Dialogical Practices for Imagined Lines: Listening, Interference, & (Non)straight

Michael O’Connor, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

 

Lines are problematic. Some initially think of only straight lines. Others want to distinguish between a line, an edge or a trace. When it comes to imagined lines, the difficulty is intensified as it appears there is nothing to look at. This does not mean imaginary lines, as imagined lines, are not not-there; they appear as fictive motion, remembered motion, cognitive mappings or spatial relations in the mind’s eye. The “imagined” of imagined lines refers to their location and, as described, imagined lines can have multiple variations, even when not visible. Imagined lines can entail not just imagining how a body can move or shapes of our mental architecture, but they also appear in how our language about language captures it as something physical (e.g., reciting lines of poetry). Imagined lines have to be constructed through the body.

In this essay, imagined lines produce an entanglement of concepts where parts but not wholes line up. The entanglement of imagined lines and the different modes they present themselves, provides the body a material to be in the present with—and opportunity to sense withness^[1] as a dialogical practice. John Shotter says that as humans, our nature is indeterminate and unfinished; “what is of importance to us exists not only in relation to what else is around it and us but also in our sense that there is always a something more beyond it” (2015, 232). Imagined lines can give us the opportunity to sense this unfinished movement that continues between bodies and words.

We are used to correlating a body in motion with imagined lines when we simply see a bird swoop through the sky and map the path of its flight. A body is inseparable from the shapes and traces that it simultaneously creates. In dance, the body is the material of motion. These shapes and traces can also be called linear designs and linear patterns.^[2] Linear designs are perceivable as the sculptural aspects of the body, but linear patterns are imagined. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone describes linear patterns as the traces of gestures or pathways the body makes in space while moving. Linear patterns therefore bring forth an imagined line. Imagined lines appear in the interplay between thoughts and body, visually placed out there or mentally imagined within. When connecting two points in space, the lines we visually imagine are what Tim Ingold would call ghost lines (2007, 47). However, the imagined lines that are made through movement and do not necessarily connect anything visual in our environment are felt in our body and in the embodied language we use. Ingold admits the taxonomy of lines cannot match the lines that seem “to wiggle free of any classification” despite living in a world of profound linearity (50). The problem with imagined lines is that without the ability to see them, they possibly resist coming to an agreement between people. There are, however, ways we can espouse the materiality of an imagined line through metaphors, embodied language, and features of the body. The following essay uses imagined lines as a tool to link bodily processes with concepts of listening, interference and (non)straight, by looking at the embodied language of stretching, straight and spatial proximity.

A Reading Practice: The initial setup

Two texts by John Shotter were used in this practice: James, Dewey, and Mead: on what must come before all our inquiries and Wittgenstein and his Philosophy of First-Time Events. Four participants were asked to read one text and another four were asked to read the second text. The participants were put in pairs so that one person in each pair had read a different article. The four pairs were asked to speak through the texts, while engaging in a thirty-minute dialogue, knowing that they had each read a different text. The term through^[3] was used so that participants did not feel they had to speak about the texts, which is at the core of Shotter’s argument. The conversations happened immediately after reading the texts. As the essays focus on “what comes before all inquiries” and “first-time events,” the participants were given an opportunity to embody the situatedness that Shotter brings to the reader’s attention. The conversations were video recorded on Zoom. Each person also audio recorded their side of the conversation. A group video and audio were fabricated out of these dialogues. Explorations of the editing processes and works are incorporated into this writing.^[4]

Stretching

intendō, present infinitive intendere, perfect active intendī, supine intentum

Borrowing the Latin intendō, defined as “to point out” or “be directed toward,” the French language has etymologically developed the word in different ways. One usage evolved towards the verb entendre: “to hear” and “to understand.” Another derivation can be found in the verb tendre, “to reach or stretch.” We can find the latter term developed in ballet terminology, tendu: “tight or outstretched.” In ballet, a tendu is the physical act of stretching the foot out. This action is mirrored in the Latin etymology, where “to hear” – entendre in French – is also to stretch, to aim, to direct. In this example, we see the developments in the French language correlate stretching the body and the act of hearing. Both acts utilize imagined lines, but slightly differently. The imagined line that comes from the body moving is a remembered trace by a viewer or a felt line from within by the dancer. With hearing and understanding, in other words a type of listening,^[5] the pointing out or stretching is fictive motion or a mental spatial relation.

