Becoming a Knower: Fabricating Knowing Through Coaction

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a step back from considering expertise as a social phenomenon. One should investigate how people become knowers before assigning expertise to a person’s actions. Using a temporal-sensitive systemic ethnography, a case study shows how undergraduate students form a social system out of necessity as they fabricate knowledge around an empty wording like ‘conscious living’. Tracing the engagement with students and tutor to recursive moments of coaction, I argue that, through the subtleties of bodily movements, people incorporate the actions of others as they become knowers. Knowing for a person solidifies as they imbue concepts, terms, facts, etc. with their own understanding. While coaction refers to the interlocking of actions in a specific moment, the fabrication of knowledge resides in temporally distributed moments of coaction where students deliberately incorporate and build on past occurrences in a present moment. In so doing, people cannot be separated from their systemic embedding. Linking coaction with systemic cognition, people fabricate knowledge within wider systemic structures. Within these boundaries, knowers come to fabricate knowledge for themselves and a wider system. Thus, knowing must be seen as an active, embodied, dialogical and multiscalar activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Languaging
• coaction
• systemic cognition
• embodiment

Acknowledgments

This paper benefited greatly from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Stephen Cowley for his very valuable comments and for the insightful conversations about this paper. I also would like to thank the two editors of this special issue, Sarah Bro Trasmundi and Charlie Lassiter, for their patience and kindness and for making this special issue happen. My special thanks go to Charlie Lassiter for his invaluable feedback and help on this paper. A heartfelt thanks go to the research participants who consented to this study. Without them, this paper could not have been written.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The written language bias emerges from Linell’s (1982) observation that ‘[o]ur conception of linguistic behavior is biased by a tendency to treat processes, activities, and conditions on them in terms of object-like, static, autonomous and permanent structures, i.e. as if they shared such properties with written characters, words, texts, pictures and images’ (1). Pointing towards the bias of treating ‘natural’ language in terms of its written forms – that is, as ‘thing’-like entities – greatly excludes how human beings bring about language. Consequently, rather than acknowledging the heterogeneous character of language, linguists (and beyond) assign fixed and stable meanings to lexical items, view language as homogeneous systems, and think about language use in terms of acting with stable structures (Linell 2019). Hence, traditional linguistics dismiss how people, through gaze, gestures and other bodily dynamics, engage in linguistic activity together (see Cowley 2010; Thibault 2011). Thus, the written language bias as a notion reminds scholars not to view language as an autonomous system and stable entity in itself but as something that emerges, first and foremost, from human bodily engagement with other people and things in and with the world.

2. As my concern broadly is with how the actions of others change personhood in the long run, I find much value in Wegner and Sparrow’s (2007) notion of coaction as it grants attention to how people incorporate the actions of others in their actions. This leads to blurring the lines of authorship in one’s actions. For me, there is, therefore, a difference between ‘joint action’ and ‘coaction’. While ‘joint action’ might presuppose ‘coaction’, in my view, ‘joint action’ alludes to how people together achieve a common goal paired with we-intentions (Fiebich and Gallagher 2013). The notion, thus, focuses on the activity in itself and what happens between people but not on how people build on the actions of others and how it induces a change in a person.

3. Emphasizing that language is embodied activity before it is symbolic, Cowley defines wordings as ‘readily repeated aspects of vocalizations that, for speakers of a community, carry historically derived information’ (Cowley 2011, 186). Wordings differ from ‘words’ as the notion highlights that in languaging, people phenomenologically draw on stabilized patterns of articulatory gestures rather than on abstract objects in a language system (as highlighted in the Written Language Bias) (Cowley and Harvey 2016). The notion of wording fits the multiscalar character of languaging: bodily dynamics occurring on fast bodily time scales mesh with the slower sociocultural scales of a community. A person’s past experience of engaging in a specific linguistic community enables them to react to and act upon specific patterns of articulatory movements.

4. I am certain that many of us have stumbled upon an old textbook or folder from their past student days, as I have the other day. Looking at my old notes immediately evoked instances of talking and discussing in class with teachers and co-students. It brought about past moments of engaging with others, now reified in my own writing.

5. Systemic cognition (Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau 2013) highlights the role of a person – as a human cognitive agent (Giere 2004) – in wider systems. Giving due weight to how a person is embedded in and brings forth systemic structures, the view calls attention to a person’s actions within a system (e.g. in a work environment or a sports team). I will present the view in more detail later.

6. The term ‘fabricating’ emerged during vivid discussions with Stephen Cowley on a first draft of the manuscript, who rightly saw that the students under investigation do not display expertise but engage in moments of constructing knowledge for themselves and others.

7. From a biological view, Maturana uses ‘consensual’ to describe how organisms interacting with each other do so as ‘they are exposed to similar sensory stimuli in the same physical environment’ (Kravchenko 2007, 652). In doing so, Maturana emphasizes the role of the immediate environment on an organism’s actions.

