In M. Mayerfeld Bell and M. Gardiner (Eds.) Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp.13-29.
A BAKHTINIAN PSYCHOLOGY:
FROM OUT OF THE HEADS OF INDIVIDUALS
AND INTO THE DIALOGUES BETWEEN THEM
John Shotter
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH, U.S.A.
and
Michael Billig
Department of Social Studies
University of Loughborough
Loughborough, U.K.
"It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) to think that truth can only be the truth that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.37).
"Language lives," says Bakhtin (1984), "only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it" (p.183). The move to the dialogical thus leads toward a psychology that focuses more on people's social practices, rather than on what is supposed to be occurring within their individual heads. Our attention is drawn, not just to the responses of others to what we do, but to our own embodied responses both to them and to our surroundings - that is: we are confronted once again with the question of whether it matters that we exist in the world as living bodies with a history in a society, rather than as isolated inanimate mechanisms? But more than just reminding us of our embodiment and our living relations to each other and our surroundings, the turn to dialogue also confronts us with something else quite remarkable, for something very special occurs when one human voice addresses another: "An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)" (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.119-120). Dialogical events are therefore unique and unrepeatable. Yet, as we shall argue, it is in these "once-occurrent event[s] of Being" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.2), that we shape our living relations both to each other and to our surroundings. We express ourselves and 'show' each other the nature of our own unique 'inner' lives in these brief and fleeting moments. While these moments themselves both contribute to the continuation of, and are situated in, ideology and history.
In their work, in their own distinctive ways, Bakhtin and Volosinov [endnote 1] extensively explore the special, dialogical relations present among all the influences at work in such moments - relations which have long been repressed in our Cartesian, mechanistic ignoring of both our living bodies and of our everyday social lives together. And through their dialogical formulations (of the dialogical phenomena in question), they help us to become sensitive to everyday discursive phenomena that until now have passed us by. In this article, then, we want both to explore the dialogical nature of these events, as well as to discuss what such a focus will imply for our investigatory practices in psychological research.
The practices of a social, social psychology
Bakhtin's and Volosinov's work, then, points to a radical relocation of the topics of psychology: individual psychology is first transformed into social psychology, and then social psychology is rooted in the study of people's dialogical utterances. Indeed, their work contains two basic assumptions about the nature of psychological phenomena, both of which stand at variance with the theory and methodological practice of current mainstream academic psychology: (i) the first is, as we have seen, that mental processes are created through our language intertwined social practices, in our language-activity; (ii) and the second is, that since language-activity is predominantly dialogical, then human thinking is also predominantly dialogical and, therefore, also marked by an internally complex, two-sidedness. We shall briefly outline the thinking behind these two assumptions, and then go on to suggest that both these assumptions are shared by the new discursive and rhetorical social psychology which has recently emerged and which, in effect, is realizing the Bakhtinian-Volosinovian project for a radically new kind of psychology.
(i) In contrast to traditional, individualistic, monological psychology, which assumes that speech is a reflection of inner, unobservable processes of thought, the first assumption suggests that thinking is an aspect of our language-activity. Indeed, not only does Volosinov (1986) claim that "the reality of the psyche is the same reality as that of the sign" (p.26), both Bakhtin and Volosinov also describe solitary thinking as 'inner speech'. The theoretical implications are most clearly outlined by Volosinov (1986) in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. In that work, he suggests that: "A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee" (p.86). Since the word is "the semiotic material of inner life - of consciousness (inner speech)" (p. 14), then, as Volosinov recognized, "the processes that basically define the content of the psyche occur not inside but outside the individual organism, although they involve its participation" (1986, p.25).
Since words are not abstract entities of grammar, but the speaking of words (utterance) is a living social process - in which "each and every word expresses the 'one' [addresser] in relation to the 'other' [addressee] (p.86) - then people's 'inner lives' are to be seen as particular and concrete social constructions. Volosinov (1986) stresses that only if it is recognized that "the individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact," will it be possible to "construct either an objective psychology or an objective study of ideologies" (p. 12). Because psychological phenomena are socially created through the practical use of language, a psychology of consciousness necessarily should be a social psychology, which is rooted in the study of our communicational or language-activities. Thus, for Volosinov (1986), "social psychology exists primarily in a wide variety of forms of the 'utterance', of little speech genres of internal and external kinds - things left completely unstudied to the present day" (p. 20). Indeed, as we shall go on to argue, not only are these 'little things' presently left unstudied, in focusing only on what is stable, regular, repeatable, and thus systematic, our current methods actually preclude their study.
