At various points throughout the book, we have consciously and without apologies chosen language—bodies, autonomy, individuation, sense-making, agency, etc.—that serves to break dualisms that have sedimented in academic discourse. Doing this required a certain unabashedness. Making a point requires sticking one’s neck out. It requires literal bodily vulnerability. We only do that with a passion, with something that is worth a risk.
The very attempt at formulating a truly embodied, nonrepresentationalist approach to language is non-neutral, even if it might seem to belong exclusively to the realm of dry academic debates. In fact, non-neutrality characterizes as much the content as the epistemic attitude of the enactive program. We assume a non-neutral position in realizing that what and how we theorize matters for practices in the world. This is not anything special about our approach; it simply grasps a fact that is sometimes forgotten: there is no neutral perspective on how we decide to study the human mind; nothing is just the way it is, untouched by an ideology. This is true in general, but it is all the more relevant for human beings as unfinished linguistic bodies who are in an ongoing process of becoming, as individual persons and as communities. Education is not an option for human beings, but an essential duty, and to educate is to intervene in the world.
It is our responsibility to express as clearly as possible and to critically examine our own ideological framework and be skeptical of those who claim they haven’t got any. In bringing this book to a close, we want to reflect on something we have mentioned at various points, the wider dimensions of thinking about human beings as linguistic bodies. Ethical concerns follow directly from the heart of the enactive approach. We care about life and about the world because we are precarious organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies.1
Immediately, this entails an ethical stance toward our objects of study, which is also a stance toward life, human beings, our own activity as practitioners of research, and the world we inhabit. Our account of linguistic bodies also sheds light on the kind of agency that claims to possess such an ethical stance, namely linguistic agency. We have seen examples of this ethical stance, for instance, in chapter 9, where we discussed the critical consciousness that emerges from the becoming of linguistic selves. Our description of autistic linguistic becoming in chapter 10 goes together with an ethical demand to better understand the sometimes counterintuitive sense-making of autistic people and to support interactive environments that encourage real participation. A concern for enactivists is that theories of life and mind should avoid obfuscating this inherent ethical stance. Obfuscation occurs if we choose the wrong language or do not dare to push existing categories outside their frames when this is called for. Our understanding of linguistic communities, of the continuities between life and language, implies that language is a field of struggle. Entrenched perspectives will never be really challenged if we do not learn to speak differently.
In continuation with this general point about the embedded ethical aspects of enactive theory and the ideological dimension in using language, linguistic bodies help us understand the origins and varieties of ethical concern. At its core, the practice of languaging is ethical in that it entails a self-asserting reflective stance toward linguistic bodies, their communities, and the world. The autonomy of linguistic bodies is open and unfinished in that it is inherently oriented toward acting in relation to others (together with others, addressing others, in conflict with others, etc.) and toward the self as an other. Linguistic practice is a practice of otherness and, as such, involves inherently ethical concerns. To become a linguistic body is to place oneself in a responsible relation of care about others and concern for others. Ethical concern is not something that is added to already constituted linguistic bodies, as sociocultural normativity is supposedly added to a presumed original nature in dualistic thought. On the contrary, ethical concern is the essence of every linguistic act, whether oriented toward other linguistic bodies, toward the self, or toward the world.
The different dimensions of embodiment, as we saw in part I, emerge as different kinds of autonomy and agency. Linguistic bodies are entangled with these dimensions. An invariant in these complex relations is the idea that bodies are always networks of material relational processes that produce precarious forms of self-individuation. By their very nature bodies have a perspective of care on the world. At the same time, bodies are vulnerable. Linguistic bodies are no different in this respect. What, then, are the particular sorts of needing and caring introduced by linguistic bodies?
Linguistic bodies are nourished by communal and interpersonal relations. Identity processes in linguistic bodies are therefore complex and relational. Linguistic bodies are a social phenomenon, a feature of the communities that produce them as well as of the biological and sensorimotor bodies that incarnate them. The tensions that must be navigated by linguistic bodies arise from joint histories of linguistic becoming and from the living stream of languaging in a community. The integrity of linguistic bodies depends on the exercise of certain forms of agency and participation in community practices. It is also a consequence of the activity and attitudes of others. Linguistic bodies are vulnerable in ways that surpass sensorimotor or organic vulnerabilities (even though these vulnerabilities become inextricably entangled). The specific vulnerabilities of linguistic bodies include systematic impairments of linguistic becoming (isolation, neurological conditions), sometimes taking the form of systematic affronts to their integrity and processes of reaffirmation (both as capable linguistic agents and as belonging to a community). Examples include exclusion, impairments to participation, lack of recognition, not being skillful in a foreign language or the language of a subcommunity, neurophysiological impairments, mental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, trauma.
While the vulnerabilities listed indicate that there are indeed “bad” ways of existing as linguistic bodies—that is, ways that expose linguistic bodies to systematic risk and damage—it is perhaps misleading to think that one way of being a viable linguistic body is necessarily better than another. The ethical question must span the community, the interpersonal, and the individual. We can then ask: What should happen in linguistic communities such that the potentialities of linguistic bodies are encouraged and systematic risks reduced?
