Protactile Research Network
The medium of intersubjectivity
Terra Edwards
University of Chicago
Sage Journals
Terra Edwards
University of Chicago
Sage Journals
The notion of an utterance deprived of its context of human interaction is as absurd as the notion of a fall deprived of the gravitational field within which it takes place.
-Ragnar Rommetveit, The Architecture of Intersubjectivity
Introduction
Intersubjectivity has entered the conceptual landscape of anthropology via broader debates in the humanities and social sciences. In one such debate, sociologists foregrounded intersubjectivity as a way of challenging economists’ claims that individuals act in order to maximize their own utility. If this were the case, they argued, if everyone were simply acting in their own self-interest, what motivation would anyone have to cooperate with others, to create a coherent social order? Drawing on thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, Talcott Parsons, for example, addressed this question by combining theories of society with theories of personality (Heritage, 1984: 7–36). Parsons argued that within particular routines and institutions, social actors cooperate with one another because they have internalized standards of appropriateness and they are afraid that if they do not live up to those standards, love and approval will be withdrawn (Heritage 1984: 17). From this perspective, the social order emerges out of situated engagement between actors who are driven not (only) by a conscious desire to maximize utility, but also by an unconscious desire to be loved, approved of, or accepted.
Building on these ideas, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman shifted attention away from unconscious desires, toward public behaviors, which, they argued, can reveal how participants are orienting to their interlocutors, moment to moment (Rawls, 2002, 2006). This made intersubjectivity an empirical, social scientific object, observable as whatever is “achieved” in interaction (see Duranti, 2010; Edwards, 2022; Heritage, 1984; Rawls, 2002, 2006). The underlying aim, however, remained: to understand the cooperative mechanisms and processes that give rise to and reproduce particular social orders.
Anthropologists have since challenged the idea that interaction is organized by cooperative principles (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008). Some of these scholars have returned to psychoanalytic theory to ask what, beyond the unconscious desire for love and acceptance, might motivate us to act and how might those motivations vary across ethnographic contexts. Groark (2013), for example, starts from the premise that we know very little about what people think or what they are trying to do, and we sometimes have good reason for expecting the worst. We worry, for example, that others are trying to deceive us, shame us, or disparage us, and we act in ways that will minimize exposure (also see Russell, 2020). Given this, Groark argues that in some ethnographic contexts, the “achievement of mutual understanding” might best be understood as a fantasy, dominated by projective processes that conflate self and other, rendering interaction dangerous, inadvisable, or morally questionable (Groark, 2013: 279–280).
Taken together with insights from anthropologists working on related questions elsewhere, we learn that expectations about the intentions of others will vary across cultural contexts. Of course, whether you enter into an interaction feeling strategic, feeling needy, or feeling exposed will also depend on who you are. Each individual has their own memories, experiences, traumas, and desires, which they objectify and thematize or not, and those processes shape their expectations and motivations. With this in mind, and drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Duranti (2010) re-frames intersubjectivity as an existential problem, asking how we transcend our individual perspectives to enter into an objective world, shared by others. His answer begins with “reciprocal empathy” or “the understandings made possible by the possibility of exchanging places” (Duranti, 2010: 6). For example, if you and I were standing on opposite sides of a table, you would have no direct evidence that the side of the table facing me is there. However, you would take it for granted that what you see and what I see are two sides of the same thing. The existence of the table is not a matter of perspective but an objective part of reality. Intersubjectivity is, therefore, not something we achieve, but rather, is part of an existential condition that “can lead to a shared understanding […] rather than being itself such an understanding” (Duranti, 2010: 6–7). The fact that we both take the table to be objectively “there” makes a statement like, “Is this my seat?” readily interpretable, for example. It is part of what can lead to a shared understanding but does not constitute that understanding.
In this article, my aim is to build on these insights by exploring the role of the environment. Drawing on recent contributions to protactile theory
* One might be inclined to call protactile theory a “semiotic ideology,” or “people’s underlying (i.e. implicit) assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce” (Keane, 2018: 1). Protactile theory is related to semiotic ideology but is distinct in that it is a theory not an ideology. According to a document titled, “Advice to Authors and Reviewers of Anthropological Theory,” which is distributed, along with a style sheet and article template to all authors who publish in this journal, to call something a “theory” requires the following: (1) explicitness, (2) utility for explanation and understanding, (3) statements of relationships between concepts, (4) generality and abstraction, and (5) validation. Together these yield (6) “theorization.” Protactile theory is explicit—it is not implicit. It emerged out of 10 years of teaching protactile practices, as the organizing principles (and their associated concepts) that needed to be understood to be effective as a student learning protactile. This satisfied (2) above. They also specify dependencies between principles. For example, in Granda and Nuccio (2018: 1), there is a set of seven protactile principles, but as the first principle is introduced, they state: “Signing in contact space is an overarching principle, which all other principles follow from.”. Several principles also have sub-principles. These relations satisfy (3) above. With respect to (4), protactile principles are stated at a level of generality that makes it possible for DeafBlind people elsewhere to adopt them and apply them in a context with a different ambient sign language and under different socio-political conditions, which to my knowledge has occurred in France and Italy and likely elsewhere. (5) Validation is provided in the examples given in Granda and Nuccio (2018), and in later evidence generated by a systematic linguistic analysis (Edwards and Brentari, 2020). There is a sense among protactile theorists, such as Hayley Broadway (personal communication), that protactile principles, by the time they are written down and distributed are likely to be “outdated.” The theory is chasing the phenomenon but does not constitute it. *
(Clark, 2019; Clark and Nuccio, 2020; Granda and Nuccio, 2018), I focus, in particular, on the medium of intersubjectivity. Consider pointing, a well-known way to effectively modulate intersubjective attention. Air is a good medium for pointing because it offers little resistance; the arm can move freely in different directions through it. Water, in contrast, would have a dampening effect, and mud (depending on its viscosity and transparency) might be prohibitive. Air carries vibratory waves, making it a good medium for sound, while the presence of luminous surfaces is important for visibility (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 12–26). The intersubjective affordances of a medium, however, can only be considered in relation to organisms with particular characteristics. For creatures with no mobile appendages, the degree to which air restricts the movement of the arm would be irrelevant. Instead, some other medium, suited to the creatures’ capacities, would be seized upon. In what follows, I will argue that whether you look at intersubjectivity as the thing that is achieved in interaction, the thing that is desired but never obtained, or the thing that is presupposed by objectivity, the intersubjective environment, and in particular, the medium, plays a critical role in setting the parameters of intelligibility.
My interest in the medium of intersubjectivity comes from long-term ethnographic engagement with DeafBlind people in the USA who call themselves “protactile.” Most of the protactile people I know were born deaf and slowly became blind over the course of many years. They grew up in Deaf communities, attended Deaf schools, and spoke American Sign Language (ASL). As the process of becoming blind unfolded, the possibility of trading places with others eroded, signs of others’ intentions became absent or deeply ambiguous, and the experience of converging on shared understandings became increasingly rare. Eventually, they sought out DeafBlind communities. While some DeafBlind people might treat these problems as an effect of “vision loss,” protactile people treat them as a deficiency in the environment. That is why when communication or interaction fails, protactile people talk about animals, not eyes.
One day, for example, a group of us were sinking into the couch cushions, trying to converse. To keep ourselves upright and at the right height, we had to weave our legs together—one leg over, one leg under, and so on, into a four-person lattice. That arrangement gave us some leverage but we were still slipping. Slumped over in a heap, Adrijana, a DeafBlind member of the group said, “We are moles.” We all laughed. Appeals like these to animal life can diffuse tension by highlighting the fact that “we” aren’t the problem, its the environment. Whether it is worms, moles, or some other blind creature, it is not uncommon for protactile people to invoke animals—not because they are comparing themselves to animals, but because the relation between those animals and their environments suggests a utopic horizon for them—a perfect organism–environment complementarity.
Moles sleep in mole piles. They travel in mole tunnels, which intersect with those of their prey (worms and insects). A worm traveling along its own path unwittingly drops into a mole’s tunnel, where it is discovered with great efficiency and eaten. Moles do not inhabit visual space. And at the same time, they are not limited to their own tunnels. They exist in a medium, structured by networks of intersecting pathways, created by them and also other living things. The mole does not venture into pathways created by others, nor does it expose itself above ground. Moles receive creatures whose lines of travel intersect with their own. Above ground, the mole’s searching capacity—its receptive scope—would be ill-suited to locating prey. But in its tunnel, the prey is restricted to a searchable space. The parameters of intelligibility that constitute the mole’s environment and its interactions with others in that environment are perfectly suited to the mole.
Intersubjective engagement between protactile people often unfolds in an environment that, unlike the mole’s, is unsupportive or prohibitive. In order to understand the medium, as a concept, a broader question must be addressed: How is the world intelligible to the creature, as it goes about living—communicating, finding food, seeking shelter, building tools, finding a mate, competing, cooperating, and so on? The answer, as I will discuss at length in this article, must be sought in the irreducible relation between the organism and the affordances of its environment as a whole. This is what constitutes a “life” (Uexküll, [1934] 1964), and for humans, “existence” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 67–77).
Existence
Our existential characteristics—simply put—are the different ways we can be. Being is “that […] on the basis of which […] entities are already understood” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 25–26).
* “Existentia” applies to “Being-present-at-hand,” while “existence” applies specifically to Dasein, which is what we are. “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” Therefore, its characteristics cannot be “properties” as if its mode of being were present-at-hand. Rather, Dasein’s characteristics are “in each case possible ways for it to be.” These characteristics of Dasein’s being are called “existentialia” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 67–70). *
Being-in-the-world (unlike having a perspective on the world) involves “residence in” or “being alongside […] that which is familiar to me” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 79–80). Being-in-the-world is an absorption in the world.