In this methodological respect, Bakhtin's and Volosinov's psychology is as anti-systematic and anti-structuralist as their theory of language. Just as they argue that the life and reality of language lies in the actual movement of speech activity as it unfolds, moment-by-moment, rather than in completed speech acts or in an assumed underlying grammatical structure, so their psychology also disclaims the reality of internal mental structures. The psyche is not to be sought within unobservable, internal mental structures of representation, but it is displayed or constituted 'in' observable acts of communication - as Searle (1992) might put it, our sense of our own and other people's mental states exists only 'in' the internal relations within such acts. If Bakhtin and Volosinov are correct, psychologists, and linguists, should be analyzing what is observable, rather than chasing the inherently unobservable. But what is involved in us actually doing this, is something to which we shall have to return in a moment. Why we should pay more attention to the observable is, however, our next topic.
(ii) The speech acts, our language-activities, which Bakhtin and Volosinov claimed to be the topic of social psychology, are not simple or uniformly constituted. For, as each utterance is a response both to other utterances and to the rest of our surroundings, and itself acts like a question or query provoking further responses, every utterance is shaped by other utterances. This is why in practice, the meaning of an utterance cannot be sought in the internal psyche of an individual speaker: it must be understood in its concrete, particular, rhetorical and dialogical context. Not only is "a word in the mouth of a particular individual person" a product of "the living interaction of social forces" but the word itself is inherently complex: "each word, as we know, is a little arena for the clash and criss-crossing of differently oriented social accents" (Volosinov, 1986, p. 41). Each word reflects and refracts other words, and 'our' words, reflect and refract not merely 'our' thoughts, but also the thoughts of those with whom we might be disagreeing - indeed: "All words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, an age group, the day the hour. Each word tastes of the context in which it has lived its socially charged life..." (p.293).
Bakhtin (1981) expands on the rhetorical implications of this position in the following way: As he sees it, communication is in continual tension between contrary forces, especially between what he calls 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' forces. Centripetal forces push toward unity, agreement and monologue, while the centrifugal forces seek multiplicity, disagreement and heteroglossia. In a point of profound significance, he stresses their inseparability, not just within an utterance but even within single words: "Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear... It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance having once exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language" (1981, p. 272). There are crucial psychological implications in the idea that each utterance reflects the tensions between "the processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification" (p. 272). If the psyche is modelled on the utterance and the utterance contains contrary tensions, then human thinking is itself inherently 'two-sided': we can agree and disagree, question and answer, criticize and justify (Billig, 1996). Bakhtin's insight is not merely that we can perform contrary tasks (broadly speaking, both distinguishing and relating, particularizing and categorizing, centrifugal and centripetal operations), but that we can do so simultaneously. As we speak (and think internally) so our utterances (and thoughts) are marked by a dialectic tension between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, tendencies toward merging and unity, and toward separation and multiplicity. In consequence, our language-activities, and thereby our psyches, are marked by a detailed complexity and inherent two-sidedness which is overlooked by traditional structural linguistics and psychology.
Both assumptions (i) and (ii) play an important role in the new discursive-rhetorical psychology. Discursive psychologists stress the social and linguistic constitution of psychological phenomena, arguing that many of the phenomena, which have traditionally been taken as the topics of psychology, are socially constructed in the course of dialogic activity (e.g. Antaki, 1994; Billig, 1991 and 1996; Edwards and Potter, 1993; Harre' and Gillett, 1995; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Shotter 1993a and 1993b). The use of video and sound recording-machines permits not only a far finer-grained analysis of conversation than Bakhtin and Volosinov would have imagined, but the repetition of what in the normal course of events is fleeting and unrepeatable. Discursive psychologists, adopting methods derived from conversation analysts and ethnomethodology, have shown how micro-pauses and barely audible overlaps, intakes of breath and facial expressions, gestures and other bodily movements, can all have significant dialogical, and thereby psychological, meanings.
In particular, assumption (ii) points to the significance of the rhetorical aspects of communication. Indeed, a number of rhetorical psychologists have stressed the two-sided, dialogical (or dilemmatic) nature of communication, and thus of much human thinking (Billig et al, 1988) - in contrast to the monological forms of thought studied in cognitive psychology inspired by the computational model (Evans, 1993). However, if the assumptions behind this aspect of discursive psychology are Bakhtinian in spirit, then it must be said, not all discursive psychologists have explicitly recognized this link. Even so, implicit similarities can be demonstrated in the absence of outward connection (e.g., Bialostosky, 1995; Shotter, 1992).
