Dialogical dynamics - inside the moment of speaking

John Shotter

For C. L. Prevignano and P.J. Thibault (Eds.) Interaction Analysis and Language: Discussing the State-of the-Art. Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins.

Abstract: I have been centrally influenced in the dialogical approach I take to interpersonal communication, not by the theories of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov, but by certain specific utterances or expressions in their writings. As I see it, all communication begins in, and continues with, our living, spontaneous, expressive-responsive (gestural), bodily activities that occur in the meetings between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us. Indeed, as living, embodied beings, we cannot not be responsive in some fashion to the expressions of others (spoken, written, or otherwise), and to other kinds of events, occurring in our immediate surroundings. Thus, as I see it, abstract and general theories are of little help to each of us in the unique living of our unique lives together, either as ordinary people or as professional practitioners. While the specific words of another person, uttered as a ‘reminder’ at a timely moment as to the character of our next step within an ongoing practical activity, can be a crucial influence in its development and refinement. Thus in this paper, I outline a distinction between ‘withness-‘ and ‘aboutness-thinking’: Withness (dialogic)-thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. It gives rise, not to a ‘seeing’, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor to an interpretation, for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions; but to a ‘shaped’ and ‘vectored’ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings – engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do. Aboutness (monologic)-thinking, however, is unresponsive to another’s expressions; it works simply in terms of a thinker’s ‘theoretical pictures’ – but,

even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to interpret it, and to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action.

“On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us. – On the other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order. So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.98).

When I first began to study language (Shotter, 1968), I was strongly influenced by Chomsky (1957, 1965). Central to his whole approach then was idealization: “Linguistic theory,” he said, “is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener...” (p.3). For, as he then saw it, due to “memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance” (p.3), our utterances, actual acts of speaking were too disorderly to study. Indeed: “A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance” (p.4). In other words, his central concern in his theory is with discovering the “mental reality” underlying actual behavior. Now, with reference to Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark above, my interest has switched completely to a focus on the deviations that Chomsky, rightly, sees as standing in the way of conducting a “natural scientific” investigation into the workings of language.

In the dialogical approach to interaction and interaction analysis I now take, I have been centrally influenced, not by their theories – as they all especially eschew idealizations – but by certain specific utterances or expressions in the writings of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov, as well as drawing influences from expressions in Merleau-Ponty’s and Garfinkel’s writings. As I see it, all communication begins in, and continues with, our living, spontaneous, expressive-responsive (gestural), bodily activities that occur in the meetings between ourselves and the others and

othernesses around us. Indeed, as living, embodied beings, we cannot not be responsive in some fashion to the expressions of others, as well as to other kinds of events, occurring in our immediate surroundings – hence my emphasis above on my own embodied responsiveness to the writings (the expressive-responsive utterances) of others. It is this that leads me to the view that, as I see it, abstract and general theories as such are of little help to us in the unique living of our unique lives together, whether as ordinary people or as professional practitioners. While the specific words of another person, uttered as a ‘reminder’ at a timely moment, can exert a crucial influence in the development and refinement of our ongoing activities and practices. Primarily, as I see it, it is the living, bodily activity of speaking to other people responsively that matters, that ‘moves’ them, not the simply displaying before them of patterned forms. And such spontaneously responsive occurrences can, as Garfinkel (1967) continually occur “for ‘another first time’” (p.9).

