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c o n c l u s i o n Transaction and the Dynamic Distinctiveness of Races To change that which is “outside” a body is to change that body as well, which is why Dewey writes “[o]ne might as well study an organism in complete detachment from its environment as try to study an electric clock on the wall in disregard of the wire leading to it.”1 Just as an electric clock cannot tell time if electricity does not ®ow into it, an organism cannot function apart from the environments that “®ow” through it. Unlike the relationship between an electric clock and electricity, however, the relationships between organisms and their various environments are reciprocal. Not only do organisms exist by means of their environments, but their environments also exist by means of the impact that organisms have on them. While Dewey’s metaphor of an electric clock and wire fails to capture fully the live circuit between organic bodies and environments, it does emphasize successfully the importance of including environments in one’s understanding of bodies. Just as one cannot adequately understand the electric clock separated from its power source, one cannot best understand bodies sharply detached from their environments because, as Dewey claims, life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it. No creature lives merely under its skin; its subcutaneous organs are means of connection with what lies beyond its bodily frame, and to which, in order to live, it must adjust itself. . . . The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way.2 In some situations and for some purposes, the skin marks a limit between the body’s inside and outside. As a boundary, skin constitutes a functional, rather than substantive, essential, or ¤xed, delimitation. In many cases, to understand and attempt to improve bodily experience means to turn one’s attention to a multitude of physical, social, political, and cultural environments , rather than to “the body” per se. Or better, to focus attention on these various environments can be precisely to attend to the bodily beings that transact with them. As an organ, on the other hand, skin is more than mere boundary. It functions as the site of transaction between inside and outside a body. In addition to looking outside a body to grasp its inside, in many situations, one also must look at the skin itself, that is, at the event of transaction between inside and outside. Much of this book has focused on the way in which the concept of transaction undercuts an understanding of bodies and environments as related like the ingredients of a tossed salad. This emphasis is meant to counter the concept of atomism, with regard to bodies, that is prevalent in philosophy. It should not be taken as an indication that distinctiveness is less important to transaction than is continuity. These seemingly opposed characteristics are both vitally important to the concept of transaction. This should be clear from the metaphor of stew: in their transaction with each other, the vegetables of a stew dynamically constitute each other as the vegetables that they are or that they become in the stew. The vegetables are changed in texture, color, and ®avor by the process of stewing, but they do not thereby become one indistinguishable lump. In a stew, rather than undermine the distinctiveness of one another, the vegetables’ contribution to each other’s constitution helps compose their distinctiveness. In turn, their distinctiveness gives each of them something particular to contribute to the others. The idea of the preservation of dynamic distinctiveness through transaction has a number of signi¤cant implications. I want here to consider it in connection with critical race theory.3 Addressing concerns about the concept of transaction that critical race theory implicitly raises will produce richer understandings of race and of transaction. Using transaction to understand race means conceiving of races as dynamically co-constituting each other in such a way that their distinctiveness is preserved.4 Taking white and black people as an example, the concept of transaction means that in and through their transactions, white and black people “stew” together in such a way that what constitutes whiteness is effected by what counts as blackness, and vice versa. This does not mean that white and black people necessarily melt together into one race of identical, khakicolored people. The...

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