Abstract
This paper begins to trace a conceptual progression from interaction as inherently meaningful to intersubjectivity, and from intersubjectivity as the co-presence of alter egos to intercorporeality. It is an exercise in cultural phenomenology insofar as ethnographic instances provide the concrete data for phenomenological reflection. In examining two instances in which the intercorporeal hinge between participants in an interaction is in the hands, and two in which this hinge is in the lips, I touch in varying degrees on elements of embodiment including language, gesture, touch, etiquette, alterity, spontaneity, body image, sonority, mimesis, and immediacy. The analysis supports the substantive conclusion that intersubjectivity is a concrete rather than an abstract relationship and that it is primary rather than a secondary achievement of isolated egos, as well as the methodological conclusion that cultural phenomenology is not bound by subjective idealism.
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Notes
In my vignettes visiting the hands and lips as intercorporeal hinges, I have used instances of dyadic interaction to reflect on intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. I do not intend thereby to minimize the importance of either individual subjectivity or collective intersubjectivity.
In this broader domain we must distinguish two meanings of subjectivity, both inadequate to our purpose. In reference to the state of being subject to sovereign power, the notion of subjectivity easily excludes experience; understood as a mental or psychological phenomenon, subjectivity privileges the isolated and sovereign cogito, or the “rational man” actor. In both instances, if it is introduced at all intersubjectivity is secondary and added on as a transaction between subjects. In this light it would be important to place the notions of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality in dialogue with Foucault, for whom subjectivity is taken in both senses simultaneously. Individual subjectivity is shared and hence becomes collective to the extent that it is formed under similar conditions for all subjects of a discursive regime. But this view does not necessarily account for interaction – collective subjectivity can still be (and under some conditions must be?) the sum of the subjectivities of isolated individuals.
The next sentence reads: “And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its ‘style’ is in our view to form a metaphor” (1964, p. 55). Note that this nonverbal landscape is explicitly a variant and not an analogue of speech; and that it has a style only in a metaphorical sense, a sense we project on it as intercorporeal beings.
Another approach linking intersubjectivity and intercorporeality at the intersection of philosophy and sociology is elaborated by Crossley (1996).
Husserl arrived at intersubjectivity by showing the impossibility of solipsism, and “…that one and the same world is common to us without being multiplied as many times as there are consciousnesses” (Ricoeur 1991, p. 235), freeing us to start with intersubjectivity in the first place.
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Csordas, T. Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality. Subjectivity 22, 110–121 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.5