A Deep History of Hanging Out: Relaxed Availability, Recursive Fluidity, and the Ordinary Achievement of Co-presence

The behavioural and social sciences have such a deep bias towards recordable events and exchanges that they systematically overlooked living beings hanging out.

Abstract

Living beings spend a remarkable amount of time together without actively interacting. Humans sit side by side, work in the same library, share rooms, train in the same gym, and sleep in the same bed, and other animals do much the same. Social theory and the study of animal behaviour have mostly located sociality in events: interactions, exchanges, utterances, acts of grooming or support that can be observed, counted, and traded. This article argues that the event bias has hidden a vast range of interrecursivity in which nothing is said or done and the presence of a particular other nonetheless co-mediates each participant’s ongoing life. Relaxed availability, the condition in which another living being remains accessible and consequential without requiring attention, is a central achievement of living coordination. Its conditions are shelter, returnability, and the assurance that the other is not going to eat you, which is why its most dangerous counterfeit is the predator’s invitation to lunch. It becomes intelligible within the encompassing concept of recursive fluidity, the capacity to move among counterparts and levels of recursivity and to return to muted coordination when nothing further is needed.

I. The Library

During the first Covid lockdown in 2020 I spoke with postgraduate students at the University of Edinburgh about what they were missing most. I expected them to name in-person teaching: seminars, supervisions, the conversations that follow a lecture. The vast majority named something else. What they missed most was working in the university library. It had helped them to concentrate, they said, and it had helped to know that others were around, even people they did not know.

The answer stayed with me because none of it concerned an interaction. Students in a library do not talk to one another, and silence is the rule of the place. Most of the people at the neighbouring desks are strangers, and they remain strangers. Nothing is exchanged, and anyone counting the events of an afternoon in a reading room would find almost none to count. Yet the students knew from experience that the presence of others, each bent over their own work, made their own work possible in a way that a desk at home did not. What lockdown took away was a condition of concentration that others had supplied simply by being there and doing the same thing, and it had little to do with any particular person.

A more intimate version of the same condition can be found at home. Two people sit on a sofa. One reads, the other looks out of the window. For half an hour neither says anything. They are comfortable together, ignoring nobody, and each knows the other is there. One gets up to make tea, the other asks for a cup, they exchange a few words, and both settle again to what they were doing.

A sociology of interaction would attend to the exchange about the tea. A theory of communication would ask what the silence communicated. An account of intimacy would read the ease of sitting together as evidence of a close relationship. Each would say something useful, and each would leave a simpler fact unexplained. For most of the half-hour the two people were together without having to do anything about being together. There was no difficulty to solve, no conversation to keep going, no joint decision to reach, and no affection to demonstrate. Being together was the condition within which each could attend to other things, and neither of them had to organise or sustain it by deliberate effort.

Suppose that one of them becomes restless, or leaves without a word, or keeps interrupting the other. The arrangement that had worked unnoticed now becomes noticeable, and what had been easy calls for adjustment. The contrast shows that the earlier quiet depended on something. Each could rely on the other to remain predictable enough and available enough for the question of the other to recede.

Living Value Theory has met this problem before, at a much larger scale and a much greater distance. Nothing Special Had to Happen read the stone enclosures of Göbekli Tepe, with their benches running along the inner walls and facing inward, as an architecture of relaxed availability, defined there as “material and spatial arrangements that enabled humans to remain present to one another without a predetermined outcome.” Its claim was that “the primary achievement was architectural: creating interiors where nothing special had to happen.” The reading is contested, and the article itself records Barbara Helwing’s objection that the buildings were probably entered by ladder through the roof. Sitting Together: The First Twelve Thousand Years followed the same problem from those benches to the Shona dare, the coffeehouse, the Japanese ma, and the Friendship Bench in Harare, and it observed that what stone cannot preserve is the gathering itself, because “being-with leaves no material trace.”

The present article turns the architectural concept into a relational one. Benches, rooms, and enclosures set conditions, and within them living beings achieve, or fail to achieve, a way of being together that no longer needs attending to. The question here is how that condition is reached between particular beings, why the sciences of social life have found it so hard to see, and what it shows about life more generally. The concept that makes the phenomenon intelligible is recursive fluidity.

II. Recursive Fluidity

Living Value Theory begins from the principle that life is recursive mediation in a mesocosm (Core Principles). A living being continuously sustains, repairs, and transforms its coordination with the conditions on which its continuation depends, and earlier coordination alters the conditions of later coordination. The coordination runs through five mediations: multisensorial embodiment, multispecies being-with, multiversal dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization. It also involves counterparts of three types. Some counterparts do not alter their course in response to being engaged. A chair, a wall, a stone, or a cup may be worn or moved by handling, and it does not adjust its conduct to the person handling it. Some coordination is selfrecursive, a living being’s responsiveness to its own changing condition, in fatigue, hunger, movement, pain, recovery, and learning. And some is interrecursive, the coordination of recursive beings who respond to one another’s responses, so that what each does next depends on the other (Interrecursivity: Social Theory’s Missing Concept).

