). Here we have a concrete constraint that we have not yet incorporated into our analysis: coregulation depends on sensorimotor equilibration. Another concrete constraint is that social interactions take place with biased distributions: some participants are more likely to interact repeatedly than others. Family and group members participate together in repeated interactions more often than total strangers. These two concrete constraints have important implications for how coregulation occurs. Sensorimotor equilibration tends to stabilize sensorimotor patterns. This is not different in situations of social interaction. Consider again the crank-rotating study by Reed and colleagues. This is a clear example of a coregulated act: the sensorimotor regulations of both participants are physically coupled through the same solid rotating crank. The movements of one participant influence the sensorimotor regulation of the other and vice versa as both attempt to reach the same goal. Different strategies are available for this coregulation. By analyzing the forces exerted by each individual the authors found that, in many cases, patterns of “specialization” emerge. One member of the dyad specializes in accelerating the movement and the other in braking it. Moreover, once the target has been reached, instead of letting go, both members sustain an equal but opposing force, creating the dyadic analog of the contraction of agonist and antagonist muscles in a single body. The stiffness thus created increases the stability of the final stage of the movement (Reed and Peshkin 2008). It is almost as if one member of the dyad assumes the role of a muscle group and the other member the role of the opposing muscle group. This is an example of the kind of mutual sensorimotor stabilization that can occur during coregulation, leading to specialized contributions in different participants. Differential contributions are likely to be repeated and increasingly equilibrated if the conditions tend to recur, as in social interactions involving similar situations with recurring participants. In such conditions successful social acts tend to crystallize. The contribution of each participant becomes a stable sensorimotor pattern (e.g., accelerating or decelerating the rotation of the crank). We call such stable patterns partial

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acts. The condition of success of such patterns depends on the successful coupling with partial acts produced by other agents. In most concrete conditions, the coregulation of social acts is therefore not likely to start from scratch. The split of the coregulatory task into partial specialized contributions tends to recur if conditions and partners recur. Moreover, as in the case of any equilibrated sensorimotor scheme, successful partial acts group into classes of equivalence. In the crank example, perhaps a dyad can work well and reach the goal even if the profile of accelerating and decelerating forces is different between trials. Several possible partial acts thus assimilate the partial acts of other participants, forming an equivalence class. Conversely, this equivalence class stands in a relation of complementarity with the equivalent classes of partial acts performed by others. A daily example is, again, offering and accepting an object, a social act that may be enacted with myriad variants as long as a fit is found between the required complementary partial acts. Having at their disposal a structured repertoire of complementary and equivalent partial acts, agents successfully navigating interactive tensions need not always rely on a vast open search of possibilities for spontaneous, one-off coregulation. They may start from their know-how of partial acts. Codefined classes of equivalent and complementary partial acts reshape the double normative space of the interactive situation. If, as a result of dissonance, interactive participants enter into a coregulation attempt and this attempt fails, this may now be attributed to a mismatch between partial acts. Maybe the sensorimotor enactment of one of the partial acts failed, or maybe something failed in bringing the partial acts together. The possibilities are structured by previous interactive experience and available in the joint embodied know-how of the participants. This shared know-how gradually turns into a pragmatics of interacting. But this of course is not a guarantee for successful coregulation. The precarious materiality of interactions and the autonomy of individual agents will always demand some form of creative adjustment of social acts to novel particular situations. Too strict a set of pragmatic norms and the autonomy of interactions and participants becomes threatened. But too open-ended and unstructured an attempt at coregulation and the interaction may break down before a solution is found. A tension exists between spontaneous social acts and habitual codefined partial acts—that is, between the opposing needs for matching the openness of the coregulatory problem and the practical means provided by established patterns. The tension, however, resists solutions of the golden-mean type. There is a tendency toward equilibrating the sensorimotor schemes that we use

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to engage the world and each other, so that no matter how unpredictable an interaction becomes at certain turns, we frequently manage to at least partially steer it toward some familiar groove, and so we can catch our breath by bringing past experiences and settled skills to bear on the new situation. A social encounter that is constantly changing gears is hard to sustain and can exact a high emotional cost in frustration, alarm, and confusion. Eventually it dissipates. But, as a contrast, at the end of the tendency toward reusing sedimented social acts lies the full determination of the encounter. If this point is reached, no remainder of indeterminacy is left to the encounter itself, no material for its self-assertion, and so no possible autonomy can arise in the relational domain. Interactive patterns also die down at that point. Social interactions cannot occur in such extremely prescribed circumstances. But that they do occur arises from the fact that the tendency for individuals to overuse settled, tried solutions is met with a countertendency in the interactive domain for relational patterns to sustain themselves. Individual participants enable but do not fully control these patterns. Again, it is the materiality of the participants’ moves, which exceed their acts, that feeds this process and threatens to break down established interactive rules and protocols, and often succeeds in doing so. These opposing tendencies transform the possibilities of social agency and reshape the problem of managing the primordial tension. 7.3.3  Coordination of Social Acts: Going Meta If the sensorimotor bodies of the participants can equilibrate and build complex, clustered repertoires of sensorimotor schemes (as described in chapter 3), then the opposing tendencies toward assimilative reuse of partial acts and creative, de novo enactments of social acts will modify the sensorimotor repertoires in codependent ways as participants accumulate interactive experience. New partial acts emerge from the experience of coping with dissonances in the interaction, and in turn these new schemes accommodate within an existing repertoire in each sensorimotor body. Newly learned partial acts join current classes or eventually split from them and create a new equivalence class. But this process does not occur in individual bodies alone, since equivalence classes of partial acts are defined together with their complementary classes. Sensorimotor development is thus codetermined among interacting bodies. Consider cultural variations in salutation gestures as an example of creative differentiation within a class of partial acts. These partial acts involve similar contexts such as initiation or termination of the encounter, and several invariants, such as body orientation, gaze, address, relatively fast

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timescale, and so on. For instance, when a Japanese person, say a lawyer, offers her business card to you, she holds it with both hands. A Westerner, not experienced in these matters, may respond to the offer by extending his hand toward the card, but this particular gesture is considered disrespectful in Japan (as if one responded with half the body’s attention to an offering made with the full body). The appropriate response is to accept the card with both hands and read it. This partial act, for the Westerner, was probably part of the same equivalence class as accepting an object with only one hand; perhaps the two-hand variant was only used for heavy or bulky objects. But now, as the person learns the appropriate response, the equivalence class will be altered owing to an interactive norm that subdivides it. Differentiations between previously equivalent partial acts can eventually lead to new and distinct equivalence classes, as further accommodations occur both intercorporeally and within a given body. In sum, expanding a repertoire of mutually defined schemes allows for richer and subtler coregulatory enactments. It also provides a shared context of interactive skills and sensitivities from which a new kind of coregulation can emerge: the coordination of social acts by means of the regulation and ongoing equilibration of partial acts. This coordination involves semistructured attempts to select and, if necessary, mutually accommodate existing partial acts such that their equivalence and complementary relations become reaffirmed or redefined, and eventually new classes of partial acts are created. Once large repertoires of partial acts are in place, interactive coregulation can be attempted first by using the already existing classes. As in the example above, in case of a breakdown, one may try out another equivalent act before giving up on a particular equivalence class (accepting the card, but in a different way). The space of solutions to the coregulation problem is now structured differently from the situation where large classes of partial acts did not exist. The exploration by participants of equivalent and complementary classes of partial acts can itself be coregulated by other social acts. Imagine the smiling Japanese lawyer holding fast to her card and looking intently at your other hand in order to gently teach you what a polite person does in these cases. A partial act can thus become a recursive regulator of other partial acts. The coregulation problem becomes, in part, a problem of coordinating ways to coregulate. Coregulation can take the shape of a metaregulation. For example, achieving the right distance during a face-to-face interaction is a social act normally accomplished jointly through individual approaching or distancing moves. Different opposing factors affect this

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social act (e.g., the clarity in seeing and hearing each other and the discomfort from too much proximity). If normal coregulation is impeded—for instance, if one of the participants is confined to a bed—it is possible to use social acts to recursively alter the way distance regulation is achieved (a gesture for others to approach or to move backward). Regulatory roles of this recursive kind can emerge spontaneously in partial acts, such as through changes in the component sensorimotor coordination patterns that make up a particular enactment. All partial acts to some extent induce a certain projection and expectation about the responses that would fit them and complete the whole social act. An intensification of these projective aspects (the Japanese lawyer holding on to the card for a bit longer) can turn a partial act into a metaregulatory one. This is often how cool handshakes are learned for the first time. Seeing them performed does not always place the novice in a position to actually enact a cool handshake, especially if it is complex, the situation is unclear, and some stylishness is required. This is also the case with relatively common handshakes. Fist bump, high five, standard handshake, or embrace? Or a combination of these? Partial acts in one of these classes are not compatible with partial acts in the others, although they all belong to a class of acts that work similarly in initiating an encounter, establishing connection, level of trust, body orientations and distances, and so on. The awkward moment when noncompatible partial acts are initiated is often resolved spontaneously, on the fly. But it is possible for one participant to intensify an aspect of a partial act and thus regulate the choice of complementary act in the other participant—for instance, gesturing ahead toward the partial act to be enacted, initiating it earlier or emphasizing it (e.g., opening both arms a bit quicker so as to move toward an embrace). Certain emphases and changes to the structure of a sensorimotor scheme can become increasingly reused for their metaregulatory effect. Pausing between the transition from one sensorimotor coordination pattern to another, repetitions or intensifications of these patterns, and so on, may strengthen the projective and regulatory reverberations of a partial act. Eventually some patterns adopt an almost exclusively regulatory role for a group of interactors—for instance, the use of a pause to indicate something is not quite right, a nod to reinforce a choice of a satisfactory response, shaking the head or showing a palm to induce a pause in the partial acts others are initiating, and so forth. Some of these sensorimotor patterns can become partial acts in themselves and be used almost exclusively to help coregulate a social act. They also modulate and differentiate partial acts and their classes. We call these

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acts regulatory partial acts. They become increasingly distinct with their reuse in different situations. As a consequence, another implication of a growing repertoire of partial acts is the emergence of classes of partial acts to be used in this more generalized, regulatory, and recursive role.8 Speech and other vocalizations, forms of expressivity, exaggerations, accents and emphases, suspensions, and all kinds of gestures, can all serve the purpose of regulating partial acts, and so they belong to the class of regulatory acts. They are all indeed metaregulatory in the sense that they include a normative evaluation of how participants coregulate their activity, the use of regulatory acts included.9 An important contrast now emerges. A regulatory act can facilitate the selection between partial acts among a set of possibilities. Or it can facilitate a suitable concatenation of partial acts enacted by different participants (in succession or simultaneously). Regulatory acts operate on other partial acts; partial acts can be objects of regulation. In other words, the measure of success of regulatory acts is whether they can make partial acts fit, or equilibrate appropriately. Participants have experiences of how to enact a variety of partial acts. This does not imply that they know how these partial acts relate to each other. Each enactment of a regulatory act (e.g., a nod, a gesture indicating that something is wrong) contributes to building this additional know-how. Regulatory acts make present the relations between classes of partial acts in those that enact them and those that witness them. In particular, regulatory acts make explicit otherwise implicit differences in the relations between the partial acts that make up a shared repertoire: whether they relate as suitable alternatives or as suitable complements in the joint enactment of a social act. The regulations facilitating the choice of one particular partial act among a set of options structure the repertoire along a paradigmatic dimension. The regulations that facilitate or inhibit the concatenation of partial acts structure the repertoire along a syntagmatic dimension. These terms, however, need not be understood in the strict linguistic sense, nor in the associated dimensions of simultaneity and succession. For the moment, they only describe the difference between equivalent or complementary alternatives made present to the participants thanks to the use of regulatory acts. While the difference in the way partial acts relate to each other is implicit in the existence of various classes of equivalence (paradigmatic alternatives) and complementarities (syntagmatic alternatives), it is the introduction of the operation of regulating these alternatives that makes this difference have a real effect in social interactions. A form of doing, an enactment, is required to bring these relations to life, so to speak. With regulatory choice

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in place, the paradigmatic or syntagmatic alternatives that are not enacted have an effect on the sensorimotor schemes that are actualized. The virtual alternatives, especially those neighboring currently activated sensorimotor schemes—that is, those partial acts that would almost fit the situation or definitely should be avoided and inhibited—form a structured network of relations between schemes, the more clearly defined as participants gain joint interactive experience. This patterning of partial acts is thus not a formally and externally described structure of alternative choices. It is made present as the situated and concrete set of virtualities that envelop a current enactment: not the handshake instead of the high five, but the handshake-not-the-high-five, the alternative not enacted is made present in the actualized one. In some cases, the effects of patterning along the paradigmatic/syntagmatic dimensions will be stronger than in other cases. This will depend on the number of concrete connections that have been built between schemes by the successful use of regulatory acts that link those schemes together into priming and inhibitory relations. In the concrete interpretation given here (i.e., not as a mere formal distinction), the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions are normative in an embodied sense. Not only does the recursive use of social acts create a powerful way of handling dissonances, but in conjunction with the spontaneous drift of coadapting social acts, it establishes normativity expressed at the level of social acts themselves. A regulatory act always carries an “implicit commentary” on how the act itself should be taken in the current situation. This introduces a double normative refinement. On the one hand, the regulatory act implicitly evaluates the suitability of the partial acts it regulates (e.g., it evaluates whether they fit or need adjustment or replacement). On the other, the regulatory act itself is evaluated in terms of its effectiveness, its clarity, and its suitability for mediation. Gestures conveying approval or disapproval may be poor mediators if they resemble each other too much or can be confused with other gestures. Herein lies the tension between the two forms of coordination: the difficulties of establishing creative coordination make participants turn to recursive regulation, which is more structured, as they gain interactive experience. But a regulatory act that fails to mediate prompts further attempts at creative solutions, including at the level of metaregulatory gestures. The first aspect of normativity is directly derivative from the original need to handle dissonances between individual and interactive norms. But the second aspect is novel and pertains to the concrete way the original tension was managed, a normativity within the shared repertoire of social acts themselves. Some of them are better or more appropriate than others

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at helping participants find and adjust their partial acts. And some partial acts are easier to regulate than others. In this way, social acts become evaluated and articulated by other social acts, opening a new shared horizon in social agency. 7.3.4  Normativity of Social Acts The normativity in the use of regulatory acts is the result of mutual accommodations between interactive participants sharing a history of interactive encounters. Resorting to the local norms that emerge from frequent interactions may of course sometimes fail, no matter how much history the participants share. But in some circumstances these norms are not guaranteed to even apply. If local pragmatics fail systematically this arises from the fact that the underlying norms are not shared by all the participants, something we can attribute to insufficient joint interactive history. A mediational act simply does not work if it is not taken by participants as such. Different factors may lead to this situation. One is experiencing social encounters outside the familiar group. Another is overaccommodation between some participants into what we may call a “private” pragmatics, where there is an overfit of intercorporeal repertoires not shared by other group members. If we assume, as another concrete constraint on our model, that social interactions are not limited to encounters within a fixed or very slowly changing in-group, then a tendency toward private pragmatics (i.e., toward too close an adjustment between frequent partners) is met with a countertendency: the need for partial acts to be portable to other social interactions. Social acts are fluid, full of subtle variations and forms of coparticipation. Some of these subtleties, including the novel normativity of social acts, may need to be adjusted when meeting new partners. Portability of these shared adjustments is not guaranteed. In those cases, dissonances between embodied and interactive norms must be handled with more basic forms of coregulation. What helps to avoid having to reconstruct a full new set of social acts is if, at least to some extent, some learned partial acts are not only complementary but also interlocking. Interlocking social acts are such that the partial acts that compose them are themselves strongly normative with respect to what they admit as a complement. In other words, they contain in themselves intensive metaregulatory elements that project what complementary act is expected from other participants. Interlocking partial acts leave little room for misunderstanding.

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Once again, the distinction is clear, not in the formal plane, but in the plane of the physicality of acts-moves. For instance, if someone is getting too close to my personal space during an interaction and I cannot comfortably compensate for this, I can gesture with open palms oriented toward the approaching body. This partial act will be successful if the other stops the approach and moves back. But if unsuccessful, the intensification of the same partial act can take the role of the full individual act when, in the extreme case, I hold the other in position or push her back. Implicit in the gesture is a clear indication of what the expected response is that will complete the social act. What needs to be understood about this gesture does not primarily depend on past intercorporeal equilibration but on more basic forms of sensorimotor experience in both persons (you cannot walk through barriers). Crucially, the mediational significance of an interlocking act emerges materially and on its own from the concrete meeting between this act and the partial act it attempts to regulate. Such acts do not need to rely on shared interactive history to succeed. Interlocking partial acts, which are sometimes full individual acts diminished in intensity as in the example, are more portable across different social interactions than locally developed pragmatics. They may be “discovered” as local pragmatics evolves among those acts that are particularly efficient at mediating dissonances (although not all such efficient acts will also be interlocking; some may be good mediators, but still idiosyncratic). Interlocking social acts are in tension with the open-endedness of subtle private pragmatics. They tend to contradict spontaneous, nuanced, and particular solutions that balance interactive and individual autonomy. In cases like the example above, they provide portability and allow participants to successfully transit between different in-group pragmatics without having to start entirely from scratch. Consider how gestures for moving forward or backward tend to be widely used even when very little of the repertoire is shared. Or gestures to indicate the act of eating. And even locally strongly normative partial acts are necessary: as social acts become sedimented and as the effort to accommodate the acts of other participants gets “built in” by history into the act, the need for that effort never goes away. The tension in the evolution of social acts between local accommodation and interlocking portability is manifested as repeated interactions begin to occur involving mobile participants. To the extent that historical and material conditions facilitate or demand exchange between groups, local repertoires for social agency can find ways

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of becoming shared through already established interlocking acts. The latter in turn can change historically as particular interactive habits become widespread (e.g., head nods to convey approval). The interlocking nature of some partial acts is socialized. They will not necessarily always be based on deintensified individual acts, but they may be formed through emergent community-wide conventions. Interlocking acts may serve as bridges between different local pragmatics, altering situated social repertoires and themselves changing in the process. Social acts eventually acquire a form of closure at the community level. Here we mean closure in the sense of networks of codependence in how social acts relate to each other. The meaning of a social act in such a closed network always involves the articulation of other concrete, embodied, and situated social acts. The open horizon of recursive mediational relations between social acts can now be said to constitute a shared social world. 7.4  The Model So Far We summarize the first part of the dialectical model in figure 7.2. Here we can see each new step in the concretization of participatory sense-making. Each stage gives rise to its own internal tensions and contradictions. The interactive situation we assume as the starting point of our model entails a primordial tension between individual embodied norms and interactive norms. Dissonances between these orders of normativity can occur independently of whether the intentions of participants are in conflict or not. Any attempt at removing these dissonances enacted by single participants will eventually threaten the autonomy of the interaction dynamics, turning the encounter into a script orchestrating individual action. Only the joint intervention of the participants can have a chance of managing dissonances. Such coregulated acts are jointly enacted and jointly constituted, since their norms involve several participants and their relations. Social acts, such as the act of offering/accepting an object or coregulating divisions of labor, may appear spontaneously or as a result of sensorimotor schemes that match across the participants, constituting partial acts (e.g., two halves of a handshake). Mutual equilibration in sensorimotor bodies that interact frequently provides a tendency toward the creation of codefined repertoires of partial acts. While facilitating coregulation based on past experiences, this tendency, if left to evolve toward its conclusion, will threaten interactive autonomy as coregulation again becomes a matter of following a set of rules or scripts. A countertendency toward spontaneity

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Participatory sense-making

Individual norms

Interactive norms

Social acts

Spontaneous acts

Partial acts

Coordination of social acts

Creative

Recursive

Normativity of social acts

Local pragmatics

Portable acts

Figure 7.2 Summary of the first part of the dialectical model. Each central node represents a step in the concretization of participatory sense-making. Each new kind of social agency breaks down into its main form of tension.

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affirms the autonomy of interactions. Social agency becomes an active management of these tendencies. As interactive know-how builds up between frequent coparticipants, partial acts become increasingly projective about their expected complementary responses. As a consequence, a local normativity is at play in partial acts, which can sometimes be emphasized through the intensification of some of their components, such as pauses, stressed movements, and so on. Some of these elements help partial acts regulate other partial acts. These regulatory acts contribute to the coregulation problem by helping participants achieve a higher-level coordination based on the structure of equivalence and complementary classes of partial acts in their repertoires. Coordinating how to enact a social act together becomes a question of navigating existing, settled interactive skills and creatively accommodating them between the repertoires of different participants and in different situations. Regulatory acts introduce a recursive element, an operation, by which the relations between partial acts become increasingly crisp and manifested in each enactment as coactive or inhibited alternatives. New normativity emerges in the use of recursive regulatory acts. Some of these acts are better at achieving regulation than others, and some partial acts are easier to regulate than others. Progressively, through mutual equilibration, a local pragmatics emerges, which is in principle not guaranteed to cohere with the pragmatics emerging in other groups. However, having learned the use of regulatory acts, it is possible to find among them those that are strongly normative and leave little room for misunderstanding. Some among such interlocking partial acts will be deintensified individual acts and so they will have a good chance of being portable in their regulatory significance. And, as their use becomes socialized beyond the local group, the various local pragmatics have a chance of encountering each other and begin accommodating across groups, starting to form a community-level closure of sensorimotor repertoires. The model shows how from a stripped-down version of participatory sense-making (i.e., an interactive situation between autonomous agents without any other concrete presuppositions) it is possible to elaborate increasingly concrete stages involving different kinds of social agency. A few things should be noted. First, the introduction of new forms of social agency alters the existing tensions and how they are managed, but does not fully overcome them. So each stage should not be understood as a “synthesis” of contradictory moments in a previous stage, but as a move forward in clarifying and modifying internal relations. At any point in the model, previous stages do not fully disappear. They are present both in

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elaborated fashion in the more advanced forms of social agency and in their original forms. When coregulatory partial acts fail, participants can resort to more basic forms of coregulation and eventually to the spontaneous coordination of acts-moves through mutual influence characteristic of basic participatory sense-making. Something else we should note is the appearance of elements that we associate with properties of language, such as shared know-how, normativity at the level of partial acts themselves, and recursive partial acts operating on other partial acts. These aspects do not emerge mysteriously but always in an operational manner. These categories are “spread out” in our model in order to present them as precisely as possible. However, in an actual social interaction several or all of these forms of social agency are often found collapsed in single observable actions. A scene involving several partial acts, say during the initiation of an encounter, will coalesce a series of basic forms of coregulation, uses of regulatory acts, both local and portable, repairs and evaluations, all in quick succession or simultaneously coenacted. Even sophisticated observations may fail to break down such scenes and reveal the dialectically related categories we have introduced. What makes the model grounded and not purely conceptual is the progressive introduction of concrete elements, as demanded by the logic of the tensions revealed at each stage: sensorimotor bodies, locally biased distribution of interaction frequencies, and the existence of groups forming different pragmatics of interaction with possibilities for movement between groups. Finally, we should note that a sensitivity for others and for the self is gradually built into the skills and capacities of the participants as we move through the stages of the model. We assume the most basic form of sensitivity to start with, which is almost no sensitivity at all. Participants engage in interaction and mutually influence each other’s sense-making without implying that they see themselves as “selves”/“others,” a capacity that is often assumed as fundamental but, as we see in this first part of the model, is anything but trivial. This will become even clearer in the next chapter. Elements of sensitivities toward others appear as the model unfolds. Self and other become increasingly concretized. Participants are at first assumed to be sensitive to being engaged in interactions but in a rather abstract sense. Coregulating social acts implies that each participant must sometimes let regulations initiated by others into the constitution of her own sensorimotor acts. Other participants are now more concrete than mere patterns of influence and are increasingly admitted into the coauthoring of a social

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act. As sensorimotor repertoires are built in conjunction with others, each individual begins to embody part of a shared know-how, one where partial acts become grouped into classes in ways that cohere with how the same process occurs in others. Regulatory acts highlight the relations between schemes in their own repertoires, making participants increasingly able to access these relations as well as helping them see how their own schemes relate to the repertoires of others. In this way, participants become increasingly sensitive to their own powers and skills and those of others. Still at this point, these elements are not yet sufficient to speak of a recognition of others as autonomous copresent agents. Together with further developments of the self, this sensitivity only appears in the second part of our model.

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© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

8.1  A Dialectical Model, Continued The move from the general conditions of participatory sense-making toward concrete skills for coregulating social acts is accompanied by the increasingly explicit role played by existing sociomaterial constraints. Social interactions always already occur in complex networks of relations of familiarity, power, practices, rituals, and traditions, of joint and conflicting interests, and of environmental, geographic, and climatic conditions, all of which affect forms of interactive agency and social organization. The lifeworld of sociomaterial practices, of collaboration, conflict, and survival, is not something that emerges from our model. Rather, it constitutes the already existing conditions that constrain it. Guided by the internal tensions at each stage of the model, these factors enter our story not all at once, but through particular constraints that take us from one stage to the next. In this chapter we look at constraints arising from the conditions of social relations across a community of interactors and the patterns of social practices such communities conserve and transform. Besides moving the model forward to a form of agency that we will call linguistic, the development is oriented toward the conceptual emergence of personhood through processes of social recognition. Our aim is to understand linguistic agency and linguistic bodies in the most general terms permitted within human practices and social patterns. This means not only attempting to use constraints that are widespread, as opposed to those that appear in a particular culture or social period, but also attempting to eschew prejudices about the ways linguistic agency occurs. The result should be a concept of linguistic bodies applicable, but not limited, to contemporaneous human beings. The concept will not be specific as to the form that languaging can take (e.g., speech, gestures, facial expressions). In this way, we attempt to look at the conditions that make social

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agency linguistic, the deeper roots all forms of human languaging share. These conditions may also apply to other cases apart from contemporary humans, provided the material constraints we have used in the model can be generalized to those cases. 8.1.1  Community of Interactors In the last stage of the model in chapter 7 we saw the emergence of regulatory acts with strong portability—that is, acts that are more efficient than others at exerting a regulatory influence on other partial acts due to their strong embedded normativity. Portability becomes known to participants through using these acts at increasingly larger distances from the local group, clan, tribe, and so on. The effect is double and contradictory. On the one hand, by regulating interactions even when pragmatic know-how is not shared, portable acts serve as bridges across which local repertoires can spread and combine. On the other hand, having learned and understood the property of portability, participants will never do away with using portable acts as they remain helpful for confronting the ever-present possibility of dissonances. The frequency of enactment of these acts serves to reaffirm the difference between local and distant engagements. This occurs to the point that even when repertoires have been partly homogenized within a larger community, the distinction between local, private, familiar, more spontaneous interactions and distant, public, stranger, more ritualized ones becomes a matter of style of engagement and no longer just a function of the actual frequency of encounters. In this way, an intimacy-distance quality emerges in how participants relate and work together. This quality will in general correlate with the familiarity of the participants engaging in interaction, but not always. If the interaction with a stranger easily switches to a low frequency of portable acts and a kind of resonance in the use of more familiar know-how, the quality, at least during that particular encounter, is one of quickly gained intimacy. Conversely, if breakdowns within the local, familiar group make participants resort too often to strongly normative acts, the result can be the formalization of a previously fluid style of interaction, a moment of estrangement. The potentially shifting quality of intimacy in interactive encounters is part of the lived experience through which participants begin to identify others as familiar or strangers. It is necessary to experience encounters at larger distances and with wider groups to begin to experience, through the interaction itself, that particular others are, for the most part, easier to get along with or just the opposite, distant partners in social engagement. The

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interactive resources to cope with spatial distance (frequency of encounter) become the measure, and ultimately the redefinition, of interpersonal distance (familiarity). These interactive experiences may be associated with the qualities of specific individuals but they are, as yet, insufficient for them to be recognized as autonomous others. At this stage in our model, following our minimal-presupposition strategy, interactive engagements do not yet entail a recognition of others as bearers of intentions, perspectives, motives, personal identities, and so on. But this starts to change as a consequence of the availability of socially portable regulatory acts. Their use establishes not only an asymmetry between different interactive encounters along the axis of intimacydistance, they also establish asymmetries among participants within an interactive encounter. Up to this point we have considered participants as interacting on symmetric terms. Actual, material asymmetries of course predate interactive encounters. Bodies have different powers, sizes, ages, genders, possessions, and so forth. Asymmetries, however, have not yet emerged in our model as a consequence of how participants interact. Now, using strongly normative acts can introduce an interactional asymmetry in the roles participants play during an interaction. As we have seen, the dissonances between the interactive and individual orders at the root of the primordial tension are not to be equated with conflicts between the individual participants. Interactive dissonances and even full breakdowns may occur due to the materiality of the social encounter, no matter how much the motives and intentions of the participants are aligned or precoordinated. This does not mean that when intercorporeal misalignments exist, they cannot be one possible source of interactive dissonance. Up to this point in the model participants are sensitive to dissonances through their interactive effects, not through their causes. However, a sudden increased and sustained use of strongly normative acts by a given participant can become an interactive manifestation of that participant’s individual intentions and motives as an embodied agent. A strongly normative act tends to guarantee the management of the primordial tension by limiting the options of other participants rather than achieving a consensual coregulation. The effect is incorporated and spread through a community. Think of your own embodied responses if you are going about your business and someone loudly attracts your attention, or shouts “Don’t do that!” Whatever you eventually decide to do, including ignoring this call, the short-term effect of the strongly normative act is a direct regulation, almost a highjacking, of your sense-making: you will

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direct your attention toward the other, you will likely stop doing what you are doing. The use of strongly normative acts is not immediately costly, so there is a possibility of overusing them. This is not necessarily because individual participants wish to dominate others but simply because these acts are available as powerful ways of resolving interactive dissonances by aligning interactions with a participant’s individual intentions. In other words, the overuse of strongly normative acts is an attempt to put a social interaction momentarily under the control of a single agent. But this, as we have seen, is risky. If one participant initiates a strongly normative partial act, then this participant is assuming a regulator role. If the interaction is sustained in such a case, then other participants can only assume regulated roles. This differentiation can persist because to assume a regulated role is not yet to have lost autonomy; it can be a role that is accepted by the regulated participants, a prolongation in time of the attitude of letting things be that enables social acts to be coregulated in the first place. Social agency is always strictly a joint regulation of the interactive coupling. However, because of the availability of strongly normative acts, it is possible for one individual to attempt to regulate others while still acting as a social agent within an interaction (through requests, orders, demands, etc.), not by violently forcing the others. Violent acts are precisely those that attempt to reduce or eliminate the autonomy of others. In the context of a social interaction such acts are possible, but if they succeed their effect is to break off the interaction by turning the encounter into something else. Adopting the role of regulator is not in itself violent in this same sense, but the strategy can turn violent if overused or if circumstances change. There is a deferral in time of the interactive costs of using strongly normative acts to try to align the course of the interaction with the intentions of one individual. Because of this deferral, the possibility emerges of inhabiting the regulator role for a period of time without breaking down the interaction, resulting instead in an asymmetry, which if sustained for too long could eventually become violent in itself. As in other parts in our model, a qualitative difference hinges on matters of intensity and temporality. We should repeat that unlike other material, factual asymmetries (size, strength, age, wealth, power, etc.), the skillful use of strongly normative acts is an asymmetry that emerges within the possibilities of social agency. In fact, participants that find themselves in regulated roles are not simply confronting one individual as regulator, but implicitly, the accepted

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normativity of a larger community because the interlocking social acts used by the regulator are conventional and widespread. Skillfulness in the use of these strongly normative acts can itself become a source of power sometimes able to compete with other factual sources or to reshape their configuration. If the quality of intimacy-distance is a first step toward the social recognition of others, the asymmetry of regulator-regulated roles is a second step. The breaking of participants into roles (whether short-lived or sustained in time) induces a one-to-many social structure in which the regulator is experienced by others as an individual and the effects of strongly regulatory acts as manifestations of an embodied individuality. The asymmetry between differentiated roles, if sustained over time, can become a threat to the social encounter if no other factors mediate to legitimize it—for example, on the basis of more durable social asymmetries. Examining this possibility would oblige us to pursue a branching in our model into the dialectics of social power, structures of domination, norms, and institutions. This is not irrelevant to our account of linguistic bodies (we come back to some of these issues in chapters 9 and 12). However, to proceed in the spirit of minimal presuppositions, we assume that a power asymmetry that emerges during an interaction need not be accepted without resistance or be the reflection of preexisting asymmetries. In that case, if participants playing the regulated role find their autonomies progressively eroded, the interaction may break off. In other words, in the absence of other external asymmetries, the asymmetry of interactive roles becomes dynamically unstable over time. As time passes the sustained use of strongly normative acts builds up interactive tension (although duration is not the only factor that determines the tolerability of a regulator; the intensity, style, and presence of the regulator’s acts, and past experiences will also count). Provided the regulator role is relinquished before a full interactive breakdown occurs, the encounter may continue. The situation is not yet fully stable because the regulator role may be adopted again by the same individual, probably with a diminished tolerance on the part of the others. The only way a metastable, durable situation may be achieved is through different individuals adopting regulator and regulated roles on different occasions and in a reciprocal manner. Reciprocity induces not quite an elimination but a time allocation of interactive asymmetry, which, if successfully coenacted, tends to simultaneously elevate the level of tolerance for the acts of the regulator and moderate the use of these acts.

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The time allocation of roles is contextual. It may take the shape of a semiregular taking of turns among the various participants, or the acceptance in some cases of “monological” phases accompanied by joint enactments that reaffirm the conditions of participatory sense-making. In whatever case, the buildup of interactive tension while inhabiting regulator and regulated roles determines what is acceptable in a concrete encounter and not the actual amounts of time spent in each role per se. We will in general refer to this way of overcoming the tensions of role asymmetry as dialogic, taking into account that we do not necessarily mean a strict situation of turn-taking. Role asymmetry induces a one-to-many dynamic configuration. This is followed by a many-to-one recognition of the individual adopting the regulator role. As this configuration changes reciprocally with different individuals adopting the regulator role, eventually many participants experience the acts of recognizing others and being recognized by them. To inhabit the role of regulator means to pull attention to the embodied intentionality of the agent in this role. The audience’s act of attending to the regulator thematizes her embodied presence within the interaction. And when recognition is reciprocal, the regulator is also aware that her acts may conflict or be aligned with the intentions of others as embodied agents. This is because she has learned to see them as bearers of intentions too. The recognition of other participants as embodied agents also involves an additional sensitivity, in all participants, to the circumstances that can make the sustained use of a regulator role go wrong and induce others to break off the interaction, and the skill to act adaptively to avoid this outcome. In other words, recognition is dynamically circumscribed and may shift in intensity within or between encounters, from full recognition to a blanket acknowledgment of others while actually ignoring their participation or even their presence (which would correspond to a poor sensitivity to the possibilities of the interaction breaking off). The experiences that shape these reciprocal sensitivities and skills tend to travel around the various participants if we assume that no other social asymmetries are at play. As a result of the bidirectional sensitivities to the intentions behind the acts of others and of intentions in others implied in how regulatory acts are received, participants are recognized and identified as autonomous others. The same happens in how participants relate to themselves individually. In both cases, in considering others and in considering the self, the actions and moves of participants are seen as anchored to an identifiable center that can be related to the actions and moves inherent in the same body across time (eventually across recurring encounters). Mutual recognition, as

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the attempt to overcome the dialectics of domination in Hegelian style (e.g., Hegel 1807/1976; Honneth 1995; Hyppolite 1969; Ricoeur 2005), would correspond to the projection of this group process onto the history of relations and interactions between two specific roles (a master and a slave) usually embodied in two parties. Focusing at the level of a group of participants allows us to conceive of recognition as a heterogeneous process. In this way, recognition may give rise to novel asymmetries that become materially sustained (or even self-actualizing) in the life of a group of interactors through their shared embodied know-how—for example, “the person everybody listens to,” “the person you shouldn’t pay too much attention to,” “the bossy person we must tolerate,” and so on. The process is more generally susceptible to the materiality of bodies and environments, and so more diverse, than a successful master-slave dialectics that moves ideally toward some kind of equalization. Following the logic of the model, to see that others are autonomous beings involves not only a sensitivity toward others, but a new kind of sensitivity to one’s own effect on the interaction dynamics: the incorporation of a new interactive skill of taking others into account. In sum, the tensions induced by role asymmetry can be resolved by contextually structuring the skewness between regulator and regulated roles over time and through reciprocal arrangements. And this solution leads to the skills and sensitivities that allow others to be recognized as autonomous.1 8.1.2  Dialogue and Mutual Recognition This is a momentous development in the dialectical deployment of participatory sense-making. It is important to see it as such. We must remark on the tendency to conceptualize social interactions by default as dialogues (and usually spoken ones). This tendency is prevalent and implicit in the way social interactions are studied in sociology and psychology: individual partners and their individual actions are taken as the naturally partitioned elements for analysis. Social interactions are generally assumed, or constructed by the choice of study method, to be dialogic. The consequence of this is that much of the relational, often messy, in-between dynamics can be lost (we return to this issue in chapter 9). In our model, social interactions are not required to be dialogic. Interactions can involve all kinds of internal organizations, including the lack of any specific organization other than the conditions of conserved autonomy at the interactive and individual levels. Jointly pushing a car with a dead battery, rolling on the grass with your dogs, howling at night at the students’ residence, walking

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in a group, improvising music together, and so forth, are all cases of social interaction. None of them is necessarily a dialogue. In no way do we benefit conceptually by taking dialogic interactions as paradigmatic. This attitude is what makes us search, unhampered by prejudice, for the origins of this widespread but particular way of organizing social interactions. Dialogues emerge conceptually as a way to handle the interactional asymmetries introduced by community-sanctioned, strongly normative acts. Since these acts are a way of coping with the primordial tension, their use remains necessary due to the ever-present precariousness of interactive dynamics, even after interactive repertoires have been more or less homogenized within a community. Dialogues transform the tension between the tendency for strongly normative acts to be overused to regulate interactive dissonance and the countertendency for interactions to break down as a result. A dialogic organization requires a reciprocal agreement on the allocation of roles among participants in an interaction. This allocation is contextual and depends on the situated distribution and temporality of the buildup of interactive tension between the participants and their skills at managing the risk of breakdown. A dialogic organization implies the regular participation of those involved in the interaction, either in momentarily taking a regulator role or in (re)validating the acceptance of the continued use of this role by another. In some cases, this organization may take the form of quasi-regular turn-taking, but it is not required to do so. What is characteristic of a dialogic organization is the presence of periods in which one participant enacts a role that asymmetrically brings together and orients the sense-making of other participants who accept and support this configuration. In a broad sense, we call such periods dialogic turns. Once the dialogic organization is in place, the participant holding a turn does not need to impose herself on others via the constant use of strongly normative acts. Being accepted by the group, the dialogic mode of interacting is jointly sustained. This permits a reduction, though not the disappearance, of strong normative calls for attention and orientation of the sense-making of others. The individual holding the turn is not constantly required to enact a strict regulator role since a space of attention is granted by the ongoing construction of the dialogue by all participants. Acts of strong regulation will not be entirely absent because there is always a risk of losing the dialogic organization (interruptions, distractions, disputes, fatigue). Nondialogic aspects of the interaction occur concurrently with dialogues. The turn-holder may capture the attention of others, but simultaneously

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other regulations (intercorporeal distances, passing of objects, adoption of coordinated postures, etc.) keep taking place. These coregulations may be “paradialogic”—that is, they support the ongoing enactment of the dialogue. They may also run somehow in parallel to the dialogue and occasionally take over from it by transforming the interaction. An example would be two people gesturing back and forth about whether they will start dancing a tango together (a dialogic phase), who then actually start dancing (not necessarily a dialogic interaction anymore). Generalizing Bakhtin’s (1986) definition, we will call the activity of the turn-holder, while holding a turn in a dialogue, an utterance. We should quickly clarify that we are not implying that the activity of the turn-holder is limited to some form of vocal or gestural “speech.” Turn activity, throughout our model, must be understood more generally as the series of acts that compose a turn, whatever their shape and modality; we therefore always mean the word utterance in this generic sense.2 Other acts that do not follow the dialogic organization but occur concurrently do not count as part of the turn (though they may influence the unfolding of the dialogue and be influenced by it). If a master toolmaker interrupts an apprentice and calls his attention to a wordless demonstration of how to perform certain moves correctly, this whole sequence counts as an utterance in our model, even if no speech is used, even if it lasts a long time. Within a dialogically organized interaction, utterances can be as short as a quick ostensive gesture or as long as a full demonstration of how to start a fire. What matters is the asymmetric interactive organization that all participants involved enact. Utterances, in other words, are constituted as such relationally and not only by the participant that produces them. The term utterance is appropriate because we can attribute many of the properties discussed by Bakhtin to the general turn activity in our model. Acts within an utterance are always social acts. They may be enactments of individual nonsocial acts, as in a demonstration, but they are not in themselves (simply) those individual acts because these enactments are part of a dialogic situation. In this way, a demonstration of how to start a fire may also be an actual instance of starting a fire, but it is done with an orientation toward others and not only instrumentally; some moves are slowed down, important points emphasized or repeated, the attention of others refocused if necessary, and so on. Moreover, the utterance creates and projects a space of meaningful responses, reactions, and rejoinders for other participants to take up. Eventually, utterances are linked—that is, they “travel through” a space of significance sustained and enacted by the participants. We can see this in the etymology of the word dialogue (διά

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‘through,’ λόγος ‘reason, articulation, meaning’).3 Acts within an utterance “live” in a network of situated relations with other acts, including the acts of the audience. These relations determine the effect of these acts on the interaction, in other words their sense within the dialogic context. Part of this network of relations is made up of links between acts and people. Turn activity, as we have seen, induces an asymmetry between participants. A turn does not exist in the absence of a producer, someone who enacts it (a demonstrator, a voice, a gesturer, etc.). At the same time, the activity of the turn is inherently addressed to someone (an apprentice, listeners, an audience, etc.). An utterance holds within its own internal structure a series of regulatory and normative checks to make sure that both these sets of relations between acts on the one hand and participants on the other are as unambiguous as possible. The utterance as a whole is a social act in the sense we have given to this term: it is constructed as much by the audience as by the producer and may fail if the corresponding complementary acts are not coordinated. Different elements within an utterance may also take the shape of partial acts to be completed by the audience’s attention and reception, guiding the producer by means of gazes, gestures, smiles, nods, frowns, vocalizations, etc.4 Utterances succeed if, among other goals, the dialogic configuration is sustained. In such cases they lead to other utterances, which themselves are evaluated according to a sense of relevance. They may address the expectations raised by previous utterances, they may respond to them, follow them up, contradict them, and so on. And although utterances may also introduce new elements by directing audience attention to a new topic, fully irrelevant utterances are felt by the participants as dissonant with respect to the normativity implied by previous utterances and the sociomaterial configuration of the dialogue. As we will show below, the overall themes and directions of the dialogue are thus constructed out of a situated braiding of utterances. When dialogues are established as durable entities, they bear to utterances a relation of a whole to its parts, which dialectically individuates the parts as units in terms of their relations to other units and the whole. The progression of the dialogue is one of the determining factors in establishing not only what counts as a relevant utterance, but also what acts play the role of an utterance. For example, as dialogues progress there can be reversals of the relation between participants and utterances. Initially, and for the most part, utterances correspond to the turn-delimited activity of a particular participant and eventually, in their relation to other utterances and participants, become an individuated part of the dialogic whole.

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The relation between utterances and participants is initially primary and the relation between different utterances secondary. But this order may be reversed and utterances may achieve their individuation primarily as parts of the dialogic whole. This allows utterances to sometimes be enacted through the intervention of different producers.5 Thus, utterances may be produced jointly or initiated and completed by different participants either fluidly or through collaborative work (as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon). In turn, this can lead to new sources of miscoordination and frustration: utterance completion by another participant may be elicited by a midphrase pause but still be felt as an interruption. In particular cases, when a participant is impeded from producing full utterances, he may still do this by guiding the actions of others, participating pragmatically in the dialogue and expressing his motives, states, and intentions in this way.6 Other key properties of utterances will appear in the next stages of the model. For the moment, let us focus on how utterances imply relations between social acts and participants, now identifiable and recognized as autonomous agents. Since the dialogic organization implies an asymmetry of roles, we must examine the conditions of sense-making when participants inhabit each of these roles. We will see that the asymmetry is actually a polarity in that participants at different sides of an utterance are involved in forms of sense-making that tend to be in tension. Turn-holders engage in a form of participation that cannot be anonymous.7 They are the producers, the authors of utterances. Part of what constitutes an utterance as such is the identification of who is producing it. These participants are not only recognized as sensorimotor bodies, bearing embodied intentions, skills, etc., as when they are seen occupied in some noninteractive practical activity. They are also recognized as social bodies because of the normativity of the acts that make up the utterances, which results from the spread of interactive repertoires throughout a community. Producers enact a particular social role; they enact social acts in a configuration that identifies them as social participants (by themselves and by others). At the same time, they are sensorimotor and organic bodies. Let us take utterances, for the moment, to have a single identifiable producer (the next points will generalize to other cases). Because of the recognition of the agent behind them as producer, utterances have a double dimension of meaning. On the one hand, they are part of the ongoing coregulation of the interactive encounter. They serve purposes including individual and common goals and contribute to sustaining the interaction. These are the pragmatic aspects of the utterance. The term pragmatic is

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broadly understood as it can include acts that can be classified as performative, descriptive, interrogative, imperative, etc., and acts that do not fit any such classification but are used to coregulate the dialogue. On the other hand, utterances bear meaning in how they relate to the participants that produce them and to their audience. These are the expressive aspects (again, broadly understood). In addition to its regulatory effects, an utterance can reflect the affect, attitudes, and intentions of the producer to all participants (the producer included). It also has direct effects on the affect, attitudes, and intentions of all participants that extend beyond the pragmatics of coregulation. An utterance, for instance, directing someone’s attention to an object in the producer’s hand and gesturing for this object to be taken by the other, may succeed pragmatically (the other person attends to the object and takes it) and yet the intensity and timing of the moves embodying these acts can express radically different attitudes and intentions in either participant, varying from politeness to exasperation. In other words, expressive aspects do not reduce to pragmatic aspects. For the participants, the distinction only emerges as a consequence of the dialogic configuration. In other words, even if applicable to wider contexts, expressiveness becomes a distinguishable aspect of an act within interactive and dialogic situations. This does not mean that social acts performed outside the dialogic frame—for instance, the various partial acts described in the previous steps of the model—lack expressivity. It means that expressivity and pragmatics are conflated in those acts. We have seen that in fact elements of partial acts may be exaggerated, emphasized, even suspended, to enhance the regulatory effect on the performance of complementary acts by other participants. In a dialogue these normatively enhanced partial acts are recognized as belonging to a particular agent, not only as features inherent in acts and moves but specifically as this agent’s acts and moves. These elements show themselves as expressive of the agent’s situation (i.e., as relating qualities of moves to the embodied intentionality of their producer). In particular, expressive aspects show the agent’s experience, intention, state, and motivation “coming through” in the act—for example, in the actual timing and manner of movement, in the overall style of the act’s performance. The expressivity of a partial act was not, prior to this stage in the model, actively distinguishable from other aspects of the act; it was rather an integrated part of the whole. It is only with interpersonal recognition achieved in dialogue that expressiveness (i.e., the expressivity of a move in relation to an agent) becomes explicit due to the fact that utterances always bear a relation to their producers. Note, however, that expressivity, once we are specifically sensitive to it, does not reduce to the

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intentionality of copresent agents. Consider the boldness of a boldly drawn arrow. Even if I see the arrow later, without seeing the act of its drawing or the artist who drew it, the boldness of its appearance will still strike me with some excess of connotation and mood beyond its function as indicating a direction. The double dimension of meaning in utterances is thus reflected in a novel form of participatory sense-making: interpretation. Utterances must be interpreted in the sense that they admit open possibilities of meaning beyond their pragmatic aspects, which are not so much in themselves interpreted as responded to directly. Utterances exceed these pragmatic aspects in the dimension of expressiveness understood as the relation between producer, audience, utterance, and interaction dynamics. Making sense of this dimension is not a given in the repertoire of complementary and equivalent partial acts. It involves a new sensitivity to relations between participants, acts, and context. An audience may be composed of participants that are directly addressed and those that are not (Clark 1996; Goffman 1981). Yet, anyone in the audience attending to the utterance as an act belonging to a producer can for the first time adopt an interrogative stance: a “what do you mean?” attitude understood both in the sense of what the purpose of this utterance is and what the intention in producing it is. This is the problem of interpretive sense-making: understanding the acts and moves of the other as a signifying other. The activity of interpretation is codefined with utterance production (within the participatory process of dialogue construction). But this does not mean these two forms of sense-making are “prealigned”; in fact, they coemerge as a polar pair. To see this, consider the contrast between the demands utterance production and utterance interpretation place on sense-making. The dialectics between these demands shape the contextually acceptable form of an utterance. This can be seen if we postulate the ideal conditions for production and interpretation separately. From the production side, in terms of effort, time, and simplicity, the utterance would ideally be compact rather than redundant, holistic rather than partitioned, integrated rather than differentiated, open-ended rather than delimited, tacit rather than explicit, and contracted rather than expanded. For interpretative sense-making, the demands are exactly the opposite. In the ideal circumstances that maximally facilitate production, a producer would generate the pragmatic and expressive aspects of an utterance as one integrated whole. In the ideal circumstances that maximally facilitate interpretation, these aspects would be clearly distinguishable. A producer would throw herself into the turn activity without attempting to determine or signal its

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duration early in the act or its approaching ending. An interpreter would prefer a clear indication of the duration of the utterance as soon as possible and a warning when the turn is about to end. And so on. The codependence and polarity between production and interpretation result in divergent tendencies. They demand an active negotiation among the participants. There is no context-free golden mean. Acceptable utterance duration, intelligibility, redundancy, and expressivity can vary radically whether in the context of a poetry reading, a political rally, a business lunch, or a conversation between family members. Resolving these tensions is a “live” problem in dialogues, part of the active sense-making of producers and audience. This problem can be solved idiosyncratically at first, by the interactive partners accommodating each other’s styles (analogous to the private pragmatics at previous stages). Subsequently these particular solutions will pass through the community-level socialization, as we have seen before, resulting in relatively well-delimited starting points that precoordinate the expectations of producers and audience without ever removing the need for ongoing negotiation and coregulation. We call these starting points participation genres. We introduce this term on the basis of Bakhtin’s speech genres—that is, flexible normative frameworks that prestructure the organization of spoken utterances in terms of duration, style, expressivity, and semantics (Bakhtin 1986; Voloshinov 1929/1973). Participation genres (which could include activities such as cooking together, eating together, finding seats at the theater, participating in rallies, learning through demonstrations, coordinating labor, playing team sports, etc.) are applied in our case to generic utterances (i.e., not only speech or gesture, but any partial act fitting within a dialogic organization). They include Bakhtin’s speech genres as a subset (salutations, requests, orders, gossip, arguments, narrations, reports, lectures, and other discursive activity). Participation genres, which include nonverbal utterances, are in turn a subset of the activity genres or sensorimotor microworlds introduced in chapter 3. The latter are more general and include noninteractive activities (figure 8.1).8 Participation genres, like activity or life genres, are normatively integrated as well as being situated contextually and regionally according to differences in groups and communities. Styles and schemes for utterance production and interpretation within a participation genre form networked relations of mutual functional and structural support. As a consequence, genres become increasingly differentiated in terms of what possibilities resonate or clash with this regional normativity. The result is that participation genres massively precoordinate production and interpretation according

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poetry reading cooking

phone conversations team sports

Speech genres

commuting collaborative work

Participation genres

housework gardening

Life genres

Figure 8.1 Genres for human practices. Activities-of-life genres frame all kinds of clustered sensorimotor processes usually enacted in a microworld. Participation genres encompass the practices and situated norms of different kinds of social interaction, a subset of which are Bakhtin’s speech genres. Examples are only illustrative; it must be kept in mind that activities may be framed by different kinds of genres depending on circumstances. “Gardening,” if done in collaboration, also belongs to participation genres such as “collaborative work” and speech genres such as “work-related conversations.”

to context and history. Within a genre such as participating in a protest rally, apart from the precoordination of joint actions (the pace and direction of walking, carrying banners together, etc.), utterance production and interpretation are also precoordinated: slogans, short and mobilizing, to be chanted together, directions to the crowd to be spoken and gestured loud and clear, neighbors frequently addressed “sideways” while walking, making subtle facial gestures less effective, and so on. Utterances framed by participation genres are structured wholes, with clear contextual indications to the audience about duration, expected suitable responses, and combined yet discernible expressive and pragmatic aspects. By managing the tensions of production and interpretation, each utterance produced by one individual appropriates and selectively perpetuates the normative structuring of a participation genre. In their habitus-like dynamics of sedimentation and innovation, genres are metastable, historical, and open-ended spaces of interactive sense-making. 8.1.3  Participation Genres Participation genres emerge out of the sociomaterial constraints that structure all human activity, not only social interactions or dialogues. They are

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shaped by the recurrence of organic, sensorimotor, and environmental rhythms and patterns of plasticity, as these meet the demands of social production, conflicts, interpersonal accommodation, and socialization of forms of sense-making. Environmental settings can massively determine all kinds of human behavior (Barker 1968; Schoggen 1989), as do the social settings of organized activities (Leont’ev 1978). Their normativity is situated, sociomaterially determining the demands and affordances of a situation in a concrete, contextual manner (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). Participation genres are a subspecies of habitus-like social patterns. Such patterns occur at different scales and may not always be clearly separable, going from the habits of familiar interactions, actions, and gestures among close relatives and friends, to styles of interaction shared with unfamiliar others, up to patterns of behavior associated with class, status, social roles, nations, etc., eventually languages and cultures as wholes. What is common to these patterns is their logic of individuation and reproduction. Although the relevant processes may occur at very different scales, they always operate with a circular mutual influence between bodily appropriation and transformation and the enactment of practices that alter and disseminate the incorporated social patterns. The relations among socially individuated patterns of norms, material structures, and sense-making are not neatly ordered as in a hierarchy but involve positions along multiple dimensions, such as social distance (degrees of intimacy), frequency of encounters, dissemination across groups, normative strength and specificity, temporal scales, and so on. These dimensions relate in complex ways, which sometimes may resemble hierarchical relations. Thus, some participation genres may cluster regionally. Buying a train ticket at the station or buying clothes in a shop are distinct genres, but they share normative elements (e.g., the framing of a commercial exchange) that neither share, for instance, with jointly repairing a car engine or building a wall. At a different scale, all of these examples share normative elements, scope, and scale of interaction (e.g., horizontal interactive organization, goal specificity, typical duration of the encounter) that none of them share with a poetry reading or a protest march. What distinguishes participation genres from other structures of the social habitus? Are the private patterns of familiar conversation between two lifelong friends a participation genre? Is the capitalist mode of production a participation genre? In some senses they both are, the same way that the relation between host and symbiont and the interactions in full ecosystems are examples of interspecies patterns. Concrete encounters contribute to the dynamics of stabilization and innovation of social patterns

