In Concepts and Transformation, 1(2/3), pp.213-237, 1996
ARTICULATING A PRACTICE FROM WITHIN THE PRACTICE ITSELF:
ESTABLISHING FORMATIVE DIALOGUES BY
THE USE OF A 'SOCIAL POETICS'
John Shotter
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
and
Arlene M. Katz
Department of Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
ABSTRACT: In this, the first of two interlinked articles, we describe a set of methods - that we call a 'social poetics' - for use by a group of practitioners in coming to a more articulate grasp of their own practices, thus to develop them. Crucially influenced by Wittgenstein's (1953) claims - that "Nothing is hidden" from us in our conduct of our practices, and that "the origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction" - we show how the methods of philosophical investigation he outlines can also be used to great effect in our everyday affairs. They work, not in terms of concepts or theories worked out ahead of time in committee rooms or research laboratories by experts, but in terms of certain practical uses of language, at crucial points within the ongoing conduct of a practice, by those involved in it. Crucially, they lead us to focus on novelties, on new but unnoticed possibilities for 'going on' available to us in our present circumstances, but present to us usually in only fleeting moments. If we can allow ourselves to be 'struck by' these novelties, then we can often go on, not to solve what had been seen as a problem, but to develop new ways forward, in which the old problems become irrelevant.
"Any part or process in any specific organization has to feed on a continuous stream of experience, ideas, analyses, and theory" (Gustavsen, 1996, p.94).
"Although theory and experience cannot substitute for each other, they do not have a clear boundary against each other; rather, it is only through a process of close and intense interaction that both elements are used most fully" (Gustavsen, 1996, pp.94-95).
"Is theory useful?" (Gustavsen, in press a)
"And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place... The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known" (1953, no.109)(1).
"What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities" (Lectures, 1930-32, 1980a, p.26).
"We talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life" (1953, p.209).
"How do sentences do it? - Don't you know? For nothing is hidden" (1953, no.435).
"The likeness makes a striking impression on me; then the impression fades. It only struck me for a few minutes, and then no longer did... Is being struck looking plus thinking? No. Many of our concepts cross here" (1953, p.211).
"Different genetic forms coexist in thinking, just as different rock formations coexist in the earth's crust... Developmentally late forms coexist in behavior with younger forms" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.140).
Gustavsen (1996) discusses the dialogical turn in work-life research to "the idea of inquiry as a collaborative effort with people rather than an investigation of them..." (p.90, our emphases). As Gustavsen sees it, central to this turn is a questioning of the whole relation of theory to practice that has grown out of a new view of the relation of language to reality, mostly influenced by Wittgenstein's (1953) later work - although, as we will indicate in a moment, the work of many others is important in this sphere too. As Gustavsen (in press b) puts it, the new key issues are to do with the constitutive and formative roles of language in our everyday affairs, along with a de-emphasis on its representational function: "Everyday language... is [now seen] not so much as a series of pictures of reality as a set of instruments enabling people to deal with reality. Each word is an arbitrary collection of signs or sounds: its meaning is found in its use. It can consequently be argued that, in order to create 'new theory', research must restructure the language out of which theory can grow. In order to do this, it is necessary to restructure those forms of practices to which the relevant elements of everyday languages are bound" (p.7). Indeed, as he points out, we must turn to the idea of what he calls "process-carrying structures" (Gustavsen, 1996, p.97; see also Gustavsen, 1992, 1993) - that is, we must come to see what in the past was discussed as 'research into' and 'theory about' a practice by outsiders to it, as now constituting different 'moments' and 'phases' occurring within the ongoing flow of distinct but interrelated activities making up the overall conduct of the practice itself(2).
In this article, we want to outline what we feel is involved in what Gustavsen calls the process-carrying structure of a professional social practice. We want to explore: i) the detailed character of those special 'structuring structures' that contain, as one of us has called them elsewhere, "conversational realities" (Shotter, 1993a and b); ii) what is involved in them possessing what might be called both self-elaborating and self-appreciative dimensions; and iii) the problems to do both with their initial institution as well as with them being sustained in existence. Our work in this sphere has been influenced by Bakhtin's (1984, 1986), Volosinov's (1973, 1976), Vygotsky's (1978, 1986), as well as by Garfinkel's (1967), Taylor's (1985, 1991, 1993), and Bachelard's (1992) work, but we have been most influenced by Wittgenstein's (1953, 1980a, 1980b, 1981) innovative approach to philosophical investigation. For it is in terms of his very 'practical' methods of investigation that, it seems to us, we can begin to articulate linguistically what is involved in creating, within our everyday, ongoing practices, spheres of conduct to do with their further development and with their criticism. What is so special about his methods is that they do not work in terms of abstract concepts. They work by focusing our attention on certain kinds of events occurring in the situation surrounding us. Indeed, they work by sensitizing us to the fleeting and momentary events that we are 'struck' by in some way, events which are novel and unrepeatable, events which, in Bakhtin's (1993, p.1) terms are only "once-occurrent" events, or, in Garfinkel's (1967, p.9) terms, are occurring for yet "another first time." And what is important about such events, is that instead of a representational-referential understanding which can be formulated in terms of laws, principles, or rules supposedly governing repetitive events, they provoke a wholly different kind of understanding: a relational-responsive kind of understanding, not to do with what something 'is' in itself, but with a practical grasp of the changing, moment-by-moment links and relations between such events and their surroundings as they unfold(3).
