Pre-personal Consciousness and the Pre-reflective Self

I was honored by having my work (Green, 2022a, 2022b) reviewed by Cheryl Baldwin, “An Update on Transformative Learning” (2013), for the New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education issue. Let me start with what she mostly gets right, and I will conclude with a correction. She was commenting on two papers that I had written that identified agency as the force that generated transformation.

I will briefly describe my model before commenting on Baldwin’s understanding. My model articulates the interplay between the structures and dynamic forces at play in transformative learning. Illeris (2014) suggested that it is the form or structure of one’s identity that transforms. I appreciate his term “identity” because most people have some intuitive sense of its meaning—it is one’s essential or core self. However, I identify the “pre-reflective self” as the form that transforms. The term “pre-reflective” denotes that, for the most part, it operates out of awareness. It is made up of one’s sedimented, experiential history. It is where we look from: conditioning what we perceive. In that respect it is similar, if not equivalent, to Mezirow’s (2000) “meaning perspective.” The dynamic force responsible for transforming this structure has a double aspect—manifesting both as pre-personal consciousness and as life force. Both aspects are necessary for creative agency.

We are endowed with pre-personal consciousness at birth, which we employ to incrementally construct a pre-reflective self or identity based on our experiential history. Once a rudimentary pre-reflective self is established, consciousness begins to operate from within that structure. In so doing, it becomes a personal consciousness—because it is now fused with the meaning structure. “I am my meaning perspective.” However, to cope with a disorienting dilemma, there is a requirement for consciousness to first detach or de-fuse from the pre-reflective self. Once released from that structure, it is free to reflect upon, and critically inspect, the premises upon which that pre-reflective self was built. It is also responsible for creating a revised pre-reflective self that can account for, and respond appropriately to, further iterations of that disorienting dilemma.

Baldwin also understood that agency is an activity rather than an entity. Or, to put it linguistically, it is a verb (exercising agency) rather than a noun (the agent). This corrects the tendency to hypostatize—giving an activity the status of a concrete object. For example, “exercising agency” is not a thing, whereas an “agent” is. Contrast the experience of exercising agency with the experience of running on auto-pilot. With the latter, serviceable action patterns that are sedimented in the pre-reflective self generate pre-determined behavioral responses. This collection of action protocols and interpretive frameworks is experienced as “my personal self”—something that endures over time. It qualifies as a noun because it is a structure that is stable and predictable. “Everybody knows what Jake is like.” Those protocols are adequate for most, but not all, circumstantial challenges. A simple example: a person offers their hand; we automatically reach out, grasp, and shake it.

However, when the results of that action reveal that the response was inadequate, pre-personal consciousness is aroused and comes into play. This occurs when the offered hand is suddenly withdrawn. One becomes alert—no longer operating from the pre-reflective. Now one is in the realm of the unexpected: a circumstance for which the pre-reflective self has no programmed response. At that point, dynamic consciousness takes control, displacing the “programmed responses.” It improvises. In doing so, it is attempting to create an appropriate response. This capacity to improvise and create distinguishes it from the stereotypical responses produced by the pre-reflective. To state it metaphorically, pre-personal consciousness creates, whereas the pre-reflective is the created.

Let me give a more complex example. I had a conversation with the owner of a brain injury clinic. She reported that when one family member sustained a brain injury, the whole family was disabled. It wasn’t just the self of the victim that changed. Each family member was challenged to transform their pre-reflective meaning scheme of a family member who had suddenly become an unfamiliar being in a familiar body. Currently nobody knows “what Jake is like.” Eventually, everybody either accommodates by developing a revised pre-reflective schema or they try to maintain their old identity by leaving the family. Those who adjusted would have undergone transformation. Those who left were also transformed. The results are different, but both outcomes were initiated by a disorienting dilemma. In both cases, the dynamic, impersonal consciousness forged a new path into the future. Baldwin understands this when she stated: “As a process, Green (2022a) asserted that agency is not necessarily expressed in a patterned and predictable manner.” Yes! It is the identity or pre-reflective self that is patterned and predictable. As the transformations sketched out above reveal, life doesn’t continue as before irrespective of the choice that was made. This is what makes transformation so anxiety provoking. One leaves the process as a different self than the one that entered it.

The Inherent Difficulty of Theorizing Agency

I titled one of my papers Agency: Force and Compass of Transformation. I was attempting to understand why agency was given so little attention in the literature of transformative learning. In it, I suggested that agency is exercised living forward, whereas our conceptual understanding is a retroactive, representational account. The action and its account occur in different registers or domains. The account, because it is expressed through language, demands a subject and an object, a noun that generates an action—but this linguistic form misrepresents the phenomenon—positing, as it does, an agent. Experiments with split-brain patients support this position. When a question was asked that required a verbal response, the patient frequently confabulated an answer that had little to do with their actual motive. Whereas when they were asked to respond with a gesture (an action), they pointed to the correct answer. Their behavior was appropriate, whereas their verbal explanation was untrustworthy.

I will make two more points before concluding this response. The pre-reflective self is representational and functions via relatively stable concepts. Pre-personal consciousness, however, is not representational. When a soccer player is moving down the field, she is not activating concepts to deal with the approaching defender. She is guided by perceptions not concepts. Her pre-personal consciousness improvises the right moves or doesn’t. Because pre-personal consciousness is responding to the never before encountered, delegating the task to the pre-reflective is not an option. This has implications for theorizing agency within language. As my example of the soccer player demonstrated, pre-personal consciousness is not language dependent. Its operation cannot faithfully be represented by language. Perhaps this explains why there is a paucity of articles on the exercise of agency.

Baldwin is correct in her understanding of the critical moment of transformation: pre-personal consciousness detaches from the pre-reflective or meaning perspective. This detachment can be very difficult for two reasons. Firstly, it introduces one to the experience of groundlessness—there are no signposts in the liminal zone. Secondly, there is a grieving process involved. For example, family members had to give up the meaning scheme of what Jake was, but no longer is. Instead, they were beginning to understand, and relate to, what Jake had become. This requires the difficult process of letting go of the old Jake in order to make room for the new one.

My only caveat with Baldwin’s understanding of my work is that she conflates pre-personal consciousness with the pre-reflective as in the following:

Agency has … a prereflective element, which Green (2022a) associates with pre-personal consciousness. As he explains, pre-reflective agency responds to self-environment interactions and acts as a source for change when needed. (Baldwin, 2023, p. 66)

No. Pre-reflective agency is limited to repetitious action protocols. Only pre-personal consciousness is capable of genuine creation—constructing both the pre-reflective self, as well as generating revisions when a disorienting dilemma reveals the pre-reflective’s inadequacy.