At the heart of the transactional approach lies the recognition of the primacy of (a) what we might refer to as an open-ended world-as-event, life-as-event, or Being-as- event and (b) the individual life as an event of a moral being. The approach is char- acterized by the presupposition of “the unity of life-in-process-of-becoming”
(Bakhtin 1993, 13), which necessitates theoretical categories and images that are events rather than self-identical things (entities). The hypothesis of the double trans- actional relation – in space, between person and (social, material) environment; and in time, between consecutive phases of unfinalized and unknown events – can be visualized in terms of corresponding lines of becoming. Things and persons no lon- ger are theorized as stable entities but (a) in longitudinal, temporal terms of unfin- ished lifelines that (b) stand in corresponding relations with other lifelines (i.e.
people, things). This result of pragmatic philosophy has an antecedent in the recog- nition that “duration, identity with itself, Being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events appar- ently durable in comparison with other complexes” (Nietzsche 1922b, 55). Such a perspective on the transactional nature of life, with its spatial and temporal qualities expressed in the evental notions of corresponding and responding (see Chap. 3) is captured in an analogy (which, as any analogy, is partial): individual human beings are like strands in the larger thread of societal activities, which, as an ensemble, form the total fabric of a society. This analogy preserves, most importantly, the two forms of extensions typical of events: temporal continuity within a family of events and spatial relations between families of events within the ensemble of all events that make the life process of society, humanity, or nature in their respective entirety.
Consider the analogy of a piece of cloth making a pillow with tassels (Fig. 2.5).
In the analogical situation, strands are made of short fibers twined together, their particular forms shaping and giving shape to one another and to the strand as a whole (Fig. 2.5c). The fibers may be thought to stand for very small (nano- or micro-) events, breathing, eating, digesting (including many microbial life forms in the gut constitutive of who and what the person is), thinking, perceiving, attending, moving, and so on. These fibers come together, intertwine, and form strands. In intertwining with each other, each fiber is becoming like and taking a shape corre- sponding to the ensemble of other fibers in the strand. This coming together and intertwining corresponds to a shared history in the making. One or more fibers may separate again from the strand, or terminate, without nevertheless doing harm to the strand. This thus is an analogy for the many different life processes that together make a living organism, such as a human being. Even though the cells in a human body are all exchanged within a matter of weeks, we have the sense of continuity across much of our lifespan. Fibers (micro- or nanoevents) are shaped in their
encounter with other fibers such that these others are immanent in their form beyond the actual encounter. Being entwined with another fiber leaves traces (markings) in the historical forms that both can take in the course of their evolution. The result is that the shape of individual fibers can be thought only through abstraction from their constitutive relations with others.
From the intertwining of fibers also come ensemble effects, some of which may be of a new logical kind. This phenomenon is quite apparent in the analogy of vision (e.g. Bateson 1979). Rather than leading to some form of addition (subtraction, multiplication, etc.) of two individual (monocular) images each coming from a dif- ferent eye, the conjunction of two eyes leads to a new form: binocular vision, that is, vision in depth. The conjunction of the two eyes, this transactional relation, therefore gives rise to a new organ (i.e. binocular vision); and this organ has the functional characteristic of seeing in depth. Strands come together to intertwine to give rise to threads (Fig. 2.5b), each of which we may think of as a human being.
We can use this analogy to think of all the biological processes in the human body as events. When they come together, they do not merely add up but give rise to new organs and new forms of events. Among these are the various perceptual events – seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and hearing – and, most importantly, those that we refer to as thinking, remembering, or imagining. In this analogy, there- fore, there no longer is a body–mind split. Instead, every higher order event is the result of the ensemble relation between constituent biological events; but it consti- tutes a new logical type. This new type of event therefore is characteristic of the ensemble, the strand, which, in this analogy, was taken to stand for an individual
Fig. 2.5 In this analogy, fibers, strands, threads, and textures represent different levels of happen- ing (events), with a factual determination in the past and an indeterminate relation to the future. (a) Highly collective forms, such as cloth and tassels are the ensemble results of many threads coming together and relating in specific ways. (b) Threads come together to give rise to collective forms, but themselves consist of a number of tightly intertwined strands. (c) Strands are made from fibers that take part in constituting, and are shaped by, the collective form. (© Wolff-Michael Roth, used with permission)
human being. We can also say that this ensemble relation is an emergent property that cannot be predicted based on the properties of its antecedents.