* What kind of semiotic process is this? To address that question, Paul Kockelman (2006a) proposes “the residential whole” and the “representational whole,”—two slices of the same “thing”: Being-in-the-world. In this article, the focus is on aspects of Being-in-the-world, spelled out in Being and Time (Division I), which correspond to Kockelman’s residential whole. Kockelman analyzes the residential whole into a set of “constituents,” which are “finite, structured, intuitive, and articulatable” (Kockelman, 2006: 21). They are affordances, instruments, actions, roles, and identities. The best way to understand these constituents as semiotic processes is to look at Kockelman’s chart on p. 22 of Residence in the World (Kockelman, 2006). Briefly, what unifies all of the constituents (and distinguishes them from the constituents of the representational whole) is that they are all non-propositional semiotic processes. This means (among other things) that as thirds, their objects are neither inferred propositions nor concepts, their signs are material features of the world (“not purposely expressed for the sake of another’s interpretant”), and their interpretants are other constituents (Kockelman, 2006: 22). Grasping the affordances of instruments in a particular way will call forth certain kinds of action (and not others); engaging in the kinds of action those instruments afford will make certain roles available, and taking on particular roles habitually will lead to a mode of existence (Kockelman calls it identity). This structure, when compared to the kinds of propositional semiosis found in such things as the exchange of utterances or the performance of a greeting, is “maximally reflexive” because its interpretants are other parts of itself. This is what is discussed in the body of the paper as “circularity.” Being-in-the-world is a selfreinforcing loop, hence “reality” (in biosemiotics) and “direct perception” (in ecological psychology). In Kockelman’s terms, the relevant distinction is not between immediacy and mediation (it is all mediation) but between propositional and non-propositional semiosis.*
This aspect of human being is part of life, broadly construed. Jakob von Uexküll shows us, for example, how sea urchins, flies, and creatures of all kinds are, like us, absorbed in the world, each in their own special way. The incredible range of possibilities for how organisms can be, according to Uexküll, derive from a circularity in the organism–environment relation, where the sensations we are capable of registering are projected outward and are perceived as features of the world itself. This cycle, he says, is the basis of intelligibility and constitutive of life (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 48–50).
Uexküll says that organisms have “receptor” cues, which can register some subset of possible stimuli—or features—in the “perceptual field” and then convert them into “effector cues” in “the motor field” (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 10). For example, the Paramecium (a simple freshwater animal shaped like a slipper) “is covered with dense rows of cilia, whose lashing drives it swiftly through the water, while it revolves continually on its longitudinal axis.” It has but a single receptor cue, “which, whenever, wherever, and however the Paramecium is stimulated, impels it to the motion of escape.” Uexküll explains (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 31–32):
The same obstacle cue always elicits the same fleeing reaction. This consists of a backward motion, followed by a lateral deflection, whereupon the animal again begins to swim forward. By this, the obstacle is removed. […] The small animal comes to rest only when it reaches food, the bacteria of putrefaction, which alone of all the things in the world do not emit stimuli.
The world is intelligible to the Paramecium against the backdrop of its own ciliapropelled locomotion. As it goes about living, the world speaks to it via a single sign, equipped with an on/off switch. Switched on, the world calls out to it, “Escape!” In the off position, it says, “Eat.” These processes—what Uexküll’s interpreters call “biosemiosis” (Brentari, 2015)—set the parameters for the intelligibility of the environment. The medium is a special part of that process because it can be part of the “operative world,” without being part of the “perceptual world” (Brentari, 2015: 99). Without water, for example, the Parimecium’s world would go silent. Its life would come to an end. And yet, water itself slips by undetected. As Brentari explains, the animal “does not reperceive in any way the object features which are for it operative carriers (for example, it does not feel the presence of water or air, even though they allow it to move)” (Brentari, 2015: 101).
The Parimecium is both similar to and different from us. Like us, its being is that, on the basis of which, the world is already intelligible. Unlike us, in its being, its being is not an issue for it (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32).
*In Heidegger’s words: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship toward that Being—a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32).*
It doesn’t cope with the world. It isn’t weighed down by the strange on/off-ness of its life; and its relationship to its own being is not manifest in its comportment or behavior (Dreyfus, 1991: 40–59; Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32–35). These characteristics are unique to existence. The Parimecium is alive but does not exist.
We exist, and we do so in a medium. While the Parimecium cannot reperceive its own medium, we are aware of the medium we move through and can manipulate it. Insofar as the manipulation of the medium enters into the behavioral manifestation of our relationship to our own being, it is part of our existence. For example, John Lee Clark, a protactile essayist and poet, writes about being granted access to the face of an interlocutor (Poetry Magazine, 2019):
Here, you can touch my face. Thank you, no.
No, it’s fine. Really.
Nah. I just— I want you to.
Well, I want to tell them, what you are offering for my inspection is just a skin-covered skull.
The face—a locus of dense intersubjective signaling for the sighted—is, at best, peripheral for Clark. This has to do not with the face, per se, but with the parameters of intelligibility that organize his life. Clark goes on to recall a time when a friend showed him a “prized possession of his, an egg-shaped sculpture. I could feel its eyebrows, nose, and mouth,” Clark writes, “but they conveyed nothing. For my sighted friend, it has an exquisite expression of serenity. ‘Peace,’ it’s called.” Sharing a moment of appreciation for a work of art is one way to establish intersubjective coordination. “Face-to-face” contact is another way. The reason why both attempts flopped is that the face only has intersubjective affordances if you are operating from within a sighted mode of existence. Put another way: You have to be sighted to think a face, or a sculpture of one, would be a good thing to share. According to Granda and Nuccio (2018), this kind of intersubjective failure is due not to some sort of mishap in a process of intention attribution, but to the fact that the things faces do, don’t count as signs in “contact space.”
*This article focuses largely on protactile people’s theories of their own experience as articulated in published works including essays, poems, and pedagogical materials. However, I also draw on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Seattle DeafBlind community during the period of time when the protactile movement took root and then spread across the country and one year of ethnographic fieldwork among protactile people at Gallaudet in 2016 and 2017. Explicit analyses of protactile interaction, language-use, and language structure can be found in Edwards (2014, 2015, 2017) and Edwards and Brentari (2020, 2021).*
Before going any further, it is important to emphasize that “contact space” is a theoretical construct meant to capture culturally and historically specific parameters of intelligibility in protactile contexts. If you have never been where protactile people are and you have no plans of going there, then you have never been in contact space, and you never will be. However, you have been in some other intersubjective medium (we are all in something!), which, odds are, has not been theorized, because it is taken for granted (it is part of the operative world without being part of the perceptual world). Protactile theorists are uniquely positioned to objectify the medium and to draw our attention to its existential significance because, due to radical changes in their relationship with their environment, they cannot take it for granted. In each ethnographic context, the medium of intersubjectivity must be drawn out and theorized on its own terms. While the method for doing so will vary, a good place to start is to ask: What are we in when we’re together?
Being in contact space
After more than a decade at the center of the protactile movement, Granda and Nuccio (2018) distilled what they had learned into a set of seven “protactile principles.” The principles apply broadly and are presented as guidelines—not just for communication, but for a “way of life.” In the first paragraph of the document, they explain:
Protactile philosophy has grown out of the realization that DeafBlind people’s intuitions about tactile communication are stronger than the intuitions sighted people have. This realization has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we work with interpreters, and more generally, the way we live. We call this way of life and the principles and practices that shape it, “protactile,” [or “PT”]. Protactile has been growing slowly in our community and as that has happened, we have developed a framework for sharing that knowledge.
The protactile way of life is a natural consequence of uncovering what has always been there—an intuition DeafBlind people have for tactile communication. The principles are guidelines for making that intuition manifest in behavior.
*In Kockelman’s terms: protactile behaviors are signs of “tactile intuition.” The intuition is the object of the sign. A protactile behavior, performed routinely, would have a protactile role as its interpretant, and the two are related by way of effectiveness and appropriateness, so that, “the object of a sign is that to which all appropriate and effective interpretants of that sign correspondingly relate” (Kockelman, 2006: 22). The problem with sighted behaviors for protactile people is that, prior to the protactile movement, they were the only appropriate option, and yet, those behaviors were ineffective because DeafBlind people had no intuition for them. Kockelman calls this “strain” (Kockelman, 2006: 39).*
Granda and Nuccio explain that carving out a space for this requires political framings and institutional authority:
We did not invent PT like a person would “invent” cued speech or some “interpreting technique.” We pointed out to DeafBlind people that their intuitions were more right than they realized, and we encouraged that in them. We tried to give them permission as the Director and the Education Coordinator of DBSC [DeafBlind Service Center]. Then we named things that we and other DeafBlind people were doing and created a political discourse so that people had a way of talking about it and fighting for it. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 3)
The manifestation of tactile intuition in behavior required nothing short of a social movement (Edwards, 2014) because sighted intuitions tend to reproduce existing social structures, which reinforce sighted intuitions. For DeafBlind people in sighted environments, that loop is broken. Elliot, a DeafBlind person who had recently immersed himself in protactile environments when I interviewed him in 2016, reflected on the character of that experience. He explained that he does not experience his own deafblindness. “It’s not like I see black areas in my visual field or something,” he said. “I don’t see that area at all and I am not aware of it.” And yet, “deafblindness” becomes explicit in its effects: running into people, tripping over things, etc.