These are three types of counterpart within one life, and they are met together. A person sitting beside a friend is coordinating at once with the sofa, with her own body, with the other’s presence, and with the room. The types shift in prominence from minute to minute without replacing one another. Suppose she has been sitting comfortably for an hour and her back begins to ache. She shifts position. The movement disturbs the person beside her, who moves slightly to make room, and both settle again. The sofa has remained a counterpart that answers to nothing. Her discomfort made a selfrecursive coordination salient. Her movement produced a brief interrecursive adjustment. And the whole arrangement then returned to a condition in which none of these relations needed attention. Nobody decided to pass from one type of coordination to another. The passages happened as part of living.

The theory also distinguishes levels of recursivity. At L1 a coordination proceeds without becoming separately salient. At L2 a disturbance, discrepancy, or attraction is felt before it can be named. At L3 it is articulated in symbols for the occasion, at L4 stabilised into portable categories and institutions, and at L5 those stabilisations become available for reconsideration. Recursive fluidity names the capacity to move through these levels as a situation requires and, where a disturbance has been adequately met, to return to muted coordination. Recursive Fluidity is Mental Health treated this capacity as the core of mental health, and its loss, in being stuck at one level or held by one demand, as what suffering looks like from within. Vitality does not consist in remaining at L1. It consists in the capacity for settled coordination to stay muted where it works and to reopen when disturbance, curiosity, or attraction makes further recursion valuable.

Recursive fluidity is the encompassing concept, and it is worth stating why. Movement among levels never happens in the abstract. A bodily disturbance, an unexpected obstacle, and a demanding encounter with another being may each occasion it, and the kinds of counterpart involved differ while the need for fluid movement remains. The person on the sofa moves among attentions and counterparts for half an hour, and part of what makes the companionship comfortable is that none of these movements has to be negotiated.

Within that encompassing concept, a narrower one can be marked off. Interrecursive fluidity is the capacity to enter, sustain, intensify, relax, or leave reciprocal engagement with another living being as circumstances allow or require. It matters a great deal, and it is a particular case. Living beings leave a demanding conversation because they are tired, withdraw from company to attend to pain, seek help because a material obstacle defeats them, and become absorbed in mending something before returning to talk. Their movements in and out of engagement with others are interwoven with movements involving their bodies, their surroundings, and the things they handle, and a theory that isolated the interpersonal movements would lose sight of what they are for.

III. Relaxed Availability

Relaxed availability names a particular condition of being-with. Another living being is present, or near, familiar, and accessible. The relationship can become actively reciprocal whenever something calls for it, and it does not require continuous engagement to remain operative.

The condition is more specific than proximity. Two strangers sitting side by side on a train accommodate each other’s elbows and bags and establish little else. Two friends in the same seats have a different range of possibilities open to them. Each knows something of how the other is likely to respond, what may be asked, what can be left unsaid, and whether a silence is comfortable. Relaxed availability does not require friendship. Familiar neighbours, household animals, and colleagues who have settled workable routines around one another can achieve it. Nor does it require touch, or even continuous awareness. Someone cooking in the kitchen knows that someone else is reading in the next room and has no need to monitor her. If she calls out, a reply is likely.

Three conditions must be kept apart here. Eventful interrecursivity occurs where responses are presently altering each other’s subsequent course in ways that could be described as acts: a question and an answer, a touch and a turning towards. Interrecursive availability is an established possibility of such responsiveness on which the participants can rely, as when a friend is at home across town and could be called. Between these lies a third condition, which is the main subject of this article. Two beings are near each other, nothing is said or done, and each one’s ongoing coordination, with a book, with sleep, with the view from the window, is co-mediated by the continuing presence of that particular other. Each is settled in a way that depends on the other being there and being as they are, and each would register at once if the other became restless, left, or was replaced by someone else. This is interrecursivity without events. It should not be inferred merely because two beings are together, and it should not be denied merely because no exchange can be recorded. Whether it is present is an empirical question, and Section V says how it can be answered.

A relationship has a history. Earlier coordinations have laid down expectations, familiar arrangements, and possibilities of later engagement, and these remain consequential when no exchange is taking place. Being-With and Time traced how interrecursivity carries its pasts forward. Relaxed availability is one of the forms in which they are carried.

The corpus has a term for another aspect of this. Recursive Mediation as Continuous Discernment defines returnability as “the recursively discerned possibility that such resumption remains available,” the possibility of taking up a coordination again after departure, interruption, or loss of immediate access. Relaxed availability is returnability held close at hand, the possibility of turning to the other so secure that it need not be tested. The same article separates recursive capacity from recursive availability: “Sleep changes recursive availability, not recursive type wholesale.” A sleeping companion has lost none of her capacities, and only their present availability has contracted. Relaxed availability depends on this distinction. The other’s full capacity to respond remains in reserve while its present demands are low, and what makes the condition relaxed is that the reserve can be trusted.

IV. Grooming and the Event Bias

The study of animal social life has a paradigm case of relaxed availability, and it is grooming. Primates sit together and one works through the other’s fur with its fingers. The groomed animal often lies slack, eyes half closed. Grooming is associated with lowered arousal and with the release of endorphins, activated, as Being With Others Doesn’t Mean Having to Think about Others put it, “through specialised C-tactile afferent fibres,” so that the activity is “actively rewarding: self-sustaining, sought out, and physiologically restorative” (Dunbar 2010). It is individuated, since primates groom particular partners and the partner “is not a fungible occupant of a slot but a specific other.” It is also clearly interrecursive, since the groomer adjusts to the groomed animal’s posture and the groomed animal shifts to present another part of its body. Grooming is, as that article argued, the clearest case of settled interrecursivity at L1.