Joint participation in a flow of spontaneously responsive activity: shared ‘feelings of tendency’

In taking this approach, I was influenced early on by a remark of Vygotsky’s (1962) about the “basic laws governing human development.” As he saw it, “one of them is that consciousness and control appear only at a late stage in the development of a function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control we must first possess it” (p.90). In other words, long before we are individually consciously aware of deliberately acting to achieve a goal, we are nonetheless coming to act unconsciously and spontaneously in ways intelligible to those around us. And, as was clear from all the rest of Vygotsky’s work, while we might possess as an aspect of our biological inheritance a great range of ‘lower’ psychological functions, the gradual growth of our voluntary ability to organize them into ‘higher’, more complex forms, comes about through other, already competent member of our verbal community, ‘in-structing’ us verbally in how do so: “All the higher psychic functions are mediated processes, and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. The mediating sign is incorporated in their structure as an indispensable, indeed the central, part of the total process. In concept formation that sign is the word, which at first plays the role of means in forming the concept but later becomes its symbol” (1962, p.56, my emphasis) – and one person’s words, their bodily voicing of an utterance, their expressions, can exert this immediate and spontaneous (gestural) effect

on (and in) another person. And later, the speaking of their words to ourselves is “the means by which we [can come to] direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution of the problem confronting us” (Vygotsky, 1962, p.58).

Thus, as I see it, from a dialogical point of view, our intellectual lives are not primarily based in picture-like mental representations, i.e., inner structures of only a formal (static patterned) kind, but in ‘inner’ dialogically-structured movements, in a dialogical dynamics giving rise to unfolding movements which shift this way and that in a distinctive fashion, movements whose ‘shape’ can be ‘felt’ or ‘sensed’ but not pictured, or known at all in a propositional form. These sensed or shaped ‘inner movements’ are, I take it, the “linguistic intuition[s] of the native speaker” against which such linguists as Chomsky (1965, p.19) Endnote test their theories of syntactic structure, or other such general and abstract features of our use of language – what he now calls their “I-language” (Chomsky, 2000) Endnote .

But here, in talking of such sensed or felt ‘inner movements,’ i.e., of thought as not in any way separate from feeling, I am taking an approach toward these issues very different in kind to Chomsky’s: mine is a practical-descriptive kind of approach rather than a theoretical-explanatory one, as I will explain in a moment. For, in line with Vygotsky’s comments quoted above, from a dialogical point of view, our inner intellectual lives can be seen as consisting in an ‘orchestrated’ intertwining of many different kinds of influence: conscious and unconscious ones, cognitive and affective, deliberate and spontaneous, biologically given and culturally developed ones, and in fact, as we shall see, many others of a much more occasional or momentary kind that are at work in the immediate practical surroundings of a particular utterance.

As William James (1980) noted in his famous “The Stream of Thought” chapter, we have failed in the past, in discussing the nature of such dynamic forms, to register “the transitive parts” of the stream and succumbed to an “undue emphasizing of [its] substantive parts [i.e., its resting-places]” (p.237). In so doing, we have tended to confuse “the thoughts themselves... and the things of which they are aware... [But, while] the things are discrete and discontinuous... their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie” (p.233). To break the strangle-hold of this compulsion upon us, James entreats us thus: “Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream,

which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all Endnote “ (p.246). And, in being aware of them from within, i.e., of the transitory parts of the inner stream of thought occurring within us, we find that as they unfold they provided us with both a ‘shaped’ and a ‘vectored’ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings. In short, we find such responsive feelings as engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do – in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, they can provide us with an immediate sense of how to “go on” in our current, practical circumstances. Elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), I have explored such transitory understandings and action guiding anticipations extensively.

But what I must do here, is to note that from a dialogical point of view, it is (mostly) out in the larger flow of inter-activity taking place between people whenever they meet, the flow within which they as individuals are ‘participant parts’, that the momentary dynamic stabilities of interest to us occur – not within the ‘stream of thought’ hidden inside people’s heads. I say ‘mostly’, as the back and forth flow of movement in such inter-activity, its ‘rhythm’, is of such a kind that, if we are being spontaneously responsive to the embodied expressions of others, then we are, so to speak, ‘resonating in tune with them’. And to the extent that we are jointly participating in this common rhythm with our whole being, both our ‘inner’ feelings and our ‘outer’ expressions share in, or partake of, it too.

