514144
research-article2013
TAP24310.1177/0959354313514144Theory & PsychologyShotter
Article
Agential realism, social
constructionism, and our living
relations to our surroundings:
Sensing similarities rather than
seeing patterns
Theory & Psychology
2014, Vol. 24(3) 305­–325
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354313514144
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John Shotter
University of New Hampshire
Abstract
If Barad’s account of agential realism is correct, then the psychological “things” that we name
as “thoughts,” “ideas,” “theories,” “knowledge,” or “observations,” and study as the products
of processes hidden within the heads of individuals, are better talked of as emerging within
material intra-actions occurring in activities out in the world at large. For, in placing the agential
cuts, i.e., the distinctions we make between subjective and objective “things,” in different places
at different times, we do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things;
instead, we ourselves bring such “things” into existence. So, although we might talk in social
constructionism of our understandings as being produced by forms of negotiated understanding,
such forms of activity can only be seen as having been at work in people’s performances after
they have been achieved—and this is the case with many topics of our study in psychological
research. Something, somewhere else altogether, guides us in the performance of our actions
in relation to our surroundings than the “named things” we claim to have discovered in our
research. It is the nature of this “something else,” and how it can be publicly studied, that I
want to explore below.
Keywords
agential realism, communication, language, performative understandings, social constructionism
A performative understanding of scientific practices, for example, takes account of the fact that
knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct
material engagement with the world. (Barad, 2007, p. 49)
Corresponding author:
John Shotter, 4 Owls Close, Whittlesford, Cambs CB22 4PL, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior
existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through
specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of
phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.
(Barad, 2007, p. 139)
Are any new movements of thought that go beyond Social Constructionism still possible? Are there yet further steps to be taken? I think there are—many, in fact. A profound
conceptual shift has been, and currently still is, taking place in Social Theory (e.g., see
the current work of Barad, 2003, 2007; Gendlin, 1991; Gergen, 2009; Ingold, 2008,
2011; Johnson, 1987, 2007; Sheets-Johnstone, 1992, 2009, 2011). It is to do with re-situating ourselves—as spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings—
within a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of unfolding,
agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in separation from anything else, a
reality within which we are immersed both as participant agencies and to which we also
owe significant aspects of our own natures. If the above thinkers and writers are correct,
and I think they are, then we can no longer think of ourselves as the only organizing
agencies at work in the larger world within which we live out our lives; other agencies
than the “one” we each (mis)name as “I” are at work within us, and all around us.
But much more is afoot. We can no longer assume there is a single, clear and simple,
already existing Cartesian subject/object cut between ourselves, “as a bounded, unique
… dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social
and natural background” (see Geertz, 1983, p. 59)—with all involved (ourselves and all
the other things and beings around us) occupying the two great neutral containers of
space and time. Nor can we any longer think of ourselves as simply facing the task of
discovering their nature, along with their laws of motion and/or combination, with the
aim of subjecting them to our aims and desires. As living beings, not only do we come
into the world moving, but on coming into one or another kind of contact with our surroundings, we are also ourselves also continually “moved.” Indeed, as Maxine SheetsJohnstone (2011) puts it, “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves
forms movement” (p. 119). We thus find our bodies doing many things for us and to us,
as it were, without our having ourselves to direct them within such doings, and further,
as a consequence of how we become related to our surroundings within such movements, traces of their doings become inscribed in our bodies and influence the shaping
of our actions in future encounters within our surroundings. As Merleau-Ponty (1964)
puts it, my body is “a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other
way except through it” (p. 93).
In such a posthumanist reality as this, as Karen Barad (2007) notes, our current
humanist assumptions—that certain events out in the world follow as a consequence of
human actions, choices, intentions, presuppositions, and the like—need to be re-thought,
or re-visioned, as “after the fact” attributions we make in relation to the outcomes of
intra-active events. Indeed, in her scheme of things, not even our bodies can “simply
take their place in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular
environments. Rather ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted.
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Bodies (‘human,’ ‘environmental,’ or otherwise) are integral ‘parts’ of, or dynamic
reconfigurations of, what is” (p. 170), she claims. In other words, “things” that in the past
we have taken to be basic, and the source of the activities of interest to us, become themselves outcomes of more basic activities. As Gadamer (2000) noted a while ago in commenting on the nature of play: “all playing is a being-played. The attraction of a game,
the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the players”
(p. 106), and their experience of it changes them. We must, therefore, inquire into “somethings,” occurring somewhere else than within the players themselves—occurring within
the larger flow of activity in which the players are immersed—if we are to understand the
changes taking place here. The nature of these “somethings,” and the “place” of their
occurrence, are my concerns below.
My aims in this paper are thus somewhat revolutionary. If it is the case that we only
have our being within a dynamic reality in ceaseless, unfolding movement, in which
nothing is separate from anything else, and the psychological “things” we have in the
past talked of as the focal objects of our studies are best thought of as after the fact emergents occurring within that indivisible reality, then a major re-orientation in the focal
topics of our studies is required. First, assuming we are not the only agencies at work in
such a reality, I try to show that our contributions to an intra-action “show up” both in
the “efforts” we make to “get things right,” and in how we expect to “go on” to act in our
practices, i.e., in our agential “movements.” This leads on, in the next section, to an
extended discussion of our use of words: more than their merely representational use is
at stake; they function also to direct people’s attention, especially, towards anticipating
what will happen next. In the next section, I examine the possible influence of agential
realism in social constructionist inquiries. There, I focus on recent developments in
Gergen’s (2009) Relational Being and suggest that he also is beginning to move towards
something very like agential realism. Overall, this leads not only to very different foci in
our psychological inquiries into psychology, but also to a very different conception of
what we can hope for in our conduct of them: instead of the very general results we have
sought in the past, we will find that the partial and situated results we can in fact obtain
will in the end, perhaps surprisingly, turn out to be of far greater practical use to us.