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at several scales simultaneously. Two friends deciding on investing their savings in a joint business venture perpetuate both their familiar patterns of relating and the workings of capital, not to mention other patterns such as legal institutions and the moral view that seeking personal profit in this way is acceptable. In light of the operational modes involved in their conservation and change, all of these social patterns would count as participation genres. But to apply the term this broadly is unhelpful. We choose to speak of participation genres more narrowly, only when metastable, self-sustained social patterns possess the following additional characteristics. First, we exclude conserved patterns that apply to specific individuals only. Thus, “conversations between friends about literature” are a participation genre, but “conversations between Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares” are not. In the second place, it is useful to think of participation genres as something one can switch into and out of and sometimes combine without entering into serious sustained conflict. Thus, as difficult as it may be in real life, most people switch between work-related and family interactions every day and so they constitute two different classes of genres. But we should exclude patterns that apply so “universally” that it is hard to see them as one genre out of many, unless we compare them with distant cultures and historical periods. The word genre in these cases is unintuitive as we cannot easily switch from one system to another (though perhaps the term may be politically useful in some circumstances). Thus, economic and legal systems, relations of power, the organization of social capital, prevalent moral views, and so on are better not conceived as genres. One cannot switch back and forth between them without sustained conflict. Considering these restrictions, what do participation genres precoordinate exactly? In the case of dialogically organized interactions, they provide frameworks for structuring the production of utterances in all their possible modalities and for specifying kinds of audience participation. They also frame what is required for interpretation—for instance, the expected effort and degree of attention to the utterance, or the elements that can be assumed to be already understood. Genres also help coordinate various other nondialogic social acts, such as the regulation of interactive spatiality and temporality, postures, rhythms, intensities, suitable social and environmental conditions, and so forth. Take, for example, a work phone call with a colleague. How long should it go on? If it switches into a social call, the participation genre will change and expectations of duration will change. These precoordination patterns, as always in our model, do not replace the concrete actual labor of regulating breakdowns and dissonances during

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interactions. Being within a participation genre may help this task but cannot guarantee its success given the openness of human bodies and their sociomaterial environment. Moreover, new forms of interactive dissonance may emerge as participation genres are inhabited ambiguously. To see this possibility more clearly, we need to consider how an instance of social interaction “falls” within a participation genre. In most cases, sociomaterial circumstances (spatial and temporal constraints, technological mediation, weather, surroundings, the relation between the participants, social roles, status, etc.) constrain the genres in such a way that social interactions tend to fall into one of a few suitable options. Shifts between these options may be common, very much like the state of a dynamical system visiting metastable attractors itinerantly. Circumstances favor certain genres and resist others. A heart-to-heart conversation is incompatible with the anger and exhilaration of a political protest, as is attempting to engage the riot police in a rational exchange of ideas. For the most part, interactive experience incorporates a sensitivity to the genres that are available in different circumstances. The ease with which we naturally tend to agree on a participation genre, or at least to recognize it as suitable or unsuitable to the circumstances, means that it is rare for a social interaction, particularly a dialogue, to be genre-free. The framework may be loose but, short of being in a situation where participants without any shared background begin to enact a dialogue for the first time, there are always some shared normative elements, including the elements that allow participants to come to some agreement on which specific genre they will enact. The problem is, as in previous stages, that the novel factor that helps participants deal with sources of dissonances (in this case, the conflicting sense-making tendencies for utterance production and interpretation) creates new dissonances of its own. There may be confusion and difficulty in settling on a particular participation genre when a situation is ambiguous. Suppose that you are working at the supermarket cash register and the next customer accidentally drops half of her purchases and you decide to help her with the task of picking up some items still rolling on the floor. In the middle of this process of picking up things together (one participation genre, i.e., helping a stranger) you realize that this person is a long-lost childhood friend and you start greeting each other and commenting on the odd chance of meeting in such circumstances, asking questions about each other’s lives, and so on (another participation genre), while you continue picking up groceries. There is potential for confusion here even if one assumes both aspects of the ongoing interaction involve no interpersonal

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conflict. It is a case of interactive dissonance. Should you look her in the eye when she’s asking you whether you still live in the old neighborhood or should you kneel down to catch the rolling oranges? The most negative outcome in this particular example would likely be awkwardness, but in other cases it could be misunderstanding, or worse. Situations like this are ripe for occurrences of misproduction and misinterpretation—that is, failures in producing utterances consonant with the situation and audience support, and failures of interpretive sense-making where the utterances of participants are not clearly consonant with their expressed intentions, affective states, motives, and so on. Sustaining a dialogic encounter belonging to two different genres simultaneously is difficult as the demands and temporality for joint action are often in conflict (the queue line, the shop environment, the desire to catch up on each other’s lives). One way out of a situation like this may involve going back to some nondialogic form of coregulation in an attempt to coordinate social acts with others through recursive regulation (e.g., partial acts such as nodding, inviting complementary responses, reestablishing personal distance, and so on). Another way involves using dialogic resources such as interpretive sense-making recursively to try to correct utterance misproduction and misinterpretation. Through a process of mutual recursive interpretation, a participation genre may be agreed on (falling back into one of the previous options, or creatively extending an existing genre, or switching to a new one). The process of recursive mutual interpretation arises as a codefined pair along with the self-regulation of utterance production. A participant facing misinterpretation of her utterances may attempt to alter her own production—for instance, the relation between its pragmatic and expressive aspects. Different circumstances may lead to this, such as when misinterpretation is pervasive, or when the reciprocity of the dialogic structure breaks down (e.g., unresponsive silence, an audience not paying attention). This process of attempting to metaregulate utterances in response to breaks in the flow of the dialogue due to genre dissonances demands from the producer the adoption of an interpretive stance on her own productions (in conjunction with her interpretation of the utterances of others). As an interpreter herself, the producer can therefore be guided by self-interpretation. In such a case, the dialogic know-how and skills are used not to engage directly with the utterances of others but instead with the producer’s own utterances. As we have seen, interpretation and production are two sides of the same social act of participatory sense-making. This remains the case for self-interpretation. To actively interpret oneself in the situated dialogic

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context invites changes to one’s own utterances, changes that are themselves regulated dialogically—that is, using other utterances addressed to one participant in particular: oneself. In other words, mutual interpretation leads to self-interpretation and to the self-regulation of utterance production. The latter in turn can be achieved through the resources of dialogic agency (i.e., through self-directed utterances). We arrive then at a form of social self-control made possible by the fact that the producer plays, at other points, the role of interpreter and hence knows how to respond to utterances to alter her own sense-making, including the production of modified new utterances. These self-directed utterances, as in the rest of our model, are not restricted to speech; the only requirement is that their enactments must somehow reflexively affect the agent that produces them.9 A participant using dialogic resources to induce social selfcontrol enacts the parts of producer and interpreter, of the Meadian “I” and “me” (Mead 1934). This is different from other kinds of self-regulation that emerge from the adaptive processes of individual embodied agency. Social self-control involves regulating oneself as an other (and being regulated by an other who is oneself). Unlike sensorimotor self-regulation, which is subject to the normativity of sensorimotor agency, acts of social self-control are effective via their social normativity. Hence a single participant can enact a dialogic structure of regulation on herself, producing a self-dialogue in search of a way to modulate the expressive and pragmatic aspects of her other-directed utterances. This produces a split attitude toward one’s own body. We would like to emphasize two points about social self-control. First, to regulate oneself socially is a particular form of agency, one that is not aimed at directly altering the agent’s coupling with the environment according to some incorporated individual norm, but one that imposes on the agent an originally external norm. The acts of an utterance, or their traces, that a participant produces to regulate others in dialogue, turn on herself and “externally” regulate her own body. Unlike other forms of self-regulating that occur at the sensorimotor level (e.g., finding the right distance to visually appreciate a painting), social self-control allows us to submit to displaced norms (sometimes going against the body’s most immediate concerns). In the here-and-now of the coupling we are able to act with respect to concerns beyond the here-and-now of the organic and sensorimotor bodies. Second, without having been put in the role of interpreter, or without experiencing the struggle of submitting our own immediate intentions to external regulations, we would never be able to socially regulate ourselves, because doing so implies holding together the producer and interpreter roles of a

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dialogue. Our bodies must have experienced and accepted moments of submission if they are going to be capable of following the paths they dictate for themselves. This is the first appearance of a reflective social form of agency and sensemaking in the enactive approach. Social self-control and recursive mutual interpretation are coarising forms of sophisticated metaregulation in the dialogic mode. They make social acts quite heavily charged with hermeneutic potentiality, since in principle there is no end to this activity. The interactive dissonances that occur when participation genres are ambiguous or in conflict involve every level in our model from the individual embodied agents, now recognized socially, to the interactive dynamics, the sociomaterial context, and several embedded levels of metaregulation. As with other coarising pairs, mutual interpretation and social selfcontrol imply each other but also involve conflicting tendencies. The enactment of social self-control in an interactive situation (using self-directed utterances in an attempt to bring the dialogue out of dissonance) can lead to confusion as acts of self-regulation get mistaken for utterances directed at others. Much is made of the importance of self-directed utterances for the self-regulation of one’s own behavior, but not much attention is paid to their role in the interactive context from which they emerge. A self-directed gesture may be useful, for example, to help oneself reaffirm the interpretation of someone else’s utterance and find an appropriate response to it. One may at first be in doubt about the right interpretation of what another participant is in the process of uttering due to ambiguities between genres. But in view of other elements of context, history, and so on, one interpretation becomes more relevant. The choice in favor of this interpretation may be concretized as an act of interpretive sense-making in part supported by, for example, a self-directed passage from a frown to a head nod in the interpreter. But these gestures may be taken by others as the response they are expecting, even while, say, a self-directed nod in realization that the other’s utterance makes sense is different from conveying agreement with it. In the dialogic context, a self-directed utterance comes on the scene ready to be interpreted by others like any other utterance. Emphasizing certain aspects of utterances can turn a self-directed utterance into an explicitly self-addressed one, one that contrasts with other-addressed utterances. This may help remove some of the ambiguity. One could assume such markers could have arisen as partial acts when similar ambiguities emerged in dialogues with multiple partners and some utterances had to be addressed to specific partners. But self-addressed utterances tend to obviate or abbreviate

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these markers the more they are used; in other words, the risk of confusion remains. A (partial) solution for the potential confusion introduced by selfdirected utterances involves ways of “shielding” other participants from the interactive effect of these utterances by making them less overt (e.g., through abbreviations and reductions in intensity). However, acts of social self-control, like all acts performed by bodies, are material moves and they always exceed the intentional boundaries set by the producer. Self-directed utterances, therefore, are never “internal,” even though they may shortcut some aspects of the fully overt utterance. They are accompanied by gestures, pauses, etc., that affect the interaction dynamics and remain open to interpretation. In short, the very act of attempting to overcome an unresolved process of mutual interpretation through social self-control can fuel renewed attempts at mutual interpretation, thus making dialogic interactions particularly excitable in dynamical terms due to the ever-present possibility of recursive and self-induced acts of mutual interpretation, self-interpretation, and corrective production. To stabilize the hermeneutic and dynamical excitability of dialogues when participants make use of these recursive skills, another skill must be brought into the picture: that of creating more stable pathways in the interaction through the reflection, repetition, and refraction of previous utterances, one’s own and those of others. 8.1.4  Reported Utterances When participation genres get mixed up, utterances can be used to attempt to bring a dialogue out of dissonance. Since participation genres themselves provide the normative framework for the type and style of utterances, the situation seems overdetermined. An utterance framed by one participation genre may be used to reaffirm the framing of the dialogue within that particular genre, but it seems logically impossible to use such genre-framed utterances to negotiate a change of genres. The strategy is feasible, nevertheless, because genres are not sets of prescriptive rules nor are utterances commands in a programming code. Both utterances and genres are concretized more organically than mere logical functions—they subtend multiple material relations. They exist within softly assembled sets of dynamically open relations between norms of different strength and generality, broad constraints delimiting otherwise open possibilities, and the rich materiality of living bodies and their milieu. Utterances can then be used in a metaregulatory fashion because the “space” of possible genres within the shared

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know-how of a group or community is not random or undefined. It is not set in stone either and can evolve with every enacted dialogue. The structure of this space, the fact that genres are metastable, the fact that they are distinct enough and organized in relations of embeddedness, and the fact that concrete utterances are always open and never entirely contained within just one single genre, make it feasible for participants in a situation of dissonance to use utterances to attempt to converge toward a newly coordinated genre. The recursive regulation of participation genres occurs through the process of mutual interpretation and its codefined pair, social self-control. Social self-control is never fully private—it can trigger renewed attempts at mutual interpretation in a potentially unending cycle. What is missing, to avoid runaway processes that would break down the interaction or grind it to a halt, is the equivalent of a coregulated act within a dialogic context and at the level of dialogic regulation (i.e., a coregulated utterance). By coregulation we do not mean that the utterance is enacted jointly (as in the case of utterance completion or joint speech), nor do we mean the already established need for an audience to play an active role in turning the producer’s acts into an utterance in the first place, which is also a kind of coregulation. By a coregulated utterance, we rather mean that the regulatory aim of the utterance as a whole act—that is, the situation the utterance is meant to bring about—emerges from joint acts of participation and not from the intentions of individual agents. This situation is to an extent analogous to the most basic instantiation of the primordial tension we saw at the beginning of the model, in that we must move from regulatory attempts by single participants to coregulation. Can such wholly coregulated utterances exist given that the dialogic situation introduces an asymmetry between producer and audience? Can they be authored by many but enacted by only one? A solution to this problem is encountered in reported utterances—that is, utterances that echo, reflect, refract, or somehow make use of other utterances, the producer’s own or those of others. A reported utterance documents, brings into the open, the producer’s interpretation of the utterances it repeats or reflects (Voloshinov 1929/1973, 117). Indirect utterances about the utterances of others thus provide the ground for dialogic regulation to occur. Reported utterances put participants in a close relation that in some ways resembles predialogic forms of coregulation in which social acts are jointly enacted without a clear delineation of authorship. Dialogues grow out of these forms of predialogic coordination, which never go away, but as dialogues their defining feature is to thematize authorship. Utterances

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contrast producer and audience. The effect of engaging in dialogues is as much a sophisticated connection between participants as it is a separation of participants by asserting in the very shape of the interaction their mutual presence as distinct agents. Up to this point, utterances themselves are by definition situated asymmetrically with respect to the participants. Short of returning to a predialogic engagement (e.g., stopping the conversation and moving into a joint situation of play or dance, or exerting some coordinated effort to achieve some goal such as moving a big object together), dialogues assert the participants as distinct. A coregulated utterance must somehow bring participants together in the production of a dialogic act, while keeping them in separated roles, only one of which is at a given moment that of a producer. Reported utterances achieve this; they enable joint regulation without abandoning the dialogic frame. With them, participants appropriate past utterances in the dialogue (even utterances experienced in other dialogues) and reenact them in the context of a new utterance. Just as this reenactment is a summoning of a previous act of production and of the presence of its producer, so too does it entail a blending with the current producer’s presence and acts. With inevitable distortions caused by this blending with the current producer’s own sense-making, other participants are to an extent involved in the production of a reported utterance in that their own past utterances are part of it. The reported utterance uniquely highlights the interpretive processes of the current producer and how she stands in relation to other participants whose utterances are reported. The result is what we call a braiding of utterances. Utterances must be mutually relevant for the participation genre and the emerging frame of the specific dialogue. They build their links on mutual parallelisms, projections, and dialogic resonances (Du Bois 2014). But this is not all there is to utterance braiding, which comes from reported utterances being recursively used in the way just described to jointly construct dialogues out of multiply authored fragments. Since reports can be made on utterances that are not part of the present dialogue but were produced on other occasions, the braiding incorporates historical threads too. Reported utterances can take many forms with respect to the utterances they thematize. They may be simple repetitions, such as those used in the self-affirmation of interpretive activity—for instance, when a request, especially a complex one, is repeated by the person that carries it out for the purpose of confirmation, or self-regulation, or as a live memory aid. They can also be modified, abbreviated, or extended repetitions that seek to aid the interpretive process, as when an audience member attempts to reenact

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a demonstration in search of some confirmatory gesture from the original demonstrator. Most reported utterances are refractions of the original. By the very fact of being reenacted (even if the same participant was the producer of the original), they go through a process of interpretation that makes them already take the shape of a commentary (Goffman 1981; Günther 1999). In some cases, we may speak of reported utterances reflecting a previous utterance, not so much because the reenactment is faithful to the original but because the interpretive activity is somehow held back, is partially suspended, or is itself what the producer attempts to self-regulate, as when repeating something not yet understood. Utterances that are strict reflections or echoes of other, in particular adjacent, utterances tend to be rare. Even in the case of echolalia during normal development or in cases of autism, it is possible to find in such repetitions new elements deployed by the producer for interactive or contextual purposes (we come back to this in chapters 9 and 10). Reported utterances can otherwise present almost unlimited variations with respect to the utterances they report, even in the extreme case implying in a novel enactment the virtual elements of a previous utterance without actually reenacting it. This would be the case of an exaggerated or deliberate deformation of the “reported” utterance without repeating any of its partial acts but maintaining elements of style or structure or relations to the world and to others. For instance, an utterance not reporting on any specific element of a previous utterance but repeating its intensity and rhythm can become an allusion or commentary as well. Moreover, alterations occur not only with the addition or modification of elements but by changing the expressivity of the utterance, introducing comments on the relation between original utterance and original producer. Such comments may go from a clarification of what was originally expressed only unclearly to distortions favorable or unfavorable with respect to the original producer (e.g., approval, praise, reverence, or mockery, irony, sarcasm). By openly manifesting processes of interpretation in the participant doing the reporting, reported utterances can break potential runaway cycles of mutual interpretation and social self-control when participation genres are ambiguous. One way of converging on one genre is to apply social self-control to the task of reflecting the utterances of others, especially but not only those the producer finds ambiguous. This application of the skill of reporting results in an overt utterance about previous utterances in the same dialogue, highlighting the producer’s process of interpretation. Made into an utterance itself, this complex set of relations between acts

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and people is now offered to further interpretation by all the participants. The authors of the utterances being reported see their own actions refracted and interpreted by others and may in turn attempt to come back to their previous productions through new indirect utterances, repetitions, modifications, and so on. In dynamical systems terms, instead of a runaway process, a metastable region emerges through the very activity of multiple reportings and their variations, pulling the dialogic activity back into a new “theme.” The direction of the dialogue again becomes enframed, this time not from having fallen into a given participation genre through circumstances but from a joint enactment of frame building. The theme is established through the way utterances circulate among the participants in reported form. It plays the role of a fleeting microgenre emerging in bottom-up fashion. Recursive reporting leads to emerging situated norms (e.g., a particular utterance prone to misinterpretation is avoided for the rest of the dialogue). In this microframe the dialogue can be jointly steered back into more established participation genres, thus resolving the situation of ambiguity. The recursive use of utterances to “reframe” dialogues where the genre has become ambiguous endows dialogues with the power to critically thematize and interpellate the structure of existing participation genres in a community. Dialogues thus become powerful active instruments for making explicit and questioning the normative structures that frame them and other social activities. The bottom-up influence of concrete dialogues on participation genres was already present before this point, but as it occurs at other phases in our model, this influence was not explicit to the participants. It took place simply as a consequence of their actions, in a habituslike dynamics of enactments constraining future enactments that in turn reaffirm the constraints. Now, this process becomes visible and jointly steered when participants create dialogic themes and frames through braiding and transforming their own reported utterances. The creation of themes and frames often takes the form of play, which by definition entails a questioning, transforming, and distancing attitude toward established genres and the enacting of new ones (for this reason, play can often be subversive). Dialogues are therefore always potentially metadialogues and so always potentially critical of the norms that frame them. They are also, in contrast and by the same power, susceptible to reaffirming their frames uncritically when utterances and participants circulate in closed circles, reifying local norms as established universal truths. The power of enacting dialogues through the use of reported utterances makes them simultaneously transformative of both social relations and

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individual minds. It is in this transformative potential that we encounter the last tension of our model. The ongoing management of this tension is what defines a new kind of embodied agency: linguistic bodies. 8.1.5  Linguistic Bodies Let us consider the skills entailed by a participant able to engage in dialogic interactions. What goes on in an agent capable of regulating her processes of participation through self-directed utterances to recursively produce utterances that report other utterances? What kind of practices, what kind of bodies are enacted in this manner? The first thing we must notice is that a participant at this stage in the model is involved in two coupled flows of braided utterances: one is the dialogue itself, the other is the flow of self-control (i.e., the regular use of self-directed utterances). These flows are coupled and mutually constraining. They create a situation where a closed organization can emerge. As we have seen, the braiding of reported utterances can generate situated norms, leading to emerging frames. This can also occur through the braiding of self-directed utterances. When this happens the flow of self-control takes the shape not of single, isolated utterances, but of a framed dialogue, where a single agent plays the roles of producer and audience. In this way, the selfdirected flow frames further self-directed utterances, in an operationally closed set of relations (utterances and frame mutually enabling each other). If closure obtains at these levels, a new kind of personal autonomy emerges, one not fully determined by organic or sensorimotor bodies. To see this, a helpful analogy is that of sensorimotor bodies who are constituted as embodied subjects through the reaffirmation of networks of relations between sensorimotor schemes every time a scheme is enacted (as we saw in chapter 3). Linguistic agency is constituted by recurring selfsustaining, self-asserting flows of utterances. Utterances, self-directed or not, establish frames of relevance that (circumstances not intervening) influence a linguistic agent’s intentions, motives, emotion, and what she can make sense of and how. While sustaining these flows, a linguistic agent is capable of effectively coupling with other linguistic agents in actual dialogues. The utterance flows that constitute a linguistic agent, and that through their recursive powers regulate the agent as a whole, are not themselves generated inwardly, de novo and coming from nowhere. They are rooted in past utterances made and reported by a multitude of participants, including the linguistic agent in question. There is an ongoing process of appropriation of the utterances of others, which themselves may abbreviate or

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contain previous layers of reporting that obscure their origin. Linguistic agency, in other words, depends on the incorporation of the acts of other linguistic agents, acts that may sometimes lie deep in the past of a community’s linguistic experience. This process must be understood broadly, as we have understood utterances broadly, since it involves not merely the incorporation of specific concrete utterances, but of styles, voices, forms of expressivity, body techniques, attitudes, ways of participating, and so on. Furthermore, the process of incorporation is not merely a random absorption of any experienced utterance but is instead modulated by how specific participants stand with respect to each other and to the linguistic agent. Thus, incorporation occurs differentially according to factors such as affectivity toward other participants, familiarity, relations of power, need to emancipate, and so on (and also according to physiological demands, sensorimotor habits, states of health, fatigue, or hunger). As in other cases of autonomy and sense-making, the norms involved in the incorporation of utterances are brought forth by the very utterance flows that constitute linguistic agency. Incorporation into a flow of utterances, like other forms of incorporation, works through processes of assimilation and accommodation. The utterances that become incorporated are thus transformed and will not conserve all or even many of the properties they had when they were first experienced in the actions of another linguistic agent. Whatever is incorporated transforms the linguistic agent, in the same way that incorporation of a novel sensorimotor skill reshapes the network of relations between sensorimotor structures that make up a sensorimotor body. There are two important differences, however, between the linguistic agency we are describing and the agency of sensorimotor bodies. The first difference is in the social nature of linguistic agency. Sensorimotor skills may reflect processes of assimilation and accommodation that have occurred in other agents, those, for instance, whose skillful acts serve as scaffolds, models, or guidance. Some (in the case of humans probably most) skills incorporated by sensorimotor bodies emerge out of previous processes of incorporation in other bodies and so are a reflection of a social habitus. In the case of the incorporation of utterances, this aspect is no longer an option, but is inherent in the process. The social horizon of incorporated utterances is extended by the fact that when other people act as linguistic agents, their own utterances are already reflections of past incorporations. If their utterances trigger new processes of incorporation, whatever is conserved in them will have a trace of dialogic acts that extend into the past and into the wider community. Utterances become historically entangled

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and this, in part, drives processes of sedimentation in the living stream of language. The incorporated flows of utterances that make up a linguistic agent are always the joint result of personal enactments and of patterns that live in the community; linguistic bodies—the embodiment of linguistic agency—are both personal and constitutively social. They are communal achievements. The other difference with the incorporation of sensorimotor skills is a radical one but may also be understood by recalling how sensorimotor bodies are constituted. As we discussed in chapter 3, a sensorimotor self is constituted by its own acts, more specifically by how these acts reaffirm a set of embodied sensorimotor norms that emerge out of the functional and structural relations between sensorimotor coordination patterns, schemes, and activities. Acts that contribute to the viability of this network of relations affirm the agency of the sensorimotor body, its capabilities, its meaningful relations to the world, its style, and so on. Acts and events that put these relations at risk are evaluated by the sensorimotor body as in need of adaptive regulation to avoid breaking down the ongoing process of selfindividuation. The important thing here is that sensorimotor bodies are made up of acts and relations between acts. So too are linguistic bodies made up of utterances and relations between utterances. The continuity with the dimensions of embodiment should be stressed here, in that utterances themselves are embodied and material patterns whose enactment always includes the sensorimotor and organic bodies. Yet an utterance is not just any act, but a dialogically structured one. Utterances, as we have seen, entail relations between acts and people, in particular orientations and projections toward addressed others and the adoption of a personal stance by the producer, who in turn is recognized as a social participant by the audience. Utterances, in other words, are acts that embed relations between people. In particular, the agency of the producer as a recognized participant in the dialogue is embedded in the utterances she produces. The traces of others (concretely experienced others and others entailed by wider community patterns) are not erasable from the processes that sustain the identity of a linguistic agent. To incorporate an utterance, in consequence, is in part to incarnate others. Incarnation is entailed in the very possibility of a flow of self-directed utterances since utterances induce a role distinction between producer and audience. To use an utterance is always to accept this implicit distinction. For this reason, the self-directed flow inevitably gives rise to a dialogic attitude and, as a consequence, an audience is invoked even in the actual absence of other participants. Since self-directed utterances are

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incorporated out of real dialogues, the virtual audience sometimes takes the form of concrete others; their presence is summoned into virtual dialogues. Other times, the audience is less concrete without ever quite becoming an abstract other. Virtual dialogues can be enacted by a single linguistic agent if in addition to invoking the presence of (specific or indeterminate) others, these others are also incarnated—that is, “animated” as agents and given a part in the construction of the virtual dialogue. Herein lies the paradox of linguistic bodies, the novel dialectical situation they engender: acts of utterance incorporation define a linguistic agent, but the process of incorporation simultaneously entails the incarnation of other linguistic agents, their perspectives, attitudes, voices, gestures, movements, personalities, ways of relating, and so on. Moreover, their intentions, motivations, affects, desires, and all kinds of sense-making, also partially permeate the incorporated utterances. This can happen to the point that it is hard to disentangle whether an act of social self-control (e.g., deciding to go on a diet or refraining from making a comment during a meeting) reflects an original intention or traces back to intentions, opinions, perspectives, habits, etc., embedded in the appropriated utterances of others. In fact, the whole notion of an original intention, when speaking about linguistic bodies, is ambiguous and always open to revision and criticism. As a result, linguistic bodies navigate an inherent tension between incorporation of utterances that reassert their identity and the incarnation of foreign agencies embedded in those incorporated utterances. Linguistic bodies are defined by the tendency to make up a coherent identity out of materials that bring into play the influence of other identities. Because of this influence, linguistic bodies are also defined by a countertendency toward decoherence. There is a risk of excessive incarnation in the very exercise of linguistic agency, because to enact an utterance is to appropriate more than a given vocabulary or phrase but a whole manner of sensemaking, positioning, and so forth. Linguistic bodies, in other words, are inherently self-contradictory. Just as the process of incorporation is social (i.e., it does not occur within the confines of a putative inner realm of the linguistic agent), so too is incarnation a social process. Audiences play a crucial role in regulating how a linguistic agent incarnates others, through expectations, approval or rejection, the reification of personality traits, the labeling and reproduction of stereotypes, and so on. The very concept of a personality cannot be separated from the fundamental social nature of being a linguistic body, a dimension that partly explains patterns of diversity and variability between people, and also when one single linguistic agent is observed in different

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sociomaterial circumstances (as we pointed out in chapter 5, human diversity is a key datum that must be accounted for and the social nature of incorporation and incarnation contributes to explaining it). In a fundamental sense, a linguistic body is a socially situated performance where different agencies may be incarnated in different situations and where the outcome depends as much on the audience as on the performers, a fact long recognized in the microsociology of social interactions by Erving Goffman (1959). We note one additional property of linguistic bodies here (we discuss other aspects in the following chapters). It concerns the relations of a linguistic agent to the sensorimotor and organic dimensions of embodiment. As we have seen in chapter 5, the question of how dimensions of embodiment relate in concrete bodies is complex. Traditional vocabularies can fail to capture the intricate situations that arise when different kinds of autonomy intersect materially, are mutually dependent, and yet form conceptually distinct forms of self-individuation. Organic bodies are precarious processes of metabolic self-individuation and adaptive coupling to the environment; sensorimotor bodies are precarious processes of selfindividuation in the network of sensorimotor structures; and linguistic bodies are precarious processes of self-individuation in the flow of self- and other-directed utterances in coupling with dialogic engagements and all kinds of social interaction. To help us make sense of their tangled relations it is convenient to trace aspects of lived experience. We have introduced in chapter 5 the metaphor of anchoring to describe the currently existing center of sense-making in intersecting organic and sensorimotor bodies. Should we think of linguistic bodies as also relating to their sensorimotor and organic dimensions through a form of anchoring? It is tempting to think in this way. The subject of linguistic engagements, the participant in dialogues, and so on, is after all an embodied being. Her linguistic agency relates to the intersubjective dimension of embodiment, which we have seen can be suitably thought about using the anchoring metaphor. Her linguistic body would not be possible in the absence of her organic and sensorimotor body, not merely causally but also conceptually, as linguistic sense-making derives from other kinds of embodied sensemaking. We could think of linguistic agency relating to sensorimotor bodies as the latter relate to organic bodies, in relations of mutual constrain and enablement. More than this, we could think of the same subjectivity inhabiting all of these dimensions, including the dimension of linguistic agency, anchored to a same movable center, perhaps with different intensity according to circumstance.

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This possibility coheres with some of the experiences of being an embodied linguistic agent (the sensorimotor schemes involved in producing utterances, the orientation of the body according to the flow of the dialogue, etc.), but it does not fit well with some of the novelties linguistic agency introduces. One important difference, as already noted, resides in the use of self-directed social acts to exert control over one’s own body, over action, emotion, and perception, as well as over relations to the sociomaterial world in general.10 We have already mentioned the case of going on a diet, which we may assume not to be “what the body wants” but “what the body should do.” A sociolinguistic normativity is at play and in conflict with organic/sensorimotor normativity: from one perspective the diet is recognized as a route toward better health, etc., from the other the present craving for ice cream makes other considerations secondary. Regardless of the complexities we are bypassing in this example (a craving for ice cream is influenced by factors such as the commercial profit to be obtained from promoting sugar addiction; the conviction that a diet is a healthy choice may follow externally imposed standards that promote states of personal self-dissatisfaction instead of actual health) and regardless of what happens eventually, the situation of conflict here is not the same as when conflicts arise between sensorimotor and organic norms. Linguistic agency has the power of thematizing the body, and for this reason, of displacing itself from it. The body is acted on as if it belonged to another agent, one we engage dialogically, and for this reason, implicit in this form of engagement is a role separation between a more active, leading facet and a more passive, led facet of the linguistic body. This separation is not absolute, just as the separation between different linguistic bodies is not absolute either: the first is belied by the deeper continuity between all dimensions of embodiment and the second by intercorporeality and a common world. But the displacement introduced by linguistic agency toward its own body is not imaginary either. A distance, not a full disconnection, is introduced by this form of agency, as if it did not quite share a common anchored center with its organic and sensorimotor dimensions but were related to this center as the foci of an ellipse (figure 8.2), displaced, yet linked by lawful relations. Sensorimotor and organic bodies are transformed under the socially mediated and reflexive relations linguistic agents enter into to the point of becoming dependent on linguistic skills, broadly construed. Planning and executing complex sensorimotor sequences, organizing memory, using tools, querying experience, and controlling attention are all, in the human case, linguistically organized and regulated. It is telling just how much of a

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Figure 8.2 Linguistic agency. Schematic depiction of the relation between linguistic agency and sensorimotor and organic bodies. Sensorimotor agency is shown as in figure 3.1 approximately located at one of the focal points of the darker ellipse. A virtual other is placed near the other focal point representing the agent’s stance toward her own body. The ellipse is a closing arrow of ongoing regulations of the relations between linguistic body and world, including self-regulation of the body’s attitudes toward itself. Different agencies may be incarnated in this way and so the ellipse can change over time as reported utterances bring forth elements of other foreign agencies into the flow of self-regulation of the linguistic body (lighter ellipses).

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stretch of the imagination is required for the vast majority of us to envision life without language. Breathing is arguably achievable without linguistic mediation, yet it can be regulated by it as in yoga, or controlled practice for swimming or running, or in military training. Eating, securing shelter, caring for illness and injury, managing the care of others, and so on are not typically lived at the human level without language. With linguistic bodies—such is their constitutive blend, weaving the social and the personal—a new form of autonomy emerges at the community level, that of patterns of utterances, expressions, styles, and openended norms. This emergence can be explained partly on the model of the habitus, partly on the thematizing powers of dialogically empowered criticism that promotes social changes in the form of struggles. This new form of social autonomy, the linguistic community, is not only a domain of ways of interacting, but in general of organizing practices and producing subjectivities. It is also a realm where the sense-making of linguistic participants is evaluated and reshaped at all levels in accordance with emerging linguistic norms—that is, norms pertaining to the ongoing individuation of linguistic bodies. We summarize the second part of the dialectical model in figure 8.3. As can be appreciated, the concepts of linguistic bodies and linguistic communities are not themselves resolutions to the tensions that emerge in the last stage of the model but ways these tensions are manifested and inhabited. The open-endedness, powers, and creativity of linguistic bodies derive precisely from their unfinished, self-contradictory nature, a theme to which we will return. 8.2  The Objectifying Attitude Emerges The model begins and ends with the same primordial tension between orders of normativity that fuels participatory sense-making: individual and interactional. The unfurling of this tension, its expansion as an organizing force behind social acts of increasing recursivity, generates the complexity required for a self-other relation as such to first become possible. In this way the dialectics witnesses the emergence of person-level subjectivity out of an implicit, background intersubjectivity. Conceptually, intersubjectivity and intercorporeality come first, as acts of regulation and coregulation arrive early on the scene. Roles of regulator and regulated come later, as interactional labor self-organizes into distributed positions, enabling expression as distinct from pragmatic regulation, and analogously, subjectivity as distinct from (even if always grounded in) intersubjectivity. We could roughly

Local pragmatics

Portable acts

Community of interactors

Regulator role

Regulated role

Dialogue and recognition

Production

Interpretation

Participation genres

Self-control

Mutual interpretation

Reported utterances

Incorporation

Incarnation

Figure 8.3 Summary of the second part of the dialectical model. The diagram continues from the end of the diagram shown in figure 7.2 (first part of the model).

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formulate something like: intersubjectivity is to coregulation as subjectivity is to regulatory roles and expression. If one were interested in juxtaposing the model against significant 20th-century proposals in philosophy of language, particularly ones geared toward pragmatic and natural language use, one might sense an absence: is there an analog to the “third leg” of Davidson’s triangulation account (1982), or of Habermas’s tripartite relation to the lifeworld achieved in communicative action (1984), or of one of three functions making up Bühler’s Organon model (1934/1990)? Where, when, and how does objectivity make its appearance? Of course the question and the comparison presuppose a clean schema that is in fact an ad hoc theoretical apparatus produced by a scientific attitude. If by “objectivity” we want to pick out the quality of something having been objectified together, then indeed, the activity of taking something as a thing, a this that is the object of our treating, doing, acting, or uttering, has been there in the model all along. For we see objects of joint doing—that is, things that explain what we are about or around what participants are orienting—at every turn. As a legacy of a long-standing philosophical perspective on truth, reference, and meaning, for some the notion of objectivity is linked to the idea of propositional content. Pragmatically oriented proposals in the 20th century sought to expand or remedy this in various ways (e.g., Austin’s (1975) or Searle’s (1969) speech act theory), recognizing that what an utterance is about may not be exhausted by the idea of reference to an objective situation or thing. For example, consider Habermas’s schema (1984): in communicative action a subject relates to one of three dimensions of the lifeworld (objective, social, or subjective) by staking a validity claim (a normatively regulated, defeasible stated relation). When it comes to relating to the “objective” world, validity is determined in terms of truth, measured on the basis of shared propositional knowledge. The purpose of speech acts is to represent states and events. The standard form is an elementary propositional sentence, not an utterance as such. Content here is understood as the states and events referred to in such a sentence. In Habermasian communicative acts that stake a relation to the social world, content is understood as regulative effects achieved in imperatives or explicit intentions (promises) and evaluated according to communal norms. In the subjective world, content would be experience shared through expressive statements of self-presentation and evaluated in terms of sincerity. To a certain, limited extent, this schema is helpful for understanding how content, like subjectivity and objectivity, is something that emerges at various stages throughout our model. All sense-making is inherently

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world-relating and world-involving; moreover, embodied, social acts have real effects for sense-makers that can take forms more or less recognizable as answering a question of content. “Aboutness” is not limited to propositions. It lives in embodied intentionality of sensorimotor and intersubjective bodies going about their business, in acts of guiding, modifying, or even projecting others’ acts (as with interlocking partial acts), in the interpretations of utterances recognized as coming from an other, in the framing of participation genres (e.g., using public transportation—if one comports oneself on a city bus in a manner more befitting to a public library, the norms violated concern expectations and facts about using public transportation), and in the built-in commentary of reported utterances. One might notice that we part ways with the Habermasian framework in remaining modality generic. In fact, this marks a deeper difference, because, unlike the starting point of the disembodied sentence, we define utterance from the beginning in terms of role-constituting acts made in sociomaterial environments, not in terms of received ideas of propositions, grammar, or speaker activity.11 Another consequence of our starting point is that it doesn’t always make sense to neatly categorize an utterance as staking a single or distinguishably objective, subjective, or intersubjective relation to the lifeworld. Andrén (2017, 118–120) analyzes a documented example of a two-year-old playing “coffee” with her mother. After a few rounds of pouring “coffee,” “milk,” and “sugar” from some (empty) containers into other (empty) ones, the girl, eager to maintain her mother’s involvement, holds her hand above the collection of objects on the table and hesitates before landing on and picking up an object. Andrén observes: “At the moment … when Bella’s reaching movement stops, she says ‘more’ (mera), thereby making reference both to what has happened before (what there should be more of [e.g., a further serving of coffee, milk, or sugar]), to the present (e.g., more of a yet undecided something; the current activity of choosing between milk, coffee, and sugar), and to what will happen next (more serving of this ‘what,’ whatever it will be decided to be). … The overall multimodal ensemble incorporates past, present, and future” (p. 119) and generally demonstrates Andrén’s notion of “responsive agency”—that is, the incorporation of a whole situation into an action. The child simultaneously participates in and summons a world of physical expectations, constraints, actions, entities, social needs and niceties, abbreviated (or “play”) temporality, choices and other burdens of agency, pretense, and emotional significance. The act of hesitating with the coffeepot in her hands is expressive of her complex involvement in the scene and communicates the intention to continue the routine, even if she is not sure just how yet. After a

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certain point, the aptness of the question “Where, or what, is the content of an utterance?” dissolves, and we find instead that sense-making assumes, responds to, and generates meaning in a variety of ways and at a variety of levels as interactions navigate their own course. Equally revealing of the complexity of nonpropositional referencing are the examples of partial or metonymic suspension of instrumental acts to create an indication of a missing element. The semiotic suspension of acts in children was studied by Ángel Rivière and colleagues (Rivière and Sotillo 2003; Rivière and Español 2003). Suspension is proposed as a foundation of enactive symbols, an example of which is that of the eighteen-month toddler who, after making certain of his father’s attention by touching his leg and calling him, shows him a cigarette lighter and “blows” into the air. Naturally the lighter is out. Blowing into the air while showing the object is, again, a suspended action. An action that is signifying precisely insofar as it is not efficient: blowing air does not put out anything … there is, in fact, no flame to put out. … The suspension of the functions that belong to an instrumental action (in this case, that of blowing out the flame) is the mechanism that enables a semiotic activity that permits the act of representing that which is not yet present (in this case, perhaps the action of striking the lighter, which is what the child wishes, or the “enactive declaration”: “Daddy … this is an object like those you can flick on and off!”). If the action is interpretable as signifying, it is precisely because it is no longer efficient on the plane of immediate material transformation of the physical world. (Rivière and Sotillo 2003, 197, translated by the authors)

The example is interesting because it involves a dialogic use of an instrumental, nonspeech act whose indicative meanings, as in the vignette provided by Andrén, are ambiguous and multiple. We do not see a pure denotation of the flame or the act of producing a flame. Nevertheless, several other elements in the activity of flicking on a lighter are implied, as well as the way these activities relate to the father, who presumably has a habit of using the cigarette lighter often. If we follow the logic of the model to discover what emerges there through collaborative processes of sense-making (e.g., regulating, expressing, objectifying) we find a new framework for thinking about objects, norms, content, and the acts of relating (to) these that have long been taken to be the hallmark of linguistic agency. While available at earlier stages, as has already been indicated, the sort of objectifying that takes place in reported utterances has a number of implications for how to think about objects. Consider that in my repeating your utterance, including it in some fashion in the utterance I make to you as audience, we have done some of

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the following: brought that utterance to presence (i.e., to shared attention and awareness); in so doing, we have made it a possible object of shared regulatory action; and we have also opened up the possibility of appreciating the utterance, of letting it be, of lingering there with us. Think of when a friend says something unexpectedly hysterical and you repeat it out of sheer amusement; the friend may first see the humor in that repetition, or find deeper humor thanks to your reaction, which brought the utterance forward as amusing. (As a counter we can of course imagine the repetition of an interlocutor’s sentence done in order to render it outrageous, an object of contempt or critique.) Children’s interactions with objects can be like this too: they bring them into a certain kind of focus or even life, often to simply enjoy the there-ness and other qualities, not always for instrumental action or imaginative play. We see some if not all of these marks of objectivity—something is brought to shared awareness, action, and appreciation—in various stages of the model. Social acts seek to synergize interactive and individual normativity as part of their own conditions for satisfaction; they are often “about” the tension; they integrate it and are motivated by it, they treat it. And they involve more than one participant in so doing (objectifying is always a co-objectifying). A tension exists between spontaneous social acts and habitual codefined partial acts—that is, between the opposing needs for matching the openness of the coregulatory problem and the practical means provided by established patterns. This tension motivates how some acts objectify other acts by playing a regulatory role; the acts regulated are objects, and participants learn in the moment of treatment/objectification how this act is or is not fitting. What’s more, partial acts implicitly call for certain kinds of acts as complements. Here one could mark the attended “birth” of an object and of accompanying normativity or objectifying attitude (this is the right object for right here and right now): all partial acts to some extent induce a certain projection and expectation about the responses that would fit them and complete the whole social act. Recall too from chapter 7 that speech and other vocalizations, delays, exaggerations, accents and emphases, suspensions, and all kinds of gestures, can serve the purpose of coordinating partial acts, and so they belong to the class of regulatory acts. Whatever these acts regulate becomes an object within the field of the interaction. This object is evaluated according to its use and fit. The objectifying attitude, understood less as the search for propositional truths than as the practice of regulating other practices and experiences in a mutually constraining relation with sociomaterial conditions, appears

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progressively in our model in the shape of a recursive pragmatics: social practices for regulating other social practices. These go from the use of partial acts to regulate other partial acts, as we have just indicated, to the coupled flows of self-directed and reported utterances in dialogues. Each of these powers goes hand in hand with sensitivities that contribute to the objectifying attitude. Even at an early stage in the model, the power to induce a change in others when their partial acts and our own are mismatched (e.g., one half of a handshake and one half of a high five) entails a sensitivity to already existing and shared norms and structures of codefinition between classes of partial acts. These norms and structures do not just exist in the mind of the individual performing the regulation, or even in the aggregated minds of many individuals, but primarily in the practices of a community, practices that are rooted as much in bodies as in sedimented sociomaterial conditions (spaces, rhythms, objects, tools, plants, animals, etc.). The simple attempt to induce a partner toward his half of the handshake, and not some other partial act, reveals an embodied understanding of norms that have been accumulated through a history of material constraints and therefore speak as much of the world as of the intentions, motivations, and preferences of social agents: the fact of the matter is that half of a handshake and half of a high five do not together realize a successful social act. Regulatory acts that attempt to avoid or correct this mismatch implicitly thematize this fact. Because only some facts of the matter, and not others, are revealed by the shared norms, the objectifying attitude is consequently always relative to a set of practices in a community. In other words, objectification cannot be absolute. If knowing-that is built on the recursive application of knowing-how, the objectifying attitude never ceases to be situated historically. More sophisticated kinds of recursive pragmatics are found in dialogic situations. The latter are always live and open-ended events shaped by the encounter between the bottom-up topic setting that occurs in a dialogue through the braiding of reported utterances and the top-down framing of the same dialogue by the participation genres that exist in a community. The encounter, as we have seen, is always one where social normativity is both potentially reaffirmed and potentially criticized. As a result, a mutual regulation of sensorimotor patterns occurs among participants, a regulation actively guided, facilitated, and constrained by the encounter between the live dialogic event and the context of existing social practices. In their braided kind of meaning-making, utterances have as their regulated objects other utterances. They recursively coordinate the relations

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between participants and their sense-making, regulating the perception of a state of affairs, the practical actions called for in order to alter it, and the affects and intentions of the participants. This does not occur once and for all. It is an ongoing process constructed dialogically in which participants mutually orient themselves toward their situation according to coherences and dissonances between their creative open-ended dialogic enactments and the sedimented norms and practices that reflect the historically situated, materially realized world of the community they belong to. The critical power of dialogues is itself a participatory objectifying power in that they can thematize the set of norms and practices that enframe them. To repeat, these norms and practices are embodied in the traces they leave in altered environments, artifacts and other products of labor, organisms, spatial and temporal relations, and so on. In consequence, participants in a dialogue have the power to jointly thematize these embodiments, some of which become reified through ongoing thematization within and across other dialogues in a community, becoming part of a shared common sense. Reified thematizations thus provide the objects that certain utterances and dialogues can refer to. These objects can be anything from patterns of social exchange, kinship, obligations, and institutions, to material presences (things, events, spaces, patterns, flows, shapes, movements, bodily parts, sounds, smells, bits of the landscape, plants, animal tracks, etc.). These presences are brought forth as objects by socially enabled and regulated sensorimotor schemes. Being sensitive to the rightness of an utterance always occurs in this context of ongoing upward criticism of frames and sensorimotor downregulation. As an analogy, consider the way the hidden side of an opaque object is apperceived in virtue of the multiple socially constituted virtual perspectives that inform my sensorimotor engagements (Di Paolo 2016). Perceiving the object depends not only on my know-how of virtual sensorimotor variations in my coupling with it, but also on my know-how in dealing with virtual alternative points of view others might have on the object. Sensitivity to rightness in the case of utterances and their implicit relations to common sense, situations, and bodies is similarly socially constituted by the virtual critical utterances that others could enact. To be sensitive to the rightness of an utterance means to understand how it fits in the intricate web of norms that constitute the autonomy of languaging patterns in a community, the autonomy of the interactive encounter, and the autonomies of interacting bodies. It also means to understand whether the utterance itself, or further reports on it, can bring these autonomous realms into a relation of coherence. If utterances

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relate to other utterances in such a way that the sensorimotor patterns they regulate cohere with the critical thematization of social practices they also bring about, such utterances are right, correct, or fitting. To regulate a shift of attention toward an object using a gesture holds true if that gesture fits within a set of alternative gestures in the same way that the looking response fits within a coherently structured set of alternative sensorimotor schemes. Because linguistic and sensorimotor know-hows coevolve together and are always in flux, concrete utterances contribute to making truths as much as they can help reveal them. The same can be said about a speech utterance, such as “Look there—a white rabbit!” To be correct the utterance must establish a coherence between historically reified categories, the situated norms at play (e.g., whether we are hunting, painting a landscape, or taking a toddler for his first visit to the countryside), and the enacted sensorimotor skills that bring forth the present experience of veritably perceiving a white (not brown, not black) rabbit (not dog, not cat).12 Reflexive skills for self-regulation empower the objectifying attitude via increasingly decentered and critical sense-making. Self-regulatory acts (e.g., self-directed utterances) are always accompanied by the possibility of critical attitudes toward one’s own actions, affect, and experiences. Criticism of sense-making emanates as much from the linguistic agent herself as from the agencies she incarnates. Even in the absence of a social interaction the linguistic agent faces her world from the perspective of incorporated practices and of incarnated others, such that through virtual actions, social practices of criticism are invoked that break down, analyze, and organize the perceptual field in space, time, affordances, values, and other objective features and relations. As noted by Norbert Elias in 1939, “Robinson Crusoe, too, bears the imprint of a particular society, a particular nation and class. Isolated from all relations to them as he is on his island, he behaves, wishes and plans by their standard and thus exhibits different behaviour, wishes and plans to Friday” (Elias 1991, 27). To which we may add the obvious implication: they also exhibit different objectifying attitudes and sensitivities. The pattern, in summary, that brings forth the objectifying attitude at different stages in the model is always framed by the dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation. In recursive pragmatics, regulatory acts fulfill a critical role in their attempt to steer the responses, situations, objects, and events they regulate. At the same time, regulatory acts are sustained by existing norms: they concretize their ongoing individuation (and potential change), in fact, regulating in the sense of establishing regulations. The objectifying attitude simultaneously validates and criticizes normative

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frameworks and social reifications and trains our sensorimotor skills, bringing them in an ongoing confrontation with world-involving and worldtransforming practices. The realm of the ideal or ideality emerges as metastable patterns or reifications in this ongoing confrontation between world, practices, norms, and bodies (Ilyenkov 2014; Thao 1984). For it is not the material object whose presence is realized by the objectifying attitude (this would imply some kind of naive idealism) but the object as subtending a network of relations to a broad set of categories that have been established by past social practice. In other words, the socially concretized object exists in its relations of form, kind, number, measure, value, etc.—relations, in other words, of ideality.13 These relations do not reside in the minds or brains of individuals (this would imply some kind of naive materialism) but in the ongoing circulation between practices, world, and linguistic bodies. When ideal relations are taken in isolation, reified as such, they form the basis for abstractions. Among relations between abstractions we encounter ideal truths, such as those of geometry or algebra. Ideal truths and images, in turn, alter social practices and orient the transformation of the material world. It is a mistake, however, to transform this circular flow between materiality, embodied social practices, and ideality into a linear flow that puts the realm of the ideal as primordial in virtue of the apparently selfdetermined norms that emerge in this realm. As argued by Lukács in his theory of reification (1923/1971), the fact that the categories and norms of ideality are socially produced to fit a certain socioeconomic and political order does not lie on the surface for immediate inspection but remains hidden under the guise of ahistoricity. But this fact may be revealed by critical investigations, such as Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of the origin of Kantian categories of space, time, causality, quantity, quality, etc., in modes of economic production and exchange (Sohn-Rethel 1978; Stewart 2014), also in anthropological studies on the constitution of the ideal (Godelier 1986), and by proponents of the ontological turn in anthropology who abandon a representational approach to cultures as systems of belief for one of practices and performances involving humans and non-humans that make a world (e.g., Descola 2013; Viveiros de Castro 1998). A powerful aid to reification, deeply rooted in Western culture, is the tendency to understand the operations of worldshaping in hylomorphic terms (i.e., as the imposition of form on matter). As sharply criticized by Simondon (2005), the hylomorphic conception of what goes on in the brick-making process as the bringing together of two independent domains (ideal and material) is typical of the brick factory owner. The workers,

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by contrast, understand the taking of form as a practical operation that demands a particularly organized encounter between preformed matter (properly treated clay) and the shaping processes of force equilibration and physicochemical transformation (molds made of certain materials, with certain elasticity, adequately prepared). Ideal relations, the realm of objective truths, are therefore always tethered to the realm of the life activity of linguistic bodies because the circularities that grant these ideal relations their individuation always loop through bodies and world. As Ilyenkov insists: the ideal form is the form of a thing outside the thing, realized in human life activity, goals, and needs, and at the same time, the ideal is the form of life activity, but outside human bodies in the form of the things life activity creates. “‘Ideality’ as such exists only in the constant transformation of these two forms … and does not coincide with either of them separately. It exists only through the unceasing process of transformation of the form of activity into the form of a thing and back—the form of a thing into a form of activity. … Try to identify the ‘ideal’ with any one of these two forms of its immediate existence—and it no longer exists” (Ilyenkov 2014, 77–78).14 At the beginning of chapter 7 we promised that at the end of a complex chain of transformations of embodied agency and sense-making, we would be in a position to understand relations of denotation between language and objects and settings, or the sensitivity to the issue of rightness (Taylor 2016). We also said that it would be possible to explain this sensitivity as arising within an explanation of living in language that is both constitutive and continuous, and that links “inside” interpretation with “outside” conditions of correctness. Thanks to the categories developed in our model, we see how this process takes place through recursive pragmatics and the way they realize the circulation between material world, embodied practices, and ideality. In collaborative and recursive acts of bringing to presence, the sense-making activities of linguistic bodies inherently refer. Linguistic bodies also bring each other to presence in recursive social action. Holding apart-together (activities of logos) allows for modulation of what is brought to presence according to normativities that have been generated before or that are emerging in and with that presencing. What we are “about” may begin as reactions to acts, which are already about the present moment. We are also “about” manner and style, as expression now brings to presence another field of phenomena that can be objectified, thematized, and commented on: the realm of ideality.