*Here, the object of collision-as-sign is “deafblindness,” whereas the object of locomotionas-sign is “tactile intuition.”*
Every time something like that happened, he would infer the presence of things in his environment, and he would try to calculate—based on that limited input—when and where they might appear next. But as a protactile person looking back on that experience, he realized that inference and calculation are no substitute for life.
*Non-propositional semiosis is displaced by, and substituted for, propositional semiosis, whichturns life into a representation of itself.*
Protactile principles start with what is intuitive to you, not what is appropriate for them. As intuitions are acted on, some subset of resulting behaviors is eventually deemed appropriate and ratified by the collective. Once sighted restrictions on touch have been relaxed and this process can freely unfold, the environment starts throwing out messages that can be elaborated as actions. There is no intervening process of inference or calculation. This obviousness and automaticity are characteristic of “perceiving affordances.” It isn’t hard to figure out what to do next, because as Gibson says, “The postbox ‘invites’ the mailing of a letter, the handle ‘wants to be grasped,’ things ‘tell us what to do with them’ (Gibson, 2015: 138). After a decade of uncovering a world that speaks to protactile people, Granda and Nuccio (2018) began to theorize its parameters of intelligibility as “Protactile Principles.” The first principle, on which all others depend, is stated as follows:
Any time space is used, make sure it is contact space, not air space. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 4)
For purposes of communication and interaction, contact space is defined as the space on the surface of the interlocutor’s body together with their proprioceptive grasp of their position relative to that space (see Edwards and Brentari, 2020, 2021). In order to activate contact space—either for the production of linguistic signs or for providing conversational feedback (similar to nodding, grimacing, and so on)—the body of one’s interlocutor must be touched. This principle is complemented by another, which guides intersubjective behaviors such as pointing, referring, and depicting:
Take a protactile perspective; this means working together to co-create signs that are easy to feel and also describing things in ways that reflect protactile experience. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 9)
This additional principle extends “contact space” out into the environment so that the intersubjective or “shared” world and our means of representing that world align.
*In Kockelman’s (2006a) terms, this extension of contact space ensures that the “residential whole” and the “representational whole” are indeed, two different slices of the same thing.*
Air space is inadmissible for both, because for protactile people, it lacks affordances for communicating in and about the world. While vibratory and olfactory features can be important signs that another person is present, the best way to be sure is touch. That is why in nearly every interaction I have witnessed between DeafBlind protactile teachers and inexperienced, sighted students, the following series of events will unfold: the student, deep in thought, forgets to maintain tactile contact—their hand slips off the leg of their teacher and drifts away into air space. Immediately, the teacher responds by reminding them: “If you aren’t touching me, you aren’t here.” This is hard for the sighted student to internalize, since he can see he is there with his teacher, but it is possible for him to, over time, become habituated to the fact that protactile practices require total absorption in contact space. From there, (whether you can see or not) the regions of the world that spoke to you before are muffled, frozen in place, or gone, and a new landscape, full of chatter, comes alive.
As we move through the world, reflexively oriented to our own being, we do so in a medium. We can be visual or protactile people. We are sea creatures or land animals. The medium itself can define us.
The medium of intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity requires (potential) engagement between two subjectivities in an environment. For example, repair, “a self-righting mechanism usable wherever troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding are encountered” (Sidnell, 2015: 178), requires the ability to detect trouble. In instances of “repair”—a ubiquitous feature of intersubjective engagement—we receive a trouble-sign and then do our human version of reversal, plus lateral deflection, plus course correction. But if you take away the medium, the whole process short circuits. For protactile people, that medium is contact space. For example, if a protactile person is talking to you, and your hand goes limp on their leg, trouble is detected. If a protactile person is talking to you and your eyes glaze over, trouble will not be detected. Eye glaze in contact space is like a spark in water—it extinguishes itself before anything can come of it. This is emphasized repeatedly by Granda and Nuccio. Under Principle 1d: “Emphasis and Emotion,” they write:
If your hand goes limp on the leg of the person you are talking to, that expresses the feeling of being tired or disinterested like a yawn does for sighted people. If someone is talking to you about something scary, you can grip their legs to express heightened attention […] [Either one] is fine, but whichever you choose, be sure to use contact space, not air space. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 6)
Express your feelings however you like but be sure to do it in contact space. This same point is repeated for a list of other behaviors, such as direction-giving, referent tracking, description, demonstration, depiction, and backchanneling. Each one includes examples of how the behavior should be carried out (in contact space) and how it should not (in air space). For example, they explain:
Suppose you are giving directions to someone in the same place where you are communicating, for example, they are a visitor in your home and they want to know where the kitchen is. You start by finding a physical thing nearby that will not move, such as a table, a railing, or a door. That will function as a landmark for the starting place. Once the listener has touched the starting place, explain where to go by describing additional landmarks on the body of the listener in relation to the starting place. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 10)
Landmarks in the environment are anchored in contact space, just as reference itself is. Nothing outside of the medium. The protactile principles, therefore, are not just a list of resources for achieving intersubjectivity (though they are this). They are necessary components for constructing what Granda and Nuccio call a “way of life.” What turns the list into a life is the medium.
*A curious fact should be noted here: nearly all anthropological theories of intersubjectivity come in lists.
How landmarks find us
In 2010, I accompanied a DeafBlind person, who I call Helen, on a trip to the transit tunnels in downtown Seattle with her “orientation and mobility” instructor, “Marcus.” Marcus is a hearing, sighted speaker of ASL who provides training to DeafBlind people, designed to orient them in urban environments. He focuses specifically on urban transit systems needed to travel to and from work. On this particular morning, after Helen and Marcus boarded the bus on the way to the transit tunnel, Helen asked Marcus about the route. Marcus responded, “This bus goes down Eastlake, past REI, into downtown and then into the tunnel.” The bus passes by many locations, but Marcus mentions only one road, the name of one business, one area, “downtown,” and the destination for the trip, which is the transit tunnel. For me, as a sighted person who is familiar with Seattle, this description is adequate because it distinguishes a limited number of feasible routes from one place to another. The city is not perfectly grid-like because it is built around several bodies of water. These bodies of water force traffic through several bottleneck bridges. From Greenlake to downtown, there are two highly feasible options—Interstate 5 or Eastlake. Eastlake crosses underneath I-5, and the two form an “X” when viewed from above on a map. They diverge as you enter the downtown area. At that point of divergence, REI appears as a salient visual landmark, which can distinguish one possible path from the other. For Helen, however, the meaning of the REI landmark is diminished.
On an entirely separate occasion, I was riding a bus along this very same route in the opposite direction (northbound), when I noticed a DeafBlind person I knew coming aboard. I sat next to him and we struck up a conversation. He asked me where I was going, I told him, and then we moved on to other topics. At some point, I stopped paying attention to where I was. Just before I would have missed my stop, he interrupted our conversation and told me I better get my bag because my stop was coming. I thanked him and asked him how he knew. He said that he sometimes gets off at that stop (the DeafBlind Service Center used to be located there), and he knew that just before you have to get off, there are characteristic motions of the bus, which he had sensitized himself to. In both the interaction between Helen and Marcus, and in this interaction, an attempt at shared understanding, oriented to a landmark, unfolded in a medium. In the first instance, rays of sunlight bounced off luminous surfaces. The effect of that was ambient light. By virtue of that light, the landmark was visible.
*See Gibson ([1979] 2015: 41–46).*
In the second instance, a gravitational field brought the bus’s wheels in contact with the ground and the bus rider in contact with the bus. Within that gravitational field, a particular bus motion (felt as a shift in proprioceptive orientation) became a sign of the landmark. In both cases, there are landmarks in the environment that have affordances for direction giving. The first landmark throws out signals that can be detected in ambient light (there is no use in pointing out visual landmarks in the dark), and the second releases signals to be detected in a gravitational field (the bus signals would have vanished in outer space). My interlocutor acted on the latter possibility and, in doing so, rendered an intersubjective medium operative. Landmarks may throw out signals, but without a shared medium, the signals have no way of getting to us.
Intersubjective language
Within an intersubjective medium, language can function as a system of prompts for directing attention in particular ways.
*See also Hanks (1996: 147–149).*
There is no better example of this than “deictics” (Bühler, [1934] 2001; Diessel, 1999; Evans et al., 2018; Hanks, 1990). For example, Yucatec Maya encodes a three-way distinction between referents based on whether they are tactually, visually, or audibly accessible (Hanks, 2009: 14). Jahai, a language spoken in Malaysia, makes distinctions based on elevation, such as “superjacent vs. subjacent,” that is, located above the speech situation, as in “overhead, uphill, or upstream” versus located below the speech situation, as in “underneath, downhill, or downstream” (Burenhult, 2003 cited in Evans et al., 2018: 129). Each of these categories primes receptivity in the addressee in a different way. That variable priming function is, according to Bühler, the most fundamental, defining feature of deictics:
[deictic words] are expedient ways to guide the partners. The partner is called by them, and his gaze, more generally, his searching perceptual activity, his readiness for sensory reception is referred by the deictic words to clues, gesture-like clues and their equivalents, which improve and supplement his orientation among the details of the situation. That is the function of the deictic words in verbal contact, if one insists upon reducing this function to a single general formula. (Bühler, [1934] 2001: 121)
Deictics, then, are a key resource, which can be drawn on by speakers and addressees to build up intersubjective access to and knowledge about a shared world. In reverse—going from the world to language—deictics function as repositories of routinized forms of interaction with others and with the environment (Hanks, 2009: 22). Where elevation functions as an organizing dimension of life, differences in elevation can become orienting features of the environment. Features that are routinely referred to can be encoded in the language as a set of choices for how to expediently ready the partner for their “searching perceptual activity.” In this manner, the linguistic system comes to anticipate the world it has emerged from and offers helpful clues to navigate within it. This process yields linguistic resources, which help us keep “track of what others know and how their knowledge can be related to the knowledge of others.” Some linguists refer to these resources as “intersubjective grammar” (Evans et al., 2018: 121).