The importance of our bodily doings on the “subjective”
side of the Cartesian subject/object cut
As a first step in our process of re-visioning our approach, we must turn our attention to
the nature of our own inner sensings of our present circumstances, what currently we
take our “situation” to be. In the past, on the basis of the assumption of a clear and simple, Cartesian subject/object cut, we have thought of ourselves as primarily agential
beings, able to do things by our own self-instigated, or I-directed, movements, while
acting on the basis of our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, or theories. We have thus aimed in our
psychological inquiries at discovering ways to plan our activities to bring off certain
desired consequences. But if the world in which we live is a world in which the “things”
of importance to us are not fixed and finalized for all time, but are dynamically sustained
stabilities within a larger realm of continuing, flowing movement; and further, if we are
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not the only agencies at work in such a world, then it becomes difficult, as we shall see,
to differentiate within an occurring phenomenon what aspects1 of it should be accounted
objective—as existing independently of us—and what subjective—dependent upon our
attitudes, moods, or other influences on how we are related to our circumstances.
It is precisely within such a realm of unfolding, fluid, agential activities as this that
Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) “agential realism” finds its point of purchase. For, as we will
see, rather than with the more familiar Cartesian cut—where we take the pre-existence
of a simple split between “subject” and “object” for granted—where, at any one moment
within an unfolding phenomenon, that subject/object cut is placed, what we count as
being over against us, on what we call the “objective” side of the cut, and what with us,
on what we call the “subjective” side, is, she claims, up to us.2
If she is correct, then this clearly raises the need for ways to study how we might make
such different placements of the cut. That is, we need to understand how we might come
to perform the appropriate inner mental movements required to “go out” towards our
surroundings with specific expectations, “subjectively” at the ready, so to speak, thus to
attend to the “objective aspects” within them upon which we intend to act. Barad (2007)
calls such cuts “agential cuts” (p. 175) for we can “enact” them in different ways, at different points in time, with different ends in view, in picking out for attention, and action,
different features from within the phenomena currently before us. Within speech phenomena, say, we can choose to pick out what counts for us as physical or physiological
from what is psychological, what is orderly and often repeated from what is unique and
quite singular, and so on.
This shift of concern to events occurring much more on the agential, i.e., subjective
side of the Cartesian subject/object split is, thus, a major aspect of the profound conceptual shift of which Barad (2007) speaks. Central to it, and in line with the task of re-situating ourselves as spontaneously responsive, embodied beings, immersed within a
somewhat “fluid” reality, is the turn to a study of our felt experiences.
In the past, such experiences have been thought of as utterly idiosyncratic and quite
unamenable to scientific investigation. Investigations into them have been dismissed as
merely introspective, as requiring “observation” of something wholly hidden within our
individual selves, and thus lacking in any publicly accessible features. This, however, is
clearly not the case. In very large part, we continually show, i.e., express, what we are
feeling in our actions.3 As Wundt and Jung noticed long ago, people’s reaction times in
responding with an association to certain words differed, and this led them to their development of the word association test, with the claim by Freud (1966) “that these striking
reactions were determined in the most definite fashion by the subject’s complexes” (p.
134), that is, by “groups of strongly emotional thoughts and interests” (p. 133).
Now it is not that I want to endorse Freud’s essential theoretical claims here—far
from it. But I do want to draw attention to the importance of Wundt’s, Jung’s, and Freud’s
noticing of the qualitative nature of these reactions, and the fact that they were in some
way indicative of crucially important states of affairs occurring within people, on the
subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object split, in a way that mattered to them. And
clearly, as work in CA (Conversational Analysis) shows (see e.g., Atkinson & Heritage,
1984; Nofsinger, 1991; Potter, 2007; Schegloff, 2007; Zimmerman, 2005), the expressive variations occurring as we body forth our utterances—in such things as choice of
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words, emphases, intonations, pausing, pacing, repeating, etc.—are of crucial importance
in providing listeners, not simply with further factual information, but with orientation,
with ways of relating themselves both to what is said, as well as inter-relating events
within what is said. For often, it is not at all obvious what the overall situation is within
which an utterance should be placed, if its sense is to be understood.
Indeed, as Zimmerman (2005) points out, our everyday communicative actions are
often “designed with respect to an oriented to, but specifically unarticulated, matter”
(p. 446)—as, for instance, when we show our care for another in the compliments we
give them, or show our respect or love4 for them in the tone of our greeting. Thus, as we
shall see below, when we turn to the issue of what is involved in working our way
through from an initially bewildering situation to resolving on a way forward within it, a
conversational inter5-action can be organized around a hoped-for-end that has not yet
happened, but its relevance nevertheless shapes or animates participants’ actions.
As Garfinkel (1967) puts it, we make “use of many … ‘seen but unnoticed’, expected
[emphasis added], background features of everyday scenes” (p. 36) in organizing the
sequentially occurring fragments of the communicative expressions we experience into
understandings to which we can sensibly respond—that is, into performative understandings (Austin, 1962), i.e., into understandings which we show in our actions, but
which are otherwise unarticulated and exist only on the subjective side of the subject/
object cut. “Demonstrably,” says Garfinkel (1967), people are “responsive to this background, while at the same time [they are] at a loss to tell us specifically of what their
expectancies consist” (pp. 36–37).
However, although people are at a loss in giving a name to their “background expectancies,” this is not to say that they cannot allude to them in some way. In fact, the task
of characterizing what it is that people show in the “unfolding movements” of their
expressions, is in fact quite easy. For something that we continually notice among our
own and other people’s expression of their experiences, is similarities—some of our
experiences seem to have, so to speak, a very similar “music” to them as theirs, such that
on hearing a friend recount an experience, we find it “arousing” or “occasioning”6
(Adato, 1980; Nofsinger, 1991) experiences within us that are felt to be of a similar kind
(even though, factually, they may be very different). Hence our use of metaphors and
other images in our giving some kind of voice to the felt experiences to which we try to
give intelligible linguistic expression. For a new experience can often “remind” us of a
past experience with a similar unfolding time-course to it, with a similar set of what
Stern (2004, 2010) calls “vitality affects” to it.
