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p.27 Drawing on the work of the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1974), one can understand consciousness as arising in the communicative interaction between human bodies.
[JLJ - not sure I agree here. One can be conscious and totally alone. Consciousness is the interaction between the self and the environment, whatever that happens to be. Practically, one cannot function alone for significant periods of time. But when one is alone, one does not have to invent imaginary characters in order to be conscious. One can read, or watch videos, or sleep, or dream, or study concepts, or even play games such as solitaire or chess.]
p.27 consciousness... is a social process in which meaning emerges in the social act of gesture-response, where the gesture can never be separated from the response.
p.28 Human interaction forms and is formed by the social at the same time. To put this another way, local interaction forms and is formed by global patterns at the same time.
p.29 In their communicative interacting and power relating, humans are always making choices between one action and another... In other words, human action is always evaluative, sometimes consciously and at other times unconsciously.
p.30 Complex responsive processes of relating are, therefore, simultaneously processes of communicative interaction, power relating and ideological evaluation in which local individual selves/identities and the global patterns of the social emerge at the same time, each forming and being formed by the other at the same time.
p.31 meaning does not lie in the tools but in the gestures-responses made with the tools.
p.35 It is important to note how Mead used the term 'object' in a social sense as a 'tendency to act' rather than as a concept or a thing, which are meanings appropriate to physical objects... We seem to have a strong tendency to reify patterns of acting and this makes it important to emphasize that Mead's social object is not a thing.
p.35 To summarize, social objects are generalized tendencies, common to large numbers of people, to act in similar ways in similar situations. These generalized tendencies to act are iterated in each living present as rather repetitive, habitual patterns of action. However, in their continual iteration, these general tendencies to act are normally particularized in the specific situation and the specific present in which the actors find themselves... The possibility of transformation, that is, further evolution, of the social object arises in this particularizing because of the potential for spontaneity to generate variety in human action and the capacity of nonlinear interaction to amplify consequent small differences in their particularization. While physical objects are to be found in nature, social objects can only be experienced in their particularization in complex social acts in the living present. Social objects do not have any existence outside of such particularizing social acts.
p.35 Social objects as generalized tendencies to act in similar ways both enable and constrain the actors at the same time. Social objects are thus forms of social control reflected in figurations of power relations between people.
p.36 In all his formulations of human communicative interaction, Mead presented the same paradox. Gesture and response are inseparable phases of one social act in which meaningful patterns of interaction arise.
p.37 The global is the imaginatively created unity we perceive in our patterns of interaction - it is the generalization and the idealization as one phase of social object. The local is the particularizing of the general and the functionalizing of the idealization. However, these are phases of one social act and can never be separated. The general is only to be found in the experience of the particular - it has no existence outside of it.
p.44 The notions of social forces and social structures are easily reified so that we slip into the habit of regarding them as things with an independent existence outside of our interaction with each other, even following their own laws... However, on careful consideration it becomes clear that what we are referring to when we use these terms is nothing more than widespread enduring and repetitive patterns of interaction with each other that we call routines or habits. When we reify or anthropomorphize these routines and habits, we tend to think of them as external powers causing our interactions. The perspective of complex responsive processes avoids such anthropomorphizing and reifying, and does not view routines and habits as causal powers with regard to our interactions. Instead, we come to see that global routines and habits emerge in our local interactions and continue to be sustained as they are iterated from present to present in those local interactions. Social forces, social structures, routines and habits can all be understood as generalizations that are particularized over and over again in each specific situation we find ourselves. In other words, they are social objects, generalized tendencies to act. Furthermore, these generalizations are often idealized and come to form the cult values we repeatedly have to functionalize in our interaction.
p.45 Power figurations emerge in the interaction between people and, like all other organizing themes, there is a strong tendency for them to become habitual, generalized and even idealized. From a complex responsive processes perspective one understands institutionalized instruments, or technologies, of power to be just such generalized/idealized/habitual figurations of power relations. They too are iterated and particularized in each present and it is in such particularization that they evolve. They are not to be found as things or forces outside of our experience of interaction but only in that experience.
p.98 To reiterate my own position, which is in contradiction to this mainstream line of thinking, I believe we need to account for both stability and change as arising from within the process of local interaction.
p.103 The gesture of inquiry, as it is made, is incomplete, unknown in its trajectory, but I believe more likely to be fresh, enlivening, not stuck.
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