In the Architecture of Intersubjectivity, Ragnar Rommetveit theorizes the operable environment by way of coordinates, defined along temporal, spatial, and social dimensions (Rommetveit, 1976: 94). Within a set of coordinates, first-person and secondperson pronouns, that is, I and You “constitute the two poles of potential states of intersubjectivity” (Rommetveit, 1976: 94). Rommetveit says that while it may seem like the person speaking has control of the intersubjective space, “under normal conditions, based upon a reciprocally endorsed and spontaneously fulfilled contract of complementarity, Encoding is tacitly assumed to involve anticipatory decoding. It is taken for granted that speech is continuously listener oriented” (Rommetveit, 1976: 96). Ultimately, he argues that “intersubjectivity [must] be taken for granted in order to be achieved. It is based on mutual faith in a shared social world” (Rommetveit, 1976: 96). The meanings of utterances and the shared knowledge of the participants are drawn on and fixed by way of “meta-contracts” or “a shared frame of reference for making sense of what is said” (Rommetveit, 1976: 104).
There are some things Rommetveit does not address. The most glaring of these is: How do certain things, and not others, come to be taken for granted? Within an intersubjective medium, the world is already intelligible to us (i.e. it is taken for granted) by virtue of our existence. Existence unfolds in a medium, seized upon for its intersubjective affordances. You and I, therefore, do not take up relational positions in Cartesian space, we are beings who exist in a “meaningful environment” (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 12–38).
*Gibson says: “The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of ecological reality […] does. If what we perceived were the entities of physics and mathematics, meanings would have to be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the entities of environmental science, their meanings can be discovered” (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 28). This perspective aligns with Uexküll, who, as Brentari (2013: 12) explains, thinks that “sense-qualities are possible only on the basis of determinate transcendental forms which are more particular and content-related than the Kantian intuitions of space and time. These concrete forms of perceptual experience are classified by the Estonian biologist [as signs].”*
Languages—and particularly deictic systems—are useful not because they constitute relational coordinates for you and I to inhabit, but because they come to anticipate the features of the environment that are meaningful to us. Edwards and Brentari (2021) offer a glimpse into how this anticipatory capacity begins to develop in grammar. At the earliest stages of protactile language emergence, conventionalized backchanneling cues were co-opted by emergent grammatical systems, taking on a range of divergent, linguistic functions, all of which were rooted in intersubjective attention modulation. While not the focus of this article, taken together with the present argument, this suggests that the way the environment speaks to us affects how we speak to one another.
*Centering the medium of intersubjectivity also helps clarify the difference between “tactile sign languages” and tactile language. There is a convention among researchers studying communication and language-use in DeafBlind communities in the USA and beyond. Any signed language can be modified with the term “tactile”, as in “tactile [name of sign language]” (Willoughby, 2018). Prior to the protactile movement, the language available to DeafBlind people in the USA was tactile ASL or “TASL” (Collins and Petronio, 1998; Petronio and Dively, 2006). To perceive ASL, a DeafBlind addressee placed their hand(s) on the hand(s) of the signer. Practices like this have also been documented for Japanese Sign Language (Bono et al., 2018), Auslan (Iwasaki et al., 2022), and Swedish Sign Language (Mesch, 2013), among others. From within contact space (broadly construed), TASL feels like grasping at straws (Clark and Nuccio, 2020). In Nuccio’s words: “Trying to chase down ASL signs is hard work, and when we have to use ASL, communicating and learning are much harder than they should be” (Clark and Nuccio, 2020: 1–2). When articulation is performed on the body of the addressee, communication is “grounded” and “intuitive,” insofar as both parties exist in contact space. TASL and protactile language both require touch to be produced and perceived, but only protactile language is already-operable in contact space. This suggests that the “modality” of a language is not determined in relation to the channels used to transmit it but rather in relation to the medium of intersubjectivity.*
Maybe, then, to achieve intersubjectivity via language-use, we don’t need contracts, rules, or coordinates, and we don’t have to have faith. Maybe all we need to do is submerge ourselves in the medium and wait for a sign.
*Learning to be protactile involves shifting your expectations about what, in your environment,might constitute a sign. DeafBlind people who are new to protactile environments sometimes seek out stimuli that can be mapped onto objects that were once intelligible elsewhere. For example, after entering a room where a community event is taking place, a person might worry, “How will I know how many people are here, and who they are, without an interpreter to tell me?” They can address that problem by straining to use whatever vision they have left, and some people do that. Others, move around the room asking people explicitly, “Who are you?” “Who are you?” Until they have identified everyone. But what protactile theorists encourage people to do instead is ask: “What signs are already present in this environment, and how can I make them operable for me? When people make that shift, they notice new things like how much the floor is vibrating, for example. If it is vibrating a lot, that might be a sign that there are many people present. Or maybe they notice that each person has a unique scent that can be used to identify them. When I say that “all you have to do is submerge yourself and wait for a sign,” I mean that one makes a decision to stop trying to reassemble the signs that were there before and, instead, set out with others to find new ways of interpreting affordances, within new parameters of intelligibility. In protactile environments, the commitment to stick around and learn to interpret affordances as others do is what opens the door to “contact space.” You only pick up on these patterns, though, if you have accepted that the parameters of intelligibility in this new environment will be different, and you wait for signs to surface that you would have otherwise passed by.*
Conclusion
In this article, I have contributed to anthropological understandings of intersubjectivity by interpreting protactile theory through the lens of biosemiotics, ecological psychology, and existential phenomenology. I have argued that the medium of intersubjectivity sets the parameters of intelligibility for communication, interaction, and existence. This argument raises questions of broad anthropological concern. For example, in the introduction to this article, I recalled a sociological argument opposing economic theories of rational action on intersubjective grounds. In the present historical moment, economic debates about why people act and what decisions they are likely to make are being transformed by new communication infrastructures that collect constant streams of data on decisionmaking processes in real-time (Seaver, 2017). Economists don’t really need to posit an abstract, rational actor, in theory, since they (and many others) have staggering quantities of data at their disposal that they can use to generate probabilistic predictions about how people will behave (including what they will buy and who they will vote for, among other things) by predicting who they probably are and what they are probably feeling (Brubaker, 2020; Cheney-Lippold, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Adopting a theory of intersubjectivity that foregrounds the medium, we might ask: How are the parameters of intelligibility being re-structured for the people whose intersubjective engagements unfold within these infrastructures, for whom are those changes operative, and how are they affecting social structures and processes, such as the way democracies function, how financial markets behave, or how work and education are structured? Without a theory of intersubjectivity that begins with the medium, we might miss opportunities to understand how intersubjectivity itself can vary as existential and environmental conditions shift.
Am I saying that we should attend more to “multimodality” or the “affordances of technology”? If I were, none of this would be new. Linguistic anthropologists already know that shared understandings can be achieved in different modalities, from language to gesture to gaze (e.g. Goodwin, 1990; Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987; Streeck et al., 2011) to complex analytic objects such as “a recipient’s brief look away” or “a fidgeting hand” (Sidnell, 2014: 366–368). We also know that meaning in interaction can be structured by forms of technological mediation (e.g. Johnson and Jones, 2021; Kunreuther, 2010; Nakassis, 2019; Smalls, 2018). Given this, some have emphasized the importance of taking a multi-modal approach to the analysis of interaction and language-use.
Starting with communicative action, sensory and technological channels can function for the analyst as a means of grouping media and modalities into higher-level categories (cf. Kockelman, 2010). For example, gesture and cinema are both “visual” forms of communication, while spoken language is “verbal,” and language and gesture are both expressed through visual channels in the context of sign language communication (e.g. Cooperider et al., 2021; Dudis, 2004; Fenlon et al., 2019; Goldin-Meadow and Brentari, 2017; Hodge and Johnston, 2014; Liddell, 2003; Nakassis, 2019; Okrent, 2002; Shaw, 2019). This tends to frame modality as different ways of doing the same thing or as different resources that can be used; for example, the idea that joint attention can be accomplished via visual means for Deaf parent–child dyads or it can be accomplished via visual and auditory means for Hearing parent–child dyads. The intersubjective action that is achieved is the same, but it is achieved in different modalities.
*Disability studies, which intersects in many ways with anthropology, has a long and rich tradition of thinking about bodily difference. This paper, however, focuses on the unique contribution of the protactile theory, which does not draw on disability frameworks for reasons that might be best captured by John Lee Clark’s (2021) essay, “Against Access” (https://audio. mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html).*
Starting with the intersubjective medium, rather than a particular action or accomplishment, turns the analysis around. Instead of asking which sensory channels are used to accomplish an action, one asks: In what medium are these actions already intelligible? This focuses attention not on what people are doing in communicating, but on the always-shifting existential and environmental conditions that give rise to the parameters of intelligibility in a particular ethnographic context.
AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank the protactile theorists who have invited her into their conversations, including the feedback she received on this manuscript during John Lee Clark’s wildly popular Protactile Theory seminar. The author also thanks Ben Lee, Greg Urban, and the members of the Semiotics Group at the Center for Transcultural Studies, especially Paul Kockelman, Kamala Russell, Bill Hanks, and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and feedback.
Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
FundingThe authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for ethnographic aspects of this research was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant Nos. 8110 and 9146). Funding for linguistic aspects of this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1651100). Support for the writing phase was provided by the Saint Louis University Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Fund.