In chapter 10, we mentioned some of the conditions that can make people with autism wither or thrive. These conditions intimately connect wider societal norms and expectations about what counts as good or healthy with specific interpersonal histories and patterns of interactions within a family, psychological and neurophysiological particularities of autistic bodies, and the variability of autistic becoming. We encountered examples of better ways to configure these relations—for instance, in attitudes that encourage participation, humor, and interpersonal connection. Changes at the community level that come from critical stances, such as the formation of self-advocacy communities and the dissemination into the wider public of diverse knowledge about autism, are also part of a community process of becoming better at understanding autism.
Our point is that the ethical concerns raised by linguistic vulnerabilities must be addressed by taking their whole complexity into account. It follows from our theory that to do anything less would itself be unethical. It is equally dangerous to reduce personal grievances to abstract community patterns, or concrete community problems to the sum of individual attitudes.
As we discussed in chapter 8, through self-regulation and self-talk, through the displaced stance on their own bodies, linguistic bodies bring forth an ethical dimension. There are no ethical agents before linguistic bodies. But the possibility of self-control, and of adopting critical stances toward oneself, others, and one’s community, do not make linguistic agency ethical simply as a result of being able to assign responsibilities for actions and events. On the contrary, we have seen how difficult it can be to navigate the tensions of linguistic sense-making without any residual ambiguities due to the open-endedness of linguistic acts as well as the material autonomy of interactive patterns. Linguistic agency is ethical agency precisely because of the ambiguities that coemerge with linguistic powers of critical reflection and self-control. Linguistic practice involves making choices. The production of person-level subjectivity demands the ongoing navigation of the tensions between incorporation and incarnation, a problem that has no general solution, which is precisely what makes it an ethical problem. If we had a method for systematically managing this tension, ethics would be superfluous at this level.
Take for instance the act of reporting an utterance. As discussed, the original intention behind an utterance is always open to criticism. We hear in it the voice of the agent as well as the voices of incarnated agencies. For linguistic bodies in particular, the dependence is on the agencies of others, making the question of choice and attribution always open to revision. Did this person mean what he said? Did he say what he meant?
This does not remove responsibility for linguistic acts. Ambiguity makes the question of responsibility an ethical one, a question of what attitudes we should take to what we and others say. The ethical dimensions are operative as much before as after the utterance event. If full control were possible in determining the contents of an utterance and the way it should be interpreted, we would be reintroducing a dualism into our account that devalues the bodily constraints of all of our acts and the autonomy of interactions. Such perfect control can never exist in the material world. But we need not resign ourselves to the opposite idea: that we have no control over what we say, or how we interpret what others say. It is after all a concrete linguistic body that incorporates and controls the flow of utterances that make up our autonomy, even when these incorporated utterances contain the traces (opinions, attitudes, intentions) of other agents.
In ambiguity and imperfection, linguistic bodies adopt an ethical stance toward their own acts and those of others. The ethical stance is a practical one, a type of ethical know-how. We should think of it as a form of expertise, like riding a bicycle, with the double implication that we can be more or less ethically skillful and that our ethical attitudes are often prereflective.2 We may learn something about the norms in our community in the form of abstract rules (e.g., popular refrains), but the deeper learning only happens through practice, including, as a matter of necessity, breakdowns. We should not be afraid of ethical breakdowns. On occasions, however, precisely because of the thematizing and critical power of utterances, the ethical stance becomes explicitly enacted: the avowed ownership of an act, a declaration of love, an act of solidarity, a gesture of rebellion, a recognition of one’s mistakes, a commitment to a cause or a leader, the use of a political slogan, the identification with certain groups, the rejection of others, the faithfulness to the outcomes of a life-changing event (Badiou 2001), the construction of an identity, an act of teaching, an act of caring, and so on. Explicit ethical acts ride, so to speak, on the constitutive power of prereflective ethical know-how tacitly animating all the acts performed as linguistics bodies, but they also make use of the critical powers of linguistic bodies to question frames and norms, or to question one’s own attitudes and motivations. Ethical stances, combining prereflective ethical know-how and explicit ethical acts, vary according to history and situatedness. They may vary according to personal idiosyncrasies, but they will never be just unipersonal. There is always a languaging (sub)community behind them.
There cannot be ethical agency that at some level is not also potentially critical. We saw that critical power emerges from the reframing of genres and norms that may occur in dialogues. Linguistic bodies may actively and critically question the origins and desirability of their acts and the norms and community patterns they experience, or they may not. Most likely they may oscillate between these possibilities, not always consistently. These are all ethical stances, be they tacit or explicit. But without the possibility and enactments of criticism, there could be no ethical agency, only sedimented patterns, blindly followed.
The ethical dimension of acting in language is always present, sometimes as a horizon, sometimes as the focus of our linguistic experience. We feel that a choice of words in an email response may be too curt, we feel a tension in a conversation and may even be aware that uttering certain words could be catastrophic, we feel the double binds of trying to be honest, pragmatic, and caring for others. Languaging is never free from risk and sometimes it can feel like walking a tightrope. And these experiences become entangled with organic and sensorimotor bodies; linguistic risks are felt as bodily tensions, they trigger emotional episodes and stress, and if systematically experienced they may lead to serious disorders.
