Social Aesthetics and Plastic Flowers in Home-Making Processes

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Gestures, Intercorporeity, and the Fate of Phenomenology in

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Katharine Young
Gestures, Intercorporeity, and the

Fate of Phenomenology in Folklore
Culture apprentices the body to its style. Gestures are the visible and kinaesthetic
trace of that apprenticeship. They are specific to bodies, families, age grades, ethnic
groups, social orders, and historical moments. They are folklore. The gestures I
consider here are affiliated with talk. They conjure up in the gesture space in front
of the body the iconic and metaphoric objects that talk mentions. In a gesture,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “the intentional object is offered to the spectator
at the same time as the gesture itself ” ([1962] 1995:186). The gesturer’s intention-
ality colonizes the spectator’s, making it intersubjective: phenomenology’s founda-
tional perspective.
Difficult Intersubjectivity
folklorists have invoked phenomenology in support of embodied first-person

ethnographic descriptions of phenomena. The folklorist appears in such descriptions
as what Robert Heinlein calls a “Fair Witness,” who can attest at the perceptual level
only to what the fronts of objects look like, the backs being held to be inaccessible to
perception, and who can attest at the conceptual level only to the truth as she knows
it (1961). The Fair Witness is bound to her own perspective and omniscient within
it.1 This sort of pure subjectivity is offered as a corrective to the pure objectivity of
disembodied third-person ethnographic descriptions, which hold that objects have
absolute properties to which observers are supposed to be able to attest as if they
required no witness at all. The truth about objects is supposed to lie beyond the per-
ceiver’s idiosyncratic grasp of them.
For social scientists, the problem with either pure subjectivity or pure objectivity
is other people. Objectivity—making others objects—should not be folklore’s project.
Objectivity produces bodies like things, unproblematically intelligible from the out-
side to any perceiver. We embrace it in the hope of acquiring the clout of scientific
inquiry. But in sealing others up in their skins and alienating them from ourselves,
we misunderstand the peculiar difficulties of intersubjectivity as the requirement that
we perceive from elsewhere, from above or beyond the other, as if we could extract
Katharine Young is an independent scholar and occasional lecturer in folklore, anthropology,

and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley
Journal of American Folklore 124(492):55–87

Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
56 Journal of American Folklore 124 (2011)
ourselves from the world in which we are enmeshed with them. In this, surely, we
deceive ourselves. Objectivity is impossible because I am there.
The phenomenological move in folklore, as in the social sciences generally, has
been to counter objectivity by recentering the discipline on subjectivity. Perhaps
subjective accounts do make up for some of the distortions of objective accounts. But
subjectivity is not phenomenology’s gift to the social sciences: the word phenomeno-
logical is not a double for the word subjective. As a philosophy, phenomenology is no
more committed to subjectivity than to objectivity. It cannot, in consequence, legiti-
mize the move to subjectivity in folkloristics. In shifting from objectivity to subjectiv-
ity, folklorists have solved one problem and created another. The problem we have
solved is pretending to stand outside what we perceive. Descriptions, we now accede,
are always situated. But it is the problem we have created that concerns me here.
Having relinquished claims to objectivity, are we left with nothing but subjectivity?
If I give up the claim that the world exists independently of me, am I stuck with my
own particular subjective hold on it? Is the only experience to which I can have access
my own? If so, I cannot recount other people’s experiences but only my experience of
their account, my perception of their experience. All sense-making about other peo-
ple’s experience becomes speculative. Subjective accounts suffer from the solipsistic
illusion that I have access only to my own impressions. Subjectivity does not make
others subjects; it makes them my subject. I take on an arrogant subjectivity that acts
as if it were superior to theirs, as if it could encompass them. Subjectivity is impos-
sible because others are there, too. Objectivity makes objects important; subjectivity
makes us important. What we want to make important as folklorists, as social scien-
tists, is neither self nor object but other subjects. The move phenomenology could
legitimize is to a more foundational perspective than either objectivity or subjectivity,
the perspective Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “intersubjectivity” or, more tellingly,
“intercorporeity” ([1962] 1995:352, 355; 1968:140–41).2 This difficult intersubjectiv-
ity should be folklore’s project.
This is not to claim that either objectivity or subjectivity ought to be discounte-
nanced altogether in folkloristic theory and practice. Presenting objects as indepen-
dent of their observers, on the one hand, and, on the other, presenting oneself as the
observer of objects are critical, revealing, and respectable undertakings. But neither
the objecthood of the world nor the subjecthood of its perceivers is primary. What
is primary for social scientists is the intersubjectivity of the world’s inhabitants.
Phenomenology can theorize the intersubjective grounds of folklore, and folklore
can demonstrate this phenomenological intersubjectivity. I explore their mutual il-
lumination in gestures.
Gestures
Culture apprentices the body to its style. Gestures are the visible and kinaesthetic
trace of that apprenticeship. They are specific to bodies, families, age grades, ethnic
groups, social orders, and historical epochs. They are folklore. A movement, lifted
away from its practical engagement with objects in the world, presents itself as the
object of attention, delineates the object to which it alludes, and at the same time
Young, Gestures, Intercorporeity, and Phenomenology 57
alludes to the gesturer’s speech or thought. I grasp all three allusions because I am a
culturally educated body. It is not that I decipher the thought or the object from the
gesture. With the gesture, I inhabit the world of meanings in which it and I inhere.
The perceptible stylistic differences between, say, the way Swedes gesture and the way
Italians do are differences in how gesturers inhabit their worlds of meaning, differ-
ences that constitute kindred gesturers as folk groups. Here, I take gestures in par-
ticular as emblematic of folkloristics in general and folkloristics in particular as em-
blematic of the social sciences in general.
The gestures I consider are the iconic and metaphoric gestures affiliated with speak-
ing, sometimes called spontaneous or conversational gestures. These gestures conjure
up in the gesture space in front of the body objects that talk mentions.
Iconics represent concrete acts and objects (see Iconic Gestures in Figure 1). Though
they have elements of mimesis, iconics are not fully mimetic, and although individu-
als and groups produce recognizable repertoires, they are not fully conventional either.
I might, for example, affiliate the Red Queen’s remark, “Off with his head,” with an
iconic gesture for cutting off a head, in which the edge of my hand represents the blade
of an ax and an abrupt downward motion the act of chopping.
Metaphorics represent abstract ideas as if they were concrete acts and objects (see
Metaphoric Gestures in Figure 1). Speech, for instance, can be metaphorized as a
substance conducted from one body to another along a conduit between them. I
might affiliate the same throat-cutting gesture with the remark to my extremely loud
children, “Pipe down,” where the gesture now represents stopping talking metaphor-
ically as cutting the speech stream off at the throat. All metaphorics are at root icon-
ic for the source domain of the metaphor (Young 2002:59 n.; Lakoff and Johnson
1999:58).
Iconic and metaphoric gestures are two of the four types of affiliative gestures
David McNeill describes in Hand and Mind (1992). The other two are beats and
deictic gestures.
Beats are a special case of metaphoric gestures, which treat talk as if it were an
object, typically a stream, that gestures punctuate or choreograph (see Beats in Figure
1). I might, for instance, affiliate the remark that a speech was very choppy with a
gesture of chopping the speech stream up into chunks with the edge of my hand.
Deictics point either to actual objects in the world, iconic objects in the gesture
space, or metaphorical objects in the gesture space, including aspects of talk as an
object (see Deictic Gestures I, II, and III in Figure 1). I might point, for instance, to
an actual knife in the world; I might point to a virtual knife in the gesture space; or
I might remind my noisy children of what I just said by pointing to the virtual knife
I just conjured up in the gesture space as a metaphoric for cutting them off.
McNeill calls these latter two types of deictics “abstract pointing,” by which he
means pointing at virtual objects (1992:18). It might be more apt to think of pointing
as a form of virtual reaching, in which the object is not grasped but, as it were, des-
ignated for grasping.
These affiliative gestures, which are language dependent and free form, contrast
with emblematic gestures, which are freestanding and fixed form. Emblems are not
affiliated with talk; they are forms of talk and can be substituted for words.
Figure 1. Motor Intentionality

INTENTIONAL ARC INTENTIONAL ARC
loops through body INTENTIONAL ARC loops through loops through
and world the body and the virtual world the body
Virtual Manipulation Manipulation of
Object Manipulation of Virtual Metaphorical Self
Manipulation of Objects Objects Virtual Objects Manipulation
DEICTIC DEICTIC DEICTIC

GESTURES I: GESTURES II: GESTURES III:
gestures that gestures that gestures that point
point to point to iconic to metaphoric
objects in objects in objects in gesture
world (virtual gesture space space (virtual
reach for (virtual reach for reach for
INSTRUMENTAL actual objects) virtual objects) metaphoric virtual SELF-
GESTURES: objects) TOUCHING
gestures that ICONIC GESTURES:
initiate movement GESTURES: METAPHORIC gestures that
into the world; gestures that GESTURES: extinguish
actions imitate objects gestures that movement into
or actions imitate abstract the world;
ideas as if they passions
were objects or
actions
BEATS: gestures
that manipulate
metaphoric
representations of
speech as if it were
an object
Emblems are arbitrary but conventional gestures whose meanings are mutually
agreed upon by their users (see Emblems in Figure 2). In contrast to iconic and meta-
phoric gestures, emblems do not necessarily look like what they mean. Unlike affiliative
gestures, which partially depend on their affiliated words for meaning, emblems are
themselves language-like and can be substituted for words. Sign languages use both
arbitrary emblems and motivated gestures. Emblems are culturally specific. The gesture
of slicing my hand horizontally across my throat, for example, has become a conven-
tional emblem for radio or television silence in Euro-American culture.
Figure 2. Representational Intentionality

