Shutai and Dimensions of Critical Realism
Roy Bhaskar's dialectical critical realism describes how reality is not just positive, or what exists in the world, but also negative, or what does not exist which is should be recognized as its own ontology so we can explain how reality can change. His MELD system — First Moment, Second Edge, Third Level, Fourth Dimension — identifies four progressively richer dimensions of the same reality, each revealing a new layer of ontological complexity. As one's understanding deepens, the form of creative practice changes with it, and so does the mode of shutai.
| MELD Moment | Ontology | Creative Practice | Mode of shutai |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M — Structured Reality | Substance | Embodied practices | Moving into presence |
| 2E — Absence / Negativity | Process | Self-reflexive practices | Presenting presence |
| 3L — Totality | Relational | Communicative practices | Presenting absence |
| 4D — Transformative Praxis | Transformative | Exercizing agency | Absenting absence |
If modern social structures and systems are only part of the positive ontology of our complex reality, then Bhaskar asks us (and I agree) that we are missing an entire sea of what is (not), which equally affects us all the same. Negativity is not just what is not there or which we do not physically see, but it can include all kind of phenomena from dreams, forgetting, memories, hallucinations, imaginations, distance, deferral, silence, denial, to of course 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 can learn to become part of the change that is always and already ongoing. One of my projects is to trace and analyze the modern history of Japan through the MELD lens.
Bamen as a Heuristic
Bamen is a heuristic that can potentially help us perceive Bhaskar's abstract philosophical framework in our everyday lives. In one of my published papers "Tedate and an emergentist theory of student agency" (2020), I showed that agency research has been hampered by two predicaments: 1) social ambiguity in distinguishing children's learning from adult guidance; and 2) causal uncertainty between children's cognitive development and the affordance of their social contexts. I introduced tedate as an instructional scaffolding that uses these predicaments to foster student agency in classroom.
Bamen is the imaginative, puzzling, attention-grabbing "hook" often used in tedate. In the paper, science teacher Mr. Takada invokes an imaginary situation where the students had received a letter from an anonymous person asking for their help (Hasegawa 2000, 6). This is bamen at (2E). It frames a troubling situation by disclosing something that was absent (a letter from an anonymous person asking for help) and raises a question that cannot be resolved without changing the troubling situation. This is bamen as ontogenetic disclosure: the real showing itself in a way that initiates action.
At the third level (3L), bamen holds up a parallax view - we come to perceive a reality that escapes, denies, or critiques an existing discourse about it. This can be as simple as the moment when students made new colors with cellophane that needed an original name or realized how the washing machine, detergent, and clothing all used different instructional languages for doing laundry (Hasegawa 2020, 8-11). Or, it can also be a breakthrough moment when something is seen that cannot be unseen and one's perceptual field irreversibly reorganized (Meyer and Land 2005).
At the fourth level (4D), bamen-as-heuristic is not discarded but bcomes the thing we make, and with which we make sense of the world. This is where shutai is also an autonomous agent, whose engagement with the world has its own momentum and who now produces bamen as a shared perceptual horizon for and with others. Bamen has transformed from a heuristic medium to a cultural media that can fabricate our social-ecological horizon.
Making (4D) is not an endpoint. When one becomes shutai — when everyday practice starts to change how others perceive and engage with worlds — new situations become possible, new absences and presences emerge, and new experiences of selves and worlds become accessible. The cycle does not close; it spirals. This is the metabolic quality of social life: not a system that tends toward equilibrium, but one that continually transforms through becoming shutai which simultaneously makes visible the people and the worlds they co-create.