Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I: The Sense-Making Body [Hardcover ed.] 0815379536, 9780815379539

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What if we thought of language not as a system of symbols to be manipulated, but as a living process by which we more complexly embed ourselves in the social ecology around us and thereby enlarge our capacity to understand and influence it? What if we viewed language in use not as something originating in “minds” or thoughts, but in our biological processes of perception and action, exploring and being emotionally enmeshed in our social and natural environment? Paul Thibault’s Distributed Languaging offers a detailed alternative model of how language works, based on an extensive synthesis of recent and classical research and his own sophisticated insights, with numerous detailed examples and analyses. Part of a larger intellectual movement toward post-representational and enactive accounts of how we deal meaningfully with life, this major synthesis opens up many new avenues for research and inquiry. —Jay Lemke, Professor Emeritus, City University of New York What it means to become a self in a society of selves? How do we develop the capacity to participate in dialogically coordinated processes of stance-taking in and through our languaging with others? Why is human culture irreducible to subjective structures, individual agency and social interactions as emphasised in postmodernist discourse analytic, social semiotic and socio-linguistic approaches? Why can’t human consciousness be explained in terms of natural processes as emphasised in recent brain sciences? What is human consciousness? One can only be impressed by the vastness and immensity of the scope and depth of Paul Thibault’s project as he takes up these tremendous questions and carves out an accessible and convincing exposition that interweaves insights and wisdom from Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Gibson’s affordance theory, and Ingold’s process anthropology, among many others, into a theory of “extended human ecology” emphasising process, flows and movement, in-betweenness and relationality. I highly recommend this book to students and researchers in the language sciences, socio-linguistics, education, anthropology, psychology, neurosciences, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and cultural sciences. —Angel M. Y. Lin, Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Plurilingual and Intercultural Education, Simon Fraser University

In the 20th century linguistics was completely dominated by abstract objectivism. Since then a paradigm shift has taken place in both theoretical and empirical studies. The new experience-based network focuses on activities and products of languaging in terms of embodiment, temporality, multimodality, heterogeneities, and multi-level sense-making. This book is the perfect guide to these new trends. Paul Thibault is one of the world’s leading experts in interdisciplinary language sciences, especially spoken languaging. Here he explains the multifarious matters with great clarity. His text is a necessary read for anybody who is interested in following the development of language studies. —Per Linell, Professor Emeritus in Communication (Gothenburg University) and in Language and Culture (Linköping University), Sweden The modern linguistics of languages, inaugurated a hundred years ago by Saussure’s famous Cours, is principally concerned with theorising about the acquisition and use by human beings of the systems of form-meaning pairings that allegedly permit linguistic interaction among those who have such a system as their shared possession. Latterly it has become ever more obvious that such systems are ultimately the result of metalinguistically organising and regulating the decontextualised products of languaging, as conducted within an interpersonal network or speech community whose members are constrained by societal norms to aim at linguistic convergence, and that although they undeniably exist as the cultural constructs we call “languages”, retrojecting them on to languagers as the basis for their languaging is a fundamental conceptual error. As Paul Thibault puts it in this magnificently learned, wide-ranging survey of the prospects for forging a coherent discipline from multifarious nascent attempts to articulate and analyse the ingredients of a linguistics of languaging, “an understanding of languaging and its place in the human ecology requires a new synthesis of biology, complex systems thinking, cultural psychology, ecology, ecological psychology, the cognitive sciences, the language sciences, social theory, and much more”. This book will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in contributing to that synthesis. —Nigel Love, Department of Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa In this erudite and provocative book that deepens and extends his decades of discipline-transforming contributions, Paul Thibault cogently argues that relational entanglements connect language, culture, and biology to meaning, action, and affect. His core critique is that a linguistics premised on static formal abstractions is anemic and reductionistic, just as a shadow is to the polychromic figure casting it. In contrast, Thibault ardently argues for a theory of languaging or communicative action that is multimodal, embodied, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. As we have come to expect from Thibault’s prior research, his voraciously broad intellectual horizons allow him to artfully integrate ideas from ecological psychology, linguistics, semantics, philosophy, and distributed language approaches, among others, to create a transdisciplinary paradigm that will

inform, and perhaps reform, the epistemology, ontology, and methodology of the language sciences for decades to come. —Steven L. Thorne, Portland State University and University of Groningen This book is by a linguist interested in gifts of imagination that lead to mastery of talk and reading. It will guide parents and teachers to enjoy the creative and emotional expressions of children, how they show purposes, experiences and feelings playfully to friends of all ages. We learn language as a tool, crafted to describe purposes and experiences of objects and events in cultural understanding. Two features of human vitality give us these special powers. From birth we use clever hands and voice to tell others stories of imagination in creative projects. And we seek to do this in love with playful friends, imitating and advising what we want to share. We discover “facts” as tricks to possess and to recall what is discovered by our imagination-in-action, the affordances of “reality” for enjoyment. This descriptive, psychobiological approach helps us accept the gifts of children for companionship with emotion. How we share the joys and dangers of life in our special ecology which has accumulated beliefs through thousands of years, remembered as symbols in work and art. Paul Thibault gives us a compassionate guide for parents and teachers, not just an expert review of the science of speaking and writing. —Colwyn Trevarthen, PhD, FRSE, Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh This is a monumental volume that challenges the received wisdom in contemporary linguistics. The Languaging approach, comprehensively and systematically advanced in the book, emphasises the living and experiencing process. Through many varied and real-life examples, the author demonstrates how languaging forms an integral part of the human ecology. It is a major contribution to knowledge, with far-reaching and long-lasting implications for language teaching and learning, human cognition and human sociality. —Li Wei, Chair of Applied Linguistics, University College London

Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term “language,” as defined in the language sciences of the twentieth century and the traditions these have drawn on, has arguably limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language⁠—the distributed language view⁠—that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be localised as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organisation that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault’s book grounds languaging in process theory: Languaging and the forms of experience it actualises are always an event, not a thing that we “use.” In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, Thibault's two volume study considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume I focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics

in languaging activity. Volume II connects the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated. Paul J. Thibault, who grew up in Newcastle, Australia, and completed his PhD under Michael Halliday’s supervision at the University of Sydney in 1984, is Professor in linguistics and communication studies at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. He was Hans Christian Andersen Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense (2015–2018). He has held academic posts in Australia, China, Italy, and Hong Kong. His research interests and publications are in the areas of applied and general linguistics, development, distributed language and cognition, graphics and interactivity, human–animal interaction, human interactivity, learning, multimodality, narrative, social theory, learning theory and teaching and learning in higher education, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, systemic-functional linguistics. He is also currently working on two new books entitled The Linguistic Imagination and Language, Body, World: A Critical Rereading of Hjelmslev. He is currently on the editorial boards of six international journals. With Mark King, he is developing theoretical frameworks and methodological tools for the study of human learning in tertiary settings using the perspectives of distributed cognition, eye tracking, interactivity, and multimodal event analysis. With Anthony Baldry, he is developing the idea of multimodal ecological literacy. He has had a deep interest in ecological questions since he was seven years old. He believes that the predominantly mechanistic theories of human cognition and semiosis need to be replaced by a new account of what it means to be a living, feeling human self in the human ecology.

Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory Series Editor: Adrian Pablé Words—An Integrational Approach Hayley G. Davis The Language Myth in Western Culture Edited by Roy Harris Rethinking Linguistics Edited by Hayley G. Davis & Talbot J. Taylor The Written Language Bias in Linguistics Its Nature, Origins and Transformations Per Linell Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives Edited by Nigel Love Language Teaching Integrational Linguistic Approaches Edited by Michael Toolan Rationality and the Literate Mind Roy Harris Critical Humanist Perspectives The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communications Edited by Adrian Pablé The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry Integrational Linguistics in Practice Dorthe Duncker Integrationism and the Self Reflections on the Legal Personhood of Animals Christopher Hutton Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I The Sense-Making Body Paul J. Thibault Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume II Co-Articulating Self and World Paul J. Thibault For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Rout ledge-Advances-in-Communication-and-Linguistic-Theory/book-series/RACLT

Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I The Sense-Making Body Paul J. Thibault

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Paul J. Thibault The right of Paul J. Thibault to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thibault, Paul J., author. Title: Distributed languaging, affective dynamics, and the human ecology / Paul J. Thibault. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge advances in communication and linguistic theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v. 1. The sense-making body – v. 2. Co-articulating self and world. | Summary: “Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term ‘language’ as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language – the Distributed Language view – that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault’s book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we ‘use’. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of selfreflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II connects the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are Integrated”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023101 (print) | LCCN 2020023102 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815379539 (v. 1; hardback) | ISBN 9780367611910 (v. 2; hardback) | ISBN 9781351215589 (v. 1; ebook) | ISBN 9781003104551 (v. 2; ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Linguistics–Philosophy. | Psycholinguistics. | Affect (Psychology) | Human ecology. | Sociolinguistics. Classification: LCC P121 .T46 2020 (print) | LCC P121 (ebook) | DDC 401/.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023101 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023102 ISBN: 978-0-8153-7953-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-21558-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To my two daughters, Ilaria Thibault and Catherine Lifei Thibault, and to my grandson, Leonardo Gunduz, and my granddaughter, Ayla Gunduz, in gratitude and love for the pathways of movement, growth, and becoming we have forged and continue to forge together in and though our languaging.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Foreword Preface Introduction 1. Concrete Languaging and Embodied Experience in the Human Ecology 1 2. Creating the Object of Study in Linguistics: Saussure’s Postulate and Its Enduring Consequences 3 3. The Problem: Is There Such a Thing as “Language”? 8 4. The 9E View of Languaging 12 Note 17 1

Value 1. Extensive and Intensive Properties: Living in Zones of Intensity 18 2. The Emergence of Co-Articulated Phonetic Gestures: A New Layer of Complexity 20 3. Extensive Products, Intensive Flows, and the Two Orders of Language 23 4. Stratifying the Organs-Body-Organism-Person System as the Locus of Human Languaging 28 5. Value Gradients, Intentional Dynamics, and Grammar Order Parameters: A Specification Hierarchy of Languaging 35 6. Buying and Selling in a Greengrocer’s Shop: Zone of Intensity Example 1 38 7. Affective Sense-Making: A Visceral Language Science of Blood, Guts, Sweat, and Tears 42

xvii xix xxi xxv 1

18

xiv

Contents 8. A Wall Street Financial Market in Meltdown: Zone of Intensity Example 2 42 9. Languaging as Caring and Minding and En-Minding of Others: Zone of Intensity Example 3 57 10. Conclusion 66

2

Flow 1. Transcending the Duality of Form and Substance: The Sociality of Human Biology and the Organic Basis of Human Sociality 70 2. Linguistic Work: Unifying the Formal-Informational and the Material-Energetic Aspects of Languaging 77 3. Humans are Biocultural Becomings 82 4. The Person-Organism as a Lifeline of Movement, Growth, and Becoming 84 5. Respiration, Languaging, and the Flow of the Living 89 6. Infant Babbling and the Zone of Interpenetration: An Example of Co-Construction and Co-Development in an Episode of Infant–Mother Mutual Attunement 93 7. The Media, Substances, and Surfaces of Linguistically Structured Vocal Tract Action 98 8. The Systems of the Human Voice: An Integrative View 103 9. The Systemic Relationality of Human Biocultural Becomings 119 10. The Organism-Person: Re-Thinking Endogenous and Exogenous Dynamics 123

70

3

Melody 1. Languaging within the Ethiosphere 127 2. The Feeling of Languaging 133 3. The Body’s Tactile-Kinaesthetic Melodies 134 4. Freeman’s Neurobiology of Meaning and the Self’s Intentional Structures: Leaning into the World with the Body’s Melodies through Assimilation and Cooperation 136 5. Knowledge Is Brought forth in Movement: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Kinetic Melodies 142 6. Luria’s Account of Kinetic Melodies of Enskilment 144

126

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xv

7. Three Dimensions of Melodies of Expressive Movement: The Kinematic, the Energetic, and the Physiognomic 149 8. Three Dimensions of Expressive Melodies of Movement: An Analysis of a Wordless Narrative between Father and PreLinguistic Infant 154 9. Micro-Temporal Phases in an Episode of Infant–Mother Interaction: Concerted Rehearsal and the Orientation to Social Norms 161 10. Biological Agency and Lived Full-Bodied Sense-Making: Susan Stuart’s Theory of Enkinaesthesia 165 11. Kinetic Melodies as Forms of Engagement 168 12. The Fracturing of Melody and the Collapse of Empathy: Disintegration of a Dialogic System 171 13. Mood, Kinetic Melodies, and the Musicality of Languaging 178 14. Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics 183 15. The Musicality of Languaging 196 16. Imitation, Entrainment, and the Musicality of Languaging 197 17. Conclusion 201 Notes 203 4

Sense-Making 1. Languaging and Sensory-Kinetic Experience 204 2. Knowing Levels and the Emergence of Lexicogrammar 205 3. Submorphemic Markers and Sensory-Kinetic Experience: Embodied Self-Utterance-Environment Dynamics and the Emergence of Levels of Self-Reflective Abstraction in Languaging 207 4. Knowing Levels: From Embodied Interactivity to Lexicogrammar 210 5. Knowing Level 4: Explicit Pointing to and Explicit Naming in Lexicogrammar 232 6. Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Enablements in the Flow of Languaging 235 7. The Flow of Languaging: An Example 243 8. Lexicogrammatical Selection Pressures: Extending the Lexical Range of Grammatical Pattern 249 9. Sense-Making and the Convention-Constituting Capacities of Languaging 250

204

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Contents 10. The Situation-Transcending and Bodily-Grounded Properties and Functional Capacities of Linguistic Actions of the Vocal Tract 255 Note 258

Conclusion to Volume I Appendix I References Index

259 261 263 281

Figures

0.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4 2.5

Unfolding the basic characteristics of the whole from within the germ cell of word meaning 12 Saussure’s illustration of language [la langue] as the intermediary between “ideas” (A) and “sound” (B); Saussure (1971/1915: 156) 29 Saussure’s illustration of the relationship between the two relata, signifié (signified) and signifiant (signifier), in the linguistic sign; Saussure (1971/1915: 158) 30 Anatomy of neonate and adult vocal tract compared 73 Infant’s vocalisation in Phase 1: Note sequence of three quasi-CV units of diminishing intensity (yellow line) and sharply falling pitch contour (blue line) starting at 450 Hz and falling to 337.6 Hz; note protracted formant transitions of the three pre-canonical CV units, of 0.568, 0.679, and 0.996, in conformity with the slower rate of production of the infant’s precanonical CV units 96 The mother’s vocalisation (“yeah say dada”) in Phase 2 shows a sequence of four syllabic units; the pitch contour of the first syllable drops from 262.5 Hz to 89.87 (blue line) and is markedly lengthened, with a moderate degree of creakiness, as shown by the duration of the formant transition (0.800 s); the second syllable has a duration of 0.326 s; the third is 0.438 s; and the fourth is significantly lengthened, showing a duration of 0.679 s. Moreover, the pitch range of “say dada” starts on a high of 276.3 Hz and falls to 230.3 Hz. The relatively steady pitch rate and the slow rate of syllable duration show how the mother is tracking the infant’s vocalisations at the same time that she is adjusting her own vocalisations to those of the infant 97 The three systems involved in the production of vocal tract gestures 103 Anatomical structure of the larynx. [Source: https://commons .wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larynx_and_nearby_structures; downloaded 13 July 2020.] 104

xviii Figures 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9

2.10 2.11

3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

The layered structure of the vocal folds The layered structure of the lamina propria The three cavities of the supralaryngeal vocal tract The articulators of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. Key: 1. Nasal cavity; 2. Oral cavity; 3. Hard palate (palatum); 4. Soft palate (velum); 5. Teeth (dentes); 6. Uvula; 7. Lips (labia); 8. Pharynx; 9. Tip of tongue; 10. Epiglottis; 11. Blade of tongue; 12. Vocal cords; 13. Front of tongue; 14. Glottis; 15. Back of tongue; 16. Wind pipe (trachea); 17. Larynx. [Source: https://commons.wiki media.org/wiki/File:VocalTract_withNumbers.svg.] The fixed articulators of the supralaryngeal vocal tract (labels in rectangles). [Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ommons/e/e1/Tract; downloaded 13 July 2020.] Double articulation of vocal tract gesture, showing the stratification of the fundamental frequencies of the source event into its formant frequencies and their re-stratification as a pattern of contrasts in the acoustic array. [Source: https://commons.wiki media.org/wiki/File:Vocal_folds-speaking_201611 (vibrating vocal folds); https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c /cc/Source-filter_model_diagram (source filer); downloaded 13 July 2020.] The subjective and objective poles of the derivation of conduct from character, seen as a derivational sequence of subjective phases originating in the core self and transitioning to the impersonal values of the ethiosphere Phase 1, Subphase 1 of wordless narrative between father and infant; duration 1.96 s Phase 1, Subphase 2 of wordless narrative between father and infant; duration 1.53 s Voice dynamics and monological closure: The build-up to the trigger and aftermath in the Miller–Howard dispute; AH = Aaron Howard; KB = Kara Box; JM = John Miller; MM = Michael Miller. Items in small caps gloss the phases of the build-up Pitch (blue) and intensity (green) contours in Noeleen’s utterance yeah look this is the one you had Pitch, intensity, and spectrograph display of the utterance I’m scared (audible inhale) I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before First pitch movement showing four points measured in Hz from onset to terminus; the arrows from the pitch measurement below indicate the measurement point in the pitch movement Second pitch movement (“I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before”); note the jagged irregular course of the blue line

106 107 109

109 110

115

129 156 158

176 185 188 190 191

Tables

1.1 Stratifying the Person-Organism as Languaging Agent 1.2 Mapping the Phases of the Collapse of the Risk Managers’ Viewpoint to the Dominant Monological Perspective of the Traders 1.3 Transcription of Monkey Bars Episode; Cross-Referenced to Description of Phases 1 and 2 in Main Text 2.1 Transcription of Mutual Attunement Episode between Infant and Mother Focused on the Infant’s Vocalising of Early Quasi-Syllabic Structures, or “Babbling”; Temporal Durations in Seconds and Milliseconds. See the description of Phases 1 to 5 in Appendix I 2.2 Stratifying the Respiratory-Phonatory-Articulatory-Informational System 3.1 General Proto-Metafunctional Properties of Kinetic Melodies of Expressive Bodily Movement and Their Intrinsic Intersubjective Dimension 3.2 The Four Subphases of the Introduction Phase of the Wordless Narrative between Infant and Father, Showing the Vocalisations of Infant and Father, Intervals of Silence, and Their Duration 3.3 Four Phases in Micro-Temporal Dynamics of Tokened Rehearsal (Fetching Game) between Mother and Infant 3.4 Transcription of the Final Seconds of the Dispute between Howard and the Millers 3.5 Pitch, Intensity, and Duration in the Three Tones (Pitch Movements) in Noeleen’s Utterance 3.6 Minimum, Maximum, and Mean Values for Pitch, Intensity, and F1 and F2 in Pitch Movements 1 and 2 3.7 The Articulation of an Emotion Stance in the Speaker’s Utterance, Showing the Integration of Global Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Local Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics in Response to the Body’s Encounter with the Frustrating Situation of Laurie’s Inability to Get the Pens to Write 3.8 Minimum, Maximum, and Mean Values for Pitch, Intensity, and F1 and F2 in Pitch Movements 1 and 2

34 54 61

95 112 152 155 162 172 185 186

187 191

xx

Tables

3.9

The Articulation of an Emotion Stance in the Speaker’s Utterance, Showing the Integration of Global Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Local Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics in Response to the Body’s Encounter with an Unexpected and Life-Threatening Situation Deictic This in the Utterance This Is the One You Had Deictic This in the Utterance This Is the Berry Tree Deictic This in the Utterance Well They Sort of Look Like This Deictic That in Neil Armstrong’s Utterance after His First Step on the Lunar Surface John Newland’s Opening Presentation of an Episode of One Step Beyond, “The Captain’s Guests” The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 1 The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 2 The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 3 Situation-Transcending and Bodily-Grounded Properties and Capacities of Utterances

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

193 223 224 225 228 230 245 246 247 256

Foreword

To Osu or Not to Osu Between 2014 and 2018, I was involved in what has become known as the TLAN project: “Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse wards in four UK cities (TLANG).” The project gathered a large amount of data on how people used multiple languages in business, sports, heritage and culture, and legal contexts. In the context of sports, we carried out a linguistic ethnography in karate clubs in London, led by a Polish Roma karate coach. We observed multiple uses, and teaching, of the Japanese expression osu (sometime written as oss to represent the pronunciation more closely). Osu in Japanese has been described as an “insanely useful” but simultaneously “insanely misunderstood” and misused expression. If you ask people who know Japanese, they would suggest everything and anything, including “hi,” “hello,” “goodbye,” “okay,” “thanks,” “excuse me,” “hey there,” “come here,” “go there,” “what’s up,” “look at me,” “do it this way,” “that way,” “do you understand?,” “I understand,” and, in the context of karate, “train harder.” But if you ask a native Japanese speaker, they are mostly likely to say that it is “untranslatable.” There are different theories about where the expression came from and how it got into the world of karate in particular. But I will not go into any of them here. The kanji that represents the expression is 押忍, which literally means “to press/ push” and “to endure (suffering).” A more patient language teacher might explain the sensitive and complex issues of gender, age, and social status associated with the uses of the expression. But the following scene that we observed in the karate club in London stuck in my mind: The coach lined up the students, mainly children between the age of 6 and 14, bowed with hands closed in front of his chest and said “Osu.” The children responded in chorus “osu.” But the coach directed his gaze at some of the children and said “No osu like this.” He then demonstrated by his bowing and the saying of osu again for the children to copy. This happened on many occasions, and sometimes, he would say the same “No osu like this” when the children stood up from kneeling saying osu at the same time. He would demonstrate which leg to straighten first and when exactly osu should be said while trying to stand up. If someone came late, they would kneel

xxii Foreword at the edge of the mat, saying osu seemingly to themselves and patiently waiting for the coach to signal when to join the group. When they stand up, they bow and say osu again. Sometimes the coach would ask them to do it again because he did not think they did it properly. When they leave the dojo, the karate practice room, they need to turn around facing the inside, bow and say osu. The coach would not accept a half turn of the body and always insisted that they face the centre of the dojo when they bow and say osu. In talking to the coach, he literally said to us, “I don’t know what it (osu) means, but I can show you how to say it.” These scenes occurred again and again in my mind while reading Paul Thibault’s new two-volume project. We have analysed such examples in terms of embodied learning and cultural translation. To us, the coach knew exactly what osu meant and the meaning, and indeed meanings, cannot be divorced from the articulation of the body. What I know now, having read the present volume, is that a full 9E analysis of the teaching and learning of this expression in the karate club will reveal much more of its richness and complexity. A key to this is the absolute inseparability of the person, the activity they are engaged in and the actions they are performing, the media through which the activity and actions are performed, and the context in which the activity and actions occur including the historical context from which the present context evolved. This is a monumental project that challenges the received wisdom in contemporary linguistics and urges us to rethink how we conceptualise language and how we analyse the so-called linguistic data. The languaging approach that is so cogently articulated in the two volumes is not exactly new of course. And Paul himself has done the research into the history of the concept in the academic literature. But he has put forward a comprehensive framework for analysis, a methodology for empirical research. And this is the key value of the two volumes and will be its legacy. Linguistics is an amazingly fractionary discipline. If one googles “linguistics and blind men and the elephant,” one will find many caricatures of how different schools of linguists only see an aspect of what they consider of the real language from their particular viewpoint. The languaging approach is not aiming to bring these competing views together, but offering a radically different perspective that language only exists in the experiencing. Languaging therefore is inseparable from the experiencing person, or self/selves as Paul calls them, and their relations with the other experiencing selves, the environment, and the objects around them. This has far more fundamental impact on the way we do linguistic analysis than it may look. First, there is the constant objectivisation of the so-called “linguistic data,” separating the languager’s experiencing from the observer-analyst’s observing and analysing, as if the latter themselves were not experiencing or their experiencing had no impact on their capacity to observe and analyse. The linguistic data could then be coded, computerised, and presented in numbers and figures. Moreover, there is the view that the world is neatly dividable into linguistic and non-linguistic systems and the linguistic system itself is neatly dividable into sub-components. As Paul argues, languaging is a living process. The languaging

Foreword

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selves are looking, listening, thinking, acting and reacting, and, crucially, feeling. They are of course influenced and constrained by history and the environment, but they are also making and transforming history and the environment. Languaging then is created by selves but selves are also created by languaging. As Paul says understanding the self-in-languaging is fundamental to the development of an understanding of the multi-scalar dynamics of languaging (p. 2). But the significance of languaging is that it forms an integral part of the human ecology. Languaging is constitutive of the many forms of ecological work whereby selves attend to and care for each other and for the other agents and agencies with which they are in relations of community and reciprocity (p. 58). Our interactivity with others crucially depends on our sensitivity to the ecological information that is made available by micro-temporal or pico-scale bodily dynamics. I recall an incident when my older son, aged three and a half at the time, accidentally knocked a glass of milk off the table. His younger brother, aged one year and nine months and strapped in a high chair, turned to look at me immediately and seeing that I did not blame his brother, made a gesture and extended his hand to him before turning his hand to point to the glass. Young children learn to attune to the subtle aspects of human interaction and develop what Paul calls “biosemiotic skills of interpretation” of bodily events. These biosemiotic skills are key to how we experience others, the objects around us, and the environment. An important implication of this line of argument is for language teaching and learning, and for educational and applied linguistics more broadly. The field of language teaching and learning, whether first, second, foreign, or additional, by and large still assumes that there are abstract systems represented in the form of linguistic structures that can somehow be acquired first, which would then be put to use. A great deal of effort centres around teaching such abstracted structures and the practical strategy is “to press” and “to push” on behalf of the teacher, and “to endure” and “to suffer” on behalf of the learner. The teaching, and research, community seems somehow puzzled when they see that learners do not learn what they are taught in this manner. The languaging perspective argues that the novice does not “acquire” language, but rather “they adapt their bodies and brains to the languaging activity that surrounds them,” and in doing so, “they participate in cultural worlds and learn that they can get things done with others in accordance with the culturally promoted norms and values” (Thibault 2017: 76). I find this argument particularly appealing and useful in my own work on language teaching and learning a process of embodied participation and resemiotisation. The languaging perspective, more comprehensively and systematically advanced in this two-volume study than anywhere else, is a timely reminder in the era of artificial intelligence that human cognition is not reducible to computer programmes, however sophisticated they may be. Human beings live in what Paul calls “a world of cultural constructs,” including “a vast range of virtual constructs in the form of agreements, beliefs, cooperation, social coordination, intentions, morals, norms, roles, obligations, responsibilities, social relations, understandings, values, viewpoints,” and so on. None of these is reducible to or explainable in abstract computing codes. The languaging selves are socio-cognitive-affective

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assemblages. And languaging is constituted and enacted in interactive loops between brains, bodies, and the external environment rather than internal mental states and their representations or abstract verbal patterns, as in current discourseanalytical and form-based approaches. Seen from this perspective, languaging is an integrated system of action-affect-thinking that enables us to live and experience. Of course the practical challenge will always be to design research projects that investigate languaging phenomena holistically and in an integrated manner, rather than focussing selectively on fragments of abstracted structures, and to introduce educational policies and practices that promote the experiencing and the living. The present study urges us to abandon the standard paradigms and to think innovatively of ways of carrying out academic research and professional practice. Beyond the practical implications of the theoretical arguments, the many varied, real-life examples discussed in the two volumes connect us to the fast-changing world and invite us to reflect on the way we go about our everyday languaging life. The twentieth century saw the beginning of both crewed and robotic missions to the Moon. But all the landings were on the near side of the Moon. The far side, or the dark side, is said to be far more rugged with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat areas compared to the near side which is visible from earth. The landing of the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e 4 on the far side of the Moon on 3 January 2019 marked the beginning of new explorations but was also a reminder of how much we do not know about the Moon. Human language is a completely different matter. But there are certainly a lot more unknowns than knowns about it. Paul Thibault’s thought-provoking two-volume project takes us a little closer to the invisible side of human language by directing our attention to languaging as an experiencing and living process. It will help us to discover more of ourselves. And that is a major contribution to human knowledge. Li Wei Chair of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Applied Linguistics, Institute of Education, University College London London, January 2020

Preface

Many persons have contributed to and have supported and helped me in various ways in the writing of this two-volume project. They too are therefore deeply enfolded with its melodies and textures as I have in various ways moved along with them in the making of our lives and work together in different places and times. Their intellectual, personal, and material support is greatly appreciated. I am not embarrassed to say that the list is quite long. I would like to thank John Alexander, Chris Baber, Elaine Espindola Baldissera, Anthony Baldry, Leslie Barratt, Will Barratt, Marco Battachi, Jim Benson, Marta Bogusławska-Tafelska, Didier Bottineau, Paul Bouissac, Stein Bråten, David Butt, Jeremy Coller, She Dan, Dorthe Duncker, Hannele Duva, Sima Erami, Colin Evers, Parisio di Giovanni, Andrew Goatly, Bill Greaves, Michael Gregory, Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Glenn Haugeberg, Bert Hodges, Tim Ingold, Peter Jones, Marcel Kinsbourne, Alex Kravchenko, Natalia Malenko, Mark King, Thao Le, Jim Lantolf, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Angel Lin, Per Linell, Marc Lorrimar, Nigel Love, Bob Lumsden, Eva Maagerø, Ahmar Mahboob, Christian Matthiessen, Jim Martin, Kieran McGillicuddy, Bill McGregor, Blair McKenzie, Ann McKewan, Saeed Karimi Aghdam Ordaklou, Janaina Minelli De Oliveira, Sigrid Norris, Alex Peng, Fred Peng, Carlo Prevignano, Xie Qiuzhi, Vincenzo Raimondi, Itai Roffmann, Alex Rosborough, Wolff-Michael Roth, Keith Russell, Wendy Saalfeld, Susanna Shore, Susan Stuart, Steve Thorne, Morten Tønnessen, Colwyn Trevarthen, Theo van Leeuwen, Eija Ventola, Jim Wafer, Li Wei, Peter White, Geoff Williams, Dongping Zheng, Xin Zhiying, Feifei Zhou, and Sanmao Zhu. I am grateful to Routledge series editor, Adrian Pablé, for his interest in this project and for supporting its publication in the series which he edits. I also acknowledge the dedicated work of Katie Peace, Samantha Phua, and Jacy Hui of Routledge in helping me to bring this project from initial proposal to the final two volumes thanks to their patience and always helpful expert professional guidance. The University of Agder (UiA) generously granted me a 12-month research leave in 2018 to support the writing of this project. I am grateful to UiA for giving me the extended quality time that is so essential for the development of a project of this complexity. In particular, I thank Sunniva Whittaker, then Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education, now Rector of UiA, Hans-Olav Hodøl,

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Head, Department of Nordic and Media Studies, and Terje Tellefesen, Faculty Director, for supporting my research leave application. I wish to express my deepest gratitude and love to my parents, Philip Jan Thibault and Sylvia Katherine Thibault, for all their years of belief in me, their unstinting love, and the footsteps and pathways they have laid down for me to move along. To my brother, Mark, and his companion, Heleyne, I express my unbounded appreciation and thanks for their loyalty and love. I am deeply grateful in ways that words can hardly express to my wife, Ng Lai Ping, for her support, tenacity, and love. To my daughter-in-law, Fei Fei Ko, and son-in-law, Tung Chun Lam (Simon), I express my deepest affection and gratitude for their valuable assistance, support, and love. I dedicate this first volume study to my two daughters, Ilaria and Catherine Thibault, and to my two grandchildren, Leonardo and Ayla Gunduz, in celebration of the movement, growth, and becoming that we have forged together over the years in the diverse places (Australia, China, England, Hong Kong, Italy, and Norway) in which my life has variously been enfolded with aspects of theirs. To Deniz Gunduz, my son-in-law, husband of Ilaria, and father of Leonardo and Ayla, I say it is wonderful you are such a dedicated and enabling part of all of this. I am grateful to you all for your enduring inspiration, sense of fun, and love. Jay Lemke, Angel Lin, Per Linell, Nigel Love, Steven Thorne, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Li Wei all read the entire pre-publication manuscript and provided me with valuable comments. I thank them profusely for their commitment, insight, and generosity. Kristiansand, Norway October 2019–April 2020

Introduction

Like our theological forebears, we are starting to produce truth in a virtual world instead of discovering it. James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), p. 114 A living tongue is not a petrified object whose forms are clearly defined and crystallized; but it is living, full of movement. Words are the signs of ideas; and the ideas changing, assume a variety of aspects which invite to new combinations of words in the expression of our thoughts. Words, too, like individuals, experience their varied phases of existence, and have their youth, their mature age, and their decay; or they resemble our coins, which are received till, their effigies becoming worn and defaced by use, they drop into disuse. In a living tongue there is a perpetual renovation, not only of words, but of their combinations. As some die, others spring into existence. Neologism and archaism are the two sources from which living languages repair their perpetual decadence and maintain their everlasting youth. Étienne Jean Baptiste Thibault, Modern languages at the Melbourne University, The Melbourne Review, July 1881, p. 320 Our predecessors thought of language as an organism, and drew their analogies from evolution. We reject this as misleading; but no less misleading is its familiar substitute, according to which language is an edifice and the morphemes are the bricks. Perhaps if language had been thought of as activity we should never have heard of “morphemics.” M. A. K. Halliday, Categories of the theory of grammar, 2002/1961, pp. 64–65

1. Concrete Languaging and Embodied Experience in the Human Ecology The two inter-linked volumes of this study aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling. Volume I focuses on the shorter timescales of the material dynamics of our

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Introduction

embodiment and the crucial role of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. For this reason, it is subtitled The Sense-Making Body. Volume II, which is subtitled Co-Articulating Self and World, integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics with the longer timescales of linguistic and cultural norms and patterns. The subtitle of Volume II puts the focus on what selves do in the human ecology. I show that what selves do and how selfhood is constituted depend on what the human ecology needs them to do. Rather than an individual- or organism-centred perspective, I emphasise the dialectical nature of the relations between selvesin-interaction and larger-scale ecosystem processes. Just as selves participate in processes that enable them to maintain themselves, to develop, and to individuate, so do ecosystem processes. The progression outlined here between the two volumes is not a strictly linear one. The reader will find that discussion of both the shorter and longer timescales occurs throughout both volumes. The aim is to produce an integrated account of the multi-scalarity of human languaging in the human ecology. In the quotation that heads this introduction, my great-great grandfather, Dr Étienne Jean Baptiste Thibault, who emigrated from France to Australia and taught modern languages at the University of Melbourne in the late 1870s and early 1880s before then taking up a position at the University of Sydney, eloquently renders the way in which languaging is a living process and movement. In the two volumes, the ideas of living process and movement are fundamental conceptual tools that I develop in the current effort to re-connect languaging to the living of life of the selves who make their home in the human ecology. I hope therefore that the chapters which follow suitably honour my great-great grandfather’s fundamental insight and the inspiration it has provided me in the development of the present study. Students of languaging have all too often been seduced by the currently dominant technologies as their guiding metaphors. It is time that we re-invent for our times an understanding of languaging that is apprehended and felt up close and that is, as Étienne Thibault wrote in 1881, “living, full of movement” and that has its “varied phases of existence” (Thibault, op. cit.). It is a view of languaging for our times that makes embodied skills, expertise, and local hands-on knowledge central just as our nineteenth-century ancestors did for their times. It is time for the creative linguistic destruction of the unproductive technocratic mindset grounded in routinisation and managerial process and its replacement with new democratic energies. Such an enterprise can contribute to the development of productive social relations and the selves who make them on a solid foundation of practices designed to extend the self’s capacities for self-understanding, a self-critical attitude, and self-mastery (Lasch, 1984: 255–258). Donna Haraway (1976: 2) points out that metaphor plays a vital role in directing research and its interpretation. In my study, the guiding metaphors that direct my research and interpretation include the movement, growth, and becoming that are characteristic of the life process in contrast to the mechanistic metaphors of codes, computationalism, and information processing and transmission that have guided and shaped research and interpretation of language and cognition since Saussure’s model of

Introduction 3 the speech circuit was informed by the then-prevailing technologies of electrical telegraphy and the telephone.

2. Creating the Object of Study in Linguistics: Saussure’s Postulate and Its Enduring Consequences The language sciences have tended to extract, collect, measure, and classify linguistic data by processes of observation conducted by observers and their observation systems. Saussure famously remarked in the posthumously published text of his Course in General Linguistics (1971/1915: 23) that the theoretical viewpoint “creates”⁠—c’est le point du vue qui crée l’objet—the object of study. There have been various uptakes of Saussure’s remark. I will not present a detailed review here and will limit myself to a few general observations that will serve to frame the discussion that follows. On this view, system-internal structural descriptions, of which Saussure’s la langue is the prototype, focus on the description and formalisation of linguistic forms, the units that comprise them, their principles of combination, and their probability distributions. Analogously, the selves who engage in languaging are reduced to abstract speaker-hearers or sender-receivers who extract linguistic data from an external environmental source and process the input data so extracted by means of an internal linguistic or cognitive competence, an internalised code or system, or an internalised dictionary that confers order on the data in order to yield outputs in the form of linguistic utterances. Winograd (1983: 16–17) synthesises this view when he explains the stratification of linguistic structure in the following way: When a person hears a sentence, the sequence of sounds forms an initial level of structure. The phonological process applies rules to analyse these into a sequence of phonemes. The morphological process applies other rules to analyse the phoneme sequence into a sequence of morphemes, the dictionary is used to relate these to words, the syntactic rules are used to analyse these into phrases, and so on down through the levels. A producer would proceed in a similar way, working from bottom to top. (Winograd, 1983: 17) From both points of view, Saussure’s le langage is converted into highly abstract formal systems—e.g., phonological, syntactic, etc.—and the logical operations performed on them. These formal systems are postulated as the internal architecture of the linguistic system. Saussure’s observational postulate separates the “object of study” from the rest of the world. The heterogeneity and flux of le langage in all its manifestations that constitute the basis of empirical observation are re-processed by the linguist’s theoretical machinery as linguistic data in the guise of formal regularities and their combinations that are separated from human experience and treated as the inputs and outputs of a linguistic competence, linguistic code, or language system. One consequence of this approach is that the experiencing of utterances

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Introduction

and the ways in which they affect experiencing selves are simply left out of the descriptive and explanatory picture. These different aspects of experience are not part of the virtual models of “language processing” that are generated by the linguist’s data. The only viewpoint admitted into the theory is that of the linguist as organiser and interpreter of his or her data. The viewpoints of the conscious selves who engage in and are affected by their own and others’ languaging are effectively disallowed. One effect of this view is that "language" is conceived of as systems of abstract forms and formal operations on them that are separated from the selves who produce and experience them in concrete acts of languaging activity. The removal of selves from the picture and the reduction of language to the linguist’s data in turn give rise to the following splits: 1. The splitting of the experiencing and observing self from the experienced and observed world; 2. The splitting of the experienced and observed world into the language system separated from its environment; 3. The splitting of the language system into its component parts, their principles of combination, their formal regularities, and so on. On this basis, the undivided continuum of the world is split into formalised linguistic data, experiencing and observing selves, and theoretical viewpoints and systems (Coseriu, 1981: 175). The theoretical system and its viewpoints thus mediate the communication between observers and the data in a world in which self is now separated from the world, including its own languaging activity. A further consequence is that the resulting splits referred to above are taken to be the way things are “out there,” though we have no ultimate way of stepping outside our own meaning systems, including our theoretical viewpoints, to determine whether the resulting splits actually correspond to the way we experience human languaging. As Saussure made clear, the empirical data of le langage can only be made sense of by a linguist-observer and some established theoretical framework (la langue) that enables the linguist to organise and interpret the raw data. Saussure’s theoretical construct la langue thus serves to place the data in a framework of analysis and interpretation which in effect reduces the data to the requirements of the given framework’s measurement practices and the alignment of the data so derived to a specific algorithm that reliably tracks the object system’s behaviour. By the time we get to the third of the three splits outlined above, languaging has become “language”—abstract linguistic forms without bodies, without persons, without environments. As in Saussure’s conception of linguistic value (see Thibault, 1997: chap. 8), the ecological work that is performed by persons in and through their languaging is turned into something abstract and measurable that is disconnected from the living of life, from ethics, from action, from bodies, from feelings, from cooperation, from culture, from the bio-social life flows in which people participate. The work of languaging is turned into the abstract exchange

Introduction 5 value of “language” (Rossi-Landi, 1992: 134). “Language” is abstract form, not substance (Saussure, 1971/1915: 156–157). In actual fact, Saussure gave voice to another possibility that has tended to be overlooked in favour of the later idea that the sign is a pairing of a form with a meaning. Saussure through his editors writes of la langue as the “domain of articulations” (1971/1915: 156) that serves as the intermediary between thought and sound rather than as the material phonic means for the expression of ideas. However, I argue that language is not an intermediary; it does not “mediate” between “mind” and “world.” Instead, it is the further articulation of action, affect, and thinking that strives for expression so that it can be both reflected on and acted out in the world. In other words, action, affect, and thinking are further elaborated and developed by languaging. Rather than an intermediary in the sense defined by Saussure, languaging, I argue, is a highly productive action system that enables people to intervene in and to co-articulate themselves with selected aspects of their world. It is not an intermediary or an interface that stands between self and the world, but a way of selectively acting on and transforming the world. Saussure confined his observations to the systemic viewpoint of la langue as the “domain of articulations,” but he did not show that articulation is fundamental to languaging as a mode of human action. It is not necessary to throw the Saussurean baby out with the bathwater, but, rather, a matter of returning languaging from “Theologia” to “Geologia” (see below). As I show in Volume II, Chapter 4, languaging is a highly articulated mode of action that co-articulates selves, their utterances, and selected aspects of the world that are targeted by their utterances. The view of language as abstract form has had a number of consequences that remain ingrained in thinking about “language” to the present day: (1) linguistic forms are seen to be imposed on a world of substances that they categorise and make intelligible, as distinct from the idea I develop in this study that languaging is a relational and transformative dynamic—a biosocial organisation of process—that is both enmeshed with and is constitutive of ecological processes and relations and serves to catalyse, direct, and guide many other process flows in the human ecology (Thibault, 1991, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c); (2) the self is seen as an external observer who “represents” and “controls” an external world by means of linguistic (or other) “representations” that mediate the supposed gap between self and world, as distinct from the view I develop below that languaging is an embodied, sense-making action system for acting on and participating in the flows of the human ecology (see Pred’s [2005: 276–282] discussion of the active voice stance as a way of detaching the self from the flow of experience); (3) the construct “language” that is aggregated from the analytical procedures outlined above is taken as the unproblematic model of the object of study as distinct from the ecological processes and flows in which languaging participates and in which it is actively shaped at the same time that it contributes to the shaping of the ecological process flows of the human ecology. The language sciences overall (again with some exceptions) have been and remain to the present day notably reticent as to the complicity of their own analytical and theoretical constructs and their own self-narratives in shaping how

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we think about “language” as a means of measurement and control whose formal structure serves to convert flows of materials, energy, and information in the human ecology into abstract exchange values that serve the increasingly antidemocratic and anti-ecological relations of capitalist power and wealth extraction. Paraphrasing Rossi-Landi, we therefore need to develop a view of the role of human languaging as part of the work processes that create and sustain the living of human life together with the other living beings with which we share the human ecology. For this reason, as readers will discover in due course, the present study mainly focuses its analytical lens on examples of uncommodified life activities in which the “primacy of embodied experience,” as Reed (1996a) put it, is central in contrast to written inscriptions and digital media. Saussure’s observation applies as much to “language” as it does to the point of view of the researcher. “Language” has the functional capacity to evoke virtual objects. The linguist exercises this capacity to create the virtual theoretical object la langue, as shown in the following passage from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics: if we study language [le langage] under several aspects at the same time, the object of linguistics appears to us as a confused mass of heteroclite things without any connection between them. When one proceeds thus, the door is opened to various sciences—psychology, anthropology, normative grammar, philology, etc.—that we separate clearly from linguistics, but it is here, thanks to an incorrect method, that language [le langage] could be claimed as one of their objects. (Saussure, 1971/1915: 24–25; my translation) Saussure, as ventriloquised by his editors, writes approvingly of a plurality of objects of study, none of which precedes or is superior to any of the others. This admiral plurality, however, obscures the way in which linguistics has created objects of study that have often eliminated persons and the processes of languaging that persons participate in. Saussure created a virtual object—la langue—that allows no theoretical place for the fact that there would be no languaging without persons and no persons without languaging. Saussure’s concern, in part, is to close the door to the other sciences—psychology, anthropology, normative grammar, philology, etc.—in order to establish the “object of linguistics,” viz. la langue. In part, Saussure’s move has to do with the staking out of the territory of the new academic discipline of general linguistics. However, Saussure is less heedful of the way in which the new object of linguistics is itself created by the power of language to differentiate and to conjure up virtual objects that have a tendency to take on a life of their own in the sense that positive feedback loops that act back on and influence languaging activity, including theoretical activity, lead to the creation of more and more virtual entities that we then hypostatise as real and act accordingly. One consequence is the confusion noted by Eugenio Coseriu (1981: 71) between the level of research and the level on which the research is carried out. The resulting proliferation of virtual objects as models of

Introduction 7 how to act and be in the world tends more and more to alienate us from the concrete and embodied nature of the lives we live with others in and through our languaging. In the case of academia, there is the tendency to create an ever-increasing number of hyperspecialised virtual objects, domains of study, and academic brands rather than attending to the living processes of concrete languaging in the human ecology. Latour posits the distinction between the “Global” and the “Terrestrial” as a way of thinking through the implications of how we relate to flows of energy and materials in the human ecology, as follows: To restore a positive meaning to the words “realistic,” “objective,” “efficient,” or “rational,” we have to turn them away from the Global, where they have so clearly failed, and toward the Terrestrial. How can this difference in orientation be defined? The two poles are almost the same, except that the Globe grasps all things from far away, as if they were external to the social world and completely indifferent to human concerns. The Terrestrial grasps the same structures from up close, as internal to the collectivities and sensitive to human actions, to which they react swiftly. Two very different versions of the way for these very scientists to have their feet on the ground, as it were. (Latour, 2018/2017: 116; italics in original) The idea of ‘the human ecology’ in the present study is more Terrestrial than Global. We live in an ecology that has been continuously made, re-made, and transformed by the collective activity of humans and other living beings as they live their lives together, not always or necessarily harmoniously, in relations of community and reciprocity with other persons, with other living beings, with artefacts, tools, technologies, aspects of the physical world, and so on. The world we live in is the product of previous transformative activity. What we conventionally call the natural world, as if it existed in a separate realm beyond and external to human (and other) culture, is in reality an integral part of the human ecology. It too is a contingent and historical outcome of human praxis (Thibault, 1991). What we conventionally call ‘Nature’ in opposition to ‘Culture’ is itself constituted by human sense-making activities and is a product of the productive labour of those activities. Nature, to use that term, is not external to us, but is a product of human work and for this reason is best seen as a human artefact because it arises in and through and is not independent of human activity. Saussure’s creation of la langue as the “object of linguistics” has become a sort of “Theologia,” or heavenly knowledge, that is separated off from the “Geologia,” or earthly knowledge, of how earth-dwelling Terrestrials live and nurture their lives together through their languaging. Just as geology became subsumed into a more encompassing earth system science (see Selley, 2005: 430), it is, I submit, time to incorporate the study of languaging into a more integrative ecological science of languaging and to re-constitute our scientific understanding of languaging in relation to the living of human life by the Terrestrials who dwell in languaging and find their way through the world along the pathways laid down by it.

8 Introduction It is time to stop making languaging conform to formal abstracta and virtual computationalist models and to bring it back to the earth we live on. An understanding of languaging and its place in the human ecology requires a new synthesis of biology, complex systems thinking, cultural psychology, ecology, ecological psychology, the cognitive sciences, the language sciences, social theory, and much more. This book makes a small start on some aspects of this challenge. My aim is to put people and the living of their lives back into the explanation ahead of the virtual systems and models that Saussure’s creation of the “object” of linguistic science tried to conform languaging to, in the process eliminating much of what matters about the concrete languaging that takes place between persons in the human ecology.

3. The Problem: Is There Such a Thing as “Language”? A fundamental assumption of the language sciences in the Western tradition is that something called “language” exists in and can be abstracted or extracted from the real-time flow of socially coordinated and organised languaging between persons. In the various sectarian re-incarnations (e.g., cognitive, formal, functional) of its post-Saussurean legacy, practitioners of the science of linguistics have often assumed that abstract linguistic form constitutes a domain of internal structural units and the relations between them that can be studied in their own right. It is further assumed that in establishing the “facts” of these forms through the techniques of distributional and structuralist analysis, it will be possible to relate the forms so defined to their “meaning” or “sense,” defined as a coding or mapping operation that pairs a particular unit (or structured arrangement of units) of linguistic form to its meaning or sense. On the basis of such abstracting generalisations, linguistic systems or codes are postulated as the means by which linguistic communication takes place. It is further assumed or postulated that this abstract code or system is shared to varying degrees by the members of a speech community and underlies (explains?) the individual person’s ability to participate in linguistic or discursive interaction. In accordance with the central tenets of Saussure’s langue-based theory of “language,” it is further assumed that the purportedly heteroclite and chaotic mass of facts and contextual effects observable in the actual linguistic activities (concrete utterances) of individuals are instantiations of the same kinds of formal regularities that are taken for granted as the core of formal analysis at the same time that these assumptions are supplemented in cognitive and functionalist theories by attention to contextual effects of performance, though without ever calling into question the core assumptions of the analysis of abstract linguistic form as an end in itself. Phenomenalism and the poverty of the stimulus Much linguistic and semiotic theory has been heavily influenced by phenomenalism. The basic thesis of phenomenalism is that the relationship between a person and their world is indirect and mediated. According to this view, the organism and

Introduction 9 the external world “out there” are radically separated from each other. Knowledge of the external world is obtained by means of internal representations or mental schemata that “mediate” the organism’s contact with the world “out there.” The relationship between organism and world is therefore indirect. On this view, sensory encodings are inputs that constitute the means by which the organism obtains knowledge of the world. However, sensory inputs are considered to be unreliable, incomplete, and arbitrary guides to the world; they do not specify what is in the world. Instead, the organism must enrich the impoverished sensory inputs by means of internal processes so as to internally reconstruct the particular aspect of the world that caused the sensory input. The internal processes of the organism thus give rise to ideas, concepts, models, schemata, and so on that are either acquired through sensory experience or have a transcendental origin. The phenomena of our mental experience are all that we can know. Our experience of the world is thus a mental construct that we project onto reality and objectify as if it really were an attribute of the world “out there.” Knowledge of the world is gained by the interpretation of input sensory encodings and the process is mediated by reference to internal ideas, concepts, or representations. The basic premises of phenomenalism are well entrenched in many contemporary theories of language and learning that have influenced educational theory and practice. For example, the purported arbitrariness of the relation between linguistic signifiers and their signifieds is based on the lack of any apparent structural isomorphism between the two. On this view, meaning—Saussure’s signification—is the result of the associative relationship between two psychological abstracta— the acoustic image (signifier) and the concept (signified) in Saussure’s terminology. In more modern terms, language is assumed to be a system of form-meaning pairings or mappings (Taylor, 2012: 125, 241; Thibault, 1986). Meanings are thus identified as the symbolic pole that is paired with a phonological pole to form a linguistic construction (Langacker, 1987; Taylor, 2012). According to social semiotic theory, the sign is an association of a signifier with a signified that is motivated by the sign-maker’s interest (Adami, 2017; Bezemer & Jewett, 2009; Kress, 1993). In these diverse approaches, the common thread of concern here is that a language or other semiotic mode is seen as a system of form-meaning associations. Meaning is reified as the conceptual or symbolic structures that are associated with their corresponding phonological, graphological, or other forms. None of these theories claims that there is a simple relation of structural correspondence or isomorphism between the two poles or strata. The lack of any structural isomorphism between the two leads to the idea that this relationship is mediated by a symbolic code, linguistic system, mental dictionary, or mental corpus that specifies the rules that relate forms to meanings. The code, system, or mental dictionary mediates between the two levels (form and meaning or signifier and signified) so that units of meaning can be assigned to phonological, graphological, or other forms. On this view, cognition, perception, and language entail interpretative and inferential activities that enrich otherwise meaningless sensations that are the input signals to sensory encodings. Given that these interpretative activities require the mediation of arbitrary mental or social codes in

10

Introduction

order that these sensory inputs can be made meaningful, it is assumed that the input signals coming from the world are in themselves meaningless and therefore unknowable. In other words, the perception of such signals cannot be taken as a reliable guide to the world. The world outside the organism is thus considered to be unknowable. Knowledge of the world is therefore dependent upon a priori internal codes, models, mental schemata, representations, and so on that constitute our ways of knowing the world. In spite of variations on this idea amongst the different schools of thought, “meaning” is seen as a mediated relationship between the units that comprise the two aspects of the biplanar linguistic (or other) sign. However, this view is much less clear about the role played by people in the constitution of meaning. The idea that a meaning is paired with or is coded by a linguistic form is based on the association psychology that in its modern form is traceable to Hume, Mill, and Locke. Saussure’s idea of the sign as a biplanar relation of association between two abstract psychic entities—signifier and signified—lies in the same tradition. Recent social semiotic theorising persists with the same basic idea that a sign is an association of a form (signifier) with a meaning (signified). As Wolff-Michael Roth (2016: 95–96, 101, 205) has pointed out, “meaning” becomes a metaphysical abstraction that is said to be carried by or is attributable to a given form. On this basis, “meaning-making” is assumed to be the process of selecting the forms with which meanings are associated or combined and/or the process of interpreting the meaning of a form in keeping with constructivist accounts. According to this model, the acoustic signal must be mentally processed after the ear receives basic or raw sensations. The perception of linguistic form in the signal is a mental process. Auditory perceptions of, for example, phonemes are constructed on the basis of raw sensations through (1) comparison with previously encountered perceptions stored in memory; (2) inferences based on acoustic cues in the sensation; and (3) judgements concerning the nature of the external stimulus (see Bickhard & Richie, 1983: 8). The underlying assumption is that full perceptions are synthesised from impoverished sense data by a mental reconstructive process (Bickhard & Richie, 1983: 11). Computationalism A close ally of phenomenalism is computationalism. An admirably clear rendering of the computational model of language processing is provided by Terry Winograd (1983: 15–16). As in comparable models of action and perception, which are seen as separate, and which act as buffers between mind and world (Hurley, 1998: 1), computational models of language processing are based on the passive inputting to the brain of meaningless environmental sensations. These sensations are then assembled so that more general properties can be extracted before then being enriched and processed as perceptual and conceptual categories that provide input to cognitive processing (e.g., decision-making, reasoning, thinking) in the mind.

Introduction 11 As Winograd’s discussion shows, computational models are representationalist. They presuppose a linear sequence of steps corresponding to input-cognition-output (see Section 1). Winograd explains that when an utterance is heard, structures of sound patterns are created, which are then analysed to produce syntactic structures, which are in turn used to create appropriate representations. The representations so created constitute the basis for cognitive processes such as reasoning, which in turn may lead to the construction of further representations. This in turn may result in the production of an action or an utterance. The computational model is based on the description of the processes that explicitly manipulate formal processes. Computational models of language processing are premised on the idea of a process operating with a knowledge base or data structure and acting to generate structures and interact with an environment (Winograd, 1983: 16). Winograd states clearly that computationalism is a metaphor that is modelled on how the digital computer works (Winograd, 1983: 13). Winograd is explicitly concerned with the building of techniques for structuring data and programs in computers. Unfortunately, the computationalist metaphor, while valid in the domain of computers, has been extended to serve as a model of how the human mind works and, in particular, how it processes “language.” Computationalist models of language processing de-biologise language and assume that language processing is a passive process of inputs and outputs. Time is sequential and causation is linear in this view. Both phenomenalism and computationalism have their historical roots in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century internalist association psychology. These accounts presuppose the existence of a metaphysical entity called “meaning,” viewed as a quasi-object in its own right. As I pointed out above, the linguist’s or semiotician’s concern then becomes one of establishing the structural correspondences between forms and meanings, signifiers and signifieds, words and concepts, etc. The resulting reification of “meaning” poses the further problem as to where “meaning” is located. Is it coded by or expressed by the forms? Is it in the mind of the perceiver? Some combination of both? In the present study, I develop the view of languaging as a form of action that enables us to take care of the world we live in and to perform concrete ecological work in concert with others by drawing on and orchestrating familiar cultural patterns and regularities that have normative value and thus the capacity normatively to affect experience. Humans (and other animals) are sense-making organisms who learn about and create knowledge of their world through their enactment of and participation in action-perception cycles that integrate the organism with its world. The relevant unit of analysis is not an organism that is separated from its world and which requires mediational interfaces to make sense of the world. Instead, the organism, its action-perception systems, and the world it interacts with form a unitary organism–environment system. In accordance with the ecological realism developed by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (1983/1966, 1986/1979), I argue in this two volume study that languaging can best be understood as a form of extended action-perception by means of which selves, their internal dynamics, their languaging (and other forms of activity), and their worlds are recursively structurally coupled so as to

12

Introduction

constitute cycles of languaging (and other) activity that are embedded in and are in dialectical relation with what Sune Steffensen (2011) has aptly called the “extended human ecology.”

4. The 9E View of Languaging The quotation from Michael Halliday at the head of this introduction points out that when we move beyond the idea that language is an “edifice” in which smaller units combine to form larger ones and we give priority to languaging as activity, we open up new ways of thinking about the organisation and functionality of languaging. The present study aligns with and builds on recent developments in “4E” theories of cognition according to which cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive.1 I propose that languaging can be productively thought about in terms of what I will call the 9 Es of languaging. 9E languaging is embodied, enkinaesthetic, empathic, enactive, enskilled, embedded, extended, experiential, and ecological. Figure 0.1 displays the 9E view in relation to the germ cell of word meaning developed by Vygotsky (1987/1934) in his Thinking and Speech.

ACTIVITY/PROJECT: Ecological

Embedded

Word Meaning

ACTION/CONCEPT: Empathic Enskilled

Experiential

ARTEFACT: Enacted Embodied Enkinaesthetic

Extended

Figure 0.1 Unfolding the basic characteristics of the whole from within the germ cell of word meaning.

Introduction 13 Whereas many theories of “language” operate some version of the idea that linguistic forms or signs or utterances encode, express, or convey (a) “meaning,” or are the means by which meaning-making takes place, I argue that the term “meaning” in these accounts is vague and of little use. One reason is that meaning is assumed to be the result of an association between a signifier and a signified or between a form and a meaning. Vygotsky (1987/1934: 46) proposed a radical critique of the association psychology that underpins Saussure’s account of the linguistic sign as an association of a signifier and a signified. Saussure’s account entrenched analytical practices and theoretical precepts of decomposition that dissolved the given phenomenon into its constituent elements. Vygotsky argued for an alternative approach based on what he called the “unit of analysis” (1987/1934: 46): In our view, an entirely different form of analysis is fundamental to further development of theories of thinking and speech. This form of analysis relies on the partitioning of the complex whole into units. In contrast to the term “element,” the term “unit” designates a product of analysis that possesses all the basic characteristics of the whole. The unit is a vital and irreducible part of the whole. The key to the explanation of the characteristics of water lies not in the investigation of its chemical formula but in the investigation of its molecule and its molecular movements. In precisely the same sense, the living cell is the real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life that are inherent in the living organism. (Vygotsky, 1987/1934: 46) Vygotsky’s unit of analysis for developing a theory of thinking and speech is the unit he called “word meaning.” Andy Blunden (2017) insightfully discusses Vygotsky’s account of word meaning as the “germ cell” that unfolds from within all of the components of Vygotsky’s theoretical account of word meaning. The word, rather than being a building block for combining with other blocks to make larger blocks, is itself a cell or a microcosm that contains within itself a model or a concept that, in the words of Vygotsky in the above quotation, “possesses all of the basic characteristics of the whole” (see also Blunden, 2017: 141). As I show in Figure 0.1, word meaning in Vygotsky’s sense is a unit of analysis that contains within itself all the basic characteristics of languaging that I have outlined below as the 9E view of languaging. Unpacking these terms means that languaging is: (1) Embodied in the ways in which we use our bodies and our bodily skills to couple with our material and semiotic environments (Clark, 1997; Hutchins, 1995, 2010); (2) Enkinaesthetic because the reciprocal affective sensory-kinetic dynamics and muscle tensions—the kinetic melodies (Luria, 1973)—that are felt and enfolded between co-participating agents that are in dialogical relations of community and reciprocity with each other and with “objects” play

14 Introduction

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6) (7) (8)

(9)

an integral role in the full-bodied sense-making transactions that generate affects and ideas when persons couple to their worlds (Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015); Empathic because micro-temporal or pico-scale bodily dynamics enable and sustain a feeling of what David Abercrombie (1967: 97) called “phonetic empathy” (see also Thibault, 2004b: 124–125, 148) that enables and supports the relational “betweenness” of languaging; Enacted by concrete material artefacts, both bodily and extra-bodily, through which we couple to the environment so that we actively explore and discover its meaning potentials when we act skilfully on the world and seek to modify it (Gibson, 1986/1979); Enskilled activity in which selves learn to develop and to deploy, initially under the guidance of more expert others, the capacities and skills that enable them to adapt the language stance. In this way, selves learn to detect and to make use of the affordances of languaging—their own and that of others—in attending to and coordinating with other selves and with aspects of their worlds. Skills are developed and exist relative to the affordances of the environment that selves interact with and learn to exploit in the furtherance of their own and others’ activities; Embedded in situations and in social and cultural realities rather than being confined to individual minds; Extended over and integrating persons, artefacts, tools, technologies, aspects of situations, and cultural patterns and conventions on multiple place and timescales; Experiential in the following two inter-related senses: (a) languaging is always grounded in the primacy of first-order bodily experience and personal and cultural histories of such experience; and (b) linguistic structure functionally constrains, directs, enables, guides, and stimulates flows of linguistically constituted experience in the form of, for example, virtual action-perception and movement through actual and virtual environments (Verbrugge, 1980); Ecological because the functional system is an integrated Person-UtteranceEnvironment Interaction System that presupposes that there is dynamic coupling across multiple timescales between all components of the system rather than an interface or gap that separates persons from their environments and which must be mediated by mental models or representations that fill the gap.

Languaging makes available second-order semantic information in the form of words and wordings—information that is selected, arranged, and processed in order to provide what Reed (1996a: 3) calls “secondhand or indirect knowledge.” Images and texts make available processed information in this sense, whereas a so-called face-to-face encounter between two or more persons, as Reed (1996a) points out, makes available first-order ecological information that is constituted by our embodied interactivity with the affordances of the world, including the bodies of other persons. As Reed shows, a photo of someone’s face as distinct

Introduction 15 from a face-to-face encounter with another person is much more limited in what it can teach us about that person. We develop biosemiotic skills that enable us to attune to and interpret very subtle and fleeting aspects of facial, gestural, postural, and vocal dynamics in our encounters with other persons. The second-order information that languaging also makes available by means of linguistic pattern—words and wordings—is, in Reed’s terms, indirect and secondhand. I can tell you about something that I have directly experienced through my body’s sense-making systems. For me, the experience that I tell you about is direct, whereas for you the experience is secondhand. However, your ability to understand what I tell you of my first-hand experience is necessarily grounded in and derived from first-order ecological information. Reed (1996a) drew attention to the overwhelming emphasis in contemporary Western culture on secondhand or processed information that has been massively expanded in recent decades by the increasing reliance on digital technologies. Whether “direct” and “indirect” are the best terms to use here, I think that the crucial point is that human mental life is not hidden away in a separate inner sphere, but is there to be apprehended in our fine-grained attunement to persons’ observable actions and bodily behaviours and how these play out over time in the constitution of histories of such interactions in relation to the affordance potentials of the situations in which they occur. Given the intrinsic self-reflexivity of the social encounters between persons, together with their biosemiotic sensitivity to the affordances of other persons and the environments that they relate to and interact with, we can perceive persons’ emotions, feelings, intentions, motives, thoughts, and so on in what they say and do. Put simply, the embodied, dialogically coordinated relational dynamics of first-order languaging constitute the ground of our mental activities. The “9Es” of languaging sketched above constitute different aspects of this relational dynamic and are interwoven in many different ways throughout this book. Languaging is ontologically foundational to what it means to become a self in a society of selves, i.e., the capacity self-reflexively to enact and to participate in dialogically coordinated processes of stance-taking in and through languaging with others. Selves are fundamentally and intrinsically dialogical in character. The “betweenness” and the “relationality” that I emphasised above means that languaging is the ontological ground of the capacity of selves to participate in, to take responsibility for their participating, and to be held responsible for their participating in the flows of languaging in which we go along with and attend to others in the living of our daily lives. Bakhtin made the following highly relevant observations: Three types of relations: 1. Relations among objects, among things, among physical phenomena, among chemical phenomena, causal relations, mathematical relations, logical relations, linguistic relations, and so forth. 2. Relations among subject and object.

16 Introduction 3. Relations among subjects—individual, personal relations: dialogic relations among utterances, ethical relations, and so forth. This also includes all kinds of personified semantic ties. Relations among consciousnesses, truths, mutual influences, apprenticeship, love, hate, falsehood, friendship, respect, reverence, trust, mistrust, and so forth. But if the relations are de-personified (among utterances and styles, with the linguistic approach, and so forth), they change into the first type. On the other hand, it is possible to personify many objectlike relations and transform them into the third type. Reification and personification. (Bakhtin, 1986: 138–139) In this book, I attempt to address the problem that Bakhtin identified with respect to the three types of relations in the quotation above. Linguistics has “de-personified” languaging. For example, discourse-analytical approaches have tended to consider discourse in terms of the patterned relations among “moves” and “turns” in discourse (Bakhtin’s type 1) rather than the dialogically coordinated relations between selves and their worlds (Bakhtin’s type 2) and between selves (Bakhtin’s type 3). I attempt to show at least some aspects of Bakhtin’s suggestions concerning “The determination of the subject (of personality) in intersubjective relations: concreteness (name), integrity, answerability, and so forth; inexhaustibility, open-endedness, openness” (Bakhtin, 1986: 139). It is in and through these relations of dialogical “betweenness” that selves constitute and live in societies of selves. Aristotle showed that our understanding of what it means to be human cannot be reduced to the scientific and technical management of people by experts. Instead, to be human is a continual process of movement, growth, and becoming that cannot be reduced to any one system of categorisation. Rather, as Marx showed with his concept of Gattungswesen, humans have a generic human nature. The “plasticity” of humans enables them self-reflexively to organise themselves and to form new interpersonal, economic, social, and political arrangements that elude any attempt at scientific management and control. The human ecology is thus understood to be the continual praxis of societies of selves in determining the concrete forms and practices of their individual and community life. This ontology has much in common with and derives, historically speaking, from Aristotle’s conception of ontological possibility (dynamei on) that was taken up by Marx (1959/1932: 31–32, 43, 45, 55, 66, 69 ff.) and developed as his conception of generic human nature (Gattungswesen: “species-being”). For present purposes, this translates into the idea that the virtual internal ecology of the self (Thibault, 2019a) is ontologically and intrinsically open to diverse forms of human sociality. The idea of ontological potentiality presupposes that human nature is not fixed or determined by biology though it is of course constrained by it. Human nature is characterised by a form of intrinsic social polymorphism, i.e., the ontological capacity for selves to enact and produce diverse socio-anthropological models and forms of experience that are rooted in the unified bio-social potential of humans.

Introduction 17 I take up the challenges outlined above to develop a contribution to our understanding of languaging as a concrete living process in the human ecology. Moreover, it is a contribution that works as much as possible without recourse to metaphysical constructs. In undertaking the task of writing this two-volume study, I have embraced Alfred North Whitehead’s (1967/1933) principle that the articulation and promotion of the view of languaging set out below is an Adventure of Ideas. Rather than postmodern nihilism and obscurantism, new Adventures of Ideas fit for the living of life in the twenty-first century are needed. How we rethink languaging and its place in the human ecology is crucial to this endeavour.

Note 1 See for example the website of the 4E cognition group: https://4ecognitiongroup.wordpress.com/.

1

Value

The entire organism must be considered in relation to a double articulation, and on different levels. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 2004/1980, p. 47 Speech is a powerful ruler. Its substance is minute and invisible, but its achievements are superhuman; for it is able to stop fear and to remove sorrow and to create joy and to augment pity. Gorgias of Leontini, The Encomium of Helen, 1982/ca. 414, pp. 23–25 The power of speech bears the same relation to the ordering of the mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies. Just as different drugs expel different humours from the body, and some stop it from being ill but others stop it from living, so too some speeches cause sorrow, some cause pleasure, some cause fear, some give the hearers confidence, some drug and bewitch the mind with an evil persuasion. - Gorgias of Leontini, The Encomium of Helen, 1982/ca. 414, p. 27

1. Extensive and Intensive Properties: Living in Zones of Intensity All biological agents live within extensive boundaries as well as inhabiting zones of intensity (Delanda, 2010: 115). Extensive boundaries exist on different spatial and temporal scales. They are defined by their extent and have definite boundaries that define their outer limits and their separateness from their surrounds. DeLanda cites a country, a city, a neighbourhood, an ecosystem, and the human body as examples of extensive systems. All of these systems, albeit on different spatial and temporal scales, have extensive properties. On the other hand, DeLanda points out, we humans, like all other living systems, also inhabit zones of intensity. Zones of intensity are characterised by intensive properties. They are not defined by spatial or temporal extent, but by critical thresholds

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(DeLanda, op. cit.). Some examples of zones of intensity cited by DeLanda include: The zones of high pressure explored by deep-sea divers; the zones of low gravity lived by astronauts; the zones of low temperatures experienced by arctic explorers; the zones of high speed traversed by test pilots. (DeLanda, 2010: 115) Most of us don’t live and work in the zones of intensity characteristic of the lives of astronauts, arctic explorers, and test pilots. More familiar zones of intensity include classrooms, families, games, sports events, and workplaces. Extensive and intensive properties have been most studied in thermodynamics. Physical systems like clouds, hurricanes, and thunderstorms are animated by gradients of temperature, air pressure, and speed (DeLanda, 2010: 116) that enable them to be formed and to exist over a certain spatial and temporal extent before they cease to exist. Many biological organisms similarly are extensive entities that are animated by biochemical and gene gradients that are responsible for the morphogenesis of such organisms through embryological processes (DeLanda, 2010: 116). Gradients are intensive differences that animate and drive extensive systems. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system that produces the human voice is, in the first instance, a biophysical system. Physical properties are measurable. Physical properties can be either extensive or intensive (or neither). Linguistic utterances have physical properties such as spatial and temporal extension. Extensive properties are dependent on the size or the amount of matter (the mass) in the system. Examples of extensive properties include volume and energy. Intensive properties, on the other hand, are not dependent on the spatial or temporal extent of the system. Intensive differences drive intensive fluxes of energy through a system. Intensive properties are independent of the amount of matter (mass) in the system. Examples of intensive properties include speed, temperature, and pressure. Organisms and the things outside the organisms with which the organism interacts are defined by extensive boundaries. Extensive boundaries delimit zones that have spatial and/or temporal extension. The matter, energy, and information gradients that flow between organisms and their environments are not defined by extensive boundaries, but by intensive flows and critical thresholds in zones of interpenetration. These flows are characterised by intensive differences, i.e., differences in the intensity of the flows of matter, energy, and information. These gradients are the drivers of the organism’s structural integrity and its recursive self-maintenance and self-individuation over time (Allen & Bickhard, 2011: 108; Simondon, 1995: 42–46).1 We take for granted the common-sense phenomenology according to which the organism is defined by the extensive boundaries that stop at its skin, but we are less able to perceive the intensive flows and gradients of matter, energy, and information that generate organisms and maintain them over time.

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Person-organisms are deictically anchored to the singularity of their embodiment. Our embodiment is the locus of perceptual, motor, and neuro-chemical processes that we characterise as taking place within us and without which we would have no experience of feelings and emotions. By the same token, the processes we mark as “internal” can only occur and be sustained in and through the organism’s interactivity with its material and cultural environments. Emotions, feelings, and meanings that we experience as occurring within the skin-bound confines of our embodiment and the viewpoints that this embodiment affords are specific subjective appropriations to the self-perspective of processes that are grounded in our interactivity with our material and cultural environments. The self appropriates those aspects that it makes salient or important to its self-perspective for the purposes of sustaining its ongoing narrative of the person that is held responsible for its actions, feelings, and so on (Vol. II, Chapter 4). Accordingly, we make, construe, or construct selected aspects of the impersonal intensive flows that characterise our embeddedness in a larger-scale ecosocial environment as the basis for the extensive boundaries that create the separate, autonomous individual person-organisms presupposed by normative individualism. In this way, person-organisms can be held accountable for their thoughts, utterances, actions, feelings, and so on, according to the standards of the moral order(s) of which they are participating members. The flows of matter, energy, and information that characterise the continual transactions that take place between organism and environment are, as Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980) and Simondon (1989, 1995) have pointed out, impersonal and intensive. They are preindividual. Intensive processes are primary. Phenomenologically, persons interact with their environments in ways that appropriate and individuate selected aspects of the impersonal flows of matter, energy, and information. The selections made prompt or elicit changes to the body’s neurohormonal flows and muscular tensions that are sensed as subjective feelings.

2. The Emergence of Co-Articulated Phonetic Gestures: A New Layer of Complexity As I discuss in detail in Volume I, Chapter 2, the respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system acts as a filter that modulates the oscillating flow of air. Unlike the frozen products of transcription practices and the formal abstracta derived from them for the purposes of linguistic analysis, the activity of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is a living gradient. The gradient that is set up contains more information than a transcription does because the flow of air resulting from the modulation of the activity of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is more ordered and has more pattern. In humans, the larynx and the vocal folds underwent a number of critical evolutionary changes: The larynx and the vocal cords lowered their position relative to the bone at the base of the skull, thus extending the range of vowels that could be produced. The articulators (tongue, lips, teeth) were thus able to produce many fine-grained modulations of pressure gradients to a high

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level of precision. Resonances in the vocal cavity concentrated the energy of the airflow around particular frequencies (formants) that became the building blocks of the vocal tract gestures and related speech sounds that give rise to the world’s languages. The vocal tract is a complex of organs that produces a pressure gradient in the form of a modulated airflow. This flow is in turn modulated by the organ-specific constriction actions of the articulators whose couplings and decouplings yield coarticulated phonetic gestures. Constriction actions are couplings and decouplings of articulators that interrupt and modulate the airflow and in part appropriate this flow of matter, energy, and information for the purposes of the internal regulation of the person-organism. By the same token, matter, energy, and information flow beyond the body and into the extra-somatic ecosocial environment of other person-organisms. In this sense, the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is a complex of organs that functions to appropriate and regulate matter-energy flows that function both to couple with and to regulate flows within the internal milieu of the body and to negotiate with ambient flows outside the body (Vol. I, Chapter 2). Person-organisms negotiate with their outside at the same time that they regulate their internal milieu and that of others through their languaging activity. Frequently used terms like “oral language” and “spoken language” point to the ways in which the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system tends in most accounts of language to be treated as isolated from the whole person and from the whole-body co-participatory sense-making that persons enact in their dialogically coordinated languaging. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is thus seen as partially detached from the person and viewed as a source in its own right of intensive matter, energy, and information flows between the inside and the outside of the organism. Rather than being integrated to the person-organism and the ways in which ecosocial flows enter and leave person-organisms and attune them to larger-scale ecosocial patterns (see also Protevi, 2009: 94), these flows between organs and the ecosocial environment are viewed as if they operate at the sub-personal level (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 12). The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system regulates flows of matter, energy, and information between the person-organism and its environment at the same time that the latter is regulated by the environment. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is a coupled system of organs that regulates the flow of matter, energy, and information between the internal milieu of the person-organism and its outside. Organs produce flows that are cut or interrupted by other organs (Protevi, 2009: 94). Protevi further points out: Organs are flow-break couplings in which a matter-energy flow is interrupted, and part is siphoned off to flow in the economy of the body. In other words, organs are a body’s way of negotiating with the outside and regulating the inside, appropriating and regulating matter-energy flow. (2009: 94)

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The vocal folds in the larynx break the flow of air from the lungs and modulate it. The flow of air over the vocal folds then passes into the vocal tract where the flow is again interrupted by the actions of the articulators in the vocal tract before flowing to the outside of the person-organism as that person’s voice. The flow of a person’s voice to the outside creates a value gradient that is most concentrated at the source of the voice—the speaker’s body—and progressively weaker over greater distances. Just as the bacteria swims up a sugar gradient to where the concentration of the sugar is greatest, other persons can detect the value gradient and orient to its source, i.e., the person, as a repository of information and value that can be tapped into. The development of the individual person’s respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system and the capacity to produce voice is contingent upon input flow from the social system (the language community) in which the individual participates. Linguistic subjects are produced ontogenetically when they are entrained to the second-order phonological and other patterns of the speech community or communities in which they happen to live. The physiology and the anatomy of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system and its capacity for producing voice is not determined by the genome. Instead, the development of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system and its capacity to produce voice is determined by the learning that takes place during ontogenesis (Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 1). On the population scale, individuals participate in subjectification practices whereby individual person-organisms are differentially entrained to patterns according to variables such as gender, ethnicity, social class, professional affiliation, schooling, language, and other factors that regulate the matter, energy, and information flows that circulate amongst individual persons and the affordances of their ecosocial niche. The vocal tract apparatus is an assemblage of organs that is coupled to and regulated both by other organs, by flows within the body of the individual person, and by matter, energy, and information flows between persons on the “outside” of the individual organism, i.e., the ecosocial environment. The human vocal tract modulates flows of air by means of co-articulated vocal tract gestural activity. The restructuring of the ambient acoustic-auditory array that is caused by linguistically shaped activity of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system thus enables matter, energy, and information flows in and out of bodies, thereby connecting the somatic and the ecosocial. Preconceptual neurohormonal flows and other felt responses in the internal milieu of the body connect to events in the ecosocial world of the agent by means of these flows. A particular pattern of wording that is detected in someone’s vocal tract action is a nonlocal potential that is accessed and which has the capacity to activate an attunement to forms of experience that are not necessarily supported by locally availably perceptual stimulus information (Vol. II, Chapter 1). The co-orientation to experience that wordings in utterances enable people to achieve also provides information about a person’s intentions towards a given phenomenon, especially if the given phenomenon has the capacity to affect persons and be affected by them. The emergence of co-articulated phonetic gestures from the intensive flows

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of matter and energy through the vocal tract that link the body’s internal milieu to the extra-somatic ecosocial environment of social agents introduces a further layer of complexity into the world in addition to the biophysical complexity of the vocal tract itself. As this new layer emerged, it was meshed with social practices, activities, habits, and skills that were already embedded in processes of culturalhistorical learning across generations. The emerging new layer exerts its own constraining and enabling effects on both the neurohormonal and other flows of the internal milieu and on the body’s connections to its extra-somatic environment at the same time that the socio-cognitive interaction dynamics of the individuals so constrained and enabled give rise to emergent social functions. Persons, like all other living systems, though in many different ways, are not simply blind replicators of pregiven genetic and cultural forms that are driven by biological and/or cultural selection (Rose, 1997: 16). They are active makers of and participants in the dynamics of their own life processes. More specifically, humans are not static “beings,” but, as Tim Ingold (2013) writes, they are “human becomings” who play an active role in their own self-construction and development (see Rose, 1997: 152; see also Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 1). Human becomings both recursively self-maintain and recursively self-individuate their own lives and those of the others with whom they are in relations of community and reciprocity, all the while making their own individual and collective history.

