ABSTRACT
Persons are biosocial organisms that store energy in coherent, socially useful ways. Intensive differences are energy gradients that can be harnessed in socially useful ways. Intensive differences or energy gradients can be formed both within and between persons. Individual persons are local repositories of such stored energy in a socially distributed network of such local repositories. The interactivity of languaging enables the structural coupling of these intensive differences between persons in ways that have the ability to animate, mobilise, and direct socially useful harnessings and flows of intensive differences. Languaging agents tap into value gradients that flow through a population. Intensifications of these flows produce concentrations of values created by the patterns of socially coordinated and distributed collective beliefs, memories, decision-making, and learning that flow through and are stored by complex forms of social relations. Communities of languaging agents produce concentration gradients formed by their own collective body dynamics in ways that afford their further differentiation and re-differentiation as value-weighted dialogically coordinated possibilities for affecting others and being affected by them. In other words, a social gradient is formed and with it the possibility of harnessing this socially distributed and organised resource for coordinating their natural, biological interactivity in increasingly socially and culturally saturated ways. Examples analysed to illustrate languaging operating in zones of intensity include: (1) buying and selling in a greengrocer’s shop; (2) a Wall Street financial market in meltdown; and (3) languaging as caring for and minding and en-minding self and others in a play episode between two six-year-old girls.