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8.3  Linguistic Bodies Are Unfinished From the beginning of the book we have assumed that understanding language through the enactive lens of the life-mind continuity requires explicating the coemergence of new patterns of social organization and a novel form of embodied agency. The task does not reduce to understanding the particular cognitive demands imposed by linguistic skills and sensitivities on human beings, nor does it reduce to understanding the particular norms and structures the linguistic habitus takes in contemporary societies. These are important issues (and we will turn to some of them in the remainder of the book). But they can obscure the deeper questions that emerge once we query language and languaging from embodied, enactive, materialist perspectives. In consequence, our thinking is oriented toward the complex, precarious processes that organize bodies in all their dimensions and the forms of agency and sense-making these processes entail. How can we understand the deep structure of the kind and style of sense-making we call languaging? What are the categories we need to introduce to move from sensorimotor to linguistic bodies? And on what basis must they be justified? These questions have motivated the dialectical model. It starts from the enactive theory of bodies presented in part I and proceeds in the spirit of minimal assumptions from the abstract to the concrete. Its dialectics is guided by the conceptual opening of unresolved internal tensions and the historical, material, empirical factors conducive to the partial resolution of these tensions. This avoids several traps of prejudging the factors that are fundamental for an account of linguistic bodies (without of course meaning that the model cannot be improved or criticized). We have found that the understanding of linguistic agency can be taken quite far in the scale of sophisticated forms of sense-making and new kinds of social and personal autonomy, without even assuming elements that would otherwise seem self-evidently central to human language, such as the use of speech, the distinction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, deep grammatical structures, duality of patterning, and so on. Some elements have appeared in the model that connect to some of these aspects of human language. Many of these features will surely be implied by the additional physiological, anatomical, social, and material constraints in which human linguistic bodies have been historically realized. But what emerges as fundamental for linguistic bodies are not these specific realizations per se. Provided the sociomaterial constraints used in our model are sufficiently similar, linguistic bodies of other kinds may be imagined through alternative historical paths.

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Having been developed as a dialectical concretization of participatory sense-making, the concept of linguistic bodies accumulates multiple internal relations. We encounter in this concept several key factors that have progressively emerged in the model and that never disappear. Thus, linguistic bodies entail: skills of interactive coregulation, shared repertoires and know-how for partial acts, the recursive coordination of partial acts, the emergence of communitywide sharing of repertoires and norms, the asymmetries between participants induced by strongly regulatory acts, the dialogic organization of interactions between mutually recognized participants, the skills and sensitivities involved in utterance production and interpretation, the emergence of metastable participation genres, the skills of mutual interpretation and social self-control, the recursive use of utterances to report other utterances, their incorporation in the flow of self-directed utterances, and the incarnation of other linguistic agencies produced by the skill of reporting. These factors, and not others, emerge as fundamental in our model. It is encouraging that these factors resonate with what various thinkers have identified as fundamental aspects of language: the complexities and displacements brought by recursive regulation (Chafe 1994; Hockett 1960), the reportability of utterances (Bakhtin 1986; Benveniste 1971; Deleuze and Guattari 2004), the autonomy and reflexivity of language as a medium that activates our own agency and sometimes seems to even direct it (Heidegger 1993). Notice that the constituent factors for linguistic bodies always originate and progressively regulate different kinds of social interaction. However, they do not reduce languaging strictly to a form of communication, a term that is rather ambiguous in its application. Even in dialogic situations, where the skills of interpretation bind together the utterances of others and their attitudes, motivations, intentions, etc., the notion of communication is always an abstraction of what goes on, a projection of the concrete dialogue onto a particular plane of investigative concern focused on informational flows that describe the mutual orientations occurring among sense-makers. Beyond this particular plane of interest, utterances (not to mention other nondialogic partial acts) have multiple regulatory effects on the actions of participants that are not describable in communication terms. These include the power to question, critique, and reestablish the frame of a dialogue, something that by definition implies nonstationary dynamic reconfigurations of the interactive situation in defiance of informational descriptions that are valid only within an ultimately fixed frame. Other effects that escape the concept of communication are due to the

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materiality and affectivity involved in producing and interpreting utterances. Incantations, spells, songs, and mantras induce resonant affectivity, sensitivities, and powers for joint sense-making through their materiality, allusions, and community-shaping power. Languaging is cast as a web vaster and differently spun than we would expect if we were to take its more salient features as primary. The web reaches beyond human beings since the model is applicable to any species meeting social and material constraints relevant to each stage. Some species may be capable of enacting social agency up to a particular stage in the model, the tensions at that stage remaining unresolved, but the skills and sensitivities present at that stage potentially open these agents to different degrees of engagement with the linguistic world of humans. The forms of social agency reached by these not-quite or not-yet linguistic bodies will always be liable to induce breakdowns due to the unresolved tensions. But this does not mean that enactments at this stage of social agency are not practicable as long as the tensions are not concretely manifested as breakdowns. A species capable of a form of social agency at a given stage in the model will always need to navigate the tensions generated at that level with whatever resources are available in a situated context. This is no different for human beings. Human linguistic bodies, as they are today, cannot escape the contradictions of incorporation and incarnation; there is, as far as we know, no superseding form of agency that can systematically regulate this tension. This always remains a daily task and accomplishment for us. In this way, we are unfinished and potentially aware of being so. At previous stages in our model we have found concretely instantiated forms of agency that moved the dialectical expansion from one stage to the next. Not so at the last stage. It is an open question whether consistent “solutions” to the internal tensions of linguistic bodies could even be imagined from our historical vantage point. Human beings seem to have reached only up to this form of social and personal agency in their history. In view of this, it is worth noting that the concepts of incorporation and incarnation are two key senses of the word embodiment when applied to human beings. The first sense denotes the process by which something is assimilated into the body: “The malaise of perpetual exile became progressively embodied in Walter.” The second sense describes how the body as a whole stands for, demonstrates, or speaks for other agencies, traits, and ideas: “Angela embodies the revolutionary struggle of black women in the US.” Incorporation and incarnation, these two faces of embodiment, describe the primordial tension of participatory sense-making at the level of human

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languaging—that is, the tension between the self-assertion of embodied agency through the engagements with its sociomaterial world and the assertion of social, interactive paths that reproduce ways of being human and that incarnate in human bodies. Several of the pervasive ambiguities of the human condition (between the personal and the collective, between repressive norms and emancipatory struggles, etc.) are somehow linked to the unresolved tension in the last stage of the model. Others, such as the nature/culture divide, are revealed as false dichotomies once we grasp the open dynamic totality of linguistic bodies and the societal linguistic patterns they sustain and change.

III  Living as Linguistic Bodies

9  Becoming Linguistic Bodies Chapter Becoming

Linguistic

9 Bodies

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

9.1  Linguistic Experience It’s 6:20 am and two-year-old K., from underneath his quilt in his crib in the next room, indicates that he’s awake with a self-entertaining, loud chant: “Mom-MEE, Mom-MEE.” I go to get him, and give him an extra-big hug as I carry him back to cuddle in my bed before getting up for the day. I hadn’t been home to put him to bed the night before and I know he had been upset and behaving noncooperatively with his dad at bedtime. We snuggle under the blankets, he lays his head on my pillow and tugs at my face, grinning. He says something and, still in the process of waking up, I’m not totally sure at first what it is. I respond but I don’t get it right. He repeats, more clearly now, “You [he pronounces it ‘lou’] back at home!” I’m helped out by his emphatic tone. “Yes, I’m home, I’m back, I went out with my friend last night and you were asleep by the time I came home.” He responds, face tucked in between two pillows, “I cried.” “You were upset that I wasn’t home when you went to bed?” “Where you goed?” he asks, curiosity and some residual dissatisfaction mixing together and confirming my suggestion. “I went to a restaurant and then I came back.” Springing up to his knees, K. is satisfied and concludes the exchange: “Yes! Me so happy now!”1

What do children learn when they learn language? This is a question that drives a vast, multidisciplinary research effort on language acquisition. Yet this question knows too much to begin with. It knows what language is. It knows what learning is. And it already frames the situation in a way that puts all or most of the labor on children, leaving out adults and environment. The work of the previous chapters allows us to begin differently. There we introduced the ontological category of linguistic bodies. Linguistic bodies are precarious dynamic processes of navigating the primordial tension of participatory sense-making in dialogic contexts. Linguistic sense-making, as the activity of linguistic bodies, consists in receiving, producing, interpreting, and reporting utterances. An utterance, recall,

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is the generic (or modality-neutral) activity that a dialogic participant performs while holding a turn; it enacts dialogic organization of asymmetric roles within a context of coregulation. The act of uttering incorporates and moves forward an array of stages and behaviors that constitute interactional meaning-making. When it comes to looking at the development and learning of language for humans, the questions we want to ask are: How do we become properly perceptive and powerful so that we are able to do (all) this? How do we become linguistic bodies? The dialectical model can be thought of as expanding a condensed moment of real participatory sense-making, akin to the way one unfolds a Jacob’s ladder. With its clarified categories, we can identify stages and skills, tensions and navigations, in a scene like the mother-child exchange above. For example, we can note the trading of roles, how the mother allows herself to be regulated by the child in various ways, or how both she and her son report each other’s utterances. We take into account the emotional resolution that this dialogue makes possible, asymmetries in emotional regulation, as well as asymmetries in relevant knowledge about recent past events. With only a cursory tally of what, in our terms, is going on with this toddler and parent, we can begin to appreciate the deep and everlasting complexity of learning how to exist as a socially situated performance, a self-contradictory agency, a process made up of utterances and relations between utterances, which is to say, a process made up of acts that embed relations between people, and relations between acts that embed relations between people. The recursivity that reverberates in these first descriptions tells us that becoming linguistic bodies is no simple linear matter. Explaining how human linguistic bodies develop in time will require more than a ladder of clarified concepts. It behooves us to recall the wheel-of-languaging figure, used as our first attempt to capture this complexity (Cuffari et al. 2015; see figure 9.1). This was meant to “zoom in” on the enabling/constraining processes and relations in play whenever there is languaging between people: practices and expectations sourced from a lifeworld, incorporated sensorimotor loops, tensions and affordances of participatory sense-making, and so on. This original figure did not attend to asymmetries and temporalities in sufficient detail; moreover, the present goal is different: here we are trying to explain becoming; how is it that one becomes a linguistic body? Keep in mind that becoming is built into the very notion itself. Linguistic bodies are those that navigate a constitutive tension between incorporation of utterances into their flow of self-directed acts and the incarnation of other agencies embedded in those incorporated utterances. In other words,

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Participatory sense-making Languaging

Social interactions

Incarnation

Enlanguaged environments

Incorporation

Lifeworld

Linguistic bodies

Figure 9.1 The wheel of languaging. A partial representation of the processes and their various enabling relations that describe the activity of languaging (adapted from Cuffari et al. 2015). This figure does not depict temporal scales, asymmetries at the level of interactions, or dynamic processes in the enlanguaged environments. The elements that we will be discussing in this chapter are included in the figure, but our focus will be on their multiple dynamic relations, which cannot easily be shown here. Linguistic bodies are enacted as practices of participatory sense-making, themselves framed within the lifeworld of a given linguistic community that in turn is constituted by the activities of linguistic bodies. This is the main circularity described in the figure. At behavioral timescales, languaging is one form of participatory sense-making that becomes ever more dominant with increasing participation in a linguistic community. At developmental timescales, through the mediation of interactions with others, linguistic bodies are constituted as an ongoing navigation of the tension between incorporating linguistic skills and incarnating linguistic agencies. At historical timescales, the circular interplay between actual interactions and sociomaterial constraints and norms of enlanguaged environments sustains the lifeworld in a dialectics of critical spontaneity and sedimentation.

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linguistic bodies are constantly putting themselves together out of the spare parts of others’ acts and utterances; they are constantly fine-tuning, breaking down, needing something missing, in short, learning how to be what they are again and again. When we attend to the case of humans, learning always already takes place in an enlanguaged environment (lifeworld) and with other linguistic bodies. What a child learns in the process of becoming a linguistic body does not come before the how of it. A scene shifts as a child explores it, also for the parent or teacher, who must themselves be open to learning if they are to engage meaningfully with differently skilled linguistic bodies. Parents typically understand their children’s speech better than others for the first few years (Bowen 1998); to make sense of her son’s frequent phrases like “ma awesome guy” and “ma hangin out” his mother must be open enough to realize that by “ma” he means “I”/“I’m” rather than an abbreviation of “Mom.” Second language learners do not wait for perfect mastery before they hazard making sense in the new language. Indeed, they cannot; there is no clearcut moment, either for infants or adults in a foreign space, in which comprehending or acting can start. Linguistic bodies are always in becoming. Sense-making is always underway. Before she knows it, a baby babbles back at her father; a tourist mimics an emphatic gesture; it might be a mess, but we just can’t help ourselves. How to sort through such a mess? In part, by embracing it, as we do below. Also by (inevitably) projecting some structure onto it. Here we are guided by our model, which suggests that a path for becoming linguistic bodies is charted by opportunities for acting. Of course not just any acting—we mean acting that unfolds and matters in a social domain, and that is learned with, not just from, others. The model tells us that learning opportunities will be encountered within genres—that is, normative and referential horizons that set the stage for any particular actors. Finally, following the model, one can expect that language learning approached under the rubric of becoming a linguistic body will be recursive on multiple levels: one learns how to learn as processes of incorporation and incarnation facilitate self-directed utterances as well as “metacognitive” evaluations and plans. What follows in the rest of this chapter is not an exhaustive account of the becoming of linguistic bodies in their complexity and variability. It is an attempt to identify and illustrate the ontological, epistemological, and methodological challenges of this question, of which the issue of language acquisition in a child, vast as it is, is only one facet.

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9.2  The Autonomies of Linguistic Bodies and Communities In looking at language acquisition in terms of becoming linguistic bodies, we behold certain phenomena as salient. A defining mark of linguistic bodies is the particular kind of agency nurtured in and alongside particular patterns of social interaction and world relation. Such coarisings afford ongoing processes of becoming autonomous; one does not achieve linguistic agency once and for all, and the process of such achievement is not a simple additive concatenation of skills. Rooted in sensorimotor bodies, the autonomy of linguistic bodies is distinct, as it itself is made of the historical and ongoing flow of linguistic acts in a community and its subgroups. Before we go on to discuss the becoming of linguistic bodies, it will be useful to map the contours of the complex relations between processes of individuation, or autonomy, at personal, interpersonal, and community levels. 9.2.1  (Not Quite Like) Plants and Soil We have applied the idea of autonomy to different domains, from the biochemical organization of metabolism, to the physiology of multicellular bodies, and to the closure of neuronal and sensorimotor activity. Whenever precarious relational processes organize themselves into self-enabling networks of constraints, we are in the presence of an autonomous system. We have also applied this idea to sensorimotor networks of mutually supported schemes (chapter 3) and the concept of social interaction (chapter 4). In each of these cases, the autonomous system has its own properties, its own conditions of viability and adaptivity, and exists in temporal and spatial scales congruous with the processes involved. Each is its own creature and the use of a single concept, autonomy, to describe them only highlights an organizational similarity; we can expect the phenomena involved in different autonomous systems to vary significantly. An autonomous system, of any kind, cannot exist in a vacuum. It requires an associated milieu that enables it and is in turn affected by it. In Simondonian terms the effect that autonomous systems have on their milieu can accumulate through processes of transduction—that is, the propagation of structuring changes operating on states rich in potentialities in the medium (Simondon 2005, 2010). Autonomous systems that operate over a large range of timescales and orders of magnitude establish a historical domain of durable but not fixed relations between system and milieu. For instance, the autonomy of a sensorimotor agent involves neural and physiological processes at the millisecond scale, behavioral processes at the second and minute range,

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affective and plastic processes at the range of several minutes to hours, and adaptation processes at the range of hours, days, and months. Sensorimotor bodies also change over developmental timescales of several years. The cumulative transductive effects of their activity on the milieu feed back on the sensorimotor and developmental processes these agents undergo over the whole range of scales. We are interested in understanding this pattern of historical codetermination for the case of linguistic bodies and their communities. As a starting example, consider that the soil in which plants grow is not a preexisting and unchanging substrate, but a product of life. Plants modify the soil in which they grow and these changes in turn influence the same plants and other species. Roots exude organic compounds into the soil that have effects on bacteria, fungi, and insects and alter the soil’s chemical and physical properties. These changes impact plants in turn in what is known as plant-soil feedback. This feedback can, for example, slow down invasions and regulate abundance and community relations between different plant species. Is this perhaps analogous to the relation between linguistic bodies and the linguistic communities that sustain them? Patterns of interactions and jointly learned practices can also, in the right circumstances, sediment into a shared know-how in a community and in the material substrate for interactive activities. In turn, such accumulated patterns precoordinate interactive encounters and provide participants with conflict resolution tools or appropriate environmental conditions for new interactions to unfold. But the analogy is imperfect. There is indeed an accumulation of plastic changes both in the bodies of interactors and in their sociomaterial milieu and practices that we could theorize as the “soil” that is produced by interactive and practical activity, by recurring encounters and patterns of social relations. This “soil” in turn affects how linguistic bodies grow into a community, as in the case of plants. But the complexity of historically codefined social habits and interactive practices is such that the “soil” in this case is even more active than the plant-soil analogy suggests. Selfsustaining processes at the larger scales of the associated milieu induce a modulatory effect on the actions and development of the interacting bodies. Modulation, in this context, is the top-down counterpart of bottom-up transduction, and the correlations between the two operations organize and entangle processes at the various scales between metabolism and community (Simondon 2010). We can see this two-way traffic in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus. Conceived as a system of durable dispositions, the habitus emerges

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from practices and in turn organizes them. The habitus stands halfway between the theoretical limits of full spontaneity and set-in-stone institutional structures and resides in the sociomaterial environment and in bodies themselves. For Marcel Mauss (1934/1973) the habitus is incarnated in habits, skills, sensitivities, and “techniques of the body,” such as the style adopted by a swimmer or the bodily aspects of engaging in prayer (kneeling, breathing, positions of hands and eyes, head posture, and so on). It does not occur purposefully nor for the most part is it a conscious process, but rather it is akin to a shaping that is in-formed in ongoing interactions, breakdowns and recoveries, and gradual insertion into a community. The idea is close to the notion of sensorimotor incorporation that we have discussed in part I. Institutional norms, ethos, and practices become literally incorporated into bodily styles, skills, and sensitivities. Consider Brian Lande’s study of the disciplining of breathing patterns in young army cadets, which must meet contradictory demands such as sustaining long periods of running, shouting orders, and remaining controllable in order to shoot at a target. These bodily changes to one of the most basic physiological processes are acquired through a combination of training, examples, and direct physical demonstrations: “Producing a soldier who handles a rifle well involves creating a bodily sensitivity that is the result of a protracted and diffuse process … rather than the product of a deliberate will” (Lande 2007, 102). Other examples demonstrate similar patterns of incorporated skills and sensitivities (Charlesworth 2000; McNeill 1995; Wacquant 2004). Rather than a set structure, or a system of rules, the habitus exhibits a form of closure as self-individuating sets of social norms, practices, and codes—in other words, communitywide autonomous systems, sustained by the practices of human bodies and human environments, which in turn they shape. Once we understand the habitus in this way, it becomes possible to flip the plant-soil analogy. The habitus is not only the “soil,” modified through the transductive effects of human activity; humans, as members of a community and subject to its modulatory effects, are at the same time part of the “soil” for the habitus. By being a material for, as well as the producers of, the habitus, human bodies become the particular bodies that belong to this or that group or community. What has not yet been individuated in these bodies by the organic and sensorimotor dimensions is open to transindividual individuation, in particular to individuation induced by the habitus. At this point, our original analogy of plants and soil must give way to a more complex picture.

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As we have seen, to be a linguistic body is to incorporate powers and sensitivities to participate in group and community engagements involving the different kinds of social agency described in the dialectical model. But it is also to be part of the ecological relations between the various autonomous patterns at play in the multiple timescales involved. Being a linguistic body means not only having a personal capacity for language but also playing a role in community patterns. Here we have a new kind of closure, as we have described at the end of the model. It is an autonomy that at the same time belongs to the individual and to the community. It is constituted by the encounter between both, and it is granted to the individual almost as an alien presence in her body. This occurs through the incorporation of utterances, which are person-shaping and person-relating acts, unavoidably altering the agency of those who incorporate them through a tendency to incarnate the voices, gestures, opinions, styles, and perspectives of others. Unlike sensorimotor autonomy, which is rooted in the organic body even if it transcends it, linguistic agency does not originate completely “out of” an individual’s body, but also comes from her world and moves into the constitution of a “new” body, a linguistic one, that is tethered but displaced, at once distanced from and oriented toward “its” organic and sensorimotor body. If under normal circumstances we don’t seem to be aware of this alien presence it is because “we” are it. Discussing social interactions in phenomenological terms, Fuchs and De  Jaegher note that “our body’s operational intentionality is partially decentered. There are now two ‘centres of gravity’ which both continuously oscillate between activity and receptivity, or ‘dominance’ and ‘submission’ in the course of the interaction” (Fuchs and De  Jaegher 2009, 476). We take this picture a step further: rather than being subject to rising and ebbing tides of outward gravitational pulls, the linguistic body orbits around various “centers of gravity,” in different ways, with different distances, all within itself (recall figure 8.2). The ability to take a stance on one’s self, to act on and regulate one’s relation to communities and institutions as well as one’s sense of self or one’s own feelings and practices, is afforded by linguistic mediation or decentering. It is at this level of linguistic autonomy that we can say, following Helmuth Plessner (1970), that a person both is and has a body. Decentered from the organic and sensorimotor dimensions, one can command one’s body, objectify it, do things “it” doesn’t want, like trying to remove a splinter despite the expected and inevitable pain involved in the process.

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Linguistic bodies cope with and participate in active, excitable, organizing linguistic milieus, going beyond a mutually enabling relationship (as that between plants and soil) to the unique situation of engaging in a double act of agency constitution and criticism in which the linguistic body is at once agent and patient, source of transductions and recipient of modulations. Linguistic bodies participate in dialogues and practices shaped by the genres and ideologies of a community with the power to question and reframe them and engage in self-criticism. Linguistic powers and sensitivities, when applied to oneself, project an image of the body as separate, as something we have, own, must direct, and care for. To be able to go on a diet or stop smoking are linguistic forms of control (they enact a set of social norms). Reflexively empowered, we also target our discursive actions by editing our speech and writing, critiquing social discourses, or learning new conversational patterns. What does all of this say about the question of becoming linguistic bodies? The question must be framed in this complex context where several patterns of transformation intervene at different timescales, supporting, constraining, enabling, and opposing one another in different times and circumstances. To do otherwise is to massively miss the scope of the problem. To posit, say, the question of language acquisition as one of how the individual learns a series of skills from a flow of experiences minimizes a scientific and philosophical problem that in fact has several more dimensions. Developing linguistic bodies are not simply pattern recognizers but active participants in linguistic encounters from the very beginning. They are subject to modulatory effects of their community but they are also seeds of transductive effects on others, especially those close to them. The actions of developing linguistic bodies become absorbed into networks of dialogic interpretation and interactive engagement, allowing them forms of participation they are not yet “competent” to sustain on their own. 9.2.2  (Not Quite) Private Speech A commonly held tenet about child language learning says that children internalize the speech that adults direct at them. What might we learn here about the emergence of personal-level autonomy in asymmetric social interactions? Even those who substantially agree on the relevance of embodiment and social interaction may propose very different interpretations of a developmental phenomenon. This cautionary tale will clear the way for our discussion of linguistic becoming in the next section. As scholars of private and “inner” speech observe, we talk to ourselves often. Scientists following in the Vygotskian tradition (Vygotsky 1978,

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2012) identify a range of kinds of self-talk that are crucial for child development (see Berk 1992 and Winsler 2009 for thorough reviews), while others, like James Wertsch (1991) and Charles Fernyhough (2016), explore the rich and nuanced phenomenon of “the voices within” that many adults (healthy and otherwise) hear but do not (necessarily or typically) vocalize. One of Vygotsky’s insights guiding such work is that one only talks to oneself because of (and often in the presence of) others. Moreover, Vygotsky held that the development of speech and the development of thought become inextricably intertwined. Private speech (talking to oneself out loud) develops for children who necessarily are first capable of public speech. Children then repeat to themselves in appropriate situations and in useful ways things that adult carers and teachers have said to them in conversation, like “careful, don’t fall” while going down steps. Eventually a child’s private speech increasingly operates silently although overt vocalization continues to occur even in adults. Exploring self-directed utterances as a mark of linguistic agency is useful in that it emphasizes the irreducibly social process of, and indeed key motivation for, language. Indeed, work in cultural psychology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology shows not only that humans are “social first” but also that the task of being a healthy, “full” adult person is precisely the task of navigating and sustaining the unresolvable tensions of being an individual. Recalling the lesson of the habitus discussion, the tension is not “being an individual in a society,” but goes deeper: being an individual whose defining traits and sustaining practices emerge in and through social interaction. Internalization is the magic word widely used to refer to the learning that yields self-directed utterances. Following James V. Wertsch (1998), however, we should understand the term more broadly as referring to the mastery of a skill or the appropriation of a mediational tool by an agent. It would be more consistent to talk about incorporated speech rather than inner or internalized speech, since we do not think the partially nonovert character of self-directed utterances makes them at all less than proper acts of a world-situated agent. Let us compare three attempts to explain the processes of “internalization.” These attempts avoid computational explanations in favor of interactive ones; all feature the parent-child relation as of originary importance. Yet they differ in their eagerness for a resolution that is not adequate to the intrinsic permeability and sociality of linguistic bodies. In the first case, which maintains a Husserlian influence on its thinking of intersubjectivity, a social starting point reduces to isolation: once language enters the

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scene, the endless recursivity creates a kind of mirror-house effect in which self and other are likely to be mere reflections. In the second, cyberneticsinspired option, the possibility of intersubjectivity is achieved by positing a placeholder other within the mind itself, ready to go from the start, but unexplained and unmotivated. The last approach, as dialectical, sets us on the most promising course of the three but needs further elaboration to “reach” languaging as such and to appreciate a vaster scope of social and material scenarios in which we become linguistic bodies. (1) Without disregarding the social processes involved, it is easy to relegate these processes to a background role and offer accounts of self-talk that in essence remain largely individualistic. To take just one example of this trend, philosopher Stephen Langfur’s (2016) “You-I account” of infant selfexperience and the development of inner speech offers one such take on how verbal language helps people manage this ongoing tension. Analyzing situations of caregivers “frontally engaging” infants, Langfur argues that “when a prominence in the sensory manifold appears in a certain configuration, the infant experiences a person perceiving, and the implicit target of that perceiving is what will henceforth count for [the infant] as me” (p. 166). This suggestion would be in accordance with Vasu Reddy’s (2008) account of the early development of infants’ sensitivities to being the object of attention of others, something they sometimes respond to with coyness and humor. Langfur proposes that a dramatic strategy of preserving my-infant-self via preservation of the You-I event comes with the start of toddlerhood. Here a convergence of typical milestones—walking, weaning, daycare, toilet training, a new baby in the house—threatens the loss of the carer’s love and attention. “Against the possibility of losing the carer, language offers a technique of self-defense” (Langfur, 170). Langfur points to private speech as a way of sustaining carer presence (e.g., repeating assurances and directives to oneself after a parent leaves the room at bedtime) and surmises that “a major function of private speech is to create and maintain an ersatz, controllable You” (ibid.). In Langfur’s account, when the infant plays a “You” role to herself, “a new version of the self emerges” as the implied focal center of the played You: “a mock self” (p. 170). Both sides of a dialogue are enacted; the infant, in playing You, generates a played I. When this practice becomes routine, as with children’s private speech, it “creates the illusion of an articulated mental interior” (ibid.). At this point, and not before (says Langfur), a young child at once internalizes (or as Freud says “introjects”) her carer and creates

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a space in which such internalization may reside. Yet, thanks to the “constant option of inner speech” in which I play the You role, “the possibility of encountering an absolutely important You is all but precluded” (p. 171). Becoming a (verbal) language user, in this view, requires the dual and complete loss of the “selfhood-bestowing other” and the “true self” alike. (2) Perhaps a more promising route to the internalization presumed to accompany self-talk is a shortcut: to begin with the other (literally and already) “in mind.” Stein Bråten casts social processes in a more central role in an influential 1988 paper. Bråten confronts the intriguing studies of neonate imitation (classic tongue-protrusion studies like Zazzo 1957, Maratos 1973, and Meltzoff and Moore 1977)—that is, the apparent performance of a mother-newborn “conversation.” How does an infant, without language or even a sense of self, perceive and copy the actions of the adult facing her? Bråten proposes a “dialogic systems principle,” which posits an “innate dyadic organization of mind involving the primary participation of the virtual other as a prerequisite for the actual other’s stepping into the dialogic circle without destroying the primary dyadic organization” (1988, 201). In other words, human infants are born with a “virtual Alter” that participates in the processes of operational closure that organize and constitute cognition. It is because they first interact with a “felt perspective” (p. 196) of an other that they are able to interact with a real “outside” other (the actual adult) who can “step into” the dialogic circle that constitutes the infant’s mind from the beginning (p. 199). Bråten’s conclusion comes in full counterpoint to Langfur’s: “The innate You is realized in the actual meeting of You” (p. 201). Notice that social agency as we have defined it is not a live option in either of these arrangements; both accounts remain relatively static. Without real tension, is there really languaging? Thankfully, private speech is not the end of the becoming of linguistic bodies. The reporting of utterances, whether to the self or to another, generates another tension within participatory sense-making: that between incorporation and incarnation. Having an articulated inner world—illusory or not—complicates what goes on in real time in social interactions and participatory sense-making, but it does not overwrite our intersubjective and intercorporeal nature. This complication is precisely what we see at the self-control / mutual interpretation stage of the model. In short, real encounters with real others remain a possibility—and a potential problem—for us throughout life. (3) Assuming the social/individual ambiguity of the human condition thus appears as a more enactive solution. Such a perspective concerns the

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development of personal autonomy broadly construed. Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (1988) presents a treatment of intersubjectivity as a constantly managed tension that does not devolve into rigid polarities concerning real vs. virtual others and selves. Overemphasizing internalization fails to account for Benjamin’s notion of “mutual recognition,” which requires a real encounter between two full subjects who are nonetheless open, vulnerable to the other, and hence involved in the difficult and dynamic work of sustaining the paradox of intersubjectivity. We first practice this paradox in mother-infant interactions; even here, and even granting profound asymmetries, two subjects exist and recognize each other. Despite the tendency of theory to treat the mother as the ultimate provider, entertainer, vehicle, and source of reality checks for her child, “the real mother … is, in fact, another subject whose independent center must be outside her child if she is to grant him the recognition he seeks” (p. 24). As Benjamin goes on to point out, “This is no simple enterprise” (ibid.). The temptations to maternal or paternal bad faith are myriad: it would be easy to overly determine the infant’s attention or actions, to utterly submit one’s adult self and projects to the endless tasks of caring for another, or to seek a way out from the toil of childrearing. As deeply and complexly challenging as it is to be someone else’s carer, especially someone so small, dependent, intimately related, and yet distinct and in important ways unknown, the parent-child relationship affords the experience of real contact between interactors. Joining with another’s inner experiences is not facilitated by direct imitation, Benjamin suggests, but by responsive translations and expressions that communicate that one is reacting to the feelings of another. The mother does not have the exact same feeling as the child—she is not excited by the rattle, as her baby is—but has a feeling in response to the child’s feelings. She whoops and claps in delight as the baby vigorously shakes the toy, face lit up and tensed with joy. “This conscious pleasure in sharing a feeling introduces a new level of mutuality—a sense that inner experience can be joined … the awareness of the separate other enhances the felt connection with him: this other mind can share my feeling” (Benjamin 1988, 30). The point is that between parent and child there is a true encounter whenever they sustain the being-different-people-together paradox of intersubjectivity. Benjamin’s focus on mother-infant dynamics indicates that this is how we do not just learn once and for all but continually practice the work of becoming linguistic bodies. Of course, people, even infants, meet in numbers greater than two. Our model describes mutual recognition as occurring in multiparticipant

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situations and to different degrees, offering the many-to-one and one-tomany recognition configurations that help establish and maintain regulator and regulated dialogic roles not just de facto but normatively for a community as well. This is just one way we can find the ongoing tensions Benjamin describes as crucially obtaining between parent and infant leading into adult life both inside familial relations and beyond. While concerned with the demands of intersubjectivity, neither Bråten nor Benjamin treats (verbal or nonverbal) language as such. In a way, this is in line with our general principle of not beginning with or presupposing the typical phenomena we seek to explain in other terms. But it also reminds us that careful analysis of just one or two stages of the model— dialogic interaction, self-directed utterance—will not give us the whole picture of what is entailed in becoming linguistic bodies. It makes sense to seek an understanding of self-directed talking (or other forms of self-directed utterance) within the total framework of the model, because learning to become a linguistic body is not something that finds an ultimate resolution. The most condensed and complex moments of interactive sense-making entail many stages of, and solutions to, dialectical tension. Real and ongoing experience navigating these tensions, which is something we do together with others, and something that children do together with more experienced linguistic bodies, generates skills and sensitivities—and more tensions! Thus we can move beyond a metaphoric sense of “internalization” and offer instead a plausible story of how linguistic agency works and is learned. The whole dialectical model is relevant to language learning because it is relevant to any and every moment of living as a linguistic body. A single pass through the stages of navigating dialectical tensions does not make a linguistic body. Appreciating the simultaneous relevance of the entire model helps several methodological insights to surface, regarding where, how, and what we must look for when it comes to figuring out how we become linguistic bodies (i.e., how we “learn language”). It is clear that, as Taylor (2016, 67) observes, “parent-child communion” forms the “original chrysalis” for ontogenetic “hominization” (p. 337) or, in short, becoming a linguistic body and a person. This gives us the where of the inquiry. A wealth of empirical work since the 1970s (starting with Bruner, Bateson, Trevarthen, Stern, etc.) and continuing to the present demonstrates robustly that parental responsiveness, attunement, and scaffolding—from the earliest moments of a baby’s life—inform the sensitivities and behaviors that are key to the activities commonly called linguistic, and induct the child into cultural

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patterns and embodied knowledges that constitute group membership at all salient levels. The parent-child interactional frame as the motivation and facilitation of language learning has been recognized since antiquity. Chad Engelland’s philosophical discussion of infant word learning offers this salient rehabilitation of Augustine: “The infant acquires speech through intimate exposure to others, the very basis of friendship” (2014, 93, quoting Confessions 4.8.13). As Engelland understands Augustine, “Language is an inheritance of our joint human nature, which allows the child to participate in life’s activities with those who love him” (ibid.). This strikes us as a valuable insight around which to organize an inquiry into language learning. In what follows we look to some details about family interactions on the presumption that there we will find the roles, genres, and acts that linguistic bodies incorporate and incarnate. This gives us the what of the inquiry. We also aim to keep in mind that very little can be taken for granted in respect of how a child goes about “coming into language”—even in monolingual middle class families in the Western world. Who (and how many) their caregivers are; how people individually and conventionally interact with them, and what beliefs they hold about children’s language learning; what kinds of activities the child engages in (with and without peers or siblings); the interactions in relation to which they are only an overhearer—all may codetermine the course of their language acquisition. (Leather and van Dam 2003, 14)

In short, when it comes to the question of how to proceed, what we need now is not models, but mess. 9.3  Abiding and Engaging In this section we address some of the above aspects and explanatory possibilities of language learning. But we must already notice and strive to avoid a curiously common pattern in the literature: the parent as full, complex person with competing needs drops out of the picture, and the interactive scene becomes rather sterile: moves are clear, intentions straightforward and single, the scene is uncluttered, neatly severed from the flow of daily life. Even when studied in their ecological settings, real interactions are coded and analyzed into patterns that are abstract and suited to certain disciplinary analyses and methodologies. In reality, caregiving adults and children engage in messy interactions. Real interactions occasionally achieve the clean configurations that appear

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in experimental setups. But not usually. The calm scene of infant and adult sitting together and playing with toys is often crisscrossed by the adult’s divided attention to other siblings, household duties, work, and all kinds of other interruptions. Even when time is set aside for interacting together, the adult often engages the infant not only in clean calls for attention toward an object, but in feeding them, getting them dressed, preventing them from harming themselves, lifting them and carrying them around, losing patience, and so on. The infant, in turn, participates in every interaction, task, errand, and episode. Precisely because each emerging participatory skill is coenacted with other, older linguistic bodies on the scene, baby linguistic bodies engage in all of the things described in the dialectical model. They may not do them in ways that are particularly similar to the adult performance; nonetheless, their participation is real and (for better or worse) contributes directly, semiotically, affectively, etc., to the unfolding activity. This is the way adult-infant interactions are. Interactional disorder is key for understanding why and how we learn to live as linguistic bodies. 9.3.1  Mess-Positive Methodology In contrast to the stereotypical picture of the individual learner confronted with a sea of stimuli from which she is tasked with extracting data, rules, skills, and knowledge, the situation in which linguistic skills are acquired in the real world is, without exception, always interactive and intersubjective. This has become increasingly accepted among researchers in developmental psychology. But we are not just discussing the adequate context for learning: the undisputed point that the lifeworld is the informational source for language acquisition. Interactive processes play not just contextual or informative roles in language learning but enabling and constitutive roles as well (De Jaegher et al. 2010; De Jaegher et al. 2017; Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2012). The interactive and intersubjective situation redefines the processes of learning, turning them into processes of joint participation. Linguistic skills are not learned in isolation from other sensorimotor and social skills. They all form a complex, messy, changing web of interrelated, sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes contradictory developmental processes. Appreciating this point, we must include some further methodological considerations. Full Linguistic Engagement  The categories that emerge in the model, as we have stated, do not represent a historical or developmental progression.

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They are the unraveling of the different forms of participatory sensemaking, as well as other processes that operate concurrently in any linguistic act. What this means, when asking questions about the development of linguistic skills, is that in the interactive, intersubjective milieu in which development happens, infants are not “exposed” to sentences, or speech acts, or examples of conversations as is often assumed. This is a half-truth. In reality, infants are fully engaged in participation with adults and children in linguistic interactions that bring all of the categories of the model in full force as joint acts of linguistic sense-making. From the start, infants do not simply attend to utterances the full meaning of which they do not yet grasp, but, with those very utterances, they are also moved, addressed, responded to, in short, engaged in interactive and recursive coordination and in the use of partial acts and regulatory acts. They are exposed throughout the day to different kinds of engagement following different participation genres; they are prompted to recognize others at the same time they are recognized themselves, to make sense of people and situations, their attitudes and moods, and to flow along the braiding of utterances that at first only adults can fully enact. However differentially sensitive and responsive to these forms of participation, infants are engaged by the whole complexity of linguistic agency from the beginning. Linguistic bodies develop in such contexts of full linguistic engagement. Adults adapt, simplify, emphasize, and facilitate the linguistic participation of infants, but these accommodations never amount to less than a full linguistic engagement once we consider all that is contained in the “simple” act of addressing an utterance to the infant. The moment this act happens, infants are put in contact with the whole of language and placed within the borders of a living linguistic community. Human history is brought into their lives. This point is easier to appreciate by contrasting it with the common assumption that there is a progressive acquisition of abilities. Even when the adult-infant interactive situation is put at the center of the investigation, we find a tendency to think of interactive and linguistic skills as piling one on top of the other. Jerome Bruner (1975) is an early and influential example of the interactive perspective we favor. He proposes functional and structural links between the development of action and perception patterns, particularly intersubjective ones, and the development of semiotic patterns (agent-action, action-object, etc.). Yet, even Bruner (like many others) sometimes posits certain sensorimotor and intersubjective abilities as primary and, as a separate event, language entering into the picture to modify such abilities. This may occur through some kind of initial

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associative link that later becomes a semantic joining of various elements of the social act into a label or a command. Bruner, for instance, describes how following the mother’s gaze, joint attention is encouraged by her phonation (“Oh, look!”), and in time this pattern is replaced by labeling objects such that uttering the label induces the joint attending (p. 9). Our perspective, while looking at the same situation and much in agreement with Bruner’s foregrounding of the pragmatics of mother-infant interaction and play, is different in that elements are not piled or associated together to constitute a novel form of participatory sense-making. Sense-making is always already whole and it develops as a changing whole. Because the mother enacts a full linguistic engagement, the interaction is already linguistic, even if the child is individually proficient in some of the skills that make up a linguistic body and is only potentially skillful in others. Thus, to follow the example, joint attention does not develop as an independent whole first, only to be modified by labeling later. Joint attention is one facet of developing linguistic sense-making that appears in the context of (very likely thanks to) the concurrently ongoing labeling, uttering, requesting, indicating, regulating, coordinating, addressing, smiling, playing, etc. that occurs both while sitting quietly and playing with Mom and also with Dad while he is busy preparing dinner, with siblings when they are listening to music, with aunts, pets, street noises, voices coming from the TV, and so forth. Joint attention makes particular sense in this messy context and its development can be said to be oriented toward it. Joint attention is “operationalized” in labs and video coding standards but this does not circumscribe it conceptually in relation to all kinds of interpersonal and linguistic skills. This does not signify that empirical findings are misleading. Responding to labels or indicative gestures may not be manifested before joint attention as operationalized in experiments, but taking the perspective of full linguistic engagement, we must make it our default assumption that, as with other interactive skills, joint attention develops within a context of, in intimate relation to, oriented toward, and possibly even depending on, such patterns separately operationalized as labeling, indicating, etc. Earlier appearance is no mark of primordiality or independence of processes that show up later as acquired skills in the individual. The messy circumstances of concrete linguistic engagement force us to think of all the factors that make up linguistic agency as operative from the start and bearing among themselves complex and nonlinear relations. As Merleau-Ponty (1964, 40) says: “The whole of spoken language surrounding

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the child snaps him up like a whirlwind, tempts him by its internal articulations, and brings him almost up to the moment when all this noise begins to mean something.” Even those elements of linguistic agency that take months or years to become manifested in the infant are present in each fascinated utterance parents address to their newborn. For this reason, it is not safe to assume the infant is not affected by all aspects of linguistic engagement. The question of “what comes first” in situations of full linguistic engagement is not simply answered by “what is manifested first.”2 There is considerable cultural variability in the way caregivers engage infants linguistically, but in general, parenting styles never fully “shield” infants from linguistic practices in the community, even if they regulate their contact with these practices differently. These differences arise from differences in expectations toward the developing child and in childrearing practices, from beliefs about what the child can and cannot do, from beliefs about their status as persons and community members, and so on. These differences affect early adult-infant interactions (e.g., Gratier 2003; Kärtner et al. 2010; Keller et al. 2008) as well as how parents and other family members see themselves in their role (Bornstein and Lansford 2010). Even societies with comparable living standards can show significantly different parenting styles: Japanese mothers expect early mastery of emotional maturity, self-control, and social courtesy in their children, whereas American mothers expect early mastery of verbal competence and self-actualization in theirs. American mothers promote autonomy and organize social interactions with their children so as to foster physical and verbal assertiveness and independence. By contrast, Japanese mothers organize social interactions with children so as to consolidate and strengthen closeness and dependency within the dyad, and they tend to indulge young children. (Bornstein 2013, 259)

Cross-cultural studies show that we should not expect the dyadic monolingual conversational format to be the universal frame for language acquisition (Leather and van Dam 2003; Rogoff 2003; Saville-Troike 2003). Rather, multiparty, multilingual interactions, ritualized formats, different modes of participation, involvement from siblings, other children, the extended family and the local community, and so forth, are all commonly encountered patterns (e.g., Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Ochs 1988; de León 1998). While we should not expect culturally neutral frames, what seems clear is that infants are still engaged by other linguistic bodies through linguistic practices such as coregulating social acts, structuring interactive engagements dialogically, positioning within dynamic relational configurations, braiding

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utterances (whether directly addressing or speaking for the infant or not), differentiating into participation genres, taking the infant as a participant in family activities, work, games, rituals, etc. (Duranti et al. 2012). Purposeful participation in family and community activities underpins informal learning of language and skills following patterns that Barbara Rogoff and colleagues describe as “observing and pitching in” (Rogoff 2014; Rogoff et al. 2015). These patterns are present in many cultures together with activities that promote them. In short, the complexity—the messiness—of interactions, practices, and relations encountered by the growing infant seems to be found in possibly all cultural settings, especially as we shift the concept of culture from relatively neutral notions of “ways of life” to a more active conception of patterns of participation (Rogoff 2016). Edward S. Reed (1995, 3) remarks that “the language-learning child thus exists in a complexly nested environment, which is not only full of highly structured objects, places, and events, but is also populated by other people who spend a significant portion of their time while interacting with the child in emphasizing and reshaping these structures.” The reason Reed finds this important—in fact, crucial—for understanding language learning is that complex, nonuniform, messy environments generate conflicting situations, dissonances, and tensions. “Far from being ‘noise’ which creates a problem for language learners, both the linguistic variations and nonlinguistic variations (contexts, gestures, games) in the use of language provide crucial information to the language-learning child about the way language is structured in his linguistic community” (Reed 1995, 6). It is indeed the presence of conflict, tension, and complexity that we deem, as Reed does, not merely relevant, but essential for a child to become a linguistic body. Unlike Reed, however, we put our emphasis not so much on the importance of the ecological information and affordances for participation that these messy contexts provide but rather on the constitutive claim that stems from our model. To become a linguistic body is to be able to navigate jointly with others the conflictive, often agonistic complexity of a community of linguistic bodies and their practices, regardless of whether this is achieved through individual information “pickup,” the joint construction of new mediations, collaborative work, or any other participatory practice. Full linguistic engagement is not only empirically the case; it allows simplification only at the cost of losing sight of the meaning of the concept of linguistic bodies. Abiding in Potentiality  A process of unfinished becoming is both constituted and instituted in linguistic bodies. In other words, what has usually

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been cast as a problem of acquiring or mastering a set of skills is in reality a problem that is part social (re)production, part constitution of individuality, and part active participation by a developing agency. On the one hand, questions of language acquisition cannot be separated from questions about becoming a new kind of embodied agent. On the other, the associated milieu for this process of ongoing and deeper individuation is itself a self-sustaining, excitable medium of social practices. Linguistic bodies expand the reach of the interactive locus for understanding language acquisition well beyond the dyad both in the direction of societal processes and in the direction of the subjectivity that is produced. The patterns and practices of a community that are created by the actions of linguistic bodies are themselves actively involved in their production (by specifying genres for adult-infant interactions, by establishing patterns of care, play, communication, routines, spaces, technological mediation, systems of education, systems of writing and counting, etc.). Moving in the other direction, the development of linguistic bodies is always the ongoing constitution of socially recognized person-level subjectivity, not merely a question of a given form of agency (e.g., a sensorimotor body) becoming proficient in a set of skills and sensitivities by a series of appropriations. These outreaches from the interactive situation toward the societal and toward the subjective indicate once more that we are defending a constitutive view of language. Nowhere is the convergence of the personal, interpersonal, and societal spheres clearer than when we consider the evolutionary and historical tendencies toward neoteny in humans (e.g., Montagu 1989). It important to avoid reading neoteny in hylomorphic terms—that is, as the datum that extended periods of maturation in human children indicate that becoming a person is instituted through a process of “enculturation,” a process that takes in a tiny body from an initial state of material potentiality and returns a finished adult form. It is profitable to look again at the Simondonian account of individuation. Unlike physical individuals that may exhaust their sources of potentiality, driving their individuation process to a low-energy halt, organic individuation is an open process that is prevented from fully consuming its associated milieu without first having transformed it or exchanged it for one with new sources of potentiality (energy, resources). Tellingly, Simondon describes this as a neotenization of physical individuation: It is customary to see in vital processes a larger complexity than in non-vital, physicochemical processes. However, … we would suppose that vital individuation does not come after physicochemical individuation but during this

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individuation, before it is finished, suspending it at the moment when it has not yet reached its stable equilibrium, and rendering it capable of extending and propagating itself before the iteration of the perfect structure capable only of repeating itself, and this would conserve in the living individual something of the pre individual tension, of the active communication, under the form of an internal resonance between extreme orders of magnitude. (Simondon 2005, 152, authors’ translation)

All living individuals therefore carry with and around them a remainder of potentiality: the preindividual. This remainder is subject to determinations from other spheres in response to tensions and conflicts. Eventually, such sources are found in the collective or the transindividual. The living individual becomes further determined in her social relations, her style, her social roles, and her language. What is interesting here, as noted by Paolo Virno (2015), is that this further determination by entrance in a community is an affirmation of individuality, not a loss of it. In other words, if conflicts between the individual and the collective exist (and they do exist), this is not due to some fundamental opposition between two forces fighting each other over determining who a person is and what she does. Contradictions arise but not because of a dichotomous split between matter and form or between the individual and the social. They arise contingently from the fact that various kinds of autonomy are at play (as we saw in the model). The individual need not lose herself in the collective, nor lose those idiosyncrasies that make her a particular person: “Contrary to what our deformed common sense might tell us, collective life is the opportunity for a further, more complex individuation. Far from regressing, the singularity reaches its highest level in common action, in the plurality of voices and, finally, in the common sphere” (Virno 2015, 234). We must approach neoteny in terms of the messiness of social interactions. Social encounters do not act as simple funnels through which language and culture are poured into the child. On the contrary, social interactions, as we have maintained, are active, open-ended, sometimes unpredictable creatures, constrained by the modulation of the community but also acting as sources of novelty and change. In the case of caregiverinfant interactions, adults as much as infants undergo accommodation and learning. Part of what they do can be seen as assessing the infant and adjusting the influence of all the spheres at play: the interpersonal, the family context, the social practices, the language patterns, and so on. Scaffolding is in part an active filtering of social significance, attempting to produce interactive episodes of regulated complexity, even if much escapes through

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the filters because of messiness. But scaffolding is not limited to that role; actual parents in concrete situations, interacting with actual infants, must face tensions and work out resolutions in an active and open-ended way. Hence the relevance of the fact that, according to our model, we never finish becoming linguistic bodies. Not all the “solutions” are previously stipulated by cultural practices, nor can all decisions follow established norms. Not only do children have “watery souls” according to the beautiful image that comes from Fiji (Sahlins 2008), but they never entirely solidify with the passage of time. In Paulo Freire’s (1996a) words, human beings are, and always remain, unfinished. The messy interactive context is creative and demands ongoing learning and, consequently, so must we understand neoteny. Human parenting, because it entails adults learning, changing, and potentially interpellating their own values and social practices, can directly modify these practices. We must see human neoteny as a biological and historical species’ way of abiding in potentiality, of stretching its horizons in response to their creative body- and world-transforming practices, not by escaping its various sources of determination (material, biological, personal, collective) but by holding them in abeyance, slowing them down, playing with them, and keeping options open as much as circumstances allow. Rather than pointing to a cauldron where separate nature and culture meet and mix, neoteny draws our attention to nature’s way of growing cultures and culture’s way of producing natures. 9.3.2  Making Sense in the Mess K., three and a half weeks old, lies on Aunt Lois’s lap facing her, eyes on her. She holds a squeaky monkey in her right hand, and holds K.’s right hand in her left. She holds the monkey about six inches above K.’s face, in his sight line. He watches as she moves it back and forth, squeezes it to make noise, brings it to K.’s raised fingers. She helps him take hold of it in his right hand and then lets go as he brings it to rest on his lips. He holds it there for a moment before releasing it, opening his arm away from his body and opens his mouth slightly, perhaps prematurely losing his grip on the toy. Aunt Lois catches it as it starts to fall. In the same moment that K. releases the toy and moves arm, torso, and mouth, breaking the momentary stillness with the toy, Mom asks (off-screen, behind the camera) “Is that your first toy?” Lois has already returned the toy to K.’s focus, holding it in both hands, squeaking it, bringing it in for a light kiss of K.’s forehead and bringing it away again, repeating the quick-kiss-and-up move. Mom, quieter: “Is that your first toy, K.?” When K. fixes his gaze on the toy now just a few inches above him, Aunt Lois spends some time placing K.’s hands on the toy. At less than a month old, bringing the hands together at the body’s midline is a new skill, a developmental fact of which both adults are aware and have been

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discussing. As his aunt works on helping him hold the toy, K. makes eye contact with Mom/the camera positioned above his head. Mom responds to the upturned gaze: “Hi! Hi sweetie, look at the toy.” K. grunts as he turns his attention back to Aunt Lois, who squeaks it a few more times and tries bringing it back to the hand that held it successfully before. K. attempts to bring his arms together and touches Aunt Lois’s hands lightly a few times. After a few collaborative attempts, Lois and K. secure the toy in K.’s hands. She lifts her hands away, he tightens his grasp with his left fist, and with the fingers of his right hand gently explores the side of the monkey while bringing its face down to his mouth. There is a brief but distinct moment in which K. holds and feels the toy on his own, while looking up in his aunt’s direction. As he flings his arms open again, displacing the toy, Aunt Lois and Mom gasp in delight and Aunt Lois asks quickly, “Did you get it on video?”