3. Extensive Products, Intensive Flows, and the Two Orders of Language The activities of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system that produce voice are sub-personal component processes of individual personorganisms. These processes exhibit both intensive and extensive properties. A person has extensive boundaries defined by the skin of the organism. The skin is a permeable surface that marks both the extensive difference between the organism and its extensive properties and what lies outside the organism. However, person-organisms also inhabit zones of intensity. Intensive flows of matter, energy, and information move within and between person-organisms and their environments. These constant flows are necessary for the recursive self-maintenance of the organism’s structural integrity over time. In addition to the biological gradients mentioned above along with others, human persons inhabit social zones of intensity that are dependent on the flows of matter, energy, and information through social networks and their regulation by the socio-cognitive dynamics that bond people to each other as members of informal interpersonal networks, institutions, communities, and so on. Persons also participate in Distributed Cognitive Systems of various kinds that are, on their scale, likewise characterised by both extensive and intensive properties, as are the participating human persons on their particular scale. Social systems are animated by gradients of solidarity, affect, values, and information. A value gradient is a productive and positive difference. It is the driver of a process whereby one agent affects another agent, or is affected by another agent.

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A value gradient is the process of becoming of an experience, not the object-experience that one might talk about as an experienced feeling or emotion. A value gradient is the process through which a particular action or utterance, etc., is brought into being. This means that a value gradient is the affective or affect dimension of interactivity. It is an affect that corresponds to the actualisation of an affect when one body affects another, or is affected by another body. Following Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980: 283), bodies have differential capacities to affect other bodies, and to be affected by other bodies. When a body affects another body it brings about a change in it. Protevi points out that a felt change in a body increases or decreases its power to form assemblages with other bodies (2009: 49). For Deleuze and Guattari, affect energises and directs the capacity of bodies to form assemblages with other bodies. This requires a clear distinction between affect, feeling, and emotion. The three terms are often used interchangeably. Feeling is the physiological and psychological appropriation of a portion of the flow of affect through bodies-in-interaction to the subjective perspective of the self. In this way, bodily feelings function as somatic markers (Damasio, 1999, 2005, 2010) that orient the organism-person in particular situations (Vol. II, Chapter 3, Section 2). Feelings function as evaluators of either real-time events or of future potentialities of interaction with a particular situation that the agent encounters—what it would or could be like to go down a particular pathway. Again, it is important to emphasise that the term “subjective” does not refer to a separate individual-centred domain, but to the embedding of larger-scale ecosocial dynamics in individuals and their agency in ways that enable them to participate in higher-scalar socio-cognitive-affective assemblages that operate on relatively longer timescales. Affects operate on shorter timescales of bodily processes and enable persons to connect to and to participate in these assemblages. Emotions are action programmes and displays that are intrinsically linked to ideational content or conceptual categories, though not necessarily conscious, linguistic categories. Ideation is central and intrinsic to emotion. Emotions can be displayed in ways that separate feeling from emotion, though the latter term best captures aspects of culturally named feelings and their forms of display. A display of love or grief, for example, can be simulated without any concomitant bodily feeling to animate the display. Emotion displays can be culturally shaped and refined to the extent that they can take on a conventional and ritual character. Emotion displays and the action programmes that they express bind affect to a category that also gives it an aim (Brown, 2005: 107). An emotion programme therefore is animated by feeling and is sustained by it over the temporal span of the emotion. A value gradient is a cycle or pulse of feeling that energises an action programme and brings it into being and sustains it over its duration, in the process fulfilling the aim of the category by actualising it, so that it then perishes and gives way to the next cycle (Brown, 2005: 107). Let us for the moment focus on the spatio-temporal scale of a single utterance. As already pointed out, utterances have extensive properties that are measurable. Utterances are also animated by intensive differences that flow through the organism-person, including most centrally the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal

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articulatory system of that organism-person. By the same token, utterances are cultural artefacts that have the capacity to instigate socio-cognitive-affective phase transitions in individual persons, groups of persons, and the Distributed Cognitive Systems in which they participate. They are also connected to and are an integral part of the larger organism-person system and the still larger sociocultural system that the organism-person inhabits and participates in. The point is that the utterance is not a separable entity that is detached from the person. Instead, it is connected to a supply of matter, energy, and information that is regulated and controlled by both the organism-person system and by the largerscale socio-cultural system. Persons can modulate the flow of matter, energy, and information that moves through the vocal tract in ways that bring about transformations in the spatio-temporal organisation of the vocal tract when thresholds of intensity are crossed. Utterances exist on a still smaller scale with respect to the persons who utter them. On their sub-personal scale, utterances have spatial and temporal extensive properties. Moreover, they are composed of separate parts and they can be decomposed or segmented into their different parts. These parts can be summed as the separate components and their properties that comprise the system. That is, the separate parts can be counted and in that sense they are measurable. For example, the grammatical properties attributed to utterances in the form of word classes and combinations of word classes are extensive properties that result when flows of intensive differences are solidified as second-order linguistic patterns with their determinate properties. A vocal tract constriction action, e.g., constriction of the lips, is also an extensive property: It exists in space and time within determinate and specifiable limits. Moreover, it can be combined with other extensive properties to form larger molecular wholes such as vowels and consonants, and so on. A given constriction action can be co-articulated with other constriction actions, e.g., lip closure or constriction of the lips is co-articulated with the constriction of the vocal folds in the larynx to yield devoicing. The co-articulation of the two constriction actions yields the consonant /p/. Constrictions of the vocal tract are thresholds of intensity that cause spontaneous transformations in the spatio-temporal organisation of the vocal tract when speakers intentionally and affectively modulate the activity of the vocal tract. Speakers can modulate the amount of energy flowing through the system so that critical points or thresholds are crossed. At a particular intensive threshold, e.g., the degree of constriction of the lips or the degree of constriction of the folds in the larynx, a particular constriction action emerges. In turn, the crossing of these thresholds extends the potential of the system for increasing complexity. With the emergence of constriction actions, we reach another threshold, i.e., the capacity for constriction actions to co-articulate with other constriction actions with concomitant changes in extensive properties and their capacity to modulate intensive flows. Phonetic equivalence classes of distinctive gestures emerge in the form of consonants and vowels. In turn, consonants and vowels are co-articulated to form larger gestural units such as syllables and combinations of syllables into distinctive patterns of vocal tract gestural scores (Browman & Goldstein, 1992).

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Consonants like /p/ and vowels like /a/, etc., are vocal tract gestures characterised by high combinatorial productivity. As we add more and more parameters, an intensive map of very high dimensionality emerges. This map yields further changes in the material dynamics of the respiratorylaryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system. The degree of lip closure and the degree of constriction of the folds of the larynx are intensive properties. The crossing of a threshold, e.g., lips constricted/lips not constricted, is a segmentation of an intensive map, though it is one that modifies the dynamical properties of the vocal tract. After discussing the ways in which sudden changes of speed affect the behaviour of fluids in motion as an example of an intensive map, DeLanda draws out the following two lessons for a metaphysics of the intensive flows that animate living systems: The first lesson is that, as Deleuze argues, intensive properties are not so much indivisible, as that which cannot be divided without changing nature. The thresholds do segment an intensive map but each subdivision corresponds to a different variant phase or regime. The second lesson is that the critical thresholds are always one dimension lower than the map itself. If, like mathematicians, we use the variable “n” to indicate the number of dimensions, we can say that intensive thresholds always have n–1 dimensions: points in a line, lines to a surface, surfaces in a volume. (DeLanda, 2010: 123) The different variant phases or regimes in vocal tract gestural activity constitute potentially salient differences. Delanda also draws a second lesson from Deleuze that is pertinent here, as shown in the above quotation. Constriction actions are intensive thresholds that have n – 1 dimensions, whereas the number of salient variables that the co-articulation of constriction actions yields is indicated by the variable “n.” Following Deleuze, DeLanda stresses here that in a materialist metaphysics “the structure of possibility spaces must always be immanent not transcendent” (2010: 123). Transcendent determination would exist on a higher dimension, “n + 1.” What matters here is bottom-up agency rather than top-down determination. Matter matters and the “empire of matter” has its own ways of striking back. There are no formal essences existing on a higher-order transcendental plane that impose form on a shapeless and passive matter. Form is not a transcendental essence that homogenises and unifies matter from above. Instead, constriction action intensive variables on n – 1 constitute an immanent structure of virtual potentialities that can be actualised in divergent ways according to how their dynamical potentialities are entrained to the population scale dynamics of a particular community of languaging agents. Phonological and lexicogrammatical pattern are hardenings and solidifications of the flows of matter, energy, and information out of which linguistic materials are assembled in a given population of languaging agents. Lexicogrammatical patterns are the final products resulting from the solidification on cultural-historical timescales of the intensive flows that animate a population of agents. On the other

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hand, phonetic gestures are animated and maintained by a continuous flow of matter, energy, and information that keeps the population of gestures, for example, far from equilibrium (DeLanda, 2010: 124). It is only in this way that the gradients are kept alive: The intensive flows and thresholds institute and maintain the living processes that characterise first-order languaging between living persons in their worlds. The focus on second-order lexicogrammatical pattern detached from the bodily dynamics of first-order languaging, as in discourse-analytical approaches to human interaction, defines “language” in terms of reified second-order final products. These products are the formal abstracta that are said to characterise the various levels of linguistic organisation⁠—phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics—of the linguistic code or system, so understood. They are the solidified final segments amenable to certain kinds of meta-linguistic operations of analysis, transcription, and reflection that are modelled on writing (Linell, 2011/2005). They are characteristically defined as the final products transcribed into orthographic or other notational forms for the purposes of study and analysis. A focus on the final products, defined by meta-linguistic criteria of segmentation and other forms of analysis, is noteworthy for its focus on both the extensive properties and the intensive properties at equilibrium of these reified patterns. In other words, the patterns average out as the probabilities of the system once “a gradient has been cancelled” (Delanda, 2010: 130). This form of explanation is a consequence of the characteristic move in post-Saussurean linguistics to define and understand “language” as a second-order system of formal abstracta that is detached from living, moving, feeling, animated persons in their worlds. Languaging inhabits both the molar and the molecular, the segmental and the liquid. In this, it is no different from any of the other phenomena that populate the world on different spatial and temporal scales. DeLanda (2010: 130) summarises this point as follows: the actual world is constituted by two separate, but related segmentarities: one molar or rigid defining finished products, from atoms and molecules, to institutional organizations and cities; the other molecular or supple defining flows or thresholds that enter into the production and maintenance of the molar segments. (DeLanda, 2010: 130) The distinction between second-order language and first-order languaging enables us to sketch how languaging straddles these two domains and belongs to both of them, though with the important proviso that many intermediate scalar levels are involved. The central question is how the familiar patterns on many different scales (e.g., physical, chemical, geological, biological, cultural) self-organise to constitute the world. Language is just one further manifestation of these selforganising potentialities, albeit with its own specific properties and capacities. In the case of language, formal abstracts are the reified final products of intensive production processes. The problem therefore arises when this focus leads to “language” and its component processes being labelled and classified in terms of the

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defining properties of these reified final products. When this occurs, it is as if the linguistic forms so derived were formal essences that can explain the morphogenesis of linguistic form. This approach has led to the creation of static typologies of form-meaning associations or correlations (Vol. I, Introduction, Section 1), classifications of abstract forms, abstract systems, etc., all based on these formal criteria. Consequently, we have a metaphysics of the transcendent linguistic code or system, seen as the epistemological guarantor and generator of these formal essences. On the other hand, when we see that these forms emerge from and are sustained by the intensive flows and thresholds that animate first-order languaging between languaging agents in their worlds, then we have a better way, as DeLanda suggests, of explaining the generation of these forms and their role in constraining and scaffolding dialogically coordinated first-order languaging between persons.

4. Stratifying the Organs-Body-Organism-Person System as the Locus of Human Languaging The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is an orchestration of substances, surfaces, and media of the person-organism (Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 7). The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is a means by which person-organisms couple to each other via the medium which they inhabit. Rather than separating “language” from fundamental biological processes like respiration, circulation, and so on, languaging just is something we humans do as part of the living of our human lives. Languaging is a fundamental part of the human life process and is no less important to the person-organism than are other biological processes such as breathing, eating, excretion, sexual activity, and so on. As Maturana shows in his Biology of Cognition (1980/1970), cognition in this biogenic perspective is a function of the processes of the living of life, as seen from the perspective of the person-organism. Dialogically coordinated languaging between person-organisms is an important marker of one’s personal and social identity (Vol. II, Chapters 3 and 4). The cultural resources of second-order language (see also Thibault, 2011a) codify many aspects of our personal and social identity—our status as a person, or as a moral agent, in a community and our membership of a particular community, interpersonal network, or social institution. In this way, languaging is an irreducible component of assemblages on both the personal scale and on the social scale. By the same token, language can be treated as an assemblage in its own right that can be studied independently of its role in the coding of personal and social identities such as community membership. This second perspective is that of an external observer: The biosocial processes of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system are observed to have “linguistic” functions that place these processes in a wider, more encompassing framework: The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system as the producer of linguistically shaped actions. Such a description is made relative to the observer’s perspectives and interests in relation to the larger system in which

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the activities of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system are embedded and in terms of which its functions are defined. Such a “punctuation” of the system is made for a particular purpose and is not intrinsic to the biological system. Maturana’s original insight shows that languaging is no more separable from the other life processes of person-organisms than are respiration, eating, etc. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system directs patterns of intensive flows in the “zone of interpenetration” (Ingold, 2013) that connects and entangles the dynamics of the internal milieu of person-organisms with external environmental processes and structures. In this regard, it is interesting to note that many linguists isolate the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system from the rest of the person-organism and treat it as a delimited phenomenon. Consequently, it is isolated from whole-body sense-making. Phonologists are prone to talk in terms of “talking vocal tracts,” and linguists under the influence of Saussure continue to reproduce the “talking heads” model of Saussure’s speech circuit (Saussure, 1993/1907, 1910–1911: 278). In the remainder of this section, I will outline a stratified model of the organs-body-organism-person system as the locus of human languaging activity. The externalist perspective mentioned above has yielded the idea of “language” as a reified entity that is detached from and exists independently of the person-organism, as in Saussure’s famous diagram, reproduced in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.1 shows that language is slotted between the two formless domains of “thought” and “sound” and imposes order on them. In this way, the linguistic sign is the articulation of an idea in a sound just as a sound is the articulation of an idea. The biplanar relationship between the resulting union of a signifier and a signified is shown in Figure 1.2, which reproduces Saussure’s conception of the linguistic sign as a two-sided psychic entity consisting of the mutually presupposing relationship between a sound image and a concept. I have mentioned Saussure’s conception here because it illustrates very clearly the reification of language as a biplanar pairing of a form with a meaning that has

Figure 1.1 Saussure’s illustration of language [la langue] as the intermediary between “ideas” (A) and “sound” (B); Saussure (1971/1915: 156).

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Figure 1.2 Saussure’s illustration of the relationship between the two relata, signifié (signified) and signifiant (signifier), in the linguistic sign; Saussure (1971/1915: 158).

dominated thinking about language ever since. In treating language as something that can be studied as an entity in its own right and in stratifying language in this way, language is detached from person-organisms and from the role it plays in the regulation of the flows that connect person-organisms to each other in larger-scale biosocial assemblages. As I argue below, following the quotation from Deleuze and Guattari at the beginning of this chapter, language must be reconnected to person-organisms and understood in terms of the double articulation of personorganisms, rather than being detached from them and treated as reified relations between levels of formal abstracta. In the remainder of this section, I will pursue this task. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system works by interrupting and modulating the flow of matter, energy, and information between the internal milieu of the person-organism and its ecosocial environment. These interruptions and modulations both regulate the internal milieu and interact with the outside of the organism at the same time that some of this flow is appropriated. Seen in this way, organs are regulators and appropriators of impersonal flows in and out of bodies (Protevi, 2009: 94). The respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system is a synergy based on the coordination of the respiratory, laryngeal, and supralaryngeal systems. This synergy also works in coordination with other systems, including autonomic, cortical, and behavioural systems. Protevi (2009: 104) points out that “organs are points of intensity of matter-energy, a place of activity differentially related to the flows in the environment and in the body’s other organs” (2009: 104). An organism is a hierarchical organisation of organs that appropriates the matter-energy of the organs and “funnels a surplus portion of them to the benefit of the organism as a transcendent entity relative to its organs, a superior body that has appropriated the organs as labor” (2009: 104). The organism is thus the environment of the organs just as individual cells themselves are surrounded by membranes that both separate them and connect them to their environments, which may be a specific organ of the larger organism.

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The concept of stratification refers to the objective historical processes that give rise to the stable identities of the material world. It is a way of explaining what DeLanda (2010: 31) calls the “objective synthesis” of the material forms of the world. On this view, form is not imposed on an inert and passive matter to yield a formed substance. There is no distinction between form and substance except a modal one (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004/1980: 49). A formed substance has intrinsic capacities to affect and to be affected—capacities that are intrinsic to matter itself and which can be actualised according to the ways in which matter is formed into (formed) substance. A formed substance thus taps into, channels, and harnesses the capacities and the flows that are intrinsic to matter. Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980: 49) argue that the double articulation of language into content and expression in the process of stratification refers to far more general processes than the stratification of language per se. Hjelmslev’s (1961/1943) Danish term mening, or “purport” in Whitfield’s English translation, refers to unstratified, unorganised material flows. The term content refers to formed matters. Formed matters are considered from two points of view—substance and form. A substance is a selection from the unstratified flow of matter that is organised or formed in a certain way (form). This first stratum consists of a first articulation of a formed matter, i.e., a content. The medium of air is an unstratified material flow—Gibson (1986/1979: 16) said it is homogeneous— from which a selection is made in order to form the content stratum, consisting of the articulation of content substance by content form. Content form is an ordering principle rather than a separate level of abstract form that is imposed on matter as in the hylomorphic model of the form–matter relation. This brings us to the second stratum—the expression stratum. Deleuze and Guattari point out: A stratum always has a dimension of the expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance; for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and functions of the organism. (2004/1980: 49) This follows from the fact that the ordering and pattern that are created by the first articulation—the content stratum—contain more information than does the unstratified and homogeneous medium of the air. This is the information that is conveyed by the physical organisation of the system. An air pressure gradient in the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system contains more information than the unstratified medium from which this gradient is selected because the energy which is pumped through the system from the lungs is more organised and has pattern (Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 7). Every stratification of matter, Deleuze and Guattari point out, expresses itself: “Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth” (2004/1980: 49). Orchids, wasps, rocks, and rivers

32 Value have organisation that is expressed by distinctive patterns of physical information. A dead tree or a dead wasp expresses a different organisation from a living one because of the ways in which the different properties of these entities have differing capacities to create distinctive patterns of information on account of the different wavelengths of the light spectrum that a dead tree and a living one absorb. Moreover, these patterns of information make available information that expresses the identity of the entity. The ordering and patterning of the air molecules by the combined activities of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system are expressive in this sense. The expression stratum, like the content stratum, is articulated in terms of substance and form. The expression stratum, in Deleuze and Guattari’s account, refers to functional structures. It is because the pressure gradient that is created on the first stratum is filled with information that these functional structures emerge. In the present example, this information is appropriated to the perspective of the organism as a whole and seen as expressive of not only its internal states, but also its relations to the world, to other organisms, and its intentions with respect to these. Moreover, this information has the capacity to affect other organisms with which the organism shares a particular field of relations just as the organism has the capacity to be affected by other organisms. Expression form is then the organisation of the content form—the articulation of the medium of air as a pressure gradient—into a functional structure that serves the purposes of the organism as a whole and is informed by its perspectives. For example, combinations of formants to create co-articulated auditoryarticulatory gestures arising from modulations of the activity of the respiratorylaryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system have this capacity. The capacity to affect and to be affected mentioned above is thus consolidated as stable functional structures—second-order cultural pattern such as semantically structured lexicogrammar—that serve to articulate a unified “centre of Indetermination” (Bergson, 1911/1896; Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 5) (the hierarchically structured organism of the first articulation). In this way, the organism is formed as a person, i.e., a stable expression substance. The person so formed has the capacity to access and thus to co-articulate relations with other persons in order to form large-scale assemblages of person-organisms in interaction, i.e., larger-scale functional structures consisting of meshworks of person-organisms in co-affective relations of reciprocity and community (Vol. I, Chapter 3, Section 1) (see also Protevi, 2009: 49). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the “surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the strata” (2004/1980: 45). The assemblage is an inter-stratum. On the one hand, it faces the unstratified impersonal flows of the medium that the surfaces of the body come into contact with; it connects the organism to these flows by bringing the substances, surfaces, and media of the organism into contact with those of the external environment (Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 7). On the other, it faces the social and cultural world with which the person-organism interacts. It thus articulates and connects person-organisms, artefacts, objects, events, etc., into large-scale social assemblages. For example, a person-organism produces deformations and modulations of the person’s

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respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system to yield a linguistically shaped and intentionally focused action (an utterance). This action is designed to affect another person-organism by, for example, coordinating the attention and the action of the two person-organisms in relation to a particular object that they must integrate into a shared task. The resulting co-articulation of the two persons, the utterance, the object, and the task is an example of a machinic assemblage. An assemblage of this kind cuts across the biological, the social, and the situational. It integrates heterogeneous component parts into a large-scale formation that has emergent capacities. The emergent larger-scale assemblage not only affects and constrains the component parts of the assemblage but also the capacity to interact with and to affect and constrain other formations that it interacts with. Table 1.1 outlines the double articulation of the person-organism in terms of the synthetic processes that are generated on each stratum with reference to the person-organism’s languaging activity. Modern linguistics recapitulates the opposition between form and substance that can be traced back to Aristotle. This opposition parallels a further opposition that has characterised much of the endeavour to understand our place in the world over the past few centuries. The material world is reduced to a formless substance that is moulded into shape by linguistic form. Substance remains external to the definition of language, which is defined as different levels of formal linguistic units and their inter-relations. The opposition of the cultural to the biological reduces the latter to innate mechanisms as distinct from cultural forms that are said to be transmitted across generations by non-genetic means. One effect of these two oppositions is to exclude from the domain of “language” the somatic and extra-somatic materials which humans integrate into skilled languaging activities in the pursuit of human life. A further effect is that biology is excluded from the developmental processes by which humans become skilled languaging agents while treating these skills as the outward manifestation of a non-genetic informational supplement that emanates from transmitted culture. Moreover, the notion of “transmission” is itself deeply flawed owing to its separation of knowledge-as-information from our interactivity with the affordances of our world, which is the true driver of knowledge creation and knowledge development. Humans typically learn from others not through an abstract process of information transmission, but through their co-participation as observers, as actors, and as imitators in the forms of interactivity that enable the guided reinvention of language (Lock, 1980) and the processes of growth and becoming that this entails. The focus is thus on the organism-person’s development and enhancement of the interactive capacities and skills which give rise to and enable the more complex forms of interactivity that will support the recursive self-maintenance and the recursive self-individuation of the organism-person and its ability to achieve an increasing range of interactive openness. Organisms do not simply or necessarily go with the flow. Rather, they develop capacities and skills to manage the flow. Rose (1997: 137) points out that many single-celled organisms “are equipped with chemosensors enabling them to detect gradients of concentration of sugar

Synthetic Processes Involved in the Formation of Stable Identity on Each Stratum

Example of Synthetic Process with Respect to the PersonOrganism’s Languaging Expression The organism in its learning and development is attuned to and sensitised to cultural Phonetic gestures afford the perception of substance: constraints and norms such as those afforded by second-order language and its lexicogrammatical pattern that regulates the Organism lexicogrammatical and semantic patterns. Rather than being rigidly determined by person-organism’s relations to its cultural world substance its genotype, the organism’s bodily shape and its functionality are shaped by cultural and its capacity to affect and to form larger-scale (the person) constraints that it orients to in its interactivity with more acculturated person-organisms assemblages with other person-organisms in its social world, giving rise to emergent functional structures such as the respiratorylaryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system that operationalise the possibility of the organism-person to co-articulate its own dynamics with those of other personorganisms; the organism is shaped and articulated as a subject by subjectification practices at the same time that its orientation to cultural norms enables it to be evaluated as a person operating according to the standards of the interpersonal moral orders of which the person-organism is a recognised member with concomitant rights and responsibilities and the ability to form assemblages with other persons Articulated as Expression Substance ↑ Expression The organism appropriates the matter, energy, and information flows of the organs to its Combinations of formants yield co-articulated phonetic form: own embodied self-perspective in ways that appropriate and individuate certain aspects gestures that extend the organism’s capacity for its Organism of the flows that prompt and elicit felt changes in the body’s neurohormonal flows and recursive self-maintenance and self-individuation form (the muscular tensions as subjective feelings; the regulation of these flows by the organism body) means that they are characterised as taking place within the bounds of the skin-bound organism and the perspectives that its embodiment makes possible Content form: The regulation and appropriation of flows in and out of the body by the body’s organs as The high-precision manipulation of the flow of air by Organ form intensive differences, i.e., gradients of matter, energy, and information the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system as pressure gradients producing resonances in the supralaryngeal vocal tract that are concentrated around particular frequencies, known as formants Articulated as Content Form ↑ Content Selections from impersonal flows of matter, energy, information that differentially relate to Selections from the medium of air by the activity of the substance: the flows in the environment and in the body’s other organs respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory Organ system substance

Stratum

Table 1.1 Stratifying the Person-Organism as Languaging Agent

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solutions, and tails (flagella) or oars (cilia) enabling them to swim or row up the gradient to regions richer in foodstuff.” The recursive self-maintenance of singlecelled organisms already shows the development of interactive competences that enable them to regulate their relationships to their environment so that favourable conditions can be sought out and unfavourable ones avoided. In the present study, the emphasis will be on languaging as enskilment and how the capacities and skills of languaging serve in the recursive self-maintenance and self-individuation of the self. Rose (1997: 249) poses the question in terms of the time-honoured dilemma of the chicken and the egg: Are chickens the egg’s way of making another egg, or are eggs the chicken’s way of making another chicken? Analogously, we might think in terms of languaging and persons. Are persons language’s way of making utterances, or is languaging the person’s way of making other persons? Just as the ultra-Darwinist gives priority to the egg over the chicken, or the gene over the organism, linguists have all too often given priority to “language” over persons. In the present study, I work to reinstate the priority of the person and the role that languaging plays in enabling persons to make persons. Given this priority, to language is part of what it means to be alive and to live the human way of life and therefore to be embedded in and shaped by the multiscalar process flows of the human ecology. To live as an enlanguaged self with an enlanguaged body (Thibault, 2017a: 374; Vol. II, Chapter 3) is to participate in the life processes that allow one to develop and to enhance the biosocial capacities and skills necessary for moving along with other sense-making selves in the zones of intensity in which we live and in which we must learn, together with others, to manage its flows with care and skill. In the following sections, I turn to these questions with reference to the discussion of several concrete examples.

5. Value Gradients, Intentional Dynamics, and Grammar Order Parameters: A Specification Hierarchy of Languaging In the previous section, I pointed out that living systems, including simple singlecelled organisms, develop strategies for orienting to what is beneficial to them and avoiding what is harmful to them. For example, a single-celled organism has the capacity to detect gradients of concentration of sugar solutions and to swim or row up the gradient to where the sugar concentration is located. What drives the creation of order in intentional systems? If far-from-equilibrium systems alone cannot provide the answer to this question, what can? Linguistic utterances can be seen as modes of interactivity that access non-local matter, energy, and information potentials. An utterance sets up and/or presupposes a modalised value gradient between speaker and listener. The speaker’s intention is responsive to a modal differential that defines a potential interaction between a speaker and a listener. For example, I know something that you don’t know and I want to tell you. I might say, for example, I’ll be flying to London tomorrow. A modalised value differential exists between the speaker who has access to this information and the prospective listener, who does not. A coupled difference of

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this kind forms a value gradient. A value gradient is an intensive property. The term “intensive” originally applied to physical properties such as temperature and pressure that can form gradients containing useful energy (Section 1). A temperature gradient results from coupling hot and cold masses of air; pressure gradients from coupling high- and low-pressure zones (Delanda, 2010: 95). A sugar gradient results when a single-celled organism detects and is coupled to a concentration of a sugar solution in its environment so that the organism can move up to reach the sugar concentration. Value gradients result from coupling value differentials between human agents in zones of intensity. Value gradients thus couple implicit modal differences between human agents even in the absence of explicit linguistic markers of modality. Human interactivity is always intrinsically modal even if only implicitly so. Interactivity is always a future-oriented exploration of interactive potentialities. Languaging agents tap into value gradients as well as feed off them. This also means that agents become concentrations of values that other agents can tap into and feed off. Coupled differences in modal values thus have the capacity to drive languaging behaviour (Thibault, 2002). The modalised value differential is a creative tension between the two (or more) agents. When I tell my interlocutor that I’ll be flying to London tomorrow, my utterance makes available information that potentially transforms the modalised relations (the value differential) between the two agents at the same time that the utterance sets up the possibility of getting a response from my interlocutor. Indeed, I may want to gauge the listener’s response when she receives this information. I want to see how she reacts. Will she respond or not? Approve or disapprove? And so on. My interlocutor’s response will, potentially, provide me with information that enables me to assess my interlocutor even if she remains silent. In other words, my interlocutor is a potential source of information and value that my utterance seeks to tap into. However, the existence of a value difference between two agents in itself is not enough to explain utterance activity. Utterances are the exploratory activities of intentional agents. They are in the first instance phonetic trajectories that are modulated along their trajectory by the intentionality, feeling, and affect of the agents who produce them. The existence of a value differential or gradient is in itself not enough to get the process going as a felt, creative tension between a speaker and a listener. Utterance activity is a pulse or a series of pulses of intentionally and affectively modulated interactivity that puts agents in a condition of modal tension in the pursuit of a project that may generate an emergent result, e.g., the modalised transformation of values of the agents involved. A value gradient and the tension it entails or sets up is an intensive flow that agents can tap into and feed off through the intentionality and affect of their utterance activity. In this sense, languaging is a mode of intentionally directed values-realising activity (Hodges, 2007a, 2007b; Reed, 1996b: 102–103) that is grounded in agents’ perceptions of the potentiality for creating new values when they interact. The opportunity to modalise that is presented by a value gradient, coupled to the intentional and affective modulation of utterances by the agents who produce them, is what makes this happen. Languaging therefore presupposes not

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equilibrium as the natural reference point for human interactivity, but dynamic disequilibrium. Languaging is driven by the dynamic modal disequilibrium that characterises the value gradients that couple agents to each other. Utterances have, in varying ways, the capacity to affect the bodies that comprise a socio-cognitive-affective assemblage. I derive the term “assemblage” from the work of Deleuze (2004/1968) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980). Deleuze and Guattari define affect as a body’s capacity to act and to be acted upon (Section 3 above). Bodies have the capacity to form functional assemblages with other bodies. In other words, bodies have the capacity to form functional structures with other bodies while maintaining the heterogeneity of the component parts of the assemblage. Utterances have the capacity to act upon and to change the implicit presuppositions of a given situation and the situation conventions that are perceived to be in operation. Utterances are operations on situation conventions that can trigger or catalyse particular social effects in a given assemblage when the right conditions prevail. These effects are activated when thresholds, i.e., critical points or singularities, are crossed. For example, a marriage celebrant is invested with the social authority to change the social status of two persons from unmarried to married. The two persons must also fulfil a set of conditions if the marriage is to be valid: In Western cultures, they must not be married to someone else; any previous marriage must be effectively annulled through divorce, etc. Such constellations of essential factors constitute the thresholds or the singularities of the situation, irrespective of the particular individuals involved. These thresholds or singularities are therefore impersonal and pre-individual. When the celebrant utters the words, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” for instance, and the two persons signal their agreement in the required way, the social status of the two persons is transformed, meaning that they have acquired commitments, obligations, responsibilities, and rights with respect to each other that they did not previously possess, or at least not within an institutionally sanctioned legal framework. The uttering of the celebrant’s words, the agreement on the part of the two persons, and the celebrant’s ratification of this agreement catalyse or trigger the crossing of a threshold whereby the impersonal, pre-individual patterns of commitment, obligation, etc., referred to above are activated. The utterance effects not only a transformation of the social status of the two persons; it also operates upon the situation that is understood to be in operation and its conventions and transforms them. The marriage of two persons, Joan and Harry, or Joan and Joanna, say, by marriage celebrant, Charlotte, on a particular occasion is an actualised, individuated state of the (social) system. Underlying actualised states of the system are what Deleuze (2004/1968) calls intensive pre-individual or impersonal individuations. These are the intensive morphogenetic processes that make actual states possible. In turn, these are defined by virtual pre-individual singularities (critical points, thresholds) that structure the intensive morphogenetic processes. Given the right constellation of thresholds, as defined above, the utterance “I pronounce you husband and wife” is a catalyst that enacts a critical transition from one actualised state to another, i.e., to a state that creates the commitments,

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obligations, and so on referred to above at the same time that the two now married persons take on their new social status as husband and wife. How these commitments, obligations, and responsibilities are concretely acted out will depend upon the interactions among many factors, including the sociallegal framework within which the marriage takes place, community expectations and norms, somatic affects, gendered differences, and individual predispositions, e.g., whether the persons approach the marriage and hence each other in selfregarding ways in which the demands of marriage are seen as being in competition with other spheres of interest outside the marriage (e.g., career) or whether the marriage is founded on an inter-dependent relationship of love and trust. Differences in the interactions among these factors, along with others not mentioned here, install thresholds or critical points which, when crossed, activate the patterns of, for example, response that one might associate with views of marriage as business transaction vis-à-vis marriage as an intimate relationship of interdependency founded on love and trust or some compromise between these values. Utterances thus have the capacity to catalyse social phase transitions, or changes of state, in the form of remodalisations of agents and values with respect to the situations on which utterances operate (Thibault, 2002; 2011c: 99). The utterance activity of interacting agents involves periodic cycles or pulses of activity that: (1) explore their environment in order to elicit a response from it; and (2) access and feed off the non-local potentials across diverse timescales that such responses provide, thereby drawing in a source of order that allows for a new phase of integration.

6. Buying and Selling in a Greengrocer’s Shop: Zone of Intensity Example 1 Utterances tap into and set up or attempt to set up value gradients that organismpersons can tap into and exploit in the process of constructing their own and others’ self-organisation before the gradient is dissipated back into the environment to make way for the next cycle of the self-construction process. Utterances are explorations of and attunements to some facet of the environment that the utterance serves to couple organism-persons to in order to realise values that are perceived to be available or potentially available in that environment. Consider the following example: Customer: Can I have ten oranges and a kilo of bananas please? Seller: Yes, anything else? Customer: No thanks (Borrowed from Hasan, 1989/1985) Languaging is an undivided melodic flow or field of movement rather than a succession of discrete instants (Vol. I, Chapter 3). The enkinaesthetic experience of this flow includes a retention of what has just passed, the current moment, and a protension (anticipation) of what is about to come (Husserl, 1964). I am

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talking here about the felt enkinaesthetic preconceptual underpinnings of languaging (Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015), not the extensive products that tend to be the descriptive focus of our transcription practices. In other words, languaging is not a set of discrete instants of time, the one following the other, but a temporally extended horizon of actual and potential. It is a becoming, not a thing. A verbal transcription obviously masks and cannot do justice to the lived temporality of the enkinaesthetic enfolding of agents to each other’s neural and bodily dynamics that underpins and generates experience when persons language together. The orthographic transcription above is a reified product in the form of a textual record that effectively cancels out the intensive processes that generated the original event of which the transcription is a very partial record. Nonetheless, the transcription interests me because it leaves some traces of those intensive processes in the reified extensive product that is the transcription. I will now discuss some aspects of this. Following Protevi’s (2009) account of affective sense-making, we can say that the situation is structured by Deleuze’s three-fold ontology of virtual, intensive, and actual. First, the actuality of a situation unfolds from potential to actual and is deposited in consciousness as extensive properties, i.e., entities—actual or virtual—with metric properties that are generated by the digital semantic categories of lexicogrammar, by habitual perception, and so on. The seller enters a fruit and vegetable shop and senses its actualities: Displayed fruit and vegetables, a shop counter, a cash register, the greengrocer, other customers, and so on. The actualities of situations have the capacity to affect persons at the same time that actualities can be affected by persons, for example, by paying attention to them and therefore bringing them into the current horizon of interest and value (Vol. II, Chapter 2, Section 8). In this way, organism-persons are animated by and switched on to relevant aspects of situations. From the customer’s perspective, the seller and the fruit are actualities in this sense—they have extensive properties and can be apprehended as “objects” of particular kinds. The intensities of the situation are “composed of tendencies, sensed as approaches to switch points, as anticipations of triggers to thresholds” (Protevi, 2009: 51). Intensity is felt positively or negatively, as attracting or repelling. One such intensity is of course the customer’s interest in and attraction to the desired fruit. Intensity therefore is about the feelings that structure our evaluations of situations. In the customer’s opening utterance, oranges and bananas are specified as intensities of the situation in the following sense: The customer’s utterance sets up a values-realising gradient that anticipates the presence and availability of a particular value (oranges and bananas). The intensive refers to the virtual: The virtuality of situations is the phase space of differential patterns and thresholds that structure intensive (form-creating or morphogenetic) processes. They both drive and structure the unfolding situation. The virtual has real effects: It is sensed, Protevi observes, “in our feeling for the genesis and future of situations; our intuition of how we got here and of what could happen next” (2009: 51).

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The intensive is also about realising values: The body’s feeling that an encounter with a particular sensed object is good, bad, indifferent (Protevi, 2009: 52). These bodily feelings are proto-modal evaluators that can operate in realtime and evaluate how you feel about a sensed object now, or they can proceed by as-if loops, activating somatic markers (Damasio, 1999; Vol. II, Chapter 3, Section 2) that enable the self to feel what it would be like to live through such and such a situation. The bananas and oranges are a desired value. The server’s utterance “anything else?” is a nice example of the speaker’s sensing the immanent virtualities of the unfolding situation. This utterance marks the server’s sense of another switch point: Where will things go next? In making a bid for another sale, the server is sensitive to and animated by the felt virtualities of the situation, by the server’s sense of where things are now, and where and how they might go next. The customer’s opening utterance sets up a value gradient that brings the customer into relation both with the server and with the desired commodities (oranges and bananas). The value gradient is established by virtue of the fact that the customer wants the fruit but is not yet in possession of it at the time of the utterance. The lexical specification of oranges and bananas in the customer’s opening utterance serves to coordinate the attention of the customer and the server and thus to bring into joint awareness the particular aspect of the current situation that interests the customer. The customer’s utterance thus anticipates the potential future development of the situation. The utterance evokes and anticipates a possibility space of thresholds and potential future actions that structure the unfolding situation. The virtual is therefore sensed in the customer’s sense of where she is now and what is likely to happen next. Her utterance is the crossing of a threshold, as distinct, say, from merely browsing the fruit on display without articulating an intention to buy. Once she crosses this threshold by addressing the seller, new possibilities open up. The third aspect of Deleuzian sense-making identified by Protevi is the directionality of action. An utterance has vectorial qualities of orientation and direction that indicate a path to be taken. From this viewpoint, the field of movement of utterance-activity can be seen to be emanating from the two speakers and extending along multiple lines out into the world that the customer and server couple to and follow as a particular pathway that they forge together in the process of exploring the actualities and the virtualities of the situation (Ingold, 2011: 70; Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 2). Two value gradients drive the interaction—one subjective, the other objective. The subjective gradient concerns the customer’s desire to acquire the goods and the vendor’s desire to make a sale and thus to increase profits. In the present case, the specification on the part of the customer of a certain quantity of oranges and a certain quantity of bananas indicates where in the subjective possibility space of desirability the preferences of the customer are located. Another customer may be indifferent to oranges and bananas; someone else may prefer apples and pears, and so on. The customer makes her choice because she is not indifferent to the ways in which not all choices are equally desirable. If, on the other hand, the customer

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were unable to choose between oranges and bananas, on the one hand, and apples and pears, on the other, because both were equally desirable, then those points in the possibility space, being equally desirable, would yield an indifference curve that tells us something about the subjective possibility space of the customer. The two subjective gradients—one for each agent—are driven by satisfaction. The customer is satisfied when she acquires the desired oranges and bananas at a price she is willing to pay. On the other hand, the seller seeks to increase sales and hence his or her profit. As the transcription shows, the seller makes a second sales bid, which is declined by the customer. In this way, the subjective desirability gradient is dissipated by the buyer’s “no thanks.” Therefore, the satisfaction obtained by each agent remains unequal: The buyer has acquired what she wanted; the seller on the other hand did not get to make another sale. It is this dynamic modal disequilibrium which drives the interaction. Two objective gradients must also be considered. The first of these is the availability gradient: The seller has an available stock of fruit that is dependent on fluctuating market conditions that are not under the control of the seller, e.g., a drought or a bad storm can make a particular product scarce and therefore more expensive. On the other hand, the price-savvy customer has a certain amount of money together with a good knowledge of the going price of particular goods. These two factors determine what can be sold and bought. One agent has a range of fruit products subject to conditions of supply and demand, glut and scarcity; the other a certain amount of money. Possible quantities of a particular commodity (oranges, bananas, etc.) can be traded at particular prices. The objective gradient of the quantity of goods and the subjective gradient of desirability define possible combinations of goods, as the buyer’s initiating act shows: She specifies a desired quantity of the two goods that can be integrated with the availability and price gradients. This brings us to the second objective gradient. The second objective gradient is the price of the goods. The price is a singularity that enables the transaction to proceed: The seller sells a given quantity of the good at a certain price that is stabilised by the competition with other sellers. The buyer is willing (or not) to pay that price. This dynamic establishes a competitive equilibrium in which the prices of given quantities of goods provided by sellers’ and buyers’ willingness to set and to pay the price are stabilised around a singularity that enables the transaction to proceed. The two objective gradients also embody the institutional roles and respective competencies of the two agents. With respect to the availability gradient, each agent is endowed with specific capacities. The seller has the capacity to provide the good; the buyer has the capacity to pay for it. The respective competencies of the two agents also entail the different skills and knowledge that each possesses for the transaction to take place. The seller must be knowledgeable of the products he or she sells and the prevailing market conditions. The buyer is on the lookout for quality products at the right price and is prepared to change customer loyalty or to shop around in order to obtain this. Furthermore, the customer is alert to dishonest salespersons who may try to sell inferior goods, overcharge, or otherwise rip off the customer.

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7. Affective Sense-Making: A Visceral Language Science of Blood, Guts, Sweat, and Tears Linguistics has proved by and large to be a bloodless and gutless science. In accordance with centuries of Platonic and Cartesian idealism, language has been seen as abstract form rather than bodily substance, as a matter of the rational mind over the experiencing and feeling body. Linguists have taken the blood, guts, sweat, and tears out of human languaging and replaced it with the description of abstract formal patterns that are largely devoid of any explanatory power. Saussure’s dictum that the point of view creates the object of study has meant in practice that language has been defined for the most part in terms of what can be transcribed on the basis of what is seen and heard. These recording practices are grounded in millennia-old lay assumptions about the capacity of orthographic transcription practices based on alphabetic writing systems to represent and record “language” as text or discourse (see Linell, 2011/2005; Thibault, 2011b: 2–5). The object of study is therefore made to conform to transcription practices that focus on and record abstract verbal patterns modelled on the conventions of alphabetic writing. Organism-persons are described as “users” of a system of abstract forms in ways that strikingly conform to neoliberal capitalism’s reduction of human agency to that of the consumer of commodities and the end-user of programmes created by others. Rather than real organism-persons made up of blood, guts, sweat, and tears, linguists have turned language “users” into zombies who live on some kind of linguistic Twin Earth where human biology is disregarded and the zombies are controlled by disembodied software programmes in the form of language codes and systems. We have witnessed major advances in our understanding of the unity of brain and body in recent decades. However, the language sciences, along with much of the social sciences more generally, have often failed to understand the organic, biological basis of our lived and living sociality. In Volume I, Chapter 2, I develop further the idea of the “organism-person” in order to re-orient thinking around this question so that we can better understand the zones of intensity in which we live and which affect us not only as individual organism-persons, but also as larger-scale, socially organised assemblages of organism-persons. The implications of this reorientation go far beyond the usual narrowly sectarian and tribal skirmishes that characterise and diminish so much academic discussion. They have extensive and important practical implications for how we think of and do applied language studies that put the organic, biological basis of human sociality at the centre of our understanding of human languaging and its role in the living of human life. In the following section, I consider some aspects of a recent study of the physiological responses of Wall Street traders in relation to these concerns.

8. A Wall Street Financial Market in Meltdown: Zone of Intensity Example 2 In his book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2012), neuroscientist and former Wall Street trader, John Coates, presents a fascinating account of the role

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of the biochemistry of bodily responses in financial risk-taking. Traders working in financial markets such as Wall Street inhabit zones of intensity that set up a history of body experiences and affects together with their triggers and thresholds. In his book, Coates analyses a number of case studies of Wall Street traders responding to bull and bear markets. I will focus on one case study about a trader’s stress response to a bear market. In Coates’ study, the trader is named Scott (pp. 195–207). Traders inhabit a zone of intensity that is characterised by the sheer speed and immensity of the information flow that characterises a global financial meltdown such as the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Coates analyses the different responses of two traders, Scott and Martin, to a bear market that takes place in the crash of October 2008. Coates describes the triggering event for the traders’ responses as follows: And then it comes. Shortly after Martin’s commentary, two more announcements scroll across the screens. Traders and salespeople freeze as they read the news. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse have also downgraded Citibank, and confirm the extent of the damage it has suffered. It is at this moment, all along Wall Street, that the penny drops. The US housing market is falling off a cliff, and is taking the banking system with it. No one on the floor, not even the most pessimistic of bears, anticipated anything like this. A momentary beat … then a roaring, desperate bedlam. (Coates, 2012: 190) It is important to emphasise that the triggering event described by Coates is very different from the sudden appearance of a mountain lion blocking one’s way on a lonely mountain trail. The rapid flow of information and data appearing on traders’ computer monitors, tablets, and so on—the news of the US housing market falling off a cliff—is a cultural event. The US housing market is an abstract cultural entity that is very different from a mountain lion. The nominal group the US housing market functions as a locator of a complex pattern of data that exists as a Dennettian real pattern in a particular region of space and time (Dennett, 1991). Without of course denying that people can and do have fight-or-flight responses to mountain lions, snakes, spiders, and so on, I want to emphasise that human emotions, as distinct from animal ones, are saturated with cultural meanings and values. The traders’ response to the triggering event is based on their understandings of economic, financial, social, legal, and other values (see Ratner, 2012: 161). The triggering event is a cultural event that is mediated by consciousness of cultural meanings and values without which the event would have no meaning at all and therefore would be incapable of triggering the traders’ emotional responses to it. In modern urban societies, mountain lions, snakes, and other potentially dangerous animals are not the main sources of stress. The main sources of stress are cultural events such as a financial loss, a business failure, a family breakdown, a competitive environment, thwarted ambitions, unemployment, social isolation, mobbing in the workplace, and so on. All of these are cultural events that affect our health, our personal psychology, our social relations, and our material

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circumstances. This suggests that the solution to much of the stress of modern urban life lies “above” the individual level and requires intervention and change in the socio-cultural patterns of activities, meanings, and values that trigger stress responses in populations of individuals. A dog, for instance, would not be able to have any response to the US housing market falling off a cliff or the downgrading of Citibank by analysts at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Of course, a dog can have a fight-or-flight response to a mountain lion jumping off a cliff, but that is not the same thing. A mountain lion jumping off a cliff does not have the same cultural significance that the US housing market falling off a cliff does. This does not of course mean that human understandings of and responses to mountain lions are not mediated by cultural categories that organise our responses to them. They are. However, dogs too and many other animal species have their own functional analogues of higher-scalar cultural arrangements even if many humans are unwilling to recognise this for largely ideological reasons. Furthermore, dogs and many other animals also participate in human cultural ecologies and attune to and respond to aspects of its feeling-meaning flows and economies as well as hybridising their own social-cultural dynamics with human ones (see Vol. II, Chapter 1, Section 4). To be sure, a dog, unlike a human, is not in possession of the cultural categories and values for participating in the events on Wall Street described above. Such events have no meaning for a dog because a dog, including one socialised to cohabit with humans in domestic settings, has no access to and no capacity to access the cultural meaning systems of such events. Citibank and the US housing market simply do not register on the cultural radar screens of dogs. Dog too have the genes, the hormones, the neurotransmitters, etc., that enable them to have a fight-or-flight response to things like mountain lions. Humans and dogs have enough physiology in common to make this possible. However, none of this equips dogs to respond to cultural events like the US housing market falling off a cliff. No dog has ever worked as a trader on Wall Street. No dog sold off shares in response to the events described by Coates. No dog has read or will ever read Coates’ book. Those theorists who claim that human and animals share the same basic emotions, aside from vague neo-Darwinist hand-waving in the direction of language (e.g., Ellis & Toronchuk, 2005) as the sine qua non of humans, are silent on how the lower-scalar behavioural mechanisms are integrated to higher-scalar ecological processes in both cases rather than assuming that they necessarily generate different results in the case of humans and other animals (Ratner, 2012: 82). It is assumed, reductively, that because animals have the genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters that enable them to have basic emotions like fight-or-flight, then these lower-scalar factors must provide the explanation in both cases. What is needed, instead, is an explanation that can account for the ways in which other species have functional analogues of human culture and moreover that they have capacities to attune to and to participate in (aspects of) human cultural arrangements.

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Fight-and-flight in humans cannot be reduced to basic animal-like mechanisms because it is saturated with human cultural meanings and values through and through. These cultural values are the outcome of the ways in which humans coconstitute and co-develop other humans, in the process guiding them along culturally shaped trajectories of learning and development that no dog or no elephant will ever have. Rather than the reduction of the physiological stress response of Wall Street traders like Scott to a more basic animal level, we need to understand how human (and animal) physiology, persons, and socio-cultural practices, meanings, and values interact. The interaction of these factors installs the thresholds and triggers that activate particular responses in specific situations such as the highly volatile environment of the trading floor at Wall Street, especially in a period of extreme crisis such as October 2008. Culture recruits, shapes, and directs human physiology along cultural trajectories in the service of cultural ends, not purely physiological ones. That’s what makes us human. Organism-persons qua human becomings have cultural capacities that are the outcome of the cultural environment that has enabled us to enter into and be part of the ongoing process of living our human cultural life together with other human becomings with whom we become intertwined, form relationships, and so on. This can also apply to other species and inter-species relations. Dogs, for example, have capacities to affect and be affected. These capacities are saturated and culturally shaped by higher-scalar cultural ecologies—both canine and human—in ways that are analogous to the human ones that most of us feel closest too. Moreover, it is very probably the case that the affectual and feeling ground of what feels closest or farthest from us and our human perspectives drives and motivates the ideological refusal on the part of many humans to countenance the idea that other animals are sensitive to and are shaped by higher-scalar cultural arrangements. The stress response known as fight-or-flight involves a rapid switch from normal bodily functions to a state of emergency. It arises in situations of imminent physical threat such as an unexpected encounter with a dangerous animal. Coates describes fight-or-flight as follows: In preparation for an exceptional muscular effort, be it fighting for our life or sprinting to safety, our body marshals all the glucose and oxygen it can, while shutting down long-term and metabolically expensive functions of the body. The stress response is an overwhelming experience, and over the long sweep of evolutionary time it has proved essential in keeping us alive. However, while the stress response is useful when we are faced by a mountain lion, it can prove highly counterproductive when seated in the work place. (Coates, 2012: 191) The fight-or-flight response is a self-organising affective response that can function without the subject’s conscious control. Coates further analyses the stress response in terms of the sub-personal flows of electrical impulses and hormones

46 Value at the level of the organs (Section 4). He maps out the stress response in terms of several stages, as follows: The stress response unfolds in several stages: two fast ones, employing electrical impulses, and two slow ones, employing hormones. First, the amygdala must register the danger and pass on a warning via electrical signals to other parts of the brain, a rapid process taking place in a matter of milliseconds. Second, electrical signals sent from the amygdala via the brain stem to visceral organs such as the heart and lungs increase our heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. These signals begin to have their effects in less than a second, although their full effects can take a little longer. The initial electrical responses in body and brain are thus lightning fast, and when successful carry us clear of danger. But they are metabolically draining, and burn out quickly without more fuel. This fuel is provided by slower hormonal responses such as adrenalin, which works its effects over the course of seconds and minutes. These early stages of the stress response constitute the “fight-or-flight” response. This response, as we have seen, is initiated by any situation requiring a quick mobilization of energy and attention. (Coates, 2012: 191–192) Martin and Scott manifest different physiological responses, especially in the final stages of the stress response: Martin’s and Scott’s physiologies differ, however, in the final stage of the stress response. If a crisis lasts longer than fight-or-flight, then the shell of the adrenal glands, called the adrenal cortex (cortex means outer layer), secretes ever increasing amounts of cortisol. This hormone, the big gun of the stress response, brought into action to support us in a more sustained effort, takes effect over the course of minutes to hours, even days. Cortisol has powerful effects on our brain, and our health, and while Martin experiences moderate increases in this hormone and benefits from its invigorating effects, Scott comes to suffer even higher levels, and these impair his judgement. (Coates, 2012: 192) If the kind of crisis described above endures, the adrenal cortex responds by flooding the brain with more cortisol—“the big gun of the stress response” (Coates, 2012: 192). This response functions over longer time spans than the initial fightor-flight response. Scott comes to suffer ever-increasing levels of cortisol that “impair his judgement” (Coates, 2012: 192). As we shall see below, the crossing of physiological thresholds opens up or closes down the ways that structure our responses to situations that are saturated with cultural meanings and values. I will now turn my attention to Scott’s response on what Coates (2012: 195) designates “A worse day on the mortgage desk.” Initially, the stock market dips

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before slowly creeping back up to the levels Scott has just bought. This is followed by a tepid upward trend, described by Coates as follows: And now Scott, together with the arb desk, and behind them the thousandstrong trading floor, and behind it the hundreds of similar trading floors around the world, waits for that reassuring elevator-tug as the markets bounce. And for a while they do, stocks, mortgages, corporates, tentatively building up confidence, gathering buyers, the incipient rally picking up steam after a rumour spreads that the Fed will make an announcement later that day, no doubt stating its resolve to support the market. Mortgages rally 2 per cent, reducing Scott’s loss. Legs twitching, egging the market on, Scott feels the old magic returning, and senses relief along the arb desk. If this market keeps rallying, he could actually make money again. (Coates, 2012: 196) After an hour of the rally described here, the rally stalls. The trigger for Scott’s response on this occasion is as follows: Other rumours begin clouding the picture about mortgage originators having liquidity problems, hedge fund losses, banks taking massive write-offs on their bad loans, the British banking system collapsing, and the rally stalls. (Coates, 2012: 197) Coates records Scott’s progressive loss of control as the accelerating speed of the events overwhelms him: And now, in a daze, a panic, rancid sweat seeping from his pores, Scott watches spellbound as the bottom falls out of the market and it is sucked into a death spiral, the occasional price flickering on the way down – 32.50, 32.15, 32.27, 31.90, 31.35 – a wretched din from the trading floor heard as in a dream, and by mid-afternoon, as prices settle, the news tape reports the ABX down a record of 12 per cent. The box office confirms Scott’s position and he is still long most of his bonds, about $415 million. Prices and positions in his risk management system stabilize, and reluctantly, fearfully, he looks at the P&L number posted in the bottom right-hand corner of his computer screen, gasping as he sees the loss of $24 million, almost all the money he has made in the past six months. The news goes off like a depth charge in his brain, breathing accelerates, blood pressure rockets, and his bowels liquefy. (Coates, 2012: 197) This passage speaks to the felt change in Scott’s body as he senses the decrease in its power in response to the enormous loss of money that registers on his computer screen. The passage indicates both the physiological and the psychological aspects of his response. These two semantic prosodies are woven through the text, as shown by the use of bold and italics to highlight the main items from

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the two prosodies. Text in bold indicates items that belong to the psychological prosody; text in italics indicates the physiological prosody. The two prosodies complement and amplify each other in ways that highlight the intensity of Scott’s physiological and psychological states in response to the collapse of the bonds market. A third prosody, which I have indicated with underlined text, refers to the phenomenon—the market collapse—that affects Scott by diminishing his capacity to act. This third prosody highlights meanings associated with “down” and “loss” that bring about the re-modalisation of Scott as someone who is, initially, no longer in effective contact with his surroundings (“in a daze, a panic,” “spellbound,” and “in a dream”) to someone who is reluctant and fearful and unable to act, no longer able to act in a focused and productive way on his surroundings. In the following section, entitled “The stress response to a bear market,” Coates gives the following narrative of the sub-personal biology of the organs and the organ flows involved in the orchestration of Scott’s stress response: The biology unfolds in the following way: the amygdala broadcasts a signal to the hypothalamus, a neighbouring brain region which controls the body’s hormones. The hypothalamus tells the pituitary, a gland lying just below it, to secrete a chemical messenger into the blood, where it rushes about looking for receptors in which it fits. The messenger soon finds these in the rim of the adrenal glands, and instructs cells to manufacture cortisol. The cortisol, now pouring out of Scott’s adrenal glands, carries a message to far-flung reaches of his body: the fight-or-flight is taking longer than expected, so to maintain the energy levels needed for this marathon struggle, shut down long-term functions of the body and marshal all available resources, mostly glucose, for immediate use. Adrenalin had initiated this process, but it is short-acting, so now cortisol takes over, maintaining high blood pressure and an accelerated heart rate, and diverting energy away from digestion, reproduction, growth and energy storage. (Coates, 2012: 197–198) Coates’ narrative focuses on the sub-personal biology of the organs and organ flows that are connected to the triggering event (see Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 12). Rather than Scott, the person, the focus in Coates’ narrative reconstruction is on the actions of a number of sub-personal narrative participants: The amygdala, the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the adrenal glands, and so on. The organs mentioned are connected to each by flows of various chemical substances. These flows connect particular organs to other organs in order to regulate the internal milieu of the organism by diverting resources required for the long-term functions of the body. Resources like glucose can be marshalled for immediate use in response to the crisis situation that Scott has encountered on the trading floor in the form of the news reports referred to above. The focus of the narrative is on the active capacities of an organ to affect and its passive capacities to be affected. At the subpersonal level, organs thus have the capacity both to do things and to have things

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done to them. In the following, I have picked out the most salient actions in the narrative sequence quoted above: 1. The amygdala broadcasts a signal to the hypothalamus; 2. The hypothalamus tells the pituitary to secrete a chemical messenger into the blood; 3. It [the chemical messenger] rushes about looking for receptors in which it fits; 4. The messenger soon finds these in the rim of the adrenal glands and instructs cells to manufacture cortisol; 5. The cortisol carries a message to far-flung reaches of his (Scott’s) body; 6. Cortisol takes over, maintaining high blood pressure and an accelerated heart rate, and diverting energy away from digestion, growth, and energy storage. When one organ affects another in this narrative, it brings about a change in the affected organ. For example, when the amygdala broadcasts a signal to the hypothalamus, the latter is changed. This change is in the form of the given organ’s capacity to act. The change either decreases or increases that capacity. The hypothalamus responds to the change by telling the pituitary to secrete a chemical messenger into the blood. Likewise, when the pituitary secretes a chemical message into the blood, the capacity of the adrenal glands to manufacture cortisol and release it into the blood is increased. The narrative described above shows how the organs, the flows of chemical substances that link organs, and the effects these flows have on organs produce emergent assemblages. These assemblages can increase or decrease the body’s capacity to articulate connections with other bodies in order to form assemblages that have the capacity to deal with the events that they encounter in positive or negative ways. Coates’ narrative gives the reader a de-stratified account of the response of the organism-person named Scott. Instead of the thoughts, actions, and decisions of Scott, Scott is de-stratified to yield a focus on the sub-personal biology of the organs and intensive organ flows that constitute a field of difference in their own right without reference to the largerscale entity, the person. The organs in Coates’ narrative are points of intensity “in a network of flows in and out of bodies” (Protevi, 2009: 94). The organs and their flows on the sub-personal level constitute an assemblage that is attuned to changes in the zone of intensity of the trading floor. As Protevi remarks, patterned flows between organs can form a sub-personal body politic that “fits into a scheme in which ecosocial flows enter and exit somatic bodies, attuning them to its pattern” (2009: 94). Coates’ neuroscientific narrative locates agency in sub-personal organs that “broadcast,” “tell,” “rush about,” “find,” and so on. This is action without conscious will playing a causal role. The amygdala’s action of broadcasting, the hypothalamus’ action of telling, etc., display control by virtue of their having a relevant capacity to affect rather than being directed or orchestrated by a conscious will (see also Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 12). On this view, the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the chemical messenger, etc., are sub-personal agents that have certain capacities to affect (and to

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be affected). Moreover, as Coates’ narrative shows, the agency of the amygdala, the hypothalamus, etc., put control on display when what they do (“broadcasting,” “telling,” “rushing about,” etc.) is performed in the domain of the relevant capacity to affect. This means that the amygdala has a certain capacity and that its agentive control over a certain domain is constituted by that capacity. Protevi’s (2009: 94) observes that patterns of organs and their flows at the sub-organismic level may be in the service of a social machine that bypasses the personal level. By the same token, the actions of these sub-personal agents take place in a loop that either links or delinks flows, organs, organisms, and persons. In this way, the personal level can be bypassed. An impersonal flow may be linked to the social in ways that the person has little or no awareness of or control over. Persons, on the other hand, are formed by their participation in and their positioning in social structures and practices and through their relations with others in these structures and practices. Coates’ analysis of traders like Scott working on the trading floor at Wall Street shows how their physiology is constructed and becomes attuned to larger-scale cultural meanings and events. Coates cites experimental evidence that suggests that traders’ cortisol levels increase in response to the high level of uncertainty associated with the derivatives market (2012: 204). Referring to an experimental study conducted by Coates and colleagues, Coates comments: During that study, in addition to testosterone, I also collected cortisol from the traders, and gauged the uncertainty they faced by measuring the volatility of the market. The higher the volatility, we reasoned, the less certain traders would be of where market prices would trade in the coming days. What we found was that their cortisol levels rose substantially with the volatility of the market, demonstrating that their cortisol did indeed increase with uncertainty. In fact, so sensitive were traders’ cortisol levels to volatility that they displayed a remarkably tight relationship with the prices of derivatives, the securities used to hedge volatility, a finding that raises the intriguing possibility that stress hormones form the physiological foundation of the derivatives market. (Coates, 2012: 203–204) The sensitivity of traders’ cortisol levels to the price of derivatives suggests that the volatility of the derivatives market constitutes a threshold which, when crossed, triggers the physiological response documented by Coates. The varying responses of the traders—Scott, Martin, Gwen—noted by Coates (2012: 200) can be explained by the ways in which their varying physiologies, experiences, personal histories, and the social practices of the trading floor have differentially formed triggers and thresholds that activate their respective bodies politic in different ways. Coates also remarks on the fact that Scott and other traders found themselves in a situation in October 2008 that was without precedent in their entire careers. Indeed, nothing like it had occurred since the Crash of 1929 (Coates, 2012: 204). This leads to an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the

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entire system. This felt sense of uncertainty and traders’ cortisol levels are not explanatorily reducible to the individual organism. They are aspects of an ecological relational dynamic that is systemic in character. They are time- and spaceextended process flows that pertain to the dynamics of a larger-scale eco-cultural system. The neurohormonal and bodily dynamics of individual traders on scalar level n – 1 are organised into phenomena such as their personal experiences and histories and the social practices they participate in on level n. In turn, the intermediate level n is always already embedded in higher-scalar processes and forms of organisation on level n + 1 such as the global derivatives market in the example discussed above. The waves of fear are intensive prosody-like flows of feelingmeaning on intermediate ecosystem scalar levels that vary in spatial extent, duration, intensity, degree of acceleration, and the speed of their movement through a given community or population. Furthermore, these flows are captured by individual persons, artefacts such as texts, social practices, and institutions that are the hosts. These feeling-meaning flows are in some ways internally homologous to the waves of a viral pandemic such as COVID-19 at the time of writing in 2020. Just as the virus attaches itself to its host and inhabits it in a relationship of symbiosis, waves of feeling-meaning on intermediate ecosocial scales can be embedded in and affect the neurohormonal, the bodily dynamics, and the bodily feelings and orientations of individual persons on lower scalar levels. As Coates’ account shows, different traders are primed to respond in different ways for the reasons spelled out above. Individual persons and cultural artefacts such as texts selectively reenvoice aspects of these feeling-meaning flows as heteroglossically positioned voices of, for example, alignment with or opposition to a particular feeling-meaning configuration. There are, I submit, deep internal homologies that connect the dynamic of attraction/repulsion at work in the immune system of the organism to the modalised axiological stances that persons take up and invest in. Sociologist Frank Furedi shows how fear has been both pathologised and normalised in contemporary Western societies. He notes fear’s “unpredictable and free-floating character” (2007/1997: 4). Furedi further observes: “Fear today has a free-floating character and can attach itself to a wide variety of phenomena” (Furedi, 2007/1997: 4). These characteristics of fear point to its prosody-like character that I mentioned above. Fear therefore is not reducible to individual feelings or to individual physiology, though these are functioning lower-scalar component processes of the ways in which feedback loops across and within different ecosystem scalar levels interact and work to amplify the movement of waves of feeling-meaning through a population. Furedi also points out that fear has been normalised in Western societies. Moreover, its free-floating capacity to attach itself to different social and political issues⁠—e.g., Brexit, Trump, terrorism, COVID-19, crime, etc. —shows that powerful macro-cultural forces and agencies in business, the corporate media, government, vested interests, and so on, often act as unaccountable agents of control that construct and direct these intermediate-scale feeling-meaning flows in order to secure their political, economic, and social priorities. The feeling-meanings of “fear,” for example, can therefore serve

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to modulate and control our feelings in order to exercise control over our attention and our agency as we fret about our jobs, our mortgages, and so on while corporations and politicians put in place intensified regimes of surveillance or transfer enormous sums of public money to bail out unaccountable private corporations. Just as viruses move in waves through a population and attach themselves to their hosts—humans and other organisms⁠—which they seek to take over, on higher-scalar ecosystem levels in the human ecology waves of feeling-meaning can be orchestrated by powerful social groups and agencies to direct attention and control us. I believe the analogy is more than just a metaphor, as noted above. Analogous processes work on and through different scalar levels of ecosocial organisation and of course interact across scales, e.g., a large-scale wave of feeling-meaning such as fear that is propagated by the corporate media, etc., interacts with and affects individual persons, their physiology, bodily feelings, and so on. Waves of fear that are propagated through the social system get attached to and captured by individual persons, practices, and artefacts in ways that create feedback loops that increase anxiety, stress, and hence adverse physiological and other responses that can lead to illness. Persons therefore need to articulate and develop appropriate and effective counter-meanings to act like immune systems to defeat the invader and to stay healthy, both physically and semiotically. Human languaging and other meaning systems have ancient roots in our immune system responses as in the dynamic of being attracted to things that are good for us and being repelled by things that are bad for us. However, the development of appropriate semiotic immunity requires appropriate responses on the community level rather than the individual person level per se to be effective. The affective sense-making of fear is functional in disabling agency by making us feel anxious and stressed and unable to act in focused and productive ways. It is also functional in weakening the interpersonal and community bonds that enable communities to build effective solidarity gradients. In the concluding chapter of his study, Coates reflects on possible solutions that go above the level of the individual organism-person to take into account the forms of social organisation and cultural meanings that dampen the volatile behaviour and high testosterone that characterise the groups of young males who are a large proportion of the population of Wall Street traders. Coates makes some observations concerning high testosterone levels in young male elephants that prematurely go into musth, causing them to run amok, killing other animals and trampling villages. He then points out the calming effect of the introduction of an elder male elephant to illustrate the argument that the disproportionate number of testosterone-charged young males in the financial sector can be counteracted by a more diverse and balanced mix of men and women, young and old. This would foster balanced judgement and stable asset prices rather than volatile behaviour. Coates further comments on this prospect as follows: I like this policy of altering the biology of the market by increasing the number of women and elder men in it. It strikes me as eminently sensible, and my hunch is that it would work. To argue for it one need not claim that women

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and older men are better risk-takers than young men, just different. Difference in the market means greater stability. (Coates, 2012: 256) These observations point to an important yet undeveloped insight on the part of Coates that human physiology and neural dynamics are sensitive to and controlled by the social dynamics in which organism-persons are embedded. On this level, persons qua selves can take care of each other. The greater diversity of age and gender among traders advocated by Coates means that a greater diversity of social dynamics and the experiences associated with this increased range have the potential to nurture in people the creative inner dialogues and the dialogues between persons that will socialise traders to less volatile, more thoughtful ways of acting. Physiological responses on the sub-personal level can be accounted for and, when necessary, modified in accordance with the ways in which the social dynamics of particular groups have installed triggers and thresholds that activate the volatile behaviour associated with high levels of testosterone in young males. As we saw above, Coates tends to equate the high-testosterone behaviour of young males to behaviours observed in other species such as the elephant (2012: 256). However, this diminishes the unique role of culture in the explanation of human emotions. The behaviour of traders cannot be reduced to a question of high testosterone levels per se. The trading floor is a cultural site with its meanings, values, and practices. The responses of traders are mediated by cultural meanings and values (see above). The volatile behaviour of young male traders simply cannot be put on the same level as elephants running amok. This is tantamount to saying there is no difference between human and elephant behaviour. Elephants don’t run amok on the trading floor of Wall Street. The difference needs to be explained. My suggestion is that the relationship between the predominance of young male traders, high testosterone levels, and physiological sensitivity to the derivatives market arises when dialogue breaks down because of an overwhelming pressure to conform to the norms of the social group. This possibility is strongly suggested in the following quotation from Coates that described a hastily convened meeting of traders and risk managers to decide how to respond to the crisis: The traders, in half-finished, telegraphic sentences, bounce opinions back and forth, agreeing the move is overdone. Hedge funds, they reason, have been shorting mortgages and will want to cover after a move of this magnitude; and besides, with the housing market collapsing the Fed will surely continue to lower interest rates, a policy that normally causes mortgages, stocks and other credit-sensitive markets to rally. Expecting a bounce any time now, the traders decide to add to their positions. The risk managers look concerned, remembering similar arguments made during the Asian Financial Crisis and the Russian Default, but agree, based on the desk’s track record this year, to let the traders increase the size of their trades. Once again the risk managers

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The pressure to conform for fear of losing profits gives rise to groupthink that is at its strongest in periods of high intensity like the one that occurred in October 2008. In conformity to the cultural norm that profit-making takes precedence over the avoidance or mitigation of risk, the volatile behaviour of the traders is amplified. The prospect of dialogue and thus the airing of diverse options is diminished, discouraged, or outrightly cancelled. Table 1.2 maps the phases of this process to show the collapsing of the viewpoint of the risk managers to that of the dominant perspective of the traders. The concerns of the risk managers that are raised in their interactions with the traders and the historical memories that the risk managers draw upon are offset by the expectation of a bounce anytime soon and the traders’ desire to increase the size of their trades. The overriding cultural norm here is the incentive to increase profits together with the expectation of an imminent bounce. Consequently, a form of groupthink affects the judgements of all participants and induces them to submit to a monological perspective as the only way to behave in the given circumstances in spite of the presence of evidence that does not support the monological viewpoint. Table 1.2 Mapping the Phases of the Collapse of the Risk Managers’ Viewpoint to the Dominant Monological Perspective of the Traders Text 1 The traders, in half-finished, telegraphic sentences, bounce opinions back and forth, agreeing the move is overdone. Hedge funds, they reason, have been shorting mortgages and will want to cover after a move of this magnitude; and besides, with the housing market collapsing the Fed will surely continue to lower interest rates, a policy that normally causes mortgages, stocks and other creditsensitive markets to rally. 2 Expecting a bounce any time now, the traders decide to add to their positions. 3 The risk managers look concerned, remembering similar arguments made during the Asian Financial Crisis and the Russian Default, 4 but agree, based on the desk’s track record this year, to let the traders increase the size of their trades. 5 Once again the risk managers are in an impossible situation – if they refuse and the market goes up, they will get blamed for lost profits.

Narrative Phase The traders’ viewpoint; reasons for traders’ decision

Expectation + the traders’ decision Risk managers register their concerns based on their historically informed viewpoint Counter-expectation: Risk managers subsume their viewpoint to that of the traders Reason for the risk managers collapsing their viewpoint to the dominant perspective of the traders

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The monological social group or person that gives voice to and sustains only one perspective may appear to have great capacities to affect. However, the loss of diversity at the social level—i.e., above the level of the individual organismperson—means that the high levels of cortisol associated with the volatility of derivatives are mediated and shaped by cultural values and norms. Factors such as the “tight relationship” noted by Coates (2012: 204) between the traders’ cortisol levels and the price of derivatives, or the increase in the variability of traders’ P&L in accordance with dramatic increases in their cortisol levels that Coates’ experiments revealed (2012: 203–204; see discussion above), indicate the entraining effect of culturally significant events such as volatility in the derivatives market and the increase in the variability of P&L noted by Coates. The physiological responses documented by Coates occur when cultural thresholds of volatility and variability are crossed. These thresholds or critical points trigger the physiological response and entrain it to the larger-scale cultural dynamic. Different traders, as already noted, have different thresholds. However, the intensity (the speed, etc.) of the flow of information appearing on the traders’ computer screens captures the collective physiological dynamics and entrains them to responses that favour one perspective over others. The volatility of derivatives is a cultural concept saturated with meaning and value, not a raw physical stimulus. The sub-personal physiological level (high cortisol) is not directly triggered by the price of derivatives. Instead, the relationship between the two is mediated by a cultural perspective and its associated cultural meanings—a perspective, moreover, that excludes any other perspective that is not subsumed by the monological perspective. This further means that the overwhelming presence of traders from just one group—young males—creates and promotes the conditions in which the viewpoint of the self is dominated by those of a similar viewpoint to the extent that the self’s capacity for autonomous self-creative dialogue collapses and is replaced by the dominant perspective of groupthink (see Bråten, 2013: 140). Affects, as noted above, have the capacity to increase or decrease the power of a body to act. Volatility increases uncertainty and uncertainty can lead to fear. Coates compares the different physiological responses of a number of traders: Martin hears of Scott’s loss and glancing down the aisle advises him, “This thing’s a freight train; don’t get in the way.” Scott wisely takes the advice, and over the course of the afternoon, as he tries to sell out the remains of his ill-conceived position, his cortisol levels continue to rise. He and Martin are having very different experiences, Martin thrilling to the volatility, Scott being crushed by it. In fact, across the floor, traders—depending on their physiology, training and exposure to credit markets—display varying physical responses to the volatility. Scott is a wreck, suffering an exaggerated stress response; Gwen is thriving on the flows, and is sustaining a mild fight-orflight response, with moderate and invigorating levels of both adrenalin and cortisol, just as she used to be in mid-tennis match; while Martin, benefiting from a toughened physiology and years of experience, has not needed much cortisol today, nor even much of the fight-or-flight response—his vagus nerve

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Different traders for the reasons given by Coates have different physiological thresholds and patterns of response. I will focus on Scott’s response. Scott is “crushed” by the volatility. He is a “wreck.” His “exaggerated stress response” to the volatility and the ensuing uncertainty diminishes his capacity to act, to harness his body in ways that will enable it to form effective and productive assemblages with other bodies, both human and non-human. Scott’s feeling “crushed” is a lexical semantic construal of the particular syndrome of body feelings whereby his physiology conspires to produce a felt change in the power of his body to act in focused and productive ways (Protevi, 2009: 49). It is a reduction in the agentive capacity of his body to act on and affect other bodies in effective and productive ways. Scott, unlike the other traders mentioned by Coates, is unable to cope: The crisis he faces today demands far more physiological resources than his idle can provide, so his body has initiated a powerful stress response. The tidal wave of stress hormones that now overwhelms him has been caused by more than the large amount of money he has lost; it has also been caused by the bewildering volatility of the market. Volatility means uncertainty, and uncertainty can have as large an effect on our bodies as actual harm, a fact of great importance in understanding stress in modern life. (Coates, 2012: 201) Scott’s ability to focus his body in productive ways is diminished. He is unable to focus on and attend to things in ways that discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant. Tellingly, Scott is said to be “powerless to trade profitably” (Coates, 2012: 205): This afternoon, Scott finds himself trapped in a situation that is novel. He has never seen anything like this market—anything remotely like it—in his entire career. In fact, no one has. To find anything comparable, a crisis involving all credit markets and even threatening the solvency of governments themselves, you would have to go back to the Crash of 1929. Scott has furthermore never been so uncertain about the future course of events, an uncertainty he shares with other traders. Evidence of this collective uncertainty is found in the VIX, “the Fear Index”, which has risen from a sleepy 11 per cent in the summer to over 25 percent today, and in the coming months will hit a terrified 80 per cent. Finally, Scott has lost record amounts of money, meaning by definition that he has lost control. The cumulative effect of losses and the novel, uncertain and uncontrollable conditions of the markets is a massive upwelling of cortisol in Scott and other traders along Wall Street. (Coates, 2012: 204–205)

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and But now, under a heavy load of stress, the pattern of neural firing in Scott’s locus cereleus alters, from short and frequent bursts to sustained firing. When this pattern takes over a person can no longer concentrate, but instead scans the environment, the reason being that when confronted with true novelty we no longer know what is relevant and what to focus on. Our scanning becomes hurried and indiscriminate, almost panicky. Too stressed to think clearly, his attention jumping from one thing to another, Scott sits out the rest of the day, powerless to trade profitably. (Coates, 2012: 205) In his narrative, Coates links Scott’s reaction to the collective uncertainty measured by the so-called “fear index,” the VIX, aka the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index. Feeling states of the body, which have a physiological basis, get contextually integrated with the emotion-categories of a given culture through the semiotic mediation of particular genres and social activity-types (see Thibault, 2004a: chap. 7 for discussion). The word fear is a lexicalised emotion category of the English language. It both experientially construes a particular category of emotion at the same time that it organises a particular kind of interpersonal stance on whatever it is that the subject fears. In the case of fear, we might say that this amounts to a negative evaluation of a situation combined with an evaluation of its expectedness (UNEXPECTED) and an action response (WITHDRAW/FLEE/AVOID). The collective physiological response that Coates describes as a “massive upwelling of cortisol in Scott and other traders” is contextualised with reference to the linguistic category fear in relation to a particular contextual configuration that is in part characterised by the incapacity of Scott (and other traders) to affect their surroundings in focused and productive ways. The emotion category fear thus mediates the physiological response—the upwelling of cortisol—and gives it a cultural meaning that is appropriated by individual psychology as a means for explaining and accounting for bodily responses in culturally meaningful ways that link physiology to social practices and social situations that make sense to self and others.