In such a short article as this, I cannot explore at any length the extensive array of complex issues arising out of our participation in dialogically-structured realities (but see Shotter, 1996, 2003). But I do want to emphasize here one of its most important consequences: it is only in such meetings – and not in the heads of individuals – that we can find the starting points for our analyses. For it is in such meetings that we can find the beginnings of our language games. As Wittgenstein (1980) puts it: “The origin and the primitive form of the language game is,” he says (p.31), a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (quoting Goethe)’.” “The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word” (1953, p.218). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?” he asks, “Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1981, no.541). In other words – and this is a point

of especial importance to practitioners – it is in the once-off, fleeting reactions occurring at the beginning of our meetings with others, that we can find the beginnings of the uniquely new ways of thinking required if we are to come to a grasp of the particular, concrete, never-before-encountered person or circumstances now confronting us. These moments, then, are moments of common reference, shared foundational moments that can function as shared starting points for the further exploration of the unique person or circumstance before us.

Developing our practices in practice

Indeed, to go further, we clearly do not need to be able to explain our everyday utterances and actions scientifically, i.e., analyze them into a certain set of elements that combine in repetitive patterns to produce observed outcomes, to be able, through everyday reflection and inquiry, to improve them, to gain a more deliberate command of them. And to make this claim is not to reject the value of science in our lives. It is simply to note such facts, for instance, that in the course of their everyday involvements with them, in being spontaneous responsive to their children’s actions in a living, bodily, expressive manner, parents can (informally) teach their children, not only their mother tongue, but also countless other aspects of acceptable and intelligible behavior, without having any idea of the laws by which their children’s minds and bodies are governed. In other words, at work here in the spontaneous, living bodily interactions occurring unceasingly between all of us, not just parents with their children, is another kind of process of understanding and of acting expressively, quite different from that at work when we act deliberately and individually as scientists Endnote – a process that comes into play in, and can only come into play, in our living meetings with the others and othernesses around us, a dialogical form of understanding. Scientific understandings do work in terms of static, picture-like, inner mental representations, but our everyday, spontaneous, living understandings do not seem to work in this way. If Bakhtin (1986) is right, they work in terms of in inner, dialogically-structured movements, a dialogical dynamics, that gives rise to distinctive ‘movements’ whose shape can be felt or sensed but not pictured, i.e., not known in a propositional form.

Crucial to this process, is the realization that there are, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’ ‘sentences’” (no.23), and that, besides people’s talk about states of affairs, in which something is

pictured or portrayed, we need also to understand (among its many other uses) the expressive use of our embodied talk. Indeed, unless we can understand how others as 1st-persons, as ‘I’s’, manifest or exhibit crucial aspects of their ‘inner’ lives to us, e.g., their surety and confidence, their uncertainty or humility, their pomposity and arrogance, their respect or contempt for us, their anxiety and sadness, and so on, in the present moment of their acting, we cannot understand how, so to speak, to ‘relate’ to them.

Tom Andersen (1996), a world-renowned Norwegian family therapist, in characterizing his therapeutic attitude to his client’s utterances, their words, comments as follows: “The listener who sees as much as he or she hears will notice that various spoken words ‘touch’ the speaker differently. The speaker is touched by the words as they reach his or her own ears. Some words touch the speaker in such a way that the listener can see him or her being moved... one example may clarify this.

A woman had felt sad for a long while related that she could never ask for help, even when she was sick. Help had to be given by others, not asked for by her. “Because,” she explained, “independence was a big word in my family. We were supposed to be independent.” [JS: The voice of her father and mother at work in her – see the final sentence in this quote below.] A shift in her face and a drop in the voice when she uttered the word ‘independent’ indicated the meaningfulness of the word. When she was asked: “If you looked into that word ‘independence’, what might you see?” she first said that she did not like the word very much. Asked what she saw that she did not like, she put her hands to her face and said, weeping: “it is so hard for me to talk about loneliness... yes, it means staying alone.” As she told how hard it had been to stay alone in order to fulfill all expectations of her being independent, she cried and her body sank in resignation. She talked for a long while without interruption and started to wonder if she would be able to fulfill those expectations. Being more and more eagerly involved in her own discussion, her voice raised, and her neck and shoulders raised, and she talked more and more angrily as the idea of being-in-the-world as independent was forcefully challenged.