Manipulation of a Virtual Body Manipulation of a Virtual World
MIME: EMBLEMS/SIGNS/WORDS:
mimetic but not conventional hand or conventional but not (necessarily)
body movements that represent actions mimetic hand, mouth, or body
movements that refer to objects,
actions, or ideas
These symbolic gestures are distinct, on the one hand, from instrumental or ma-
nipulative gestures and, on the other, from self-touching or self-manipulative ges-
tures.
Instrumental gestures are actions, moves into the world in order to handle things,
manipulate objects, act: grabbing things, moving things, holding things. Though
nonsymbolic, these gestures can exhibit personal and cultural styles of movement.
The way I pick up a knife and cut discloses something about me.
Self-touching gestures, sometimes called adaptors, are manipulations by the ges-
turer of his or her own body, self-manipulations. In contrast to instrumental gestures,
they are passions, in the archaic sense, retractions of the body from the world in
order to become absorbed in itself: rubbing an ear, fiddling with a lock of hair, tapping
my fingers. Touching my body on purpose—for instance, to inspect it—is of course
a form of instrumental gesture by which I treat my own body as an object just as
touching my body to point to it is a form of deictic gesture. Like instrumental gestures,
self-touching gestures display personal and cultural style and undoubtedly exude
significance, but without affiliated language it is difficult to know what that significance
is. I might find myself stroking my throat, and that might reveal something about
what I am thinking of saying (or not saying), but how could I guess what, even about
myself? (See Object Manipulation and Self Manipulation in Figure 1.)
In contrast to McNeill’s repertoire of affiliative gestures I would also place ges-
tural imitations of actions, including imitations of the act of gesturing. In these, the
mimetic gesture is designed to refer to the actual gesture or movement it imitates.
Mimetic gestures are unconventional, nonarbitrary gestures that imitate actions,
movements, gestures, even objects. In contrast to emblems, their intelligibility is
entirely dependent on looking like what they mean (see Mime in Figure 2). As Clif-
ford Geertz’s recycling of Gilbert Ryle’s commentary on the ambiguities among blinks,
winks, imitations of winks or blinks, mock winks, rehearsals, parodies, and so on
indicates, their mimecity does not ensure that I can figure out what mimetic gestures
mean from how they look (Ryle 1971; Geertz 1973:6–7). Like iconic gestures, they
depend on something beyond likeness to make meaning.
David McNeill describes conversational hand gestures and the words with which
they are affiliated as coexpressive of thought (1992:23, 33). In the field of gesture
analysis, gesturers are assumed to produce gestures on purpose in order to com-
municate (Young 2002:57–63). Iconics represent in the gesture space in front of the
body the concrete acts or objects that talk mentions; metaphorics represent abstract
ideas as if they were concrete acts and objects. The gesture space becomes a theatre
of representation for iconic and metaphoric acts and objects. On this interpretation,
I, as gesturer, conjure up a world you, as perceiver, apprehend. Neither of us gets
access to the other’s subjectivity; we are both oriented independently to a represen-
tational object.
Intentionality
The gesture theorist Jürgen Streeck argues that gestures arise from practical actions
(2002:37, 40–42). Gestures for cutting somebody down or cutting somebody off or
cutting somebody’s throat evolve out of our knife-handling practices. Symbolic ges-
tures are made out of instrumental ones. As Curtis LeBaron and Streeck put it in a
cowritten article, “conversational hand gestures ascend from ordinary, non-symbol-
ic exploratory and instrumental manipulations in the world of matter and things”
(2000:119). LeBaron and Streeck’s intimation that actions precede meanings is mis-
leading. The educated body does not learn to differentiate its ways of moving by
bumping into objects in the material world and accommodating itself to the object’s
configurations; it learns to differentiate its ways of moving by engaging the meaning
that objects, acts, and others in its material world have for it. As Clifford Geertz,
following Max Weber, puts it, we are “suspended in webs of significance [we ourselves
have] spun” (1973:5), not in material circumstances without significance for us. Ways
of moving are both cultural and biological from their inception. There are for humans
probably no ways of moving that are either merely exploratory and instrumental or
purely symbolic. Gestures elucidate the webs of significance in which we find our-
selves suspended.
The gesture does not merely represent the object; it is a dynamic pattern, an act,
the unfolding of a relationship between the body and things. This relationship is what
phenomenologists call intentionality. To have some cake, for instance, I do not have
to figure out how to grip the handle of the knife I am using; I just cut a piece. As Drew
Leder puts it in The Absent Body, in the act of cutting the cake, my hand disappears
from awareness as I decide on how much to have, where to cut, whether I should. “I
here employ the term disappearance rather than absence,” Leder explains, “for I have
given the latter a more general significance. Absence, according to its etymology,
refers to all the ways in which the body can be away from itself. One manner is sim-
ply through disappearing from self-awareness” (1990:26). In acts, aspects of the body
are always absent to the actor. I move skillfully among things without instructions
from myself. My body proceeds without me so that it is absorbed into my engagement
with things. If the knife for which I reached turned out to be stuck to the surface of
the table, picking it up would become my project and I would have to think about
how I could get a grip on it. But unless there is a hitch in the proceedings, my body
acts without my having to think about it. I hum to myself, or watch TV, or think about
philosophy. Hubert Dreyfus describes what my body does without me as “transparent
coping” (2002; see also 1991:72).
Without conscious prompting, the hand of a person picking up a knife begins to
shape itself to the handle before it gets there. I do not represent it to myself and form
an intention to take hold of it. I do not think it and then do it. To use J. J. Gibson’s
term, the handle affords a certain hold (Gibson 1966:14, 23), and the hold occupies
the body in anticipation of the actual grip (Dreyfus 2002). What Martin Heidegger
calls the equipmentality of a tool already inhabits the body as part of its anticipatory
set toward the world (Heidegger 1962:91–99, 409; Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:137,
139). The body is, in Dreyfus’s phrase, solicited by things (2002). We are not usually
aware of ourselves shaping the hand for the knife as we go to pick it up—though you
might now notice it the next time you cut something—but this anticipatory shaping
is perfectly visible on videotapes of people handling knives. Insofar as I have a con-
scious intention, it is to have a piece of cake. The actions my body performs to do so

are intentional but out of awareness.
In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, the shaping of the hand as an anticipatory set toward
the world is part of “motor intentionality,” ways my body operates me without me,
as it were ([1962] 1995:106, 110); my designs on the cake are part of what he calls
“representational intentionality,” ways I operate myself on purpose. All gestures show
motor intentionality, only some aspects of which may be available to me as repre-
sentational intentionality. In acts, my body disappears; it is in thoughts, including
thinking about acting, that my body reappears to me but as a representation of itself.
Whenever I think about my body, it shows up for me as an object of my own con-
sciousness: I represent it to myself. But when I act, my body becomes available to
me as a set of potentialities, of what Edmund Husserl calls “I cans” (Merleau-Ponty
[1962] 1995:18, 137; Sheets-Johnstone 1993:29), rather than as an inert object await-
ing activation by my subjectivity.
Objects and Subjects
The other’s body, in contrast to my own, appears to me as a thing among things. As

an objectivist, I am mystified about how it is that I am tempted to grant it subjectivity.
In an objective world, things ignore me and have relations with each other indepen-
dently of me. The world is self-constituted. It is as if I could cut myself out of the world,
suture up its fabric behind me, and perceive it from nowhere in particular. Objects are
suspended in Cartesian space without hidden sides or overlapping aspects, without
proximate and distant parts. The body of the other joins this alienated reality as an-
other opaque object. My awareness of the world is irrelevant to its existence. From an
objective perspective, things are real but I have in some way been de-realized.
But once I am inserted into the fabric of the world, I can never fully apprehend this
objective world of things as they are; I see only one side. Perspective is not inherent
in the world; it is introduced by the fact of my embodiment. For a subjectivist, the
world is incorrigibly perspectival. I cut into it at a certain angle from which the world
opens itself up to me. From a subjective perspective, things face me and conceal their
backs. I hold them in relation to each other from my anchorage among them. Percep-
tion constitutes things. The body of the other appears to me as an object of my con-
stitutive consciousness. My subjectivity extinguishes the subjectivity of the other, and
I become the “universal subject” or “transcendental Ego,” the “I” who holds the world
in its consciousness (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:358; 208). Without me, it disappears.
From this perspective, although I am real, things have been de-realized. How can I
acknowledge the reality of both thoughts and things?
Philosophically, I find myself trapped between two modes of being, neither of which
can be right. It is as if, as Merleau-Ponty writes,
There are two modes of being and two only: being in itself, which is that of objects
arrayed in space, and being for itself, which is that of consciousness. . . . I ought to
both distinguish him [that is, the other] from myself, and therefore place him in the
world of objects, and think of him as a consciousness, that is, the sort of being with
no outside and no parts, to which I have access because the being is myself ([1962]
1995:349).
That is, there ought to be the transcendental subject and there ought to be objects
in the phenomenal world. How can the other be both the object of my constitutive
consciousness and a constitutive consciousness in its own right? I cannot acknowl-
edge other subjects from either perspective, in the subjective case, because my sub-
jectivity excludes theirs; in the objective case, because the other’s body is arranged
before me as a sort of object. Nonetheless, the body of the other presents itself to me
as what Merleau-Ponty calls “the eloquent relic of an existence” ([1962] 1995:348–49).
How can this be so?
In an attempt to acknowledge the reality of both thoughts and things, social sci-
entists sometimes advert to an uneasy amalgam of the body-as-object and the con-
stitutiveness of consciousness, as if my body could be left as a thing among things
and I could at the same time transcend it and them. On this theory, each of us is a
transcendent subject trapped inside a body object, and our problem is how to convey
information from the inside of one body-object to the inside of the other—that is,
how to get out of solipsism into intersubjectivity. The assumption that gestures are
purely communicative operates implicitly on this theory (for a counterargument, see
Young 2002:59–62). The theory leads to what Merleau-Ponty describes as “the ab-
surdity of a multiple solipsism,” each of which extinguishes the other: “Conscious-
nesses present themselves with the absurdity of a multiple solipsism. . . . Solitude and
communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma, but two ‘moments’ of one
phenomenon. . . . Reflection must in some way present the unreflected, otherwise
we should have nothing to set over against it, and it would not become a problem
for us” ([1962] 1995:359). He grants that I am rooted in an insurmountable solipsism,
and that “with my first perception there was launched an insatiable being who ap-
propriates everything he meets” ([1962] 1995:358). Insofar as I pull the world in
around me as its centrality, I can never find anybody else there. Such signals as the
body of the other emits I must interpret by analogy to my own body as signs of pres-
ence in the flesh, without direct access to the other’s subjectivity. If my knowledge
of other selves were purely analogic, as Daniel Dennett perversely but persuasively
argues, any automaton or zombie that emitted the same signals would count as a
fellow subject (1978:154). Or to reverse the problem, if the other is the consciousness
who constitutes the world, then my body is the object of her constitutive conscious-
ness. She holds things in thrall around her, including my body, and her subjectivity
extinguishes mine.
The Other
If I turn my attention to objects, they skin over, close up into themselves, and present
their surfaces, but if I act through objects, they are absorbed into my body or I am
extended into them. “This paradox is that of all being in the world: when I move
towards a world I bury my perceptual and practical intentions in objects which ulti-
mately appear prior to and external to those intentions, and which nevertheless exist
for me only in so far as they arouse in me thoughts or volitions” (Merleau-Ponty
[1962] 1995:82). If I turn my attention to the other as object, her body is set over
among things and seals its subjectivity off from me.
Because of the opacity of objects, including the body of the other, and the inacces-
sibility of subjects, except myself, the other’s motor intentionality ought to be imper-
ceptible to me. But because the other’s intentionality, like my own, is buried in things,
the gesture that anticipates the other’s action can disclose to me her intentions. As
Merleau-Ponty writes, “In the action of the hand which is raised towards an object is
contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly
specific thing towards which we project ourselves, near which we are, in anticipation,
and which we haunt. Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the inter-
mediary of the body” ([1962] 1995:138–39). I might perceive what you intend to do
about a cup by how you reach for it (to turn it over, drink out of it, look in), whether
I think about it or not (I might just intercept you, warn you it’s too hot, pour in cof-
fee). What I would not perceive is what the cup is for you (to hold something, to
gather together, to display its emptiness—that is, to display nothing—to remove from
attention by inverting, to feel the texture of the holder—malleable or rigid—to posi-
tion relative to other objects or ideas). I would not perceive how the cup has lent itself
to your intentions.3 In reaching for the cup, the way you move might reveal how your
body is colonized by the cup, but the cup cannot by any similar self-transformation
reveal how it is colonized by your body. Though you have become transparent, the
cup remains opaque.
In iconic and metaphoric gestures, by contrast, I perceive both object and action
in the gesture itself, both what the thing is and what the gesturer has in mind about
it. The object is colonized by the action; the action issues in its object. These gestures
reveal not only consciousness as corporeity, the movement of the body in the world,
but also objects as intentional. In the symbolic gesture, unlike the anticipatory hand,
the object as well as the gesturer exhibits intentional qualities. The solidity of neither
cranium nor thing conceals from the perceiver the intentionality of the gesturer. In
the iconic or metaphoric gesture, the solidity of the object has dematerialized at the
same time as the other’s intentionality has materialized. There, Merleau-Ponty writes,
“the intentional object is offered to the spectator at the same time as the gesture itself ”
([1962] 1995:186).4
It would be possible to mime handling a cup, but here such intentionality as the
mime reveals is an intention to represent. As with all representational gestures, the
movement can recoup part of the motor intentionality of the act the gesture mimics,
but the event presented to the audience of the mime is not the act but the actor act-
ing.5 In contrast to the preternatural precision of miming picking up a cup, iconic
gestures and their metaphoric counterparts tend to de-realize some properties of a
cup (maybe its precise shape, weight, or rigidity) and thematize others (its capacity
to hold together elusive substances, to reveal or conceal, to offer up for inspection).
In an iconic gesture, the pertinent properties of the cup appear along with the perti-
nent properties of the action, but such miming as they effect is partial.
Because iconic and metaphoric gestures are affiliated with words, gesture theorists
have been inclined to characterize them as instances of representational intentional-