9. Languaging as Caring and Minding and En-Minding of Others: Zone of Intensity Example 3 Shi-xu (2009) critiques the functionalist and instrumentalist tendencies of Western-centric theories of language in which “human beings use language as a social-institutional tool for achieving their purposes as speakers, the most important of which is to persuade others or get them under control” (2009: 34). Shi-xu contrasts this Western-centric bias towards a speaker-centred agent who operates in terms of a calculus of self-interest to the Chinese “social-Other oriented” norm of creating and maintaining harmonious relations with others. This view is anchored in a wider Confucian tradition in which social values such as ren, hexie,

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and qijia zhiguo-pingtianxia are encouraged and fostered. The most important value in this tradition, Shi-xu writes, “is to attend to, not self-interest, but the Others in the communicative event, and to maintain a harmonious relationship with the Other” (2009: 35). Applying Western theory to Chinese communicative phenomena, Shi-xu adds, may lead one to “miss the essential characteristics of Chinese discourse caring for others in speech” (2009: 35). Qiao Liqing and Min Shangchao (2009: 70), in their essay on Confucius’ theory of language, embed an ethical dimension together with a political dimension in the “surface” level of linguistic communication. In my view, Shi-xu’s critique of the application of Western-centric theories of language to Chinese phenomena applies to Western languaging practices as well. In this section, I explore the idea that languaging is very often a mode of caring whereby agents take care of each other’s bodies and minds, in the process minding and en-minding self and other. Caring is a time-extended commitment that requires a consistency of orientation and behaviour (Frankfurt, 1982: 261). Caring requires a commitment to one’s own desires, wants, and preferences. It is a form of meta-wanting or a higherorder will, a wanting to want something. Caring about something means that the agent is willingly committed to a particular desire about something. Caring is, then, an attitude or orientation to the world that encompasses all those things that we do to maintain, nurture, and repair the things we care about for the broader ecological good (Hodges, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Hodges & Baron, 1992; Hodges & Lindhiem, 2006; Taylor, 2002). Caring includes care of the self, but also and importantly includes a particular orientation to the ecology of our lived relations with other organism-persons and their lives, the things that matter to us, and so on. Caring is therefore grounded in a felt sense of community and reciprocity. It is most commonly directed towards those organism-persons and things who share a given attribute or value or cluster of attributes or values that the carer considers worthwhile. Caring can only arise for something that is felt to have value for the carer. It is also directed towards the future good of the things we care for. Values flow along a gradient that binds the carer to the person or thing cared for. The person or thing cared for is an object of salience and value for the carer. The thing cared for thus has a sense of worth for the carer and therefore warrants the carer’s investment of value in the cared-for object. Caring is a future-oriented volitional orientation tied to action. Without action, there is no caring. In caring, feeling and action are harnessed in ways that are coherent with each other and follow the same trajectory. Caring in humans is a complex and refined emotion in which the will to care (the wanting to want to care) is felt as the sense of a time-extended consistency of orientation that is grounded in the history of the relationship between the carer and the cared-for person or object. At the same time, caring is felt as a future-directed aim that is satisfied in particular encounters. Caring qua emotion is, then, the felt experience of this process—a process, as Brown (2005: 108) writes, that actualises the person we are at the same time that it enables us to individuate those others whom we care about and whose minds we seek to mind and en-mind. Caring is

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about minding and en-minding others’ minds and for this reason it is closely tied to teaching and learning. A good deal of our languaging is caring for self and others (Hodges, 2009). Caring is an intentional orientation in that the carer cares about something. There is a directionality to the relationship between the carer and cared-for thing. The relationship sets up a value gradient that produces a flow of feeling from the carer to the person or thing cared for. I now examine an episode involving two six-year-old girls in order to shed further light on the idea of languaging as caring. The transcription in Table 1.3 is based on an analysis of a brief video-recorded episode involving two six-year-old girls, who are friends, exploring together the interactive potential of the monkey bars located in a neighbourhood children’s playground near where I lived in Kristiansand, Norway, at the time of writing. The video-recorded episode is of 1 min. 48 secs. duration and consists of a number of distinct sub-phases. In Table 1.3 and related discussion I focus on two sub-phases. The two phases identified in the transcription are analysed below in terms of their respective frames. Each frame is identified by a number. The two girls are identified as E. and C. Phase 1: 1. E. is sitting on the monkey bar. She addresses her friend C. with the utterance “here and your hands here” as she orients the vector formed by the coordination of her gaze and left arm-hand movement towards the position on the rope designated by “here”; her right hand touches and holds that position; 2. She then moves the left hand to a segment of the rope that is nearer to her and grips that segment. This movement is co-temporal with the utterance “and your hands here”; 3. Bending her upper body, she says “and your body here,” at the same time indicating with her right hand the position on another, lower segment of rope indicated by “here”; 4. Maintaining the same overall body posture and gaze orientation, E. again says “and your body here” while she indicates the designated position on the rope with her right hand (the same position as in 3 above); 5. She moves her right hand closer to her own body to indicate another segment of rope. While saying “and my body here,” her right hand indicates the segment of rope intended for the proposed positioning of her body. She initiates the incomplete utterance “and my bo…”; 6. C. begins to climb on the monkey bar. She breaks off the former activity and says “here it’s ... no + ouch!” with excited voice prosodics as she engages with E. at the same time that the two girls establish co-orientation through reciprocal gaze and upper body co-orientation. Phase 2 occurs a few seconds later, after several other very brief sub-phases with a different focus intervene, before the resumed focus on the monkey bars shown in Phase 2.

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7. C. is standing on the ground below the monkey bars; E. and C. face each other. E. utters “here” and raises her left hand towards the rope to indicate the position of “here”; C. responds with “yeah.” Mutual bodily orientation is maintained throughout. The gaze and hand-arm movements of both girls are directed towards the respective segments of the rope that they propose to grip; 8. E. stretches and grips her segment of rope with both hands, saying, “here you hold my hands here here here.” C. responds with “yeah,” while holding her segment of rope with her left hand; 9. C. swings her left foot to a higher segment of rope, initiating the utterance “here to …” (completed in 4) where “here” specifies the position of her right foot; 10. C. brings her foot down again, completing the utterance with “here” while indicating with her right hand the segment of rope intended by “here”; 11. E. looks upwards toward her segment of rope, reaches with her right hand, and grasps the rope while saying “here.” C. also grasps her segment of rope, which E. acknowledges, saying “good”; 12. E. swings both legs upwards to grip the rope with her feet, saying “and my foot feel here.” C. maintains her previous position while attending to E’s movement; 13. E. wraps both legs securely around her segment of rope and says to C. “and you put yours here.” C. directs gaze at E. while stretching her hands upwards in the direction of the rope; 14. While suspended by her legs on the rope, E. points with her left hand to the position on the rope which she wants C. to hold while saying “feel the thumb (?) here”; 15. Holding her segment of rope with both hands, C. swings her feet upwards and grips the rope. E. says “good” in response to C’s success. Note: The numbering of each phase above is cross-referenced to the numbering in Table 1.3. In the episode, the two girls engage in concerted activity, i.e., activity in which the participants deliberately conform to each other and act in unison (Melser, 2009). The two participants act in synchrony and with self-awareness that they are doing so. E. takes on the role of leader or teacher and shows C. how to play on the monkey bars by showing her where to place her hands, feet, etc., by demonstrating particular actions, and by checking that C. has performed the action in the right way. Imitation and mirroring play a key role here, as in all teaching and learning. The feedback from C.’s imitation of E.’s actions provides criteria for gauging whether the imitator has correctly imitated the action modelled by the teacher. In this way, both girls achieve a high degree of togetherness that generates the flow of affect and both sustains and gives direction to their concerted activity.

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Table 1.3 Transcription of Monkey Bars Episode; Cross-Referenced to Description of Phases 1 and 2 in Main Text

The two girls, in demonstrating their capacity to act in concert, generate a crescendo of affect. E., in her role as demonstrator/teacher, designs her action to ensure C.’s involvement. At the time that the episode occurred, C. had been in Norway only a few months and spoke little Norwegian after attending a kindergarten for a few months. E., who is a native speaker of Norwegian (not of

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English), adopts a simple English in order better to scaffold C.s participation in their concerted activity. Her scaffolding also functions by demonstration through the performance of parts of the activity in ways that focus attention on its salient components. Through pointing and hand positions, E. indicates to C. the salient part of the monkey bars that will serve in performing a particular component of the activity. Through her voice, she creates vectors of attention at the same time that she uses her hands and feet to demonstrate the particular action that is the current locus of attention. The episode shows E. scaffolding C.’s entering into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, in Deleuze’s sense, of the monkey bars. The bodies of the two girls are meshed with the problem space constituted by the monkey bars and the singularities of that space. The girls in concert with each other enact bodily skills, affective relations, social roles, thresholds, and triggers. The two girls actively make sense of the monkey bars by realising values as they co-orient to the monkey bars and the problems they pose. Their co-cognition of the monkey bars is co-constituted with affective openness to the unfolding situation (Protevi, 2009: 33) as they monitor and self-monitor the ways in which their bodies change in relation to the changing situations posed by the monkey bars. Through their interactivity with each other and with the monkey bars, the two girls co-construct an emergent assemblage, which, in turn, has constraining and enabling effects on the relations of their bodies to each other and to the monkey bars. In this way, their bodies develop new patterns of behaviour. They also develop thresholds at which these patterns are activated, and they develop sensitivity to triggers in their worlds (Protevi, 2009: 36). Triggers are dynamic, intensive, and context-dependent. In the episode, utterances function as triggers that set up value gradients that push a body over a threshold and into a pattern of activation of bodily behaviour (Protevi, 2009: 36). The two girls enact intensive flows that connect their bodies to each other and to the monkey bars. They co-deploy a certain range of bodily skills and techniques that actualise their relationship to each other, their relationship to the monkey bars, and to the activity they are concerting in and through their felt togetherness. They deploy skills and techniques that configure and embody a particular relation to the world that they are co-constructing and co-developing. Above all, the two girls co-explore the ethical implications of the skills and techniques that they develop together. It is an ethics of caring that is grounded in the ongoing and future-oriented nurturing of their friendship. The Idea, in Deleuze’s sense, of the monkey bars is a virtual space of possibilities that structures the intensive flows of the girls’ bodily activities. These intensive flows—the actions of the two girls—are values-realising activities that seek or tend towards particular attractors. On level n, the virtual space of possibilities on level n – 1 is actualised in a diversity of “real relations and actual terms” (Deleuze, 2004/1968: 231) in the girls’ embodied first-order interactivity with the monkey bars. These actualisations of the field of virtual potentialities are constituted by the meshing of the monkey bars with the girls’ bodies. Particular meshings of the differential elements of the monkey bars with the singularities of the girls’ bodily potentials

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individuate specific actualisations of the impersonal field of virtual potentialities, as shown in the following: n + 1: The organisation of the observable phenomena on the intermediate level n is dependent on the higher-scalar systems of constraints and enablements that are provided by the ways in which level n is always already embedded in ecological processes and forms of organisation on level n + 1. These include the monkey bars as an enduring designed artefact which is located in a children’s playground for a specific purpose; n: The girl’s first-order interactivity with the monkey bars: First-order interactivity and languaging (whole-body sense-making) individuate matter-energy flows as specific actualisations of the child–monkey bars interaction system; n – 1: The Idea of the monkey bars is a virtual field of differential elements and relations and singularities: A type of playground equipment made of plastic and rope that affords climbing, swinging, hanging, sitting, etc., for children. The materiality of the monkey bars and their immanent potentialities for interacting with and affecting children’s bodies and their intrinsic capacities in the form of intensive impersonal individuations. The structure of a space of possibilities is immanent in the girls’ interactivity both with each other and with the monkey bars. There is no transcendent domain of determination n + 1 that imposes itself on level n and gives form to it. Deleuze writes: “In all cases the multiplicity is intrinsically defined, without external reference or recourse to a uniform space in which it would be submerged” (Deleuze, 2004/1968: 231). Instead, it is an immanent space of possibilities on level n – 1 that gives rise to a multiplicity of divergent or variant forms that cannot be homogenised to a single, unifying transcendent principle (DeLanda, 2010: 123–124). Deleuze (2004/1968: 232) points out that a particular actualisation does not resemble or correspond to the Idea that generated it. The relationship is a “structural-genetic” one: “Just as structure is independent of any principle of identity, so genesis is independent of a rule of resemblance” (Deleuze, 2004/1968: 232). Unlike the hylomorphic model of a transcendent form that is impressed onto a passive and inert matter to yield a copy of the form that stands in a relationship of resemblance to the form, an Idea gives rise to divergent or variant actualisations. These divergent actualisations are generated by the intensive, form-creating flows that forge relations, to varying degrees of intensity, between the differential elements that constitute the virtual possibility space of an Idea. My transcription, like any transcription, freezes the intensive flows of the girls’ interactivity into actual states: E’s hand is holding a particular monkey bar at a particular frozen instant of time, C. has placed her hand in another position, the two girls are so many centimetres from each other, and so on. Actualities refer to stable states and extensive metric properties that can be measured. Intensive differences refer to the form-generating processes that generate these states. A particular state was arrived at by a particular organisation of intensive flows that

64 Value channel matter, energy, and information so as to give rise to a particular form, a particular configuration or interplay of differential relations. The Idea of the monkey bars is a virtual multiplicity of differential elements, their relations, and virtual singularities that mark the thresholds at which intensive processes that produce particular states shift to yield new states. Again, I draw on Protevi’s (2009: 51–52) account of affective sense-making (see Section 7 above) to examine how the girls’ interactivity with the money bars is structured by Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, the intensive, and the actual in terms of the three aspects of affective sense-making discussed below: Sensibility, values-realising, and direction. I now discuss these three aspects: Sensibility refers to the agent’s openness or closedness to the world and hence the ability to sense the potentialities of situations and the willingness to be affected by situations, and to be moved by them, i.e., to be moved into situations and forms of experience that have the capacity to attract or to repel us and to change us. The two girls are open to the potentialities of the situation afforded by both the monkey bars and by the ways in which their felt togetherness provides the infrastructure for the adaptation of feeling to the needs and desires of self and other as shaped by the caring economy of their interaction. Values-realising refers to the heterarchy of values that mutually constrain an action and give it energy as it unfolds along its trajectory. The heterarchy of values work together and enhance each other (Hodges, 2009: 632) to shape and guide the activity. In the episode, the heterarchy of values includes values such as: (1) accuracy (e.g., putting your hand, foot, etc., in the right position); (2) concerting so that the actions of the two girls conform to each other to yield togetherness (e.g., imitation and mirroring of each other’s actions); and (3) enjoyment (e.g., the flow of pleasure that felt togetherness, imitation, and mirroring engender in the girls’ bodies, especially when imitation is rewarded by success); and (4) friendship. These values are shaped and guided by an overarching commitment to a caring attitude towards each other that orients and selects for the realisation of the various values mentioned here. Caring, as I mentioned above, is a form of meta-wanting that grounds a commitment to one’s own desire to care for the other. Values-realising is exploratory activity. In the episode, the girls explore the potentialities of both the monkey bars and each other’s bodies and capacities. These potentialities vary in relation to the girls’ movements as they explore these potentialities. Their kinetic-sensory exploration of the monkey bars and the embodied techniques and skills that they deploy to explore its affordance potentials through their interactivity with them thereby enable them to discover how the monkey bars structure and give form to their experience. Values-realising activity sets up value gradients that bring E. and C. into relationship with each other and with different aspects of the monkey bars. For example, in Phase 1, Frame 1 of the transcribed episode, E. sets up a value gradient that aims to get C. to hold

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the monkey bar with her hand at the point indicated by “here.” The particular position on the monkey bar indicated by E. is a differential element that her action brings into relation with E. and C. The particular position on the monkey bars already existed prior to E.’s action. The action serves to set up a values-realising gradient in which the particular place on the monkey bar and its use realise a particular value for the two agents. Direction entails and requires a pathway to be laid down and followed. In Phase 1, Frame 1, E’s utterance, together with the way she configures her body to indicate to C. the desired position on the monkey bars, lays down a pathway to be followed, observed, attended to, and imitated. It would in my view be wrong to call this a “representation.” E. is not representing something to C. She is indicating a co-participatory practice, or a form of coaction, that seeks to couple C.’s pathway to the pathway E. lays down for C. The idea of “representation” renders passive and remote something that in actual fact involves engaged co-participation, active attention, observation, and imitation. E. is an active demonstrator and instructor while C. is an active observer and imitator. Vygotsky (1962/1934: 104) pointed out that “imitation is indispensable” for learning and the progression to new developmental levels. E. is not representing anything to C. Instead, together the two girls are concerting and are reciprocally caught up in the forging of a pathway along which they move together. In this way, one agent leads the other to a particular place in the world at the same time that aspects of the two participants’ bodily dynamics are enfolded into each other in relations of “correspondence” and co-responsivity (Ames, 1955; Ingold, 2016; Vol. II, Chapter 2, Section 4). E. catches C’s attention; C. looks, listens, and feels. Together they concert, while moving along the pathway which they forge together, the bodily skills and perceptions that are needed for their active engagement with the monkey bars. There is no split here between doing and knowing (Ingold, 2014: 387). The concerted activity of the two girls is both participation and observation as they create knowledge not through abstract and objectified representations, but through the relationality of their friendship and thus the living of their lives together as they bring their respective pathways of movement, growth, and becoming into correspondence with each other. The two girls attend to each other, observe each other, and concert through demonstration and imitation a coupling of observer and observed that educates the attention and opens one to the potentialities of the world. In the present example, the girls are working with each other and with the material affordances of the monkey bars. Rather than a series of prespecified stages laid down in advance that must be followed to their predetermined end point, teaching and learning in this episode, like so many others, reside in on-the-fly perceptual attunement, engaged co-action, the reciprocal enfolding of each other’s dynamics, and the anticipations of the further development of the pathway. In this way, the learner is readied for the task and also given the

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In drawing attention to the ethical implications of what the girls achieve together, I am aware of the ambiguous status of my relationship as analyst-theorist to their achievement. I have more in mind than just my onlooker status as the person who video-recorded the episode. Rather, I am aware of the ways in which the academic stance can reduce the girls’ techniques to a classification that can be expropriated by a technology into a system of the most productive techniques that serve to increase profit for the capitalist system. Educational technologies are currently doing this with children’s play. As the activist group Invisible Committee argue in their essay, Fuck Off, Google (2014), the hierarchisation of techniques by technology introduces an implicit criterion that “is simply the quantifiable productivity of the techniques, considered apart from what each technique might involve ethically, without regard to the sensible world it engenders” (Invisible Committee, 2014: 7). The techniques of children’s play are being expropriated so that they may serve the profit-making ends of technology rather than the ethical ends that the techniques devised by children imply for the realisation of values such as caring in the nurturing of their relationships with each other. As the activist group, Invisible Committee, further writes in their online essay, Fuck Off, Google (2014): Technology is the systematizing of the most effective techniques, and consequently the levelling of the world and the relations with the world that everyone deploys … In this sense, capitalism is essentially technological; it is the profitable organization of the most productive techniques into a system. Its cardinal figure is not the economist but the engineer. The engineer is the specialist in techniques and thus the chief expropriator of them, one who doesn’t let himself be affected by any of them, and spreads his own absence from the world everywhere he can. (Invisible Committee, 2014: 7) Under neoliberal capitalism, education is in the hands of education managers and education engineers. The engineer serves to expropriate those techniques that better serve the functionality of the system in the service of profit-making. On the other hand, the two girls are more like experimenters, who co-explore and coperform the ethical implications of the techniques that they devise to explore the problem-space of the Idea of the monkey bars and thus to actualise determinate solutions.

10. Conclusion As the quotation at the head of this chapter from pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Gorgias of Leontini’s epideoxis, The Encomium of Helen (ca. 414), shows,

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utterances have the capacity to affect and to transform the living body in profoundly visceral ways. Gorgias anticipated modern understandings of the living body and of whole-body sense-making. He refers to the magical and druglike power of languaging to act on and affect the living, feeling body. Languaging affects the inherent coherency of all of the body’s subsystems, including the living body’s biochemistry, neurohormonal flows, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response. It is the inherent coherency of the living body’s subsystems that enables what Ho (1998: 194) calls “instantaneous intercommunication” of all the body’s functions that is mediated by the macroscopic wholeness or coherency of the living body. The relatively low expenditure of the speaker’s onboard energy that is required to power the local, small-scale movements of the respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system in the production of the human voice is nonetheless capable of moving others in directions and into dimensions of space-time that transcend the local and extend to the “divine.” In stopping fear, assuaging pain, producing joy, and making mercy abound, the speaker, by means of his or her voice, moves others along value gradients and informational pathways that extend over space-time potentials that are very different from the local biophysical potentials of the speaker’s voice dynamics and fill the former with order in the form of action and meaning. Moreover, the voice has differential properties and capacities to move and guide the feelings and actions of others by exploiting the value biases of voice dynamics. In this way, listeners categorise voice dynamics differentially by responding to their value settings in ways that move them to experience different feelings and emotions. We orient to gradients of information that the voice activates. The ability of perceivers to discover structure and order in the dynamics of someone’s voice means that the perceiver must reduce the great variety of the micro-temporal or pico-scale dynamics to a pattern that enables ecological work to be directed in useful directions. Wordings are patterns of this kind. The ability to detect and to make use of wordings in utterances depends on the perceiver’s skills and knowledge. The perceiver must be in possession of the capacities and skills to detect the culturally salient pattern. Utterances are self-organising dynamical patterns rather than biplanar pairings of acoustic images and concepts, or forms and meanings. Utterances prompt events that integrate voice and other bodily dynamics, prosodies, wordings, elements in working memory, previously experienced percepts, and expectations such that dynamics are integrated to a heard pattern (Cowley, 2008: 331). Utterances are synthesised from the real-time assembling of factors such as those mentioned above: “artefacts (utterances) prompt brains to fill out incomplete information” (Cowley, 2008: 331). Utterances are self-organising dynamical organisations of bodily process that are entrained to social and cultural dynamics. The coherency of the whole is due to the fact that the component processes are in constant movement and flux. A written transcription freezes this dynamic disequilibrium into static formal abstracta that are then analysed into their component parts. Utterances, rather than pairings of formal abstracta (form and meaning, signifier

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and signified), are forms of action that are enacted by living selves by virtue of their embodiment and their relations to their worlds. Unlike coding views which view articulation and audition as the different ends of a system of local sensory inputs and motor outputs, the view of utterances as self-organising dynamical patterns emphasises their grounding in the “instantaneous (nonlocal) coordination of body functions” (Ho, 1998: 195) of the living, sense-making body, including the circulatory system, connective tissue, the immune system, neurohormonal flows, and the viscera (Colombetti, 2014: xiv– xv; Damasio, 1999, 2010; Gendlin, 1968; Gick & Derrick, 2009; Ho, 1998; Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015). All of these bodily systems contribute to lived experience and to the capacity of the body both to affect other bodies and to be affected by them. Human mental life, including languaging, is deeply connected to and shaped by these bodily systems (Colombetti, 2014; Gendlin & Berlin, 1961; Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015). Languaging is a form of whole-body sense-making that presupposes no mind–body dualism. The sensed unity of experience is in the first instance grounded in the self’s felt, embodied experience of itself as a bodily unity that is the deictic source of its actions. Rather than an inputoutput machine, the living, experiencing body includes all the systems mentioned above in the life of the mind. Human sense-making is a whole-body process that is characterised by an anticipatory dynamic of seeking after meaning and value. Gendlin (1997: 22–23) writes of “carrying forward” in this sense. Sense-making is a “carrying forward” of sense as its continuation and further development (Gendlin, 1997: 22). Languaging, seen as a form of whole-body sense-making, integrates to its own principles of organisation many layers of experiencing ranging from the implicit to the fully articulated. When we attend to experiences, the act of attending to the experience modifies the quality of the experience and brings other, related experiences to bear on the experience that is focused on. When we do this, experience is “carried forward” to a new articulation of that experience. For example, if I attend to the persistent pain in my gut, I may experience a feeling of anxiety and unease about the future. If I attend to the feeling of anxiety and unease, I may experience imagery and memories that relate to my feeling of anxiety and unease. I might, for example, focus on a recent argument with my wife. My focusing on this argument brings to awareness other arguments and the feelings of anger and frustration that I experienced in those situations. Having brought forth this awareness, I then articulate a narrative account of the argument and why it occurred. At each stage of this process, the living body brings forth ways of responding to the situation that can be carried forward and further articulated. Languaging is not an already codified system of public meanings that the individual is obliged to accept, or which is imposed on individual selves as if people have nothing to say that is not already codified in the public language (Gendlin, 1997: 34). It is also a means whereby persons seek to articulate and thus to bring forth unique often deeply implicit experience. Gendlin observes: In some respects people are forming their social patterns, rather than only being formed by them. It is a mistake to assume that social change must

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always move from the social level to the individuals. But individual development does not usually change the social structure. We need a whole new branch of social science to study the more rare conditions under which social change moves from the articulation of experience to structural change. (Gendlin, 1997: 34–35) The attempt to impose compulsory “politically correct” speech codes on people is one example of a top-down technology of linguistic control that assumes that “language” is an already codified system of public meanings that denies the fundamental role of personal meaning and its striving for articulation that is carried forward into languaging as a way of giving voice to personal and social change through the articulation of previously implicit experience. Whole-body sense-making is not then a question of fitting experience to available conceptualideational and discursive structures. It is rather a forward-moving seeking after meaning and value that strives to articulate that which was inarticulate and in so doing to make words work in new ways (Gendlin, 1997: 35).

Note 1 Self-maintenant systems such as tornadoes and dust devils contribute to their own self-maintenance through their own activity, but are at the mercy of external forces. Recursively self-maintenant systems, on the other hand, have the intrinsic capacity to “select amongst different types of activity that will be appropriate to changing conditions in the environment” (Allen & Bickhard, 2011: 108). Living systems are recursively self-maintenant systems: They select amongst different types of activity that contribute to their ongoing recursive self-maintenance and self-construction.

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The world seems more intelligible without universals. George Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, 2003, p. 25 It follows from the transformational and heterogeneous nature of observables that in principle we always measure dynamic observables, even when “common sense” speaks about a static observable. In other words, the elementary empirical units of modelling are snapshots – frozen-out pictures provided by dynamic observables. Everything else is derived from this as a seed. That static observables may seem nevertheless more “natural” has to do with the existence of the canonical methods by which they are derived automatically such that we do not even notice. George Kampis, Self-Organizing Systems in Biology and Cognitive Science: A New Framework for Dynamics, Information and Complexity, 1991, p. 57

1. Transcending the Duality of Form and Substance: The Sociality of Human Biology and the Organic Basis of Human Sociality The distinction between form and substance, which Saussure posited as an essential requirement of his theory of la langue, defines language as a system of forms that are prefigured in the virtual space of la langue independently of the bodily activities of the persons who engage in languaging activity. The result is that linguistic form is seen to pre-exist in the virtual space of la langue prior to its material instantiation in concrete acts of languaging behaviour. Languaging becomes then the instantiation of the prefigured form by the material substrate of vocal tract or other articulatory activity. This way of thinking echoes Aristotle’s (1957/1936) distinction in De Anima between form (morphe) and matter (hyle), which claims that the things of the world are engendered by the combination of the two. In accordance with this hylomorphic model of creation, an utterance is seen as the result of the ordering of a formless and inert matter by a form that has a prior existence either as a mental code or a language system that somehow

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exists independently of the materials out of which acts of languaging behaviour are assembled. On this view, language acquisition reduces to the transcription of the prefigured formal and substantive properties of language onto the “primary linguistic data” that the child encounters in linguistic performance. Chomsky (1965) writes: Using the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity (to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented “theory of his language” and, second, to the linguist’s account of this), we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar, in the sense described. He has done this on the basis of observation of what we may call primary linguistic data. This must include examples of linguistic performance that are taken to be well-formed sentences, and may include also examples designated as nonsentences, and no doubt much other information of the sort that is required for language learning, whatever this may be (see pp. 31–32). On the basis of such data, the child constructs a grammar—that is, a theory of the language of which the well-formed sentences of the primary linguistic data constitute a small sample. To learn a language, then, the child must have a method for devising an appropriate grammar, given primary linguistic data. As a precondition for language learning, he must possess, first, a linguistic theory that specifies the form of the grammar of a possible human language, and, second, a strategy for selecting a grammar of the appropriate form that is compatible with the primary linguistic data. (Chomsky, 1965: 25) Contrasting his rationalist theory of language acquisition to the empiricist views of taxonomic linguistics, Chomsky further writes: the discussion of language acquisition in preceding sections was rationalistic in its assumption that various formal and substantive universals are intrinsic properties of the language acquisition system, these providing a schema that is applied to data and that determines in a highly restricted way the general form and, in part, even the substantive features of the grammar that may emerge upon presentation of appropriate data. (Chomsky 1965: 53) For Chomsky, the individual “acquires” a language that is essentially prefigured in the individual by the various formal and substantive universals that are intrinsic to the language-acquisition system (1965: 53). The individual “acquires” language when the language-acquisition system is presented with “appropriate data” (1965: 53) in the form of the well-formed utterances of the speaker-hearers in the child’s environment. The so-called “ambient language” serves as variable environmental input to the pre-constructed language-acquisition system. Learning to talk is a matter of acquiring from the environment the data that satisfy the input conditions of a pre-constructed, genetically hardwired language-acquisition module. The

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frequently used term “ambient language” misleadingly suggests that the languaging that goes on in the infant’s world is external to it, a source of stimulation from an external environment. In actual fact, the constant transactions between organisms and their environments show that the boundaries are neither fixed nor easily definable in terms of what is “inside” and “outside” the organism. Organisms constantly take in aspects of their environments just as flows of materials, energy, and information move from organism to outside. It is more accurate to say, as Rose (1997: 139) suggests, that there is a constant “dialectic of interpenetration.” The environment flows into and penetrates the organism just as the organism interpenetrates its environment. The environment is not a passive external source of matter, energy, and information. The environment plays its own active role in selecting which actions the organism will adopt in responding to future environmental demands. The structuring of the environment, which centrally includes other persons, affects how the child interacts with it just as the child’s interactions with the environment affect and shape its perceptions and understandings of the environment. Humans both actively shape and actively choose their environments in ways that affect and shape the recursive self-maintenance and the recursive self-individuation of the self. On the Chomskyian view, a language-acquisition system in the brain is copied together with the DNA of the genome at the beginning of every new human life. From the outset, this device exists in the brain ready to process relevant environmental data irrespective of the developmental processes in which the newborn participates in the richly structured physical and social environments in which he or she is embedded. Absent in Chomsky’s account is the developmental process itself. There is no account of the ways in which the environment of the newborn provides the conditions for the soft-assembly in developmental time of the neurophysiological and anatomical features and their inter-connections that are required for skilful participation in languaging behaviour. For example, infant babbling (Cattell, 2007/2000: 4–8) is entrained to the auditory and articulatory patterns of the languaging activities with which the infant is enmeshed (Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984; Boysson-Bardies, Vihman, Roug-Hellichjius, Durand, Landberg, & Arao, 1992; Chen & Kent, 2005). Research also shows that the development of the structure of the vocal tract in ontogenesis is in part shaped by function (Bosma, 1975, 1976, 1985; Kent, 1976, 1981, 1992; Vorperian et al., 2005). Bosma further theorised that the changing size and shape of the vocal tract in the course of development would require different models of vocal tract linguistic actions at different stages of development, e.g., neonate, infancy, early childhood. Figure 2.1 illustrates the comparative anatomy of the neonate and adult vocal tracts. Chomsky’s 1960s account of the language-acquisition system is a gene-centred one. Language acquisition (note: Not development) is the result of an interaction between genes and environment. On this view, the genes contain the hardwired blueprint whereas the environment functions only to provide the requisite conditions that trigger the activation of the acquisition device. That is, the formal requirements of language are copied as DNA was assumed to be, from the outset

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Figure 2.1 Anatomy of neonate and adult vocal tract compared.

of the organism’s life and thus before any interaction with the environment. This formal blueprint or coded design for language then interacts with the triggering role of the environment and gives rise to the growth of the language organ in the individual. The growth of the language organ refers to an endogenous process, i.e., it belongs to and pertains to the inside of the organism. The language organ grows as a consequence of the organism’s genome interacting with appropriate environmental data to induce the maturational pathways that lead to the growth and maturity of the language organ. Endogenous and exogenous processes are clearly separated and coincide with the separation of the organism’s “inside” from its “outside.” Chomsky’s conception of the language organ follows the classic definitions of the 1950s and 1960s: Development is the suite of mechanisms that enable an organism (or an organ) to unfold from immaturity to maturity. Development is viewed in internalist terms and includes “key embryological states, such as cleavage, cellular differentiation, and organ-genesis” (Pradeu, 2011: 81). The growth of the postulated language organ is a form of organogenesis not unlike embryogenesis, which, in its classic definitions, is an autonomous process. The language organ is a mental organ whose developmental autonomy is commensurate with the homogeneity of Chomsky’s (1965) concept of linguistic competence, as distinct from the heterogeneity of performance. Chomsky’s term “language acquisition” can be understood in this light. The growth of the language organ is the expression through the copying mechanism of the inherited formal blueprint. There is no place in this account of how form is a self-organising and emergent property of the developmental process itself rather than the expression through copying of an innate design principle that controls the process (Thelen & Smith, 1994). The organism is the passive recipient of

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evolutionary and environmental selection pressures that are triggered by the presence of the “appropriate environmental data.” There is no role assigned in this account to the organism’s own activity in the shaping of its development, no role for the child’s interactivity with its environment, in particular the other persons who form the child’s world and who participate in and contribute to the child’s development. Chomsky’s idea of language growth is a species of developmental autonomy. There is no account of development and therefore of the life processes that individuals actively participate in both with other persons and with the materials to hand as they fashion their lives in the processes of making, growing, movement, and becoming that are the real source of the forms (de Beaugrande, 1997: 438–443). Chomsky’s view is therefore increasingly difficult to uphold, as is the idea that the organism is the product of an “interaction” between genetic and environmental factors (Ingold, 2013: 7; Stetsenko, 2019). It is important not to equate “organismic” to “internal” factors and “environment” to external factors. Languaging is a culturally constrained biophysical process. What is the relationship between second-order language and the biophysical dynamics of vocal tract and other gestural activity? The relationship is in some ways akin to, though by no means reducible to, that between the epigenome and the genome in biology. Davies (2012: 45) points out that epigenome and genome are “completely different conceptual entities.” Davies further explains: “The epigenome is exponentially larger (in informational terms) than the genome” (2012: 45). Epigenetic changes enable the environment to contribute information to the epigenome. Moreover, epigenetic factors can be promoted or reversed by environmental factors (Waddington, 1977). Likewise, the lexicogrammatical patterns of a language compress culturalhistorical information that derives from the collective interactions of an entire population of languaging agents. However, words and wordings are not readymade abstract ideas or forms that are culturally “transmitted” from one generation to the next. As Ingold points out, the idea of cultural transmission suggests that the forms are simply “deposited ready-made into the minds and bodies of novices” (2013: 15). Instead, lexicogrammatical capacities and skills are developed through participation in the life processes whereby the constraints and enablements that lexicogrammar affords are enfolded into the dynamics of persons as they actively participate together in the languaging that is embedded in the living of life. The gene-centred view of language “acquisition” is contradicted, for example, by what is now known about the role that the infant’s “babbling” plays in the shaping of the anatomy of the vocal tract (Chen & Kent, 2005). Babbling is just one instance of how the infant co-constructs his or her own development in interacting with the patterns of the languaging activity that it is enmeshed with. In their babbling, infants entrain to the articulatory and auditory patterns of this languaging activity, in the process reshaping the functional anatomy of their vocal tract. Living systems dwell in a generative field of forms and relations. Organism and field are mutually constituting: They co-develop and co-evolve. Development is co-construction and co-development (Thibault, 2000; Thibault, 2005a: 140–142).

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The gene-centred view is also contradicted by more recent revisions of the previously held idea that all the cells of the same individual contain identical DNA (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005; Pearson, 2006; Sgaramella, 2010). Instead, new evidence indicates there is considerable variation and that the genomes of many organisms, humans included, are much more variable and that DNA is modified by selectively turning cells on and off in response to varying environmental factors and conditions. What both these examples—babbling and the variability of DNA—point to is that much more is involved than the genetically controlled protein synthesis that builds bodies. The focus shifts back to the embodied organism as the locus of development and change (Moss, 2004/2003). Human bodies participate in social practices and interact with the social and cultural affordances of their worlds in ways that shape how we develop, grow, think, act, and perceive. If we adopt an intra-organism perspective, there is growing evidence that the human organism itself is more like a society in Whitehead’s sense than a homogenised organic totality. Whitehead distinguishes the idea of a “nexus” from that of a “society.” A “nexus” is defined by some notion of spatial or temporal contiguity (Whitehead, 1967/1933: 202–203). Whitehead writes: A Society is a nexus which “illustrates” or “shares in”, some type of “Social Order”. “Social order” can be defined as follows:—“A nexus enjoys ‘social order’ when (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings involving that common form. Such a nexus is called a ‘society’, and the common form is the ‘defining characteristic’ of that society.” (Whitehead, 1967/1933: 203) A society is a self-sustaining unity of entities that is defined and sustained by a common process. The human organism is an entire ecosystem—a society—of microbial and human cells (Turnbaugh et al., 2007). The human genetic landscape can therefore be seen as an assemblage of the genes in the human genome and the microbiome, and human metabolic features as a blend of human and microbial traits. The human organism is in fact now considered by many microbiologists to be a “superorganism” (Proal et al., 2009, 2011). Proal et al. (2009) write: “Homo sapiens was once thought to be the product of one genome. Now, humans are best described as superorganisms in which a multitude of microbial genomes persist in concert with our own” (2009: 678) (see also Proal et al., 2011, where the human body is described as “an ecosystem of microbes”). These authors further point out that according to the NIH Human Microbiome Project, “a mere 10% of the cells that comprise the organism known as Homo sapiens are human cells. The remaining 90% are bacterial in origin. Thus, Homo

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sapiens is best described as a superorganism in which a large number of different organisms coexist as one” (Proal et al., 2009: 678). Proal et al. (2011) also refer to a 2009 study in Science on microbial diversity in skin. This study showed that forearms and underarms, “though located just a short distance apart on the human body, are as ‘ecologically dissimilar as rainforests are to deserts’” (Proal et al., 2011: 213). Both the exterior surfaces and the internal milieu of the human organism are shown by the studies referred to here (and many others) to be complex ecosystems of coexisting microbial forms living together in self-organising meshworks. In these meshworks, the different forms are inter-connected both by their functional complementarities and, in the case of autoimmune disease, the functional dysregulation of entire communities of microbes. In the latter case, Proal et al. (2011) point out, “the body is not targeting its own tissues, but is generating antibodies against fragments of these metagenomic communities of microbes” (2011: 214). In these circumstances, “entire ecosystems of microbes can become dysregulated by the pathogenic genomes” rather than, as previously theorised around a century ago, one microbe causing one disease. In Whitehead’s terms, pathogeneic genomes threaten the condition of reproduction of the whole society—the superorganism—because of their introduction of negative feelings involving that common form that the society seeks to repel. The older organicist ontology of the organism is now revealed to be a type of upwards macro-reductionism in which the diversity of the interacting microbial and cellular forms that make up the human organism is sacrificed to a conception of an organic totality, i.e., a totalising conception of the organism as a whole that fully determines the component parts and homogenises them to the whole. That is, the parts are subsumed to their functional relations to the whole and are defined as parts of wholes that cannot exist independently of the relations they have with each other as parts of the same totality to which they are homogenised. The microbial cells that inhabit the human superorganism outnumber the human cells by a factor of 10:1 (Proal et al., 2011: 213). Moreover, “the genes of these microbes number in the millions, dwarfing the paltry 23,000 genes comprising the human genome” (Proal et al., 2011: 213). The idea of the human superorganism shows instead that the parts retain their heterogeneity and a relative autonomy so that they can be detached from one whole and thus they can enter into interactions with some other whole or some other part of the same whole or some other part of some other whole (DeLanda, 2010: 3–4). By the same token, it is also important to avoid a downwards micro-reductionism that views the whole as a mere aggregate of its parts. Instead, what the idea of the human superorganism shows is that the interactions between its microbial and cellular component parts give rise to emergent properties that are not present in the component parts, but they contribute to the prehension of positive feelings regarding that common form. The findings reported above bring into sharper focus a new ontology of living becomings. The ontological stratification of biology and society as separate levels of reality that was characteristic of modernist thinking is shown to be increasingly

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untenable. Whereas the modernist conception operated a strong distinction between the two, it is now becoming clearer, as Ingold (2013) has argued, that biology is social through and through. Organisms, including the human organism, are not organic totalities, but more like Whiteheadian societies. They are complex ecosystems of interacting life forms. These interactions give rise to selforganising meshworks of inter-connected microbial and cellular life forms. The interactions between these heterogeneous microbial and cellular life forms further suggest that it is the heterogeneity of the interacting component parts that endows the ecosystem of the organism not so much with stability through the maintenance of an overall homeostatic stable state characterised by only minor internal fluctuations, but with systemic resilience, i.e., the ability to switch between a range of different alternative states (see DeLanda, 1997: 107). The fact that the human body harbours thousands of genomes that interact with the human genome in both health and disease (Proal et al., 2011) lends support to this idea. Moreover, the modernist idea of the person as the product of a specific cultural shaping of the formless and pre-existing material substrate of nature is now shown to be a very Western ideological construction. Instead, the socialisation of the biological and the biologisation of the social that we have considered here indicate that a new understanding is possible—one that sees the intrinsically relational character of our biology and the centrality of the flows of our organismic life to our social relations in the living of human life in the human ecology.

2. Linguistic Work: Unifying the Formal-Informational and the Material-Energetic Aspects of Languaging Saussure’s (1993/1907–1910–1911) claim that language is form, not substance, has overshadowed thinking about language ever since. It can be seen as one influential expression of an assumption that sits at the heart of many subsequent developments in the cognitive and language sciences over the past century or so. These developments include cognitive, formal, and functional theories of language in linguistics; classical (first-wave) cognitive science; artificial intelligence; connectionism; and cybernetics (see Kay, 2000). According to this assumption, the formal-informational properties of living systems can be defined and explained independently of their material-energetic properties. Saussure’s claim can be seen in the context of a broader functionalist tradition of thought that separates abstract form from the life processes of living organisms. The material-energetic aspects of organisms’ organisation are seen as no more than the physical means—the substrate—for the implementing of an organism’s formal-informational organisation. The two aspects are considered to be independent of each other. The study of language becomes the description of lifeless forms separated from the material-energetic dynamics of the living bodies that animate and energise them and breathe life into them. A further consequence is that the bodily dynamics of human languaging are abstracted away from and seen as irrelevant or marginal to the description of the formal architecture of language, seen as relations on different levels between

78 Flow formal constructions and their principles of combination. This is so to the extent that our definitions of and ways of talking about our experience of “language” have been assimilated to and shaped by formal abstracta and the phenomenology of linguistic form that a focus on these abstracta has given rise to over several millennia of thinking about language in the Western tradition. Language got separated from what I shall call below person-organisms. Human languaging was seen as the transmission of abstract information from one person’s mind to another person’s. However, if we put back together the formal-informational and the materialenergetic aspects of living organisms, and furthermore if we see that languaging is not adequately defined or explained by the description of abstract forms detached from and seen as separate from the person-organisms of which they are extensions, we can begin to develop a new understanding of human languaging which puts the life processes of living person-organisms at the centre. Such a view seeks to explain languaging as a form of biosocial coordination that channels complex, socially organised matter-energy flows that are supported, shaped, and constrained by the formal-informational properties of “language” in the management of human life in the human ecology. To be human is, as Ingold (2013) emphasises, a constant process of becoming. This process of becoming is not reducible to the organism, seen as a discrete, skin-bound entity with definite boundaries. It is rather an assemblage of organism-person-environmental processes that is maintained and changed over time by a constant, controlled flow of energy and materials through the system. For example, the ingestion of food in eating and air in breathing supply energy to organisms at the same time that energy and waste products are returned to the environment (usually as heat and waste products such as CO2). Languaging is a form of extended metabolism that relates to the integrity of the entire assemblage of processes that recursively self-maintain and self-individuate the organism-person-environment assemblage. On the other hand, linguists have, on the whole, sought the architecture of “language” in terms of formal constructs rather than in the context of the living human person-organism-environment assemblage. Consequently, the matter-energy flows, their dissipation, and the structural coupling relations involved in the organisation of what Ingold refers to as biosocial becomings are not seen as fundamental. The formal system requirements are typically formulated in ways that take no account of these material and energetic requirements. As we shall see below with respect to respiration and the role it plays in phonation and articulation, this requires something more than simply adding the formal-informational and the material-energetic dimensions of the system to each other. Instead, we need to engage in a major reconceptualisation of what we believe “language” to be and therefore how we describe it and relate it to the living of life in the extended human ecology (Steffensen, 2011). Living systems, unlike non-living ones, are able to store energy so that they can maintain their organisation and self-regulate their activity over extended time frames. Furthermore, living systems are not exclusively regulated by external local potentials and constraints such as the oxygen in the air that is required to support the

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burning of a candle. Instead, living systems construct their own constraints—constraints, moreover, which make it possible for organisms to engage in structural couplings with aspects of their worlds and which channel the flows of matter and energy within the organism and between organisms. Organisms are connected to their surrounds by a permeable boundary such as the skin that serves to demarcate the processes internal to the organism from its surrounds. This boundary enables the organisation of processes and functions internal to the organism to confer on the organism the structural integrity, the stability, the cohesion, and the autonomy that maintain its persistence as a functional whole over time. In demarcating the organism’s internal processes from its surrounds, the boundary is also the means whereby processes internal to the organism interact with processes in the environment of the organism. The organism’s internal processes and functions maintain a stable infrastructure that is able to respond to and adjust to relevant changes in its environment. The respiratorylaryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is an organism-internal infrastructure in this sense that can adjust its internal processes in response to relevant changes in its external environment. As we shall see below, constraints on the inflow and outflow of air that are effected by the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system guide and modulate the flows of air that are required for the production of linguistic actions of the vocal tract. The linguistic organisation of the respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system may be described as a set of neurophysiological mechanisms that constrain the flow of energy through this system. The operation of these constraints means that the person-organism can select when, where, and how to make use of these resources in the ongoing recursive self-maintenance and self-construction of the person-organism, i.e., when he or she wants to say something. The combined respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system established what Kauffman (2013: 610) describes as a recursive relationship between work and constraints in the service of the person-organism’s recursive self-maintenance and structural integrity over time. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is an instantiation of the more general principle that the effective and useful harnessing of energy flows requires functional constraints such as the modulatory capacities of the actions of co-articulated constriction actions of the vocal tract articulators. Linguistically constrained and channelled actions of the respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system thus generate work, or linguistic labour (RossiLandi, 1968, 1977). Moreover, these functional constraints are generated by the person-organism’s interactivity with selected aspects of its world. Interactivity is a form of human work no less than material commodity production. Rossi-Landi demonstrated a deep homological relation between commodity production and linguistic production: Both material commodities and utterances are the products of social work and therefore they both play a central role in the reproduction of human social life on the basis of certain structural and genetic (i.e., developmental) resemblances that unify material commodities and utterances as components of a larger-scale social reality.

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Halliday’s (1975) pioneering study of one child’s transition from proto-language to language shows how the child, in concert with others, constructs the linguistic constraints which, in turn, afford the child’s increased access to a greater range of nonlocal potentials. What we have here is an illustration of how the emergence of macro-functional components in the lexicogrammar qua formal-informational constraints are meshed with and fully integrated with the recursive self-management of the matter-energy flows within and without the person-organism system. The child’s emerging lexicogrammar is a developing system of functional constraints that enables the person-organism to self-regulate the flows of matter and energy both within it and between it and its “outside.” This emerging level of functional constraints also enables structural coupling between the person-organism’s endogenous processes and exogenous ones. The respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system therefore constrains energy flows so that the resulting linguistic organisation is functional and meaningful for the person-organism system. Kauffman’s idea of “work cycles” (2013: 610) is applicable here. Both commodity production and linguistic production link exergonic and endergonic reactions: They gather energy, synthesise it into a material or linguistic product, and dissipate waste energy into their environments. Kauffman’s point is that work is a functionally constrained harnessing of energy. A work cycle, Kauffman argues, is achieved by the coupling of exergonic and endergonic reactions. There is, Kauffman argues, a recursive relationship between work and constraints in the achieving of the system’s autonomy. In constraining energy flows, the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system generates functional constraints on the flow of energy through the system. Moreover, these constraints are self-constructed in the course of development: The person-organism needs to expend energy in development to produce linguistically constrained flows of energy through the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system. The constraining of these flows enables the person-organism to engage in the production of linguistic labour. Linguistic labour is functional not only in the recursive self-maintenance and self-construction of the person-organism and its extended possibilities of interacting with its world, but also of the extended biosocial relationality in which the person-organism is embedded. The idea that language is form, not substance, which Saussure inaugurated in its modern guise, in assuming that the world of matter outside language is formless and inert, mistakenly assumes that matter does not play an active, shaping role on the level of form. On this view, matter is passive and external to language. It is formed and given meaning by linguistic form that is externally imposed on it. The separation of form from substance is unable to account for the intrinsic bodily dynamics of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system and the fundamental role these dynamics play in the actualisation of languaging activity. Moreover, it fails to show how emergent formal constraints on the activity of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system are, in fact, emergent results of the intrinsic activity of the system. These constraints work to restrict the degrees of freedom of the system. In terms of Aristotle’s four causes, we can say that emergent larger-scale constraints

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such as lexicogrammar are formal causes that selectively and functionally constrain lower-scale bodily dynamics and energetic flows. The wordings that we learn to attend to in utterances are the phenomenological effects of lexicogrammatical attractors, i.e., implicit properties of system dynamics that attract the lower-scalar dynamics of individuals in first-order languaging to the principles of organisation of the higher-scale system tendencies of a population of languaging agent—the patterns of second-order language (Thibault, 2011a). These long-term system tendencies stabilise the collective socio-cognitive dynamics of the population on cultural-historical timescales. They therefore give rise to regularities in the production process that are experienced by individuals as a phenomenology of linguistic forms. Formal causes re-organise material dynamics. By the same token, the lowerscale material dynamics are not passive and inert, but have their own immanent forms of organisation and hence their own capacities for the generation of form. The dynamical properties and capacities of the lower-scale system mutually act on and influence each other. The intrinsic properties and potentialities of material dynamics therefore play an active role in the construction of form. In the latter part of the twentieth century, computational models of language and mind separated form from matter and mind from biology. Computational models of both mind and language, and the relationship between the two, thus blocked from the outset the development of any understanding of the relationship between the bodily dynamics of living person-organisms and the functional constraints which operate on and constrain these dynamics. The idea that language is form, not substance, which shaped and authorised this thinking, views language or the architecture of language as layers of inter-related formal units and their relations at the same time that it ignores the fundamental role of the material bodily dynamics. The study of the neurophysiology and anatomy of the respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system is typically seen as a separate, specialised domain with its own intrinsic properties that have nothing to do with the formal architecture of language other than being its material substrate. Consequently, the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is seen as a biophysical substrate that physically implements linguistic activity but does not contribute to the definition and understanding of the multi-scalar dynamics of human languaging and does not in any way affect its fundamental architecture. Language form is accordingly defined as inter-related levels of formal abstracta. Consequently, the relationship of language form to the biophysical dynamics of the respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is viewed as arbitrary. However, when we see bodily dynamics as intrinsic to the functionality of the system, and, second, when we consider the intrinsic capacities of the substances, media, and surfaces of this system (Section 7 below), we are forced to engage in a radical re-conception of “language.” This re-conception is forced upon us because the non-arbitrary incorporation of bodily dynamics and their cognitive and affective capacities into the definition of language radically redefines the nature of the “object of study” and the possible theoretical viewpoints on it.

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The definition of language as form, not substance, implicitly forgets that formgenerating capacities are immanent in the dynamical organisation of material dynamics. Saussure and followers assumed that language form operates on passive and inert matter in ways similar to how the behaviour of matter in the computational medium depends on explicit and external instructions. Human languaging cannot be adequately theorised unless we take into account the immanent formgenerating capacities of the human body. The emergence of functional linguistic constraints on bodily activity involves the mutual interaction of formal-informational and material-energetic properties and capacities. The interweaving of the form-generating capacities immanent in material systems and the re-organisation of these systems by means of intrinsically generated functional constraints on their own activity is a fundamental requirement of the recursive self-maintenance of person-organisms qua languaging agents (Section 6 below).

3. Humans are Biocultural Becomings Linguists, neurobiologists, philosophers, and psychologists of all stripes like to tell us that Homo sapiens is the “symbolic species.” It is this claim that places us over and above the other species with which we share the planet. The evolved capacity for symbolic meaning and for language in particular is said to be the basis of our universal humanity—a capacity, moreover, which allows scientists of the human to view people as products of the natural world at the same time that we have symbolic capacities not possessed by other living organisms. The latter capacities, we are told, allow us to transcend the limitations of organic nature. Language is held up as evidence of Homo sapiens having reached an optimal stage of evolution, a privileged vantage point from which we can distinguish ourselves from the other organisms with which we share the ecosystem of planet earth. In the classical version of this narrative, language is seen as the optimal solution towards which human evolution was directed as its pinnacle. In the case of language, this fixed criterion of optimality has been defined in terms of things like “recursive syntax,” symbolic thinking, etc., that have purportedly arisen as the optimal outcome of human evolution, seen in biological terms. On the other hand, the actions of languaging agents as they engage with and solve problems in particular circumstances in the course of their own ontogenesis are set apart from human evolution and viewed as human history (see Ingold, 2013: 12). Development is thus separated from evolution at the same time that languaging agents engineer the informational-semiotic niche of future generations in ways that are designed to scaffold their future development. A similar division is discernible in the Saussure's separation of his synchronicstructural view of la langue and his diachronic-evolutionary perspective on language change. On this view, historical languages are said to have evolved from prior languages just as the Romance languages evolved from Latin, for example. On the other hand, the moment-by-moment processes of languaging whereby individual persons live out their lives and contribute to their own and others’ development are seen as separate from the longue durée of the evolution of historical

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languages. One effect of the standard division of the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language—the division between the transmission of heritable traits from one generation to the next and the changes wrought by organisms themselves in the processes of their own growth and development—can no longer be sustained (Ingold, 2013: 11). The evolution of language and the evolution of persons are not separate processes, divided between two distinct timescales. This is not to deny long-term evolutionary change. However, it is to deny that the developmental processes are separate from evolution (Salthe, 1993). Instead, it is to say that the co-evolution of persons and languaging takes place in and is taken forward by the life trajectories of persons qua biocultural becomings. Just as our sociality is immanent in our biology, our evolution is immanent in our development, in the living trajectories of human biocultural becomings. There is no transcendent and extra-historical solution of human evolution—a point of arrival for human beings. It is at this point that the notion of “culture” is interposed between organic nature and the human capacity for symbolic meaning to the extent that human beings are said to exist in the two realms of “nature” and “culture.” The result is a concept of “language” founded on a phenomenology of formal abstracta that is fundamentally at odds with and which separates us from the fluxes and flows of organic life within which human existence is immersed. Language, defined and understood in this way, is the product of a “language machine” (Harris, 1987) that separates language from organic life and from the materials out of which linguistic artefacts are fashioned by speakers and writers. Saussure envisaged the environment of language to be a formless and chaotic mass of “thought” and “sound” not unlike the variable environmental input that is processed by the innate and pre-constructed mechanisms of earlier cognitive science. On this view, the “language machine” is a pre-constructed cultural mechanism for imposing order and meaning on a formless and variable external world. Instead, I argue that the environment, rather than being the raw material that is re-processed as “meaning” according to the categories and mechanisms internal to the language system, itself provides many of the variable conditions for the on-line soft-assembly of the processes which, in the course of development, enable and support the child’s capacities for languaging. It is nowadays somewhat commonplace to debunk Chomsky’s claim that the “ambient language” that constituted the input to the child’s innate linguistic competence is anything but poor and lacking in structure and complexity. However, it is also necessary to debunk the fashionable though erroneous idea, promoted in recent decades by social constructivism, that the child or, indeed, speaker-hearers more generally, encounter an unstructured and meaningless external world and that the task of language is to impose order and form on it. Instead, both the languaging and the environment of the languaging in which the child is embedded as an active participate are richly structured and in ways that presuppose the child’s developing perceptual attunement to this richly structured environment. In this way, the child develops the resources for differentially attuning to, attending to, and discriminating the variable conditions that are encountered in the course of his or her interactivity with the world.

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The development of repertoires of phonetic gestures make available an array of procedures for attuning to and skilfully interacting with the variable conditions of the child’s world. On this view, the child, the child’s languaging, and the environment are continually and simultaneously being co-developed. Linguistic constraints arise within the context of the child’s ongoing, temporally extended interactivity with its environment (Halliday, 1975). It is in and through this interactivity with the affordances of the child’s world, including, most centrally, other persons, that languaging emerges in developmental systems—systems in which person-organisms set up, through their own participation and interactivity, the developmental conditions for the creation of semiotic-informational niches designed to scaffold and shape the development of future generations.

4. The Person-Organism as a Lifeline of Movement, Growth, and Becoming The way out of this intellectual impasse—i.e., the separation of development and evolution—is to understand humans not as discrete organisms whose spatial extension stops at the skin, but as temporally extended trajectories of movement, growth, and becoming that move along with the trajectories of other becomings— both human and non-human—with which we become entangled over the course of our life trajectories. On this view, one’s membership of the human species, of a particular culture, language community, interpersonal network, and so on is not in itself a guarantee of our humanity. Rather, our humanity is something that we must continually create and re-create as we fashion our way along the pathways which life has laid down for us at the same time that we guide others along these pathways through our joint participation in various forms of co-action, including, most centrally, our languaging. Languaging is not a ready-made system of options from which one chooses as from an à la carte menu in a restaurant; selection is more like table d’hote (Rose, 1997: 245). The formal units of linguistic analysis— sentences, phrases, etc.—are the reified products that result when trajectories of movement and becoming are converted into static formal entities. The resulting linguistic entities are abstracted from the dynamical ecological processes in which they occur. They are treated as objects of study as if they have an independent existence and can be analysed in their own right. Languaging and its regularities are more like historically sedimented intertwined pathways or lifelines that people have actively laid down and moved along in the forging of their life trajectories with others as they constantly seek to modify the environments in which the living of human life is conducted. These lifelines are not static structures, but structures of movement and becoming that are both somewhere in time and place and yet in movement to some other time and place. Humans are constantly forging, laying down, discovering, adjusting, tweaking, and appropriating the lifelines or pathways to be attended to, participated in, and followed. These pathways allow one to get on with the business of living and to guide the ways of others through forms of co-action that enable others to learn and to follow the pathways that language lays down (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 2).

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Languaging is a meshwork of a multiplicity of entangled living pathways forged through co-action, co-orientation, co-presence, and co-sensing between persons and between persons and other living beings and artefacts in the human ecology. Languaging involves our relationships with others and therefore the constant intertwining and interweaving of the trajectories of human becomings. This constant enfolding and unfolding of the manifold trajectories of human becomings create an ongoing and open-ended relational meshwork of the multiple forms of human becomings in the living of their lives together. In forging our pathways or trajectories through this meshwork, we become entangled with the lives of others. In the process, we create multiple lifelines of sensemaking. Rather than an already given and totalising system of linguistic forms and meanings from which we select, languaging is a simultaneous multiplicity of interwoven and forever becoming sense-making trajectories that are embedded in and are an inseparable part of the human life world and the life lines of the people who move along together and respond to each other in the making of human life. The simultaneous multiplicity of entangled trajectories referred to above is never finished and is a constant process of becoming. Patterns and regularities emerge because trajectories on different scalar levels are self-organising systems that cohere over time (Salthe, 1993: 182). Cultural forms arise through the intertwining and enfolding of trajectories that constitute still higher-scalar trajectories. The trajectory of an individual person, say, is an ontogenetic trajectory whose development unfolds within the overall meshwork of ecological relationships as a consequence of its enfoldings and unfolding with the other trajectories of the other persons with which it is bound together to form the cohesion of still higherscalar trajectories-of-becomings. Trajectories mutually shape and define each other and thus contribute to each other’s development on account of their mutually shaping relationality. In this sense, all life is social (Ingold, 2013: 9; Prodi, 1989: 101; Thibault, 2004a: 213): There is a constant exchange of materials and energy between trajectories-of-becoming. At the same time, all life entails fluxes and flows of materials and energy across the permeable surfaces that connect organic forms to their worlds. Elsewhere, I have coined the term “biodynamical social engine” to highlight this aspect of languaging agents (Thibault, 2011b: 57-59). As Ingold (2013: 9) also points out, this means that the trajectory of a person issues forth within a dynamical field of relations that is “intrinsically social and biological, or in short, biosocial.” Ingold’s term biosocial does not denote some kind of hybrid mix of two separate components, the biological and the social. Nor does it assume that the biological and the social are two different levels of ontological stratification of reality such that the social is reduced to the “lower” level of biology. At all scalar levels of organisation of the trajectory-of-becoming that we define as the lived life of persons, we find the intertwining of the trajectories of persons that constitute the cohesion of still higher-scalar trajectories as persons go along with each other in relations of movement, growth, and becoming in the making of human social life together (Ingold, 2013; Vol. II, Chapter 2, Section 4).

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A radical change of perspective is needed. In the 1970s, Michael Halliday (1978: 10–14) made a distinction between the intra- and inter-organism perspectives on language. At that time, the distinction served, in part, to discriminate Halliday’s inter-organismic idea of “language and social man” from Chomsky’s (1965) intra-organismic focus on the linguistic competence of the individual person. Echoing Chomsky, Halliday (1978: 12) relates the intra-organism perspective of Chomsky to the idea of “language as knowledge” in contrast to Halliday’s inter-organism perspective on “language as behaviour.” While asserting the complementarity of the two perspectives on language, the distinction nonetheless reinforces the individual as the locus of the biological and the group as the locus of the social. Halliday writes: instead of looking at the group as a derivation from and extension of the biologically endowed mental powers of the individual, we explain the nature of the individual as a derivation from and extension of his participation in the group. Instead of starting inside the organism and looking outwards, we can adopt a Durkheimian perspective and start from outside the organism in order to look inwards. (Halliday, 1978: 14) For Halliday, language was a means for the exchange of meanings between persons, whereas for Chomsky language was above all a cognitive resource for individual thinking and cognition. Both Chomsky and Halliday assume that the organism is a discrete, bounded entity that is distinguished from its external environment. Moreover, both Chomsky and Halliday assume that the environment is that which surrounds the organism at the same time that the organism participates in vital transactions with the environment that surrounds it. Halliday’s contrast between the intra- and inter-organism perspectives is valuable because it puts the focus on organisms rather than on sub-personal modules and hardwired genetic programmes. However, the contrast between the intra- and inter-organism perspectives can now be transcended and replaced with a new perspective. The distinction between these two perspectives implicitly assumes that the intraorganismic is the locus of the biological and the inter-organismic is the locus of the social, thereby maintaining a dualistic conception of the biological and the social that can now be re-thought (see Thibault, 2005a: 136–139 for discussion). Chomsky argues that the individual is in possession of a biologically innate language-acquisition device that is triggered by appropriate linguistic data provided by the environment of the child learner. Chomsky (2002; see also Anderson & Lightfoot, 2002) has characterised language as a mental organ that grows and matures just like any other organ when triggered by the appropriate environmental data. Chomsky’s view draws on gene-centred biology, which plays down or ignores development (see Ramirez-Goicoechea, 2013; Salthe, 1993 for critical discussion and alternatives). The proponents of gene-centred biology in NeoDarwinist evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and allied disciplines claim that the gene is a strand of a macromolecule known as DNA that is located

Flow 87 in the nucleus on the eukaryotic cell and is the bearer of a coded set of instructions that will lead to the production of the protein that will produce a particular phenotypic trait of the individual. On this view, the gene is the bearer of a message (a plan or blueprint) encoded in DNA that pre-specifies the life trajectory of the organism. Chomsky’s view is based upon the opposition between an innate biology and an external environment that has no role other than to trigger the growth of the language organ. One problem with Chomsky’s formal view of language is that an attenuated and diminished view of evolution fails to see that real historical processes live in our real-time languaging—in the material processes of development that mediate the accumulated genetic information accumulated by experience (Salthe, 1993: 140). For Chomsky, neither the environment nor the embodied person-organism plays an active, organising role. While Chomsky is not very specific about the biology involved, he does, however, see that biological processes grow and mature over time while at the same time treating the development of language as no more than the outward expression of a coded genetic instruction or blueprint that gives shape to the output of this process. On this view, the environment is effectively excluded from the ontogenetic and developmental processes in so far as it plays no more than a triggering role rather than an active and shaping one. The language-acquisition system is a contextindependent device that excludes specific contextual factors as irrelevant to phenotypic outcomes. In other words, specific contextual factors such as environmental affordances, socio-historical conditions, parent–child interaction, etc., which might contribute to the ontogenesis of language, are excluded from the explanation. For Chomsky, language growth is the outcome of the interaction between the language-acquisition system and the triggering effect of appropriate data presented by the environment. The information that is carried in the genes thus has the role of imposing order on formless environmental data in the actualisation of the phenotype. The error of this view lies in the assumption that the form of language is pre-figured in the genetic instructions that precede the ontogenetic processes that give rise to the forms of a particular language (Oyama, 2000/1985; Salthe, 1993: chap. 4). Moreover, Chomsky’s idea of growth is seen as being under the control of intrinsic biological mechanisms that require reference to the gene as the locus of control. Growth is seen as following a pre-determined genetic blueprint or plan that is simply unfolded in the maturational process. Nonetheless, Chomsky’s idea of language growth remains a fertile one if, unlike Chomsky, we assign priority to the ontogenetic process itself, seen as the dynamical flows of materials and energy that connect the person-organism to others in developmental time. It is these flows that nurture and support the processes of growth and becoming referred to above. In taking this step, it becomes clearer that evolution can and does take place through the cumulative transformations that person-organisms themselves bring about. Persons do not simply adapt to their environments. They actively modify the conditions of development of themselves and the other person-organisms with whom they are relationally connected

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through the flows of matter, energy, and information that are generated by their linguistic and other work in the human ecology. Ingold (2013) writes of enskilment as the embodied and ongoing processes of shaping ourselves and others not as human beings, but as human becomings. The term “human being” suggests an already existing entity that is the endpoint of some prior process. On the other hand, the term “human becoming” serves to indicate the open-ended and constantly fluctuating nature of the life processes in which humans are forever participating in order to ensure that they live their lives within the bounds of the human. Enskilment is a process that takes place in the course of our development. It depends on such factors as one’s life history, the persons and institutions we interact with, social class, economic circumstances, and how we use our bodies. All of these factors (and many more) interact with and are entangled with our evolutionary history and with the neurophysiological, neurohormonal, and morphological properties and capacities of our bodies in complex, non-linear ways that give rise to particular person-organisms (Fuentes, 2013: 53). A number of consequences arise as a result of this radical rethinking. First, the organism can no longer be thought of as a discrete, bounded entity that is set against the environment that surrounds it. Instead, the organism is a self-organising ontogenetic trajectory—a time-extended locus of growth and change—within a field of relations defined by flows of materials, energy, and information. The cohesion of the organism-person depends on its time-extended entanglements with the other trajectories that it encounters and which leave their cumulative marks on it. Second, living becomings are dissipative structures. The organism’s beingin-the world is constituted by two-way flows of matter, energy, and information between the organism and its outside. Ordinarily, the organism is seen to be separated from and hence delineated from its “outside” by the skin, which encloses the organism and defines the interface where the “outside” and the “inside” meet. The skin on this view is a permeable boundary that defines the outer limit of the organism which is contained inside this boundary at the same time that the organism is separated from and defined as distinct from the “outside”, which surrounds it in the form of an environment. The skin of the organism is the outer boundary that sets off the organism against its surrounding environment. On this view, the organism is contained by this outer boundary and hence resides “in here,” separate from the environment “out there.” Ingold (2011: 69–70) has proposed an alternative to this conception, which is founded on the distinction between what is inside the organism and what is outside. According to Ingold, an organism is like a line; it is “a trail of movement or growth” (2011: 69). Ingold writes: Every such trail discloses a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another – between the organism “here” and the environment “there”. It is rather a trail along which life is lived. Neither beginning here and ending there, nor vice versa, the trail winds through or amidst like the root of a plant or a stream between its banks. Each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture of the lifeworld. This texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted within a relational field.

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It is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines; not a network but a meshwork. (Ingold, 2011: 69–70) Ingold further develops the idea of organism-as-line in pointing out that the single line is an oversimplification. Rather, the lives of complex organisms extend along multiple lines, issuing from a source (Ingold, 2011: 70). The relational field that Ingold writes about in the above quotation is organised around a relational source that extends outwards along multiple pathways or threads that become entangled with the pathways or lifelines of other organisms. Ingold counters the idea of the network as a model of the agent–environment relation with the idea of a meshwork of interwoven and knotted lines. A network of relations is conceptualised as consisting of points and the lines joining the points in which the points are, logically, pre-existing entities that are joined together by the lines that connect them. The organism is not a pre-existing point that is joined to other points by the lines connecting them, but, as Ingold argues, the organism is more like “knots in a tissue of knots” (2011: 70). An organism is a particularly thick or dense entanglement of lines or threads. It is like a tissue, or a weaving together of knots, whose lines or threads extend beyond this tissue to become entangled with lines issuing from other knots. In this way, organisms create a meshwork of pathways that are folded and unfolded as organisms entangle with other organisms and with the artefacts of their worlds to form what Ingold calls “a domain of entanglement” (Ingold, 2011: 71). The interweaving of all these lines constitutes the texture of the lived world. Dissipative structures are structured by cycles of cascading and collecting. Living becomings are characterised above all by their characteristic movements along pathways or trajectories that issue forth into the world of the organism and become interwoven with the movement pathways of other organisms. Movement pathways leave behind characteristic traces or patterns of activity. The movement of living things is not mere displacement from one place to another, but a process of becoming, of growth, and of renewal. Movement is a cycle of collecting and cascading. The “inside” of the organism is now seen as a self-referential perspective resulting from the effects of the organism’s cascading activities (Salthe, 1993: 173). The organism’s movements are like threads or lines that extend beyond the organism in the form of spontaneous movement cascades. By the same token, these movements have effects in the world, some of which are collected by the organism and stored by it. As a consequence of this increase in stored information, the organism begins to develop a self-referential perspective and to have effects in the world that are sourceable at this perspective and explainable in terms of the self (Vol. II, Chapter 3).

5. Respiration, Languaging, and the Flow of the Living Linguists often claim that speech sounds encode the linguistic pattern that is functional in the transmission of “content” from one person’s mind to another person’s mind. According to this fanciful but unrealistic idea of linguistic “communication,” speech sounds are seen as the means of bridging the solipsistic gap that separates one mind from another. The significance of the elemental fact that sound is a restructuring of the acoustic medium of air by a mechanical event at some source that causes

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pressure waves to be propagated through the medium of the air is missed. Speech sounds are affordance layouts in a complex and multi-layered environment to which languaging agents have become attuned. Speech sounds are a layer of this multilayering that is fine-tuned to human needs. The air is a fluid medium that we continually inhale and exhale. We continually inhale the medium of air into our bodies and exhale it when we breathe. Breathing is a rhythmic or periodic process that is an essential part of the metabolic processes required for the maintenance of the living organism. Keeping an organism alive requires a constant flow of energy through the living system. As we shall see below, organism and environment interpenetrate and flow through each other (Rose, 1997: 139). Breathing enables an input of chemical components that supply energy to the organism at the same time that some of the energy produced, together with waste products, is returned (dissipated) to the environment of the organism. The flow of air into and out of the organism is a controlled and recursive process that can also to some extent be modulated voluntarily. The metabolic processes of which breathing is just one aspect do more than simply organise and regulate the flows of matter and energy between the organism and its “outside.” The metabolic processes that maintain the living organism also maintain the overall coherence and structural integrity of the organism over time. It is easy to say that metabolism is a process of continual exchange of matter and energy between the “inside” of an organism and its “outside,” i.e., what is often called the environment of the organism. I, too, have used this way of writing just a few lines ago. At times it is a useful shorthand, but it can quickly lead us into unhelpful and unwise ways of thinking if we are not careful. For example, it is easy to think of breathing as a transaction of matter and energy that takes place between the “inside” and the “outside” of the organism. As Ingold points out (see above), this habit of thinking sets a discrete, bounded organism against an external environment. The example of breathing shows that the relationship between the two is not simply a matter of a permeable dividing line or interface across which air passes as it enters and leaves the organism during inhalation and exhalation. The medium of air does not simply surround the organism like an external environment. Instead, it exists in and is an integral part of the organism. The human organism, for example, is interpenetrated by the medium of air just as the organism interpenetrates the medium of air and moves through it (see Rose, 1997: 139). Ingold (2013: 11) writes of a “zone of interpenetration” in precisely this sense as a way of re-thinking the term “environment”: Within this zone, organisms grow to take on the forms they do, incorporating into themselves the lifelines of other organisms as they do so. Every organism is a site of infestation, a vast ecosystem in itself, and humans – about 90% of whose cells are actually bacteria or other micro-organisms – perhaps more than most. But the forms of organism, as we have seen, are not already prefigured within the genome, nor are they simply transcribed into the plasmic materials of life. The only “reading” of the genome is the process of ontogenetic development itself. (Ingold, 2013: 11)

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We are inclined to think of ourselves as solid entities that persist over time in spite of the bodily changes that we observe and attribute to factors like ageing and the “passage of time.” In actual fact, human organisms are fluid beings—much more gaseous and liquid than we might think—rather than solids. Here I mean something more than the obvious though important point that our bodies and the organs and cells of our bodies consist in large measure of air and water. Our fluid nature is necessary for our lifelong ontogenetic development. The forms of human life arise in the processes of our ontogenetic development. Every breath that we take is a form of articulation not only of the musculo-skeletal systems of the body involved in breathing, but of the periodicities that couple us to ecosystem processes at the same time that they constrain the in-flow and out-flow of air in a self-maintaining way. My point is that every breath we take gives rise to forms of organisation that produce the functional constraints necessary for the organism’s ongoing selfconstruction and recursive self-maintenance. Functional constraints regulate and modulate the matter and energy flows that give the organism its self-consistency and persistence over time. They “solidify” or harden to a degree these flows in the service of the organism’s intrinsic relationality. The organism engages in an active and ongoing process of both its own self-construction and of the co-construction of the ecosystem. Normally, the emphasis in discussions of organismic metabolism is on the self-construction of the organism. However, I want to restore the emphasis on the two-way nature of this process. The organism is also a coproducer, for good and for ill, of that zone of interpenetration with which it is entangled and with which it commingles. We may not normally think of breathing in this way, but every breath that every organism expels relates it to other ecosystem processes and entities along pathways of matter-energy flows that we may scarcely ever think about, but which tell us something important about the essential relationality and sociality of biological organisms. Our specifically human sociality builds on this. Normally, we think about individual organisms as discrete, bounded, and selfcontained entities that are countable as the members of a population, as in NeoDarwinist thinking (Ingold, 2013: 13). In the human case, population thinking assumes an individualistic and rational agent who acts on the basis of self-interest. The individual organism is pitted against an external environment to which the individual must adapt in order to survive. Evolution of the population, not the individual, is defined as the interaction between the genotype and the environment. Qualities developed in the course of the individual’s encounters with his or her world in the course of development (ontogenesis) have no place in the Neo-Darwinist account of evolution. Only the genotype can be passed from one generation to future generations. This thinking has left us, as Ingold explains (2013: 13), with two disjoined ontologies of the human being—the relational one of the humanistic and social sciences and the populational one of the Neo-Darwinist biological sciences. Ingold emphasises the importance of an integrated view that views the biological organism, like the person, as an ensemble of relations. The biological organism

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is more like a Whiteheadian society (Section 1). On this view, human biology no less than society is social. In the twentieth century, biology infiltrated sociology and gave us structural-functional models of society modelled on the organicist idea of society as an organic totality of inter-related components. Saussure refers to la langue in these same organicist terms as follows: “La langue quoique complexe représente un tout separable, un organisme en soi qu’il est possible de classer, quant à elle” (1993/1910–1911: 276). On this view, the reciprocally defining terms that are internal to la langue lay the foundations of the idea that the linguistic sign is a biplanar relation between two mental abstracta—the acoustic image and the concept—that are derived from the organic totality of the relations among the purely negatively defined differences that comprise la langue. Society can now infiltrate biology to yield a new, non-organicist view of organisms as self-organising processes of becoming that are not confined to their skin, but which extend out into their worlds along multiple pathways. The biology of organisms is intrinsically relational in this sense. Organisms are what Bergson (1911/1896: 28) called “centres of indetermination” that are enmeshed in many entangled pathways of relations that thread outwards and become entangled with the other entities and processes that affect them and which are affected by them. They are “centres of indetermination” in the sense that their action-perception systems suppress those aspects of “reality” in which the functionality of the organism has no interest. Bergson remarks: “They [living organisms, PJT] allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others, isolated, become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” (1911/1896: 28–29). The multiple pathways along which living systems extend into their worlds by means of their action systems are selective and interested. Rather than being passively stimulated to act by an external world of impersonal information, living systems actively and selectively orient to that which is of interest for their recursive self-maintenance and self-individuation. We are interested beings who act and perceive from a personal point of view that is grounded in our bodies, in first-person experience, personal memory, and the continuity of our felt sense of selfhood. The world we are immersed in provides us with indications of potential actions. We are deictically situated in vast networks of possible actions. Our perceptions of these possibilities are interactively constituted as patterns of invariances in local situations that our bodies can interact with. We are “centres of indetermination” that can selectively interact with these potentials in ways that open up further possibilities of interaction. Which aspects will open up depends on the kinds of interactions we engage in. As “centres of indetermination” we are deictically situated in the world by our embodiment, but open to the possibilities that our embodiment is receptive to. Biologists talk about dissipative structures to refer to the dispersal of waste materials and energy (heat) into the environment—those products of metabolism that are no longer useful to the organism—as by-products of the organism’s ongoing work to achieve self-maintenance. However, the metaphor of “dissipation” remains in some ways organism-centric: It does not pay enough attention to the parallel lives of the other organisms whose existence depends on their capacity to couple with and to metabolise our waste products (DeLanda, 1997: 107). Ecologists have shown

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that ecosystems are self-organising meshworks in which plant and animal species are inter-connected by their functional complementarities. These meshworks are characterised by their resilience—their capacity to deal with large-scale internal and external fluctuations by switching between one or another stable alternative state. Utterances are one form of movement pattern that extend into the world, leave their traces, and become interwoven with the movements and movement traces of other persons. Person-organisms in their languaging weave their own paths into the world and become entangled with those of the others whom they encounter. In so doing, they contribute to the ever-evolving texture of the world, including the texture of their languaging. Utterances are deictically anchored to the perspectives of the organism and are traceable back to that source. As the infant self-elaborates during ontogeny, formerly vague and ill-defined bodily movements and gestures individuate into increasingly more differentiated ones together with the increasing capacity to store information. The formerly vague, ill-differentiated precursor movement patterns differentiate into ever more differentiated ones that become increasingly more constrained by the organism’s entrainment to higher-scalar cultural dynamics. The increasing differentiation affords ever more control over and specification of processes with which the organism becomes entangled. Hence, agentive control increases, as does individuality: There is more stored information. The autocollection of the organism’s cascading products means that selfhood becomes increasingly honed, specified, and determinate (Salthe, 1993: 175). The agent’s self-organisation can thus be seen as an increasingly more specified and individuated collection of self-produced products of its own cascading activities as these activities are extended into the environment (Salthe, 1993: 176). The speaker’s utterance-activity enacts a pathway that enables the agent to collect (some of) the effects of its own cascading in the form of its interpretations of the responses it receives from the world, its anticipations of future potentialities of interaction, and so on.

