Massey colloquium three, May 12^th, 2004.

Abstract: An important aspect of our verbal communication with those around us, is our uttering or voicing (as 1^st-person agents, as an 'I') of certain expressions that 'tell' others of ourselves, of our feelings and judgments, of our ways of relating ourselves to our circumstances. Thus, when confronted with the expressive movements of another human being, there is a whole collection of dynamically interrelated events _ to do with what is expected or anticipated at each moment in their temporal unfolding _ which we cannot 'see', which are in fact 'invisible' to us, but which are crucial in determining their 'meaning' for us. It is in terms of the expectations and anticipations they engender, that we can 'go on' in relation to their movements. We can represent states of affairs external to our selves in the static patterns or forms present in our spoken words, i.e., in words used in accord with existing conventions. However, in the unique, unfolding temporal 'movement' of our words in their speaking we can reveal of own unique 'inner lives'. This is the power, so to speak, in Wittgenstein's (1953) appeal to what we say in our ordinary, everyday talk. For here, in this sphere of language use, it is not a question of what a person's words mean, but of what the person means in saying them _ the sense in which their words are an expression of what matters to them in their own inner worlds, their own inner lives.

My comments here today will, I think, be very close to those of Tom Andersen   (See footnote 1)  . For we both see the pernicious neglect of the living body in modern Western thought _ the repression of the uncontrollable, living human being in favor of dead, controllable mechanisms _ as something which, if we are to arrive at an adequate understanding of our special nature as dialogically- interrelated beings, must now be overcome.

    Like him, I shall suggest that we must pay more attention to our spontaneous, bodily, expressive-responsive activities as living beings; we must focus on the unique concrete details of our living, bodily involvements _ or participations _ in the world around us. If we do this, if we do begin to take our living bodily activities as basic, then quite amazing new possibilities of a quite surprising kind are opened up. The ordinary is not only more peculiar than we imagine, but even more extra-ordinary than we can ever imagine (J.B.S. Haldane) _ a world in which things can have 'faces' and the words of others can exert a compulsive force on us.

To begin at a rather elementary level, with a focus on our bodily activities, three things will, initially, I suggest, become apparent to us:

1 .      (1) The first is that something very special can occur on those occasions when two or more of us approach each other bodily, face-to-face, and engage in a meeting, in a dialogical encounter. For it is in such face-to-face meetings, such encounters, that we can create between us and the others (and all the other othernesses around us) certain unique and particular 'inner worlds of shared meanings'. And it is the particular kind of unique practical understandings that we can have from within our ongoing participation within such meetings (“relationally-responsive understandings”) that can enable us _ which are quite unlike the theoretical (or “representational-referential”) understandings of general laws or principles that we can have as stand alone individuals _ to go on in practical situations in an unconfused, well-oriented fashion. For, rather than repetitions and

regularities of a general kind, such practical understandings give us a sense of the specific, unique connections and relations existing between specific, unique aspects of our circumstances. It is a kind of understanding which, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it, “as ranges round the subject a world which speaks to him of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world” (p.132), which enables us to feel 'at home' in our surroundings.
2 .      (2) Another thing that will become apparent to us, I suggest, is the fact that we are always embedded within an ever present background flow of spontaneously unfolding, reciprocally responsive inter-activity between us and our surroundings. We are never not embedded in a whole set of reciprocally responsive relations to our surroundings. We always have our being only as participants within a ceaseless flow of ongoing activity.
3 .      (3) But the third thing that emerges, is that 'practical understandings' we can have from within our encounters with a living being, have a complex, multidimensional quality to them _ a quality which elsewhere, again following Merleau-Ponty (1968), I have called 'chiasmic' [i.e., intertwined]. In brief, they are understandings of a 'primordial' kind, containing, so to speak, 'precursors' of all our other understandings, whether of a subjective or objective kind, of an orderly or disorderly nature, and so on.

    What is of importance for us here, are the two very different aspects of a living being's movements that become apparent to us. Besides its spatial structure at an instant in time, which we say we can 'picture', there is a whole collection of dynamic events _ those to do with the temporal unfolding of its activities, with their emerging 'shape' in time, their 'orchestration' or 'tempo' or 'pulse' _ which we cannot 'see', which are in fact 'invisible' to us.

    It is these kinds of the events occurring around us, the expressive bodily movements of living beings, that we first make sense of, not intellectually, but bodily, in our spontaneous responses to them. This is where people's spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive-responsive activities become of importance _ especially in those aspects of their responsive expressions they manifest in the voicing of their utterances. For, sometimes, a kind of relationship or relatedness, something about the way in which the world is present to us, and we to the world, that can only be expressed in the unfolding (intonational) contours of our talk.