It is also an event. It has a beginning and an end, a groomer and a recipient, a direction, a duration, and a frequency. It can be seen from a distance, written down, and counted, and the science of primate social life has been built on counting it. Robert Hinde’s (1976) framework, which shaped the field, held that relationships consist of series of interactions between individuals over time, and that social structure is the pattern of relationships. On that view a relationship is made of interactions in the way a wall is made of bricks. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney (1984) showed that vervet monkeys were more likely to respond to the calls of an animal that had recently groomed them, and a long line of work since then has treated grooming as something given in return for something else. In biological market theory grooming becomes a commodity exchanged for grooming, tolerance, coalitionary support, or access to infants, at rates that shift with supply and demand (Noë and Hammerstein 1995; Henzi and Barrett 1999). Gabriele Schino’s (2007) meta-analysis found grooming and support to be reciprocated across many species. Robin Dunbar’s (1996) argument that human language evolved as “vocal grooming” begins from a time budget. Grooming takes time, the time available is limited, and the number of relationships an animal can keep up is constrained by the hours it can spend servicing them.

These are major achievements, and they share a premise. Social bonds are made and maintained by events, acts that can be scored, summed, and exchanged. The premise has methodological roots. Jeanne Altmann’s (1974) classic paper on sampling distinguished events, which have negligible duration and can be counted, from states, which have duration and are sampled by noting at intervals what each animal is doing. Sitting in contact, resting near another animal, or having a particular nearest neighbour are recorded as states, as distances measured at a scan. In the study of social networks, being found in the same group is often taken as a stand-in for interacting, an assumption known as “the gambit of the group” (Whitehead and Dufault 1999). Composite indices of bond strength combine grooming with proximity or association (Silk, Altmann, and Alberts 2006). In each case co-presence is admitted into the analysis as a geometric fact, a proxy for interaction, or the opportunity for interaction, and the explanatory weight falls on what is done.

Human social science has the same bias in another form. Erving Goffman (1963) gave co-presence its most careful description, and even his “unfocused interaction” is named as a kind of interaction, organised around glances and the management of information. What Doesn’t Answer Back showed how far Goffman’s world consists of people performing for each other. Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks (1973), in their study of how conversations close, noticed that people in a car or a living room may fall silent for long periods without closing the conversation. They described such stretches as “continuing states of incipient talk,” and the description treats the silence as talk that has not yet resumed. Later conversation analysts studied such lapses carefully, and again as silences accountable to the talk around them (Hoey 2020). Georg Simmel (1949) described sociability as association for its own sake, carried by talk whose content hardly matters, and it is still carried by talk.

Two bodies of research come closer. Studies of social buffering have found, across many mammals, that the presence of a familiar conspecific reduces stress responses to a threat, even when the companion does nothing (Kikusui, Winslow, and Mori 2006). Studies of vigilance have found that animals in groups spend less time scanning for predators, because the eyes of others partly take over the work (Pulliam 1973; Elgar 1989). Both recognise that presence does something. Both treat it as an input to the physiology or behaviour of one animal, measured as an outcome in that animal, with the companion standing as a condition or a number of eyes. Neither asks what the two animals are doing together when they are doing nothing.

This is the blind spot. Research looks for the event, something said or done, because the event can be recorded. It therefore passes over the vast spectrum of interrecursivity in which nothing is said and nothing is done, and in which the presence of a particular other nonetheless co-mediates what each is doing. Grooming has made the blind spot harder to see, because it is relaxed availability in an eventful form. It is relaxed, individuated, and restorative, and it is also an act. It has allowed the field to study relaxed being-with while continuing to count acts, and it has made the uneventful hours on either side of a grooming bout look like the empty time between data. Yet grooming rarely takes more than a fifth of a primate’s day, and in many species much less (Dunbar 1991), and much of the remaining time is spent resting, feeding, and travelling in the near company of the same animals. A theory of social bonds built on grooming is a theory of the bonds’ most visible moments.

Living Value Theory has the resources to see the rest, because its idea of value never depended on visibility. Value is What Makes Life Better (Even if You Cannot Measure It) and Value Without Trace argued that the coordinations meeting a stake most fully are the likeliest to disappear from view. The market models of grooming have a further family resemblance to what Of Garage Sales and Free Pianos called transactive dualism, the assumption that value appears only where something passes from one party to another. Eventless being-with passes nothing, and so it falls outside any accounting of exchange.

V. Presence as Co-mediation

What does it mean to say that the presence of another co-mediates without anything being done? The corpus already contains the elements of an answer, and they need sharpening.

Being With Others described gulls on a roof in Tromsø. They kept their distances by small adjustments and attended to one another enough to keep apart, and yet “the gulls on that roof socialized but they did not engage each other interrecursively.” Each bird “seemed to treat the others much as it treated the tiles, the chimney, the angle of the roof itself: an almost fixed feature of the environment to be spaced around.” The article concluded: “registration is not engagement.” Why Do Bees Not Turn Into Ghosts? by contrast listed “resting together, grooming, relaxed co-presence, the mutual spacing of a flock” together as interrecursivity “at its lowest setting.” The two formulations pull against each other, and the distinction drawn here resolves them. Grooming is eventful interrecursivity at low intensity. Flock spacing, as on the Tromsø roof, is registration without individuation: the others are obstacles and conditions, and any gull would do. Relaxed co-presence is a third thing. It is eventless, and in its fullest form it is individuated.