6. Infant Babbling and the Zone of Interpenetration: An Example of Co-Construction and Co-Development in an Episode of Infant–Mother Mutual Attunement In this section, I focus on the analysis of a transcribed episode of proto-conversation between an infant girl and her mother. The analysis presented below serves to demonstrate how the infant–mother dyad constitutes a “zone of interpenetration” in which the two person-organisms incorporate aspects of each other’s voice dynamics into their own dynamics at the same time that both participants in the episode modulate each other’s dynamics. The episode presented by the transcription in Table 2.1 helps to focus on co-construction and co-development as a recursive mode of organisation. The transcription presented in Table 2.1 shows the dynamics of the entanglement of infant and mother in each other’s dynamics in an episode of mutual attunement featuring early infant “babbling.” In the episode featured in Table 2.1, infant and mother are coupled in a relation of mutual attunement. As the transcription shows, infant and mother engage in a form of coordinated mutual attunement and co-presencing in which they take up, respond to, and reenvoice (Dore, 1989; Thibault, 2004a: chap. 5) aspects of each

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other’s vocal dynamics. The infant–mother dyad is generated and sustained by a constant flow of energy and affect linking the two agents in a state of mutual communion called “presentational immediacy” (Bråten, 2013: 33). A constant flow of energy through the dyad-system is required in order to sustain this state. The infant’s spontaneous, low-order babbling yields constraints that depend, in part, on the mother’s tracking, modelling, and scaffolding the infant’s vocalisations. For example, the mother tends to lengthen the syllables of her own speech in the modelling of “dada” to adjust to the longer duration of the infant’s proto-syllabic vocalisations (Phase 3, Frame 5; Phase 5, Frame 9). In this way, she makes more salient those articulatory and auditory patterns which she judges as best approximating the adult model in the infant’s vocalisations. Figures 2.2 and 2.3 illustrate this using the software programme Praat for the analysis of speech sounds to analyse the vocal dynamics of the infant’s vocalisation in Phase 1, Frame 1 of the transcription and the mother’s response in Phase 2, Frame 3. Figure 2.2 shows the long duration of the infant’s less structured quasi-syllables and the protracted formant transitions that they evidence. Figure 2.3, which features the mother’s vocal response to the infant’s vocalisation featured in Figure 2.2, shows how the mother adjusts the dynamics of the reduplicated syllabic pattern “dada” [= daddy] in order to (1) adjust to the dynamics of the infant; and thus (2) to provide a model to scaffold the infant’s vocalisation to the culturally valued pattern. The mother uses syllabic reduplication, which is characteristic of infant babbling, both to mirror the infant’s pattern and to rehearse for the infant a desired, though simplified, production model. The mother also rewards those patterns with positive affect and with comments such as “that’s a good girl” in Phase 5, Frame 9. The infant also participates in the self-construction of her own constraints. In orienting to and adjusting to the speech of the mother, the infant’s babbling selfconstructs a new layer of articulatory-auditory constraints that constrain the flow of matter-energy between infant and mother. Infant and mother attune to and couple to each other’s bodily dynamics. In doing so, the dyad constrains more and more the flows of matter, energy, and information so that the system, consisting of the two participants, controls how it makes use of each other’s bodily and neural resources to constrain the flow of affect in the recursive re-construction of these dyad-based routines which Bråten (2007; Bråten & Trevarthen, 2007) and Trevarthen (1998) have discussed as mutual attunement of infant and mother to each other’s bodily dynamics. By the same token, the mother selects and rewards those patterns that best approximate the culturally valued ones. The child’s self-construction of proto-syllabic patterns in so-called babbling is thus a step towards increased autonomy and therefore the increased capacity to couple to other persons as sources of energy and value. In gradually learning to bring under intentional control the dynamics of her vocalisations in conformity with culturally rewarded norms and to feel and perceive the responses that her vocalisations elicit, the infant self-constructs a set of constraints that constrain her coupling with other persons in a recursively self-maintaining way. Infant and mother tap into and “feed off” each other’s energy. In the episode, the flow of energy that animates the dyad-system and is essential for

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Table 2.1 Transcription of Mutual Attunement Episode between Infant and Mother Focused on the Infant’s Vocalising of Early Quasi-Syllabic Structures, or “Babbling”; Temporal Durations in Seconds and Milliseconds; Italicised Text Indicates Adult Speech. See the description of Phases 1 to 5 in Appendix I

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Figure 2.2 Infant’s vocalisation in Phase 1: Note sequence of three quasi-CV units of diminishing intensity (yellow line) and sharply falling pitch contour (blue line) starting at 450 Hz and falling to 337.6 Hz; note protracted formant transitions of the three pre-canonical CV units, of 0.568, 0.679, and 0.996, in conformity with the slower rate of production of the infant’s pre-canonical CV units.

its continuing operation is evidenced not only in the vocalisations of the two participants, but also in the rhythmic synchronisation of the movements of the infant’s arms and feet with the rhythmic structure of the mother’s vocalisations. In attuning to and coupling with each other, co-construction and co-development take place (Thibault, 2005a). The infant invests a great deal of the energy that it appropriates from the dyad to the self-construction of its own constraints under the guidance of the mother. The infant’s proto-syllabic constructions are vague precursors of the syllabic patterns of the adult language. Infant babbling,

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Figure 2.3 The mother’s vocalisation (“yeah say dada”) in Phase 2 shows a sequence of four syllabic units; the pitch contour of the first syllable drops from 262.5 Hz to 89.87 (blue line) and is markedly lengthened, with a moderate degree of creakiness, as shown by the duration of the formant transition (0.800 s); the second syllable has a duration of 0.326 s; the third is 0.438 s; and the fourth is significantly lengthened, showing a duration of 0.679 s. Moreover, the pitch range of “say dada” starts on a high of 276.3 Hz and falls to 230.3 Hz. The relatively steady pitch rate and the slow rate of syllable duration show how the mother is tracking the infant’s vocalisations at the same time that she is adjusting her own vocalisations to those of the infant.

I argue, is the self-construction of the infant’s own functional constraints on action. Rather than struggling with the development of an arbitrary soundmeaning link (Storkel, 2001), infants, in self-constructing, in their vocalisations, their own functional constraints in concert with more senior others, also learn to exercise these constraints in the recursive self-maintenance of the

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infant-system and thus their own agency. The development of these constraints facilitates and extends the coupling of the infant-system to other persons in the process of directing and channelling the matter, energy, and information flows that contribute to the recursive self-maintenance of the person-organism system. Developing syllabic patterns are functional constraints on action that enable the infant to tap into other person-organisms as repositories of energy and value. The relatively low level of organisation of the infant’s babbling is dissipated into the social-affective environment of the dyad at the same time that the mother (and other acculturated persons in the infant’s life) responds with more ordered linguistic structures that are functional in increasing the internal organisation of the infant-system. Babbling, rather than representing a struggle to grasp the “arbitrary” link between sound and meaning, shows how the infant-system builds up intrinsic functional constraints on its own vocalising and other action. In this way, the quasi-syllabic or syllable-like structures in early infant babbling impose macro-level constraints on lower-scale bodily dynamics. These constraints enable the developing agent to co-articulate its relations with matter, energy, and information flows in the human ecology in more focused and productive ways that enable it to achieve a functional fit with the affordances of its world (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 2). The infant increases in internal organisation and autonomy at the same time that it learns to couple to and to constrain the matter, energy, and information flows in which it is immersed in ways that are both functional and meaningful for the agent-system.

7. The Media, Substances, and Surfaces of Linguistically Structured Vocal Tract Action Theories of language cast in the conventional mould view linguistic communication as a process of information transmission between separate brains and the physical bodies that these brains are housed in—bodies moreover that are located in abstract space rather than bodies that dwell in and move around particular places in the human ecology. These theories simply treat the medium of the air as a neutral means for the transmission of the sound waves that carry the elements of linguistic communication across the abstract and empty space that separates speaker from hearer or sender from receiver. The key assumption of this thinking is that speech particles such as consonants and vowels are sounds that are manifest in the acoustic medium of sound waves. The air simply fills an abstract space that separates persons and enables the transmission of the acoustic particles of speech. Each speaker or hearer is a separate skin-bound entity that occupies a position in abstract space. The medium of the air is taken to be no more than a transmission channel for crossing the gap that separates one mind from another. Seen in this way, it is no longer understood to be an integral component of the life processes that sustain the world we inhabit and which bind together the lifelines of the diverse persons whom we move along with. Alternatively, the medium of air is a means of moving through the world and of binding together the multiple

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pathways of the complex weave of life that we create through our languaging with each other. Such understandings fail to show that there is a deep and important connection between the vital role played by the air in the respiratory activities of all organisms on the planet and the idea of the air as a zone of interpenetration. As a zone of interpenetration, the medium of the air enables persons to weave the living of their lives with those of others in the course of their ongoing languaging behaviour with each other. In order to develop this point more fully, I now turn to the contribution that Gibson’s ecological psychology of perception can make to this endeavour. According to Gibson’s (1986/1979) ecological theory of perception, the environment of an animal consists of media, substances, and surfaces. The three components in Gibson’s account of the environment are a useful starting point for developing an ecological account of the relationship between the medium of the air, the bodily substances involved in vocal tract and related articulatory action, and the surfaces of the body that interact with and restructure the medium in the enacting of linguistic gestures.

Medium The air is a relatively formless composition of gases that makes “a layer of atmosphere above the earth and the water” (Gibson, 1986/1979: 16). The interface between any two of the three states of matter—solid, liquid, gas—constitutes a surface. Gibson mentions three such interfaces: The earth–water interface at the bottom of a body of water such as a lake or river; the water–air interface at the top of a body of water; and the earth–air interface. The third of these, Gibson points out, is the ground—the most important surface for terrestrial animals, including humans. The gaseous medium of the air affords terrestrial animals locomotion through it. Air is thus the usual medium of locomotion for such animals on account of the less resistance air offers as compared to water. Humans can of course wade or swim through a body of water, but we have not evolved the streamlined bodies of sharks, dolphins, and fishes for locomotion in the liquid medium of water. The medium of air thus affords the movement of animals through it. A further important aspect of the medium is that it contains information that guides the movements of animals and the tracking of the movements of other objects through the medium. The medium of air allows rapid chemical diffusion of molecules from a source to dissolve outward from that source provided the source is soluble or volatile (Gibson, 1986/1979: 17). In this way, the air allows animals to detect the smells of things in the environment. The air also allows the transmission and reverberation of light back and forth between surfaces so that the light “brings about the condition we call illumination” (Gibson, 1986/1979: 17). Ambient light fills the medium and thus makes light available at any potential point of observation, i.e., the light comes from all directions. In this way, light makes available information about objects and events in the animal’s environment—information that the animal uses to guide its movement. The medium of air also transmits vibrations or pressure waves from a mechanical

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event, perceived as the source of sound waves. The animal’s ability to detect pressure waves permits listening to the source event—the vibratory event—that caused the pressure wave to be propagated through the medium. The medium of the air is filled with information—optical, acoustic, olfactory, etc. Gibson writes: Any point in the medium is a possible point of observation for any observer who can look, listen, or sniff. And these points of observation are continuously connected to one another by paths of possible locomotion. Instead of geometrical points and lines, then, we have points of observation and lines of locomotion. As the observer moves from point to point, the optical information, the acoustic information, and the chemical information change accordingly. Each potential point of observation in the medium is unique in that respect. The notion of a medium, therefore, is not the same as the concept of space inasmuch as the points in space are not unique but equivalent to one another. (Gibson, 1986/1979: 17) As we saw above, the medium of air also affords breathing. The air contains oxygen that the animal absorbs and carbon dioxide is dissipated as waste after the metabolism of fuel in the animal’s tissue. Gibson also refers to the homogeneity of the medium of air. This homogeneity means that the amount of oxygen in the air has remained roughly 21% for aeons, thereby guaranteeing a stable source of oxygen for the maintenance of life. The homogeneity of the air is also important because it means that structured disturbances of the medium caused by light or sound waves and by the diffusion of chemicals from a volatile or soluble source can be detected. The homogeneity of the medium is important because the perceptual systems of animals are adapted to detect arrays of contrasts in environmental energy fields. These structured arrays of contrasts carry information about the environmental events that caused these arrays of contrasts. Structured arrays of contrasts in ambient energy fields provide information about the ecological events that caused them. A vibratory event causes a structured change in the medium of air in the form of a pressure wave that emanates from the mechanical event. The listener can detect this change and in the process gain information about the source event. The information in the acoustic medium—the pressure wave propagated from a source event—specifies information about the event. In this sense, ecological information is specificational in Gibson’s theory. The fluid medium of air affords animals both movement and the detection of environmental information. Moreover, the medium is not simply external to the animal. Instead, medium and animal commingle; this commingling constitutes zones of interpenetration that enable animals to couple with other animals and with objects and events in their environments. An animal is a locus of pathways of information that the animal makes available to other animals through the dissemination—both intentional and nonintentional—of fields of optic, acoustic, olfactory, and other information that other animals can detect and incorporate into themselves. Moreover, the medium of air is incorporated into the bodies of the organisms that breathe it. Languaging is an extension of, and a specific manifestation of, this more general process.

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Substances Gibson’s term “substances” does not refer to the passive and inert conception of matter in the hylomorphic model of creation. For Gibson, substances are matter in its solid or semisolid state—matter which is substantial as distinct from insubstantial gases and the intermediate status of liquids, which lie somewhere between solids and gases (Gibson, 1986/1979: 19). Importantly, Gibson points out that substances, in his use of the term, are “more or less rigid … more or less resistant to deformation, more or less impenetrable by solid bodies, and more or less permanent in shape” (1986/1979: 19). Whereas the medium of air tends to be homogeneous, the substances of the environment tend to be heterogeneous. That is, they are made of heterogeneous mixtures of elements and compounds that Gibson calls aggregates (1986/1979: 19). The substances of speech are the nerve, fleshy tissue, and the bone that make up the articulatory and phonatory organs involved in the shaping of the vocal tract in the production of co-articulated vocal tract linguistic actions. Substances have many different properties. Relevant properties for present purposes include degree of hardness, elasticity (tendency to regain previous shape after deformation), plasticity (the tendency to hold the subsequent shape after deformation), and viscosity (Gibson, 1986/1979: 20). The substances of the vocal tract, just like those of the environment, differ in their ability to reflect or absorb sound waves, their ability to reflect sound waves, their ability to refract sound waves, their ability to give rise to reverberation, and their ability to create resonance patterns. The organs of speech are made up of different substances—e.g., soft tissue, nerve, and hard bone—that have a specific composition, made up of nested hierarchies of cells, minerals, and so on. We don’t need to delve into their physiochemical composition for our present purposes. If, for example, we were concerned with gustation, our concern would be different. We would be more interested in the biochemical properties of the receptors of gustation, for instance. We do not need to delve into the biochemical composition of the tongue or the teeth to understand their role in the production of speech gestures. What is important is the heterogeneity of their composition on the ecological level of analysis. The tendency toward compositional heterogeneity of the substances comprising the various organs of speech means that the different organs (e.g., jaw, larynx, lips, tongue, teeth, etc.) afford different possibilities for the person, including breathing, eating, tasting, and talking. Our concern is with talking. The compositional heterogeneity of the individual organs of speech is compounded or aggregated in complex ways to produce complex higher-order heterogeneities in the production of vocal tract linguistic actions.

Surfaces Gibson explains that a medium is separated from the substances of the environment by surfaces (Gibson, 1986/1979: 22). The persistence of surfaces depends on the persistence of their substances. Surfaces also have a certain layout. Gibson

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writes: “the layout also tends to persist. The persistence of the layout depends on the resistance of the substance to change” (1986/1979: 22). Surfaces are important because that is where most of the action occurs (Gibson, 1986/1979: 23). For example, a surface is where light is reflected or absorbed, that which touches an animal, where chemical reactions occur, where vaporisation or diffusion into the medium occurs, and where vibrations of substances are transmitted into the medium, e.g., as compression waves from a mechanical source event (Gibson, 1986/1979: 23). Surfaces have a characteristic layout. A level terrestrial surface together with its firmness has a layout that affords locomotion for terrestrial animals, e.g., walking. The surfaces of the organs of speech all have their characteristic layouts, their different degrees of resistance to deformation (viscosity), their characteristic texture, a characteristic shape, characteristic reflectance and resonance properties, and so on. The surfaces of the vocal tract partially enclose the medium of air to deform its flow in the production of speech gestures. The different surfaces of the organs of speech vary from rigid (teeth, jaw) to plastic (tongue, lips). Plastic surfaces can be deformed or reshaped in ways that modulate the flow of air. Rigid and semi-rigid surfaces can resist airflow. The different surfaces of the vocal tract also have their characteristic fine-grained textures. The texture of the teeth is different from the texture of the tongue, and so on. Each surface has its specific layout texture and pigment texture. Surface texture specifies what the substance is, what it is made of (Gibson, 1986/1979: 28). The different qualities of the surface texture of lips, teeth, tongue, etc., in combination, contribute to the acoustic texture of the speaker’s voice when it is detected in the environment by listeners. As I wrote above, following Gibson, the fluidity of the acoustic medium affords locomotion for terrestrial organisms like ourselves. However, this fluidity also affords another kind of movement, which the idea of the medium as the transmission of, say, sounds from one mind to another fails to see. I wish to emphasise that the acoustic information that we detect, track, and follow in the ambient array is in fact a temporal pathway or a trace that leads somewhere and which the listener follows, attends to, orients to, and so on. Rather than the passive reception of sound waves that are “transmitted” to a no less passive hearer, speech sounds afford an ongoing, attentive, and active co-engagement between persons. Part of this is the tracking of the vocal tract gestures that speech sounds provide information about. But it would be limited and limiting to suppose that things ended here. Instead, the fluidity of the medium of air enables us to couple with each other and to engage with each other as person-organisms. In attuning to another person’s vocal tract activity, we are also attuning to the person, not just what goes on in their vocal tract. Speech sounds are neither reducible to the abstract mental entity which Saussure (1993/1907–1910–1911) called the “acoustic image.” Nor are they simply external to the person-organism. Speech sounds are generated from within the person-organism and they enter into other person-organisms in that zone of interpenetration identified by Ingold (2013: 11; see above). It is in that zone that speech sounds generate a particular phenomenology of our biosocial relationality. This phenomenology is integral to the deeply felt, coupled nature of

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the forms of linguistically constituted experience that human languaging generates for person-organisms. At the same time, languaging draws on and is animated by the felt, embodied melodies of experience that are its essential underpinning (Stuart & Thibault, 2015; see also Vol. I, Chapter 3).

8. The Systems of the Human Voice: An Integrative View Vocal tract linguistic actions integrate and depend on three anatomical and physiological systems: The respiratory system, the laryngeal system, and the supralaryngeal articulatory system. Human vocal tract gestures and the voice that these produce are the result of the coupling of phonation with resonance (laryngeal vibration), and vocal tract articulation. Figure 2.4 shows in schematic form the three systems involved in the production of vocal tract gestures. The three systems are under the control of the nervous system, including highlevel cortical control, as well as brain stem reflexes that protect the airways from external stimuli and foreign objects. Let us start with phonation. The production of the human voice depends on the generation of a flow of air from or into the lungs. Respiration is the foundation of voice production. To be sustained, phonation requires the flow of a constant volume of air. Lung capacity, chest wall compliance, pharyngeal, nasal, and oral anatomy, and the speaker’s psychological condition are all recruited to this end. In addition, very fine-grained control of the laryngeal musculature is required to produce glottal closure together with fine-grained control of the elasticity and tension of the vocal folds. Phonation depends on highly specialised muscular control of particular

Figure 2.4 The three systems involved in the production of vocal tract gestures.

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vectors of laryngeal action, depending on the muscles recruited, as well as very fine-grained timing of onset of muscle contraction, and the degree of recruitment and fade in phonation.

Respiration The vocal tract is a biophysical system that is animated by pressure gradients in the production of the speaker’s vocal tract gestures. The process of phonation is initiated by the alternation of the egressive action of deflating the lungs to compress air and the ingressive action of dilating the lungs in order to create a flow of air into the lungs. The rhythmic alternation of these two actions initiates the flow of air that is expelled from the lungs via the glottis, thereby lowering the pressure across the larynx. The larynx is the upper part of the windpipe. It consists of the vocal folds, the glottis, the epiglottis, the thyroid cartilage, the arytenoid cartilage, and the cricoid cartilage. Figure 2.5 shows the anatomical structure of the larynx. The larynx is a valve. It has two basic functions. First, it protects the lungs by blocking the entry of foreign objects into them. Second, it allows people to block their airways in order to increase intra-abdominal pressure that is important in the ejection of objects, childbirth, and lifting heavy weights.

Figure 2.5 Anatomical structure of the larynx. [Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Larynx_and_nearby_structures; downloaded 13 July 2020.]

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If the pressure of the airflow across the larynx is sufficiently lowered, a critical threshold is crossed that triggers the vibration of the vocal folds. Phonation is the process of modifying the flow of air from the lungs through a closed glottis. The oscillation of the vocal folds functions to modulate the flow and pressure of the air passing through the larynx. The flow of air causes the vocal cords and ligaments to vibrate. Voice pitch is modulated by the size, length, and tension of the vocal cords and ligaments. The posterior ends of the vocal cords and ligaments are connected to the arytenoid cartilages, located along the upper end of the cricoid cartilage. The muscles of the larynx cause movements of the thyroid cartilage and the arytenoid cartilage. These movements vary the tension exerted on the vocal folds, in the process altering the pitch of the voice.

Phonation The process of phonation begins with inhalation followed by closure of the glottis. By lowering the diaphragm, the lungs expand in volume, allowing air to occupy the expanded space. This is the process called inhalation. On lowering the muscles of the rib cage and diaphragm, the resulting contraction of the lungs forces the air out. This process is called exhalation. In order to produce voice, the adductor muscles are activated, thereby providing resistance to the outflow of air from the lungs in the form of subglottal closure. Voice production requires that the outflow of air be modulated in some way. Air is pushed through the closed vocal folds. The force of the air passing through the vocal folds causes the pressure between the folds to drop, making them come back together. The passage of air between the vocal folds enables phonation to take effect. This process is explained by what is called the “Bernoulli effect” after the eighteenth-century scientist, Daniel Bernoulli. Bernoulli developed an important theory of fluid dynamics. Bernoulli discovered the inverse relation between pressure and volume in a fluid-driven system. If the volume of a fluid (liquid or gas) remains constant as it passes through a constricted tube or passageway, its energy, equal to pressure times velocity, also stays constant. An increase in pressure means a decrease in velocity; a decrease in pressure means an increase in velocity. The Bernoulli effect explains the role of the oscillation (vibrations) of the vocal folds in the production of voice. The air exhaled from the lungs forces its way through the closed vocal folds. As the air is forced through the vocal folds, the pressure between the folds decreases, bringing the folds back together. The vibratory movement of the vocal folds, as they are pushed apart and then brought back together again, occurs hundreds to thousands of times per second, producing the voice. A single vibratory (oscillatory) cycle of the vocal folds can be broken down into the following phases: (1) the vocal folds are closed by muscular activity in the larynx; (2) the closed glottis causes an increase in air pressure below the closed glottis; (3) the increasing air pressure begins to force the glottis open, beginning on the underside of the glottis on account of the cover’s ability to move independently of the body; (4) the glottis opens, from bottom to top, allowing the air to escape; (5) the flow of air through the glottis indicates an increase in velocity and

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a decrease in pressure, as predicted by the Bernoulli effect; (6) the elasticity of the vocal folds means that after opening, they close again; vocal fold closure is also aided by the negative pressure of the Bernoulli effect; (7) the glottis closes from bottom to top; (8) the complete closure of the glottis means the glottis can open again, thereby repeating the cyclic process of opening and closing of the glottis hundreds or thousands of times per second, depending on the pitch frequency of the voice. The vibration of the vocal folds is the result of the airflow interacting with the tissue in the absence of repetitive muscular constriction. The vocal folds are a complex layered or stratified structure located within the protective cartilage of the larynx. The vocal fold consists of three main layers— the outermost or surface layer, the mucosa; the intermediate layer, the vocal ligament; and the innermost layer, the vocalis muscle. The substances and the surface properties of the vocal folds, as we shall now see, are crucial for the way in which the vocal cords interact with the medium of the air to produce the voice. The outer layer, the mucosa, is the surface that makes contact with the medium of the air. It has developed highly specialised features to aid in its vibratory function and is itself stratified into three layers. The surface or external layer is the squamous epithelium. This layer consists of layers of interlocking skin cells that are smaller on the surface and become progressively larger near the deepest layer of these cells. The squamous epithelium is also called the mucosa because it is constantly bathed in mucous. Beneath the squamous epithelium lies the layer of the lamina propria. Figure 2.6 shows the layered structure of the vocal folds.

Figure 2.6 The layered structure of the vocal folds.

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The lamina propria is internally stratified into three layers: (1) the superficial layer of the lamina propria is gelatinous in nature. It is composed of extracellular matrix proteins, water, and fibres of collagen and elastin; (2) between the superficial lamina propria and the further layers of the lamina propria resides Reinke’s space; (3) the two further layers of the lamina propria—the intermediate and deep layers, respectively—are mainly composed of elastin and collagen; the intermediate and deep layers of the lamina propria together form the vocal ligament. The gelatinous superficial layer of the lamina propria, together with the surface layer of the squamous epithelium, moves over the vocal ligament and muscle to produce the vibrations that give rise to voice; (4) the deepest layer of the lamina propria is composed of tightly bonded collagen fibres; (5) the innermost layer, the vocalis muscle, also called the thyroarytenoid muscle. This muscle is the body of the vocal fold. The internal stratification of the lamina propria into three distinct layers with their distinctive physical characteristics results from differences in the distribution of elastin and collagen fibres. The outermost layer of the lamina propria is coupled to the squamous epithelium by a basement membrane. This outer layer is also the thinnest layer of the lamina propria and also the one with the lowest viscosity. The intermediate layer of the lamina propria is both wider and more viscous. The vocal ligament passes through this region. Figure 2.7 illustrates the layering of the lamina propria. The stratification of the vocal folds allows the cover to slide over the body in order to facilitate oscillation. When the cover slides over the body, a mucosal wave is generated. The movement of the surface of the fold (the cover) over the body gives rise to a wavelike movement, as follows. During the oscillatory cycle referred to above, a vertical phase difference between the lower and upper edges of

Figure 2.7 The layered structure of the lamina propria.

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the vocal folds is observable. The opening and closing of the glottis during phonation are characterised by the opening of the lower edge occurring before the opening of the upper edge. The independent movement of the lower and upper parts of the vocal folds plays a major role in the creation of the mucosal wave. When the folds contact each other at the lower edge, a wave is propagated across the surface of the folds. Vocal fold oscillation (vibration) is currently attributed to various factors. The Bernoulli effect, referred to above, is not the only factor involved in maintaining vocal fold oscillation. Other factors include the natural oscillation frequencies of vocal fold tissue, the resistance to the movement of air through the supraglottal vocal tract, and the interaction of resonance with the vocal folds. The interaction between genes, environmental factors, and the activities of the organism is evidenced in a study of the unphonated vocal folds of several young adults that showed abnormalities in vocal fold mucosa due, it is theorised, to the absence of the vibratory stimulation caused by airflow across the vocal folds in phonation. A study by Sato and Nakashima (2008) shows that vocal fold mucosae of the young adults studied were hypoplastic, rudimentary, and lacking in vocal fold ligament, Reinke’s space, and the layered structure referred to above. This study is an example of how the form-generating properties of the materials of the laryngeal systems involved in phonation depend on the reactions of these materials to the conditions of their own growth and development (see also Sato et al., 2008, 2012). A further example of how genes, environmental factors, and the organism’s own activity interpenetrate to contribute to the development of the functional anatomy of the vocal tract is illustrated in the work of Stål and Lindman (2000). These researchers have shown that the muscle fibre of the tongue is different from that of the neighbouring limb, orofacial, and masticatory muscles. The predominance of Type II muscle fibres and the regional heterogeneity of the tongue (anterior, mid-anterior, mid-posterior, and posterior muscles) were interpreted by these researchers as facilitating the rapid and flexible positionings of the tongue that are required during the production of co-articulated phonetic gestures.

Co-Articulation The vocal tract is the place where co-articulated vocal tract gestures are produced. Co-articulation refers to the coordinated actions of one or more articulators on each other: The jaw and lips for /b/, the jaw and tongue body for /a/ (Fowler, 2010, 2014). The articulatory system, also called the supralaryngeal system, consists of three cavities: The nasal cavity, the oral cavity, and the pharyngeal cavity. Figure 2.8 shows the three cavities of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. These three cavities and the articulators form an extended assemblage of tissue and organs consisting of these three cavities and the articulators. The articulators are either movable or fixed. Movable articulators include the lips, the mandible (lower jaw), the pharynx, the soft palate (velum), the tongue, and the uvula. Figure 2.9 illustrates the articulators of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. The fixed articulators include the alveolar ridge, the hard palate, and the teeth, as shown in Figure 2.10.

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Figure 2.8 The three cavities of the supralaryngeal vocal tract.

Figure 2.9 The articulators of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. Key: 1. Nasal cavity; 2. Oral cavity; 3. Hard palate (palatum); 4. Soft palate (velum); 5. Teeth (dentes); 6. Uvula; 7. Lips (labia); 8. Pharynx; 9. Tip of tongue; 10. Epiglottis; 11. Blade of tongue; 12. Vocal cords; 13. Front of tongue; 14. Glottis; 15. Back of tongue; 16. Wind pipe (trachea); 17. Larynx. [Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:VocalTract_withNumbers.svg.]

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Figure 2.10 The fixed articulators of the supralaryngeal vocal tract (labels in rectangles). Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Tract; downloaded 13 July 2020.]

According to the source-filter model of speech production first postulated by Johannes Müller (1839) and since developed by others (e.g., Fant, 1960; Fry, 1979; Lieberman, 2001; Lieberman & Blumstein, 1988), speech sounds are the combined result of a source of acoustic energy (the larynx) and its modulation by the filter function of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. As noted above, voiced sounds are produced by the quasiperiodic opening and closing of the vocal folds. The supralaryngeal vocal tract functions as a time-varying acoustic filter that dampens or inhibits the flow of acoustic energy at some frequencies while allowing other frequencies to pass. In other words, the vocal tract, acting in its filter function, functions as a sorting process that takes the glottal air flow that is forced through the vocal folds as its source. The frequency spectrum of the source flow is its fundamental frequency. When the source flow is passed on to the supralaryngeal vocal tract, the coarticulated actions of the articulators work to produce a vocal tract action that inhibits some frequencies while allowing other frequencies to get through. That is, a particular shape of the vocal tract acts as a filter that selects for some bands of energy while suppressing others. The laryngeal source is modulated by the filter function of the vocal tract. Formants are those frequencies corresponding to the local energy maxima that are sustained by the supralaryngeal vocal tract and determined by its overall shape, length, and volume. The output spectrum

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of, for instance, a vowel is the result of the excitation of the filter function of the supralaryngeal vocal tract by the source spectrum.

Stratifying the Voice System In other words, the acoustic energy is stratified, or doubly articulated, as it passes from the respiratory system to the laryngeal system and then onto the supralaryngeal vocal tract. However, vocal tract gestures are also partly visible; the actions of articulators such as lips and teeth are visible, not merely audible. Moreover, the actions of the facial system and the eyes are also involved. The supralaryngeal vocal tract does not exist in anatomical isolation, but is housed in the craniofacial system. It is located in a mobile head that sits atop a mobile body that can move around its environment, orient itself, and interact with things that populate that environment while the person is talking. Let us now consider the stratification of the acoustic energy by starting with the raw material that gets the process going. Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980) have developed an original and insightful account of stratification that shows how geological, biological, and social phenomena are formed through a generalisation of the concept of double articulation that linguists more narrowly associate with the formal organisation of language in Martinet’s (2005/1970: 17–18) structural-functional linguistic theory (Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 4). In the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980), stratification refers to far more general processes and is not derived from or confined to language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, each stratum undergoes processes of double articulation. A first stratum selects from unstable matter-energy flows (expression substance) and imposes on them a statistical ordering of units and the relations between them (expression form). The second articulation establishes functional and stable forms (content form) and the global structuring of the material entity that expresses the identity of the whole (content substance) (see also DeLanda, 2010: 32). The respiratory system provides the raw material in the form of an aerodynamic source of energy based on airflow from the lungs. The source spectrum of the glottal airflow with its varying fundamental frequency constitutes the selection of the raw materials of which the first stratum will be synthesised. In other words, a first articulation consists of the voicing that is created by the frequency of the vibration of the vocal folds that is caused by the airflow from the lungs passing over them. A second articulation is performed by the filter function of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. The second articulation establishes the formant frequencies, in the process constructing a more stable structure that is determined by the global shape and action of the vocal tract on the source material. The output acoustic energy that is propagated from the source event is a stable quantum of acoustic information that provides information about a linguistically significant vocal tract action such as a vowel. Table 2.2 sets out the double articulation of the aerodynamic flow of air that is provided by the lungs as the raw material that gets the whole process going. The stratification that this double articulation entails does not mean that the different

Source event: Phonatory substance

First articulation: Phonatory form

Second articulation: Vocal tract gestural/ articulatory form

Mechanical event of vocal tract action propagates Acoustic and optical (multimodal) Craniofacial system and its capacity for auditory, vibratory event through medium information detectable as optical, etc., display and pattern of contrasts in ambient orientation: Moveable head auditory-acoustic and optical atop moveable body; facial arrays specifying speaker’s system; eye gaze system; vocal tract action available at orientational systems of points of observation moveable head, eyes, etc. Co-articulated vocal tract gesture Supralaryngeal vocal tract Constriction actions of articulators reshape airflow in the cavities of the vocal tract; the filter function of the supralaryngeal vocal tract establishes the formant frequencies through the reshaping and deformation of the vocal tract caused by co-articulated constriction actions of some subset of the articulators Airflow from lungs passes across the vocal folds, The varying fundamental Laryngeal system causing the quasiperiodic opening and closing frequency spectrum of the of the vocal folds to yield a fundamental glottal airflow constitutes frequency (F0) spectrum a first articulation of the aerodynamic flow of air from the lungs. The quasiperiodic opening and closing of the vocal folds generate voice and voicelessness The respiratory system provides the raw material Aerodynamic source of energy Respiratory system; diaphragm through contractions of the lungs that force based on airflow from the lungs airflow out of the lungs

Anatomy

Output environmental event: Vocal tract gestural/articulatory substance

Product

Process

Stratum

Table 2.2 Stratifying the Respiratory-Phonatory-Articulatory-Informational System

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strata are discrete levels. Rather, each stratum is a reorganisation of processes on preceding levels (strata) that integrate the products of the organisation of preceding levels in the overall cycle to their own principles of organisation without transcending the preceding levels. The stratification across levels does not therefore refer to distinct and separable levels of formal organisation in a static structure, but to the diverse phases that the source event (the aerodynamic flow of air from the lungs) transitions across to yield the output event (patterns of energy contrasts in the medium that provide information that specifies the speaker’s linguistically shaped respiratory-phonatory-articulatory-informational action). The final product integrates all of the preceding phases to its own principles of organisation and may more properly and completely be called a respiratory-pho natory-articulatory-ecological/informational event, not just an articulatory one. The left-to-right ordering of the different phases of this progression in this formulation corresponds to the logic of the different integrative levels involved in the integration hierarchy proposed by Salthe (1993). The left-to-right ordering corresponds to layers of increasingly specific constraints (Salthe, 1993: 64), as follows: {respiratory system {laryngeal system {supralaryngeal vocal tract {craniofacial system {utterance: ecological event}}}}}. The left-most (respiratory) layer is the most general, most vague, and the one sharing the most variables with nonlinguistic functions of respiration such as breathing, specifically energy potential and flow. The left-most layer is the lowest integrative level in the left-to-right progression from lowest to highest integrative level. The lower level gives rise to the next highest level, which contextually integrates to its level the integration of the lower levels. The point is that each layer of increasingly specific constraints in the progression from left to right potentially makes a difference, including at the right-most (most specified) level I have called “utterance.” For this reason, it is legitimate (and logical) to consider all of the layers of constraints as relevant to the articulation of linguistic vocal tract action. However, it is important to note that speech respiration and resting respiration nonetheless exhibit variable dynamics even at the left-most (most general) layer of the proposed integrative hierarchy. For example, speech respiration has “a shorter inspiratory duration with increased velocity of airflow, and a longer expiratory duration with a decrease in velocity” (Wang et al., 2010: 301). Conrad and Schonle (1979) found that the respiratory patterns of speech are linked to the degree of internal verbalisation and that the respiratory patterns of different tasks became more speech-like in accordance with an increase in the cognitive-linguistic processing that is involved in these tasks. These variable respiratory dynamics show how the energy potential and flow of respiration in speech activity as compared to the resting respiration mentioned by Wang et al. (2010) cannot be solely explained in terms of the mechanisms—the material causes—involved. Instead, the different patterns are emergent from the different contexts—nonspeech and speech motor activity—that a number of researchers hypothesise to have developed in parallel with each other in infancy rather than one being derived from the other (Ruark & Moore, 1997; Moore, Caulfield, & Green, 2001; Wilson, Green, Yunusova, & Moore, 2008).

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As the logic of the integrative hierarchy shows, the further to the right that one progresses, the more specific the constraints become. Given that the relations between the levels of the integrative hierarchy are fully transitive (Salthe 1993: 64), the more specified levels exert their own constraints on speech respiration and thus leave their mark at the most general (left-most) level of respiration. The structuring of speech is based on breath groups (Lieberman, 1966, 1967), which are based on rhythmic periodicities in the patterns of airflow from the lungs. Breath groups are not constrained by respiration alone, but are constrained by factors deriving from all levels of the integrative hierarchy proposed above. In the final analysis, breath groups are constrained by the linguistic structure that is enacted by the linguistically shaped actions of the respiratory-phonatory-articula tory-informational system, including temporal features such as breath group duration, inter-breath group pause, and inspiratory duration (Wang et al., 2010: 298). The right-most layer of the hierarchy (articulation) is the most highly specified, the least general: The constraints are those specific to linguistically shaped vocal tract action. The final output event specifies information about all of the phases in the cycle that constituted it. I should also mention that the cycle of events described here is also entrained to larger-scale cultural pattern in the form of the phonological, lexicogrammatical, and semantic routines and conventions of a particular community of speaker-hearers. As I shall show later, these refer to second-order cultural pattern to which person-organisms orient and are entrained in their dialogically co-ordinated languaging and entail a further cycle of stratification (double articulation). The events discussed here on the other hand belong to the first-order languaging in which person-organisms participate. Table 2.2 can be explained as follows. The reader should start with the source event in the bottom row of Table 2.2 and read upwards to follow the discussion in this paragraph of Table 2.2. Starting from the source event (phonatory substance) in the bottom row, the respiratory system provides the raw material in the form of an aerodynamic source of energy based on airflow from the lungs. With a first articulation (phonatory form), airflow from the lungs passes across the vocal folds, causing the quasiperiodic opening and closing of the vocal folds to yield a fundamental frequency (F0) spectrum generated by the airflow across the vocal folds. The varying fundamental frequency spectrum of the glottal airflow constitutes a first articulation of the aerodynamic flow of air from the lungs. The quasiperiodic opening and closing of the vocal folds thus generate voice. With a second articulation (vocal tract form), the filter function of the supralaryngeal vocal tract establishes the formant frequencies through the reshaping and deformation of the vocal tract caused by co-articulated constriction actions of some subset of the articulators. With the output event (vocal tract substance), the acoustic and optical information specifies an articulatory event (a speaker’s vocal tract action embedded in a moving craniofacial system mounted on top of a moving body) that is detected as a pattern of contrasts in the ambient energy array by the listener. Figure 2.11 shows the stratification of the fundamental frequencies of the source event into its formant frequencies and their re-stratification as a pattern

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Figure 2.11 Double articulation of vocal tract gesture, showing the stratification of the fundamental frequencies of the source event into its formant frequencies and their re-stratification as a pattern of contrasts in the acoustic array. [Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vocal_folds-speaking_201611 (vibrating vocal folds); https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c /cc/Source-filter_model_diagram (source filer); downloaded 13 July 2020.]

of contrasts in the acoustic array that carries linguistically significant information about the speaker’s vocal tract shape—the linguistically structured vocal tract gesture—that caused the perceived disturbance of the array. Co-articulated constriction actions of the articulators can be flexibly and rapidly adjusted to form a large variety of shapes, i.e., vocal tract linguistic actions (phonetic gestures). The co-articulation of the articulators over the course of its temporal trajectory configures a continually changing, time-extended shape for the vocal tract that results in a continually changing acoustic medium. Person-organisms in the course of their development, starting with the affective synchronisation of neural and bodily dynamics between infants and their

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caregivers (Bråten, 2007; Trevarthen, 1998), learn to constrain the flows of matter, energy, and information between person-organisms in dialogically coordinated interactivity (Section 6). Starting with the intake of air into the lungs required for vocalising, the developing person-organism learns to constrain the flow and to convert it into socially and cognitively useful interactive work. Person-organisms, I suggested above, are complex integrations of substances, surfaces, and media that progressively differentiate and become more complex in development. We have seen how the complex interactions between the flow of air and the vocal folds set up quasi-periodic oscillations of the vocal folds capable of producing very complex, fine-grained discriminations of the fundamental frequency spectrum in the production of voice. Co-articulated actions of the articulators in the vocal tract likewise produce many fine-grained kineticsensory distinctions. These observations point to the impossibility of distinguishing in any scientifically meaningful way two distinct realms of substance and form, matter and information. The substances, surfaces, and media that are integrated in the selfconstruction of organisms, including the activities of the respiratory-phonator y-laryngeal-supralaryngeal system in human speech, are, objectively speaking, informational. Reality is not divided into inert substance and information. The biophysical dynamics of the respiratory-phonatory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal system just are informational. On the scale of the human body, and for our particular purposes, the respiratory-phonatory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal system, we can say that distinctive, irreducibly dynamical real patterns exist that make available information—information that person-organisms organise and rationalise in terms of folk-theoretical constructs that help to make the living of human life predictable and manageable (Vol. II, Chapter 4). The language sciences qua special sciences tend to be organised by “notionalworld principles” (Ladyman & Ross et al., 2007: 298–299) like agency, causation, gender, action, etc., that people use to make sense of their everyday commonsense world and which linguists, often with remarkably little distance from the folk-theories, evoke in their own analyses and explanations. This means that the subject matter of linguistics all too often becomes the notional principles rather than the real patterns. According to a long tradition dating back at least to the ancient Greek grammarians, the notional principles were reified as abstract forms that made no reference to the modal properties of the material processes of which they are a particular organisation. Supposedly inert and lifeless matter simply served as the substrate that carried the forms, so conceived, rather than being the generative source of the forms and their powers (Molnar, 1999, 2003). However, the tracking of lexicogrammatical pattern, for example, is an instance of the study of a distinctive local reality where “distinctive, irreducibly dynamical real patterns are manifest” (Ladyman & Ross et al., 2007: 299). The respiratory-phonatory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal system is a local reality on a particular set of scales that manifests distinctive, irreducibly dynamical real patterns of a biophysical nature. Furthermore, these patterns of process have real powers. Intrinsic properties of the substances, surfaces, and media non-exhaustively include:

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(1) the gelatinous properties of the lamina propria; (2) the predominance of Type II muscle fibres and the regional heterogeneity of the tongue; (3) the capacity of the tissue of the vocal folds to sustain different modes or registers of vibration (modal, pulse, falsetto); (4) the capacity for the pressure of the medium of the air to be modified to produce increases or decreases in acoustic energy (measured in decibels); (5) modulation of subglottal air flow to increase or decrease intensity; and (6) changing the tension, length, and mass of the crocothyroid and thyrovocalis muscles though elongation in order to stretch and tense the vocal folds in order to change pitch. This small sample of the intrinsic properties of the substances, surfaces, and the media that constitutes the respiratory-phonatory-articulatory-informational system serves to show that these macroscopic substances, surfaces, and media possess intrinsic powers that are manifested in the dynamical behaviour of the respiratory-phonatory-articulatory-informational system and its components. Rather than saying that the macroscopic substances, surfaces, and the media of this system are the causal base of functional dispositions, we see that their intrinsic properties just are their irreducible potential for behaving in certain ways. The behaviour of the bearer of a disposition, quite simply, is the manifestation of that disposition (Molnar, 1999: 15; 2003). Over the individual person’s life trajectory early stages of development are embedded in and are re-organised by later ones. Vocal tract routines become entrenched and persist over longer timescales. However, other constraints come into play in the case of conscious and deliberate selection. Consider, for example, creaky voice. While there are many possible reasons for creaky voice, recent sociolinguistic research shows that creaky voice may play a role in consciously selected repertoires of status, affect, gender, and social persona displays (see Mendoza-Denton, 2011). Moreover, speakers may wilfully play with the pitch range of amodal phonation—falsetto at the top, creaky voice at the bottom—in order to create a “gay diva” persona (Podevsa, 2007). The voice is a playful and creative assemblage of displayed vocal features that project the speaker’s interactional persona. Mendoza-Denton documents a subtle analysis of voice dynamics in a young woman’s narrative to show how vocal creak plays a role in a local economy of affect centred on playing the persona of “tough girl” in Chicano gangs, i.e., staying silent, being hard of heart, and toughened by experience. In this case, the young woman’s amodal phonation is constrained by multiple repeated iterations of non-linear feedback loops that operate within and across diverse time scales. These iterations include for example the previously mentioned local economy of affect, the desire to project a “hardcore self,” the pain and danger of her everyday life, and the concomitant need to manage one’s feelings and emotions (MendozaDenton, 2011: 269–270). In this case, creak is part of an anti-language (Halliday, 1976). It is a hardcore, “modality of voice that hints at turbulence and unruliness in the pitch range” (Mendoza-Denton, 2011: 270). Creaky voice in this example is a selection from among a repertory of possibilities that serves in the recursive self-maintenance of a hardcore gang persona. What it means to be and to enact such a persona is a property of multi-scalar system dynamics (see above). For example, Mendoza-Denton

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(2011: 270–272) refers to temporally extended intertextual formations that feature creaky voice in raps and in Kid Frost’s songs about Chicano gang life and which connect to the use of creak in the young woman in Mendoza-Denton’s ethnographic study. The value of Mendoza-Denton’s study for present purposes lies in the way that it shows how microtemporal aspects of voice dynamics such as phonation on level n – 1 play a role in voicing the identity of the speaker in her languaging on level n at the same time that she orients to larger-scale ecosocial constraints, values, and meaning flows on level n + 1 that define a Chicano gang subculture, its anti-language, and gendered identities and social roles. The vertical coupling of different timescales on account of the feedback processes within and between scalar levels makes this possible. Vertical coupling means, for example, that microtemporal features of voice dynamics such as creaky voice on their timescale are not seen as random fluctuations, as seen, say, from the viewpoint of the cultural timescale or some intermediate social-ecological scale. Instead, they are coupled to events on longer, slower cultural time-scales (amongst others). Bio-feedback processes in complex biocultural systems such as in languaging are vertically coupled on many different timescales, e.g., those stipulated above, taking in the neural to the cultural. As Van Orden and Holden (2002: 94) point out, this leads to the emergence of “fractal patterns of long-range correlation,” e.g., between the neural, bodily, and cultural time-scales, or between intentional semantic contents of utterances of individual persons and the lexicogrammatical constraints emanating from the cultural scale. As the discussion of voice creak shows, microtemporal features of phonation have the capacity to indicate possible interactions with the relevant environment. In this sense, they constitute anticipations of possible interaction outcomes. The voice dynamics that are salient in a given population or subculture serve this function because they differentiate the environment in relation to the agent’s valuerealising activities. In the first instance, this means that they have the functional capacity to achieve mutual attunement between speakers. Importantly, this shows more clearly why vocal dynamics have value for agents in their worlds—not because they participate in an abstract play of differential oppositions between phonemes, but because they are positive and productive differentiators (Deleuze, 2004/1968: 254–256) whereby agents affect others and are affected by them. Their value resides in the fact that languaging agents are highly attuned to the vocal and other bodily dynamics of other persons. Moreover, specific dynamical properties can directly affect interaction outcomes by amplifying or inhibiting the responses of others. It is my contention that a positive relationship between these real patterns and the notional principles can be found such that the explanatory gap can be narrowed. This is probably a long-term goal. However, recognising that no principled distinction between material dynamics and information can be upheld on metaphysical grounds is a necessary starting point for achieving this goal. The particular organised patterns of process that we call lexicogrammatical pattern (wordings) and that we have learned to attend to and discriminate in each other’s talk in ways that are relevant to our activity and awareness and which constrain

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our ongoing management of situations are manifestations of the modal properties of the real patterns themselves. The dynamical real patterns of the respiratory-pho natory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal system that are manifested in human languaging activity have modal properties (e.g., possibilities) that are actualised in and associated with particular organisations of the real patterns mentioned above. That is, the intrinsic possibilities of particular arrangements of real patterns that are actualised in languaging activity between person-organisms are culturally significant organisations of process that affect person-organisms like ourselves on the particular set of scales on which human becomings live their lives. Living systems are not open dynamic systems by chance. They are open dynamic systems out of ontological necessity. Living systems are constituted as organisations of process that maintain and sensitise their thermodynamic farfrom-equilibrium conditions to changing environmental conditions. Persons are intentional systems whose normativity, including their languaging, arises out of this necessity to attune to, to maintain, to obtain, and use the matter, energy, and information flows and gradients that are necessary for their existence. As we saw in Volume I, Chapter 1, the normativity of human languaging is founded on the value gradients that are set up between person-organisms in their dialogically coordinated languaging.

9. The Systemic Relationality of Human Biocultural Becomings We have seen in earlier sections that the organism-person has been defined in different ways. These include: 1. According to orthodox Neo-Darwinist biology, the person-organism is a discrete individual that belongs to a population of other individuals, all of which are linked as members of the same population by their sharing some biological relation (e.g., belonging to the same species, sharing the same gene pool). On this view, the organism is an unproblematic individual defined as an organic totality whose confines are defined by the permeable membrane of the skin; 2. The gene-centred view in effect deconstructs the idea of an unproblematic individual interacting with its environment. This view assumes, in its different versions, that genes or genomes, not organisms, are central, and that the human organism, say, is controlled by either genes competing with each other for replication (Dawkins, 1976), or by whole genotypes, which are the source of variability (Lewontin, 1992). Interaction is between genes or genotypes and environments, not between organisms and environments; 3. The person-organism is in fact a superorganism, defined as an ecosystem or community of interacting microbial life forms and human cells. This is another kind of deconstruction of the Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy. In this case, superorganisms such as Homo sapiens are more like societies or ecosystems organised as meshworks rather than hierarchically organised organic totalities;

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4. The person-organism is a dense, self-referential knotting of many interwoven threads that develops along its ontogenetic trajectory and also extends outwards from a “centre of indetermination” and its viewpoints to become entangled with other such “centres of indetermination” and their viewpoints in the constitution of shared inter-worlds between persons. According to the standard view in Western ontology, the organism has clear physical boundaries defined by the outer surfaces of its body. This view has been subjected to increasing questioning, and more recently it has been partly supplanted by a new ontology of the body itself as extended, permeable, and entangled with its environment. Ingold (2013, 2014) has developed what he calls “relational thinking,” which views the organism “not as a discrete pre-specified entity but as a particular locus of growth and development within a continuous field of relationships”. Ingold stresses that this field of relationships “unfolds in the life activities of organisms and that is enfolded in their specific morphologies” (Ingold, 2004: 219). Central to Ingold’s formulation, as we saw above, is that persons are biosocial becomings; that is, they incorporate the processes of unfolding and enfolding that enact and define their relationality with their environments. Vaisman (2013: 113), in responding positively to Ingold, also seeks to go further. She argues for the need to re-think the idea of the organism as a physically bounded entity. In discussing a ruling of the Supreme Court in Argentina concerning the use of an individual’s shed-DNA that led to a raid on the individual’s house to obtain samples of shed-DNA in order to determine the individual’s biological identity, Vaisman uses this case to ask us to reconsider the physical boundaries of the person. I now briefly discuss three examples to illustrate and develop Vaisman’s argument. The first of these is the case analysed by Vaisman. The ambiguity of the situation described by Vaisman lies in the way shed-DNA can be viewed both as a part of the individual’s body and as a separate entity that has legal value (Vaisman, 2013: 112). Vaisman writes: “it may be that we need to think of the human not only as organism-human but as an assemblage of environment-organism-human: a human whose boundaries are always open to the world and whose existence is enmeshed with its surroundings” (2013: 113). An analogous situation arises in the case of the linguistically shaped respirator y-phonatory-articulatory-informational events that I discussed in the previous section. Spoken utterances are bodily events that extend person-organisms and their agency across multiple timescales. By the same token, they are cultural artefacts that can be recorded, transcribed, witnessed, repeated, and otherwise detached from the bodies of the person-organisms who produced them and appropriated by other person-organisms and social institutions. A person’s utterance-activity can also, like the case of shed-DNA analysed by Vaisman, have legal value. The individual, Guillermo Gabriel Prieto, in the case discussed by Vaisman, argued in court that the DNA material found on personal objects in his home belonged to him and should be protected from state intervention (Vaisman, 2013: 113). The basis of his claim, as Vaisman reports, was that biological material, whether inside or outside the body, is the exclusive property of the individual and that only

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the individual person has rights of ownership over it. However, the Argentine court took the view that the ownership question was not decisive; rather, the information that the biological material provided about the individual person was, for the court, the crux of the issue. It is, of course, entirely routine for courts to use samples of a person’s languaging activity—spoken and written—for the purpose of obtaining or making use of information about that person. A call by a Melbourne IT academic for Australian defence personnel to erase their online lives on all digital networks—Facebook, Google, iTunes, Twitter, etc.—for the duration of their employment by the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) (Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August 2015) highlights further interesting aspects of the same problematic raised by Vaisman. (See www.smh .com.au/it-pro/government-it/public-servants-should-get-off-social-media-warni ng-after-islamic-state-hack-20150814-giz3vn.html.) The academic’s call was in response to a widely publicised case of Islamic State posting online a so-called “hit list” of personal information about Australian Defence Force employees (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 2015). (See www.smh.com.au/national/i slamic-state-posts-australian-hit-list-after-hacking-addresses-mobile-numbers-20 150812-gixrmz.html). The information was allegedly obtained by Islamic State hackers of the AFDA website. This case provides a further perspective on the same problematic and again raises the question: What are the physical boundaries of the person? If our online profiles, etc., provide information about the individual person that can also be obtained from a direct encounter with that person, then it may be that this too is grounds for upholding the view that the human is best defined and understood not as a discrete entity, the skin-bound body, but as an assemblage of environment-organism-human in the way Vaisman suggests. In my view, we can go still further. To do so, we need to think outside and beyond the idea of boundaries no matter how porous or permeable we may envisage them to be. Boundaries are themselves punctuations, to use a Batesonian turn of phrase, of more complex systemic relations (Bateson, 1973: 136, 263, 269). They are always imposed by someone, somewhere, for some purpose. They may be useful for those limited purposes, but they impose limitations on how we think about the systemic relationality of living systems. Instead, I argue that organism-person-environment relationality can be seen as open-ended assemblages of substances, surfaces, and media. We have seen above that linguistically shaped voicing is a cultural sculpting of (1) the substances of the coupling of respiratory system, the laryngeal system, and the supralaryngeal articulatory system; (2) the surfaces where interactivity with the medium takes place in the form of, for example, the interactivity between the oscillating vocal folds in the production of voice and the air flow that is forced through them, or the interactivity of co-articulated actions of the articulators with the medium of air; and (3) the restructuring of the medium as acoustically, optically, etc., structured arrays of contrasts in environmental energy fields that are propagated through the medium as light waves or mechanical energy (Reed, 1996b: 51). Moreover, we have seen in the case of the combined respiratory-laryngealsupralaryngeal articulatory system that the substances, surfaces, and the media

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that comprise this system are in large measure located within the physical boundaries of the organism, seen as a discrete, bounded physical entity. By the same token, these substances, surfaces, and media interact with the constant inflow and outflow of the medium of air that is both within the organism (e.g., in the lungs or in the larynx) and without the organism in the surrounding atmosphere. Furthermore, there is no distinct boundary between the two. Rather, there is a continuous flow that is grounded in and modulated in the first instance by the continuous process of respiration (Table 2.2). We have also considered how it is that the co-articulation of the substances, surfaces, and media of the combined respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system yields linguistically structured vocal tract actions. In a very concrete sense, languaging is a bioculturally organised assemblage of materials and energy flows resulting from the co-articulation of substances, surfaces, and media that cuts across the distinction between the “inner” and “outer” domains of the organism. This is so because the substances, surfaces, and media of the organism make contact with, interact with, and interpenetrate those in the environment. The medium of air, for instance, exists both inside and outside the organism and thus interpenetrates both. The idea of the superorganism discussed in Section 1 also showed that the “inside” of the organism is constituted out of a heterogeneity of microbial life forms that is incommensurate with the distinction between “inside” and “outside.” After all, 90% of the life forms making up the human organism are nonhuman constituents of the human superorganism. The person-organism is thus constituted out of both endogenous and exogenous factors. Moreover, the person-organism leaves traces of itself in its environment, as discussed above. Shed-DNA, traces of our languaging activity, and of our online activity are all generated by the person-organism’s dynamics in concert with environmental dynamics. Moreover, the traces that are deposited in the environment can be taken as information about the organism. They can also be incorporated into the dynamics of other person-organisms. For example, person-organisms incorporate to their endogenous dynamics the voices and voice dynamics of other person-organisms with whom they enter into particular relationships and their histories. Persons “reenvoice” in their own voice the voices of others (Dore, 1989; Thibault, 2004a: chap. 5). The exogenous dynamics of others interpenetrate the person-organism and may play a formative role in the growth and development of the person. By the same token, person-organisms are agents with the capacity to take stances on and to reject or resist those voices that do not correspond to the patterns they usually interact with or that do not conform to the value systems of the person-organism (see Vol. I, Chapter 1). The co-articulation of the substances, surfaces, and media of the combined respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system described above also eliminates the idea that spoken language is composed of sound particles that are propagated through the acoustic medium from a speaker to a listener, each defined by their respective endogenous dynamics. The production of linguistically shaped actions of the combined respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system is an assemblage of substances, surfaces, and media that cuts across the distinction

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between the discrete, bounded organism and its surrounding, encompassing environment and shows it to be a fluid zone of interpenetration. Surfaces, rather than being the permeable boundaries that delimit and separate, are enmeshed with and are inseparable from the substances, surfaces, and media of the world. The physical organism is not a discrete, bounded individual entity, but a historically formed assemblage of substances, surfaces, and media that affects and is affected by other such assemblages and with which it forms larger-scale assemblages at the same time that it is constituted out of smaller-scale ones. By the same token, organism-persons are, as Bergson argued, “centres of indetermination” whose systemic relationality needs to be understood and studied in a wider context that than of the skin-bound organism per se. This does not mean, however, that the distinction between the person-organism and the environment has now been dissolved. The three cases I have discussed above point to the systemic relationality of human becomings and hence the need to study this systemic relationality in the appropriate context and with the appropriate theoretical and analytical tools. However, this does not mean that organisms are now reductively seen as haphazard intersections of media, substances, and surfaces that render them indistinguishable for the rest of the world and therefore inconsequential. My use of Bergson’s term “centres of indetermination” suggests that organism-persons are especially dense repositories or concentrations of matter, energy, and information that operate from the viewpoints that have accrued to them along their developmental trajectories. To adapt a turn of phrase used by Ingold, I would say that organisms are particular, extremely dense and historically in-formed and developed enfoldings, knottings, or weavings of substances, surfaces, and media and the flows of matter and energy that the interactivity between these generate as they incorporate themselves into other organisms and incorporate other organisms into themselves both “above,” “alongside,” and “below” the individual. The three examples I have discussed above show that the organism-person system and its identity is not limited to the confines of the skin-bound organism, but extends into the environment via the medium that couples bodies to each other, is entangled with the substances of other bodies, both human and nonhuman, and deposits traces of its own activity on the surfaces of the environment, including other person-organisms. The coupling of person-organisms to each other that the media afford also means that organism-persons incorporate themselves into other organism-persons just as they are themselves incorporated by others in the course of their co-constitution, co-development, and co-evolution.

10. The Organism-Person: Re-Thinking Endogenous and Exogenous Dynamics We saw in this chapter that the organism-person does not result from the progressive unfolding of its inner essence into ever more differentiated and specialised forms that are coded in the organism’s genome. On this genome-centred view, the task of the immune system is to defend the integrity of the endogenous constituents that comprise the organism against invasive exogenous elements belonging to the domain of the non-self. The organism is defined in terms of its endogenous

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constituents, which arise from within the organism and are the product of its genome. The organism and its constituents are defined against what belongs outside the organism and cannot be part of the definition of the organism. According to this view, the immune system functions to defend the organism from attack by exogenous elements that do not originate in the inside of the organism. Ellis and Toronchuk (2005) maintain this distinction between self and non-self without clarifying that the self is in fact an ongoing enfolding to its endogenous dynamics of the dynamics of the many non-selves that it encounters in the living of life. Recent work in immunology shows that the distinction between self and non-self that is founded on the distinction between endogenous and exogenous elements is in need of revision. Organism-persons consist of both endogenous and exogenous elements that coexist in various kinds of symbiotic relationship. According to this new view, an immune response is not based on the difference between exogenous and endogenous elements. Instead, an immune response takes place when the antigens with which the immune receptors interact are different from those with which they usually interact. An immune response is, therefore, triggered by the sudden appearance of highly unusual epitopes, i.e., epitopes that are highly differentiated from those with which the immune receptors typically interact and which remain the same over extended time frames. The criterion of unusuality is not an all-or-nothing matter. It is an intensive proto-modal difference. The immune receptors, in responding to the difference between themselves and the antigens, also take into account the following factors: (1) the quantities of the antigen: Very small quantities do not trigger an immune response; (2) the degree of the molecular difference between the new antigen and those with which the immune receptors typically interact; and (3) the speed of appearance of the unusual antigenic pattern: A progressive introduction of an antigen to an organism may lead to tolerance rather than destruction of the antigen. An immune response therefore requires a strong difference according to: (1) the quantity of the antigen; (2) its molecular difference with respect to the usual antigens; and (3) the speed of antigenic modification (see Pradeu & Carosella, 2006: 17859–17860). These three factors suggest that an immune response constitutes a primitive proto-modal evaluation by the immune receptors of the antigen that organises a response to the presence of the antigen. For example, determining the usuality of an antigen can be likened to a very primitive form of proto-modal evaluation that can be placed on a graded scale ranging from “usual” to “unusual.” If the presence of a particular antigen registers as unusual, this proto-modal evaluation serves to organise an action response by the immune system. I use the term protomodal to indicate the vague, less specified precursors of the lexicogrammar and semantics of modality in second-order language. Moreover, the persistence and cohesiveness of the organism as a “centre of indetermination” are not based on the maintaining and defending of the difference between endogenous and exogenous elements. Organisms are like societies consisting of both endogenous and exogenous elements and the symbiotic relations between them. The immune system does not discriminate on this basis.

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Analogously, the person is not constituted on the basis of its endogenous elements, belonging to its “inside,” and exogenous elements, originating from its “outside.” Persons are constituted through processes of co-construction and codevelopment that are concerted, not always harmoniously, with other persons. We envoice and re-envoice others’ voices and the melodies and tones of their voices, etc., as our own voices, as the analysis in Section 6 above showed. Instead of the maturation of a language organ that belongs to the endogenous dynamics of the person-organism under the control of the genome, person-organisms consist of symbiotic relations between many different voices and their associated values that have been appropriated from the impersonal matter, energy, and information flows and integrated to the perspective of the self. Moreover, person-organisms habitually interact with and therefore envoice to their own perspective a particular set of voices that may vary relatively slowly over extended time frames and constitute the background or usual (habitual) subjectivity of the person. Person-organisms assemble from various sources others’ voices, including their qualities such as melody, degree of intensity, speed, etc., and assemble them into a whole. Voices are sub-personal components of the whole that are appropriated to the perspective of the person in the constitution of that person’s subjectivity. The person is stabilised over time as an assemblage consisting of a typical or usual configuration of voices that changes only slowly and which defines and maintains the boundaries of the subject over time. Habit synthesises past and present in anticipation of possible futures. The habitual activation of a particular voice and its axiological stance on other voices can therefore be relied upon to yield a similar result in the future. Habit ensures that a stable subjectivity has the capacity to accommodate and to tolerate within certain parameters that may be discovered a range of voices and their associated axiological stances that are in some sense “alien” to the self though without necessarily provoking rejection. Our subjectivity can accommodate interactions with a wide range of exogenous voices to its self-perspective without seeking to eliminate or neutralise them. On the other hand, the sudden appearance of voices that run counter to the expectations of the habitually stabilised relations between voices that constitute a person’s subjectivity may threaten to destabilise that subjectivity. Their strong differentiation from the habitual patterns and their potential for undoing the habitual co-articulations of voices have the capacity to provoke a strong reaction of rejection or closure when the “alien word,” as Bakhtin (1984/1929) called it, interacts with and perturbs the subject’s habitual configurations of voices. Such responses do not necessarily or automatically follow from the presence of an alien voice. However, when a certain critical threshold is crossed, e.g., when the quantity, speed, or intensity of the intrusion of the alien voice reaches a critical threshold, this may induce a negative response such as rejection, closure, or flight, as distinct from positive responses such as acceptance, openness, and play. In conclusion, this chapter is very much focused on bottom-up or lower-scalar bodily dynamics—how we go from n – 1 to n level processes. The role of higherscalar n + 1 processes will gradually be filled in in the chapters that follow in both Volumes I and II.

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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1820 Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen? Ach gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwas Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die nicht weiterschwingt,wenn deineTiefen schwingen. Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich, nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich, der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht. Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt? Und welcher Spieler hat uns in der Hand? O süßes Lied. Rainer Maria Rilke, Liebeslied (“Love Song”) [http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/rainer-maria-rilke-gedichte-831/80]; published in Neue Gedichte, 1907

first

If interactants experience positive tone setting in their interaction with each other, their mutual relation over time is likely to develop an evenly relaxed tone which will, all things being equal, carry over from one interaction to the next: when we talk of positive affect, what we really mean is that the mutual interactive history of those interactants has hitherto not given rise to any significant anticipation of conflict or strain. Ruqaiya Hasan, Speaking with reference to context, 2016/1999, p. 284

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1. Languaging within the Ethiosphere “Language” has been viewed as a “tool” or a “resource” whereby the human actors who use this tool or resource convert a meaningless external world into the categories of human society and cognition, or through which they exchange information and goods and services. Similarly, the idea of language as a code for packaging and transmitting abstract content between persons across the Cartesian space between separate minds encased in their separate bodies is cut from the same rationalist cloth. These ideas, I submit, are no longer fit for purpose. “Language” in this rationalist view was the basis of the human capacity to transcend the natural world and to inhabit a symbolic order of culture and “discourse” that freed humans from the necessity of the external world of nature. Language was the symbol par excellence of human exceptionalism according to which humans existed at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree. Languaging, according to the new view, is a primary human means of engendering, nurturing, and caring for the relations that bring together all of the agents and agencies—human and nonhuman—that inhabit the terrestrial ethiosphere (Stuart, 2010) which we humans inhabit in relations of community and reciprocity with all the other agents and agencies—atmospheric, geological, biological, social—that dwell in and constitute the ethiosphere together with us humans. These agents and agencies are not simply the external backdrops—the external environment—of developmental and evolutionary processes. As biologist Vilmos Csányi (1998: 4) argues, it is not a question of how a changed environment formed some species, but how all of these factors are themselves changing. These agents and agencies are themselves internal to the processes of the larger system that Csányi refers to as the “biosphere.” The term “biosphere” points to the systemic character of the living world. I prefer the term “ethiosphere” because in a system-internal perspective evolution is semiotic (Prodi, 1977, 1987; Salthe, 1993). For example, all of the agents and agencies mentioned above are not external to us. They coevolve with us and are enfolded into us. Such a perspective must therefore take into account the observer and the observer’s perspectives and decisions (Vol. I, Introduction, section 1). The ethiosphere—Susan Stuart’s (2010) term—constitutes a decisive turn away from the idea that human freedom and agency are exercised against the backdrop of an inert and meaningless material world that constitutes the raw materials that are converted into the products of human invention. Saussure’s idea of a world of amorphous and inert “sound” and “thought” that is converted into the phonic and conceptual categories of a given language system fits into this paradigm (Saussure, 1971/1915: 155–156; Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 4). Persons in the Saussurean view exercise their “will and intelligence” (Saussure, 1971/1915: 30–31; Thibault, 1997: 24–25) in relation to a negatively defined system of differences—la langue—that provides no ontological grounding in the life of a community and its history. The ethiosphere, as I conceptualise it, situates individual persons and their languaging in relation not only to each other in relations of community and reciprocity, but also in relation to the longer timescales of the

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cultural-historical processes that constitute the collective learning process of the human species. There are no value-free facts “out there” waiting to be discovered and then assigned their value. The externalist perspective is based on the idea that there exists independently of human values a world of valueless matter. However, the fact that something exists or not is an impersonal value. Contrary to Saussure’s conception that the human mind imposes the values—the phonic and conceptual terms—of la langue on an inert and meaningless world, a process-ontological perspective holds that the world that we perceive, act on, talk about, and so on, grows out of and is an extension of feeling and desire. To quote Brown (2005: 29), the mind “distributes its own intrinsic feeling into the objects it creates.” The transition from core self to its objects in the world is not an external relation between subject and object, but a partitioning and co-articulation of the self’s own valuations as feeling that is derived into the world together with the object (Brown, 2005: 30). As Brown points out, there is a phasal shift from within the self that transitions from subjective drive and desire to objective value. Objective values are those which are crystallised and sedimented over time as “facts” by social consensus, convention, and tradition. They are an aspect of the cultural-historical learning process mentioned above. The Cartesian split between a subjective internal world and an objective external one treats mental contents—desires, percepts, thoughts, memories, etc.—as entities that can be described objectively, whereas in fact they are the terminal phases of antecedent processes of formation that have their unconscious origins in feeling and value. The melodies of our moving with others in the world are from the outset infused with conceptual feeling tone and value. Concept and feeling are not separate, but are fused at all stages of the derivation of a melody. The body’s melodies arise in the core self and are directed outward as melodies of movement and the actions that these melodies underpin and sustain. The body’s melodies of movement are informed and modulated by intrinsic affect, motive, and purpose (Russell, 2005). Melodies of movement are shaped by social activities and practices. Social activities and practices, which affect others, are regulated by institutional norms and cultural dynamics. The latter are in turn regulated by the system-internal processes of the entire living ethiosphere (see Figure 3.1). The melodies of languaging are based on a very different bio-logic with respect to the modernist view outlined above. The kinetic melodies of languaging are based on a bio-logic of co-dependency and relationality. They are the means of bringing forth, nurturing, and sustaining the relations and hence the values between all the agents and agencies—human and nonhuman—with which we cohabit the ethiosphere in relations of co-dependency. Rather than “representing” a detached external world, they are the means whereby the agents and agencies referred to above become enfolded with each other in complex “zones of interpenetration” (Vol. I, Chapter 2) that belie the hallowed modernist notion of a stable and inert world of external matter that is the material setting for our modernist

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ethiosphere social institutions and practises action-perception sensory-kinetic melodies languaging [SOCIETY] intrinsic motive, purpose, choice conceptual feeling, value [PSYCHOLOGY] unconscious core (character)

Figure 3.1 The subjective and objective poles of the derivation of conduct from character, seen as a derivational sequence of subjective phases originating in the core self and transitioning to the impersonal values of the ethiosphere.

fantasies of economic production and growth. Instead, the idea of the ethiosphere recognises the fundamentally intertwined and co-dependent character of our relations with all the other agents and agencies with which humans must co-inhabit in the ethiosphere. The notion of the ethiosphere requires us to re-think what it means to be human and the place of humans in relation to the other agents and agencies that inhabit the ethiosphere. Such a re-thinking also requires a re-thinking of the idea of “language” as that which places the human in a cultural world that stands over and above the natural world, seen as the inert and indifferent setting of human endeavour (Ingold, 2013). Living organisms can be neither explained as nor reduced to aggregates of small-sized particles or entities and their properties. They are dynamic open far-from-equilibrium systems (Vol. I, Chapter 1) and therefore they are organisations of process and process flows rather than aggregates of thing-like entities or particles. The melodies of the body are an expression of the process-based ontology that is informed by this understanding. Rather than things, the world that we inhabit is made up of organisations of process, process flows, and interactions between process flows on many different scales of time and space. Flow therefore is a fundamental concept in this ontology (Vol. I, Chapter 2). The concept of melody with respect to our being-with, our living-with, and our moving-with the world with the movement of our body’s sensori-kinetic melodies is an expression of this ontology. Melodies of movement are organised flows of process in ways that I discuss below. The important question here is to get the ontology—the metaphysic—right. Bergson (1950/1889: 111) understood the essentially melodic

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character of experience as a qualitative or intensive synthesis of our movement in the world and how the world affects the body: We generally say that a movement takes place in space, and when we assert that motion is homogeneous and divisible, it is of the space traversed that we are thinking, as if it were interchangeable with the motion itself. Now, if we reflect further, we shall see that the successive positions of the moving body really do occupy space, but that the process by which it passes from one position to the other, a process which occupies duration and which has no reality except for a conscious spectator, eludes space. We have to do here not with an object but with a progress: motion, in so far as it is a passage from one point to another, is a mental synthesis, a psychic and therefore unextended process. Space contains only parts of space, and at whatever point of space we consider the moving body, we shall get only a position. If consciousness is aware of anything more than positions, the reason is that it keeps the successive positions in mind and synthesizes them. But how does it carry out a synthesis of this kind? It cannot be by a fresh setting out of these same positions in a homogeneous medium, for a fresh synthesis would be necessary to connect the positions with one another, and so on indefinitely. We are thus compelled to admit that we have here to do with a synthesis which is, so to speak, qualitative, a gradual organization of our successive sensations, a unity resembling that of a phrase in a melody. This is just the idea of motion which we form when we think of it by itself, when, so to speak, from motion we extract mobility. (Bergson, 1950/1889: 110–111) Reflecting further with Bergson, a melody is a dynamic, continuous movement in which each “note,” interval, or “successive sensation” interpenetrates each succeeding one and grows out of the prior one. A melody is a temporally indivisible flow; it does not consist of component parts or states that define discrete instants in time that come into and then go out of existence relative to some timescale. Instead, each “note” in the melody coalesces with the other notes in the formation of a temporal continuity that is perhaps best described as a non-differentiable movement-in-time defined by quality and duration. Melody is fractal, not segmental. It occurs on many different temporal scales. The pre-conceptual enkinaesthetic melodies experienced in first-order languaging are conceptually partitioned into discrete conceptual units such as words, phrases, clauses, conversational turns, discourse moves, and so on, seen as discrete, separable units that succeed each other in a sequential arrangement in “discourse.” This partitioning arises as a consequence of the reifications of conceptual thinking and the abstract entities that this imposes on the temporal flow of experience. Such reifications serve to anchor the body in a world of “things” and their motions that we can orient to, act upon, and grasp in perception in order to maintain our grip on the world. Thus, our phenomenology—our experience—of the words and wordings that we perceive, orient to, and are affected by in languaging

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activity are relative to the timescale of the perceived world of the human ecology and its objects and events. The perception of words and wordings in languaging activity is relative to a particular space-time partition that is determined by the hierarchical dynamics of the brain (Brown, 2015; Robbins, 2002: 308). The perception of words and wordings occurs on a slower timescale relative to the faster timescales of the body’s kinetic melodies of movement and the micro-temporal or pico-scale body dynamics of the melodies that underpin and modulate languaging activity (Section 14). Languaging cannot be isolated to just one scale—e.g., the scale of the perception of words and wordings—but is spread over and integrates many scales that define the system as a whole. Languaging is multi-scalar in this sense. It is the coherency of the multi-scalarity of the whole system that defines languaging in relation to the selves who enact it. For this reason, there are no privileged levels. The kinetic melodies that underpin languaging modulate and affect the system as a whole. Experience is scale relative. The kinds of and the range of experiences constituted in and through languaging activity are thus dependent on the brain’s space-time partitioning of the world we live in into a world of common-sense notional objects and events. The ecological scale of languaging therefore supports the qualitative aspects of our experience of the world. The multi-scalarity of languaging therefore is defined as process flows on different scales and the interactions between these process flows. Process flows affect and move each other. One process flow can be affected, regulated, or controlled by another. The intertwined melodies of persons who move with each other and with the world therefore entail a relational ontology of living-with and movingwith. The pre-linguistic melodies of the infant’s movement are not random, but shape and regulate the melodies of the other persons with whom the infant lives in relations of community and reciprocity (Sections 8 and 9 below). Infants have agency. They have a repertoire of capacities for influencing caregivers and making things happen in the caregiver–infant dyad. The melodies of two persons regulate each other when their reciprocal and intertwined neural and bodily dynamics achieve some kind of dynamic equilibrium or harmony (Campbell, 2015: 165). Caregivers also exercise stronger forms of regulation: By their melodies, they seek to control those of the infant. That is, they seek to conform the infant’s melodies to the adult’s desires and goals and to social expectations and norms. Shaping, regulating, and controlling are therefore increasingly stronger forms of influence whereby one person’s melodies exert selection pressures on the melodies of the other, modifying, modulating, and moulding the possibilities that the other person (e.g., the infant) has for developing and thus for moving with the world. These relational dynamics are of course an essential a priori underpinning of all human languaging—and much more—and not just the caregiver–infant dyads mentioned here (see below). According to the relational ontology of languaging that I seek to develop in this study, languaging and the sensory-kinetic melodies of movement that are its foundational underpinning are a means of moving along with and enfolding with the movements of the other agents and agencies—human and nonhuman—with

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which we live in relations of community and reciprocity as we forge common pathways for finding our way in the world and for venturing together into the future. In this sense, the movements of our languaging and its melodies are both a way of dwelling in the ethiosphere and a constant process of growth and becoming that we participate in with all those agents and agencies that are affected by us as we are affected by them. The way we language affects the how of the living of life with all those other agents and agencies that are affected by us as we move along with them. The way we language affects the oceans, the air we breathe, the earth we stand on, the forests we cut down, and so on. These agents and agencies in turn react on and affect us in ways that we can no longer remain indifferent to. They too are lines of life and melodies of movement that are deeply intertwined with the lines of life and the melodies of movement of the agents and agents that we think of as the human. We need therefore to re-think what it means to be human and the role of human languaging in such a re-thinking. Rather than seeing “language” as that supreme instrument that both detaches us from nature and enables us to extend executive control over it, we need to view the processes of languaging as a way of living in and inhabiting the ethiosphere together with all the other agents and agencies with which we are entangled and which, with us humans, have a stake in finding ways of engendering and nurturing ways of moving along together that truly ground us in the agency of the earth systems with which we are deeply and inextricably entangled. The social institution of (second-order) “language” has served to discipline and shape the human habitus and its modes of feeling and etiquette (Elias, 2000/1939). This institution has exercised considerable pedagogical and political power for several millennia. We see the exercise of this power play out in the expansion of globalised English and its homogenising consumerist culture, on the one hand, and the retreat to local identities and languages in reaction to the former tendency, on the other. In both cases, the modernist institution of “language” and its disciplinary functions remains intact. Susan Stuart’s concept of the ethiosphere, on the other hand, currently has no institutionalised or political status. However, it embodies the recognition that we humans and the other agents and agencies—Latour’s (2018/2017) Terrestrials—need to place ourselves under the ethical authority of the ethiosphere. In this way, we can together develop the systemic trust and wisdom essential for the formation of the new social and political institutions and the forms of languaging, their melodies of movement and becoming, their forms of community and reciprocity, that will best enable us humans to cohabit the ethiosphere with those other agents and agencies with which we move along together in the living of our lives. Engagement between humans and between humans and other sentient beings is grounded in biological agency. It is important to develop a clearer view of biological agency and how this, in turn, becomes the forms of social agency and co-agency that define in many different ways the various modes of human relationality and felt being-with the world. Biological agency is grounded in fullbodied sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). Full-bodied sense-making

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allows persons to engage with each other and later to take part in many different kinds of social activities and practices. Humans and other sentient beings alike do things as they are moved/affected by the movements—the whole-body sensemaking—of others. Relationality is grounded in lived sense-making. The body’s melodies and their relational enfolding with those of others—human and nonhuman—are ontologically intrinsic to our grounding in and our being-with the world. The body and its melodies of movement are central to the development of human relationality and agency in ways that I explore in this chapter.