Memory and Attitudes
The Bakhtinian-Volosinovian flavor of discursive psychology can be briefly illustrated in relation to two psychological topics: memory and attitudes (for more details, see Billig, 1996b). Both topics have been extensively studied within orthodox social psychology, and both have been addressed recently by discursive psychologists. This discursive perspective has sought to relocate these topics, traditionally assumed to be hidded 'inner' processes occuring inside individuals, in the outward communicative activities occurring between them, in just the way prefigured by Bakhtin.
The so-called cognitive revolution in psychology has seen a great deal of research into the topic of memory. Much effort has devoted to the project of detailing the inner cognitive processes, which supposedly produce memory. Researchers conduct laboratory experiments, in the hope that the results will indicate how information is retained, stored, and recovered by subjects. The 'processing' of the relevant 'information' is assumed to be unobservable, occurring within the 'cognitive system' of the individual. The key terms of cognitive theories of memory, such as 'Memory Organization Packets' (see, for example, Stevenson, 1993), consequently refer to ghostly entities, whose internal existence is indirectly inferred from the outward behavior of subjects performing memory tasks. Above all, these constructs are believed to operate behind, or to underlie language, at some sort of basic, non-linguistic level of information-processing.
Discursive psychologists, on the other hand, dispute the psychological usefulness of such cognitive constructs (Edwards, in press; Harre' and Gillett, 1995). Instead of searching for unobservable supposed inner processes, whose reality can never be established, discursive psychologists examine what people are actually doing when they are said to be remembering (i.e. Edwards and Potter, 1993; Billig and Edwards, 1994; Middleton and Edwards, 1990). As Bakhtin and Volosinov would have predicted, discursive psychologists have drawn attention to the importance of language, to the relational functions of memory claims and to the rhetorical functions served by their different formulations. In consequence, remembering is shown to be a social, rather than individual, activity. For instance, discursive psychologists have examined mothers teaching children about what should be considered 'memorable' (Edwards and Middleton, 1986), families discussing 'unforgettable' events such as royal weddings (Billig and Edwards, 1994; Billig, in press a), and political arguments about the recall of sensitive, and rhetorically pointed, information (Potter and Edwards, 1990). All these studies underline the basic point that when people talk of remembering in everyday life - when they make 'memory-claims' - they are rarely, if ever, simply describing or reporting an internal process or mental state: they are engaging in the rhetorical, and often contentious, activity of social life, and telling of, or expressing, something of their own position in the current scheme of things in relation to the others around them.
The discursive study of attitudes points even more directly towards the rhetorical and two-sided nature of human thinking, and to the ways in which individuals put this two-sidedness to their own uses. Traditionally, social psychologists have assumed that individuals possess 'attitudes', and that such 'attitudes' are internal mental structures which determine an individual's reactions to 'attitudinal objects'. 'Attitudes', just like cognitive processes, are presumed to be fixed, unobservable, hypothetical constructs: one cannot see or hear an attitude, but one can, according to attitude-theorists, measure its consequences. Discursive psychologists have disputed whether people actually hold - and indeed whether they could possibly hold - 'attitudes' as described by the traditional theories (see, in particular, Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Instead of pursuing such these ghostly entities, discursive psychologists have studied the dialogical activity of expressing attitudes or giving opinions. The results of such studies indicate the complexity of 'attitude-language'.
When people say 'I think that capital punishment is wrong' or 'I feel that the government is at fault', they are not describing inner states. They are typically engaging in complex rhetorical activity, for an attitude is not so much an internal psychic structure, but the expression of a rhetorical stance or position on an issue of public debate (Billig, 1991 and 1996; van Dijk, 1996). As such, attitude-talk is inevitably dialogical, and is typically marked by the sort of rhetorical complexity which Bakhtin broadly described in terms of the dialectic between centripetal and centrifugal forces. An opinion tends to be offered in relation to counter-attitudes, or 'anti-logoi', as speakers counterpose their views to those positions with which they are disagreeing. Attitude-talk, thus, is argumentative and is marked by the rhetoric of justification and criticism, with speakers justifying their own position while criticizing the counter-positions of others. Further, individual speakers will vary their attitude-talk depending upon rhetorical context of controversy. This talk, in the micro-details of its utterance, typically expresses a rhetorical amalgam of monologic (or centripetal) and heteroglossic (or centrifugal) themes. Speakers will present their views as their own, as if recognizing the multiplicity of other views, or voices, on the topic; simultaneously, they will justify their views, using a persuasive rhetoric as if implying that their views are more reasonable (or correct) than other views (Billig, 1991). For instance, this has been demonstrated in studies investigating the language of contemporary racism. White speakers, criticizing non-whites often preface their complaints with the phrase "I'm not prejudiced but..." (see, for instance, van Dijk, 1992), thus indicating that, although others might hear their remarks as being prejudiced, in fact they are not. In this way, speakers are not merely attempting to persuade their listeners of the reasonableness of their views against non-whites, but of their own reasonableness (and lack of prejudice): they want to distance themselves from the views of non-whites while claiming to share the same general repudiation of prejudice as everyone else (Billig, 1991). Thus, the individual utterances of such attitudinal talk will simultaneously contain centrifugal rhetoric, which seems to acknowledge heterogeneity, and centripetal rhetoric, whose persuasive ends are a monologic agreement.