A person reaching for something with their hand or the foot of a dancer stretching out on the ground both make a linear design with their body. They also draw a linear pattern or trace in space, which, as explained, is imagined. It is these imagined lines and the actions of the body that allow us to find meaning within the imagined lines of verbal language. Sheets-Johnstone points out that our human ability is to “think analogically along the lines of our bodies and, in turn, to think in movement” (2009, 294). According to her, this is how our kinetic corporeal experience brought meaning to our verbal language. The act of listening and the act of extending the body both create imagined lines because they both are movements that are directed towards something.

Let us compare the physical logic of the lines of the body to propose a conceptual logic for the imagined lines of listening. In a tendu, the dancer's foot draws a linear trace on the ground as it extends the leg forward, flexing in the hip—a fold in the hip joint. Within the realm of the human body, to draw a line is to also make a fold, literally, as a dual action.

Instruction 1:

Reach your arm in one direction and notice a fold also materializes in your body as a co-action depending on which direction your arm reaches.

If we apply the same causal relationship to the subject of listening, then the reaching out of listening is to trace an imagined line and also to make a fold. The imagined line cast in listening could be focus, or the desire to comprehend. The act of listening reaches out to sound qualities and reaches out to content. In the case of listening, does the fold happen the same as it does with the hip?

Gilles Deleuze points out that different materials fold differently (1992, 34). Why does the hip fold? It is a response, an entanglement with the design of the leg. In drawing a trace on the ground, a linear pattern with the foot, the linear design of the leg is changed in the hip socket as the head of the femur rotates backward. The leg moves from under the dancer, where it stands on itself securely, to stretching out. It creates a fold—causing a need to restabilize. The adjusted linear design of the body is a response to the linear trace. The dancer does not think to crease or fold in the hip socket. The dancer thinks to stretch out from the toes at the distal end. The fold and the backward action in the joint are a response in time. Distal and proximal points move in relation.

The material of the trace and the design are the same—the body. To question where the fold is made in listening, first, we must look at the materiality of listening as Deleuze has pointed out. In listening, the trace from reaching out is our ear's capacity to receive sound and our mind’s to understand the meaning. Accordingly, we are looking for a change in the linear design, or in other words the fold, as its response. The fold could be the inter-mingling of lines of thought that arrives milliseconds after the cast listening—it is the return, backward and down. The fold as a response in listening is the “knowing how to go forward,” the withness to use Shotter’s term. We often think of listening as only this backward motion, as the “that which comes to me.” However, knowing that the first step of listening is to “tendu,” to stretch out, the backward action that creates the fold is the second part, when we use the function of the corporeal ballet tendu as a line to think along.

We could say that the linear trace in listening is to hear and attend to the sounds, and the fold is to bring those sounds into an understanding-with. Additionally, a fold consequently makes a type of container. The cast line is not just something with an edge anymore, but by returning and making a fold it now has the capacity to contain. Informed by the body, listening as a reaching out creates not only an imagined line but also an imagined fold.

Editing Practice 1: Responsive Listening as Dialogical Interference

Thinking of listening as an imagined line developed from the video Unfinished dialogical responses. This video work was built from the recordings of duet conversations that were part of the reading practice. The collection of the four dialogues was then combined into one. For each video conversation, the camera captures the non-speaker listening. By omitting the speaker, what is captured are bodies contained in folded listening. Though imagined lines may not at first come to mind when viewing the video, they are being cast by the listener. The listener’s capacity to attend is directed out towards the other, and the conceptual linear fold produces visible responses in their bodily movements. We see them contained in the speakers’ words—caught in the two-step imagined fold.

