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 ofshutai.
| 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 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 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 2000, 6). This is bamen at 2E. 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 third level (3L), bamen opens a parallax view — we come to perceive a reality that escapes, unsettles, or exceeds existing discourse about it. This can be as simple as the moment when students mix cellophane to produce new colors that demand an original name, or discover that the washing machine, detergent, and clothing each speak a different instructional language for doing laundry (Hasegawa 2020, 8–11). It can also be as consequential as crossing a threshold, when something seen cannot be unseen and one's perceptual field is irreversibly reorganized (Meyer and Land 2005).
At the fourth level (4D), bamen-as-heuristic is not discarded but becomes what we make and with which we make sense of the world. Here shutai acts as an autonomous agent whose engagement with the world carries its own momentum, and who now produces bamen as a shared perceptual horizon for and with others. Bamen has transformed from a heuristic medium into a cultural one — a form capable of fabricating 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 the world 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.