There is a further point which is stressed by discursive psychologists. In varying what they will say according to the rhetorical context, individuals will themselves often express contrary themes in their talk at different times (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Billig et al, 1988). Because no conversation is entirely similar to another; but each has its unique features, speakers are continually uttering remarks, which, at least in their detail, neither they, nor anyone else, has ever uttered before. Thus, attitudinal-talk cannot be simply a product of a pre-set internal schema, otherwise it would not be characterized by this continual novelty. Even people who are socially recognized to have 'strong views', which, according to traditional psychological theory should be marked by mental rigidity, are constantly creating new utterances, as they speak argumentatively on their favored topics (Billig, 1991). Given that conversational utterances can be made spontaneously, without, as it were, noticeable pause for thought, it makes little sense to presuppose that each novel utterance is merely the outward form of a prior mental process. The utterance, in a real sense, is the thinking, and, in consequence, thinking can be directly observed, or rather heard, in people's dialogical exchanges - if, that is, we can learn how as academics to listen for it.
Ideology and the Dialogic Unconscious
There is a further dimension - the ideological. As we noted above, Volosinov (1986) wrote that consciousness is a social-ideological fact, and elsewhere, he notes that "any human verbal utterance is an ideological construct in the small" (Volosinov, 1987, p.88). Yet much recent work in conversation analysis has tended to overlook the ideological aspects of language, concentrating on what, broadly speaking, could be termed the more interpersonal or proximal dimensions of the emerging social constructions. Such work tends to focus on how particular utterances are occasioned by the immediate dialogical context, and to ignore the more long term ideological influences at work in a speaker's society at large.
Crucial to Bakhtin's and Volosinov's work in this sphere is their distinction between established systems of ideology and what they call a society's behavioral ideology. Where a "behavioral ideology is that atmosphere of unsystematized and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows our every instance of behavior and action and our every 'conscious' state with meaning" (p.91). And it is from out of the sea of a people's lived, behavioral ideology - "made up of multifarious speech performances that engulf and wash over all persistent forms and kinds of ideological creativity" (1986, p.19) - that the materials relevant to the official ideologies of ruling elites are selected, and others excluded. In other words, here again we can note the influence of centripetal forces pushing toward unity and order, while those of a centrifugal kind - to do with what is not done or mentioned in our official ideologies - push outward toward multiplicity and diversity. The centripetal influence of our official ideologies exert an influence on us at every moment, in terms of whose words we can use in expressing ourselves. But, "the wider and deeper the breach between the official and the unofficial consciousness, the more difficult it becomes for motives of inner speech to turn into outward speech (oral or written or printed, in a circumscribed or broad social milieu) wherein they might acquire formulation, clarity, and rigor," suggests Volosinov (1987, p.89). It is in this way that what Freud claimed to be conflicts within an individual's 'unconscious mind', and theorized in asocial, ahistorical, biological terms, Bakhtin and Volosinov see as occurring out in the everyday world between people. As a result, they both tended to avoid talk of 'an unconscious', seeing it as opening the door yet again to talk of supposedly 'hidden' influences and the invention of mysterious theoretical entities to represent them.
Yet, given that consciousness is dialogically constructed, there is still point, we feel, in talking of the unconscious - as long as it is talk of a 'dialogic unconscious' (for details see Billig, in press b); and we see it as operating, not within the heads of individuals, but in our use of certain words at certain times in certain ways, while repressing or ignoring the use of others. In such a view, there would be a dialectical relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, for, as attention, or consciousness, is drawn dialogically to certain issues, in the very words we use, it is drawn away from others. As dialogic consciousness, or attention, is focused on particular aspects of language, so others slip by, as it were, unnoticed.
