Forms Of Intersubjectivity Research Articles

The Status of the Social Fact

The Status of the Social Fact

Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie

As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption. What distinguishes the selfie from other photographic genres is its ability to enact intersubjectivity – the possibility for difference of perspectives to be created and this difference to be shared between the image creator and the viewer. Based on a social semiotic analysis of selfies on Instagram, we identify four subtypes of selfie, each deploying a combination of visual resources to represent a distinct form of intersubjectivity. Our analysis suggests that the potential for empowerment is inherent in the visual structure of the selfie, and that, as a genre, it is open for recontextualisation across contexts and social media platforms.

‘Behemoth Pulls the Peasant’s Plough’: Convergence and Resistance to Business Civilization in China

It has been widely held that China’s development was forged from a unique pathway to that of Western countries. As a result, it has been assumed that China’s historical experience of modernization contains important lessons for other developing states. However, as we show, modernization in China can be seen as sharing many of the same assumptions of development as the West. Using insights from Cox’s work on civilizations—particularly the notion of ‘Business Civilization’ (adapted from Susan Strange)—our paper examines how modernization theoretic assumptions underpin both Chinese and World Bank perspectives on agricultural development not only within China but also across their engagements, policies, and practices of development throughout Africa. We argue that development constitutes a political project historically inseparable from La mission civilisatrice of Business Civilization, extending a form of intersubjectivity and materiality, power and rationality, based on a specific civilizational worldview. This process retains a number of contradictions and points of conflict and we focus on the resistances of traditional forms of civilization in contestations around the imposition of commercialized agriculture.

Something special: Care, pre-school television and the dis/abled child

Abstract Through a close reading of the series Something Special (2003–), this article explores the implicit and explicit rhetorics of ‘care’ within the remit and content of the UK pre-school children’s channel CBeebies. With its address to an audience that includes disabled children and children with special educational needs, CBeebies is celebrated as an inclusive site of play and learning for its diverse audience of 0–6 year-olds. In Something Special (2003–), for example, Mr Tumble’s playful encounters with the world around him are supported through the use of Makaton, a sign language designed to help both children in the early stages of language development and those with communication disorders. With the channel’s emphasis on learning, development and ‘care’, this article questions the ways in which the disabled child both challenges and reinforces understandings of childhood and development. By exploring the manifestations of touch, texture, performance, play and repetition within this programme, it considers this inclusive mode of address for what it reveals about forms of intersubjectivity and non-verbal modes of communication.

Pedagogy, Education and Praxis: understanding new forms of intersubjectivity through action research and practice theory

The Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) network is a cross-institutional, collaborative research programme which brings together researchers from Australia, Columbia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Caribbean, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These researchers are investigating the nature, traditions and conditions of pedagogy, education and praxis and how they are understood, developed and sustained in different national contexts and various educational settings. The PEP international network emerged in 2005 out of a series of discussions about the ways in which the bureaucratization and de-professionalization of education were eroding the moral, social and political commitments that informed pedagogical practice until the recent past, and a shared conviction of the need for a form of educational research committed to reviving and restoring these commitments. This article outlines the PEP’s research programme, ‘Action Research and Site Based Education Development’, through the lens of the theory of practice architectures. This theory offers insights into the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions that shape practices, throwing light on contemporary educational issues and suggesting ways forward for site based education development.

Intersubjectivity of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time: How Authenticity is a Return to Community

This essay discusses an alternative interpretation of the term “Dasein” as Heidegger uses it in Being and Time and, in particular, the possibility that Dasein is meant to contain an inherent form of intersubjectivity to which we must “return” in order to achieve authenticity. In doing so, I build on the work of John Haugeland and his interpretation of Dasein as a mass term, while exploring the implications such an interpretation has on Heidegger’s conception of “authenticity”. Ultimately, this paper aims to take seriously Heidegger’s claim to be moving past the isolated Cartesian subject and towards a view of authentic human existence that is cognizant of the way our identities are always formed within a pre-existing community. In addition, since many interpretations of Heidegger have argued that “the Anyone” (Das Man) is representative of all possible forms of community, I consider how this alternative understanding of Dasein as intersubjective can shed new light on critical remarks Heidegger makes about “the Anyone”. Thus, I argue that by reinterpreting Dasein as community, we can find more coherence between Heidegger’s otherwise conflicting conceptions of authenticity and “the Anyone”.