ity, as if, like language, we produced gestures on purpose in order to communicate.
At the same time, gesture theorists have been resistant to acknowledging gestures
as instances of motor intentionality, in which the movement of the hand is taken up
with or given over to the material properties of the virtual object in the course of an
action that binds them together in the actor’s intentionality. The tension between
communicating meaning gesturally and embodying meaning gesturally captures in
miniature the tension in folklore between treating performances as artifacts that
performers design for audiences and treating performances as embodied acts to
which performers are given over undesignedly and for which they cannot be held
altogether responsible. In the first instance, performances are held to be conscious-
ly representational all the way through, and performers can be expected to be able
to elucidate them; in the second, something about the performance remains inde-
cipherable to its performer but could be deciphered by an observer who grasps its
intercorporeity.
Gestures are not just visual representations; they are also, as I argue elsewhere
(2002:61), tactile-kinaesthetic movements that engage motor intentionality. Motor
intentionality can go on without representational intentionality—I could knead bread
and think about philosophy—but speaking seems to require that I think about it while
doing it. Gesturing does not. My ability to recollect my words but not my gestures
evidences this difference. If I ask you what you were talking about, you are quite
likely to be able to tell me; if I ask you what gestures you made, you are quite un-
likely to remember a single one. Your gestures are for you, not me, visible traces of
your embodied engagement with the virtual objects you have in mind when speaking.
My perception of your gestures implicates me in your motor intentionality, not because
you are undertaking to pull me into your project but because you make present to
me the intentional object that then haunts my body as it does your own.
My contention is that iconic and metaphoric gestures are not intended to describe
an object or an act by representing it for a perceiver as a form of representational
intentionality. Under that assumption, gestures would be flawed or partial mimeses
of the objects and acts they represent. Rather, they are intended to take hold of a
virtual object for a gesturer such that both the object and the action happen to be
partially revealed by the gesture. They are perfectly competent and complete virtual
actions, matters of motor intentionality, not representational intentionality. Iconic or
metaphoric gestures might be thought to blend an object brought forward by repre-
sentational intentionality and an act brought forward by motor intentionality (see
Virtual Manipulations in Figure 1), but such a description misses the way the object
is transparent to the act. The peculiar virtue of iconic and metaphoric gestures is that
they permit the perceiver to participate in the gesturer’s engagement with her own
thought processes, even though neither of us is thinking about them on purpose (for
a fuller account of the perceiver’s interception of self-directed gestures, see Young
2002:62). Gestures exhibit the intersubjectivity/intercorporeity that precedes and
makes possible acts of communication. They do not open up communication between
subjects; they rely on it.
The Intentional Arc
Gestures are suspended between manipulations of objects and manipulations of one’s

own body: they manipulate virtual objects in the gesture space (see the spectrum of
manipulations in Figure 1). Instrumental gestures are forms of action that initiate
movement into the world. I and things are looped together in what Merleau-Ponty
calls an “intentional arc”:
[T]he life of consciousness—cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life—is sub-
tended by an “intentional arc” which projects round about us our past, our future, our
human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results
in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about
the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility. ([1962] 1995:136)
My body partakes of the thing, or, to put it the other way, the thing absorbs part of
my subjectivity (see Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:72 on intentional threads). Because
my intentionality is invested in things, because I act, my subjectivity exceeds me and
leaps to take in the world so that, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “I am outrun on all sides
by my own acts” ([1962] 1995:358). I am not a subject set over against objects; I and
things are intercorporeal cohabitants. “We must therefore avoid saying that our body
is in space, or in time. It inhabits or haunts space and time” (139). I can withdraw
from the intentional arc gesturally and touch myself. But the touch no longer displays
either instrumentality or intentionality. Self-touching gestures are forms of passion
that extinguish movement into the world: the loop collapses back into the body; things
retreat. I cease to project myself into the world but retract from it and turn in on
myself. Nothing happens; nobody does anything; the arc “goes limp” (136). In gestures,
the intentional arc loops through the body and the virtual world. Things go transpar-
ent; actions are inscribed into them. The intentional arc is, I shall say, illuminated by
gestures (see the Intentional Arc in Figure 1).
Intersubjectivity/Intercorporeity
The other, Merleau-Ponty writes, is “the paradox of a consciousness seen from the
outside, of a thought which has its abode in the external world, and which, therefore,
is already subjectless and anonymous compared with mine” ([1962] 1995:349). But
I do not merely interpret such signals as the body of the other emits by analogy to
my own body as signs of presence in the flesh.6 Merleau-Ponty explains:
The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the
body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behaviour. Whether it be a ques-
tion of vestiges or the body of another person, we need to know how an object in
space can become the eloquent relic of an existence; how, conversely, an intention,
a thought or a project can detach themselves from the personal subject and become
visible outside him in the shape of his body, and in the environment which he builds
for himself. (348–49)
Because he shows up for me either as eloquent relic or visible intention, the other
disturbs my hold on things. Merleau-Ponty continues:
No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living body in process of acting than the objects
surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of significance: they are no longer
simply what I myself could make of them, they are what this other pattern of behav-
iour is about to make of them. Round about the perceived body a vortex forms, towards
which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer
mine, and no longer merely present, it is present to x, to that other manifestation of
behaviour which begins to take shape in it. . . . There is taking place over there a
certain manipulation of things hitherto my property. Someone is making use of my
familiar objects. But who can it be? I say it is another, a second self, and this I know
in the first place because this living body has the same structure as mine. (353)
If the other gestures, then the world I had drawn in around me torques away from
me and tilts toward that other subjectivity, that intruder, whose gestures grab the world
from his perspective. Objects in the presence of the other can change their meanings;
they can be “sucked in” to the other’s world. It is now he who holds a world of mean-
ings around his body. I perceive my world as pulled in around the other’s projects: “the
other’s gaze fixed upon me has, by inserting me into his field, stripped me of part of
my being.” The other’s subjectivity encroaches on me and threatens my own. I can be
“disinherited in favour of the other” (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:357).
I am faced with the impossible presence of two transcendental subjects. How, then,
can I who perceive, and who ipso facto, assert myself as universal subject, perceive
another who immediately deprives me of this universality? . . . I am given, that is, I
find myself already situated and involved in a physical and social world—I am given
to myself, which means that this situation is never hidden from me, it is never round
about me as an alien necessity, and I am never in effect enclosed in it like an object
in a box. My freedom, the fundamental power which I enjoy of being the subject of
all my experiences, is not distinct from my insertion into the world. It is a fate for
me to be free, to be unable to reduce myself to anything that I experience, to main-
tain in relation to any factual situation a faculty of withdrawal. (360)
There is a limit to the other’s capacity to make me his object or of mine to make him
mine. The gesture or word of the other drops us into an intersubjective/ intercorpo-
real world. “But let him utter a word,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “or even a gesture of
impatience, and already he ceases to transcend me” (361). Things no longer yield to
what he makes of them. If he is no longer engaged in actions but speaks, or loses hold
and gestures impatiently, the things, hitherto in thrall to his motor intentionality, fall
away from his intentional arc. “In fact,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “the other’s gaze trans-
forms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of
our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us
feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an
insect’s” (361). This insect gaze is the scientific eye of the transcendent subject on the
body-as-object.
As a consequence of the unreflectiveness of my motor intentionality, when I return

my own acts to representational intentionality by reflecting on them, part of what I
did remains opaque to me. “I find in myself, through reflection, along with the per-
ceiving subject, a pre-personal subject given to itself,” Merleau-Ponty writes. ([1962]
1995:352–53). In the same way that I am partially given over to the pre-personal, to
the body at work without me, just so do “I understand the existence of other people,”
Merleau-Ponty claims. “Here again I have only the trace of a consciousness which
evades me in its actuality” (351). So I find in me two traces: the trace of the pre-
personal: ways I am not subject; the trace of the other’s subjectivity: ways the other
is not object. Our opacities are reflections of each other. “I re-enact the alien existence
in a sort of reflection” (351). So we are both “beings which are outrun by their world,
and which consequently may well be outrun by each other” (353). The pre-personal
exceeds us. It falls away from us as the horizons that open ahead of our experience,
and it enters into us as our own unperceived opacities.
The intercorporeity in which I participate inhabits both our bodies simultane-
ously. Just as my own intersensorial perceptions come together in things and are not
perceptions of things but being-in-the-world, so my subjectivity participates in the
other as it does in myself, despite our opacities. “But we have learned in individual
perception not to conceive our perspective views as independent of each other; we
know that they slip into each other and are brought together finally in the thing. In
the same way we must learn to find the communication between consciousness and
another in one and the same world,” Merleau-Ponty writes ([1962] 1995:353). Even
though I perceive one side of an object and you perceive the other, my experience of
the object includes the perspective you bring to bear on it.
I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world; now, it is precisely
my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a
miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the
world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together compromise a system, so my
body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon,
and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth
inhabits both bodies simultaneously. (354)
Because my own pre-personal processes are opaque to me, the opacity to me of the
other does not deter me from experiencing her as a subject in the way I experience
myself. “The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and
because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake” (352). But because I can estrange
myself from myself, I can withdraw into a detachment from which I can perceive
myself, as I do the other, from elsewhere. My not having privileged access to myself
permits me to acknowledge the other as a subject to whom I do not have privileged
access either. Merleau-Ponty elaborates:
It is true that I can recognize only one Ego, but as universal subject I cease to be a
finite self, and become an impartial spectator before whom the other and myself,
each as an empirical being, are on a footing of equality, without my enjoying any
particular privilege. Of the consciousness which I discover by reflection and before

