[Xmca-l] contrasting matching and marking acts

[Larry Purss]

We have been discussing the imaginal and I want to focus on what I notice as a recurring theme.  Fonagey studied the intimate dance of care giver and infant within primary inter-subjectivity. He documented how if the care giver matched the babies response [copying, mirroring, identity] that this was mechanical, pathological, and profoundly distressing to the infant. The care giver was unable to read the intimate dance or bond of love.
In contrast when the care giver marks the baby’s movements by modulating his/her responses and through attention and focus to responding with marked affect by intensifying or softening or in other ways changing the rhythm, then the baby is met and held within primary inter-subjectivity.
Now my conjecture is this example of the difference between matching and marking movements has far reaching and general applications within ongoing human conduct.
I will give one more example from hermeneutics and the way translation may be envisioned as a marking phenomena.
Manfred Frank recalled the contribution of August Boeckh to hermeneutics, who wrote:

To record an individual expression and re-produce it in the act of reading [in other words re-create it] does not then signify [and this is decisive] articulating the same linguistic sequence again and indeed with like meaning, but rather undertaking another articulation of the same linguistic sequence.

For August Boeckh,  “one can never produce the same thing again”

In other words, marking not matching is foundational to human conduct across the life span.

This is why listening, really listening, is performing marking acts [of semblance] as  mutually shared modulation and is animated or embodied. In contrast to re-present as a mechanical act of identity is matching.

This is where I insert this conceptual contrast of marking and matching into the notion of refuge which Ana Heras is actualizing in her work. Refuge is a place where marking acts of mutual modulation create places of hope in response to suffering and despair. Actual brick and mortar {material and imaginal] places. Places where the not yet becomes possible from this place of care giving. 
A spiral understanding.




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