Three marks distinguish it. The first is that it matters who the other is. A dog asleep at the feet of its person settles differently when a stranger sits in the same chair. A child absorbed in a game plays on when a parent is in the next room and looks up when a visitor takes the parent’s place. The second is history. The condition is reached through earlier coordination, and it is specific to a relationship in a way that the spacing of gulls is not. The third is that each one’s settledness is contingent on the other’s continuing state. The reader on the sofa is not watching her companion, and she would register a change in his breathing, a restlessness, or a sudden stillness of the wrong kind. Her calm is held partly by his, and his partly by hers. This is what makes the condition interrecursive though nothing passes. Each one’s L1 coordination is continuously open to the other’s, and each one’s continuing presence is a response to the other’s continuing presence. Staying is something both are doing.

The library shows that individuation is a matter of degree. The students at neighbouring desks did not know one another, and still their presence co-mediated each one’s concentration. They differ from the gulls on the roof because each registers the others as engaged in the same kind of activity, and that shared orientation does the work. A reader in a library is held by the concentration of others in a way that a gull is not held by the gulls it spaces around. Someone who began typing loudly, eating crisps, or talking on the phone would be registered at once, and the room’s quiet would have to be repaired. Anonymous co-presence of this kind is weaker than the co-presence of intimates, and it is easily transferred, since any studious stranger at the next desk will serve. It is nonetheless interrecursive in the sense developed here, because each one’s continuing work is part of what sustains everyone else’s. Social psychology has studied a version of it as social facilitation, the improvement of simple or well-practised performance in the presence of others (Zajonc 1965), and once again it has studied it as an effect of others on an individual. Between the gulls and the sleeping couple runs a long gradient, from registration through anonymous co-mediation to individuated co-presence, and relaxed availability deepens as it moves along it.

Metabolic Recognition as the Ground of All Understanding and Sitting Together supply the mode of attention involved. Mesometabolic recognition is “the embodied registration of another living being’s condition through shared participation in an immediate environment, prior to explicit symbolic classification.” The grandmother on the bench registers that the person beside her is carrying something heavy before either has spoken. Relaxed co-presence is mesometabolic recognition at rest. It continues all the time two familiar beings are together, it seldom rises to L2, and it is what allows a change in the other to be registered at once.

The most important methodological consequence follows. Eventless co-mediation becomes visible mainly when it ends. When the other leaves the room, the dog lifts its head. When the parent goes out, the child stops playing and comes looking. When a quarrel has entered the house, the reader can no longer read. The evidence of the condition appears at its withdrawal, at a substitution, or at a disturbance, and at that moment an event is recorded, an approach, a call, a following. An event-based record therefore captures relaxed co-presence chiefly through its breakdowns, and it mistakes them for the start of the social process. Ontologically Grounded Theory argued that interrecursive life includes events that never happened: prevented encounters, unspoken articulations, coordination that never had to rise to notice. Eventless co-presence is the everyday form of that. It can be studied by asking what changes when the other leaves, or is replaced, or becomes restless. Latencies to sleep, depth of rest, the time an animal spends scanning, the length of time someone can concentrate, and the readiness to wander off and come back are all measurable, and they become evidence of being-with as soon as they are compared across the presence and absence of particular others.

VI. Sleeping Together

Sleeping together carries the problem to its limit. When two people share a bed, their capacities for explicit interaction are greatly reduced. They do not converse or watch each other, and most of what passes between them happens without becoming salient to either. They nevertheless accommodate each other. Each occupies a part of the mattress. A movement by one may produce a small adjustment in the other’s posture, and each may shift when the other turns or comes closer. Some people sleep better with a familiar person beside them and some sleep worse, and studies of couples have found sleep to be a jointly organised and often contested business (Troxel et al. 2007).

The deeper point concerns what makes sleep possible at all. Sleep is a periodic reconfiguration of living coordination in which the monitoring of one’s surroundings contracts while the body’s own recursive organisation continues (A Living Value Theory of Sleep). Sleep Disruption as Violence called this protected recursive unavailability, and argued that it requires time, permission, and security, and that where a group sleeps, someone usually carries the delegated vigilance that lets the others stop. A person who has to keep watch on the other sleeper cannot easily sleep. Sharing a bed therefore depends on the other’s presence having become reliable enough to recede from attention altogether. Compare sleeping beside a trusted partner with trying to sleep beside someone whose behaviour feels threatening or unpredictable. The distance between the two bodies is the same, and the conditions for rest are utterly different.

Shared sleep is thus the extreme case of eventless co-mediation. Each sleeper’s selfrecursive coordination is held, through the night, by the other’s presence, and each would register at once, even asleep, an unfamiliar movement or the other’s absence. Shared sleep also distributes recursive burden. A household in which one adult listens for the baby while the other sleeps has allocated that burden, and it has frequently been allocated unequally, most often to women (Venn et al. 2008). The House at Night showed how much of domestic architecture is an arrangement for exactly this, for letting bodies become unavailable to the world while remaining near enough to one another.