which everything is an object, it cannot be said that it is myself: my self is arrayed
before me like any other thing, and my consciousness constitutes it and is not enclosed
within it, so that it can without difficulty constitute other (my)selves. (358)
My overreaching of my own body is “exactly compensated,” as Merleau-Ponty puts

it, by the reach of things into my body. He continues:
There is here a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable. It

is true that I do not feel that I am the constituting agent either of the natural or of
the cultural world: into each perception and into each judgement I bring either
sensory functions or cultural settings which are not actually mine. Yet although I
am outrun on all sides by my own acts, and submerged in generality, the fact remains
that I am the one by whom they are experiences, and with my first perception there
was launched an insatiable being who appropriates everything that he meets, to
whom nothing can be purely and simply given because he has inherited his share
of the world, and hence carries within him the project of all possible being, because
it has been once and for all imprinted in his field of experiences. The generality of
the body will never make it clear how the indeclinable I can estrange itself in favour
of another, since this generality is exactly compensated by the other generality of
my inalienable subjectivity. How should I find elsewhere, in my perceptual field, such
a presence of self to self? (358)
So my subjectivity transcends me—I am outrun by my own acts—and at the same time

I am taken over, occupied, by the pre-personal—“submerged in generality” (358).
Once she gestures, the subjectivity of the other no longer strikes me as a mystery
secreted inside the other’s body but as a visible intention (Merleau-Ponty [1962]
1995:348–49). “I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world,” Merleau-
Ponty writes, and the body of the other appears as “a miraculous prolongation of my
own intentions” so that “the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-re-
newed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously” (354). This participation
in the pre-personal, which jointly inhabits both bodies, is intercorporeity.
Folklorists, like other social scientists who argue for intersubjectivity, are inclined
to treat it as the very thing I am arguing it is not: two subjects, each consciously aware
of the other as commensurately subject. Harris Berger has drawn my attention to a
number of ethnomusicologists who are explicitly concerned with the relationship
between subjectivity and intersubjectivity (personal communication, October 2,
2009).7 The problem of subjectivity, as Ruth Stone recognizes in her book on the
music of the Kpelle of Nigeria, is that it is private to the individual and incommen-
surable with other subjectivities (1982:9). To work, intersubjectivity must transcend
subjectivity, not fall under its illusion, which is why Merleau-Ponty coins a different
word for it. Stone’s study of the spatialization of time in Kpelle musical performance
brings forward one of the ways music can afford participants the prospect of an in-
tersubjectivity that is precisely not private and not incommensurable with other
bodies but rather intercorporeal among hearers and between hearers and musicians,
though she does not describe it in those terms (1982:67–69). The assumption that
intersubjectivity is an effect of mutual attention between two still self-contained

subjects underpins Jeff Todd Titon’s argument that the unfolding dialogue between
ethnographer and other brings forth the “intersubjective reality” the ethnographer
then reconstructs in writing (1988:13), as if subjectivity preceded intersubjectivity
when in fact it is, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, the other way around: “before any
voluntary adoption of a position [of objectivity or subjectivity] I [am] already situ-
ated in an intersubjective world” ([1962] 1995:355, italics in original). Timothy Rice
is likewise persuaded that “the self-conscious task of understanding music” requires
a “reflexive process” but toggles between this “distanciated” explanation and inter-
pretation, taking up Paul Ricoeur’s terms, and the “appropriation” of music by mak-
ing it bodily so that for Rice understanding music is a “dialectic movement between
distanciation, which invites explanation, and appropriation, which suggests new
understanding” (Ricoeur 1981:192–93; Rice 1994:6). The bodily appropriation of
instruments, playing, and music itself comes very near intercorporeity. But it is Berg-
er’s work, on his own and with Giovanna del Negro, that grapples most deeply with
phenomenological questions.
To write of self-awareness as the grounds of intersubjectivity, following Husserl’s
fifth meditation (in Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, [1931]
1977), as Berger and del Negro do in the preface to Identity and Everyday Life: Essays
in the Study of Folklore, Magic, and Popular Culture, is to miss entirely the nature of
intercorporeity as motor rather than representational intentionality (2004:xiii). In-
tersubjectivity is grounded in something more like unself-awareness. In his section
of the book, Berger attempts “to develop a phenomenological account of one type
of self experience—the self that emerges from the perspectival organization of phe-
nomena in perception” (2004:61). That self, the self that has a perspectival hold on
phenomena, is, as Berger acknowledges earlier on, pure subjectivity (2004:46). De-
spite putting the weight of his argument on subjectivity where I would put it on
intercorporeity, Berger has a perfectly clear grasp of the difference. He describes
reflective consciousness (the body’s experience of representational intentionality)
as turning attention to my own body as object as opposed to unreflective conscious-
ness (the body’s experience of motor intentionality), which he describes as being
absorbed bodily in an act. He instances the difference between the experience of
“steering” a pen and the experience of writing something down in which my ma-
nipulations of the pen are absorbed in or disappear into my dialogic project of think-
ing for writing. Similarly, for a carpenter, hammering the nail into the wood disap-
pears into the act of constructing a wall. My awareness of myself has shifted from
the local mechanics of my actions to the broader project of solving a philosophical
problem or building a house. Berger is especially acute in his rendering of this dis-
tinction as the difference between dwelling in my thoughts or feeling emotional at
one moment and then experiencing that same thought or emotion as “an idea I had,
[an] emotion I felt, rather than my (!) self ” (2004:61). My problem with Berger and
del Negro is that approaching intersubjectivity through subjectivity makes it too
mental. As a consequence, they find themselves stuck with the consequences of
multiple solipsism, a problem they try to get out of by invoking Alfred Schutz’s no-
tion of “partial sharing” (Berger and del Negro 2004:99–100; Schutz 1967). “To say
that I experience the body of the other as a subject is not to say that I can perfectly
understand the other’s experiences [but rather to say that] I experience that body as
an entity that has experience and that I may partially share those experiences,” Berg-
er and del Negro write (2004:101). By contrast, my project, following Merleau-Pon-
ty, is to make intersubjectivity corporeal.
If I step outside myself to turn my attention back on myself, I discover myself as a
sort of object. Just so if I turn my attention to the other: I render her a sort of object.
It is this fatal estrangement of self from self and by extension of self from other that
gets privileged in subjectivity and makes intersubjectivity problematic. Intersubjectiv-
ity/intercorporeity is not the impossible copresence of two subjects turned toward
each other but the inescapable copresence of two bodies, whose motor intentional-
ity makes them perspicuous to each other by turning both toward the world that
opens seamlessly before them. Intersubjectivity, as Merleau-Ponty means it, is the
sense of copresence with other subjects who are jointly implicated in a perceptual
world. If I become aware of the other as subject, rather than participating with her
in a world we cohabit, it is because she has created a distortion effect in my world by
dragging it away from me as its centrality and pulling it in around her. Intercorpore-
ity includes not only my enmeshment with other bodies but also my enmeshment
with the things I handle. Gestures, perhaps uniquely, bring forward at the same time
relations between bodies and bodies and relations between bodies and objects. In
intercorporeity, Merleau-Ponty writes, “men are empty heads turned towards one
single, self-evident world where everything takes place” ([1962] 1995:355). To that
world, folklorists and their others have joint access.
Mirror Neurons
Half a century after Merleau-Ponty described intersubjectivity/intercorporeity, two

Italian neuroscientists found neurological evidence of the inscription of the other’s
gesture in its observer’s body: mirror neurons. Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Riz-
zolatti and their associates examined the premotor cortices of macaque monkeys and
discovered that if a macaque observes another macaque (or a person) making an
instrumental gesture, a specific set of neurons in its brain displays the same pattern
it would if the observing animal had made the gesture itself (Gallese et al. 1996:593;
Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998:188). That is, the gesture of one macaque is inscribed in
the brain of the other; the other’s gesture is, as it were, grasped from within. These
are the neurons Gallese and Rizzolatti call “mirror neurons.” The gestures, appre-
hended by the visual cortex, are registered in the premotor cortex, so they occur not
only as visual perception but also as motor intentionality. The macaque might not
make the gesture it observes—the mirror neuronal pattern is only a partial of the
neural organization of a gesture—but if it does, it is in effect repeating itself. Tran-
scranic Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET scan)
experiments indicate that humans have the same sort of “mirror system for gesture
recognition” (Fadiga et al. 1995; Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998:188). If I perceive an-
other making a gesture, the gesture inscribes itself on my mirror neurons as if I had
made it myself.
In macaques, the gestures to which mirror neurons respond are specific to gestures
in which “the experimenter’s hand or mouth interacted with objects,” specifically by
“grasping, manipulating, and placing them” (Gallese et al. 1996:593). The mirror
neuron response is initiated as soon as the hand starts to shape itself for the gesture,
continues through its grasp of the object, and is extinguished with the object’s release
(Gallese et al. 1996:596). From the perspective of gesture analysis, these are not sym-
bolic gestures, forms of representation; they are instrumental gestures, forms of action,
movements of the hand for practical purposes, to handle objects. Symbolic or repre-
sentational gestures, by contrast, are more like virtual actions, hand movements with-
out practical outcomes. In humans, the mirror neuronal response becomes active if
I think in order to move my hands (thinking for moving), if I think about rotating
my hands (imagining myself moving), or if I think about somebody else grasping
something (imagining somebody else moving herself) (Gallese 2005). Mirror neurons
reflect motor intentionality. Whether there is a mirror neuronal response to iconic
or metaphoric gestures has not yet been investigated.
Marco Iacoboni and his associates describe the mirror neuron response as an in-
stance of “imitation learning” (1999:2526). It is a misdesignation. This way of register-
ing the gesture of the other is neither learned nor mimetic. The perceiver does not
observe the gesture visually, break it down or figure it out cognitively, and then labo-
riously copy it on purpose. Such a theory of learning assumes a black-box model of
communication in which information inside one closed system is conveyed to the
inside of another via a medium of communication external to both. The sender-re-
ceiver model assumes the double solipsism of representational intentionality. Motor
intentionality, by contrast, simply participates in intercorporeity. For the observer,
the instrumental gesture is always already done; there is nothing to learn. The gesture’s
performance by the other is not anterior to its mirroring by the observer; it is simul-
taneous with that mirroring. On enactment, the gesture is inscribed in the observer
as in the gesturer, in schematic form. If the observer happens to perform the gesture,
she will be copying herself. Actually making the gesture, as opposed to just register-
ing it in the mirror neuron system, requires a more complex engagement of neural
processes, which can include the sort of imitation learning Iacoboni describes. But
to the extent that the gesture is indebted to its maker’s mirror neurons, making the
same gesture is not mimesis but self-repetition.8
Even if the perceiver does not make the gesture, she registers the gesture as if it
were her own. Some neuroscientists regard this as an instance of empathy, as if I were
putting myself in the other’s place. It is the reverse. I am not experiencing empathy
for the other, and especially not empathy as a conscious or volitional act; I am un-
dergoing colonization by the other, a colonization quite outside my conscious or
volitional control. I am not putting myself in the other’s place; the other acts in my
place, gets under my skin, ordains my style of movement. I am precipitated by her
gesture into intersubjectivity/intercorporeity. Theodore Lipps, who coined the term
einfülung, of which empathy is a translation, described it as “inner imitation” of the
other’s actions (Iacoboni 2005:95). It might also be translated as “feeling into” (Wis-
pé 1991:62). If this is understood as mental and imaginative, then I project myself
into the other’s position. As Frédérique de Vignemont notes, “It is only when mir-
roring is cognitively loaded that it can generate empathy” (forthcoming). If it is un-