Watch Unfinished dialogical responses: https://www.youtube.com/embed/5XtqOGYImhA

Dialogical Interference

The bodily motions one makes while listening as a response to a speaker dialogically interfere, often without words. Inhabiting the situatedness of our words and the bodily expressions of another is what Mikhail Bahktin termed dialogical. Explaining the dialogic, Richard Sennett says: “Though no shared agreements may be reached, through the process of exchange people may become more aware of their own views and expand their understanding of another” (2012, 19). Bad listeners don’t attend “to those small phrases, facial gestures or silences which open up a discussion” (20). Dialogical listening, therefore, is not only the act of attending to those very components of utterances and gestures, but also contains the understanding that those components are responsive entanglements amidst imagined lines. A good listener becomes entangled in the imagined lines and folds of exchange. Sennett reminds us that empathy is part of dialogical conversations. Sometimes the meaning or understanding is not in the content of the words but also in the felt sense of the tone of voice, the sound—not just the musical note, but the way it is played. Shotter reminds us that Wittgenstein called on us to pay attention to:

tones of voice, bodily movements and gestures, facial expressions, eye directions and so on – and thus place our everyday utterances back into the circumstances of our everyday lives then, rather than bewildering us, the detailed relations between particularities within the complexity can arouse quite specific responses in us. (2007, 4)

Through shifts of body weight, bones moving backward and rotating in sockets, a tendu shares its dialogical agreements and exchanges with its corporeal self. Linear designs and linear patterns of the moving body share these dialogical agreements. In listening, the exchanges happen with imagined lines found in the arguments the person is laying out—the intermingling of different lines of thought. In the case of this practice, lines are found in the thought from the author, lines of thought from the speakers, and one’s own inner thoughts that come from the lines and folds of listening. In the same way physical objects move toward targets leaving imagined lines behind (a train carrying people or a ball aiming for a goal), ideas and concepts could be looked at with the same imagined traces. Sweetser proposes:

When speaker and hearer understand each other, they are thus in a (partially) shared mental state, which is metaphorically mapped onto a shared location. When they continue to understand each other through a shifting sequence of mental states, they metaphorically travel from location to location together, remaining co-located throughout the shared journey. (1992, 716–717)

    Do you follow me?

                                                                            Your train of thought may go in different directions than mine.

        Before you reach any conclusions, let’s keep going.

To be present in the dialogical, what Shotter calls withness, is to let a type of interference incite responses. Interference is something getting in the way of a path or trajectory. A movement between lines. Interference happens also when affect attunement volleys between people allowing for openings in the dialogue. Ammaniti and Ferrari state: “Facial mirroring illustrates that there are interactions organized by ongoing regulations and experiences of mutually attuned interactions, which are fundamental to the developing sense of the ‘we’” (2013, 4). The “spontaneous, relationally responsive, living, bodily activity” Shotter describes is a realm for activity between people that, “only has the character it has in relation to yours, that is, in relation to your response to it” (2007, 3). Taking these notions into consideration, it is possible to look at interference as a response from being within the words of another, contained in the folds of listening.

Interference as not straight

Implicit in the traces that are made when reaching out to listen or made with a bodily limb is the characteristic of straightness. The words used in the definition of entendre andtendu noted earlier— pointing, tight and outstretched—evoke a straight quality. According to conceptual metaphor theory, the way we use straight and not straight as concepts in our society comes from our body and physical interactions in our environment. Alan Cienki outlines how the image schema of STRAIGHT is developed in our language through bodily actions. An image schema is a structural understanding the mind uses to make meaning that is developed from repeated behaviors in our environment (Lakoff 1987, 459–461; Johnson 1987, 19–21). In his essay “STRAIGHT: An image schema and its metaphorical extensions” (1998), Cienki provides evidence of how visual and perceptual experiences of straight extend into abstract language domains.

reg - ‘to move in a straight line’ Latin regere, ‘to rule, govern’, German Reich, ‘empire’, Recht ‘law’

Compared to intendō, where a straight line is implicit and concealed, in the Latin reg we see an overt etymological link to a straight line and through the linguistic developments relating to those straight lines—rule(r), govern, law. Straight can mean to put something in order (Cienki 1998, 110) and logical thought is straight (122). “The qualities of straightness, control, being up, strong, and firm, therefore commonly group together in our experience given how our bodies function, with a contrasting grouping being bent/curved, lack of control, down, weak, and soft” (111). A few examples of primary metaphors that are structured from the STRAIGHT image schema are:

UNCOMPLICATED ACTION IS MOTION ALONG A STRAIGHT PATH (123).

LOGICAL THOUGHT IS STRAIGHT (122).