VII. The Cave

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo’s Child (2004) opens and closes in a cave where a parent and a child sleep. The Gruffalo has warned his child about the Big Bad Mouse in the deep dark wood. One snowy night, while the father sleeps, the child slips out to look for the mouse, meets a snake, an owl, and a fox, is frightened half to death by a mouse whose moonlit shadow makes it look enormous, and runs home to the cave, where the father is still asleep, and settles down beside him.

Recursive Mediation as Continuous Discernment read this story for returnability. The child “leaves the safety of the cave,” and the venture is possible because “the Gruffalo’s child assumes that the cave remains standing, that the route back can be retraced.” Bravery, on that reading, “just is a form of recursive discernment, and what it discerns is the currently available strength of returnability.” The sleeping father “has not lost the capacities that made him fearsome in the first” book: “touch him hard enough, and he wakes.”

Read alongside the present argument, the cave is relaxed availability in its most elementary form. A parent and child sleep together in a shelter, and the father’s availability has contracted almost to nothing while his capacity remains whole. He does not watch the child, and the child does not need him to. What the child takes into the wood is the cave held in reserve, a condition so settled that it can be left. And the story ends where it began, because return is how relaxed availability shows its value. The child comes back to a sleeping father who never noticed the absence, and the reunion is no event at all. The child lies down and sleeps. Recursive Mediation as Continuous Discernment observed that “an actual return is always, to some degree, a remediation rather than a literal restoration.” What has been remediated here is the child’s relation to the wood, which now contains a mouse, and to the cave, which is now known to be worth coming back to.

The book also shows the event bias at work in storytelling. Everything that can be told happens in the wood: the encounters, the questions, the fright. The cave, which frames the story and makes it possible, contains only sleep. Stories, like ethograms, are made of events, and the condition that lets the events be survived appears only at the beginning and the end, as the place one leaves and the place one comes home to.

VIII. “Come and Have Lunch in My Underground House”

The first book sheds a darker light on the same condition. In The Gruffalo (Donaldson and Scheffler 1999) a mouse walks through the wood and is met in turn by a fox, an owl, and a snake. The fox says, “Come and have lunch in my underground house.” The owl and the snake make similar offers of tea and a feast at home. There’s No Such Thing as a Gruffalo observed that “the language of every invitation is deceptive.” The fox “frames the encounter as hospitality, masking consumption as conviviality,” and under every offer lies the same fact: “Someone is going to be eaten.”

What the predators offer is relaxed availability. A home, a meal, an invitation to sit down together are the very settings in which, throughout this article, relaxed availability is achieved. The fox does not threaten. He invites the mouse to stop being vigilant, to come home with him, and to share food, and the underground house promises exactly the shelter that the open wood lacks. Metabolic Recognition as the Ground of All Understanding argued that offering food is one of the deepest acknowledgements one living being can make of another, since it registers that the other has a body that needs things. The predator’s invitation counterfeits that acknowledgement exactly. It recognises that the mouse has a body, and it proposes to use that body as lunch. The guest is the meal.

Under the invitation lies antagonistic interrecursivity at its most extreme. Each encounter in the wood is a contest of modelling, in which predator and prey anticipate each other’s anticipations, and Why Do Bees Not Turn Into Ghosts? noted that “predator and prey are each other’s antagonistic interrecursive counterparts,” and that antagonism is the most draining form of engagement. The invitation tries to end the contest by persuading one side to stop playing. The mouse declines by raising the stakes. It names a still larger predator, the Gruffalo, with whom it is supposedly having lunch, and the fox, the owl, and the snake flee for fear of being eaten themselves. When the Gruffalo turns out to exist and to want the mouse on a slice of bread, the mouse turns the same move on him, and he flees from the threat of becoming a crumble. Everyone in the deep dark wood is somebody’s potential meal, and nobody in it can relax. There’s No Such Thing as a Gruffalo noted that the mouse “operates one recursive level above” its antagonists, and the story ends when the mouse, alone and safe, “sits down and eats a nut.” The nut does not answer back. Only then is the wood quiet.

Being killed and eaten by someone else is the absolute end of relaxed availability, and it shows what the condition rests on. Every animal is a heterotroph, as Why Do Bees Not Turn Into Ghosts? put it, and must live from the bodies of other living beings. For the prey, being killed ends recursive mediation itself, and being eaten converts its body into the material of another’s continuation. Technologies of Power treated predation and incorporation as the extreme forms of mesocosmic expansion. The most elementary condition of relaxed availability is therefore the assurance that the other is not going to eat you, and not going to kill you so that someone else can. Herbivores are often seen grazing within sight of lions that have fed, because a sated predator’s capacity to kill is in reserve and its present availability for killing is low. That is relaxed availability across the most dangerous divide in nature, and it lasts only until the lions are hungry again. Among human beings the same assurance has been built into the oldest rules of hospitality, which oblige host and guest to keep each other safe under one roof. When a guest turns on a host, the betrayal has long been felt as worse than ordinary violence. Scots law knew a special category of “murder under trust,” and it is the charge that has clung to the massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692, where the soldiers had been their guests for nearly two weeks. And English uses the same word, grooming, for the predatory manufacture of trust by which an abuser imitates relaxed availability in order to exploit it.

