우리는 나의 복수일까?: 상호작용 세계로 들어가는 질문 (Is ‘we’ the plural of ‘I’?: An introductory question to the world of interaction)

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· 저자명 : 이향천

초록

In the traditional grammar ‘we’ is called ‘the first person plural’ and the ‘I’, ‘the first person singular’, and the both, ‘personal pronouns’. First, ‘we’, ‘I’, and ‘you’ are not pronouns. They are not anaphoric expressions like ‘he, she, it, or they’. Nor are they general nouns like ‘tree’, ‘man’ or what. They are deictic expressions depicting adressors or addressees within a specific conversational situation viewed in the first person perspective. They are not objective expressions which refer to things in the 3rd person perspective.
We are the mirror image of you in the conversation, and they can be switched from one to the other with the perspective shift.
We can be viewed as a group of people but it is not a simple group of people. It is a group of people consisting of me and you, or of people constructed around me.
We can be a relation, but it is not a simple relation like one between friends. It is a complex relation consisting of the relation between I(the subject) and you(the object) together with the relation between you(the subject) and me(the object), or it can be a complex relation consisting of the relation between I(the subject) and you(the recipient) and the relation vice versa.
And if I can be viewed as a narrative, we can be viewed as an integrated narrative of I-narratives, or a shared narrative.
We can be viewed as a process, but it is not a simple process like the flowing of a river, or the movement of a body. It is a process which has the symmetricity or the self-reflexivity. It is an interactive process.
We are divided into two: ‘together-We’ and ‘reciprocal We’. Together-We is constructed around me, reciprocal We is an interaction between you and me.
Our topic “What is We?” is an identity question, but we do not approach Us only through this identity question. There are a lot of things we do with Us. We can ask We-becoming, We-maintaing, We-constraing, We-concern and in the cover term, We-ing. We live ourselves in Us, with Us, through Us. In short, we are We-ing. And we are the inter-actant, inter-observer, and inter-subject of the interaction, ontologically, epistemologically, and linguistically respectively.
Phenomenological stance does not accept that the observer and the observed are connected. But the process of We-becoming necessitates that I-the observer see you-the observed and you-the observer see me-the observed. Likewise, it necessitates that I-the actor acts upon you-the acted upon and you-the actor acts upon me(the acted upon). It is interactional. This means that the phenomenological stance cannot succeed in capturing Us. To capture Us we need to take the ecological stance or interaction-theoretical stance.
The world of interaction is different from that of action. The leading principle of the world of action is the pursuit of the individuals’ goals, but the principle of the world of interaction is the harmony of the interactants, and the stability of the system. Thus, the constituting norms of each world are different from each other.
To interpret the utterance “What are you talking about?” it is not sufficient to know the meanings of each words and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We must know what constitutes the norms of the society of the conversants. And the utterance above means that the addressor is accusing that the partner violates a certain norm of interaction. The norms do constitute the meaning of the utterance.
And the interaction is not the composition of the actions. It is not the conjunction of actions. It is a category sui generis. Rather, the world of interaction is the world of higher dimension. It cannot be described, or explained in terms of actions or what. On the contrary, action is just an element, or an aspect of the interaction. The latter view has more explanatory power. In the beginning was the interaction! This means that interaction is the most fundamental, or the primitive explanatory principle.
In this regard we can say that both I and you are derived from Us, or that We are the frame of Me and You. Our theory of interaction goes beyond the individual-based ontology, or the action-based ontology. The society is not constituted of groups of people but of Us. We are the basic unit of society.
We cannot be approached from the 3rd person perspective, but only from the inter-observers’ perspective.
Sociologists nowadays approach the interactional phenomena through the study of Conversational Analysis, and their studies are helpful in our approaching Us. But their view of interaction still takes, in my view, the reductionistic stance. They do not view interaction as one sui generis but a composition of actions or what. Every solution of problems must be sought from the plane of higher dimension. The world of interactions is of a higher dimension than that of actions. Only when we put ourselves in the world of interaction, we can rightly see and understand the human actions. This is what I see. We are the constituting element, the hero, the frame, and the process itself of the world of interaction.