Asked what her mother would see in the word, she replied that she would see strength; her father would also see strength, but of another kind. Her sister and grandmother would also see what she did” (p.212).

In another case, Andersen (1996) brings to light further influences of (other’s) words on us: “One woman who had been hospitalized at a mental hospital for a year

finally came to family therapy. Besides herself and her family and the family therapist, the doctor-in-chief at the hospital and her nurse contact at the ward were present. When she was asked if she had been given any diagnosis, she said: “a manic-depressive psychosis.” When she was asked if that diagnosis made any difference, she said it changed her life. She could no longer laugh and be happy nor be sad and cry, because she could see on the faces of those around her that they thought she might go manic or she might become depressed. She therefore had a new inner voice speaking to her all the time: “Don’t be happy and don’t be sad! Don’t laugh and don’t cry!” (pp.123-124).

As Vygotsky (1962) noted above, words are “the means by which we direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution of the problem confronting us” (p.58). But clearly, as both Andersen’s two cases cited above suggest, and as Wittgenstein suggests throughout his later work, not all the words we learn from others orient us appropriately, many can also disorient or mislead us. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, with respect to the kind of ‘problems’ – or better, difficulties of orientation – we often face (but are often unconscious of) in our own human affairs: “A simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance, and this disquiets us. ‘But this isn't how it is!’ we say. ‘Yet this is how it has to be!’” (no.112), i.e., this is how it has ‘to be’, if we are to be intelligible to, and accepted by, those around us as competent members of our social group. “‘But this is how it is — ’ I say to myself over and over again. I feel as though, if only I could fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact, get it in focus, I must grasp the essence of the matter” (no.113). To cure ourselves of such bewilderments, we require “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (no.109). But in this struggle, “there is not a philosophical method [JS - a methodology], though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (no.133).

Methods for exploring how to improve our practices from within our conduct of the practices

If we cannot work in terms of general theories, in terms of representations, to refine our practices in the unique circumstances of their performance, what can we do? The stance toward spoken words suggested above – that we think of the gestural meaning of our words-in-their-speaking as ordinarily working to draw our attention to the existing connections between our utterances and their circumstances – suggests that they can

also be used extraordinarily, to draw our attention to how we do in fact make such connections. To repeat yet again Vygotsky’s (1962) comment that words are “the means by which we direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution of the problem confronting us” (p.58), it is clear that we can use certain ways of talking as psychological ‘tools’ Endnote , so to speak, as instruments or implements through which to responsively influence, not only the behavior of others, but our own as well. For these instructive forms of talk can, in practice – in terms of the feelings of tendency they can engender in us if we can dialogically engage with them – ‘move’ us to do something we would not otherwise do. Thus, in ‘gesturing’ or ‘pointing’ toward something in our circumstances, they can cause us to relate ourselves to our circumstances in a different way.

This way of talking, however, involves a special form of talk, one that like poetic forms of talk uses quite ordinary words (no special technical words denoting technical concepts) juxtaposed in unusual, and thus ‘striking’ or ‘arresting’ combinations. Hence his remark about his style of philosophical writing: “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.24). It is the ‘poetic’, ‘gestural’ function of his ‘instructive’ forms of talk that is their key feature. This is what gives them their ‘life’, their function ‘within’ our lives.

He calls the remarks he uses to draw our attention to what is, in fact, already know to us, ‘reminders’. For, as he says: “Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine], is something we need to remind ourselves of” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.89). We are bringing to light what we are already doing spontaneously, in order later to do it deliberately Endnote .