Göbekli Tepe makes the same point in stone. The enclosures are full of carved predators, leopards, boars, vultures, snakes, and scorpions, and Nothing Special Had to Happen read their presence on the pillars as containment: “The predators are outside.” Sitting Together added that “the bench under the leopard is safer than the hillside where the leopard actually is.” An architecture of relaxed availability is, among other things, a place where nobody is going to be eaten. The cave of the Gruffalo’s child is such a place too, and the underground house of the fox is its most dangerous imitation.

IX. Household Life

Most relaxed availability happens at home, and most of it goes unremarked because it is the texture of ordinary domestic days. In a household that works, people pass one another on the stairs without greeting, cook while someone else lays the table, read in the same room, take turns in the bathroom, and leave the house and come back without each departure and return becoming an occasion. They know one another’s rhythms well enough that much of what has to be coordinated never has to be raised. Who is up first, who needs quiet in the evening, who will be hungry at six, and which door is left open for whom have long since settled into L1.

Two features of the home make this possible. The first is material. A house is a made arrangement, and its walls, doors, and rooms let people be near each other and apart at once. A door left ajar, a light visible under another door, the sound of someone moving about upstairs all carry a low, continuous signal of availability that asks nothing of its recipient. Architecture deposits, in timber and plaster, an answer to the question of how near people can be without having to deal with each other, and different houses answer it differently. A one-room dwelling in which a whole family eats, works, and sleeps sets very different conditions for relaxed availability from a house with a room for each child, and neither is the more natural arrangement. The second feature is temporal. A household has a history of repeated days, and the history is what allows so much to go unsaid. The first weeks of sharing a flat with someone are full of small negotiations, over the kitchen, the noise, the hours, which later disappear. Their disappearance is the household’s achievement.

Children learn this as part of growing up in a house, and they learn it as much from what adults do not do as from what they do. A child doing homework at the kitchen table while a parent cooks is in the condition Winnicott described, absorbed and not alone, and the parent is available without supervising. Adolescents often seek a version of the same thing in reverse, wanting the household to be available to them while asking that it make no demands, and much friction in families with teenagers concerns the terms of that availability: whether a closed door means leave me alone or simply I am busy, and whether a parent who knocks is offering availability or exercising surveillance.

X. Alone in the Presence of Others

D. W. Winnicott (1958) proposed that the capacity to be alone develops through the experience of being alone in the presence of someone trusted, the infant playing absorbed and undisturbed while the mother is near. The formulation contains a productive paradox. One is alone without being isolated. The other is present without requiring that one abandon one’s own activity, and attention can stay where it has settled.

Winnicott’s formulation is among the few in which eventless presence carries the theoretical weight, and Living Value Theory can take it further. The significance of the other’s presence is more than affection, attachment, or a representation of security. It lies in what becomes possible in ongoing coordination. A child can play without checking every minute that the adult is still there. Two adults can pursue separate occupations without repeatedly establishing that they remain on good terms. A person and a dog can share a room without turning each moment into an encounter. The relationship does not vanish when attention turns away, and the individual does not vanish into the relationship. Relaxed availability makes room for both.

There is an asymmetry that should not be passed over. The person who finds quiet company restful may be relying on another whose own capacity to rest is restricted. A parent sitting beside a sleeping infant may be relaxed enough to read and still more watchful than the child. A carer may sustain another person’s comfortable absorption through demanding work of her own. Relaxed availability must not be romanticised as an effortless condition equally shared by everyone present. An account of it should ask whose coordination has become easier, whose responsiveness maintains that ease, and what would happen if the arrangement changed.

XI. Resting Between Sets

Anyone who goes to a gym knows that people spend most of their time there resting. They sit on the benches between sets, wander to the water fountain, and above all look at their phones. Of an hour in the gym, the minutes actually spent under load are a small part. An observer counting events would conclude that a gym is a place where people look at screens, and that the others in the room hardly matter, since most of them never speak to one another.

Being in the gym with others is nonetheless indispensable to many who train there. Many people who could train at home choose to train among others, and many say they cannot make themselves work as hard alone. The others do nothing to motivate them. They do not cheer, instruct, or openly compete. Their presence, bent on the same kind of effort, makes one’s own effort easier to begin and harder to abandon. Psychologists noticed more than a century ago that cyclists rode faster with others than alone (Triplett 1898), and the gym is the everyday form of that finding. In the terms of this article, each person’s selfrecursive coordination with their own effort is co-mediated, without anything being said, by the effort of the others around them, and their own effort is in turn part of what holds the others’. It is the library again, with weights instead of books.

The gym also shows why recursive fluidity, more than interrecursive intensity, is the right frame. During a heavy set the lifter is absorbed in a selfrecursive coordination with their own effort, breathing, and fatigue, and with plates and cables that answer to nothing. During the rest they may turn to their phone, where they may well be engaged interrecursively with people elsewhere. Someone comes over, says something, gets an answer, and both go back to what they were doing. Nobody has to announce that a conversation is over, and nobody apologizes for attending to the weights. The possibility of company persists while attention goes elsewhere, and each can set their own level of involvement, from none to a good deal, without negotiating it. The phones that look like a withdrawal from company are part of what lets the company continue at low cost, by giving each person something to do while they are with the others.

