Bamen as Heuristic

Shutai and Dimensions of Critical Realism

Roy Bhaskar's dialectical critical realism holds that reality is not only positive — what exists — but also negative: what does not yet exist, and must be recognized as having its own ontological standing if we are to account for how reality changes. His MELD system — First Moment, Second Edge, Third Level, Fourth Dimension — identifies four progressively richer dimensions of the same reality, each disclosing a new layer of ontological complexity. As understanding deepens, the form of creative practice changes with it, and so does the mode of shutai.

If modern social structures and systems belong only to the positive ontology of our complex reality, then — following Bhaskar, and I concur — we are missing an entire sea of what is not, which shapes us no less than what is. Negativity is not simply absence or what eludes physical perception; it encompasses phenomena as varied as dreams, forgetting, memories, hallucinations, imagination, distance, deferral, silence, denial, and death.

Becoming shutai entails cultivating one's reflexive capacity to recognize and transform negativity. This is what the Kyoto School philosopher Kōsaka Masaaki called 主体的無 (shutaiteki mu, "subjective nothingness") at the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Symposium. Shutaiteki-mu is the recognition that shutai exists as a generative gap, neither purely subject nor object, from which a person learns to become part of a change that is always already underway. One of my projects is to trace and analyze the modern Japanese history told through the lens of becoming shutai.

Bamen as a Heuristic

Bamen is a heuristic that can help us perceive Bhaskar's abstract philosophical framework in our everyday lives. In my published paper "Tedate and an emergentist theory of student agency" (2020), I showed that agency research has been hampered by two predicaments: social ambiguity in distinguishing children's learning from adult guidance, and causal uncertainty between children's cognitive development and the affordances of their social contexts. I introduced tedate as an instructional scaffolding that turns these predicaments into conditions for fostering student agency in the classroom.

Bamen at first moment (1M) is the imaginative, puzzling, attention-grabbing "hook" that tedate characteristically employs. In the paper, science teacher Mr. Takada invokes an imaginary situation in which students have received a letter from an anonymous person asking for their help (Hasegawa 2020, 6). It frames a troubling situation by disclosing something absent — a letter from an unknown sender soliciting help — and raises a question that cannot be resolved without transforming the situation itself. Here, bamen operates as ontogenetic disclosure: the real showing itself in a way that initiates action.

At the second edge (2E), bamen opens a parallax view — we come to perceive a reality that escapes, unsettles, or exceeds existing discourse about it. One of the students' proposal to call the plastic factory to identify the five different types of plastic instead of doing the work - then being told from another student it wasn't an option because "it won't be a class if we could" (Hasegawa 2020, 7) reveals how the students maintain the imaginary situation and the reality of their classroom as separate systems.

At the third level (3L), bamen takes on the characteristic of an interval - the fort-da rhythm of absence and presence from which a new horizon and a new way of understanding emerges. This can be as simple as the moment when students realize they are using food to name new colors they've produced by mixing cellophane, or discover that the washing machine, detergent, and clothing each speak a different instructional language for doing laundry (Hasegawa 2020, 8–11).

It is by moving through the intervals that bamen can reveal a pattern, which is where the alchemy happens. This alchemy occurs when something new emerges from the parallax view, rendering that something visible, intelligible, and memorable. We might also think of this alchemy as a product of metabolism — the electrochemical charge generated as electrons pass along the electron transport chain inside the mitochondria, a process that slightly alters membrane-embedded proteins so that protons can pass through them.

This mechanism, in which the mitochondria's membrane proteins change shape, is called a conformational change. It is what allows vital cell functions — energy production, mitochondrial fusion, and cell death — to occur. Metamorphosis of Forms (4D) is the multi-scale semiotic relay from endo-, bio-, to eco-semiosis that this biochemical change can trigger — each tier transforming, rather than merely transmitting, the signal to ultimately change the form of behavior from activity to agency. When activity gains purpose and intention, it invites new situations to develop, new absences and presences to emerge, thus granting access to new experiences of self and world.

Metamorphosis of Forms is an event that both projects alternative courses of action and calibrates assumptions in the existing discourse. While all scientists do both, natural scientists tend to stay within the physical facts. Social scientists ask how metamorphosis is not only an outcome of biogenetic survival but also of dispositional qualities such as desire, values, taste, as well as situational conditions such as memory, purpose, and circumstance. Bamen is the site of this coupling and a method of commoning discourses to bridge the natural and social sciences. Hence, the bamen topology is as scientific as it is fabricated. The Science and Art of Fabrication refers to this double-sided topological surface, and to how developing the scientific literacy to articulate multi-tiered semiotic relays — from endo- through bio- to eco-semiosis — moves the traversal along from the transformative becoming-in-coupling face to the phenomenological description-to-explanation face, the traversal thus revitalizing and refashioning those socio-ecological assemblages which we are a part of.