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-Ragnar Rommetveit, The Architecture of Intersubjectivity
Introduction
Intersubjectivity has entered the conceptual landscape of anthropology via broader debates in the humanities and social sciences. In one such debate, sociologists foregrounded intersubjectivity as a way of challenging economists’ claims that individuals act in order to maximize their own utility. If this were the case, they argued, if everyone were simply acting in their own self-interest, what motivation would anyone have to cooperate with others, to create a coherent social order? Drawing on thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, Talcott Parsons, for example, addressed this question by combining theories of society with theories of personality (Heritage, 1984: 7–36). Parsons argued that within particular routines and institutions, social actors cooperate with one another because they have internalized standards of appropriateness and they are afraid that if they do not live up to those standards, love and approval will be withdrawn (Heritage 1984: 17). From this perspective, the social order emerges out of situated engagement between actors who are driven not (only) by a conscious desire to maximize utility, but also by an unconscious desire to be loved, approved of, or accepted.
Building on these ideas, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman shifted attention away from unconscious desires, toward public behaviors, which, they argued, can reveal how participants are orienting to their interlocutors, moment to moment (Rawls, 2002, 2006). This made intersubjectivity an empirical, social scientific object, observable as whatever is “achieved” in interaction (see Duranti, 2010; Edwards, 2022; Heritage, 1984; Rawls, 2002, 2006). The underlying aim, however, remained: to understand the cooperative mechanisms and processes that give rise to and reproduce particular social orders.
Anthropologists have since challenged the idea that interaction is organized by cooperative principles (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008). Some of these scholars have returned to psychoanalytic theory to ask what, beyond the unconscious desire for love and acceptance, might motivate us to act and how might those motivations vary across ethnographic contexts. Groark (2013), for example, starts from the premise that we know very little about what people think or what they are trying to do, and we sometimes have good reason for expecting the worst. We worry, for example, that others are trying to deceive us, shame us, or disparage us, and we act in ways that will minimize exposure (also see Russell, 2020). Given this, Groark argues that in some ethnographic contexts, the “achievement of mutual understanding” might best be understood as a fantasy, dominated by projective processes that conflate self and other, rendering interaction dangerous, inadvisable, or morally questionable (Groark, 2013: 279–280).
Taken together with insights from anthropologists working on related questions elsewhere, we learn that expectations about the intentions of others will vary across cultural contexts. Of course, whether you enter into an interaction feeling strategic, feeling needy, or feeling exposed will also depend on who you are. Each individual has their own memories, experiences, traumas, and desires, which they objectify and thematize or not, and those processes shape their expectations and motivations. With this in mind, and drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Duranti (2010) re-frames intersubjectivity as an existential problem, asking how we transcend our individual perspectives to enter into an objective world, shared by others. His answer begins with “reciprocal empathy” or “the understandings made possible by the possibility of exchanging places” (Duranti, 2010: 6). For example, if you and I were standing on opposite sides of a table, you would have no direct evidence that the side of the table facing me is there. However, you would take it for granted that what you see and what I see are two sides of the same thing. The existence of the table is not a matter of perspective but an objective part of reality. Intersubjectivity is, therefore, not something we achieve, but rather, is part of an existential condition that “can lead to a shared understanding […] rather than being itself such an understanding” (Duranti, 2010: 6–7). The fact that we both take the table to be objectively “there” makes a statement like, “Is this my seat?” readily interpretable, for example. It is part of what can lead to a shared understanding but does not constitute that understanding.
In this article, my aim is to build on these insights by exploring the role of the environment. Drawing on recent contributions to protactile theory
* One might be inclined to call protactile theory a “semiotic ideology,” or “people’s underlying (i.e. implicit) assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce” (Keane, 2018: 1). Protactile theory is related to semiotic ideology but is distinct in that it is a theory not an ideology. According to a document titled, “Advice to Authors and Reviewers of Anthropological Theory,” which is distributed, along with a style sheet and article template to all authors who publish in this journal, to call something a “theory” requires the following: (1) explicitness, (2) utility for explanation and understanding, (3) statements of relationships between concepts, (4) generality and abstraction, and (5) validation. Together these yield (6) “theorization.” Protactile theory is explicit—it is not implicit. It emerged out of 10 years of teaching protactile practices, as the organizing principles (and their associated concepts) that needed to be understood to be effective as a student learning protactile. This satisfied (2) above. They also specify dependencies between principles. For example, in Granda and Nuccio (2018: 1), there is a set of seven protactile principles, but as the first principle is introduced, they state: “Signing in contact space is an overarching principle, which all other principles follow from.”. Several principles also have sub-principles. These relations satisfy (3) above. With respect to (4), protactile principles are stated at a level of generality that makes it possible for DeafBlind people elsewhere to adopt them and apply them in a context with a different ambient sign language and under different socio-political conditions, which to my knowledge has occurred in France and Italy and likely elsewhere. (5) Validation is provided in the examples given in Granda and Nuccio (2018), and in later evidence generated by a systematic linguistic analysis (Edwards and Brentari, 2020). There is a sense among protactile theorists, such as Hayley Broadway (personal communication), that protactile principles, by the time they are written down and distributed are likely to be “outdated.” The theory is chasing the phenomenon but does not constitute it. *
(Clark, 2019; Clark and Nuccio, 2020; Granda and Nuccio, 2018), I focus, in particular, on the medium of intersubjectivity. Consider pointing, a well-known way to effectively modulate intersubjective attention. Air is a good medium for pointing because it offers little resistance; the arm can move freely in different directions through it. Water, in contrast, would have a dampening effect, and mud (depending on its viscosity and transparency) might be prohibitive. Air carries vibratory waves, making it a good medium for sound, while the presence of luminous surfaces is important for visibility (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 12–26). The intersubjective affordances of a medium, however, can only be considered in relation to organisms with particular characteristics. For creatures with no mobile appendages, the degree to which air restricts the movement of the arm would be irrelevant. Instead, some other medium, suited to the creatures’ capacities, would be seized upon. In what follows, I will argue that whether you look at intersubjectivity as the thing that is achieved in interaction, the thing that is desired but never obtained, or the thing that is presupposed by objectivity, the intersubjective environment, and in particular, the medium, plays a critical role in setting the parameters of intelligibility.
My interest in the medium of intersubjectivity comes from long-term ethnographic engagement with DeafBlind people in the USA who call themselves “protactile.” Most of the protactile people I know were born deaf and slowly became blind over the course of many years. They grew up in Deaf communities, attended Deaf schools, and spoke American Sign Language (ASL). As the process of becoming blind unfolded, the possibility of trading places with others eroded, signs of others’ intentions became absent or deeply ambiguous, and the experience of converging on shared understandings became increasingly rare. Eventually, they sought out DeafBlind communities. While some DeafBlind people might treat these problems as an effect of “vision loss,” protactile people treat them as a deficiency in the environment. That is why when communication or interaction fails, protactile people talk about animals, not eyes.
One day, for example, a group of us were sinking into the couch cushions, trying to converse. To keep ourselves upright and at the right height, we had to weave our legs together—one leg over, one leg under, and so on, into a four-person lattice. That arrangement gave us some leverage but we were still slipping. Slumped over in a heap, Adrijana, a DeafBlind member of the group said, “We are moles.” We all laughed. Appeals like these to animal life can diffuse tension by highlighting the fact that “we” aren’t the problem, its the environment. Whether it is worms, moles, or some other blind creature, it is not uncommon for protactile people to invoke animals—not because they are comparing themselves to animals, but because the relation between those animals and their environments suggests a utopic horizon for them—a perfect organism–environment complementarity.
Moles sleep in mole piles. They travel in mole tunnels, which intersect with those of their prey (worms and insects). A worm traveling along its own path unwittingly drops into a mole’s tunnel, where it is discovered with great efficiency and eaten. Moles do not inhabit visual space. And at the same time, they are not limited to their own tunnels. They exist in a medium, structured by networks of intersecting pathways, created by them and also other living things. The mole does not venture into pathways created by others, nor does it expose itself above ground. Moles receive creatures whose lines of travel intersect with their own. Above ground, the mole’s searching capacity—its receptive scope—would be ill-suited to locating prey. But in its tunnel, the prey is restricted to a searchable space. The parameters of intelligibility that constitute the mole’s environment and its interactions with others in that environment are perfectly suited to the mole.
Intersubjective engagement between protactile people often unfolds in an environment that, unlike the mole’s, is unsupportive or prohibitive. In order to understand the medium, as a concept, a broader question must be addressed: How is the world intelligible to the creature, as it goes about living—communicating, finding food, seeking shelter, building tools, finding a mate, competing, cooperating, and so on? The answer, as I will discuss at length in this article, must be sought in the irreducible relation between the organism and the affordances of its environment as a whole. This is what constitutes a “life” (Uexküll, [1934] 1964), and for humans, “existence” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 67–77).
Existence
Our existential characteristics—simply put—are the different ways we can be. Being is “that […] on the basis of which […] entities are already understood” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 25–26).
* “Existentia” applies to “Being-present-at-hand,” while “existence” applies specifically to Dasein, which is what we are. “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” Therefore, its characteristics cannot be “properties” as if its mode of being were present-at-hand. Rather, Dasein’s characteristics are “in each case possible ways for it to be.” These characteristics of Dasein’s being are called “existentialia” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 67–70). *
Being-in-the-world (unlike having a perspective on the world) involves “residence in” or “being alongside […] that which is familiar to me” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 79–80). Being-in-the-world is an absorption in the world.