Verification of discrimination and reliability of faux pas test

The theory of mind enables understanding of ourselves and other people around us as beings who have a mental world, a world of desires, needs, thoughts, intentions and beliefs. Theory of mind is a form of intersubjectivity based on symbolic thoughts and speech. With regard to the fact that the development of theory of mind does not end at the age of six, a special test has been developed which should asses that ability at a later age. One such test is recognizing faux pas stories. Faux pas is a more advanced theory of mind task, and it measures the ability of having an insight into more complex mental states present in unintentional insults. The goal of this paper is to check reliability and discrimination of the faux pas test. The research showed that questions are discriminative, but also that some cultural adjustment should be done.

Developmental trajectory of intersubjectivity in the second and third year of life: Study of fixed-population and random-individual effects

Colwyn Trevarthen claimed that babies have an intrinsic motivation to communicate and engage with others that he called intersubjectivity. Around the ninth month of life, this motivation changes and passes from person-to-person dyadic (primary intersubjectivity) to triangulate a person–person–object relationship (secondary intersubjectivity). Despite the scientific consensus on this developmental leap, few empirical studies explore the trajectory of this more complex form of intersubjectivity between the second and third year of life. One hundred and fifteen free play sessions from 27 mother–child dyads (13 girls and 14 boys) between 9 and 37 months were filmed and were categorized based on the Level of Intersubjective Attunement Scale. The data were analysed using a linear mixed-effects model. Results show both a population trajectory of the levels of intersubjective attunement and random individual differences. We discuss these results in relation to the binomial typical developmental route and interindividual variability.

Avoiding Circularities on the Empathic Path to Transcendental Intersubjectivity

The foundational status that Edmund Husserl envisages for phenomenology in relation to the sciences would seem to suggest that the successful unfolding of contemporary debates in the field of social cognition will be conditioned by progress in resolving certain central controversies in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, notably in long-standing questions pertaining to the priority of subjectivity in relation to intersubjectivity, and the priority of empathy in relation to other forms of intersubjectivity. That such controversies are long-standing is in no small part attributable to the fact that the debate surrounding Husserl’s seminal attempts to elucidate these problems has placed his account, and certainly his published position, under a certain amount of pressure, pressure which stems from the suspicion that intentionality toward others may be more deeply embedded in subjectivity than the Husserl of Cartesian Meditations seems prepared to admit. Is the primordinally reduced solipsistic subject of the Fifth Meditation really capable of discovering intersubjectivity in the way that Husserl describes, or is such putative discovery (indeed, subjective transformation) already conditioned by a more primitive form of intersubjectivity? This paper investigates two ways in which this kind of “circularity” objection might arise. Firstly, it might be argued that Husserl presupposes an external perspective on one’s own body, a perspective which rationally would have to be correlated with an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Secondly, the view has been advanced (Zahavi in Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: a response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 2001b) that horizonal perceptual awareness of another spatio-temporal entity turns out to be essentially intersubjective, on the grounds that awareness of some of an object’s averted aspects commits one to positing the possibility in principle of those averted aspects being available to an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Objections such as these seem to place the phenomenological enquiry into the encounter with another person at something of a crossroads. On the one hand, they have led some to argue that basic empathy, as Husserl conceives it, must indeed be conditioned by the anonymous constituting influence of a more primitive form of intersubjectivity. On the other hand, the option remains open to seek to defend Husserl’s published position against the charges of circularity. This paper pursues the latter alternative, and argues that, with appropriate clarification, the objections from circularity can be convincingly answered. It will be argued that the key to understanding why the standard Husserlian position can be sustained lies in recognising the centrality of the activity of the imagination as a condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity.

