3 History, Sociability and Intersubjectivity
3.3 Intersubjectivity as “the Centres of Our History”
The problem now is situated squarely on the concept of intersubjectivity. As mentioned above, Reich (2010) presents a very well balanced approach to understanding the intellectual undercurrents that have contributed to developing its somewhat confused comprehension by scholars at least up to the point at which the article was published. Reich identifies three dominant canons within the intersubjectivity discourse which are listed as three distinct questions. These questions motivated the angles taken by the numerous scholars who dealt with this concept.
The dominant canons are;
(a) on the matter of Other Minds,
(b) on intersubjectivity as mutual knowledge of an object, And lastly,
(c) the problem of double-contingency.
On the matter of Other Minds, the discussions as Reich summaries them revolve around the problem of opacity, which was promptly recognized at the very onset of this chapter. Without the ability to directly read into the thoughts of another person, people’s ability to still be able to arrive at understanding or to limit the occurrences of misunderstanding presents an obvious paradox. On Intersubjectivity as mutual knowledge or co-awareness of an object, the opacity problem seems to be temporarily overcome but at the expense of arriving at another problem of co-perception. The most obvious and intuitive solution seems to be communication or the intentional endeavour of various persons to strive to be understood in a certain fashion. And with it, the temporarily overcome opacity is made all the more intense. This then requires that very complex typologies be developed in order to categorize the various cognitive and social
91
levels of communication, such as lying as opposed to telling the truth, are concerned. The person now comes to cognitively carry the tensions of the two worlds of outward portrayals versus inward motivations.141 This is markedly dissimilar to performance which is essentially the continuous surface state of acting within limitations as a learned way of living as opposed to an all-the-time cognitively engaged activity of how to carry-out a certain kind of action. This is warranted because history – that collectively shared canon or stock of things – already prescribes definitional limitations regarding the use of its various resources. Intentionality on the part of consciousness is its endemic pursuit of realizing outcomes which, as already demonstrated, only occasionally becomes aware of its own processes of thinking once the on- going monitoring aspect of consciousness stumbles upon a discord between the world outside the mind and the content of the mind.
The problem of double-contingency, which was brought about by Parsons following his attempts to resolve the opacity and co-awareness problems, arises when Parsons argues that intersubjectivity is achieved with due regard to the conventions of broader society. Thus, in every situation involving any number of persons or actors, prior knowledge of what is expected comes to feature and helps decide what is expected of them in that particular context. However, with this announcement, a nihilism ensues in which social actors find themselves unable to act because they have no certain means of knowing what the others would expect them to do within those very vague social conventions. Expectations brew more expectations as actors continuously send and receive indications of what the others intend to do given that context and the broader societal conventions. In short, the existence of norms is insufficient as it pertains to action primarily because norms do not pre-empt who should proceed to act once the context or the Stage emerges. Norms only regularize actions after this incapacitating oddity of intersubjectivity has already been overcome. Reich (2010) summarily makes the contribution that intersubjectivity can perhaps be understood in the terms of human sociobiological evolution in which the human state of consciousness has learned to read the bodily dispositions of others and to make inferences from them as non-intentional giveaways of internal bodily states, while adhering concurrently to the more intentional signals transmitted via linguistic communication.
141 Interestingly Husserl who is considered the founder of Phenomenology with his renowned slogan “Back to the things” effectively announces a foreclosure into looking at things as they collectively appear through the veil of culture preferring to inquire how they appear to people as individuals. With that posture, the intersubjectivity logically conflates with communication, and the lines between minds are entrenched ever more deeply. See Wolff (1978: 501). This intellectual mood might have lent its hands to the Parsionian problem of double-contingency.
92
He leaves the rest of the nuances to empirical research specifically aimed at looking at what the complexities of interaction are.
This dissertation proposes a few tweaks to the generally outlined problems of intersubjectivity rendered above. Firstly, the assumption that intersubjectivity is arrived at is seen to be misleading particularly to the extent that social action is assumed to be docile or directed at no one until there is an instance in which an interaction becomes inevitable. Preferably, this study argues that intersubjectivity is always on-going. This is attested to by the fact that people even in states largely devoid of direct interactional engagement with others portray actions which are recognisably persons-consistent (Coleman, 1994, pp. 34-47). This is as if to say that the state of ordinary normality already entails non-direct but nonetheless intentional engagement. The fact that the behaviour of people varies considerably when they are in isolation as opposed to when they are in the company of others goes to further this notion that ordinarily people are already intersubjectivity engaged once they make the entry into the public domain. Consequently, the instance in which face-to-face interactions present themselves ought not to be seen as the coming to the fore of a stage. Rather, they could be seen as part of a continuous procession of an already occurring stage, or the merging of different individual actors onto the same stage, so to speak, brought about by the continuously rolling intersubjective canvas in the background of that instance. Intersubjectivity is thus not achieved; it is the continuously undergirding platform whereupon the various performances are staged. Intersubjectivity is thus neither static nor fixed, it is always under the intrusions of actors who look to it to not reproduce it but stake a claim for a different set of actions out of the collectively known roster of its contents. With this angle, the Other Minds problem of opacity grappled with by Schutz and Husserl, the double-contingency problem of Parsons, and intersubjectivity as the mutual knowledge of an object seen in the arguments of some existentialist philosophers, become more manageable.142
One implication of this argument can be summarized by this question: what then is the social essence of human action? A second and subsequent implication could also be summarized in the question: how then do we think of the idea of communication which is everywhere present at the point of interaction? With regards to the former, human action entails a brutal intent upon an object and thus, human action in its essence is pure intentionality towards that thing or object that the individual seeks to affect. Performances are therefore aesthetics and elaborate contingences that accompany that action for the purpose of the co-present minds. As such, there is the thing – the social ontology – that is the object to which action is brutally geared towards,
142 See Reich (2010) “Three Problems of Intersubjectivity – And One Solution”.
93
and then there is the co-present mind whose unknown intentions must yield to the performance that legitimates the equally unknown intentions of the perpetrator towards that social ontology or thing. In the latter question, communication which is facilitated largely by the resource of language collapses into the realm of performances precisely because it is unnecessary as regards the question of acting upon or towards social ontologies. Communication and its linguistic processes are thus exclusively for the other co-present mind: social actors do not communicate with the social ontologies they encounter, they only communicate with other social actors.
Communication is thus the process of speaking about and around the social ontology in play.
Within this conceptualization, communication particularly as a linguistic exercise, involves turning a certain number of its signs or symbols into representatives of the social ontology-(ies) in question, and then using the vast remainder of its other signs and symbols to haggle around and about an aspect of that social ontology. In this process, the performance of language manages to both institute the object under contest as well as to argue about what that object can become, what that object is, and what that object is not.
It is in this regard that this study made its decisive break with the communicative rationality of Habermas, and other similar agency theories presented above in which individuals are shown to be engaged in the transmission of arguments back and forth between and amongst themselves, and thereby unwittingly conflating communication as intersubjectivity itself or in the best case as a process of achieving an intersubjectivity reminiscent of a consensus. Here, social ontologies are the building blocks of intersubjectivity, and therefore transform the concept of intersubjectivity from one that is worked towards into one that is continuously present.
Communication inclusive of language, on the other hand, becomes the entirety of the performance that masks the brute intentionality of action. Furthermore, communication thus functions as the persistent reminder that we all know what we are talking about precisely because language resides seemingly symmetrically in all of us – as such, people assume that we all must know the same things. As the argument for the historical canon presented in the previous section goes, social ontologies can accurately be seen as centres of shared public history in which the society as a whole recognizes itself based on the manner in which it normally presides over various situations.