* What kind of semiotic process is this? To address that question, Paul Kockelman (2006a) proposes “the residential whole” and the “representational whole,”—two slices of the same “thing”: Being-in-the-world. In this article, the focus is on aspects of Being-in-the-world, spelled out in Being and Time (Division I), which correspond to Kockelman’s residential whole. Kockelman analyzes the residential whole into a set of “constituents,” which are “finite, structured, intuitive, and articulatable” (Kockelman, 2006: 21). They are affordances, instruments, actions, roles, and identities. The best way to understand these constituents as semiotic processes is to look at Kockelman’s chart on p. 22 of Residence in the World (Kockelman, 2006). Briefly, what unifies all of the constituents (and distinguishes them from the constituents of the representational whole) is that they are all non-propositional semiotic processes. This means (among other things) that as thirds, their objects are neither inferred propositions nor concepts, their signs are material features of the world (“not purposely expressed for the sake of another’s interpretant”), and their interpretants are other constituents (Kockelman, 2006: 22). Grasping the affordances of instruments in a particular way will call forth certain kinds of action (and not others); engaging in the kinds of action those instruments afford will make certain roles available, and taking on particular roles habitually will lead to a mode of existence (Kockelman calls it identity). This structure, when compared to the kinds of propositional semiosis found in such things as the exchange of utterances or the performance of a greeting, is “maximally reflexive” because its interpretants are other parts of itself. This is what is discussed in the body of the paper as “circularity.” Being-in-the-world is a selfreinforcing loop, hence “reality” (in biosemiotics) and “direct perception” (in ecological psychology). In Kockelman’s terms, the relevant distinction is not between immediacy and mediation (it is all mediation) but between propositional and non-propositional semiosis.*
This aspect of human being is part of life, broadly construed. Jakob von Uexküll shows us, for example, how sea urchins, flies, and creatures of all kinds are, like us, absorbed in the world, each in their own special way. The incredible range of possibilities for how organisms can be, according to Uexküll, derive from a circularity in the organism–environment relation, where the sensations we are capable of registering are projected outward and are perceived as features of the world itself. This cycle, he says, is the basis of intelligibility and constitutive of life (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 48–50).
Uexküll says that organisms have “receptor” cues, which can register some subset of possible stimuli—or features—in the “perceptual field” and then convert them into “effector cues” in “the motor field” (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 10). For example, the Paramecium (a simple freshwater animal shaped like a slipper) “is covered with dense rows of cilia, whose lashing drives it swiftly through the water, while it revolves continually on its longitudinal axis.” It has but a single receptor cue, “which, whenever, wherever, and however the Paramecium is stimulated, impels it to the motion of escape.” Uexküll explains (Uexküll, [1934] 1964: 31–32):
The same obstacle cue always elicits the same fleeing reaction. This consists of a backward motion, followed by a lateral deflection, whereupon the animal again begins to swim forward. By this, the obstacle is removed. […] The small animal comes to rest only when it reaches food, the bacteria of putrefaction, which alone of all the things in the world do not emit stimuli.
The world is intelligible to the Paramecium against the backdrop of its own ciliapropelled locomotion. As it goes about living, the world speaks to it via a single sign, equipped with an on/off switch. Switched on, the world calls out to it, “Escape!” In the off position, it says, “Eat.” These processes—what Uexküll’s interpreters call “biosemiosis” (Brentari, 2015)—set the parameters for the intelligibility of the environment. The medium is a special part of that process because it can be part of the “operative world,” without being part of the “perceptual world” (Brentari, 2015: 99). Without water, for example, the Parimecium’s world would go silent. Its life would come to an end. And yet, water itself slips by undetected. As Brentari explains, the animal “does not reperceive in any way the object features which are for it operative carriers (for example, it does not feel the presence of water or air, even though they allow it to move)” (Brentari, 2015: 101).
The Parimecium is both similar to and different from us. Like us, its being is that, on the basis of which, the world is already intelligible. Unlike us, in its being, its being is not an issue for it (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32).
*In Heidegger’s words: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship toward that Being—a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly” (Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32).*
It doesn’t cope with the world. It isn’t weighed down by the strange on/off-ness of its life; and its relationship to its own being is not manifest in its comportment or behavior (Dreyfus, 1991: 40–59; Heidegger, [1927] 1962: 32–35). These characteristics are unique to existence. The Parimecium is alive but does not exist.
We exist, and we do so in a medium. While the Parimecium cannot reperceive its own medium, we are aware of the medium we move through and can manipulate it. Insofar as the manipulation of the medium enters into the behavioral manifestation of our relationship to our own being, it is part of our existence. For example, John Lee Clark, a protactile essayist and poet, writes about being granted access to the face of an interlocutor (Poetry Magazine, 2019):
Here, you can touch my face. Thank you, no.
No, it’s fine. Really.
Nah. I just— I want you to.
Well, I want to tell them, what you are offering for my inspection is just a skin-covered skull.
The face—a locus of dense intersubjective signaling for the sighted—is, at best, peripheral for Clark. This has to do not with the face, per se, but with the parameters of intelligibility that organize his life. Clark goes on to recall a time when a friend showed him a “prized possession of his, an egg-shaped sculpture. I could feel its eyebrows, nose, and mouth,” Clark writes, “but they conveyed nothing. For my sighted friend, it has an exquisite expression of serenity. ‘Peace,’ it’s called.” Sharing a moment of appreciation for a work of art is one way to establish intersubjective coordination. “Face-to-face” contact is another way. The reason why both attempts flopped is that the face only has intersubjective affordances if you are operating from within a sighted mode of existence. Put another way: You have to be sighted to think a face, or a sculpture of one, would be a good thing to share. According to Granda and Nuccio (2018), this kind of intersubjective failure is due not to some sort of mishap in a process of intention attribution, but to the fact that the things faces do, don’t count as signs in “contact space.”
*This article focuses largely on protactile people’s theories of their own experience as articulated in published works including essays, poems, and pedagogical materials. However, I also draw on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Seattle DeafBlind community during the period of time when the protactile movement took root and then spread across the country and one year of ethnographic fieldwork among protactile people at Gallaudet in 2016 and 2017. Explicit analyses of protactile interaction, language-use, and language structure can be found in Edwards (2014, 2015, 2017) and Edwards and Brentari (2020, 2021).*
Before going any further, it is important to emphasize that “contact space” is a theoretical construct meant to capture culturally and historically specific parameters of intelligibility in protactile contexts. If you have never been where protactile people are and you have no plans of going there, then you have never been in contact space, and you never will be. However, you have been in some other intersubjective medium (we are all in something!), which, odds are, has not been theorized, because it is taken for granted (it is part of the operative world without being part of the perceptual world). Protactile theorists are uniquely positioned to objectify the medium and to draw our attention to its existential significance because, due to radical changes in their relationship with their environment, they cannot take it for granted. In each ethnographic context, the medium of intersubjectivity must be drawn out and theorized on its own terms. While the method for doing so will vary, a good place to start is to ask: What are we in when we’re together?
Being in contact space
After more than a decade at the center of the protactile movement, Granda and Nuccio (2018) distilled what they had learned into a set of seven “protactile principles.” The principles apply broadly and are presented as guidelines—not just for communication, but for a “way of life.” In the first paragraph of the document, they explain:
Protactile philosophy has grown out of the realization that DeafBlind people’s intuitions about tactile communication are stronger than the intuitions sighted people have. This realization has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we work with interpreters, and more generally, the way we live. We call this way of life and the principles and practices that shape it, “protactile,” [or “PT”]. Protactile has been growing slowly in our community and as that has happened, we have developed a framework for sharing that knowledge.
The protactile way of life is a natural consequence of uncovering what has always been there—an intuition DeafBlind people have for tactile communication. The principles are guidelines for making that intuition manifest in behavior.
*In Kockelman’s terms: protactile behaviors are signs of “tactile intuition.” The intuition is the object of the sign. A protactile behavior, performed routinely, would have a protactile role as its interpretant, and the two are related by way of effectiveness and appropriateness, so that, “the object of a sign is that to which all appropriate and effective interpretants of that sign correspondingly relate” (Kockelman, 2006: 22). The problem with sighted behaviors for protactile people is that, prior to the protactile movement, they were the only appropriate option, and yet, those behaviors were ineffective because DeafBlind people had no intuition for them. Kockelman calls this “strain” (Kockelman, 2006: 39).*
Granda and Nuccio explain that carving out a space for this requires political framings and institutional authority:
We did not invent PT like a person would “invent” cued speech or some “interpreting technique.” We pointed out to DeafBlind people that their intuitions were more right than they realized, and we encouraged that in them. We tried to give them permission as the Director and the Education Coordinator of DBSC [DeafBlind Service Center]. Then we named things that we and other DeafBlind people were doing and created a political discourse so that people had a way of talking about it and fighting for it. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 3)
The manifestation of tactile intuition in behavior required nothing short of a social movement (Edwards, 2014) because sighted intuitions tend to reproduce existing social structures, which reinforce sighted intuitions. For DeafBlind people in sighted environments, that loop is broken. Elliot, a DeafBlind person who had recently immersed himself in protactile environments when I interviewed him in 2016, reflected on the character of that experience. He explained that he does not experience his own deafblindness. “It’s not like I see black areas in my visual field or something,” he said. “I don’t see that area at all and I am not aware of it.” And yet, “deafblindness” becomes explicit in its effects: running into people, tripping over things, etc.
*Here, the object of collision-as-sign is “deafblindness,” whereas the object of locomotionas-sign is “tactile intuition.”*
Every time something like that happened, he would infer the presence of things in his environment, and he would try to calculate—based on that limited input—when and where they might appear next. But as a protactile person looking back on that experience, he realized that inference and calculation are no substitute for life.