The converse of this picture, which is also a specifically linguistic vulnerability, is that to live as a linguistic body is to accept that language has a hold on us, that we are partially open to its movements. Our behavior, our ideas, our intentions are in part the result of being exposed to the linguistic acts of others. These acts can go straight into our bodies, in all their dimensions, and in part orient and direct, even momentarily take possession of our affect and our agency. This is particularly the case where existing asymmetries are at play. The voices of others find an echo chamber in the flow of self-directed utterances and may not be easily silenced. Since utterances are constitutive of the linguistic self and of relations to others, in these embodied resonances, words sometimes cause harm and other times remedy injuries.
A frequent arena in which linguistic vulnerabilities are met and undergone is the scene of social interactions. Recall that interactive autonomy “feeds” on the unclaimed, preindividual excesses of the moves that all social acts at the same time are. Relations between interactive autonomy and participant agencies are varying and asymmetric. This comes with the significant consequence that full control in an interaction is impossible. As we said, complete control over others is not an interaction but a domination, and all coregulating essentially entails some degree of letting be, an active passivity in the face of others’ regulating moves. Building on this, we claimed that the acts that constitute linguistic bodies are themselves previously received acts of others both near and far, known and unknown. The primordial tension of participatory sense-making is a tension between individual and interactive orders of constitutive normativity, but for linguistic bodies, tensions between past and present, and self and community, amplify and distort this basic ongoing challenge. Such complexity manifests in a variety of ways in interpersonal exchanges, and sustains an excitable field—in some cases one is tempted to say a minefield—of potential harms.
Consider the phenomenon of microaggression. The term was introduced in the 1970s by Chester M. Pierce (1974, 515), who wrote that “the major vehicle for racism in this country [the US] is offenses done to blacks by whites in this sort of gratuitous never-ending way. These offenses are microaggressions. Almost all black-white racial interactions are characterized by white put-downs, done in automatic, pre-conscious, or unconscious fashion.” The term has since broadened beyond black-white relations, while the features of “automatic” and potentially “unconscious” communicative behaviors, which sediment and concatenate throughout a community at different levels, and that have immediate and “stunning” effects on marginalized persons, express the core of the concept (e.g., Sue 2010; Delgado and Stefancic 1992; Sue et al. 2007; McCabe 2009).
Paradigmatic examples of microaggressions under discussion in academia and activism today include: “You are so articulate!” (said to a black student); “What are you?” (said to an ambiguously nonwhite person); the use of the word illegals to refer to people in the US seen as Latino/a; assumptions about a person’s success or lack thereof in an academic subject or job due to their race or gender; nonverbal behaviors such as white people locking car doors in a predominantly of-color or low-income neighborhood, avoiding close spaces such as elevators if people of color (especially black men) are on them, or ignoring or delaying service to people of color or sexual minorities.3
The broad public conversation about microaggressions in the US today takes the form of a polarized debate. On the one hand, sociologists, psychologists, and some pundits take the strong outcry against microaggressions as an indication of the rise of a “victimhood culture” in the US, in particular in higher-education and public institutional settings (Campbell and Manning 2014; Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). On the other hand, many see explicit identification and rejection of microaggressions as a key move toward social justice (Runyowa 2015).
In considering the opposing stances, one might find applicable Judith Butler’s intervention in the hate speech debates of the early 1990s. Butler (1997) rejects both the racist and opportunistic legal-political interpretations of hate speech as free speech and the self-victimizing claim that hate speech really does annihilate or wound a person’s subjectivity. In Butler’s view, following J. L. Austin’s philosophy of performativity in ordinary language, one who speaks hate speech is not a “sovereign subject” because she is not (no one can be) fully in control of her speech, either in the enunciatory action or in the achieved or actual effects of the action. At the same time, by Butler’s logic of linguistic being, the addressee is called into being as a subject no matter what he is called in the hateful utterance directed at him. A subject can respond, unpredictably, and so is not fully determined by the hate speech act; the addressee is in principle as empowered as he is disabled by the hate speech act. This is in part because the hate speaker draws on conventions that exceed her own origin or control, while the addressee responds from (Butler presumes) a more authentic place. It is also because the hate speaker is always betrayed by her body, whereas the addressee’s body, as a target exposed in hate speech, is highlighted in such a way that also at once resists the intended force of the hate speech. The hate speaker expects to humiliate and reduce the subjectivity of the addressee, but only reveals her own limits in so doing. The addressee, rather than being (only) humiliated and reduced, is revealed as a signifying body-on-the-scene just as much as the speaker; this “surprise” turn of events may even give him the upper hand. In short, the addressee, qua addressee, is empowered as a linguistic subject, in part because both bodies (speaker and receiver) are vulnerable and excessive as bodies.
Butler’s treatment of hate speech, based on her notion of linguistic being, potentially resonates with what our theory of linguistic bodies might suggest. She rejects both institutional and individual responsibility as a final answer, instead featuring local, actual, feeling bodies in unpredictable and unstable relations with one another. However, Butler (1997, 11) effectively divorces what is bodily from what is linguistic, putting them at odds: “The body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said. That the speech act is a bodily act means that the act is redoubled in the moment of speech: there is what is said, and then there is a kind of saying that the bodily ‘instrument’ of the utterance performs.” In her view, the speaking body speaks twice: it speaks the words of the (disembodied, conscious, greater) subject, and it speaks for itself as body, unknowingly and unwittingly. Butler here manages a paradoxical reduction of the “speaking body” to the status of an “extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse” (McNally 2001, 2).
