Re-evoking absent people

What languaging implies for radical embodiment

Abstract

Re-evoking examines how languaging enacts human social intelligence. Turning from linguistic tradition, we reduce language to neither abstracta nor form. Rather, as human activity, languaging enables people to co-act as they direct attention within what Margolis (2010b; 2016) calls an enlanguaged world. Given their embodiment, people use languaging to evoke absent others in a flow of action, feeling, judgment, and attitudes. Although based on organism-environment coupling, languaging is also activity that re-evokes the absent. In an enlanguaged world, people use emplaced activity as part of practices, events, situations, artifacts, and so on. Hence, people reach beyond the body as they re-evoke the absent by languaging or, by definition, “activity in which wordings play a part.” As we suggest, absent people are evoked by othering. In common domains (e.g. a school), social habits give rise to dispositions during a history of co-acting that, later, can re-evoke absent others and past selves. Having begun with a literary example, we later turn to a detailed case study to show how a narrator brings feeling to languaging (in this case, frustration) as she re-evokes other people as they are for her. In conclusion, we suggest that radical embodiment needs to be extended to include how human practices link coupling with social intelligence as people channel what they do with the help of languaging.