as- relations come into existence? Unless we have some viable description of the birth of signs, we have no way of deciding whether a theory of signs is sound on phylogenetic (evolutionary) or ontogenetic (developmental) grounds. Otherwise we get stuck, as constructivist approaches are stuck because they presuppose the very capacities – e.g. interpreting, making/constructing meaning – that require explana- tion. That is, we have to overcome the existing ideologies of the nature of the sign.2 With respect to the attempt of explaining the emergence of language – one form of sign use – there are three main classes of theories, two of which presuppose the existence of symbolic forms that are discrete and unrelated to bodily processes, that is, unrelated to events. In the third class of models, communicative forms and their meanings are treated as “embodied,” where the “meanings are modeled as the sensed states of the world” (Hutchins and Johnson 2009, 531). That is, even here where there is an emphasis on the body, the focus is on the emergence of things that are somehow embodied – with all the dangers that such discourses come with – rather than on the functional relation of events.
kinds of processes that might be involved in this historically elusive transition”
(Hutchins and Johnson 2009, 534).
One particular case of communication is associated with the movement that leads the mother to pick up the infant. It is not as if the mother simply picked up the infant. Instead there is an occasion as part of which both individuals move so that the event, in transactional terms, consists of phases each of which presupposes the other. The pick-up event is produced in joint work that cannot be reduced to the addition of the individual participants’ contributions (acts). Here is how the move- ments have been described:
Mothers and experienced infants come together for the carry activity in a very fluid way.
The transition from other activities to the carry is an almost ballistic event. Mothers often sweep up infants and move off while looking at their destination. A mother can pick up an infant without looking directly at the infant because the infant simultaneously moves its body and hands in ways that fit and take advantage of the mother’s motions. Mother and infant just come at one another, interdigitating (grab, climb on, lift, etc.) mainly by feel.
Bonobo mothers experience most carries as tactile and proprioceptive events rather than as visual events. Mothers and infants coming together for a carry is an oft-repeated trajectory, a shared practice with distinctive roles that tends to unfold in regular patterns.
The ways of entering a carry range from direct “enactments,” such as the infant climb- ing on as the mother lifts the infant, to something much more interesting that we will call
“gestures.” These gestures take the form of frozen fragments of previously enacted trajec- tories that have been part of the carry activity. For example, a common part of the infant’s role in establishing a ventral carry is to lean back and reach out and up. Infants assume this pose and hold it as a solicitation to the mother to pick up the infant and carry it. The frozen gestures are produced in a complex activity field that includes other attention-getting actions such as the infant touching mother’s knee to get her to attend or orient in a particular direction. (Hutchins and Johnson 2009, 535)
There are other aspects in signaling behavior that might be seen developing, for example, in captive animals. In one of the videos that I found on YouTube, the three members of a family can be seen stretching out a hand well before some fruit is thrown toward that specific individual. In the same video, the female “invites” the male to sexual intercourse by placing the arm around his shoulders (Fig. 5.2a), to the point of “nudging” him when the required movement into the position does not
Fig. 5.2 To reduce social tension, a female bonobo initiates a sexual encounter. (a) The arm around the shoulder of the male, gaze toward face of male. (b) The female raises the right hand into the male’s field of vision in face-to-face position. (c) The beginning of the joint movement leading to intercourse from behind, though the same pair also engages in intercourse in face-to-face posi- tion. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKMQxwW5Dyg)
immediately begin by raising the hand in his field of vision (Fig. 5.2b), before the joint movement begins that terminates in the act (Fig. 5.2c). These situations are of a kind of “animal behavior … [that] displays or exhibits transaction such that cer- tain constituents in them act, operate or work, as preparatory of transactions to take place later” (Dewey 2008, 472). In other instances that end with copulation, the female approaches the male, begins to turn around, and both animals than move into position and begin mating. In such situations, therefore, the occasion is of the same ballistic kind as the pickup and carry, as the intercourse appears to arise seamlessly from other forms of activity, here feeding.