영어초록

In the traditional grammar ‘we’ is called ‘the first person plural’ and the ‘I’, ‘the first person singular’, and the both, ‘personal pronouns’. First, ‘we’, ‘I’, and ‘you’ are not pronouns. They are not anaphoric expressions like ‘he, she, it, or they’. Nor are they general nouns like ‘tree’, ‘man’ or what. They are deictic expressions depicting adressors or addressees within a specific conversational situation viewed in the first person perspective. They are not objective expressions which refer to things in the 3rd person perspective.
We are the mirror image of you in the conversation, and they can be switched from one to the other with the perspective shift.
We can be viewed as a group of people but it is not a simple group of people. It is a group of people consisting of me and you, or of people constructed around me.
We can be a relation, but it is not a simple relation like one between friends. It is a complex relation consisting of the relation between I(the subject) and you(the object) together with the relation between you(the subject) and me(the object), or it can be a complex relation consisting of the relation between I(the subject) and you(the recipient) and the relation vice versa.
And if I can be viewed as a narrative, we can be viewed as an integrated narrative of I-narratives, or a shared narrative.
We can be viewed as a process, but it is not a simple process like the flowing of a river, or the movement of a body. It is a process which has the symmetricity or the self-reflexivity. It is an interactive process.
We are divided into two: ‘together-We’ and ‘reciprocal We’. Together-We is constructed around me, reciprocal We is an interaction between you and me.
Our topic “What is We?” is an identity question, but we do not approach Us only through this identity question. There are a lot of things we do with Us. We can ask We-becoming, We-maintaing, We-constraing, We-concern and in the cover term, We-ing. We live ourselves in Us, with Us, through Us. In short, we are We-ing. And we are the inter-actant, inter-observer, and inter-subject of the interaction, ontologically, epistemologically, and linguistically respectively.
Phenomenological stance does not accept that the observer and the observed are connected. But the process of We-becoming necessitates that I-the observer see you-the observed and you-the observer see me-the observed. Likewise, it necessitates that I-the actor acts upon you-the acted upon and you-the actor acts upon me(the acted upon). It is interactional. This means that the phenomenological stance cannot succeed in capturing Us. To capture Us we need to take the ecological stance or interaction-theoretical stance.
The world of interaction is different from that of action. The leading principle of the world of action is the pursuit of the individuals’ goals, but the principle of the world of interaction is the harmony of the interactants, and the stability of the system. Thus, the constituting norms of each world are different from each other.
To interpret the utterance “What are you talking about?” it is not sufficient to know the meanings of each words and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We must know what constitutes the norms of the society of the conversants. And the utterance above means that the addressor is accusing that the partner violates a certain norm of interaction. The norms do constitute the meaning of the utterance.
And the interaction is not the composition of the actions. It is not the conjunction of actions. It is a category sui generis. Rather, the world of interaction is the world of higher dimension. It cannot be described, or explained in terms of actions or what. On the contrary, action is just an element, or an aspect of the interaction. The latter view has more explanatory power. In the beginning was the interaction! This means that interaction is the most fundamental, or the primitive explanatory principle.
In this regard we can say that both I and you are derived from Us, or that We are the frame of Me and You. Our theory of interaction goes beyond the individual-based ontology, or the action-based ontology. The society is not constituted of groups of people but of Us. We are the basic unit of society.
We cannot be approached from the 3rd person perspective, but only from the inter-observers’ perspective.
Sociologists nowadays approach the interactional phenomena through the study of Conversational Analysis, and their studies are helpful in our approaching Us. But their view of interaction still takes, in my view, the reductionistic stance. They do not view interaction as one sui generis but a composition of actions or what. Every solution of problems must be sought from the plane of higher dimension. The world of interactions is of a higher dimension than that of actions. Only when we put ourselves in the world of interaction, we can rightly see and understand the human actions. This is what I see. We are the constituting element, the hero, the frame, and the process itself of the world of interaction.

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