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.
A performative understanding of scientific practices, for example, takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world. (Barad, 2007, p. 49) The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. (Barad, 2007, p. 139)
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 Sheets-Johnstone (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. 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 not the only agencies at work in such a world, then it becomes difficult, as we shall see, to differentiate within an occurring phenomenon what aspects 1 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 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 love 4 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 inter 5 -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 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 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 “one-shot” 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 sensing 9 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.
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. “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)
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 inter-actions, 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).
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 intra-actions. 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 much-needed 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.)
[narrator] And all the trees fell down.
[cat character, to clown] Put your legs down.
[pirate character, stalking in, threatening voice] I am the pirate.
[speaking as himself to the observer] See his sword? Is he really a pirate [emphasis added]?
Yeah.
[speaking as himself to the observer] Are you telling the truth [emphasis added]?
Yeah.
[speaking as himself] Not really. Just in here.
[cat character, scratching pirate] Scratch, scratch, scratch.
[pirate character] Don’t you dare.
(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 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 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, 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 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)
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 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)
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.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.