This, then, is my concern in this article: to explore ways in which we might study, in
a systematic and disciplined manner, not only people’s performative understandings of
each other’s communicative or performative expressions, but also the kind of agential
doings that go into the “shaping” of such expressions. For it is in the agential “movements,” in the “efforts” we make in the course of our expressions in our efforts to “get
them right”—that is, to repeat, in our intonations, in the word choices we make, in our
emphases, etc.—that we “show” the recipients of our expressions how they should orient
themselves towards them.
But our task in doing this, is not that easy, for our expressions in any situation can
never be fully explicit. We need to resolve the ambiguities and indeterminacies within
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them “on the hoof,” so to speak. Involved in doing this, it needs to be emphasized, is not
a process of problem-solving, nor can it be illuminated by an explanatory investigation
of a scientific kind, for it is not a difficulty of a general kind.7 It is a specific bewilderment or confusion occurring in a specific situation, in relation to a particular circumstance. It has the general form, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, of “‘I don’t know my way
about’” (no. 123), and in our particular resolution of it, rather than claiming that we have
now understood something in general, we simply declare, “‘Now I can go on’ … [where]
it is particular circumstances,” as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, “which justify me in
saying I can go on” (no. 154). It is our doing that is primary, and it is on the basis of a felt
sense of a right and a wrong next move in relation to this or that circumstance that we,
retrospectively, try to formulate rules of procedure.
The primacy of performative understandings in guiding us
in performing our actions
“Background” and “foreground” in our understandings
It was John Austin (1962) in his book, How to Do Things with Words,8 who first drew our
attention to what he called performative utterances, those utterances which, although
they may take the form of typical indicative sentences, i.e., sentences to do with constating, “describing” or “reporting” something factual, are, or are a part of, “doing an action”
(p. 5), e.g., the saying of “I bet you $10 it will rain tomorrow,” or in the marriage ceremony of “I (name), take you (name) to be my (husband/wife), etc.” But as he notes, such
utterances do “not describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing
or to state that I am doing it; it is to do it” (p. 6). And further, although the uttering of the
words is a, or even the leading incident in the performing of the act, it is hardly ever “the
sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed” (p. 8): both its
surrounding circumstances “should be in some way, or ways, appropriate” (p. 8) and the
speaker “should also perform certain other actions” (p. 8).
Yet further: if our performative utterances are not to be “unhappy” or “infelicitous,”
as Austin terms it, if all that is expected of them by their recipients is to be delivered, then
all those involved “must actually so conduct themselves subsequently” (1962, p. 15). In
other words, all involved are committed to act in a certain way, or ways, in the future by
what currently they are doing now—again a matter of our actions being organized in
terms of a hoped-for end, their “point,” that has not yet happened. But we must add here,
especially because it will be of central importance later, is that whenever we say that we
can or could do something, or could have done something, Austin (1970) asks, “is there
an if in the offing?” (p. 205). He asks this in the context of discussing ethical claims, and
wonders whether it is the case that “could have done something” simply means “I could
have done it if I had chosen to”? And Austin goes on to extend the meaning of “I can” to
“I can, if I try.”
In other words, he separates the psychological and physical activities involved in the
doing of an action from the intention or desire to perform it, by showing us that not only
do we “pick out” classes of actions by our choice of adverbial expressions, but also “the
internal detail of the machinery of doing actions, or the departments into which the
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business of doing actions is organized” (Austin, 1970, p. 193). For if we are to succeed
in doing something,
we have to pay (some) attention to what we are doing and to take (some) care to guard against
(likely) dangers: we may need to use judgment or tact: we must exercise sufficient control over
our bodily parts: and so on … But there are many other departments in the business too, each
of which is to be traced and mapped through its cluster of verbs and adverbs. (p. 193)
We thus find that our speech and other performances do not involve a simple “oneshot” implementation of an intention or desire; they involve an unfolding sequence of
particular tryings, a movement this way and that, guided by an inner sensing of a specific situation’s “requirements” at each stage of our acting within it. And what we show
or display in our utterances (and in our other forms of expression) is our felt sensing9
of these “demands” as we act out their satisfaction over time in relation to that situation. This is why they cannot be objectively theorized in any general terms at all. They
are unique; they are of a fleeting, dynamical, relational nature, shaped by our anticipations and felt obligations toward our addressees as we perform them, and the corresponding expectations they engender, or “occasion”10 within them as a result. Thus it
is difficult to think of our performative understandings as being representative of any
well-defined, self-contained “thing” or “things” as such at all. If any “thinking” is
involved in acting in relation to a performative understanding, it cannot be only, or
even primarily, of a cognitive kind, for it inevitably involves, as Austin (1970) makes
clear above, acting into a unique current situation in such a way as to satisfy expectations that cannot, in any simply objective fashion, be related to it, prior to our acting
within it.11
One way in which Austin (1970) makes this clear, is in discussing a department in the
business of acting “too often overlooked, where troubles and excuses abound” (p. 193),
a department in which, even when we are “in receipt of excellent intelligence, … also in
self-conscious possession of excellent principles (the five golden rules for winning victories), and yet [we] hit upon a plan that leads to disaster” (p. 194)—because we fail “at
the stage of appreciation of the situation” (p. 194) within which we must act.
In other words, following Barad (2007) and Austin (1962, 1970), what I have called
our performative understandings, are not to do with facts or information; they are to do
with what kind of context we are in, with the “requirements” our current surroundings
exert on us to respond within them in appropriate ways, as well as with the opportunities
for action they afford (Gibson, 1979) us. They thus involve a particular kind of knowing
that shows up in our readiness to respond in certain ways, spontaneously, according to
the anticipations embodied in our approach, attitude, or stance towards the particular
circumstances we happen to find ourselves in. Thus, as we shall see, rather than seeking
deliberately to make observations in relation to expectations arising out of our theories,
our inquiries will be focussed much more on what we can notice as occurring, spontaneously, within the flow of people’s activities within a particular circumstance. And this is
the value of Barad’s (2007) terminology, for it directs our attention towards the agential
doings of people’s bodies, to the more extensive doings occurring as a result of what
people merely think of themselves as doing.