In traditional psychology, such a linguistic unconsciousness of this kind is not entirely unknown. Bartlett (1932) demonstrated many years ago that listeners cannot concentrate on the details of words, as they attempt to commit the broad themes of utterances to memory (see also Erdelyi, 1990). Indeed, if ideology is reproduced through the unconscious aspects of language, then analysts should not only pay attention to the 'big' words, which carry obvious ideological meanings (i.e. words such as 'democracy', 'freedom', equality' etc.); they should also pay attention to the 'little' words, whose presence is necessary for communication, but which are rarely the objects of conscious awareness in the course of dialogue. These are words which operate in the service, as it were, of the big words, and as such are the unobtrusive servants of dialogue. As always, the most powerful forms of ideology operate in the actions of the servant class as they unconsciously fulfil the tasks required of them by their masters.
Discourse analysis is well suited to examining the role of these 'little words'. For example, Billig (1995) looked at the way in which the nation-state is reproduced as an imagined community, daily and banally, in the lives of the contemporary citizen. This is not accomplished so much in the grand themes of national rhetoric, which invite the citizen to wave the flag in displays of patriotic fervor. It is done unobtrusively on the margins of conscious awareness by little words, such as 'the' and 'we'. Each day we read, or hear, phrases such as 'the prime minister', 'the nation' or 'the weather'. The definite article assumes deictically the national borders. It points to the homeland: but while we, the readers or listeners, understand the pointing, we do not follow it with our consciousness - it is a "seen but unnoticed" feature of our everyday discourse (Garfinkel, 1967, p.41). In this way, we, the readers or listeners, continue to be 'we, the nationals', especially as our attention is directed onto other matters.
The dialogic unconscious operates at other, perhaps deeper, levels of unawareness. The concept of a dialogic unconscious attempts to reinterpret the Freudian notion of repression dialogically, by assuming that language is both expressive and repressive (for more details, see Billig, in press b). The expressive and the repressive can operate simultaneously, rather as Bakhtin described the simultaneous operation of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Indeed, for the very accomplishment of everyday, intelligible speech, certain impulses need to be routinely curtailed and driven from moment-by-moment awareness. Conversation depends upon ritual following of intricate codes, detailing what are considered appropriate responses in terms of pitch, speed, hesitation and so on. So, infractions, even minor ones, are considered to be breeches of a morality implicit in language use. We cannot just say anything anywhere. Impulses to rudeness, which are visible in the talk of three year olds (Dunn, 1988), must be repressed for the conventional accomplishment of adult talk.
Rhetoric is crucial for the operation of a dialogic unconscious, which is dialectically related to the sort of dialogic consciousness of which both Bakhtin and Volosinov wrote. Ideology provides the person with multiple ways of talking, genres, voices and discursive repertoires. Give the heteroglossic (or dilemmatic) nature of ideology, it is necessary that speakers possess the rhetorics of disagreement (Billig et al, 1988). In fact, language would not be language without the grammar, syntax, and rhetorical forms for disagreeing (Billig, 1996). In this sense, rhetoric provides the faculty for opening up debate, and thereby the faculty for dialogical thinking. Yet, as in all matters of utterance, rhetorical forms are two-sided. The forms which open up debate can be used to close down talk, or to shift the topic to other matters. We can argue by changing topics, avoiding discursive traps and so on; and these same rhetorics can be used to avoid argument. This is particularly important for certain ideological issues. For example, study of white speakers, approaching topics of racial sensitivity, shows the speakers failing to ask questions, projecting their prejudices onto 'others', and using complex rhetorics of discursive avoidance in order to protect themselves from the unspoken accusation of 'prejudice' (Billig, in press c). If consciousness is constituted through dialogue, then the avoidance of themes in the very words we use will constitute a dialogic unconscious.
To study the dialogic unconscious, the analyst must examine what is routinely said, together with the dialogic routines which make the saying possible. In addition, it is necessary to study what is routinely not being said, and how the routines of saying accomplish routines of not-saying. These routines are more than routines of talk: they are, as both Bakhtin and Volosinov realized, routines of consciousness and, thereby also routines of dialogic repression. In the gaps between and within words, including the dialogic gaps filled by the little unnoticed words, ideology inserts itself and so is reproduced while speakers direct their dialogic consciousness onto matters, where the dialectics of justification and criticism can be safely limited. It is to the noticing of these small, fleeting, and usually unnoticed events, and the implications of their noticing, that we would like to devote the rest of this article.