*Non-propositional semiosis is displaced by, and substituted for, propositional semiosis, whichturns life into a representation of itself.*
Protactile principles start with what is intuitive to you, not what is appropriate for them. As intuitions are acted on, some subset of resulting behaviors is eventually deemed appropriate and ratified by the collective. Once sighted restrictions on touch have been relaxed and this process can freely unfold, the environment starts throwing out messages that can be elaborated as actions. There is no intervening process of inference or calculation. This obviousness and automaticity are characteristic of “perceiving affordances.” It isn’t hard to figure out what to do next, because as Gibson says, “The postbox ‘invites’ the mailing of a letter, the handle ‘wants to be grasped,’ things ‘tell us what to do with them’ (Gibson, 2015: 138). After a decade of uncovering a world that speaks to protactile people, Granda and Nuccio (2018) began to theorize its parameters of intelligibility as “Protactile Principles.” The first principle, on which all others depend, is stated as follows:
Any time space is used, make sure it is contact space, not air space. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 4)
For purposes of communication and interaction, contact space is defined as the space on the surface of the interlocutor’s body together with their proprioceptive grasp of their position relative to that space (see Edwards and Brentari, 2020, 2021). In order to activate contact space—either for the production of linguistic signs or for providing conversational feedback (similar to nodding, grimacing, and so on)—the body of one’s interlocutor must be touched. This principle is complemented by another, which guides intersubjective behaviors such as pointing, referring, and depicting:
Take a protactile perspective; this means working together to co-create signs that are easy to feel and also describing things in ways that reflect protactile experience. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 9)
This additional principle extends “contact space” out into the environment so that the intersubjective or “shared” world and our means of representing that world align.
*In Kockelman’s (2006a) terms, this extension of contact space ensures that the “residential whole” and the “representational whole” are indeed, two different slices of the same thing.*
Air space is inadmissible for both, because for protactile people, it lacks affordances for communicating in and about the world. While vibratory and olfactory features can be important signs that another person is present, the best way to be sure is touch. That is why in nearly every interaction I have witnessed between DeafBlind protactile teachers and inexperienced, sighted students, the following series of events will unfold: the student, deep in thought, forgets to maintain tactile contact—their hand slips off the leg of their teacher and drifts away into air space. Immediately, the teacher responds by reminding them: “If you aren’t touching me, you aren’t here.” This is hard for the sighted student to internalize, since he can see he is there with his teacher, but it is possible for him to, over time, become habituated to the fact that protactile practices require total absorption in contact space. From there, (whether you can see or not) the regions of the world that spoke to you before are muffled, frozen in place, or gone, and a new landscape, full of chatter, comes alive.
As we move through the world, reflexively oriented to our own being, we do so in a medium. We can be visual or protactile people. We are sea creatures or land animals. The medium itself can define us.
The medium of intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity requires (potential) engagement between two subjectivities in an environment. For example, repair, “a self-righting mechanism usable wherever troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding are encountered” (Sidnell, 2015: 178), requires the ability to detect trouble. In instances of “repair”—a ubiquitous feature of intersubjective engagement—we receive a trouble-sign and then do our human version of reversal, plus lateral deflection, plus course correction. But if you take away the medium, the whole process short circuits. For protactile people, that medium is contact space. For example, if a protactile person is talking to you, and your hand goes limp on their leg, trouble is detected. If a protactile person is talking to you and your eyes glaze over, trouble will not be detected. Eye glaze in contact space is like a spark in water—it extinguishes itself before anything can come of it. This is emphasized repeatedly by Granda and Nuccio. Under Principle 1d: “Emphasis and Emotion,” they write:
If your hand goes limp on the leg of the person you are talking to, that expresses the feeling of being tired or disinterested like a yawn does for sighted people. If someone is talking to you about something scary, you can grip their legs to express heightened attention […] [Either one] is fine, but whichever you choose, be sure to use contact space, not air space. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 6)
Express your feelings however you like but be sure to do it in contact space. This same point is repeated for a list of other behaviors, such as direction-giving, referent tracking, description, demonstration, depiction, and backchanneling. Each one includes examples of how the behavior should be carried out (in contact space) and how it should not (in air space). For example, they explain:
Suppose you are giving directions to someone in the same place where you are communicating, for example, they are a visitor in your home and they want to know where the kitchen is. You start by finding a physical thing nearby that will not move, such as a table, a railing, or a door. That will function as a landmark for the starting place. Once the listener has touched the starting place, explain where to go by describing additional landmarks on the body of the listener in relation to the starting place. (Granda and Nuccio, 2018: 10)
Landmarks in the environment are anchored in contact space, just as reference itself is. Nothing outside of the medium. The protactile principles, therefore, are not just a list of resources for achieving intersubjectivity (though they are this). They are necessary components for constructing what Granda and Nuccio call a “way of life.” What turns the list into a life is the medium.
*A curious fact should be noted here: nearly all anthropological theories of intersubjectivity come in lists.
How landmarks find us
In 2010, I accompanied a DeafBlind person, who I call Helen, on a trip to the transit tunnels in downtown Seattle with her “orientation and mobility” instructor, “Marcus.” Marcus is a hearing, sighted speaker of ASL who provides training to DeafBlind people, designed to orient them in urban environments. He focuses specifically on urban transit systems needed to travel to and from work. On this particular morning, after Helen and Marcus boarded the bus on the way to the transit tunnel, Helen asked Marcus about the route. Marcus responded, “This bus goes down Eastlake, past REI, into downtown and then into the tunnel.” The bus passes by many locations, but Marcus mentions only one road, the name of one business, one area, “downtown,” and the destination for the trip, which is the transit tunnel. For me, as a sighted person who is familiar with Seattle, this description is adequate because it distinguishes a limited number of feasible routes from one place to another. The city is not perfectly grid-like because it is built around several bodies of water. These bodies of water force traffic through several bottleneck bridges. From Greenlake to downtown, there are two highly feasible options—Interstate 5 or Eastlake. Eastlake crosses underneath I-5, and the two form an “X” when viewed from above on a map. They diverge as you enter the downtown area. At that point of divergence, REI appears as a salient visual landmark, which can distinguish one possible path from the other. For Helen, however, the meaning of the REI landmark is diminished.
On an entirely separate occasion, I was riding a bus along this very same route in the opposite direction (northbound), when I noticed a DeafBlind person I knew coming aboard. I sat next to him and we struck up a conversation. He asked me where I was going, I told him, and then we moved on to other topics. At some point, I stopped paying attention to where I was. Just before I would have missed my stop, he interrupted our conversation and told me I better get my bag because my stop was coming. I thanked him and asked him how he knew. He said that he sometimes gets off at that stop (the DeafBlind Service Center used to be located there), and he knew that just before you have to get off, there are characteristic motions of the bus, which he had sensitized himself to. In both the interaction between Helen and Marcus, and in this interaction, an attempt at shared understanding, oriented to a landmark, unfolded in a medium. In the first instance, rays of sunlight bounced off luminous surfaces. The effect of that was ambient light. By virtue of that light, the landmark was visible.
*See Gibson ([1979] 2015: 41–46).*
In the second instance, a gravitational field brought the bus’s wheels in contact with the ground and the bus rider in contact with the bus. Within that gravitational field, a particular bus motion (felt as a shift in proprioceptive orientation) became a sign of the landmark. In both cases, there are landmarks in the environment that have affordances for direction giving. The first landmark throws out signals that can be detected in ambient light (there is no use in pointing out visual landmarks in the dark), and the second releases signals to be detected in a gravitational field (the bus signals would have vanished in outer space). My interlocutor acted on the latter possibility and, in doing so, rendered an intersubjective medium operative. Landmarks may throw out signals, but without a shared medium, the signals have no way of getting to us.
Intersubjective language
Within an intersubjective medium, language can function as a system of prompts for directing attention in particular ways.
*See also Hanks (1996: 147–149).*
There is no better example of this than “deictics” (Bühler, [1934] 2001; Diessel, 1999; Evans et al., 2018; Hanks, 1990). For example, Yucatec Maya encodes a three-way distinction between referents based on whether they are tactually, visually, or audibly accessible (Hanks, 2009: 14). Jahai, a language spoken in Malaysia, makes distinctions based on elevation, such as “superjacent vs. subjacent,” that is, located above the speech situation, as in “overhead, uphill, or upstream” versus located below the speech situation, as in “underneath, downhill, or downstream” (Burenhult, 2003 cited in Evans et al., 2018: 129). Each of these categories primes receptivity in the addressee in a different way. That variable priming function is, according to Bühler, the most fundamental, defining feature of deictics:
[deictic words] are expedient ways to guide the partners. The partner is called by them, and his gaze, more generally, his searching perceptual activity, his readiness for sensory reception is referred by the deictic words to clues, gesture-like clues and their equivalents, which improve and supplement his orientation among the details of the situation. That is the function of the deictic words in verbal contact, if one insists upon reducing this function to a single general formula. (Bühler, [1934] 2001: 121)
Deictics, then, are a key resource, which can be drawn on by speakers and addressees to build up intersubjective access to and knowledge about a shared world. In reverse—going from the world to language—deictics function as repositories of routinized forms of interaction with others and with the environment (Hanks, 2009: 22). Where elevation functions as an organizing dimension of life, differences in elevation can become orienting features of the environment. Features that are routinely referred to can be encoded in the language as a set of choices for how to expediently ready the partner for their “searching perceptual activity.” In this manner, the linguistic system comes to anticipate the world it has emerged from and offers helpful clues to navigate within it. This process yields linguistic resources, which help us keep “track of what others know and how their knowledge can be related to the knowledge of others.” Some linguists refer to these resources as “intersubjective grammar” (Evans et al., 2018: 121).