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Although it can easily seem that we are unaware of these more contextual influences
on our actions, that cannot possibly be the case. If we were unaware of them, we would
be utterly disoriented as to “where” at any one moment we “are.” Our awareness of
them is thus, of a qualitatively very different kind from our awareness of certain “things”
as existing for us in our surroundings. No wonder that we think of such influences, to
the extent that they exert an organizing function in what we foreground in our actions,
as constituting in some way the “background” to our more consciously performed
actions.12 But without this multi-stranded, embodied “background” (perceptual) understanding of the specific field of possibilities within which, in each changing moment,
we are embedded, we would not only lack all orientation, but in not knowing “where
we are,” we would also, literally “not know what to do next.” Thus the qualitatively
distinct, dynamically unfolding feelings they engender within us, guide us as we move
about in the world by providing us not only with transitional understandings as to
“where” we are currently placed in achieving a resolution of the ambiguity we face, but
also with action guiding anticipations as to where next we might go (Shotter, 2005). But
what might be the nature of these “inner experiences” and how might they “show”
themselves in our outward behaviour?
John Austin and William James on our inner awareness of uniquely
distinct experiences
Austin (1970) tells a tale of both himself, and his friend, owning donkeys. One day he
conceives a dislike for his and shoots it, only to find that he has shot his friend’s donkey—by accident, or is it, by mistake? “How readily these can appear indifferent,” he
remarks. “Yet, a story or two, and everybody will not merely agree that they are completely different, but even discover for himself what the difference is and what each
means” (pp. 184–185). Saying “by mistake” he means that he took the usual care, that the
process did not go out of his control at any time, but it was at the appreciation stage of
the situation that he went wrong; while in saying “by accident” he means that the process
went out of his control, a strong wind blew the shot off course, or something else intervened. We seem to have an “acutely discriminative sense” guiding our choice of words
in such situations as these.
I take this term, of course, from William James’ (1890) famous chapter on “The
Stream of Thought,” which he began by saying it was “the study of the mind from within
[emphasis added]” (p. 224). As he saw it,
what strikes us first is [the] different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of
an alternation of flights and perchings … Let us call the resting-places the ‘‘substantive parts,’’
and the places of flight the ‘‘transitive parts,’’ of the stream of thought. (p. 243)
Thus in the Cartesian-cut vocabulary we have been using above, we might say that the
moving, transitive parts are more on the subjective, performative side of the cut, whilst
the relatively stable, substantive parts are more on the objective side.
But like Barad (2003, 2007), James (1890) also points out that our experiences from
within the flow are not at all like bounded entities with clear beginnings and endings.
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“The truth is,” he says, “large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction
in thought of which we have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (p. 253), they are “feelings of tendency, often
so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (p. 254)—for even as they occur, they
are on the way to somewhere else. But, in being capable of directing our thought, they
have agency; they can move us, this way and that. If we were to name them, turn them
into objects, we would fall foul of what Billig (2008) calls nominalization and passivization, and as a result, delete their agential nature that should have been the focus of our
study.
It is James’ noting of the fact that we can have an acutely discriminative sense of such
feelings of tendency, that I particularly want to highlight here. And that, in the course of
performing our actions, in trying to get them right, we are clearly conscious in a very
immediate fashion of exercising that discriminative sense in “shaping,” so to speak, the
direction and movement of the flow of inner mental activity involved, even when we
lack an “inner show” of in what these transitions consist. This is why, of course, the others around us can be helpful to us, for they can notice inappropriate aspects of our tryings
unavailable to us—the golf coach can look separately at the golfer’s grip, stance, alignment, backswing, downswing, putting, etc., in a way that the golfer herself, intent simply
on hitting the ball hard, cannot.
Resolving ambiguities, indeterminacies, and fluidities in understanding
speech
If asked to reflect upon the process of speaking, we do not usually comment on the
physical noises we make or upon the physiological efforts involved; we, so to speak,
“see through” the speech we use “from” what we say, either “to” its effects, or “to” its
meanings (Polanyi, 1967). Consequently, we fail to notice its prosthetic functioning,
the way in which we “extend” the material “reach” of our selves out into the world
around us “through” the ways of relating ourselves to the others around us that our
speech “affords” (Gibson, 1979). These ways remain “invisible” to us. We fail to
notice them because, like blind people “seeing” their surroundings “through” the
sweeping movements of their long canes, we act “through” the bodily movements
occurring in our own and other people’s utterances in “making sense” of them—but,
as Polanyi (1967) makes clear, bodily movements, and bodily awarenesses, are
involved nonetheless.
Voloshinov (1929/1986) is also quite explicit about this:
Let us emphasize this point: not only can experience be outwardly expressed through the
agency of the sign … but also, aside from this outward expression (for others), experience exists
even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs. Outside that material there is no
experience as such … What, then, is the sign material of the psyche? Any organic activity or
process: breathing, blood circulation, movements of the body, articulation, inner speech,
mimetic motions, reaction to external stimuli (e.g., light stimuli) and so forth. In short, anything
and everything occurring within the organism can become the material of experience, since
everything can acquire semiotic significance, can become expressive. (pp. 28–29)
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It is easy to forget the ineradicable materiality of the activities involved here, and to
act as if there is a material break in the flow of activity involved, a crossing over from
one qualitative realm of activity to another of a qualitatively very different kind, from res
extensa to res cogitans as Descartes (1968) described it. But this is to mistake the different distinguishings we may enact on the subjective side of the Cartesian cut—as in our
different ways of relating ourselves to the words we speak or hear spoken, discussed
above. It is only too easy to take our words as being representative of already existing
differences on the objective side, rather than as doings in the situation of their
utterance.
In our relations to linguistic signs, then, we can see them, I think, as possessing what
might be called a “prosthetic-tool-text ambiguity,” the three different aspects each
becoming visible according to the different “directions” of our view: acting towards the
future, prospectively, in our saying of an utterance, we attempt to use it both prosthetically, as a device “through” which to express our meanings, but also as a tool-like means
to “move” other people—in Austin’s terms, to both constate a fact of some kind, and to
do something within the being of another person. Indeed, in this prosthetic-tool function
of speech, our words in their speaking, work on the others and othernesses in our surroundings to specify them further. Retrospectively, however, the pattern of already spoken words remains “on hand,” so to speak, as like a “text,” constituting a given aspect of
the situation between ourselves and our interlocutors, into which they (as well as we)
must direct their/our speech.
