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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Simplex selves, functional synergies, and selving: Languaging in a complex world

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Abstract In this paper, I present selves as simplex structures (Berthoz, 2012/2009) that construct themselves and are constructed in and through the embodied socio-cognitive dynamics of ‘selving’. Selves are, following Vygotsky (1986 : 59–73; see also Ratner, 2017), individuations and crystallisations of the concrete social relations in which the self has participated along its life-trajectory. Selving arises and takes place in dialogically coordinated languaging activity. In complex social and cultural worlds, simplex selves-in-languaging constitute and stabilise their own and others' experience and living bodies in and through norm saturated languaging. Thus, while human subjectivity is foundational, a self emerges from an ontogenetic history –it is a bodily-based time-extended process that generates a sense of its felt agency. Given the agency of self, a person experiences an ‘inner’ life—a virtual internal ecology—that generates affective relations and dialogical resonances with its ‘objects’. The latter come to be co-articulated together with how the self contributes to their becoming. Far from being ‘representational’, mental objects derive from a microgenetic constructive process that arises under both endophasic and exophasic controlling factors. The self is thus empowered to enact an embodied and enduring anima that is intrinsic to a living human being: it appears in articulatory acts and, dramatically, when people engage with each other by means of what is generically called ‘languaging’. In illustration, I analyse an example of observable first-order languaging activity in which action, perception, and expression constitute a unitary field within which parties undertake selving. Having presented the example, I conclude by showing that, during first-order languaging, wilful acts can be traced to the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy in which selves participate. The analysis shows how, on at least some occasions, selving is a matter of configuring personal meaning and adapting and integrating it to second-order cultural resources in ways that are amenable to a description of languaging activity in terms of a three-part structure.