Are Mom and Aunt Lois right—is this K.’s first moment of playing with a toy? Or is this some kind of overeager interpretation—are they just seeing what they want to see? Another question arises: Why are Mom and Aunt Lois so excited? Do they see the sudden action when he holds the stuffed monkey to his lips as a demonstration of enjoyment and affection toward the toy, as a demonstration of a gross motor skill mentioned in parenting literature, or both? To outsiders and even sometimes to themselves, parents often seem to be in a rush to name or narrate each fledgling movement or noise their newborn makes. This is a bittersweet mélange of savoring every passing second, with its unique events and immediate significances, paired with an inevitable anticipation of a child’s future skills, needs, and possibilities. The breastfeeding mom plans for a return to her workplace in a few weeks. Relatives note a strong grip on a ball or vivid interest in passing cars and suggest a career in sports or mechanics. Some of this is practical, some poetic, but the practice is widespread in contemporary Western cultures. There are important phenomena to note in these quotidian, sometimes silly-seeming habits, following the methodological points outlined above. Adults adjust their participation intuitively during interactions with infants (Kaye and Fogel 1980). These interactions form dynamic configurations with different patterns of symmetry and stability and with path-dependent transitions between these patterns according to interactive history and the developing relationships between infant and adults (Hsu and Fogel 2003; Fogel et al. 2006). While adult adjustments happen intuitively, they are themselves supported by infants’ sensitivities to utterances, gestures, and other social acts they cannot yet fully respond to. These sensitivities reveal the infants’ potentialities as linguistic bodies and consequently draw adults into interactions that help actualize these potentialities.

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Many of these interactive sensitivities, particularly to spoken language, are present very early. Evidence has shown that even newborns are sensitive to the uttered invitations made by adults; they are able to discriminate the rhythms, intonations, and prosody of their mother tongue (e.g., Ramus et al. 2000; Nazzi and Ramus 2003). A study by Abboub et al. (2016) shows the presence of perceptual biases in newborns toward the prosody of their native language, which correlate with prenatal linguistic experience. Although at three and a half weeks, K. will not answer or understand the query “Is that your first toy?,” this is how it makes sense for Mom to engage him. Notice that her vocalization also marks the close of a first holding episode with the squeaky monkey, concretizing a meaning in the flow of sensations and movements. In support of what we have called full linguistic engagement, Katharina Rohlfing and Iris Nomikou (2014, 117–118) point out that “even in early interactions, language can already be perceived as a social signal segmenting the action stream meaningfully. … This social signal does not just play a role in emotional attunement between the caregiver and child … it also modulates infants’ attention to objects and events.” This can be seen rather directly in the given example, when Mom says “look at the toy.” In several publications Nomikou and Rohlfing (2011; Rohlfing and Nomikou 2014) share findings from a longitudinal study of interactions between mothers and infants during everyday episodes of diapering in a middle-class Western culture. In different ways, the mothers in the study provide rich and intermodal sensory and contentful experiences for their infants. The mothers lean their heads and upper bodies in and out of a close visual range (close to the infant’s face); they catch and hold their infant’s gaze; they make a variety of facial expressions; and they sing, speak, babytalk, etc., modulating vocal pitch and also enacting a turn-taking structure that treats the infant as a real conversational participant. The 2011 study codes these classes of engaging bodily movement and vocal activity in temporal overlap and finds a variety of patterned relationships. Nomikou and Rohlfing find that such multimodal synchrony constituted a third of the interaction time and conclude that young infant perception and attention are achieved from parental education, particularly from maternal synchronous intermodal packaging of actions and verbal language. Because “language ‘packages’ events for our perception,” because even newborns live in social, linguistically carved environments, it is hard to argue that babies are ever prelinguistic (Nomikou and Rohlfing 2011, 114). A longitudinal observational study reveals the importance of the evolution of roles over time: young babies watch their mothers more or less

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constantly (during diapering positions), but with an older baby, the mother looks for “slots” when the baby is not looking elsewhere or squirming toward another point of interest to provide the synchrony (Rohlfing and Nomikou 2014, 131). In a significant sense, then, the baby begins to “lead” the interaction, even though she is in some respects still a relatively captive and seemingly passive audience. When mothers shift their own behavior to respond to and make the most out of the baby’s attention, meaning is facilitated in the present shared moment but also in the longer trajectory of the baby’s growing linguistic capabilities. Researchers working with a robust sample of parent-infant interactions note that everyday scaffolded and guided dialogic interactions correlate with how children verbalize later, plausibly demonstrating incorporation of linguistic sensitivities and skills. The shaping effects of contact with the linguistic world take place not only through the adult’s utterances but also by engaging in the whole gamut of categories of participatory sense-making described in the model. Emotionally sensitive, interactive acts and moves by adults shape the infant’s participatory skills, an idea that has had many defenders in the past (e.g., Bruner 1983; Kaye 1982; Schaffer 1984; Stern 1977/2002; several contributions to two “classic” collections: Bullowa 1979; Lock 1978). For instance, contingent, nonvocal maternal reactions to the infant’s vocalizations—that is, responses such as approaching, touching, or smiling—facilitate the infant’s vocal behavior later in the same interaction (Goldstein et al. 2003). Further studies show similar effects over longer periods (between 8 and 14 months of age): again, contingent, sensitive maternal responses (vocal and nonvocal), rather than overall number of responses, correlate with the infant’s future pragmatic use of vocalizations (Gros-Louis et al. 2014). In particular, maternal imitations and elaborations of the infant’s vocalization are strongly predictive of future mother-directed vocalizations by the infant (see also a meta-analysis by Dunst et al. 2010). Together with the finding that mothers seem less inclined to respond to vocalizations that are not directed at them, the result is particularly significant from our perspective: maternal imitations and elaborations take the shape of a reporting of the infant’s utterances. While all kinds of maternal participation seem to have some effect, infants crucially learn at the same time that utterances are addressed and can be reported back and forth. These studies provide concrete, everyday examples of Bruner’s (1983) notion of “interactional routines” or “formats” as providing the needed scaffolding, predictability, motivation, and education for young children to learn interactional sense-making skills. Bruner describes parents and caregivers as naturally offering young children “a language acquisition support

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system” (ibid.), without which they would not come to inhabit the moves and means of human communication and sense-making. Just by playing typical games with their infants, parents help children become adept at languaging, by limiting the semantic domain, providing task structure and variance, enacting reversible role relations, taking turns and addressing and reporting utterances, and maintaining a playful atmosphere (Ratner and Bruner 1978, 401). Dialogic exchange builds the environment parents and children share, a world shaped and disclosed by language understood as a dynamic interactive practice enacting all the elements we are discussing. Consider Heidegger’s (1971, 199–200) provocative pronouncement: “In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones. By thinging, things carry out world.” Who does the naming? In the early years of life, adult caregivers or cohabitants do. Names—words for things—organize the parent-child interaction, organize the child’s sensorimotor engagement with the world, and allow interactors to experience something as present with them. Names are not simply added to an already organized world of action and perception. The organization they bring forth results because children attune to their parents’ actions, because adult speaking intervenes in the sense-making and world-relating of children, and because parents speak the name with a certain manner, and also often use hands and eyes and limbs to present the corresponding object in a highlighted way. Chen Yu and Linda Smith (2012, 244) found that “when 18-month-olds interacted with objects in play with their parents, [the parents] created moments in which a single object was visually dominant. If parents named the object during these moments of bottom-up selectivity, later forcedchoice tests showed that infants learned the name, but did not when naming occurred during a less visually selective moment.” More recently the same researchers found that parental attention during play episodes with a shared object educates one-year-olds to sustain their visual attention on an object. “The self-regulation of attention may have social origins, because human development occurs in a social environment in which invested parents are part of evolutionarily expected experiences” (Yu and Smith 2016, 1239). What might look like projecting—“Is that your first toy, K.?”—is not a delusion or a bad thing, then, but a materially grounded and materially effective process of enacting meaning together. Social completion of acts (e.g., taking the infant’s vocalizations as actual utterances by responding to them, imitating them, and elaborating them) concretizes a certain trajectory and

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outcome out of a field of virtually present possibilities, selecting it into actuality. This may occur even when the infant’s “partial act” being completed by an adult social response is not yet or not quite an act as such, but a move, perhaps the result of other acts and intentions. In the case of social acts, projection does not “add” anything that the enacted move lacks in the form of a sense or meaning otherwise absent; on the contrary, it “subtracts” from or “selects” among virtually present potentialities and “steers” joint sense-making in a concrete, particular direction out of the many the material configuration affords (see Di  Paolo 2015). Projection is a legitimate interpretive tool that scaffolds collaborative sense-making, especially in asymmetrically structured dialogic interactions. In interactions with very young linguistic bodies, in most Western cultures, parents treat hand movements as gestures and treat gestures, vocalizations, facial expressions, and object handling as speech acts. They take their children to be participating in a social act of saying something or showing something to each other. The effects of projection are not only local, i.e., in laying down this particular path. They are also more general because projecting shapes the creative force of environment-relating and other-relating for young children. In the scene described earlier, the adults treat K.’s handling of the toy as, first and foremost, a big deal. Even now, it is a challenge to watch the video of this episode and not see the contact as a kiss, the holding as an embrace, even if adult viewers know intellectually that young babies use hands and mouth to explore. It is hard not to see the event as an achievement, to see the flinging aside of the toy as a gesture of satisfaction—there, I did it!—even if the adults were coaching him to meet the expectation (early) of bringing his hands together in front of his body. It looks like success; it looks like playing; it looks like snuggling a cute new toy. This is the point: the projections are meaningful and efficacious; they are a crucial part of becoming linguistic bodies. Adults see what they look for as linguistic bodies living in particular times, places, and cultures. This is part of the asymmetry of the situation, and shows up in what the adults do and do not vocalize for K. They say “look at the toy”; they do not say “bring your hands together at your midline.” Both would be encouragement of typical, age-appropriate (or perhaps soon-to-be-age-appropriate) behavior. Yet the vocalized message they make explicit to the baby discloses the world in a certain way: the way of play, of toys, of pretense and relation. The Western, educated “adult” world of developmental research, milestones, measurements, knowledge about the human motor system, they keep to themselves. Nevertheless, in also motivating their highly positive reactions, K. gets feedback about moving his body in a certain way. The

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lesson remains in place, implicitly, thanks to the material and affective richness of real reactions and interactions, thanks to (and reinforcing) the sensitivities and attunements all parties have vis-à-vis the other (Adolph et al. 2010, 1041). Of course, these kinds of scaffolded and projecting interactions do not just happen once or a few times. The gears keep turning together, and sensitivities and skills “ratchet up” at various paces. Recall the exchange at the opening of this chapter, when K. is two years old and recounts in conversation with his mother her absence at bedtime the previous evening. While more subtle, projecting of the sort we are describing operates here as well. Mom takes K.’s first utterance as an utterance, even though she is not sure what it is. She listens when he speaks, answers his questions, uses vocabulary and referents that will work for him. Again asymmetrically positioned in terms of knowledge about the event under discussion as well as conversational know-how, Mom guides the conversation along a certain trajectory that helps to make sense of and emotionally accept an unpleasant situation still present and significant in K.’s experience. Yet there is evidently more autonomy from K.’s side: he introduces the topic (“You back at home!”), requests more information (“Where you goed?”), evaluates the event (“I cried”). Regulating (improving) his emotional state quickly becomes the shared goal (“Me so happy now!”). What Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi and Iris Nomikou (2015, 8) note about mother-infant interactions applies to adult-toddler interactions as well: “By mirroring the infant’s behavior, the mother is responding in a way that makes the infant’s actions ‘sensible’ for the interaction … the turns are constructed by using the materials the infant provides and then building upon them. … The infant’s vocalizations have an effect on the interaction.” Later on, this is less striking, but not less the case; the ground for conversation is laid in conversation itself, in the full linguistic engagement into which children are thrown from birth. Note that in the mess of parent-child life, then, we have what we need to explain becoming linguistic bodies. While parents in studies may sound like they are making special efforts or are particularly skilled at interacting with their children, everyday, imperfect interactions concretize the flow of sensorimotor and interpersonal coordination patterns into coattended and coenacted happenings and carve up shared space and time into the meaningful contours of experience. In fact, caring and attentive but less-thanperfect parenting may positively contribute to the robustness of infants’ developing linguistic bodies by inadvertently adding to tensions and breakdowns that provide the opportunity for adults and infants to work out how to coauthor their resolution.

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When analyzing such interactions, it is commonplace to say that parents are teaching their children or that children are learning from parents. The reality is less linear and strict. Perhaps “learning consists in the mother ‘moving’ the baby into a cultural episode that she is enacting, and then, as the child begins to actively participate, in reinforcing proper joint actions” (Rączaszek-Leonardi and Nomikou 2015, 10). Certainly there is asymmetric guidance, as we have noted, in the way parents scaffold and reinforce child participation. We should view these activities as the participatory sense-making of linguistic bodies in different stages and rates of becoming. Parents are neither perfect nor neutral nor trained teachers. Parents are simply concerned linguistic bodies, embedded in cultures and habits, ready to interact. Recall that to be a linguistic body is always to continue to become a linguistic body—that is, a body realized in potentialities. Parents are also, at least at first but arguably with each child or with each new stage of a child’s development, trying to figure things out for themselves. Parents are not just leading children along a straightforward path to knowledge or skill acquisition; as coparticipants, even leading ones, they are also admitting another agent into their acting. In this case the paradox of coregulation may be particularly acute, because of how differently capable and differently sensitive the other agent(s) may be. Whether or not the paradox is at the forefront of the experience, it is nonetheless the case that parents are becoming linguistic bodies too. 9.3.3  Social Learning in Real Life Language learning is an ongoing effect of linguistic bodies interacting, and hence becoming, together. Parent-infant or caregiver-infant interactions are highlighted in the literature almost intuitively. When we attend to the special circumstances of human neoteny, we find some justification for this focus. The prolonged dependency of young human linguistic bodies on older more developed linguistic bodies creates a situation of constant, asymmetric, scaffolded interactions in which all relevant stages of dialectical navigation of individual and interactive sense-making unfold. In this messy milieu, linguistic bodies continue to become what they are. Does it make sense to wonder about this happening in better or worse ways? One of the frequently noted puzzles in language acquisition is that children are so very good at learning to speak in the languages in which they are raised. Some approaches insist that, statistically speaking, children are not exposed to enough examples of grammatical forms or lexical items in their “mother tongue” to generalize from them as effectively as they do. Perhaps this indicates that an inborn universal faculty must be there to pick

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up the slack, and/or that young human brains are incredible pattern detectors and number crunchers, or are particularly sensitive to cultural information that they can pick up from the communicative intentions of adults (à la natural pedagogy, e.g., Csibra and Gergely 2009). For us, understanding language learning as becoming linguistic bodies, in other words as practicing all stages of the dialectical expansion model and practicing in particular the balancing act of incorporation and incarnation, relocates the puzzle of child language learning. It is none other than the basic paradox that is the primordial tension of participatory sense-making—that is, the constant need to navigate between contradictory and competing sets of norms at individual and interactive levels of lifeworld relations. Given that children from birth and even before are thrown into an enlanguaged environment and into the care of linguistic bodies, the idea of poverty of the stimulus makes no sense. Let us set aside for a moment the definitive critical point that any learning that happens is not the result of passive stimuli processing (e.g., Reed 1995; Zukow-Goldring 2012) but a process that involves the active participation by children as agents that normatively regulate their own environmental and social couplings. An additional mistake arises from restricting “the stimulus” to words and syntactic constructions—and the poverty of even these has been disputed in linguistics (e.g., Pullum and and Scholz 2002) and philosophy (see Schoneberger 2005 for a review)—instead of the full linguistic engagement that actually takes place. It has been shown that more than exposure to a rich vocabulary, it is the engagement in actual, contingently themed conversations that most strongly correlates with the development of linguistic skills in toddlers and young children (McGillion et al. 2017; Romeo et al. 2018). It is relevant that the sensitivities of a very young linguistic body are radically in training and, simply put, not the same as their adult counterparts. If we are looking for a magic threshold across which stimuli that were previously undetectable suddenly become salient and able to impinge on equipment correctly calibrated to receive it, we will indeed face a mysterious situation. This is the problem with functionalist in-the-head frames for cognitive explanations, as opposed to the world-involving frame of the enactive approach, where world processes can enable and constitute an agent’s sense-making (see chapter 3). If we understand language learning as interactive, collaborative processes of embodied becoming in already-happening sense-making situations, we are no longer looking for stimuli and response, but for the mutual tuning, shaping, and strengthening of powers and sensitivities developing at different rates side by side, as discussed above.

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Similarly off-point is the search for linguistic “competence” as a singular, finished, consistently identifiable and measurable phenomenon. Even young linguistic bodies are included and active within full-blown languaging interactions; they are involved in performing (not necessarily all in the same moment or episode) all of the acts and navigations we describe in the dialectical expansion model, with help. In fact, that help never goes away. Linguistic bodies are bodies in becoming, in social interactions. Competence will vary according to situation and interlocutor (as well as myriad other factors relevant to embodied social sense-making). Importantly, the universalizing and individualist nature of the formulation of the driving questions in most language acquisition theories is not only inaccurate on our view, but misses the possibility of very different kinds of linguistic sensemaking and linguistic body becoming in our midst. One might expect that in the enactive account we provide, just growing up in a linguistic environment and with linguistic others is sufficient for becoming a linguistic body. Indeed, in the abstract, this is the case: most humans in that scenario become linguistic bodies. But we are in a unique position to consider an array of variations in that becoming. This includes variations in how parents or caregivers develop as such, which will partly be a result of the amount of help they need and receive in this becoming. Learning to be a parent or caregiver involves a variety of specific skills, importantly including communication skills. But it also involves changing the patterns that sustain and constitute their bodies. One learns to love in new ways. One is radically decentered from what may be best for oneself, in both the long and the short run, again at a variety of distinct but real levels. This learning, this decentering, is the mark of linguistic bodies as such. For parents or other caregivers, it takes place in the process of childrearing and alongside, and in complex constitutive relations with, children’s own becoming. (Think for example of learning to back off from a moody teenager who wants privacy.) This general existential situation is rife with tensions. Despite the plethora of best-selling books and viral blog posts from all of the entrenched camps of parenting styles, there is no way to sort out on an abstract plane how actual tensions will be resolved. From a learning perspective, this is for the best. Of course, intersubjective turmoil indeed can have negative, even severely negative, consequences for what kinds of linguistic bodies people become. It is unlikely, however, that diagnostic tools set to measure the “competence” of individual language users, or ones that focus exclusively on one aspect of languaging, such as vocabulary or syntax, will reflect proportionately the effects of different or unhealthy engagements linguistic

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bodies experience when young. No experimental design or even therapeutic intervention is likely going to be able to capture a full picture of the sensitivities and powers of a linguistic body, since these are significantly variable across individual history and sociocultural situatedness. Accepting this basic situation need not rule out the possibility of identifying, evaluating, or seeking to remedy problems in adult-child interactions. It does mean that when it comes to considering situations that are recognized as problematic for healthy development, we must proceed with caution and with a robust sensitivity to the specifics. No two linguistic bodies (at any stage of life) are the same. Investigations into narrowly defined phenomena (verb production, vocabulary), just like broad theoretical formulas, yield epistemological constructs (statistics, definitions) rather than real people. Our account proposes no prototypical adult linguistic body although we can expect patterns in the distribution of linguistic skills and habits. What we predict instead is that we are all “marked” in our living as linguistic bodies. So long as we are interacting with other linguistic bodies, any differences in play do not challenge the ontological status or the structures of the essential activity. The extent to which these differences matter, at times passing over from the realm of “style” into “dysfunction” or “pathology,” is a function of culture, location, project, and other contingencies. Let us consider an example. According to a wealth of empirical data and psychological theory, caregiver sensitivity is pivotal in providing and facilitating the kind of interaction dynamics and ongoing relationships with infants and young children that are most conducive to language learning. This sensitivity is impaired during a crucial developmental stage in episodes of postpartum depression (Stein et al. 2008), yet 10%–15% of Western mothers experience this form of depression. Studies indicate that the negative effects of postpartum depression on language are surpassed by the age of five, while behavioral and psychopathological issues may persist later in life (Grace et al. 2003, 273). Research on the effects of postpartum depression on language development uses combinations of standard diagnostic tests and maternal reports, and measures “language development” in terms of numbers and types of words the child recognizes and produces. However, our model and the present discussion indicate that becoming a linguistic body is not merely a matter of growing one’s vocabulary or mastering verb use. If we understand languaging in enactive terms, it is reasonable to think that systematic disturbances in any of the stages of intersubjective engagement disclosed in the dialectical model will have consequences for a linguistic body. Such consequences may not yet have been named and measured in ways that tie

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them to language as commonly or traditionally defined; we might expect them to show up in communication styles, in self-talk, in handling tensions and contradictions, in openness and flexibility, and so on. Indeed, it would be surprising that so much research is devoted to the topic of postpartum depression if it were believed that any ill effect on developing children and their language would be overcome as a simple matter of aging. Yet even as scholars note the various forms and eventual mitigation of these effects (so measured), urgency and concern grip the opening paragraphs of articles about maternal depression and child development (for example: “Maternal depression is prevalent, and puts children at risk. Little evidence addresses whether treatment for maternal depression is sufficient to improve child outcomes”; Forman et al. 2007, 585). One might balance the dire specter of widespread postpartum depression with the detached optimism of the anthropologist’s broad bird’s-eye view, as when Terrence Deacon (1997, 110) observes that given evolutionary pressures on language to be acquirable, “children don’t have to be particularly smart, and parents don’t have to be particularly gifted teachers. The limitations of the learners and the teachers are an unavoidable part of the ecology of language transmission.” One answer to the question of how children compensate for postpartum effects on development might just simply be the presence of other adults and caretakers. Evidence suggests that if other caregivers are properly constant, engaged with, and sensitive to a child, language learning is supported and even potentially improved, as young children in daycare centers are shown to have higher scores on language diagnostic tests than peers who are solely in maternal care (Stein et al. 2008; NICHD ECCRN 2000). One could read Deacon to be making the more radical point that no matter how bad the lesson, children will learn language. Such a reading favors the end over the means. In our view, however, the means is where the real story unfolds and keeps unfolding. Yes, it appears that children of postpartum-depressed mothers still “learn language”—they learn to do the things traditionally associated with being a language user. How? As we say in the context of participatory sense-making, preparing to do well at coordinating does not overcome the condition of autonomy in each participant. Babies are linguistic bodies in becoming. Add to this the point that social acts are open and require exploration. The mother suffering from postpartum depression does not fully determine the course of interactions with her infant, provided that interactions do occur. What we might predict to be the discriminating factor in question is the difficulty this mother may face in learning from her infant, in responsively coregulating, which means opening up

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to interactional influences and accepting them. As we saw in the discussion of Benjamin above, sustaining the paradox of mutual recognition is hard, counterintuitive work for everybody. No one does it perfectly all or even most of the time. Recall that we identify the real mess and pitfalls of parenting as a positive source of lessons in interactional breakdown and recovery. However, if mothers in an infant-mother dyad are suffering from postpartum depression, interaction breakdowns are not repaired as quickly or effectively (or at all), and positive states of matched affect are less frequent (Reck et al. 2011). If it is consistently and substantially harder for mothers suffering from postpartum depression to participate in and lead coregulating interactions, it makes sense to expect effects on children, but not ones that will necessarily show up on spelling quizzes (at least not for that direct reason). We must clarify that the process of becoming a linguistic body can fully break down, possibly irrevocably. We are dealing with precarious, material bodies at all levels. If the necessary access to social interactions involving full linguistic engagement and the capacities for mutual plastic accommodation and coregulation are systematically absent, the potentialities for participating in a linguistic community will eventually be lost. Extreme trauma, isolation, and neglect can lead to serious damage to the capacity to participate in linguistic interactions (Davis 1940, 1947; Curtiss et al. 1974). Other extreme situations (sustained wartime and refugee experience, gratuitous violence and torture) can not only impede the development of linguistic agency, but also break down a previously functioning linguistic body and psyche (Malabou 2012). The same can occur as a result of severe brain lesions and with some neurodegenerative conditions. Becoming a linguistic body is, unsurprisingly, a precarious daily achievement. What is remarkable is that once the necessary elements are present (reliable participatory access to a linguistic community and to mutually accommodating interactive experiences), there is a resilient qualitative jump from being only a sensorimotor body to being a linguistic body (as witnessed by late language learning experiences in victims of extreme isolation; see Curtiss et al. 1974 and Skuse 1984). Independently of measurable differences in language use and skills and of whether a particular culture decides to look at these differences as pathologies, the amazing fact is that the capacity for linguistic participation involving all the stages in our model is a mark of human personhood and of a shared degree of linguistic intelligence when we contrast these capacities against sensorimotor bodies that are not linguistic. There seem to be few, if any, middle stages between language and no language in the case of human beings. To be sure, this is in part due to

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how we conceive of language enactively. But it is also telling that language is still learned even in systematically challenged situations of illness, abuse, or violence, provided some access to linguistic engagement is available. Children from violent households or other routinely stressful environments tend to score lower on standard tests of intelligence, language, memory, inhibition, and other abilities; the received psychopathological view is that stress impairs cognitive development. Some realize that stress need not result in “impairments,” however, as formative time spent in stressful environments can give rise to unique coping strategies that turn into sophisticated yet atypical interpersonal skills (Frankenhuis and de Weerth 2013). What might this mean? Learning, understood as intersubjectively motivated and intersubjectively conducted, or as ongoing processes of incorporation of sensitivities and powers most relevant to sharing forms of life with significant others, takes place even in situations where interactional dynamics are unhealthy, irregular, negative, and so on. Children incorporate skills and styles of linguistic sense-making from the caregivers and significant others in their lives, in contingent and idiosyncratic respects, regardless of the “goodness” of lessons or stimuli. 9.4  Perpetual Becoming 9.4.1  Languaging Is Acquiring Centuries of Western scholarship and folk wisdom alike hold adults to be the finished version of the human product. In parallel to the capacity to speak and reason that places humans at the top of the hierarchy of beings in ancient and modern Western ontologies, a key mark of adulthood is presumed mastery of language (if not reason). Adult speech is taken as the default model for measuring competency in a language, and typically developed adult embodiment and socialization is taken as the model for the physical and normative constructions of our environments. In our view, adults are, when compared with children, generally more settled and technically more experienced as linguistic bodies, by virtue of having lived more years in enlanguaged environments with other linguistic bodies. Adults have had more practice navigating the primordial tension of participatory sense-making, participating in social acts, inhabiting dialogic roles, incorporating acts and norms at local and institutional levels, regulating their own sense-making, and incarnating the agential attitudes of others. However, despite the mutual sedimenting of habits and habitats that makes adult living theoretically smoother and more ordered than that of children, the messiness of essentially unfinished, precarious,

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needful sense-making bodies in complexly sustaining relations and ongoing interactions with each other persists throughout life. Despite myths of independence that haunt Western ideas of model citizenship and maturity, the need for and the provisions of help also remain. Idiosyncrasies or differences among adult linguistic bodies are the rule rather than the exception, which means we should expect variations in patterns and processes of sense-making. Not all adults are literate to the same extent or in the same ways. For example, US national surveys conducted in 1992 and 2003 measure literacy of continuous (“prose”) texts as well as noncontinuous texts (documents like maps or job applications) and texts requiring quantitative engagement (paying a bill or calculating a tip), and cite a broad range of levels of ability (Kirsch et al. 1993; Kutner et al. 2007). Such variability is more than statistical fodder for political campaigning or education reform: as scholars have long noted, the move to written symbol systems was nothing short of monumental for human sense-making, self-making, and society-making (e.g., Goody 1977; Ong 2002; Stewart 2010; see chapter 11). Whether or not the difference is problematic depends on context, but prima facie the sensitivities and powers that a locally illiterate linguistic body has at her disposal will set her apart from literate counterparts. Monolingualism, assumed as the norm even in language acquisition scholarship, is not an accurate global standard (Leather and van Dam 2003). Speakers of English worldwide speak very differently from one another and experience widely varying relationships to this language of imperialism (hooks 1994; Lecercle 2005). Accent, grammar, diction, and vocabulary are crucial variables in bids for and attributions of epistemic authority and social capital (Bourdieu 1991). The assumptions made about adults as language users can be heterogeneous and contradictory, then, intersected by assumptions regarding the cognitive competencies of certain genders, races, social classes, and ages. Again, we are navigating messy territory. We seek to include these social components of bodily existing within lifeworlds in our account of cognition as sense-making. Linguistic bodies by definition work on making sense of contradictions and tensions. Embracing the mess, we find adults realizing themselves as linguistic bodies, incorporating specific sensitivities and powers, and incarnating the styles, perspectives, and attitudes of other linguistic agents—that is, learning with others, learning to be themselves with others—in all of their “adulting” endeavors. Consider these cases: Learning a foreign language. Learning the language game belonging to your field of technical expertise, or of your particular “institutional culture.” Learning pilates. Learning to become a

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better listener (as in couples therapy). Learning to retrain your internal monologues (as in cognitive behavior therapy). William Hanks (1996, 222) describes the continuousness of learning “new ways of speaking, even in our native language, as we enter into collective endeavors of various kinds. This learning does not involve acquiring rules or codes so much as ways of acting and different kinds of participation.” Such learning is not simply a question of new vocabulary or even interactional style but of new ways of bodily being and experiencing in relation to the new elements of sense-making as and with linguistic bodies. In other words, one learns to act, to participate, to regulate oneself and others in new ways. Learning to speak with locals in the Basque Country requires not just the typical skills of parsing and producing Castellano (and as much Euskera as one can manage) but also getting into the rhythm of everyday exchanges, perhaps repeating oneself more often to follow some of the local more redundant patterns of conversation, occupying the regulator role of a discourse with more commitment and vigor than other colloquial environments require, and so forth. Learning to think more positively sounds like something one does alone, but in reality it is an act that must be practiced in the context of others’ actions and in social self-reporting (e.g., answering the question “How are you?”). Appreciating the perpetual becoming of linguistic bodies, in his lectures on child psychology and pedagogy, Merleau-Ponty (2010, 34) advances the idea of a continual acquisition of language: “All acquisition made at a certain level must be begun again at a higher level.” Think of knowing in general what roof means and then becoming a homeowner (or a roofer) and discovering more vivid or differently consequential meanings. In the terms of our model, such basic cases reiterate the point that we pass through stages of navigating interactional meaning-making again and again. For adults and children, for adolescents and older people, at all moments of human social conduct, we are relearning how to get along together. “Even for the adult expression of what is most his own in his experience will always have to be perfected. Hence, far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 34–35, emphasis added). There may be a flipside to this perspective of perpetual openness that Merleau-Ponty does not highlight, however. If all languaging is acquiring, then all languaging also carries the potential for unacquiring, for losing, forgetting, or replacing. Nonprimary language fluency fades with lack of regular use in an authentic context. The microdialects of an adolescent friend group fail to impress in college and get discarded. Abrupt

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changes in priorities, like newborn caregiving, may unsettle previously well-entrenched practices, say socializing with friends in bars or long bouts of reading in a coffeehouse. Beyond changes in location, role, activity, or priority, adult linguistic bodies also face consequences of aging, including hearing loss, isolation, memory impairments, weakening of vision, carpal tunnel syndrome, stroke, illness, being out of sync with communication technologies, and other contributors to or forms of cognitive degradations. Both openness and precariousness result from the double-edged material nature of linguistic bodies. 9.4.2  Acquiring Is Self-Making Readers may have already detected an implicit parallel between the markers of mature linguistic bodies and philosophically highlighted aspects of selfhood. The dialectical model witnesses the coemergence of person-level autonomies and linguistic bodies through the conceptual stages of linguistic agency. Given the all-at-onceness and full linguistic engagement that characterize human development, we predict a similarly intertwined and processual ontological relation between person-level selfhood and linguistic agency. As participants in linguistic engagements, children will, to different degrees and relying on scaffolding and interactional support, progressively exercise the various practices that constitute linguistic bodies. Adults, also linguistic bodies in becoming, face a different set of expectations regarding how well and how relatively independently they enact these practices. For example, “the development of control over the expression of feelings, discretion about whom to trust, and caution about what information to share are hallmarks of the concept of mature adulthood” in some Western, northern nations (Overall 2016, 151). In all cases, the practices that constitute linguistic agency are at the same time practices of identity building as well as practices of interpersonal relating. Why not just talk about linguistic bodies as human selves, then? Can we make a full transposition from one to the other? Notice that in almost all cases thus far, we have spoken of bodies (organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective, linguistic) in the plural. Selves, too, can be treated in the plural, but this is not the standard Western notion. In fact, the usage connotes a deviance, either an interesting nontraditional theory pointing out that, as Walt Whitman famously observed, we each “contain multitudes,” or a diagnosis of pathology: multiplicity where we should expect singularity. In both cases, we intend the plural in a dual sense: bodies and selves come about as populations, communities, groups, and could not exist otherwise. We might call this the community sense. But also, rather than emphasize

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a reified notion of “the individual,” it makes sense in our view to speak of bodies, and of selves. The singular term we use in place of the traditional self or person is agency, which in the case of humans is a linguistic and person-level agency. Agency is that which orchestrates and regulates the flows and patterns of social acting by which a “course of a life” (Lysaker 2017) individuates itself. As we have discussed throughout this chapter, this agency is socially constituted in the interactive milieu as a result of acting with others. It is to keep this sense of agency in focus that we generally employ the term linguistic bodies. That being said, the dialectical model of the conceptual emergence of linguistic bodies out of participatory sense-making contributes to a philosophical account of person-level selfhood in several distinct ways. (1) The recursive use of regulatory acts generates a prereflective know-how of one’s own repertoire of partial acts. (2) Negotiations of role exchange entail attention paid to an interactor as a sense-maker and thereby lead to a situation of mutual recognition. This is where we say others, and as a consequence, selves, coemerge explicitly for an agent for the “first time.” (3) Iterations of interpretive effort enable social self-control as one takes a displaced perspective on one’s own actions. (4) Self-directed utterances are one type of social self-control and again are learned first from the collaborative practice of reporting utterances to resolve tensions that arise when interactors coproduce and coenact a participatory genre. (5) Another outcome of the practice of reporting utterances is that linguistic bodies incarnate others’ agencies in an excessive, foreign way that can potentially destabilize their own incorporated linguistic processes. (6) The unique community-level form of autonomy that coemerges with linguistic bodies at the same time produces subjectivities—that is, linguistic bodies subject to open-ended, intersubjectively regulated norms different from those that individuate organic and sensorimotor bodies. Notably, when it comes to fully concretizing the model for the case of human beings, the dynamic notion of development we deploy to understand language acquisition again animates the conceptual stages such that we can posit these contributing elements of selfhood being practiced all at once, and being honed at different rates, in the messy reality of perpetual social learning. In resonance with Meadian and dialogic theories of the self, the concept of person-level self as linguistic agency that emerges from our account is radically different from traditional individualistic and modernist perspectives. Central to our model are interpersonal constitutive relations enacted in and sustaining communities big and small (groups, families, clans, tribes). These are the fundamental human selves, in the sense that it is at

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this level that we encounter the processes of self-making, not at the level of the “individual person” who in a sense has a derivative existence, externally sustained by interpersonal relations of mutual recognition and shared practices and by an organic and sensorimotor body. “The individual” manifests itself rather as the exception, when we are on our own and not doing much and inaccurately perceive ourselves as independent. The insistence on the person-level self as an individuum in modernist metaphysics (Taylor 1989)—in sharp contrast to non-Western ontologies (e.g., Wiredu 1996; Masolo 2010; Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 1998)—is a reification of a particular “end product” of human self-making: a linguistic body occasionally engaging in solitary self-reflection. This reification ignores the ontologically prior constitutive, dynamic, relational, and collective processes and conditions that individuate and make human personal becoming conceivable. We should see in the received Western view of person-level selfhood an abstraction of concrete processual patterns—that is, a partial view that serves the stability of certain societal relations.3 Alternatively, the awakening of a critical-ethical consciousness—itself also a product of counterframing societal processes (e.g., Freire 1996a, 1996b; Giroux 2011; hooks 1994)—reveals the concrete individual in his complete personal experience as a dialectical moment always turning into its opposite, its networks of relations. This is a dynamic, ongoing, recursive reversal that is nothing if not the navigation of tensions between incorporation and incarnations characteristic of linguistic communities and their linguistic bodies. Note that once we take ourselves as the phenomena to explore, we enter a conversation where the leading concerns are ethical. To talk of agency and acting with others, of upholding and critiquing community, is to talk of ethics. To talk of loved ones and life courses is to talk of what matters, of what can be won or lost, celebrated or mourned. Recall that the full sense of linguistic bodies appears in the model when we come to reported utterances and the tension between incorporation and incarnation that this kind of reflexive social act generates. Utterances are acts that embed relations between people. Talking or gesturing to oneself overtly, thinking to oneself privately, letting a rude comment slide, all such self-regulatory acts are essentially the same move: allowing others to shape one’s sense-making. This happens to different degrees and can just as readily take a form of resistance as it can one of welcome. A linguistic agent enacts herself as such by performing the roles of producer and audience, effectively bringing about a decentered self, or an agent inherently in tension. She is divided not only by dialogic roles she plays out simultaneously in self-regulation, but also by the deeper disjunct that opens between the self-constructing and variably

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stable interaction into which she incorporates utterances and the excessive influence of others that permeates this incorporation as incarnated agencies. Our notion that linguistic bodies are continually constituted by incorporated and self-directed utterances has implications for what we think it means to be some (linguistic) body. Being somebody, analogously, is a fluid process rather than a clean achievement; it is always a putting-oneselftogether. Reflecting on the endlessly arising act of answering everyday questions about himself (questions like “Who are you?,” “What do you do?,” or “Are you happy with who you’ve become?”), philosopher John Lysaker (2017, 61–62) observes: “I would answer differently as different thoughts came to mind as I found myself in different situations. But that wouldn’t surprise me, at least not at twenty-nine, nor at twenty, and now I expect it, even delight in it. Do different enough things, hang out with different enough people, and you’ll prove kaleidoscopic, a spectacle, not yet a dog peddling the same old tricks.” One possibility of adulthood is that with reflective practice over the years, one relaxes a little into the uneven multiplicity of one’s being. By this we are not suggesting that human selves qua linguistic bodies are only a dialogic construction; this is only one particular facet of their linguistic character. It is a particular community that orders into existence the café waiter in Sartre’s (1943/1969, 59) classic existential analysis of a badfaith incarnation of a social role: “He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. … All his behavior seems to us a game.” One can be a waiter but should not be too much a waiter. One should not—in Sartre’s view, cannot—let any single social role override the multiplicity, even while one is primarily enacting this role. A social role is “a ‘representation’ for others and for myself, which means I can be he [a waiter] only in representation. … I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not” (ibid., 60). To an extent, Sartre is sympathetic to the waiter, who is caught in the inherently alienating position of earning a living by fulfilling a social role and of meeting the expectations others hold that, at least during working hours and with the apron on, he be a waiter and not any more or less. The waiter needs to find the right balance to inhabit this role such that he pulls it off—gives a believable performance. Sartre aligns this role “play” with that of a child playing “with his body in order to explore it” (p. 59). Presumably this is meant to highlight the innocence, even the necessity, of the play. We should not lose sight of the ever-present tensions, however: exploration

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dances with expectation. A self is a summoned, risked, and temporary foregrounding against the background of a community. An agent, which selfconstitutes by incorporating recursive acts of linguistic sense-making, and that hence cannot help but undergo (interpret and respond to) the causes and forces of his situation (Lysaker 2017), stands out as a self insofar as he incarnates the styles, manners, and values of others. Linguistic bodies exist in and as these contradictions that spur them forward on their course.4 Our conception of linguistic bodies as unfinished resonates with Paulo Freire’s call for a pedagogy that recognizes the ongoing personal becoming of students and teachers (to which we might add of parents and children, of adults and infants). Such a pedagogy, he says, affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. (1996b, 65)

It is therefore in the realization of incompletion and the adoption of an ethical-critical attitude, and not in any kind of ontological self-sufficiency, that human selves exist at their truest, as nodes of convergent and conflicting spheres and realities. In the enactive view, in other words, an authentic human self is one that understands her own constitutive dependencies and her own incompletion, and in so doing contributes creatively to—and struggles critically against—the framing that community processes impose on herself and her people. A “self” deeming itself individuated and primordial is always, in contrast, inauthentic and for this very reason, easily falls victim of ideologies it does not, and cannot, question. Even its transgressions are attributable to social contradictions schizophrenically trying to overdetermine this self (“you must stand out and be different from others,” “you must follow the rules”) rather than emanating from a true, creative, bodily critical stance only knowledge of one’s own incomplete social nature can provide. For linguistic bodies, keeping the course of one’s life coherent for oneself is the inherited and ontologically definitive struggle. Whether and to what extent this becomes a self-conscious, salient pursuit of authenticity—that is, an ethical endeavor—is undetermined; it need not befall every linguistic

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body as such. But it can, and that is part of the point. We are bodies whose being is an issue for ourselves (to paraphrase Heidegger). This ethical question can show up in a variety of ways related to the ever-shifting terrain of linguistic self-construction. 9.5  Better Questions Thinking about language acquisition within the linguistic-bodies framework raises different questions, giving rise to the need for different methodologies. For example, we suggest that children, even at or before birth, experience full linguistic engagement, are party to relevant social acts constituting linguistic agency, and incorporate sensitivities to, norms about, and powers of performing such acts. Insofar as linguistic bodies are always in becoming—that is, insofar as their nature is to abide in potentiality— children are never entirely prelinguistic. This view challenges the received notion of linear stages of development and even the popular milestones of parenting books. New questions emerge regarding how to think scientifically about typical and atypical phenomena in the dynamic trajectories of becoming; how to circumscribe, measure, and assess different elements of becoming; and how to facilitate optimal experiences (e.g., implications for pedagogy or for perfectionist trends in parenting discourses). We also affirm that mature linguistic bodies are still in becoming. Here, due perhaps to the increased complexity that comes along with the adult relation to social roles, institutionalized expectations, and the relative and temporary period of physical independence in midlife (for medically typical adults), we find that questions of ethical agency and self-inquiry are preeminent (something we return to in chapter 12). In cases of aging linguistic bodies, dependency returns in heightened ways; one might expect to find a resurgence of the sort of scaffolding and hermeneutic generosity shown to children in languaging interactions in the West. This is an area for further exploration. Our view of linguistic bodies in becoming sets aside certain questions and provides the necessary philosophical elements to reformulate them, avoiding dualisms and top-down presuppositions. Once the ontological ground is clearly mapped, what remains to be explored are scientific and ethical pursuits. For instance, it does not make sense to ask whether a particular body or type of creature “is” a linguistic body. One could imagine the question: Are gorillas in captivity (or in the wild) linguistic bodies? This sort of question is an instance of a broader species of inquiry that wants to know why puppies, raised in the same enlanguaged environment as human

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babies, do not learn to talk. Doesn’t the fact that they don’t show that species-specific aspects (anatomy, genes, developmental sequences, “brain structure”) determine language learning? These are not our questions, because they presuppose a different conception of language from the one we present, a conception of language as the appropriation of so many nonconstitutive skills. However, they offer an opportunity for some comments. We have remarked on the resilience of the jump from nonlinguistic sensorimotor bodies to linguistic bodies in human beings once the elements of genuine community participation are present. By the same logic of the full linguistic engagement of human infants, we might suppose that pets, especially cats and dogs, are linguistic bodies in becoming too. Why especially cats and dogs? This may make intuitive sense, but why? Presumably because pet-owning families likely treat them differently than they do goldfish or guinea pigs—there are more routine and richer interactions, perhaps more emotional bonding (generally speaking). Still, we would be more alarmed than not if the audience dogs used to help overcome public speaking anxiety (Fandos 2016) suddenly came up with a few pointers on our delivery style. Or if a pet dog or cat started using symbols or gesturing. Then again, Chaser the border collie responds to over 1,000 combinations of action commands and object names (Pilley and Reid 2011). We can advance the suggestion that while enculturated species that are treated linguistically are invited into participating in human linguistic communities, and to different extents they respond to this invitation, their patterns of psychic and social individuation will continue along their paths. Such invitations may do little in the way of making these patterns of individuation swerve into the direction of open linguistic agency. In other words, their becoming does not necessitate the sociohistorical engagements that human babies require to subsist, nor is it precisely attuned to inducing the necessary abiding in potentiality of human linguistic bodies. Unlike babies, language does not take these companion species in a whirlwind, to recall Merleau-Ponty’s apt image. The point: this is not a black-or-white issue, or an on-and-off switch, or a skill that is simply added to an existing sensorimotor repertoire. At this moment in our history, given what we know, the human species is the one that enacts the gamut of stages we posit as definitive of linguistic agency. It does so in the particularly human way of becoming linguistic communities and linguistic bodies. This leaves the door open for non-Earth-based lifeforms, for companion species, and for the transformations of other species in the wild to manifest or evolve their own ways of entering into patterns of participation that promote, sustain,

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and extend their potentialities into a linguistic mode of existence, thus creating a social history according to their own timescales and environmental conditions. Our definition entails that all human bodies able to engage in linguistic interactions are linguistic bodies, to a virtually equal degree. Differences between linguistic bodies exist, but these are not grounds for ontological distinctions. Open to scientific and ethical investigation, they are differences that may affect one or many aspects of linguistic sense-making, important to the extent that they are relevant in particular cultures and situations, for particular bodies. As we explore in the next chapter, linguistic bodies who have been placed on the spectrum of autism disorders are no less linguistic bodies as a result of this condition.

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10.1  Not Afraid of Experiencing Autism Two boys, Lenny and Colin, between 5 and 11 years old, both autistic,1 play with a toy robot that moves around on the floor and “speaks.” The robot’s sensors allow it to react to movements around it. Also present are a teaching assistant (TA) and a computer science researcher (CR). Of interest are the spelling assertions that Lenny makes a few times during the session. We describe three such occasions here.2 The robot moves about and produces a monotone “Excuse me please.” Lenny, looking down at the robot, says, “How do you know where I am?” and looks at the TA. The robot says “Hello there,” while the TA starts saying “’Cause it’s got little sensors on it.” The robot moves toward Colin, who grasps it with both arms. Lenny stands up, spreads his hands, and says loudly: “‘EXCUSE me’ got an O IN IT.” The TA says “No, ‘excuse me’ hasn’t got an o in it.” Meanwhile the robot has been saying “Excuse me please,” and “Hello there, … hello there.” Overlapping with the second “Hello there,” Lenny looks up and starts saying “‘HELLO’ HAS.” Then he starts clapping and running around, uttering “urhrrrhhhhhhh.” Lenny has grasped the robot, which says, “Hello there.” The TA extends her hands toward the robot, then glances toward Lenny, who sits up. “Please,” says the robot, while the TA brings the palm of her right hand toward it. She raises her palm; her palm and gaze track the robot’s reversing movement. Lenny says “igh,” while the robot moves away from him. The TA’s palm and gaze still follow the robot’s movements. Lenny says, with rising intonation, “‘Please’ has got an A IN IT,” while looking back and forth between the TA and the door of the room. Lenny says, while looking to the robot, then to the TA, “Ar am being nice to it.” The TA says, “Well, go on then.” CR extends his hand toward the robot and pushes it back. It says, “Hello there, …, hello there.” CR withdraws his hand. The TA also extends her hand toward the robot. Lenny raises his eyes, then he says, “(Unclear)’s got AN O IN IIITT” at screaming volume, and raises his hands to his ears.

