Chapter 13 Gesturing Language

Among the different approaches that focus on language as enactive, i.e., as the extension of action, Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher elaborate a thoughtprovoking proposal in Linguistic Bodies. The Continuity between Life and Language (2018). They rework Maturana’s concept of languaging in a new way by connecting it to their theory of Sensorimotor Enactivism (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran 2017 and Di Paolo 2005) and the participatory sense-making process (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran 2017). The term “languaging,” in fact, was coined by Maturana (1978, 1988, and 2002) to highlight a way of living together in a stream of recursive coordinations of consensual behaviors that arise in collaborative “doing things together.” However, even if sensorimotor enactivists adopt the active role of our sociality to overcome the epistemological and methodological individualism inherited from Varela and Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, they still never really abandon their individualistic assumption. To face this individualistic methodological approach to language, I propose to look at George Herbert Mead’s pragmatist theory of gesture. In this chapter, I will show that his gesture theory can offer helpful elements to confront some issues that arise with the enactivist languaging proposal.