Only when the flow of activity mediated by their use breaks down, is interrupted in
some way, or they are otherwise “separated out” from it in some way—just as when a
tool is damaged (to use Heidegger’s example), or there is no connection between our
activity and the state of the instrument—do we become aware of them as “nameable
instruments” as such. But then they become unsuitable for use as “ready-to-hand” equipment, and become conspicuous as “present-to-hand” things or objects (Heidegger, 1962,
pp. 102–103), i.e., from being transparent in their use, they become opaque—and as
such, will only have meaning for us if placed within an interpretative schema, a conceptual or theoretical framework. But in being severed from the flow of activity within
which they have their “life,” they will lose what unique performative functions they had
at different particular moments in that flow and simply take on “one size fits all” conventional meanings.
This, then, is where Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) insistence on seeing such events as
entailing an intra- rather than an inter-action becomes crucial. For she would say that our
being “moved” by our performative use of words, and so on, does not involve interactions, for that is to assume the separate pre-existence of the “things”—our “words” and
our “selves”—which become related only as they inter-act. Whereas, clearly, if our
assumption above of a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing strands of unfolding, agential activity is correct, “they” (if this pronoun can now be used at all) are already
related. Thus, rather than in the more familiar Cartesian cut, which takes the pre-existence of a cut between “subject” and “object” for granted, as she sees it, at different
moments in time, different “agential cuts” (Barad, 2007) can occur, which enact “a resolution within [a] phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy
[existing within a ‘fluid’ reality]” (p. 139).
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Within an intra-action, which aspect within an ongoing flow of activity is “subjective”
(i.e., agentially active) at any one time, and which “objective” (i.e., acted upon), can thus
be made determinate in different ways at different moments in time. Consquently, “relata
do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intraactions. Crucially, then, intra-actions enact agential-separability—the condition of exteriority-within-phenomena” (p. 139).
We can, perhaps, bring Barad’s stratospheric, although both very accurate and muchneeded terminology here, down to earth with an everyday example. As Wolf (1990) has
observed, even babies in their first year of life, in their fleetingly distinct responses in
their movements in relation to their surroundings—in their smiles and concentration as
they totter forward, in their seeking of social connection as they stop to scan the room, in
their directing of a carer’s attention in their pointing at something—show or express in
quick succession many different ways of relating to, or attitudes towards, their surroundings. In Barad’s (2007) terms, they enact agential cuts in many different ways within
their activities.13 As Wolf (1990) notes: “We know that these envelopes of experience are
observable, vivid, and differentially provocative ways of being, not merely private fluctuations in internal states” (p. 184), and we can see this in the following transcript, in
which Wolf describes what she observes in the play of a normally developing, 4-year-old
boy, J., in a middle-class American family:
J. is playing with a puppet theater and a set of small figures, including the members of a family,
a cat, and a pirate. (The transcript is marked to indicate which roles J. is taking at each point
when he speaks.)
(J. knocks down some of the trees in the theater.)
J.:
[narrator] And all the trees fell down.
J.:
[cat character, to clown] Put your legs down.
J.:
[pirate character, stalking in, threatening voice] I am the pirate.
J.:
[speaking as himself to the observer] See his sword? Is he really a pirate [emphasis added]?
Observer: Yeah.
[speaking as himself to the observer] Are you telling the truth [emphasis added]?
J.:
Observer: Yeah.
[speaking as himself] Not really. Just in here.
J.:
[cat character, scratching pirate] Scratch, scratch, scratch.
J.:
[pirate character] Don’t you dare.
J.:
(J. has the figures continue to fight.)
[man character] Don’t kill me, don’t kill me … and don’t kill any of my friends
J.:
either. (p. 196)
The episode lasts for no more than 10 to 15 seconds, yet within it, J. is by turns the organizing stage-manager and formulating narrator of the events; the scrappy, aggressive characters—the cat, pirate, and the man; as well as a young boy frankly indicating the reality
status of the plastic pirate. And Wolf goes on to remark, that while J.’s different utterances may be seen merely as a part of a conventional way to play, they may also be seen
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as a way of him talking over within himself the question: “Is he really a pirate?” If this is
so, then his rapidly shifting orientations towards it can be seen as providing him with
different performative understandings, i.e., with different transitional understandings
and action guiding anticipations as to “where” he might move, as he makes his way
towards the resolution of it he seeks—is he in his being, as J., a pirate?
In this connection it is worth commenting that Austin later came to see that no clear
existential distinction could be drawn between constative and performative utterances;
we are always doing something in our utterances: “This contrast surely, if we look back
on it,” he says (Austin, 1970), “is unsatisfactory. Of course statements are liable to be
assessed in this matter of their correspondence or failure to correspond with facts, that is,
as being true or false. But they are also liable to infelicity every bit as much as are performative utterances” (pp. 247–248)14—clearly, our stating something to someone also
does something to them (as well as to ourselves). As Gadamer (2000) remarks, in coming
to an understanding in a dialogue, we are “transformed into a communion in which we
do not remain what we were” (p. 379).
What are we constructing in our social constructions?—
Gergen’s relational being
As we have already noted, while we may continually use the same word to refer to a
recognizably witnessable aspect of an infolding phenomenon, we can do so, not because
it has objectively the same form out in the world as a pattern, but because it can often
“remind” us of other past experiences with a similar unfolding time-course to them. With
this in mind, I want now to turn to some of the re-visionings within the social constructionist approach in psychology that the views articulated above might entail: an early
social constructionist tenet, as Gergen (1985) stated it some time ago, is that “the terms
in which the world is understood are social artifacts, products of historically situated
interchanges among people” (p. 267), and this clearly put a great deal of emphasis on the
importance of language.