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Is Lenny participating in this interaction linguistically? His spelling assertions can be seen as echolalic. Echolalia is often defined as the inappropriate, irrelevant, meaningless repetition of one’s own or someone else’s utterances. This common understanding immediately brings to the surface a tension between the functionalist idea of language that informs it—language as primarily serving a communicative function—and the languaging of linguistic bodies. In a way, the typical definition takes any languaging in our sense of the word out of echolalia. If the common definition is true, echolalia isn’t languaging. Echolalia is common in autistic language, though it is not its only characteristic, nor is it exclusively definitive of autistic language—other things are going on. Echolalia seems more frequent in autism than in other cases, autistic repetitions seem more faithful to the source utterance in several dimensions, and they are usually a persistent feature of an autistic child’s repertoire. Because echolalia is reminiscent of reported utterances, it is a good jumping-off point from which to begin telling a linguistic-bodies story of autism. If it is true that linguistic bodies always fully engage in an enlanguaged world, and that it is nearly impossible for a human being to not be a linguistic body, then people with autism are linguistic bodies. As a consequence, a linguistic engagement with autism is necessary to understand autistic linguistic bodies in their becoming (and everybody’s—we will come back to this at the end of the chapter). The vignette allows us some kind of entrance into experiencing autism. People with autism participate in the linguistic world. Except they tend to do so differently. Autism comes with specific differences in interactive and linguistic participation, which we will now point to using our dialectical-experiential array of enactive tools. 10.2  Powers and Sensitivities in Autistic Sense-Making Our story of autistic linguistic bodies—or of linguistic bodies with autism— should also begin at the beginning: with a look at autistic sense-making and participatory sense-making. People with autism, just like everybody else, are sense-makers. Perhaps it is strange that this has to be said. However, it bears repeating in light of many approaches to autism that still attempt to “treat away” behaviors that nonautistics find hard to understand. Take for instance rocking or hand flapping. These behaviors may seem inappropriate and in need of remedial therapy, until we understand what they are for, what they do for the person enacting them. It is becoming increasingly understood that “stimming”—self-stimulatory behavior, often in the

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form of repetitive movements of the body or body parts or an object—is an important way for people with autism to cope with sensory overwhelmedness. Similarly, something like the rapid hand movements through which a child with autism looks at a flower that he holds in his other hand, may be a way to slow down the visual world, thus helping make sense of the world. Being a sense-maker, things matter to you, and they matter to you as the particular intersubjective, sensorimotor, organic body that you are in your world. Most theories of autism have—in keeping with good old-fashioned cognitive science—focused on theories-in-the-head, on executive functions, and on capacities for drawing coherence, or rather the absence of these. But recent years have seen an encouraging change of thinking in the direction of autistic embodiment. The sensory hyper- and hyposensitivities, as well as motoric and coordination differences of people with autism, are increasingly taken as deeply intertwined with why and how autistics make sense of things in the ways they do (Torres and Donnellan 2015; Bogdashina 2016). These sensitivities have now been taken up in the diagnostic criteria (American Psychiatric Association 2013). The upshot of an enactive approach to (inter)subjectivity, especially when applied to challenging phenomena, is that the basic questions to ask are always versions of: Why does something mean something for someone in this situation? What matters to this person, what is at stake for her? And how can and do they participate here? We can further break down these questions into: Why do (autistic) people act and perceive in the ways they do, and what does this have to do with how they engage with and understand the world, others, and themselves? Like every other living being, a person with autism cares. Autistics relate in meaningful ways to their world, and this relation of caring is as deeply bodily as it is for anyone else. Therefore, if, as is well known, autistics have hypo- or hypersensitivities, and perceive, move, and emote differently, then the ways they care—their meaningful interactions with the world—will be different too. Things make sense to a person with autism in ways that nonautistics may not always find easy to grasp. But this does not mean that the significance is not there. Sense is being made. We just need to look and listen harder. The effort required to understand people with autism and their varieties of sense-making is itself a social effort. The fact that this effort is often considerable is due not only to autism, but also to a world organized largely by and for nonautistics (De Jaegher 2013). Sense-making, as we saw in chapter 2, is the narrowing of the complexity of the world in terms of that which is relevant for the organism. For

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different organisms, different things are relevant, in accordance with their particular bodies, needs, and constraints. From very early in development, children with autism resonate differently with the world, motorically and sensorially (Torres and Donnellan 2015), which naturally coincides with autistic people attending to different things, also when attending together with others. Thus, the (social) world looks, feels, and sounds different to people with autism from the start (Donnellan et al. 2013). So, for instance, they have a preference for processing the details of a visual scene or a story piecemeal, rather than capturing its gist. They like repetition and structure over unpredictability, and would prefer to dedicate themselves to just one or two interests than be generalists. One piece of evidence for thinking of these as preferences, rather than handicaps, even if they sometimes do interfere with everyday life and relationships and need managing, is that people with autism tend to enjoy them (Mercier et al. 2000). As regards sense-making together with others, if people with autism have difficulty with basic interactional timing, such as motor resonance, as well as sometimes highly different interests than nonautistics, participatory sense-making will often be difficult, and so will linguistic participation. Let’s look into some elements of this. 10.3  Two Hypotheses Just as there are billions of linguistic bodies, so too are there tens of millions of autistic bodies. Each person with autism has their own autism, is their own person. Autism, and autistic language, manifest themselves in heterogeneous ways. Can we then say something general? Following the logic of all we have developed so far, we think this is possible. However, we do not aim to give a fully fleshed out account of autistic linguistic bodies here. All we can do is provide some elements with which to encounter and characterize such bodies. As much as this will be an unfinished story about autistic languaging—though as always, begun on principled starting points—it will be a template for a to-be-continued story, and also for telling stories about other different bodies (e.g., about schizophrenia, addiction, and other phenomena of challenged and challenging participation). Languaging in autism spans a wide range of possibilities. Language development is often delayed, and some people with autism never speak. Sometimes a child with autism transitions from not speaking to suddenly uttering full, complex sentences, apparently out of the blue. Autistic language is often literal, which plays out in many different ways: autistics can have difficulty getting or producing metaphors or irony, often take

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directives and suggestions literally (e.g., “Could you pass the salt?” “Yes.”), and have difficulty grasping the meaning of homonyms (like board) from the context (someone sitting on an executive board or a wooden board). People with autism can find it hard to capture the gist or the humor of stories, images, and events, to understand sentences with many embedded and subordinate clauses, to get wh-questions, such as “what, how, who, where, etc.,” and to connect meanings across several utterances (Vicker 2017). And then there are those who contest these claims in part or in full. Such as JoB, a man diagnosed with an ASD, who quips, in a tweet replying to psychologist Peter Hobson’s argument (Hobson 2002) that people with autism think literally, much like computers do: “Fortunately, I lack both the #imagination & the #creativity to #feel the sting of #Hobson’s argument on #autism” #ASD [(Bervoets, Jo (@JoBervoets), 13 March 2017, 1:45 AM]. Central to autism are social and communicative difficulties, and yet there is a striking diversity and variability in (social) functioning and languaging. Can we make sense of all this? Looking at autism with the dialectical model of linguistic bodies in hand, should we ask if any of the model’s elements are missing in autism? This would not be in the dialectical spirit, nor would it make sense in light of evidence that each and every interactive skill described by the model can be found in people with autism. Without providing an exhaustive list, autistics do produce partial acts, as in greetings, they are spontaneous, they regulate and are regulated, they are aware of, abide by, and question norms, and they produce and interpret utterances, control themselves using self-talk, report and incorporate utterances—though often, something about the way they do these things seems strange. People with autism are undoubtedly linguistic bodies. They are fully embedded in a linguistic world in which they participate. What we need to know is how their concrete linguistic becoming occurs. 10.3.1  Under- and Overshooting Interactive Regulation Our first hypothesis is that people with autism tend to over- or undershoot when (co)regulating participatory sense-making. We can see cases of this at any stage of the model, and probably at many or all of them at the same time. Recall that the model folds out the skills, capacities, tensions, and navigations involved in instances of linguistic participatory sense-making. When looking at autistic languaging, we can therefore pull apart what goes on in a particular instance, in specific circumstances. Because autistics generally have problems attuning to what goes on around them (in the form

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of hyper- or hyposensitivities, coordination difficulties, the world moving too fast or too slowly for them, and so on), and because this is especially so in the social world (e.g., high sensitivity to eye contact or touch, which can even be painful, as Amythest Schaber discusses in her YouTube series Ask An Autistic, Schaber 2014), autistics may cope with the inherent tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms by either overregulating or underregulating. That means they may attempt to resolve a particular tension as individual agents rather than in a joint act with others, or withdraw momentarily to allow others to resolve the tension. What seems more difficult in general for autistic people is to co-construct or coregulate an interactive dissonance together with other participants. When the necessary skills are learned, some of the elements that allow coregulation to happen will be in place, but the tendency toward over- or undershooting is still largely present, particularly at a direct, prereflective, embodied level. This can then, for instance, lead to outbursts (tantrums) when boundaries are exceeded. At such points the interaction often breaks down. A particular stage in the model where over- and undershooting are especially prominent or heightened is in the joint coordination of the regulator and regulated role. This is, in the model, the tension that is managed through dialogue and, even more important here, through recognizing others as others and being recognized by them. This may be a crux in autism, and it may be why autistics seem to have problems with recognition of others as others, and also—note!—with being recognized (as autonomous sense-makers, as linguistic bodies, etc.) by others. To work through the tension between overregulating and underregulating, an important skill becomes that of taking others into account. This, as we saw, requires not only a sensitivity to others, but also a sensitivity to one’s own effect on the interaction dynamics. This may be particularly difficult in autism, and not only from the point of view of the person with autism. It is an issue that affects all sides. We saw that when someone takes on a strong regulator role, this forces the people around her to see her in terms of her embodied intentionality. In turn, the attitude and recognition of the audience support her dialogic acts, provided the context, the genres, the interpersonal history, etc., allow this support to continue. When the person with autism takes on this strong regulator role in ways that are hard for her nonautistic audience to recognize, her sustained participation is at risk of breaking down. When this occurs, participants in a dialogue tend to initiate all kinds of coregulatory moves (expressive behaviors, vocalizations, changes of posture, distracted looks) to effect some change in the regulator before the

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interaction breaks down. If these attempts at coregulation are not met with their other half, the social act fails and it may do so through overregulation or underregulation. The vignette with which we began the chapter illustrates this. At several points in the play session with the robot and the other child, Lenny screamed seemingly inappropriate and meaningless “spelling assertions.” He definitely made himself heard and seen, and did so in quite an overwhelming way (even to himself, as can be gleaned from his covering of his ears while screaming one of the times). This behavior was usually ignored, or the spelling assertions were responded to in their literal meaning, as when the TA pointed out Lenny’s mistake. However, using conversation analysis, Penny Stribling and her colleagues found that Lenny’s spelling screams happened at those moments when someone else had control of the robot. Moreover, they noted that the intonation was one of protest— that is, with a rising pitch (Stribling et al. 2006). We could say that the overly loud utterances that appeared unrelated to the context were at the very least a way for Lenny to show his frustration at not controlling the robot and at failing to negotiate the regulator role, and they possibly represented his attempt to say he now wanted to play with it. A further conjecture is that, since the phrases were statements of facts or knowledge (even if he was wrong in one case), they were attempts to assert himself as someone who knows about spelling (i.e., a capable person). But none of this was, in its strangeness, taken up in the immediate situation. The spelling assertions were too far off topic, too loudly uttered, and too disruptive—in sum, too overregulative—to be seen as ways of participating, or attempts to. Lenny was attempting to grasp a regulator role, excessively so, and no dialogue or full recognition took place. He was not recognized in his attempt by the others, nor did he recognize them as full participants in the situation. We saw in chapter 8 that dialogue emerges as a way to handle interactional tensions brought about by strongly normative acts. In autism, this may often go wrong because of a clash between the specifics of autistic self-organization and embodiment on the one hand, and the cultural habitus or the languaging world of parents and caregivers on the other. Such a clash may prevent a solution in terms of dialogue and mutual recognition from being found. We find support for this idea in a study by Elinor Ochs, Olga Solomon, and Laura Sterponi on what they call child-directed communication (Ochs et al. 2005). Their research reveals, as we also saw in chapter 9, that parents and caregivers interact with young children according to implicit and explicit beliefs about how children (should) develop,

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and how best to aid them in this development. European and North American parents, for instance, assume that children will develop and at certain rates, so they organize interactions in predominantly face-to-face settings (in contrast, for instance, to nested settings, as when carrying a child on the front or the back or in side-by-side arrangements), making them use speech as the default medium, which is moreover slow, lengthened, highpitched speech infused with high positive affect (“baby talk”). Ochs and colleagues also show that with an autistic child, with whom it is hard to connect and communicate, caregivers may further exaggerate any or all of these elements. They may lean in closer, with still higher expressiveness— wide-open mouths and eyes—and even more emphatically praise the child, including for just trying, not always also succeeding, at a task (e.g., “Good TRY:::ing!!”; Ochs et al. 2005, 563). Through such emphases, caregivers engage in overregulation, in reaction to which the autistic child can often only underregulate. These interaction styles may not be a good match for autistic children, who are often very sensitive to close interpersonal contact. And yet parents and caregivers, with the best will in the world, but because these are the ways of their world, often do not easily find alternatives. Fortunately though, “the dispositions that compose the habitus of [child-directed communication] are not static; rather, members continuously improvise ways of thinking, acting, and feeling in relation to children’s life worlds as they inhabit and construct them” (ibid., 565). Ochs and Solomon (2010) describe ways caregivers may help autistic children in their becoming linguistic bodies, ways that match up their body styles and skills with an adept, flexible habitus. Some initial parameters and conditions for such a habitus are other than face-to-face positioning. Examples might include sitting next to each other; letting interactions be mediated by artifacts and even animals; using writing, pointing, movement, and music as primary media of communication; showing restrained affect; using a moderate to rapid tempo; restricting topics to objective knowledge; and keeping conversation sequences short. These suggestions would facilitate genuine coregulation (or at least avoid the conditions that make typical aspects of autistic sense-making difficult). This may help reduce the need for strongly normative acts on the part of either the child with autism or of those around them. According to our model, many social acts come before or bypass a need for personal recognition. Highlighting this is useful in general, but also especially for autism. The prepersonal, genre-specified normativities of many social acts (the sedimented formulas or commonplaces built into the

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linguistic habitus), such as those used in interacting with a government agency, whether via a clerk at a counter or online, may be something autistics can rely on in moments of difficulty with close interpersonal contact, moments we actually all have sometimes. Relying on sedimented repertoires as a coping strategy—in other words, falling back on some recursive acts, as far as this is condoned or appropriate to the occasion—may be helpful when the interpersonal world seems overwhelming. It might be even more acceptable, the more everyone is aware that this is sometimes needed and enough. 10.3.2  Braiding Utterances Differently In chapter 9, we discussed full linguistic engagement and said that children’s sense-making is from the beginning whole, and develops as a whole in contact with language practices and through participation in them. The case of autism can shed light on this claim. There is a tension between a person with autism being—as the word denotes—isolated, and yet, like any other linguistic body, always already fully engaged in language. In the same way, autistic people’s sense-making too is whole and develops as such. How to make sense of this? Starting from this wholeness, where do things go wrong, so that for and with people with autism there is often a broken connection? Full linguistic engagement means that we are enveloped by language, but not like an object wrapped in paper. Engagement is mutual: we participate in linguistic worlds and everyone does so with their capacities, with their own ways of engaging, which may or may not be well matched to those of others at any particular instant. What are the patterns we find when people with autism engage in the live stream of language? We can conjecture that autistics, as our second hypothesis, tend to be better at the pragmatic aspects of dialogue than at the expressive aspects. This may be a direct consequence of their difficulties in engaging in coregulation and acts of mutual recognition. The pragmatic elements (say of an utterance) have direct effects on the practical aspects of the interactive situation, whereas the expressive aspects are more subtly related to the relations between the participants. The combined sources of meaning that make up the skill of interpretive sense-making are hard to disentangle if the undercurrent of interpersonal relating that flows together with the pragmatic aspects of utterances is difficult to access. An ambiguous situation (such as an utterance expressed sarcastically) demands interpretive moves. An autistic person may be sensitive to the need for such interpretive sensemaking, but the complexities drive her to grasp more firmly at aspects of

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the utterance she has fewer doubts about. In this case that would be the pragmatic elements: what the utterance most literally says or does. Take as an example a conversation between an autistic boy and his parents, where the boy reports his grandmother questioning his grandfather, who had taken the boy out on a bike ride, something she deemed unsafe (Ochs et al. 2004). The boy’s parents react to this relaying of the grandmother’s questions, recognizing her “interrogation” style. They laugh and comment that she should have been a lawyer or a detective. The boy says, “Yes, she finds things easily.” What is happening here? He has grasped that they are talking about the grandmother using a cultural reference, but fails to see their attitude of amused criticism toward her. The boy centers on a known fact about his grandmother that fits both her actions and his parents’ comments, interpreting in so doing his parents’ comparisons. He misses, however, the expressive register, his parents’ reaction to what he himself has just conveyed about his grandmother’s style. This may be confounded by his having already missed his grandmother’s critical attitude in the conversation with his grandfather, even though he reported it himself, accurately enough it seems, to his parents. If it is difficult for the autistic boy to grasp the expressive register in utterances, it is even more so when this register later refers back to other expressive aspects he may have missed before. While a dialogue is being woven, a person with autism systematically focuses on some threads and others remain almost invisible to him, while they all are being woven in. It is incorrect to say that he is unable to notice the existence of these threads. They are manifested in the configuration of the threads he can see. He has to make the best sense of them he can (connecting a capacity he knows of his grandmother’s with the professions his parents mention). While the pattern of threads, woven all together, also relates threads that he finds harder to follow, he notices that there must be something there, and he reacts to it. In some cases, long segments of a dialogue may be sustained in this way without anybody noticing anything strange, until at some point a dissonance or a discrepancy makes itself evident, as it did here. Its roots, however, may lie deep in the dialogue’s past. Such a dialogue may appear suddenly out of whack, while actually, everyone has been participating in different ways all along. We suggest that a mismatch exists where people with autism are fully linguistically taken up by their surroundings and yet tend to stay more firmly in one of its registers, the pragmatic one. They can coregulate some aspects of social interaction, but often not those that require or engender recognition of others’ intentions or others as persons, who also express

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things as they interact. An utterance is both a regulation and an expression, and expressing can exceed regulating. The braiding of utterances connects these two aspects in complex ways. It may be the latter part, this excess of meaning that is (inter)personal and intentional, that people with autism generally have difficulty with. This is not surprising if the expressive aspects are those that are often most sensorially overwhelming, or too subtle. And yet there are also examples that seem to put this into a different perspective again. People with autism express wanting to connect with others in meaningful ways, but often not knowing how to do this. But if they have an interaction partner who gets it and wants this too, then close meaningful connection, even mutually enjoyable linguistic play, does happen. As Kristen Bottema-Beutel (2017, 27) says, “Children with ASD may more readily engage with highly responsive interlocutors, who incorporate ‘atypical’ interactive moves into their own talk.” Laura Sterponi, Jennifer Shankey, and Alessandra Fasulo discuss a number of examples of this in several papers on echolalia (Sterponi and Shankey 2014; Sterponi and Fasulo 2010). Their examples all involve the same boy, five-year-old Aaron, with his mother, his tutor, or both his parents. One thing he does repeatedly in interaction is play with withdrawal and engagement. In one interaction between Aaron and his mother, Aaron looks away and his mom asks, “What are you thinking about?” He looks further away, accompanied by an “uh oh” from mom. Then Aaron produces a repetition, something he and his parents often do in similar situations—his saying this in a singsong voice is a further indication that this is an echolalic utterance—“You’re looking at the brick-stove.” “You’re looking at the brick-stove,” his mother repeats, adding “We are not together.” At this, Aaron turns rapidly back to his mother, who says “Uh, now we are together.” He looks quickly away again, mom says “uh oh,” Aaron turns back, fast, laughing. She says “Do you want to be together?” and he replies, “Yes.” Aaron looks away again, laughing again, and the game continues in the same vein. Here both produce the repetitions, which are already repeated from previous instances of this game. While Aaron does not answer his mother’s initial question, he responds to its implicit aim of reengaging, repeatedly, in an exchange that makes them both laugh, and that is both literally and figuratively about coregulating. As Kristen Bottema-Beutel (2017) suggests, examples like this, and also “phatic talk,” such as repeated uttering of short rhyming words (like “bug hug”), which is not concerned with sharing information but with affiliating, may be a workable way of connecting for autistics. Phatic talk can connect people at and through the pragmatics of a conversation, without

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having to recognize each other much at a more personal level, where their utterances would express their intentions and relations. Recursive pragmatics can generate and express closeness but does not necessarily require active and deeper (inter)personal recognition. In an interesting move, however, Sterponi and Fasulo (2010) go on to suggest that playing with pragmatics can open up the beginnings of a personal, subjective stance. They show how, in further conversations between Aaron and his mother, the repetitions Aaron brings in end up inviting him to speak in the first person (something he doesn’t otherwise do much) and to indicate things he likes or dislikes. In particular, on being told to do something, he will often say “or else?”—a stock repetition, if you will. However, in effect, Sterponi and Fasulo argue, this sets up several next turns between him and his interaction partner, eventually allowing him to take a stance. For instance, when mom announces it’s bath time, he asks “or else?” and she suggests he will stink and have no friends. This leads him to say, a few turns along, laughing: “Yeah, I want to stink too bad.” Another example shows him doing the same thing during a game with his home tutor. Here, his “or else?” invites her to say that the game will pop if they’re not fast enough, and it will be loud and scary. Which elicits an emphatic “I DON’T WANT [the game] TO POP” from him. Here, it is almost as if Aaron, dialogically with his conversation partner, goes through a less personal statement, of generalizations and norms (if you don’t wash, you’ll stink and you won’t have friends), toward a subjective stance (joking “I want to stink!”). He not only reports but also incorporates utterances, which are generative of further interactive moves as well as self-presenting, self-regulating moves. Another example illustrates this as well. Aaron and his mother are watching the gardener from the balcony. Mom would like Aaron to say what the gardener is doing. She is in a pedagogical frame, literally asking him to produce a full, grammatical sentence. Aaron, however, puts off having to comply for a while when he answers her with a drawn out “yeees,” giggling, and starting to talk about “geeerrms,” one of his favorite topics. This diverts from his mother’s aims, even though later he does produce the full sentence, at the level of detail his mother was asking for. This shows him producing the kind of utterance that was asked of him by his mother, but also, more interestingly, he challenges what she asks of him in conversation, thereby taking his part of control of the situation, in a playful mode that both enjoy. This goes further than just affiliative interactions, and brings in more complex production and interpretation of utterances and stances. Aaron here plays with the participation genres of pedagogy and perhaps the rather autistic

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(but not exclusively so) genre of going off on a tangent of restricted interest (for Aaron: germs). Repetitions and reported speech may also be a form of autistic selfregulation, or an attempt at such. For example, Wolff and Chess report a child that, after coughing, repeats his mother’s dictum “You must cough in your hand” (Wolff and Chess 1965, 35, quoted in Stribling et al. 2006). When would we say this is a self-regulation, or an attempt at such? Another example from Aaron sheds light on this. Some of Aaron’s repetitions are of household norms, and of how they frame activities, like sitting down at dinner. One night, when he’s fumbling at the dinner table and standing up from it while his mother is serving dinner, his father urges him to sit down and put his napkin in his lap. Aaron says, “Because it’s … because it’s dinner time” (Sterponi and Fasulo 2010, 122). Self-regulation and social normativity here seem to come close. Another example of this is the smiling and clapping of hands that children with autism sometimes do when successful at something (see Stribling et al. 2006; Ochs et al. 2005). Is this an incarnation, or on the way to incarnation? We suggest that autistics will find it easier to incarnate societal roles than the stylistic idiosyncrasies of specific individual people. That is, they are more likely to incarnate a frequent parental dictum (“it’s dinner time!”), and less the intricacies of affective expressiveness and emotional reactions— unless their interaction partners are closely sensitive to their emotions, like Aaron’s mother is. People with autism may be more able to incarnate the more impersonal aspects of linguistic agency, and this has to do with how they move through the tensions and resolutions of the model and the skills they deploy and develop as they do so. Phatic talk or affiliative banter, whether it is verbal or nonverbal interaction (like tickle fights or roughhousing, or imitation (Nadel et al. 2000) or intensive interaction (Caldwell 2006)), seems accessible to people with autism, if engaged in with trusted interaction partners. At the same time, they tend to be better at knowing and applying more impersonal rules and norms, and can be more explicit (though rote-learned) about knowing them. They are good at talking about their restricted interests and find it easier to hold monologues. When into one of their fad topics, they don’t seem to need dialogue as much for sustained speaking as nonautistics do (except perhaps for professors! Incidentally, Hans Asperger allegedly called the autistic children in his care “little professors”, Silberman 2015). What may be harder to connect to for an autistic person are the personal stances through which societal normativity is relevant to us. Following our model, when a particular norm is brought to our attention, this often happens through partially incarnated others

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(the voice of the irritated neighbor if we play loud music, the disappointed look of a parent, etc.). For a person with autism, such rules may be learned in more impersonal ways, “because that’s the rule.” In this way, it seems that people with autism jump over the expressive details of face-to-face encounters—encounters that they do engage in, often by necessity, but in which they do not pick up or engage in all the same threads as nonautistics do. They may go straight to understanding societal normativity, because of how they are taught it in relevant interactive situations (bath time, dinnertime), and because of a need to self-regulate and to interactively regulate imposed by these situations and by their interaction partners in them. In any case, it is clear that the environment, the linguistic world of the person with autism, and the “match” between the two, is absolutely crucial. As we said in chapter 9, abiding in the potentiality of language stretches out beyond the here-and-now of an interaction, both into the sociocultural world and into the self being developed and transformed in encounters. If people with autism find the expressive threads harder to engage with, to produce, and to follow, then there may be something different as well about the relation between self-development, self-expression, and sociocultural norms. If the expressive aspects are missing, reduced, or faltering, people with autism may still abide by rules and norms, because of how they have been socialized into them—for example, by being intensely taught (some say drilled) in them, such as through traditional Applied Behavioral Analysis.3 However, without firsthand, interactively relevant experience with coregulating others of where, how, and why these rules apply or have come about, oddness often remains: an oddness for autistics about why these are the rules and how precisely they should be applied in their experiential detail, and an oddness for those around them in the form of a certain lack of fluency or finesse in interacting that seems so natural, but obviously is not, if it does not come naturally. Bypassing the “natural development” of these skills, by for instance installing the rules of Theory of Mind, does not make people fluent at social interaction (Ozonoff and Miller 1995). What makes people fluent at participatory sense-making is engaging in participatory sense-making. To summarize, we can give some characteristics of an autistic style of languaging. Several interactive investigations of autism seem to agree on a gradation of autistic intersubjective capacities (Ochs et al. 2004; BottemaBeutel 2017). Recurring capacities are those of engaging in turn-taking, sequencing, and general interactional coordination, notwithstanding coordination differences. They appear to have somewhat more difficulty with “formulating situational scenarios” (Ochs et al. 2004) or what we might call

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flexible switching between participation genres. The most difficult thing for autistics seems to be the situated nature of language, referring to and interpreting sociocultural meanings (Ochs et al. 2004), which may relate to a “difficulty in coordinating joint action and meaning that occurs over extended interactional sequences” (Bottema-Beutel 2017, 31). But with adaptive partners, it appears, some people with autism are capable of doing all of the latter. With regard to our hypothesis about the pragmatic threads being easier to weave and to follow for autistics, what these examples show is that, with an engaging, carefully attuning trusted interaction partner who has reason to trust the person’s participatory and linguistic capacities (Sterponi and Fasulo 2010), their linguistic becoming can be a blossoming. At this point, however, a difficult question turns up: What about the linguistic engagement of nonspeaking autistic children? The answer to this is the same as for the other linguistic capacities. People with autism who do not speak are still fully enveloped in the linguistic world in which they live, and their participation in it is the particular one available to them at any point, with the partners available to them (and whom they might choose themselves). Here too, the linguistic world around them, their participation partners, are crucial to what they can do—to their concrete linguistic becoming. This is forcefully illustrated in therapeutic work like Phoebe Caldwell’s intensive interaction (Caldwell 2006), or Jacqueline Nadel’s work on imitation (Nadel et al. 2000). Approaches such as these attempt to begin where the particular child they encounter is in their participatory capacities, and to meet them there. This is also a principle of dance and movement therapies for children with autism (Samaritter and Payne 2013). Whether this always works is another question, of course (therapists may themselves under- or overshoot their coregulation with difficult-to-reach children), but the impulse is well oriented, we think, of searching for the right stage of participation and working toward more refined coregulation from there. We have discussed autistic linguistic bodies on the basis of only a few examples from a small number of people. An enactive approach to any phenomenon always acts on a general level and a particular level at the same time. At a general level, we can speak of how life and mind organize themselves such that they are precisely mind and life. At the same time, the point is that we cannot but, and have to, look at the specifics of this or that life, of this or that person, in their context. Experience is inherent in subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and experience is particular, while at the same time also adhering, as a phenomenon, to general characteristics, to

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invariances. It is both these things, and so we should look at, theorize, and understand them folded into one as they are, and also with each open to inspection, theorizing, and discussion. 10.4  Strengthening Participation A fuller enactive take on autistic linguistic bodies would demand further attention to other phenomena that we have not approached in this chapter, such as inner speech and deixic inversion. Nevertheless, the benefits of starting to think about our model through the lens of autism are threefold: it has implications for autism, it has implications for improving the model, and it has consequences for all of us linguistic bodies (not just the authors, but also the readers, including, of course, autistics). Making use of our model and the concept of linguistic bodies, we have offered two general hypotheses that may contribute to a better understanding of autistic languaging. The first hypothesis concerns the tendency toward regulatory under- and overshooting in situations that normally would require a coregulation involving other people. This may happen with different kinds of interactive situations, from the timing of bodily coordination to sustaining conversations. The other hypothesis concerns the difficulties of holding together the pragmatic and expressive aspects of dialogic utterances, a problem that can be compounded by the braiding of utterances in dialogues. These hypotheses of course would have to be checked in light of the already mentioned wide variability of autistic languaging. We can almost expect that some autistic people may not fit well within the picture sketched by these proposals. Does this mean that we cannot glean any general practical implications from our approach? Actually, we can. There is one general maxim that we think applies to all forms of linguistic becoming and is even more relevant for the case of autism: Make sure that participation happens, at whatever level. Find the ways of engaging that promote and allow continued and expanding forms of participation. This is important precisely because there is such variability in how people with autism engage with the world and with language that no method will necessarily work for everybody, except this one: Do whatever helps and promotes participation. Participation, as we saw, requires efforts from all sides, particularly the effort of knowing when to let things be. This is not simply a positive or politically correct message for the sake of it. Nor is it wishful thinking. It is strictly a consequence of the model. By going through participation, including breakdowns and reconnections, the conditions in which autistic

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people must and can coregulate and coauthor social acts with others can be understood, identified, and dealt with, for each particular case. This is one of the reasons why for instance the participatory, personal, and experiential design of supportive technologies for autistics is so important (e.g., Spiel et al. 2017). People with autism already heed this maxim in self-advocacy movements. Dialogues can be critical of the social frames that constrain them (the dialogues themselves) by creating novel stances and perspectives. The processes by which a community emerges often use this enframing/reframing power of dialogues. This is exactly what is going on in the case of advocacy groups of autistics, because a good part of their activity is about questioning existing frames by which autism is evaluated by our societies, including turning the table by suggesting diagnostic criteria for “neurotypicals.” This is an appropriate point to come back to the idea that, as linguistic bodies studying autistic languaging, we also are changed. At the interpersonal level of everyday, real-time interactions, the conclusion is what it also is for people with autism: enhance participation. At the theoretical level, we can also learn from autism. For instance, studying autistic languaging has shown that without a perfect or good enough attunement to expressiveness, there can be both effective affective coregulation, and awareness of societal norms. There are multiple ways participation can be achieved, even if some elements fail. Languaging is robust. Investigating what goes on in challenged participation, and doing this precisely, patiently, and carefully, can make the difference to difference (here: to autistic difference and its place in the world). This brings together a plea of both self-advocacy groups and nonautistics seeking to build bridges: Let everybody learn to enhance participation.

11  Enacting Language “as We Know It” Chapter Enacting

Language

“as

We

Know

11 It”

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

11.1  Language Emerging What were you doing about this time, two days ago? You, reader. We’re talking to you. We’re asking you: what can you recall? What can you tell us? Was it the weekend, did you go out? Was it a workday, a difficult one? Dinner at home? Maybe not much happened at all? What is happening for you right now, as you respond in whatever particular ways to our inquiry—by ignoring it, by indulging it? How much impact do our words have on you? In whose voices do you hear them? Are you dialoguing with yourself—“It was Wednesday, I know because I had so many appointments,” or “Who cares? I’ll just keep reading,” or possibly “Even if I do remember, how could I tell you anything?”

We have held language—as we typically, unreflectively know it and call it—at arm’s length throughout the first and second parts of this book. The aim of the abeyance, to be clear, is not to preserve as intact and separate traditional, canonical, or narrow theories or folk knowledges about language, to be draped like a skin over the bones, sinews, and pumping organs of our bodies. It is not the case that in considering grammar, symbol, convention, and written language in this chapter, we have finally built our way up to the inevitable plane where ideal entities of higher-order cognitive abilities hang out. If anything, in confronting these issues, we find ourselves retracing earlier steps, steps that hopefully are becoming increasingly familiar to readers. The simple motivation for waiting to address phenomena like words and syntax and graphic symbols is that now when we come across or enter into the “basic, everyday” languaging scenarios of our lives, we can experience them differently, knowing better what it is that gives language “as we know it” its character. We can see more readily the various sensitivities and powers of linguistic agency, and the circulations between these, swirling together as the life flows of linguistic bodies.

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While we keep our feet firmly on the ground, then, we are seeking to reconfigure our relationship to the land we live in, to retill earth so that it may be dwelled in anew. We join others who work to coinhabit enlanguaged environments even as they study them and render aspects of them at different levels of abstraction. As interactionists note, “Grammar’s integrity and efficacy are bound up with its place in larger schemes of organization of human conduct, and with social interaction in particular” (Ochs et al. 1996, 3). Or we might say, with anthropologist/linguist Edward Sapir, that language completely interpenetrates with experience (Sapir 1927/1949). What is particularly new about our enactive take? A significant number of researchers have looked into a kind of correspondence or affinity between language and the structure of the world, of semantic relations and schemes regarding the organization of action and of utterance logic (e.g., Bühler 1934/1990; Talmy 1988; Croft and Cruse 2004). Our own perspective is likely to be compatible with research that links grammar to a logic of practices, material structures, and social relations. But perhaps the new elements we can add to these views come from some aspects of our model, in particular, the joint structuring and mutual accommodation of repertoires, the normative regulation of interactive encounters in driving such processes of learning and becoming linguistic bodies, the active meeting of the various spheres of autonomy (bodily, interactive, societal), and the tensions of incorporation and incarnation in which linguistic becoming is at the same time a further individuation of the embodied self. Even a “simple” exercise like the one at the start of this chapter can bring up myriad details, points, and phenomena ripe for an enactive exploration: Sensitivities to symbols, grammar, convention, regulation, narrative. The question of absent dialogue partners. The experience of interacting with a text. The inextricability of these sensitivities, skills, and situations from the fleshy abundance of your experience, the familiarity of your own voice, the shadings that make your perspective on the world your own. In this chapter, we outline an account of living, emergent grammar. Following this, we sketch an enactive take on symbolizing, gesturing, and reading and storytelling. We recommend that readers not expect that from this point we will derive everything that students of grammars (or narratives, etc.) study. We are proposing general concepts grounded on our account of linguistic bodies, which is itself grounded on the life-mind continuity. In offering our account of grammaticalizing, we have not stepped out of this continuity. Our proposal resonates with existing work on the connections between grammar and interactions, but the categories we have introduced in the previous chapters enable us to interpret these ideas in a

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nonrepresentational, world-involving way. We consider the grounding of language in the continuity between life and mind to be a contribution that may lead to more specific proposals. The situation is analogous with other enactive concepts, like participatory sense-making. Postulating participatory sense-making is a useful thing to do because: (1) It provides a grounded theoretical construct for an alternative way of thinking about social cognition. (2) It embraces and collects several existing dissatisfactions with traditional approaches. (3) Yet the concept remains relatively general in that not all forms of participatory sensemaking have been worked out, analyzed, and so on. This is an ongoing project (and this book an example). With enactive grammar, we have something analogous: (1) This concept provides an idea of how grammar happens in the agency of linguistic bodies, as well as of the dynamics of sedimentation in a community. The concept is theoretically grounded in the life-mind continuity. (2) It resonates with various compatible proposals (discussed below). (3) Yet here we do not fully develop the whole gamut of instantiations that the concept entails. Just as somebody studying the role of the gaze in interactions may find that participatory sense-making does not directly formulate an answer to her questions, somebody interested in ergative languages may find our emergent grammar falls somehow short of her target. In both cases what is missing is traveling the road from the general to the particular, which is of course work to be done. In other words, we present living emergent embodied grammar—enactive grammar—as a general concept that further work could link with more specific aspects of grammar as studied by linguists. 11.2 Grammaticalizing What is grammar? Philosophers employ the term in a variety of abstract ways, often marking a normativity that arises within a system or set. Broadly, the domain of grammar is characterized by rules that are external and must be learned, innate parameters that are locally specified, abstract forms or patterns that have nothing to do with content, and so on. The more standard linguistic usage denotes the structure and system of a particular language, with focus on syntax and morphology. Grammar, even when we narrow our focus to the particular practices of syntactic rules, can be understood as a dynamic and local organizing activity of linguistic bodies. Beginning from the primordial tension of participatory sense-making, we indeed find regulating, patterning, recursion, and

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generativity in negotiations of interactional and individual autonomies. Grammar is realized interactively as a dialectical movement between poles of spontaneity and sedimentation, of exploration and expectation, of community and community members. From an enactive perspective, linguistic norms should not be understood so much in terms of rules of grammar or lexicography as typically studied by the science of linguistics. Such categories ultimately derive from more fundamental autonomous patterns in a linguistic community. These patterns take the form of complex types of interactive regulation. At various phases in the dialectical model we see a dialectics of spontaneity/ sedimentation at play. This not only applies to cases of emergent regulative norms for the linkages of social acts that we can identify with aspects of grammar, but also to all kinds of practices, repertoires, conventions, ways of organizing groups, and so forth. With respect to grammar, we see spontaneity/sedimentation passages in different aspects of the model, in particular in the spread of networks of codefined social acts and the braiding of utterances in reported speech (both discussed in this section) as well as the sensitivity to rightness that comes with the objectifying attitude in linguistic participation (discussed in the next section). The first aspect concerns the structuring of repertoires for participating in interactions. As we saw in chapter 7, these repertoires emerge early in the model as participants use ever more sophisticated skills for interactive coregulation. The need to manage the primordial tension of participatory sense-making leads participants to exercise social acts together (acts composed of partial acts enacted by different people). As repertoires for partial acts plastically accommodate to each other among individuals that frequently engage in interaction, shared classes of equivalent and complementary acts begin to emerge. All partial acts have regulatory elements. Thanks to the establishment of codefined classes of equivalence, these regulatory elements are used recursively to perform the job of evaluating and managing the coordination of which partial acts should be enacted at a particular moment. At this stage, we already see two important grammatical facets here: (1) an increasingly sedimented set of networked repertoires for available action and (2) the recursive use of partial acts to jointly “navigate” these networks when interactive dissonances occur. The latter use of partial acts is at the same time the means for participants to access their own shared sedimented know-how—that is, of “going meta.” A double normativity is entailed at this stage of the model: the same sensorimotor activities (enactments of partial acts) become evaluated both as objects of regulation and as acts that effect regulation.

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We discussed in chapter 7 how shared classes of equivalent and complementary partial acts correspond to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of social acts. These relations are not part of a static set of conventions, but must be enacted each time through operations that regulate between alternatives. Regulatory acts bring sedimented relations to life and reinforce linkages in the shared repertoires, contributing to their sedimentation. Each concrete regulation, moreover, is colored by relevant alternatives that are not actualized so that the sedimented shared structures have an influence on which partial acts are enacted and how. This is important because it is people in situated interactions that produce these relations. The patterns in the shared know-how are not simply a set of predispositions that a scientist could describe externally by studying behavioral statistics. They have real effects as sets of virtualities, as alternatives to be evaluated and selected from, as influences in how selected options are enacted. Regulatory partial acts bring forth these virtual relations, priming some possibilities and inhibiting others. A living embodied grammar is apparent at these stages of the model, a grammar that “inhabits” the shared know-how of the participants. The same passages between sedimented know-how and concrete acts of regulation apply at subsequent stages in the model as repertoires must be accommodated between groups and a dialectics of distance/proximity introduces differentiations regarding what regulatory moves to use depending on who we are interacting with and in what circumstances. We find similar patterns with sedimented structures of interactive experience in bodies and in the sociomaterial milieu, and those structures being recursively “accessed,” brought to life, via the use of metaregulatory acts. The same occurs in the framing of dialogues by participation genres and the critical power of dialogues in selecting and transforming those genres. It occurs, too, in the need to introduce forms of differentiation between selfdirected and other-directed utterances. Metaregulation becomes increasingly convoluted in the case of reported utterances and demands a set of conventions simply for reporting to be feasible. Here, norms look increasingly like the grammar rules of human languages (“grammar as we know it”). The passages that produce these forms of regulation have not been explored in detail in our model. Existing work in psychology and linguistics, however, suggests how the dialectical steps might unfold. The first thing to notice is that reporting utterances involves a combination of processes of interpretation and production, resulting in a new utterance that will be subject to new interpretations (and potential reporting).

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Whether the report is a close quotation or a very indirect refraction, sufficient regulatory elements must be in place to guide interpretations when the context is ambiguous. Thus, an immediate repetition of somebody’s utterance with a change in intonation relies on the currently coordinated attitudes of the participants toward the interaction, their practical goals, and so on. A remark about something that was uttered much earlier or by somebody currently absent needs appropriate regulatory markers to avoid misinterpretation. In addition, markers must be in place to disambiguate authorial elements that change and modify the sense of a reported utterance: Reported speech is regarded by the speaker as an utterance belonging to someone else, an utterance that was originally totally independent, complete in its construction, and lying outside the given context. … The author’s utterance, in incorporating the other utterance, brings into play syntactic, stylistic, and compositional norms for its partial assimilation—that is, its adaptation to the syntactic, compositional, and stylistic design of the author’s utterance, while preserving (if only in rudimentary form) the initial autonomy (in syntactic, compositional, and stylistic terms) of the reported utterance, which otherwise could not be grasped in full. (Voloshinov 1929/1973, 116)

Grammar “as we know it” is inherent in the activity of reporting utterances. As we saw in chapter 8, utterances are by definition structured in terms of relations between persons and relations between persons and activities. At the point dialogues first appear in the model all of these relations may be conceived as emerging syncretically and sustained by interactive coregulation and participation genres. Relations to people and relations to activities become differentiated with the practice of reporting utterances. As in the case of a regulatory act used to select or evaluate another partial act, the reporting of utterances is a recursive operation, whose object of transformation is another utterance. But, unlike recursive regulatory acts that rely on sedimented shared repertoires, the reporting of utterances is highly contextual, and often it cannot rely entirely on established knowhow or sociomaterial conditions. Consequently, the operation of reporting must establish by itself sufficient background elements for the new utterance to be effective (i.e., to continue to support the frame and topic of the dialogue, to contribute to the producer’s motivations, to be interpreted as a report, to respond to others, etc.). Once regulatory elements are in place to differentiate the set of interpersonal and person-activity or person-event relations, further elements are needed to establish the links between the reporting and the reported parts of the utterance. In his 1957 essay “Shifters, Verbal Categories and

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the Russian Verb,” Roman Jakobson sketches some of these metarelations. He starts by considering different relations of reporting (between messages and contexts). He then classifies what we would call regulatory elements according to the possible relations between events (narrated and dialogic) and persons (participants in the dialogue and participants in the narrated events). He adds further distinctions such as whether only one item (person or event) or a relation between items is being narrated, or whether these narrated items are presented in relation to the dialogue itself and/or its participants. A map of these many connections leads to several standard verbal categories such as person, gender, number, tense, aspect, etc. Although this is rather more specific than the general person-person and person-activity relations we are considering (and assumes the operation of reference to be in place), it shows the possible direction a more detailed analysis could take using the concepts developed in the model. The advantage of Jakobson’s scheme is that it is not merely empirical, starting from language as it is (one of the categories following logically from his analysis did not even have a standard name). There are several lists of syntactic categories and the semantic/pragmatic properties they entail determined inductively, such as (noun):(object’s name), (verb):(action on object), (adjective):(property of object), and so on (e.g., Pinker 1984). Jakobson’s categories are closer in spirit to our model in that they are derived from a principle of relating persons and events, narrated or occurring during the dialogue. Other examples that could serve to extend our model consider further refinements and other constraints on languaging. For example, Herbert H. Clark looks at the different kinds of participation (e.g., addressed vs. nonaddressed members of an audience) and joint practices and commitments (Clark 1996). John Du Bois (2014) examines the structural, pragmatic, and semantic resonances between closely enacted utterances, from which he elaborates a proposal for a dialogic approach to syntax. Peter Auer, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and other interactional linguists consider the constraints and shaping factors imposed on grammar by the temporality and materiality of dialogic organization (Auer 2005; Auer et al. 1999; Schegloff 1996). Linking our model with analyses and proposals like these can further extend the enactive understanding of the sedimented “grammar of regulation.” In doing this, we must be careful not to dismiss the active element of the dialectics: the practices that bring about the “regulation of grammar.” Both arcs of the circle meet in concrete dialogic enactments in what some linguists describe as “emergent grammar” (Hopper 1987, 2011; Helasvuo 2001), a “notion that is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes

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out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process … the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance” (Hopper 1987, 142). Understanding a grammatical structure is not necessarily about abstracting rules, but about letting utterances be guided and shaped by a shared and embodied know-how of interactive regulatory acts at all levels. Copious evidence collected by interactional linguists (Auer et al. 1999; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Ochs et al. 1996; Tanaka 1999; Tanskanen et al. 2010) suggests that this know-how does not pile up into some reservoir where it is stored and from which it must be retrieved in the form of a priori general rules. This is the wrong view of the operations we have described in our model. Per Linell expresses a similar view when he writes, “We do not first have a grammar a priori, and then start building utterances in accordance with it. Instead, we are always immersed in languaging, in and through which we develop habits of using and reusing elements of language and routines of enacting communicative projects through linguistics and other semiotic means. As a result of this continuous process, regularities emerge and rules of linguistic behavior get established and conventionalized” (Linell 2009, 56–57).1 We hear similar warnings against the reification of linguistic signs and rules by researchers in integrational linguistics (e.g., Harris 1981, 1996; Love 2004). To get an idea of how living embodied grammar works in dialogic interactions, we may notice that a complex utterance in progress will not affect participants homogeneously in time but will rather present points of varying projective, pragmatic, and expressive intensities. Through these unfolding temporal variations, utterances reach possible turn-changing points. As with other partial acts in interaction, these are the points where the utterance’s effects become more intensely individuated, that is, the points of interactive regulation where, through orientations and projections, the sense-making of speakers and audience become most affected by the utterance in progress. According to Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen (2005), such punctuations in an utterance define an interactional unit, which they recognize as often being composed of a predicate and phrases that accompany it, what linguists call a clause (see also Helasvuo 2001). They suggest that the predicate … enables recipients to know what social action is being carried out by a given utterance in a given sequential context. … The clause is precisely that unit which permits significant projectability. … Orienting to predicates, would-be next speakers can monitor the course of an utterance in progress for its

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projectable completion and thus be in a position to recognize the social action it is implementing. The clause, then, with its crucial predicate, appears to be a unit which facilitates the monitoring of talk for social actions. (Thompson and Coupler-Kuhlen 2005, 485)

Clauses in interaction would then be homologous structures to what we could call the “action points” of an utterance or the points of high regulatory intensity (typically the ending of an utterance, but also possibly happening as intermediate punctuations). At these action points a certain regulatory move is presented to the participants, projecting a space of virtual responses (Auer 2005). The intended “unity” of action points is often reinforced by the use of gestures (Goodwin 1986; Streeck 2009a) that foreshadow the coming moves in a dialogue (e.g., a hand gesture indicating a rejection of a request or insisting that a response is expected). We must be cautious however with interpreting the moments of intense regulatory power in an utterance as fully individuated and well-delimited interactional units. It is clear that utterances remain what we have technically called partial acts, whose full effect is only obtained by how linguistic bodies respond to them (often with other utterances, equally open). Action points are therefore simply points of high regulatory intensity, likely to become endpoints of a partial act if other participants take up the projected space of suitable partial acts as a prompt for enacting a response. But, since this may or may not occur, strictly speaking the utterance remains open, even if the action point is clearly marked, for instance by a moment of silence. This observation does not contradict the observed “structural homologies between action projection and grammatical projection” (Auer 2005, 7) that become apparent at these action points. But it reminds us not to lose sight of the fact that the interactive practices that emergent grammar is supposed to help regulate are always participatory. Shared sedimented grammatical experience helps an audience project the emergence of action points in the utterance they are attending to as it unfolds. But so can an audience affect the emerging grammar of the utterance by the use of partial regulatory acts (e.g., Helasvuo 2004). Charles Goodwin (1981) has shown how a speaker’s grammatical coherence (as opposed to relatively fragmented speech) is modulated by the listener’s attention and gesturing (such as meeting the speaker’s gaze). Looping over such audience-to-speaker regulation, Janet B. Bavelas and colleagues (2002) show that at some points the speaker herself may seek the intervention of the listener by attempting to achieve mutual gaze while the utterance is in progress. These are examples of unspoken regulative patterns that help coordinate the construction of utterances. Emergent grammatical patterns,

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even when relying on crystallized complex community norms regarding speech production, are in essence no different from these more obviously embodied and interactive forms of coregulation. Grammar gets sedimented as reusable solutions to coordination problems in dialogic practices. We continue to highlight the role of utterance reportability in driving this process. Following Du Bois (2014), Danjie Su (2016) proposes that during conversations the frequent occurrence of utterance modification and reuse works as an innovation/sedimentation dialectics. Resonant reuse of syntactic, stylistic, prosodic, and semantic structures facilitates production of a new utterance by maximizing affinities with a prior one. Yet, responders are interested in establishing their own points and following their own motivations. As a result, modifications are introduced in the resonant utterance that conserve some affinities but modify the overall meaning (e.g., “I sometimes come to this bar after work” / “I never come to this bar”). Su suggests that the novelty thus introduced may percolate through subsequent reuses where frequently used elements contribute to fixed frames and frequently varied elements to open slots. From our perspective, what Su describes is an example of the dialectical situation that characterizes the primordial tension in linguistic bodies. Modified reuses are clear cases of navigating the tension between incorporation and incarnation. The resonant appropriation of the structure of a prior utterance used to express my own different perspective sets me on a course initiated by the previous speaker’s agency. In this way, we may find in a successfully modified resonance (1) the convergence of the flow of the interaction dynamics’ influence on the speakers (the projected structuring of a resonant response), (2) their contribution to interactive consonance (by conveying understanding through partial incarnation of the other’s agency in the reported or resonant utterance), and (3) the opportunity for individual differentiation and renewing of the potentialities of the interaction by the modifications introduced in the response. The assumption of grammar as a reified set of a priori rules that participants must bring to a conversation—the assumption that we seek to set aside—goes hand in hand with the still largely prevalent premise of monolingualism as the default mode for linguistic bodies (Franceschini 1998; Leather and van Dam 2003). The enactive alternative, in contrast, is well exemplified by some aspects of the complex phenomenon of codeswitching and code-mixing in conversation (Auer 1998; Gumperz 1982; Gardner-Chloros 2009; Jacobson 1998, 2001; Muysken 2000). The spontaneous use of two or more languages or dialects in a conversation can take

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different forms: alternations between speakers, or between sentences by a single speaker, and even intrasentential alternations and insertions. Effective code-switching and code-mixing can occur between languages with very different grammars (e.g., Basque and Spanish). Alternation may be so fluent that some linguists suggest they should be treated as “mixed codes” rather than the combination of more than one language. Mixed codes are used seamlessly. As John Gumperz (1982, 61) says: While linguists, concerned with grammatical description as such, see the code alternation as highly salient, participants immersed in the interaction itself are often quite unaware which code is used at any one time. Their main concern is with the communicative effect of what they are saying. Selection among linguistic alternants is automatic, not readily subject to conscious recall. The social norms or rules which govern language usage here, at first glance at least, seem to function much like grammatical rules. They form part of the underlying knowledge which speakers use to convey meaning.

Code-mixing can be a default way of speaking in some communities: “Monolingual language use is marked and is perceived by members as special, artificial, or even unintelligible speech” (Meeuwis and Blommaert 1998, 81). In cases of language mixing, juxtapositions within a single utterance are so frequent that it is difficult to describe them as alternations or switching of codes, the style of languaging often being given its own folk name (e.g., Italoschwyz). Auer (1999) suggests that there is a unidirectional path from code-switching among bilinguals, to more sedimented language mixing that may result in what he calls fused lects. The latter are characterized by the emergence of structurally sedimented function-form relationships (i.e., by their own grammaticalization). Importantly, code-mixing does not necessarily imply monolingual competences in either of the mixed languages. Speakers of a fused lect, Auer remarks, need not be proficient speakers of either of the mixed languages. In Switzerland, for example, “code-switching between Italian and German (dialect) does not imply full competence in the respective languages, but may be found in speakers who do not dispose of the respective monolingual varieties as well” (Auer 1998, 49). The presupposition that code-switching is a secondary phenomenon riding on full bilingual competences seems empirically questionable. In their ethnographic analysis of recursive switching of codes between Congolese immigrants in Belgium, Michael Meeuwis and Jan Blommaert propose a “monolectal view of code-switching” whereby “the overall code-switched variant used by speakers is not seen as a product of blending between two

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or more languages (with its implication of full knowledge of those languages), but as one code in its own right,” operating with its own dynamics according to the concrete interactive situation (Meeuwis and Blommaert 1998, 76). In fact, unlike attempts to explain code-switching from a cognitive/individualistic perspective by postulating rational-choice models weighing various rights, obligations, attitudes, and identities (e.g., MyersScotton 1999), Li Wei (2005) interprets instances of switching and mixing in Chinese-English bilingual speakers as meaningful in regulating talk-ininteraction. Switches may be used to draw the conversation in a new direction or reframe it, to mark reinforcements or signal noncompliance. In Merleau-Pontyan terms, code-mixing affords rich opportunities for appreciating instances of singing the world—for example, in the creation of bilingual compound verbs (Gardner-Chloros 2009, 108) as well as multilingual puns. These forms that could not be explained as the summation of two grammar systems highlight the dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation. New grammatical and lexical norms may emerge quickly in code-mixing communities, for instance by favoring mixed structures that facilitate alterations or insertions or are otherwise highly congruent between the two monolingual variants (Boeschoten 1998). Rita Franceschini (1998) proposes a useful reversal of the (mono)linguistic aprioristic picture of grammar. She suggests that code-switching should not be seen as an exception but as a manifestation of variability in linguistic use and flexibility of linguistic behavior, characteristics she deems central to language in general (whether one switches codes or not). This is very close to our view of languaging. Code-switching serves as evidence for our understanding of grammar not as rules, but as concretely present structures situated in interactions and sociomaterial environments, including intergenerational relations, the sociopolitical context, and the history of previous encounters between participants. These influences on the actual dialogue are directly embodied as shared and negotiated know-how; norms and structures do not need to be repeated as rules in individual minds. Code-mixing is thus a useful variational tool through which to look at monolingual dialogic interactions. The ongoing flexible negotiation of linguistic variability shown in mixed codes is in fact present in monolingual conversations—for instance, when a dialogue switches from a formal to an informal style (Saville-Troike 2003), shifting the footing of the conversation (Goffman 1979), or when the conversation wanders in topic. Unlike the flexibility and variability characteristic of living embodied grammar, the picture that goes with the retrieval of abstract rules that then inform the production of an utterance is not that of sedimentation, but

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one of accumulation of particular uses. Sedimentation does not occur as the piling up of examples, the accretion of linguistic experiences, which at most become salient through the property of frequency. If frequency of use (e.g., Bybee 2006) were the sole determinant of linguistic norms we would indeed require an account of generalizations from particulars to universals. But a cumulative model cannot explain the emerging norms other than by an appeal to what’s statistically common, and this has well-known problems. Frequencies provide descriptive accounts, not normative ones. They do not solve the problem of how norms and common usage may ever enter into conflict (like the Bakhtinian centrifugal and centripetal forces in language change), and why such conflicts may result in new norms that do not necessarily reflect the statistics of the moment (a frequent pattern will not endure if, for instance, it is suppressed by a dominant group). Changing frequencies of use (assuming we could discount the contribution to frequency that results from applying current linguistic norms) play a role in one of the arcs of the spontaneity/sedimentation dialectics. A series of accommodative/assimilative operations must take place in order for the transductive and modulatory effects to propagate into sedimented norms. The result of this process of historical individuation, typically, will not be linear. When we consider the nature of this process, we realize that generalization to universal rules as a cognitive problem mischaracterizes grammar use and grammar learning. At all stages of interactive coregulation, sedimented structures come alive in the interaction. Regulatory acts make the virtual possibilities for action present; there is no need for representing them in the form of rules for linguistic production or interpretation. Because we look at language as a live stream of activity and not as a settled set of static abstract layers from which information must be retrieved and generalized, our approach to grammar does not require agents to store knowledge in the form of internal representations. Linguistic expertise is multiply embodied, the dialogic equivalent of a bicycle ride with friends. We should notice that the effects of emergent grammars of interaction that sediment into community norms extend beyond what is typically considered the domain of linguistic behavior. Just as linguistic bodies are grounded on the sensorimotor dimension of embodiment, so the shared grammatical know-how for structuring utterances into sequences, embeddings, correspondences, conjugations, relatively fixed and variable combinations, interrogatives, imperatives, topics and comments, and so on, helps to shape novel forms of sensorimotor sense-making. Skills such as knitting, preparing a recipe, assembling flat-packed furniture, or repairing

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a roof are hard to conceive or exercise without the action organization that linguistic bodies learn from grammatically structured practices. The embodied know-how for conjugating complex sequences of sensorimotor schemes is learned in participation. Controlling complex action is one of the well-known effects of self-directed speech (Luria 1961; Vygotsky 1978) and the effects of linguistic categories and dialogic attitudes on decentered perception are well established (reviewed in Di  Paolo 2016). But the links between grammar and complex behavior run deeper. Complex activities involving planning, composition, and variations often resemble syntactic structures in language and can be described using similar methods (e.g., Root 1975). For instance, functional similarities have been found between the coordination of dominant and nondominant hands in bimanual tasks and the structuring of utterances into topic and comment (Krifka 2008). Advocates for the phylogenetic uniqueness of human language see such links between syntax and action as metaphors at best or as evidence of a “top-down” influence of language on action practices (e.g., Moro 2014), whereas those interested in grounding language in the gradual evolution and neural substrates of other behaviors think the connection is more fundamental (e.g., Arbib 2012; Pulvermüller 2014; Stout 2010). What is clear from our model is that any explanation postulating unidirectional influences (from language to complex action or from complex action to language) is incomplete. To recapitulate, we have established how the normative elements of grammar originate in the dialectics of developing shared structured repertoires for coregulating interactive encounters. The more complex such coregulation is, the more recognizably “grammatical” the corresponding skills become. But at all stages, these skills entail a reorganization of sensorimotor networks. These networks, as we discussed in chapter 3, always show complex forms of operational closure and normative constraints, even for nonlinguistic sensorimotor bodies. Becoming linguistic bodies is therefore an ongoing process based on the transformation of organic and sensorimotor networks. This process contingently navigates the dialectics of the primordial tension of participatory sense-making. At each step, some equilibration is needed between the coherence and normativity of individual agency and the ever more sophisticated, more linguistic, interactive norms. In short, we find linear descriptions of this process limited in their causal structure: one suggests that for some reason action structures get increasingly complex and result in language, the other thinks language somehow appeared in evolution influencing all kinds of practices in a top-down manner, including complex action.