TO SPEAK IN A MAXIMALLY INFORMATIIVE WAY IS TO TRANSFER WORDS ALONG A STRAIGHT PATH (116).

UNINTERRUPTED SEQUENCE IS STRAIGHT (119)

Cienki gives us examples of how the STRAIGHT image schema leads to everyday language expressions and conceptual understandings. We view straight as uncomplicated as in He went straight home or She gave a straightforward answer. We see complicated action as not straight, as inThey’re talking in circles. Straight is correct: Let me set the record straight. Wrong is therefore not straight. We also view logical and intelligent thought as going along a straight path. And people who speak in ways that sound illogical or insane are said to have warped, bent, or contorted thoughts. These concepts are understood conceptually because of our understanding of them physically.

Let us look at the physical actions of being not straight. For some things to make a change, a bending is required. For example, when the direction of a tree growing straight up is blocked, it bends. We see this logic appear in non-material realms; a plot twist, aturn of events, or when saying something is dishonest is to bend the truth. As an UNINTERRUPTED SEQUENCE IS STRAIGHT, a linear comprehension is normally associated with speaking and understanding. As we are accustomed to linear comprehension, interference can be a practice that forces the listener to come to terms with their anticipated imagined trajectory of logical thought. Complicated, illogical, and bent conversations are an attempt to resist straightness. Interference forces the listener to understand diffractively^[6] —meaning to let words and images be in two places at the same time—entangled, cut, re-worked and threaded through one another.^[7] Words can exist in the context they were originally spoken in and in a context within which they are now placed. We could say that interference during dialogues makes straight things not straight.

Straight is examined here to show how the straight line is strongly constructed in our language and thinking, even implicitly when hidden inside listening, understanding and the way we follow someone’s words, like this very writing. However, we can listen or think in non-straight ways. That is not the binary opposite of straight but results in diffractive openings of possible differences. Cienki writes that there is one way to be straight and many ways to be not straight (142). The multiplicities of not straight are what I am associating with diffraction. As Donna Haraway describes, “Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear” (1992, 300). In this way, diffraction is seen as the results of many differences made through interference. Through embodied language and image schemas, we can find common ground between Cienki’s not-straight and Haraway’s nuanced idea of interference and diffraction in that they both produce multiplicities of possible differences.

Editing Practice 2: Listening for the (non)straight

In Entangled Thoughts/Entangled Texts, eight audio recordings of one-sided dialogues were cut and rearranged together in an editing program. The aim was to interrupt the sequences so that thoughts were neither maximally informative, uncomplicated nor logical. To make sure all speech is taken out of context throughout the entire track, the original conversation partners' words never follow each other. Instead, reasons to determine which audio fragment would come next were: key phrases and specific words that repeated, a causal relationship like question and answer, or when a speaker started with conjunctions like ‘and’ or ‘but’ that could be used as transitions. Another tactic that was used was to sense the imagined lines stemming from the mental imagery evoked through a speaker’s words. The subjects of the sentences were different, but the movement and imagery that came to my mind while I listened had similar imagined shapes or trajectories within another sentence. These then were arranged in a sequence, so the imagined lines that were pictured and felt were what brought the statements into proximity. Sensing the lines in the speaker’s use of imagery and the cutting of straight linear comprehension between the speakers were two ways to use imagined lines as a method for practicing interference.

Instruction 2:

Feel the imagined lines from the mental imagery evoked in the following utterances from five different speakers:

individual pullings on a center

different forces working at the same time

from a root center that is interconnected

a thinning out… a piece of elastic being pulled from different directions

in terms of perspective, where you’re standing, where your feet are entangled

Imagined lines in speech

Imagined lines are not only found in the etymology of words or metaphorical image schemas, but as seen above, can also appear in the mental imagery that a speaker is creating. During one of the conversations in Entangled Thoughts/Entangled Texts, one speaker questions the difference between perspective and orientation, saying;

Perspective is the act of looking at, and orientation is the act of looking towards… Perspective is a separation that bridges a gap through viewing. Orientation is more like—already linking the thing. Like there is a suction between the two; there is already a way there, you don’t have to bridge anything.