Yet it is precisely the entanglement of bodies that at once makes possible linguistic bodies, linguistic harm, and the agency of critical response and change. If as a linguistic body I was fully detached from my “other” bodies, the full depth of my embodiment would not matter to my discursive positioning and discursive vulnerability, and microaggressions would not “work” on me. If I spoke only “outward” from a body of which I had no interior or felt sense, again, microaggressions would fail to harm me by casting me exhaustively as a member of a denigrated group.
As we depict in figure 8.2, which shows the constitution of linguistic bodies, these take a displaced but not detached perspective on themselves as bodies. Microaggressions are utterances directed at bodies that are in fact entanglements of organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies, thus showing up in a particular way in a social world—gendered, raced, weighted, abled, accented, literate or not, having appropriated certain discourses more or less well, and so on. Microaggressions threaten to dismantle linguistic bodies, functioning through a sort of reductive strategy: a person is described through some bodily feature (e.g., sexual aspects, hair texture, apparent disabilities). Paradoxically, the aggressor (perhaps unwittingly) plays on a monistic reduction of the person to an aspect of the body and the victim feels that her distancing to her own body is obliterated. Both seem to know that a person does not reduce to her physical appearance, but both the sustaining logic (you are just your body) and the offended reaction (I am not my body) are wrong. Perhaps a culture of microaggressions of this kind is a culture that promotes and is promoted by a dualistic ontology of the body, one that opposes a monolithic physical body to a disembodied self. Meanwhile, experiences belie this neat separation: one feels physically uncomfortable occupying a certain social space or dialogic role, if one anticipates or is shown that one’s very presence invites judgment, exclusion, or misrecognition. People interpellate and render each other more or less powerful, credible, worthy, in dialogic situations, on the basis of this complex relationship between embodiment and agency. Both embodiment and agency are linguistic; they are stylized, contradictory, other-incorporating and other-incarnating processes—and this is what microaggressions exploit.
Pushing past a dualistic understanding of the body, our view suggests a different source and meaning of the bodily “excess” in which Butler sources the power of critical response to aggressive social action. We have already explained this excess as the not-yet-individuated material remainder of individual moves, which is exactly what provides the matter and energy that interaction dynamics shape in their emergence. A shift in tone or posture, a look away, a “way” of saying or not saying something, a moment of fluster or backpedaling, are indeed excesses of a communicative act that feed or starve the flows between interactional and individual autonomies. But the material excesses in play also flow downstream, from interaction dynamics and from broader community-level norms and repertoires to acts. Such influences may take the form of constraints, clichés, “tone-deaf” overreaches or undersensitivities. It is important to note the signature of a microaggression in the ambiguity of intention and the asymmetry of sensitivities: speakers need not feel or anticipate the racist, sexist, heteronormative connotations of their messages, but the receivers do. The excesses are local but also historical, and are distributed unevenly and differently.
How might one respond, then, to the stunning effects of a microaggression? A common practice on certain college campuses takes the form of “calling out”: publicly shaming someone for saying or doing something that violates a norm of political correctness (or common decency, or cultural sensitivity). The callout is sometimes done to educate but is evidently frequently to shame or dominate, and at the same time to accrue sympathy for the caller-out. Such a response seemingly proliferates conflict and struggle for recognition of victim status, itself a kind of power.
Enactive theory cannot endorse a plea for neutral discourse (especially not when the plea is disingenuous). Sense-making is never neutral. Callout culture is itself aggressive; it in turn treats a speaker as a community, with the presumed power and intent of a community or an entire normative horizon, rather than as a linguistic body, imperfect, incomplete, and hazarding meaning in unpredictable acts and excessive moves. A callout can in some cases be a microaggression—a way of shaming somebody for a lowbrow cultural background or lack of sophistication and being “in the know” about political correctness—and so the cycle continues. Microaggressions are real and damaging behaviors; they are material carriers of domination and privilege, regardless of the varying degrees of privilege that the bodies enacting them enjoy. The idea should not be to place blame on the individual speaker, the aggrieved respondent, or the community norms, but rather to ask how together they are coresponsible for interactional cultures that foster certain linguistic habits. It is of less value to blame people for the sensitivities they have or lack than to invite awareness and curiosity about these sensitivities and how they shape (literally, materially contribute to) flows of an interaction.4
In regard to microaggressions, it is difficult yet important to consider the varying and agent-intention-transcending influence of interactional autonomy on concrete instances of languaging. It can be too easy to miss this dimension when microaggressions are identified as such through a particular process of utterance reporting. The utterance in focus, frequently, is lifted out of a concrete interactional flow, frozen in time, elevated to the level of a community act, and made an object of political as well as personal critique. Sometimes the reporting is addressed to the original speaker, affording the possibility of a critical dialogue about the offending act; the typical form of microaggression identification however is a public statement made after the fact about an aggressive act.5 This single and unidirectional interpretive focus makes it hard to attend to the emergent third-party autonomy that participatory sense-making names as a crucial constitutive component in social interactive meaning-making. Just what attending to this interactive dimension would change or do for this conversation remains an open question.