XII. Other Animals

A household dog may spend hours in the same room as a person without asking for anything. The dog sleeps and the person reads or works. The person gets up, the dog lifts its head, sees that nothing follows, and settles again. Later the dog comes over to be stroked, and an active exchange begins, which ends when one or the other has had enough. Why Do Bees Not Turn Into Ghosts? described the dog as “around most of the time in a relaxed, mutually adjusted co-presence,” and the household as a place of “half-attentive companionship.” Of Hamsters, Dogs, and Peccaries examined the recursive mediational attributions people make to animals in such companionship. The lifted head is the moment at which an observer would start recording. The hours before it are where the relationship lives.

The distinctions drawn in Section V apply across species. Gulls on a roof keep their individual distances (Hediger 1955) by small adjustments, and they register one another as features of the roof. Flocks and herds lower their individual vigilance as their numbers grow, and the others serve as so many eyes. Both are forms of being-with without individuation. Primates dozing against particular partners, a mare standing nose to tail with a familiar companion, and a dog asleep against one person and alert beside another are forms of individuated, eventless co-mediation. And grooming, preening, play, mating, and fighting are events of different intensities. Much of ordinary animal life proceeds through coordination at L1 and L2. Animals rest, feed, move, keep their distance, and settle into arrangements in which other beings remain present without requiring a response. A theory attentive only to conspicuous encounters would miss most of the time during which relationships are actually carried on.

XIII. Intensities and Events

Interrecursivity can be arranged along a spectrum of intensity. At one end lie reciprocal adjustments that demand very little attention: familiar spacing, small accommodations, the intermittent movements of companions sharing a space. Further along lie sustained conversation, encounters with strangers, collaborative work, play, and coordinated performance. At the far end lie encounters of continuous reciprocal anticipation under uncertainty, danger, or antagonism, of which the encounter between predator and prey is the type.

The argument of this article adds a second dimension. Intensity and eventfulness are different things. A grooming bout is low in intensity and eventful. A silent standoff is high in intensity and almost eventless. Shared sleep is low in both. A heated argument is high in both. Research has followed the events, and so it has studied the low-intensity end of the spectrum mainly where something happens there. The degree of reciprocal responsiveness, the effort of sustaining it, the danger of miscoordination, the compatibility of the participants’ stakes, and the eventfulness of the coordination are five different things.

Once this is seen, maximal interrecursivity ceases to look like the highest achievement of social life. In many circumstances living well depends on being able to reduce interrecursive demands. A disagreement is settled. A contested space comes to be shared. A stranger becomes familiar. A child no longer needs constant reassurance. Two people can at last sit together in silence. None of these reductions lessens the value of the relationship. Each may improve the coordination the relationship makes possible, and the result is often an enlargement of recursive fluidity, as a wider range of activities can proceed without renewed negotiation.

The same view clarifies what is distinctive about antagonistic interrecursivity. When another being’s responses threaten one’s own coordination, it becomes hard to turn attention elsewhere. The counterpart has to be monitored, because looking away carries risk. The encounter claims a growing share of bodily attention and energy, and its cost lies in the narrowing of alternatives as much as in its intensity. The person cannot go back to her book, and the animal cannot settle. The opposite of relaxed being-with is a condition in which another’s responsiveness has become an unavoidable demand, and at its limit it is the condition of the prey, for whom looking away may mean being eaten.

XIV. How Relaxed Availability Is Made and Lost

Relaxed availability is built over time. Strangers who come to share a space begin in a condition of heightened mutual attention, because neither yet knows what the other will do, and the attention is itself a cost. Over repeated encounters each learns the other’s habits, and what had to be watched settles into expectation. The process can be seen in new flatmates, in a puppy brought into a household with an older dog, in a class of children in the first weeks of term, and in a couple in the first months of living together. Its result is that a growing share of the relationship can be left to L1 and that the remaining openings, when they come, are shorter and easier to close. Grooming may be one of the ways primates get there. Among other things, it may be a means by which two animals become able to sit together afterwards without grooming.

The condition can also be damaged. A quarrel that has not been settled turns a shared room from a place of rest into a place of vigilance, because each must now watch the other for signs of renewed hostility or of reconciliation. People describe this as an atmosphere, and the word is apt, since what has changed is the whole field in which they are together. Repair restores availability more than it restores any particular sentiment, and the sign that a quarrel is truly over is often that the two can once again sit in silence without the silence meaning anything.

Relaxed availability is most sharply revealed when it is lost for good. The bereaved often say that what they miss most is less the conversations, which they remember, than the presence that asked for nothing: someone in the next room, the weight on the other side of the bed, the second cup that no longer needs making. What had been held at L1 for years becomes, in its absence, continuously salient, and the habits built around it go on running into the empty place, the hand reaching across in the night, the remark half turned towards someone who is not there. Here the withdrawal that reveals eventless co-mediation is final. The value of relaxed availability is often recognised only after the possibility of return has gone, and the cave is empty.

