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20 The Positive Sense of “Situation” I have distinguished between the idea of a situation as internally related to life and the more familiar positive idea of situations as independent entities comprising similarly independent entities. It appears, however, that both lead to the same conclusion, that what is typically considered to be external to subjectivity has a subjective aspect that is an irreducible feature of its objectivity . This chapter considers some implications of this conclusion insofar as it is implicit in the attempt to maintain a positive conception of “situation.” We often use the term “situation” in a positive way to refer to what had come to an actor’s notice prior to her decision to act and is, in that sense, already there. When I sit with someone at a dining table, the food and utensils are in place and effectively fixed in their qualities and amounts, regardless of whether I have an appetite and regardless of whether my purpose is to eat or to keep someone, say John, company. If I do not initially intend to eat, I may nevertheless feel that I should at least nibble, for example, if John is not to feel awkward while eating in front of me. It might be said, then, that I eventually form an intention to eat (rather than ingest) despite the fact that I initially had no such intention and might still have no appetite. It seems necessary to add that I might always have intended to act in whatever ways might make John comfortable. But that changes nothing. He appears in all this as an element in my situation, as the other that I take into account in what I am doing. Yet the intimacy of the moment—its autonomous aspect—imposes no special effort on me, no need to deliberate, in order to fit into the John-laden situation (including , perhaps, nibbling, making small talk, and the like). It makes a difference in how I see John and what I do and do not do in his company. This cannot be a matter of just taking him into account (as part of my being rational in what I 344 Chapter 20 choose to do, as in the standard theory of action) but fitting in to a subjectivity in which differences, such as they are, are subordinate to the course of activity. I do not make a decision to nibble. I nibble by way of being of a relation that cannot be represented (even by me or John) as two parties externally connected and therefore essentially independent of one another; it would be equally incorrect , and for the same reason, to say that speaking conversationally involves, fundamentally, making one decision after another to speak. A necessary condition of my being with John in the intimately situated manner of consociates is, like conversational discourse, the sort of sociality Rousseau referred to as “the basic fact” understood as a course of activity. To be in a situation is to be of it in a way that constantly reconstitutes subjectivity across parties who are conceived of as independent only in theory. The food and utensils and even John’s mood and what he is doing are, for the positive sense of “situation,” like stage props, certain qualities of which will be significant to what I do but which are independent of qualities that might be significant in another situation. The forks, spoons, and knives are nothing more than indications of how eating is done, though attributes of them derived from other courses of activity may interfere with the momentum of dining together , as when the value of the material of which they are made becomes a topic, thereby disrupting the course of activity. Using them realizes the ongoing character of an activity that is not merely ingesting and that has momentum , call it “John and I dining,” where, relative to the activity, John and I are exchangeable features of it. So it must be admitted that there is something different about John from the “props,” and this difference threatens to undermine the radical distinction between actor (and action) and situation that positive accounts of situations are normally designed to preserve. John’s mood, possibly assessed in advance, has something of this givenness to the situation and so might be considered one of its material elements. But this is not as simple a matter as it might seem, since mood is inseparable from the person as he is situationally found. Neither John...

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