derstood as corporeal and motoric, then the other projects himself into mine. The
mirror neuron response is nearer possession than empathy. Because my body is or-
dained to act like the other’s body, I may be disposed corporeally to a certain attitude
that occupies me apart from and prior to any conscious reflection on my feelings or
ideas about the other’s situation inclines me to feel empathic.9 This is not a conscious
orientation on my part. On reflection, I might resist my inclination. Iacoboni’s de-
scription of empathy as “sharing of experiences, needs, and goals across individuals”
(2005:95) comes much nearer to intercorporeity. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The com-
munication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my
intentions and the intentions of others, of my gestures and the intentions discernible
in other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine
his” ([1962] 1995:185). Unlike representational intentionality, which is uniquely mine,
my motor intentionality is not private to me but participates in intercorporeity.
For gestures that evoke a mirror neuron response, the problem is not the commu-
nicative problem of how to exteriorize some of my mental representations as gestures,
pass them across in a visual modality, and insert them into the body of the other. There
the problem would be making sure the information is the same at both ends, figuring
out whether the message made it through its translation from one body to the other.
That problem is rooted in solipsism. Iacoboni characterizes the problem of solipsism
in terms of self-identity, the problem of how I know an act is mine, how, out of the
ongoing flux of inner inscriptions, I come to apprehend some as of my own making.
Iacoboni et al. write, “An immediate question that the direct matching mechanism of
imitation raises is how an individual may preserve the sense of self during action
observation, given the shared motor representation between the ‘actor’ of the move-
ment and the ‘imitator’” (1999:2527). For Iacoboni et al., the problem with what they
call “kinaesthetic copies” of gestures by mirror neurons is figuring out how the infor-
mation is different at both ends, how it belongs to me at one end and to the other at
the other (1999:2527).10 From the intercorporeal perspective I take here, this elision
of one body into another in the mirror neuron response is not the problem but the
solution to the problem of solipsism.11
My subjectivity does not consist in sequestering the gestures of the other inscribed
within me as alien in order to preserve my self-identity. I am always colonized by the
pre-personal: time, things, culture, and the other, which inhabit me as “regions of si-
lence” (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:82). Mirror neurons are merely a specific instance
of my opacity to myself. We never get self-identity in the sense of self-transparency.
My body is from the outset forfeit to a past it has only partially enacted; I am inhab-
ited by the other’s intentionalities. So I always exceed myself. My motor intentionality
transcends me and leaps to take in the world: I am outrun by my own acts. At the same
time, I am exceeded by my own horizons, which open themselves beyond me: I am
outrun by my world. And I am partially colonized by other subjectivities: we are out-
run by each other (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:358, 353). Phenomenologically, Iaco-
boni’s anxiety about self-identity is a red herring. I am colonized by the gesture of the
other just as I am colonized by the pre-personal in myself. Both are aspects of the way
my body operates me without me in motor intentionality. Even if I do not make the
gesture, the mirror neuron response remains as the trace of the other in me. I and you
are not separate subjectivities. We are intercorporeities.
Mirror neurons demonstrate neurologically what Merleau-Ponty detected phe-
nomenologically half a century earlier: that my intentionality can be colonized by the
other. This demonstration undermines two moves in folkloristics and in the social
sciences in general: the move to make folklore an object independent of the subjects
who investigate it, on the model of science; and its reciprocal, the move to acknowl-
edge subjective perspectives on phenomena by interpolating self-disclosures as a sort
of confessional footnote to fieldwork. Mirror neurons are signs of a pre-personal
process in which both our bodies participate, an existence that sustains our intercor-
poreity prior to any possibility of constitutive consciousness. My access to the other’s
pre-personal processes is no more problematic than my access to my own. To write
the other, I do not have to read her from the outside in, treating her gestures either
as opaque because I cannot know what is going on inside her or as transparent because
they represent something going on outside either of us. The gesture space is a space
for kinaesthetic thinking. Via the motor intentionality of gestures, I find myself as
observer corporeally engaged in a jointly embodied motor project unfolding in the
gesture space in front of the body of the other. Intercorporeity makes the other avail-
able to me because I participate in making meaning bodily.
Consciousness
My own consciousness, far from being self-transparent, is at once partially opaque

to me and partially transparent to my perceiver. As Merleau-Ponty asserts,
As for consciousness, it has to be conceived, no longer as a constituting conscious-

ness and, as it were, a pure being-for-itself, but as a perceptual consciousness, as the
subject of a pattern of behaviour, as being-in-the-world, or existence, for only thus
can another appear at the top of his phenomenal body, and be endowed with a sort
of “locality.” Under these conditions the antinomies of objective thought vanish.
Through phenomenological reflection I discover vision, not as a “thinking about
seeing,” to use Descartes’ expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and
that is why for me there can be another’s gaze; that expressive instrument called a
face can carry an existence, as my own existence is carried by my body, that knowl-
edge acquiring apparatus. When I turn towards perception, and pass from direct
perception to thinking about that perception, I re-enact it, and find at work in my
organs of perception a thinking older than itself of which those organs are merely
the trace. In the same way I understand the existence of other people. Here again I
have only the trace of a consciousness which evades me in its actuality and, when
my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection.
([1962] 1995:351)
As I speak, my iconic and metaphoric gestures bring into my body traces of the per-
ceptual experiences they represent. But I am not necessarily thinking about gesturing
while I am doing it; gesturing is evidence of how my thinking is, as Merleau-Ponty
puts it, “at grips with a visible world.” My gestures betray both the opacity to me of
some of my own processes and my body’s engagement with things. It is not that I
open up my subjectivity for my perceiver by gesturing; it is rather that when I gesture,
part of my subjectivity is obscure to me even as part of it is transparent to her. Gestures
disclose our participation in intercorporeity.
Intuitions of Impurity
The impediment to doing folklore phenomenologically is the problem of conscious-

ness: how I can be conscious of the other’s motor intentionality? I can always withdraw
myself from my own motor intentionality, my engagement with things, and as it were,
turn my attention back to myself as the subject of that engagement. I can, for instance,
pay attention to my own gestures or they can obtrude themselves on my awareness.
As Merleau-Ponty writes,
Contrary to the social world I can always use my nature as a sensory being, close my
eyes, stop up my ears, live as a stranger in society, treat others, ceremonies and in-
stitutions as mere arrangements of colour and light, and strip them of all their human
significance. Contrary to the natural world I can always have recourse to my think-
ing nature and entertain doubts about each perception taken on its own. The truth
of solipsism is there. ([1962] 1995:360)
When I do this, what has hitherto been part of the background or horizon of my
perception becomes thematized in consciousness as its focal configuration, and rep-
resentational intentionality takes over motor intentionality. Though my attempt to
retract myself from the world and stay in my thinking nature is always threatened,
breached, by the pre-personal and the other, by intercorporeity and intersubjectivity,
my attempt to return myself to my unreflective engagement with things and at the
same time reflect on that engagement is doomed by my thinking nature, by subjectiv-
ity. If I can bring my unselfconscious gesture to consciousness, it will no longer be as
it was when I was unconscious of it. I can never catch myself in the act of unselfcon-
sciously gesturing.
My access to the other’s motor intentionality is doubly threatened by my own rep-
resentational intentionality and by the other’s. As I perceive the world torqued away
from me by the other’s gesture, pulled into the vortex of her body’s engagement with
things, I inhabit her meaning. My body participates in the other’s motor intentional-
ity as it does my own. But here it is not clear what it would be like to bring the mirror
gesture to mind at all. So if my interest were in doing folklore phenomenologically,
the trick would be to catch myself in the act of reflecting the other’s gesture within
me without my reflection interfering with its motor intentionality.
Jean-Paul Sartre contends that if I make my own consciousness an object of con-
sciousness, if I introspect, I enter into bad faith. Like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre is heir to
the German phenomenological tradition, but whereas Merleau-Ponty concentrates
on the body’s engagement with things, Sartre turns to the workings of consciousness.
Sartre recognizes Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality—he calls it unreflective con-
sciousness or the pre-reflective cogito, the thinking that cannot reflect on itself—but
his account of it is relatively shallow. He has a far more complex account of represen-
tational intentionality, which he calls reflective consciousness.
Like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre begins with a contrast between thoughts and things.
As Iris Murdoch writes, “Sartre pictures consciousness by means of two contrasts.
The first is the contrast between the flickering, unstable, semi-transparent moment-
to-moment ‘being’ of the consciousness, the shifting way in which it conceives objects
and itself—and the solid, opaque, inert ‘in-themselvesness’ of things which simply
are what they are” (1980:42). Things Sartre describes as being-in-itself, the en-soi, in
contrast to the being-for-itself of consciousness, the pour-soi. Murdoch continues:
The consciousness, however, is not constantly in a state of translucent or empty self-

awareness (we are not always reflecting); usually we are unreflectively engaged in
grasping the world as a reality which is coloured by our emotions or intentions. . . .
In these ways the consciousness moves from a state of open self-awareness toward a
more opaque and thing-like condition; only since the consciousness is not a thing,
but however absorbed or fascinated retains a certain self-awareness, or flexibility, or
tendency to flicker, it is more appropriate to picture it as a gluey or paste-like substance
which may become more or less solidified—and which retains something of its heavy
inert sticky nature even in reflective moments. (Introspection is not the focusing of
a beam on something determinate.) “Glueyness” (le visqueux) is for Sartre the image
of consciousness; and fascinates us for that reason. (1980:42)
Sartre contrasts the translucency of reflective consciousness (Merleau-Ponty’s “rep-

resentational intentionality”) with the viscosity of the pre-reflective cogito (Merleau-
Ponty’s “motor intentionality”). But even reflective consciousness is not, as Murdoch
notes, a “radiant source.” Sartre “pictures it sluggish and dark, implicitly rather than
explicitly self-aware, and yet, even in its unreflective times, the responsible creator of
sense” (1980:64). For Sartre, consciousness aspires to a purity it cannot attain.
The other contrast which Sartre uses is that between the flickery discontinuous in-
stability of consciousness (we are moody, lacking in concentration, the “depth” or
“richness” of our apprehension of our surroundings varies, we cannot hold an object
steady for long in our attention, however intense or delighted) and a condition of
perfect stability and completion toward which it aspires. (Murdoch 1980:43)
Hazel Barnes describes Sartrean consciousness as “the reflection-reflecting” (1964:552).