    We body forth of our responses to the world around us in the 'movement' of our expressions. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it:

    “... the location of the organizing and formative center [of an utterance] is not within (i.e., not in the material of inner signs) but outside. It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction...The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is... in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” (p.85, p.93).

This is not to say, however, that this is always the case. This is, for Voloshinov, what it is to speak dialogically, i.e., in such a way that our utterances are responsive to, and expressive of, the surroundings (the 'world') within which they are uttered. Thus, in speaking dialogically, our utterances are internally related to and expressive of the world they are meant to utter _ they “sing the world,” as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it   (See footnote 2)  ¹ .

    But we need not always speak (or listen) in this responsive way. We can speak monologically, we can separate ourselves from our surroundings, ignoring our bodily responses to them, and speak 'out of our heads', as it were, in an external relation to our surroundings. As Bakhtin (1984) puts it: “Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality” (p.293). This is often how we speak as intellectuals, as academics, as scientists 'enthralled' by a theory, of as philosophers still 'captivated' by the unexamined metaphysical assumptions dwelling in our language   (See footnote 3)  ² .

As academics and intellectuals, we have not been very alive to 'withness' talk, to talk shaped by 'invisible' influences at work on us within the circumstances of our talk. To help in orienting toward the nature of these 'invisible' influences, let me begin with some quotations from some well-known thinkers.

    The first two are from Freud (1966/1917):

4 .      (1) In the New Introductory Lectures, he notes that: “Nothing takes place in a psycho- analytic treatment but an exchange of words between patient and the analyst... The uninstructed relatives of our patients... never fail to express their doubts whether 'anything can be done about the illness by mere talking'... [But] words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men” (pp.19-20).
5 .      (2) In the next quote, Freud is rebutting the criticism that psycho-analysis is “nothing more than a particularly well-disguised form of suggestive treatment” (p.562). He does this by agreeing that a doctor has no difficulty in “Making him [a patient] a supporter of some particular theory... [and] in this respect the patient is behaving like anyone else _ like a pupil _ but this only affects his intelligence, not his illness. After all, his conflicts will only be successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with what is real in him” (pp.562-563).

6 .      (3) My third quote is from Levi-Strauss's (1963) account of a song sung by shaman to Cuna women _ the Cuna are a tribe of people living in the Panama Republic _ to facilitate a difficult childbirth. The song is about a mythic uterine world peopled with dangerous animals and fantastic monsters all involved in invasions and struggles with each other. “The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded,” he notes. “[But] once the sick woman understands [the song]... she does more than resign herself [to her difficult child birth]; she gets well” (p.197). He then goes on to comment:

    “But no such things happens to our sick when the causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs, or viruses. We shall perhaps be accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not. And yet, the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is cause-and-effect relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to the mind, whether conscious or unconscious...The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed” (pp.196-197, my emphases).

    I begin with these quotations, as each one draws our attention to something crucial about the powerful influences that one person's living expressions, the utterances of their voice, can sometimes _ but not always _ exert upon an other.

7 .      Once words were 'magic' and 'to this day have retained much of their ancient magical power', suggests Freud.
8 .      But they do so, only if when we utter them 'the anticipatory ideas' we offer the other 'tally with what is real' within them, he claims.

    Indeed, we can already point to the power of the words of others _ those especially of Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Vygotsky _ in contributing toward the dramatic success of the adoption of the Open Dialogue (OD) approach to the treatment of psychotic crises by Jaakko Seikkula, Jukka Aaltonen, Birgitta Alakare, and their colleagues. This, I think, is what has brought us all together at the this workshop in Tornio. For we need to discuss the special nature of such OD further, to understand what it is precisely that makes this approach is such a powerful influence in the treatment process.

    Psychotic people are not the only ones to find the voices of others as powerful as their own in influencing what they do.

Without attempting to account in any comprehensive fashion for psychotic behavior, I would like to turn now to an exploration of how people can sometimes feel compelled to act by (meaningful) influences having their source in the expressions of others.

    As we have already seen _ (1) in Freud's comments on the 'magical' nature of words, (2) Levi-Strauss's remarks on the power of linguistic relations that are internal to a person's mind, (3) Merleau-Ponty's remarks on works of art, and (4) Wittgenstein's on the face of words, and the influence of (5) Bakhtin's, Voloshinov's, Vygotsky's and Wittgenstein's words on our gathering here _ the words of others can exert a powerful influence in every one of our own individual lives.

