ABSTRACT
In previous chapters I have been drawing on the thought of Elias and Mead, as well as work done in the natural complexity sciences, to suggest a theory of complex responsive processes in which individual minds and social relations emerge simultaneously. The processes being referred to are those of communicative interaction and power relating between human bodies, where those processes of interaction have the intrinsic capacity for coherently patterning themselves. Communicative interaction between human bodies patterns itself as coherent narrative-like themes fundamentally to do with being, doing and becoming together. From this perspective, the patterning of communicative interaction patterns further communicative interaction. Interacting humans are not thought of as producing anything outside of this direct interaction, such as a social or cultural system, a group mind, a matrix or a common pool of meaning. Direct interaction leads to more direct interaction and nothing else. We produce artifacts and tools in that interaction to use in further interaction but we do not produce mysterious wholes outside our direct experience. Furthermore there is no underlying deep structure or innate, internal world of representations in which subsequent experience is stored in conscious and unconscious memory.