How our Bodies Become Us: Embodiment, Semiosis and Intersubjectivity

Abstract In recent years, the body and the related notion of embodiment have become pervasive objects of inquiry in numerous disciplines, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, and so on. This article aims to investigate more closely the characteristics of the notion of ‘body’ presupposed by these different theories, which often naturalize the body by taking it as a non-gendered, pre-discursive phenomenon, and thus hiding the concrete reality of the many different bodies we all as persons possess, with all their specific social, cultural, and discursive determinations. The body is not an isolated entity, but the result of a complex set of interactions with the environment and with others, where intersubjectivity plays a crucial role. Much research over the last few years has focused on the ways in which the body has inscribed in itself a predisposition to intersubjectivity: this article discusses another, complementary, question: the way in which intersubjectivity itself shapes bodies. Here the body is seen as the result of a process that takes place in a sociocultural environment and in intimate interaction with others, rather than the starting point for a process that, beginning from the single organism, expands and opens up towards a wider relational world. In this approach, intersubjectivity becomes a semiotic dimension of the social co-construction and sharing of meaning. All forms of intersubjectivity imply, and at the same time produce, a work of continual interpretation and reinterpretation which lies at the very basis of the peircean concept of semiosis. Finally, to exemplify how intersubjectivity, semiosis, and embodiment intimately intertwine with one another, one particular field of investigation is considered: the very the first stages of human development, where it is shown how the body becomes a semiotic entity: something much more than - and very different from - a purely natural organism.

Random Reflections of a Founding Witness

Random Reflections of a Founding Witness

The Intersubjective and Cooperative Origins of Consciousness: An Evolutionary-Developmental Approach

We discuss consciousness from evolutionary and developmental perspectives. The expansion of communicative abilities was a necessary step for the emergence of a new type of cooperation based on equality that probably appeared for the first time among nomadic hunter gatherers during the upper Paleolithic era. In turn, this new level of cooperation gave raise to an expanded form of consciousness. From a developmental perspective an expansion of intersubjective abilities and consciousness go together. Three basic levels of intersubjectivity are present in humans. A primary form of intersubjective communication is accompanied by a primary form of consciousness that is not easily accessible for conscious scrutiny. During the second year of human life secondary forms of intersubjectivity expand consciousness from the immediacy of one-to-one interactions, to include a shared understanding of intentions and goals with caregivers. Secondary forms of intersubjectivity give raise to the type of consciousness characterized by preverbal symbols and images--a primordial form of conceptual knowledge. A further step in intersubjective communication uses the meanings and concepts that have emerged earlier in development and transforms them into words. The leap into language allows our species to conceive past, present, and future simultaneously. The cultural transmission of knowledge and social mores depends on these abilities. This further expands the scope of consciousness and creates conditions for self reflection, a type of consciousness that is uniquely human.

The Young Infant's Triangular Communication in the Family: Access to Threesome Intersubjectivity? Conceptual Considerations and Case Illustrations

During these last decades, the notion of primary intersubjectivity has gained acceptance among developmentalists and clinicians. But a new challenge is put out to our models by recent findings on the triangular competence of the very young infant, or her capacity to simultaneously communicate with two partners at a time. This discovery raises the question of a collective form of intersubjectivity. Findings on the triangular competence of the 3- to 4-month-old interactions with father and mother in different contexts of the Lausanne trilogue play situation are reviewed and illustrated, with a view to examine whether it is based on a dyadic or triangular program and whether conditions for a threesome form of primary intersubjectivity are fulfilled. The discussion focuses on the revisions of the theory of intersubjectivity, of developmental theory, and of clinical practice these findings call for, pointing toward a three -person psychology too.

Foreword to Fivaz-Depeursinge, Lavanchy-Scaiola, and Favez Paper

This introduction to the paper by Fivaz-Depeursinge, Lavanchy-Scaiola, and Favez points toward its key implications: The paper proposes a fundamental reorientation in our thinking about intersubjectivity, by suggesting that it develops in a three-person as well as a two-person field. Moreover, it identifies the origins of these forms of intersubjectivity in capacities that emerge along with the three-person field, rather than as a precondition for them. In addition, these observations substantiate Oedipal theory, especially those readings of it as originating in the interactive family context.

Faith and the Intersubjectivity of Care in Botswana

In encouraging men and women to rethink the moral bases of sexual relations, HIV/AIDS-prevention campaigns commonly entail efforts to reshape their subjectivities. This article relates conceptions of morally correct forms of subjectivity to religious understandings of proper speech to and about God. Historically, experiences with sexually transmitted diseases in Botswana have compelled family members to imagine and reshape the nature of their caregiving sentiments toward one another. Thus, for members of a church of the spirit in Gaborone, expressing faith in God so as to heal the sick and console the bereaved is a means of authorizing certain forms of intersubjectivity, rather than of asserting self-determining agency. AIDS-control policies ought to be designed to enhance people's capacities to care for one another properly, and to avoid reinforcing distinctions between healthy and sickly lives.

