Each of us lives at the centre of a private world of thoughts, feelings and experiences which is quite unique as well as exquisitely vulnerable. Within the secret depths of our personal experience are packed a seemingly infinite range of hopes, fears and fantasies, desires we hardly dare to recognize and shames that are anguish to contemplate.
What gives form to this subjective world, makes it intelligible and bearable, is the social space in which we find ourselves located and which confers meaning on our experience. Our bodies, to be sure, give us knowledge of the world, but we can only truly make sense of that knowledge through the structures of meaning which are provided through our congress with others. But that does not mean that our embodied knowledge of the world is infinitely malleable, can be shaped into whatever stories people choose to tell us. Those stories may be true or they may be false; they may guide us towards an intelligible world which answers faithfully to our embodied understanding, or they may obscure it from us in a blanket of mystery that renders our actions tentative, fearful, dangerous.
Where the public world is painstakingly shaped to accommodate, appreciate, elaborate and civilize our private experience, a kind of harmony may be given to our lives that, while certainly not erasing all possibility of tragedy, at least gives us a chance to live, as selves, in accord with others about the nature of the world into which we have been thrown. There comes to be a kind of satisfaction in being a subject in social space.
Where, on the other hand, the public world is shaped to exploit our subjectivity, to mystify, obscure or distort the wordless knowledge our bodies give us of the world, no such harmony will be possible. Either we may accept and attempt to live within the distortions, surrendering to orthodoxy at the cost of our souls, or we may be driven to live out our subjectivity in a constant state of confusion and apprehension, scurrying in the cracks which show through make-believe like woodlice in a rotten wall. Very rarely, some people seem to have from the start a confidence in their embodied experience that no amount of adversity can shake, but even so they nearly always find themselves in a revolutionary minority split off in many ways from the social mainstream.