In American Behavioral Scientist, 36(1), pp.8-12, 1992

BAKHTIN AND BILLIG: MONOLOGICAL VERSUS DIALOGICAL

PRACTICES

John Shotter

Deaprtment of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH 03824

In the last twenty years or so, in what are currently still called (but perhaps, not for so very much longer) the behavioral and social sciences, we have begun to experience a major movement, a change not so much in our theories as in our practices: a shift of interest toward how we talk and write about our different subject matters - with a corresponding decrease in what the supposed nature of these subject matters might actually be. We are beginning to take seriously the realization that everything we do, we make sense of - either before, during, or after its execution - from within an intralinguistic, socially negotiated and constructed reality of one kind or another (of an already existing or posited kind). For a way of speaking (and writing) works, not only to represent a state of affairs, but also prosthetically, as a device (or "psychological tool or instrument" - Vygotsky, 1986): i) through which to act and to form or sustain one or another kind of social relation with those around one; and ii) through which to attend to, and make sense of, one's circumstances. Thus, it is from within a socially constructed intralinguistic reality that we give (or 'lend') determinate sense or form to an otherwise only partially structured circumstance, a sense that makes sense to the others around us who speak in the same way. In Garfinkel's (1967, p.vii) words, a way of talking works to make our everyday activities "visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., 'accountable' as organizations of commonplace everyday activities."

              This 'formative' or 'form-giving' stance toward the nature of language, as distinct from its referential function, is, as I see it, an aspect of just one strand in what is coming generally to be known as social constructionism (Harre', 1986; Gergen, 1985). Very roughly, this strand can be characterized in terms of its focus upon "words in their speaking," to contrast with another strand which focusses upon characteristics of "already spoken words." This latter strand is influenced primarily by the writings of Derrida and Rorty, and emphasizes already existing, decontexualized systems of conventionalized meanings or usages; while the first - in its dialogical, not its monological, individualistic, romanticist form - is primarily influenced by Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin, and emphasizes the unique, social, relational (and intrapersonal) functions of situated language use. It is from within this dialogical strand of the movement that I want to make the methodological, or better, metamethodological remarks that follow.

Metaphors and 'pictures': 'views' and 'voices'

To date, all these strands are marginal. Indeed, as a whole, the movement still operates in those uncertain, interdisciplinary zones between the mainstream disciplines (and that, perhaps, is where inevitably it must stay). But it is now present on the boundaries of all the separate spheres of social and behavioral inquiry to such an extent, that when taken together in all its manifestations, it is beginning to constitute a distinct 'voice' of challenge to the mainstream 'view' as to how social and behavioral inquiry is best conducted. It is a 'voice' which speaks, as we shall see, in a 'tone' (or with an "evaluative accent or orientation" - Volosinov, 1973), that 'invites' or 'affords' further dialogue or conversation between other, differently 'situated' or 'positioned' voices, rather than 'provoking' the current, Neo-Darwinian struggle at the center between monologically represented 'views'. And indeed, it is precisely this that I want to discuss in my metamethodological remarks below: to explore, by way of an example, the way in which a new linguistic form - of a rhetorico-dialogic (rather than a systematic-monologic) kind - can itself work like a microscope or telescope, i.e., as a new analytic device to reveal aspects of human conduct 'obscured' by other forms of talk. In other words, can it work to change those of our practices in which our own self-understanding is at stake?

              As a part of my attempt to do this, to change our practices, I want to introduce (at least to some extent) a new 'speech-communicational' (or oral/auditory) vocabulary into our discussions of mind, rather than to make use of the usual set of 'visual' terms. To an extent, I have been influenced in this by Rorty (1980), and his comments about the literalizing of metaphors and images into 'pictures' (Rorty, 1989). In discussing philosophical theories of knowledge, he has illustrated how certain selected metaphors (and not empirical facts) have determined much of what we think to be indubitably true about the nature of mind. Why he chose "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" as the title of his book, is because, he says (Rorty, 1980, p.12): "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements which determine most of our philosophical convictions... [And] without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself." Indeed, if we lacked vision totally, and had to make use either of auditory or tactile images; and, as a result, we also found it all but impossible to literalize such auditory or tactile images into spatial 'pictures' of bounded objects separate from ourselves, i.e., to form 'inner' mental re-presentations of them, then, our 'sense' of what knowledge is might be very different from what we now take it to be.