“‘The For-itself can be only in the mode of a reflection causing itself to be reflected
as not being a certain being.’ In other words, consciousness exists as a translucent
consciousness of being other than the objects of which it is consciousness” (Barnes
1964:552; first sentence quoted from Sartre 1964:552). This not-being at the core
of being is the nothingness of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, not only
are there two types of consciousness, the reflective and the unreflective types, but
there are also two types of reflective consciousness, pure reflection and impure
reflection. Sartre writes, “We must distinguish two kinds of reflection. . . . reflection
can be either pure or impure. Pure reflection, the simple presence of the reflective
for-itself to the for-itself reflected-on, is at once the original form of reflection and
its ideal form” (1964:135).
For Sartre, pure reflection is implicitly present to motor intentionality, the pre-
reflective cogito. As Murdoch explains,
We do not, at every moment, spring back into a reflective condition and explicitly
notice how it is that we are “taking” our surroundings. . . .
In an unreflective condition we are implicitly aware of ourselves. This implicit
awareness Sartre calls conscience (de) soi, and sometimes he calls it “the pre-reflective
cogito.” It is that on which the reflective awareness may at any moment turn back. It
is the condition which classical philosophy has neglected in favour of the reflective
cogito (or the “simple idea,” which represents the same starting point). What we are
explicitly aware of at such times however is not ourselves being aware, not even a
particular determinate mental datum as such—but the world provoking or inviting
us in some particular way or charged with some particular properties. (1980:57)
For Sartre, motor intentionality, the pre-reflective cogito, is haunted by a conscious-

ness that never becomes explicit. The subject, the pour-soi, experiences her possi-
bilities as the potentialities of objects. Sometimes, that is, I export the way the world
solicits me to objects, which hold my desires for me as if they were the object’s prop-
erties. I experience my thirst as a beverage-to-be-drunk. Sartre describes this as the
way things borrow our body:
On the unreflective plane, in fact, the For-itself is its own possibilities in the non-
thetic mode; and since its possibilities are possible presences to the world beyond
the given state of the world, what is revealed thetically but non-thematically across
these possibilities is a state of the world synthetically bound with the given state.
Consequently the modifications to be imposed on the world are given thetically in
the present things as objective potentialities which have to realize themselves by
borrowing our body as the instrument of their realization. It is thus that the man
who is angry sees on the face of his opponent the objective quality of asking for a
punch in the nose. (1964:139–40)
My possibilities are not already prescribed for me, laid down thetically; they come
forward in my engagement with the world, though not thematically. I do not think them
explicitly in order to realize them. It is my desire to do so that moves me toward impure
reflection. Impure reflection is the attempt to turn my attention to what I am doing
while I am doing it or to what I am thinking as I am thinking it. It arises as I try to make
sense of myself. I try, as it were, to catch myself in my own act. Impure reflection is
consciousness’s paradoxical attempt to make itself its own object, as if it could break
itself off and look back at itself or fold back over on itself and experience itself from
both the inside and the outside.12 “Impure reflection,” Sartre writes, “is an abortive effort
on the part of the for-itself to be another while remaining itself” (1964:137). Because of
this paradox, “Consciousness is ‘troubled’; we are not able to contemplate our states of
consciousness, they are not thing-like” (Murdoch 1980:56).
Our body here is like a medium in a trance. Through it must be realized a certain
potentiality of things (a beverage-about-to-be-drunk . . . ), and reflection arising in
the midst of all these apprehends the ontological relation of the For-itself to its pos-
sibilities but as an object. Thus the act rises as the virtual object of the reflective
consciousness. . . . We use the term Psyche for the organized totality of these virtual
and transcendent existents which form a permanent cortege for impure reflection
and which are the natural object of psychological research. (Sartre 1964:139)
This cortege of mental objects posing as our own interiority accompanies impure
reflection. “We are tempted, however, to create for ourselves at this point a spurious
object: our character or nature, which we may imagine to be causally related to our
conduct. This is what Sartre calls la réflexion complice, or bad faith” (Murdoch 1980:57).
I attribute my own acts to forces within me beyond my control.
As soon as we enter on the plane of impure reflection—that is, of the reflection which
seeks to determine the being which I am—an entire world appears which peoples
this temporality. This world, a virtual presence, the probable object of my reflective
intention, is the psychic world or the psyche. In one sense its existence is purely
ideal; in another it is, since it is-made-to-be, since it is revealed to consciousness. It
is “my shadow;” it is what is revealed to me when I wish to see myself. In addition
this phantom world exists as a real situation of the for-itself, for it can be that in terms
of which the for-itself determines itself to be what it has to be. For example, I shall
not go to this or that person’s house “because of ” the antipathy which I feel toward
him. Or I decide on this or that action by taking into consideration my hate or my
love. (Sartre 1964:146)
I seek to determine who I am by impure reflection. Insofar as this seeking makes

objects of my subjectivity, it is impure. To account for myself to myself, I export
myself to my psychic objects.
The temptation to think of our psychic life as a thing is of course increased by the
fact that this is how other people think of it. Serious reflexion about one’s own char-
acter will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another per-
son well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him [the nothingness at the
center of being]. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.) But usually one
views other people as compact finished products to whom labels (“jealous,” “bad-
tempered,” “shrewd,” “vivacious”) are attached on the strength of their conduct; and
since the myth of the “ghost in the machine” is so deep in our language we inevita-
bly think of the person as composed of psychic forces which issue in the perfor-
mances that justify the names. (It is exclusively this aspect of our knowledge of mind
which is dealt with in [Gilbert Ryle’s] The Concept of Mind . . . ) Our consciousness
of how other people label us in this sort of way, and how they see us, is often very
acute. . . . To see ourselves through the eyes of another is to see ourselves suddenly
fixed, opaque, complete; and we may well be tempted to accept such a valuation as
our own, as a relief from the apparent emptiness of self-examinations. On the other
hand if we disown that which we apprehend the other as seeing, the experience may
be distressing or maddening. (Murdoch 1980:57)13
I am not driven by psychic forces that precipitate my acts. My cortege of psychic

forces comes into being only as I try to figure out what I am doing by introspection.
This impure reflection tears apart my intercorporeal entanglement with things and
others and reflects it back to me as if it were split into two parts: my intention and
the act into which my intention thrust me. But in fact, I have not intended the act;
the act has disclosed my intention. It is not because I stand apart from my body and
deliberate my next move that a horizon of possibilities opens before me; it is because
my body is already absorbed in its motor intentional engagements that I find myself
open to a horizon of possibilities.
What of the openness of the future, in relation to which Sartre wished to give mean-
ing to the projet of consciousness, what of this liberty which lies deeper than will?
This is to be sought at the level of the projet fondamental, which is the level of a pu-
rifying reflexion, as distinct from the reflexion complice which accompanies willed
deliberation. Elsewhere in a revealing phrase Sartre says: “The circularity of: to speak
I must know my thought but how am I to fix my thought except in words? is the form
or all human reality.” The existent is determined by the not-yet-existent, and vice
versa. Our acts teach us our intentions just as our language teaches us our thoughts;
and this is not the same as to say that our intentions are nothing but our acts, or our
thoughts nothing but our words. (Murdoch 1980:61)
In this, Sartre’s purifying reflection, réflexion purifiante, brushes up against the impure
kind.
Despite these philosophical tangles, there are in Being and Nothingness hints of a
solution to the problem of catching a glimpse of my own consciousness. It is the mo-
ment reflection gets dirty but not yet impure or the moment impure reflection purges
itself of its viscosity before it achieves the status of pure reflection. Just before impure
reflection freezes my thoughts into objects, I get what Sartre calls an intuition of impure
reflection (Sartre 1964:136). I have not yet made my own psychic processes objects,
but they are getting viscous; I have not settled into thinking and my consciousness is
still, as Murdoch puts it, flickering (1980:42, 43, 66). Here, as I move from the pre-
reflective cogito (motor intentionality) to impure reflection, I might catch myself, in
both the sense of getting an inkling of what I am like when I am not paying attention
to myself and of stopping myself short of plunging from unreflective consciousness
into either pure or impure reflection. At that moment, I am, however ephemerally,
possessed by a sense of my own meaning as presence. Sartre calls this evidence:
The objects although virtual are not abstract; the reflective does not aim at them in
emptiness; they are given as the concrete in-itself which the reflective has to be beyond
the reflected on. We shall use the term evidence for the immediate presence “in per-
son” of hate, exile, systematic doubt in the reflective For-itself. . . .
But this possibility of making present a love proves better than any argument the
transcendence of the psychic. When I abruptly discover, when I see my love [that is,
when I turn my attention to my own emotion], I apprehend at the same stroke that
it stands before my consciousness. I can take points of view regarding it, can judge
it; I am not engaged in it as the reflective is in the reflected-on. . . . Due to this very
fact I apprehend it as not being of the nature of the For-itself. It is infinitely heavier,
more opaque, more solid than that absolute transparency. That is why the evidence
with which the psychic gives itself to the intuition of impure reflection is not apod-
ictic. . . . If I did not apprehend in the psychic object a love with its future arrested
[that is, an endless love, one that does not change over time], would it still be love?
Would it not rather fall under the heading of caprice? (Sartre 1964:140)
Between reflections, Sartre locates an intuition of impure reflection, the moment an