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Both explanations are causally poor because they miss or downplay the dialectics of becoming linguistic in concrete social interactions. 11.3  Symbolizing and Sensitizing Our claim throughout the present work has been that meaning applies to and happens for whole situated organisms. Nonrepresentational explanations of reference and content, normativity and intentionality, are viable when these phenomena are understood as living, dynamic activities of precarious bodies situated in—that is, sensitive to and powerful in—social and semiotic space. A gestalt switch is called for: let us not talk about “reference,” “rules,” “content,” “symbol,” or “well-formedness judgments,” but about referring, regulating, judging, symbolizing, and sensitizing, and thus be able to preserve the materiality, agency, and susceptibility of these processes. Typical conceptions of grammar “as we know it” rely strongly on the referential powers of existing languages. We have discussed the origins of the objectifying attitude in chapter 8 and how it leads to a practicegrounded realm of ideality. The elements for referencing as an operation, to repeat our previous points, depend on skills for producing and interpreting reported utterances as well as on collective skills for enacting dialogues that are able to stand critically against the normative frames of a community. Both these sets of operative and dialogic capabilities give the conditions for referencing and eventually for representing. With the help of the grammatical elements brought about by braiding reported utterances, participants are able to make social and pragmatic relations present, even when the context is not entirely shared. Utterances are therefore about people, about their actions, and about previous utterances, before they are about objects or events. We see this in the transformations brought about by the pragmatic gesture at the beginning of Tran Duc Thao’s account of the origins of language mentioned in chapter 6. The mutually enacted group gesture only ever becomes truly indicative and generative of ideal images (e.g., of an object regardless of its immediate presence) when its use is recursively applied to the self in its world- and other-relation. This occurs when there is a gap or a breakdown in the usual mutuality that accompanies the use of the gesture in a group—for instance, when the rest of the group is far away and yet the gesturer responds to his own enactment as belonging to the group and directing his own attention and actions. A self-world relation is

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transformed into a relation between self and world through the recursive, mediational, self-directed use of sedimented interactive patterns. Conversely, spontaneous reorientations or dislocations of the acting self toward shared practices become invested with symbolic potential; they send forth a symbolic power. We have seen this in the enactive symbols in children’s dialogues that emerge through metonymic selection, emphasis, or suspension of interactive patterns (recall the work of Mats Andrén and Ángel Rivière described in chapter 8). Tools in the Pleistocene are thought to be have been used in this way, as symbolic action cues mediating the decoupling of pragmatic and semantic meanings (Byers 1999a). Such enactive symbols bring together—thematize—a set of virtual implications that resonate within the shared interactive repertoires and orient self and others toward a new microcontext of the interaction, a momentary shared orientation cast toward a person, an object, a situation, an act, etc. As in Tran Duc Thao’s account, the symbolic character of an interactive move may at first be given through coregulative response where others “follow through” a child’s open gesture or utterance and reflect its virtual implications back to her. Living symbols emerge as nodes for sensorimotor virtualities not just for children but in all dialogues. Their main effect is to state a claim (often ambiguous and open-ended) on the current relations between selves, activities, and world. The ongoing emergence of symbolic activity may be difficult to appreciate outside of developmental contexts (children often make particularly creative use of language and gestures) since, like all other linguistic phenomena, living symbols are subject to processes of sedimentation. If we lose sight of these dynamic processes, the active power of symbols in coalescing interactive and sensorimotor virtualities becomes reified into a static convention, a dictionary entry. The braiding of reporting utterances empowers dialectical processes between the living use and sedimented structuring of enactive symbols. These are always concrete operations happening between bodies, actual interactions, and sedimented patterns in communities. These operations function as microcontext generators by casting self and others into the virtual flows and images the enactive symbol creates (like the child that blows air into a flameless lighter). Ideal images, as we discussed in chapter 8 following the work of Evald Ilyenkov (2014), are realized in symbolic activity (not simply denoted by it) in the form of meaningful relations between practices that orient joint sense-making through perceivable sounds, shapes, movements, objects, or places used to effect such regulation and that we call symbols. Once the symbolic skills for enacting ideal images transduce through a community, enactive symbols themselves become valid objects

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for recursive referencing and thematizing, provoking new demands on the structuring of utterances. Out of these demands we would expect verbal categories such as those proposed by Jakobson to emerge. Referring, then, is an emerging outcome of sense-making processes of linguistic bodies becoming together. The interplay of living use and given histories shows that in addition to grammaticalizing, linguistic bodies also symbolize and interact with symbols as “products” of this activity. Symbols re-present in a world-involving way for linguistic bodies who are sensitized to interactive moves and affordances through their codefined and complementary know-how. Symbols do not operate, as often thought, by externalizing inner mental representations. This is simply an explanatory inversion of their interactive power for re-presentation, i.e., for invoking presences (a power itself constituted by a series of combined powers for action reorientation, generation of microcontexts, orientation of sense-making, and thematization of ideal relations). In dualist thought, this complex, multifaceted, social power is reinserted into the posited “inner” mental realm; this is a cart-before-the-horse move unable ever to offer a naturalistic explanation of the re-presentational capacity of linguistic bodies. On the contrary, we see that, as interactive operations, enactive symbols rely on the powers of bodies, on the context of social interactions, on sedimented repertoires for recursive coregulation, and on historically structured environments. On this basis they bring forth novel normative relations between selves and world, relations of ideality, what we commonly know as thinking but revealed as constitutively embodied and interactive. It is precisely because we do not rely on putative internal representations that we can offer our account as a genuine noncircular explanation of linguistic and cognitive acts of re-presenting. Our view of symbolizing is therefore that of an operation that linguistic bodies perform that is at once concrete and often spontaneous as well as embedded in the sedimented repertoires of previous operations of symbolizing. Symbols act as jointly used and created constraints that bring forth virtual flows in participatory sense-making. Speaking in dynamical terms, symbols act as metastable emergent constraints that modulate the processes of social interaction and mutually interlock with other symbols. This view is compatible with Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (2012) proposal to apply to natural language the work of Howard H. Pattee on symbols as dynamical constraints in biomolecular processes, serving functions of measurement and control. This idea leads Rączaszek-Leonardi to a perspective on languaging close to our own, as well as an ultimately nonrepresentational approach to explaining representational acts.

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We notice, however, that not all emergent constraints that appear in social interactions are symbolic in the more restricted sense we intend here. We see many instances of such constraints in our model. The effective use of regulatory partial acts, through their evaluation and control of what partial act should follow in response to another, fulfills a function of control and measurement that would deem regulatory acts already symbolic. This is indeed in keeping with the etymology of the term (the symbolon as two halves of an object warranting the identity of contracting parties; see Liddell and Scott 1996, 1676) in that regulated partial acts are only effective as they meet their complementary partial acts; moreover, as we have seen, they call their other halves forth. But this is not specific enough to capture the contemporary use of the term. This may be merely a disagreement over the scope of applicability of the word symbol and not over the dynamical interpretation. Our choice is to foreground the engaged and the consensual (warranting and projective, “to throw, to cast together”) aspects of the term. Hence, symbols, as we understand them, belong to the class of emerging constraints on interactive dynamics, but do not entirely cover this class. They are active operations performed by linguistic bodies that call forth mutually sedimented structures of action and sense-making (other spontaneous emerging constraints may be deemed symbolic in our sense only once they are taken as such—operated on symbolically—by linguistic bodies). All living symbols, like all acts, are material, whether spoken or gestured, whether propped up by tools, objects, buildings, star constellations, or bits of the landscape. The material instantiation of some symbols, however, allows their constraining effects to endure beyond the acts that produced them, to suspend in time the matching of partial acts of participatory sense-making. Such is the case of graphic marks, engravings, tools, artifacts, places, and arrangements of objects produced or used as symbolic constraints on action. Enduring material symbols—often simply called material symbols, though we insist that ephemeral symbols are also material—are some of the central clues in recent developments in cognitive archeology. Lambros Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory is an example. He describes “enactive signs” as action-constitutive, primarily instantiating and substantiating, rather than denoting or describing, constraints of further action (Malafouris 2013). The symbolic force of wearing a badge or carrying a ritual staff consists in giving flesh to a series of performative enactments, not in describing or denoting some norm or tradition (see Byers 1999b). This is a crucial shift for the hermeneutics of archeology: “Material signs are not simply message carriers in some pre-ordered social

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universe. Material signs are the actual physical forces that shape the social and cognitive universe” (Malafouris 2013, 97). Material culture should therefore be interpreted as primarily active rather than as static, passive traces that only record or refer. The situation is ripe for confusion, though, since the contemporary researcher interprets descriptively the very same symbolic artifact used as action-constitutive in the past (“What does this object tell us about the people who made it?”). Their very power of endurance reveals an apparent fragility in material symbols: as the spatial, historical, and cultural distances between sense-makers grow, their meanings shift. This suggests that irrespective of their enduring qualities, there is always an element of ephemerality in all enactive symbols, the same way even ephemeral symbols are material. Lacking a sufficient shared know-how about the use of a symbol, contemporary interpreters must attempt to reconstruct the attitudes, goals, and motivations of those who produced it. The material symbol thus adopts a new significance, that of denoting for contemporary sense-makers the bygone practices in which it was used. The badge that co-constituted acts of authority in the past has no such effect today and only symbolizes a certain social structure. This variation in meaning highlights the fact that a symbol is both material and ideal: it requires the virtualities of concrete sense-making for it to become symbolic, and these virtualities will change historically. An insistence on materiality is a necessary move away from purely ideal relations of denotation. But we must follow this with an understanding of symbolic power as constitutive of ideality through living practices. In this way, as a result of their endurance beyond their context of production, we can understand the transformation through time in the meaning of material symbols not as a secondary effect, but as an inherent part of their dynamic and historical character. Enactive symbols are action-constitutive, but it is actions, past and present, that constitute them as symbols. Enactive symbols—whether lasting or short-lived—propose a projective microframing of participatory sense-making. They are always dialogic. Speaking of the word in particular, Bakhtin (1981, 279) remarks that a “dialogism penetrates its entire structure, all its semantic and expressive layers.” The meaning of symbols is therefore not something fully grasped once and for all, but it is always open, including its most sedimented conventions. This is clear in the phenomenon of non-sense, which is not the same as being sensitive to something as incorrect in terms of relations of normative ideality at play in a community. Non-sense is the unresolved metastability that results from enacted symbols that neither flow and orient

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the interaction nor are refused or overrun by the interactive dynamics (by indifference or by establishing their irrelevance or incorrectness). Nonsense is the abiding symbolic potentiality that momentarily entraps the flow of joint meaning-making by being simultaneously effective in some of its dimensions (e.g., semantically, grammatically, connotationally) and ineffective in others (e.g., relevancy, timing, delivery). Non-sense may be “resolved” through subsequent clarification, but if not, there is no escape from it other than abandoning the interactive microcontext thus created and moving on. Linguistic bodies respond to symbolizing activity in a certain way, feeling a special type of constraint and emergent orientation of their linguistic sense-making. Note that they need not all feel this in the same precise way, and likely do not. This is one of the factors that makes symbolizing openended. Symbols “as we know them,” like rules of grammar, are an emergent shorthand that consolidates histories of interactions and live negotiations, and bring a (not exhaustive or fully determining) force of sedimentation to bear on spontaneous sense-making. As linguistic bodies, we symbolize and we sensitize at once—they are two sides of the same coin, two features of one activity. As a result of this perpetual tuning process, we are capable of more abstract acts like grammaticality judgments, but these judgments are themselves fundamentally embodied sensitivities. Grammaticality is a sensitivity of linguistic bodies to the shared norms we use for structuring linguistic engagements. We never stop acting with our bodies and making sense with our bodies. This is why the felicity of a bon mot is something we feel and makes us smile. 11.4 Gesturing Over the past twenty-five or so years, with the advent and availability of certain video technologies and the rise of embodied approaches in psychology and linguistics, an interdisciplinary field of scholarship has advanced hand gesturing as a complex object of study. Of course, rhetoricians, anthropologists, and laypeople have long been familiar with the ubiquitous reality of people “talking with their hands.” What is new in this research is the multifaceted but common attempt to take gesturing seriously as being part of language “as we know it.” Hand gesturing interlaces with, anticipates, replaces, or outstrips speaking as a variegated phenomenon showcasing the dialectical ways in which linguistic bodies organize sense-making. While we follow Merleau-Ponty in maintaining that gesturing is a broad category of bodily intersubjectivity and speaking is just

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another kind of gesture (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012; Cuffari and Streeck 2017; Cuffari 2017), attending to the particular modality of expressive hand movements sheds light on processes still alive and operative but harder to see in the more evidently conventionalized practices of working with verbal symbols. Hand gesturing, as traditionally carved up in influential taxonomies, is by definition nonconventional: “Gesticulation accompanies speech, is nonconventionalized, is global and synthetic in mode of expression, and lacks languagelike properties of its own. The speech with which gesture occurs, in contrast, is conventionalized, segmented, and analytic, and is fully possessed of linguistic properties” (McNeill 2005, 12). However, a number of studies indicate that gesturing enacts phenomena that do seem conventional: recurrent parameters such as handshape, orientation, movement trajectory, or location in gesture space (Ladewig and Bressem 2013), predictable links between movement, form, and meaning (via iconicity, metaphoricity; e.g., Cienki and Müller 2008), and identifiable ecologies of environment-shared, task-expressive goal relation (Streeck 2010). Thus a live research question concerns whether gestures are, in terms of their identifiable parameters, idiosyncratic (personal, generated anew and uniquely by individuals) or reflective of community practices and standards.2 Work on recurrent gestures suggests that “gestural forms are not just individual improvisations of single speakers but are rather produced by repeatedly using particular hand shapes, orientations, movements, and positions” (Ladewig and Bressem 2013, 222). A range of studies identify “recurrent gestures” as an “independent gesture type” belonging on the continuum from gesture to sign language, placed between idiosyncratic gestures and emblems (Ladewig and Bressem 2013, 215; see, e.g., Brookes 2001, 2004; Kendon 2004; Müller 2004; Fricke 2012). An example of a typical iconic (less conventional, more idiosyncratic) gesture would be a seated speaker holding his left hand over to the left of his body, fingers loosely cupped and oriented downward, nearly in the shape of an umbrella, while uttering “you’re talking about the weather” (adapted from a video analysis, Cuffari 2011). An emblematic gesture is completely set in terms of form and occurs easily in the absence of any accompanying speech because the meaning is conventionalized—for example, a thumbs-up, or, for a less friendly example common to many regions, the middle finger. Between onthe-fly and quite sedimented gestures, then, would be recurrent gestures, like the cyclic gesture discussed below. Such gestures, born of repetition and observable throughout a community, thus demarcate a borderland between conventional and nonconventional or nonnatural and natural signs.

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One potentially far-ranging consequence of this recurrence is that gestures, without constituting a language in terms of language-as-system, can be analyzed grammatically. For example, researchers working with a “linguistic-semiotic,” “form-based” approach to hand gestures (Müller et al. 2013), suggest that “the four parameters of sign language [hand shape, movement, orientation, and position in gesture space] can and should be used as an instrument for systematic description of gestural forms” and as “an analytic device, which a) detects new and unknown patterns and structures in gestures and b) allows for a refinement and specification of alreadyidentified or familiar phenomena” (Ladewig and Bressem 2013, 204–205). This approach begins with the assumption that language is multimodal and that gesturing should be amenable to linguistic analysis, particularly to categories and elements that make sense for the visuo-haptic modality of manual action, hence the borrowing of parameters from sign language linguistics. Given that most gesture coding and analysis starts from a different theoretical and practical assumption, that of gesturing as a handmaiden to speaking, the idea that gesture phases can be analyzed and coded in terms of articulatory features alone (visible physical characteristics that distribute systematically) is already significant (Bressem and Ladewig 2011). Attending to patterns on the level of form and in isolation from the speech stream presses the similarity with grammar seen from a traditional perspective highlighting arbitrariness, segmentability, etc. Using this approach, Silva Ladewig and Jana Bressem find “a possible repertoire of gestural forms for German speakers. ... German speakers have standardized gestural forms which they use recurrently,” noting that one form in particular, a “cyclic gesture,” shows up in predictable form-context links with predictable variations in morphophonemic features (Ladewig and Bressem 2013, 221–222).3 The “formational core” of this gesture is its distinct movement pattern, “the continuous circular movement of the hand, performed away from the body, outward” (p. 216). In a sample of twelve German participants observed in ten hours of naturally occurring conversation, 56 cyclic gestures were identified in terms of recurrent combinations of gesture parameters and occurred in three use contexts: “word/ concept search, a description, and a request” (p. 221). These contexts varied systematically in terms of the gesture’s position and movement size, with movement size in turn being specified according to how much of the body (forearm, lax hand, single finger, etc.) was used in enacting the cyclic movement pattern. In other words, certain parameters were stable enough to identify the gesture as cyclic (movement pattern or trajectory), while other

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parameters varied in accordance with context of use (ibid.). Such patterning is both expressive and grammatical. Again, this research is quite significant for a field that has long wondered about the purpose and function of co-speech gesturing and that has kept itself in a theoretical bind by ruling out the conventionality and languagelike nature of hand gestures (McNeill 1992, 2005; Parrill 2008). In our view, however, the matter is straightforward. Recurrent gestures, like iconic, metaphoric, emblematic, and other gestures, are enactive symbols: they emerge from operations between bodies, interactions, and sedimented community practices, and they establish for participants microcontexts of virtual flows and ideal images, with attendant constraints and affordances. Recurrent gestures are, as Ladewig, Bressem, Müller, and others suggest, more sedimented than other symbols, but this means only that they are identified, used, and responded to in certain ways rather than others. Their unique zone of partial sedimentation—the way they admit of certain structural analyses and enjoy a certain stability in interactive effect, yet are not “wordlike”—actually makes recurrent gestures a more ready example of enactive symbolizing than word use. As enactive symbols, such gestures are neither fully open nor fully closed; they simply are likely to bring about this set of projective and regulatory effects on an interaction rather than another. Continua are popular in gesture scholarship, and this is fitting, because gesturing as a living process of sense-making yields fleeting products, and both processes and products admit of varying degrees along various spectra of measurement and demarcation. We take a step farther in maintaining that this admitting of degrees is not true only of gesture, or of semiosis, but is the beating heart of all that we call linguistic. What remains an open question, now that we have reinforced a continuity between gesture and speech under the banner of enactive symbol, is why and how symbols differ from one another in their varying degrees of conventionalization and constraining power. Cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker (2016, 39) notes that “being conventional and being linguistic are matters of degree.” His model of Cognitive Grammar attempts to chart this by defining a linguistic unit as “an established pattern of activity: a complex neural event with a significant potential for recurrence” (p. 40). The ranges that we take as most salient in determining the more and less of the matters of convention or linguisticality, however, are not degrees of entrenchment in neural patterning and processing, as Langacker suggests. Ladewig and Bressem (2013, 224) borrow from this cognitive paradigm: “We may argue that this stable form-meaning pairing is entrenched in the individual minds of the speakers since frequency of use

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correlates with entrenchment (Langacker 1987, 2008).” Without committing to Langacker’s (2016) neural sense of entrenchment, this explanation still requires somehow locating gesture forms in individual minds (presumably “picked up” from community exposure and from practice).4 We are in a position instead to see the symbolic skills and sensitivities involved in recurrent gesturing as live events of incorporating and incarnating articulations available in and for a community. They are available in the way that neural patterns, musculoskeletal memory, interpersonal relations, spatial arrangements, activity schedules, artifacts, tools, instruments of labor, places, and buildings and other environmental settings meet, but without digging trenches in any of these. Their availability is no less reliable because of this; quite the contrary since distributed processual redundancies that have sedimented historically tend toward robust forms of meaning-making. The degrees of conventionality and other aspects relate to the kind of metastability produced when all these factors meet, not to a presumed causal concentration of symbolic activity in any one of them and the potential loss of metastability that is likely to follow such entrenchment. We have already noted that expressive and referential as well as pragmatic functions arise as the result of bodily movements that, in the course of regulating and responding to interactive dynamics, are always becoming articulate. There is no need to posit a careful accumulation of entities or representations like phonemes, words, or gestures in the brain because, as linguist Robert Port (2010) says plainly, they do not live there. 11.5  Reading and Writing We saw above that what scholars call grammar has a basis in the real life of linguistic practices. Symbols materialize virtual relations that emerge out of the open dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation. Even if the words in an utterance stick to their dictionary meanings and the phrasing is commonplace, there is, because of their materiality, always an openness in the moves and sounds that do the symbolizing in linguistic encounters. Gestures are probably some of the clearer exemplars of this openness. But like spoken words, they might lead us to think that openness somehow goes together with the fleeting temporality and materiality of action, of moves and sounds. What about symbols that have apparently been frozen in time, the remainders of previous linguistic interactions, their material traces? Can they be enactive symbols as well? We have suggested earlier that they are, even though their action-constitutive power may vary paradoxically as a result of their endurance. This complexity might be a reason why

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enduring material symbols seem to approach the traditional denotative conception of a relation between signifier and signified, like a dictionary entry. Actually, inscribing and deciphering—practices enabled by particular linguistic skills and access to plastic materials—still enact meaning and play special roles in transforming and articulating relations of ideality. Here once more a live encounter of world and agency brings forth significance (which is not, as we might think, retrieved from a text through a pregiven frame). Even these acts, at their core, belong to the forms of participatory sense-making. A great deal could be said on the subject of reading and writing as embodied, social, enactive processes, including open problems such as the sensorimotor aspects of reading, phenomena like subvocalizations, varieties in writing systems, and so on. While we think an enactive perspective can in principle contribute to such inquiries, we do not attempt this here (see Stewart 2010). The short story that we choose to tell right now, given the ground-setting of previous chapters and discussions, has to do with storytelling itself. Narrative studies and research on embodied cognition have crossed paths a few times in recent years. Various explanations of embodied experience, from sensorimotor to enactive and ecological accounts, have been employed to support theories of narrative human experientiality (e.g., Caracciolo 2012, 2014; Kuzmičová 2012, 2014; Polvinen 2016; Popova 2014, 2015; Troscianko 2014), and conversely, the structuring effects of narratives on experience, practices, self-constitution, and thought have supported theories of embodied/enactive cognition (Hutto 2008; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Gallagher 2011, 2014). On the road to narrative, an enactive account of literacy in linguistic communities fitting our dialectical model is currently missing. The same may be said for the case of oral storytelling as a practice. Here we may simply point in the direction of what we consider important landmarks in this only partially explored area of the enactive approach. One such landmark derives from our account of enactive symbols and their power to position linguistic bodies as personal selves confronting a world. They do so by casting forward shared virtual images initially in a context of dialogic interactions, then as a more general symbolic sensitivity of linguistic bodies applicable to practically any context. These relations of virtual orientations and images materialize in sounds, movements, objects, and so on. They may also materialize in graphic form—that is, as real images. Countless studies are concerned with the early uses of patterns and traces in the creation of figurative and nonfigurative material symbols. While writing systems are a late development in human history, what André Leroi-Gourhan

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(1964/1993) describes as graphism, the technologies of graphic and pictorial symbol production and use may be postulated as an early linguistic capacity, one that, we could speculate, entangles the recursive production of tools (actively changing the environment) and the skills at making sense of material traces as signs of past activity (actively reading the environment).5 Early graphism or line-making, producing textures rather than texts, was part of a performance, an enactment not only of patterns of inscription and engraving, but of storytelling, rituals, dances, etc. Certain kinds of early graphic patterns that from our vantage point are associated with writing, induce an ordering in experienced temporalities, producing what Tim Ingold (2007) describes as a “linearization of time.” Graphic symbols, in these ways, further concretize live symbolic activity, introducing in their materiality a temporal endurance, a temporal direction, and an expanded potential for multiple orientations of sense-making as different linguistic bodies interact with material symbols repeatedly and at increasingly distant times. In sum, live symbolic practices produce virtual images that then guide the practices of graphic production, use, and interpretation, resulting in enduring material images. Hans Jonas saw in this recursive relation between collective sense-making and image-making a defining (or at least a sufficiently specifying) aspect of personhood (Jonas 1966). We are still a long distance from being able to say what happens while we are reading a text, but this first intermediate step is helpful for observing a fundamental aspect of graphism: material symbolic patterns are inherently authored by somebody, not like natural signs linked only causally to bodily activity (e.g., footprints), but as products of linguistic bodies acting symbolically. In short, some linguistic body, some voice or gesture, is always behind a material symbol.6 The ongoing becoming of linguistic bodies in dialogue is an enacting; it is the coupling of flows of self-directed and other-directed utterances. These flows regulate whole agents. When an audience sustains attention to the symbolic utterances of one participant, a series of jointly enacted, concatenated virtual images flow in their joint sense-making. This sustained attention is a precursor to the activity of oral storytelling, whose dialogic character, despite the quasi-monological utterances that make up a story, is still inherent in it. It is important to remark on the paradoxically active and submissive role of the audience as they listen to the campfire story. There is submission to the utterance flows produced by the narrator and to the stream of images her enactive symbolic activity helps produce, but this effect is only possible by the active engagement of the audience as linguistic

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bodies, whose self-directed utterances must already be flowing before they can be oriented by a story. Without engaging with this active flow, the story falls on deaf ears. The situation of willing submission through activity is analogous to the yoga class where the teacher, using utterances, directs the bodily movements and experiences of the students. Listening to a story is, similarly, submitting to the orienting of one’s own self-directed utterances. Recall that self-directed utterances that regulate the agent as a whole are reports on past utterances and as such realize a truly complex plurivocality and temporality. Unlike more traditional accounts, where a narrative and its experience are distanced by layers of information processing, from an enactive perspective a narrative engagement, as a subspecies of dialogues, enters directly into the patterns that constitute ongoing linguistic becoming. There is a directness of meaning-making because the flows of narrative operate directly on the ongoing processes of linguistic constitution. Listening to a story and experiencing other kinds of linguistic engagement relate to our linguistic bodies like eating and digesting an apple relate to our organic and sensorimotor bodies. From these two landmarks, the production and use of graphic material symbols and the emergence of narrative engagements in dialogue, we may see the writing and reading of texts as interactional and constitutional practices of literate linguistic bodies. This idea offers an opportunity to tap into the resources of our model as we can see that shifts in agency asymmetries actually constitute narrative sense-making (telling or being told). Texts as complex symbolic artifacts involve various techniques of production and use: notes, letters, instructions, lists. In all cases they unavoidably embody voices, the author’s voice and those indirectly reported in multiple embeddings. Reading texts, therefore, is also a form of actively letting be in our linguistic engagements. In this way, texts orient and become incarnated in a reader’s self-directed utterance flows. Applying the theory of participatory sense-making to narrative, Yanna Popova (2014, 2015) argues that reading a novel is a case of social interaction in which a reader enacts a narrative consciousness mediated by an active engagement with a text—and thereby enacts the entailed teller and reported voices the reader then encounters dialogically.7 In this situation, the reader is a linguistic body, and the text is a material-symbolic object embodying utterances of assumed conversational participants (Popova 2015, 64). We might add that these conversational participants are engaged in the storytelling genre of dialogic participation. Even when a text may play with other forms of engagement, like directly addressing the reader (as

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in our epigraph), or as in letters, reports, lists, images, etc.,8 the narrative consciousness emerges as a dialogic engagement of the reader and the text in the mode of letting go of the guidance and modulation of self-directed utterances. Narrative experience does not necessarily vanish when the book is closed (briefly or for good); thanks to the possibility of having been incarnated in the reader’s flow of self-directed utterances, it reverberates there in affective entanglement with all the other dimensions of embodiment. The present reader may already have noted some peculiar consequences of this arrangement. There is a given asymmetry between reader and text that matters to participatory sense-making, because the text is not a linguistic body but is the product of one (or more). Even if, in the case of works of fiction, the text is taken as the contribution of a distinct agent in an ongoing conversation, there is still the question of the book as material carrier of the story, which endures in time and space among other objects, lighting, noise, and so on and can be obscured from view, put down, or set aside. There are again fundamental asymmetries that obtain between the reader and the narrative consciousness she enacts by approaching the text as conversation partner. We wish to emphasize, as Popova (2014, 2015) indicates, that despite this strangeness, in both cases, coregulation is not only a possible but is the correct characterization of the engagement. The differences between linguistic body, text, and enacted narrative consciousness sometimes result in more regulatory agency and sometimes in less vis-à-vis the constraining influence of the narrative consciousness on the reader-text engagement. We thus have a range of specific cases of interactive asymmetry; the core logic of dialectical tension in participatory sensemaking works to explain reading a narrative without losing the bodily or interactive constitutions of the processes involved, including the actual act of reading with its material and temporal constraints. In an ongoing project, Popova and Cuffari (2017, 2018) propose that one axis along which interactive asymmetry in narrative sense-making can be tracked in its dynamic unfolding is the temporal re-presentation, or pacing, of the text. Semiotic analysis of temporality (lived time) identifies marked accelerations or decelerations in the text, which, Popova and Cuffari propose, modulate reader agency within the enaction of narrative consciousness. Keeping with the terms of the model, these changes in narrative pace (cued by specific use or variation in tense, aspect, adverb, repetition, rhythm/sentence length, topic, etc.) are akin to turns in a conversation. In other words, they function as utterances, and sharp(er) deviations from a (locally established) default pace create the same instability or perturbation as confusions in participation genre.9 This means that to work back

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to equilibrium, readers engage in utterance reporting and self-correction. Decelerations, moments in the narrative where action or completion of action is suspended, or where narrative time is frozen to allow checking in on multiple storylines or perspectives, expand reader agency by leaving an open space that the reader must fill. Accelerations, for example in summary passages, are no less work for the reader but may reduce agency as the meaning-making tips more heavily to the side of the narrator, who sees all and orchestrates multiple timescales and event patterns into a quick, condensed turn the reader must then unpack and order. Here we witness some of the extra challenge or experience of effort that can accompany reading, perhaps explainable as a feature of distanced linguistic interactions. Javier González de Prado Salas (2016, 83), discussing the constraints of non-face-to-face engagements such as that between the author of a novel from 100 years ago and a present-day reader, or situations where utterance contexts may be impoverished, comments that “it is plausible to think that communication in these conditions will become more precarious or at least more laborious.” Given the differences in materiality and responsiveness that must follow from the specific constraints of reading the traces of a linguistic body, of taking on the roles of both producer and interpreter for a prolonged period of time, work is called for, and, we submit, work is increased when the reader not only needs to enact the narrator’s perspective but also needs to again find a synchronicity that sets the tone for the story. Writing and reading, we may conclude, are particularly powerful modes in which material practices give rise to ideality, in Ilyenkov’s term. The personal self as a precarious practice of linguistic agency within a community is expanded in literary practices thanks to the novel materiality, asymmetry, and temporality of these engagements. Literary languaging is an exercise of linguistic agency and as such is paradoxical in terms of incorporation and incarnation. In reading, a linguistic body enacts herself through engagements with the utterances of another. In reading, one is also writing. In writing, one is also reading and inevitably deploying utterances of another, styles of another (not just one particular other), styles of a genre, etc. The frames or norms thus incarnated can be seen as ecological constraints on sense-making that are strictly in the realm of ideality, but are not less real or efficacious. We do not mean to suggest, however, that linguistic sense-making is fully circumscribed by concrete, face-to-face (or nose-in-book) interactions. Language as the living agential force of linguistic communities spills beyond the borders of linguistic bodies: consider billboards, publicity

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campaigns, slogans. Here an interesting phenomenon emerges, the voice uttered by no body, the apparently self-standing text. Once there is a community of self-and-mutual interpreters, linguistic interpreting is applied to the world too and we are put in contact with what Walter Benjamin called the nameless “languages issuing from matter … the material community of things in their communication” that grasps the world “as an undivided whole” (Benjamin 1916/1979, 122). It is perhaps because writing and reading technologies are such powerful producers of ideality that we tend to lose our sensitivity to messages from the nonhuman world unless we read them as texts. David Abram (1996) notices that particularly in cultures with alphabetic writing, nature seems to go silent because writing and reading afford a massive focusing of human sense-making on other acts of human sense-making, tuning our sensitivities largely toward the linguistic, to the exclusion of other sense-makings of the world around us. The result is that, unlike many oral cultures, only texts “speak” to literate humans in a sort of limited animism,10 and so the realm of ideality seems to detach itself from concrete practices and from the landscape. While remaining interactive in nature, language thus freed is no longer easily owned or authored, but it becomes a way a community as a whole talks and writes to itself. This passage to language as a powerful and manipulable voice/text of a community, as we will see in the next chapter, leads us directly to face the ethical and political dimensions of our account of linguistic bodies.

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12.1  Choose Life. Choose Language. At various points throughout the book, we have consciously and without apologies chosen language—bodies, autonomy, individuation, sensemaking, agency, etc.—that serves to break dualisms that have sedimented in academic discourse. Doing this required a certain unabashedness. Making a point requires sticking one’s neck out. It requires literal bodily vulnerability. We only do that with a passion, with something that is worth a risk. The very attempt at formulating a truly embodied, nonrepresentationalist approach to language is non-neutral, even if it might seem to belong exclusively to the realm of dry academic debates. In fact, non-neutrality characterizes as much the content as the epistemic attitude of the enactive program. We assume a non-neutral position in realizing that what and how we theorize matters for practices in the world. This is not anything special about our approach; it simply grasps a fact that is sometimes forgotten: there is no neutral perspective on how we decide to study the human mind; nothing is just the way it is, untouched by an ideology. This is true in general, but it is all the more relevant for human beings as unfinished linguistic bodies who are in an ongoing process of becoming, as individual persons and as communities. Education is not an option for human beings, but an essential duty, and to educate is to intervene in the world. It is our responsibility to express as clearly as possible and to critically examine our own ideological framework and be skeptical of those who claim they haven’t got any. In bringing this book to a close, we want to reflect on something we have mentioned at various points, the wider dimensions of thinking about human beings as linguistic bodies. Ethical concerns follow directly from the heart of the enactive approach. We care about life and about the world because we are precarious organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies.1

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Immediately, this entails an ethical stance toward our objects of study, which is also a stance toward life, human beings, our own activity as practitioners of research, and the world we inhabit. Our account of linguistic bodies also sheds light on the kind of agency that claims to possess such an ethical stance, namely linguistic agency. We have seen examples of this ethical stance, for instance, in chapter 9, where we discussed the critical consciousness that emerges from the becoming of linguistic selves. Our description of autistic linguistic becoming in chapter 10 goes together with an ethical demand to better understand the sometimes counterintuitive sense-making of autistic people and to support interactive environments that encourage real participation. A concern for enactivists is that theories of life and mind should avoid obfuscating this inherent ethical stance. Obfuscation occurs if we choose the wrong language or do not dare to push existing categories outside their frames when this is called for. Our understanding of linguistic communities, of the continuities between life and language, implies that language is a field of struggle. Entrenched perspectives will never be really challenged if we do not learn to speak differently. In continuation with this general point about the embedded ethical aspects of enactive theory and the ideological dimension in using language, linguistic bodies help us understand the origins and varieties of ethical concern. At its core, the practice of languaging is ethical in that it entails a self-asserting reflective stance toward linguistic bodies, their communities, and the world. The autonomy of linguistic bodies is open and unfinished in that it is inherently oriented toward acting in relation to others (together with others, addressing others, in conflict with others, etc.) and toward the self as an other. Linguistic practice is a practice of otherness and, as such, involves inherently ethical concerns. To become a linguistic body is to place oneself in a responsible relation of care about others and concern for others. Ethical concern is not something that is added to already constituted linguistic bodies, as sociocultural normativity is supposedly added to a presumed original nature in dualistic thought. On the contrary, ethical concern is the essence of every linguistic act, whether oriented toward other linguistic bodies, toward the self, or toward the world. 12.2  Linguistic Vulnerabilities and Ethical Agency The different dimensions of embodiment, as we saw in part I, emerge as different kinds of autonomy and agency. Linguistic bodies are entangled with these dimensions. An invariant in these complex relations is the idea that

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bodies are always networks of material relational processes that produce precarious forms of self-individuation. By their very nature bodies have a perspective of care on the world. At the same time, bodies are vulnerable. Linguistic bodies are no different in this respect. What, then, are the particular sorts of needing and caring introduced by linguistic bodies? Linguistic bodies are nourished by communal and interpersonal relations. Identity processes in linguistic bodies are therefore complex and relational. Linguistic bodies are a social phenomenon, a feature of the communities that produce them as well as of the biological and sensorimotor bodies that incarnate them. The tensions that must be navigated by linguistic bodies arise from joint histories of linguistic becoming and from the living stream of languaging in a community. The integrity of linguistic bodies depends on the exercise of certain forms of agency and participation in community practices. It is also a consequence of the activity and attitudes of others. Linguistic bodies are vulnerable in ways that surpass sensorimotor or organic vulnerabilities (even though these vulnerabilities become inextricably entangled). The specific vulnerabilities of linguistic bodies include systematic impairments of linguistic becoming (isolation, neurological conditions), sometimes taking the form of systematic affronts to their integrity and processes of reaffirmation (both as capable linguistic agents and as belonging to a community). Examples include exclusion, impairments to participation, lack of recognition, not being skillful in a foreign language or the language of a subcommunity, neurophysiological impairments, mental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, trauma. While the vulnerabilities listed indicate that there are indeed “bad” ways of existing as linguistic bodies—that is, ways that expose linguistic bodies to systematic risk and damage—it is perhaps misleading to think that one way of being a viable linguistic body is necessarily better than another. The ethical question must span the community, the interpersonal, and the individual. We can then ask: What should happen in linguistic communities such that the potentialities of linguistic bodies are encouraged and systematic risks reduced? In chapter 10, we mentioned some of the conditions that can make people with autism wither or thrive. These conditions intimately connect wider societal norms and expectations about what counts as good or healthy with specific interpersonal histories and patterns of interactions within a family, psychological and neurophysiological particularities of autistic bodies, and the variability of autistic becoming. We encountered examples of better ways to configure these relations—for instance, in attitudes that encourage

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participation, humor, and interpersonal connection. Changes at the community level that come from critical stances, such as the formation of selfadvocacy communities and the dissemination into the wider public of diverse knowledge about autism, are also part of a community process of becoming better at understanding autism. Our point is that the ethical concerns raised by linguistic vulnerabilities must be addressed by taking their whole complexity into account. It follows from our theory that to do anything less would itself be unethical. It is equally dangerous to reduce personal grievances to abstract community patterns, or concrete community problems to the sum of individual attitudes. As we discussed in chapter 8, through self-regulation and self-talk, through the displaced stance on their own bodies, linguistic bodies bring forth an ethical dimension. There are no ethical agents before linguistic bodies. But the possibility of self-control, and of adopting critical stances toward oneself, others, and one’s community, do not make linguistic agency ethical simply as a result of being able to assign responsibilities for actions and events. On the contrary, we have seen how difficult it can be to navigate the tensions of linguistic sense-making without any residual ambiguities due to the open-endedness of linguistic acts as well as the material autonomy of interactive patterns. Linguistic agency is ethical agency precisely because of the ambiguities that coemerge with linguistic powers of critical reflection and self-control. Linguistic practice involves making choices. The production of person-level subjectivity demands the ongoing navigation of the tensions between incorporation and incarnation, a problem that has no general solution, which is precisely what makes it an ethical problem. If we had a method for systematically managing this tension, ethics would be superfluous at this level. Take for instance the act of reporting an utterance. As discussed, the original intention behind an utterance is always open to criticism. We hear in it the voice of the agent as well as the voices of incarnated agencies. For linguistic bodies in particular, the dependence is on the agencies of others, making the question of choice and attribution always open to revision. Did this person mean what he said? Did he say what he meant? This does not remove responsibility for linguistic acts. Ambiguity makes the question of responsibility an ethical one, a question of what attitudes we should take to what we and others say. The ethical dimensions are operative as much before as after the utterance event. If full control were possible in determining the contents of an utterance and the way it should be interpreted, we would be reintroducing a dualism into our account that

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devalues the bodily constraints of all of our acts and the autonomy of interactions. Such perfect control can never exist in the material world. But we need not resign ourselves to the opposite idea: that we have no control over what we say, or how we interpret what others say. It is after all a concrete linguistic body that incorporates and controls the flow of utterances that make up our autonomy, even when these incorporated utterances contain the traces (opinions, attitudes, intentions) of other agents. In ambiguity and imperfection, linguistic bodies adopt an ethical stance toward their own acts and those of others. The ethical stance is a practical one, a type of ethical know-how. We should think of it as a form of expertise, like riding a bicycle, with the double implication that we can be more or less ethically skillful and that our ethical attitudes are often prereflective.2 We may learn something about the norms in our community in the form of abstract rules (e.g., popular refrains), but the deeper learning only happens through practice, including, as a matter of necessity, breakdowns. We should not be afraid of ethical breakdowns. On occasions, however, precisely because of the thematizing and critical power of utterances, the ethical stance becomes explicitly enacted: the avowed ownership of an act, a declaration of love, an act of solidarity, a gesture of rebellion, a recognition of one’s mistakes, a commitment to a cause or a leader, the use of a political slogan, the identification with certain groups, the rejection of others, the faithfulness to the outcomes of a life-changing event (Badiou 2001), the construction of an identity, an act of teaching, an act of caring, and so on. Explicit ethical acts ride, so to speak, on the constitutive power of prereflective ethical know-how tacitly animating all the acts performed as linguistics bodies, but they also make use of the critical powers of linguistic bodies to question frames and norms, or to question one’s own attitudes and motivations. Ethical stances, combining prereflective ethical know-how and explicit ethical acts, vary according to history and situatedness. They may vary according to personal idiosyncrasies, but they will never be just unipersonal. There is always a languaging (sub)community behind them. There cannot be ethical agency that at some level is not also potentially critical. We saw that critical power emerges from the reframing of genres and norms that may occur in dialogues. Linguistic bodies may actively and critically question the origins and desirability of their acts and the norms and community patterns they experience, or they may not. Most likely they may oscillate between these possibilities, not always consistently. These are all ethical stances, be they tacit or explicit. But without the possibility and

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enactments of criticism, there could be no ethical agency, only sedimented patterns, blindly followed. The ethical dimension of acting in language is always present, sometimes as a horizon, sometimes as the focus of our linguistic experience. We feel that a choice of words in an email response may be too curt, we feel a tension in a conversation and may even be aware that uttering certain words could be catastrophic, we feel the double binds of trying to be honest, pragmatic, and caring for others. Languaging is never free from risk and sometimes it can feel like walking a tightrope. And these experiences become entangled with organic and sensorimotor bodies; linguistic risks are felt as bodily tensions, they trigger emotional episodes and stress, and if systematically experienced they may lead to serious disorders. The converse of this picture, which is also a specifically linguistic vulnerability, is that to live as a linguistic body is to accept that language has a hold on us, that we are partially open to its movements. Our behavior, our ideas, our intentions are in part the result of being exposed to the linguistic acts of others. These acts can go straight into our bodies, in all their dimensions, and in part orient and direct, even momentarily take possession of our affect and our agency. This is particularly the case where existing asymmetries are at play. The voices of others find an echo chamber in the flow of self-directed utterances and may not be easily silenced. Since utterances are constitutive of the linguistic self and of relations to others, in these embodied resonances, words sometimes cause harm and other times remedy injuries. 12.3 Microaggressions A frequent arena in which linguistic vulnerabilities are met and undergone is the scene of social interactions. Recall that interactive autonomy “feeds” on the unclaimed, preindividual excesses of the moves that all social acts at the same time are. Relations between interactive autonomy and participant agencies are varying and asymmetric. This comes with the significant consequence that full control in an interaction is impossible. As we said, complete control over others is not an interaction but a domination, and all coregulating essentially entails some degree of letting be, an active passivity in the face of others’ regulating moves. Building on this, we claimed that the acts that constitute linguistic bodies are themselves previously received acts of others both near and far, known and unknown. The primordial tension of participatory sense-making is a tension between individual and interactive orders of constitutive normativity, but for

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linguistic bodies, tensions between past and present, and self and community, amplify and distort this basic ongoing challenge. Such complexity manifests in a variety of ways in interpersonal exchanges, and sustains an excitable field—in some cases one is tempted to say a minefield—of potential harms. Consider the phenomenon of microaggression. The term was introduced in the 1970s by Chester M. Pierce (1974, 515), who wrote that “the major vehicle for racism in this country [the US] is offenses done to blacks by whites in this sort of gratuitous never-ending way. These offenses are microaggressions. Almost all black-white racial interactions are characterized by white put-downs, done in automatic, pre-conscious, or unconscious fashion.” The term has since broadened beyond black-white relations, while the features of “automatic” and potentially “unconscious” communicative behaviors, which sediment and concatenate throughout a community at different levels, and that have immediate and “stunning” effects on marginalized persons, express the core of the concept (e.g., Sue 2010; Delgado and Stefancic 1992; Sue et al. 2007; McCabe 2009). Paradigmatic examples of microaggressions under discussion in academia and activism today include: “You are so articulate!” (said to a black student); “What are you?” (said to an ambiguously nonwhite person); the use of the word illegals to refer to people in the US seen as Latino/a; assumptions about a person’s success or lack thereof in an academic subject or job due to their race or gender; nonverbal behaviors such as white people locking car doors in a predominantly of-color or low-income neighborhood, avoiding close spaces such as elevators if people of color (especially black men) are on them, or ignoring or delaying service to people of color or sexual minorities.3 The broad public conversation about microaggressions in the US today takes the form of a polarized debate. On the one hand, sociologists, psychologists, and some pundits take the strong outcry against microaggressions as an indication of the rise of a “victimhood culture” in the US, in particular in higher-education and public institutional settings (Campbell and Manning 2014; Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). On the other hand, many see explicit identification and rejection of microaggressions as a key move toward social justice (Runyowa 2015). In considering the opposing stances, one might find applicable Judith Butler’s intervention in the hate speech debates of the early 1990s. Butler (1997) rejects both the racist and opportunistic legal-political interpretations of hate speech as free speech and the self-victimizing claim that hate speech really does annihilate or wound a person’s subjectivity. In Butler’s

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view, following J. L. Austin’s philosophy of performativity in ordinary language, one who speaks hate speech is not a “sovereign subject” because she is not (no one can be) fully in control of her speech, either in the enunciatory action or in the achieved or actual effects of the action. At the same time, by Butler’s logic of linguistic being, the addressee is called into being as a subject no matter what he is called in the hateful utterance directed at him. A subject can respond, unpredictably, and so is not fully determined by the hate speech act; the addressee is in principle as empowered as he is disabled by the hate speech act. This is in part because the hate speaker draws on conventions that exceed her own origin or control, while the addressee responds from (Butler presumes) a more authentic place. It is also because the hate speaker is always betrayed by her body, whereas the addressee’s body, as a target exposed in hate speech, is highlighted in such a way that also at once resists the intended force of the hate speech. The hate speaker expects to humiliate and reduce the subjectivity of the addressee, but only reveals her own limits in so doing. The addressee, rather than being (only) humiliated and reduced, is revealed as a signifying bodyon-the-scene just as much as the speaker; this “surprise” turn of events may even give him the upper hand. In short, the addressee, qua addressee, is empowered as a linguistic subject, in part because both bodies (speaker and receiver) are vulnerable and excessive as bodies. Butler’s treatment of hate speech, based on her notion of linguistic being, potentially resonates with what our theory of linguistic bodies might suggest. She rejects both institutional and individual responsibility as a final answer, instead featuring local, actual, feeling bodies in unpredictable and unstable relations with one another. However, Butler (1997, 11) effectively divorces what is bodily from what is linguistic, putting them at odds: “The body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said. That the speech act is a bodily act means that the act is redoubled in the moment of speech: there is what is said, and then there is a kind of saying that the bodily ‘instrument’ of the utterance performs.” In her view, the speaking body speaks twice: it speaks the words of the (disembodied, conscious, greater) subject, and it speaks for itself as body, unknowingly and unwittingly. Butler here manages a paradoxical reduction of the “speaking body” to the status of an “extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse” (McNally 2001, 2). Yet it is precisely the entanglement of bodies that at once makes possible linguistic bodies, linguistic harm, and the agency of critical response and change. If as a linguistic body I was fully detached from my “other”

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bodies, the full depth of my embodiment would not matter to my discursive positioning and discursive vulnerability, and microaggressions would not “work” on me. If I spoke only “outward” from a body of which I had no interior or felt sense, again, microaggressions would fail to harm me by casting me exhaustively as a member of a denigrated group. As we depict in figure 8.2, which shows the constitution of linguistic bodies, these take a displaced but not detached perspective on themselves as bodies. Microaggressions are utterances directed at bodies that are in fact entanglements of organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies, thus showing up in a particular way in a social world—gendered, raced, weighted, abled, accented, literate or not, having appropriated certain discourses more or less well, and so on. Microaggressions threaten to dismantle linguistic bodies, functioning through a sort of reductive strategy: a person is described through some bodily feature (e.g., sexual aspects, hair texture, apparent disabilities). Paradoxically, the aggressor (perhaps unwittingly) plays on a monistic reduction of the person to an aspect of the body and the victim feels that her distancing to her own body is obliterated. Both seem to know that a person does not reduce to her physical appearance, but both the sustaining logic (you are just your body) and the offended reaction (I am not my body) are wrong. Perhaps a culture of microaggressions of this kind is a culture that promotes and is promoted by a dualistic ontology of the body, one that opposes a monolithic physical body to a disembodied self. Meanwhile, experiences belie this neat separation: one feels physically uncomfortable occupying a certain social space or dialogic role, if one anticipates or is shown that one’s very presence invites judgment, exclusion, or misrecognition. People interpellate and render each other more or less powerful, credible, worthy, in dialogic situations, on the basis of this complex relationship between embodiment and agency. Both embodiment and agency are linguistic; they are stylized, contradictory, other-incorporating and other-incarnating processes—and this is what microaggressions exploit. Pushing past a dualistic understanding of the body, our view suggests a different source and meaning of the bodily “excess” in which Butler sources the power of critical response to aggressive social action. We have already explained this excess as the not-yet-individuated material remainder of individual moves, which is exactly what provides the matter and energy that interaction dynamics shape in their emergence. A shift in tone or posture, a look away, a “way” of saying or not saying something, a moment of fluster or backpedaling, are indeed excesses of a communicative act that feed or starve the flows between interactional and individual autonomies.