              For instance, we might find Wittgenstein's (1980) more practical , nonrepresentational talk about correct knowledge as being simply to do with 'knowing how to go on' (1953, nos.151, 179), or 'knowing one's way about' (e.g., 1980, I, no.549), without stumbling or meeting insurmountable barriers, as a perfectly acceptable way of talking about knowledge. We might accept it, not as metaphorical, but 'literally', as what (at least one basic form of) knowledge is. It is not necessarily always something which can be 'seen' with a special kind of 'inner' seeing eye. This, as he said, is one the reasons why we have so much trouble in trying to grasp what occurs when we talk: "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of our words..." (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). Without a satisfactory 'picture' of the process - one which conforms to the requirements of our current ideology of knowledge, i.e., the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation - we feel we have failed to understand. Why? Because, if Rorty and Wittgenstein are correct, our officially acceptable ways of talking about ourselves are ordered and regimented by a certain, single grammatical picture of our mental lives: a picture in which we 'see' the mind as working essentially in terms of 'pictures' or of 'models', i.e., in terms of what can be seen, if not by a human eye, then in an inner, God's-eye view of things. It is from within this "form of life" with its associated "language-game" (to use Wittgenstein's terms), that we both judge our practical knowledge as unsatisfactory, and find ourselves 'blind' to the distinctive nature of other knowledges and the part they play in our lives. At the moment, we are held 'captives' by this picture (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.115).

              But as I have already mentioned, there is another type of 'voice' that needs to be heard, the currently marginal voice informed by a very different image of the nature of mental activity than that 'pictured' in the official, mainstream version. Rorty gives us a small but significant clue to its character when he distinguishes between contributing to an inquiry, and simply participating in a conversation. He suggests that when we say something in a conversation, we are not always necessarily expressing a view about a subject: "We must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring metaphors out of our speech altogether. To do that we have to understand speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations, but not as representational at all" (Rorty, 1980, p.371).

              We can follow up this clue of Rorty's with a study of Bakhtin's (1984, 1986) and Volosinov's (1973) work. They introduce a very different metaphor into our discussions: they ask us to imagine people in dialogue. Where in a dialogue, the speaker "does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth..." (Bakhtin, 1986, p.69). In other words, in Bakhtinian dialogue, people are not primarily speaking with a certain 'view' in mind, expecting its referential understanding. If they do, then while they do so, they do not expect a reply; they are speaking monologically, closing themselves off to the upsetting activities of others. In dialogue, primarily, they are not speaking about anything, for "any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances (ibid, p.69). People are continually responding either to each other's immediate utterances, or, to the presumed, previous utterances of others.

              But let me say straightaway, like all metaphors (when used as prosthetic instruments or devices - see above), this one - of an unbroken chain of dialogical, responsive understanding - hides as much as it reveals. In playing up the dialogical, responsive aspects of language use, it plays down those of monological, representation and reference. However, if metaphors cannot be eradicated from our speech (which is surely the case), it may not be in our own best interests to regiment all our forms of inquiry and conversation about ourselves in relation to only a single one. Thus, following both Billig (1987) and Wittgenstein (1953) in this matter, I shall not want to claim that the rhetorico-responsive account of mental activity I shall offer below is correct and the representational theory of mind (RTM) wrong (i.e., that it is an inaccurate representation of the nature of mind); I shall merely want to claim that RTM is inadequate - that it is, as Billig would say, "one-sided ."

              Another side is as follows: That instead of functioning in terms of already well formed mental representations at the center of our being - which we 'codify' into words or actions - the rhetorical-responsive account suggests that many of our 'inner' mental activities are only 'given form' at the time of their expression, in a moment by moment process of ethically sensitive negotiation at the boundaries of our being. Thus, rather than functioning mechanically and systematically, our mental activities reflect in their functioning essentially the same rhetorical and ethical considerations influencing the transactions between people, out in the world. The rhetorical-reswponsive account also suggests that both people's 'inner' and 'outer' activities originate in their feelings, or, in their sense of how, semiotically, they are 'positioned' in relation to the others around them. Furthermore, it also suggests that when we speak of giving expression to our selves, or, our ideas, rather than being points of reference 'outside' our discourses, or, their extralinguistic origins, they are created within them; rather than the cause of what we say, they exist as a consequence of our talk. In other words, what is presented here is a 'cognitive' psychology based, not in inner mental representations, but in responsive dialogue between people.