The aspect of these accounts is the appearance of what are called “gestures” and
“frozen fragments of previously enacted trajectories.” A gesture, such as a body configuration or a human pointing finger, is not a form, not a thing. Instead, what- ever is denoted by the terms gesture or frozen fragment are themselves abstractions from events that are parts of the plenum, which also includes percipient events and the immediate environment-as-event surrounding the animals or human beings. As a phase of an event, the gesture in the form of a frozen trajectory fragment provides for the conditions of another mini-event, the pick-up. Each constitutes a phase of the larger event. Cogredient in this larger event are all those bodily events that produce the pathic forms of experience (affect, emotion), which change in the course of the event – e.g. a frightened infant is consoled in and by the contact with the mother.
The pick-up (as event) occurs against other (mini) events, which might include the conduct of an adult male in some “agitated” manner. In the case of mating, which is also observed in bonobo groups in the wild, researchers have described its function as the release of stress potentially arising in accessing possibly limited food supplies.
An important aspect in the conceptualization of such sequences is the unit to be chosen for analysis. Thus, in common psychological approaches, the signaling would be conceived of as separate from the accomplished act, in both the pick-up- to-carry and the copulation situations. Whereas these events are antecedent to what happens later, they are not independent of it. But if these antecedent events are not independent of those that follow, then causal reason is inapplicable. Thus, if we were to see the signaling as a cause for what happens thereafter, our scientific inquiry would actually produce a fallacy. The reasons for this have been explicated in the case of the death of a person involving a shot from a handgun of another per- son (Dewey 1938). The mere pulling of a trigger does not bring about death. Even if one were to follow the trajectory of the bullet into the heart of the person who died, we would still not arrive at a proper cause. This is so because when the bullet enters the heart (or other vital body part), this micro-event is not an antecedent of death but it is integral to the constitution of death. The philosopher concludes: “the doctrine that causation consists of a relation between an antecedent and a consequent event is thus the result of a confused mixture of ideas of two different order” (449). In our situation, the event where the bonobo infant is moving into and holding a particular body configuration is itself part of a larger event that has the picking- up and carrying as its later phases. Similarly, in all of the different situations ending in copulation, different antecedent events may lead up to the recurrent final phase.
We learn from this analysis that what matters are forms of conduct that lead to certain evental forms (pickup and carry, copulation). In the case of the bonobo, we observe the presence of conduct that increases the range of situations that conclude with a phase denoted to be the “enactment” of a “ballistic event,” but later involves other forms of conduct in the preparation. When we focus on speaking rather than on words and other signs, we may then transition to a transactional approach that analyzes not only speaking-as-event but also “world-as-event” and “Being-as- event” (Bakhtin 1993). This approach to speaking is extensively explicated in Chap. 3, and thus does not have to be repeated here. The move toward events as the basis for analyzing situations is characteristic of pragmatic approaches to language, as seen in the example of a most primitive language-game between a builder A and an assistant B consisting of the four sound-words “‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ and
‘beam’. A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such- and-such a call” (Wittgenstein 1953/1997, 3). Here, making particular sounds leads into the next phase of building, which includes carrying and bringing stones of shapes associated with sounds. One can easily imagine that some time in the evolu- tion of the genus Homo, the making of certain sounds led to the handing of certain materials – a rock for cracking nuts, as some hordes of chimpanzees do, or a twig for pulling termites from their nests, as other hordes have been reported doing. What matters is acting in ways that are providing for conditions that make certain conse- quent events more likely than others. This allows us to abandon the notion of “mean- ing” of the sounds altogether, because the only question is the ways in which they lead up to other phases of the activity, or, in other words, what matters is how some sound- word is used and how the recipient acts after the sound has been made. In all of this conduct, the “sign” is but a recurrent feature of conduct, that is, of evental forms across occasions. We also learn from this about the inherently social nature of communication that imposes itself as soon as we take the event as the minimum unit and then ask how different events are related. Events of communication lead to coordination in subsequent phases of what will have been one single event.