2. The Feeling of Languaging Feeling is the life-animating process that actualises and makes real who we are and what we do. It is the process-experience of our becoming living beings (Brown, 2005: 109). Feeling is the experience we have of our body’s moving, of moving others, and of being moved by other bodies. Living becomings channel energy in determinate directions in pursuit of their purposes as they seek to realise values. The channelling of energy in this way by living forms takes on directionality over a particular time span. When this occurs, as Brown (2005: 107) explains, energy becomes feeling. Feeling arises in and through “sensory-kinetic experience” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2010: 221). Discourse-analytical accounts of human interaction founded on social constructivism and linguistic phenomenalism fail to account for the embodied affective, cognitive, and relational dynamics of languaging. These form-based accounts fail to understand the centrality of the cognitive and affective dynamics of living, moving, and animate bodies to our forms of engagement with the world. They fail to show that when we language our bodies and brains form melodies of movement that are enfolded with the melodies of the up-close geological and biological realities that, increasingly, demonstrate their sensitivity to human actions. The brain itself is an organ of movement that both coordinates the body’s dynamical patterns of movement in the world and anticipates the ways in which the world responds. Languaging is grounded in and inseparable from our sensory-kinetic engagement with the world (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012; Stuart, 2010, 2012; Stuart & Thibault, 2015; Trevarthen, 2009). We do not simply move “in” the world as if the world were the mere container for our actions. Instead, we move with the world that we live in; we move it, and increasingly we are moved by it, as the agency of what Latour (2018/2017) calls the Terrestrial becomes more and more assertive and unruly. Melodies of movement give shape and direction to embodied minds/embrained bodies in ways that determine how the self finds its way in culturally promoted fields of action, awareness, and sensitivity with the other agents and agencies, both human and non-human, with which selves live in relations of community and reciprocity. Selves move with feeling and purpose in a field of action and awareness. The self’s dynamic bodily movements enact sensory-kinetic melodies with distinctive qualities that we can label as “sad,” “happy,” “depressing,” “joyful,” etc., and which therefore have the capacity to affect other selves. The self’s melodies of

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movement therefore constitute indicators of aim, intention, and purpose. They are trajectories of sense-making that implicate the organised point of view of a self. The self’s sensory-kinetic melodies prioritise the relational and the interactive domain over the domain of internal system operations. The relational and interactive domain is a field of action and awareness in which the melodies of selves are relationally and interactively intertwined with other selves and with other nonhuman agents and agencies in relations of community and reciprocity (Stuart, 2010). Discourse-analytical approaches presuppose the predominance of abstract verbal form and, on that basis, they take for granted that which they seek to explain, the act of conversing. In an account of “discourse” based on patternings of verbal abstracta, there is no way to get from felt, sensuous bodily experience to the idea of conversing. Conversing just is rule-bound combinations and sequences of verbal units that form discourse. Discourse “represents” experience or somehow makes experience “meaningful” by means of its patterned arrangements of verbal forms, though what experience is and how it is constituted are neither explained nor explainable by a phenomenology of abstract verbal form. The ability to“represent” what one experiences presupposes the ability to experience without explaining this ability. On the other hand, the ability to experience presupposes that the agent is in possession of the capacities and skills to interactively constitute experience by means of the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of movements that are enacted by the living, feeling body. The question is not how the semantic concepts supposedly encoded in verbal pattern “represent” experience for us as if experience were something at one remove that language detaches us from, but how the concepts themselves are grounded in embodied human interactivity with our world. Instead, shared tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of movement ground human experience, not in shared codes, but in shared bodily morphologies, neurophysiologies, and everyday behaviours. We are sensitive to, perceive, and respond to the feelings and intentions of others on the basis of their movement-based patterns of embodied engagement with their worlds.

3. The Body’s Tactile-Kinaesthetic Melodies Persons are living, animated beings who make sense of their world through movement and the feeling of their bodily movement (Gendlin, 1962; Lemke, 2015; Sheets-Johnstone, 2012; Stuart, 2010, 2012). Cognitive activity is itself grounded in movement. Synergies of movement are what ground our presence in the world. Through these movement synergies, we learn to move others as well as to be moved by others. The body’s sensory-kinetic-kinaesthetic invariants and their transformations underpin the cognitive and affective capacities, abilities, and dispositions of all living forms (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012: 31). These invariants can be modulated in values-realising ways in response to both endogenous and exogenous factors that affect and motivate persons when they engage with their worlds. Specific sensory-kinetic-tactile patterns of movement, thought,

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perception, feeling, and awareness are synthesised in response to both internal and external factors that affect the person. For example, the kinetic-tactile-kinaesthetic invariants that make up the act of embracing another person have properties that make two different performances of this act recognisably of the same kind. However, the dynamical patterning that constitutes any particular act of embracing another person can be qualitatively varied or modulated. My embrace of another person might be brief and perfunctory, or it might be long and tender. These different modulations of the sensory-kinetic-tactile-kinaesthetic invariants of embracing are responsive to and are generated by one’s awareness of situational factors, internal feelings and other states, the degree of acquaintance with the other person, etc. Moreover, the dynamical modulation of the embrace by the two participants responds to and articulates its felt sense for them. The tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of the body are neither in opposition to nor alternative to languaging. The developmental literature shows clearly what comes first. We do not transcend or float free of these melodies whenever we language. Instead, we need to understand the fundamental role of tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of movement as our primary mode of being-with the world and of making sense of it. Moreover, these melodies are the essential a priori underpinning of our languaging (Stuart & Thibault, 2015). The tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of our bodily movement underpin and support our interactivity with our world, e.g., with its objects, situations, and with the other agents and agencies, both human and nonhuman, that we engage with. These melodies are a function of the person’s affective dynamics and the properties and affordances of the particular aspect of the world with which the person engages. They therefore vary according to the relationship between person and environment, the person’s prior experience of the relevant aspect of the environment, and the person’s abilities, beliefs, dispositions, and values. Tactile-kinaesthetic melodies therefore arise through relations in Person-Object-Environment systems that develop over time. Tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of movement have the characteristics set out below. They: 1. Unfold moment by moment and grow as a continuous movement in which each “note” of the melody grows out of each prior note and bestows form and direction on feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and utterances, etc.; 2. Arise from one’s past experience and extend into and anticipate their future development and its embedding in the flow of one’s experience; 3. Are moments of our somato-sensory experience in which many processes are integrated and synthesised; 4. Are evaluative of the moment and can therefore bias action and perception, indicate interest, caring, concern, or curiosity that guides and modulates their flow and shape and the values-realising dynamic that constitutes their aim; 5. Are shaped by past experience: Their possibilities of formation in a given moment are shaped by previously developed abilities, habits, skills, and dispositions, by one’s neurophysiology and bodily morphology, by prior events

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in the flow of one’s melody, by memories, and by aspects of situations and circumstances; 6. Are shaped by the emotions, feelings, and moods of the moment at the same time that the relevance of a particular moment will depend on how it is integrated to the melody overall; 7. Are not wholly constrained by the moment of their inception, but may fluctuate freely as the melody develops; 8. Are articulated, like music and language, into short, continuous tonal units that are divided by pauses (Ball, 2011/2010: 116–117). Melodies consist of inter-related phrases that are perceived as anticipating and/or responding to other phrases that precede or follow them. Languaging starts with melodies of bodily movement and how melodies of bodily movement constitute what Sheets-Johnstone (2010: 221) terms “sensory-kinetic experience.” Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is in stark contrast to the recent findings of scientists from the Max Planck Institute (2014, 2016) who have established in a survey of over two-thirds of the 6,000 plus languages spoken around the world that the relationship between sound and meaning is far less arbitrary than what the linguistics textbooks have claimed for many decades. Sensory-kinetic experience is fundamental to the sense-making that languaging enables and supports. The notion of arbitrariness is unable to explain how language is an action system rooted in bodily experience. Movement and the associated feeling of movement (kinaesthesia) are the condition of all living systems. Instead of taking the motoric aspects of movement and corresponding sensations as primary, we need to understand languaging through what Merleau-Ponty (2005/1945: 120) called the “melodic character” of gesture and movement. Kinaesthesia is the feeling of the melodic character of movement, whether the movement flows or is interrupted, as in Luria’s (1973) idea of kinetic melodies (see also Roth, 2014; Sheets-Johnstone, 2010; Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015).

4. Freeman’s Neurobiology of Meaning and the Self’s Intentional Structures: Leaning into the World with the Body’s Melodies through Assimilation and Cooperation In a discussion of Werner’s (1930: 238) theory of physiognomic perception, Merleau-Ponty showed that when the body responds to a word it neither passively processes information in the word nor does it construct an internal representation of it. Instead, the self assimilates its body and brain dynamics to the word by shaping a tactile-kinaesthetic melody to bring it into an optimal fit with the relevant aspect of experience: In short, my body is not only an object among all other objects, a nexus of sensible qualities among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words

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with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them. It is not a matter of reducing the significance of the word “warm” to sensations of warmth by empiricist standards. For the warmth which I feel when I read the word “warm” is not an actual warmth. It is simply my body which prepares itself for heat and which, so to speak, roughs out its outline. In the same way, when a part of my body is mentioned to me, or when I represent it to myself, I experience in the corresponding part a quasi-sensation of contact which is merely the emergence of that part of my body into the total body image. We are not, then reducing the significance of the word, or even of the percept, to a collection of “bodily sensations” but we are saying that the body, in so far as it has “behaviour patterns”, is that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently “be at home in” that world, “understand” it and find significance in it. (Merleau-Ponty, 2005/1945: 274–275) In Merleau-Ponty’s discussion (of Werner), the self encounters the word “warm,” not as sensations to be processed internally and converted into a “meaning,” but as a tactile-kinaesthetic experience that the body leans into and in accordance with which it shapes itself and its behavioural patterns so that the body can “be at home” in the particular aspect of the world that the word brings forth. Similarly, Bernfeld’s (1928) theory of “fascination” anticipated later theoretical understandings of the dynamical relations between perception and action. For example, Bernfeld sought to explain the processes of “creative hearing” that animate how persons hear and interpret another person’s voice, and how their own body changes in accordance with what they perceive of another’s bodily actions. Bernfeld’s “fascination” foreshadows later understandings as to how felt melodies of movement and engagement are shaped by our motor-sensory anticipations of what action possibilities are available when we engage in anticipatory enkinaesthetic dialogue with the world (Stuart, 2010). In Merleau-Ponty’s discussion, the body shapes itself into a tactile-kinaesthetic melody in response to the word “warm.” There is no transmission of sensory information from the outside—the object encountered in the world—to the inside (the brain). Instead, body and brain of the self are actively assimilated to the word (or other object) encountered. In the following paragraphs, I show how Freeman’s neurobiology both corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s description and provides further explanation of the neurobiological processes whereby the body assimilates itself to the world. A word, like any other sensory stimulus, evokes a spike of neural activity. This spike of neural activity serves to select a self-organising pattern of neural activity that is created by the sensory cortex to which the stimulus is directed (Freeman, 1995: 66). This pattern of activity is not, Freeman points out, a representational copy of the stimulus received from the outside, but a brief surge of neural activity that constitutes the meaning and value of the stimulus for the self. These patterns depend on past learning about the stimulus that has been embedded in the

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modified synapses in cortical networks. The patterns are therefore unique to each individual and are not specific to the stimuli that triggered their construction. There is no necessary connection between the neural activity and its transformations within the organism, on the one hand, and the original environmental stimulus that triggered these organism-internal changes, on the other. Freeman explains this process as the transition from sensation to perception in the following way with reference to the perception of odours: A single sample taken in a sniff, or its equivalent in animals that do not breathe through their noses, excites a selection of receptors that forms a spatial pattern of activity in the arrays of the receptors. That pattern is transmitted by axons into the cerebrum, where it is registered as another spatial pattern of activity by the microscopic neurons that are driven by the afferent volley. This cortical pattern is the end of sensation, and it presages the beginning of perception. What happens is that the afferent volley of microscopic action potentials from the receptors destabilizes the sensory area of cortex into which it is injected, and the cortex transits from a basal state of expectancy to a new dynamic state (Freeman, 1991, 1992). This new state leads to the formation of a novel pattern of activity that is generated by the entire sensory area. (Freeman, 2000a: 9) The deletion of the original sensory-driven activity pattern and its translation into neural activity within the organism show that there is no deterministic relationship between external stimulus and the global changes that patterns of neuronal activity and their transformations that occur within the organism involve. The effects of changes in the receptors and the neural activity that such changes trigger spread and amplify throughout all levels of the organism’s organisation as successive transformations of differences in an entire circuit of circuits of circuits of …, which includes the whole organism and its relations to its environment. The changes in chaotic brain dynamics instigated by the sensory stimulus take the form of very many modifications of synapses in the form of inter-connections between many neurons in the brain. When this process is successfully completed, the result, Freeman (2009b: 27, 2008) points out, is change brought about by assimilation, not by the incorporation or internalisation of information from the outside world into the brain. Drawing on the mediaeval idea developed by Aquinas that action has its source in the unity of the self and is for this reason unidirectional, Freeman explains this unidirectionality of action as follows: Actions of the body exit by the motor systems, changing the world and changing the relation of the self to the world. The sensory consequences of the actions then enable the body to change itself in accordance with the nature of the world. However, the perception is only of the altered contours of the self as experienced inside. No forms are pushed through or across the boundary. The key word he [Aquinas, PJT] used is assimilation (adaequatio means

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towards, but not at, equality). The body does not absorb stimuli, but changes its own form to become similar to aspects of stimuli that are relevant to the intent that emerged from within the brain. (Freeman, 2000a: 27) In response to stimuli from the outside world, the brain’s own chaotic self-organising dynamics generate internal patterns of activity that constitute meaning for the self. The term “meaning” here does not mean that the brain creates a representation of the external stimulus. Rather, the brain’s spatial pattern of activity is a reflection of the entire past experience of the self. The brain’s response to the external stimulus embeds it in global patterns of activation derived from past experience. This means that the given stimulus is not “represented” in the brain. Instead, it is integrated to and contextualised in relation to the global pattern of brain activity that is constituted by the person’s past experience. In this way, the stimulus is assigned a place and therefore a meaning in the overall set of relationships that comprise the experience of the self. In this sense, the brain’s response to the stimulus is the meaning that the stimulus has for the self in the context of the self’s past experience. The function of the brain is not to create representations of external reality. Instead, it is to create meaning. Meaning in this sense is not linguistic meaning, but the meaning that is created by the processes of abstraction and generalisation involved in the brain’s responses to events in the world as these events are assigned their place as personal meaning in relation to the accumulated history of personal meaning we call experience. In other words, the many individual engagements with the objects and events in the world in the life of the self are transformed into a global meaning potential by the brain’s own internal dynamics whenever the brain responds to external (and internal) events. This meaning potential is made and continually elaborated by the brain itself. The creation of meaning in this sense is what enables the self to lean into the world by a process of assimilation. Assimilation is the process of creating meaning that shapes body and brain so that the self can optimally engage with particular aspects of the world on particular occasions. Assimilation is the opposite of passive information processing. Assimilation is an active and intentional process of shaping the brain and body dynamics of the self to the world. The self’s personalised meaning potential, which is grounded in a history of first-person experience, is the brain’s way of responding to and dealing with the complexity of the world. Assimilation is a concrete way of exercising the self’s virtual meaning potential under the existing constraints of body and brain in order to yield simplex solutions to the complexity of the world (Thibault, 2019a). Meaning in this sense modulates and shapes the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of the body. The result is a creative reshaping of brain and body dynamics that enables and facilitates skilful activity in the world together with the tactilekinaesthetic melodies of bodily movement that underpin and sustain this activity. A bodily melody is created when body and brain are creatively reshaped in ways that facilitate ongoing interactivity with the relevant aspect of the world. The formation of a melody means that the new experience is incorporated into the

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habits and skills that are formed in the life history of the self. Learning any new skill—playing a musical instrument, driving a car, learning a language—requires forming new tactile-kinaesthetic melodies and their incorporation into the life history of the self. The body’s melodies thus co-articulate self to world in flexible, adaptive, and integrated patterns of animated movement that enable creative engagement with the world. The learning of new melodies entails the growth of self-organised intentional structures that are progressively honed, refined, and differentiated (Freeman, 1995: 18–19) as the self bodily extends itself into the world so that the body changes itself in accordance with the world. In other words, the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of the body in movement are the body’s mode of changing itself in order to change its relation to the world. The body sings, so to speak, its tactilekinaesthetic melodies as it extends the self’s intentional structures into the world. The body modulates its melody in the process of assimilating itself to selected aspects of the world. If a new melody contradicts or is inconsistent with prior structures of learning and their melodies, society has devised social technologies designed to bring about the dissolution of existing neural connections in order to make way for new connections that involve the restructuring of the self and its melodies in order to facilitate new learning. Sargant (1957) investigates the social technologies of behavioural modification used to bring about the dissolution of existing neural structures (“unlearning”) and the building up of new ones. These social technologies include the techniques of religious conversion, brain-washing in religion and politics, shock therapy, torture, and the elicitation of confessions. The coercive techniques which I have referred to aim to create a situation of extreme emotional and physical stress that brings about a shock to the nervous system. This results in a collapse of the nervous system and the dissolution of existing patterns of behaviour and belief. In this condition, the subject is most susceptible to the imposition of new patterns of behaviour, belief, and value. This enhanced susceptibility means that the subject may be inculcated with the new behaviours, beliefs, and values of, for example, particular systems of political or religious belief and military organisations. Not all forms of dissolution are malign. Techniques of “unlearning” and “relearning” are also present in normal socialisation. The rhythmic, melodic, and other dynamic characteristics of music, speech, movement, and dance (amongst other possibilities) are resources that can be synchronised and harnessed in ways that build and sustain interpersonal, affective, and social bonds between individuals. These resources are fundamental to understanding the dynamical processes whereby coordinated forms of cooperative activity are created between individuals both on the small scale of interactive dyads and on the larger scales of social groups and communities. Tactile-kinaesthetic melodies are intentional and affective modulations of neural and bodily dynamics that can serve as technologies “for bonding in groups” (Freeman 1995: 134; 2000c; see also Trimble, 2007: 199). They do so by bringing about changes in the neurohormonal-muscular mechanisms of bonding between individuals. Freeman sees this “technology for

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bonding in groups” as perhaps the precursor technology to all the other major technological revolutions: The major technological revolutions in cultural evolution are commonly listed as tool making, agriculture, and manufacturing, each entailing a geometric spurt in population growth. Before them all, perhaps, emerged the technology for bonding in groups, since making tools, fires and shelters required cooperation among brains. (Freeman, 1995: 135) In all cases, irrespective of size or scale, tactile-kinaesthetic dynamics serve to build and sustain the melodies which bond individuals on the basis of affective and moral ties. Accordingly, tactile-kinaesthetic dynamics take place in situations in which they have significance potentially for all who are so bonded. Building on Freeman (1995, 2000c), these melodies create the altered states of consciousness and body feeling that build affective bonds and relationships of trust between individuals. The ability to build such bonds may have led to the socialisation of intentional structures through processes of “repeated unlearning” that lead to the harmonisation of intentional structures and hence the emergence of group identities. The emergence of group identities and the technologies of unlearning, conversion, and bonding that this involves provide resources for the focusing, harmonising, and modulation of the intentional structures required for cooperation between individuals in groups. The capacity of individual agents for group bonding through the harmonisation of their tactile-kinaesthetic melodies could have led to the ability to attribute intentional properties to other agents, given that other agents have the capacity both to affect in intentionally modulated ways and to be affected. This reciprocal capacity sets up potentialities for learning and discovery as agents immerse themselves in the fluctuating, forever mobile intensities of the melodies created by agents’ interactivity with each other and their being-with the world. Cooperation is therefore essential for reorganising individuals along social and cultural lines so that they develop the psychological capacities that culture requires in order that they can function effectively as persons with selfhood in the human ecology (Vol. II, Chapters 3 and 4). As shown above, cooperation and the forms of social bonding and the unlearning and learning that accordingly take place enable, stimulate, and support the processes whereby bio-social individuals become cultural selves. The bio-social sensitivity to the sensitivity of others that is evident from the earliest stages of infancy is transformed, in the course of the child’s development and individuation, into cultural capacities, sensitivities, and skills. Cooperation refers to the processes of social bonding and unlearning and learning that fuse individuals into larger collective structures and their configural patterns (Elias, 2000/1939). The ability to modify intentional structures so that they will converge in order to support cooperative learning (Freeman, 1995: 120) depends upon the selective

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dissolution (unlearning) of expectations that do not meet this requirement and their replacement with ones that do. The “communicative musicality” (Malloch, 1999; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009; Schögler & Trevarthen, 2007) in infant–caregiver interaction is one example of how the dynamics of the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies of the two participants in the infant–caregiver dyad are enfolded into and shaped into a living and developing unity (Sections 8 and 9 below). The shaping of each other’s melodies in this way forms the basis for cooperative bonds on account of the repeated melodic and rhythmic patterns that instill the respective bodies of infant and caregiver with a felt sense of expectation and counter-expectation. The capacity to anticipate each other’s sensory-kinetic dynamics and the mutual tuning of each other’s intentional structures enable the limbic systems of selves to access the attractors by which their intertwined sensory-kinetic melodies are shaped and moved in ways that accord with each other’s expectations. On this basis, value is distributed into certain patterns in ways that set up commonalities of expectation, e.g., the expectations of one agent concerning the nature of a given situation depend on and are shaped by the expectations of other agents in relation to the same (type of) situation. In time, these expected patterns are honed as and are solidified into the socially typical, normative, and conventional ones and take on a trans-individual status as custom, tradition, language, and law (Brown, 2005: 569). The development of the social and cognitive skills for establishing “common ground” with others (see Schmerse, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2015) is grounded in and underpinned by the emergence of these prior abilities to shape and modify the melodies of one’s intentional structures as the basis for forming cooperative bonds with others. This ability is not only foundational for languaging in the developmental sense; it is ontologically foundational for its functioning in the world. In the next section, I briefly look at a case study examined by Merleau-Ponty (2005/1945) to consider some of the implications when this ability is lacking.

5. Knowledge Is Brought forth in Movement: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Kinetic Melodies Merleau-Ponty (2005/1945: 118–120) revealingly discusses a patient, Schneider, who was studied by Gelb and Goldstein (1920: 157–250; Goldstein, 1923). The patient, who suffered from what traditional psychiatry called “psychic blindness” (Merleau-Ponty, 2005/1945: 11), was “unable to perform ‘abstract’ movements with his eyes shut.” Merleau-Ponty compares the patient’s performing to order a military salute with that of the “normal subject” or a stage actor performing the same movement: When ordered to perform a concrete movement, he first of all repeats the order in a questioning tone of voice, then his body assumes the general position required for the task; finally he goes through the movement. It is noticeable that the whole body is involved in it, and that the patient never cuts

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it down, as a normal subject would, to the strict minimum. To the military salute are added the other external marks of respect. To the right hand pantomime of combing the hair is added, with the left, that of holding a mirror; when the right hand pretends to knock in a nail, the left pretends to hold the nail. The explanation is that the order is taken quite seriously and that the patient manages to perform these concrete movements to order only provided that he places himself mentally in the actual situation to which they correspond. The normal subject, on giving, to order, a military salute, sees in it no more than an experimental situation, and therefore restricts the movement to its most important elements and does not throw himself into it. He is using his body as a means to play acting; he finds it entertaining to pretend to be a soldier; he escapes from reality in the rôle of the soldier just as the actor slips his real body into the “great phantom” of the character to be played. The normal man and the actor do not mistake imaginary situations for reality, but extricate their real bodies from the living situation to make them breathe, speak and, if need be, weep in the realm of imagination. (Merleau-Ponty, 2005/1945: 119–120) Unlike the patient, the normal subject and the actor are able to modulate the kinetic melodies of their bodies. Their performance of the salute is not experienced as the habitual performance of movements in everyday life. Instead, their salutes have their origins and inspiration in forms of autonomic arousal that creatively and imaginatively modulate the performer’s bodily melodies from within rather than being determined by the exogenous constraints of the external situation. The patient perceives the situation to be independent of him and not able to be affectively and skilfully modulated by him. Normal subjects and actors, on the other hand, skilfully deploy the endogenous dynamics of their own kinetic melodies in response to the imaginary situation which their own melodies creatively bring forth. In extricating “their real bodies from the living situation to make them breathe, speak, and, if need be, weep in the realm of the imagination,” the normal subject and the actor exercise their capacity to transcend the movement (Thibault, Forthcoming). The patient is unable to transcend the constraints of the situation and the autonomic responses it calls forth from his body. His body is an expression of the objective situation rather than his body being a creative modulator and enactor of the situation through its own movements. In being free from attachment to a specific time and place, the bodies of the normal subject and the actor in MerleauPonty’s analysis affectively and creatively modulate their relations to time and place. In this way, they are able to transcend the mere sequence of movements that the patient experiences as being externally imposed by the situation. The patient feels that his movement—the salute, for example—is mechanically produced. It cannot therefore serve as the basis of its own transcendence. Merleau-Ponty shows that the sources of learning and knowledge are prereflective and have their basis in the affective character of the agent’s kinetic melodies. As Roth explains, knowledge is born in movement “because knowledge

144 Melody … is not somehow abstracted from movement but is born in an excess of movement pregnant with the new” (Roth, 2014: 68). Learning takes place and knowledge is created when aspects of movement transcend themselves and thus stand out in new forms of awareness. The patient described by Merleau-Ponty is unable to achieve this transcendence of his own movement and is confined to the situation. In creatively modulating their kinetic melodies in the way suggested above, the normal subject and the actor give rise to a “deterritorialisation” of the movement, e.g., from doing the full-blown movement to abbreviating or reducing it to its essentials as in a rehearsal (Section 9 below; Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 3), schematising and symbolising the movement, its results, and its potentialities for normatively affecting experience and for activating the imagination (Thibault, Forthcoming). The knowledge that arises has its basis in proprioception, kinaesthetics, and the associated sensory-kinetic character of the performer’s gestural melody.

6. Luria’s Account of Kinetic Melodies of Enskilment Luria (1973: 36) developed the idea of “kinetic melody” to show that the formation of a motor skill requires the skilful orchestrating and performing of many “complex movements” that are reduced and “performed as a single ‘kinetic melody’.” Luria illustrates this reduction of many complex movements and their integration to a single performance in the form of a kinetic melody with the example of handwriting. Luria writes: In the initial stages writing depends on memorizing the graphic form of every letter. It takes place through a chain of isolated motor impulses, each of which is responsible for the performance of only one element of the graphic structure; with practice, this structure of the process is radically altered and writing is converted into a single “kinetic melody,” no longer requiring the memorizing of the visual form of each isolated letter or individual motor impulses for making every stroke. (Luria, 1973: 32) Both speaking and writing are dynamical, time-extended patterns of bodily movement that extend into and leave their traces in the world. Handwriting is a skilful activity that requires the integration of “individual motor impulses” into a single kinetic melody. The skilful practitioner of a kinetic melody is someone who can attune his or her movement patterns to particular environmental contingencies without, however, breaking the smooth flow of the melody (see also Ingold, 2011: 83, 178, 215). Luria’s description puts the focus on the patterns of bodily movement and their orchestration and co-articulation that give rise to the performance of a single smoothly flowing kinetic melody. Writing qua dynamic movement pattern or kinetic melody is a form of interactivity with the world. It is a reflexive loop of activity that coordinates brain, eye, arm-and-hand movements, writing tool, and writing surface in the unfolding

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of a kinetic melody that gives rise to and inscribes a graphic trace on a writing surface in the field of relations that connects the writer to other selves in different times and places (Thibault, 2018a: 75–86). The different components of this process—the brain, eye, arm-hand movements, graphic tool, writing surface—that are co-orchestrated to produce a single kinetic melody cannot be divided into those which belong to the organism-person and those which belong to the external environment. Instead, what we see is that all of these components are orchestrated as a single kinetic melody that makes writer and the extra-somatic world of the writer co-extensive. Rather than saying that the writer via the medium of writing interacts with a world “out there,” the orchestration of the kinetic melodies of writing is an active and practical engagement with the flows of the world that we inhabit. The learning of skilful kinetic melodies is a matter of repeated trials, observation, and the education of attention. Infants don’t learn speech sounds per se. Instead, they learn in practical situations how to integrate respiration, phonation, and articulation into the dynamic patterns of movement that underpin our languaging. Kinetic melodies are intentionally modulated dynamical patterns of movement. They enact the embodied skills and capacities that enable persons to unfold familiar patterns of movement in order to carry out a vast range of daily activities. These capacities are incorporated into our bodies as kinaesthetic memories (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012: 49). In this way, we get the feel of how to do things. When put into practice, they are not uses of the body, but particular patterns of bodily dynamics that are immanent in the synergy of body, artefact or tool, and aspects of the environment. Kinetic melodies co-develop with the dynamics of the environment that we learn to attune to and to enfold to our own dynamics. Take, for example, one’s interactivity over time with a familiar object. According to common-sense thinking, the existence and continuity of the object “in” the world is independent of the observer. Granted that objects may slowly decay or otherwise change over time, we take the object to be continuous over different occasions. In actual fact, the appearance of continuity is due to its appearing to be the same across successive cycles of reiterated perception-action. Our interactivity with the object across different occasions gives rise to familiar sensory-kinetic dynamics⁠—a familiar bodily melody—that unfolds on each occasion that we attune to and explore the object. A familiar object is in fact like a kinetic melody with its characteristic feeling-tone that is repeated on each occasion that one engages with the object such that the accumulated feeling-tone is incorporated into the dynamics of the movement pattern and in part defines it. Kinetic melodies therefore constitute our familiar ways of engaging with and being-with the world in the normal living of life. Rather than forms that we “use,” kinetic melodies are immanent in our modes of inhabiting and experiencing the world, and of growing and changing as we codevelop with our worlds. Movement is always a time-extended trajectory that requires the integration of individual motor impulses into the continuous and smooth flow of what Luria calls integral kinaesthetic structures or kinetic melodies (Luria, 1973: 31–32,

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35–37, 176). Cognition and learning are distributed and systemic activities that are always formed and scaffolded “with the support of external auxiliary tools or aids” (Luria, 1973: 31). These aids and resources are, Luria writes, “essential elements in the establishment of functional connections between individual parts of the brain, and that by their aid, areas of the brain which previously were independent become the components of a single functional system” (Luria, 1973: 31; italics in original). In an early paper, Luria argued that “the history of culture starts with a primitive outward technique and ends with a complicated psychological technique. It inevitably develops in man the functional utilization of his own conduct” (Luria, 1928: 502). The performance of complex skilled activity is dependent on external aids before it later becomes “condensed and converted into an automatic motor skill” (Luria, 1973: 32). The condensation and conversion of an activity into an automatic motor skill mean that it is synthesised, manifested, and felt as a single, smooth consecutive melody, or kinetic melody (Luria, 1973: 32, 36–37, 176). The kinetic melodies of skilled activity thus underpin the functional utilisation of one’s own conduct to enact complex psychological tasks in qualitatively new forms such as the memorisation of words when the child, in experimental studies conducted by Luria and colleagues, was able to connect a picture selected from a set of pictures to a series of words when none of the pictures reproduced the words (Luria, 1928: 502). Implicit in Luria’s discussion is the way in which the child creates “structural connections” by enacting an artificial or second-order connection, as distinct from a “natural” one, between word and picture such that the picture serves as an aid to memory. The development of the mnemonic method is thus enhanced by the smooth operation of the kinetic melodies in which the structure of acts of behaviour such as matching picture to word skilfully integrates external aids (e.g., the pictures) to the development of memory skills. Human interactivity is therefore grounded in and nurtured by kinetic melodies, their making, sustaining, and breaking. Luria’s analysis of handwriting serves to show that kinetic dynamics and hence kinetic melodies are enkinaesthetically enfolded in and temporally unfolded through all of the familiar activities of everyday living. There is a familiar kinetics of typing on the keyboard, dissecting a frog, walking down the street, stirring a cup of tea, casting a fishing rod, stroking one’s cat, cooking a meal, talking with another person, making love with one’s partner, playing ball with a child, etc. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012: 49). Learning crucially depends on the learner’s interactivity with the learning environment. As Luria, following Vygotsky, points out, external aids and tools such as language and the digital system of counting are culturally saturated resources that are essential for the functional organisation of the human brain and the emergence of higher forms of conscious activity such as problem solving. Luria’s description of the learning of handwriting shows how this is in the first instance dependent on the memorisation of the graphic form of each letter. The graphic forms of each letter are external resources with which the learner must coordinate the performance of the graphic articulatory acts required for the tracing of the graphic shapes onto a surface such as a sheet of paper.

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Later, through practice, the process of graphic articulation is altered and reorganised so as to become a single “kinetic melody” that is no longer dependent on the memorisation of the discrete graphic shapes of every letter. Instead, the kinetic dynamics of this “highly automatized engram” (Luria, 1973: 32) is grounded in the kinaesthetics of body memory (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012). The ability to perform the kinetic melody required in handwriting is a skilful bodily act that is underpinned by changes in cerebral organisation when the recruitment of the auditory and visual areas of the cortex is no longer required (Luria, 1973: 32). A kinaesthetic melody is formed in the “final stages of the development of skilled movement” (Luria, 1973: 253). The skilful orchestration and management of kinetic melodies and therefore of the ability of learners and teachers to sensitise to and to attune to each other’s kinetic melodies and their enfoldings and unfoldings are a crucial aspect of the normative self-directedness that is necessary for constructive learning to take place. Kinetic melodies are skilled performances that can be modulated in response to both endogenous and exogenous factors that affect the learning agent during the course of learning, for example, a new skill. Sheets-Johnstone (2012) argues that kinetic melodies are “inscribed” on performing bodies whereas I would rather say that they have their basis in endogenous microgenetic process (Brown, 2005) at the same time that they are shaped by and entrained to the longer, slower timescales of a community’s collective cultural-historical dynamics (Thibault, 2011a). The historical dimension is therefore critically important for understanding the development of the body’s melodies of movement and the role that these melodies play in the development of the cultural capacities and skills required for playing one’s part in cooperative social activities and processes of cultural learning. If the intrinsic motives of the infant’s melodies have a biological basis, this biological basis is itself a thoroughly social biology (Vol. I, Chapter 2) whereby the infant is from the beginning of post-natal life sensitive to and open to the more complex forms of human sociality that emerge as a consequence of the infant’s embodied dialogical coordination with more acculturated others. Caregivers are repositories of the higher-scalar social and cultural arrangements that the infant’s own intrinsic motives and purposes tap into at the same time that the caregiver actively draws on social and cultural resources so as to create what Reed (1996b) calls fields of culturally promoted activities and values that are constructed by adults for infants and children. Embodied coordination with caregivers thus enables the infant to orient to and to be affected by the world of languaging in which the infant is immersed from the outset. Luria (1973: 251–253) sets out three important conditions for the skilful performance of the body’s kinetic melodies. Paraphrasing Luria closely, these conditions are summarised as follows: 1. A three-dimensional system of spatial coordinates as the framework in which voluntary movements and action are performed (Luria, 1973: 251); 2. The integrity of the performance’s kinaesthetic afferentation: Only a constant flow of kinaesthetic impulses from the motor system can provide definite

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information about the position of the joints and the state and tone of the muscles so that the efferent impulses can reach their correct destination and the required set of motor impulses can be found and maintained (Luria, 1973: 252); 3. The constant regulation of muscle tone together with a sufficiently rapid and smooth changeover from one system of motor innervations to another leading to the formation of complete kinaesthetic melodies in the final stages of development (Luria, 1973: 253). Luria points out that the smooth performance of kinetic melodies is crucial for the successful execution of the dynamical patterns of movement that underpin our very being-with the world (Stuart, 2010). Notions like the “integrity” of the performance and the “constant regulation” of muscle tone in Luria’s discussion implicate the normativity that is intrinsic to the skilful development and sculpting of kinetic melodies. Agents become sensitised to normative standards of performance that affect and shape their sense of the integrity of a melody’s performance and criteria of regulation of muscle tone in order to attain a performance that meets the required standards of integrity. In a report in The Times (Wednesday, 7 August 2019: 56–57) on Steve Smith’s majestic batting at Edgbaston in the first test match of the 2019 Ashes series between Australia and England, Matthew Syed writes: Think of what it must have taken for Smith to try a new approach when he was struggling with short-pitched bowling from England in the third test at the Waca in 2013. To avoid the high bounce, and to give himself room, he started striding back and across the crease, a swirl of movement that has since become his trademark. He didn’t clear this new approach with a coach; he did so on his own initiative. Was not this courage predicated on a lifetime of improvisation? Some will say that Smith’s approach is ugly. As an aesthetic judgment, one must allow for an element of subjectivity, but I have to confess that I find it captivating. When I watch those pre-shot tics, that initial shuffle, and his speed of thought (perhaps “anticipation” is a more appropriate word), I am mesmerised. This is a guy who has found his own method and has demonstrated the mettle to take it into the history books. (Matthew Syed, The Times, Wednesday, 7 August 2019: 57) Syed’s appreciative commentary shows how his encounters with Smith are regulated by the timing, affective intensities, and the emphasis of Smith’s performance. Syed understands that the melodies of Steve Smith’s batting are informed by motives— e.g., avoiding the high bounce, giving himself room—that originate from within rather than being imposed by external sources. Instead, these intrinsic motives and the melodies of movement that they give rise to are endogenously generated

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responses to events in the relevant field of action and awareness. Moreover, in describing Smith’s performance as “captivating,” Syed shows that Smith’s actions are evaluated and regulated by emotions that modulate and shape inner motives and that provide observers such as Matthew Syed with criteria for aesthetic judgment, given that these emotions affect the observer as well. Smith’s actions are therefore evaluated and appreciated as forces from within that are honed, developed, and perfected as bodily skills in a lived field of dynamic relations that unfold in a game of cricket such as the first test match at Edgbaston in August 2019. The experience of being “captivated” and “mesmerised” that Syed registers when he watches Smith in action testifies to the fact that when we engage with the subjectivity of another person’s actions, we are not detached, external observers. Instead, we are internally affected by the expressive dynamics of the other’s actions. We are “fascinated” (Bernfeld, 1928) by them and our own bodily melodies are adjusted and altered as our fascination draws in and enfolds their melodies with ours. Affects are aroused that change our perspective from within and that enable the observer to enter into direct engagement with the other’s expressive movements. Smooth performance is crucial for self-directed anticipatory action. Kinetic melodies are enfolded and unfolded in our temporally extended interactivity with other persons, with texts, with external aids such as cultural tools and artefacts, and with aspects of physical settings and social situations. Kinetic melodies have their origin in endogenous dynamics of the individual person though they can also be shaped and entrained by cultural dynamics, as is certainly the case in sporting activities and languaging behaviour. Kinetic melodies characterise the intertwining of the endogenous dynamics of persons-in-interaction—persons in concerted interactivity with other persons and with other things in their worlds with which they are engaged in relations of community and reciprocity. Kinetic melodies are crucial to the self-directedness of learning because agents’ endogenous self-organising kinetic dynamics have both volition and orientation (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012: 53). Furthermore, the smoothness or otherwise of the performance provides the learner with internal signals of the appropriateness, the effectiveness, the correctness, the rightness, etc., of the activity. These felt signals from the internal milieu (the viscera, muscle tone, neurohormonal flows, etc.) are an important source of the normative constraints that guide the learning trajectory of the self.

7. Three Dimensions of Melodies of Expressive Movement: The Kinematic, the Energetic, and the Physiognomic The prospective self-sensing of the body in a field of cultural activities and values is grounded in the following three integrated facets of the body that were identified by Sherrington (1906) (see also Trevarthen 2009: 8–9). These are: Proprioception: The self’s sense of the body’s dynamical capacities for action;

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The body enacts its melodies of movement. The body’s melodies of movement are generated by affective biases, motives, conceptual feelings, experiential memories, and values. Trevarthen (2009: 11) points out that a “new, dynamic biology of intentions and emotions is required” that is based on how motives that are generated from within by brains give rise to bodily melodies that are entangled with the melodies generated by other selves. The body’s melodies are thus generated from within by the self’s positing of intentions, motives, and purposes that inform and modulate the body’s melodies. By the same token, these melodies serve to make the self’s intentions, motives, feelings, and purposes available to others. The new dynamic biology of intentions and motives envisaged by Trevarthen inverts the modern understanding that brains are first and foremost input machines which process data (sense impressions) passively received from the outside. Instead, brains intentionally act on and explore the world through their bodies (output). In so doing, the responses of other agents and other bodies to this output in turn constitute inputs which calibrate and shape brain dynamics (Freeman, 1995; 26; Buzsáki, 2006: ix, 11). The conscious self that is derived from the unconscious core and enacted in particular situations requires the self-awareness of one’s body as coherent, intentional, and flexibly adaptive to the situated demands of the body-in-action. The self thus lives its body as a body-in-interaction-with-its-world. The experienced or lived body is a sense-making body that is directly related to the body’s lived experience. In the human world, selves typically inhabit a world that is populated by other selves with whom they engage in various forms of transaction. The living, experiencing body is not a self-contained body. It is a body in entangled relations of community and reciprocity with other bodies (Stuart, 2010; Stuart & Thibault, 2015; Sections 1 and 10). It develops a sensitivity to and is attuned to the sensitivity of other selves to its actions, perceptions, feelings, and so on. In infancy, the developing self quickly learns to attend to the bodily orientation, the gaze, and the vocalisations of other selves and to gauge their focus of interest or attention, their goals, and their intentions. Living agents—human and nonhuman—that engage in cooperative behaviour with other living agents whether of the same species or other species must be able to make information available to others about their intentions, interests, and motives (Thibault, 2018b, 2019b). The expressive movements of their bodies and

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the kinetic melodies of movement enacted by their bodies provide information that other agents, provided they are in possession of the requisite skills and capacities, can attune to and make use of. In this way, persons develop forms of intersubjective coordination of intention, motive, and purpose. Trevarthen (2009: 11) describes these three dimensions of intersubjective communication as follows: (1) the kinematic dimension is concerned with rhythmic movement dynamics; (2) the energetic dimension is concerned with variations in the force or intensity of body movements; and (3) the physiognomic dimension is concerned with modulations of body shape and how these modulations organise postural, gestural, facial, and vocal settings into distinct categories that relate to the subject’s changing focus and interest in relation to its environment (see Table 3.1). Trevarthen (2009: 11–12) identifies the three dimensions of movement in Table 3.1 as a primary, largely innate level of organisation on which more culturally elaborated forms are built. Kinetic melodies of expressive bodily movement of all kinds can be said to have the three dimensions identified by Trevarthen. A kinetic melody unifies all three dimensions in patterned sequences that enable agents to move along with each other. They do so in ways that are identified by the kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic dimensions of movement. First, the kinematic dimension has to do with rhythmic timing: Participants move along with each other and are synchronised in time in ways that give rise to inter-individual patterns of body movements. Second, participants are also moved by energetic surges of intensity and fluctuations of affect and feeling. Third, they are moved to attend to a shared locus of concern that a particular posture indicates as worthy of interest or as being relevant to current aims and purposes in relation to the embodied viewpoints of the agent. The sensory-kinetic melodies of human movement have the capacity to attract the interest and attention of others. Rather than random, uncontrolled motor movements, the human infant’s endogenously generated melodies of movement have adaptive value (Trevarthen, 2009: 27). They have the power to attract others to entrain to them and to respond to them as the melodies of infant and sensitive caregiver entrain to each other and become enfolded to each other’s neural and bodily dynamics as reciprocally intertwined melodies as infant and caregiver move along with each other. Table 3.1 summarises three inter-related dimensions of the sensory-kinetic melodies whereby we move along with others. The capacity to move along with others and thus to participate in the relational dynamics of reciprocally enfolded melodies of movement is crucial for learning, development, cooperation, and interpersonal and ecological well-being. The three dimensions of movement presented in Table 3.1 show that selves become entangled with each other’s neural and bodily dynamics as the melodies of selves-in-interaction become enfolded with each other in forms of processual co-emergence of truly inter-individual patterning. The emergence of inter-individual patterning in these interactive encounters between infant and caregiver cannot be explained in terms of imitation per se. Strictly speaking, imitation in the early months of the infant’s life refers to the infant’s capacity to relate to and to mirror the external behaviour of others

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Table 3.1 General Proto-Metafunctional Properties of Kinetic Melodies of Expressive Bodily Movement and Their Intrinsic Intersubjective Dimension Three Dimensions of Expressive Movement (Trevarthen, 2009)

General Characteristics

Kinematic

Rhythmic movement Timing; moving in Textual; periodic dynamics; rhythmic pulses time with each of time; intra-self and interother self synchrony Aim; moving and Interpersonal; Intensity, force, power of being moved by wave-like actions; expression of shared feeling internal affective states and affect and motives; self and other arousal felt as proto-modal dissonance or consonance between internal states and external circumstances Experiential; Style; articulatedChanges in shape of the particulate differentiated body: Organisation of locus of concern; postural, gestural, facial, moving and vocal settings into distinct being moved to categories related to agent’s attend to a shared changing interests and locus of concern, purposes in relation to its what one cares environment about

Energetic

Physiognomic

Function

Metafunction Analogue and Mode of Organisation (Halliday, 1979)

(Hart 2011/2006: 23–24). However, mutual attunement is more than imitation so defined. Imitation alone could not get the dialogical coupling of persons through their reciprocal languaging off the ground, so to speak. Mutual attunement is based on the capacity to affect each other’s internal dynamics and to modulate them. Mutual attunement is affective attunement and, as Hart points out, it “is essential for our ability to feel other people and to feel that we are felt, which facilitates the development of attachment capacity and enables us to relate to significant others throughout our life span” (Hart 2011/2006: 23). The ability to affect each other’s internal dynamics is therefore an essential foundation for the capacity of listeners to covertly simulate the speaker’s vocal tract (and other) actions through the activation of neural structures that mirror the vocal tract actions of the speaker, as proposed in the motor theory of speech perception (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985; see also Kinsbourne, 2005). Trevarthen (2009: 23) points to recent evidence that human foetuses perform complex self-regulatory movements of hands, jaws, trunk, arms, and legs as they respond to the uterine environment. Human foetuses perform coherent actions

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that display their innate sensitivity to their environment and their capacity to incorporate sensory input to guide their movement in their environment, which includes the amniotic fluid, the walls of the placenta, the contractions of the mother’s uterine muscles, and her body movements. By 11 weeks, human foetuses are already animated agents of sensitivity and vitality with a developing self-sensing unity of purpose. Mehler et al. (1988) and May et al. (2011) show that when the prenatal foetus hears the sounds of the languaging that the mother participates in, the amniotic fluid muffles the vowels and consonants. The foetus hears utterances as sequences of tonal resonance patterns that are more music-like than speech-like. The foetus and the newborn infant initially perceive languaging as sequences of tones. Pauses are heard as occurring at the end of tones rather than between words (Perkins & Kent, 1986; Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 2001: 280). It is therefore feasible to say that infants start their languaging with sequences of tonal resonance patterns that form the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies on which languaging is built up. Sander (1977) showed that the infant’s ability to self-regulate develops in the earliest stages of infancy. In the post-natal environment, caregiver and infant engage in interaction routines that promote affect-based forms of co-regulation (Trevarthen, 1998; Bråten & Trevarthen, 2007; Bråten, 2007). The reticular activation system in the brain stem creates a temporal structure for brain activity. Neurotransmitters in this system control sensorimotor exploration, attention, and motivation. Motivation arises from the interaction between the reticular activation system, the diencephalon, and limbic system (Hart, 2011/2006: 48). Bråten (2007), Trevarthen (1998), Stern (2002/1977), Cowley et al. (2004), and others have further shown that synchronised interaction between infant and caregiver gives rise to joint motivation and attention. The mutual regulation of arousal between infant and caregiver also results in physiobiological and psychobiological attunement between them (Stern, 1984). As Hart (2011/2006: 49) points out, caregiver and infant modulate each other’s energy states through their mutual attunement and the interpersonal routines in which this is embedded. New patterns of neural activity form in the brain as a result of the interactivity between persons and their environments. Regular, repeated experiences and intense affect establish new patterns of neural activity that reactivate more readily (Hart, 2011/2006: 49). When mutual attunement occurs, there is “deep coordination” (Hart, 2011/2006: 49) of the autonomic and limbic centres in the brain, which are important for the fine-tuning of the emotional regions of the brain, amongst other things such as “heart rate, breathing, digestion” (Hart, 2011/2006: 49). Synchronised attunement, which is based on the limbic regions, is referred to as “limbic resonance” by Hart (2011/2006: 49). Limbic resonance, Hart (2011/2006: 49–50) explains, “requires that an internal state be expressed externally” (Hart, 2011/2006: 49). The many fine-grained motor distinctions of the face, the hands, and the vocal tract are able to articulate many very fine-grained motor-sensory discriminations and combinations of these, which partly come under the control of the cranial

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nerves in the brain stem. The cranial nerves connect to circuitry involving the diencephalon, the limbic system, the insula, and the amygdala. They also “later connect with an area deep inside the frontal lobes: the orbitofrontal cortex, which enables us to feel and understand facial expressions” (Hart, 2011/2006: 50). In this way, the human brain and that of other primates can link the perception of gaze and facial expression to emotion, motivation, and meaning. Deep coordination and the capacity to affect each other’s internal dynamics when the melodies of selves are enfolded with each other in relations of community and reciprocity take place along the kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic dimensions described by Trevarthen. The three dimensions of the body’s sensory-kinetic melodies of movement identified in Table 3.1 constitute inter-related dimensions of the dynamical melodies of movement. They are three dimensions of how the dynamics of intentional agents with self-sensing unity of motive and purpose become entangled with each other. I now consider in more detail the three dimensions presented in Table 3.1. In Sections 8 and 9 below, I explore more fully the dialogical dynamics of enkinaesthetic melodies in relation to two examples.

8. Three Dimensions of Expressive Melodies of Movement: An Analysis of a Wordless Narrative between Father and Pre-Linguistic Infant The episode between father and infant has four phases that form the components of an unfolding wordless narrative in which infant and father move along together. Following Malloch and Trevarthen (2009), these phases are introduction, development, climax, and resolution. For reasons of space, my analysis and discussion will focus on the first phase only, the introduction, which lasts 12.68 s, in order to make the points that I develop below. Table 3.2 analyses the entire first phase as a series of wordless vocalisations, intervals of silence, and other bodily activity. The sequence overall consists of four pulses of dialogical activity in which father and daughter respond to each other’s rhythms, changing degrees of intensity, and vocal postures. The four pulses of dialogic activity show clearly that father and infant engage in dialogical communion that is grounded in and sustained by fine-grained or micro-temporal bodily coordination. Following Oller’s (2000; Nathani & Oller, 2001; see also Ramsdell et al., 2007) infraphonological model, all of the infant’s vocalisations in the excerpt were vowel-like protophones or quasi-vowels, i.e., the vocal tract is at rest without discernible posturing such as jaw lowering, lips spreading (Hsu et al., 2014: 140; Nathani & Oller, 2001: 329). Moreover, the infant’s quasi-vowels do not sound like adult vowels. All the infant’s vocalisations were low on resonance and highly melodic. The father’s imitations of the infant’s vocalisations followed the same pattern, namely, unpostured quasi-vowels with a clear melodic contour though with a higher degree of audible resonance. The father was quite consciously and playfully imitating the infant’s vocalisations. No consonants or consonant–vowel (syllabic) combinations occurred.

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Table 3.2 The Four Subphases of the Introduction Phase of the Wordless Narrative between Infant and Father, Showing the Vocalisations of Infant and Father, Intervals of Silence, and Their Duration

Silence Infant 0.66 (0.93) + Silence (0.34) + Father (0.83)

Subphase 1

Infant (0.1) Silence 2.0) + Silence (0.60) + Father (0.47) + Silence (0.13) + Infant (0.18) Subphase 2

Infant (0.41) Infant (0.27) Silence (2.04) + Silence + Silence (0.24) + (1.18) Father + Infant (0.48) (0.49) + Silence (0.35) + Father (0.35) Subphase 3 Subphase 4

The first pulse of dialogical activity between father and infant is presented in Figure 3.2. The infant initiates with a vocalisation lasting 0.93 s. The pitch of the infant’s vocalisation starts at 251.5 Hz and initially remains quite level until 250.4 Hz when there is a sharp rise to a peak of 499.1 Hz before tapering off to 431.8 Hz (see blue pitch line in Figure 3.2). The overall shape of this melody is something like aah (level) yay (rising-falling). The intensity level (green line in Figure 3.2) shows a surge that then decreases in the final phase of the vocalisation. A silence of approximately 0.20 s follows the infant’s vocalisation. The father’s vocalisation responds to and seeks to mirror the infant’s vocalisation. His vocalisation lasts 0.83 s. The pitch contour mirrors the level contour of the first part of the infant’s vocalisation, moving from 290 Hz and terminating at 273 Hz. The intensity level is higher due to the greater force and volume of the father’s vocalisation. Like the infant’s, there is a surge of intensity that decreases towards the end. The kinematics of this phase may be summarised in terms of the co-synchrony of the two participants’ vocalisations as they resonate with each other’s vocal

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Figure 3.2 Phase 1, Subphase 1 of wordless narrative between father and infant; duration 1.96 s.

and other body dynamics. In moving in time with each other, the bodies of the two participants begin the process of meshing productively with each other as they begin to move along together in sympathetic attunement and co-affiliation. Likewise, the energetics show a similar or convergent (not identical) pattern in the ebb and flow of energy through this movement sequence in the process of reducing the intensive difference. The infant’s initiating vocalisation is informed by motives of sympathy and arousal that seek a response from the other. The father is thus prompted to co-orient with the infant around a locus of shared concern and affect. The physiognomics is at this stage not easily separable from the kinematics and the energetics. Reed (1996b: 84–85) and Gibson and Pick (2000: 46–48) argue that posture and postural control is a fundamental requirement of bodily actions. Posture and postural control function to maintain the body or a body part in a stable relation to

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the environment as well as to allow specific action systems to develop on the basis of increasing postural control. Thus, the ability to control head and eye movement in early infancy is foundational for the later emergence of action systems based on vocalising, facial expressiveness, and so on. Vocalising is a form of audible body gesture which is in part embedded in the head-neck system. The latter affords the possibility of adjusting the position and orientation of the head (rotating, tilting, compensating) to facilitate the exploratory and/or performatory orientation of eyes, ears, face, nose, mouth, and organs of speech to a source of stimulus information, including an interactional partner in one’s environment. During the infant’s vocalisation, the father’s head moves very gently left then right as he gently sways the infant, whom he is holding, in synchrony with the infant’s vocalisation. The father’s mouth is open, probably in anticipation of or in sympathy with the infant’s vocalisation. Mutual facial orientation and gaze establish interpersonal co-orientation to each other as loci of interest and concern. An interval of silence lasting 0.66 s follows this first pulse of vocal activity. The second pulse (see Figure 3.3) is of 1.53 s duration. The infant initiates with a very brief, very soft vocalisation lasting approximately 0.2 s. The pitch contour is flat, starting at 339 Hz and finishing at 342.9 Hz. This vocalisation is followed by a silence lasting 0.61 s. In this interval of silence, the baby gently rocks back and forth. The father opens and partly closes his mouth prior to his vocalisation, which is of 0.46 s duration. The father injects a significant amount of enthusiasm and intensity into his vocalisation (see green line), which is also deeply resonant. The pitch contour is fairly constant around 133 Hz from start to finish (see blue line in Figure 3.3). The father smiles and his eyebrows move upwards throughout his vocalisation. The father raises the infant very slightly in synchrony with his vocalisation. After an interval of silence lasting 0.14 s, the infant responds with another very brief vocalisation of 0.16 s duration. The pitch range of this vocalisation starts at 271.7 Hz and terminates at 322.3 Hz. During this vocalisation, the father’s head gently jerks backwards then forwards in synchrony with the movement of the infant’s vocalisation. As before, mutual gaze and facial orientation are maintained throughout. Without going into the detail, it is noteworthy that the final two pulses of synchronised vocal activity in Phase 1 of the episode show increasing synchronisation and convergence of the voice dynamics of infant and father along the kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic dimensions. The wordless dialogue that takes place between father and infant is grounded in and based on their reciprocal feeling of being-with. The feeling of being-with is the a priori condition for the co-agency of father and infant. As Stuart (2010) argues, this capacity for wordless, pre-conceptual, and pre-reflective enkinaesthesia is the essential pre-condition of dialogue and the sensory-kinetic melodies that enable and sustain this dialogue. Throughout the episode, the father responds, tracks, and emulates the surges of intensity—the energetic dimension (Table 3.1)—to a greater extent than he can be said to emulate the pitch contour of the infant’s vocalisations. This is significant because it points to the ways in which surges of affect and hence their capacity to affect others occur

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Figure 3.3 Phase 1, Subphase 2 of wordless narrative between father and infant; duration 1.53 s.

in rhythmically packaged surges that have intrinsic variability that makes them interesting and thus with a high capacity to arouse others. As Pfaff (2006) shows, this intrinsic variability in regularity has higher informational value that naturally works on the sensitivity of the organism to the sensitivity of the other. Pfaff (2006: 77–78) reformulated the traditional division of the arousal systems into the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Alternatively, he argues that arousal states, as in emotionally laden behaviours, are based on two key factors: (1) teamwork or coordination between autonomic, cortical, and behavioural systems (e.g., cardiovascular and respiratory systems); and (2) a high degree of sensitivity on the part of the organism and hence a high information content on account of the enhanced sensitivity to environmental states (e.g., the appearance of threat) that the arousal of the systems mentioned in (1) entails in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability. Uncertainty and unpredictability cause autonomic arousal and place the animal in a state of readiness to deal with the new situation. In the episode analysed, we might say that the father’s sensitivity to the sensitivity of

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the infant’s surges of intensity, as shown in Figures 3.2 and 3.3 above, provides an objective measure of the energetic surges of affect that move self and other. As the episode illustrates, this early kind of coordination—Mary Catherine Bateson’s (1971, 1979) “proto-conversation,” Trevarthen’s (1979) “primary intersubjectivity”—is driven by affect, which motivates and sustains mutual attunement. Father and infant are having fun together. Their mutual enjoyment stimulates each other to go on, reaching a climax of affective intensity in the third phase before settling down into a quiet state of relaxation in the final phase. The pulses of dialogical activity show emergent regularity as father and infant orient to each other and anticipate each other’s responses. Emergent regularities of dialogical responsivity set up anticipations that lay the foundations for the infant’s attunement to social regularities and expectations and hence the normative value of these regularities. These regularities also constitute early forms of enskilment that give rise to: (1) early forms of dialogical reciprocity and responsivity; (2) the ability productively to engage with expectations and their flows; (3) the ability to coordinate with other social agents; (4) the ability to attune to and to sensitise to other’s affective states, and to be affected by them; and (5) the ability to exercise the reciprocal ability to affect others with one’s own affective states. Infants naturally sensitise to the other’s sensory-kinetic melodies of movement in sound, facial expressions, body movements, and so on. These melodies arouse and thus attract the infant’s curiosity, interest, and attention. The infant is moved by the melodies of others just as caregivers are moved by the melodies of the infant. These abilities are innate (Trevarthen, 2009: 32). The ability of caregivers and infants to attract and sustain each other’s interest as they move along together and enfold the dynamics of their bodily melodies into each other’s neural and bodily dynamics lays the foundations for the infant’s participation in and orientation to the social structures of the group and its norms and expectations. This can be observed in the proto-metafunctional character of the three dimensions of kinetic melodies—kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic—set out in Table 3.1. The rhythmic pulses of the kinematic dimension and the co-synchronisation of each other’s bodily rhythms set up and sustain recursive rhythmic periodicities that exhibit patterned regularities with variation. The mutual entrainment of infant and father to each other’s kinematic patterns and the resulting inter-individual patterns that co-emerge create regularities that both enable the infant to synchronise his affective and bodily dynamics with others and to fit into and play a role in social encounters. The surges of intensity that characterise the energetic dimension in the form of changes in pace, force, degree of loudness, degree of arousal, and so on have the capacity to arouse the infant’s intrinsic motivation systems, to draw them out, and to engage them in proto-social forms of dialogical activity that sensitise the infant to and direct the infant to participate in playful dialogical rituals like the one shown here. Participation in such rituals begins the processes of unlearning and learning whereby the infant’s intrinsic motivation systems are gradually sculpted and transformed along social lines that sensitise the infant to social norms and values.

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The changes in vocal and other bodily postures of the physiognomic dimension of this wordless narrative cannot be assigned linguistic values. However, they show how modulations of body shape and the movement transformations from one postural setting to another relate to and map the shifting interests and purposes of the two participants. Father and infant co-orient to each other, and through their acts of imitation the infant begins the process of co-articulating the body’s action systems in relation to changing environmental events. In episodes of primary intersubjectivity, as here, the environment is the infant–father dyad. The developing ability to articulate and to sustain a given body posture in relation to a given aspect of the environment serves to keep the infant in contact with selected aspects of his world. In the present example, the infant maintains postural settings of face and gaze that sustain an orientation to the father’s face and gaze (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3) while also being held upright by the father’s hands in ways that support this mutual orientation. The infant’s vocalisations are nested within this larger-scale orientational framework (see Vol. II, Chapter 3, Section 2). From the physiognomic point of view, the infant’s vocalisations show an ability to adjust to and to entrain to those of the father (and vice versa). Embedded within the larger facio-glossal system and the postures that it sustains, the infant’s vocalisations are anything but random or involuntary (Hsu et al., 2014: 133–134; Trevarthen, 2009: 27). They are driven and modulated by motive and purpose that originate from within the infant’s intrinsic motivation systems. The infant is learning how to control and to sustain vocal postures and in doing so to direct them along a vector of attention and interest to his addressee—the father in the present case. That is, the infant is developing and honing the still primordial ability to articulate and to hold a given vocal or other posture in relation to some feature of the environment. The physiognomic dimension of melodies of movement therefore underpins the later ability to articulate a given phonetic or other gesture in relation to some aspect of a social situation. It is a first form of dynamic postural regulation and control of the relationship between body and environment that later develops as full-fledged control of phonetic gestures and the articulation of semantic control over an ever-expanding social and cultural environment. The second aspect of this ability, also evident in the episode, is the developing ability not only to articulate and to hold a given vocal posture, but also the ability to control the transformation from one posture to another (see Reed, 1996b: 84–85). The body’s melodies of movement, including its vocalisations, are constituted in part by the ability to transition from one posture to another as the infant’s interests and purposes shift in response to changing events in its environment. In honing these far from random abilities, the infant lays the foundations for the developmental emergence of interaction routines that ground dialogically coordinated languaging between persons. Dialogically coordinated languaging between persons requires that the kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic dimensions of the body’s sensory-kinetic melodies of movement, together with related action-perceptions skills, are integrated into coordinated higher-order synergies that are constrained and directed by and integrated to cultural-semantic pattern—second-order phonology and

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lexicogrammar (Thibault, 2011a, 2012a)—to give rise to dialogically coordinated languaging between persons (Vol. II, Chapter 1). The kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic dimensions described above are aspects of the primordial firstorder languaging of the infant that are integrated to and re-organised by social and cultural dynamics that these same primordial melodies of movement enable the infant to be entrained to and captured by. The three complementary dimensions of expressive movement in Table 3.1 can be seen as precursors of the three complementary metafunctional components of lexicogrammar in Halliday’s (1979) account of the functionally motivated relation between lexicogrammatical form and meaning. Column 4 in Table 3.1 indicates relevant analogies with Halliday’s metafunctional account of language. Languaging requires very high levels of precision and enskilment that the three dimensions of the first-order melodies lay the foundations for at the same time that the latter are never transcended. For example, rhythmic periodicities require agents to synchronise their actions with others, to be in time with others, and thus to participate in action routines and their interpersonal and social roles. The fluctuating energetic surges require the ability to attune to others’ motives and affect, to be affected by them, and to move along with them in ways that will motivate and enhance successful interaction outcomes. Finally, the ability to articulate semantic postures and to effect transitions between postures requires great precision in successfully co-articulating the relationship between self and environment (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 2).

9. Micro-Temporal Phases in an Episode of Infant– Mother Interaction: Concerted Rehearsal and the Orientation to Social Norms I will now consider some aspects of the cognitive significance of bodies-in-interaction in an analysis of a brief episode of infant–mother interaction. Typically, agents’ living, moving sense-making trajectories integrate brain, body, and world-side factors in short pulses or intervals that are connected to each other along their trajectory. This can be observed in the following episode involving a one-year-old boy, Luke, and his mother, Sheila. Luke and Sheila are playing a fetching game involving plastic cubes.2 Sheila encourages and prompts Luke to go and fetch one of the cubes on his own, without the assistance of his mother. In the episode, we see that verbal, postural, kinesic, prosodic, gaze, and facial movements all interact. Each of these controlled movements is a modification in the postural orientation of the body or some part of it. Each such movement is directed towards the realisation of a value in the situation, e.g., the mother wants her son to fetch the cube, to pay attention to her; Luke wants to please his mother, and so on. The main intervals of this brief slice of a trajectory may be summarised with reference to Table 3.3 as four micro-temporal phases, as follows: 1. The mother takes the green cube in her hand (00.07.28), adjusts her posture inclining backwards (00.08.52) and then leans forwards towards Luke,

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Table 3.3 Four Phases in Micro-Temporal Dynamics of Tokened Rehearsal (Fetching Game) between Mother and Infant

Source: Stephen Cowley, with permission.

holding the cube in front of him and engaging his interest and attention (00.10.00); 2. The mother shifts her overall posture and body orientation by leaning forwards towards the designated target of the proposed “fetch” with the cube in

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her hand (00.10.48): This is the onset of the tokened or abbreviated “fetch” that the mother is promoting; Luke’s gaze and body orientation shift to track his mother (00.11.00–00.11.68); 3. She then briefly re-establishes mutual eye gaze with Luke by turning her head to engage Luke’s gaze (00.12.60); she then turns her head in the direction of her outstretched hand, holding the cube (00.13.56); maintaining this posture, her gaze then shifts back to Luke (00.14.16); 4. She then turns her gaze towards Luke while maintaining the forward-leaning posture (00.14.60). This movement is followed by a rapid sequence of vocalisations, e.g., “go and fetch it,” that are rhythmically synchronised with a sequence of rapid head turns towards Luke, on the one hand, and towards the target of the proposed fetch (the cube), on the other (00.14.60–00.16.40). The head turns serve: (1) to engage Luke; and (2) to direct Luke to the designated target of the proposed “fetch”; Luke begins to move towards the cube (off screen) while his mother directs her gaze to him while holding the previous posture (00.16.40); Luke starts to crawl towards the cube, smiling, while his mother shifts her posture backwards to give Luke the space to initiate the fetch on his own (00.18.20). In this brief episode, we see that each of the four micro-temporal phases analysed above forms a pattern of behaviour that is distributed across different bodily postures and their transformations. Moreover, each phase, as well as the episode as a whole, shows the three properties of intentional behaviour identified by Freeman (2000b: 116), viz., wholeness, unity, and intent. It makes little sense to split the behaviour into separate channels, codes, or modes of communication that are “combined” (cf. Trager 1958; see Thibault, 2008 for discussion). Instead, they form a unity from the outset and must be studied as such (Arndt & Janney, 1987: 107). In the present example, we see how the concerted rehearsal that constitutes the fetching game between Luke and Sheila involves the two persons acting on each other, on the relevant objects (the plastic cubes), and on the situation through coorchestrated and dialogically coordinated real-time bodily dynamics that allow them to generalise and abstract (rehearse) so as to create the sense-making structures through which infants like Luke come to perceive and act in the world. Rather than holding an object, a hammer, say, in my hand and exploring it through the haptics and kinesics of tactile exploration, the increasingly compressed and abstracted forms of bodily dynamics enacted in concerted languaging qua rehearsal between infants and parents give rise to virtual perception-action cycles that enable infants such as Luke to grasp both in imagination and in action the culturally valued patterns of behaviour that are promoted by caregivers. Engaging in languaging as a form of concerted rehearsal is therefore a means of dynamically shaping and focusing trajectories of value-realising actions in the human ecology (Hodges, 2007a, 2009). Caregivers structure and exert control over the daily life of infants in order to shape and direct it into meaningful patterns in accordance with the requirements

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and expectations of higher-scalar social and cultural norms and values. The caregiver is a repository of higher-scalar cultural capacities and skills that he or she draws on to shape the infant’s interactivity both with her and with the wider social world (Thibault, 2004a: chap. 3). As here, the child is encouraged to become attuned to recurrent normative patterns—e.g., the verbal artefact fetch—and the capacities of these linguistic and other patterns to shape and direct behaviour. Caregivers structure the field of action and awareness in ways that introduce what I have elsewhere called proto-modal friction (Thibault, 1995; 2004a: 108– 109, 118–119) that is experienced when the world does not behave according to expectations. The friction between self and world provides opportunities for the re-modalisation of the self’s relationship to the breakdown of expectation and the formulation of strategies for solving the problem that this poses. Friction gives rise to a pattern of arousal that is felt as a dissonance that must be resolved by negotiating the means to move towards a resolution that is felt as a consonance in the agent’s relationship to the world, or at any rate a move away from dissonance and tension. Caretakers play a key role in enabling the child to orient to and draw on the appropriate social and cultural resources for doing so. Increasingly, this entails the dialogic appropriation of meaningful patterns that are rich in cultural normativity. Meaningful patterns entail participation roles. Caregivers and infants together engage in structured forms of activity involving a differentiation of roles and specialisations. Caregivers orchestrate the field of “promoted action” (Reed 1996b: 149) so as to help the child bridge the gap between the child’s performance and a competent execution of the skill or action. Melser (2004, 2009) sees languaging as a mode of concerted rehearsal between individuals. Concerted activities such as languaging entail the acquisition of the requisite perceptual, (inter)actional, and cognitive skills for taking part in activities of this kind. Rehearsal implies that the persons who participate in concerted forms of rehearsal such as languaging are readying or preparing themselves for a possible future real performance of the rehearsed action. Rehearsal may also modulate, prompt, guide, direct, orient, correct, and organise one’s participation in action. As in the episode analysed above, the caregiver structures and directs the interactional environment in ways that sensitise the child to social and cultural patterns and norms that impose layers of social and cultural expectations that increasingly play a role in the dynamical self-organisation of the child’s interactivity with the world (Thibault, 2004a). The child’s melodies of movement are increasingly entrained to forms of cultural enskilment and interactive stance-taking that enable him or her to participate as an agent with selfhood in human social life (Vol. II, Chapters 3 and 4). The embodied melodies of movement are increasingly structured in ways that enable selves to co-articulate their bodies with a world of cultural norms and resources. The infant’s biologically innate intrinsic motivations are transformed not only because they participate in episodes like the two analysed above, but also because the ideal forms of social life are already fully present in the infant’s social life in the form of the more acculturated persons and the cultural artefacts that populate his or her social world. The ideal forms that the child orients to exert

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their influence from the beginning. As Vygotsky (1987/1934) argued, the social and cultural environment provides the means that enable the child to individuate social and cultural functions as psychological functions (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 13). Individual psychology is enabled, stimulated, and supported by macro-cultural factors that generate action, perception, emotion, and intentionality. Artefacts, concepts, institutions, norms, policies, economic structures, and so on are all macro-cultural factors that shape, guide, and normalise particular forms of psychological functioning in society (see Ratner, 2012).

10. Biological Agency and Lived Full-Bodied SenseMaking: Susan Stuart’s Theory of Enkinaesthesia The episodes analysed in Sections 8 and 9 show how our bodies (and those of other living agents) show intrinsic sensitivity not only to others, but also to the sensitivity of the sensitivity of others to one’s own sensitivity to others (Stuart 2010). Stuart refers to the co-sensitivity of living bodies as enkinaesthesia (Stuart, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018; Stuart & Thibault, 2015). Stuart’s term enkinaesthesia builds on the idea of kinaesthesia (Stuart, 2010, 2013, 2014). The latter term emphasises the phenomenological dimension of a living agent’s felt kinaesthetic engagement with its world through the control of muscle tensions and bodily movement. Stuart’s use of the prefix en- in her neologism enkinaesthesia emphasises not just the felt kinetic-sensory dynamics of the individual agent, but the dialogical dynamics of the felt kinetic-sensory relations between agents. Enkinaesthesia refers to the co-affective entwining, blending, and enfolding of the co-sensed, co-experienced, and co-lived enkinaesthetic melodies of sensing and experiencing agents whose bodily (and neural) dynamics are entangled with each other in relations of community and reciprocity. Building on the idea of kinetic melodies discussed above, enkinaesthetic melodies refer to the deep co-affective enfolding of agents’ melodies to each other’s felt bodily dynamics in their dialogical encounters with one another. As Stuart (2010) points out, this implicates a transcendental dialogics of agency that underpins the enkinaesthetics of human relationality. The enkinaesthetics of lived sense-making is therefore recursive and historical as the neural, somato-sensory, and affective dynamics of agents (human and non-human) become entangled with each other over time (Thibault, 2011b: 127–136). The lived temporality of our experience of other persons and our recollections of them are characterised by the reciprocal enfolding into each other’s enkinaesthetic melodies when we participate with them in relations of community and reciprocity. Persons are co-constituted, co-constructed, and co-developed as persons by the reciprocal enfolding (and unfolding) of the bodily dynamics of others to their own bodily dynamics at the same time that one’s own bodily dynamics affect others and are enfolded to their bodily dynamics. Stuart’s term enkinaesthesia therefore recognises the temporal-spatial-energic qualities of kinetic melodies (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012), but goes further. Enkinaesthetic activity acknowledges the importance of the dynamic plenisentient

166 Melody and affectively saturated interrelation of agent and world. The enkinaesthetic entwining of melodies creates intercorporeal resonances with those agents with whom, and those objects with which, we are in relations of community and reciprocity. The bodily feelings that underpin our dialogically coordinated first-order languaging with other agents and things are always and intrinsically a feelingwith (Stuart & Thibault, 2015). Stuart takes the capacity for enkinaesthetic dialogue to be “an a priori nomological condition for agency” (2010: 305). Through the creation of enkinaesthetic memories, kinetic melodies, and imagination, the capacity to generate a felt anticipatory dynamics makes possible our skilful practical engagement with the world by means of movement-dependent co-exploratory activity (Thibault, 2005b, 2005c). The term “enkinaesthesia” thus emphasises the somato-sensory dynamics and the neuromuscular flows and tensions that are felt by the individual agent. However, it also and most fundamentally emphasises the entwined, blended, and co-situated feeling of the other (agential or non-agential, animate or non-animate, person or thing). In their languaging together, agents’ affective intentional reciprocity—their folding into, enfolding with, and unfolding from each other—coconstitutes the conscious relational and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that characterise the formation and maintenance of the enkinaesthetic melodies that unite agents in relations of co-effective affiliation and closeness. Enkinaesthetic melodies thus emphasise the intrinsically dialogical character of the feeling of being-with or being-among other agents and things in relations of community and reciprocity. Heidegger’s (1971) idea of “things” is relevant here. Heidegger (1971) distinguished “things” from bounded “objects.” Things are relational entities with which agents become entwined. Agents enact, with “things,” understood in Heidegger’s sense, felt relations of enkinaesthetic enfoldings, refoldings, and unfoldings that form extended melodies over time. These felt, reciprocal (not symmetrical) enkinaesthetic structures are the basis of our intentional structures and the organisation of their transient melodies into lasting relations of community and relationship that create and sustain interpersonal and social bonds and a sense of belonging (Section 4). The dialogical enkinaesthetic melodies of languaging have complex recursive dynamics that make pre-reflective, pre-conceptual experience meaningful. For this reason, I have emphasised our being-with, our acting with, our living with, and our moving with the world, rather than our being “in” it. Kinetic melodies are more than just sensori-motor articulations. They are affect-laden melodies that underpin, nurture, and sustain (or break and change) the social bonds between persons and between the other objects and the other agents and agencies with which we live in relations of community and reciprocity (Stuart, 2012). Moreover, these melodies have their own (wordless) intelligibility (Section 8). Their intelligibility is formed within our feelings of anticipation, of sensed familiarity, and sensed unfamiliarity, and how these both propel us forward and/ or hold us back (Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 6). It is a form of intelligibility that is proto-modal (Stuart & Thibault, 2015). Proto-modal intelligibility is spread out across time rather than being located at a specific point in time. It is an integral

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part of the living present of Husserl’s phenomenological structure of time consciousness. The living present is itself melodic rather than a series of discrete sequentially ordered instants of time. The “living-present” extends beyond the now of the primal impression, into the retained just-past, and the protended yetto-come (Husserl, 1964; see also discussion of Bergson’s account of the melodic structure of experience in Section 1 above). The living of life in which languaging is embedded and functions is a perpetually modulated becoming. It is a living and lived time⁠—not mechanical clock time⁠—experienced as changing assemblages of process flows and melodies. It is both the medium in which life is intelligible and the primal underpinning of our feeling of time as duration and becoming. The skilful enactment and the sustaining of sensory-kinetic melodies are the basis of what Heidegger (1962) called “smooth coping.” When things go wrong, when the tool breaks, when a personal relationship is falling apart, the melodies that sustained our relationship with the thing or person also falter and break in ways that we feel. These smooth unfolding sensory-kinetic melodies require care to maintain and nurture. When they falter and break, the world, or some part of it, seems chaotic, dissonant, and not in accordance with our expectations. Complexity suddenly puts a brake on smooth coping. The effect can be quite jarring and overwhelming. The sensory-kinetic melodies of skilful activity are also careful melodies. We need to attune to them and to pay attention to them. They are the foundational form of simplexity (Berthoz, 2012/2009). They serve to keep the relational dynamics of our being in the world in good working order and thus to contribute to both personal and ecological health (Hodges, 2007a; Sternberg, 2000). The melodies of sensed familiarity are smooth but never static. The living present is always enkinaesthetically active; it is always entangled with and in lived relations of community and reciprocity with the other agents and “things” that inhabit the inter-worlds that we construct and share with others. Moreover, the living present is always on the move; we are always exploring through our senses to reveal/discover how our world is or will be, whether it will call forth the response we had anticipated and so confirm our sense of the familiar or disrupt our sense of the familiar by a sensed unfamiliarity that introduces enkinaesthetic friction and tension/dissonance. In these cases, the felt enkinaesthetic dissonance when we sense the unfamiliar moves us to seek a resolution of the dissonance, or a new consonance. The movement from dissonance to its resolution, perhaps to a new consonance, or at any rate away from the felt dissonance, constitutes/enacts an always-differentiating recursive process that is characteristic of the melodies of our lived co-participatory sense-making. The “empathic stance” that is currently receiving so much emphasis is not quite the same as the enkinaesthetics of lived co-participatory sense-making. The notion of empathy is still individual-centred. It entails that the individual agent has or feels empathy towards another agent. It therefore emphasises that empathy is a stance that one individual has towards another individual, or perhaps towards a group of individuals. It does not therefore emphasise the immersiveness of the agent in a complex community of agents and objects in co-lived relations of community and reciprocity.