The responsive nature of our 'inner' lives

At the very beginning of Thought and Language, Vygotsky (1986, pp.1-2) remarks that "The unity of consciousness and the interrelation of all psychological functions [e.g., perceiving, attending, thinking, remembering, speaking, feeling (affect), etc.] were, it is true, accepted by all; the single functions were assumed to operate inseparably, in an uninterrupted connection with one another. But this unity of consciousness was usually taken as a postulate, rather than as a subject of study." Thus, in turning to the study of what he called "interfunctional relations," he opened up a gap, so to speak, both between all the psychological functions, and between them and the world. And it became an aspect of human labor (he was not wholly uninfluenced by Marx) to figure out ways in which that gap might be bridged, e.g., how remembering might to linked to thinking, how thinking might be linked to speaking, how speaking might be linked to feeling, and so on, such that, ultimately, complex 'organizations' of functions, involving our 'orchestration' of them, could be carried out under our own control. The key he offers to the solution of this problem - the revolutionary potentials of which still seem to me to be mostly unrecognized in these days in which the representational theory of mind is still hegemonic - is to study the nature of the mediatory 'tools' we use in making and shaping the necessary 'links', especially the nature of those strange 'tools' we call signs - strange, because signs have and shape us as much as we have and use them to shape our surroundings. Indeed, "it is decisively important that speech not only facilitates the child's [and adult's] effective manipulation of objects but also controls the child's [and the adult's] own behavior (Vygotsky, 1978, p.26). And it is the later application of interpersonal functions of speech communication, intrapersonally, to oneself, especially those of interpersonal control , that is Vygotsky's main concern.

              To take his analysis of sign use further, we can note that both for Bakhtin and Volosinov, a similar 'gap' also exists, but not only between our words and the world, but between two speakers. But, as already mentioned, people's linguistic task is not in any way like that depicted in Saussure's (1960) classic, paradigmatic account of the communicative situation, in which an immaterial idea or concept in the 'mind' of one person (a speaker or writer) is sent into the mind of another, essentially similar person (but now in the role of a listener or reader). It is a process in which people, who occupy different 'positions' in a discourse, influence each other's behavior, and attempt to make things known to them known to others. But because people can never wholly occupy each other's place (without losing their own), two speakers can never completely understand one another. They remain only partially satisfied with each other's replies; each utterance occasions a further response. Thus the creative bridging of each 'gap' occasions the need for a further response, and, as said before, the speech chain continues unbroken.

              Listening too must be responsive: listeners must be preparing themselves to respond to what they are hearing. Indeed, again to repeat, the speaker does not expect passive understanding that only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of the listener preparing a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth. "To understand another person's utterance means to orient yourself with repect to it, to find a proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words" (Volosonov, 1973, p.102). Thus for Bakhtin and Volosinov, in their dialogic account of active, responsive understanding, there are no preformed, orderly, and constant relations between thoughts and words, but only ones which are 'formed' or 'developed' within a particular dialogue. But if this is so, where should we 'locate' our mental activities if not at the center of ourselves? Where should our self-awareness be placed? Bakhtin answers this question as follows: "the idea is interindividual and intersubjective... The idea is a living event which is played out in the point where two or more consciousnesses meet dialogically" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.72). "A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another" (ibid, p.287).

              In other words, in this account, rather than us possessing already systematic and orderly thoughts at the center of our being, which, in our utterances, we merely codify into words, what we call 'our thoughts' are only given a form for us as we talk or write; our awareness is located in that point of contact between a word's use and the responsive effect it achieves (or is meant to achieve). Thus, beginning as vague (chaotic), diffusely distributed, but not wholly unspecified 'feelings' or 'tendencies' which are open to, or permit, a degree of further specification, the ordering of our utterances must be negotiated with the others around us in ways which they find intelligible and legitimate. If we do not negotiate our ordering of our utterances with them, if we do not address them in a way which is responsive to their concerns, there is no point for them in what we say and we cannot hope to have them respond to it in any way. At least, this is Bakhtin's claim in his theory of the utterance, the central, 'dialogical' concept in his approach, to which I shall now turn.

