Dear Mark, 

 

Let me just for academic purposes, note that the “we-relationship” is part of 
Schutz’ (1975 [1952]) critique of Husserl when he formulates as follows:

 

“As long as man is born from woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship 
will be the foundation for all other categories of human existence.” (p. 82; 
boldface added). 

 

Schutz wishes to bring the body back into the reflection, whereas Husserl’s 
position is more abstract:

 

“All communication, whether by so-called expressive movements, deictic 
gestures, or the use of visual or acoustic signs, already presupposes an 
external event in that common surrounding world which, according to Husserl, is 
not constituted except by communication.” (Schutz, 1975, at p. 72).

 

The bracketing abstracts from the body and immediacy (e.g., a supposed 
“feeling” or primary movement such as dance or music). These seeming 
immediacies can be reconstructed as symbolic media of communication (Luhmann, 
Parsons) using specific codes. Music, for example, is different from noise; 
dance different from spasm. The cultural intersubjectivity is primordial (from 
this perspective). 

 

It seems to me that this first abstraction is needed for defining information 
(H) first abstracted from a system of reference (such as biological processes 
or physical collisions). Systems of reference are needed for the measurement. 
Analogously, the body is needed for “making music together” (Schutz, 1951). 
However, the two steps have first to be distinguished, since “making music” is 
action that reorganizes possible structures. The window on the latter should 
not be obscured by focusing on the former. 

 

Best,

Loet

 

References:

 

·       Schutz, A. (1951). Making music together, Social Research, 18(1), 76-97.

·       Schutz, A. (1975). The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity. In 
I. Schutz (Ed.), Collected Papers III. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy 
(pp. 51-91). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

 

 

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ;  
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Honorary Professor,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of 
Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; 
Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing;

Visiting Professor,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; 

 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> 
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

 

From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Mark Johnson
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2016 11:43 PM
To: FIS Webinar
Subject: [Fis] _ Re: Response to Mark Johnson

 

Dear Maxine,

 

Thank you for your response. I’m grateful for the reference you gave to your 
work on music, which I will read.

 

I found it interesting that in responding to my question about “what do we do 
when we describe something”, you pointed to the phenomenological method. I 
think this amplifies my question rather than addresses it. It also raises 
further questions about ‘coherent scientific discourse’ (the really important 
thing here is ‘coherence’).

 

The attraction of ‘pointing at the method’ is that we can get coherence by 
indexing the stages of the method: first we do ‘bracketing’, etc. Everyone 
who’s studied Husserl, even (or particularly) at a basic level, can agree. As 
simple steps to go through it perhaps isn’t controversial – until we ask about 
what bracketing is, or the nature and locus of the structures of consciousness 
which are revealed, or whether bracketing is possible at all...

 

Husserl accepted that consciousness was intersubjective, but his understanding 
of the Other in intersubjectivity was restricted to what Eugene Fink describes 
as “Others as are present to me in person (gegenwärtig anwesenden Anderen), 
that is to Others who stand in my near-field, in my perceptual field” (Fink's 
commentary on Schutz's paper 'The problems of Transcendental intersubjectivity 
in Husserl') Fink goes on to say “his analysis limits itself to explicating 
this Other as being present in a body, as having a body and, to this extent, 
not differing much from cats and dogs. And if having a body should serve as a 
sufficient indication of a transcendental fellow-subject, then one must 
consequently conclude that cats and dogs are also transcendental subjects.” 
That then leads on to a lot of problems in comparing cats and dogs to humans, 
amongst which are the ways that descriptions are made.

 

Acts of description, and acts of phenomenological reduction, occur in a world 
of Others. The question is, What conception of this world-of-others do we have, 
and how do different conceptions affect our description? I think the question 
is about codification and abstraction. Phenomenological reduction is a codified 
method shared among academics. For each academic, it is a communication in the 
“world of contemporaries” – Schutz’s term for the intersubjective relations 
between people who are remote from each other but live at the same time. 
Academic papers, books and perhaps email lists are the general medium. But 
saying to somebody in a face-to-face situation “I feel really sad right now” is 
an intersubjective domain that Schutz calls a “pure we-relation”. 
(Incidentally, Realist philosophers have recently picked up on relational 
sociology and borrowed the term “we-relation” with quite a different meaning – 
see 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Relational-Subject-Pierpaolo-Donati-ebook/dp/B00Y37ZK9M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8
 
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Relational-Subject-Pierpaolo-Donati-ebook/dp/B00Y37ZK9M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456523972&sr=8-1&keywords=archer+and+donati>
 &qid=1456523972&sr=8-1&keywords=archer+and+donati)

 

The point is that descriptions are relational, and the kinds of relation depend 
on the intersubjective context. Interestingly, different kinds of description 
cross over different kinds of relation: to express a description codified in 
the “world of contemporaries” in a pure we-relation setting is a moment of 
didacticism (education is full of this!); to ask “how do you feel?” in a pure 
we-relation is a moment of empathy, or maybe therapy. In my experience asking 
academics to say “how do you feel” in the context of formal discourse, if a 
response is forthcoming at all, it is likely to be couched or masked in formal 
academic language which reveals little authenticity about feeling. Dance, 
however, like music, can make a kind of description as a pure we-relation 
(Schutz wrote about this in his paper “Making music together”). This relational 
nature of description is, I think, important when we think of science, 
discourse and academia. Darwin’s is an interesting example of descriptions 
within the context of many kinds of relation. Today’s world of online education 
also provides some interesting case-studies for exploring this.

 

I mention all this partly because my interest in information lies in the hope 
that we might find better ways of understanding and studying relations and 
ecologies. Understanding description is key to this. 

 

best wishes,

 

Mark

 

p.s. I think the link between dance/tango and information comes through the 
Latin root of 'conversation': con versare - to "turn together". I think Gordon 
Pask was the first to talk about this in his cybernetic "conversation theory"; 
his pupil Ranulph Glanville used to talk about a lot.

  <https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif> 

 

On 25 February 2016 at 06:33, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone <m...@uoregon.edu> wrote:

Response to Mark Johnson:

?What are the conditions within which a coherent scientific discourse can
 address the phenomenon of dance (or music)??


Studies that recognize the essentially dynamic nature of movement
can offer a "coherent scientific discourse" on movement, but not
on dance as a formed and performed art. One may well pursue a coherent
scientific discourse on non-art forms of dance (social dance, folk dance,
for example)in terms of kinesiology, psychology, and even physics--all
such studies being centered not directly on dance but on the movement
that makes dance possible and on the people who are moving.

As for music: May I refer you to a 2014 article of mine in the journal
Mind, Music, and Language (pp. 1-12). the article originated in a keynote
address at the first international conference on Emile Dalcroze, a musician.
The title of the article is "Dalcroze and Animate Life."

I suspect Maxine is right to point to Darwin's 'descriptive' process. So a
 sub-question is:

 "What do we do when we describe something?"

In phenomenology, we begin by "bracketing" all assumptions and beliefs, and,
in Husserl's words, turn "to the things themselves." In so doing (and in
the common way of specifying what one is doing), we are making the familiar
strange. We are thus not clouding our description with prejudices of any kind
but hewing to what is there, sensuously present in our experience.

I hope the above sketches are sufficient beginning answers your questions.

Cheers,
Maxine
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-- 

Dr. Mark William Johnson
Institute of Learning and Teaching

Faculty of Health and Life Sciences

University of Liverpool


Visiting Professor
Far Eastern Federal University, Russia


Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonm...@gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com 

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