The dialogical and its existence in 'little things'
Noting the "orientation toward unity" central to most academic approaches in philosophical and linguistic thought, Bakhtin (1981) points out how this has concentrated attention "on the firmest, most stable, least changeable and most mono-semic aspects of discourse... [and as a result] a whole series of phenomena have therefore remained almost entirely beyond the realm of consideration: these include the specific phenomena that are present in discourse and that are determined by its dialogic orientation" (pp.274-275). The distinctive 'sensings' we get when involved in discourse intertwined, everyday activities with others - the responsive understandings in terms of which we judge whether it is our turn to speak or not, whether others are questioning us or requesting something of us, or are acting sincerely, or ironically, and so on - lack "proper theoretical recognition and illumination," suggests Bakhtin (1981, p.274). If Bakhtin and Volosinov are correct, then our 'inner lives' - what traditional psychological thought terms our 'inner psychological states' - are 'displayed in' or 'carried in' the small but uniquely distinctive ways in which we express the normatively identical forms of our language in our language-activities [endnote 2]. In other words, our inner lives are not so much inside us geographically, so to speak, as 'in' the temporal unfolding of those of our activities in which we relate ourselves to our surroundings - which, of course, are out in the world for us all to see, if only we can become responsive to them.
Thus, rather than attempting to provide models of the cognitive structures of the isolated, individual thinker, we are more concerned to poit toward often unnoticed features of ongoing social practices. If we can increase our sensitivity to those aspects of our discursive activities which, although fleeting and utterly unrepeatable are nonetheless uniquely tailored to the circumstances of their expression, then we can begin to understand how it is that, as unique individuals, we can express the unique nature of our inner lives to each other. Indeed, the consequences of us recovering a comprehensive sense of our embodied connectness to and embeddedness in our surroundings, are, we believe, very radical, not only for psychology, but for all aspects of social theory in our attempts at understanding our social lives together.
In what follows below, then, we shall explore in brief some of the consequences of shifting our attention in our psychological inquiries away from mental representations (supposedly inside people's individual heads), and toward the complex mixture of influences at work in momentary, ephemeral events occurring in the discourses between them as they unfold. But as a first move, we must go further into the details of the special - and strange! - nature of our living, dialogically responsive understanding of each other, and how it differs from the representational-referential kind of understanding to which we are familiar.
Two living, embodied human beings cannot exist juxtaposed for long without affecting each other in a living way. We cannot, like dead and inanimate things, remain utterly inert when in one another's presence; neither can we not be responsive to aspects of our surroundings in some way. Thus, as a result, we are always in a living relation of one or another kind, both to the others around us and to features in the rest of our surroundings. But further: because the actions of a first person in the presence of a second are to an extent responsively shaped by those of that second person (and vise-versa), and because the first responds in anticipation to what the actions of a second person point or gesture toward, our actions are always a complex mixture of influences both from within ourselves and from elsewhere. They are never wholly our own! Indeed, an other or otherness around us, can always 'call out' utterly unique, unpredictable, never-before-performed responses from us. Thus, says Bakhtin (1993): "An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus. It looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life. But there is no unitary and unique plane where both faces would mutually determine each other in relation to a single unity. It is only the once-occurrent event of Being in the process of actualization that can constitute this unity" (p.2).
An important aspect of the dialogical stems, then, from our felt, sensuous involvement in social practices, our language-activities: for, although we may not always be able to articulate in any explicit way what people are doing in their activities, or why they are doing it, from our responsive involvements with them, we can nonetheless gain a sharply nuanced, practical understanding of a quite remarkable kind to what is 'displayed' or 'carried' in the 'specific variabilities' of their activities. As Bakhtin (1984) notes, and as is confirmed by work in conversational analysis, "we 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" (p.201). And we in turn show our stance to what they do or say also in fleeting bodily reactions, facial expressions, sounds of approval or disapproval, etc. Indeed, even in the continuously responsive unfolding of nonlinguistic activities between ourselves and others - in a dance, a handshake, or even a mere chance collision on the street, say - we are acutely aware of whether the other's motions are, so to speak, 'in tune' or 'at odds' with ours. And in our sense of their attunement or lack of it, we can sense their attitude to us as intimate or distant, friendly or hostile, deferential or arrogant, and so on. Similarly, in the back-and-forth flow of a conversation, all involved (almost always) keenly sense the moment when the speaking turn should pass from one to another, such that both faster and slower take-ups than normal are of special significance. Such living involvements are crucial. "Even if I know a given person thoroughly, and I also know myself, I still have to grasp the truth of the unitary and unique event which links us, and in which we are participants" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.17). If we are to engage with each other, as unique, living, and responsible individuals in ways appropriate to the actual nature of our uniquely shared circumstances, we cannot locate ourselves in generalized abstractions. We cannot live by putting theories into practice, or by trying to follow explicitly formulated principles. If we do, we shall find ourselves not living out our own lives, but lives set out for us by the abstractions's original authors.