Linguistic bodies struggle for meaning, recognition, and self-determination not only within institutional settings but also with institutions and other instruments of power and authority. Put differently, we are addressed not only by other linguistic bodies, but also by utterances that issue seemingly from nowhere and no one, utterances without an enunciator. Consider billboards, buzzwords, and many forms of signage. It seems a stretch to claim that participatory sense-making takes place in these situations, but linguistic bodies do make sense of posted parking ordinances, political messages on bumper stickers, advertisements, abruptly ubiquitous phrases (e.g., “fake news”), the memes of the day. What is going on here?
One could return to the idea of a summoned and enacted narrative consciousness, as discussed in chapter 11. Yet I encounter a sign directing me this way for baggage or forbidding certain items in my hand luggage in a very different context than I encounter the words in the new novel I buy to read on the flight. In the latter instance, I buy the book, I decide to read at this time and place, I open it to a page, I direct my eyes along the printed lines. I have less agency in the face of airport signage, no doubt linked to the reduction in agency that happens to everyone entering highly regulated spaces (where for example warrantless searches have been deemed reasonable in airport complexes in some countries, as posted signs inform approaching travelers).
Another crucial difference occurs at the level of linguistic form: certain formal elements, importantly temporal markers like tense, aspect, pacing, are needed for a narratorial voice to be triggered and enacted (Popova 2015, 67–69). Who is it, then, if not a narrator, who speaks to us through institutional utterances? A clue comes when we note that we are working with simply much less text in most cases, and text that is on the whole simpler. This is language that, if there is enough to form a whole clause, takes a certain grammatical shape and mood: the imperative, but not only this—an impersonal, powerful, unequivocal imperative. Herbert Marcuse (1964, 86–89) names a “syntax of abridgement” as the mark of “the language of total administration.” This is “the word that orders and organizes, that induces people to do, to buy, and to accept. It is transmitted in a style which is a veritable linguistic creation; a syntax in which the structure of the sentence is abridged and condensed in such a way that no tension, no ‘space’ is left between the parts of the sentence. This linguistic form militates against a development of meaning” (p. 86). For Marcuse, as for us, “cognition and cognitive evaluation” require “mediation,” “stages,” “process,” in short, a dialectical exchange (p. 85). When we encounter words as if from nowhere, not only is dialogue precluded, but frequently the grammar itself shuts out the possibility of any rich unfolding of meaning (like the sort we find with narrative engagements). Then it is likely right to assume we are encountering voices of power and authority.
Confrontations with discourse untethered to a genuine potential participant often turn into situations of maximal linguistic asymmetry. For example, in the case of slogans or widely circulated phrases (“death panels,” “tax relief,” “CCTV in operation”) there is no interlocutor with whom one can reset the discourse terms, or check intelligibility. In many cases one has little choice but to submit to the “false familiarity” born of repetition, especially in the private spheres of receiving news at home or in the car (Marcuse 1964, 91–92). There is a voice empowered by ubiquitousness, repetition, permanence, font type, sheer volume, and so on, which is designed not to be missed and is attuned to the linguistic sensitivities of a community. While this voice is materially presented as absent, to be filled in, and unapproachable, unlike that of real or virtual interlocutors, it is very hard to consciously avoid it unless one chooses not to engage in standard activities.
In the absence of counterdiscourses and critical dialogues, the experience of these confrontations—particularly if we experience them as individuals and not as groups capable of effective responses—is that of facing a voice tacitly accepted by others, and consequently a voice of common sense, of consent, the voice of the community itself. Common sense, usually the result of a community talking to itself, sedimenting practices, facing conflicts, struggling for meanings, etc., is also forged by powerful actors who can maximize linguistic asymmetry through their access to resources and control over massive channels of communication. Their utterances are disguised as not theirs, not anyone’s, but everyone’s. In mass media, such manipulations can often be spotted by blanket references to collectives (“People think that …,” “The prevailing opinion is …,” “The University will not accept …”) and by the tacit setting of the “discussion” agenda in the selection of what deserves to be talked about. Paradoxically, asymmetries are enhanced rather than leveled by staging dialogues between a few actors, whether genuine or not, that take the place of actual community debates. By simulating participation by proxy, the spectacle of these dialogues augments the power of the tacit ideology: Why debate this particular issue and ignore that one? For example, why treat climate change as up for debate when the global majority of scientists and experts in the field see it as a settled reality? The audience of these dialogic utterances remains asymmetrically passive.
Linguistic bodies are interpreting creatures primed to make sense out of the linguistic material that surrounds us and seeks us out on all sides. This activity entails a passivity as its necessary flipside. One hears the “Hey, you there!” of the police officer and turns around before thinking better of it. There is something similar about the way we inevitably work with utterances that lack enunciators but nonetheless can be experienced like hailings. If literate, or to the degree one is literate, one generally does not decide to read a sign in a public space. The sign is there to be read, and linguistic bodies read it. If hearing, commands over loudspeakers are as unavoidable as advertisements in your free music streaming service or along the highway when driving. One feels addressed, affected as a body because one’s first sensitivity is “as if” there were a real interlocutor there. For linguistic bodies, the readiness to interact that intersubjective bodies enjoy spills over and applies to language itself.