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But the material excesses in play also flow downstream, from interaction dynamics and from broader community-level norms and repertoires to acts. Such influences may take the form of constraints, clichés, “tone-deaf” overreaches or undersensitivities. It is important to note the signature of a microaggression in the ambiguity of intention and the asymmetry of sensitivities: speakers need not feel or anticipate the racist, sexist, heteronormative connotations of their messages, but the receivers do. The excesses are local but also historical, and are distributed unevenly and differently. How might one respond, then, to the stunning effects of a microaggression? A common practice on certain college campuses takes the form of “calling out”: publicly shaming someone for saying or doing something that violates a norm of political correctness (or common decency, or cultural sensitivity). The callout is sometimes done to educate but is evidently frequently to shame or dominate, and at the same time to accrue sympathy for the caller-out. Such a response seemingly proliferates conflict and struggle for recognition of victim status, itself a kind of power. Enactive theory cannot endorse a plea for neutral discourse (especially not when the plea is disingenuous). Sense-making is never neutral. Callout culture is itself aggressive; it in turn treats a speaker as a community, with the presumed power and intent of a community or an entire normative horizon, rather than as a linguistic body, imperfect, incomplete, and hazarding meaning in unpredictable acts and excessive moves. A callout can in some cases be a microaggression—a way of shaming somebody for a lowbrow cultural background or lack of sophistication and being “in the know” about political correctness—and so the cycle continues. Microaggressions are real and damaging behaviors; they are material carriers of domination and privilege, regardless of the varying degrees of privilege that the bodies enacting them enjoy. The idea should not be to place blame on the individual speaker, the aggrieved respondent, or the community norms, but rather to ask how together they are coresponsible for interactional cultures that foster certain linguistic habits. It is of less value to blame people for the sensitivities they have or lack than to invite awareness and curiosity about these sensitivities and how they shape (literally, materially contribute to) flows of an interaction.4 In regard to microaggressions, it is difficult yet important to consider the varying and agent-intention-transcending influence of interactional autonomy on concrete instances of languaging. It can be too easy to miss this dimension when microaggressions are identified as such through a particular process of utterance reporting. The utterance in focus, frequently, is lifted out of a concrete interactional flow, frozen in time, elevated to

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the level of a community act, and made an object of political as well as personal critique. Sometimes the reporting is addressed to the original speaker, affording the possibility of a critical dialogue about the offending act; the typical form of microaggression identification however is a public statement made after the fact about an aggressive act.5 This single and unidirectional interpretive focus makes it hard to attend to the emergent third-party autonomy that participatory sense-making names as a crucial constitutive component in social interactive meaning-making. Just what attending to this interactive dimension would change or do for this conversation remains an open question. 12.4  Institutional Speaking and Ideology Linguistic bodies struggle for meaning, recognition, and self-determination not only within institutional settings but also with institutions and other instruments of power and authority. Put differently, we are addressed not only by other linguistic bodies, but also by utterances that issue seemingly from nowhere and no one, utterances without an enunciator. Consider billboards, buzzwords, and many forms of signage. It seems a stretch to claim that participatory sense-making takes place in these situations, but linguistic bodies do make sense of posted parking ordinances, political messages on bumper stickers, advertisements, abruptly ubiquitous phrases (e.g., “fake news”), the memes of the day. What is going on here? One could return to the idea of a summoned and enacted narrative consciousness, as discussed in chapter 11. Yet I encounter a sign directing me this way for baggage or forbidding certain items in my hand luggage in a very different context than I encounter the words in the new novel I buy to read on the flight. In the latter instance, I buy the book, I decide to read at this time and place, I open it to a page, I direct my eyes along the printed lines. I have less agency in the face of airport signage, no doubt linked to the reduction in agency that happens to everyone entering highly regulated spaces (where for example warrantless searches have been deemed reasonable in airport complexes in some countries, as posted signs inform approaching travelers). Another crucial difference occurs at the level of linguistic form: certain formal elements, importantly temporal markers like tense, aspect, pacing, are needed for a narratorial voice to be triggered and enacted (Popova 2015, 67–69). Who is it, then, if not a narrator, who speaks to us through institutional utterances? A clue comes when we note that we are working with simply much less text in most cases, and text that is on the whole simpler. This

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is language that, if there is enough to form a whole clause, takes a certain grammatical shape and mood: the imperative, but not only this—an impersonal, powerful, unequivocal imperative. Herbert Marcuse (1964, 86–89) names a “syntax of abridgement” as the mark of “the language of total administration.” This is “the word that orders and organizes, that induces people to do, to buy, and to accept. It is transmitted in a style which is a veritable linguistic creation; a syntax in which the structure of the sentence is abridged and condensed in such a way that no tension, no ‘space’ is left between the parts of the sentence. This linguistic form militates against a development of meaning” (p. 86). For Marcuse, as for us, “cognition and cognitive evaluation” require “mediation,” “stages,” “process,” in short, a dialectical exchange (p. 85). When we encounter words as if from nowhere, not only is dialogue precluded, but frequently the grammar itself shuts out the possibility of any rich unfolding of meaning (like the sort we find with narrative engagements). Then it is likely right to assume we are encountering voices of power and authority. Confrontations with discourse untethered to a genuine potential participant often turn into situations of maximal linguistic asymmetry. For example, in the case of slogans or widely circulated phrases (“death panels,” “tax relief,” “CCTV in operation”) there is no interlocutor with whom one can reset the discourse terms, or check intelligibility. In many cases one has little choice but to submit to the “false familiarity” born of repetition, especially in the private spheres of receiving news at home or in the car (Marcuse 1964, 91–92). There is a voice empowered by ubiquitousness, repetition, permanence, font type, sheer volume, and so on, which is designed not to be missed and is attuned to the linguistic sensitivities of a community. While this voice is materially presented as absent, to be filled in, and unapproachable, unlike that of real or virtual interlocutors, it is very hard to consciously avoid it unless one chooses not to engage in standard activities. In the absence of counterdiscourses and critical dialogues, the experience of these confrontations—particularly if we experience them as individuals and not as groups capable of effective responses—is that of facing a voice tacitly accepted by others, and consequently a voice of common sense, of consent, the voice of the community itself. Common sense, usually the result of a community talking to itself, sedimenting practices, facing conflicts, struggling for meanings, etc., is also forged by powerful actors who can maximize linguistic asymmetry through their access to resources and control over massive channels of communication. Their utterances are disguised as not theirs, not anyone’s, but everyone’s. In mass media, such

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manipulations can often be spotted by blanket references to collectives (“People think that …,” “The prevailing opinion is …,” “The University will not accept …”) and by the tacit setting of the “discussion” agenda in the selection of what deserves to be talked about. Paradoxically, asymmetries are enhanced rather than leveled by staging dialogues between a few actors, whether genuine or not, that take the place of actual community debates. By simulating participation by proxy, the spectacle of these dialogues augments the power of the tacit ideology: Why debate this particular issue and ignore that one? For example, why treat climate change as up for debate when the global majority of scientists and experts in the field see it as a settled reality? The audience of these dialogic utterances remains asymmetrically passive. Linguistic bodies are interpreting creatures primed to make sense out of the linguistic material that surrounds us and seeks us out on all sides. This activity entails a passivity as its necessary flipside. One hears the “Hey, you there!” of the police officer and turns around before thinking better of it. There is something similar about the way we inevitably work with utterances that lack enunciators but nonetheless can be experienced like hailings. If literate, or to the degree one is literate, one generally does not decide to read a sign in a public space. The sign is there to be read, and linguistic bodies read it. If hearing, commands over loudspeakers are as unavoidable as advertisements in your free music streaming service or along the highway when driving. One feels addressed, affected as a body because one’s first sensitivity is “as if” there were a real interlocutor there. For linguistic bodies, the readiness to interact that intersubjective bodies enjoy spills over and applies to language itself. Given that incorporating and incarnating received utterances are the constitutive moves of linguistic bodies, it seems safe to say linguistic bodies are used to working with formulations that precede them, as we discussed for example in regard to symbols in chapter 11, or the introduction of reported utterances in chapter 8. Complexities, difficulties, and ethical dilemmas arise when this aspect of the nature of linguistic bodies is used against them, as in ideological manipulation and the promotion of docility. But notice that this can happen on either side of the political spectrum. Consider Noam Chomsky as one example of a liberal positivist: he tells people how it really is. He arrives on the scene as an expert, with his voice and his alone meant to speak truth to power. What he should be telling people to do is talk to each other; simply listening to a strong voice (logical, strident, deeply informed) can also have the effect of silencing people’s

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conversations and communal discovery. Such a voice can maximize linguistic asymmetry too. Isolation sustains the power of the absent enunciator, because an individual trying to make sense of administrative language will take it as common sense and assume others do the same, rather than hazarding a radical interpretation by oneself that goes against the grain. Indeed, to question may not even appear as an option in the absence of dialogue—this matter-of-fact closedness or “overwhelming concreteness” is what Marcuse (1964, 94) fears most in linguistic abridgment. Breaking the isolation here requires local interaction; revolutionaries should encourage people to turn to each other rather than to turn to them. While we have only scratched the surface of the phenomena of ideology and institutional discourses (leaving out, for example, issues of anonymity, outrage, and dissemination in the echo chambers of the Internet), we suggest that resistance can be cultivated as a habit of critical thinking by attuning to subtler feelings of discomfort when facing enunciatorless enunciations. We posit that linguistic bodies are likely to feel shades of annoyance or uncertainty in the face of strong linguistic asymmetry. Indicative reactive experiences may take the form of wondering whether a given prohibition or exhortation applies to one; annoyance at being told what to do; a sense of being invaded, say by aggressive billboards or an urgent tone in social media telling us what we should care about; anxiety or exasperation regarding how and when one will be expected to act in accordance with ambiguous orders; or disinclination to engage or act at all in the face of one-sided lecturing (even if one agrees with the gist of the message). We can gain insight from “listening to” the entangled dimensions of our bodies in these and all interactions. Of course, training in docility can transform or mask these telltale feelings to various degrees. Critical pedagogy provides a way to combat or avoid such docility. 12.5  Ethics of Participation If bodies bring forth a world through their enactments, then in facing another body I am confronted with a radical difference, I am confronted with someone else’s world, irreducible to mine. Such is, in enactive parlance, the metaphysical departure point of radical alterity for an ethics of the Other as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas (1979). But is alterity so radical in our account? Is it not the case that linguistic bodies are co-constituted in participation, and that inevitably and constantly they assimilate and accommodate alterity? Knud Løgstrup (1997) similarly elaborates an ethics on the basis of the experience of living with others. He recognizes that we

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play important roles in how others bring forth their worlds, that we participate in them, and therefore share mutual responsibilities and obligations. We encounter others under normal circumstances with a “natural trust” like the trust our bodies typically have in the world. We tend to trust others with an attitude of surrendering and letting be, without which—as we have shown—true social acts would not be possible. The ethical demand, which precedes moral judgments, is a demand silently placed by this trust, a demand to participate well, to know how to coexist, how to speak, when to create distance, how to act together. Overthematizing the other, however, risks absolutizing alterity, whereas both at the intercorporeal level and in the constitution of linguistic bodies, self and others interpenetrate. They, moreover, are not given as such, but rely for their existence on processes of becoming that constantly define and redefine their mutual and multiple distinctions. Self and other (or rather “selfing” and “othering”) are material processes and not metaphysical boundaries that precede these activities. If we are to avoid walking those alleys that lead to dualism and mysticism, we must keep close the notion of ethical know-how as a practice while acknowledging the multiple fundamental ambiguities of linguistic bodies. Alain Badiou argues that the logic of identity, of the Same, by which traditional thought frames the idea of self, is an attempt to unify a multiple with innumerable differences, as varied between me and my neighbor, between myself at different moments, circumstances, and ages, as between a hunter-gatherer and a journalist. Contingently on our situation and our culture, we make more or less of these differences, radicalizing some and ignoring others, but that does not make them fundamental. For Badiou, crucially, the sameness, the universality we share, is not what we are, as this is in constant flux, but the fact that we are constantly coming to be. Our becoming is for him a truth-process, a bringing forth of our bodies and our world: “The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural—or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world” (Badiou 2001, 28). Truth-processes are, for the most part, collective; we bring forth the world. These processes sustain truths that have been inscribed in the community’s history. Through the powers of critical interpellation and through sheer material openness, they also imprint novel truths in the world in the form of events that, to a greater or lesser extent, reconstitute the shared coordinates of meaning. An individual body participates in truth-processes, but he makes ethical choices in affirming or rejecting his own collaborations with the world. Witnessing a tragedy or admiring a work of art, feeling

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exhilaration about a scientific discovery, being concerned at what the daily news brings, answering the call to militancy as his political duty, or committing to his loved ones—such events produce resonances for him to avow or ignore. In choosing one or the other lies the heart of the ethical act. The ethics of participation is not an ethics of correct communication, not even an ethics of recognition per se; it is an ethics of cultivating skills to partake critically in historically situated passages from practice to ideality and back. In lending our powers of becoming to transpersonal truthprocesses, we must reconcile our own autonomous perseverance (the “yes” that life says to itself in the words of Hans Jonas) and the flourishing of events to which we choose to remain faithful. It is in the ethical sphere, and not only in the epistemic realm, that the enactive view differs from approaches to intersubjectivity in terms of a primordial we-ness (“shared intentionality,” “joint this-and-that”). While agreeing with the opposition to methodological individualism, enactive theory deemphasizes the assumption that participation is all about shared or collective mental states. Participation is not about including the other in my intentions or my emotions, or already being attuned to others since birth. In participation we may move into and out of such particular states and this makes them secondary to concrete processes of interaction. The ethical angle of the we-ness, “wired-to-connect,” prosocial approach indeed highlights the limitations of internalism and individualism, the agent as a self-sufficient entity that secondarily enters into a world of human relations (who behaves rationally to minimize prediction errors, maximize survival, sustain power, or increase profit). The we-ness approach opposes, like we do, the naturalistic fallacies of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. If we are critical of the we-ness way of thinking, it is not to return to individualism. As we have seen, truth-processes are collective; selfing and othering are enactments. What we oppose is answering one naturalistic fallacy with another, one that would see us as primordially social, cooperative, and empathic. Skills for shared intentionality, empathic resonance, and so on are neither givens nor outcomes of our model. They are possibilities, alongside other widespread but less savory interpersonal and intergroup attitudes, such as self-centered, exploitative, dehumanizing, and destructive stances toward others. The ethical-ideological debate must move away from this fatigued terrain. Human “nature,” if we can say anything about it, is the struggle for resolving tensions in community being and collectively and individually abiding in potentiality, and often failing to do one or the other. This

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struggle is realized in myriad different ways. Being with others is indeed a given and participation a constitutive part of existing in a linguistic community, but this does not immediately set us on the path of universal collaboration toward the good. If it did, there would be no ethical agency to worry about, only pathologies: we would just have to cure those who have strayed from becoming “true” human selves. On the contrary, because outcomes are not guaranteed, because ideologies can endure that create massive inequalities, systematic injustices, and pervasive suffering for generations (and do so by morally recuperating self-centered interest as “natural”), changes to this state of affairs must come from struggles over how to best become ethical-critical linguistic bodies in communities of human practice and relating—struggles over ideas, over language, over meanings and power; in short, struggles for truth-processes—not through new appeals to nature, no matter how much we may otherwise agree with those who make them. The mode of existence of linguistic bodies and communities entails a permanent opening to potentiality; in Simondonian terms, this is the neotenization of processes of individuation that hold the determinations of animal being in abeyance. Much of what animals resolve by instinct becomes for us an open issue with multiple alternatives. Our choices do not negate “nature”; they are real choices precisely because we position ourselves at a stage “before” other determinants make them for us. We exist as linguistic bodies by (partially, precariously) refraining from fully becoming animals. This means being more unfinished than animals, actively avoiding the paths of determination they must walk, and becoming more critically aware of our own incompletion. We work at staying more open to choices. We create pockets of potentiality and then, by making choices, as persons and as communities, we trace particular paths in a mode of existence that is inherently historical: “The only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is ‘in’ that nature to construct its own history” (Rose et al. 1984, 14). As a conception of our relations to nature, this is quite different from the idea that our humanity rests on overcoming an inherited animality. It is equally distant from the notion that reconciling ourselves to our animal “nature” is the path toward harmony. Animality is what we tend toward, and if successful, the horizon we manage to keep at a distance; it is not a primordial, problematic substance we inherit or a state of bliss we should embrace. Moral appeals to “nature,” whatever their orientation, rest on an upside-down ontology.6 We choose to extract an ethical maxim from this mode of existence in potentiality: it is that the powers of dialogic criticism, counterframing,

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interpellation, creativity, etc., that sustain this precarious human openness must be widely taught, developed, and exercised. These are the powers of novelty, resistance, and dissidence that bring forth new truth-processes and open up linguistic communities to diverse sources of potentiality and alternative modes of existence. These powers become fully effective as we commit to truth-processes. The promotion of these powers is an ethical defense of potentiality, of choice and autonomy, that may take countless different shapes depending on historical and material circumstances. In fact, the same ethical principle may find itself realized in contradictory moral stances advocated by groups that struggle for different forms of life. This is to be expected; if not, the ethical maxim would become a blanket mandate, a categorical imperative. A question is ethical precisely because concrete solutions are, for now, multiple or undefined. The same ethical-critical defense of potentiality drives the work of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire and his followers. As we have seen, for Freire human beings are unfinished creatures who may collectively become conscious of their unfinishedness—that is, of their potential and the limitations imposed on its realization. Oppression is sustained by material power as well as by ideological justifications that asymmetrically mold a community’s common sense and suppress the teaching and exercise of critical linguistic powers via narratives that distract people’s attention, impose identities, instill extraneous concerns, push false dichotomies into their languaging, train them in apathy and docility, and make them blind to their own condition as oppressed/colonized or oppressing/colonizing.7 How to best enact the ethical maxim? No general answer can be given to this question. However, our work suggests that we often move forward in situations of participation and that, conversely, the endurance of true participation is a sign of moving forward. This may not apply to all situations, but it applies to many. We have already suggested that finding ways toward better participation is useful in guiding parenting of autistic and nonautistic children. To participate is in general a preferable option in comparison with remaining at the breakdown stage of an interaction (between people, communities, political actors, etc.). Participation does not entail lack of conflict. Breakdowns, as we have said, are unavoidable. Even rebellions are participatory. Breakdowns and all, participation has the highest transformative potential. Ethical participation requires contributing our bodies’ powers to the realization of larger truth-processes. Conversations go on while participants come and go. Participating in such events (keeping them alive) is often desirable even if our participation doesn’t seem to bring matters to a

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close, even if we are confused and have difficulties reconciling our embodied agency with other truth-processes. The opposite attitude of apathy or aversion (why bother participating if nothing is going to change or if I may put myself at risk?) feeds on the misleading notion that since change cannot come from just talking, then talking is useless. Our model reminds us that critical participation is much more than engaging in mere talk; it is a transformative sociomaterial practice empowered by education, debate, and reflection, and will often take the shape of conflict and confrontation. The ethical-critical aim for better dialogues is first and foremost an end in itself. Note that it is precisely this end that microaggressions, aggressive callouts, and the abbreviated style of ideological discourse would avoid. These addresses manipulate our always already participating bodies into traps where further participation is stunted or unlikely. On the other hand, critical participation helps bring forth new meanings. Educated to labor toward change, critical participants spread ways of languaging and thinking within a community; they build up tensions and nurture the energies that await and animate forthcoming transformative events. Insofar as participation is a mode of existence and worldmaking, it takes us full circle back into our task as situated researchers with responsibilities. Critical participation describes the enactive relation between knowing subject and object of knowledge, which, if we are coherent, can no longer be one of determination, domination, or interrogation, but one of engagement, an entre-deux. In considering the juridical case for constitutions recently granting legal rights to Nature (such as those of Bolivia and Ecuador), Eugenio R. Zaffaroni (2012, 100) remarks on the etymological differences between objectum and Gegenstand, both descriptions of attitudes toward an object. The latter “stands in front of, vis-à-vis” the subject, the former more actively “throws itself against” the subject. If the process of knowledge starts from a separation between knower and Gegenstand, from the subject placing himself on a higher plane than the object of inquiry, he ignores the object in its milieu, deconcretizes it, and narrows it down to his own interrogative perspective, his own interests. Still, a concrete objectum responds as a whole entity, disregarding the particular focus of the interrogating subject, who becomes subjected to it. This wholeness is either ignored and the subject merely confirms his preexisting epistemological frame by cherry-picking whatever fits it, or the subject experiences a subjection by the object (as when we get a shock from probing an electric socket). If the epistemological process remains one of superior interrogation, the response to the experience of subjection will be further attempts at dominating the object, fighting it, domesticating it, making it safe, reframing its

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being—sometimes lethally—within the epistemology of the interrogating community. But this always leaves a remainder of unknown/unknowable objectivity. A deeper knowledge is gained, in contrast, through participatory engagement, the same way we learn new forms of coregulation from interactive breakdowns. A participatory, dialogic epistemology learns from subjection events that there is a need to rethink how we choose to relate to objects. We let ourselves be guided by them at the same time that we try to engage them. Reaching the end of this journey, we share one of the most important things we have learned: we need not accept the tacit dictum that ethical issues cloud the researcher’s judgment and objectivity, or that at best they form part of a different conversation. We have worked together in this book by embracing the power conversations have to move from one topic to the next and, in so doing, to show us their connections. It would be artificial to refuse the demand a research question places on us to clarify or take an ethical stance, simply because we are “supposed to” talk about that in a different context. Too often one encounters this separation between knowledge and ethics in the black-and-white epistemology of scientism (knowledge is value-free, what we do with knowledge is not). When such barriers frame research language (scientific on one side, ethical-political on the other), we should question them critically and, as we have tried to do in this book, subvert linguistic and disciplinary conventions. Proponents of emancipatory epistemologies (Enrique Dussel 2016, Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2014, and others) target exactly this institutionally sanctioned separation between science, ethics, and politics, between the “Main Research Proposal” and the “Ethical Issues Appendix.” This separation confines research conversations to the echo chamber of unending commentary; academic knowledge is thus kept apart from other human practices. This segregation is unfortunate since those engaged in nonacademic pursuits may be more skilled in the ethics of participation, that is, in the art of engaging the world as a coparticipant. We have often seen in this book that the experience and knowledge of practitioners, parents, workers, children, and social movements provide the richest examples for counteracting the functionalist hegemony in the sciences of the mind.

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Adaptivity  A system’s capacity to regulate its states and its relation to the environment, with the result that if state trajectories approach the limit of viability they change with a tendency to avoid crossing this limit. Adaptive regulation may succeed or fail and introduces an intrinsic temporality (direction and granularity) in autonomous systems. Agent  A self-individuating, autonomous system capable of asymmetrically regulating its coupling with the environment following intrinsic norms. Often synonymous with sense-maker and behaving system. Associated milieu  A tightly coupled set of environmental conditions that enable the ongoing self-individuation of an autonomous system and in turn are affected by said system in a history of codefining alterations. Autonomy  The property that describes a far-from-equilibrium, precarious, operationally closed system in any domain. Autonomous systems are self-individuating and depend on their associated milieu, which nevertheless does not fully determine its states. Autopoiesis  An autonomous system in the domain of processes of molecular transformations and interactions. An autopoietic system is defined as a network of biochemical processes organized in such a way that the operation of these processes sustains and regenerates the network of relations and forms a self-distinguishing topological unity in space. Example: a living cell. Concretization  The operation of actualizing and expanding internal relations within a system as well as external relations with its milieu. Analogously, the operation of enriching an idea by expanding and elaborating its internal relations and its relations to other ideas. The opposite of abstraction. Coordination  The nonaccidental correlation between the behaviors of two or more systems that are in sustained coupling, or have been coupled in the past, or have been coupled to another, common, system.

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Coregulation  The regulation needed for acts performed by more than one agent. Coregulation is the organizing of individual sensorimotor coordination patterns into a jointly enacted sensorimotor scheme. It involves not only affecting or enabling the conditions for individual regulation, but mutual influences in the enactment of sensorimotor coordination patterns, implying moments of passivity and acceptance of the influence of other agents. Coupling  A dynamical system is coupled to another one when the laws describing the changes of state in the first are dependent on parameters and conditions that change as a function of the state of the other. Dialogue  A form of social interaction characterized by interpersonal recognition and the sustained use of asymmetric regulatory roles by different participants. Entanglement  When coupled dynamical systems sustain patterns of coordination, mutual constraining, and/or codependence across a range of timescales and orders of magnitude. Entangled systems cannot be approximated as nearly decomposable. Environment  A system’s environment is the set of all processes to which the system is coupled—that is, processes that affect the system and/or are affected by it. Excitable medium  A dynamical system where local perturbations propagate nonlinearly from one part to the next (between spatial neighbors or linked parts), diffusing, enduring, and potentially becoming amplified (e.g., biological tissue, neural populations). Habits  Sensorimotor schemes whose bodily and environmental support is structurally unstable and relies on repeated enactments of the scheme to continue to enable such enactments. Incarnation  The manifestation of foreign linguistic agencies in the act of reporting utterances. The dialectical counterpart of incorporation. Incorporation  In general, when processes once external to a system become constitutive of the system. In sensorimotor terms, the equilibration of a new set of sensorimotor schemes constituting a new skill. Applied to linguistic bodies, the appropriation of utterances, stances, styles, etc., through acts of reporting. Individuation  The operation by which a set of ongoing processes is organized as a distinct, concrete system or structure by flows of energy from states of high potentiality to states of low potentiality. Mastery  Used to refer to the capabilities, sensitivities, and embodied understanding associated with an action or perception skill. Technically, mastery is both the accumulated organization of mutually equilibrated sensorimotor schemes and the capacity of the agent to keep equilibrating in the face of changing environmental and bodily conditions. Mastery is a property of the whole situated body.

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Modulation  Changes induced on the parameters and constraints governing the dynamics of a system or a coupling between systems. Normativity  In the context of autonomous systems, we talk about intrinsic normativity as emerging from the adaptive evaluation of events and conditions with respect to their consequences for the ongoing viability of the system. Applied to living organisms, some vital norms specify the conditions that guide adaptive regulation (others may not be accessible to the organism). Norms may also be externally imposed on the system. The objectifying powers of linguistic bodies establish a set of ideal relations subject to norms of correctness (e.g., truth, felicity) by bringing the domains of community practice, shared interactive know-how, and sensorimotor organization into relations of coherence. Operational closure  A system’s property specifying that among the conditions enabling the operation of any constituent process in the system there will always be one or more processes that also belong to the system. And, in addition, every process in the system enables at least one other constituent process, thus forming a closed network of enabling relations. There are no processes that are not enabled by other processes in the system. External processes can also enable the constituent processes, but such processes are not part of the operationally closed network as they are not themselves enabled by the system’s constituent processes. Partial act  The contribution to a social act enacted by an individual agent, usually to be coupled in parallel or in sequence with the partial acts of other agents. Participatory sense-making  Sense-making in the context of a social interaction as it is affected by coordination patterns, breakdowns, and recoveries undergone during social encounters. Participatory sense-making is how people understand each other and how they understand and act on the world together. Portable act  In the context of participatory sense-making, a regulatory act with strong embedded projective normative conditions, leaving little ambiguity regarding the partial acts needed to complete a social act. Precariousness  A property of nonlinearly fluctuating material relations in far-fromequilibrium systems by which no single aspect of an isolated constituent process of the system is long-term stable at the same timescale as that of the whole system. This includes any putative functional properties. Precarious circumstances in an operationally closed system are those in which its isolated constituent processes will tend to run down or extinguish in the absence of the organization of the system in an otherwise equivalent physical situation. Regulation  A modulation according to norms. Regulatory act  In the context of participatory sense-making, a partial act used in order to modulate, select, project, reject, or encourage other particular partial acts within a shared repertoire.

332 Glossary

Self-individuation  The condition of ongoing self-production and self-distinction in a system that actively sustains its own organization under precarious conditions by constantly engaging metastable sources of active matter and energy. Sense-making  The active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. The basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring. Sensorimotor agency  An autonomous system in the domain of structural and functional relations between sensorimotor schemes that asymmetrically engages its own environment and with each act reaffirms its identity as a sensorimotor agent. Sensorimotor schemes  Organized, task-related sequences of sensorimotor coordination patterns, following either intrinsic or external norms. They necessitate the enabling support of bodily and environmental processes. Social act  An act whose normative conditions of satisfaction require the participation of more than one agent. For instance, the act of giving/accepting an object or the act of shaking hands. Social interaction  The regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved. Social self-control  Regulatory acts in which an agent uses socially normative partial acts reflexively to induce a displaced form of self-regulation. It may involve any social partial act, such as gestures, but when involving utterances, social self-control takes the shape of an ongoing flow of self-directed talk, inducing a displaced attitude toward one’s own body by reflexively directing dialogic interpersonal recognition skills and attitudes to oneself. Transduction  An operation by which an activity propagates locally, producing changes from point to neighboring point in a given domain (physical, biological, mental, social, etc.) that moves from a global state rich in potentialities to a lowerenergy condition. Example: the process of crystal formation in a saturated liquid medium. Transduction is a key notion in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. Utterance  A dialogic act, enacted asymmetrically through the actions of a mutually recognized producer and an audience. Utterances occur in various modalities and are composed of several regulatory acts that operate recursively on parts of the utterance in relation to its pragmatic and expressive aspects, as well as on how the utterance affects the interpersonal relations between the participants in a dialogue. Utterances may become braided to other utterances via reporting and resonances of all kinds.

Glossary 333

Viability  The condition of autonomy in a self-individuating system is precarious and defines a domain of viability in the space of the system’s states and its relation to its milieu. States and relations within the viability set are those in which the system remains autonomous. Virtual action/image  Regulation of the relations between an initiated or enacted sensorimotor scheme and its structural and functional links (e.g., priming, inhibition) to other, nonactualized schemes. For linguistic bodies, these may be thematized as images, sensorimotor tendencies, etc., as a result of engaging in utterance flows or with enactive symbols. Virtual field  The set of concrete dynamic traces and tendencies surrounding a given situation or event as well as neighboring potentialities that have not been actualized. World-involving / In-the-head explanations  In world-involving accounts the explanatory role of the world exceeds that of being a source of information to be processed by the agent. Cognitive activity is co-constituted by agent and world. By contrast, in-the-head explanations take cognition as sufficiently constituted by processes internal to the agent (whether actually instantiated in the head or not). The world in such explanations plays only contextual, causal, or informational roles but not constitutive ones.

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Chapter 2 1.  Important developments in enactive ideas have been described in Evan Thompson’s (2007) book Mind in Life, as well as in the collection Enaction (Stewart et al. 2010). More recently, the ongoing work by Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin has been articulated in a broader critique of notions of content in philosophy of mind (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017). Implications of enactive ideas for psychology have been discussed by Baerveldt and Verheggen (1999), McGann, De  Jaegher, and Di  Paolo (2013), and McGann (2014). Regarding applications to theoretical, empirical, and practical questions, there are, to name a few, enactive perspectives on emotion and affectivity (Maiese 2011; Colombetti 2014), on sensorimotor learning (Di Paolo et al. 2014), on intersubjectivity and social cognition (De  Jaegher and Di  Paolo 2007; De  Jaegher et al. 2010), hypotheses on the social brain (Di  Paolo and De  Jaegher 2012), on sociocognitive development (e.g., Fuchs 2012; Gallagher 2015b), on metaphor (Jensen and Cuffari 2014), on conversational hand gesture (Cuffari 2012), on narrativity (Caracciolo 2012; Popova 2015), on the upright posture (Gallagher 2017), on education (Maiese 2017), on human-canine interaction (Merritt 2015), on music cognition and education (Matyja and Schiavio 2013; van der Schyff 2015), hypotheses and models about the interactive factors affecting imitation (Froese et al. 2012), person-based approaches to autism (De  Jaegher 2013) and practical methods for investigating interactive experience (De  Jaegher et al. 2017), organism-based theories of color vision (Thompson et al. 1992), enactive perspectives on brain function (Fuchs 2011; Gallagher et al. 2013; Varela 1995; Varela et al. 2001), on perceptual modalities (McGann 2010), on speech coordination (Cummins 2013), on schizophrenia (Kyselo 2016), on AI and robotics (Iizuka and Di Paolo 2007; Vernon 2010; Froese and Ziemke 2009), and on neurobiological and bodily factors in prehistoric art and material culture (Froese et al. 2013; Malafouris 2013). There are also enactive reflections on ethics (Varela 1999a; Urban 2014; Colombetti and Torrance 2009), intimacy (De  Jaegher 2015), and consciousness (Varela 1996, 1999b; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Varela 2001).

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2. We mainly focus on the embodied turn as it happened in cognitive science. Somewhat parallel (and not unrelated) developments have occurred in other disciplines such as anthropology (e.g., Csordas 1990), cultural and developmental psychology (e.g., Thelen and Smith 1994; Overton, Müller, and Newman 2008; Voestermans and Verheggen 2013), social psychology (Stam 1998), and sociology (e.g., Crossley 2001; Wacquant 2005). It speaks for the current state of segregation of research efforts and traditions that cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind do not connect to these fields as frequently and strongly as they should (see also Boden 2006 on anthropology as the missing discipline in cognitive science). The theme of “the body” is of course central to postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in the humanities and social science, from literature and cultural studies to political science, postphenomenology, gender studies, disability studies, etc. While we will aim to draw on some of these sources, our main focus in this book will be on clarifying and expanding the enactive conception of bodies. 3.  See Brooks (1991). Previous to this work only the solitary voice of Hubert L. Dreyfus (1972) announced the conceptual problems of Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) research. His criticism was based precisely on the disembodied, phenomenologically poor aspects of computer programs as literal artificial minds (using programs to model, rather than instantiate, cognitive function was seen as less problematic). 4.  See Suchman (1987), Agre (1988), and Winograd and Flores (1986). 5. For instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), and Lakoff and Núñez (2000). 6.  We use the term dynamical when referring to mathematical tools and techniques generally known as dynamical systems theory and by extension to qualify terminology pertaining to this theory (e.g., dynamical landscape, dynamical states, dynamical trajectories) as well as epistemic terms based on it (e.g., dynamical interpretation, dynamical hypothesis, dynamical explanation). To describe the changing or evolving attributes of entities and processes in general, we use dynamic instead. 7. See Kelso (1995), Skarda and Freeman (1987), Thelen and Smith (1994), and Hutchins (1995). 8.  The term coupling (see the glossary for quick definitions of technical terms), used throughout the book, refers to the dynamical systems notion whereby two systems are said to influence one another. That is, the parameters in the equations that describe one of the systems depend on the state of the variables in the other, and vice versa (Ashby 1960). 9. See Clark (1997); Wheeler (2005); Rupert (2016). See also discussions in Calvo and Gomila (2008), Kiverstein (2012), Shapiro (2014), and others. 10.  Throughout the book the relation between enactive ideas and materiality will be a recurring theme. Although some of the deeper philosophical implications of this

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relation should be made explicit beyond the cursory treatment we give them here, it may be sufficient for our purposes to point out that our take on materiality is guided by well-known phenomena studied in science and experienced in human practice. Under the label “active matter,” physical science studies microscopic and macroscopic systems composed of various interactive elements capable of consuming and dissipating energy and in the process sustaining various kinds of organized patterns (Marchetti et al. 2013; Ramaswamy 2010; Vicsek and Zafeiris 2012). Such systems give rise to phenomena such as collective motion, self-propulsion, self-assembly, active polar gels, and molecular engines. These systems invariably comprise complex, far-from-equilibrium, irreversible dynamics characterized by nonintegrable and resonant interactions governed by emerging nonholonomic constraints (Pattee 1973; Prigogine 1997). Such systems may drive themselves into critical states from which big changes may be triggered by small perturbations (Bak 1996), or they may move itinerantly and unpredictably between different metastable states (Tsuda 2001). Other examples of active matter include spontaneously mobile oil droplets in water (Hanczyc 2014; Hanczyc et al. 2007). As surfactants in far-from-equilibrium conditions concentrate nonuniformly at the droplet-medium interface, they induce internal convective flows, and the droplet moves producing surprisingly lifelike phenomena, including gradient climbing and complex interactions. 11.  There is nothing mystical about adaptivity. It is a perfectly operational property present in all known instances of life. For instance, it is exemplified by the contextual activation of gene sequences as in the case of the lac operon in E. coli, which allows for the digestion of lactose when the preferred nutrient (glucose) is absent. Adaptivity can be modeled mathematically and computationally (e.g., Egbert et al. 2010). 12.  In case the reader fears that rejecting strict state determinism condemns enactivists to repeat the mistakes of representationalism, we point out that what matters for a system to be autonomous is that its dynamics are state-dependent, not state-determined. With this more relaxed assumption, the enactive approach conserves the terrain gained by autopoietic theory: events in the environment cannot instruct or determine their effect on the autonomous system while it remains autonomous, but affect the system as perturbations, and the agent-environment relation is one of (regulated) structural coupling. 13. Our world-involving account of the individuation of organisms avoids falling into subject-object dualism. Sense-making is constructed in terms of operations of regulation of the relations that mutually constitute the sense-maker and its associated milieu. In other words, through its ongoing individuation, the sense-maker emerges out of the very processes it makes sense of in conjunction with its world of significance. World and sense-maker are not two realities external to each other. 14. A hypothesis for the origin of life is that protometabolisms were confined in cavities or chambers within small iron sulfide chimneys formed on the ocean floor

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about 350 million years ago (Russell and Martin 2004). Distinction in this case would have been realized separately from production.

Chapter 3 1.  The kind of sensorimotor subjectivity described in this chapter applies prototypically to animals with an important degree of plasticity, but not exclusively to this class. For instance, research in plant cognition (Calvo and Keijzer 2011) has shown that plants can possess sophisticated forms of sense-making, including learning dependent on complex “neural-like” internal signaling. 2.  See, for example, Varela et al. (2001); Buzsáki (2006). For more on the complexity of self-induced critical neural dynamics, transients, and itinerant patterns of neural activity see, for instance, Plenz and Niebur (2014); Tsuda (2001). 3.  For reviews on the brain’s intrinsic activity see Raichle (2015a, 2015b). 4. Habits in this context are taken in the more organicist understanding of the concept; see Barandiaran and Di  Paolo (2014) for a brief genealogical map of the different interpretations of the term. For discussions on habit see Carlisle (2014). 5.  The argument resembles the kind of reasoning by default that we have criticized in chapter 2. If nonactualized (e.g., alternative or future) sensorimotor possibilities inform my current perception of an object, this is only possible, the argument goes, by means of currently available stored knowledge based on actual past experiences. Presented as a there-is-no-alternative argument, it follows the tacit requirement not to abandon the epistemic framing of functionalism. It thus discards alternatives without properly considering them, such as the engagement with virtual traces and tendencies involved in all sense-making that are embodied as know-how of the body in coupling with the environment. For discussions on these points see Hutto (2005). The representational option has been translated into in-the-head conceptions of mastery using predictive models (e.g., Seth 2014; see also Di Paolo 2014).

Chapter 4 1. The idea of social interactions forming complex dynamical systems has been explored in psychotherapy and other disciplines. Watzlawick, Beavin-Bavelas, and Jackson (1967) describe the organization of human interaction using General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy 1968) to describe paradoxical social interaction patterns. This systemic turn (see related comments on interactions in Bateson 1979), a precursor of the dynamical systems approach in psychology and cognitive science, has been influential in disciplines such as conversation analysis, family therapy, and systems psychotherapy. In developmental psychology we encounter similar proposals foregrounding the dynamic aspect of interaction and the interactive and relationship levels as proper levels of analysis (Schaffer 1984; Fogel 1993; Kaye 1982;

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Stern 1977). Here we should contrast the conception of interactions as systems with the “we-ness” approach to intersubjectivity (e.g., Brinck et al. 2017) that consists in adding social adjectives (joint, shared, collective, mutual, co-) to subjective nouns (intentionality, attention, perception, action, and so on). The endgame of such an approach, even if it also attempts to thematize the social dimension of the human mind, is a return to representationalism, sometimes in quite paradoxical forms such as the so-called mental representations in the “we-mode” proposed by Gallotti and Frith (2013) as something both irreducibly collective and instantiated in the individual brain (see Di Paolo, De Jaegher, and Gallagher 2013). 2. Many coordinated patterns in behavioral and physiological variables emerge unintentionally during interactions. They occur at the level of bodily movement (Richardson et al. 2007; Marsh et al. 2009), posture (Varlet et al. 2011), heart rates and breathing and arousal patterns (McFarland 2001; Müller and Lindenberger 2011; Konvalinka et al. 2011), autonomic responses (Ebisch et al. 2012; Ioannou et al. 2014), and EEG patterns (Tognoli et al. 2007; Lindenberger et al. 2009; Dumas et al. 2010; Naeem et al. 2012). Coordination may involve the performance of similar movements (rocking chairs, tapping) or the emergence of more complex synergistic patterns (Riley et al. 2011). It may be aperiodic, as in the case of two people reading from a text together (Cummins 2011, 2013; Cummins et al. 2013). It may be absolute (perfect entrainment) or relative (more inconstant and fluid distribution of variables over time exhibiting coherence and phase attraction). A case of relative coordination would be an adult and a child walking together at the same speed despite their natural differences in stride length (Kelso 1995). 3.  More examples of joint regulation of interpersonal space during interactions can be found in Hall (1966) and Kendon (1990).

Chapter 5 1.  Note that the disparity does not disappear when educational opportunities and experiences are the same: “The rate of infant mortality for African American [women] with college degrees or higher is about three times higher than that of white women with the same level of education, and well-educated African American women have worse infant mortality rates than white women without a high school education” (California Newsreel 2008, 3–4; cited in Sullivan 2013, 197). 2. Work in feminist philosophy, also, has long argued for this (e.g., Jaggar and Bordo 1989; Grosz 1994; Collins 2005).

Chapter 6 1.  There are many flavors of dialectics, with a history of heated debates and political confrontations regarding the proper use of the term. It is not our business to enter

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into those debates. Suffice it to say that we understand dialectics nondogmatically and so we can indeed take much advantage of Hegelian or Marxist “dialectical moves” without ignoring criticisms that have been directed toward too strict an interpretation of their respective uses of the method. At the same time, these criticisms need not drive us to abandon the term dialectics. We can remain open in this way to reinterpreting much that has emerged from previous dialectical analyses of life, nature, social relations, and so on. We may be less prone to using phrases like “the work of the negative,” since we know that the tensions and overdeterminations that provoke the move from one metastable, dialectical situation to another need not be thought of as mystically “driven” by lacks or negativities when concrete and material excesses, potentials, and ambivalences also lead to dialectical situations. We do not think these differences with more traditional usage require us to drop the term dialectics when it is precisely the spirit of dialectical thinking that ideas undergo further (dialectical!) determinations in the process of historical clarification, rethinking, and practical application. Having said that, what we are describing is a particular, complex-systems-informed flavor of dialectical materialism as used most notably by Marx in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production in volume 1 of Capital (1867/1976) and his Grundrisse (1973), understood as a materialist empowerment of Hegel’s Logic (see, e.g., Ilyenkov 1960/2008; Moseley and Smith 2014). What we do in the following chapters is compatible with the more progressive descriptions of Marx’s method (e.g., Kosík 1976; Lefebvre 1940/2009; Ollman 2003; Ollman and Smith 2008). 2.  This is the reason why resolving the opposition between two theories simply by combining them into a reconciliatory hybrid (a move often made in cognitive science) tends to be problematic (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2013; Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2017). Dialectics “does not reason on the ‘on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand’ principle” (Ilyenkov 1960/2008, 138). 3.  Apart from Marx’s analyses in Capital and the examples mentioned in the next section, other complex totalities have been approached dialectically in the way we look at linguistic bodies. For instance, Henri Lefebvre has applied the dialectical method to the study of the social production of space (Lefebvre 1991), the interaction between multiple social and urban rhythms, and the critique of everyday life (Lefebvre 2004, 2014). In a similar vein, David Harvey has explored the geopolitical patterns of justice, property, rent, and urban transformation (e.g., Harvey 1996, 2009). In the former Soviet Union, dialectical analysis was applied to diverse problems—often putting the authors in conflict with the orthodox party line—from the origins of legal systems and theories of jurisprudence by Evgeny B. Pashukanis (1924/1989), to the contradictions in mythology by Aleksei F. Losev (1930/2003), and to the socioeconomic situatedness of the scientific revolution by Boris M. Hessen (1931). In science, dialectics has nurtured the influential work of Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in evolutionary biology, genetics, agriculture, and ecosystem modeling (Levins and Lewontin 1985; Lewontin and Levins 2007).

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4. For example, when you ruminate on something worrying and inadvertently respond to someone’s request with a tone of annoyance. Or when you expect someone to make a decision that you think may go against you and you read a lot into their demeanor even if they are not saying anything yet. In such cases, the flow of self-talk can predispose you to unintended acts of production and interpretation.

Chapter 7 1. The tendency in mainstream linguistics throughout the 20th century has been toward increasing abstraction in the study of language as a self-contained, freefloating formal system. Countermovements have criticized this tendency by foregrounding the interactive and ecological embeddedness of real language and its entanglement with broader human activities. Here we name just a few examples of work that resonates with our approach in this general orientation toward language in its embodied and interactive concreteness. We come back to some of this work in chapters 9 and 11. At the boundaries between linguistics, psychology, and sociology, work in conversation analysis, interaction studies, and ethnography has been a constant source of crucial empirical evidence about the organization of social interactions in response to the demands of the social and material context, how speech and gestures are used, how language is embedded in other human activities, what factors determine language change, and so on (Sacks 1992; Sacks et al. 1974; Goodwin 1981; Kendon 1990; Streeck 2009b, 2010; Gumperz 1982). The study of language in its situatedness (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Leather and van Dam 2003; Steffensen and Fill 2014; Kravchenko 2007; Cowley 2011; Thibault 2011) has also begun to be approached from dynamical systems perspectives, particularly regarding the investigation of intercorporeal coordination (Fusaroli et al. 2014; Abney et al. 2014; Gibbs and Cameron 2008; Müller and Tag 2010). Precursors of such dynamical analyses can be found in systemic approaches to the multiple circularities found in interactive situations, particularly in therapeutic contexts (e.g., Watzlawick et al. 1967). The more dialectical cousins of these systemic approaches, as we saw in chapter 6, are the different variants of dialogic theoretical approaches (Bakhtin 1986; Voloshinov 1929/1973; Bråten 1988; Linell 2009). Many of these views are broadly compatible with integrational linguistics (Harris 1981, 1996, 2002; Love 2004; Toolan 1996), which sees abstraction and formalization as misleading for understanding real language use and language change as they emerge in networks of acts of participation. The organization of real linguistic interactions, in particular the turn organization of dialogues, the collaborative patterns of joint acts between participants, and the temporality and rhythms of speech, are deemed to constrain aspects of language such as grammar and dialogic syntax (Clark 1996; Ochs et al. 1996; Auer et al. 1999; DuBois 2014; Sakita 2006; Tannen 1989; Clark and WilkesGibbs 1986; Levinson 2016).

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2.  A theory with which our approach has some points in common but that we see as an example of the enframing kind is Michael Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language (e.g., Tomasello 2003). This theory makes the claim that language structure emerges from language use (a claim compatible with the image of language coming out of our model) via specific interactions of general cognitive abilities such as intention-reading, pattern-finding, and schematization. While Tomasello relies on various plausible feedbacks at the evolutionary, historical, and developmental timescales, these feedbacks take the form of informational processes (e.g., the effects on the individual learner of experienced type or token frequencies) and do not radically alter the general capacities language learning relies on. A constitutive theory, in contrast, would postulate that these and other capacities are shaped by language itself and that the feedbacks are not merely informational. We return to these issues in chapter 9. 3.  Constitutive views of language are implicitly theories of the being of humans in the world, which does not mean they necessarily position language as the origin of humanity, as the primordial mover of human practices and human minds. Says Raymond Williams: “It is precisely the sense of language as an indissoluble element of human self-creation that gives any acceptable meaning to its description as ‘constitutive.’ To make it precede all other connected activities is to claim something quite different” (Williams 1977, 29). The dialectical model presented in this chapter and the next aims to unravel the conceptual (not causal or historical) meaning of constitution. 4.  It is conceivable that some of the cases briefly mentioned in chapter 5 where the intersubjective world induces a breakdown in the organic or sensorimotor bodies, may require us to drop this simplification of an integrated embodied actor in order to study how interaction patterns and embodied integration affect each other (e.g., in situations of double bind). But we do not pursue this question in the current model. 5.  The material implication of acts, as well as the constraints imposed on them by material conditions, have been increasingly recognized by researchers in cognitive anthropology and archeology, often describing this double relation between embodied agents and material world under the rubric of material agency or material culture (e.g., Hutchins 1995, 2005; Malafouris 2013; Malafouris and Renfrew 2010; McGraw and Krátký 2017; see chapter 11). While this work tends to focus on traces of actions and their material constraints and enabling relations when they have been concretized on sedimented changes in objects, tools, spatial arrangements in the environment, etc., the materiality of acts also has a more fleeting dimension as these acts are embodied in actual moves (with their unintended immediate and not necessarily durable influences on environment, objects, animals, people). Both these dimensions, the immediate and the longer term, are relevant to our distinction between acts and moves in this and the following chapters.

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6.  Analogous results are confirmed by other studies (e.g., Gorman and Crites 2013; Zheng, Swanström, and MacKenzie 2007), although the effect may depend on the task, the skill levels of the people involved, etc. 7.  It is hard not to notice the connection between the primordial tension of participatory sense-making and the tension inherent in the autonomy of material selfindividuation in living systems we discussed in chapter 2. As in that case, we have here again that the very concept that seemed to bring together the jointly sufficient requirements to understand social interactions harbors an internal contradiction that must be transformed by introducing a novel domain of coordination and regulation. 8.  This stage in our model is similar to what is referred to as “coordination of coordination” in other approaches to languaging (Maturana 1978). The difference is that we have clarified how partial acts can acquire this recursive power by explicating the distinction between influence and coregulation and describing the structuring of partial acts into equivalent and complementary classes. With these clarifications we manage to operationally distinguish “coordination of coordination” from just plain coordination, instead of having to rely on external convention. 9.  Most taxonomies of hand gestures note a regulatory or pragmatic function. An influential 1969 paper on the origin, usage, and coding of nonverbal language includes “interactive” as a dimension of significant and intelligible nonverbal behavior and posits general categories such as “regulators,” “self-adaptors” and “other-adaptors” that have interactive effects (Ekman and Friesen 1969). Jürgen Streeck’s (2010, 226) gestural ecologies include an ecology of “gestures by which transactions are managed, including those that regulate the behavior of cointeractants.” Adam Kendon (2004) defines conversational hand gestures as “visible actions” that show “manifest deliberate expressivity” but explains their meaning primarily through attention to interactive use contexts. While primarily concerned with speaker-internal speech-gesture psychological units, David McNeill (2005) notes a “social-interactive context” for the emergence of speech-gesture units. For our purposes, gesture is the broad category of regulatory social acts, and pragmatic and interactive effects are their first and central engine of sense-making.

Chapter 8 1.  As we have already indicated, the analysis depends on the lack of preexisting factual asymmetries beyond those that appear in the interaction. But these asymmetries cannot be obviated in many situations of interest, such as the situation of adult-infant interactions or situations of power inequalities. In some cases, asymmetries can be equalized following mutual recognition (e.g., in cases of typical development, as we discuss in chapter 9, or in the case of emancipatory struggles). In other cases (abusive relationships, social inequalities, strong hierarchies, war,

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slavery), interactional asymmetries can be sustained over time. The dialectics of mutual recognition that starts at the interactive level can initiate processes that resist these factual asymmetries but it is unlikely by itself to fully overcome them. As Nancy Fraser (2013) notes in her critique of identity politics, the achievement of parity at the level of recognition assumes that misrecognition is a freestanding asymmetry, one that, in our terms, could potentially be fully resolved interactively. But in many real cases, it is not. The politics of recognition (Taylor 1992; Honneth 1995) is at best of limited effect without a politics of social transformation against inequalities, eradication of forced patterns of cultural assimilation and double consciousness, elimination of oppressive dichotomies, and actual redistribution (Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1967; Freire 1996b; Fraser 2013). 2.  From this point in our model, it becomes increasingly difficult to name the new categories of social agency without alluding to the speech modality. We will try to avoid suggesting this link, but terms like utterance and dialogue already connote situations of speech-based conversations, counting sign language as a form of speech. It is important to keep in mind that our model is meant to describe the organizational and relational constituents of each category (utterance, dialogue, etc.). We do not base our definition on the specifics of how these are implemented, at least until the point that such specifics enter into the model itself as part of the concretization of participatory sense-making. 3. While logos is often translated as “speech” or “word,” we prefer to highlight the deeper link that unifies various plausible translations: logos as the articulation— the holding apart, together—of things and world, of meanings and the ground that lets meanings appear. (See, for example, the discussion in Silverman and Ihde 1985, 173.) 4.  On the role of audiences and listeners in the construction of utterances see, for example, Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson (2000, 2002) as well as Bodie et al. (2008). 5.  For example, an utterance may count as incomplete (e.g., a demonstration where the final stage is lacking). Someone may step in and attempt to complete the demonstration. What makes the two parts (enacted by different people) belong to the same utterance is how these parts relate, forming a single unit within the set of relations to other utterances and contexts (in this case both constitute the demonstration that may have been requested by others, who after witnessing the two-part utterance may now respond to it by imitating the whole procedure or nodding in gratitude). 6.  See the work of Charles Goodwin on the joint construction of utterances by his father, who suffered from aphasia. Goodwin (1995, 2004) demonstrates that even though his father can only use three words, he is a full linguistic participant, who competently enlists other speakers’ talk not just to complement his own, but to tell what he cannot tell. This allows Goodwin to remark that “only when the unit of analysis expands beyond the grammatical abilities of the individual to encompass

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multiparty sequences of talk and embodied action can his ability to act as a speaker be theorized” (2004, 151). See also Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony (1984) and Oswald Ducrot’s (1984) polyphonic theory of enunciation. 7.  In other words, utterances always imply a subject of enunciation, which is not to say that with increasingly sophisticated uses of utterances this subject is always a flesh-and-blood known person. In fact, apart from anonymous utterances (a phenomenon on the rise in the case of Internet communications, discussion forums, blog comments, etc.), utterances without an identifiable producer (slogans painted on a wall, publicity in public transport or in the streets, all kinds of institutional communications, etc.) work through an ambivalence that gives them particular, almost mystical power precisely by hiding the producer from view (as if language itself is speaking, or “society,” the big Other, etc.). Such utterances work by emptying one of their “natural” relations (the relation to its producer). This, however, does not imply that the relation to a producer is optional. We return to some of these issues in chapter 12; see also Lecercle (2005) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004). 8.  Voloshinov (1929/1973, 96–97) recognizes what we call participation and activity genres as the larger sets within which speech genres are embedded—that is, the recurring life situations and activities from which they emerge. Although the phrase he uses (жизненные жанры) has been translated as “behavioral genres,” Morson and Emerson (1990, 291) correctly point out a more appropriate translation is “life genres” in the sense of vital or daily-life genres. 9.  Social self-control is a particular form of self-regulation using dialogically structured social acts. The self-regulatory use of social acts was already possible in previous stages of the model. Regulatory partial acts, manifested in concrete material moves, can always feed back on their producer. For example, when they’re alone, children make self-regulatory use of ostensive gestures (Rodríguez et al. 2015) that have been honed and equilibrated interpersonally in generally interactive but also in specifically dialogic contexts. The difference in the case of social self-control is that the regulatory acts are utterances. 10. In addition to organizing behavior (Luria 1961), self-directed utterances can regulate perceptual attitudes, helping segment a perceptual scene, focus attention voluntarily on particular details, and discern different temporal and spatial aspects of the perceptual act. In his essay “The Development of Perception and Attention,” Vygotsky (1978, 32) speaks about the mediation introduced by speech in children’s perception, though his points apply to self-directed utterances in general: “By means of words children single out separate elements, thereby overcoming the natural structure of the sensory field and forming new (artificially introduced and dynamic) structural centers. The child begins to perceive the world not only through his eyes but also through his speech. As a result, the immediacy of ‘natural’ perception is supplanted by a complex mediated process.”

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11.  Lecercle (2005, 56) also observes the abstract and reductive character of Habermas’s model of language. 12. Notice that in conjunction with issues of rightness, the question of relevance inherently arises in our framework. The indeterminateness of reference made famous by Quine’s (1960) gavagai example (the utterance of a native speaker of an unknown language in the presence of a rabbit, which might refer to the rabbit, to a part of it, to its movement, or might express a superstitious belief provoked by the sighting of rabbits, etc.) is firstly a property of all utterances given their constitutive openness, even those utterances expressed in a known language. It is also a result of the rather unsituated character of Quine’s thought experiment in which nothing is told about the frames and social practices currently at play (A hunt? A conversation about fauna? About cooking? A lesson on how to leap and bounce?). Nor do we know anything about how gavagai is braided with other utterances, past and present. A few statements about context do not replace the concreteness of a real situation. The openness of utterances by no means implies a priori incomprehensibility. Situatedness is not additional information that might help settle the otherwise inscrutable referent of an abstract, free-floating utterance. Rather, situatedness is constitutive of what it means for concrete utterances to be right or wrong. Without a grasp of how utterances are embodied, situated, and braided to each other, the issue of correctness cannot even arise. If the rightness of an utterance is the outcome of an implicit or explicit critical power seeking coherence between practices, situations, and sense-making, then rightness is always contained within the frames of relevance that concern linguistic bodies in their current situation. In our example, assuming that a community’s practices reify differences between certain colors and between certain animals, we could have that “Look there—a white rabbit!” is right and “Look there—a yellow fox!” wrong. But “Look there—a Napoleonic badger!” is neither right nor wrong, it simply falls outside the common sense that frames the situated sensitivities to rightness of linguistic agents in that particular community and concrete situation. Properly (re)used, however, nonsensical utterances can provide sharp critical tools to question common sense even further. 13.  “Activity makes manifest the relations of objects from the very fact of isolating them. The separated object is abstract, and the relation is then the concrete. But once it has been isolated the relation itself becomes abstract in respect of the object and refers to the object, to the essence of the object. Activity thus moves perpetually from the abstract to the concrete and back again. It unites, having first separated, and vice versa. It reveals relations, having first isolated elements, and vice versa” (Lefebvre 1940/2009, 122). 14. Ilyenkov articulates in a clear manner a recurring theme that to some extent (and with unavoidable nuances) has been advanced by several other dialectical thinkers against a naive (and unfortunately for many years “official”) reading of materialism whereby ideality and ideology are simply a secondary effect of the activity of the economic base structure. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of

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consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” (Marx and Engels 1846/1976, 36). “Ideas are not an instance separated from social relations, offering them afresh, after the event, as it were, to thought. The mental is thought in all its functions, present and active in all man’s activities, and something which only exists in society. The mental cannot be opposed to the material … The mental then is what thought does” (Godelier 1986, 151).