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Stuart also points out, with reference to the work of Edith Stein (1917), that “empathy” does not emphasise the deeply felt coupled nature of experience— Stein’s “feeling into” (Einfühling). When I rub my hand across the surface of my desk, or when I press my hand against the desk surface, the agency of the desk provides resistance and friction with its distinctive feel, grain, and texture that in turn affect the way I feel the table. My feeling of the desk is constituted by my active exploration of it as I modulate my hand movement through changes of pressure, tension, and velocity and thus encounter the friction or resistance of the desk opposing me. The friction or resistance offered by the desk is itself dependent on the different agencies, on different timescales, that are acting through the desk. These changes of hand movement, pressure, etc., are a form of “feeling into” (Einfühling) in Stein’s (1917) sense. My “feeling into” engages with the affordances of the desk that are brought forth by my hand movement. This “feeling into” the desk has the capacity to modulate the unfolding melody of the coupling relation that is my experience of the desk as I explore it with my hand. Experience is deeply felt and coupled in this sense, as Stein showed. There is a felt enfolding of my exploratory interactivity with the grain, hardness, and texture, etc., of the desk. We do not of course empathise with desks. The example serves to illustrate the felt, coupled nature of all experience, whether of other persons or things, that is absent in the empathy approach. Empathy in Stein’s sense does not mean that the empathising agent loses him- or herself in the other person. The empathising agent does not fully identify with or merge with the other. The other is recognised as an originary embodied deictic source whose feelings, etc., can be apprehended from the perspective of one’s self as originary deictic source. The empathising agent cannot experience the here-ness, the now-ness, or the me-ness of the other, but he or she can “feel into” the other through the enkinaesthetically enfolded sensory-kinetic melodies that entangle their respective neurohormonal and bodily dynamics in topologically complex dialogical relations of community and reciprocity. On this reading, empathic identification is interactively and affectively significant because it enables (and explains how) the reciprocal coupling and entraining of agents to each other’s bodily and neural dynamics sets up the basis for imitation-based learning to occur (Section 16).

11. Kinetic Melodies as Forms of Engagement Luria’s description of the writing of one’s signature focuses on the fluent unfolding of the kinetic melody that yields the signature inscribed on a writing surface (Section 6). Ochsner (1990: 55–59) points out that Luria’s description of this process involves three “neurological melodies” (Ochsner, 1990: 55): Kinetic, visual, and auditory. Ochsner argues that the visual and auditory [melodies, PJT] control what a writer sees and hears during the production of a written text. Thus, the visual melody determines how much of a text the eye takes in as feedback; the auditory melody regulates

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the inner voice as it matches subvocalized or, for some more advanced writers, vocally suppressed language with the language of a written text. Yet basic to these functions of the eye and ear is the kinetic melody, which innervates muscles in the hand, wrist, arm, and shoulder to produce graphic shapes. (Ochsner, 1990: 55–56) Ochsner’s observations on Luria’s account of handwriting have a broader significance. Implicit in Ochsner’s discussion is that there are different layers of intertwined melodies that provide constraints on the ways in which we interactively engage with our worlds. Moreover, the different forms support and constrain one another, as Ochsner’s discussion of kinetic, auditory, and visual melodies in handwriting shows. Melodies are always intentionally directed to something and are constituted relationally when an agent engages with some aspect of the agent’s world. They act on something or are in response to something in the agent’s world, however diffuse and vague this might be. They therefore arise from an agent’s intentional structures and are an extension of and development of them. The relational dimension of a melody is based on and emerges from the agent’s ability to discriminate and recognise specific aspects of the agent’s world and the ability to act in ways that make use of these discriminations and to be guided by them. Ochsner’s discussion of Luria suggests that the different kinds of melodies implicate different forms of engagement (Baber, 2018: 5–6). In Baber’s terms, this refers to the ways in which we engage with objects and how different forms of engagement constrain and support each other. The different melodies identified in Ochsner’s discussion of Luria are forms of engagement in Baber’s sense. Languaging, I argue, can be seen as orchestrations of different forms of engagement that constrain and support each other. We can therefore think of languaging in terms of the orchestration and interweaving of different melodies of engagement that are all embodied in and integrated to the here-now-me deictic perspective of the self-sensing body but derive from different timescales, as follows: 1. Sensory-kinaesthetic melodies are forms of engagement that integrate bodily movement and the feeling of this movement to situations and the agent’s implicit, felt evaluation of the situation; 2. Gestural/expressive melodies (phonetic (vocal tract) and other bodily melodies) are forms of skilful motor-sensory engagement that can be expressively modulated and performed in ways that reflect both the skills and intentions of the speaker and the speaker’s relations to changing situational factors; 3. Perceptual (auditory, tactile, visual, etc.) melodies are forms of engagement that pick up, track, and monitor changing affordance layouts as events in the Person-Object-Environment system that can potentially be responded to; 4. Lexicogrammatical-semantic melodies are forms of engagement that metalinguistically constrain, guide, and monitor first-order embodied interactivity (first-order languaging) and its embedding in larger-scale action systems and practices;

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5. Cultural melodies are forms of engagement that connect the PersonObject-Environment system to higher-scalar social-cultural figurations and arrangements; persons entrain their bodily melodies to stabilised culturalhistorical patterns and traditions and norms and their associated melodies (Elias, 2000/1939: 366–368). In a classic experimental study, Cohen, Bowdle, Nisbett, and Schwarz (1996) show that the melodies of a persistent culture of honour and its norms amongst white southerner males in the US are perpetuated in the institutions of the South and are embedded in its laws and social policies, e.g., in looser gun control, less restrictive self-defence statutes, and more hawkish voting by federal legislators on foreign policy issues (Cohen et al., 1996: 946). Southern white males subscribe to a socially enforced and perpetuated culture-of-honour stance which may now have become disembedded from the original historical formations that gave rise to it and re-embedded in contemporary “social roles, expectations, and shared definitions of manhood” (Cohen et al., 1996: 958). Faced with petty insults and slights that constitute a challenge or an affront to their masculinity, the offended male is socially obliged to redeem himself with a display of “toughness, dominance, or aggression” that can easily and rapidly escalate to physical violence, including homicide. This behaviour is further reinforced by the stigma of shame whereby the offended party feels diminished in the eyes of his peers (Cohen et al., 1996: 958). The researchers also looked at the neurohormonal responses of white southern males, showing that they have significantly higher testosterone outputs in response to insults compared to a control group of white northern males. The difference between the two groups may be explained in terms of the ways in which the culturally sanctioned and perpetuated modes of engagement of the two groups and the social institutions and norms in which these are embedded, in interaction with neurohormonal flows of the bodies of the two groups, and the situational triggers of these flows, set off different sensory-kinetic melodies as forms of engagement in response to perceived slights to their masculinity. While speculative, this provides insight into how culture inhabits the body and brain in ways that point to the thoroughly and seamlessly bio-social character of our being (Ingold, 2013; Miller & Kinsbourne, 2012: 40). The perceived insult is an affect that enacts a felt dissonance that requires a violent response directed at the bearer of the insult in order that the insulted party can move to a new felt consonance. In this way, the insulted party is able to restore his honour and thereby avoid shame or stigma in the eyes of his peers. The white southern males described in the study referred to above illustrate how the body’s melodies are saturated with cultural meaning and value. Body dynamics and neurohormonal flows are, in the course of development and in histories of interaction, subject to and entrained to higher-scalar ecological constraints and patterns to which they become sensitised and in relation to which they function. The brain serves to generate affectively rich (self)-consciousness of the body’s anticipatory movements in a field of cultural practices and norms.

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The culture of honour in which white southern males in the US are immersed provides norms of behaviour that body and brain assimilate to. These flows of norms throughout a community already exist prior to the self-organising dynamics of the interactions of the white southern males in question on lower-scalar levels on particular occasions. The white southern males and their actions on lower-scalar levels are integrated to the higher-scalar socio-cultural process flows that functionally complete and contextually integrate lower-scalar neurohormonal and bodily dynamics to their own logic. The former therefore provide the framework in which the self interprets the perceived insult or slight. The self therefore anticipates the effects of potential slights and insults in a world that is deictically centred on the body, its viewpoints, and its capacity for action. Visceral states, testosterone outputs, and neurohormonal flows are projected onto specific situations by the experiencing self so as to endow them with affectively charged significance. Rather than a direct causal relation between bodily states and perceived insult in the sense that the latter causes or 'triggers' the former, it is important to maintain that it is the experiencing self who experiences the bodily state as an awareness of the cultural significance of the insult. In the relevant cultural field of action and awareness, perceived slights and insults are selectively attended to for their potential to diminish the status of the self and for calling forth aggressive responses that serve to restore the status of the offended male in the eyes of the social group. In Section 12, I examine further aspects of this question with respect to a specific example.

12. The Fracturing of Melody and the Collapse of Empathy: Disintegration of a Dialogic System The transcript featured in Table 3.4 captures the final moments of a tragic shooting murder that took place in Abilene, Texas, on 1 September 2018. On that day, father, John Miller, and son, Michael Miller, shot and killed their neighbour, Aaron Howard, following a dispute over a mattress that Aaron Howard had thrown into a dumpster in a laneway adjacent to their respective homes. The dispute about the disposal of the rubbish, which lasted for several days, escalated when John Miller removed the mattress from the dumpster and threw it back onto Howard’s property. Aaron Howard and his fiancée then put the mattress back in the dumpster. John Miller then removed the mattress from the dumpster and threw it back onto Howard’s property. John Miller’s action led to the final confrontation between the Millers and Howard on the morning of 1 September 2018 when John and Michael Miller confronted Aaron Howard. As reported in The Independent in an article dated 21 September 2018, the three men started shouting at each other. John Miller pulled a handgun out of his basketball shorts. Shortly afterwards, Michael Miller appeared holding a shotgun. Kara Box, Howard’s common-law wife, began video-recording with her mobile phone at that point. A heated altercation ensued at the conclusion of which Howard died of gunshot wounds to the head and chest when John Miller, followed by his son, Michael Miller, fired a total of four or five shots.

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Table 3.4 Transcription of the Final Seconds of the Dispute between Howard and the Millers

Source: KTXS, Abilene, TX, USA; https://heavy.com/news/2018/09/aaron-howard-murder-video/.

The Independent further reports fragments of the ensuing dialogue, which I quote to give the reader some idea of what was said and done prior to the fragment transcribed in Table 3.4: “Oh yeah, you’re going to jail,” Mr Howard can be heard saying in the video.

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“Nah I’m not,” John Miller replies. He’s holding his handgun at his side. Behind him, Michael Miller has a shotgun in his right hand and is resting it on his shoulder, behind his head. His left hand is in the front pocket of his jeans. The Millers are shirtless. “Back off … If you come closer to me, I’m gonna kill you,” John Miller says calmly. “Hey, you hear him say he’s gonna kill me?” Mr Howard, who appears unarmed, asks Ms Box, before turning back to the Millers. “I’m at the dumpster. Put the gun up and go inside. You pulled a gun in front of my kids over … a mattress.” The men begin trading insults, their voices get louder. Mr Howard tells the Millers, “You’re dead. I promise you, you’re both dead … I’m gonna kill you.” Michael Miller then interrupts and advises, “If you’re gonna show this video to the cops, you might as well stop yelling that you’re gonna kill us.” Mr Howard responds that he doesn’t care and repeats his threat. “If you come within three foot of me, I’m gonna kill you,” John Miller says. “You’re not going to shoot my husband,” Ms Box responds. (Reis Thebault, How neighbours’ row over rubbish led to fatal shooting in Texas, The Independent, 21 September 2018; [www.indep endent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neighbour-sh ooting-abilene-texas-father-dead-shot-children-aar on-howard-a8548331.html]) The episode, which was recorded by Howard’s fiancée, Kara Box, on her mobile phone and later posted on the Internet [https://heavy.com/news/2018/09/aaro n-howard-murder-video/], concludes with the fatal shooting of Aaron Howard. Box’s recording runs for just over two and a half minutes. As the video shows, John and Michael Miller openly bear firearms throughout the episode, which is characterised by aggressive and angry stances, challenges, and the upholding of one’s right to “stand one’s ground.” The persons who participate in the dispute are in their everyday familiar neighbourhood world. In the world in question, firearms are part of everyday experience. This world is constituted not only by lethal cultural artefacts such as guns, but by permissive laws regulating their ownership and use, a macro-cultural legal framework that enshrines “stand one’s ground” and gun ownership as a legal right. How one lives and moves in this world is underpinned by characteristic kinetic melodies and their modulations that underpin everything that people say and do. The kinetic melodies of the sayings and doings in the episode unfold towards their tragic conclusion in ways that draw on and activate bodily (enkinaesthetic) memories that work in close synergy with one another. For example, the sequence of steps involved in the act of aiming and firing a gun at someone is a skilled activity that is initially learned and memorised as a sequence of discrete steps. When

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aiming and firing a gun becomes a skilled action, the separate steps are merged into the flow of a single kinetic melody that unfolds effortlessly and spontaneously as a seamless whole without the need to recall the separate steps. The same applies to languaging and its vitality effects (Section 13). Displays of toughness, dominance, and aggression are amply on display in the dramatic build up to the final moments of the episode that I have transcribed in Table 3.4. The circumstances in which the video recording was made do not allow us to see all aspects of the episode, though enough of it is captured to show how kinetic melodies of body movement, voice dynamics, facial displays, and posture yield a particular situation in which the different persons attune to and respond to shifts in intensity of the flow of the situation. It is noteworthy for instance that Michael Miller lowers his shotgun from its resting position on his shoulder to his right side preparatory to firing immediately after his father, John Miller, fired two shots with the handgun he is holding in his right hand. Michael Miller’s movement is in response to the dissonant quality of Aaron Howard’s defiant “shoot me,” which he says in response to John Miller’s threat to shoot him if Howard comes within three feet of Miller (Frame 1 in the transcription). Aaron Howard’s defiance at this point is a challenge which may well be the “trigger” for the fatal shooting that follows on the part of John and Michael Miller. I am not suggesting that Howard is legally responsible for his own death. Rather, his utterance constitutes a further escalation of an already highly fraught situation that in effect moves almost naturally and quite unreflectively into the next phase of the flow of the situation. His “challenge” unreflectively triggers the transformation to the next phase, his fatal shooting at the hands of John and Michael Miller. Their masculinity is called into question on quite visceral levels that almost automatically call forth their response. On the part of all three men, they encounter each other in the situation as threats to each other’s status and standing. Backing down, walking away, and de-escalating, which surely would have been preferable for all concerned, do not seem to be an option. Consequently, the aggressiveness, the dissonance, and the harshness of their kinetic melodies are experienced as an entangled flow of body feelings, neurohormonal triggers, cultural meanings such as honour codes, legal principles such as property rights and “stand your ground,” and permissive gun laws, all of which are intertwined to carry the melodies of the situation inexorably forward with tragic consequences. Michael Miller lowers his gun from his shoulder as a bodily response to Howard’s utterance “shoot me.” This is a bodily enkinaesthetic response rather than an intellectual one. Confronted with what he (and his father) perceive in the affordances of the situation flow as a threat to their standing, his lowering of his gun is activated by a kinaesthetic bodily memory that automatically kicks in as, for him, the right thing to do in the circumstances. Roth et al. (2015: 297) point out that kinetic melodies, once they are embodied in kinaesthetic memory, become entrenched as bodily habit and are hard to extinguish. The right or the 'natural' thing to do is grounded in bodily feeling. The highly charged situation does not feel right. His lowering of his gun is a response to this feeling rather than the conscious thought that he must assert or display himself as a person whose

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honour or status is on the line and must be defended. Instead, the feeling of the melody, once triggered, carries them all forward to do and say what they do until the melody moves to its conclusion. The episode in question unfolded over three days. The original trigger was the dumped mattress, which gave rise to a particular flow of events and the felt kinetic melodies that underpinned them in the bodies of the participants. Dissonances and tensions build up that propel the melody forward. One can conjecture that for John and Michael Miller the presence of the mattress in the dumpster constituted a disruption of their habitual melodies in a way that caused offence or was experienced as a perturbation of the norms that they oriented to. The intrusion of an “alien” perceptual cue may constitute a disruption of habitual melodies that in turn calls for a response. The mattress was thrown back over the fence onto Aaron Howard’s property. For reasons we will probably never know, the appearance of the mattress in the dumpster in some way triggered a visceral response to a felt sense of anomaly. The feeling of anomaly—that things are not right—sets off a flow of dissonant melodies that never, in the episode, gives rise to a harmonious concordance of choreographed melodies that may have produced a different outcome. The encounter between the four persons who took part in this tragic episode is not reducible to four persons who come together to “interact,” however violently and tragically. As I have emphasised throughout this study, persons are entangled with each other’s neural and bodily dynamics in relations of community and reciprocity, not always harmoniously, as the episode demonstrates. In the present example, the Millers and Howard and Box had not previously encountered each other until the mattress incident set off the unfolding events and their kinetic melodies. The four persons, two with guns, who came together to create this encounter, do so with their respective interaction histories and the entanglements of bodily and cultural dynamics that these histories necessarily entail. The relations of community and reciprocity that I have mentioned above mean that persons are not independent, free-standing agents but are, as Susan Stuart has written, enkinaesthetically enfolded with each other. The situation that unfolded over several days and culminated in the way we see in the video must therefore be explained and understood in terms of the overall system of inter-related factors and processes on many time and place scales that constitute the dialogic system that the event instates. The legal system assigns innocence and guilt to sovereign individuals whereas we have seen that the terrible breakdown of human relations that occurred in the episode must be understood in terms of the larger-scale dialogic system and its capacities for learning and improving and/or for degenerating into violence and the “collapse of empathy” (Bråten, 2013). What is striking about the episode is how inexorably it unfolds to its conclusion without any self-questioning or doubt on the part of the individual persons, with the exception of Kara Box when she questions John Miller’s warning to Aaron Howard that he (Miller) will shoot him if he (Howard) comes within three feet of Howard (Frames 1 and 2). John Miller “stands his ground” and warns Howard ostensibly in self-defence. However, in adopting

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this stance, he conforms to the social norms, enshrined in Texan law, that exert selection pressures on individuals to conform to the group norm that guns are a legitimate means of resolving conflict and of maintaining his social standing in the group. These pressures induce conforming attitudes and actions. On the other hand, from the Millers’ point of view, Howard appears to have violated some social norm to do with rubbish disposal and property relations, though these are never explicit in the recorded episode. Both the Millers and Howard stake out highly individualistic stances rather than cooperative pro-social ones. They aggressively defend their respective turfs in an escalating cycle of challenges, insults, and threats. Figure 3.4 presents a Praat analysis of the build-up to the final trigger, when Howard says “c’mon shoot me” in response to John Miller’s warning. The Praat analysis shows a surge in the intensity at this point. In contrast to Miller’s calmer and confident voice dynamics, the surge in intensity and the rising pitch in Howard’s response accentuates the affect. His utterance has the effect of a challenge or a goad egging the Millers on rather than seeking a way to de-escalate. This is matched by John Miller saying to Miller “you’re dead” followed by his saying to his father two times “point it.” Michael Miller’s response to Howard (“you’re dead”) can only entertain one outcome, the imminent death of Howard. Monological closure has shut down the possibility of opening up and entertaining other anticipated futures.

Figure 3.4 Voice dynamics and monological closure: The build-up to the trigger and aftermath in the Miller–Howard dispute; AH = Aaron Howard; KB = Kara Box; JM = John Miller; MM = Michael Miller. Items in small caps gloss the phases of the build-up.

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Michael Miller then in effect instigates his father’s firing of two shots when he (MM) says to his father “point it point it.” Instead of attempting to dissuade his father from opening fire, he does the opposite. Whilst we can’t measure in any precise way the dynamics at work, we can reasonably speculate that, given the group norms that are entangled with their respective internal dynamics, together with the kinetic melodies that underpin this dynamic and drive it forward, the father’s judgment and decision are affected by what his son says. The original trigger for the entire event, which unfolded over several days, was the mattress. From the perspective of the Millers, Howard’s placing the mattress in the dumpster was a perturbing element, which may have appeared to them as irrational. The fact that John Miller returned the mattress to the Howard’s property rather than open up a dialogue with Howard with a view to resolving the problem in a more creative and harmonious way shows how monological closure to others’ viewpoints cancels the complementarity of perspectives that is essential for open, creative dialogue to take place (Bråten, 2013: 140). The presence of the mattress in the dumpster is a perturbation that, as Bråten writes, “invites a monolithic perspective” (2013: 140). The action of returning the mattress to the Howard’s property is an act of control in precisely this sense. Moreover, as the full two-and-half minutes of Box’s video recording amply demonstrate, both Millers and Howard trade an escalating series of threats and insults that leave no space for empathy. Each party is unable and unwilling to perceive and feel things from the other’s perspective. The other’s perspective is simply excluded as each side consistently drives home their own singular monological perspective. Their respective monological perspectives recognise no complementary perspective on the part of the other that is worth recognising and integrating to one’s own perspective. Academic and religious sects and group think also operate in this way (Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 8). In the present example, the result is the escalation of rigidified, unyielding perspectives that gives rise to an escalating arms race of threats, insults, and pointed guns. The positive feedback loops that give rise to this escalating cascade of monological closure are not dampened by negative feedback loops that could bring the situation under control. Kara Box’s appeal to John Miller (Frame 2) is ignored even as she physically stands between the Millers and her husband. The monological system in operation is simply unable to entertain her viewpoint, which is ignored and presumably regarded as irrelevant by the Millers, as having no value in its own right. The Millers and Howard exhibit the same kinds of behavioural patterns towards each other, but have divergent orientations to the question of the mattress. Bateson (1973: 41) termed this pattern “symmetrical differentiation” in his classification of the different forms of schismogenesis. The Millers and Howard respond to each other in the same away—threats, insults, etc.—though they have different views about the mattress. Insult and threat are responded to with insult and threat in an escalating cascade that is not restrained, leading to “more and more extreme rivalry and ultimately to hostility and the breakdown of the whole system” (Bateson, 1973: 42). No meta-level is ascended to in order to interrupt this cycle.

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Nor is there any re-modulation of kinetic melodies to bring about a more conciliatory or harmonious feeling tone that could ease the tensions. The participants’ melodies activate enkinaesthetic memories that carry them forward in ways that do not require or appeal to any effort of self-reflection. Their melodies have become automatised as in Luria’s example of the learning of handwriting (Section 6). For this reason, the automatised unfolding of their melodies and their seamless entanglement in the larger dialogic system can mean that the reasons for the breakdown of dialogue, the collapse of empathy, and the degeneration into violence go unexamined and unnoticed. The fact that the Millers and Howard had not met each other before this incident is possibly telling. Given that they were neighbours, it suggests that had they had the opportunity to be acquainted with each other in other more positive circumstances before the fatal confrontation took place, they may have been able to draw upon other kinetic melodies and their corresponding enkinaesthetic memories as a way of developing together a more workable and dialogic modus operandi in which rigid stance taking, monological closure, and hostility give way to flexibility, openness, and a willingness to reach agreement or compromise. The episode discussed in this section raises many questions that I am unable to answer here. This transient encounter between persons who barely knew each other ended in tragedy. Clearly, the “mechanisms” of social control and regulation in the form of institutional norms, while invoked at times with reference to “standing one’s ground,” cannot provide the explanation we need. Such an explanation assumes a direct relation between higher-order norms and the actions of the persons in the encounter analysed above. What, then, are the mechanisms that organise and convey the relevant top-down constraints that are at play in the situation? It seems likely that there are layers of probably intermediate social-interactive organisation that work through the participants, the social setting, the relevant artefacts such as the guns, the mattress, and the positioning of the dumpster in the lane near the homes of the Millers and Howard and his wife. In ways still to be worked out in detail, such intermediate configurations and the process flows they organise would seem to be the source of the principal constraints at play. At lower sub-personal and personal layers of organisation, there is the question of habit formation and persistent patterns of body-brain melody and organisation (see Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 12). Feedback loops within and across these scalar levels yield trajectories of action, affect, and meaning that converge on particular outcomes, sometimes with tragic results, as we see here.

13. Mood, Kinetic Melodies, and the Musicality of Languaging We experience a kinetic melody as a change in the way our body feels. The felt character of the melody and therefore the experience of a melody are grounded in feelings or in a particular syndrome of feelings. There is however no implication that there is a strict correlation between a particular syndrome of feelings and a particular melody. However, the relationship between a kinetic melody and a particular syndrome of bodily feelings can be contextualised and therefore

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interpreted in ways that connect the relation to particular social situations. Kinetic melodies have the capacity to evoke a range of feelings that can be associated with a particular mood. My use of the term “mood” refers to the bodily feeling or syndrome of feelings that is experienced as a feeling tone that pervades a particular melody over some temporal duration. This feeling tone is a state of affective arousal—either positive or negative—that is thought to play a role in modulating right and left hemisphere roles in semantic priming (Frishkoff, 2007; Tucker et al., 2008: 53). These affective states have their origins in the oldest and least differentiated cortical regions of the brain known as the limbic cortex. The limbic regions together with the hypothalamus and the brainstem nuclei are closely related to emotional arousal, motivation, and the regulation of visceral functions (Tucker et al., 2008: 46). Musical mood is evoked by the dynamical structure and progression of the music itself and stands in a dynamical relationship to that structure as it unfolds in time. In languaging, the mood, in this sense, not the grammatical sense, that is evoked by a particular kinetic melody is a pre-linguistic framing of the self’s arousal to act that has its origins in limbic cognition. It is a first implicit and vague pre-semantic orientation that constitutes an early phase in the agent’s formulation of a linguistic response to the situation (Deacon, 2005: 275). This presemantic mood nonetheless leaves its mark to varying degrees as a feeling tone that perfuses the utterance. This feeling tone is the enkinaesthetic underpinning of Ruqaiya Hasan’s (2016/1999: 283–285) idea of “tone setting” referred to in the quotation at the head of this chapter. Bodily feelings thus constitute the prereflective ground of utterance meaning and interpretation. Specifically, the dynamical structure of the speaker’s kinetic melody gives rise to a feeling of the bodily/articulatory movement that is associated with a particular pre-semantic mood. The typical configurations of feelings that are associated with mood in the sense defined here relate to the dynamical structure of the kinetic melodies that underpin languaging and which leave their trace in the linguistic utterance. For example, the sense of mild irritation or annoyance that the voice dynamics of my utterance convey to the listener who interrupts me when I am working is a mood that is experienced on the basis of dynamical structures of the voice. Languaging is grounded in bodily feelings. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that these bodily feelings are the necessary and essential a priori of our capacity to interpret meaning in utterances (see also Glenberg, Havas, Becker, & Rinck, 2005; Lemke, 2015). Kinetic melodies are pre-conceptual and pre-reflective (Stuart, 2010, 2012), but they have intentionality. They are directed at bodily actions and their realisation as patterns of bodily movement such as those made by vocal tract activity in the act of speaking. The feeling of a bodily movement is an intentional structure in this sense; it is a felt way of experiencing that movement. Stern’s (1984, 1999, 2002/1977) idea of “vitality affects” is relevant here. Stern (2002/1977: 13) writes that temporally contoured vitality affects “have a musical quality.” Their temporal contours include forms such as “fading, acceleration, explosion, effortfulness, hesitancy, tentativeness, boldness” (Stern, 2002/1977: 13; 1999:

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68). These lexical descriptors verbalise how action is felt as sensory-kinetic experience. Of course, the verbal descriptor is not the same as the felt sensory experience. Vitality affects are time-bound responses to the dynamical properties of bodily actions. They are ways of going along with and responding to one’s own bodily action as well as that of other persons. Vitality affects accrue in bodily memory as dispositions, skills, and habits that bear on and shape one’s behaviour and presence in the world as a particular bodily habitus (Elias, 2000/1939; Fuchs, 2000, 2011). Vitality affects also shape the agent’s responses to sensory-kinetic experience. Languaging is a skilful bodily activity that requires the exercise and management of accrued sensory-kinetic experiences as bodily dispositions and capacities at the same time that agents must come up with appropriate bodily performances that can respond to these experiences in their dialogical encounters with others. Vitality affects are intercorporeal. They arise when an agent can feel another’s bodily action or utterance in their own bodily dynamics such that the bodily dynamics of the first agent are experienced enkinaesthetically by the second agent. Actions performed by the bodily movements of one agent are felt as vitality affects by the second agent. Both music and languaging have kinetic melodies (Luria, 1973; Merleau-Ponty, 2005/1945) that have dynamical properties such as tempo, crescendo, tension, and release that listeners can experience as vitality affects (Goffin, 2014: 2). The kinetic melodies of our languaging are nonverbal. They develop before the emergence of “language” and are its necessary underpinning. The kinetic melodies of both music and languaging evoke vitality affects that are associated with “the musical mood” of the music or the languaging. Goffin (2014: 3) points out that it is important to distinguish the musical mood from the mood that the listener happens to be in at the time of listening to a particular piece of music. The two are not the same. The musical mood refers to the particular cluster of feelings that the music itself evokes and which are paradigmatic for a particular musical mood (Goffin, 2014: 3). That is, a particular syndrome of bodily feelings that is evoked by a piece of music is contextually redundant with the dynamical structure of the music itself. In languaging, syndromes of bodily feelings may be evoked by the speaker’s voice dynamics. In both cases, the resulting “mood,” which is itself often fluctuating and merging with other moods and associated feelings, can be reported on and described using verbal means. The speaker’s voice is said to be angry, irritated, reassuring, soothing, and so on. In this way, the mood that is evoked is integrated to and contextualised by social norms and values that may foreground or background specific configurations of bodily feelings and mood, depending on the social situation and the person’s positioning in it. The mood of irritation or annoyance that the listener perceives and feels in my voice is an aspect of my voice that is constitutive of who I am as an embodied agent and how I am present in the here-and-now. It is an aspect of me as a living, feeling, animate being that constitutes what Humphrey (1992) refers to as the here-ness, now-ness, and me-ness of living experience. Humphrey (1992) points

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out that the self is in fact created through the co-orchestration of the very activities that constitute its experience. In Humphrey’s terms, the self is an “inner” or organism-centred perspective on how events in the world impinge upon and affect the agent. Moreover, such a self-perspective is possible in the first place because it is grounded in bodily feelings and sensations that lend “a here-ness and a now-ness and a me-ness to the experience of the world” (Humphrey, 1992: 73). Languaging is grounded in a feeling body that gives bodily feelings and sensations a reference point in the now-ness, the here-ness, and the me-ness of the feeling body. Feelings on this view are a form of proto-deixis that grounds our languaging in the perspective of our body and its feelings, thereby ensuring that our languaging is anchored to the reality of one’s body in a given situation. On the other hand, any lexical gloss of the mood of my voice re-presents the mood as a semantic category, and in so doing it invites a less embodied, more detached analytical perspective. Kinetic melodies, the moods they evoke, and our sensitivity to them in our languaging with others prioritise what is. McGilchrist (2012/2009: 56) explains this in terms of the right hemisphere’s prioritising of what is in the world of the living in contrast to the left hemisphere’s prioritising of an analytical perspective that re-presents things as categories that are abstracted from the animacy and immediacy of the living. Whereas the right hemisphere is responsive to the newness of the living in the here-and-now, the left hemisphere’s more detached analytical perspective integrates things to the categories of the known. The irritated mood in my voice that the listener detects and is affected by is a crucial aspect of my languaging that presents my utterance as a newness that is alive in the present of my languaging. An emphasis on “language” as abstract verbal form removes it from the living, from the new, and locates it in the realm of the non-living and the already known. Of course, the two hemispheres and therefore the two perspectives presented here operate in dynamic and integrated cooperation with each other. Body dynamics are integrated to verbal pattern. This integration occurs to varying degrees and with varying degrees of stability. The living body continuously permeates languaging by virtue of its felt character at the same time that the body is constrained and guided by verbal pattern. The language sciences have placed a disproportionate emphasis on the formal architecture of second-order “language” and therefore on abstract verbal units and their principles of combination. An excessive emphasis on the component parts of linguistic structure and the principles of their combination fragments the processual flow of languaging activity into a succession of discrete formal units that are separated from the tactile-kinaesthetic melodies that underpin them, sustain them, and propel them forward. Consequently, the sense we have of our languaging as a part of and as embedded in our becoming, in personal time, and in the organic processes of growth and development that constitute the living of our lives with others is downplayed. Our sense that languaging between persons unfolds on the basis of a shared and intuitive moral basis is replaced by a phenomenology of verbal abstracta that detaches the self from languaging as a living process. In doing so, the inherent

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temporality of languaging and the embedding of its future-directed affective and intentional dynamics in the world of human experience are lost sight of. Static structures and a world of discrete objects are privileged with a resulting alienation from the body and feeling that gives rise to a diminished and impoverished sense of what McGilchrist (2012/2009: 72–73, 95, 97, 249) calls “betweenness.” Our languaging is necessarily and ontologically bound up with our embodied nature and hence with bodily movements and the feeling of that movement. Our languaging, like all human action, is generated and felt by bodies in interaction. In focusing on the acoustic and auditory aspects of speech, the language sciences have tended to separate auditory perception from the kinetics of the bodily movements involved in both the articulation and audition of speech sounds. However, it is now well established that action and perception are not separate; they are closely related and reciprocally dependent on each other. Linguistically structured vocal tract activity is a form of action that serves to act on and transform selected aspects of the speaker’s world. Linguistically structured vocal tract activity is enacted by co-articulated gestural movements (phonetic gestures) that support the perception of speech sounds. The articulation and perception of speech sounds co-evolved (Everett, 2018/2017: 209–210). Indeed, speech sounds provide information about the gestural activity that produced the sounds, thus enabling the listener to keep track of the speaker’s vocal tract gestural activity (Fowler, 2010). It is the gestural movement which is central to the idea that languaging is grounded in bodily movement and the feeling of that movement. Languaging is more than grammar. Languaging is grounded in the body in ways that suggest that its origins and, in part, its functions overlap with those of music (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 72). The musicality of languaging keeps languaging grounded in the body, in feeling, and in emotions we associate with bodily feelings in different situations. The musicality of languaging emphasises a crucial aspect of our languaging that is downplayed or neglected if “grammar” per se is taken to be the defining characteristic of “language.” A focus on formal units and combinations of formal units has tended to emphasise those aspects of “language” that are abstracted out of the flow of experience and seen as sequences of discrete grammatical forms that are combined and re-combined into larger sequences. Conventional linguistics focuses on “language” as a means for detaching the self from the world so that the world can be viewed and manipulated from a distance (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 93; Pred, 2005: 211) by making it more explicit and de-contextualised. The informing meta-language is derived from written text (Linell, 2011/2005). Linguistic structure is seen to consist of component parts that are assembled into larger wholes according to rules which specify their principles of combination. On the other hand, the musicality of languaging is concerned with relation, with inter-connectedness, with context, with movement and the feeling of movement, and with the embodied particularity of our experiences. The informing metaphor is melody. Linguistic structure is fractal: The component parts derive from antecedent wholes; the wholes progressively partition into increasingly specified parts (Brown, 2015: 4).

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Until fairly recently, neuroscientists on the whole considered the left hemisphere to be the domain of spoken language. A notable early dissenter from this view was Hughlings Jackson (1879, 1932). Hughlings Jackson proposed that the brain was organised hierarchically by evolution. Importantly, Hughlings Jackson moved away from the idea proposed by Broca and other localisers that language was localised in the left hemisphere. Hughlings Jackson emphasised the role of both the left and the right hemispheres, linking them to intellectual and emotional expression, respectively (Trimble, 2007: 66). In recent decades, a steadily accumulating body of research supports the early work of Hughlings Jackson. It is now becoming clear that neither the left nor the right hemisphere is the exclusive domain of languaging. The two hemispheres offer different perspectives that are integrated in languaging. Utterances have their microgenetic origins in affects, bodily feelings, and feeling tones that are generated and modulated by subcortical and limbic structures and by the right hemisphere (Trimble, 2007: 200–201). The links from the limbic structure to the right hemisphere reflect early stages in human evolution when life and how one responded to the environment were driven to a large extent by feeling and emotion. With the emergence of language, these links have remained. It seems likely that they developed to a greater extent in the right hemisphere of the human brain in comparison to the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is dominant for emotion though the expression of emotion is modulated by both “verbal (both hemispheres) and nonverbal (motor-limbic—basal ganglia) expression” (Trimble, 2007: 200). Emotion and its expression are central to language, music, poetry, and religious experience. All of these are deeply intertwined with the neurobiology of the human brain (Trimble, 2007: 200). Trimble points out that prosody, which neurobiologists understand to be a right-hemisphere phenomenon, includes a range of features (accent, cadence, pauses, pitch, rhythm, stress, timbre, tone) that are common to both languaging and music. The right hemisphere therefore has the capacity to modulate the forms of experience referred to here. It does so, I argue, by modulating the melodic character of our movements, both bodily and those we rehearse in the imagination.

14. Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics Real-time first-order languaging is a dynamic and complex process that is distributed across diverse timescales. Pico-scale bodily events on very small timescales of milliseconds to fractions of seconds are constantly emerging and coalescing with other features on larger scales so as to give rise to the familiar dynamical properties of utterances (Cowley, 1994; Steffensen, Thibault, & Cowley, 2010; Thibault, 2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2017b). According to the view that language consists of levels of formal abstracta, these material and energetic phenomena fall outside of any formal description and are therefore discounted. Formal theories are thus unable to provide an account of the material-cognitive dynamics of the languaging behaviour of living, animate, sentient human agents. My point is that phonetic and other, related gestural activities individuate pico-scale

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phenomena of this kind, whereas theories of “language” based on formal abstracta remain unable to explain these phenomena. As Steffensen (2013) has shown, pico-scale bodily events are very often the pivots that prompt subtle changes of agents’ awareness and cognition in unfolding cognitive events. First-order languaging is embodied inter-individual activity that takes place in real-time. It is grounded in body dynamics on fast timescales measurable in milliseconds to fractions of seconds of fine-grained and co-orchestrated bodily activity between persons (Cowley 2008; Steffensen, Thibault, & Cowley 2010; Thibault 2008, 2011a, 2017b). The researchers cited here have developed, in recent years, the notion of pico-scale bodily dynamics in order to theorise and to develop methodologies for the study of this scale of languaging behaviour. It is therefore appropriate to focus on and develop explanations that are grounded in the fast timescales of these pico-scale bodily dynamics that are co-orchestrated and cosynchronised by persons in talk. In the following, I discuss two short examples to illustrate the principles discussed here.

Example 1 The utterance analysed below is transcribed from a video-recording of an animated discussion between husband and wife, L. and N. Before the excerpt, L. has expressed his frustration at his inability to get any of the pens he has been using to write. N. intervenes and tries to show L. that the pens do in fact work. The analysis below focuses on one moment in the episode when N. demonstrates to her husband that the pen she takes from the pen rack and which he had unsuccessfully used beforehand does in fact work. The episode from which the present example is taken is the basis of a more extended analysis in Volume II, Chapter 2. I will briefly consider the harmonic progression of the three tones in N.'s utterance yeah look this is the one you had. Taken together, the overall progression, from the first tone to the third, yields a melody, as shown in Figure 3.5. The central question is whether the melody moves towards harmonic resolution so that the key of the first tone is supported, or not. As in music, a harmonic mode cannot be established unless a third pitch is intoned. This does not mean all such melodies end in a harmonic resolution. There are other possibilities (Cook, 2002: 250). The third pitch can establish either a major or a minor mode, or it can fail to do so. As Cook points out, if a resolved major or minor mode is established, then “both a harmonic mode and an emotional mood are implied” (Cook, 2002: 251). In the example, the third pitch falls sharply from the tonic (“this”), which has a pitch of 338.14 Hz on onset, and falls to a low of 142.8 Hz (‘had”). It constitutes a harmonic statement that is a confidently asserted major mode. The first tone (“yeah”) is a response to what Laurie had said previously. Table 3.5 presents the pitch and intensity analysis of each tone movement. The first tone is rising-falling with an onset value of 254.8 Hz, rising to 357.4 Hz and falling to 332.1 Hz on its terminus. It signals more than just acknowledgement of what Laurie had just said. It sets up and anticipates a possible harmonic resolution that may or may not be delivered by the pitch movements that follow it. The

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Figure 3.5 Pitch (blue) and intensity (green) contours in Noeleen’s utterance yeah look this is the one you had. Table 3.5 Pitch, Intensity, and Duration in the Three Tones (Pitch Movements) in Noeleen’s Utterance Tone

Onset

Midpoint

Terminus

Duration

Wording

Tone 1: Pitch Tone 1: Intensity Tone 2: Pitch Tone 2: Intensity Tone 3a: Pitch Tone 3a: Intensity Tone 3b: Pitch Tone 3b: Intensity

264.5 Hz 71.2 dB 254.8 Hz 69.7 dB 338.14 Hz 63.21 dB 289.6 Hz 68.03 dB

304.7 Hz

255.4 Hz 50.26 dB 332.1 Hz 69.01 dB 341.1 Hz 63.06 dB 142.8 Hz 67.9 dB

0.20 s

yeah

0.08 s

look

0.30 s

this is

0.58 s

the one you had

357.4 Hz

second tone (“look”) markedly contrasts with the first one. This is clearly shown when one compares the mean pitch of the first pitch movement (“yeah”), which is 287.79 Hz, to that of the second pitch movement (“look”), which is 321.04 Hz (see Table 3.6). The key question here is whether the second tone is antithetical to the first one or supportive of it. The sharp rise of the second tone (“look”) creates a state of harmonic tension and uncertainty that is unresolved. With respect to the first pitch (“yeah”), which moved towards resolution and certainty, the second pitch yields an unresolved tension. Tone 3a (“this”) is rising-falling (onset 338.14 Hz; terminus 341.1 Hz). Tone 3b falls continuously from 289.6 Hz to 142.8 Hz. The overall tone of the third pitch movement, consisting of 3a and 3b, sets up a consonance with the first one, implying that the process of establishing a mode that began in the first pitch (“yeah”) is now resolved. After the uncertainty and tension of the second pitch (“look”), the third pitch achieves a modal resolution

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Table 3.6 Minimum, Maximum, and Mean Values for Pitch, Intensity, and F1 and F2 in Pitch Movements 1 and 2

Pitch movement 1: Yeah Pitch Intensity F1 F2 Pitch movement 2: Look Pitch Intensity F1 F2 Pitch movement 3: This is the one you had Pitch Intensity F1 F2

Minimum

Maximum

Mean

250.31 Hz 57.01 dB

323.43 Hz 71.37 dB

287.79 Hz 67.42 dB 545.04 Hz 2078.97 Hz

253.93 Hz 55.63 dB

357.73 Hz 71.12 dB

321.04 Hz 69.06 dB 668.29 Hz 1622.31 Hz

87.46 Hz 56.59 dB

376.57 Hz 71.88 dB

219.29 Hz 66.22 dB 678.17 Hz 1836.20 Hz

that was initiated more tentatively by the falling movement of the first pitch. If you think about it musically, the second pitch serves to delay the resolution through the creation of uncertainty and tension that anticipates its modal resolution. The first tone proposes a pitch that is in some sense challenged by the second one. The tonal dissonance that is created by the second pitch (“look”) delays but does not negate the proposed tone in the first pitch. The second pitch therefore has important implications with regard to mode, but it cannot lead directly to it. The third pitch (“this is the one you had”) leads to an affective resolution through the establishment of a major mode. Table 3.6 presents parameters of minimum, maximum, and mean pitch and intensity readings for each of the three pitch movements together with mean F1 and F2. The intensity range across the three pitch movements is fairly steady and does not fluctuate markedly, with mean values of 67.42 dB, 69.06 dB, and 66.22 dB, respectively (see Table 3.6). These values, together with the rapid tempo (speaking rate) of Noeleen’s utterance, correlate with a positively valenced emotions of valency and control (Goudbeek et al., 2009: 1575–1576). N. is assertive and in charge of the situation. The analysis is borne out by other aspects of the situation. L. is increasingly frustrated by his inability to get the pen to work. In the first pitch (“yeah”), the positive polarity does not mean that N. agrees with what L. had just said. Rather, the first pitch is the first phase in the establishment and subsequent working through of an affective valence that leads away from L.’s frustration to the setting up of a resolved mood of positive affect whereby N. shifts L.’s attention to the fact that the pen really does work. F1 bandwidth is also fairly steady in pitch movement 2 (mean value 668.29 Hz) and pitch movement 3 (mean value 678.17 Hz)

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(Table 3.6), attesting to the correlation between increased formant frequencies and the larger vocalic area as N.’s utterance becomes more assertive and selfconfident as it progresses from onset to conclusion. The three phases in the harmonic development and resolution of N.’s utterance are a response to the modal friction of the situation: L. struggles to get the pens to work contrary to expectation so that frustration and unresolved tension build up. L.’s inability to get the pens to write yields a negative affect. N.’s utterance, which I have focused on, successfully moves to a positive affect in the form of a harmonic resolution. The pitch movements outlined above must of course be seen in relation to the dynamics of the whole situation. Table 3.7 shows the integration of a lexicogrammatical pattern with picoscale voice dynamics to yield an utterance in which one can hear a distinctive wording. This wording arises from the functional synergy of vocal dynamics and lexicogrammatical pattern. The utterance is a response that is generated by an affect—the felt changes in the body that are instigated by the situation in which the speaker finds herself. This affect is in the form of the felt dissonance or tension caused by the proto-modal friction between body and situation and which seeks to move to a desirable resolution. Pico-scale voice dynamics are not only heard but are also felt as the change in the affected body that motivates the speaker’s utterance. This motivation is the product of complex circular causation that links factors both internal to the speaker’s body to factors outside it. Table 3.7 The Articulation of an Emotion Stance in the Speaker’s Utterance, Showing the Integration of Global Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Local Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics in Response to the Body’s Encounter with the Frustrating Situation of Laurie’s Inability to Get the Pens to Write N.’s husband, L., can’t get yeah look the pens to write The body encounters the material world: the pens don’t work for Laurie Affected body: L.’s inability to make pens work and his growing frustration instigates bodily change in Noeleen; felt dissonance and desire/ need to move towards resolution

The body’s encounter with the material world

this is the one you had + writes with pen on paper to show Laurie that it works Wording

N. moves the situation away from the initial felt dissonance and frustration to a newly established consonance: The pens work, resulting in an increase in N.’s power to act and thus to form an effective functional assemblage with relevant aspects of the situation (the pen, the paper, L.) Pico-scale voice dynamics with values described above Affective dynamics of linguistic stance organise a culturalsemantic emotion stance Emotion stance: Increase in body’s power as N. takes charge of situation and directs L.’s attention to the pen she is holding in her hand to show him that it really does write

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N.’s utterance works to jointly coordinate their attention with respect to the action that is proposed in pitch movement 2, which is the imperative clause “look.” This utterance is followed by N.’s writing on the piece of paper to show that the pen really does work. The harmonic resolution that is heard and felt in the third pitch movement as N. confidently shows that the pen works is also played out in the action she performs to bring about this resolution. In a much vaguer, less defined way, the music mood of the pitch movement described above is motivated by an initial negative affect—frustration, tension, uncertainty—that “motivates” and prompts the attempt—successful in this case—to move things in another more positive direction. The harmonic movement of an utterance is thus the first stirrings of felt tensions that motivate the desire to move from tension and uncertainty to harmony and certainty.

Example 2 In this example, the speaker, Debra Stevens, was trapped inside her SUV as it was sinking beneath the water in a flooded creek that she had driven into accidently. Her utterance was part of the conversation with the 911 emergency centre despatcher who handled her call. The despatcher was subsequently criticised for the way she handled the call with Stevens. Stevens drowned in her car before the rescue services could save her. See www.yahoo.com/gma/911-dispatcher-under-fire-chastising-22305 4996.html?guccounter=1. As reported by news services, at the time of the phone conversation with the despatcher, the water was up to Stevens’ neck. As the speaker’s utterance shows, she finds herself in totally unfamiliar and dangerous territory and rightly fears for her life. Her voice dynamics register the fear, stress, and anxiety that she feels as her primary affective response to the situation she finds herself in. Figure 3.6 presents pitch, intensity, and spectograph details of the two pitch movements in the speaker’s utterance I’m scared (audible inhale) I’ve never had

Figure 3.6 Pitch, intensity, and spectrograph display of the utterance I’m scared (audible inhale) I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before.

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anything like this happen to me before. Along the three emotion dimensions of arousal, valence, and potency/control in Goudbeek et al. (2009), arousal is high, emotion valence is negative (fear, panic, stress), and potency/control is low. Arousal refers to degree of alertness, excitement, or engagement. Valence refers to the positive or negative attractiveness of the emotion. Potency/control refers to the person’s sense of power or control over the situation (Goudbeek et al., 2009: 1575–1576). In the utterance that I focus on here, the speaker’s feeling of potency/control is decidedly negative in contrast to the way that N. takes control of the situation in the previous example. The harmonic progression in this example consists of two tones. Unlike the previous example, the melody does not move towards harmonic resolution. There is no third pitch that establishes such a resolution. The first pitch movement (“I’m scared”) is characterised by irregular up and down fluctuations, as shown more clearly in Figure 3.7. The F0 range is wide and on the high side. Figure 3.7 samples pitch measured in Hz of this pitch movement at four intervals from onset to terminus. The second pitch movement (“I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before”) starts from 269.8 Hz, which is about the same as the terminus of the first pitch movement, and consistently remains at a higher level. The irregular up and down fluctuations are especially prominent in pitch movement 2 (see the jagged, fluctuating blue line of the pitch movement in Figure 3.8). Overall, the first pitch movement is heard and felt as tense and dissonant. The second pitch movement supports the first one rather than providing an opposing or antithetical stance. In pitch movement 2, the F0 is higher and its range is wider, given the irregular fluctuations shown in the pitch movement, ranging from a minimum of 170.59 Hz to a maximum of 412.38 Hz. The overall progression is then towards dissonance and tension that remains unresolved, but which constitutes a desperate appeal by the speaker for a harmonious resolution, which tragically did not come. The proto-modal friction of the utterance is generated by the dire situation in which she finds herself together with the fear and anxiety that this generates. Her life is imperilled. Other parameters are presented in Table 3.8. I now discuss some aspects of these. The intensity range, measured in dB, is narrower in the first pitch movement compared to the second pitch movement. In the first pitch movement, the minimum intensity is 53.93 dB and the maximum is 81.04 dB. This range correlates with the increased tempo (speaking rate) of pitch movement 2 together with the decreased F1 bandwidth on account of the more restricted vocalic area. Goudbeek et al. (2009: 1576) report that changes in formant frequencies result in a larger vocalic area for positively valenced emotions of potency and control such as elation, joy, pride, and pleasure in contrast to a smaller vocalic area for negatively valenced emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety. Pitch movement 2 overall evidences a higher frequency energy as the speaker’s voice registers her growing fear and anxiety. In the present example, the speaker’s voice dynamics register the lack of potency and control that characterises the situation she is in.

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Figure 3.7 First pitch movement showing four points measured in Hz from onset to terminus; the arrows from the pitch measurement below indicate the measurement point in the pitch movement.

The pico-scale voice dynamics in this example register an affective stance that is spread across the entire utterance rather than being located in any particular segment. The speaker is in an entirely unfamiliar and dangerous situation. The right brain is speaking here. The right brain is more in touch with the situation and with the speaker’s feelings. It kicks in prior to the left brain’s propensity for reasoned

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Figure 3.8 Second pitch movement (“I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before”); note the jagged irregular course of the blue line. Table 3.8 Minimum, Maximum, and Mean Values for Pitch, Intensity, and F1 and F2 in Pitch Movements 1 and 2

Pitch movement 1: I’m scared Pitch Intensity F1 F2 Pitch movement 2: I’ve never had … Pitch Intensity F1 F2

Minimum

Maximum

Mean

222.80 Hz 53.93 dB

362.56 Hz 81.04 dB

281.33 Hz 74.97 dB 761.96 Hz 1754.50 Hz

170.59 Hz 43.37 dB

412.38 Hz 90.97 dB

340.60 Hz 75.09 dB 588.27 Hz 1724.18 Hz

analysis and cognitive assessment. The pico-scale voice dynamics therefore immediately and intuitively register her current relationship to the world. Her entire being-with the world is in jeopardy as she speaks. The body’s felt relationship with the world is at the core of our experience of being-with the world (Vol. I, Chapter 3, Section 1). This example graphically and tragically shows how the feeling body registers and evaluates the body’s feeling-with the world prior to rational thinking and cognition. The key point, I think, is that the pico-scale vocal dynamics are what gives the utterance its reality, its bodily grounding in the world. Pico-scale dynamics animate and energise utterances from within. They give them their animacy and vitality and in so doing they make them real and rooted in the body’s feelings and experience of being-with the world. It is what makes languaging present in the world. In the terms that Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980) derive from Spinoza, affect is defined by a body’s ability to act and/or to be acted on. The speaker undergoes felt bodily changes that are instigated by the situation in which she finds

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herself. In this case, she experiences a felt change in the capacity or power of her body—Goudbeek’s potency/control dimension—to act. She is “scared” and this emotion registers in the pico-scale voice dynamics that I have analysed above. The speaker’s body undergoes a felt change in the power of her body to act, felt as fear, panic, and anxiety and manifested in the synergies of pico-scale vocal dynamics discussed above. On the other hand, the left hemisphere takes a more analytical, detached, and disembodied perspective. The virtual categories that lexicogrammatical differentiators evoke for us are of the latter kind. If one produces an orthographic transcription of the wording in the utterance analysed and takes that alone as the object of the analysis, then the utterance is deprived of its animacy and vitality. The tendency is to treat the lexicogrammar as a “representation” of a detached external world. One might say that this is a left-brain way of thinking about languaging. It is only when we put the two perspectives back together that we can begin to appreciate that utterances derive their feeling of reality from the bodily feelings and related body dynamics that animate them and give them presence in the world. The speaker’s ability to form effective functioning assemblages with other bodies is diminished through no fault of her own by virtue of her being trapped inside her car, which is submerged in a flooded creek and sinking beneath the water. The voice dynamics that are the focus of my analysis thus have a proto-modal value in the form of the bodily dissonance that is felt by her encounter with the desperate situation she is in. Bodily feelings and affects are caused by felt changes in the body’s relationship to the world that may either increase or decrease the body’s power to co-articulate itself in effective ways with other bodies—human and nonhuman—that give rise to emergent functional structures that enable focused action and cognition to take place (see Protevi, 2009: 49; Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 2). The utterance as a whole gives voice to an emotion stance because the felt affect is given a semantic value (“scared”). Emotions like fear and being scared are instigated by negatively valenced interactions with unexpected or unfamiliar situations. Such situations give rise to increased arousal. Moreover, they are evaluated in the first instance by bodily feelings as positive or negative that encourage further exploration (interest, curiosity) or flight (fear), respectively. In the former case, felt changes in the agent’s body increase the body’s power to act and thus to explore. In the latter case, the body undergoes a felt decrease in its power to act that can take the form of panic responses, anxiety, and stress. Table 3.9, like Table 3.7, shows the integration of a lexicogrammatical pattern with pico-scale voice dynamics to yield an utterance in which one can hear a distinctive wording. The same general observations concerning the functional synergy of vocal dynamics and lexicogrammatical pattern made in relation to Table 3.7 apply here as well. The utterance is a response that is generated by an affect— the felt changes in the body that are instigated by the desperate situation in which the speaker finds herself. As before, this affect is in the form of the felt dissonance or tension caused by the proto-modal friction between body and situation and which seeks to move to a desirable resolution—a resolution that is not attained in Example 2. Pico-scale voice dynamics are not only heard but are also felt as

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Table 3.9 The Articulation of an Emotion Stance in the Speaker’s Utterance, Showing the Integration of Global Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Local Pico-Scale Voice Dynamics in Response to the Body’s Encounter with an Unexpected and Life-Threatening Situation

the change in the affected body that both motivates the speaker’s utterance and seeks a resolution that is not forthcoming. As in Example 1, the speaker's motivation in Example 2 is the product of complex circular causation that links factors both internal to the speaker’s body and factors external to it. The pico-scale voice dynamics are then an aspect of the speaker's awareness of something—her perilous situation—that points beyond the speaker and which her utterance is about. Concluding Remarks on the Pico-Scale Analysis Pico-scale bodily events are fleeting and persist for only as long as the action that they motivate. Pico-scale bodily events are behaviours of the person and they are

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displayed as such. They are not sub-personal in the same way that dedicated (specialised) groups of neurons are. Pico-scale bodily events are sub-personal in the sense that they are associated with sub-personal projects that may not necessarily be endorsed by the whole person, but they are, nonetheless, behaviours that are associated with the whole person and are interpreted as such. Pico-scale events are weighted by values, including feelings, and are aspects of values-seeking behaviour of the whole person. Pico-scale events thus integrate valuation, salience, and orientation to the perspectives of the self. These events elicit interpretation and responses on the part of others. Pico-scale dynamical bodily events bias action and perception in ways that modulate wordings from below. Wordings “feed off” and are animated by pico-scale bodily dynamics. The pico-scale vocal and other bodily dynamics of an utterance do not belong to the constituent parts of an utterance, as seen from the perspective of utterances as hierarchically arranged combinations of particles or segments. Pico-scale dynamics belong to the whole utterance. These dynamical properties of utterances are not confined to particular constituent parts, but are spread as an entire field of energy over the whole utterance or some span of it. Pico-scale dynamics are above all about the spread of bodily energies throughout the entire utterance. It is in this way that the utterance as a whole is held together as a dynamical field of bodily energy that has vectorial properties of magnitude and orientation. Pico-scale dynamics produce energy fields that spread over the entire utterance and hold it together as a whole. The non-aggregative, non-linear effects of these dynamical fields yield new forms of field organisation (Campbell, 2015: 210) and new wholes with causal powers that cannot be derived from the pico-scale dynamics per se. By the same token, the lexicogrammatical properties of utterances, on the other hand, are global properties. Their properties emerge from the holistic organisation of the pico-scale dynamics. Global lexicogrammatical organisation has properties that pico-scale dynamics do not have. Lexicogrammatical properties do not supervene on the properties of pico-scale bodily events, but on the overall organisation of the utterance as a whole (the whole dynamical field held together by the energy of the pico-scale dynamics) and constrain it. Utterances are dynamic organisations of process, not static structures. This dynamical organisation cannot be adequately characterised by describing the relations between combinations of formal linguistic units on different levels. Utterances do not exist sui generis but are bodily actions performed by human agents that participate in the recursive self-maintenance of the agent as a whole. They involve both positive and negative feedback from the operations of the agent-utterance-environment interaction system. Utterances are bodily actions that are best seen as synergies of bodily movement that we learn to harness in order to move others and to be moved ourselves by others and their activity in the seeking and realisation of particular values. The kinetic-tactile-kinaesthetic patterns of movement—the kinetic melodies— that underpin utterances are patterns of process in which everything is moving. Utterances, after all, are activities arising out of the interactions between sub-processes of organism-persons. They do not exist sui generis as static entities. They

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are activities of living, animated, feeling organism-persons. Organism-persons draw upon and channel on-board stores of energy in the performance of particular actions, including of course their utterance-activity. As Aristotle showed, persons are self-directed. They can direct and channel their stored energy supply along particular action trajectories in order to motivate the seeking and the realisation of particular values in the situations in which they act. Culturally saturated lexicogrammatical patterns are high-order global constraints that specify a pattern of parameters within which the body-brain dynamics of languaging agents are co-articulated. Lexicogrammatical order parameters constrain and bias action and perception. In Example 1 above, the imperative look dialogically shapes and coordinates the bodies of the two participants—N. and L.—into a joint act of visual exploration of the pens and what they can do. In this way, participants become task-specific, functionally defined, dialogically coordinated, special purpose, context-sensitive bio-dynamical social engines in interactivity (Thibault, 2011b: 57–59). Participants draw on high-order culturalsemantic invariants—semantic categories—such as the category of action specified by the wording look. In doing so, they assimilate them to their body dynamics and reshape them accordingly. Utterances have the capacity to partition or differentiate the currently active experiential topology in local, context-sensitive ways as well as to coordinate the interactivity between agents. These high-order cultural-semantic patterns (words and wordings) function as order parameters that organise the movement dynamics of agents into structured, co-articulated relations between the different component processes of the emerging task—e.g., N.’s vocalisation, her holding the pen in her hand to show L., then writing with it on the paper—that are assembled into a particular task as the movement develops along its time-extended trajectory. The bodies of the two participants, together with relevant aspects of the situation, are in this way shaped into a coherent action trajectory for the performance of ecological work. Pico-scale bodily dynamics, on the other hand, are local constraints or “tuning parameters” (Saltzman & Kelso, 1983: 25). They are globally constrained by the lexicogrammatical order parameters to behave, for instance, as an imperative clause evoking a culturally recognisable act of visually attending to something. These global constraints are tuned by local constraints specified by pico-scale bodily dynamics that are specific to the immediate Agent-Environment Interaction System. The close synchronisation of the pico-scale bodily dynamics of the two speakers (N. and L. in Example 1 above) again shows the importance of finegrained context-sensitive information that is not amenable to discourse-analytical techniques that focus on verbal abstracta. Attunement to pico-scale bodily dynamics provides agents with feedback that enables them to adjust and direct the interaction trajectory more effectively in order that the agent can stay adaptive, aware, and sensitive to changing circumstances. Importantly, pico-scale bodily dynamics have the potential to bring about changes in the agent in the form of bodily feelings that can induce changes in the way the agent will interact with the relevant environment. The agent thus learns to track a complex matrix of interaction processes and environmental organisation that is spread across diverse time and place scales

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and is, moreover, continuously modulated by fluctuating heterarchies of norms and values.

15. The Musicality of Languaging In recent years, neuro-scientists have paid renewed attention to the right hemisphere after a long period of relative neglect (Cutting, 1990; McGilchrist, 2012/2009; Trimble, 2007). The right hemisphere, and, more specifically, the right temporal region, has areas that sensitise us to what is specifically human (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 56). The right hemisphere enables us to be sensitive to other persons as individual selves and to participate in inter-subjective processes on account of what McGilchrist calls this hemisphere’s “openness to the interconnectedness of things” (2012/2009: 57). The openness to the inter-connectedness of things that McGilchrist writes about refers to the sensitivity of all living things to the animacy of living, moving, feeling bodies that affect and move each other. In our dealings with other persons, the right inferior parietal lobe and the right lateral prefrontal cortex are resources of the right hemisphere that, respectively, sensitise us to the point of view of others and inhibit the tendency to express one’s own point of view (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 57). It is the right hemisphere that sensitises us to the affective dynamics and points of view of others. Moreover, the right hemisphere is only responsive to other living beings rather than a non-living “entity” or one produced by a technology. McGilchrist points out: When we look at either a real hand or a “virtual reality” hand grasping an object, we automatically activate the appropriate left-hemisphere areas, as if we too were grasping—but, strikingly, only in the case of the real, living hand do regions in the right temporoparietal area become activated. We have an unconscious, involuntary urge to imitate someone we are watching carrying out an action—so much so that, especially if it’s something we’ve practised ourselves, the empathic entrainment is actually stronger than the voluntary desire to do something we’d like to see happen. But this is true only if we think it is a real person that’s acting. If we think it’s a computer, we just are not engaged. (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 57) The traditional idea that the left hemisphere is the domain of language is, thanks to new developments in the brain sciences, being replaced by the view that the right hemisphere also has resources and functions that are crucial for language. The left hemisphere is specialised for analysis and abstraction, for breaking things into their component parts and detaching them from their living context and manipulating them. It is the domain of syntax and hence the analytical domain of the combining and recombining of discrete units into larger units. The left hemisphere is concerned with categorisation and with the abstract and general. The right hemisphere is the domain of meaning, including the meaning of others.

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It is the domain of the contextual and holistic. It is the domain of emotion, the individual, and the particular (Cutting, 1990: 23; McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 70–71; Trimble, 2007: 91). The right hemisphere plays an important role in our capacity for empathic entrainment to and imitation of others (Kinsbourne, 2005). It is sensitive to very fine-grained affect-modulated body dynamics such as, for example, subtle modulations of the eyes and facial expressions that the observer’s right hemisphere attunes to, mirrors, and synchronises with on very rapid timescales in the 300 to 400 ms range (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 71). It is therefore crucial for the human capacity to experience things from another person’s perspective and to see their point of view. In other words, the right hemisphere is crucially involved in our capacity for dialogic communication with others and the self-reflexivity that is intrinsic to this capacity (Thibault, 2017b). Felt kinetic melodies are grounded in micro-temporal or pico-scale body dynamics (Steffensen, Thibault & Cowley, 2010; Thibault, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; see Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 11). These very fine-grained body dynamics give rise to the vitality affects and moods that resonate, in languaging, with bodily feelings and fluctuations in these in response to our situated being-in-the-world. These melodies are a necessary and a priori underpinning of human languaging (Stuart & Thibault, 2015). In grounding languaging in the living, feeling body and its affects, pre-conceptual and pre-reflective kinetic melodies are essential to the dialogical capacities that we exercise in our languaging in order that we can entrain to, affiliate with, be aware of, and be sensitive to the living presence of other selves and their desires, expectations, feelings, meanings, and values. They are an essential aspect of the “how” of our enskilled languaging rather than the “what” (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 93). The “how” of these kinetic melodies is grounded in music and in the musicality of languaging. Music and languaging very possibly have a common evolutionary origin (Mithen, 2005). Their common evolutionary origin and their partially overlapping functions have to do with the fact that music communicates emotion—a crucial function of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 72; Trimble, 2007: 189–190). I am not concerned here with the question as to whether music has or expresses meaning or whether music has a grammar. My concern lies with the fact that music and languaging are deeply embedded in human life and in our socio-biology. The musicality of both languaging and music is central to the biosocial technologies that serve to entrain individual selves to the ways of life of the social group. I discuss how in the following section.

16. Imitation, Entrainment, and the Musicality of Languaging Both music and languaging are skilled activities. The musicality inherent in both serves to entrain people to the rhythms and melodies of music and languaging, respectively. Rhythm and melody in both music and language have the capacity to affect people. People are attracted to the rhythms and melodies of both music and languaging. The musicality of both serves to entrain people to social activities

198 Melody and shared ways of life. People are moved to imitate the rhythms and melodies of the group, though this is far from mechanistic copying (McGilchrist, 2012/2009: 121). Imitation, as Kinsbourne (2005) points out, is primarily about “affiliation” and of entraining to and integrating with the activities of others and thus in forming social bonds with them. In affiliating with others in this way, we lay the foundations for and develop the empathic skills whereby we can experience things from another’s perspective. Our ability to entrain to the patterns of behaviour of other persons is foundational for the development of skilful activities of all kinds. We do so in the first instance by observing and then emulating others, by seeing how they do things, and entraining our own bodily and neural dynamics to the patterns of behaviour we observe others performing and which we seek to emulate. To do so, we must see and do things as others do. Through empathic identification with more skilled others, we entrain our bodies and brains to take up the position of our role model or teacher and, through processes of affective identification with that position and the possibilities it affords, we entrain our bodily and neural dynamics to those of the role model, who may be a parent, a teacher, and so on. The musicality of both music and languaging is thus an affectively compelling social resource for entraining people to the ways of life of the group and to the seeking and realisation of its values by entraining them to shared rhythm and melody that contribute to the formation of social cohesion and interpersonal bonding (Hart, 2008/2006). It is probably no coincidence that both music and languaging have, in both human evolution and development, underpinned and sustained the entraining of individuals to many other forms of skilled activity, especially those that require and depend on social coordination between persons. In this way, people not only get things done and make things together, but they share and refine experiences by reaching out to and engaging with others through participation in the plethora of skilled activities that have come together to give rise to human languaging. Even if the claim that the evolutionary origins of languaging are speculative and difficult to confirm, the developmental evidence is clear. The “pre-linguistic” infant starts life with elementary precursor forms of first-order languaging that are based on inter-individual rhythmic synchronisation and melody. Their languaging is intrinsically musical from the outset. Infant and caregiver entrain to each other’s vocal and other bodily rhythms and melodies. The infant develops the skills of tracking and identifying with the emotional world of the caregiver, and vice versa. In this way, infant and caregiver attune to each other’s affective dynamics. Infant and caregiver go along with each other’s rhythms and melodies and, in these moments of interpersonal communion (Bråten, 2007; Trevarthen, 1998), they give rise to forms of being-with and thus to the creation of a with-world. The with-world emerges from the harmonisation of the inter-corporeal dynamics of the two agents in the early infant–caregiver dyads. The neural and bodily dynamics of infant and caregiver occur on very fast timescales between the two individuals. The very fast timescales of these inter-individual dynamics and their inter-meshing cause the kinetic melodies of the two individuals to be co-created and enfolded into each other’s neural and bodily dynamics. Each individual is a

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virtual co-creator of and a co-participant in others’ behaviours, as borne out by the neurological and developmental evidence. Each individual becomes, in the resulting inter-corporeal dynamics, a temporary extension of the other, as infant and caregiver co-construct a shared emotional inter-world. I think this helps to explain what McGilchrist means when he writes that “language originates as an embodied expression of emotion, that is communicated by one individual ‘inhabiting’ the body, and therefore the emotional world, of another” (2012/2009: 122). Imitation is a way of inhabiting the bodily and affective dynamics of another person. It involves empathic identification with another person. Imitation is based on enskilled inter-corporeal dynamics, which themselves are grounded in the fact of our common corporeality and the kinds of experiences that are grounded in our body’s interactivity with the world, including other bodies. The very fast or picoscale bodily dynamics that underpin our languaging give rise to inter-individual resonance patterns involving the neurohormonal and bodily dynamics of the persons who co-participate in concerted or dialogically coordinated languaging. In entraining to the caregiver’s affective and bodily dynamics, the infant begins to learn basic skills of attuning to others, tracking them and their intentions, sharing affects, etc., that support and are the necessary precursors of the subsequent emergence of “language.” Languaging therefore has its developmental basis and origins in musical structures that are the ground of our capacity to attune to the feelings and viewpoints of others and to participate in concerted forms of cooperative activity with others. Languaging has its developmental origins in the communication of affect, which promotes interpersonal and social bonding and cohesion, and intersubjective attunement. The emergence of languaging from these music-like structures and the skills they promote and develop mean that the infant gradually learns, by means of, for example, imitation, that he or she can transcend the limitations of individual experience and perspective and, through the imaginative leaps that these early skills make possible, the infant learns the skills to transcend its own bodily movement. Development of the human infant takes place through the many ways in which the kinetic melodies of others are enfolded into the dynamics of the self (Vol. I, Chapter 2, Section 6). Selves are thus co-constructed and co-developed through the interweaving of the many kinetic melodies that others extend into the self just as the self extends its dynamics into the other persons and things with which it is in relations of community and reciprocity. It is in the zone of interpenetration (Vol. I, Chapter 2) between persons that agents’ melodies entwine with each other, influence and shape one another, refer to each other, and elicit responses from each other. The zone of interpenetration is thus a zone of enmeshment and immersion in which our bio-social relationality is forged (Vol. I, Chapter 2). It is on this foundation that our important longer-term, more enduring relationships with others are constructed. These relationships include parent–child bonding, pair bonding, teacher–learner bonding, and many others that require the laying down and sustaining of cooperative bonds that go beyond more casual and ephemeral encounters with others across a range of social situations.

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Kinetic melodies are active in the latter too. The crucial difference lies in the ways in which the more enduring relations, the interpersonal bonds they forge, and the kinetic melodies they generate form the foundations of enduring cooperative social domains. Intentional dynamics inherited from previous experience are unlearned through processes of breaking down old structures of learning so as to pave the way for the creation of new learning that is functional in the maintenance of social cooperation. Unlearning weakens neuronal connections so that previously learned associations and memories are dissolved to make way for the building of new connections (Freeman, 1995: 121–123). Freeman (1995: 121– 123; 2000b, 108, 152) showed that the neurochemical hormone oxytocin plays a role in the dissolving of neural structures of previously learned behaviours. In performing this function, oxytocin paves the way for the building of new connections in the learning of new behaviours and in the pair bonding of mother and offspring. The historical recursivity of the new kinetic melodies forged through these enduring social bonds plays a formative role in the processes of social learning whereby intentional structures are integrated to and made functional in largerscale social unities (Freeman, 1995: 130–134). For example, the intentional structures of the newborn infant and parent are shaped and guided by the kinetic melodies of vocalisations, body movements, smiles, facial expressions, gestures, and so on. The reciprocal melodies of infant and parent are intertwined to form a deeper and larger unity that is functional in the creation of the enduring forms of harmony between and bonding of intentional structures that is the basis for trust and cooperation (Freeman, 1995: 131). Stern’s idea of “vitality affects”⁠—“the temporally contoured feelings that accompany all experience” (2002/1977: 13)— comes close to the idea of kinetic melodies in some respects. Stern writes: As an experience unfolds—say, as you watch someone smile at you—there are micro-shifts in the quality and intensity of the act, and of the feeling evoked in you. These shifts trace a time line. The smile may explode on the other person’s face, giving you an accelerating feeling of surprise and pleasure, a sudden lift. Or it may form slowly, too slowly, even sneakily, evoking a growing wariness. Or it may form spontaneously, but then fade too rapidly, evoking an expanding sense of negatively tinged curiosity. These temporally contoured feelings are evoked when we observe behavior in others, and they accompany our own behaviour. They provide a way to communicate feelings that goes beyond the behavioural act itself—the smile—to reach the feelings behind the act. (Stern, 2002/1977: 13–14) Importantly, Stern notes the “temporally contoured” character of feelings in relation to an unfolding experience. He also points out the fast timescales of the bodily events and the shifts in quality and intensity of such events as they unfold in time. This observation is commensurate with the notion of pico-scale bodily

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events (Vol. II, Chapter 4, Section 11) that occur on timescales of fractions of seconds to milliseconds. Implicit too, is the idea that such events are saturated with value and therefore have the capacity to bias action and perception. These three points indicate close affinities with the idea of kinetic melodies, as developed in this chapter (see also Stuart & Thibault, 2015). A number of differences may also be noted. Whereas Stern writes of the feelings “behind the act,” I would argue that feelings are intrinsic to the act along its entire temporal trajectory. Feelings flow through that trajectory from its inception to its completion and modulate it. Stern also writes of feelings as being evoked when we observe the behaviour of others as if the evoked feeling is a response to the observed behaviour on analogy with the idea of turn-taking in conversation. On the other hand, the concept of enkinaesthesia does not envisage reciprocity as the alternation of turns of the type Observed Behaviour^Evoked Feeling. Rather, the concept of enfolding of kinetic melodies first proposed and developed by Stuart (2010) points to the way in which the temporal dynamics involved are so rapid such that the kinetic melodies of, say, two agents in conversation are meshed to form new melodies in which it is difficult to distinguish the contributions of the two individuals. Instead, they give rise to emergent inter-individual melodies that extend each person involved in the formation of the melody into the other. Of course, this can occur to different degrees of involvement over timescales of varying length, but it gets at an essential point: The dialogical character of our melodies means that they are interindividual, not individual, in character. Finally, Stern writes that feelings are “communicated” from person to person whereas I would rather say that the capacity of a kinetic melody to evoke feelings in both self and other needs to be seen as a way of coupling agents or agents and things in ways that orient and guide agents’ activities along particular pathways. Following Damasio (1999), feelings are somatic markers that implicitly evaluate how we sense the potentialities of situations and therefore the way to go on in situations.

17. Conclusion The quoted texts from Keats and Rilke, respectively, at the head of this chapter condense in a few affectively charged poetic lines much of what this chapter is about. It is through the creation, experiencing, and retention in embodied enkinaesthetic memory of the body’s melodies of movement—Keats’ “heard melodies”—that the melodies of the imagination—Keats’ “unheard” melodies—are created. Keats’ enkinaesthetic dialogue with the urn is a process of affective feeling-with the urn. This enkinaesthetic dialogue stimulates the melodies of the imagination that are played by the “spirit ditties of no tone.” Rilke crystallises the poetic insight that touch—direct and indirect—has the capacity to enfold the affective dynamics of two persons who are in dialogical relation with one another as a unified dynamic that is felt between the two persons

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as a single voice as if from two strings played by the same bow in Rilke’s text. The locus of experience and feeling is not enclosed within separate Cartesian souls, but lies in the folding into, enfolding with, and unfolding from the world of other agents with which we are experientially entangled. Theories of languaging that are based on formal abstracta and associated phenomenology are unable to show how languaging agents are bonded in relations of community and reciprocity that are grounded in the enkinaesthetic melodies of our being-with. The enkinaesthetic processes of melodic enfolding between agents (e.g., self and other) are based on neurohormonal-muscular mechanisms of bonding between individuals. The rhythmic, melodic, and other dynamic characteristics of speech, movement, and dance, amongst other possibilities, are resources that can be synchronised and harnessed in ways that build and sustain interpersonal and social bonds between agents and between agents and aspects of their worlds. These resources are fundamental to understanding the dynamical processes whereby enkinaesthetic melodies are created between individuals both on the small scale of dyads and on the larger scales of social groups and communities. In all cases, irrespective of size or scale, enkinaesthetic melodies serve to build and sustain the bonds between persons on the basis of affective and moral ties. Enkinaesthetic melodies create, sustain, and maintain the altered states of consciousness that build affective bonds and relationships of trust between individuals and communities (Freeman, 1995: 129–134). The enkinaesthetic melodies enfolded between agents and between agents and things are the ground of our social being. Human social being is not founded on abstract relations of exchange, but on the “substance” of our bodies and the substantive engagements that take place between bodies. This is something very different from the alienated relationality of the purely formal character of the mercantile relations that connect people and things qua commodities in globalised “postmodern” financial capitalism. This reification of the abstract exchange relations qua mode of human relationality and the subsequent displacing of the substantive foundations of human communitas, historically speaking, gave birth to the Cartesian subject. The Cartesian subject represents in his or her mind an objectified external world (res extensa) that is independent of the subject. It is a world which the cognising subject so defined can “communicate” from one mind to another as abstract mental contents in so far as these mental contents and their representations assure the correct reproduction of an already given world to which the mind must adapt. The Cartesian separation of subject and object consequently leads to the transformation of the subject into a detached cogniser and communicator who “represents” the world in thought and language. It is a subject who is not co-affectively and co-agentially immersed in a plenitsentient world of time-extended experience and participation in transformative social action. The Cartesian subject can no longer view him- or herself as someone who is solidary with a given community, but as a sovereign individual that is unaffected by its co-participation in relational networks with other subjects.

