The medium of intersubjectivity

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute to anthropological understandings of intersubjectivity by foregrounding the role of the environment. I begin by reviewing three key approaches that have emerged out of broader debates in the humanities and social sciences. The first mobilizes intersubjectivity as a way of explaining how a coherent social order is (re-)produced, given that the rational choice, for individuals, is to act in their own self-interest. Intersubjectivity in this view is the shared understanding that is achieved when actors adhere to normative constraints on interaction in order to fulfill an unconscious desire to be loved and accepted by others. The second approach to intersubjectivity challenges this idea, arguing that the motivations and expectations that individuals bring to interaction vary across ethnographic contexts, and for some, shared understanding is a false promise that masks the harmful intentions others are likely to have. Intersubjectivity, in this view, is organized by a desire to minimize exposure to others. The third approach treats intersubjectivity not as a possible outcome of interaction but as an existential condition that makes meaningful interaction possible. In this article, I put these debates in dialogue with “protactile theory,” which has grown out of a social movement in DeafBlind communities in the United States. Reading protactile theory through the lens of biosemiotics, ecological psychology, and existential phenomenology, I argue that the medium or “the thing we're in when we’re together” is the basis of intelligibility for all intersubjective behaviors and capacities; it can define a way of being, is ethnographically graspable, and is central to how humans interact.