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o n e Living Across and Through Skins Bodies in Transaction What does Dewey mean by transaction, particularly with respect to bodies? Central to transaction are its undercutting of the dualism of organism and environment—or, of humans in particular, self and world—and its rejection of the atomism that accompanies such a dualism. Two notions are especially important to an understanding of bodies as transactional: the related concepts of “body–mind” and organism, and the concept of habit. By conceiving of bodies as body–mind and as organism, Dewey rejects the idea that humans are made up of two separate mental and physical substances that somehow coexist. In contrast to accounts of self as substance, including that of monism as well as that of dualism, Dewey claims that the human organism is characterized by activity, which has physical and mental aspects to it. An organism’s activity, in turn, is characterized by a particular style. In an organism’s transactions with the world, patterns occur, which is to say that organic activity is characterized primarily by habit. By transaction Dewey means an active and dynamic relationship between things such that those things are co-constitutive of each other. I use the term “things” here to indicate broadly that transaction is a feature of many, various entities, not merely physical things. While Dewey often uses the word “interaction” to describe the constitutive “back and forth” between things, the term does not capture the relationship between things that Dewey intends.1 Because the term “interaction” can suggest a process by which things that exist apart from each other come into contact and exchange with each other, it can imply a positing of those things as fundamentally , ontologically separate. In so doing, it tends to cast the dynamic exchange of things as a relatively super¤cial process that has little constitutive impact on what those things are, rather than as a thoroughgoing process that effects the constitution of the things themselves. Put another way, the idea of interaction conceives of entities as in an exchange that is relatively static, as previously and fully formed prior to interactions with others, and therefore as not signi¤cantly effected by those interactions. For this reason, in his later work and using the speci¤c example of an organism and its environment, Dewey describes interaction as “assum [ing] the organism and its environmental objects to be present as substantially separate existences or forms of existence, prior to their entry into joint investigation.”2 In contrast, the term “transaction” indicates dynamic entities that are continually undergoing reconstitution through their interconstitutive relations with others. Again, in the instance of organisms and their environments, one can see what Dewey means by transaction: “Organisms do not live without air and water, nor without food ingestion and radiation. They live, that is, as much in processes across and ‘through’ skins as in processes ‘within’ skins.”3 The epidermis is not some sort of rigid border that guards the organism “inside” the skin from foreign elements “outside” it. Organisms, such as humans, are not “located” within the epidermis in an isolated, self-contained way; they are instead constituted as much by things “outside” the skin as “within” it, as well as by the skin, or site of transaction, itself. The commonplace process of being nourished by eating food is merely one possible example of how organisms are constituted through their transactions with the world. As Dewey claims, “there is no absolute separation between skin and the interior [or exterior] of the body. No sooner is the distinction drawn than it has to be quali¤ed.”4 The example of organisms living in processes that reach across and through skins illustrates the dynamic quality of transaction without suggesting a formlessness in which entities are in such ®ux that they have no stability, order, or identity. That organic processes take place between organism and environment in such a way that rigid boundaries between the two are blurred does not mean that the organism can have no form or distinction or that it does not exist as this particular organism and not another. In its rejection of a static ontology, the notion of transaction does not reify®ux or complete dissolution of identity. Put another way, the concept of transaction no more supports a process metaphysics than it does a substance metaphysics. Instead, as Dewey claims, transaction invokes something like “a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing .”5 Moreover, this stability...

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