In listening to this speaker’s words, I see imagined lines enacted from the prepositions that each have different qualities. The word “at” as a line, to the speaker’s understanding, functions as a bridge and, at its definition, creates distance. The distance is felt like how a bridge operates on the premise of two points needing connection. If these points were actually visible, for Ingold, they would create a ghost line. Since the images stay mentally constructed through language, they are instead imagined lines from fictive motion and spatial relation in the mind’s eye. As the speaker describes “towards,” the self is situated and therefore is already linked. They use the term suction as if there is perhaps some mutuality. The imagined line that is conjured is a path already felt, known, and agreed upon. Though the speaker is describing the act of looking in both phrases, the sense of the whole body appears important within the “orientating-towards” explanation. Their use of “suction” and “way there” does not describe vision but is of the body.

Instruction 3:

Imagine a drawing showing the lines conjured for “at” and “towards.” Using pen and paper, actually draw these imagined lines into physical forms through the traces of your hand.

“At” and “towards” become different types of imagined lines. Qualities of these imagined lines drawn from “at” and “towards” become associated with the concept they’re linked to; at-perspective, towards-orientation. Accordingly, we could say perspective is a longer, sharper, thinner line with an intention as those are qualities associated with the line of at. Orientation is softer, easier, and known because the line of towards has proximity. While listening to the speaker compare the concepts, imagined lines felt in my body and visualized in my mind allow me to understand their proposition. Sheets-Johnstone has called this the imaginative consciousness of movement (2007) whereby movement’s imagined linear qualities are how we come to understand metaphoric concepts. My own felt response makes me think perspective is visual and orientation is of the body. Looking from a perspective, we focus and our eyesight is narrower; vision is formed by light. Light as a line also has properties; we might say longer, sharper, and thinner, with already preconceived “intents” or rules.^[8] With orientation, I think of my body and I know that my skin senses do not go as far as my sight. My skin is more proximally stimulated, soft and familiar than that which is only seen in the distance. Through this comparison, I can make associations between “at” with sight and “towards” with the body. Through experience, I can proclaim that the lines light creates belong to my vision, and the lines my body makes belong to movement. The conceptual and metaphoric understandings of linear quality are attributed to having a body and experience with moving it (Sheets-Johnstone 2007, 120).

Therefore, I suggest when “perspective at” or “orientated towards” are spoken, different imagined lines are evoked based on properties of light and motion, or vision and body. Cienki comes to a similar acknowledgment through linguistic metaphor: Truth is seen as light. Truth is also straight. Our perception that light travels in a straight path is why we find coherence between truth, straight and light (1998, 121). When a concept is associated with certain physical properties, those properties become mapped onto the concept. These prepositions take on linear qualities depending on the usage and concepts they are linked to: an at line associated with light is thin and straight, and a toward line associated with the body is bent, thicker and shorter. As stated by Sheets-Johnstone in the beginning of this essay, it is a fundamental human ability to think along the lines of the body when thinking metaphorically. Using the body and its senses is the very point between body and language Sheets-Johnstone claims we do metaphorically and analogically to create meaning. Metaphors based on lines are ubiquitous in our language.

Listen to Entangled Thoughts/Entangled Texts: https://soundcloud.com/mike-oconnor-649946845/entangled-thoughtsentangled-texts

Relationally responsive, dialogically structured understandings

Imagined lines have their very presence in this work of writing. The felt entanglements of Shotter’s lines of thoughts, metaphoric language, the parallel lines of etymological development, the hidden image schemas that bend concepts— they resist when tried to be drawn into a straight linear argument. Lines easily become entangled. Sometimes linearity means controlled, understandable, and in order, and other times lines are curved, unfinished, and bent. The lines spoken about here are sometimes straight when perceived but become non-straight when imagined and vice versa. Imagined lines find tension in dialogical thoughts. The visual lines I imagine when I think of interference oppose the cohesive linear aspect argumentation intends to weave. My thoughts burst out in different directions as imagined traces, but the words typed here strut across the document evenly spaced and horizontally stuck. Caught between the words that leave traces in my mind and the words that make it onto this page is my body.

This sentence has a perceived straight linear form—different from sentences spoken or heard.