Given that incorporating and incarnating received utterances are the constitutive moves of linguistic bodies, it seems safe to say linguistic bodies are used to working with formulations that precede them, as we discussed for example in regard to symbols in chapter 11, or the introduction of reported utterances in chapter 8. Complexities, difficulties, and ethical dilemmas arise when this aspect of the nature of linguistic bodies is used against them, as in ideological manipulation and the promotion of docility.
But notice that this can happen on either side of the political spectrum. Consider Noam Chomsky as one example of a liberal positivist: he tells people how it really is. He arrives on the scene as an expert, with his voice and his alone meant to speak truth to power. What he should be telling people to do is talk to each other; simply listening to a strong voice (logical, strident, deeply informed) can also have the effect of silencing people’s conversations and communal discovery. Such a voice can maximize linguistic asymmetry too. Isolation sustains the power of the absent enunciator, because an individual trying to make sense of administrative language will take it as common sense and assume others do the same, rather than hazarding a radical interpretation by oneself that goes against the grain. Indeed, to question may not even appear as an option in the absence of dialogue—this matter-of-fact closedness or “overwhelming concreteness” is what Marcuse (1964, 94) fears most in linguistic abridgment. Breaking the isolation here requires local interaction; revolutionaries should encourage people to turn to each other rather than to turn to them.
While we have only scratched the surface of the phenomena of ideology and institutional discourses (leaving out, for example, issues of anonymity, outrage, and dissemination in the echo chambers of the Internet), we suggest that resistance can be cultivated as a habit of critical thinking by attuning to subtler feelings of discomfort when facing enunciatorless enunciations. We posit that linguistic bodies are likely to feel shades of annoyance or uncertainty in the face of strong linguistic asymmetry. Indicative reactive experiences may take the form of wondering whether a given prohibition or exhortation applies to one; annoyance at being told what to do; a sense of being invaded, say by aggressive billboards or an urgent tone in social media telling us what we should care about; anxiety or exasperation regarding how and when one will be expected to act in accordance with ambiguous orders; or disinclination to engage or act at all in the face of one-sided lecturing (even if one agrees with the gist of the message). We can gain insight from “listening to” the entangled dimensions of our bodies in these and all interactions. Of course, training in docility can transform or mask these telltale feelings to various degrees. Critical pedagogy provides a way to combat or avoid such docility.
If bodies bring forth a world through their enactments, then in facing another body I am confronted with a radical difference, I am confronted with someone else’s world, irreducible to mine. Such is, in enactive parlance, the metaphysical departure point of radical alterity for an ethics of the Other as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas (1979). But is alterity so radical in our account? Is it not the case that linguistic bodies are co-constituted in participation, and that inevitably and constantly they assimilate and accommodate alterity? Knud Løgstrup (1997) similarly elaborates an ethics on the basis of the experience of living with others. He recognizes that we play important roles in how others bring forth their worlds, that we participate in them, and therefore share mutual responsibilities and obligations. We encounter others under normal circumstances with a “natural trust” like the trust our bodies typically have in the world. We tend to trust others with an attitude of surrendering and letting be, without which—as we have shown—true social acts would not be possible. The ethical demand, which precedes moral judgments, is a demand silently placed by this trust, a demand to participate well, to know how to coexist, how to speak, when to create distance, how to act together.
Overthematizing the other, however, risks absolutizing alterity, whereas both at the intercorporeal level and in the constitution of linguistic bodies, self and others interpenetrate. They, moreover, are not given as such, but rely for their existence on processes of becoming that constantly define and redefine their mutual and multiple distinctions. Self and other (or rather “selfing” and “othering”) are material processes and not metaphysical boundaries that precede these activities. If we are to avoid walking those alleys that lead to dualism and mysticism, we must keep close the notion of ethical know-how as a practice while acknowledging the multiple fundamental ambiguities of linguistic bodies. Alain Badiou argues that the logic of identity, of the Same, by which traditional thought frames the idea of self, is an attempt to unify a multiple with innumerable differences, as varied between me and my neighbor, between myself at different moments, circumstances, and ages, as between a hunter-gatherer and a journalist. Contingently on our situation and our culture, we make more or less of these differences, radicalizing some and ignoring others, but that does not make them fundamental. For Badiou, crucially, the sameness, the universality we share, is not what we are, as this is in constant flux, but the fact that we are constantly coming to be. Our becoming is for him a truth-process, a bringing forth of our bodies and our world: “The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural—or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world” (Badiou 2001, 28).
Truth-processes are, for the most part, collective; we bring forth the world. These processes sustain truths that have been inscribed in the community’s history. Through the powers of critical interpellation and through sheer material openness, they also imprint novel truths in the world in the form of events that, to a greater or lesser extent, reconstitute the shared coordinates of meaning. An individual body participates in truth-processes, but he makes ethical choices in affirming or rejecting his own collaborations with the world. Witnessing a tragedy or admiring a work of art, feeling exhilaration about a scientific discovery, being concerned at what the daily news brings, answering the call to militancy as his political duty, or committing to his loved ones—such events produce resonances for him to avow or ignore. In choosing one or the other lies the heart of the ethical act.