Utterances, texts, and intralinguistic contexts

As already mentioned, Bakhtin contrasts his views with those of Saussure (1974). Because he is concerned with how different embodied beings interact and not just with the relations between abstract words and concepts, Bakhtin takes actual spoken utterances rather than grammatically well-formed sentences as his basic linguistic unit. The utterance is a real responsive-interactive unit for at least two major reasons: 1) It marks out the boundaries (or the gaps) in the speech flow between different speakers: "The first and foremost criterion for the finalization of an utterance is the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude to it (for example, executing an order)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.76). But 2) it is also an interactive unit because, in its performance, it must take into account the (already linguistically shaped) context into which it must be directed. Thus it is in this sense that any actual utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication, within a particular sphere, within a particular social group, possible or actual.

              And where the boundaries of utterances are determined by a change of speech subjects. Our 'inner' lives are, thus, structured by us living 'into' and 'through,' so to speak, the opportunities or enablements offered us both by the 'others' both around us, and by the 'audiences' we have internalized within ourselves from operating within different, bounded spheres of communication. The utterance is thus a real social psychological unit in that it marks out the boundaries (or the gaps) in the speech flow between different 'voices', between different 'semantic positions' - whether between people, or within them.

              This is not the case with sentences: "...the boundaries of the sentence as a unit of language are never determined by a change of speaking subjects," says Bakhtin (1986, p.72), nor has a sentence the "capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker; that is, it cannot evoke a response. The sentence as a language unit is only grammatical, not ethical in nature" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.74).

              Indeed, as we speak, as we formulate our utterances, we must ethically respect the 'voices' of these others, for we must guide what we want and are able to say (what is in our control), in relation to how we feel these 'others' will respond (what is not in our control). It is these different gaps, the 'distances' between our 'position' and the 'positions' of all those who might respond to what we say, and the struggles to which they give rise, which constitute the 'ethico-rhetorical landscape', so to speak, into which our attempted formulations must be directed. And these are the considerations to which, even when 'thinking' all alone, we must address ourselves, if, that is, we want what we write to be sensed as having point for, and as being acceptable to, these others. Thus, as Bakhtin continually reminds us, our mental life is neither wholly under our own control, nor filled wholly with our own materials. "A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual... The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all there are no words that belong to no one)" (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.121-2). We live in a way that is responsive both to our own sense of our own position as well as to the positions of those who are 'other than' ourselves, in the semiotically created 'world' in which we are 'placed'. And, it is in the bridging of the 'gaps' between these positions, at the boundaries between the different, unique positions in existence everyone and everything has and is answerable for, that everything of ethical, rhetorical (and political) importance occurs.

              The existence of such gaps, the lack of necessary, mechanistic connections between things ahead of time, does not, however, mean that everything is totally unconnected either . As each utterance is responded to, what has already said remains 'on hand', so to speak, as a 'text' to form a context (of enabling-constraints) as to what may next be said. Elsewhere (Shotter, 1984), I have discussed this phenomenon in terms of the concept of "joint action": In many of our ordinary, everyday life activities, where we must interlace our actions in with those of others and their actions determine our conduct just as much as anything within ourselves, the final outcomes of such exchanges cannot strictly be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals concerned. Hence, they cannot be accounted as planned or intended; they must be accounted as just happening events, as if a part of the 'natural', external world. However, although unintended (by any individuals) and experienced as belonging to their 'surroundings', the products of joint action still have intentionality in the sense of 'pointing to', implying, or indicating something beyond themselves. They posit a realm of other, next possible actions, and can thus function as a normative context, a 'shaping-context', into which further action must be (morally) directed if it is to 'belong' and to 'fit'.

              Within a conversation, then, it is into this temporally (and spatially) developed and developing intralinguistically created shaping-context that everyone involved must direct their expressions when it is their turn to speak or act - if, that is, their actions are to be judged as appropriate by those involved. It is the character of this 'time-space' network of intralinguistic references , a network that carries in it the traces of one's socio-cultural history, that is the key to the further understanding of the nature of our mental processes. But what is the nature of this context? Is it something that we could ever 'picture'? This is where both Bakhtin's (1984) concept of a form-shaping ideology and talk of genres, and Billig's (1987, 1991; Billig et al, 1988) rhetorical notions of an argumentative context and a living ideology, become relevant.