Unfortunately, in many early versions of Social Constructionism, there was much talk
of language as a thing or entity in its own right, i.e., “language” was used as a proper
rather than a common noun. For instance, in discussing the implications of Derrida’s
(1977) claim, that there is nothing outside the text, Gergen (1991) wrote: “language is a
system unto itself. Words derive their capacity to create a seeming world of essences from
the properties of the system. This system of language (or of sense-making) preexists the
individual; it is ‘always already’ there, available for social usage … If it is sensible, it has
already been said. The most one can do is to rearrange the sayables” (p. 107), and he continued, “words are not mirrorlike reflections of reality, but expressions of group convention” (p. 119). This led to many followers into espousing what I will call here, a linguistic
version of social constructionism—a version in which many engaged in constructionist
research, still took the study of the social construction of linguistic representations (portrayals, explanations, descriptions), as well as a search for the social conventions or their
rules of use, as their primary tasks. And although he later drew attention to the performative
and the notion of a performative psychology (Gergen, 1999)—by noting that “dance,
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poetry, drama, stand-up comedy and multi media … [could all expand] the range of professional expression in significant ways” (p. 188)—it was still done in a way that left
much social constructionist research still able happily to operate largely on the objective
side of the subject/object cut. For it still seemed to presume an ontology of already independent, nameable entities, all existing separately from each other.
However, the sometimes acknowledged background to much of Gergen’s thinking
has been, for really quite some time, his situating of it in somewhat fluid circumstances.
In his early “Social Psychology as History” paper (Gergen, 1973), for instance, he noted
that:
Unlike the natural sciences, [social psychology] deals with facts that are largely nonrepeatable
and which fluctuate markedly over time. Principles of human interaction cannot be readily
developed over time because the facts on which they are based do not remain stable. (p. 310)
Indeed, in the introduction to a volume collecting his early works together (Gergen,
1993), he commented:
The vast body of psychological theory to which my [early] studies were directed seemed
strangely alien—mechanical, lifeless and all too coherent. Most problematic was the romance
with fixedness, with a view of human action as reliably determined by a relatively fixed set of
internal dispositions, mechanisms or structures … [Whereas] I was struck with the degree to
which my own actions were embedded within local and ever-changing contexts. (pp. xi–xii)
In other words, Gergen took it then, as he has often done so, that ontologically the
very nature of the realities within which we live our lives and have our identities, are of
an unstable and continually changing, fluid nature. If there are any stabilities within
them, they are of a dynamic kind, like the eddies and vortices occurring within the ceaseless flow of intermingling streams of activities. However, an often quoted statement of
his in the social constructionist literature is his claim that
constructionism is ontologically mute. Whatever is, simply is. There is no foundational
description to be made about an “out there” as opposed to an “in here”, about experience or
material. Once we attempt to articulate “what there is”, however, we enter the world of discourse
… The adequacy of any word or arrangement of words to “capture reality as it is” is a matter of
local convention. (Gergen, 1994, pp. 72–73)
But in his recent book, Relational Being, he is anything but mute about the general
nature of the reality within which we live and have our being: it is very clearly not made
up of separate, nameable, and discoverable elements in arrangements according to discoverable rules or laws; he explicitly foregrounds what he had previously left in the
background. Taking baseball as an example, he says: “What we traditionally view as
‘independent’ elements—the man with the bat, the bags, the men in the field—are not
truly independent. They are all mutually defining … Alone they would [all] be virtually
without meaning. It is when we bring all these elements into a mutually defining relationship that we can speak about ‘playing baseball’. Let us then speak of the baseball
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game as a confluence, a form of life in this case that is constituted by an array of mutually
defining ‘entities’” (Gergen, 2009, p. 54), i.e., an entangled flowing together of different
unfolding strands of activity.
Indeed, now explicitly following Austin (1962), he notes that when people use mental
state words in their discourse—seeking forgiveness by saying “I feel bad about what
happened,” for instance—“their words are actions within a relationship, and in this sense,
equivalent to the remainder of the body in motion—lips, eye movements, gestures, posture, and so on. The spoken language is but one component of a full social performance.
Our words are notes within orchestrated patterns of action. Without the full coordination
of words and action, relational life turns strange” (Gergen, 2009, p. 73)—if in fact they
cease to be relational and again become individualistic, or in Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986)
terms, they cease to be dialogical and become monological.
But not only does he now see our utterances as doings, but also many of our other
forms of expression:
The emotions can properly be viewed as relational performances. They are forms of action that
acquire their intelligibility within relationships, and they gain their value from their social use.
It is not that we ‘‘feel emotions’’ so much as we do them. And this doing is only intelligible
within a particular tradition of relationship. (Gergen, 2009, p. 102)15
Which means, as I see it, that to the extent that we can become aware of the inner movements of feeling involved, and their intra-relations to the unfolding circumstances of their
expression, we can enter into their doing, to control our doing of them in different ways.
As Gergen (2009) puts it, their expression can become “a crafted achievement” (p.103).
For, as in the unfolding emergence of all of our expressions, we can come to use the acute
discriminative awareness available to us to “shape” the form of their expression. Thus, as
Gergen sees it, it is not the case that an inner emotion is one thing, and “its expressions
something else. Rather … what is taking place … is a partial performance. You are
engaged in ‘doing the emotion’, but simply without using the full array of words and
gestures that are common to [the usual, spontaneous, uncontrolled] public performance”
(p. 106)—a performance in relation to the others around us. Without saying it out loud,
Gergen is here, I think, espousing at least the beginnings of an agential realism, for, in
acting on the subjective side of the subject/object cut, we can resolve on a way or ways of
relating ourselves to our surroundings and taking them into account in our expressions
that are more conducive in the long term to better relations with those around us—and in
so doing, changing ourselves, not just in our knowledge, but in our very ways of
being-in-the-world.
Conclusions: Re-orienting ourselves to a focus on
performative understandings … from within our situated
practices
What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now,
an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which
we see an action. (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 567)
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What, then, is the relation between agential realism and social constructionism?16 In
pivoting my discussion around the Cartesian subject/object split, I have been suggesting
that what is usually called the inner world of our consciousness can, from within the
dynamics of the agential cuts we enact within our performative expressions, be directly
materially related to what we usually call the outside world of separate nameable things.