The ethics of participation is not an ethics of correct communication, not even an ethics of recognition per se; it is an ethics of cultivating skills to partake critically in historically situated passages from practice to ideality and back. In lending our powers of becoming to transpersonal truth-processes, we must reconcile our own autonomous perseverance (the “yes” that life says to itself in the words of Hans Jonas) and the flourishing of events to which we choose to remain faithful.
It is in the ethical sphere, and not only in the epistemic realm, that the enactive view differs from approaches to intersubjectivity in terms of a primordial we-ness (“shared intentionality,” “joint this-and-that”). While agreeing with the opposition to methodological individualism, enactive theory deemphasizes the assumption that participation is all about shared or collective mental states. Participation is not about including the other in my intentions or my emotions, or already being attuned to others since birth. In participation we may move into and out of such particular states and this makes them secondary to concrete processes of interaction. The ethical angle of the we-ness, “wired-to-connect,” prosocial approach indeed highlights the limitations of internalism and individualism, the agent as a self-sufficient entity that secondarily enters into a world of human relations (who behaves rationally to minimize prediction errors, maximize survival, sustain power, or increase profit). The we-ness approach opposes, like we do, the naturalistic fallacies of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
If we are critical of the we-ness way of thinking, it is not to return to individualism. As we have seen, truth-processes are collective; selfing and othering are enactments. What we oppose is answering one naturalistic fallacy with another, one that would see us as primordially social, cooperative, and empathic. Skills for shared intentionality, empathic resonance, and so on are neither givens nor outcomes of our model. They are possibilities, alongside other widespread but less savory interpersonal and intergroup attitudes, such as self-centered, exploitative, dehumanizing, and destructive stances toward others.
The ethical-ideological debate must move away from this fatigued terrain. Human “nature,” if we can say anything about it, is the struggle for resolving tensions in community being and collectively and individually abiding in potentiality, and often failing to do one or the other. This struggle is realized in myriad different ways. Being with others is indeed a given and participation a constitutive part of existing in a linguistic community, but this does not immediately set us on the path of universal collaboration toward the good. If it did, there would be no ethical agency to worry about, only pathologies: we would just have to cure those who have strayed from becoming “true” human selves. On the contrary, because outcomes are not guaranteed, because ideologies can endure that create massive inequalities, systematic injustices, and pervasive suffering for generations (and do so by morally recuperating self-centered interest as “natural”), changes to this state of affairs must come from struggles over how to best become ethical-critical linguistic bodies in communities of human practice and relating—struggles over ideas, over language, over meanings and power; in short, struggles for truth-processes—not through new appeals to nature, no matter how much we may otherwise agree with those who make them.
The mode of existence of linguistic bodies and communities entails a permanent opening to potentiality; in Simondonian terms, this is the neotenization of processes of individuation that hold the determinations of animal being in abeyance. Much of what animals resolve by instinct becomes for us an open issue with multiple alternatives. Our choices do not negate “nature”; they are real choices precisely because we position ourselves at a stage “before” other determinants make them for us. We exist as linguistic bodies by (partially, precariously) refraining from fully becoming animals. This means being more unfinished than animals, actively avoiding the paths of determination they must walk, and becoming more critically aware of our own incompletion. We work at staying more open to choices. We create pockets of potentiality and then, by making choices, as persons and as communities, we trace particular paths in a mode of existence that is inherently historical: “The only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is ‘in’ that nature to construct its own history” (Rose et al. 1984, 14). As a conception of our relations to nature, this is quite different from the idea that our humanity rests on overcoming an inherited animality. It is equally distant from the notion that reconciling ourselves to our animal “nature” is the path toward harmony. Animality is what we tend toward, and if successful, the horizon we manage to keep at a distance; it is not a primordial, problematic substance we inherit or a state of bliss we should embrace. Moral appeals to “nature,” whatever their orientation, rest on an upside-down ontology.6
We choose to extract an ethical maxim from this mode of existence in potentiality: it is that the powers of dialogic criticism, counterframing, interpellation, creativity, etc., that sustain this precarious human openness must be widely taught, developed, and exercised. These are the powers of novelty, resistance, and dissidence that bring forth new truth-processes and open up linguistic communities to diverse sources of potentiality and alternative modes of existence. These powers become fully effective as we commit to truth-processes. The promotion of these powers is an ethical defense of potentiality, of choice and autonomy, that may take countless different shapes depending on historical and material circumstances. In fact, the same ethical principle may find itself realized in contradictory moral stances advocated by groups that struggle for different forms of life. This is to be expected; if not, the ethical maxim would become a blanket mandate, a categorical imperative. A question is ethical precisely because concrete solutions are, for now, multiple or undefined.