Given such an interactional focus, on the living events out in the 'space' between us, if we now move now to the plane of language use, we find something similar, and perhaps equally surprising, to do with our use of words: that their meaning cannot be simply 'in' our words themselves (as we have assumed in many cognitive theories of language) - "it is not, after all," says Bakhtin (1981), "out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his [sic] words!" (p.294). But neither is their meaning in our intentions as a speaker (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) - for we cannot just use our words as we ourselves please: "In point of fact," claims Volosinov (1973), "word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant" (p.86). And furthermore, any word we voice has already been voiced by someone else. "The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent... adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation," Bakhtin (1981) points out, "the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language..., but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own... [But] expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process" (pp.293-4). We can only fill other people's words with our own meanings to the extent that we can 'shape' them in their use - in how we intone them, place them at the moment of their use in relation to other words, to other events in our surroundings, and so on. It is in the specific variabilities that they allow that we can express our own unique position in existence. And the basic task of those around us - who must understand the unique way in which things are for us - to repeat what we have already said, "does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular context... i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity" (Volosinov, 1973, p.68).
The kind of understanding indicated here is not of a cognitive, representational-referential kind, but is a practical, dialogical kind of understanding that is 'carried' in our ongoing language-activity, and is continually updated, utterance by utterance, as it unfolds. About this kind of what we might call relational-responsive understanding, Bakhtin (1986) remarks: "All real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualized). And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind" (p.69). Rather, speakers expect their utterances to be responded to with yet further meaningful activity of some kind: agreement, sympathy, elaboration, objection, supplementation, and so on. This is what understanding in practice is: it is not the grasping of a picture or an idea, but simply the practical continuation of the exchange in an intelligible manner - if the sharing of a 'mental-picture' or an idea is at stake, then that can only be achieved by people testing and checking each other's talk to establish whether they are in fact in agreement or not. Where even what it is for them to agree, like so much else in conversation, has itself to be constituted dialogically. Indeed, it is these kinds of dialogically shared, practical, relational-responsive understandings, that preexist and, so to speak, underwrite all our more individualistically intelligible understandings. Without the continual emersion in such a background flow of dialogically responsive activity occurring between us and both the others around us and the rest of our surroundings, we simply could not be the kind of self-conscious, rational and autonomous individuals that we are. We can say that our involvement in its flow is consitutive of the kind of person we are, culturally and historically. While its "specific variabilit[ies]" (Volosinov, 1986, p.69) is what allows us to express our own unqiue meanings from within it.
It is in this sense, then, that we should understand Volosinov's (1986) emphasizing that it is a mistake to separate language and life, and to think of us learning a language in the same way as we learn pre-existing bodies of knowledge handed down to us by our teachers in schools and colleges. "Language cannot properly be said to be handed down," says Volosinov (1986), "it endures, but it endures as a continuous process of becoming. Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all, rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate... it is in their native language that they first reach awareness" (p.81). And it is in this sense also, that we should understand him emphasizing that: "not only can experience can be outwardly expressed through the agency of the sign..., but also, aside from this outward expression (for others), experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs... Thus there is no leap involved between inner experience and its expression, no crossing over from one qualitative realm to another" (Volosinov, 1973, p.28).
Yet, for us to grasp this academically, as the already linguistically constituted, socially and culturally aware individuals we are, we must not simply carry over the same individualistic, representational forms of understanding (that we can only sensibly use from being already embedded in the everyday background flow of dialogical language-activity from within which they emerged), into our disciplinary practices. While we may employ this kind of cognitive understanding in coming to a grasp of other bodies of knowledge, we must recognize that if people do 'display' their 'inner lives' or 'psychological states' in the temporal organization of their behavior, then we need the same kind of socially shared, relationally-responsive, perceptual understanding in our studies as we employ in our daily lives together. And this requires us as academics to relate ourselves to those we study in a way quite different to our present, monological and centripetal modes. In focusing only on what is repeatable and essentially timeless, we talk of ourselves as studying events occurring out 'in space' independently of ourselves; we study, we say, the form or pattern of a person's or thing's 'outer', objective behavior. Such a one-way mode of 'observation' as this, does not require any living, dialogical involvement with the persons or things we study. However, if we are to focus on the unique, unrepeatable ways in which a person's behavior unfolds in time - with the aim, not of observing, but of understanding its 'inner' sense or meaning - then we can only do it from within a dialogical involvement with them. Thus the difference between these two forms of perception would seem to be more to do with the criteria in terms of which we make these two categories determinate, than anything to do with the perceptual process itself: for the criteria for our 'inner' perception of the meaning of people's expressions involves us in dialogical interactions or negotiations with them, while the criteria for our perception of the outer form of their behavior do not (Shotter, 1984, p.59). Indeed, when it come to the source people's expressions, the sphere from which they issue and in which they receive their 'shape', "the location of the organizing and formative center is not within... 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" (p.85). That is: "we do not see or feel an experience - we understand it..." (p.36).