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Notes 1 Sherrington writes of the “bodily resonance of emotions” and how a “physiological interest attaches to these states of emotion” as follows: Instead of the emotional state beginning, as Ladd puts it, as “a sort of nerve storm in the brain, whence there descends an excitement which causes commotion in the viscera and vascular regions—thus secondarily inducing an organic reverberation”—the view has been advanced that the cerebral and psychological processes of emotion are secondary to an immediate reflex reaction of vascular and visceral organs of the body suddenly excited by certain stimuli of peculiar quality. Of points where physiology and psychology touch, the place of one lies at “emotion.” Built upon sense-feeling much as cognition is built upon sense-perception, emotion may be regarded almost as a “feeling,”—a feeling excited, not by a simple little-elaborated sensation, but by a group or train of ideas. To such compound ideas it holds relation much as does “feeling” to certain species of simple sense-perceptions. It has a special physiological interest in that certain visceral reactions are peculiarly colligate with it. Heart, blood-vessels, respiratory: muscles, and secretory glands take special and characteristic part in the various emotions. These viscera, though otherwise remote from the general play of psychical process, are affected vividly by the emotional. (Sherrington, 1906: 255–256) 2 I thank Stephen Cowley for making the video recording of this episode available to me and for allowing me to use it in this analysis. The analysis is my own.

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Sense-Making

The qualities of situations in which organisms and surrounding conditions interact, when discriminated, make sense. Sense is distinct from feeling, for it has a recognized reference; it is the qualitative characteristic of something, not just a submerged unidentified quality or tone. Sense is also different from signification. The latter involves use of a quality as a sign or index of something else, as when the red of a light signifies danger, and the need of bringing a moving locomotive to a stop. The sense of a thing, on the other hand, is an immediate and immanent meaning; it is meaning which is itself felt or directly had. When we are baffled by perplexing conditions, and finally hit upon a clew, and everything falls into place, the whole thing suddenly, as we say, “makes sense.” John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 1958/1925, p. 261

1. Languaging and Sensory-Kinetic Experience Languaging is grounded in endogenous subjective process, bodily feeling, and kinetic melody. My approach to languaging starts with movement and what Sheets-Johnstone (2010: 221) terms “sensory-kinetic experience.” Movement in this sense, and the associated feeling of movement (kinaesthesia), are the condition of all living systems. Instead of taking the motoric aspects of movement and corresponding sensations as primary, I focus on the need to understand sense-making through movement and (en)kinaesthesia (Sheets-Johnstone, 2010; Stuart, 2010; Roth, 2014; Stuart & Thibault, 2015). Sense-making in languaging takes place and is enabled when aspects of bodily movement transcend themselves and thus stand out in new forms of awareness. For example, the movement or sequence of movements involved in the articulatory dynamics of linguistic vocal tract actions, or in responding to a vocal tract action that someone attends to, can give rise to a de-territorialisation of the movement, e.g., from doing the movement to symbolising the movement, its results, and its potentialities for normatively affecting experience. These expressive gestures are territorial movements of selves grounded in time and place, but at the same time they create new territories that may transcend particular bodies, times, and places.

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Sense-making has its basis in proprioception, sensory-kinetic experience, and enkinaesthesia. These phenomena are grounded in agents’ embodied interactivity with the affordance layouts of utterances together with the affordance layouts of the task-scapes with which utterances are integrated. Sense-making is the experience of a body-in-movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011) when that movement becomes an intentional act. Languaging is founded in movement and gives rise to movement, both bodily and ideational. The move from movement to action breaks the boundaries of the movement and thus expands the territory because it places intentionality between the movement and the particular aspect of the world that is focused on. This de-territorialising move opens human sense-making to (potentially) vast networks of cognitive-semiotic constructs in the human ecology. These constructs are the intentional objects of action that can be shared with others in dialogically coordinated acts of languaging. Vocal tract actions are never given all at once to the perceiver. As a consequence of the perceptual exploration of their affordance layouts by perceivers, something is constituted as a whole that transcends the kinaesthetic and sensory dimensions of the experience of the gesture. The resulting whole arises from the sequence of movements that unfolds in time and the kinaesthetic and sensory experience that it gives rise to. In this way, the agent is moved by the bodily movement to form an idea that both transcends the kinaesthetic/sensory experience at the same time that the idea is prompted or induced to emerge by the kinaesthetic/sensory experience of the movement. The forming of an ideation is not therefore the projecting of a pre-existing schema onto the gesture or bodily movement in the manner of constructivism. Ingold (2011), Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1980), and Roth (2014) have all stressed how what Ingold calls intransitive actions yield pregnancy and excess. Sense-making cannot be anticipated on the basis of what is already known. Instead, the movement-based contact with the gesture becomes, over time, abstracted from it as an ideation (a form) that constitutes its own memory (Roth, 2014) and thus its own history. Empirical studies of interactivity with material artefacts conducted by experimental psychologists (Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2011) show that persons do not interact with artefacts as already given wholes. Rather, sequences of exploratory movements that unfold in time give rise to experiences of aspects of the affordance layout of the artefact (Thibault, 2018a). The experiences so generated have irreducible kinaesthetic and sensory dimensions. The basis of our coming to know an artefact and hence its cognitive constitution as a particular form lies in the emergence of the form from an unfolding trajectory of movement sequences and thereby in discovering how an aspect changes into another aspect along a timeextended trajectory of movement.

2. Knowing Levels and the Emergence of Lexicogrammar Utterances have an artefactual status. In this sense, they are object-events. They are also time-extended ecological activities that can be reified as meta-linguistic objects. Given this dual status, they afford and promote: (1) the interactive

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exploration of and attending to their dynamical properties; and (2) the selection and differentiation of some of these properties out of the potentially infinite set of implicit properties and the abstraction of these properties to a next level of knowing where the abstracted property is explicitly differentiated (Campbell & Bickhard, 1986: 85). In turn, the second level and its properties enable further possibilities of reflection on some selection of that level’s properties and the abstraction of those properties to a still further level of knowing where the abstracted properties are explicitly differentiated. And so on. The speaker-hearer’s capacity to attune to linguistic structure (e.g., lexicogrammatical pattern) in utterances is the outcome of processes of reflective abstraction of the kind I have outlined here. The wordings that we learn to attend to and are affected by when we hear someone’s speech entail a capacity to attend to high-order invariants in phonetic gestures and written inscriptions. Moreover, these processes of reflective abstraction give rise to the possibility of their meta-linguistic manipulation and rearrangement. The linguistic “objects” so constituted can be subjected to processes of abstraction, rearrangement of items, meta-reflection, and so on. It is the artefactual status of linguistic object-events that makes this possible. In affording reflective abstraction, linguistic events provide externalised culturally saturated resources that make the development of higher-order mental and cognitive processes possible (Vygotsky, 1987/1934). Campbell and Bickhard argue that language arises in an agent system that “learns to create external indicators of various points in and aspects of its own internal processes—as it was actually engaged in those processes” (1986: 86). This does not mean that language is the encoding in external form of those internal processes. Rather, it shows that language and the kind of learning it enables cannot be separated from the endogenous dynamics of the learner. Suppose that the various points in and aspects of the learner’s internal processes (or some subset of these) are differentiations of the external environment that are important for the ongoing recursive self-maintenance of the learning system. The externalisation of those indicators (of internal processes) thus takes on an artefactual status that affords culturally promoted and entrained processes of reflection on those properties. The learning system can abstract properties of the internal processes that yielded those indicators (Campbell & Bickhard, 1986: op. cit.). In reflectively abstracting its own properties in this way and then abstracting these lower-level properties as explicit differentiations on still higher levels of knowing that afford further levels of functional attunement to these properties and reflection on them, the learning system learns to attune to those properties of lower-level events (e.g., phonetic gestures) that afford the detection of cultural meaning and value. Inhelder and Piaget (1958) argue that children progress through three knowing levels—action, representational thought, and formal understanding—and their respective levels of reflective abstraction. This idea has been assimilated to neo-Piagetian models based on information-processing frameworks. Informationprocessing in these models is assumed to take place inside individual minds. My use of the idea of knowing levels is grounded in the idea of interactivity and therefore retains an important link to Piaget’s grounding of cognition in action. The

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emergence of knowing levels is premised on dynamic agent–environment interactivity. In this way, agents develop skills and capacities for having control over and manipulating the affordances of increasing orders of abstraction as they ascend through the knowing levels proposed below. The capacity for reflective abstraction does not mean that a pre-given schema is retrieved from a memory store and projected onto a particular event in order to make sense of it. The process of reflective abstraction and the building up of levels of knowing are grounded in the agent’s active exploration of and discovery of properties that are emergent in and through the agent’s interactivity with the affordance layouts of ecological events, including the linguistic events that are our focus here. The knowing levels proposed below are not structural stages of development. Instead, they are both constraints on development and processes of reflective abstraction that occur with reference to learning and the diachronic emergence of linguistic pattern in development (Campbell & Bickhard, 1986: 52). As we shall now see, submorphemic markers embody and have the capacity to evoke kinaesthetic memory of sensory-kinetic experience. Earlier theorists theorised “descriptive vocal gestures” (A. Werner, 1919: 189) or the “pictorial potential” (Bühler, 1933: 105) of linguistic pattern below the level of the morpheme. French linguist Didier Bottineau (2007) uses the term submorphemic marker to theorise this aspect of linguistic meaning. Submorphemic markers continue to be productive in English and many other languages. As Bottineau explains, submorpheme markers focus on one salient aspect of multimodal sensory-kinetic experience through which an object or an action in relation to an object can be apprehended. Submorphemic markers constitute a still productive capacity of gesture-sound complexes to form schemas that generalise and abstract from sensorykinetic experience. As I shall show in detail below, they are a knowing level that is specified by their capacity to abstract and generalise salient properties of sensorykinetic experience from agents’ first-order embodied interactivity with salient aspects of their worlds. Moreover, the activation of a submorphemic schema in a particular situation is a function of its contextual relevance at the same time that its semiotic power depends on its ability to generalise to other situations. In the following sections, I will unpack this idea by exploring submorphemic markers, deictics, words, and lexicogrammar as the progressive building up of levels of knowing based on the principle that higher levels of the hierarchy of knowing levels, in interacting with lower levels, selectively abstract and generalise properties of the lower level that can be reflected on from the viewpoint of the higher level.

3. Submorphemic Markers and Sensory-Kinetic Experience: Embodied Self-Utterance-Environment Dynamics and the Emergence of Levels of SelfReflective Abstraction in Languaging Submorpheme markers focus on one salient aspect of multimodal sensory-kinetic experience through which an object or an action in relation to an object can be

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apprehended. The discussion below closely follows Bottineau (2007). Some examples analysed by Bottineau include: 1. /SP/: Centrifugation, rapid rotation, ejection: This submarker pertains to actions and objects that involve rotating things (spindle) and events involving rotation (spin). It also appears in nouns naming objects that involve a rotating movement on the part of the human agent: spoon, spear, spade. A spoon is “rotated” for the purpose of picking up food or catapulting a small object. A spear is “rotated” when thrown by its thrower; a spade is “rotated” when digging; 2. /ST/: Stability, fixity: This submarker is found in (i) verbs expressing the absence of movement or change: stand, stay, still; (ii) verbs expressing the end phase of a process of becoming stable: stop, stoop. The terminal state may be the end phase of a process affecting a human agent (sting, stab), or the terminal phase of an object that the agent uses as an instrument to achieve the end phase (stick); 3. /SW/: Pendulation: This submorphemic marker is found in (i) verbs of affection involving a bodily oscillation (swoon) or bodily actions involving the same (sway, swim); (ii) two-participant material processes involving the use of an instrument, object, or tool with an oscillating movement (swallow, sweep, swap, switch); (iii) one-participant ergative processes involving oscillating or alternating movement of non-human objects as the medium (swing, swivel). The submorphemic marker typically focuses the interpreter’s attention on one particular sensory-kinetic invariant that characterises the human subject’s interactivity with the phenomenon (thing, event, or action). These submorphemic markers are grounded in specific sensory-kinetic dynamics that structure the interactivity between subject and phenomenon and enact its particular dynamics. This interaction may be kinetic (spoon) or visual (to spin). The interaction may focus on an action of the agent (agent; self-actuated movement; ejection: speak, spew, spit), or the perceived object (rotating movement; wings: sparrow) or the instigated movement of a perceived object (rotating movement; liquid in container: swill). The submorphemic marker thus focuses on the perceptual invariant by means of which the sensory-kinetic coupling of the human subject to the object or event occurs and therefore the way in which the subject experiences the object or event, including how subject and object are reciprocally affected by their interaction. Submorphemic markers embody kinaesthetic memory of sensory-kinetic experience. They focus on the lived nature of the experience and in so doing they anticipate the subject’s mode of sensory-kinetic coupling to the event or object and/or the salient perceptual invariant that characterises the behaviour of the object (rotating movement; locomotion: spider), its use (rotating movement; use of object: spoon), or the sensory-kinetic way in which the subject experiences an action or event (self-movement; ejection from agent: spew, spit). In all of these examples, the submorphemic marker constrains an actual or a virtual perception

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or action involving a sensory-kinetic relationship between a human subject and a sensory-kinetic invariant and how that invariant affects the subject. Submorphemic markers are external indicators that provide indications concerning how the agent’s interactive engagements with its environment affect its internal processes in ways that are salient for the agent. Submorphemic markers are a residual archaic and yet still semantically productive trace of the ways in which embodied sensory-kinetic interactive dynamics of action-perception that are indicated by submorphemic markers both affect agents and enable agents to affect their environments through their immersion in the flow of these dynamics. For example, the word spade is an exponent of the /SP-/ submorphemic marker in word onset position. Taking this example to illustrate the argument, I now reconstruct the levels of reflective self-abstraction involved, as follows: Level 1: The self, in interacting with the flow of environmental stimulus information, operates on and attends to some particular focus of attention or interest that affects the internal dynamics of the self; for example, the self’s rotating of a spade when digging soil affects the internal dynamics of the self when the body of the self and the spade are configured in a particular way so that the spade can be used to turn over the soil; Level 2: The particular invariant that affects the self is abstracted from the flow by the self as a locus of further reflection; for example, the action of rotating the spade, in affecting the internal dynamics of the self when self, the spade, and the soil combine to form a self-spade-soil assemblage, gives rise to a focus on the rotating of the spade when it is used to turn over the soil; Level 3: The self’s internal response generates an external gesture in the form of a submorphemic marker /SP/ that abstracts Level 2 properties and relations and enables further reflection on the abstracted property of rotation that is enacted by the self-SP-spade-soil assemblage; Level 4: The self’s reflection on these Level 3 properties and the self’s relation to them gives rise to the narrativisation of the Self-Level 3 properties; the self develops an explicit stance on the abstracted phenomenon and its relation to it, for example: SELF-BODILY ACTION-WITH SPADE-TURN SOIL; Level 5: The Self–Abstracted Property relation gives rise to dependency relations between operators and arguments; an increasing diversity of operator–argument relations arises as a consequence of the self’s enhanced capacity to view multiple situations from the perspectives of multiple selves. Here are some examples: (1) we have also tried our roller on a wheat cover crop before planting soybeans, but it had little effect on the small weeds in the wheat and we ended up spading that ground before planting the soybeans; and (2) he wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work; Level 6: The dependency relations between operators and their arguments evoke more and more absent relations that contextually complete them so that absent relations in experiential memory can be redintegrated with present ones and integrated to the context of utterance (Vol. II, Chapter 1, Section 6).

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On Level 1, the self reflectively abstracts properties of its internal and external (bodily) dynamics. The self then abstracts the lower-level properties as explicit differentiations on still higher levels of knowing. These higher-level differentiations afford further levels of functional attunement to these properties and reflection on them. Reflective abstraction gives rise to further levels of knowing such that the self can attune to its relationship to its environment and reflect on it on progressively higher levels of knowing. The self thus learns self-awarely to attune to those properties of lower-level events that afford self-reflection. The flow of stimulus information on Level 1 that is interactively explored by the agent constitutes the agent’s primary awareness of the world. Level 2 processes interact with Level 1 processes and abstract selected properties of the Level 1 processes as explicit differentiations that can be reflected on. The explicit differentiations so yielded enable functional attunement to their properties and thereby enable reflection on and selective awareness of Level 1 processes. And so on. Simplexity is at work here (Berthoz, 2012/2009; Thibault, 2019a). In reflectively abstracting from selected properties at lower levels, selves find simplex solutions that enable them to simplify and thus to manage the complex experiential flow through the emergence of selves with the capacity for higher-level experiencing (Thibault, 2018b). In abstracting explicit differentiations from lower levels of experiencing that have the capacity to affect the endogenous dynamics of selves, selves, in order to coordinate with each other in their social interactions, have devised self-organising meta-level processes that enable them to externalise and to reflect upon selective aspects of the self’s experiencing as differentiations that can serve to coordinate attention, awareness, understanding, and so on between diverse selves in their dialogically coordinated languaging activity. In this way, selves take stances on the differentiations that are so abstracted and reflected on. In so doing, they also learn that other selves may have different stances. The emergence of the meta-level of awareness of others’ stances on the flow of experience enables different stances to be compared. In reflecting on the differences between stances at a still higher level and in adapting to them, we become aware of the fact that other selves have different experiences and that these differences can form the basis of selected differentiations that enable coordinated social interaction conventions that have the capacity to scaffold the interactivity between selves. As the discussion above shows, submorphemic markers are selective differentiations of and abstractions from agents’ sensory-kinetic couplings to environmental events and objects that enable higher-level contentful flows of experiencing and meta-experiencing to emerge. The social-cognitive reach of selves across an increasing diversity of space-time scales is accordingly extended.

4. Knowing Levels: From Embodied Interactivity to Lexicogrammar 4.1 Knowing Level 1: Embodied Interactivity with the Environment Infants and young children learn about the world through their first-order embodied interactivity with it. Infants interact with the world and pick up sensory-kinetic

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invariants in the stimulus flux that are significant for them and which affect them. The pick-up of information about sensory-kinetic invariants affects the internal processes of the agent. These invariants bring about structural changes in the infant’s internal processes. The invariants that are perceived afford possibilities as to how the invariant can affect the organism, or how the organism can interact with and affect the invariant. For example, the infant notices and extracts sensorykinetic invariants pertaining to the rotating motion of certain classes of objects (e.g., spider, spiral, spoon, spool) or events that involve a rotating motion (e.g., spill, spin). These sensory-kinetic invariants provide information as to how the agent interacts with the object or event, or what the agent can do with it. Changes in the infant’s internal processes set up indications of potential future interaction with the environment. The sensory-kinetic invariant is integrated to the agent’s internal processes and becomes a part of them. These internal indications enable the agent to adjust its activity in relation to changing external circumstances. They also enable the agent to detect and to differentiate between different kinds of environments in which it might select one kind of action rather than some other. The infant learns to produce in its vocal tract activity gesture-sound patterns that are functional in externalising these modifications to the agent’s internal processes. Much of this learning takes place in the social practices of child rearing involving infant and caregiver. Infants learn sensory-kinetic invariants in both the physical world and in the patterns of intersubjective engagement that bond infant and caregiver. Knowing Level 1 is implicit. The infant has no higher-level awareness of the self who is interacting with the world and experiencing the invariants that its interactivity with the environment extracts from the flux of stimulus information. The Level 1 knower is not conscious of the principles that regulate its interactivity with the world. Self, body, action, feelings, and world-side invariants are all intertwined as different aspects of the topological-continuous variation that characterise the flows in which the infant is immersed. As we shall see in the next section, submorphemic markers are action selections on a second level of knowing that enable the agent to abstract some of the properties of Knowing Level 1 to a second knowing level—Knowing Level 2. For example, the rotating movement associated with the use of a spoon or the rotating movement of a moving spider are sensory-kinetic invariants that are noticed on Knowing Level 1—the agent’s embodied interactivity with the world. In noticing and paying attention to the invariant, the agent is affected by it. 4.2 Knowing Level 2: Noticing and Attending to Invariants in the Environment as a Result of One’s Embodied Interactivity; The Fusion of Interacting and Noticing in Submorphemic Markers The externalisations of internal processes referred to above afford and promote (1) reflection on the sensory-kinetic invariants that are noticed; and (2) the differentiation of some of their potentially infinite implicit properties and the abstraction of these properties to a higher level of knowing where the abstracted property is explicitly differentiated (Campbell & Bickhard, 1986: 85). The agent’s internal

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processes are modified in ways that set up potentialities for future interaction with the now explicitly differentiated invariant. The externalisation of these processes in the form of a vocal tract gesture means that the invariant on Knowing Level 1 has been differentiated and abstracted to a higher-order Knowing Level 2, for example, in the form of the consonant cluster /SP/ in words like spoon or spider. It is important to keep in mind that the submorphemic marker /SP/ remains embedded in and thus an integral part of the sensory-kinetic complex that includes the rotation movement that was first noticed in one’s interactivity with certain objects (e.g., spoon) or in the behaviours of moving objects observed such as spiders. On the newly emergent Knowing Level 2, the differentiation and abstraction of these properties in the form of the submorphemic marker /SP/ afford reflection on these properties. The consonant cluster /SP-/ for example has the capacity to evoke the sensory-kinetic invariant /rotation/ because the sensory-kinetic invariant and the submorphemic marker have become inseparable aspects of the embodied experience that the agent has of objects and events in which rotation is a salient sensory-kinetic invariant. Submorphemic markers activate sensory-kinetic experience at the submorphemic level. In the course of their development, children begin to notice and to attend to sensory-kinetic invariants on the first level. The first knowing level becomes an object of knowledge in its own right. The agent system instantiates properties that are worth interacting with in their own right. These properties can be interacted with and hence viewed from the perspective of a second-level knowing system interacting with the first-order agent–environment interactions of the first level. The agent becomes aware of its own interactivity with the affordances of the environment. The child learns to separate the invariants from the variants and to focus attention on them (Gibson, 1967: 166). In exploring the world, the child changes the patterns of stimulus information through its own exploratory activity and learns to discriminate what does not change from what does. The child also learns that changes or transformations of these stimulus patterns are due to the child’s own movements. These sensory-kinetic dynamics refer back to the child’s own body. In this way, the child learns to control his or her movements in order to extract invariants from the environment. However, the child also learns that not all movements are caused by movements of the child’s own body. Other movements pertain to events in the environment. How does the child distinguish the two? How does the child distinguish the movement of a ball rolling across the ground from the movement of the child’s own body? Gibson postulates that a possible answer is the extracting of a higher-order invariant (1967: 166): The uncontrollable variation, the one that cannot be reversed by reversing an exploratory movement, is information for an external event just as the invariant that remains after a controllable variation is information for an external object. If the extracting of invariants over time is the key process in perception, it can be assumed to occur at higher levels, including those called “intellectual”. (Gibson, 1967: 166)

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The increasing ability to control phonetic postures (Abercrombie, 1967: 38, 42) enhances the ability of the speaker to adjust his or her vocal tract activity to features of the environment (Reed, 1996b: 84). The control of posture—the controlled transformation from one bodily state to another (Reed 1996b: 85)— involves both a dynamic change of state from one posture to another as well as the maintenance of a postural orientation in relation to something in the world of the speaker. The emergence of organised sequences of such postures “will necessarily involve a coordinate ability to control posture for an appropriate length of time and across whatever environmental changes are created by these movements” (Reed, 1996b: 85). Phonetic postures and their dynamic control create environmental changes that others can be sensitised to and calibrated with. Furthermore, this second knowing level system instantiates properties—the postures and their dynamical transformations—that take us into the realm of phono-semantics or submorphemic markers (Bottineau, 2007). Submorphemic markers are grounded in agents’ experiences of sensory-kinetic invariants on Knowing Level 1. The integration of submorphemic markers to the lexical level (e.g., the integration of /SW-/ to lexical items such as swallow, swim, swivel, etc.) amounts to their integration to and re-organisation by an additional, higher, more abstract level of organisation and significance, the phonological word. A word is a multi-layered embedding of sense-making potentialities on the following three levels (see Grégoire, 2014: 116–117): The submorphemic level (submorphemic markers); The morpheme level; The word level. Grégoire (2014: 116–117) points out that submorphemic markers on the first level can be activated or attended to with varying degrees of salience in relation to the sensory-kinetic experiences that they have the potential to evoke. Salience, in my view, can be a matter of performance, e.g., voice dynamics or graphetic articulation, or the activation and orientation to one sensory-kinetic invariant instead of another potential invariant that may be activated by the same submorphemic marker in different contextual and textual environments. The activation of one salience variable rather than some other at the submorphemic level within a word means that words, far from being pairings of forms and meanings, are dynamical organisations of process that allow a constrained yet variable attentional matrix within the structure of the word as well as variable attentional vectors that focus on and make salient particular sensory-kinetic aspects of experience in accordance with the subjective motivations and interests of languaging agents. The transition from the pre-linguistic sensory-kinetic invariants themselves to their integration to the structure of the word on the three levels mentioned above means that words are higher-order perceptual-memory structures. Although removed by several stages from the sensory-kinetic invariants that motivate submorphemic markers and the intensity of the experiences that these invariants can induce, words are flexible neuro-motor-sensory programmes for selectively differentiating,

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articulating, and simulating virtual experiences of aspects of the sensory-kinetic experience that the word differentiates and evokes. The submorphemic marker /SW-/ in words like swim, swivel, swing, etc., activates a focus on oscillating movements that are characteristic of these body movements in relation to the media and the substances of the environment. On the word level, the sense-making potential of words such as swim, swivel, and swing may be to varying degrees automatised such that little or no attention is paid to the potential of the submorphemic marker to activate an experience of the sensory-kinetic invariant in question. On the other hand, the potential of the submorphemic marker can be de-automatised and thus made salient in ways that induce an attentional focus on this or that sensory-kinetic invariant on account of performance and/or contextual factors. When this occurs, the direct link between phonology and lexical semantics is foregrounded (Halliday, 2013/2009: 116). Halliday illustrates this point with the made-up example “gloosy.” There is no such word in English though there could be. The initial consonant cluster /GL-/ fits a pattern. Halliday writes: Words beginning with /gl-/ often have to do with light, typically momentary and bright, like “gleam”, “glint”, “glimmer”, “glitter”. These have a front vowel; with a back vowel, the light is faint, as in “gloom” and “gloomy”; and perhaps “gloaming”, though with a more open vowel the light seems to be more diffuse, like in “glow” and “gloss” and “glare”. But what about the –oosy /-u:zi/? This is fuzzier; note “woozy” meaning “half asleep”, “snoozy” meaning “sleepy”, “boozy” meaning “fuddled with drink”, and also “oozy” meaning “muddy and slow moving”. When we put /gl-/ and /-u:zi/ together, this suggests wandering around sleepily with only a very dim light. (Halliday, 2013/2009: 116) Submorphemic markers continue to be productive in English. As Bottineau explains, submorpheme markers focus on one salient aspect of multimodal sensory-kinetic experience through which an object or an action in relation to an agent can be apprehended. With reference to examples discussed above, I now consider the relevance of articulatory and acoustic properties. /SP-/ The initial /s/ is a voiceless alveolar fricative produced when air is forced between the tongue and the alveolar ridge and gives rise to friction as the air is forced through the narrow space between tongue and alveolar ridge. The final /p/ is a voiceless plosive that is articulated by closure of the lips and their abrupt release as air is released. The consonant cluster /SP-/ thus articulates the abrupt and forcible ejection of air from the mouth in ways that are perceived as analogous to the forceful ejection of an object from the mouth (e.g., spitting), the forceful release of an object by another body part (spear), the forceful initiation of an object’s rotation (spin), or the forceful rotation of an object that is manipulated by a body part (spoon, spade). /ST-/ The initial /s/ is a voiceless alveolar fricative produced when air is forced between the tongue and the alveolar ridge and gives rise to friction as the air is

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forced through the narrow space between tongue and alveolar ridge. The final /t/ is a voiceless alveolar plosive that is articulated by the tongue touching the alveolar ridge and its abrupt release, which momentarily stops the flow of air produced by /s/ before abruptly releasing it as a distinct plosive sound. /SW-/ The initial /s/ is a voiceless alveolar fricative produced when air is forced between the tongue and the alveolar ridge and gives rise to friction as the air is forced through the narrow space between tongue and alveolar ridge. The final /w/ is a voiced labial-velar; its place of articulation involves both the labial and the velar regions. It is bilabial because the lips are rounded; it is velar because the back of the tongue is raised towards the velum during the articulation of this gesture. /w/ is a voiced alveo-palatal semi-vowel because the air flow is not stopped so as to cause friction though the aperture (between back of tongue and velum) through which the air passes through the aperture is smaller than that of any vowel. For this reason, /w/ is one of two vowel-like consonants in English. The felt experience of the oscillating movement between the initial forced exhalation of /s/ described above followed by the movement of the back of the tongue towards the velum of /w/ which inhibits respiration during the articulation of /SW-/ can be mapped, by analogy, to other experiences of oscillating or alternating movements involving different modalities of sensory-kinetic experience. The sensory-kinetic experience of swallowing is perhaps the one which the phonetic submorphemic marker /SW-/ most directly maps to. Analogies to other oscillating body movements (e.g., swoon, sway, swim) and to the oscillating movements of tools and objects (e.g., sweep, swivel, switch) when manipulated by actions of the body are generated on the basis of the sensory-kinetic experience of the submorphemic marker /SW-/. The sensory-kinetic experience of the articulatory structure of the gesture, in mapping to another experience that is in part internal to the organism (swallowing), establishes relations of similarity between different sensory-kinetic experiences. Such relations of similarity are simplex principles. In perceiving similarity in the diversity of experience, agents can manage their interactivity with salient aspects of the perceived environment. The cross-modal analogies between co-articulated phonetic gestures and other sensory-kinetic experiences bring about a shift from the perceptual to its integration to and re-organisation by the gestural. The gestural has the capacity to evoke or to catalyse virtual simulations of particular sensory-kinetic experiences or to direct attention to a particular kind of sensory-kinetic invariant and thus to make it interactively salient. In other words, phonetic gestures such as those discussed above (and many more) begin to functionally constrain the kinds of sensorykinetic experiences that can be evoked by the gesture in the form of either internal mental imagery or the making salient of a particular aspect of the agent’s interactivity with its external environment. Phonetic gestures can therefore operate on memory and/or perception. They can activate internal mental imagery, or they can make salient in the local context particular aspects of sensory-kinetic experience. It is noteworthy that many of the submorphemic markers analysed by Bottineau are word-initial consonant clusters, e.g., /SW-/, /ST-/, /SP-/, etc. Moreover, the analysis of submorphemic markers is relatively indifferent to syllable constituents.

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This may be an artefact of the orthographic presentation of the examples. It may also reflect ways in which perceivers do not necessarily segment spoken words into syllabic constituents. Instead, for some tasks, perceivers may chunk words into word initial and word remainder (Fowler, Treiman, & Gross, 1993: 138). Fowler et al. (1993: 138) make the following observation: Finer-grained chunks may become necessary with long stimuli, with tasks that stress working memory and with subjects of lower verbal abilities. (Fowler et al., 1993: 138) Evidence suggests that word onsets have a special status (Berg, 1989; Browman, 1978; Fowler, Treiman, & Gross, 1993; Shattuck-Hufnagel & Klatt, 1987). Kessler and Treiman (1997) and Wilshire (1998) provide evidence that the processing of English words appears to assign salience to word onsets. According to these researchers, “the first two thirds of the syllable (onset and vowel) are largely unpredictable, that is, informative and distinctive, and the last third (the coda) is largely predictable, that is, redundant” (Kessler & Treiman, 1997: 309). The informational salience of word onset appears to coincide with the occurrence of many submorphemic markers in word onset position. As I pointed out above, submorphemic markers have their origins in articulatory and acoustic aspects of production and perception. Moreover, the productivity of many submorphemic markers pointed out by Bottineau (2007) has its basis in sensory-kinetic experiences that readily lend themselves to the proliferation of analogies with different kinds of body experiences of particular sensory-kinetic invariants of the body, body part, or some tool or artefact that is manipulated by the body. Submorphemic markers do not differentiate the sensory-kinetic experience that they simulate from the deictic process of locating and interacting with it. The two aspects of submorphemic markers are not differentiated. They are fused. As we saw above, submorphemic markers arise on Knowing Level 2 when agents selectively interact with and notice sensory-kinetic invariants without distinguishing interacting from noticing. They are the historical and still productive traces in words of patterns of interactivity with the environment that have functional, sensory-kinetic or other salience. They constitute procedural forms of knowledge that have since become solidified as productive patterns at the submorphemic level. They are phono-semantic patterns that bypass lexicogrammar: Patterns of sound directly evoke selected aspects of sensory-kinetic experience. They are the smallest timescale in language that are functional in attending to environmental stimulus information and extracting a significant invariant from it that is linked to a gestural programme, e.g., the linking of /SP/ to a rotating movement (e.g., spider, spin, spoke [of wheel]). In this way, higher-level words that specify a semantic possibility space are linked to lower-level gestural programmes or action-perception cycles on the submorphemic or phono-semantic level that ground the word in sensory-kinetic experience. However, they cannot specify the entire possibility space of the word on account of their submorphemic status. I return to words in relation to Knowing Level 4 below.

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Submorphemic markers are implicitly, not explicitly, deictic. They focus on a particular aspect of sensory-kinetic experience when agents interact with specific invariants in their world. Because they are subcomponents of words, they orient to a general domain of sensory-kinetic experience (rotation, oscillation, etc.) that does not deictically locate the word in a particular situation. We can say they are implicitly deictic because they are selective; they point to specific invariants with respect to factors like shape, movement, and so on. However, they are not explicitly deictic; they do not locate the word they occur in in a particular situation in space and time. Moreover, submorphemic markers are dynamic vectors. They show the intentional and oriented character of the sensory-kinetic experience that the submorphemic marker focuses on (see Ballard et al., 1997: 725). Deictics reduce the degrees of freedom of the agent’s own body movements to just a few parameters that specify the agent’s intentions with respect to the environmental invariant that is focused on. In this way, deictics reduce experiential complexity to a manageable semiotic simplexity. As Ballard et al. (1997: 725) point out, this contrasts with a non-deictic system that would specify all the possibilities of a (semantic) phase space without however showing where the agent is oriented in that space. 4.3.1 Knowing Level 3; Explicitly Pointing (Deixis) to the Implicit Affordance Layouts of What Is Pointed to Compared to the submorphemic markers discussed in Section 4.2, submorphemic markers such as /TH/ and /WH/ are explicitly deictic. These deictics interactively operate on situations in order to point to (indicate and locate) selected environmental invariants that they differentiate as being relevant to the current interaction. They specify the situational features that are relevant to the current interaction. In doing so, they restrict the degrees of freedom of the interaction to the minimal number of parameters required for effective decision-making, action, and cognition (Ballard et al., 1997: 726). Phono-semantic operators of this kind are explicitly deictic because they selectively interact with aspects of situations and differentiate them, but they do not name them in the ways that words do. These submorphemic markers are a third-order level of knowing that interacts with the second and first levels mentioned above and in so doing further differentiates some aspects of the lower-level system properties. Bottineau (2007) shows that many morphemes consist of submorphemic clusters that have specific orienting functions. They are clusters of semantically motivated operators that can proactively organise the ways in which speakers and listeners attend to and perceive selected aspects of situations. The co-articulated gestural profiles described by Bottineau in relation to the /THIS/ and /THAT/ pair will be the focus in this section. The sensory-kinetic dynamics of these submorphemic operators have orienting functions. In time, specific combinations of submorpheme clusters (e.g. / TH + I + S/ / and /TH + A + T/) become automatised and reified. They begin to take on “autonomous profiles” in the form of the morphemes and combinations of

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morphemes out of which deictic words and other lexicogrammatical units emerge and are further differentiated. For example, the /TH-/ : /WH-/ contrast in words such as this, that and which, what consists of coordinated gestures of vocal tract and other gestural activity (e.g., finger points and eye gaze). The paradigmatic contrast between /TH/ and /WH/ is directly cognitively and semantically salient. The submorphemic operator, often in synergy with visible gestures such as pointing, facial expressions, gaze, and hand-arm gestures, functions to orient and shape the attention and the perceptions of interlocutors by virtue of its sensory-kinetic dynamics. These orienting dynamics actively shape and guide attention and perception in ways that are perceived and understood to be interactively, cognitively, and semantically salient. Bottineau’s discussion of /THIS/ shows, in my view, how pathways through networks of associations connect, for example, /TH-/, /I/, and /-S/ so as to create the linguistic unit /THIS/. To quote Bottineau: In demonstrative this, three submarkers are present: TH for anaphora – the speaker invites the hearer to locate in the physical world the object he or she is talking about and which is supposed to have already been detected or mentioned; S for present definition: S indicates that the nomination that followed is a novel one in the context, […] and finally I in between to provoke the assimilation of the semantic entity captured by TH through the anaphora and the one captured at the same moment by S introducing an operation of present naming (“nouning” would be more accurate). In terms of neural networks, this implies that anaphora and nomination are computed separately before stringing together their results as commanded by submarker of assimilation I. The overall core value of this may be summarized by a set of instructions corresponding with the individual submarkers. What you now remember (TH) is made to coincide (I) with what you now discover (S): THIS [ASSIMILATE] (I) {TH = what you now remember}-----+-----{S + NOUN = what you now discover } When “what you remember” fully coincides with the preceding phrase, the anaphora goes without marking: this minus TH is is, in instructional terms [AS- SIMILATE] (I) {what precedes} (zero) and {the following concept} (S). (Bottineau, 2007: 55) Bottom-up actions of agents causally affect what happens at higher levels. Topdown action occurs when the higher levels of the organised hierarchy affect what goes on at the lower levels by way of informational-semiotic constraints. The interaction of top-down and bottom-up factors gives rise to the emergence of newly formed intermediate levels of organisation. The unit /THIS/ is formed

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through the inter-connecting of items originating from three different submorphemic contrast sets, as follows: 1. /TH-/ (anaphora: past) vs. /WH-/ (cataphora: future); 2. /I/ (assimilate) vs. /A/(dissimilate); 3. /-S/ (what you now discover) vs. /T/ (what you then discovered). The forging of associative connections such as that between the items /TH-/ → /I/ → /S/ creates a pathway that links together different items in the overall network more tightly. The process of recursively forging such pathways and of relating components of the network to other components enables more or less stabilised connections to be built up. Grammatical relations begin to emerge and to become stabilised. The widespread and still productive occurrence of submorphemic markers in languages may well be the sedimented trace of the origins of lexicogrammatical relations, as stable pathways get built up through the interaction of top-down and bottom-up factors. More and more submorphemic markers get linked together by stable pathways as more abstract patterns of patterns. In this way, more and more items are created and maintained. For instance, the submorphemic marker /I/ in the above example assimilates past memory (/TH-/) to the item identified in the present (/S/). These pathways between items thus forge links between regions of experience, action, awareness, meaning, and knowledge in ways that give rise to an integrated interpretation of the world of the agents who operate these connections in their interactions with each other. Bottineau’s analysis shows that submorphemic markers depend on sensorykinetic knowledge. The listener’s—the addressee’s—relation to an articulatory event such as /TH/ is mediated by patterns of sensorimotor dependence, as discussed by Noë (2004). We can take the further step of arguing that this sensorykinetic knowledge constitutes in experience the articulation and the making present of the concept /IDENTIFICATION OF INDICATED PAST OBJECT WHICH YOU NOW REMEMBER/. In carrying out this operation of articulating and making present, the agent (e.g., the speaker) directs the consciousness of speaker and listener to something beyond both of them that is in the shared world that the deictic directs their attention to. The experience of deictically locating objects in the physical world that the speaker is talking about and which are presumed, from the speaker’s observational perspective, to have already been indicated, depends on the way our grasp of such objects varies as speakers, listeners, and other observers co-orient to the indicated objects. When we co-orient to someone’s finger point, we get a grip on the ways in which the indicated object in the spatial purview, the direction of pointing, the orientation of the pointing agent, and so on, work together to create a functional synergy. This grip amounts to our grasping what it means for something to be pointed at. The submorphemic deictic operator /TH/ is, in principle, no different. Our grip on it, so to speak, is dependent on our sensory-kinetic knowledge of what it means for the relevant deictic operator to present some object or event in the physical world as /IDENTIFICATION OF INDICATED OBJECT WHICH YOU NOW REMEMBER/.

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The difference between /TH/ and /WH/ depends on the paradigmatic contrast between how the two different operators present objects in relation to observers and how they are indicated as appearing from the perspective of the speaker. They are different ways of experiencing the objects indicated by the operators /TH/ and /WH/ relative to the points of view of speakers and listeners. Our grasp of what it means for objects to be indicated in these two ways constitutes two learned states of an attractor landscape, each of which can be accessed when the contextually appropriate deictic operator is activated. Each attractor has its specific basin of attraction. The latter is sculpted by patterns of sensory-kinetic dependency, experience of indicated objects in the world, habituated responses to deictic operators, and so on, whenever agents co-orient with each other in relation to the physical environment. The learned states are values that can be accessed when the appropriate stimuli are presented. The deictic operators /TH/ and /WH/ are contrasting values— learned states of an attractor landscape—that permit stimuli to generalise to this or that attractor basin. The values that we then attribute to the two operators are not however mappings of context-independent meanings to forms. What we have seen above with respect to /TH/ is that values such as those associated with /TH/ arise by virtue of having the relevant experiences of the deictic operators without there being any requirement that languaging agents are in possession of and apply deliberative judgements as to the appropriate domain of application of the concept. It is not a matter of a context-independent mapping between form and meaning. Instead, the value is grounded in sensory-kinetic experience. Value-habits are neurally set up as flexible attractor landscapes across populations of agents stabilised as norms that enable people to find their way in the world. The orienting dynamics of the deictic operators discussed in this section mean that the addressee is able to act as a virtual co-author of the addresser’s perceptions and understandings in the given situation. These deictic operators can activate altercentric perceptions and actions in listeners. Consider the final line of the nursery rhyme: One, two, three, four, five Once I caught a fish alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Then I let it go again. Why did you let it go? Because it bit my finger so. Which finger did it bite? This little finger on the right. The switch to /THIS/ in the final line enacts at the submorphemic level discussed above an orienting dynamic. This dynamic connects an object available in the common working memory of speaker and listener in the shared situation (TH) to a speaker-centred (I) current identification (S), as shown by Bottineau. The listener or reader of this nursery rhyme, in his or her capacity as observer, is

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able to co-participate in the writer/speaker’s action-perception with the support of the brain’s mirror networks—the networks of brain areas and processes that are hypothesised to underpin and support imitation, empathy, the observing and adapting to other’s actions, and thus the learning of many social skills in the dialogically coordinated, intersubjectively attuned encounters between persons (Oberman et al., 2007). In many cases, as here, the physical-experiential domain of the /THIS/ vs. /THAT/ paradigmatic contrast functions as a source domain for a metaphorical shift to an affective-expressive goal domain. The contrast between the values /PHYSICAL PROXIMITY/ and /PHYSICAL REMOTENESS/ serves as a basis for expressive-affective closeness and distance (see Foolen, 1997: 25; Lyons, 1995: 310–311, quoted in Foolen, 1995). The learned states—the attractors—of the attractor landscape include both experiential and affective values and the interactions between them. As the /TH/ vs. /WH/ distinction, amongst others, shows, the submorphemic level continues to be productive. These submorphemic operators function to coorient the perceptions and understandings of co-acting agents in context-sensitive ways. The emergence of second-order language—lexicogrammar—has bleached many of these connections (Ullmann, 1962: 110–115; Hopper & Traugott, 2003) and replaced them with so-called “arbitrary” ones such that the original motivation is no longer transparent or accessible to latter-day speakers and writers of the language. By the same token, languaging agents are participants in complex forms of social life and interpersonal relations. They inhabit worlds that are perfused with norms. The increasing complexities and intricacies of human social life have placed increased selection pressures on persons to motivate their intentional behaviours and modes of interpersonal coordination, including languaging, in ways which will enable them to discriminate accurately and correctly amongst a wide range of affective states, evaluative stances, action roles, and cues of self-expression. 4.3.2 Prehension, Pointing, and Deictic Gestures Repertoires or populations of vocal tract and other gestural activities and techniques have the capacity normatively to affect and direct the experience of the selves who participate in dialogically coordinated languaging. As I argue in Volume II, Chapter 1, languaging is an extended form of perçaction (action-perception) in which wordings play a key role. Languaging is vocal tract activity in the form of phonetic (and related) gestures that catalyse, guide, and support flows of actual and simulated or virtual experience (action-perception) that are enabled and constrained by linguistic structure, e.g., wordings. Linguistic structures (words and wordings) are not encodings of abstract representations of objects and events in the world that these representations “correspond” to. For example, the transitivity structure of the clause does not stand in a relation of encoded correspondence to actualities in the world. Encodingism entails that there is some kind of structural isomorphism between the transitivity structure of the clause and what is represented (Bickhard, 2004a, 2004b). Instead, linguistic structure functionally,

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not structurally, evokes, constrains, and guides a flow of linguistically constituted experience in the socially distributed consciousnesses of the participants in an interactive encounter. Meaning is not carried by or contained in linguistic structure. Languaging agents interact with the affordance layouts of phonetic gestures and written inscriptions in their efforts after meaning and value. Meaning is interactively constituted. Phonetic gestures are the linguistically structured vocal tract activities that enable and support these processes as well as the coordination of the activities of the diverse social agents who participate in a languaging event. For example, phonetic and other related gestures support and guide the manipulation of spatial and perspectival frames of reference, as I shall show below. 4.3.3 Deictic This in Talk Prehension is the act of reaching for, grasping, and manipulating an object (Halverson, 1931, 1932). Halverson (1932: 60) writes that around one year of age the infant develops a feeling grip as distinct from the holding grip of early infancy. The feeling grip enhances perceptual exploration and manipulation of the object that is gripped: Holding by digital tips has two other distinct advantages over palmar gripping. In the first place, holding by the digits alone necessitates fine control over the entire musculature of the hand, a condition which depends largely upon perfection of function of the proprioceptive system whose receptor organs are in muscles, tendons, and joints of the hand. This full play of the proprioceptors of the hand and digits not only enhances delicacy of pressure and preciseness of placement by the individual fingers in grasping and dexterity in manipulation, but aids in the formation of perceptions of size, form, and mass of objects. In the second place, digital grasping brings objects into direct contact with those portions of the volar hand which are most sensitive in the perception of surface qualities of objects. (Halverson, 1932: 60) Deictic this is more than pointing to or indicating something. It also builds on and extends the principle of digital grasping. Digital grasping is more delicately articulated than palmar grasping; it enables more fine-grained perceptual exploration. In this sense, we may think in terms of deictic grasping, reaching, and object manipulation. Deictic grasping is still more finely articulated because it coordinates verbal and nonverbal exploration of both actual and virtual objects. As I pointed out above, the deictic may be either accompanied by an actual reachinggrasping gesture that reaches for, grasps, and manipulates an actual object, or it may incorporate a simulated gesture. Deictic this builds on and extends these more basic action-perception structures. The three examples in this subsection show deictic this integrated with an actual hand gesture. The integration of deictic word and gesture may be illustrated by the contrast between this and that in English. I will start with this before looking at that in Section 4.3.5 below.

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In Table 4.1, the deictic this in the utterance this is the one you had is integrated with Noeleen’s hand gesture when she holds the pen to show it to Laurie. The deictic this is an ego-centred gesture that originates from Noeleen’s frame of reference. It serves to locate something (the pen she is holding) in relation to the ego-centred frame of reference and to present it as near to hand and graspable as an object in a field of coordinated attention and action with one’s interlocutor. This presents the object to the listener as available for immediate prehension. Noeleen’s deictic this occurs in synergy with her grasping of the pen to show it to Laurie. However, it is more than merely showing. The temporal synchronisation and resulting deictic synergy of this and Noeleen’s hand holding the pen constitute an interactive manipulation of the object in question. The synergy of the two aspects of one overall action serves to present specific aspects of its future interaction potential (its affordance layout) to Laurie. In making the pen available for immediate prehension in this way, the functional synergy of Noeleen’s utterance and her hand action with the pen proposes that Laurie can mentally simulate a reaching for and a grasping of the pen as an object that is both perceived and entertained in thought/the imagination (cognised) as “the one you [Laurie] had” in the recent past that worked. In the example in Table 4.2, father and daughter are in the parking area of the kindergarten that the daughter attended during that period. It is a Saturday morning. Earlier in the week, the daughter had brought home to show her father some berries that she had picked from a bush near the kindergarten. In the episode shown in Table 4.2, the daughter begins to move towards the berry bush, beckoning her father to follow her (Frame 1). As she approaches the berry bush, she Table 4.1 Deictic This in the Utterance This Is the One You Had

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points to it and says this is the berry tree … berry tree. In this case, deictic this is accompanied by a pointing gesture. The synergy of these two factors serves to indicate that the berry bush is now available for immediate prehension. In indicating that the berry bush is now available for immediate prehension, the synergy of the daughter’s hand point and deictic this does more than simply point to the location of the berry bush. It interactively constitutes it as a locus of interaction potential that can be further explored and developed. In other words, the synergy of hand gesture and deictic utterance does two things. First, it individuates the berry bush as such a locus of interactive potential in a way that connects the present encounter with it (“this”) to the daughter’s previous encounter with it one a week earlier (“the berry bush”). Deictic this differentiates the berry bush as the current locus of interaction whereas the definite article the in the nominal group the berry bush differentiates a past encounter with it. The copula verb is links the two differentiations as follows: what you now remember (“the berry bush”) is what you now discover (“this”) (see Section 4.3.1). Second, the synergy of hand gesture and deictic utterance draws attention to the affordance layout of the berry bush as itself affording future interactive potential, e.g., to be photographed, having berries picked from it by the daughter and shown to her father, talking about the berries and the berry bush. All of these things in fact happened in the ensuing interaction. The berry bush and its berries are not just pointed to; they are constituted as affordances that can be reached, grasped, and manipulated. In this sense, deictic reaching, grasping, and manipulation (Halverson’s prehension) are anticipated by the synergy of hand gesture and deictic utterance shown in Table 4.2. Table 4.2 Deictic This in the Utterance This Is the Berry Tree

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The example in Table 4.3 again shows deictic this working in synergy with an actual hand gesture. A team of three boys is competing with a team of three girls in a story-telling game prompted by instructions that appear on the computer screen. The boys have selected a story topic about a group of aliens who land on the earth. The following text about the aliens appears on the computer screen at this stage of the game and requires a response from one of the two groups who are playing the game: All the inhabitants are shocked by the appearance of these strange beings. They keep on asking each other “Will they be peaceful and friendly or will they be really nasty?” Before you go on: pretend that the “invaders” are really nasty, horrid creatures. Your group must give a description of their characteristics. In Frame 1 in Table 4.3, two of the boys are reading the text on the screen. The adult (A) picks up on some of the text on the screen to prompt the boys to get started. In Frame 2, the two boys co-orient as Boy1 says well they sort of look like this. In this case, deictic this is synchronised with Boy1 taking hold of Boy2’s ears and pulling them outwards at the same time that he gently twists Boy2’s head. In the utterance, well they sort of look like this, deictic this is synchronised with the speaker’s reaching for and grasping the other boy’s ears, which he then pulls upwards to make it into “alien” ears. Deictic this posits the ears as being available for immediate prehension and action. The synchronisation of this with the action of Boy1 reaching for, grasping, and manipulating the other boy’s ears alters the ears to change their affordance layout in the process of interactively constituting Table 4.3 Deictic This in the Utterance Well They Sort of Look Like This1

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Boy2 as an “alien.” In the present example, deictic pointing and prehension are at work simultaneously. Boy1’s utterance and hand gesture both indicate (point to) Boy2’s ears at the same time that Boy1 grasps, explores, and manipulates the affordance layout of Boy2’s ears in order to transform Boy2 into an alien. In this case, the precisely timed synchronisation of the uttering of this and Boy1’s hand movements brings into immediate prehension the physical transformation of the affordance layout. In this way, the deictically indicated object in working memory (the ears) is now discovered to be alien (Section 4.3.1). Boy1’s utterance shifts Boy2’s attention to specific features of his body and their potential for becoming “alien” features. Boy1’s utterance induces an attentional shift that changes bodily orientation and awareness. The second boy’s ears, etc., become a transient focus of attention. Multimodal coordination of bodily movements does a lot of the work here (gaze, gesture, movement, touch) rather than verbal pattern per se. This is not the mechanical execution of a prior plan: The essence of skilful languaging lies in its tuning of bodily movements to an emerging, fluctuating task-scape and its affordances. The deictic this only has “meaning” in relation to the task-scape in which the boys’ languaging is embedded. 4.3.4 Deictic This in Text The following examples of written text show how deictic this activates a mentally simulated reaching for, grasping of, and the manipulation of an object in the imagination. In other words, the deictic incorporates a simulated gesture (see above). In Text 1 below, this anaphorically points back to “you can work on your project” and makes it available for immediate prehension by entertaining it as a current capacity (“can”) that the writer can exercise in a specific location (“at home”). The writer mentally manipulates and explores the “object” that is grasped by deictic this as something that the writer can do at home. Text 1: Well, I’m not sure 12 hours of teacher contact time a week is enough. I think educators should use class time to develop strategies and skills, not just say now you can work on your projects! I can do this at home! The best courses were those that I was totally engaged every lesson! In particular painting and technology where I completed four workshops over the semester. They were fast and intensive. In Text 2, this decision points back to choosing the two streams for the rest of my course. The prior decision is made available for immediate prehension in the imagination. The deictic this constitutes a reaching back and a grasping of that decision. In this way, the writer’s decision along with the student’s unpreparedness and the lack of information associated with the decision to choose the two streams for the rest of the student’s course is made available for further reflection in the present. The prior decision that is evoked in the present thus affords reflection on

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and exploration of the virtualities of the situation. The feeling of being “entirely unprepared” is contrasted to an imagined future scenario (“an informative event with the course convenors of each stream”) that potentially empowers students (“could be helpful”) for making “a more informed decision.” The final sentence of the text is a recommendation for future action. In Text 2, we see that the simulated gesture of pointing to and reaching back to the prior decision in order to make it available for immediate prehension stimulates an intellectual movement in which past actualities give way to a noncognitive awareness of a future that cannot yet be apprehended by the senses, but which can be entertained in the imagination. Text 2: The Bachelor of Design degree would be improved if Honours was not compulsory like the Fine Arts Programme so students don’t feel compelled into studying for an extra year if they wanted to complete further studies in another educational field. Having the double degree option of Design/Arts would also be better for students who have a broad range of skills and interests. As a student who started 2nd year in the 2nd semester, the university offered me no guidance at all in choosing the two streams for the rest of my course. I felt entirely unprepared to make this decision with the little information I could gather and with many subject course outlines being unavailable for reading prior to enrolment. An informative event with the course convenors of each stream could be helpful for future students to make a more informed decision as I already know I want to change my stream thus possibly prolonging my studies. More focus needs to be placed in classes about how the skills and information we are learning are useful or applicable in the work force. In Text 3, deictic this is a simulated deictic that points back to my professional experience, which took place in the past (“last year”). The prior experience is thus made available for immediate prehension. In this way, the past experience is grasped as an opportunity for further reflection and critique. Again, the immediate prehension of the negatively evaluated past experience affords the opportunity for an intellectual movement that takes place in the remainder of the text as the writer provides information to support the writer’s criticisms as well as proving a counterfactual (“it would have made a huge difference…”) whereby the writer projects from the negatively evaluated past experience an imagined future in which the desired situation (“to have a few briefings throughout…”) is satisfied. Text 3: In this last year I did my professional experience (teaching internship). This involved only one briefing which was two weeks before. There was absolutely no support during the entire thing. It meant that I had no communication with teachers/lecturers (met them once and they weren’t very helpful), and no contact with my fellow peers. The lecturers for this course didn’t help at all, and it would have made a huge difference to have a few briefings

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4.3.5 Some Examples of Deictic That On the other hand, deictic that indicates that something is out of reach and is not feasibly available or is no longer available for immediate prehension and action. Consider astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous words when he took his first step from the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) onto the surface of the Moon, as shown in Table 4.4. The deictic that in Armstrong’s utterance locates his first step on the lunar surface as now out of reach, as already accomplished and now no longer graspable. The perspective is the ego-centred frame of reference mentioned above: The gesture originates from the speaker and his perspective. In this case, deictic that integrates with a bodily gesture of the speaker—Armstrong’s first step on the Moon—and places it within a coordinated field of attention and action that includes television viewers of the live broadcast from the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. In Text 4, that anaphorically refers back to “focus on learning how to use the uni facilities” as something the writer needs but which is not yet available for immediate prehension: It is needed but not yet reachable or graspable. Text 4: The introduction courses feel very basic, concept-wise, I find it most helpful when they focus on learning how to use the uni facilities, that’s what I

Table 4.4 Deictic That in Neil Armstrong’s Utterance after His First Step on the Lunar Surface

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMINSD7MmT4.

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need guidance with—when we just focus on concepts, it feels like the work isn’t moving beyond what I learnt in high school. In Text 5, that refers back in the text to Some teachers just should not be teachers, which contrasts an implied negative judgment about prior experiences (“some teachers”) with a counterfactual situation (“should not be teachers”) as something that is not currently reachable and therefore not available to immediate prehension in contrast to “the actual courses.” The virtuality of the way things should be, but which is currently unreachable, is contrasted with the actuality of the course, which is available for immediate prehension. Text 5: Some teachers just should not be teachers, but other than that, the actual course is incredible. In Text 6, that refers back to an undesirable actual situation (“waste units on classes that we have to take just for the sake of taking it”) that the deictic that posits as being now out of grasp, as belonging in the undesirable past, and no longer available to immediate prehension in contrast to the desired but non-actual future (“should be electives”). Text 6: I hardly think it should be necessary to take the “theory courses”. Many of us aren’t here to study media artists in order to become one. Plenty of us would like to work in movie industries etc. So I personally find essay writing on artists who have nothing to do with CGI, animation, movies etc. irrelevant. We should be taking classes that will benefit our future careers, not waste units on classes that we have to take just for the sake of taking it. Theory classes like that should be electives to give people who prefer more practical approaches more chances to do so and learn. 4.3.6 Event Deixis in Imperatives Imperative utterances are proposals for action that may function to propose a simulated bodily action or a shift in attention and awareness that is prospectively anchored in the addressee. In Frame 1 in Table 4.1, Noeleen’s imperative utterance yeah look is integrated with an action—her writing on the piece of paper on the bar table—which she performs and which is co-temporal with her vocalisation. The imperative utterance look simulates a proposed shift in attention that seeks to place her nonverbal action within a field of coordinated action and attention with her husband. Her utterance thus seeks to operate on and to manipulate the spatial frame of reference, the perception, and the viewpoint of her husband. In this case, the simulated gesture (“look”), in conjunction with the action she performs (writing on the paper), functions not only to modify a pragmatic situation

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involving the perceptual purview of the two speakers in relation to the pen. It also seeks to provide Laurie with access to knowledge, i.e., that the pen Noeleen has just used really does work. The example in Table 4.5 features the imperative utterance Now watch a giant step in presenter John Newland’s introduction to an episode (“The Captain’s Guests”) of the television series One Step Beyond, which was broadcast between 1959 and 1961. Newland’s introduction to the episode is shown in Table 4.5. The imperative utterance Now watch a giant step immediately precedes the episode that is presented by the television presenter. The temporal deictic now together with the imperative simulates a prospective gesture on the part of the addressee (the television viewer). In this case, the simulated gesture of watching the TV programme is more than just physical action. It also involves emotional and intellectual activity and engagement. In other words, the utterance indicates that the episode is now within the viewer’s grasp, both physical, emotional, and intellectual, if he or she is willing to make the effort to dedicate his or her attention to the programme that follows, in the process acquiring knowledge and enjoyment of it for being willing to make the effort. The simulated gesture both points to and creates an awareness of a prospective pathway that the viewer can move along. As in the previous example, the field of coordinated action and attention implies not only physical prehension (physically watching the programme), but also intellectual access to knowledge of it, provided that one is prepared to move along the pathway anticipated by the vocal simulation.

Table 4.5 John Newland’s Opening Presentation of an Episode of One Step Beyond, “The Captain’s Guests”

[www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGsvma-Nk80; downloaded 25 January 2017]

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In operating on spatial reference frames, changes in viewpoint, and fields of coordinated action, attention, and awareness, both thing-deixis in the nominal group and event-deixis in the clause, seek to move the participants who are coordinated by a particular utterance into and out of actual and virtual spaces that entail movement of not only the physical body, but also intellectual movement of the mind in virtual intellectual spaces. In all of the examples discussed above, we see that speakers’ vocal tract gestures and written inscriptions are techniques that enable intentionally modulated simulations of perçactions that have the capacity to move participants in both physical and mental (virtual) spaces by activating and guiding participants’ imaginative processes. In the examples discussed above, deixis is shown to be more than an indexical pointing to something beyond the “sign” that does the pointing. Deixis interactively couples an agent to his or her environment. Neural, bodily, and external resources are configured to form an extended cognitive agent. Deixis is a form of action that interactively explores and modifies external resources—actual and virtual—in physical and virtual spaces. This distribution of internal and external resources along an action trajectory serves to offload working memory onto the environment at the same time that the particular locus of attention and interactive exploration that is indicated and enabled by the deictic is interactively modified. These modifications create new arrangements of physical and virtual environments that in turn change attention, perception, and cognition in the process of finding one’s way through a given task-scape. Deictic exploration is more than pointing per se. It has the potential to give rise to outcomes that go beyond actionperception as flows of creative imagination and thinking co-emerge with the exploration and manipulation of aspects of physical and virtual environments. In enabling people selectively to attend to, explore, and manipulate affordances, languaging enables them to create and/or to discover aspects of affordances that have never been realised previously. A boy’s ears become the ears of imagined aliens. A pen held in the hand links to insight concerning the capacity of the non-working pens to write. Berries in the hand imaginatively evoke berries brought home on a previous occasion. In all these cases, interactivity with environmental affordances on multiple timescales yields ways of reconfiguring resources that modify action, awareness, perception, and cognition. Maturana (1980/1970: 9) pointed out that cognition is an observer-category; it is not a category of the cognising system itself. Languaging, which is a central aspect of human life, is something that humans do in making sense of their worlds. Following Maturana, languaging, from the person’s perspective, is not distinguishable from the other processes that sustain the living person and which enable it to make sense of and live in its world. On this view, languaging is a part of the human life process and is inseparable from the living of human life. Categories like “function” and “meaning,” on the other hand, are observer-related categories. The observer makes a functional description that imposes boundaries relative to the observer’s interests with respect to the larger system of which the “function” or “meaning” is a part. In the human case, the fact that selves can observe themselves suggests that observer-related categories and distinctions will

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affect their understanding of their own languaging. Languaging is inseparable from the human way of living by which we make sense of the world we live in by virtue of our interactions with the media in which we are immersed. It is something that humans do in the living of human life. By the same token, we can observe our own languaging as a subpart of the larger whole, “the living of human life,” and we can describe the subpart using a functional description that uses the categories of the observer’s point of view. The term “languaging” is therefore fruitfully ambiguous: It is inseparable from the rest of the living of human life at the same time that it can be viewed from an observer’s perspective as an isolated subcomponent process of the process of the living of human life and theorised vis-à-vis the limited aims of the observer’s perspective.

5. Knowing Level 4: Explicit Pointing to and Explicit Naming in Lexicogrammar Knowing Level 3 is explicitly deictic. The development of Knowing Level 4 requires (1) reflection on selected properties of the Knowing Level 3 deictic system; and (2) the integration of those properties to the Knowing Level 4 system. The Knowing Level 3 deictic system is able explicitly to specify the location of an object or event in a situation. By the same token, the paradigmatic contrasts between values such as /TH/ and /WH/ implicitly specify information about the object or event and its affordances simply by pointing to one thing rather than another. The operator /TH/ specifies that the object or event is located in the past (anaphora) in contrast to /WH/, which locates the object or event in the future (cataphora). The location of and the attending to the object or event instantiate a value stream that flows from speaker to the object that is constituted as the attentional focus. In doing so, the deictic implicitly focuses on aspects of the affordance layout of the object. These explicit and implicit capacities of deictic operators stimulate attending to the properties and affordance layouts of the objects and events that the deictic operator points to. Deictic operators enable agents to point to and to locate objects and events in the egocentric frame of reference of the addresser and in the allocentric frame of reference of addressees and others. Selection pressures therefore arise to pay attention to and to identify the properties and affordance layouts of the objects and events that are pointed to. People point to this or that aspect of experience because in some way the particular aspect has the capacity to affect them or they have the capacity to affect the given aspect. People point to things that interest or concern them. At this point, selection pressures presumably arise to name the particular domain of experience that is indicated. Lexis in language is the outcome of these selection pressures. Whereas a langue-based conception of language, in the absence of embodied selves and the activities and task-scapes with which languaging is necessarily integrated, forces a reliance on assumed pairings of forms and meanings as the criterion for determining “meaning”, the languaging perspective of the present study shows that the meaning of utterances is emergent in the activities with which they are integrated and which utterances to varying degrees constitute. Deictic

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operators, as we have seen above, are grounded in shared intentionality. Shared intentionality implicates the following two abilities: (1) the capacity of embodied selves to point to and thus to indicate something in the world beyond the self as an object of consciousness; and (2) the capacity to coordinate this intentional focus on the indicated object with other persons. In this way, a dialogic space is created in which the embodied viewpoints of selves can be coordinated with reference to some shared common ground in the form of, for example, the particular aspect of the world that the utterance invites them to attend to. As the examples discussed in Sections 4.3.3 to 4.3.6 show, utterances are constitutive aspects of activities in which participants interact not only with each other, but also with the changing affordance layouts of the activities in which they participate and in which they seek to solve determinate problems in relation to specific task-scapes. Deixis provides the coordinative framework in which intersubjective attunement and dialogic coordination between persons and between persons and selected aspects of unfolding activities can be achieved and maintained. In this way, deictic operators open up and enable relations of co-orientation, co-sensing, co-affiliation, and co-action between participants in languaging activity. The deictic field of languaging, to use Bühler's (1990/1934) term, both grounds utterances in the embodied viewpoints of selves and enables the coordination of viewpoints with reference to a common ground that is specified by the utterance. As we saw in Section 4.3.3, deictics such as this do more than simply point at something of relevance or interest in a given environment. They also facilitate focused interactive exploration of the affordance layouts and action potentials of what is indicated. They do so without however naming the affordance potential of the object in question. The naming function of languaging, which includes the full range of possibilities envisaged by Bühler's (1990/1934) symbolic field, functions to differentiate a particular domain of experience under a semantic aspect. It is generally assumed that a name, which can be the name of a thing, the name of an event, the name of an attribute or quality, and so on, is a general langue-based category that is instantiated on particular occasions by particular utterances. It often follows from this view, as in Saussure's account, that linguistic terms are categories that impose order on a formless external world. However, Gibson's (1986/1979) ecological theory of the relationship between perceivers and their environment shows that the world is not unstructured and meaningless; the world has meaning and organisation that can be interactively explored and discovered provided one has the requisite capacities and skills for doing so. In a given activity, the naming function of utterances functions by both differentiating something under a semantic aspect to some degree of dimensionality and in so doing the name also specifies the affordance potentials of that which is indicated by the name. If, in the greengrocer's shop, I say to the greengrocer, “Can I have three bananas, please?”, the nominal group three bananas both differentiates and directs attention to a particular, activity-specific domain of experience (bananas, in contrast to apples, oranges, pears, etc.) at the same time that the selection of

234 Sense-Making the lexeme bananas specifies the affordance potential or some aspect of that potential in relation to the activity in progress as well as in relation to possible future activities in which the bananas might be used. Linguistic names are constrained by the invariants of environmental structure in activity-specific ways (Borchmann, 2018: 133–134; Thibault, 2017a: 371). The non-linguistic world is structured and organised in activity-specific ways that exert selection pressures on linguistic structure. The non-linguistic dimensions of activities are organised as contrast sets of a usually quite small number of possibilities that may be activated at any given phase in an unfolding activity, depending on the local experiential topology that is currently activated (Borchmann, 2018: 148; Garfinkel, 1981: 21-48; Thibault, 2017a: 371). In the green grocer's shop in the above example, the local experiential topology includes for example the fruit and vegetables on display. These items constitute a contrast set of options that can be selectively made salient in the course of the activity. Names therefore function not so much to instantiate something as an instance of a general category, but to individuate the object that is indicated by the name under a particular semantic aspect. In individuating something with the term “banana” as distinct from “apple”, the speaker sets up an orientation to the affordance potentials of the thing so indicated as a banana potential, not an apple one. This potential is always activity or practice specific (Whorf, 1956/1941). Names have the functional capacity—the second-order affordance potential— to direct attention to and to provide indications as to the affordance potentials of the first-order ‘objects’ and ‘events’ of experience. This always entails an interactive stance organised in relation to and referrable to the self that is the source of the stance. Interactive stance-taking, or judgment in Bühler’s (1949/1930: 130) terms, is grounded in “conviction based on reasons” (1949/1930: 130) that is oriented to the seeking and realisation of value (Hodges, 2007a). The present example provides semantic indications for the purposes of both action specification and action selection. Action specification makes use of the experiential semantic structure of the utterance to construe a yet-to-be-realised relationship of possession between the buyer and the desired goods (the bananas). On the other hand, action selection functions to set up and to initiate an iterative flow of related actions and sub-actions that are required to bring off the sales transaction. If I use the word banana or lemon to indicate something in the physical environment or to evoke a virtual (nonperceptual) awareness of the given region of experience, I am providing functional indications as to the affordance potential of the object and therefore its interactive potential. Such stances are incipient forms of action. They prepare one or rehearse one for possible action in relation to the indicated object (Melser, 2004, 2009). Words do not correspond to the fixed essences of things. Instead, they serve to set up interactive stances between selves and environmental phenomena—stances that provide second-order linguistic information about some aspect of the affordance potentials of the first-order experiential topology that is selected as the current locus of attention. In so focusing and coordinating attention, they draw value from the self into the affordances so indicated. Calling something a ‘lemon’ rather than a ‘banana’ is to indicate

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something about its affordance potential and therefore how it can or might be interacted with. Names provide information above all about the affordance potentials of things and therefore how we can co-articulate ourselves with the interactive potentials of the things named. It is precisely because of this fact that prescientific and nonscientific practices and ways of orienting to and co-articulating with the environment remain correct. They have normative power that serves to guide people in the normatively correct ways to orient to their world. Words provide information about the potentialities of the interaction kinds that they differentiate. Anything that is differentiated in languaging is a real pattern created by environmental structure that exists in the human ecology and that has affordance potentials that can be interacted with. An important aspect of the functional capacities of utterances is to provide functional information about the aspects of experience that language differentiates and how the given aspect so differentiated can affect us just as we can affect it when self-co-articulates with the affordance potentials of its environment. When selves have control of the “language stance” (Cowley, 2011) and are therefore able to make normatively appropriate use of the affordance potentials of linguistic pattern in utterances, their utterances can serve to achieve high-order semantic control. Utterances can serve jointly to focus the attention of selves on the currently active part of the local experiential topology and consequently to control or to direct the action and attention of others, e.g., to get the greengrocer to sell the buyer the desired bananas. Meaning emerges as a result of such iterated branchings in the flow of unfolding co-action between selves. The ‘meaning’ of utterances is an emergent awareness or sense of the successful co-articulation of a functional fit between self, utterance, and the particular aspect of the environment that the utterance is apperceived to operate on. Knowing Level 4 is a higher level of knowing that explicitly distinguishes deixis from naming at the same time that it enables them to be dynamically co-articulated as wordings that have the functional capacity—the operative power—to differentiate and name a given region of experience to some specifiable degree of granularity or resolution and to situate it in some region of space and time. Lexis is not confined to the naming of things. It also names processes, qualities, relations, and so on. By the same token, the explicit capacity to name is implicitly deictic. Naming integrates to its own principles of organisation the deictic capacities of Knowing Level 3. Even in the absence of explicit deictic operators, a name points to and indicates some pattern of data that exists in the Universe to some degree of resolution even if it is not situated in a specific place and time.