8. The pico-scale comprises bodily dynamics that last from milliseconds to tenths of seconds, the microscale of bodily dynamics traces ‘saying and doings’ that can be measured from tenths of seconds to seconds’ and, finally, the enchro-scale enables one to trace situated social events that can be measured in seconds, minutes, etc. (Thibault 2011, 2015–216).

9. Järviletho (1998) introduces the theory of organism-environment system to counteract a ‘two systems’ view that clearly separates the organism from the environment. In asking, when drinking from a cup of coffee, whether the cup belongs to the organism or the environment, Järviletho visualizes how organism and environment are inseparable. Thus, behavior belongs to the organism-environment system and cannot be treated as a mediator between two systems. An organism-environment system is the result of behavior. In emphasizing the inseparability of organism and environment, he stresses that ‘all parts of the system are active in relation to the result’ (330) – observable behavior. In this view, pressing a button of an elevator, for example, does not depend on responding to a perceived stimuli, thus cannot only be attributed to an individual mind but to a person engaging with their immediate environment and acting within wider supra-structural cultural constraints. Knowing when to press the button, what it does and its functions emerges not only from past engagement with others but also from one’s cultural embedding. Mental activity, therefore, cannot be located in an organism but must be attributed to the whole system. The theory informs systemic cognition as it allows for acknowledging how non-local constraints (e.g. culture, autobiographical events, etc.) affect human cognitive action.

10. Built on constructivist ideas, this form of instruction leads with the premise ‘to construct knowledge by solving problems’ (Blumenfeld et al. 2000, 150). With the focus on ‘real-world problems’, students are given a driving question around a particular topic. Students learn and develop new ideas in groups and ‘represent knowledge around the driving question’ (Blumenfeld et al. 2000).

11. The group consists of four people, while Paula, Gaby and Vincent formed the core group. Anna, as the fourth member, only irregularly joined the group meetings. The course took place twice a week, while the second day was allocated for group work. The group only managed to meet in class (although attempts were made to meet outside of class), and only twice during the 7 weeks of filming has the whole group met. Hence, the theme of ‘absence’ and ‘irregularity’ greatly determined the group’s work. The four people struggled to form a group as each person wanted to work alone and had different interests. Paula’s interest was in cooking, Gaby had an interest in Korean pop music, Vincent in creating YouTube videos and Anna in baking bread. They faced the challenge of combining all four themes.

12. See detailed transcript in appendix.

13. The recordings were made with several cameras in the classroom. All students were in class together to discuss their projects. Hence, sound overlaps of all the group discussions and the talk of each group is, therefore, partly unintelligible. Instances that were impossible to transcribe, I marked as ((unintelligible)).

14. For Cowley and Harvey (2016), wordings are nonce events ‘that are perceived and construed in relation to a person’s sociocultural experience’ (58). They stress that speakers cannot produce the same sounds, but rather they produce an acoustic pattern that is treated as ‘the same’. In this logic, everything we acoustically produce is a nonce event. Only when we phenomenological act on what we hear can these actions have a normative effect.

15. Please find a more detailed transcript in the appendix.

16. Kendon (2004) distinguishes two gesture families of the open hand: Open Hand Supine (‘palm up’) and Open Hand Prone (palm down). These gestures take on a pragmatic function in conversations. For Kendon, the former (palm up) relates to contexts of negating or interrupting while the latter to contexts of serving or offering. As seen in the current instance, none of the two aspects are happening in this moment of coordination. Instead, the gestures take over a cognitive function: they allow the students to spatio-temporally anchor past events together as they establish a project and create knowledge for themselves.

17. This is contrary to traditional linguistic approaches which relegate gestures and other bodily dynamics to paralinguistic cues and, thus, not essential to linguistics. In adopting the languaging perspective, this ethnography treats such paralinguistic cues as essential and being on the same level of importance as the analysis has shown.

Additional information

Funding

Participating students in this study were given a 3% extra credit for this class and, additionally, received an extra $20 for their participation. The amount was supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants No. 31571141 and No. 31628010] in collaboration with South China Normal University. The research has been approved as exempt by the Research Compliance Human Studies Program at the American host university where the data collection was conducted. My Ph.D. research was funded by the Department of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark. The writing of this article took place during my work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Postdoc Network Brandenburg, which granted me an individual grant for my research.

Notes on contributors

Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger

Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger is a postdoctoral fellow at the European University of Viadrina (Frankfurt (Oder), Germany). She received her PhD at the Department of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark in 2021. Her research interests include distributed language/languaging, multiscalar temporal cognition, systemic views on cognition and dialogical approaches to language. She is particularly interested in how human engagement with a direct Other determines human perception, action and thinking. Interested in human lived experience and temporality, she investigates how people are able to perceive and act upon what is not directly present and how this contributes to human becoming. On the grounds of that, she developed the idea of human presencing in her PhD. She received an individual grant from the Postdoc Network Brandenburg and currently investigates human engagement with digital voice assistants in their home environments.