The ‘poetic methods’ he uses in his own writings work, first: 1) To arrest or interrupt (or ‘deconstruct’) the spontaneous, unconscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give “prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (1953, no.132). Just as a mother might say to her young son: “Stop, look, see the dirty footmarks you’ve just made... wipe you feet next time you come it,” so his remarks draw our attention to unnoticed, but possibly to further socially significant features in our actions.

2) Then, we can note that is his talk is full of such expressions as “Think of...,” “Imagine...,” “It is like...,” “So one might say...,” “Suppose...,” and so on, all designed “to draw someone’s attention to the fact that he [or she] is capable of imagining [something]” (1953, no.144). They show us other possibilities present in a circumstance, where, in imagining something new, a person is “now ... inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.144), he says. In other words, prospectively, he draws our attention to the fact that, from our position of involvement in things, there are always other possibilities available to us, other possible ways of ‘going on’ Endnote .

This suggests to us a third aspect of his methodology that is sometimes important: 3) By the careful use of selected images, similes, analogies, metaphors, or ‘pictures’, he also suggests new ways of talking, new idioms, that not only orient us toward sensing otherwise unnoticed distinctions and relations for the first time, but which also suggest new connections and relations with the rest of our proceedings. This is closely connected with a fourth: 4) By the use of various kinds of objects of comparison, e.g., other possible ways of talking, other “language games” both actual and invented, etc., he tries “to throw light on the facts of our language by way of not only similarities, but also dissimilarities” (1953, no.130). For, by noticing how what occurs differs in a distinctive way from what we otherwise would expect, such comparisons can work, he notes, to establish “an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one of many possible orders; not the order” (1953, no.132) – where again, the goal is to achieve a kind of understanding that is useful in the ‘going on’ of a practice, the overcoming of a ‘disorientation’, of ‘not knowing one’s way about’ Endnote .

Such images, similes, and metaphors, etc., cannot represent any already fixed orders in our use of language, for, by their very nature, in being open to determination only in the context of their occurrence, they do not belong to any such orders. But what such invented concepts can do for us – in artificially creating a fixed order where none before existed – is to make aspects of our situated use of language publicly discussable and accountable. They provide a practical resource: a way of talking that works to draw our attention, in different ways in different contexts, to what otherwise we would not know how to attend. Other ways of talking, other relational stances or style (i.e., orientations), will function to bring out other connections. One can imagine many different aims. Though what is at stake in them all, is not so much the grasp by isolated individuals, of an inner ‘mental picture’ of a state of affairs, but a grasp of the actual, practical connections

between aspects of our own communicative activities - influences that are present and at work in ‘shaping’ what we say in a particular circumstance.

These methods all contribute to the achievement of what he calls a “perspicuous representation” (Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung).” 5) It is as if the task is like the task we face in coming to feel ‘at home’ in a new town or city, so that we ‘know our way around’ within it without getting lost. Thus, as he puts it: “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words. – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’,” he says (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). Where the kind of understanding he is after here is a practical understanding, an understanding that allows one to ‘go on’ in practice with one’s activities. In other words, a “perspicuous presentation” is a presentation in which “problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.109) – so as we can move easily from one part of a landscape of possibilities to another. Thus, if we are ‘to find our way about’ inside our own linguistic forms of life, we need to grasp, to sense, their inner ‘landscape’, their ‘grammatical geographies’, so to speak.

We might call all the methods above, ‘positive’ methods, in that they can perhaps lead us into new ways of acting that are a refinement or elaboration of our old ways. But some of his methods are, so to speak, ‘negative’ in that they are aimed at preventing us from ever again taking certain paths. 6) Thus, with respect to our temptation to look for hidden inner mental processes, he remarks: “Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. – For that is the expression which confuses you,” he says (Wittgenstein, 1953). “But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in which circumstances, do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on’...” (no.154). For, if it is our task ‘move about’ anywhere within a particular landscape of possibilities, anywhere where there might be new connections, new relationships, etc., to be made. For the task is not to map the old already established paths, but to trail blaze new ones.