6. Lexicogrammatical Constraints and Enablements in the Flow of Languaging Rather than saying that the linguistic term “dog” constructs a given phenomenon of experience and that the given phenomenon so picked out from the noumenon

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has no mind-independent or objective existence, I would say that there exists an objective, historically created real pattern of process in space-time that can be pointed to, located, and identified to varying degrees of dimensionality by linguistic terms such as dog and the hairy dog in the corner. The fact that we can say that “dog” is the more general term and “the hairy dog in the corner” a more specific one or that “dog” is a common noun and “the hairy dog in the corner” is a nominal group, is itself an artefact of the fact that language can operate on itself. The common noun dog differentiates a pattern of data—a region of experience—as being this pattern and not that pattern. Names such as the common noun dog are intrinsically deictic in this sense. They point to, locate, and differentiate a particular domain of experience to varying degrees of resolution or dimensionality. Lexical items name the “objects” of our experience. Names are past interaction outcomes that have been selected and retained not simply or reductively because the name is an adaptation to some environmental selection pressure as if new words were a direct outcome of evolution. Rather, names are selected and retained in a population because they enable people to differentiate different areas of human experience, to reflect on them, to think about them, and to gain knowledge of them. What counts is not that naming is a product of evolution, but that humans have developed capacities and skills that enable them to learn how to enquire about, to discover, and to understand the world they live in. I use the term “object” as a cover term for a pattern of data that has the capacity to enter consciousness. I do not use the term to refer specifically to concrete particulars or substantive entities, which are a subclass of patterns of data. The term “object” in my usage has a Whiteheadian inflection: An object, which is microgenetically prehended before it is objectified, has the capacity to affect us and to be affected by us (Whitehead, 1978/1927–1928: 239). Objects are processes that afford certain potentials rather than entities with enduring properties. Objects so defined occasion events when someone interactively explores the object’s affordance layouts and in so doing activates aspects of the object’s potential. Names name “objects” in the sense that I have defined this term above. William James nailed the problem that arises when we make the mistake of thinking that lexical items or content words are the substantive parts of an utterance whereas the functional words are concerned with the relations between the substantive parts. Utterances have the potential to activate actual and virtual (simulated) flows of experience. Meaning is not in linguistic structure. Linguistic structure both constrains and enables agents’ interactivity both with the affordance layouts of utterances and with the affordances of the particular aspect of the currently active experiential topology that they indicate. Meaning is emergent and interactively constituted by the interactivity between persons and the affordances of linguistic pattern in utterances in specific activities. Linguistic pattern and meaning are neither structurally isomorphic nor co-variant because “meaning” is a flow of actual or virtual experience that is functionally activated and constrained, loosely or tightly, by an agent’s interactivity with the linguistic pattern in utterances. The substantive and the flow parts that James identified in the stream of thought are

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different aspects of the ways in which experience is a temporal flow. It is a movement that involves both the substantive and the relation parts in the flows of experience that languaging activates for persons. Writing of the rate of change of the flow or stream of thought, James remarks: The difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of a difference of subjective states of which we ought immediately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed by a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The restingplaces are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flights are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the “substantive parts,” and the places of flight the “transitive parts,” of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. (James, 1952/1890: 157–158; italics in original) The kind of thinking that James addresses here arises when it is assumed that the function words connect and relate the substantive parts of the utterance to each other. However, the intrinsically deictic character of lexical items qua content words means that they too express some kind of relation or have the potential to do so. The common noun dog can operate on a particular region of experience to some degree of granularity and precision. I can shout Dog! to point to and thus to draw attention to the dog that wanders in off the street and into my garden. Like the finger point, my utterance has a deictic function without the presence of any explicit deictic operators. My utterance relates me to the dog and me and the dog to any others whose attention I direct to the dog by means of my utterance. The utterance serves to point to and thus to operate on a non-linguistic pattern of data and to draw attention to it. The utterance is an operator that operates on its non-linguistic argument and modifies it in some way. For example, I imbue the occasion of the dog walking into the garden as an interactively constituted event that has value for me. I might be annoyed by the dog trampling my flower bed or I might be overjoyed to see its wagging tail as it greets me. The word dog can also be an argument of a deictic operator that modifies its argument, e.g., the dog. Linguistic syntagms are often described as “combinations”

238 Sense-Making of linguistic units. The idea of “combination” necessarily requires that the items that are combined existed separately before they are combined. Microgenetic theory shows that the parts differentiate out of an antecedent whole (Vol. II, Chapter 3). This antecedent whole is a non-actual and therefore timeless utterance-in-becoming until it actualises. The sense of this antecedent whole, which is a pure virtuality, nonetheless persists in the actualisation of an utterance as a real-time event. The sense of the antecedent whole perfuses each and every part of the unfolding utterance. The idea that linguistic units are combined into larger wholes derives from this more fundamental reality. It is a meta-linguistic perspective that probably originates in analytical procedures based on writing. A more fitting description would be to see linguistic syntagms as recursive operations on operations on operations … etc. The deictic operator the recursively operates on dog and modifies it. Recursive operations on operations have the status of events. The operation of the deictic operator the on its argument, dog, is an interaction between the operator and its argument that modifies (affects) the latter and in so doing defines it and actualises its potential in some way and to some degree. Specifically, the nominal group the dog actualises the noun dog by indicating its degree of definiteness and/or specificity in the situation. James (1952/1890: 158) identified the problem inherent in an “undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream” at the expense of the transitive parts. The latter are what James calls the “places of flight” or the “feeling of relation” that “lead us from one substantive conclusion to another” (1952/1890: 158). The undue emphasising of the substantive parts has meant that named substantive parts are imbued with feeling whereas feelings of relations have been denied it. James responds to this problem as follows: If there be no such thing as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it; and they have rightly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence

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than this could be brought up. But they have said nothing of that obverse error, of which we said a word in Chapter VII (see p. 127), of supposing that where there is no name no entity can exist. All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts have continually gone on. (James, 1952/1890: 159; italics in original) There is, I submit, a feeling of the in the nominal group the dog. As discussed in Section 4.3.1, the deictic submorphemic marker /TH/ is embedded in a particular sensory-kinetic dynamic that orients attention and awareness to something that is presupposed to be already known and identified. In James’s terms, deictic the is a transitive part that connects to (relates to) the substantive item dog. In this sense, it is an operator that operates on and modifies dog. The feeling of the arises precisely because the deictic operator makes the noun dog more definite, more specified, and therefore more determinate in the situation. The dog is made (grounded) more real in the situation. It is grounded as an actual specific entity whose realness is felt as are its capacities to affect and to be affected. According to traditional linguistic analysis, the is a function word. Function words are contrasted with content words. Function words include conjunctions, determiners, prepositions, and pronouns. Content words include adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs. Function words are said to form a closed set in contrast to content words, which form an open set. Function words are said to be “semantically light” in contrast to content words, which are “semantically heavy.” Function words are said to signal structure whereas content words signal content. The problem with these distinctions is that they are based on the decontextualised labelling of linguistic units as belonging to this or that grammatical class (adjective, conjunction, noun, verb, etc.) rather than to their functions in the flow of languaging activity. Content words are able to function deictically and function words are not without interactively constituted content. Moreover, the focus on content words as substantive parts tends to assume that content words slice up experience into discrete categories. In my view, the information that content words make available serves to activate an orientation to the affordance layouts either actual or virtual of some region of experience that the word differentiates. James’ insightful observation that feelings of relation have tended to be denied, given the focus on substantive parts, suggests that function words no less than content words are non-arbitrarily grounded in a sensory-kinetic complex that has its basis in embodied experience (Bolinger, 1949). There is a sensory-kinetic complex related to prepositions like “in,” “out,” “up,” “down,” “among,” “aboard,” “to,” “from,” and so on. Likewise, there is an experience-based sensory-kinetic complex associated with deictics such as “this,” “that,” “which,” “what,” or with conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” “if,” “therefore,” and so on. It is difficult

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therefore to say that functions words are without content for they are necessarily grounded in sensory-kinetic experience. “Meaning” is the phenomenological awareness from the viewpoint of a self of the achieved fit or congruence of self to environment. Moreover, when we fail to co-articulate a fit between self and environment, the lack of fit is felt. The “feeling of relation” fails us. Earlier today I was in the garage downstairs looking for a spade I needed to do some gardening. I had seen my wife using the spade only an hour before but I could not find it. I called out to my wife to ask where it was. She repeatedly replied, “it’s there.” However, her there was for my orientational purposes too vague a model. I needed a more highly specified model to orient me to the exact location of the space. My failure to achieve the fit between myself and the location of the spade that I sought was felt as frustration and bodily tension because I was unable to complete the meaning of my wife’s there in a way that brought about the desired fit. The vague contents of my perceptual model of the location of the spade were not extended by there. The successful co-articulation of an utterance with some aspect of the physical or cultural environment gives rise to a feeling of fit or congruence between self and environment. In the chapter of his The Principles of Psychology entitled “The stream of thought” from which the above quotation is taken, James’ idea of the stream of thought emphasises that thought is a constant flow or movement that focuses first on one thing then moves on to focus on another thing. A focus on substantive parts fosters a detached view that reifies the substantive parts and lifts them out of the flow. This capacity enables the self to focus on and to fixate on substantive parts so that they can be held stably in consciousness as “objects” of thought. James’ substantive parts do not refer exclusively to language. However, it is clear from the above quotations from James that they also apply to language. The substantive parts are akin to “content words” whereas the “feelings of relation,” or the transitive parts of the stream, are akin to “function words.” Chafe (1994: 80), in endorsing the distinction between content words and functions words, argues that only words that are treated as given, new, and accessible information are treated as “ideas.” Ideas, Chafe argues, are items of information that have the status of referents, events, and states. Ideas are therefore associated with content words whereas words that express non-idea information are function words. Chafe’s argument is in line with the detached view that I mentioned above. Pred (2005: 275) discusses this view in terms of the ability, fostered by a historical shift in European languages, to an active-voice stance. The active-voice stance is characterised by a partial detachment and withdrawal from the flow of experience as distinct from the middle-voice stance. The latter is characterised by the fact that the central participant in the process is involved in rather than being detached from the process (see Halliday, 2004/1985: 297–298; Pred, 2005: 275). The arguments of Chafe and Pred are relevant to the present argument because they pose in different ways the question of the relationship of languaging to the flow of experience. In contrast to Chafe’s focus on ideas as units of information in discourse, I have followed James in suggesting that both content words and function words are grounded in the flow of sensory-kinetic experience. This is

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not to deny the significant differences between content words and function words. Function words entexture the flow. They point the way. They orient and guide the flow of the utterance and therefore the flow of the activity with its participants in which the utterance functions. An utterance can be seen as an operation both on the respective streams of thought of the participants in utterance-activity and on the flow of the activity or situation in which the utterance functions along with the persons who participate in the activity. Function words appear late in the language development of children with respect to content words. They also constitute a late phase in the microgenesis of an utterance (Bühler (1949/1930: 135; Deacon, 2005: 279; Fortescue, 2001: 251– 253). In the case of children’s language development, this is so because of the fact that language development maps the developmental and maturational history of the developing child’s brain. Moreover, this developmental history is reflected in the microgenetic derivation of an utterance, which proceeds across a series of levels of neuropsychological organisation that correspond to different stages in both the evolution and development of the brain (see Brown, 1979: 141). The child’s utterances are rich in James’ “feelings of relations” in the stream of thought that are implicit, fleeting, and largely unnoticed. The child is immersed in the flow and does not differentiate name from experience. The two are syncretically fused. The later developmental emergence of function words serves to direct and guide the flow in more determinate and explicit ways that are co-articulated with the situation or the aspect of the unfolding situation that the utterance operates on. Chafe argues that function words specify the relations between ideas in discourse (Chafe, 1994: 80). However, my emphasis on the grounding of many function words in sensory-kinetic experience shows that function words too selectively activate some aspect of sensory-kinetic experience that they point to. The difference with content words is that functional words are not second-order linguistic affordances that explicitly name and make available linguistic information about other non-linguistic or environmental affordances. Function words link, relate, and point to both linguistic (textual) affordances and non-linguistic (situational) ones, but they do not have the capacity to make available second-order linguistic information about them. They operate on some aspect of the flow of actual or imagined experience that is evoked by an utterance. They direct the flow in ways that are grounded in sensory-kinetic experience. Lexicogrammar is not a system of rules for combining parts into a whole. It is a system of constraints and enablements that integrates, directs, and guides naming and relations in the flow of languaging. Languaging organises a path or trajectory as a sequence of orienting movements. Infant proto-language shows the infant gradually gaining postural control of their vocal tract activity. The infant’s protolinguistic vocal and other gestures anchor his or her attention to specific aspects of situations, including features of the physical environment. Having anchored his or her attention in this way, the infant develops a memory of it. The infant then changes posture and shifts attention to another locus of attention, which constitutes yet another memory, and so on. The flow of these stabilising gestural movements from one vocal or other posture to another and their respective loci

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of attention build up pathways or trajectories through the infant’s world. These pathways gradually enable the infant to move through his world and to constitute memories of it. With the transition from proto-language to language (Halliday, 1975), the child frees him- or herself more and more from features of situations. Content words fix one’s attention to specific domains of semantically differentiated experience that the word activates and function words manage the transitions from one locus of attention to the next in the flow. In this way, the child is more and more able to free him- or herself from the constraints of the stimulus flux and to move along linguistically simulated pathways through virtual environments. Utterances are emergent outcomes of microgenetic processes that operate in parallel with and are not separate from action-perception. Lexicogrammar enables a functionally constrained and enabled management and monitoring of the flow of linguistically constituted experience in languaging. Languaging is a higher-order or meta-level flow—the flow of languaging—that interacts with, operates on, directs, and guides lower-order flows of experience. In this sense, languaging has properties of entextualisation (Urban, 1996). Urban’s term entextualisation refers to the ways in which some set of interrelated linguistic or other signs is perceived as having internal properties that demarcate it from its surrounds so that it can be lifted out of the flow of events. This has two consequences. First, the given set of signs (1) is made into an “object” of special attention, interpretation, and evaluation; and (2) it can be removed or detached from its local situational context and transported to other situations. Points (1) and (2) apply in different ways and to different degrees. Entextualisation is not confined to written texts. A performance text such as water drumming by Baka Forest women stands out from its surrounds—the water and the surrounding forest—due to the coordinated actions and orientations of the women performers. A focus on the substantive parts of the stream of consciousness at the expense of the transitive parts has affinities with the idea of entextualisation. The substantive parts are lifted from the flow and seen as being (partially) independent of it as well as being a set of signs with their own internal properties. For this reason, transcriptions of languaging events using standard orthography focus on the entextualisation of the wordings that are heard in the flow. The result is a written text—the transcription—that is detached from and loses the critically important flow dimension of languaging events that is nonetheless implied in and enabled by the linear arrangements of textual syntagms. In utterances, and in the relations between utterances in unfolding languaging activity, wordings play a role in managing the interplay between what James called the substantive parts and the feeling of relations that move the flow along from a focus on one substantive part to another. Similarly, in languaging, wordings co-articulate an unfolding relational dynamic between content words and function words. James’ “feeling of relations” underpins the many forms of deictic co-sensing, co-affiliation, and co-orientation that are tied to our bodies and to the orientational frameworks afforded by our embodiment. James’ idea of “feeling of relations” is akin to what Dewey in the quotation placed at the beginning of this chapter described as “a submerged unidentified quality or tone” (Dewey,

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1958/1925: 261). Deictics help us to make immediate and immanent our sense of the flow because the “things” experienced in the flow are “felt or directly had” as embodied sensory-kinetic experience that enables us to “make sense” of situations. The deictic grounding of utterances in relations of co-action, co-sensing, coaffiliation, and co-orientation links utterances to micro-temporal bodily dynamics and body feelings in real-time. These body dynamics and feelings are the lines of the flows that extend out from an embodied frame of reference and latch us onto and mesh us with the flows of the other beings that we move along with in the process of living our lives. Feelings of relations connect the child to other persons, to other living beings, to actions, events, and things in felt relations of community and reciprocity. The feeling of relation of this, that, of, the, what, and so on is grounded in the need to apprehend the relations between persons, their acts, and the things acted on or with in the sense-saturated and purposive activities and practices in which the child participates with others. The child participates in various categories of making and doing that are latent in the child and acted out as “feeling of relations” before they are absorbed into a particular semantic category (see also Bühler, 1949/1930: 153–154). Lexicogrammatical pattern also has the capacity to evoke second-order cultural-semantic patterns that transcend situations and connect and integrate selves to multiple persons, places, and times on multiple time and place scales. Names specify semantic information about some aspect of the affordances of the world. Names are second-order linguistic affordances that specify information about extra-linguistic affordances whether actual or imagined by selectively differentiating or partitioning the experiential topology as this, not that, e.g., as dog not cat, red not green, stumble not walk, and so on. The fact that children’s first words function deictically rather than as names of specific regions of experience further shows that deixis is and remains intrinsic to all aspects of lexicogrammar even when function and content words are explicitly co-articulated and differentiated. The capacity to name comes later in the child’s development. The capacity to name means that the child is able to make available to self and others second-order linguistically constituted information (second-order linguistic affordances) that specify some aspect of the affordance layouts of the world that the utterance indicates. In so doing, they specify the action potential of the affordances so named and, implicitly, the speaker’s wish to act in relation to them.

7. The Flow of Languaging: An Example In this section, I refer again to the “aliens” episode analysed in Section 4.3.3 above. The two boys are in continual motion. We formalise utterances as static and lifeless structures devoid of movement. We say that static forms express or realise abstract meanings. In the living of life that real persons participate in rather than the fictional abstracta of the linguist, languaging is a part of the constant motion and e-motion that is the living of human life. Boy1’s utterance is part of and is intertwined with the overall co-motion of the two boys. They turn, twist,

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and move together as their motions extend out to the other and intertwine with the other’s motions. In terms of James’ “stream of thought,” the two boys go along with the flow of each other’s intertwined streams in a relationship of co-responsivity. Rather than detached observers who manipulate experience from an external perspective, humans are in fact more often than not caught up in the flow of their languaging and the kinds of experiences that language enables and supports. The boys’ languaging is not a detached mediation of something that is external to it. Boy1’s utterance is a part of the stream, the flow of experience. It constitutes a unity of feeling and a locus of experiencing both within the personal streams of the two boys and within the larger social streams or activity flows within which these are embedded (Pred, 2005: 281). It is a part of and at the same time a modulation of the onflow of feeling and experience as the lifelines of the two boys intertwine and interpenetrate in a process of movement, growth, and becoming. In answer to the question as to how we can describe “the interpenetration of lifelines in the mesh of life,” Ingold proposes that we think in terms of knots: A knot is formed when a strand such as of string or yarn is interlaced with itself or another strand and tightened. I suggest that in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement – that is, in a world of life – knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence. It is the way in which contrary forces of tension and friction, as in pulling tight, are generative of forms. And it is about how these forms are held in place within such a force-field or, in short, about “making things stick” (Barber 2007). (Ingold, 2016: 10) In the analysis presented in Tables 4.6 to 4.8, I illustrate how, through the flow of their languaging, the boys come together in a process of movement, growth, and becoming in which the lines constituted by the movements of the two boys are knotted together by forces of tension and friction that generate an emergent form-creating process. The total duration of the video-recorded segment is 2.88 s. The analysis is segmented into three parts, corresponding to three postures held and transformed in the co-articulation of the flow of the languaging, as shown in Tables 4.6 to 4.8. The forceful, energetic quality of the initial well (see blue-shaded segment of the Praat analysis) initiates a change of posture as the two boys re-orient from their focus on the text on the computer screen to the task of describing the aliens (Table 4.6). Table 4.7 features Posture 2. Posture 2 includes the wording they sort of look like (see blue-shaded segment of Praat analysis). The two boys establish an anaphoric link (they) to the prior mention of the “nasty horrid creatures” in the text on the computer screen. They then interactively explore the task-scape together by co-orienting. Boy2 spreads his arms outwards as Boy1 reaches for Boy2’s ears.

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Table 4.6 The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 1

Posture 3 in Table 4.8 encompasses the articulation of deictic this (see blueshaded area of Praat display). Boy1’s haptic exploration and manipulation of Boy2’s ears is precisely synchronised with the uttering of this. Boy1 takes hold of Boy2’s ears and pulls them outwards and twists them slightly. In this way, Boy1’s manipulation and re-configuration of Boy2’s ears as “alien” ears is made available for immediate prehension (Section 4.3.3). The interwoven lines of the participants in this process—the two boys in our example—lay their own trail from within the interstices of its binding with others’ trail (Ingold, 2016: 11). Ingold has developed the idea of correspondence in

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Table 4.7 The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 2

order to account for remarkably similar concerns. As Ingold puts it, participants co-respond as they move along with each other (2016: 14). Correspondence is the process by which producers and perceivers of languaging actively respond to each other over time. The two boys move along the pathway that is laid down by their unfolding languaging. A fine-grained analysis shows that the flow of their body movements and B1’s utterance joins the two boys in a relationship of correspondence. They respond to each other, affect and move each other, and are affected by and moved by each other in the unfolding of an unbroken stream of a pulse of

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Table 4.8 The Flow of Languaging in an Utterance: Posture 3

feeling and experience. The two boys co-participate in a form of co-action that is woven together from the diverse threads of their body movements and vocalising in a way that is more like counterpoint in music or the configural patterning of dance movements than a linear sequencing of separate acts by the respective participants. The two boys move along with each other in a relation of correspondence. Their respective movements— of their bodies, ears, hands, voices, etc.—are the lines that extend from each boy to form a contrapuntal intertwining of co-responsive patterns of movement. The intertwining of the respective lines of movement of the two boys thus yields a more densely knotted force-field of emergent and

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continually changing forms. It is not so much that each boy does things to the other. Rather than an active voice transitive stance of detached observers acting on a reality that is external to them, the process of intertwined lines going along with each other is better described as more like the middle voice ergative stance. The two boys act but they also and simultaneously undergo an experience that is formed by the intertwined lines of growth and becoming that they forge and move along together. Rather than detached doers and observers, they are immersed in the flow of the correspondence relation that binds them together. The two boys undergo change while engaged in processes and “feelings of relation” that they cannot detach themselves from and which they are affected by. In other words, the boys are inside not outside an experience which they both create and undergo together in the process of moving along the lifelines that bind them together, enable them to mingle with each, and with the world. Caught up in the flow of their respective yet intertwined streams, their thinking is not about things. Instead, their thinking is the onflow of the intertwined lines of the continual making of the correspondence relation. James wrote of the “overtone, halo, or fringe” (1952/1890: 182) of a word or utterance. With this idea, James suggests that the pre-linguistic antecedent to an utterance exists in consciousness as a whole and that the actualisation of the utterance in real-time is permeated from onset to termination with the feeling and sense of the antecedent whole from which the utterance is derived. In this sense, James (1952/1890: 182) referred to the “total idea” that is present both before, during, and after the utterance is spoken. James writes: Now I believe that in all cases where the words are understood, the total idea may be and usually is present not only before and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each separate word is uttered. It is the overtone, halo, or fringe of the word, as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent; no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness as mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes; and although our object differs from one moment to another as to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout the entire segment of the stream. The same object is known everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that. And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or foretaste of every other. The consciousness of the “Idea” and that of the words are thus consubstantial. They are made of the same “mind-stuff,” and form an unbroken stream. (James, 1952/1890: 182) James links the “overtone, halo, or fringe of the word” to the way it is spoken. As we saw in Chapter 3, languaging is underpinned and animated by felt sensorykinetic melodies of movement. These melodies are “forms of meaning” without specific phonetic shape (Bühler, 1949/1930: 136) that have mainly affective functions mediated by subcortical nuclei and modulated by right hemisphere cortical networks (Sidtis, 2012: 356; Vol. I, Chapter 3, Section 13). The micro-temporal

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vocal and other bodily dynamics of utterances perfuse it and are felt throughout the whole (Chapter 3, Section 14). This is clearly evident in the example discussed in this section, although no transcription can do it justice because of its felt quality. We are not talking here about abstract words that pass by in the stream. As the analysis above endeavours to show, languaging is bodied forth, not as discrete word-like entities that then slip away, but as carrying forth the melodic flow of a felt experience. The flow of experience is constituted and enacted by the boys’ languaging as the lines of their movements are shaped and meshed together. This intermeshing is a felt joining together of the inner feel of an experience that perfuses the whole from start to finish.

8. Lexicogrammatical Selection Pressures: Extending the Lexical Range of Grammatical Pattern Children learn the capacities and skills needed in order to interact successfully with the affordance layouts of utterances. These affordance layouts serve to evoke transformations of social situations, commonalities of understanding, and to differentiate the relevant experiential topology with respect to what those understandings might be (Bickhard, 1992: 88–89) when interpreters interact with them. Linguistic pattern functionally constrains these potentialities in the sense that it imposes selection pressures on them. Successful interpretation is a matter of interactively perceiving and apperceiving the indications that the affordance layouts of utterances make available for differentiating and specifying which social realities are relevant. The recursive operation of these selection pressures selectively activates, directs, guides, and supports interpreters’ interactivity with the affordance layouts of utterances. Children, under the heuristic guidance of other persons and technologies, learn to participate in more simplified forms of interactivity that constitute the resources for the recursive construction of the more complex resources that adult life requires. Successfully responding to the task to describe the “nasty horrid creatures” is a process of recursive construction of knowing levels that serves to scaffold later learning and development. In reflecting on selected aspects of the potentialities of the text on the computer screen, the boys engage in processes of variation and selection of interactivity and apperception that give rise to a new emergent level of understanding and knowing that is constituted as they explore and exploit different aspects of the text and its selection pressures, the affordances of their bodies, items of clothing, and of the situation (e.g., the competitive storytelling game), the prompting by the adult present, and so on. Lexicogrammatical selection pressures are a fourth knowing level that serves to guide the interpretative processes of social agents when they encounter utterances. Lexicogrammatical selection pressures extend what McIntosh (1961) referred to as the “range” of lexical items in contrast to the more general patterns of grammar. Lexis extends the selection pressures referred to above in intrinsically context-sensitive ways. Lexical differentiations are necessary to the functioning of languaging because situations are never identical in every detail and therefore

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never recur in every detail. Every occasion of languaging involves some degree of change in response to the new characteristics of the situation. Grammar is constituted as relatively stable forms of functioning that serve as the foundation for further, more context-sensitive lexical differentiations to be made. In interactively exploring and learning about new situations, the learner makes use of information based on past success. Learning about new situations makes use of information about successful past interaction outcomes that can be drawn on when needed. Information is located in topologies of grammatical patterns and relations that can be constructively extended to new socio-cognitive domains by the variation and selection processes involved in extending the range of lexical differentiations in ways that change how interactive construction will proceed. The link between the old problem and the old solution, which is stored in the topology as grammatical patterns and relations, provides the functional basis and the resources for more context-sensitive learning to proceed through variation and selection processes that modify and extend lexical range in new learning situations. The creation of an analogy between the boy’s body parts (ears, etc.) and aliens in Section 4.3.3 is a context-sensitive variation-and-selection process. In this activity, the target domain (the boy’s body) is semiotically re-organised in order to augment the process of analogising that can be made with the source domain (the aliens in the screen text). Range-extending lexical differentiation thus enhances learning when affective-volitional involvement guides and sustains exploratory activity. Range-extending lexis, on the other hand, is integrated to stabilising grammatical patterns that integrate lexical differentiations to unifying grammatical models. The latter synthesises newly created differentiations to existing, less conscious, and fuzzier conceptual-cognitive models that derive from our embodied experience of the world (Perlovsky, 2009). In integrating these models to grammar, they are linked to processes of cultural learning and refinement.

9. Sense-Making and the ConventionConstituting Capacities of Languaging Many linguists have talked about the “shared” nature of language systems as the basis for the coordination of the viewpoints and purposes of different persons. However, this perspective neglects the fact that many encounters between individual persons cannot be modelled on the basis of readily available associations of forms and meanings and discourse formats. Persons are frequently required to construct models of the interaction on-the-fly without being able to refer to explicit linguistic or other conventions. Languaging is not simply constrained by external cultural, social, and situation conventions. The intrinsic functional character of languaging means that utterances are themselves convention-constituting. By virtue of their intrinsic functional organisation and their intrinsic recursive productivity, utterances enable languaging agents to articulate one-off situation conventions in order to resolve, for example, questions of pronominal reference. While many utterances are boilerplate, utterances may also function as one-off

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situation conventions that operate on and activate higher-order forms of attentional control that enable agents selectively to differentiate a given aspect of the currently active experiential topology as the current locus of action, attention, awareness, cognition, and so on. If utterances were simply determined by associations of forms and meanings, they could not serve as the basis of the kinds of thinking that languaging enables—thinking that goes beyond the idea that signs are associations of forms and meaning. Consider the following example: 1. F.: Alright I think I got those + D. holds outstretched hand holding some berries she has just picked to show her father while he video-records them; 2. F.: That’ll do then + D. closes and withdraws hand; 3. D.: Turns toward berry tree, which was behind her during the previous speech; 4. F.: So you got them off that one (referring to berries that D. had picked from the same bush a week earlier to bring home to show her father). In lines 1–3 of the conversational fragment above, father (F.) and daughter (D.) are talking about the berries that the daughter is holding in her outstretched hand to show her father so that he could photograph them (Section 4.3.3). The father indicates in lines 1 and 2 that he has accomplished this task. The father’s utterance in line 4 differentiates a new focus of attention and brings in a new topic—the berries that the daughter had picked from the same tree and brought home to show her father a week earlier. The pronoun them in line 4 is not co-referential with the demonstrative those in line 1. In line 1, the demonstrative those is a deictic operator that indicates the berries which the father has just photographed and which the daughter is still holding in her outstretched hand to show to her father. In line 1, the choice of those indicates from the father’s frame of reference that the task of photographing the berries in his daughter’s hand is now accomplished and is no longer available for immediate prehension (Section 4.3.3). In line 2, he tells his daughter that there is no need to continue showing them to him. The pronoun them (line 4) does not refer to the berries that his daughter has just picked and is holding in her hand to show to him. Instead, it is a context-sensitive differentiator that differentiates the berries that the daughter had picked from the same tree and brought home to show her father a week earlier. By the same token, the nominal group that one in the same utterance differentiates the berry tree that is now before them in the current situation. The introduction of a new topic in line 4—the berries picked a week earlier—thus requires a new context-sensitive operation that resolves the pronoun reference. It is a one-off context-sensitive operation of unique differentiation that is successful. The two differentiations (those in line 1 and them in line 4) are not encodings of already existing actualities. In their respective utterances, they are operations on the flow of the currently active experiential topology that serve to indicate, locate, and track to some degree of resolution a particular pattern of data that can be differentiated and attended to by means of context-sensitive operations of differentiation.

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As mentioned above, those in line 1 indicates that the task of photographing the berries that the daughter is holding has been accomplished and that this task is no longer available for immediate prehension. In this sense, the now photographed berries indicated by those have been placed out of mental reach and therefore made less actual in the situation. In line 4, the pronoun them makes specific and therefore actualises in the here-and-now the no longer materially accessible berries that the daughter brought home on the previous occasion. In the same utterance, the use of that in the nominal group that one indicates from the father’s frame of reference that the berry tree that now stands before them, materially speaking, is no longer mentally reachable as the source of the berries brought home a week earlier. Languaging is far more than an evolutionary adaptation to one’s environment. Adaptation does not require understanding (Wettersten, 2016: 462). People exercise capacities and skills that are products of human evolution in order to make sense of things. However, these skills and capacities and their actualisation in determinate circumstances are not reducible to the products of evolution. Humans exploit the products of their evolution in order to gain knowledge of the world they live in. The examples discussed above show that languaging is a skilled form of action that enables people to make sense of their worlds, to gain knowledge of it, and to find their way in it. Utterances individuate context-sensitive differentiations that enable people to make sense of things and to think about them. Sense-making, thinking, and knowing are interactively constituted in and through dialogically coordinated languaging as social processes of exploration, discovery, and enquiry. For example, father and daughter engage in concerted interactivity with each other and with selected affordances of the local experiential topology (the berries, the berry tree) so that those aspects of the situation that they attend to fit with current selection pressures that enable the interactive potentialities of the situation to be indicated and acted on. Knowing means the capacity of the self—the knowing system—to interactively differentiate and constitute properties of its environment (Bickhard, 1992: 80). As we saw above, the first-level knowing system constitutes properties that can be reflected on and deemed worthy of differentiation by a second-level knowing system, and so on. Lexicogrammar is an emergent level of knowing and acting that is grounded in the interactive organisation of the prior levels of knowing and acting that I proposed above. Lexicogrammatical selection pressures are semantic differentiators that interact with and partition the world in domain-specific ways. Lexicogrammatical patterns are not encodings of (selected aspects of) the world. They are semantic differentiations that are learned through the interactivity of agents with the affordances of languaging and with the affordances of their social and cultural worlds. Semantic differentiators constitute models that are potentially supported by the world. Whether they are supported or not is tested through interaction itself (not encoding-decoding). Consequently, they may succeed or fail, interactively speaking, in ways that ensure their future selection and retention or their de-selection and discarding (Bickhard, 1992; Thibault 2005b, c, 2012a).

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Lexicogrammatical formats such as those in relation to the verb lift are metaphorical translations of differentiators from one domain (e.g., the domain of physically causing an object to be raised from the ground) to another domain (e.g., the domain of institutional speech acts uttered by authorised persons who have the power to legally remove a prior ban or prohibition sanctioned by law, treaty, and so on). The metaphor arises when the vagaries of the new social-cognitive domain (institutional speech acts) are extended to the semantics of the prototypically material process verb lift. When this happens, the verb in this case takes on a whole bunch of new properties that derive from the institutional domain. The material meaning of lift is extended to the institutional domain such that the material process meaning of lift is carried over to the verbal process (a speech act verb). The latter retains properties of the domain of physical lifting at the same time that new ones are added. In this way, a cognitive model of a social situation is made more specific through the interaction of a domain-specific linguistic semantics (physical lifting) and its extension to the different cognitive and social demands of the institutional domain in question. The domain specific logic of this claim also shows that cognitive models become infused with and guided by domain-specific semantic differentiations that do not decode the world but rather emerge through the collective work of agents-in-interaction and the emergence of knowing levels that this work gives rise to. Domainspecific semantic differentiations based on second-order language give cognitive models more specificity and organisation by grounding them in situation-models that are socio-cultural in nature This can apply to the structure of a social situation grounded in online perception in the here-and-now, or it can refer to abstract semantic operations, for example, in an entirely theoretical domain such as quantum physics. Cognition is grounded in the grounding of second-order language in the grounding of first-order languaging in the grounding of action-perception in metabolism. Changes in the chemical reactions internal to an organism regulate its metabolism. Action-perception interactivity on the other hand modifies the ways in which the organism as a whole regulates its relations to its environment. Actionperception interactivity can play a role in regulating metabolic processes, but they are not part of metabolism and occur on a different level of organism-environment organisation (Duijn et al., 2006). Duijn et al. (2006) argue that sensorimotor regulation in this sense constitutes a minimal form of sense-making. The spiral or ladder of sense-making can be schematised as follows. Level 4: Cognition: Situation-models and schema built up from the experience of the world and learning; these can be symbiotically meshed with and further specified by the abstracting and differentiating properties of language; Level 3: Second-order language (symbols): Cultural-semantic patterns and formats stabilise, specify, and hone to the slower, longer dynamics of the community-cultural timescales the fast timescales of first-order languaging; Level 2: First-order languaging (dynamics): Co-acting agents orienting to each other and their shared world through body dynamics; Level 1: Embodied action-perception interactivity with the world; Level 0: Metabolic regulation.

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In making sense of the world, the dialogical loop between agent and world can go through all of these layers simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive. However, any given layer may be the preferred focus in any given moment. For example, first-order languaging dynamics may come to the fore and steer the interaction and of course the understandings between agents, or the focus may be on the meanings of wordings and the need to focus attention on these. Different kinds of situations will distribute the focus differently. In play with a three-year-old, there is a lot going on in the embodied dynamics. In a university lecture, the bodily dynamics, albeit different, are by no means absent. However, the focus is on verbal-semantic patterns and their integration to schemas of knowledge and understanding (cognition). These schemas are built up through experience and cannot be reduced to or totally assimilated to language models. Language and cognition stand in a symbiotic relationship to each other. Different layers of the proposed spiral mesh with cognition in different ways and to different degrees, depending on factors such as the task, the social-cognitive domain, the participants, their preferences, the relationship between them, and much more. As we saw above, the powers of abstraction and differentiation in second-order language enable persons to organise, to make explicit, and to interact with situation-models. However, these models are constrained by many non-linguistic aspects of the world, including perception, the dependencies between events, objects, causal relations, material processes, prior patterns of neuronal activation, extent and kind of previous experience, and so on (Hutchins, 1995: 306). The intrinsic functional constraints of utterances correspond to their operative powers (Bickhard, 1980). In this sense, lexicogrammar is semantic. Utterances operate on participants’ situation understandings. Understandings of which context is in operation depend on the apperceived transformations of situations and situation conventions that occur as a consequence of the operation of the utterance on the situation that is apperceived to be in operation. Intrinsic functional constraints constrain languaging as a higher-order and highly articulated or differentiated action-perception system that directs, supports, and modulates attentional control that extends across and integrates diverse time and place scales to the deictically grounded perspectives of selves-in-interaction. Utterances work by evoking, through apperception, compressed information deriving from historical-cultural timescales. This information has the capacity to both coordinate and to scaffold interpretative decisions as to which kind of situation is in operation. Utterances therefore are shortcuts that obviate the need for extensive induction because of their capacity for information compression and conventional evocation based on apperception. They have the capacity to trigger or catalyse situationally relevant flows of cognition, perception, understanding, awareness, and affect (Thibault, 2011b, 2011c). Moreover, utterances operate on a dialogic space of diverse points of view such that the diverse agents in the situation can have a common understanding of the situation-type that is apperceived to be in operation without this implying that they necessarily share the same knowledge of the situation.

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10. The Situation-Transcending and BodilyGrounded Properties and Functional Capacities of Linguistic Actions of the Vocal Tract Utterances have both situation-transcending and situation-grounding properties and functions (Linell, 2009). Synergies of vocal tract actions embody lexicogrammatical pattern—words and wordings—that resonate with the historical-cultural traditions and conventions of a particular speech community and which imbue these patterns with culturally saturated significance that taps into and draws upon the accumulated cultural experience of a community. Vocal tract actions (phonetic gestures) are also embodied actions that do not simply serve as the vehicles of abstract linguistic meanings. The theories of “dual patterning” (Hockett, 1960) and “double articulation” (Martinet, 2005/1970: 13–15) in structuralist linguistics led to the widespread view in twentieth-century linguistics that the relationship between expression and content, or form and meaning, is an arbitrary one. On this view, phonological forms are the meaningless carriers or encoders of linguistic meaning (lexicogrammar, semantics). This view has encouraged a dichotomous view of the form-meaning relation that ignores the many ways in which the more embodied properties of utterances are also meaningful in various ways. A more helpful and realistic perspective is to see utterances as embodying a continuum of properties and capacities that range between situation-transcending properties, on the one hand, and bodily-grounded ones, on the other. Rather than a dichotomous pairing of a meaningless phonological form with a linguistic meaning, as in the classical account, we see that utterances are vocal tract actions that embody functional capacities of different kinds at all levels of their organisation and in ways that cut across the traditional separation of form and meaning. Echoing Firth, Mitchell provides a salutary reminder from the perspective of Firthian linguistics: “phonetics is meaningful pronunciation” in which many more phonetic minutiae are meaningful than those that are recognised by phonemebased analysis (Mitchell, 1975: 4) (Vol. I, Chapter 3, Section 14). Table 4.9 presents in summary form the main properties and functional capacities of phonetic gestures (vocal tract actions), seen as a continuum ranging from “maximally situation-transcending” to “maximally embodied.” Languaging behaviour is based on inter-individual sensory-kinetic coordination and coupling dynamics. It is not in the first instance motivated by the requirements of persons to engage in metabolic (chemical) exchanges with their environments, though it can certainly also facilitate these. The audible and visible behaviours that are coordinated in first-order languaging constitute wholebody sense-making that enact physical-energetic changes in the environment of the person by operating on and manipulating optic, acoustic, and other perceptual arrays in the environment so as to make information available to self and other— information that is functional in regulating the individual’s and the group’s relationship to the environment (Reed, 1996b: 24–26). With respect to the metabolic processes essential for the maintenance of life, these processes of sensory-kinetic coordination are second-order processes that

Macro-Cultural Selection and Exogenous Population-Scale Cultural Dynamics: Maximally Situation-Transcending Shaping of Content and Entrainment of Utterance-Activity to Socially Formatting of Meaning Distributed Phonology and Lexicogrammar of Speech Community Lexicogrammar: Principal Lexicogrammatical Systems Contribution to Situation Model Metafunction Experiential Functional semantic classes of Thing, Event, Culturally differentiated non-particular processes Situation, Relation, Quality, Circumstance, etc. individuated as patterns of data existing in some region of space-time that the speaker may want to say something about by creating a predicated situation when an operator operates on an argument: the cat sat on the mat Interpersonal deixis: Person deixis (Subject), temporal proximity deixis The past tense operator applied to the situation yields a Grounding of the utterance (tense), and modality proximity deixis (modality) proposition about a past situation as interactive event in the Mood: Reality status (realis/irrealis) of the clause The mood operator DECLARATIVE holds the proposition speech situation as interactive event in its scope, indicating that the speaker asserts it as a true or factual, etc., claim (realis) that is grounded in the speech event Situated deictic grounding of Deictic grounding, instantiation, classification, The prepositional phrase on the mat specifies the location of Things specified by nominal qualification, and location of Thing in nominal the event group: Locating and tracking groupDegree of definiteness, specificity of Thing The determiner the specifies that the Thing in the nominal of participants in situation group is specific and is assumed to be already grounded and therefore accessible to speaker-hearer in the situation Phonetic Gestures: Principal Vocal Tract Properties Contribution to Situation Model Proto-Metafunctions

Table 4.9 Situation-Transcending and Bodily-Grounded Properties and Capacities of Utterances

256 Sense-Making

The vocal tract action of the self is a vector that connects Vocal tract actions and other movements have the self to other objects, of the body as a force among dynamic-vectorial properties, e.g., direction, other forces that the self encounters, in an emerging force, magnitude, balance, rhythm, and enclosure pre-linguistic representational topology of pre-conceptual (Werner & Kaplan, 1984/1963: 86), that emanate relations comprising objects, forces, place, and time and from the self and enable the self to orient to and the relations among these act upon the non-self, e.g., objects, other persons. In the first instance, the vocal tract action is a dynamic-vectorial orienting to the non-self, which gives rise to the need to segment self, actions, and their objects The self is thus connected to other objects, causes, events by the dynamical-vectorial properties of pre-semantic action and event structures, e.g., self-vocal tract action-object Interpersonal coordination Co-ordination of body dynamics and embodied Vocal tract actions function as resources for the embodied of interactants (speakerviewpoints (gaze, etc.); inter-individual coordination of the actions and perceptions of speakerhearers): Energetic rhythmic entrainment of speaker-hearers;pitch hearers. Pico-scale bodily dynamics have the capacity convergence;affect modulation and expression to bias action and perception in ways that co-orient the embodied viewpoints of speaker-hearers and coordinate their actions and perceptions Bodily-deictic locating and Grounding and sourcing of speaker-hearers as Vocal tract gestures function to locate speaker-hearers tracking of participants embodied sources of vocal tract gestures; Physical in place and time relative to the positioning of their in situation: Kinematic location of speaker as source of vocal tract action bodies in relations of deictic co-sensing, co-orientation, co-participation, and co-action Vocal tract gestures have idiosyncratic and social properties (e.g., voice quality, co-entrainment of vowel length, dialect features) that specify individual identity, solidarity bonds, social provenance, emotional state, and which serve to specify relations of co-affiliation between interactants Conceptual Feeling Tone Endogenous Unfolding of Microgenetic Maximally Local, Embodied: Idiosyncratic Articulatory Sourced in Limbic Region Process Originating in Holistic, Relatively and Auditory Routines Undifferentiated Proto-Meaning

Proto-experiential: Physiognomic

Sense-Making 257

258

Sense-Making

operate on a more extended scale with respect to metabolic processes. They are grounded in a particular kind of physical embodiment, which, in the case of human agents, involves the receptors and the articulators (vocal tract, face, eyes, hands, arms, etc.). Physical embodiment is central here: The articulators are capable of many fine-grained sensory-kinetic discriminations that make possible a form of environmentally extended and dialogically coordinated cognition between human agents. Thus, the inherent behaviours of the articulators, the capacity for very many fine-grained sensory-kinetic differentiations, and the potential for the modulation of the articulators in response to specific environmental events constitute an action potential and a species-specific cultural-interaction space. Speaker-hearers do not uniformly instantiate the same internalised phonological categories in their talk. Instead, the sensory-kinetic patterns of speech and the auditory perceptual categories of individual speakers are in very many respects idiosyncratic, exhibiting a wide degree of variation across a population of speaker-hearers.2 Phonology is a socially distributed and institutionally enforced set of norms and conventions (Port, 2010) that speaker-hearers orient to and seek to emulate in their co-articulated vocal tract gestural activity. They are distal norms that agents orient to and seek to replicate on the basis of exemplarlike memories that include not only detailed articulatory and multimodal sensory information, but also many categories of objects, events, etc., that speech gestures assimilate with both in the speaker-hearer’s experience as well as according to cultural convention. On this view, phonology is a repertoire of distinct patterns and chunkings of articulatory, auditory, and multimodal routines that constitute the speakerhearer’s rich phonetic memory of actually experienced speech events in all their high-dimensional detail (Port, 2007). Speaker-hearers do not remember abstract, de-contextualised phonological schema. Instead, they remember the rich phonetic detail of the phonetic events they have experienced. On this basis, speaker-hearers are in possession of a repertoire consisting of a limited number of articulatory and auditory routines acquired on the basis of their experience. They recycle and reassemble bits of these routines to produce combinations—words and wordings—that make use of the same limited number of reusable patterns. Lexicogrammatical patterning is a further re-articulation of these emergent combinations that is entrained to, constrained by, and also augmented by the cultural dynamics emanating from a community’s historical traditions and its capacity for constant innovation and renovation.

Note 1 I thank Anthony Baldry for making available the video recording on which this transciption is based. The analysis is my own. 2 On the existence of “linguistic communities” in relation to the individual speakerhearer, Hill similarly observes: “We may start by assuming that any normal human being has a minimum of one tongue which he shares with certain other persons. The extent to which his tongue is truly identical with that of others—or indeed with itself over a period of his life—may be questioned at another level of analysis” (1958: 442).

Conclusion to Volume I

In Volume I, I examine and take seriously the ways in which we experience our own and other persons’ bodies and how this experience impacts on our understanding of languaging. Roy Harris identified “the fundamental error in contemporary linguistics” to be: a crude process of abstraction by which certain phenomena are segregated from the continuum of human communication, and these segregated phenomena are then, rather capriciously, set up for academic purposes as constituting the linguistic part of communication. (Harris, 1990: 22) It is necessary to take the entire “continuum of human communication” as the data about which hypotheses can be constructed, rather than hypotheses based on the a priori abstraction from this continuum of theoretical objects that have been postulated in advance of empirical method. Such a perspective does not assume a well-defined “linguistic part of communication” as an a priori. Instead, the “linguistic part” is no more than a limited perspective on the continuum of human sense-making. The a priori approach presupposes that there is a “linguistic part” that can be segregated from the rest and set up as an autonomous object of study in its own right. The dilemma for this approach is that it can be criticised for assuming that its limited perspective corresponds to an objectively given entity “language” whereas in reality it is no more than a very partial and contingent perspective on the continuum, a perspective that has by and large modelled “the linguistic part” on analogy with the written language of the dominant culture. When the “linguistic part” is so abstracted from the continuum, languaging is de-somatised. It is seen as sequential and recursive arrangements of linguistic forms. The model that informs this approach is not that of writing, but of reading: The notion of reading asks us to put text “in” context. Implicitly, interpretation uses textual forms which, perhaps, result from the programme-like assembly of underlying units. Text-analysis per se is the basis of theory and description. This model confuses how we think about reading some kinds of texts with how bodies engage in languaging activity. Moreover, the verbal patterns that are assumed to correspond

260 Conclusion to Volume I to the “linguistic part” are the disembodied and reified abstracta that inform our meta-semiotic ways of thinking about and analysing language on analogy with written script. Verbal patterns are described by linguists as corresponding to rulebound regularities and sequences of grammatical or discourse-analytical units and relations. The centrality of our embodiment that is articulated in this study eschews the idea of an epistemically inert nature that is seen as outside “the dialectic of human emancipation” (Bhaskar, 1991: 175). Moreover, it implies no reduction to some more fundamental biological level. Human biology itself always occurs in a dialectical relationship with historically specific social and cultural dynamics. Nature is not a transcendental objectivity that stands outside the constitution of human subjectivity. Instead, it is the historical ground of its constitution. Ipso facto, nature “cannot simply be a constituted objectivity – it must be in-itself (and, contingently, a possible object for us)” (Bhaskar, 1991: 176). That is, it is a potential that is integrated to, entrained to, and shaped by social and cultural dynamics in historically contingent ways at the same time that it exercises its own constraints. Languaging is not reducible to bodily processes per se. Languaging is deeply implicated in and constitutive of the human way of being in the world. As we shall see more fully in Volume II, languaging enables us to transcend our embodiment. It is the means by which we live in virtual worlds and relate to virtual cultural constructs. It is central to the developmental emergence of human selfhood.

Appendix I

The transcription key to Table 2.1 set out below is cross-referenced to the five phases of the episode that are subdivided into the ten frames shown in Table 2.1. Italicised text indicates the mother’s speech. Phase 1 (00.000 - 04.624 s): Frame 1: Baby’s arms outstretched beside her body; slight movements of hands; Baby vocalises pre-canonical syllabic sequence: the reduplicated pattern CVCVCV featuring rhythmic mandibular movements (mouth opening wide and closing) rather than tongue movement (this pattern is repeated with variations throughout the episode); Gaze directed at mother throughout entire episode. Frame 2: Baby moves arms to outstretched position on completion of vocalisation. Phase 2 (: 04.624 – 07.480 s): Frame 3: Mother: yeah say dada Baby moves arms downwards with beat of movement synchronized to mother’s ‘dada. Frame 4: Baby moves arms to upright position at end of mother’s utterance. Phase 3 (07.480 – 10.983 s): Frame 5: Baby vocalises sequence of three pre-canonical syllables (CVCVCV) preceded by low throat sound; Baby makes small movements of outstretched arms during vocalisation.

262 Appendix I Frame 6: Baby’s arms outstretched at end of vocalisation. Phase 4 (10.983 – 12.230): Frame 7: Mother: that’s a good girl Baby: vocalises in synchrony with mother; makes small movements of outstretched arms. Frame 8: Baby’s arms outstretched at end of vocalisation. Phase 5 (12.230 – 14.975 s): Frame 9: Mother: say … (12.249 – 12.501 s) Baby picks up on mother’s ‘say’ and vocalises long energetic sequence of precanonical syllables (12.501 – 14.968 s) Baby makes small movements of outstretched arms and feet in rhythmic synchrony with vocalisation. Frame 10: Mother: dada (14.968 – 16.132 s); Baby concludes with low breathy vocalisation suggesting contentment and relaxation (16.132 – 17.119 s).

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Index

Abercrombie, David 3, 213 abstracta, formal 27, 30, 67, 78, 81, 83, 183, 202, 260; verbal 181 action-perception 11, 209, 221, 253; virtual 14 action selection 234 action specification 234 active voice stance 5 actual 39 Adami, Elisabetta 9 adaptation, evolutionary 252 Adventure of Ideas 17 affect 24, 55, 151, 187, 199; surge of 159 affective response 188 affiliation 198 affordance 14, 64, 84, 135, 205, 224–226, 232–235, 241, 243, 252; second-order linguistic 241, 243; of utterance 249 agency 98; biological 132–133 agent 93; biological 18; moral 28 airflow 21 alien voice 125 alien word 125 Allen, Jedediah 19 Ames, Adelbert, Jr. 65 amygdala 48–50, 154 Anderson, Stephen 86 De Anima 70 animal 44 anti-language 117–118 apperception 249, 254 arbitrariness 9, 136 Aristotle 16, 33, 70, 80, 195 Armstrong, Neil 228 Arndt, Horst 163 array, acoustic-auditory 22, 100, 115 arousal 158, 189, 192; affective 179; autonomic 143, 158–159 arousal system 156 artefact 14, 67, 173, 205

articulation 32, 68, 215; graphic 146; striving for 69; vocal tract 103–104 articulator 20, 108–111, 114–115, 258 arytenoid cartilage 105 assemblage 62, 75; of bodies 56; of environment-person-organism 120–121; functional 187, 192; language as 28; machinic 32–33; of organism-personenvironmental processes 78, 125; of person-organisms 32, 42, 123; respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system as 122; sociocognitive affective 37 assimilation, of body-brain dynamics to world 138–139, 195 association, form-meaning 28 association psychology 11, 13 associative relationship 9 attention 153, 162, 226, 229–230, 234, 239, 241, 242, 251 attentional control 251, 254 attractor, lexicogrammatical 81 attractor landscape 220–221 attunement functional 206, 210; mutual 93–95, 152–153; perceptual 65, 83; sympathetic 156; to pico scale dynamics 195 Australian Defence Force Academy 121 autocollection 93 awareness 239; nonperceptual 234 babbling 72, 74–75, 94–98 Baber, Chris 169 bacteria 22 Bakhtin, Mikhail 15, 16, 125 Ball, Philip 136 Ballard, Dana 217 Barber, Karin 244 Baron, R. 58 Bateson, Gregory 121, 177

282

Index

Bateson, Mary 159 de Beaugrande, Robert 74 becoming 16, 24, 39, 65, 78, 84, 132, 244, 248; biosocial 78, 120; trajectory of 85 Becker, Raymond 179 behaviour, intentional 163 behavioural modification, social technologies of 140 Berg, Thomas 216 Bergson, Henri 92, 123, 129, 130, 167 Bernfeld, Siegfried 137, 149 Bernoulli effect 105–106, 108 Berthoz, Alain 167, 210 betweenness 14–16, 182 Bezemer, Jef 9 Bhaskar, Roy 260 Bickhard, Mark 10, 19, 206, 207, 211, 221, 249, 252, 254 biology, gene-centred 86; human 260; neoDarwinist 119; sub-personal 48 Biology of Cognition 28 biosphere 125 Blunden, Andy 13 body, enlanguaged 35; macroscopic wholeness and coherency of 67; self-sensing 169; sense-making 67, 150–151 body memory 147, 173 body politic, sub-personal 49–50 Bolinger, Dwight 239 bond, social 166, 202 bonding 140–141, 199, 202; interpersonal 198; technology of 141 Borchmann, Simon 234 Bosma, J. 72 Bottineau, Didier 207, 208, 213–220 boundary 121; extensive 18, 23 Bowdle, Brian 170 Boysson-Bardies, B. 72 brain, hierarchical dynamics of 131 brainstem nuclei 179 Bråten, Stein 55, 94, 116, 153, 175, 177, 198 breathing 90, 100 Browman, Catherine 25, 216 Brown, Jason 24, 58, 128, 131, 133, 142, 147, 182, 241 Bühler, Karl 207, 233, 234, 241, 243, 248 Buzsáki, György 150 Campbell, Richard 131, 194 Campbell, Robert 206, 207, 211 capitalism 202

caregiver 147, 151, 153, 159, 163–164, 211 caring 58, 64, 127; ethics of 62 carrying forward (Gendlin) 68–69, 127 Cartesian soul 202 Cartesian split, of subjective internal world and objective external world 128 Cartesian subject 202 cascading 93 catalyst, utterance as 37 Cattell, Ray 72 Caulfield, Tammy 113 causation, circular 187, 193 centre of indetermination (Bergson) 32, 92, 120, 123, 124 Chafe, Wallace 240, 241 chaotic brain dynamics 138–139 Chen, L. 72, 74 Chomsky, Noam 71–73, 86–87 Clark, Andy 13 clause 221 co-action 65, 84, 247 co-affiliation 156 co-articulation 25–26; of two persons 33; of self, utterance, and environment 240; of vocal tract gestures 108–111 Coates, John 42–57 code 2, 8–9 co-evolution, of persons and languaging 83 cognition 146, 253–254; 4E theory of 12 cognitive model 253 Cohen, Dov 170 Colombetti, Giovanna 68 combination 238 common noun 236–237 communicative musicality 142 communion, dialogical/interpersonal 154, 198 competence 3, 73 computationalism 2, 10–12 concept 29, 128 conceptual-cognitive model 250 conceptual feeling tone 128 concerted activity 60, 65 Conrad, B. 113 consciousness, altered states of 141 consonance 152, 164, 167, 170, 185, 187 consonant 25–26 consonant cluster 212, 214–215 constraint 79–82, 84, 114, 178, 260; articulatory-auditory 94; on development 207; functional 91; informational-semiotic 218; intrinsic functional 98, 254; local 195 constriction action 21, 25–26, 115

Index constructivism 205; social 83 content form 34 content stratum 31–32 content substance 34, 111 content word 237, 239–242 continuum, of human communication 259 contrast, paradigmatic 218, 220 Cook, Norman 184 cooperation 141 coordination, deep 154; sensory-kinetic 255 co-regulation 153 core self 128–129 co-responsivity 65, 244, 247 correspondence 65, 245–246 cortisol 46, 49–50, 55, 57 Coseriu, Eugenio 4, 6 co-synchrony 155–156 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure) 3, 6 COVID–19 51 Cowley Stephen 67, 153, 162, 183–184, 197, 203, 235 craniofacial system 111–114 creaky voice 117–118 cricket 148–149 Csányi, Vilmos 127 culture 7, 45, 83; functional analogues of in other species 45 culture of honour 170–171 Cutting, John 196, 197 Damasio, Antonio 24, 40, 68, 201 Davies, Paul 74 Dawkins, Richard 119 Deacon, Terrence 179, 241 deictic 207, 217, 224–225, 243 deictic exploration 231 deictic field 233 deictic grounding 243 deictic operator 219–220, 232–233, 235, 237–239, 251 deictic pointing 226 deictic that 228–229 deictic this 222–228, 245 deictic word 222 deixis 231, 233 De Jaegher, Hanne 132 DeLanda, Manuel 18–19, 26–28, 31, 36, 63, 76–77, 92, 111 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 20, 24, 26, 30–32, 37, 39, 62–63, 111, 118, 191, 205 Dennett, Daniel 43 derivatives, volatility of 55 derivatives market 51

283

Derrick, Donald 68 determination, transcendent 26 development 33, 73–74, 82, 86, 91 Dewey, John 204, 242 difference, intensive 24–25; modal 36 differential element 64–65 differential relation 64 differentiation 206, 210–212; contextsensitive operation of 251–252; lexical 249–250; semantic 252–253 digital grasping 222 dilemma, of chicken and egg 35 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 132 discourse 16, 134 discourse-analytical approach 27, 133–134 discrimination, sensory-kinetic 258 disequilibrium, dynamic modal 37 dissipative structure 88–89, 92 dissonance 164, 167, 175 distributed cognitive system 23, 25 dog 44 domain of articulation (Saussure) 5 Dore, John 93, 122 double articulation, of language 31, 255; of person-organism 30–33; of the voice 111 dynamei on 16 dualism, mind-body 67 dual patterning 255 Duijn, Marc van 253 dynamics, affective 133; bodily 80, 243; cognitive 133; intentional 200; inter-corporeal 199; material 81–82; material-cognitive 183; multi-scalar 81; neurohormonal 168, 199; orienting 220; recursive 166; relational 151; sensorykinetic 13, 145, 208–209, 212, 218, 239; somato-sensory 165; vocal 187 ecological work 4, 67 education engineer 66 education manager 66 egressive action (of lungs) 104 Einfühling 168; see also feeling-into embodied experience 6, 68 embodiment 20, 258 emotion 24, 183 emotion display 24 emotion programme 24 emotion valence 186, 189 empathic identification 168, 198–199 empathy, collapse of 175; phonetic 14 encodingism 221 The Encomium of Helen 66 Elias, Norbert 132, 141, 170, 180

284

Index

Ellis, George 44, 124 energetic dimension (of intersubjective communication, movement) 151–152, 154, 160–161, 257 energetics 156–157 enkinaesthesia 13, 165–168, 201 enskilment 88; languaging as 35, 161 entanglement 88–89 entextualisation 242 entrainment 159 environment, virtual 14, 242 epigenome 74 ergative process 208 ethiosphere 127–133 exchange value 4–5 exhalation 105 experience 14, 250; enkinaesthetic 38; semantically differentiated 242; sensorykinetic 133–136, 204–205, 214–217, 240–241 experiential topology 195, 234, 243, 251, 252 expression form 34 expression stratum 31–32 expression substance 34, 111 external aid 146 exteroception 150 event deixis (imperatives) 229–231 Everett, Daniel 182 evolution 236, 252; human 82, 87 falsetto voice 117 Fant, Gunnar 110 fascination (Bernfeld) 137 fear 51, 57 feeling 20, 24, 51, 128, 133, 151, 174, 178–179, 181, 238–239, 243; as protomodal evaluator 39 feeling-into 168; see also Einfühling feeling-meaning 51 feeling of relation 238–243, 248 feeling tone 178–179 field, generative 74; of action and awareness 163, 171; of attention and action 228; of culturally promoted activities and values 147, 163; of relations 85, 88 fight-or-flight response 43–44 Fiori-Cowley, Agnese 153 firearm 173; see also gun first-order languaging 27–28, 184, 198, 253 fit, functional 240 flow 129; ambient 21; ecosocial 21; of experience 237, 249; of feelingmeaning 51; impersonal 32; intensive

62–63; interruption of 30; of languaging 242–249; of matter, energy, information 20–23, 30, 34, 42; melodic of languaging 38; neurohormonal 20, 22–23, 170–171; sub-personal 45, 48–50; of voice 22 foetus 152–153 Fogel, Alan 154, 160 Foolen, Ad 221 form 4, 26, 31, 33, 70, 77, 80–82; graphic 146 formal essence 28 formant 21, 110 formant frequency 187, 189 formant transition 94 form-creating process 244 forms of engagement 169–171 Fortescue, Michael 241 Fowler, Carol 108, 182, 216 fractal pattern 118 frame of reference, ego-centred 223; embodied 243 Franken, Daan 253 Frankfurt, Harry 58 freedom, degree of 217 Freeman, Walter 137–141, 150, 163, 200, 202 friction 168 Frishkoff, Gwen 179 Fry, Dennis 110 Fuchs, Thomas 180 Fuentes, Agustin 88 function, naming 233; psychological 165 functional disposition 117 functional fit 98 functional synergy 223 function word 237, 239–241 fundamental frequency 111–112, 114 Furedi, Frank 51 Garfinkel, Alan 234 Gattungswesen 16 gaze 59–60, 112, 150, 154, 157, 161, 163 Gelb, Adhemar 142 Gendlin, Eugene 68, 69, 134 gene 72–76, 87 genome 22, 72–77, 90, 123–125 genotype 91, 119 Geologia 5 germ cell 13 gesture, simulated 226–228 gestural profile 217 gestural programme 216 Gibson, Eleanor 156 Gibson, James 11, 14, 31, 99–102, 156, 212, 233

Index Gick, Bryan 68 Glenberg, Arthur 168 Global 7 Global Financial Crisis 2008 43 glottal airflow 111 glottis 106–108 Goffin, Kris 180 Goldman, Jean Philippe 186, 189, 192 Goldstein, Kurt 142 Goldstein, Louis 25 Gorgias of Leontini 18, 66–67 Goudbeek, Martijn 186, 189, 192 gradient 19–20, 27, 64; availability 41; biological 23; objective 40–41; subjective 40–41; sugar 33–36; value 22–24, 35–40; values-realising 39 Green, Jordan 113 Grégoire, Michaël 213 Gross, Jennifer 216 groupthink 54–55, 177 growth 16, 65, 73, 84, 244, 248 Guattari, Félix 18, 20, 24, 30–32, 37, 111, 191, 205 Guillermo Gabriel Prieto 120 gun 173–174; see also firearm gun control 170 habit 125, 140, 178; bodily 174, value 220 habitus 132 Halliday, Michael A. K. 1, 12, 80, 84, 86, 117, 152, 161, 214, 240, 242 Halverson, H. 222, 224 handwriting 144–145 Haraway, Donna 2 harmonic development/progression 184, 187, 189; see also tone harmonic mode 184 harmonic movement 188 harmonic resolution 184, 187–188 harmonic tension 185 Harris, Roy 83, 259 Hart, Susan 152–154, 198 Hasan, Ruqaiya 38, 126 Havas, David 179 Heidegger, Martin 166–167 hemisphere, left & right 181–183, 192, 196–197 heterarchy, of values 64 Hill, Trevor 258n1 Hjelmslev, Louis 31 Ho, Mae-Wan 67–68 Hockett, Charles 255 Hodges, Bert 36, 58, 59, 64, 163, 167, 234 Holden, John 118

285

homological relation, between commodity production and linguistic production 79 honour code 174 Hopper, Paul 221 The Hour Between Dog and Wolf 42 Hsu, Hui-Chin 154, 160 human becoming 23, 88 human emancipation, dialectic of 260 human exceptionalism 127 Human Microbiome Project 75 human nature 16 Humphrey, Nicholas 180–181 Hurley, Susan 10 Husserl, Edmund 38, 167 Hutchins, Edwin 13, 254 hylomorphic model, of form-matter relation 31, 63, 70 hypothalamus 48–50, 179 Idea (Deleuze) 62–63, 66 idealism, Cartesian, Platonic 42 ideation 205 identity 34; group 141; personal and social 28 imagination 144, 163, 227 imitation 60, 64–65, 151–152, 160, 198–199 immune response 124–125 immune system 51–52, 123–125 immunity, semiotic 52 The Independent 171–173 indifference curve 41 individualism, normative 20 infant 211 infant–mother dyad 93–94 information, compressed historicalcultural 254; ecological 14; physical 32; pick-up of 211; secondhand 15; second-order linguistic 234; semantic 14, 243; stimulus 212; unit of 240 information processing 2 infraphonological model 154 Ingold, Tim 23, 29, 40, 65, 74, 77, 78, 82–83, 85, 88–91, 102, 120, 123, 129, 144, 170, 205, 244–246 ingressive action (of lungs) 104 inhalation 105 Inhelder, Bärbel 206 insult 170–171 integral kinaesthetic structures 145; see also kinetic melody integration hierarchy 113–114 integrative level 113–114

286

Index

intensity, of situation 39; of tone movement 184–191 intensive 39 intensive difference 19 intensive flow 19, 22, 27–29 intensive map 26 intention, biology of 150 intentional structure 140–142, 179, 200; socialisation of 141 interactivity 62, 145–146, 169, 205–208, 231, 236, 249 internal milieu 23, 29 internal representation 9 inter-organism perspective 85 interpenetration, dialectic of 72 interpretation 249 intersubjectivity, primary 160 inter-world 120 intra-organism perspective 85 intrinsic motivation 164 intrinsic motivation system 159–160 invariant 212; of environmental structure 234; sensory-kinaesthetic/kinetic 134–135, 209, 211, 214–216 Invisible Committee 66 Islamic State 121 isomorphism, structural 9 Jablonka, Eva 75 Jackson, John Hughlings 183 James, William 236–242, 244, 248 Janney, Richard 163 Jewitt, Carey 9 Kampis, George 70 Kaplan, Bernard 257 Kauffman, Stuart 79–80 Kay, Lily 77 Keats, John 126, 201 Keijzer, Fred 253 Kelso, J. 195 Kent, Ray 72, 74, 153 Kessler, Brett 216 kinaesthesia 136, 144 kinaesthetic memory 174, 178, 201, 208 kinematic dimension (of intersubjective communication, movement) 151–152, 154, 160–161, 257 kinematics 155–156 kinetic melody 13, 128–129, 136, 143–149, 168–171, 194, 197, 199–201, 204 Kinsbourne, Marcel 152, 170, 197, 198 Klatt, D. 216 knowing level 206–207, 210, 253

knowledge, indirect 14; movement basis of 143–144; sensory-kinetic 219 Kress, Gunther 9 la langue 3, 70, 92, 232; as negatively defined system of differences 127; values of 128 Lamb, Marion 75 lamina propria 106–107, 117 Langacker, Ronald 9 language, western-centric theories of 57–58 language acquisition 71–74 language-acquisition device/module 71–74, 86 language-acquisition system 71–74, 87 language growth 74, 87 language machine 83 language organ 73, 125 language stance 14, 235 languaging 5, 7, 21, 34; as caring 58–59; dialogically coordinated 160, 252; enkineasthetic underpinnings of 39; intrinsic functional character of 250; melodies of 128; musicality of 182, 198; 9E view of 12–14; temporality of 182 larynx 20, 22, 25–26, 104–105, 110 Lasch, Christopher 2 Latour, Bruno 7, 113, 132 learning 140–144, 146, 159, 200, 206–207, 211, 250; self-directedness of 149 le langage 3 Lemke, Jay 134, 179 Lewontin, Richard 119 lexicogrammar 80–81, 161, 207, 216, 221, 241–242 lexicogrammatical differentiator 192 lexis 232, 235, 249, 250 Liberman, Alvan 152 Lieberman, Philip 110, 114 Lieven, Elena 142 lifeline 84–85 Lightfoot, David 86 limbic cortex 179 limbic system (limbic region) 142, 153–154, 179 Lindhiem, Oliver 58 Lindman, Rolf 108 line, organism as 88–89 Linell, Per 27, 42, 182, 255 linguistic form, phenomenology of 81 Lock, Andrew 33 loop, dialogical 254

Index Lovelock, James 1 Luria, Alexander Romanovich 13, 136, 144–148, 168, 169, 178, 180 Lyons, John 221 Malloch, Stephen 142, 154 Martinet, André 10, 111 Marx, Karl 16 Mattingly, Ignatius 152 Maturana, Humberto 28–29, 231 Max Planck Gesellschaft 136 May, Lillian 153 McGilchrist, Iain 181–182, 196–199 McIntosh, Angus 249 meaning 8–9, 13, 68–69, 222, 231, 235, 236, 240; personal 139; symbolic 83 media 28, 32, 81, 116–117, 121–122 mediational interface 11 medium, of air 89–90, 98–100 Mehler, J. 153 melody 129; auditory 168–169; cultural 169–170; enkinaesthetic 165–168, 202; expressive/ gestural 169; inter-individual 201; lexicogrammatical-semantic 169; of movement 133–135, 160–161; neurological 168; perceptual 169; sensory-kinaesthetic 169; sensorykinetic 133–134, 248; tactilekinaesthetic 137, 142; visual 168–169 Melser, Derek 60, 164, 234 memory, rich phonetic 258 Mendoza-Denton, Norma 117–118 mening 31; see also purport mental imagery 215 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 136–137, 142–144, 180 meshwork 32, 76–77, 85, 93, 119 metabolism 78, 91, 253 meta-experiencing 210 metafunction 256–257 meta-level 177 metaphor, mechanistic metaphor 2 metaphysics, of transcendent linguistic code 28; materialist 26; process 129 meta-wanting 64 microgenesis 238, 241–242 Miller, Joan 170 Min, Shangchao 58 mirror networks (of brain) 221 Mitchell, T. F. 255 Mithen, Stephen 197 Molnar, George 98, 116–117 monological perspective 54–55

287

monologic closure 176–178 mood, musical 180; pre-semantic 179, 197 Moodley, S. 153 Moore, Christopher 113 morpheme 207, 213 Moss, Lenny 75 motive 150, 161 motor output 67 movement 16, 204, 244; exploratory 205; intellectual 227; melodies of 128; selfregulatory 152–153; trajectory of 84 Müller, Johannes 110 multi-scalarity 2, 117; of languaging 131 muscle tone 148 muscular tension 20, 165 name 234–236, 243 narrative, sub-personal of organs 48–50; wordless 154–161 Nathani Iyer, Suneeti 15 Nature 7, 260 neo-liberal capitalism 66 nexus (Whitehead) 75 niche, semiotic-informational 84 Nisbett, Richard 170 Noë, Alva 219 nominal group 251–252 norm, institutional 178; social 176 normativity 119 notional principle 116 Oberman, Lindsay 221 object 15, 236; of linguistics 8; of study 42, 81 observer 3–5, 28, 33, 65, 110, 127 Ochsner, Robert 168–169 Oller, D. Kimbrough 154 ontological possibility 16 ontology, Deleuzian 39, 64; of the human being 91; organicist of organism 76; relational 131 operator-argument relation 209 opposition, of biology and culture 33 organ 21, 47–48; as regulator of impersonal flow 30, 48 organogenesis 73 order parameter 195 organism, as hierarchical organisation of organs 30, 34; single-celled 33 organism-centred perspective 2 organism-person 195 organism-person system 122–125 oxytocin 200 Oyama, Susan 87

288

Index

path (pathway) 40, 65, 84–85, 89 pattern, cultural-semantic 195, 243; lexicogrammatical 27, 34, 187, 195, 255, 258; real 116, 118, 235, 236; second-order cultural 114, 160; second-order linguistic 25, 249; second-order phonological 22, 26, 160; tonal resonance 153 Pearson, Helen 75 perçaction 221, 231; see also action-perception perception, altercentric 220; Gibson’s ecological theory of 99 performance 73; skilled 147; smooth 148 performance text 242 periodicity, rhythmic 161 Perkins, W. 153 Perlovsky, Leonid 250 person-organism 20–23, 28–30, 34, 38, 42, 122–125; de-stratified account of 49 perspective, externalist vs. internalist 128 Pfaff, Donald 158 phase transition, socio-cognitive-affective 25 phenomenalism 8–10 phonation 103–104, 108; amodal 117–118 phonetic gesture 21–22, 27, 34, 222, 255 phonetics 255 phonology 258 physiognomic dimension (of intersubjective communication, movement) 151–152, 154, 160–161, 257 physiognomics 156–157 physiology, cultural sensitivity of 53 Piaget, Jean 206 Pick, Anne 156 pico scale bodily dynamics xxv, 14, 67, 131, 199 pico scale voice dynamics 183–196 pitch 105, 157, 184–191 pitch movement 190–191 plasticity 16 Podevsa, Robert 117 polymorphism 16 Port, Robert 258 possibility space, subjective 41 postural control 156–157, 160 postural orientation 161 postural setting 160 posture 156–157, 160, 163, 174; phonetic 212; semantic 161, 244–247; vocal 160 posturing, of vocal tract 154 potential, biophysical 67; bio-social 16; local 78; nonlocal 22, 38, 80; ontological 16

potentiality, virtual 26 Pradeu, Thomas 73, 124 praxis 16 Pred, Ralph 182, 240, 244 prehension 222–224, 226–227, 251–252 The Principles of Psychology 240 Proal, Amy 75–77 process 129; intensive morphogenetic 37, 39 process flow 129–131 Prodi, Giorgio 85, 127 productivity, combinatorial 26 property, extensive 18, 23–24, 27; formalinformational 77–78, 82; intensive 19, 23, 26–27; material-energetic 77–78, 82; modal 116, 119; physical 19; protometafunctional 152–153 proprioception 144, 149–150, 205 prosody 183; of fear 51; semantic 47–48 protension 38 proto-language 242 proto-modal evaluation 124 proto-modal friction 164, 187, 192 proto-modal intelligibility 166 proto-modal value 192 protophone 154 psychic blindness 142 punctuation 121 purport 31; see also mening Qiao, Liqing 58 quasi-vowel 154 Ramirez-Giocoechea, Eugenia 86 Ramsdell, Heather 154 range, lexical 250 Ratner, Carl 43–44, 165 reading 259 recursive construction 249 recursive operation 238 recursive self-individuation 19, 23, 33–35, 72, 78 recursive self-maintenance 19, 23, 33–35, 72, 78 recursivity, historical 200 Reed, Edward 6, 14–15, 36, 121, 147, 156, 160, 164, 213, 255 reenvoice 122 reflective abstraction 206–207, 210 rehearsal, concerted 163–164; tokened 162 Reinke’s space 107–108 relationality 15; bio-social 199 remodalisation 38, 48, 164 representation 65, 136–138, 192, 202

Index resilience 93 resonance 21; bodily, of emotions 203n1; inter-corporeal 166; limbic 153 respiration 89–90, 103, 113 respiratory-laryngeal-supralaryngeal articulatory system 19–22, 26–34, 67, 79–81, 116–119, 121–122; stratification of 112 retention 38 rhythm 154 Richie, Michael 10 Rilke, Rainer Maria 126, 201–202 Rinck, Mike 179 risk-taking, financial 43 Robbins, Stephen 131 Rose, Steven 23, 33, 35, 72, 84, 90 Ross, Don 116 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio 5–6, 79 Roth, Wolff-Michael 10, 136, 143–144, 174, 204–205 Ruark, J. 113 Russell, James 128 salience 213, 216 Salthe, Stanley 83, 85–87, 89, 93, 113–114, 127 Saltzman, Eliot 195 Sander, Louis 153 Sargant, William 140 Sato, Kiminori 108 de Saussure, Ferdinand 2–10, 13, 27, 29, 30, 42, 70, 77, 80, 82–83, 92, 102, 127–128, 136, 233 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue 153 Scherer, Klaus 186, 189, 192 schismogenesis 177 Schmerse, Daniel 142 Schonle, P. 113 Schwarz, Norbert 170 second-order language 27–28, 74, 81, 132, 181, 221, 253, 254 selection pressure 232, 234, 249; lexicogrammatical 252; of melodies 131 self-reflection 210 scalar level, of ecosocial system 51–52, 63, 178 scale, population 22 Schögler, Ben 142 segmentation 27 selection, biological 23; cultural 23 self 15, 150, 181, 199; enlanguaged 35; experiencing 171 self-construction 23, 38 self-perspective 20, 125

289

self-reflexivity 15 Selley, Richard 7 semantic priming 179 sense-making 40, 204–205; affective 39, 64; co-participatory 21; full-bodied 14, 132–133; whole-body 29, 67–68 sense-making trajectory 85 sensibility 64 sensitivity 150, 153, 156; biosemiotic 15; bio-social 141 sensorimotor dependence 219 sensory input 67 sensory-kinetic complex 239–240 sensory-kinetic dependency 220 Sgaramella, Vittorio 75 Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. 216 shed-DNA 120–122 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 133–134, 136, 145–147, 149, 165, 204, 233 Sherrington, Charles 149, 203n1 Shi-xu 57–58 Simondon, Gilbert 19–20 skill 14, 23, 33, 41, 62, 64, 67, 74, 140, 145, 198, 233; biosemiotic 15; biosocial 35; motor 146 sign, linguistic 9, 29–30, 92 signification (Saussure) 9 signified 9, 29–30 signifier 9, 29–30 simplexity 210, 217 singularity, pre-individual 37 situation 254 situation-model 253, 256 Smith, Linda 73 Smith, Steve 148–149 sociality, human 91 social phase transition 38 social status, transformation of 37 society (Whitehead) 77, 92; human organism as 75, 124; structuralfunctional models of 92 society of selves 15 somatic marker 24, 201 sound image 29 space, Cartesian 127 speech circuit (Saussure) 3, 29 speech perception, motor theory of 152 speech production, source-filter model of 110 speech sound 89–90 squamous epithelium 106–107 Stål, Per 108 stance 173, 210, 234; academic 66; active voice transitive 248; affective

290

Index

190; axiological 125; emotion 187, 192–193; empathic 167; individualistic vs. prosocial 176; middle voice ergative 248 stance-taking 15, 164 Steffensen, Sune 12, 78, 183–184, 197 Stein, Edith 168 Stern, Daniel 153, 179, 200–201 Sternberg, Esther 167 Stetsenko, Anna 74 stimulus flux 211, 242 Storkel, Holly 97 stratification 3, 31–32, 111, 113; ontological, of biology and society 76–77, 85; of vocal tract gesture 114–115 stream of consciousness/thought 237–242, 244 stress, cultural sources of 43–44, 51–52; physiological response to 46–47; psychological response to 47, 52 structural isomorphism 221 structure, linguistic 182, 206, 236; compositional vs. fractal nature of 182 Stuart, Susan 14, 39, 68, 103, 127, 132–137, 148, 150, 157, 165–166, 168, 175, 179, 197, 201, 204 subject 15; Cartesian 202 subjectivity 125 subject-object, Cartesian separation of 202 submorphemic marker 207–218, 239 substance 5, 28, 31–33, 70, 77, 80–82, 101, 116–117, 121 substantive part, of stream of thought 238, 240, 242 superorganism 75–76, 119, 122 supralaryngeal system 108–111 supralaryngeal vocal tract 108–111, 114 surface 28, 32, 81, 85, 101–102, 116–117, 121 Syed, Matthew 148–149 syllabic re-duplication 94 syllable 216 symbolic field 233 symbolic species 82 symmetrical differentiation 177 synergy, of gesture and utterance 224–226 system, far-from-equilibrium 35, 129; intentional 35, 119; living organism as 129; self-organising 85 systemic resilience 77 Taylor, John 9 Taylor, Shelley 58 technique 66; psychological 146

technology, educational 66 tension, modal 36 Terrestrial 7, 132–133 testosterone 52–53, 171 Thelen, Esther 73 Theologia 5 thermodynamic far-from-equilibrium condition 119 Thibault, Ėtienne 1, 2 Thibault, Paul 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 16, 28, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 57, 68, 74, 81, 85–86, 93, 96, 103, 122, 127, 133, 135–136, 139, 143–145, 147, 150, 161, 163–166, 183–184, 195, 197, 201, 204, 205, 210, 234, 252, 254 thing-deixis 231 Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky) 12 threshold, critical 18–19, 37, 40, 105, 125; intensive 25–28, 37; physiological 45, 50–53, 55 time, lived 167 time consciousness, phenomenological structure of 167 The Times 148–149 timescales 2, 14, 120, 131; culturalhistorical 81; of bodily events/processes 24, 184; space-time partition of 131; vertical coupling of 118 timing, rhythmic 151–152 Tomasello, Michael 142 tone 183–186; see also harmonic development/progression tool 146 Toronchuk, Judith 44, 124 Trager, George 163 trajectory, developmental 123; learning 149; ontogenetic 88; sense-making 161; time-extended 195 transaction, organism and environment 20 transcription 20, 39, 42, 67, 192, 242 transitive part, of stream of thought 238, 240, 242 transmission 33, 89, 102; cultural 74; information 98 Traugott, Elizabeth 221 Treiman, Rebecca 216 Trevarthen, Colwyn 94, 116, 133, 142, 149–154, 159–160, 198 trigger 175, 177; situational 170–171 triggering effect, of environment 87 Trimble, Michael 140, 183, 196–197 Tucker, Don 179 tuning parameter 195 Turnbaugh, P. 75

Index Ullmann, Stephen 221 unit of analysis (Vygotsky) 13 universal 70; substantive 71 unlearning 140–142, 159, 200 Urban, Greg 242 usuality 125 utterance 8, 24–25, 35, 37–38, 67, 113, 194, 238, 254; as catalyst 254; dynamical properties of 183; exploratory activity 36; functional capacities of 235; intrinsic functional organisation of 250; microgenetic origins of 183; as operation on flow 241; as product of social work 79; situation-transcending and situationgrounding properties 255–258 Vaisman, Noa 120–121 Vallée-Tourangeau, Frédéric 205 value 36, 40, 68–69; Confucian 57–58; objective 128 values-realising/seeking activity 36, 40, 62–65, 134, 194 Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana 248 Van Orden, Guy 118 variation-and-selection process 250 vector, of attention 62 Verbrugge, Robert 14 visceral state 171 visceroception 150 vitality affect 179–180, 197, 200 virtual 39 virtual object 6 virtual possibility space 62–63 vocal cords 20, 105–106 vocal fold oscillation 107–108 vocal folds 22, 105–106; quasiperiodic opening and closing of 110; stratification of 107

291

vocal tract 22, 25, 34, 103 vocal tract gestural score 25 vocal tract/phonetic gesture 103, 108–111, 182, 255–257 voice 22, 103–104, 122, 125; production of 105 voiceless alveolar fricative 214–215 Vorperian, Houri 72 vowel 25–26 Vygotsky, Lev 12–13, 65, 146, 165, 206 Waddington, Conrad 74 Wall Street 43, 50–53 Wang, Yu-Tsai 113–114 Werner, Alice 207 Werner, Heinz 136–137, 257 Wettersten, John 252 Whitehead, Alfred North 17, 75, 77, 92, 236 Whorf, Benjamin 234 Wilshire, Carolyn 216 Wilson, E. 113 Winograd, Terry 3, 10–11 word, chunking of 216 word, phonological 213 wording 14, 22, 67, 187, 194–195, 221, 254–255; perception of 131 word meaning (Vygotsky) 13 word onset 216 work 6, 79–80 work cycle 80 writing 259; alphabetic 42 Yunusova, Y. 113 zone of intensity 18, 23, 36, 42 zone of interpenetration 19, 29, 90–91, 99–100, 102, 123, 128