    Indeed, besides the influence Bakhtin (1986) has exerted on us in bringing the active, responsive nature of our everyday understanding of speech to our attention, he is also well known to us for the emphasis he has placed on the polyphonic nature of our talk (Bakhtin, 1984): the fact that much of everyday talk (and writing), merely in the fact that is addressed to an other and is shaped in anticipation to their responses to it _ their objections, evaluations, points of view, etc. _ an other's voice is there, present, in any speaker speaking dialogically.

    Given our special interest here in understanding the degree to which we can be controlled more by an other's voice than by our own, it will be useful to discuss further two topics to which Bakhtin devotes detailed attention:

11 .      (1) One topic is the phenomenon of “hidden dialogicality” in a person's speech (Bakhtin, 1984);
12 .      (2) the other, is the important distinction he makes between “internally persuasive” and “externally authoritative” speech (Bakhtin, 1981).

Crucial here will be the distinction we have already made above: how we can reveal our 'inner lives' in their unfolding temporal 'movement' of our words in their speaking, and how we can only represent states of affairs external to our selves by the use of the static patterns or forms present in our already spoken words _ and how we continually want, in the (scientific) search for knowledge, to replace contingent, dynamic movements with static, permanent forms.

    He illustrates the 'dialogical' nature of Devushkin's speech in the following quote from the novel. Devushkin talks of meeting someone (Yevstafy Invanovich), who said that “morality consists in not being a burden to anyone.”

    “Well,” says Devushkin, “I'm not a burden to anyone. My crust of bread is my own//; it is true it is a plain crust of bread, at times a dry one; but there it is, earned by my toil and put to lawful an irreprocable use.// Why, what can one do? I know very well, of course, that I don't do much by copying; but all the same I am proud of working and earning my bread in the sweat of my brow.// Why, what if I am a copying clerk, after all? What harm is there in copying , after all?//...” (p.207).

Here Devushkin's account of himself unfolds against the background of other consciousnesses that (he feels) are socially alien to him (or he to them); and he continually senses the 'ill look' of these others, their reproachful glances, or _ perhaps even worse _ their mocking glances. Under the glances of these others (marked in the text above by //), “even Devushkin's speech cringes,” says Bakhtin (1984, p.206).

    So, although Devushkin's speech may seem to be a monologue, other speakers are invisibly present in its dynamic structure, in its speaking. Their words may not be explicitly present in his speech, but deep traces left by their words exert a powerful influence in shaping what he has to say.

    In other words, although only one person is speaking, “we sense that this is a conversation,... and it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each present uttered word responds and reacts with its every fiber to the invisible speaker, points to something outside itself, beyond its own limits, to the unspoken words of another person” (Bahktin, 1984, p.197). Indeed, we can add here that, in our everyday dealings with each other,

    “we very sensitively catch the smallest shift in intonation, the slightest interruption of voices in anything of importance to us in another person's practical everyday discourse. All those verbal sideward glances, reservations, loopholes, hints, thrusts, do not slip past our ear, are not foreign to our own lips. All the more astonishing, then, that up to now all this has found no practical theoretical cognizance, nor the assessment it deserves!” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.201)

_ at least, we do in those of our relations in which we are intimate with those with whom we are speaking. For, to repeat, it is in this dynamic aspect of our speech _ what is present in our saying of our words not in what is said _ that we reveal our unique inner lives to each other. And in his saying of his utterances, their movement, that Devushkin reveals himself as someone who quite certainly does not feel 'at home' at all in the world in which he must live.

    Bakhtin (1984) describes the structure of Devushkin's consciousness of himself thus: “the hero's self-awareness was penetrated by someone else's consciousness of him, the hero's own self- utterance was injected with someone else's words about him; the other's consciousness and the other's words then give rise to specific phenomena that determine the thematic development of Devushkin's self-awareness, its breaking points, loopholes and protest on the one hand, and on the other the hero's speech with its accentual interruptions, syntactic breaking points, repetitions, and long-windedness” (p.209).

    He is, in short, not someone who feels as yet able to speak for himself wholly in his own voice _ and we can 'tell' this, or he 'tells' us this, in the unfolding dynamics of his expressions.

    (2) Authoritative discourse: Let us examine the influence that other voices can have on us

further: In his book, The Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin notes that “the topic of a speaking person” can take on a very special significance in “an individual's ideological becoming” (p.342). For, “another's discourse [can] perform here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth _ but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis our behavior; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse” (p.342).