Lacking the appropriate sensibility to notice these relational phenomena, we have felt in the past that they require explanation in terms of special, mysterious, hidden factors, already existing either within us somewhere, or, within our circumstances - hence, our tendency to seek theories, and to search for something beyond our own human forms of life. But, suggests Wittgenstein (1953): “The aspects of things that are most important

for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one’s eyes.). The real foundations of his (sic) enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful” (no.129). However, we do not need theories to explain these phenomena, to explain our meaning in our talk, for there is nothing to be explained, because... there is nothing hidden or concealed. “How do sentences do it?” Wittgenstein (1953) asks rhetorically. And he answers: “Don’t you know? For nothing is hidden.” (no.435). For, in his view, words do not in themselves have a hidden meaning underlying them. Words in their speaking are just different ‘means’ or ‘devices’ that we can use in our making of meanings, with different words (like different tools) making available a range of different possible uses. Or better: We can use our words in their speaking in further specifying, in refining or making a difference to, the meanings already present in any circumstance in which people are in each other’s living presence. Where the words we use draw their power – their ability to change the whole character of the living flow of language entwined activity between us – very little from the words themselves. They merely function to make a crucial difference at a crucial moment, a moment that arises due to what we count as the history of its flow so far.

Conclusions: from ‘aboutness-thinking’ to ‘withness-thinking’

As professional academics, we have all been trained into a certain style of ‘rational’ thought, modeled on thinking in the physical sciences, a style aimed at discovering a supposed ideal ‘reality’ hidden behind appearances. When confronted with a perplexing (or astonishing) circumstance, we take it that our task is to analyze it (i.e., dissect it) into a unique set of separate elements, to find a pattern among the elements, and then to try to invent a theoretical schematism, functioning in terms of rules, laws, or principles, to account for the pattern so observed. In the arts, we express this method by seeking ‘the content’ supposed to be hidden in the ‘forms’ before us, by offering ‘interpretations’ supposed to ‘represent’ this content. In short, we formulate the circumstance in question as a ‘problem’ requiring a ‘solution’ or ‘explanation’ that those sitting in classrooms or seminar rooms can ‘see’, can ‘picture’. To the extent that this style of thought is based in mental representations of our own creation, it leads us into adopting a certain relationship to the phenomena before us: instead of looking into them more closely, we at first to turn ourselves away from them while we cudgel our brains in the attempt to construct an appropriate theoretical schematism into which to fit them, and only then to turn back

toward them again, but now with an action in mind suggested to us by our theoretical representation of their nature. It achieves a very limited, selective account of nature – one in fact to do with becoming “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes, 1968, p.78).

Clearly, this Cartesian method of inquiry is a violent method that ignores all the already existing relations in virtue of which living things grow, develop, flower, die, but still reproduce others of their kind, thus to continue the unbroken stream of life on our planet. In it, living wholes are torn asunder (“We murder to dissect” – Wordsworth), and all the spontaneously responsive living activities occurring between us are excluded from our considerations. It is a style of thinking that ignores the fact that people’s meanings and understandings are in their responsive expressions and focuses only on hidden events supposedly occurring in their heads somewhere.

Instead of thinking in terms of mastery and possession, in terms of a wholly controlling agency, what is it to think merely in terms of being a participant, a being that is as much controlled by one’s surroundings as controlling of them?