Contexts of argumentation, and form-shaping ideologies

Let me turn first to Billig's account of rhetoric, the context in which he introduces the above two notions: As Billig presents it, rhetoric is not just the activity of engaging in an attempt to persuade an already homogeneous audience to take a particular line of action, but that of taking a position in at least a two-sided controversy. Thus he develops a dialogic, Protagorian view of rhetoric. Where, "according to Diogenes Laertius," he writes, "Protagoras was 'the first person who asserted that in every question there were two sides to the argument exactly opposite to one another'" (Billig, 1987, p.41). Thus, in shaping one's rhetorical claims - just as in Bakhtin's account of the responsive nature of utterances and their understanding - Billig points out that we must be responsive to the counter-claims our claims are implicitly criticizing. In other words, Billig's radical claim is that often, we face the task of making our claims intelligible to a possibly heterogeneous audience. Thus, to understand the "argumentative meaning" of an utterance (or of a whole discourse, for that matter), "one should not examine merely the words within that discourse or the images in the speaker's mind at the moment of utterance. One should also examine the positions which are being criticized, or against which a justification is being mounted. Without knowing these counter-positions, the argumentative meaning will be lost" (Billig, 1987, p.91).

              An argumentative context is, thus, a very strange kind of entity indeed. For it 'contains' ways of talking and writing, of thinking, feeling, perceiving, acting, and evaluating, which are held together within a dynamic unity, not because they are all founded upon the same set of logical principles or assumptions - and thus hold together as a system - but because they originate in, and are directed towards, the elaboration or further specification of certain two or more sided 'topics' or 'commonplaces' (topoi) - 'places of argumentation' which function as 'form-shaping' sources for the arguments of both sides! Indeed, the same can be said to hold for larger social groups. Thus: "It is... possible to characterize societies not only by the particular values they prize most but by the intensity with which they adhere to one or the other of a pair of antithetical loci" (Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p.85).

              It is this which distinguishes Billig's concerns both from Saussurian notions of language as a self-enclosed, impersonal, politically neutral system, as well as from the romantic, privatized, individualistic concerns of those such as Rorty (1989) . For it is where his concerns with ideology become relevant.

              In subsequent writings (Billig et al, 1988, and Billig, 1991), he has examined, not only the two-sided nature of ideological dilemmas - like the dilemmas within Western individualism between both the uniqueness, say, of all individual women, and, the reality of gender categorization - but also the dilemmatic nature of the concept of ideology itself: in one view, ordinary persons are seen as the downtrodded and duped victims of a ruling class ideology, while in another, in critiques of ideology, they are seen almost as 'natural' philosophers in their own right. "In short, the ordinary person is simultaneously a thinking and an unthinking being - the agent of thinking and a passive recipient of thoughts" (Billig, 1991, p.5). How can this be? Because, in fact there are two concepts of ideology at large: a monologic, dead, unitary, systematic version, and a dialogic, living, two- or more-sided, argumentative version. While the former can be called an "official ideology," the latter can be called a "living ideology" (Billig et al, 1988), or, to use another term, a "living tradition of argumentation."

              It is here that we can make contact with Bakhtin's account of genres, and his notion of a form-shaping ideology: Now it might seem superficially that different genres, different ways of speaking and writing, could be characterized as possessing one or another kind of formal unity. Thus, if we think of a genre as a way of speaking or writing which embodies (and thus 'shows' forth - Wittgenstein) a worldview, then we can see various scientific genres of speaking and writing as formed by developing the implications in a set of basic propositions, or, by writing within a set of rules or guidelines, whilst literary genres can be seen as formed in the explorative, temporal unfolding of the relations between a set of concrete exemplars or characters. The trouble is, with this characterization of genres, in his examination of Dostoevsky's novels, Bakhtin was unable to find any kind of formal unity as such at all. If we still want to call Dostoevsky's way of writing a genre, then it is not shaped according to a prior, mental representation, a 'plan' or 'picture' of how it should be. For in his novels, Dostoevsky creates:

"...not voiceless slaves..., but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him. A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with his own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.6).

And he can only do this, if he perceives the "highest and most authoritative orientation [as being], not his own true thought, but as another authentic human being and his discourse" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.97). Thus what he adheres to, suggests Bakhtin, is "a form-shaping ideology" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.97): the dialogical allowing of an equal say to others, rather than their monological treatment as objects of authorial thought. Thus "Dostoevsky's hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him; everything that we see and know apart from his discourse is nonessential..." (Bakhtin, 1984, p.53). And just as in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novels, so in Billig's notion of a tradition of argumentation, "the sound of argument is the sound of thinking" (Billig, 1991, p.52).