intimation of the consciousness of which I was not conscious, my “transparent cop-
ing,” in Dreyfus’s charming term, springs to my awareness but before it quite arrives.
Because I am partially colonized by the other’s gesture, my intuition can be not only
of the meaning the world has for me at that moment but also of the meaning it has
for the other whose gestures inhabit me. It is this moment, the moment transpar-
ency gets dirty, that I might catch myself in my act, and the other along with me.
For Sartre, in contrast to Merleau-Ponty, unreflective consciousness flickers with
reflective consciousness. I am, he supposes, always on the verge of catching myself
in the act. The difference is that Sartre takes both the reflective and unreflective
modes to be forms of consciousness a priori. He is interested in inner states. For
Merleau-Ponty, the way I am turned toward the world as an empty head is different
in kind from the way I turn toward myself and find my head filled, as it were, with
consciousness. I simply cannot experience myself as conscious of being empty of
consciousness. Unlike consciousness, intentionality reaches outward. Inner states
disappear into transparent coping. Consciousness brings into being the interiority
it presupposes; intentionality, by contrast, flushes me with the world’s being or mine
with its. Philosophically, I remain skeptical of Sartre’s intuitions of impurity. I intro-
duce it here to hold open for inquiry the only articulation I have come across of the
possibility of catching myself in the act that takes cognizance of the problem of how
the purely reflective could conceivably perceive itself not reflecting. If it were pos-
sible to bring off, it would constitute folkloristics’ and philosophy’s access to inner
states and other minds.
Folklore and Phenomenology
Objectivity and subjectivity have each appealed to folklorists, as to all social scien-
tists—objectivity because of the illusion that a truth is given and our problem is only
to get access to it, subjectivity because of its persuasion that I am trapped in my own
mind and could never get access to an objective truth, even if there were one. Objec-
tivity permits me to make truth claims about the external world; subjectivity frees
me to tell the truth about my own perceptions of it. Scientists are committed to the
realist position that the world of objects persists regardless of my hold on it (Merleau-
Ponty [1962] 1995:350). Things imprint themselves on the sensory apparatus of the
body and constitute my perceptions of them; thoughts are reflections of the things
themselves. Humanists are taken by the idealist position that things are constituted
for me by my perception of them. My senses reach for things and hold them in a
certain way; the idea of the thing precedes the thing itself.14
Neither seeing objects without perspective, as separate from the body, nor being
a separate body, seeing objects from a particular perspective, is foreordained by how
the world is or how the body is. Subjectivity and objectivity must be carved out of a
prior and deeper intercorporeity. I am neither a thing among things nor a subject
set over and against objects. I am entangled with others in a world of objects from
which my project as an objectivist is to disentangle myself so that I can perceive the
world as if it were made of objects and my project as a subjectivist to disentangle
myself so that I can perceive myself as if I were the only subject. Intercorporeity
anchors both these projects of disentanglement. As a methodology, intercorporeity
returns me to an undifferentiated state in which objects are my flesh and others my
cohabitants. My private subjective impressions do not matter here, nor do the prop-
erties of objects. What matters is the meaning in which you, I, and they jointly par-
ticipate. And to this, we have joint access. Our disciplinary habit of being present to
events and alternately getting involved in and reflecting on them—Ricoeur’s appro-
priation and distanciation—gives us access to the luminous moments things make
sense. Our bodies are sense-making devices in whose flesh others and objects are
embedded. Intercorporeity empowers me to tell the truth about others. It is neither
that things impress themselves on my body nor that I export meaning to them. My
body participates in the meaning we jointly inhabit. I catch intuitions of this mean-
ing on the fly or with effort. For this, I do not need access to inner states or other
minds but to my own body. That is my work as a folklorist, to elucidate the meanings
acts have for bodies.
The appeal of intercorporeity is the recognition that I belong to objects and others
before I belong to myself. I, objects, and others hang together in a matrix of meaning-
ful acts in which we are, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, intervolved ([1962] 1995:82). I can
retract myself from my intervolvement and posit, for example, a square box suspend-
ed in Cartesian space, all sides of which remain equal no matter what perspective I
take up on it. It is the effort of objectivity that lifts the box away from my body and
proposes it as exhibiting properties inherent in it regardless of me. Merleau-Ponty calls
this the view from nowhere. Or I can restrict myself to my own body and perceive the
box in the space in front of it but from here, the front side is larger than the back, the
side panel narrows as the box recedes from me. My subjectivity ties the box to my body
from a particular angle. Merleau-Ponty calls this the view from somewhere.15
But even if I perceive the box from where I am, my perception is not confined to
the side it shows me. It offers the rest of itself as its horizons of possibility. Suppose I
am walking along a street and I go up the steps of one of the buildings, open the door,
and step into a meadow of flowers. I suffer a little metaphysical shock to discover the
building has no back and I conclude, perhaps, that I have wandered onto a stage set.
But now, when I go back out the door and continue walking along the street, although
nothing has changed, I no longer see the fronts of buildings; I see façades. The back
of a building is included in my perception of the front. Even if I do not figure on go-
ing round, my anticipation of what is behind the building changes my perception of
what shows in front.16 The façades look different to me now. They look flimsy and apt
to tip over. My perception includes my appreciation of parts of the building I do not
see. I am lodged in the thing that unfolds around me. Merleau-Ponty calls this the
view from everywhere.17
[T]o look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in
terms of the aspect which they present to it. But in so far as I see those things too,
they remain abodes open to my gaze, and, being potentially lodged in them, I already
perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every
object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to
it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney,
the walls, the table can “see;” but back of the lamp is nothing but the face which it
“shows” to the chimney. . . . [E]ach one treats the others round it as spectators of its
hidden aspects and as guarantee of the permanence of those aspects. . . . [T]he house
itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.
(Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:69)
I and others participate in “the strange mode of existence enjoyed by the object behind
our back” (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995:24). I am neither trapped in my own mind
nor apprenticed to a truth outside me. We share a world. Intercorporeity returns us
to sociality, rather than to subjectivity or objectivity, as the grounds of social science.
I am no longer a subject set over and against objects. I experience objects as my own
flesh. “We say therefore that our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing
among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because it is
evident, that it unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness
to the order of the ‘object’ and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals to us quite unex-
pected relations between the two orders,” Merleau-Ponty writes (1968:137). Profes-
sionally, we become the connoisseurs of such unexpected relations.
Both objective and subjective approaches have accredited practices in social sci-
entific research. To be objective, inspect phenomena analytically, display their formal
structure, find their rules; to be subjective, bring forth the analyst with the analysis,
the observer with her observations, acknowledge bias, not as an impairment of prop-
er knowledge but as a tonic against absolutism, an inducement to multiple episte-
mologies. Objective approaches aim for the reliability, generalizability, or compara-
bility of the evidence, granting ethnographers authority; subjective approaches
support transparency, presence, and vivacity of description, granting ethnographers
authenticity (see Young 1997:148–49, 156–57, 167). Folkloristics is uniquely posi-
tioned to put forward intersubjective practices to be accredited. Its angle of entry
into culture by way of embodied behavior and performance, especially of ritualized
or habitual behavior and performance, makes it especially amenable to phenomeno-
logical approaches. As a discipline, folkloristics can get close to how cultural forms,
traditionalities, in Richard Bauman’s and Charles Briggs’s usage, can get vivified as
embodied practices that acquire authenticity from the past, and how new forms,
modernities, can paradoxically figure themselves as sites or occasions of authentic-
ity precisely because they stand against the sedimentation of tradition (Bauman and
Briggs 2003; Briggs 2005). Folklore is not just its objects, artifacts of representa-
tional intentionality; it is the body’s traversal of the objects, which awakens them
into meaning. Of course we are interested in how people represent themselves to