According to Bakhtin (1993), those who know how to think in this way, “know how not to detach their performed act from its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity” (footnote p.19). In other words, we do not think about an event or circumstance from afar, but think with it, as if feeling over its contours, in a comprehensive, responsive exploration of its living, expressive, surface(s). Thus, following Bakhtin, while resonating also with Wittgenstein, we can outline a distinction between what we might call ‘withness-‘ and ‘aboutness-thinking’ as follows: Withness (dialogic)-thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, with their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. It is a meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of ‘skins’ or of two kinds of ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), such that they come into ‘touch’ with each other. They both touch and are touched, and in the relations between their outgoing touching and resultant incoming, responsive touches of the other, the sense of a ‘touching’ or ‘moving’ difference emerges. In the interplay of living movements intertwining with each other, new possibilities of relation are engendered, new interconnections are made, new ‘shapes’ of experience can emerge.

A reflective encounter of this kind is thus not simply a ‘seeing’ of objects, for what is sensed is invisible; nor is it an interpretation (a representation), for it arises directly and immediately in one’s living encounter with an other’s expressions; neither is it merely a feeling, for carries with it as it unfolds a bodily sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to one’s momentary placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction. In short, we are spontaneously ‘moved’ toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking. While in aboutness (monologic)-thinking, “(in its extreme pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness... Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.293). It works simply in terms of ‘pictures’, thus, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action. Interpretation is necessary. But in thinking ‘with’ an other’s voice, with their utterances, in mind, we can begin to see another very different way in which what we call ‘theory’ can be an influence in, literally, ‘instructing’ us in our practical actions out in the world of our everyday, practical affairs.

Instead of turning away from the events before us to bury ourselves in thought, in an attempt to fit them into an appropriate theoretical scheme in order to respond to them later in its terms, we can turn ourselves responsively toward them, to find in our reactions to them the beginnings of new language games. This opens up to possibility of our responding to them in their terms.

But more than this, we can begin an intensive (i.e., detailed) and extensive, exploratory interaction with them, approaching them this way and that way, ‘moved’ to act in this way and that, in accord with the beneficial “reminders” Endnote issued to us by others as a result of their explorations. In other words, seeing, thinking, and acting with another’s words in mind can itself be a thoughtful, feelingful, way of seeing, thinking, or acting; while thinking with another’s words in mind can also be a feelingful, seeingful, way of thinking – a way of seeing and thinking that brings one into a close and personal, living contact with one’s surroundings, with their subtle but mattering details. In this, of course, there is no end to the ways in which we can find the words of others helpful to us in our practices.

This, then, is a style of seeingful and feelingful thought that can be of help to us in our practical daily affairs, and in further explorations of our own human lives together – in ordinary interpersonal communication, psychotherapy, intercultural communication,

management, administration, government, etc., and, in fact, in science, in understanding how ‘aboutness (monological)-thinking’ actually works. Thus, in psychotherapy, therapists may, at a moment of indecision of next to ‘go on’ in their practice with a client, might find Tom Andersen’s (1996) words reminding them of something to attend to: “The speaker is touched by the words as they reach his or her own ears. Some words touch the speaker in such a way that the listener can see him or her being moved...” And as a result, regain their lost orientation. In other words, as Wittgenstein (1953, no.98) remarked above, it is only because our ordinary everyday talk is ‘in order as it is’ that psychotherapists such as Tom Andersen can work as they do.

References:

Anderson, T. (1996) Language is not innocent. In F.W.Kaslow (Ed.) Handbook of Relational Diagnosis and Dysfunctional Family Patterns. New York: John Wiley.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, with translation and notes by Vadim Lianpov, edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co.

Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Chomsky, N. (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McGuiness, B.F. (Ed.) (1979) Ludwig Witttgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversaytions Recorded by Friederich Waismann. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.

Shotter, J. (1968) A note on a machine that “learns” rules. Brit. J. Psychol., 59, pp.173-177.

Shotter, J. (1997) Dialogical realities: the ordinary, the everyday, and other strange new worlds. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 27. pp.345-357.

Shotter, J. (2003) Real presences: meaning as living movement in a participatory world. Theory & Psychology, 13(4). pp.435-468.

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Shotter, J. (2005) Inside processes: transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and withness thinking. International Journal of Action Research, 1(1), pp.157-189.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford:Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

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