Thus we can, perhaps, see agential realism and social constructionism as two sides of
the same coin. But better, much better, is to hear what is said or written (in the course of
our trying to articulate what will show up in our attempts to implement them) as two
different embodied voices in a continuous, unending dialogical and thus continually
creative intra-relation with each other. Within such a dialogue, one voice would be
expressing the unfolding dynamical course of our experiences in performing our actions,
in intra-relation to the other voice expressing the nature and importance of the outcomes
they together achieve—that is, their properties: how they can be used instrumentally;
how they can also possess their own inner “workings”; how they can act back on how
we relate to each other and to our surroundings thus to change who we are to ourselves,
and so on, and so on.
Work of this kind, then, involves our paying attention to dynamical, fleeting, and
transitory experiences, and then trying linguistically to articulate their nature. But our
attempts to talk of transitory things clearly makes us feel uneasy. Literally, we feel that
“we don’t know what we are talking about.” It is thus all too easy to attribute our difficulties yet again to failures in our knowledge, as if there are still to be discovered
facts that will clear up our puzzlement. And that is a danger here too. In giving names
(substantive nouns) to agential realism and social constructionism it is only too easy to
think of them as separate, well-boundaried things (as rule governed “game”-like
things) whose properties need to be, and can be, well defined (in text and methods
books). But to the extent that they exist as nameable entities at all—as prospective
entities, still open to further development—they come into existence, and continue to
come into existence, in the course of our performing actions out in the world in relation
to certain orienting attitudes, in relation to our different acquired ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings.
Thus, agential realism no more comes into existence by our actually enacting “agential cuts,” than social constructionism comes into existence by our exercising “forms of
negotiated understandings” (Gergen, 1985, p. 268). As nameable practices, agential cuts
and negotiated understandings can only be seen as having been at work in people’s performances after they have been achieved. Our use of these terms is, in the final analysis,
parasitic on the emergent creativity of our trying activities, activities in which we are
continually seeking to resolve on an orientation toward being in yet another uniquely
new situation. Text-book talk is often the reverse of what is required if the learning of a
practice is what is at issue.
It is the different orienting attitudes we adopt in the course of performing our
actions—“seeing” our situation in this way at one moment and in that way at another,
like the little boy “J.” portrayed above—that matters. And our learning to “see” in both
this way and that, involves our learning to do something, not simply acquiring a new
piece of information. It requires our, to an extent, displacing already existing, deeply
embodied practices and exploring new ways of orienting ourselves to our
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circumstances. To do this, to become more well-skilled in orienting ourselves with
facility to whatever new surroundings we might find ourselves in involves, suggests
Wittgenstein (1980), “a working on oneself … On one’s way of seeing things. (And
what one expects of them)” (p. 16). And such work, as Billig (2008) has pointed out,
will not be easy. A new attitude cannot be achieved in a flash of insight, it requires
practice. In working more on the subjective side of the subject/object cut, we will need
to school ourselves in orienting towards the performative (doing) functioning of our
own and other people’s words (and other expressions), rather than towards supposing
them to have a representational (standing for) use—we will need continually to be asking ourselves, as a person speaks or writes: What is that person doing in saying that?
How are they using that word, in this situation, here and now? What are we feeling as
we experience them speaking? And so on.
All this is quite revolutionary and, as Barad (2003, 2007) makes very clear, posthumanist in the sense of shifting the focus of our inquiries away from our own human
activities, and onto the much larger flowing stream of activity within which they occur
and have their being: much of what we have taken as being basic to our inquiries, e.g.,
the variables whose effects in social life we seek to understand, such as race, ethnicity,
culture, age, social class; processes such as motivation, perception, cognition; things
such as emotions, excuses, justifications, and so on, and so on, we come to realize are
all, in fact, after the fact outcomes of our inquiries. Processes that we have thought of
and talked of in the past as named “things” residing in the heads of individuals—such
processes as “knowing,” “thinking,” “measuring,” “theorizing,” and “observing,” and
so on—are in fact material practices of intra-action occurring out, within, and as a part
of the world’s becoming.
Thus further, when in cognitive-neuroscience in particular we read such sentences
as: “Empathy draws on these bodily and limbic shifts in a process called ‘interoception’ in which we perceive inward … [where] interoception, interpretation, and attribution are the proposed steps of empathy carried out by the pre-frontal region [of the
brain]” (Siegel, 2007, p. 168), we must ask ourselves whether anything in this account
actually relates to phenomena in people’s everyday activities we call empathic
(Frankfurt, 1998)? Could we ever possibly apply these supposed “elements” in actually helping someone deficient in empathy to come to show empathy more in their
daily practice, say, in nursing elderly patients—or is it the case that the empathic
conduct of an everyday practice needs to be learned by quite some other means than
by building it up, piece by piece, from objective elements, according to pre-established principles?
In engaging in such practices, in focussing on the felt performative dynamics unfolding within an experienced phenomenon, as Barad says,
we do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in
time like little statues positioned in the world … Rather, we learn about phenomena—about
specific material configurations of the world’s becoming. The point is not simply to put the
observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely
to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we too
are part of the world’s differential becoming … [thus] which practices we enact matter—in both
senses of the word. (Barad, 2007, p. 91)
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If we are to face up to having to conduct our inquiries from within our immersion in a
“fluid” and, on occasions, “turbulent” reality, then, at least the following seven issues
will, I think, be of importance to us in their future conduct: (a) We will need to make use
of noticings, rather than mere observations, i.e., to respond to differences that make a
difference that matters to us in some way, that change how we orient or relate ourselves
to our surroundings; (b) performative expressions, that is, our need to publicly express in
some way—preferably verbal—the nature of the felt movements within which we are
involved such that we can provide performative understandings of them to other practitioners; (c) crucial in our doing this will be our use of sensed similarities in expressing
their nature—the use of metaphorical and other more poetic forms of expression; (d)
rather than going out to view the world in or through theoretical terms of our own devising to seek explanations, we will use our theories descriptively as aids to noticing what
might otherwise pass us by; (e) thus the aim of our inquiries will not be to solve problems, but to overcome difficulties of orientation, i.e., to find ways of “going on” together
with the others around us within a practice; (f) given the unusual nature of this aim (the
need to focus on what is only shown but not explicitly articulated in our acting) certain
reminders will play a central role in helping us to stay oriented towards this aim in our
inquiries; and finally, (g) as an aspect of what is involved in making our inquiries from
within the midst of complexity, from within inexhaustibly complicated forms of life, we
need to accept that agential cuts may, at any one moment in time, be made in many different ways within the same phenomenon.