Conclusions: dialogical versus monological practices

Let me now try to draw upon the resources arrayed above to form some conclusions about our future practices in this strand of social constructionist research: We can first note that thinking of our own intellectual traditions as 'living', dialogical traditions, or as multivoiced 'traditions of argumentation', gives us a very different view of what intellectual progress is. Traditionally, in the mainstream, we have seen progress as arising out of different hierarchically structured, monological systems of knowledge, being pitted against each other in a Neo-Darwinian struggle for supremacy. Billig and Bakhtin, however, allow us to see the whole process in quite a different light: as a multi-voiced activity, with both center (or centers) and margins, forming a tradition of argumentation that affords a set of positions to a whole plurality of consciousnesses, each with their own world. Where, instead of being oriented to the usual scientific tasks of prediction and control, or, mastery and possession, the new task would be simply that of understanding: "...that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122), and, I will add, in making connections.

              But we cannot expect this transition be to an easy one. We can expect a struggle: between monologisms at the center and dialogisms on the margins. For, "monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force" (1984, pp.292-3). And this is, of course, the traditional scientific view of things: we treat what we are studying as an object of thought in order to form theories to guide our further, deliberate actions in relation to it. Our representations of things suggest to us ways in which they can be manipulated and give us power over them. Lacking such 'inner' pictures, we feel an uncertainty, a lack of confidence in an our knowledge; we don't quite know were we stand.

              But this urge for certainty cannot be satisfied in dialogue. For traditions of argumentation, the multivoiced polyphony of a world in dialogic discussion with itself cannot be 'pictured'. Howver, instead of certainty (as accuracy of representation), we can concern ourselves with adequacy, with doing justice to the being of what we are studying (Shotter, 1991, 1992). Where, according to Bakhtin, "the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.293). Those denied this possibility can, to say the least, be expected to feel humiliated and angered.

              Thus, within a research tradition organized around dialogical, rather than monological practices, instead of the simple Darwinian struggle for the survival of the supposedly fittest theory (representing an already existing order), we can expect to see a whole host of other and new kinds of struggle. Especially, we can expect struggles to do with claims of an ethical kind, to do with what is involved in treating others (and otherness) with due respect - to replace the struggles we have had in the past over how they (and it) might best be manipulated. Thus, we can expect a concern with fashioning new orders of relationship (out of chaos). Consequently, we can expect contests between different presentations, i.e., between different metaphorical accounts which 'give form' to our circumstances in ways which have not been 'seen' before, providing novel understandings 'making new connections'. We can also expect to see such presentations, and claims for their worth, issuing from many different 'positions' in the tradition other than from within the mainstream (center). Further, such claims will not just critical of the mainstream, but of each other also. There will be struggles too between different genres of writing, and the form-producing ideologies, i.e., the 'imaginary worlds', they embody. Indeed, the study of writers's practices, rather than their content, can be expected to extent to a study of the tone in which they write, for the different dialogical opportunities for relationship (and being) offered to readers by authors, will become important . Finally, there will be political struggles over which presentations of a 'worldview' should be 'literalized' into an 'world-order'. For, in what is now becoming an almost world-wide phenomenon, those who are concerned with finding a 'history' or a 'tradition' of their own, have begun to object to the monological, ahistorical systems of 'central-planning and administration' which exclude them.

              Indeed, as we move out of a political world of supposed equals, of people existing as indistinguishable atoms, psychologically, all in competition with one another for power, and move into a political world of people possessing psychological characteristics according to their 'positions' in relation to each other, we begin to see a whole different dynamic at work. Instead of a 'politics of power', a new 'politics of identity' is beginning, a politics of access to or exclusion from a political economy of ontological opportunities for different ways of being. If one is to participate in this political economy with equal opportunity, then 'membership' of the community of struggle, the tradition of argumentation, cannot be conditional: one must feel one has a right, unconditionally, to 'belong'. And these claims to 'belong' are now being posed by a whole host of groups previously marginalized by professional academics: not only women, black and other ethnic movements, ecologists, and so on, but also many others without 'professional' credentials. We are moving into a new world of problems posed by a genuine recognition of the importance of differences rather than similarities. It is a world marked out by the tension between two quite different kinds of "situated knowledges" (Haraway, 1991): between the realized (privileged), explicit (monologically voiced), orderly (professional) knowledges at the center, and the unrealized (oppressed), implicit (dialogically silenced), disorderly (socially unorganized) knowledges at the margins. Where what is at issue is always: the degree to which those at the center can appropriate for mere production the novel creations of those on the margins, versus, the degree to which those silenced on the margins can gain a voice at the center in the conduct and control of their own lives.

Notes:

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