In the Architecture of Intersubjectivity, Ragnar Rommetveit theorizes the operable environment by way of coordinates, defined along temporal, spatial, and social dimensions (Rommetveit, 1976: 94). Within a set of coordinates, first-person and secondperson pronouns, that is, I and You “constitute the two poles of potential states of intersubjectivity” (Rommetveit, 1976: 94). Rommetveit says that while it may seem like the person speaking has control of the intersubjective space, “under normal conditions, based upon a reciprocally endorsed and spontaneously fulfilled contract of complementarity, Encoding is tacitly assumed to involve anticipatory decoding. It is taken for granted that speech is continuously listener oriented” (Rommetveit, 1976: 96). Ultimately, he argues that “intersubjectivity [must] be taken for granted in order to be achieved. It is based on mutual faith in a shared social world” (Rommetveit, 1976: 96). The meanings of utterances and the shared knowledge of the participants are drawn on and fixed by way of “meta-contracts” or “a shared frame of reference for making sense of what is said” (Rommetveit, 1976: 104).
There are some things Rommetveit does not address. The most glaring of these is: How do certain things, and not others, come to be taken for granted? Within an intersubjective medium, the world is already intelligible to us (i.e. it is taken for granted) by virtue of our existence. Existence unfolds in a medium, seized upon for its intersubjective affordances. You and I, therefore, do not take up relational positions in Cartesian space, we are beings who exist in a “meaningful environment” (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 12–38).
*Gibson says: “The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of ecological reality […] does. If what we perceived were the entities of physics and mathematics, meanings would have to be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the entities of environmental science, their meanings can be discovered” (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 28). This perspective aligns with Uexküll, who, as Brentari (2013: 12) explains, thinks that “sense-qualities are possible only on the basis of determinate transcendental forms which are more particular and content-related than the Kantian intuitions of space and time. These concrete forms of perceptual experience are classified by the Estonian biologist [as signs].”*
Languages—and particularly deictic systems—are useful not because they constitute relational coordinates for you and I to inhabit, but because they come to anticipate the features of the environment that are meaningful to us. Edwards and Brentari (2021) offer a glimpse into how this anticipatory capacity begins to develop in grammar. At the earliest stages of protactile language emergence, conventionalized backchanneling cues were co-opted by emergent grammatical systems, taking on a range of divergent, linguistic functions, all of which were rooted in intersubjective attention modulation. While not the focus of this article, taken together with the present argument, this suggests that the way the environment speaks to us affects how we speak to one another.
*Centering the medium of intersubjectivity also helps clarify the difference between “tactile sign languages” and tactile language. There is a convention among researchers studying communication and language-use in DeafBlind communities in the USA and beyond. Any signed language can be modified with the term “tactile”, as in “tactile [name of sign language]” (Willoughby, 2018). Prior to the protactile movement, the language available to DeafBlind people in the USA was tactile ASL or “TASL” (Collins and Petronio, 1998; Petronio and Dively, 2006). To perceive ASL, a DeafBlind addressee placed their hand(s) on the hand(s) of the signer. Practices like this have also been documented for Japanese Sign Language (Bono et al., 2018), Auslan (Iwasaki et al., 2022), and Swedish Sign Language (Mesch, 2013), among others. From within contact space (broadly construed), TASL feels like grasping at straws (Clark and Nuccio, 2020). In Nuccio’s words: “Trying to chase down ASL signs is hard work, and when we have to use ASL, communicating and learning are much harder than they should be” (Clark and Nuccio, 2020: 1–2). When articulation is performed on the body of the addressee, communication is “grounded” and “intuitive,” insofar as both parties exist in contact space. TASL and protactile language both require touch to be produced and perceived, but only protactile language is already-operable in contact space. This suggests that the “modality” of a language is not determined in relation to the channels used to transmit it but rather in relation to the medium of intersubjectivity.*
Maybe, then, to achieve intersubjectivity via language-use, we don’t need contracts, rules, or coordinates, and we don’t have to have faith. Maybe all we need to do is submerge ourselves in the medium and wait for a sign.
*Learning to be protactile involves shifting your expectations about what, in your environment,might constitute a sign. DeafBlind people who are new to protactile environments sometimes seek out stimuli that can be mapped onto objects that were once intelligible elsewhere. For example, after entering a room where a community event is taking place, a person might worry, “How will I know how many people are here, and who they are, without an interpreter to tell me?” They can address that problem by straining to use whatever vision they have left, and some people do that. Others, move around the room asking people explicitly, “Who are you?” “Who are you?” Until they have identified everyone. But what protactile theorists encourage people to do instead is ask: “What signs are already present in this environment, and how can I make them operable for me? When people make that shift, they notice new things like how much the floor is vibrating, for example. If it is vibrating a lot, that might be a sign that there are many people present. Or maybe they notice that each person has a unique scent that can be used to identify them. When I say that “all you have to do is submerge yourself and wait for a sign,” I mean that one makes a decision to stop trying to reassemble the signs that were there before and, instead, set out with others to find new ways of interpreting affordances, within new parameters of intelligibility. In protactile environments, the commitment to stick around and learn to interpret affordances as others do is what opens the door to “contact space.” You only pick up on these patterns, though, if you have accepted that the parameters of intelligibility in this new environment will be different, and you wait for signs to surface that you would have otherwise passed by.*
Conclusion
In this article, I have contributed to anthropological understandings of intersubjectivity by interpreting protactile theory through the lens of biosemiotics, ecological psychology, and existential phenomenology. I have argued that the medium of intersubjectivity sets the parameters of intelligibility for communication, interaction, and existence. This argument raises questions of broad anthropological concern. For example, in the introduction to this article, I recalled a sociological argument opposing economic theories of rational action on intersubjective grounds. In the present historical moment, economic debates about why people act and what decisions they are likely to make are being transformed by new communication infrastructures that collect constant streams of data on decisionmaking processes in real-time (Seaver, 2017). Economists don’t really need to posit an abstract, rational actor, in theory, since they (and many others) have staggering quantities of data at their disposal that they can use to generate probabilistic predictions about how people will behave (including what they will buy and who they will vote for, among other things) by predicting who they probably are and what they are probably feeling (Brubaker, 2020; Cheney-Lippold, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Adopting a theory of intersubjectivity that foregrounds the medium, we might ask: How are the parameters of intelligibility being re-structured for the people whose intersubjective engagements unfold within these infrastructures, for whom are those changes operative, and how are they affecting social structures and processes, such as the way democracies function, how financial markets behave, or how work and education are structured? Without a theory of intersubjectivity that begins with the medium, we might miss opportunities to understand how intersubjectivity itself can vary as existential and environmental conditions shift.
Am I saying that we should attend more to “multimodality” or the “affordances of technology”? If I were, none of this would be new. Linguistic anthropologists already know that shared understandings can be achieved in different modalities, from language to gesture to gaze (e.g. Goodwin, 1990; Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987; Streeck et al., 2011) to complex analytic objects such as “a recipient’s brief look away” or “a fidgeting hand” (Sidnell, 2014: 366–368). We also know that meaning in interaction can be structured by forms of technological mediation (e.g. Johnson and Jones, 2021; Kunreuther, 2010; Nakassis, 2019; Smalls, 2018). Given this, some have emphasized the importance of taking a multi-modal approach to the analysis of interaction and language-use.
Starting with communicative action, sensory and technological channels can function for the analyst as a means of grouping media and modalities into higher-level categories (cf. Kockelman, 2010). For example, gesture and cinema are both “visual” forms of communication, while spoken language is “verbal,” and language and gesture are both expressed through visual channels in the context of sign language communication (e.g. Cooperider et al., 2021; Dudis, 2004; Fenlon et al., 2019; Goldin-Meadow and Brentari, 2017; Hodge and Johnston, 2014; Liddell, 2003; Nakassis, 2019; Okrent, 2002; Shaw, 2019). This tends to frame modality as different ways of doing the same thing or as different resources that can be used; for example, the idea that joint attention can be accomplished via visual means for Deaf parent–child dyads or it can be accomplished via visual and auditory means for Hearing parent–child dyads. The intersubjective action that is achieved is the same, but it is achieved in different modalities.
*Disability studies, which intersects in many ways with anthropology, has a long and rich tradition of thinking about bodily difference. This paper, however, focuses on the unique contribution of the protactile theory, which does not draw on disability frameworks for reasons that might be best captured by John Lee Clark’s (2021) essay, “Against Access” (https://audio. mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html).*
Starting with the intersubjective medium, rather than a particular action or accomplishment, turns the analysis around. Instead of asking which sensory channels are used to accomplish an action, one asks: In what medium are these actions already intelligible? This focuses attention not on what people are doing in communicating, but on the always-shifting existential and environmental conditions that give rise to the parameters of intelligibility in a particular ethnographic context.
AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank the protactile theorists who have invited her into their conversations, including the feedback she received on this manuscript during John Lee Clark’s wildly popular Protactile Theory seminar. The author also thanks Ben Lee, Greg Urban, and the members of the Semiotics Group at the Center for Transcultural Studies, especially Paul Kockelman, Kamala Russell, Bill Hanks, and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and feedback.
Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
FundingThe authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for ethnographic aspects of this research was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant Nos. 8110 and 9146). Funding for linguistic aspects of this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1651100). Support for the writing phase was provided by the Saint Louis University Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Fund.
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