I was hoping we might talk here about the above paper, which is available as a free download at the link. It's hard to tell that the whole paper is there since there are only miniscule arrows at the sides of the pages to take you from page to page. Also want to quote some passages from the paper for consideration in our extended discussion of an ontology that can encompass consciousness and mind. This paper turns our attention again to the subject of language as it functions in human history and life.
The empirical data thus gives us two crucial pieces of information: firstly, human newborns seemingly have inherent embodied capabilities for social interaction; secondly, through these embodied interactions with others, infants begin to build a repertoire of increasingly complex cognitive capacities. Of course, such neonatal abilities do not give an unequivocal answer as to when a foetus or neonate becomes a bona fide human self. Yet at whatever time one wishes to claim a neonate develops awareness of self, which is typically taken to emerge with basic bodily self-awareness (Gallagher 2005, pp. 72 –85), one must also acknowledge that such awareness is simultaneously a modulatory normative process and, therefore, a social activity. The claim (as we will see in more depth shortly) is not that bodily (self-)understanding emerges within a social world, but that it is concurrently a kind of social (self-)understanding of one’s own presence (and modulatory capacity) that belongs to the normative experiential world of biosociality. In other words, if one accepts the view that awareness of self emerges with basic bodily self-awareness, and combines this view with the empirically supported view that neonatal bodily activity is socially imbued, then one’s fledgling awareness of self should also be considered socially imbued.
Unlike Kyselo (2014), who claims that human selfhood emerges as our self-identifying biological bodies engage in social interactions, such that selfhood is "an achievement[…] between individuals" (p. 8), my view is that selfhood is not ‘achieved’ on the back of a nascent bodily identity, but is present with the earliest indicators of individuation. Any bodily identity is a biosocial self, in that human bodily processes always occur within the experiential space of normative biosociality. This means that the organic body is simultaneously a social body as far as the human self is concerned. There is no longer ambiguity over its ontological status: the body’s organic persistence is concurrently an expression of lived sociality. The point of the neonatal considerations is that whereas Maturana and others contend that human occupation of a unique experiential domain rests on language (in the traditional sense of verbal language), I am claiming that such experience is present from the earliest moments of life through our nascent capacity for bodily-social expression. As far as humans are concerned, our biological bodies are socially saturated from the first moments of life through to our very last moments, meaning that ‘bodily’ and ‘social’ processes should both be considered ‘bodily-social’, orbiosocial processes.
In terms of interaction dynamics, the idea is that bodily activity is permeated by social norms (or social ‘ways of being’) and these social norms then feed back into individuals’ canalized range of potential bodily actions which will, in turn, generate and modulate further norms which will then instantiate further feedback (and so on). We are distinct from ‘mere animals’ because we inhabit an experiential world of social normativity that is in no way separate from our organismic bodies, but is instantiated and maintained by them. This normativity, which is literally embodied across collectives of individuals and to which we are inherently disposed, serves as a constant store of historically accumulated cognitive possibilities that are permanently in a state of dynamic modulation by intersubjective activity. We are human because we engage with this normativity, living through a biosocial world in which embodiment and ensocialment are unified. . . ."
To understand this claim in more detail, consider that any bodily activity will potentially modulate the normative possibilities of how that activity is executed, for oneself and for
others. This relies on the idea that just as the expressive embodiment of two individuals plays a participatory role in generating a dyadic relational domain that the individuals enact together, society-wide collectives of (embodied) individuals can be seen as playing participatory roles in generating society-wide relational domains that are enacted across a society. So the perceived bodily activity of any given individual is normatively laden so as to be a modulator of the various relational domains that we participate in (and emancipate ourselves from). To move one’s body is thus not merely to perturb the physical world; it is also a communicatory perturbation of the socio-normative world that we enact.
Bodies, then, have more than a merely ‘mediatory’ role in the individuation of a socially enacted self: they are the tangible disclosure of the socially enacted world. As we will come to see, relevant to this disclosure is the idea that human bodies are inscribed throughout life with social meanings that they cannot but express, such that they are inevitably implicated in the self-other generation of relational processes that constitute the individuation of the human self. Humans are thus biosocial entities because we occupy a relational domain of experience in which our bodies are (socio-)normatively laden, so as to generate a holistic network of norms through which behavioural and cognitive dynamics are looped.
Running with this idea, one could claim that our bodies are close to being ‘linguistic’ in the sense employed by Cuffari et al. (2014), in that we are bodily sensitive to the social world in such a way that intersubjective activity is habitually rendered intelligible. Indeed, my view of human bodily existence being biosocial chimes happily with Cuffari et al.’s (2014) claim that our "world-engagement is an integrated whole of embodied interpreting[…] embedded in horizons of social normativity"(p. 1115). However, care needs to be taken in not underselling the fundamental nature of the biosociality that I am proposing. It is important that embodiment and ensocialment are not separable à la Kyselo’s theory of selfhood. Unlike Kyselo’s enactive approach, in which bodily and social processes ultimately seem to occupy separate spheres of activity that must be reconciled with one another, the biosocial approach to existence rejects the possibility of fundamental separation for bodily and social
processes. Having a normatively laden body is not something that we gradually develop as we grow into a sociocultural world; rather, by occupying a relational domain of biosociality, it is something that we ontologically are. Our biological bodies and social environment belong to one and the same experiential space.
With this in mind, it is no longer enough to say that bodily existence involves a living body in a social world; instead, it is being a living social body. Human corporeality is always more than mere flesh: the body is ensconced in social purpose so that it simply is a social entity. The mistake that Kyselo (2014) rightly wished to avoid (see section 2) – that social or bodily processes are thought of as merely contextual – is now fundamentally bypassed. Without the body’s entanglement with sociality, the meaning that an agent generates through its environmental activity would be little different from the basic self-perpetuation of sucrose-seeking bacteria or sunflowers (cf. Thompson 2007, pp.98 –107; Varela 1991, pp.85 –87).
It is the imbrication of sociality and a lived body that distinguishes human ontological make-up from that of non-human animals, plants and basic autopoietic structures. For a
body to be just a body in the strictly physical sense is for it to be extracted from the collectively mediated social norms that are constitutive of humanity’s lifeworld (Ikäheimo 2009, p.36). And without the body, there is no relational medium in which the generation and modulation of social norms can take place. . . ."
