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.
| 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 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 2000, 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 2000, 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. Bamen becomes alchemical when it mediates what the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander (1979) theorized as "the timeless way of building" - timeless because creativity and innovation emerges from a lived, but unnamed quality which he describes with words like "alive," "comfortable," and "free of contradictions" - which I'd like to think of as the metabolic activity of shutai.
Alexander further states that "when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in town and buildings which we help to build. It is a self-supporting, self-maintaining, generating quality. It is the quality of life. And we must seek it, for our own sakes, in our surroundings, simply in order that we can ourselves become alive" (1979, 53). Here, the metabolic quality Alexander describes finds its structural elaboration: Metamorphosis of Forms (4D) is what happens when we become shutai — when we actively engage, adapt, and move with the rhythm of becoming — but this is not an endpoint. It is part of a self-sustaining cycle from which new situations develop, new absences and presences emerge, and new experiences of selves and the world become accessible. This cycle does not close; it spirals. Such is the metabolic quality of social life: not a system that tends toward equilibrium, but one that continually revitalizes through the activities of becoming shutai which simultaneously makes visible the reality of worlds those activities co-create and transform.