themselves and to each other, in the artifacts themselves, but, even more, we are
interested in how people invest themselves in their representations, how they are,
how we are all, intercorporeally engaged in the meaning of being in the world.18 We
activate folklore by moving into it bodily, by lending things our bodies, by borrowing
others’ subjectivities. Intersubjective approaches elucidate our shared reality as a
world of meanings, granting ethnographers presence.
Intercorporeity is the originary condition of our being in the world. We begin as
a body within a body. Our project over the course of our lives is to separate ourselves
from the mother body and other bodies, to get out of intercorporeity into solipsism.
Solipsism is not a fate; it is an accomplishment. Insofar as they participate in motor
intentionality, gestures are not signs of the effort to overcome the solipsistic separation
between subjects but evidence of our participation in an intercorporeal world. Access
to the experience of the other is not impossible; it is inescapable. It does not matter
that I cannot get into the other’s head because I cannot get her out of my body. As
folklorists, our investment has been in the phenomenology of subjectivity or even of
objectivity; it ought to be in the phenomenology of intercorporeity.
Notes
This article was originally presented at the 2007 American Folklore Society Meeting in Quebec in the
panel, “Folklore and Phenomenology,” one of a series of panels organized by Lee Haring on folklore and
philosophy. Versions of this article have been presented as a guest lecture titled “Merleau-Ponty, Mirror
Neurons, and Gestures” in Hubert Dreyfus’s course on phenomenology, University of California, Berke-
ley (2002); as a professional paper called “The Philosopher’s Body” at the International Society for Gesture
Studies meeting in Austin, Texas (2002); and as an invited lecture called “The Volitional Spectrum of
Gestures” at the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania (2006). As always, I
appreciate the ongoing commentaries and support of my colleagues in Eve Sweetser’s Berkeley Gesture
Group. I thank Amy Shuman and Harry Berger for acute readings of this paper. Amy makes me think
better (or worse) of whatever I’m writing. Harry made me think harder about the phenomenological
problems the article raises. Without his critique, I should have gotten a good deal more of it wrong than
I no doubt have. I salute both outside readers. Some of their criticisms were so acute I changed the text;
others were so oblique to my project, I held out against them. I have taken them all seriously and even
when I thought they were wrong, I have tried to clarify why I am right. Needless to say, none of these
resistances or repairs will deflect future criticisms.
1. In its pure form, you will notice the limitations of pure subjectivity. In her professional capacity, the
Fair Witness is unable to lie but also unable to generalize. It is only particulars that can be known in this
ruthlessly perspectival way.
2. In his last great incomplete work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty comes to call inter-
subjectivity intercorporeity (1968:140–41). Even in The Phenomenology of Perception ([1962] 1995), Mer-
leau-Ponty does not often use the term “intersubjectivity,” and for good reason. It imports back into the
enmeshment of two bodies a disembodied mentality, as if interactants were telepathically connected. I,
too, prefer his later term.
3. Thank Harry Berger for his skepticism. It obliged me to work out the difference between perceiving
somebody making a gesture toward an object and perceiving somebody making an iconic (or meta-
phoric) gesture that entailed its object. The puzzlement of one of the outside readers with the way I
originally wrote this sentence obliged me to clarify it in the next one. I appreciate that reader’s close at-
tention to the argument.
4. This single remark by Merleau-Ponty anchors the intersection I explore here between gestures and
phenomenology. He mentions gestures only a couple of times in The Phenomenology of Perception, and
he would not have had in mind affiliative gestures like iconics, let alone metaphorics, which George
Lakoff did not think of until the 1980s (McNeill 1992:x). Possibly Merleau-Ponty had in mind only the
sort of anticipatory gesture he describes on pages 138–39. But he understood the gesture as more than
either itself or its object. My project here is to specify what more there is to be understood.
5. As the outside reader pointed out, the distinction between representational and motor intentional-
ity is not always absolute. My discussion of Sartre’s impure reflection at the end of the article explores
this problem more closely.
6. Contrast Merleau-Ponty’s account of my perception of the other with Harris Berger and Giovanna
del Negro’s description of Husserlian apperception:
When I see the body of another person, I have what Husserl calls an “analogical apperception”—an
experience of that other body not merely as an object but as another subject, another entity who has
experience . . . Apperception occurs in any experience of things as examples of a type, but the apper-
ception of other subjects is unique. The type “subject” emerges from the most primordial level of our
experience—the sphere of own-ness . . . [so that] your body and mine are inherently “paired” in ex-
perience. One implication of this idea is that the concept “subject” establishes the apperception of both
“self ” and “other,” that the subject is not radically my own but inherently social. (2004:98)
This is the trace of idealism in Husserlian phenomenology: the idea of the thing precedes perception of
the thing itself. Merleau-Ponty’s point is that the perception in question is not merely analogical but
deeply experiential.
7. Undoubtedly other folklorists use phenomenology in their work, most notably Amy Shuman, Mary
Hufford, and Harris Berger, but it is not my undertaking here to survey the field, and my interest in those
I do mention is exclusively in the question of intersubjectivity.
8. Iacoboni does not distinguish between the intention to imitate, which is a matter of representa-
tional intentionality, and the involuntary imitation of mirror neurons, which is a matter of motor inten-
tionality. He takes imitation as the broad category of which mirror neuron responses are a narrower part.
Surely it is the other way around. Mirroring, the involuntary kind of imitation, in which the body of the
perceiver is taken over by the act of the other without the perceiver’s volition, is primary. Both bodies
simply participate in intercorporeity. Imitating somebody else on purpose builds on a prior capacity to
mirror that person unintentionally. As Vittorio Gallese suggests, “If I want to reproduce the behavior of
someone else, no matter how complex it is, or whether I understand it or not, I always need to translate
my external perspective of the demonstrator into my own personal bodily perspective” (2003:519). Rep-
resentational intentionality is a specialization of motor intentionality, not the reverse.
9. Iacoboni points out that persons considered empathetic by other criteria mimic the postures, move-
ments, and facial expressions of their interactants unconsciously (2005:95). Paul Ekman’s work on how
the imitation of face postures that are emotion expressions evokes the emotions the postures are expres-
sions of, even if the imitators do not know what expression their faces are being manipulated into, supports
this possibility (1992:390–91). Ray Birdwhistell’s work on interactional synchrony suggests that this mim-
icry may be mutual (1973). By extension, a clever practitioner can deliberately mimic the other’s move-
ment, get into synchrony, and induce her interactant to imitate hers, thereby choreographing a shared
disposition under one participant’s conscious control. This possibility constitutes a form of hypnosis.
10. Iacoboni has a guess about the solution to his problem, that identifying the gesture as my own
depends on an intensification of my body schema when I make it (1999:2528). I doubt it. My suspicion
is that the point of the mirror neuronal response is not to differentiate myself from the other but to co-
participate in being in the world.
11. I am grateful to the outside reader whose inquiries about how I might be flooded with the inten-
tionality of the other coaxed me into seeing that being taken over by the other’s motor intentionality in
this way is not the problem but the solution. As that reader suggests, it is the other’s gestures that project
motor intentionality into me as much as it is my mirror neurons that reflect that intentionality, though
neither the projection nor the reflection is deliberate or conscious.
12. Sartre describes the twofold movement of reflection: “But impure reflection, which is the first
spontaneous (but not the original) reflective movement, is-in-order-to-be the reflected-on as in-itself. Its
motivation is within it in the twofold movement, which we have already described, of interiorization and
of objectivation” (Sartre 1964:136). Sartre’s description prefigures Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus as “the dia-
lectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or more simply, of incor-
poration and objectification” (Bourdieu 1989:72), except that Bourdieu made interiority corporeal.
13. The “ghost in the machine” is Ryle’s brilliantly parodic term for the incommensurability of an
etherealized mind in a materialized body (Ryle 1949:15–16); Merleau-Ponty alludes to the same problem
in his critique of multiple solipsism.
14. Berger moves his objection to subjectivity in folklore toward ethics. He writes that “to hold a
facile subjectivist relativism, to accept all views as merely one version of the truth, is to be guilty of com-
plicity” (1999:257).
15. Berger takes Husserl to be the philosopher who broke with the idealism that held philosophy in
thrall for two thousand years. “Husserl developed his work in reaction to an idealist philosophy that set
up a sharp (and to some, commonsensical) contrast between experience and objective reality. According
to that idealism, we are never in contact with the objective world of things; we have only experience, and
this is completely distinct from objective reality” (1999:19–20). In my view, and in Hubert Dreyfus’s, the
break does not come until Heidegger (Dreyfus 2002). Like the idealists, Husserl privileges experience,
which brackets the ontological status of the objects experienced via what he calls the epoché:
we must place an epoché (set of brackets) around any claims that a particular experience is subjective
or objective and investigate the data of experience in an unprejudiced manner. When we return to
experience in this way, Husserl suggests, we make a startling discovery: nothing has changed. Strictly
as lived experience, the desk before me, for example, is a genuine other, an autonomous entity in no
way subject to my whims. As a result, we never need to remove the phenomenological brackets. (Berg-
er and del Negro 2004:97)
Maybe not, but by the same token, we never have access to the real, and here I am taken with Berger’s
own telling description of this sort of consciousness “as some metaphysical substance that must be poured
onto an object for it to be able to enter into experience” (1999:303 footnote). Like me, Berger recognizes
a distinction between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Husserl’s phenomenology is a transcendental phenomenology in that it emphasizes that the world

exists as something there to be constituted in experience; in that sense the world is constituted with-
in experience. The existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty differs from Husserl’s in
many ways, but on this fundamental level the difference is merely one of emphasis: Merleau-Ponty
agrees that the world is there for experience, but he emphasizes that the subject is there in that world,
as much constituted by it as he or she constitutes it. (1999:20)
For me, this difference cuts deeper. Merleau-Ponty, heir to both Husserl and Heidegger, discovers both
the enmeshment of the body with things and the disappearance of things from (conscious) experience
in intercorporeity.
16. Following Husserl, Berger and del Negro describe anticipation rather more literally than Merleau-
Ponty intends it, as the expectation of an actual future.
I directly experience the surfaces that face me; I don’t, of course, experience the details of its back . . .
but I am aware that the back is there and would be available for future viewing . . . [A]s I look at the
front, I experience the fact that it has a back that could be the object of my future experiences. . . . In
Husserl’s terminology, the back . . . is “presentiated” to me. Two important ideas stem from this anal-
ysis. First of all, the fact that the physical world admits other perspectives is important because it shows
that the physical world is an intersubjective world. . . . [F]eatures that are beyond my immediate grasp
. . . may become the focus of future experiences—for myself at some other point in time or for others
situated at a different location in the same space. . . . In the same way that my experience of the front
face of the desk presentiates the existence of the back of the desk, so does the body of the other pre-
sentiate a realm of particular experiences to which I do not have direct access but that I know with
certainty is there. (2004:98–99)
According to Merleau-Ponty, as Dreyfus insists (2002), the other sides of things are part of my per-
ceptual experience in the present. Nor do I grant the existence of a physical world beyond my subjective
perception because other people can see it even when I do not. Quite the reverse. It is only when I notice
that other people can see things I do not that I come up with the notion of separate subjects. Up to that
developmental moment, we inhabit the same intercorporeal world.
17. Husserl conflated two modalities of being, which Heidegger correctly, in Merleau-Ponty’s view
(and mine), separated out. Or, to put it the other way, Heidegger refined a concept already implicit in
Husserl’s phenomenology. The perceptibility of the anticipated but occluded side of objects along with
the presented side is not subjectivity but intersubjectivity or, more correctly, intercorporeity. This perspec-
tive is not thinkable or reflect-on-able but enactable. As the other outside reader notes, one’s acts antici-
pate something but not consciously. The anticipation appears as motor intentionality. What is thinkable
and what one thinks about when one thinks about it is that only the front sides of things could possibly
be perceptible. This is representational intentionality and demonstrates what happens when we try to
pull motor intentionality into consciousness. This conscious reflective moment is subjectivity, and it is
different from the corporeal capacity to act toward the properties of an object I perceive but do not see.
18. Though he, too, sees meaning as the key concern of folkloristics, Berger returns meaning to the
perspectival, which is to say, to the subjective.
What is primary for human research is the lived reality of meanings, not some ideally rich universe
of cultural objects, and this visual/physical metaphor is particularly apt for explaining the point. The
everyday world of lived social experience is always perspectival. Some meanings stand out sharply
illuminated, others wallow in the shadows, vague and colorless. More important, the relationship
between sharply articulated and intense meanings and dimly perceived, marginal meanings provides
experience with a texture—a depth and quality—that is just as important as any individual meaning
present.
Such “textures” come about as a peculiar effect of the foreground/background structure of experi-
ence. Again the metaphor is visual. (1999:123)
Merleau-Ponty’s undertaking, which I take up here, is to move meaning out of the subjective into the
intercorporeal.
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Gestures, Intercorporeity, and the

folklorists have invoked phenomenology in support of embodied first-person

Katharine Young is an independent scholar and occasional lecturer in folklore, anthropology,

Journal of American Folklore 124(492):55–87

Figure 1. Motor Intentionality

DEICTIC DEICTIC DEICTIC

Figure 2. Representational Intentionality

scious intention, it is to have a piece of cake. The actions my body performs to do so

Objects and Subjects

The other’s body, in contrast to my own, appears to me as a thing among things. As

have been inclined to characterize them as instances of representational intentional-

The Intentional Arc

Gestures are suspended between manipulations of objects and manipulations of one’s

As a consequence of the unreflectiveness of my motor intentionality, when I return

particular privilege. Of the consciousness which I discover by reflection and before

My overreaching of my own body is “exactly compensated,” as Merleau-Ponty puts

There is here a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable. It

So my subjectivity transcends me—I am outrun by my own acts—and at the same time

intersubjectivity is an effect of mutual attention between two still self-contained

Half a century after Merleau-Ponty described intersubjectivity/intercorporeity, two

roring is cognitively loaded that it can generate empathy” (forthcoming). If it is un-

My own consciousness, far from being self-transparent, is at once partially opaque

As for consciousness, it has to be conceived, no longer as a constituting conscious-

The impediment to doing folklore phenomenologically is the problem of conscious-

The consciousness, however, is not constantly in a state of translucent or empty self-

Sartre contrasts the translucency of reflective consciousness (Merleau-Ponty’s “rep-

Hazel Barnes describes Sartrean consciousness as “the reflection-reflecting” (1964:552).

For Sartre, motor intentionality, the pre-reflective cogito, is haunted by a conscious-

I seek to determine who I am by impure reflection. Insofar as this seeking makes

I am not driven by psychic forces that precipitate my acts. My cortege of psychic

Between reflections, Sartre locates an intuition of impure reflection, the moment an

Folklore and Phenomenology

into meaning. Of course we are interested in how people represent themselves to

Husserl’s phenomenology is a transcendental phenomenology in that it emphasizes that the world

———. 2002. Unpublished lectures. University of California, Berkeley.

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