But the few issues we have so far mentioned are just the beginning of the uncanny and extraordinary consequences of recognizing the dialogical nature of the interwoven flow of the living, responsive, relational, language-activity between us. Because of the mixed nature of its moment-by-moment unfolding outcomes, and because each participant acts, not just simply in response to the immediate actions of another but also in response to each momentary circumstance thus created, we do not act simply in terms of a single order of connectness between us, but we embody in our speakings ways of orchestrating the flow of our energies, a rhythm of acting, shaping, stopping, reflecting, switching positions, revising, looking back, looking forward and sideways, and so on; we embody ways or styles of responsively relating ourselves to our circumstances in different ways at different moments. In so doing, we act in relation to a whole situation, our situation, a 'landscape of possibilities' which, although we have created it collectively between us, we as individuals simply experience ourselves as existing 'within' it, along with all the others around us. And, in offering us only certain, limited ways in which we can act within it, 'our situation' seems to affect us more than we can affect 'it'. Indeed, as Bakhtin (1986) puts it: "Each dialogue takes place as if against a background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners)... The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such) - he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it" (1984, p.126-127).
In other words, what is special about dialogical activity -and, against the background assumption inculcated within us by the natural sciences of us as surrounded by an inert, inorangic reality, really rather peculiar - is that, when we are involved in it, it is to an extent as if we are living our lives, not within an inert, dead, physical reality, but only as a bodily part of a larger organism, a collective agency, a living 'we'. Taylor (1991) puts it like this: "An action is dialogical..., when it is effected by an integrated, non-individual agent. This means that for those involved in it, its identity as this kind of action essentially depends on the agency being shared" (p.311). Thus, what we do, how we act, how we make sense of our experiences, how we talk of ourselves as positioned in relation to the others around us, of our thoughts, our being, and so on, depends on the living circumstances, the 'dialogical reality' within which we find ourselves momentarily placed. And it is against or within such a background as this that the unique, momentary, and unrepeatable aspects of our utterances can be understood (see Katz and Shotter, 1996, for a study of such 'fleeting moments' in medical diagnostic interviews).
Concluding comments
Dialogical phenomena constitute a third sphere of events, distinct both from action and behavior: i) they cannot be accounted simply as actions (for they are not done by individuals, thus they cannot be explained by giving a person's reasons); neither ii) can they be treated as simply 'just happening' events (to be explained by discovering their causes). iii) They occur in a chaotic zone of indeterminacy or uncertainty in between the other two spheres. And as such, although containing aspects of each, occurrences in this sphere do not seem amenable to any clear characterizations at all. Indeed, although not wholly unspecified, it is their very lack of any final specificity, their lack of a completely pre-determined structure, and thus their openness to being specified or determined further by those involved in them, in practice (without, as we have already suggested, any awareness of them so doing), that is their central defining feature. And it is precisely this that makes the sphere of dialogical activity of especial interest to us. But it is precisely the fleeting, relationally responsive events in this sphere, that our current referential-representational forms of rationality render invisible to us, and exclude from both rational discussion and attention. Why is this? It is the urge toward both mastery and control implicit in all our current methodologies, that leads us "to banish particularized perceptions by ordering them into comprehensible and 'meaningful' regularities," suggests Bernstein (1992, p.41, quoting Kalhberg, 1980, pp.1159-60). Only if we are prepared to change our hierarchical, centripetal ways, and to dialogical balance them with ones of a more centrifugal, relational kind, can we ever hope to arrive at a psychology properly respectful of people's actual 'inner lives', without us as experts seeking to replace them with an abstract world of our devising, beyond the social and the historical [endnote 3]
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Notes:
[1] We both feel that the texts written by Bakhtin and Volosinov are different texts, for they focus on really quite different spheres: For while they both have important things to say about people's inner lives, Volosinov seems to focus broadly on social, political, historical, and ideological issues, while Bakhtin emphasizes the more subtle details in individual and ethical matters.
[2] In this respect, Bakhtin's and Volosinov's aims are similar to Wittgenstein's (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)... To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (nos.129 and 132).
[3] "The basic aspiration of the philosophy of our time is to create a world beyond the social and the historical" (Volosinov, 1987, p.91).