Chapter 9 1.  The vignettes in this chapter are taken from personal experience. 2. Complex developmental processes are studied using dynamical systems theory (e.g., Kuo 1967; Thelen and Smith 1994; Smith and Thelen 2003). The traditional view of progressive developmental stages—what Kurt Fischer calls the ladder metaphor—is recast into one of webs of developmental processes (Fischer et al. 2003; Fischer and Bidell 2006). Developmental spurts are the result of nonlinear changes in sensorimotor processes and in the way these processes relate to each other. This view accounts for stagewise patterns as well as for variability between stages, massive reorganization of repertoires, consolidation, generalization and integration of skills, and path dependency of developmental trajectories (e.g., van der Maas and Molenaar 1992; Fischer and Bidell 2006; van Geert 1998). The network metaphor may be applied to the relation between sensorimotor schemes as we saw in chapter 3. Beyond the metaphor, developmental processes are realized in extended brain-bodybehavior dynamic networks (Byrge et al. 2014). Consider a relatively simpler case that may serve as a model. In a longitudinal study of the development of reaching in infants, Thelen et al. (1996) demonstrate that reaching emerges from the interactions and modifications of nonreaching schemes such as bringing the hand to the face or moving arms rhythmically. Depending on the infant’s preferred movement speed (influenced by factors such as body size), successful reaching requires either learning to control fast movements to improve accuracy or learning to expand and accelerate short, slow movements so that the hand reaches the goal. There is no unique path from well-defined precursors into a new developmental stage. Integration of previous schemes depends on individual history and preferences, so skills emerge with considerable developmental variability. Related considerations connect sensorimotor development in infants (which is also scaffolded through interactions and will affect postural and locomotion patterns, prehension, manipulation, visual attention, etc.) and language learning (e.g., Campos et al. 2000; Iverson 2010) in complex and multifaceted ways. 3. Marshall Sahlins (2008) discusses the ideological links between Western philosophical conceptions of self-interested individuality and the Hobbesian/Freudian justifications for political and social control based on the assumed beastly nature of human beings. This vision has a long history but has been morally recuperated by

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modernity. Self-interest is cashed in terms of “realism” and “naturalism” in a picture fit for neoliberal ideology. Such a conception contrasts sharply with attitudes to personhood in other societies and is empirically at odds with findings on child development and on mutuality of behavior and experience in relations of kinship (including those with genetically unrelated others). The Western idea of persons as constituted individuals—instead of the relational patterns of ongoing embodied becoming we propose in this book—is perhaps unique among human cultures in its radical separation of nature and culture. 4.  We are not addressing in any detail issues of interiority or first-person perspective, but see Lysaker (2017) and Kyselo (2014) for select attempts to explain selfexperience without committing to metaphysical individualism.

Chapter 10 1.  We use “autist/autistic” and “person/child with autism,” as well as “autism” and “ASD” (autism spectrum disorder), interchangeably, as these are all by now, for one reason or another, and by different groups, accepted denominations. 2.  This vignette is adapted from the analysis by Stribling et al. (2006) of a case study of echolalia in a child with autism. Our rendering is based on the conversation analysis excerpts and descriptions as they appear in the article. Below, we further discuss this example. 3.  https://spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/controversy-autisms-common -therapy.

Chapter 11 1.  The notion of grammar rules originates in particular social and political practices. This idea inevitably affects the process of sedimentation by a tendency to solidify norms, but language learning, as we discussed in chapter 9, does not proceed as the progressive acquisition of such abstract rules. Even when rules are used in teaching, the child that learns to use a rule learns by incorporation, not by storing it in a mental record: “Given that what is required is a practical ability of bringing together the general rule and its particular instance, the teaching of language to a child is not mere explanation in terms of rule-formulations. Instead, it is training and initiation in technique in particular, concrete cases: ‘The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others’ [Wittgenstein 1953, PI§6, original emphasis]. In other words, the general rule and the particular application of it meet in action, reaction, and use” (Appelqvist 2017, 134–135). A related pedagogical emphasis on expressiveness and style in learning to use grammatical transformations comes forth in Bakhtin’s account of his teaching experiences. He notices that rule learning does not always affect language

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use in children if they are not shown the expressive or stylistic “point” of grammatical constructions and trained in their application: “Teaching syntax without providing stylistic elucidation and without attempting to enrich the students’ own speech lacks any creative significance and does not help them improve the creativity of their own speech productions” (Bakhtin 2004, 15). 2. The relationship between the linguistics of American Sign Language (ASL) and gesture research is rich and complex. Often the same parameters are used, but in ASL linguistics they are treated as rigorously phonemic or morphophonemic, while used generally as coding heuristics in gesture studies, except for more recent work by Müller, Bressem, and Ladewig (2013) and colleagues that shows them to be useful in analyzing gesture in a linguistic-semiotic approach. Works on the role of gesture in ASL (Liddell and Metzger 1998; Emmorey et al. 2000), on gesture as a possible substrate for grammaticalization in ASL (Janzen and Shaffer 2002), as well as observations of schematicity in the gestural use of comparative spaces in ASL (Janzen et al. 2017), collectively advance the question of when shared practice in a communicative modality becomes “a language.” 3.  The idea of a gestural repertoire for a culture or group of speakers notably builds on Kendon’s (2004) gesture families and Calbris’s (1990) landmark work on the semiotics of French gestures. 4. Garfinkel “showed in various demonstrations that ‘common’ or ‘shared’ could not mean that sets of the same contents, same meanings, same norms or rules, were inscribed in the minds/brains of separate persons, and were independently triggered and brought to bear on the production and decoding of signs, whether linguistic or otherwise” (Ochs et al. 1996, 14–15). 5.  See Byers (1999a) on tools as symbolic action cues, d’Errico (1995) on Paleolithic engraved artifacts used as external memory, and Harris (1986) on the origins of writing. Also relevant is the work of Hutchins (2005) on material anchors for blending concepts and Malafouris (2013) on material agency. Regarding the cognitive and sociocultural transformations produced by literacy, see for example Goody (1977), Ong (2002), and Abram (1996). 6.  The directness of perceived authorship is supported by neuroscientific evidence in studies by Kristian Tylén and colleagues (Tylén et al. 2009, 2016) showing that images of material symbols activate brain areas typically associated with language use and social interaction. 7. The suggestion that we interact with texts dialogically has a long history. One early, pre-Bakhtinian proponent of this idea was the Russian linguist Lev P. Yakubinsky, who in 1923 argued for the need to shift the focus of linguistics to the study of dialogues and suggested that written texts “elicit interruptions and responses. They may be purely mental or may be expressed orally or in writing through underlining, note-taking in margins, and the like” (Yakubinsky 1997, 250).

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8.  There are innumerable examples of textual variations on the classic format of a story as referred events. One particularly interesting one in this context is a chapter in Manuel Puig’s second novel, Boquitas Pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), where the reader literally incarnates one of the characters and experiences a visit to a fortuneteller by reading her comments and responses to the reader’s own (textually blank, but retroactively clear) utterances and interventions. Reading, already a coauthored form of sense-making, is turned in this case into virtual cowriting as it is almost impossible for the reader not to fill in the conversational gaps. 9.  Inevitably the “default pace” of a narrative, the equilibrium or synchrony, is at once set by genre distinctions, embodied and cultural norms of temporality (about how long it takes to do something, relevant to various conditions, like preparing a meal, commuting to work, or telling a story), and local constraints like mood, experience, or the reader’s relation to the particular author. Together these ingredients result in a common sense of a base temporality from which pacing deliberately deviates and to which the reader seeks a return. 10.  Abram (1996, 133) notes that it is not by chance that the English word spell has a double meaning signifying a magic formula and the arrangement of letters in the proper order. Both meanings connote the exerting of a powerful animation over something narrated, spelled, magically brought forth.

Chapter 12 1. Several people have drawn attention to the ethical aspects of the enactive approach. In a series of lectures, Francisco Varela (1999a) argued that the turn toward concrete situated practices in the study of the mind should be accompanied by a similar turn toward concrete ethical know-how (see also DeSouza 2013). Others have looked at the ethical implications of participatory sense-making regarding affectivity, ethical appraisal, moral responsibility, and the ethics of care (Colombetti and Torrance 2009; van Grunsven 2018; Urban 2014). 2. See Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) on ethical expertise and Varela (1999a) and DeSouza (2013) on ethical know-how. Enrique Dussel goes even further and postulates that ethics must be conceived as the general theory of all fields of practice (Dussel 2016). 3.  Examples of social media collections can be found with a simple online search; see also an extended example discussed in Friedersdorf (2015). 4.  For example, in the spring of 2016 activists Loretta Ross and Asam Amhad gave a workshop “Call In, Call Out” in which they addressed students interested in social justice work. “‘Before you call someone out for being ignorant or politically incorrect, ask yourself several questions,’ Amhad said. ‘What is your relationship to this

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person? What will you get out of calling them out? Is it possible for them to learn something? What does publically [sic] shaming them serve?’” (Ravelli 2016). 5.  One might consider the identification of a microaggression as a form of gossip in Manuel Vargas’s (2016, 238) technical sense, which presents a conversational model of moral judgment that takes place paradigmatically “between the offended and a third party” rather than between offended and offender. In this kind of gossip, “we express our concerns to the larger group and invite a shared commitment to judgments about what is permissible in order to induce or affirm norms of shared conduct” (ibid.). 6. For this reason, we avoid terms like naturalistic ethics or ethical naturalism as used by Mark Johnson (2014) despite the multiple resonances between his pragmatist project of elaborating a non-transcendental, situated, and embodied basis for morality and our own enactive perspective on linguistic agency as inherently ethical. 7.  If readers from relatively affluent communities think this applies only to people living in poverty in peripheral countries but not to them, this is likely proof of how effective dominating ideological narratives can be. It is no wonder that many contemporary followers of Freire focus their concerns on the dire suppression of critical skill learning in countries like Canada, the US, and the UK (e.g., Giroux 2011; hooks 1994; Kincheloe 2008; Ledwith 2016; McLaren 1995).

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Index I

n

d

e

x

© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Abram, D., 308, 349n5, 350n10 Abstract, Abstraction, 27, 29, 39, 55, 60, 63, 98, 106, 107, 111–116, 119, 127, 137, 207, 209, 210, 255, 280, 286, 313, 329, 341n1, 346n13. See also Concrete, Concreteness Accommodation, 50, 127, 150, 192 interpersonal, 74, 158, 180, 236, 249, 280 Active matter, 23, 38, 59, 100, 110, 332, 336–337n1. See also Materiality Activity theory, 55, 180 Adaptivity, 32, 33, 37, 40, 42, 59, 219, 329, 337n11 Adolphs, R., 78 Adult-infant interactions, 9, 216, 225, 227–243, 244, 247–249, 343n1. See also Social interactions asymmetry in, 242–244, 343n1 cross-cultural variation, 233–234 effects of postpartum depression, 247–249 full linguistic engagement, 231–232, 239, 243, 245, 249, 258 (see also Becoming linguistic bodies) imitation, 226 interactional routines, interactional formats, 240–241 internalization, 224–225, 227–228 (see also Private/inner speech) messy, 9, 229–230, 232, 234, 236, 237, 244

multimodal synchrony, 239 mutual recognition, 227, 249 neoteny, 235–237, 244 projection, 9, 241–243 reporting utterances, 240 shared attention, 216, 240 You-I model, 225 Affordances, 44, 180, 206, 216, 234, 295, 301 Agency, 32–38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 64, 95, 97, 99, 114, 235, 293, 303, 317, 329. See also Autonomy; Ethical agency; Normativity; Sense-making embodied, 136, 137, 144, 208, 209, 212, 327 experience, 43, 44, 54, 59 linguistic, 2, 3, 9, 10, 165, 166, 191–197, 202, 209, 216, 219, 222–224, 228, 231, 232, 233, 249, 253, 254, 258, 259, 273, 279, 281, 288, 305–307, 310 reflective, 185 sensorimotor, 14, 48–60, 80, 87, 140, 184, 332 social, 9, 84, 85, 115, 133, 138, 139, 145–152, 157, 158, 161, 162, 168, 211, 226, 344n2 Agre, P., 111, 336n4 Amhad, A., 350n4 Anchoring, 59, 94–96, 140, 170, 195, 196. See also Bodies; Dimensions of embodiment

400 Index

Andrén, M., 201, 202, 294 Appelqvist, H., 348n1 Arbib, M., 55, 292 Aristotle, 1, 135 Ashby, W. R., 336n8 Asperger, H., 273 Assimilation, 50, 127, 192 Auer, P., 285–289 Austin, J. L., 200, 316 Autism braiding utterances, 269–276 breakdowns, 266–267, 269, 270, 276 connection with others, 271–273 embodiment, 263, 264, 267 experience of, 261–262, 274–276 full linguistic engagement, 262, 265, 269 incorporation, 265 linguistic becoming, 265, 268, 275, 276 pragmatic and expressive aspects of utterances, 269–276 reported utterances, 189, 262, 265, 273 self- and other-recognition, 266–272 sense-making, 81, 262–264, 269, 310 under- and overshooting regulation265–269, 275, 276 utterance interpretation, 265, 269, 272 Autonomous robotics, 4, 18, 46, 111, 335n1 Autonomy, 23–32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 42, 47, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 192, 195, 236, 280, 329, 333 biological, 47, 87, 88, 95, 343n7 individual, 140, 144, 145, 146, 151, 158, 168, 171, 205, 227, 248 linguistic bodies, 191, 198, 205, 219–223, 254, 310, 313 sensorimotor, 47, 48, 87, 88, 89

social interactions, 64–73, 84, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 152, 158, 159, 161, 171, 205, 312, 313, 314, 319, 332 Autopoiesis, 24, 25, 28, 32, 37–40, 48, 108, 114, 329, 337n12 Bak, P., 337n10 Bakhtin, M. M., 117, 118–121, 122, 129, 130, 173, 178, 179, 210, 291, 297, 341n1, 344–345n6, 348n1, 349n7 Barandiaran, X., 33, 36, 47, 338n4 Barker, R. G., 55, 180 Barrett, N., 35 Bateson, G., 228, 338n1 Bavelas (Beavin-Bavelas), J., 287, 338n1(ch4), 344n4 Becoming linguistic bodies, 7, 9, 215–260, 268, 280, 292. See also Adult-infant interactions; Incorporation and incarnation; Private/inner speech abiding in potentiality, 234–237, 274 adults, 244, 250–252, 258 animals, 258–259 autistic children, 268, 275, 276 conflict and tension, 234, 257 constitutive of selfhood, 253–257 individuation, 219, 224, 235–236, 254 neotenization, 235–237 (see also Adult-infant interactions) ongoing processes and practices, 219, 227, 228, 234–237, 244, 245, 252, 256 reflexivity, 245–255 variations, 246–250 where, what, and how, 228–229 Behavior settings, 55, 180 Behaviorism, 16 Being-in-the-world, 22 Benjamin, J., 128, 227, 228, 249

Index 401

Benjamin, W., 308 Bentley, A., 60 Benveniste, É., 210 Berwick, R. C., 61 Blommaert, J., 289, 290 Boden, M., 336n2 Bodies. See also Dimensions of embodiment; Entanglement dichotomies, 19, 97–98 diversity, 2, 96–97, 98, 100, 167, 253–254, 264 enactive theory of, 5–7, 17–20, 22, 31–32, 40–42, 47, 53, 59–60, 61, 64, 78–779, 84, 98–100, 131, 134, 209, 336n10 as historical, 59, 64, 96–97 as practices, 95–96 Bornstein, M. H., 233 Bottema-Beutel, K., 271, 274, 275 Bourdieu, P., 66, 84, 220, 251 Brandom, R., 135 Bråten, S., 226, 228, 341n1 Bressem, J., 299, 300, 301, 349n2 Brooks, R., 336n3 Bruner, J., 16, 228, 231, 232, 240, 241 Buber, M., 72, 136 Buck-Morss, S., 127 Bühler, K., 200, 280 Buhrmann, T., 33, 49, 54 Butler, J., 315–317 Byers, A. M., 294, 296, 349n5 Calbris, G., 349n3 Caldwell, P., 273, 275 Calvo-Merino, B., 78 Calvo, P., 336n9, 338n1 Capitalism, 138, 180, 339–340n1 Caracciolo, M., 303, 335n1 Caregiver-infant interactions. See Adult-infant interactions Carel, H., 95 Catalysis, Autocatalysis, 27, 66 Catmur, C., 78

Chafe, W., 210 Chomsky, N., 61, 321 Clark, A., 336n9 Clark, H. H., 177, 285, 341n1 Clause, 286, 287, 320 Code switching, Code mixing, 288–290 Cognitive ecology, 54 Cognitive grammar, 301, 302 Cognitive linguistics, 4, 5, 13, 14, 18, 116 Cognitivism, 13, 15, 17, 41, 46, 58, 76, 83, 132. See also Computational explanation; Embodied functionalism; Representationalism Coin, F., 83 Cole, M., 96, 128 Colombetti, G., 335n1, 350n1 Commodities, 89, 107, 138 Communication, 7, 14, 89, 117, 118, 132, 210, 267, 268, 307, 308, 324 Computational explanation, 4, 5, 17, 19, 61, 132, 224. See also Cognitivism; Embodied functionalism; Representationalism Concrete, Concreteness, 6, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 31, 39, 40, 42, 60, 95, 99, 100, 105–107, 111–116, 119, 126, 132, 136, 138, 142, 150, 156, 157, 162, 194, 209, 283, 294, 322, 346n12. See also Abstract, Abstraction Concretization, 99, 112, 113, 130, 136, 159, 210, 329 Consciousness, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 305, 306, 333n. See also Experience Constitutive theory of language, 7, 131–138, 342n2–3 Coordination (interactive), 63, 64–69, 73–75, 131, 142, 143, 144, 187, 329, 331. See also Miscoordination; Precoordination; Sensorimotor coordination; Synergy

402 Index

Coordination (interactive) (cont.) of social acts, 152–157, 161, 162, 203, 210, 231, 266, 282, 288 in autism, 263, 274, 276 Coordination dynamics (neural), 57, 58 Coregulation, 67, 68, 85, 118, 145, 147–151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162, 167, 175, 178, 187, 200, 244, 266–269, 276, 291, 292, 295, 306, 330, 343n8. See also Social acts Couper-Kuhlen, E., 286 Cowley, S., 341n1 Craik, K., 16 Critical participation, 3, 327 Critical pedagogy, 82, 127, 257, 322, 326 Criticality, 58, 336–337n10 Crossley, N., 336n2 Csordas, T. J., 336n2 Cuffari, E., 216, 217, 299, 306, 335n1 Cummins, F., 335n1, 339n2 d’Errico, F., 349n5 Davidson, D., 200 Default mode (brain), 47 De Jaegher, H., 62, 65, 66, 73, 77, 78, 81, 84, 108, 222, 230, 263, 335n1, 339n2(ch4), 340n2 Deleuze, G., 210 Descartes, R., 23 Descola, P., 207 DeSouza, N., 350n1 Dewey, J., 6, 46, 60 Dialectical model of linguistic bodies, 9, 71, 115, 116, 129, 133–212, 216, 222, 228, 245, 246, 247, 253, 254, 255, 265, 282, 283, 303, 306, 342n3 concrete constraints, 150, 157, 162, 165 minimal assumptions, 113, 138, 209 Dialectical motifs, 108, 114, 116, 125, 129–130

Dialectical situation, 9, 113, 114, 115, 127, 138, 194, 288, 339–340n1 Dialectics, 36, 107, 177, 285, 292, 293, 339n1(ch6), 339–340n1, 340n3 abstract and concrete, 111–116, 119, 139, 194, 209, 255, 341n1, 346n13 autopoiesis/individuation, 37–41, 95, 108, 114 distance proximity, 124, 130, 169, 283 domination, 169, 171 dynamical systems, 108, 109 enactive approach, 107–111 golden mean, 114, 151, 178 Hegelian, 136, 339–340n1 history, 112, 113, 114, 115, 126, 130, 133, 139, 342n3 ideality, 346–347n14 language, 116–125 Marxist, 126, 339–340n1 method, 9, 109, 112–115, 126, 129, 130, 133, 138, 339–340n1 overdetermination, 113, 114, 339–340n1 psychology, 125–129 sedimentation spontaneity, 121, 206, 217, 282, 288, 290, 291, 302 tensions, 9, 36, 39, 40, 95, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 119, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 159, 162, 165, 169, 171, 194, 198, 209, 211, 216, 228, 246, 255, 273, 288, 339–340n1 Dialogues, 9, 118–121, 122, 128, 170, 171–179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186–191, 193, 196, 204, 205, 216, 228, 241, 266, 267, 270, 284, 285, 288, 290, 297, 330, 344n2, 345n7 asymmetries, 170–175, 187, 188, 210, 216, 242, 305, 306, 320–322 critical power, 190, 198, 204, 205, 210, 277, 283, 293, 313, 319–322, 325, 327, 328 excitability, 186

Index 403

narratives, 304–306, 350n9 roles, 170–172, 175, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193, 216, 228, 250, 255, 266, 304, 317 virtual, 194, 225, 226, 280 DiFrisco, J., 24 Dillon, M., C., 122 Dimensions of embodiment, 3, 8, 13, 21–22, 41, 61, 63, 64, 84, 87–88, 91–95, 96, 97, 101, 131, 134, 184, 191, 193, 195–196, 221, 253, 305, 306, 309, 310–311. See also Anchoring; Bodies Di Paolo, E. A., 24, 25, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 65, 66, 73, 77, 78, 84, 108, 136, 205, 230, 242, 292, 335n1, 338n4–5, 338–339n1, 340n2 Dissonance (interactive), 117, 127, 142–145, 146, 147, 149, 156, 157, 158, 159, 166, 167, 168, 172, 174, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 205, 266, 270, 282 Donnellan, A., 81, 263, 264 Dotov, D., 52 Dreyfus, H. L., 336n3, 350n2 Du Bois, J., 188, 285, 288 Du Bois, W. E. B., 343–344n1 Ducrot, O., 344–345n6 Dumas, G., 57, 77, 339n1 Dussel, E., 328, 350n2 Echolalia, 81, 189, 261–262, 267, 271–273 Ecological inheritance, 31. See also Niche construction Ecological psychology, 55, 129. See also Reed, E. S. Egbert, M., 47, 337n11 Embodied functionalism, 17, 19, 41, 132. See also Cognitivism; Computational explanation; Representationalism

Enactive approach, 6–8, 17–20, 42, 48, 73, 81–85, 99, 107–111, 132, 185, 263, 275, 276, 303, 309, 333, 337n12, 350n1 Enactive ethics, 10, 34, 257, 309, 310, 322, 335n1, 350n1 Enactive symbols, 10, 202, 280, 294–297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 333. See also Symbolizing Engelland, C., 229 Engels, F., 100, 123, 346–347n14 Entanglement, 3, 77, 84, 87–93, 96, 97, 131, 140, 192, 194, 220, 269, 306, 310, 311, 314, 316, 317, 322, 330. See also Bodies; Dimensions of embodiment Epigenetics, 88, 91 Equilibration, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 93, 150, 292, 330 Estrangement, 166 Ethical agency, 10, 255, 257, 258, 310–314, 319, 325, 351n6 Ethical know-how, 313, 323, 350n1 Ethics of participation, 310, 322–328 Excitability, excitable media, 46, 55, 69, 70, 77, 79, 84, 186, 223, 235, 315, 330 Experience, 6, 13, 35, 42, 61, 87, 90, 99, 100, 122, 123, 195, 275, 317, 327. See also Sense of agency bodily, 22, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 61, 95, 158 care and concern, 20, 22–23, 43, 44, 62, 85 first-person givenness, 100 interactive, 65, 66, 78, 79, 84, 144, 145, 151, 152, 156, 166, 182, 249, 283, 335n1 intersubjective, 62–64, 80, 85, 166, 169, 170, 322 linguistic, 136, 192, 196, 206, 215–218, 225, 227, 239, 243, 252, 258, 280, 303, 304, 306, 314, 321

404 Index

Experience (cont.) perceptual, 48, 49, 50, 52 phenomenality, 22, 35 Familiarity, 84, 130, 165, 166, 167, 192 Fanon, F., 343–344n1 Fasulo, A., 271, 272, 273, 275 Fentress, J., 55 Fernyhough, C., 224 Fischer, K., 128, 347n2 Flores, F., 336n4 Fogel, A., 65, 76, 238, 338n1(ch4) Franceschini, R., 288, 290 Fraser, N., 343–344n1 Freire, P., 82, 127, 237, 255, 257, 326, 343–344n1, 351n7 Frith, C., 339n1(ch4) Froese, T., 335n1 Fuchs, T., 58, 62, 81, 136, 222, 335n1 Full linguistic engagement, 230–234, 239, 243, 245, 249, 253, 258, 259, 262, 269. See also Adult-infant interactions; Becoming linguistic bodies Functionalist epistemology, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 34, 36, 51, 111, 245, 262, 338n5. See also Cognitivism; Embodied functionalism; Representationalism Fusaroli, R., 341n1 Gallagher, S., 17, 44, 83, 303, 335n1, 339n1(ch4) Gallese, V., 78 Gallotti, M., 338–339n1 Gánti, T., 25 Garfinkel, H., 349n4 Gavagai, 346n12 Gendlin, E., 6 Generativity, 282 Gesture, 121, 123–125, 155, 158, 185–186, 203, 242, 293, 298–302, 335n1, 341n1, 343n9, 345n9, 349n3

conventionality, 299, 301 enactive symbol, 294, 296, 301–302, 304 gesticulation, 299 grammar, 300–302 linguistic unit, 301–302 in mother-infant interaction, 128, 146, 234, 238, 242 objectifying attitude, 206 origin of, 123–125, 293 parameters, 300, 349n2 partial act ,152–154 recurrent, 299–302 regulatory act, 154–156, 158, 203 self-directed, 124–125, 185–186, 293 (see also Social self-control) as utterance, 173–174, 178–179, 287 world-involving act, 121, 125 (see also Merleau-Ponty, M.) Giroux, H., 255, 351n7 Godelier, M., 207, 346–347n14 Goffman, E., 65, 71, 72, 177, 189, 195, 290 González de Prado Salas, J., 307 Goodwin, C., 287, 341n1, 344n6 Goody, J., 251, 349n5 Grammar as complex behavior, 291–292 embodied grammar, 281, 283, 286, 290 emergent grammar, 280, 281, 282, 285, 286, 287, 291, 298 enactive grammar, 10, 280, 281, 282, 285, 288, grammaticality judgments, 298 grammaticalizing, 280, 282, 286–287, 289–293, 295, 344n6, 348–349n1, 349n2 Graphism, 304 Grice, P., 117 Grosz, E., 339n2(ch5) Guattari, F., 210

Index 405

Gumperz, J. J., 288, 289, 341n1 Günther, S., 189

Hyperdialectic, 122, 130 Hyppolite, J., 171

Habermas, J., 117, 200, 201, 346n11 Habits, 46–48, 88, 159, 180, 220, 221, 250, 330, 338n4 Habitus, 66, 84, 85, 179, 180, 190, 192, 198, 209, 220, 221, 224, 267–269 Hall, E., 339n3 Hanczyc, M., 30, 336–337n10 Hanks, W., 252 Hari, R., 76, 77, 78 Harris, A., 12810 Harris, R., 286, 341n1, 349n5 Harvey, D., 340n1 Harvey, I., 46 Hate speech, 315, 316 Hegel, F., 23, 24, 38, 40, 136, 171, 339–340n1 Heidegger, M., 135, 210, 258 Helasvuo, M.-L., 285, 286, 287 Heras-Escribano, M., 34 Herman, J., 90 Hessen, B. M., 340n3 Heteroglossia, 120 Heteronomy, 32, 141 Historicity, 23, 29, 30, 59, 64, 96, 97, 126, 209, 237, 291, 297, 325. See also Path-dependence Hobson, P., 76, 265 Hockett, C., 210 Holzkamp, K., 128, 129 Homeostasis, 41 Honneth, A., 135, 171, 343–344n1 hooks, b., 82, 251, 255, 351n7 Hopper, P. J., 285, 286 Human-computer interaction, 18 Hurley, S., 46 Husserl, E., 122, 123, 224 Hutchins, E., 54, 111, 336n7, 342n5, 349n5 Hutto, D., 33, 34, 303, 335n1, 338n5 Hylomorphism, 35, 99, 100, 207, 235

I/It/Thou, 72, 135, 136 Ideality, 9, 122, 130, 207, 208, 293, 295, 297, 303, 307, 308, 346–347n14. See also Objectivity, Objectifying attitude; Truth-process Iizuka, H., 335n1 Ilyenkov, E., 112, 115, 119, 121, 123, 129, 207, 208, 294, 307, 339–340n1, 346–347n14 In-the-head explanation, 245, 263, 333, 338n5. See also Nonrepresentational explanation; World involving explanation Incarnation, 193–195, 197, 199, 206, 210, 212, 221, 222, 254, 256, 273, 305–306, 311, 330. See also Incorporation and incarnation Incorporation, 14, 28–29, 92, 94, 96, 116, 135, 167, 171, 180, 182, 184, 188, 192–195, 199, 201, 210, 211, 216, 217, 221–222, 224, 240, 254, 256–258, 265, 271–272, 284, 313, 330, 348n1. See also Incorporation and incarnation Incorporation and incarnation, 2, 206, 217, 218, 226, 229, 245, 250–251, 255–257, 280, 288, 302, 307, 312, 317, 321 Individuation, 7, 19, 20, 23, 36, 39, 41, 42, 53, 96, 113, 132, 142, 175, 180, 198, 206, 208, 219, 221, 235–236, 259, 280, 291, 325, 330, 337n11. See also Self-individuation; Simondon, G. Inequality, 90, 325, 343n1, 343–344n1 Ingold, T., 304 Integrational linguistics, 116, 286, 341n1 Intensionality, 135 Intentional arc, 13, 43

406 Index

Intentionality, 34, 35, 63, 170, 176, 201, 222, 266, 293, 324 Interactive asymmetry, 36–37, 167–171, 174–175, 187, 242–244, 306–307, 318, 343–344n1. See also Adult-infant interactions; Dialogues; Turn-taking Interactive brain hypothesis, 77 Interactive regulation, 122, 265–269, 282, 286 Interactive sense-making, 179, 228, 244. See also Participatory sense-making Intercorporeality, 61–64, 85, 121, 157, 158, 167, 196, 198, 226, 323 Interpretation, Interpretive sense-making. See Sense-making Intimacy, 65 agential, 44, 60, 79 interpersonal, 1, 65, 129, 130, 131, 180, 227, 229, 271–275, 311 intimacy-distance, 166–167, 169, 180, 227, 229 Issartel, J., 69 Iverson, J., 347n2 Jackson, D. D., 338n1(ch4) Jaffe, J., 65 Jakobson, R., 285, 295 Jameson, F., 107 Jirsa, V., 67 John-Steiner, V., 128 Johnson, M., 5, 6, 61, 336n5, 341n1, 351n6 Joint attention, 78, 128, 232 Jonas, H., 6, 23, 24, 32, 40, 41, 100, 108, 304, 324 Juarrero, A., 35, 36 Kant, I., 23, 24, 32, 34, 37 Kaye, K., 238, 240, 338n1(ch4) Keijzer, F., 45, 338n1(ch3) Kelso, J. A. S., 57, 67, 77, 336n7, 339n2(ch4)

Kendon, A., 65, 299, 339n3, 341n1, 343n9, 349n3 Kincheloe, J., 82, 351n7 Kiverstein, J., 17, 180 Kosík, K., 339–340n1 Krátký, J., 342n5 Kravchenko, A., 341n1 Krifka, M., 292 Kuramoto, Y., 67 Kyselo, M., 335n1, 348n4 Ladewig, S. H., 299, 300, 301, 349n2 Lakoff, G., 5, 61, 336n5, 341n1 Lande, B., 221 Langacker, R., 301, 302 Langfur, S., 225, 226 Languaging, 120, 133, 134, 139, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 225, 226, 247, 250–253, 262, 264, 274, 276, 277, 290, 295, 307, 310, 313, 314, 327, 343n8 Laroche, J., 82 Lave, J., 111, 128, 129 Law, J., 95 Leather, J., 229, 233, 251, 288, 341n1 Lecercle, J.-J., 116, 117, 120, 251, 345n7 Ledwith, M., 351n7 Lefebvre, H., 113, 119, 121, 340n3, 346n13 Leont’ev, A. N., 55, 126, 128, 129, 180 Leroi-Gourhan, A., 303 Letting be, 149, 305, 314, 323 Levinas, E., 322 Levins, R., 31, 89, 109, 340n3 Lewontin, R., 31, 89, 108, 340n3 Life-mind continuity, 6, 8, 9, 14, 110, 134, 140, 193, 196, 209, 275, 280, 281 Lifeworld, 13, 64, 135, 136, 137, 138, 165, 200, 201, 216, 217, 218, 230, 245

Index 407

Linell, P., 284, 341n1 Linguistic bodies autonomy, 191, 198, 205, 219–223, 254, 310, 313 definition and constitution, 191–198, 210, 215 ongoing becoming, 101, 198, 211, 234–237, 250–258, 309, 310, 325, 326 vulnerabilities, 310–314, 317 Linguistic immanence, 105, 106 Linguistic sense-making, 195, 215, 231, 232, 250, 257, 260, 298, 307, 312 Literacy, 251, 303, 349n5 Loaiza, J., 82 Local pragmatics, 157, 158, 159, 161 Locked-in Syndrome (LiS), 89, 95 Løgstrup, K., 322 Losev, A. F., 340n3 Love, N., 286, 341n11 Lukács, G., 207 Luria, A. R., 96, 292, 345n10 Lysaker, J., 254, 256, 257, 348n4 Machines, 6, 19, 20, 21, 32, 92, 112 Maclaren, K., 63 Maiese, M., 81, 83, 335n1 Malafouris, L., 296, 297, 335n1, 342n5, 349n5 Mann, T., 94 Maratos, O., 226 Marcel, A., 44 Markers regulatory, 185–186, 284 temporal, 319 Marková, I., 128 Marx, K., 100, 115, 115, 126, 138, 340n3, 346–347n14 Masolo, D., 255 Mastery, 48, 50–52, 58, 59, 80, 85, 93, 218, 224, 330, 338n5. See also Skillfulness, Skillful coping

Materiality, 14, 20, 23, 35, 41, 42, 59, 62, 64, 84, 96, 99, 100, 110, 130, 136, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152, 167, 171, 186, 207, 211, 285, 293, 297, 302, 304, 307, 336–337n10, 342n5 Material symbols, 280, 293, 296, 297, 302, 303, 304, 305, 349n6 Maturana, H., 38, 343n8 Matyja, J., 82, 335n1 Mauss, M., 221 Maximal linguistic asymmetry, 320–322 McGann, M., 335n1 McGraw, J., 342n5 McLaren, P., 351n7 McNally, D., 316 McNeill, D., 2, 21, 299, 301, 343n9 Meeuwis, M., 289, 290 Meltzoff, A. N., 226 Merleau-Ponty, M., 6, 32, 43, 46, 63, 100, 108, 113, 117, 119, 121–125, 130, 232, 252, 259, 290, 298, 299 Merritt, M., 335n1 Metadialogues, 190 Metaregulation, 153, 185, 283 Michelini, F., 23 Microaggressions, 314–319, 327 Microbiota, 31, 91 Microidentities, 59 Microworlds, 20, 54, 55, 58, 59, 122, 178, 179 Mikhailov, F., 123 Mindreading, 75, 78. See also Theory of mind Mirror neurons, 78 Miscoordination, 63, 64, 69, 74, 175, 276 Misinterpretation, 183, 190, 284 Misproduction, 183 Mol, A., 95 Molenaar, P., 97, 347n2 Monolingualism, 229, 233, 251, 288–290

408 Index

Moore, M. K., 226 Moran, N., 82 Moreno, A., 25, 30 Moro, A., 292 Moss, M. L., 88 Mossio, M., 25, 30 Müller, C., 299, 300, 301, 349n2 Multiple realizability, 100 Musculoskeletal system, 45, 47, 48, 302 Music, 232, 268, 274, 321 as communication, 268 joint music performance, 76, 81–83, 172 music teaching, 81–83, 335n1 Mutual interpretation, 183–186, 187, 189, 210, 226 Myin, E., 33, 34, 335n1 Nadel, J., 273, 275 Narrative, 303, 305–307, 319, 320, 326, 350n9, 351n7 pacing, 306, 319 Narrow corridor situation, 69, 140, 141, 142, 143 Naturalism, 4, 6, 99, 110, 295, 347–348n3, 351n6 Natural pedagogy, 245 Nature-inspired computation, 18 Nearly decomposable systems, 76, 77, 112, 330 Needful freedom, 23, 40, 108 Neoteny, 235, 236, 237, 244, 325 Niche construction, 29, 31, 92, 109 Noë, A., 48, 51, 52 Nomikou, I., 239, 240, 243, 244 Nonintegrable systems, 35, 336–337n10 Nonrepresentational explanation, 4, 33, 51, 281, 293, 295, 309 Non-sense, 298 Normann, B., 83 Normativity, 4, 35, 37, 331. See also Agency; Sense-making; Truth-process

frames and genres, 178, 179, 180, 182, 186, 190, 206, 218 grammar, 281, 291, 292 interactive, 84, 141–145, 157, 159, 161, 198 linguistic, 9, 117, 120, 133, 135, 208, 293 multiple sources, 84, 87, 92, 93, 141–145, 196, 198 organismic, 47, 92, 93 (see also Vital norms) sensorimotor, 44, 47, 50–53, 184 sociocultural, 204, 273, 274, 310, 318 of social acts, 145, 151, 156, 159–169, 172, 174, 175, 176, 267, 268, 332 Núñez, R., 5, 336n5 Øberg, G. K., 83 Objectivity, Objectifying attitude, 134, 198–208, 222, 282, 293, 327, 328, 331. See also Ideality; Truth-process O’Brien, B., 69 Obstacles and lacunae, 51, 85, 147, 149, 150 Ochs, E., 233, 267, 268, 270, 273, 274, 275, 280, 286, 341n1, 349n4 Ollman, B., 339–340n1 Ong, W. J., 251, 349n5 Operational closure, 24–29, 32, 38, 44, 65, 66, 67, 99, 191, 222, 226, 292, 331 O’Regan, K., 48, 51, 52 Origin of language, 123–125, 228, 292–293 Overall, C., 253 Overton, W. F., 336n2 Oyama, S., 31, 108 Paradialogic coregulation, 173 Parent-infant interactions. See Adult-infant interactions

Index 409

Partial acts, 150–163, 166, 174, 204, 231, 242, 265, 282, 287, 331, 343n8. See also Social acts complementarity, 65, 80, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 161, 174, 176, 177, 183, 203, 283, 296, 343n8 equilibration, 150–153, 155, 158, 159, 161, 345n9 equivalence, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161, 177, 282, 283, 343n8 expressivity, 155, 176, 177, 189, 286 interlocking, 157–159, 161, 201 normativity, 151, 156–159, 161, 162, 166, 168, 174, 203, 204, 284, 314 objects/operators, 155, 203, 282, 332 paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions, 155, 156, 283 portability, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166, 331 recursive regulation, 153–156, 159, 161, 162, 183, 203, 204, 210, 231, 254, 282, 284, 296, 332, 343n8 repertoires, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 166, 177, 210, 254, 280, 282, 283, 284 strongly normative, 157, 158, 161, 166, 168, 210 Participation genres, 178, 179–186, 187, 201, 210, 231, 234, 272–273, 275, 284 ambiguity, 182, 183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 306 criticism, 190, 204, 283 normativity, 178, 179, 180, 204, 283 precoordination, 178, 181, 182 Participatory sense-making, 73–75, 80, 115, 117, 131, 159, 161, 170, 210, 216, 217, 226, 231, 232, 240, 248, 254, 281, 295, 297, 303, 319, 331, 350n1 applications, 81–83

in autism, 265, 266, 274 departure point for model, 137–139, 165 narratives, 305–308 primordial tension, 139–145, 149, 198, 211, 215, 245, 250, 281, 282, 292, 314, 343n7 Pashukanis, E. B., 339–340n1 Path-dependence, 35, 64, 94, 95, 96, 97, 238. See also Historicity Pattee, H., 35, 295, 336–337n10 Payne, H., 81, 275 Performance (enactment), 76, 144, 195, 207, 216, 226, 256, 304 Pfeifer, R., 46 Piaget, J., 50, 127, 148 Pickett, K., 90 Pierce, C. M., 315 Plant cognition, 338n1(ch3) Plasticity, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 59, 79, 92, 96, 97, 150, 180, 220, 249, 303, 338n1(ch3) Plessner, H., 6, 222 Popova, Y., 303, 305, 306, 319, 335n1 Potentialities, 6, 23, 41, 58, 69, 113, 114, 117, 219, 238, 242, 244, 249, 260, 288, 311, 332, 333 Poverty of the stimulus, 245 Powers, 9, 10, 14, 48, 59, 62, 71, 76, 93, 134, 135, 163, 167, 324. See also Sensitivities in autism, 262–264 linguistic, 191, 198, 211, 222, 223, 245, 247, 250, 251, 279, 293, 295, 312, 323, 325, 326, 331 Precariousness, 20, 21, 23, 25–30, 33, 37, 41, 42, 53, 71, 72, 75, 84, 93, 94, 99, 100, 110, 144, 151, 172, 195, 219, 249, 253, 307, 309, 311, 326, 331. See also Materiality; Vulnerability Precoordination, 144, 167, 178, 179, 181, 220

410 Index

Preindividual, 41, 236, 314 Prigogine, I., 336–337n10 Primordial tension of life, 37–42 Primordial tension of participatory sense-making. See Participatory sense-making Private pragmatics, 157, 158, 178 Private/inner speech, 223–229, 276. See also Self-talk Projection, 154, 193, 203, 242, 287. See also Adult-infant interactions Prosociality, 144, 145, 324 Protocells, 30 Puig, M., 350n8 Pulvermüller, F., 292 Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., 243, 244, 295 Readiness to interact, 64, 75, 78, 79, 80, 84, 134, 244, 321 Reading, 303–308, 350n8. See also Writing reader agency, 306–307 Recursion, Recursivity, 84, 106, 112, 123, 130, 134, 153–156, 159–162, 183, 185–188, 190–191, 204, 206, 208, 210, 218, 231, 254, 255, 257, 269, 281, 282–284, 289, 293–295, 304, 332, 343n8 Recursive pragmatics, 204, 206, 208, 272 Reddy, V., 75, 78, 136, 225 Reed, E. S., 129, 234, 245 Reed, K., 67, 143, 150 Reference, Referring, 121–122, 200–202, 205, 208, 218, 293, 295, 346n12, 350n8 Representationalism, 4, 5, 51, 54, 337n12, 338n5, 338–339n1. See also Cognitivism; Computational explanation; Embodied functionalism Representations, internal, 19, 21, 291, 295

Re-presenting, 295, 306 Reversibility (ontology), 63, 121, 122. See also Intercorporeality; Merleau-Ponty, M. Ricoeur, P., 171 Riegel, K. F., 127, 128 Rietveld, E., 180 Rivière, Á., 202, 294 Rodríguez, C., 345n9 Rogoff, B., 76, 129, 234 Rohde, M., 36 Rohlfing, K., 239, 240 Root, M., 292 Rosch, E., 6, 17, 21 Rosen, R., 25, 35 Ross, L., 350n4 Rossi-Landi, F., 117 Roth, W.-M., 129 Rubinstein, S. L., 127 Rupert, R., 336n9 Sacks, H., 65, 341n1 Sahlins, M., 237, 347n3 Samaritter, R., 81, 275 Santos, B. de S., 328 Sapir, E., 280 Sartori, L., 79, 80 Sartre, J.-P., 256 Saville-Troike, M., 233, 290 Schaber, A., 266 Schaffer, H., R., 65, 240, 338n1(ch4) Schegloff, E., A., 285 Scheier, C., 46 Schiavio, A., 82, 335n1 Schmidt, R. C., 69 Schoggen, P., 55, 180 Schutz, A., 64 Scribner, S., 96, 128 Searle, J., 200 Self-affection, 22, 46, 100 Self-differentiation, 41 Self-distinction, 24, 38–41, 67, 108, 114, 332

Index 411

Self-individuation, 23–25, 28, 30–33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 53, 65, 72, 92, 95, 100, 108, 195, 221, 311, 329, 332, 333. See also Individuation Self-production, 24, 38–40, 66, 108, 114, 332 Self-talk, 119, 126, 224, 225, 226, 248, 265, 312, 341n1. See also Private/ inner speech Sense certainty, 125 Sense-making, 3, 32–37, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 52, 53, 59, 73, 74, 75, 81, 95, 96, 99, 108, 110, 131, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 167, 172, 178, 180, 192, 194, 218, 241, 245, 251, 291, 332, 337n13, 338n1(ch3). See also Agency; Participatory sense-making aboutness, 200, 201, 208 in autism, 81, 262–264, 269, 310 critical, 206 interpretive, 177, 183, 185, 269 linguistic, 188, 195, 198, 202, 205, 208, 209, 215, 231, 232, 250, 252, 257, 260, 286, 295, 296, 297, 298, 304, 307, 308, 312, 318 narrative, 305, 306, 350n9 Sense of agency, 44, 54, 59 Sensitivities, 14, 19, 43, 46, 48, 54, 59, 61, 62, 76, 80, 85, 93, 134, 135, 141, 143, 153, 162, 170, 171, 221, 225, 243, 318, 330. See also Powers in autism, 262–264 hypo-, hypersensitivities, 81, 263, 266 linguistic, 209, 210, 211, 222, 228, 238, 239, 240, 245, 247, 250, 251, 279, 280, 298, 302, 308, 320 objectifying attitude, 204, 206 Sensitivity to rightness, 134, 135, 136, 205, 208, 282, 346n12 Sensorimotor approach to perception, 48, 51

Sensorimotor contingencies, 48, 49, 50, 52 Sensorimotor coordination, 4, 50, 145, 147, 148, 150, 154, 193, 330, 332 Sensorimotor environment, 49 Sensorimotor habitat, 49 Sensorimotor life, 4, 14, 44, 47, 59, 92, 93, 134 Sensorimotor schemes, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 67, 75, 79, 87, 93, 147, 148, 151, 152, 156, 159, 191, 196, 205, 206, 292, 330, 332, 347n2 Shankey, J., 271 Shapiro, L., 336n9 Sheets-Johnstone, M., 6 Shusterman, R., 6 Silberman, S., 273 Simon, H., 76, 112 Simondon, G., 7, 23, 24, 41, 70, 100, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 122, 130, 132, 207, 219, 220, 235, 236, 325, 332 Sinigaglia, C., 78 Skillfulness, Skillful coping, 43, 49, 52, 82, 85, 93, 168, 192, 232, 311, 313. See also Mastery Smith, L., 128, 241, 336n2, 347n2 Social acts, 146–159, 173, 175, 176, 181, 183, 185, 187, 196, 201, 203, 238, 242, 268, 282, 332. See also Partial acts act of giving, 146, 149, 151, 153, 159, 332 community closure, 161 coregulation and letting be, 146, 147–151, 162, 168, 244, 277, 323 normativity, 156, 157–159, 161, 169, 175, 184, 198, 203, 204, 282, 331 openness, 149, 151, 203, 248 salutations, 149, 152, 154, 156, 159, 178, 204, 265 sedimented 152, 158, 268, 282, 283, 295, 296

412 Index

Social acts (cont.) spontaneous, 149, 151, 154, 158, 159, 203 vulnerability, 149 Social cognition, 78, 81, 281. See also Participatory sense-making Social interactions, 8, 9, 63, 64–80, 131, 132, 137, 150, 157, 158, 171, 172, 181, 182, 195, 236, 246, 249, 293, 296, 314, 332, 338n1(ch4), 341n1. See also Adult-infant interactions; Participatory sense-making; Readiness to interact autonomy, 64–73, 84, 87, 88, 140, 142, 144–146, 151, 152, 158, 159, 161, 171, 205, 223, 318, 312, 313, 314, 319, 332 definition, 65, 70, 145 experience, 63, 65, 66, 69, 79, 80, 84, 142, 144, 146, 152, 166, 167, 169, 182, 195, 222, 241, 249, 280, 317, 335n1 materiality, 64, 84, 99, 130, 142, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152, 165, 167, 171 normativity, 84, 141–145, 157, 159, 161, 198 Social self-control, 184–186, 187, 189, 191, 194, 210, 226, 254, 312, 322, 345n9 Social understanding. See Participatory sense-making Sohn-Rethel, A., 207 Solomon, O., 267, 268 Speech act, 200, 316 Speech genres, 118, 178, 179, 345n8 Spiel, K., 277 Spinoza, B., 126 Stam, H., 336n2 State-determinism, 35, 337n12 Stationarity, nonstationarity, 20, 47, 210 Stawarska, B., 136 Steffensen, S., 341n1

Stern, D., 65, 228, 240, 338–339n1 Sterponi, L., 267, 271, 272, 273, 275 Stewart, J., 207, 251, 303, 335n1 Strathern, M., 255 Streeck, J., 287, 299, 341n1, 343n9 Stribling, P., 267, 273, 348n2 Style interactional, 84, 166, 169, 176, 252 linguistic, 2, 120, 178, 186, 189, 208, 209, 247, 270, 274, 289, 290, 320, 327, 348n1 sensorimotor, 48, 53, 60, 193, 221, 236 Su, D., 288 Subject of enunciation, 137, 345n7 Suchman, L., 336n4 Symbiosis, 31, 180 Symbolizing, 293, 295, 297–298, 302. See also Enactive symbols; Material symbols Synchronization, 66 in interaction, 239, 240 interbrain, 76, 77 neuronal, 58 Synergy, 17, 46, 63, 339n2(ch4) bodily, 50, 58, 92 interactive, 127, 142–145, 146, 149, 203 Systematic intersubjective stress, 90–91 Taylor, C., 15, 117, 134, 135, 208, 228, 255, Teleology, 24, 32, 34, 35 Tensegrity, 45, 47, 92 Thao, T. D., 117, 123–125, 129, 207, 293, 294 Thelen, E., 128, 336n7, 347n2 Theory of mind, 274. See also Mindreading Thibault, P., 341n1 Thompson, E., 6, 17, 21, 24, 32, 52, 108, 335n1 Thompson, S. A., 286

Index 413

Toolan, M., 341n1 Torrance, S., 335n1, 350n1 Torres, E. B., 263, 264 Towers, J., 82 Transduction, 23, 70, 219, 220, 221, 223, 291, 294, 332 Transindividual, 221, 236 Trevarthen, C., 75, 228 Trust, 8, 13, 154, 253, 273, 275, 323 Truth-process, 323–327. See also Ideality Turn-taking, 70, 77, 170, 172, 173, 239, 241, 272, 274 Turvey, M., 45 Tylén, K., 349n6 Ultrafast cognition, 58, 76 Underwater breathing (insects), 28, 92 Urban, P., 335n1, 350n1 Utterances, 2, 3, 118–120, 122, 173–179, 181, 182–186, 194, 195, 196, 201, 215, 216, 243, 293, 332, 343–344n1, 345n7, 346n12. See also Dialogues braiding, 9, 188, 191, 204, 231, 269–272, 276, 282, 294 flows, 9, 10, 191, 192, 193, 216, 304, 313 institutional, 319–322 person constituting, 9, 191, 193, 222, 254, 255, 314 reported, 186–191, 202–204, 210, 240, 241, 254, 262, 265, 283, 284, 285, 307, 312, 318 rightness, 205, 206 self-directed, 126, 185, 186, 218, 224, 228, 254, 256, 305, 306 structure of, 283, 285–288, 290, 291, 292, 295 Valsiner, J., 129 van Dam, J., 229, 233, 251, 288, 341n1 van der Schyff, D., 82, 335n1 van Grunsven, J., 350n1 Van Orden, G., 45, 52, 58

Varela, F. J., 6, 17, 21, 24, 25, 32, 38, 46, 54, 58, 100, 108, 111, 335n1, 338n2, 350n2 Vargas, M., 351n5 Viability, 33, 42, 47, 52, 53, 62, 87, 88, 92, 96, 99, 193, 219, 329, 331, 333 Villalobos, M., 34, 37 Violence, Violent acts, 90, 168, 249, 250 Virno, P., 236 Virtual, Virtuality, 6, 33, 52, 53, 54, 60, 79, 134, 141, 156, 189, 194, 197, 205, 206, 226, 227, 242, 283, 291, 294, 297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 320, 332, 333, 338n5 Virtual image, 294, 301, 303, 304, 333 Vital norms, 306, 319, 350n9. See also Normativity Viveiros de Castro, E., 207, 255 Voloshinov, V. N., 117, 118–121, 122, 178, 187, 284, 341n1, 345n8 von Uexküll, J., 44 Vulnerability, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84, 94, 97, 149, 310–314, 317. See also Precariousness Vygotsky, L. S., 76, 125–129, 223, 224, 292, 345n10 Wacquant, L., 221, 336n2 Wallon, H., 125–127 Wallot, S., 58 Ward, D., 34 Watzlawick, P., 338n1(ch4), 341n1 We-ness, 8, 324, 338–339n1 Weddell seals (behavior), 28, 29, 92 Wei, L., 290 Wertsch, J., 128, 224 Wheeler, M., 336n9 Wilkinson, R., 90 Williams, R., 116, 117, 119, 342n3 Winfree, A., 67 Winograd, T., 336n4 Wiredu, K., 255 Wittgenstein, L., 348n1

414 Index

World involving explanation, 22, 49, 51, 60, 76, 85, 96, 100, 201, 207, 245, 281, 295, 333, 337n13. See also In-the-head explanation; Nonrepresentational explanation Writing, 303–305, 307–308, 349n5, 350n8. See also Graphism; Reading Yakubinsky, L. P., 349n You-I model, 225 Yu, C., 241 Zaffaroni, E. R., 327 Zautra, N., 81 Zazzo, R., 126, 226 Zeiler, K., 81 Zoon Logon Ekhon, 1, 135 Zukow-Goldring, P., 245