Distance alters the condition without abolishing it. Families and friends separated by migration, study, or work maintain a version of relaxed availability through devices, keeping a video call open while each cooks in a separate kitchen, or leaving a group chat in which nobody says much but anyone can. Such arrangements show both how much people value availability without demand and how much of it depends on bodies sharing a space, since a screen can carry a voice and a face and cannot carry the shift of a body on a sofa or the warmth of another sleeper.

XV. What Is Valuable About Relaxed Availability?

Relaxed availability has no single value independent of the beings involved. For one person quiet company makes concentration possible, and for another it supports rest. For an animal familiar proximity reduces the need for vigilance. For friends it keeps open the chance of spontaneous talk without the work of arranging it. What the cases share is the possibility of sustaining one coordination while remaining connected to another. The other is available, and the availability does not insist on being used.

The theory holds that value is whatever sustains, repairs, intensifies, or improves living coordination, whether or not it is ever measured or recognised. A chair matters because it holds, and a room because it shelters. A trusted companion may matter because she can be present without making demands. The comparison does not make companions into furniture. Its point is that living value is not proportional to the attention a counterpart receives, or to the number of events a relationship produces. Precisely because the companion can respond, the ability to be together without constant response is significant, and it is an achievement that no chair could supply.

Sitting Together reported what happened when that value was finally counted. When the Friendship Bench was tested in a randomized trial, the benefits of sitting with a trained lay health worker on a bench under a tree were large enough to surprise the field (Chibanda et al. 2016). The trial measured an intervention with a structured talking component, and it would be wrong to attribute its results to co-presence alone. What it did show was that the conditions the dare had long supplied, a place to sit near someone who is not in a hurry, could be rebuilt and made to matter. Relaxed availability may be one of the forms in which social value is most securely established, and one of the forms most easily removed by institutions that count only what is done.

It is not always valuable. Being together can constrain movement, break concentration, disturb sleep, or make someone feel watched, and a shared room can be restful for one occupant and oppressive for another. Plessner’s (1999) defence of distance, tact, and reserve against the ideal of total intimacy is a reminder that closeness becomes bearable partly through the right amount of withdrawal. And as the fox’s invitation shows, the forms of relaxed availability can be imitated by those who mean harm. The question in any case is what this particular arrangement makes possible, for whom, and at what cost.

XVI. What Never Needs to Happen

Studying relaxed availability means attending to things that do not happen. People who live together need not arrange every meal. Close friends need not explain every silence. A person need not check whether a familiar dog will come when called. Neighbours need not negotiate their distance at each meeting. Such absences are not automatically evidence of successful coordination. Where an established arrangement makes explicit negotiation unnecessary, the absence of the negotiation is part of what has to be explained.

This has consequences for method across disciplines. An ethogram scores the grooming bout and notes the resting animals as a distance at the next scan. A conversation analyst transcribes the talk about the tea and marks the half-hour before it as a lapse. An interview yields an account of why two people enjoy each other’s company and reveals nothing about how their routines permit long periods of comfortable independence. Better questions concern the organisation of ordinary life. What can the participants do without consulting each other? When does the other’s presence become salient? What changes when this particular other leaves, or is replaced by someone else? Which interruptions call for adjustment? Which interactions have become unnecessary? What happens when one participant withdraws availability?

Such questions also separate relaxed availability from conditions that look the same from outside: enforced silence, habitual avoidance, unequal dependence, or the stillness of prey that has not yet been seen. A person who does not dare to speak is in a different condition from one who has no need to speak. The silences may be indistinguishable to an observer, and the coordinations underneath them have little in common. What distinguishes them is what would happen if the silence were broken, and that can only be found out by attending to the whole relationship and its history.

XVII. Conclusion: When Being Together Becomes Easy

A day of living depends on continual change in what needs attention and what can recede from it. A person wakes, attends to her body, meets other people, moves through familiar rooms, handles things, works, eats, talks, withdraws, and sleeps. Some coordinations become difficult and call for repair, and others settle and stop being salient. The process runs through embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization at once, and recursive fluidity is the encompassing capacity to make its transitions. No living being is well served by permanent confinement to a single demanding form of coordination. The possibility of moving away from a demand matters as much as the capacity to meet it.

Two people sit on a sofa and say little. A child plays while a trusted adult is near. Students work in silence among strangers in a library, and people rest between sets in a gym. A person reads while a dog sleeps at her feet. A parent and child sleep in a cave, and the child goes out into the wood and comes home again. What connects these scenes is the possibility of sustaining being-with while attention and activity move elsewhere, and in each of them the presence of a particular other co-mediates what each is doing without anything being said or done. That is relaxed availability. It rests on relationships that have become reliable enough to remain operative without constant renewal, on shelter, on returnability, and at bottom on the assurance that the other is not going to eat you.

The sciences of social life have studied the events that punctuate this condition, the grooming bout, the exchange, the utterance, the act of support, and they have made great discoveries by counting them. The condition itself has slipped through their records, because it does not happen at any particular moment. It appears in the data when it breaks, when the other leaves, when a stranger takes the companion’s place, or when the predator’s invitation is accepted. A theory of living value can see it whole, because it asks what a coordination makes possible, whether or not it can be counted. The possibility of sitting together without having to engage each other is one of the conditions that make sustained coexistence possible. Two beings who can be comfortably together have made room, within their relationship, for the rest of life to go on.

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