In this analogy, strands come together to yield new collective forms, some of which are based on a few individual threads (Fig. 2.5b), whereas others involve large numbers (Fig. 2.5c). “Coming together” is used synonymous with concres- cence, a key term for Whitehead (1929/1978) for describing emergence and novelty that are integral aspects of events. Togetherness means there is a nexus, even tempo- rary, of events or nexus, which, in their togetherness, become immanent in each other. These ensembles (nexūs) may be used as analogies for conversations, lessons, village (city) life, life of a society, or the life of the global community. At each level, new ensemble phenomena are created; at each level, new ensemble effects emerge from the relations between the different forms of events that come together. For example, phenomena that tend to be attributed to individuals – dependency, aggressiveness, courage, fatalism, or passive-aggressive behavior – really are char- acteristic of relationships between people. All these phenomena, the words used to refer to them, “have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something- or- other inside a person” (Bateson 1979, 133). Talking about any of these phenomena requires us to talk about at least two people in relation. The rela- tion has new qualities (properties) that differ from the qualities of individual parts;
we can also say that any relation is a phenomenon sui generis. New phenomena become visible when people come together in groups, such as academic committees or lessons in schools. In our analogy, the tassels of the pillow (Fig. 2.5) may consti- tute the corresponding level of aggregation. The popular diction of committees or school classes as having their own dynamics points to the observation that from the intertwining of life strands arise new ensemble events, including negotiating, dis- cussing, arbitrating, and decision-making. Group conduct and group dynamics can- not be understood in terms of some combination of individual conduct – as can be witnessed in committee decision-making, where the actual outcomes may be (very) different from all the positions that the individual members have had prior to meeting.
As the ensembles get larger, new ensemble effects become apparent. Thus, soci- etal order and society are the results of the life processes of individuals and groups, who themselves are subject and subjected to the collective life process (society and its order) that they contribute to creating. Communicating – making recurrent sounds or gestures – is a form of event that arises from ensembles of individuals.
Indeed, language and consciousness are ensemble effects: “Consciousness therefore is a societal product from the beginning and remains as such as long as humans exist at all” (Marx and Engels 1978, 31). In other words, consciousness is not the result of the different forms of consciousness of individuals, who get together and con- struct a collective consciousness. Instead, consciousness is a collective product, characteristic of the collective. Whereas bartering is more typical of small groups and locally restricted exchanges, the practice of monetary exchange based on the abstract notion of value is typical of societies. In the analogy, such societal effects are represented by such patterns as the cloth (Fig. 2.5a). The particular object used in the analogy is limiting, as it seems to suggest a highly homogeneous pattern at the
largest level. But there are many weaving techniques that not only produce complex two- and three-dimensional patterns but also introduce different types of materials.
This extended form of weaving therefore much better represents an analogy with the complex life forms at the level of society or “global village.”
In the analogy, each strand or thread may be understood as standing for an unfolding life accompanied and relating to other unfolding lives – of society, peo- ple, animals, plants, and inorganic materials. The individual is understood as a his- torically unfolding, continuously emerging event as a whole – thus a line – rather than the end product thereof (Nietzsche 1922a). The individual notion of lifeline is consistent with the idea that childhood and adulthood are but phases of a continuity, where the later only exists after the earlier has occurred so that it can make use of specific and accumulated experiences of the earlier phase: “The real existence is the history in its entirety” (Dewey 1929, 275). It thus is better to say there is development of the child into an adult rather than to say the child develops into an adult (Bergson 1908). The former expression makes the event the subject of inquiry, whereas the latter expression is grounded in the idea of the self-identical person- thing. Even though the individual human life is limited, the life of society is extended, unfolding over the course of decades, centenniums, or millennia.
Once we consider phenomena – individuals, groups, or societies – in terms of evental lifelines, a problem becomes apparent: when two phases of a lifeline are separated into different qualities (childhood, adulthood), the former tends to be taken as a cause for the latter. Childhood experiences are used in causal explanation for adult experiences and conduct. But in the transactional approach, they are inter- connected phases of the larger life-as-event. Earlier phases then cannot be the causal antecedents of the latter (Dewey 1938). The analogy for the transactional approach thus challenges common practices of approaching the subject (person), for example, in terms of identity, personal qualities (character traits, affective traits, aptitude, or power), and knowledge or conceptual frameworks. All these notions are premised on the classical idea of self-identical things (people, objects) that stay the same even though they are continually changing. The transactional approach instead rests on the acknowledgment of a primacy of life-as-event, the theoretical categories for which have to capture events in terms of events, and, thus, reflect transition. Most importantly, the relations existing within specific material conditions and associated social formations of life-as-event “are not explained by the anthropological consti- tution of the subjects carrying them” (Mamardašvili 1986, 102). That is, references to the subjects’ understanding, intentions, and motivations or the specific material, economic, or social processes cannot be used to build the organic whole of social life-as-event. Individual psychological processes and consciousness are inappropri- ate starting points for the analysis of organic wholes. Nevertheless, all of these are manifestations of the whole, that is, qualities attributed to this or that entity (person, thing) that is itself the result of an a posteriori abstraction.