    And it can do this _ to repeat a point made above _ without our bing aware at all of the degree to which our own voices are being shaped by our spontaneous responsiveness to the discourse of another.

    In bring out the important distinction between these two forms of discourse, Bakhtin (1981) suggests that: “The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own... The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is prior discourse...” (p.342), “...it demands our unconditional allegiance” (p.343). Here, the past words of others work in us as real presences, and as such, although they are invisible, they have agency, and like the actual words of another person, can exert a commanding personal force upon us.

    But: “When someone else's ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up. Such discourse is of decisive significance in the evolution of an individual consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourse surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself; the process of distinguishing between one's own and another's discourse, between one's own and another's thought, is activated rather late in development. When thought begins to work in an independent, experimenting and discriminating way, what first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a rejection of those congeries of discourse that do not matter to us, that do not touch us” (p.345).

    But how can the voicing of certain words work on us in this way, work to separate internally persuasive discourse from externally authoritative discourse, wake us up to our bewitchment (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.109) by the dead and alien linguistic forms of others?   (See footnote 4)  How can we come to a realization that it is in the unique, embodied movements of our words, in our living expression of them, that we express our selves; we cannot do it by the use of already established forms (no matter how special   (See footnote 5)  ³ we feel such forms may be)? What is it about a certain person's words _ perhaps the words of a special writer, words encountered in one's reading _ that can awaken us to an “independent ideological life,” that can reanimate the static forms ruling our linguistic lives, and put them back once again into movement?

To give people's doings and saying back to them, to give people the possibility of speaking 'in their own words' to express their own inner lives (rather than only being able to talk in an alienated way about things external to them), we must reverse the moves by which we take their wards away from them. We must:

13 .      (1) Re-locate what people do and say back in the unique interactive relations in which they do and say them.
14 .      (2) In other words, we must de-systematize their activities, and look in detail at the actual concrete circumstances within which their interactions take place, at their actual speakings and expressing, along with the responses of others to them, etc.

    Bakhtin (1981) describes the internally persuasive word thus: “[It] is half-ours and half someone else's. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean” (pp.345-346).

    And this is precisely both what the texts of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, etc., etc., have done for us, and what Jaakko and Jukka and colleagues in understanding how to institute Open Dialogue into their treatment procedures have been able to do for psychotically afflicted people: The introduction of new language into otherwise ossified or fossilized schemes of self-expression, new language that in struggling with such sedimented forms succeeds in dialogizing them and to put them back 'into motion'; they can 'remind' one, in Wittgenstein's (1953) sense, of what it is once again to make a dynamic use of language in expressive response to one's circumstances. Words which are expressive by being responsive to the contours of our experience, can reveal to us, to repeat, ever new ways to mean.

Appendix one:

(Andersen, 1996, p.121): “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 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.”

(Andersen, 1996, pp.123-124): “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 [end 123] 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!”

References:

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

Appendix two:

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN 'WITHNESS-THINKING' AND 'ABOUTNESS- THINKING'

    “Thus Hienroth observes properly: that my [i.e., Goethe's] faculty of thinking is “objectively active [gegenständliches Denken]”, whereby he means to say that my thinking does not separate itself from its objects; that the elements of the objects, the concrete intuitions (Anschauungen) enter into that thinking and are most inwardly permeated by it in form; that my way of seeing (anschauen) is itself a thinking, my thinking a way of seeing - a procedure said friend does not wish to deny his approbation” (Goethe, HA, 13: 37, quoted in Brady, p.97).

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, following Goethe, while resonating also with Wittgenstein and Bakhtin, we can outline a distinction between 'withness-thinking' and 'aboutness-thinking' as follows:

16 *      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'.
17 *      It is a meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of 'skins' or of two kinds of 'flesh' (Merleau- Ponty), such that they come into 'touch' with each other.
18 *      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.
19 *      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.
20 *      It gives rise, not to a 'seeing', for what is 'sensed' is invisible; nor to an interpretation (a representation), for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other's expressions.
21 *      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.
22 *      For it gives rise 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.
23 *      In short, we are spontaneously 'moved' toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking.

References:

        Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
        Brady, R.H. (1998) The idea in nature: rereading Goethe's organics. In D. Seamon and A. Zajonc (Eds.) Goethe's Way of Science: a Phenomenology of Nature, pp.83-111. Albany, NY: State University of

Notes:

Converted by Andrew Scriven