The same ethical-critical defense of potentiality drives the work of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire and his followers. As we have seen, for Freire human beings are unfinished creatures who may collectively become conscious of their unfinishedness—that is, of their potential and the limitations imposed on its realization. Oppression is sustained by material power as well as by ideological justifications that asymmetrically mold a community’s common sense and suppress the teaching and exercise of critical linguistic powers via narratives that distract people’s attention, impose identities, instill extraneous concerns, push false dichotomies into their languaging, train them in apathy and docility, and make them blind to their own condition as oppressed/colonized or oppressing/colonizing.7
How to best enact the ethical maxim? No general answer can be given to this question. However, our work suggests that we often move forward in situations of participation and that, conversely, the endurance of true participation is a sign of moving forward. This may not apply to all situations, but it applies to many. We have already suggested that finding ways toward better participation is useful in guiding parenting of autistic and nonautistic children. To participate is in general a preferable option in comparison with remaining at the breakdown stage of an interaction (between people, communities, political actors, etc.). Participation does not entail lack of conflict. Breakdowns, as we have said, are unavoidable. Even rebellions are participatory. Breakdowns and all, participation has the highest transformative potential.
Ethical participation requires contributing our bodies’ powers to the realization of larger truth-processes. Conversations go on while participants come and go. Participating in such events (keeping them alive) is often desirable even if our participation doesn’t seem to bring matters to a close, even if we are confused and have difficulties reconciling our embodied agency with other truth-processes. The opposite attitude of apathy or aversion (why bother participating if nothing is going to change or if I may put myself at risk?) feeds on the misleading notion that since change cannot come from just talking, then talking is useless. Our model reminds us that critical participation is much more than engaging in mere talk; it is a transformative sociomaterial practice empowered by education, debate, and reflection, and will often take the shape of conflict and confrontation. The ethical-critical aim for better dialogues is first and foremost an end in itself. Note that it is precisely this end that microaggressions, aggressive callouts, and the abbreviated style of ideological discourse would avoid. These addresses manipulate our always already participating bodies into traps where further participation is stunted or unlikely. On the other hand, critical participation helps bring forth new meanings. Educated to labor toward change, critical participants spread ways of languaging and thinking within a community; they build up tensions and nurture the energies that await and animate forthcoming transformative events.
Insofar as participation is a mode of existence and worldmaking, it takes us full circle back into our task as situated researchers with responsibilities. Critical participation describes the enactive relation between knowing subject and object of knowledge, which, if we are coherent, can no longer be one of determination, domination, or interrogation, but one of engagement, an entre-deux. In considering the juridical case for constitutions recently granting legal rights to Nature (such as those of Bolivia and Ecuador), Eugenio R. Zaffaroni (2012, 100) remarks on the etymological differences between objectum and Gegenstand, both descriptions of attitudes toward an object. The latter “stands in front of, vis-à-vis” the subject, the former more actively “throws itself against” the subject. If the process of knowledge starts from a separation between knower and Gegenstand, from the subject placing himself on a higher plane than the object of inquiry, he ignores the object in its milieu, deconcretizes it, and narrows it down to his own interrogative perspective, his own interests. Still, a concrete objectum responds as a whole entity, disregarding the particular focus of the interrogating subject, who becomes subjected to it. This wholeness is either ignored and the subject merely confirms his preexisting epistemological frame by cherry-picking whatever fits it, or the subject experiences a subjection by the object (as when we get a shock from probing an electric socket). If the epistemological process remains one of superior interrogation, the response to the experience of subjection will be further attempts at dominating the object, fighting it, domesticating it, making it safe, reframing its being—sometimes lethally—within the epistemology of the interrogating community. But this always leaves a remainder of unknown/unknowable objectivity. A deeper knowledge is gained, in contrast, through participatory engagement, the same way we learn new forms of coregulation from interactive breakdowns. A participatory, dialogic epistemology learns from subjection events that there is a need to rethink how we choose to relate to objects. We let ourselves be guided by them at the same time that we try to engage them.
Reaching the end of this journey, we share one of the most important things we have learned: we need not accept the tacit dictum that ethical issues cloud the researcher’s judgment and objectivity, or that at best they form part of a different conversation. We have worked together in this book by embracing the power conversations have to move from one topic to the next and, in so doing, to show us their connections. It would be artificial to refuse the demand a research question places on us to clarify or take an ethical stance, simply because we are “supposed to” talk about that in a different context.
Too often one encounters this separation between knowledge and ethics in the black-and-white epistemology of scientism (knowledge is value-free, what we do with knowledge is not). When such barriers frame research language (scientific on one side, ethical-political on the other), we should question them critically and, as we have tried to do in this book, subvert linguistic and disciplinary conventions. Proponents of emancipatory epistemologies (Enrique Dussel 2016, Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2014, and others) target exactly this institutionally sanctioned separation between science, ethics, and politics, between the “Main Research Proposal” and the “Ethical Issues Appendix.” This separation confines research conversations to the echo chamber of unending commentary; academic knowledge is thus kept apart from other human practices. This segregation is unfortunate since those engaged in nonacademic pursuits may be more skilled in the ethics of participation, that is, in the art of engaging the world as a coparticipant. We have often seen in this book that the experience and knowledge of practitioners, parents, workers, children, and social movements provide the richest examples for counteracting the functionalist hegemony in the sciences of the mind.