The Role of Intersubjectivity in Animal and Human Cooperation

I argue that analyses of various kinds of cooperation will benefit from an account of the cognitive and communicative functions required for the cooperation. In particular, I focus on the role of intersubjectivity (theory of mind), which has not been sufficiently considered in game theory. Intersubjectivity will here be divided into representing the emotions, desires, attention, intentions, and beliefs of others. I then analyze some kinds of cooperation—reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, cooperation on future goals, and conventions—with respect to their cognitive and communicative prerequisites. It is argued that uniquely human forms of cooperation depend on advanced forms of intersubjectivity.

Adolescence et subjectivation. Une déconstruction de l'intersubjectivité ?

The work of subjectivity characterises adolescence. This process of subjectivation, the new capacity of the person to learn about his/her personal functioning, finds its roots in the intersubjectivity of childhood. However, the latter itself is found in the primary link in which, the “Me not me” differentiation remains imprecise. If the mother and child have to rid themselves of this “trans-subjectivity” through little games of failings and surprise, the adolescent has to free himself from the secondary intersubjectivity in order to reach the feeling of subjectivity. The nature of this “work of subjectivation” has profoundly changed. Previously, the adolescent had to create a minimal space between this sentiment of “me” and his sentimental attachments (Oedipal bonds and affiliation bonds). The adolescent, today, is incited by the surrounding social individualism that promotes a deconstruction of all forms of intersubjectivity to assert himself in solipsist subjectivity, true fantasy of the modern subject. The symptomatic manifestations, notably the multiple actions taken by the adolescent are analysed as a trace of this new requirement.

Understanding Innovative Professional Development for Educators Through the Analysis of Intersubjectivity in Online Collaborative Dialogues

Effectiveness of professional development is affected by the quality of social interaction. This study examines how online collaborative dialogues might influence teachers’ decisions in their classrooms—sometimes hurting when not appropriated well. This theoretical article extends principal sociocultural approaches to a cognitive concept called intersubjectivity through illustrations of empirical data. Part of a larger innovative professional development involving four classroom locations across Missouri, synchronous chatroom dialogues comprising teachers and researchers, and pre- and post-unit interviews underwent qualitative discourse and focused microanalyses. We argue that teachers purposefully used their dynamic intersubjective spaces and strategies in the management of meaning-making negotiations within an online interactive environment. The findings reveal two novel variable forms of intersubjectivity: (a) temporary suspension, and (b) resistance and disagreement. These findings inform teacher educators and practitioners of online learning about the cognitive and sociocultural processes and tension of learning within advanced interactive learning environments.

Review of Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Attachment.

Reviews the book, Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Attachment by Beatrice Beebe, Steven Knoblauch, Judith Rustin, and Dorienne Sorter (2005). In this book, the authors use their 10 years of collaborative work to produce an in-depth and well-constructed discussion of verbal and nonverbal forms of intersubjectivity as observed in the treatment setting and as evidenced by data generated from more mainstream child development studies. They move beyond the lack of integration between these related though often dramatically disconnected disciplines and build on infant researchers' understanding of "prereflective" caregiver-child interactions to offer a new theory of intersubjectivity that enhances our understanding of the clinical interaction with adult patients. This book is not for those therapists who are interested in learning well-specified, new interventions to use in their psychotherapy practice. It is also not suggested for those clinicians who do not have some background in psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is, however, recommended for those clinicians who work psychodynamically and are interested in developing their awareness of the nonverbal aspects of treatment and the co-construction of the therapeutic encounter. This book would also be useful to those in the field of psychotherapy research as it poses new questions about the nature of the therapeutic process and suggests the importance of examining the role that implicit, nonverbal interactions play in psychotherapy. Beebe, Knoblauch, Rustin, and Sorter's book is well constructed, persuasively argued, and highly recommended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

The Constitution of the Subject

This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly through a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of ‘rolling identification’, the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a ‘representational wrapping of self and others’. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification.