The Societal Co-constitution of Embodied Subjectivity

Abstract. Social constructionist psychology has no adequate notion of embodied subjectivity, a situation causing conceptual errors, raising meth-odological issues, and serving to entrench within constructionism the dualisms that structure mainstream psychology. The outline of a solution to this problem is offered, drawing on contemporary work in neuroscience. A framework from Harre ́ of three ‘grammars ’ of causality and influence (P, or persons; O or organisms; and M or molecules) is described and used to structure the integration of Shotter’s notion of subjectivity with two brain systems. Damasio’s ‘somatic marker ’ hypothesis enables the feel-ingful, sensuous aspects of ‘joint action’, whilst Gazzaniga’s ‘interpreter’ enables their discursive aspects. The benefits of theorizing embodied subjectivity in this way are illustrated by a study of the phenomenon of ‘depression’, and it is concluded that such an integration makes construc-tionism more coherent, credible and critical. Key Words: embodiment, grammars of causality, joint action, social constructionism, subjectivity Social constructionist psychology is a heterogeneous mosaic of philosophy, theory and research characterized by ‘family resemblances ’ rather than conceptual or methodological consistency, but a substantive commonality within this diverse assemblage is the rejection of the Cartesian subject of mainstream psychology. Alongside a focus on language and a view of society as the prime mover, the guarantor of knowledge and root of experi-ence, constructionist psychology rejects the atomistic, bounded, coherent, rational psychological subject endorsed, at least implicitly, by most main-stream approaches. Instead, constructionists observe that notions of the person are culturally obtained and promulgated (Harré, 1987). They propose that thought has a discursive, argumentative or dialogical character that utilizes the ‘common sense ’ themes and dilemmas of a culture (Billig, 1987