Thus, strangely, as a final comment, in enacting agential cuts, we must see ourselves as exhibiting at least two aspects, one which does the sensing, and another
which is subjected to what is sensed. Thus, although it is very easy to think of ourselves as consisting of an organization of the very particulars (and their laws or rules
of connection) we think of ourselves as having discovered, if the account I have set out
above of the performative aspects of our doings is correct, then our “findings” cannot
be taken as “basic” as we often claim. While it is “amazing,” as G. Spencer-Brown
(1979) remarked a while ago, that we can divide ourselves in this way—such that we
can see aspects both of our own and of the world’s “workings”—as he went on to say
about the world:
in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at
least one other state which is seen … [thus] in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must,
equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this
condition it will always partially elude itself. (p. 105)
If this is so, and I think it is, then we must relinquish the dream of the very general, basic
results we seek in our inquiries, and be content with the limited, partial, and situated
results we can in fact obtain—which I believe, perhaps surprisingly, will in the end turn
out to be of far greater practical use to us.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
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Notes
1. The notion of an aspect of an unfolding phenomenon is of great importance to us in what follows. An aspect is not some frozen “thing” like an unchanging object, but is a recognizable
“thisness” or a “thatness” within a flowing stream of activity, within the unfolding process of
a person’s actions that can be witnessed by others. Although not separable from its context, it
is possible to say in relation to such aspects in a person’s activities: “Do that again,” or “Don’t
do it like that but like this,” or “Did you notice how he responded when she looked like this
(speaker makes a facial expression) at him?,” and so on.
2. I put both “objective” and “subjective” in scare quotes here, as clearly, we can no longer take
these terms as having their usual meanings.
3. As Wittgenstein (1981) remarks: “the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is
expression of them, i.e., facial expression, gestures, of feeling” (no. 513); our feelings are not
simply contained within us somewhere.
4. A matter so nicely expressed in the lyrics of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”:
“I see friends shaking hands saying ‘how do you do’. They’re really saying, ‘I love you’.”
5. Soon we shall have cause to give up the use of the prefix “inter-”, for we will find that once
we move to a view of reality as an indivisible, dynamically unfolding whole, within which
ourselves are also immersed, in which nothing is separate from anything else, we will need to
replace it everywhere with the prefix “intra-”, for all our inquiries will be “from within” our
ineradicable immersion within such a ceaselessly flowing reality.
6. This is a most important term, for the very nature of a performative understanding is such
that it “occasions,” i.e., establishes a situation that “calls for” responses of a certain kind from
people involved in a situation.
7. There are thus at least two great kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one (see
Shotter, 2009). We need to distinguish between those we can formulate as problems to which
we can seek rational solutions, and difficulties of orientation in which we need to seek a resolution of the lack of clarity as to what the particular situation is that we face—just as we need
to fixate and focus our eyes on a movement we have observed in the bushes, in order to see if
it is a bird or a cat or squirrel.
8. William James lectures in Harvard, 1955.
9. “the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is expression of them, i.e., facial expression, gestures, of feeling” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 513).
10. See Note 6.
11. Austin can be seen here as assuming what later was presented as the extended mind thesis
(Clark & Chalmers, 1998).
12. Searle (1983), for instance, comments about such a background as influencing what we consciously foreground, thus: “The Background is ‘preintentional’ in the sense that though not
a form or forms of Intentionality, it is nonetheless a precondition or set of preconditions of
Intentionality” (p. 143).
13. Many other examples can be found in Gopnik (2009), in which she also recounts events in which
even very young children perform, i.e., show, in their actions subtle expressions and understandings of relational phenomena, not just in anticipating what might happen next if a current action
were to continue, but also in imagining what would happen if other conditions prevailed. Thus, as
she notes, although “some psychologists and philosophers argue that most of what is significant
about human nature is determined by our genes” (p. 7), the fact is, “we [can] change our surroundings and [consequently] our surroundings can change us” (p. 8)—and this gives us a very different
picture of the nature of “evolutionary psychology” (p. 7), she suggests, than the traditional one.
14.“Performative Utterances” was transcribed from a talk delivered in the UK on the BBC in 1956.
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15. As Gadamer (2000) notes: “tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as
does the I with a Thou” (p. 358).
16. As is, perhaps, already clear, the very posing of this question can very easily lead us, yet
again, to assume that “agential realism,” “social constructionism,” and the “relation” between
them, all exist as separate, identifiable, and nameable “things,” unless we have strenuously
taught ourselves to avoid such continual reifications.
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Shotter
Author biography
John Shotter, Emeritus Professor of Communication, Department of Communication, University
of New Hampshire, USA; Research Associate, Centre for Philosophy of Natural & Social Science
(CPNSS), London School of Economics, London, UK; and Visiting Professor, Open University
Business School, Milton Keynes, UK. He is the author of Social Accountability and Selfhood
(Blackwell, 1984); Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and
Knowing of the Third Kind (Open University, 1993); Conversational Realities: The Construction
of Life through Language (Sage, 1993); Conversational Realities Revisited: Life, Language, Body,
and Word (Taos Publications, 2008); Social Construction on the Edge: Withness-Thinking and
Embodiment (Taos Publications, 2010); Getting It: Withness-Thinking and the Dialogical… in
Practice (Hampton Press, 2011). Address: 4 Owls Close, Whittlesford, Cambs CB22 4PL, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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