Imagined lines come from traced lines we once made with our body. Etymologically, we could understand listening as a type of straightness, but perhaps it benefits us to think of it as an imagined line that is bent and folded. In the same way the linear trace of an outstretched foot or arm appears to be straight, but is also made by the arching of bone joints, folding and unfolding tissues and muscles in distal areas, an imagined line made of dialogical listening is also bent and folded. To respond with interference, the body must stay flexible, less rigid and able to change.

These works propose using interference as a strategy to bring distant and multimodal lines into proximity whereby new effects through entangled reading, listening, and speaking are produced. “Entanglements are not unities. They do not erase differences; on the contrary, entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings. One move – cutting together-apart” (Barad 2014, 176). In this way, the audio and video works in Barad’s notion of cutting together/apart. Where the video subtracts the dialogues, creating conversations without words, the audio disrupts and entangles the dialogues resulting in words taken out of context. Interference can be seen at different stages of the practice, and within the editing process. In the reading practice, providing dialogue partners with different articles subjects the conversations to interruptions and entangled thoughts. Using the choices of Zoom to subtract the speaker’s main thoughts brings absence into focus— yet upon closer analysis, it discreetly shows the speakers’ words caught by the listener. In both projects, bringing all eight speakers together fabricates a group conversation that did not happen. The participants are cut into proximity—together their words and images highlight responsive differences.

This entanglement of imagined lines is what this writing brings into proximity. Imagined lines move in ways that are hard to pin down. These artworks and writing do not attempt to solve the behavior of imagined lines, but to bring to light their often unnoticed presence and the corporeal movement their invisibility orchestrates. In summary, what has been thought through and taken from these works is as follows: Imagined lines allow us to embody the proposals from Shotter, and, by becoming aware of their presence, allow the possibility of withness. In order to achieve withness, we cannot keep going in straight directions. When listening is seen as an imagined line, it is an active intermingling and intertwining element. It has in its construct a fold—a bend. It is a bodily orientating towards and not an intellectual straight line at. It appears as a line of silence but is seen in the relationally responsive bodily actions of the listener. The Dialogic is the product of interfered, folded and non-straight listening. Lines of thoughts are not reflected back on the listener but are diffracted lines from the entanglement of past thoughts, present readings, speakers' utterances, and the traces of listener's tendu-ing.

^[1] Shotter defines withness-thinking as “a way of thinking in which we permit, allow, or invite the unfolding time-contours of our experiences to shape our expressive activities” (Shotter 2016b, 107).

^[2] Linear design and linear pattern are terms from Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011, 115). In this essay, I substitute linear pattern sometimes for the term linear trace to bring attention to the aspect of movement involved with this term.

^[3] Sweetser proposes that thinking through something means you have come to a conclusion, while thinking something over means to still be in a process (1992, 716). She explains that these linguistic positions come from the physical act of having walked through a place and therefore one is not in that place anymore. However, in line with that same logic that physical acts influence mental linguistic meanings, through does not only mean one has reached the other side, but also that one has been touched by what one has experienced. For example, going over a country by an airplane is not as experiential as going through it by car. It is this sense that I am using through, and not the sense that one has come to any conclusions, but in fact is still in the process of experiencing.

^[4] See Editing Practice 1 and 2.

^[5] A distinction to note is that entendre in modern French usage means to passively hear and écouter means to actively listen. However, as seen in the etymological developments, entendre originally means to point or direct outwards, which is not passive but in fact is active. Therefore, under this viewpoint entendre can also resemble the act of listening, if listening is considered the active form of hearing and placing attention.

^[6] In quantum physics, interference and diffraction are related. Richard Feynman has stated: “no one has ever been able to define the difference between interference and diffraction satisfactorily. It is just a question of usage, and there is no specific, important physical difference between them” (Feynman, 1964).

^[7] Karen Barad uses diffraction as a metaphor for a methodology when reading and writing. Barad explains this proposal in the essay “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come” (2010).

^[8] Considering intents and rules for lines of light, we could pull from different sources. Firstly, light as a force in physics travels in a straight line. Secondly, in drawing, the invention of linear perspective brings all the lines in a picture to the same horizon focal point from the viewer’s vision. Additionally, in language we say someone has a piercing glare, exemplified by cartoon characters where beams of light stretch out of a superhero’s eyes.