Streeck, Jürgen, Goodwin, Charles, LeBaron, Curtis (Eds.), 2011a. Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Streeck, Jürgen, Goodwin, Charles, LeBaron, Curtis, 2011b. Embodied interaction in the material world: an introduction. In: Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., LeBaron, C. (Eds.), Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1--28. Tulbert, Eve, Goodwin, Marjorie H., 2011. Choreographies of attention: multimodality in a routine family activity. In: Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., LeBaron, C. (Eds.), Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 79--92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.016 Discussion note Incarnation, sensation and ventriloquism: For a sensitive and constitutive view of pragmatics François Cooren Université de Montréal, Canada Received 29 July 2013 I would like to first thank Francesca Bargiela for inviting me to contribute to this mini-forum on sensory pragmatics. This new field of study that she envisions proposes, as we know, to look beyond discursive pragmatics by exploring the questions of embodiment, sensation and materiality. According to her, studying discourse (understood as language in action) from a pragmatic perspective is not enough, marking the limits of the so-called discursive turn. This leads her to rely on MerleauPonty’s philosophy by inviting us to center our reflections on the body conceived as constitutive of experiences and sensations. In what follows, I propose to present an ontological position that I think could help us go beyond what she rightly identified as the limits of discursivity. As we will see, such a positioning goes against what most pragmatic studies tend to take for granted in the way they conceive of the functioning of language and communication. If I agree that embodiment, sensations and materialities should constitute key aspects of the way we study communication and language in general, I also think that some major reconceptualization needs to be done in order to develop an analytical vocabulary that can do justice to the multi-modal character of interaction (Streeck et al., 2011). So where should/could we begin? Echoing Alfred North Whitehead (1920), I believe that sensory pragmatics could start by questioning what this process philosopher denounced, almost one hundred years ago, as the bifurcation of nature. The bifurcation of nature, according to him, consists of incorrectly dividing reality into two systems, which are then considered to be disconnected or disjointed from each other: on one side, primary qualities (the physical properties of the world, the realm of things) and, on the other side, secondary qualities (what human beings experience, the realm of sensations and understandings). Although it could be argued that pragmatism -- as exemplified, for instance, by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1955), William James (1950) or John Dewey (1916) -- precisely consists in an attempt to reconnect these qualities that were believed to be separated, it remains that pragmatics, as a sub-discipline of linguistics, still appears to implicitly or explicitly disconnect or bifurcate the realm of things from the realm of experience, sensation and understanding. Three examples could, at this point, be given: Grice’s (1957) famous distinction between natural meaning and non- natural meaning; Searle’s (1969, 1979) intentionalist perspective on speech act theory, or even what Garfinkel (2002) presents as his intentional misreading of phenomenology. Although I do not have enough space here to explain why (but see Cooren, 2000, 2008a, 2009a, 2010), I would contend that these three authors, despite their undeniable contributions to the study of language and interaction, implicitly reproduce this bifurcation that Whitehead (1920) denounced. But what does it mean to rewire or recouple primary and secondary qualities? It means that analysts should acknowledge that human interactants are, paradoxically, not the only ones who should be systematically deemed as communicating, interacting or even saying things in a given situation (Cooren and Matte, 2010). In keeping with Nietzsche (2009 [1887]), Derrida (1982), Latour (1994) or Barad (2007), this amounts to asserting that there is no absolute origin to F. Bargiela-Chiappini / Journal of Pragmatics 58 (2013) 39--51 42 E-mail address: f.cooren@umontreal.ca.