Allowing ourselves to be 'struck' in this way is a crucial, initial aspect of his methods. For, as he remarks, when faced by emerging, changeable events of this kind, it is only too easy "... to get into that dead-end of philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind" (1953, no.436). In such circumstances, we feel that our everyday language is inadequate to the task, for the 'real' influences determining the phenomena of concern must, in fact, be hidden from us, 'behind appearances'. Yet, the fact is, in our everyday affairs, we do negotiate and navigate some extremely complex and subtle issues without too much trouble. Thus, not only must the detailed information we require to do it be present to us, in some way, 'in' our circumstances, but the linguistic means must be available to us, as required, also. Yet, as he says, "how hard it is to see what is right in front of my eyes" (1980b, p.39), and the same goes for us too. But if we can wake ourselves up to what is there for us to see, then the tasks we confront - those of trying to 'navigate' the flow of circumstances surrounding us, whilst also trying to 'orchestrate' the execution of more and more complex 'movements' in the conduct of our practices (to mix our metaphors unashamedly) - are not to do with seeking yet more detailed and accurate ways of inferring the nature of something intrinsically hidden from us. They are of quite a different kind: they are destabilizing and critical. They seek to 'deconstruct' the routine links and relations between things we once constructed and now take for granted, to reveal other, new possibilities. Thus we must begin, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, by constantly "giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (no.132).
And we can do this in just the same way as we do it within our own, everyday conversational activities themselves: by the 'directive' use of words. Simply by saying 'Look at that', 'Look at this', we can lead both others and ourselves to notice certain crucially important features of our circumstances that, although in fact readily apparent, would otherwise escape our attention. In this way that we can begin to come to a practical grasp of their nature - that is, through our talk itself - even if a theoretical description of their supposedly 'true' nature in themselves is denied us. This new beginning point for our studies Wittgenstein highlights - in the capacity of essentially 'poetic' images to 'move' us in some new way - is quite crucial(4)
.
However, moving away from a representational-referential notion of knowing and understanding, toward thinking and talking of these issues in more relational-responsive terms, changes more than just the starting point of our studies, our whole approach must shift. We must move away from foundationalist, theory based approaches to ones more rooted in people's practices. For, in our view of things, we are never not engaged in one way or another in some kind of activity in the world, and thus we are always actively relating ourselves in some way to our surroundings. In the Cartesian-modernist, intellectualist view of things, however, as primarily 'thinking things', we are set over against the world, of which we are not a part. Here, our 'minds' are supposed to consist in a kind of subjective 'inner space', in which mental representations of both actual and desired (or feared) states of affairs in the 'external', objective world exist and are processed. For, everything that we do is supposed to originate in a thought of one kind or another. It is a picture that has come down to us, through Descartes, from the Greeks. In it, we talk (think!) of ourselves as primarily in contact only with 'seemings', with appearances. To acquire a true knowledge of the real but hidden world behind appearances, we must exercise our rational intellects, that is, our 'minds', in a properly orderly way (thus a discipline is necessary). It is only through such true representations that we, as the persons we are, have any relevant contact with our surroundings, including both our own bodies and those of other people. As Descartes (1986) claimed to have 'proved' in his meditations: "I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from being touched or seen but from their being understood..." (p.22). Thus, the 'inner space' constituting such a Cartesian mind or mentality is definable to itself independently of both one's own body and of others: "I am," said Descartes, "in the strict sense only a thing that thinks" (p.18), a disembodied, disinterested, decontextualized, isolated, thinking or reasoning thing.
This is a view of our being in the world that, although it suggests that we have an already active mind, innately, that can perceive objects in some mysterious way, leaves out the fact that we are living beings, that we have bodies, and that we live in a continual state of involvement with our surroundings. But we are not like computers and other mechanical things. As living beings we cannot be indifferent to the world around us. Without having 'to work it out', we continuously react and respond to events in our surroundings in a direct and immediate way, whether we like it or not; we have an unavoidable, spontaneous, living involvement in with the activities surrounding us. For us, a number of important points follow from this:
- 1) As we have already emphasized, certain souunds, movements, touches, tastes, and smells, 'strike' us; they compel our attention, 'call out' from us various responses. As a result, we are always in one or another kind of living relation to our circumstances, and such relations constitute the source of all our much later, more deliberate activities(5).
- 2) In our initial responses to such events, we do not apply concepts to them, far from it. While here is not the place to provide a full-scale account of Vygotsky's (1986) account of the different complexes (see endnote 3), as he calls them, that manifest themselves in the child's behavior before the child comes to think in terms of concepts as such, let us mention the following points: i) "Remains of complex [type] thinking persist in the language of adults. Family names are perhaps the best example of this... The child at [an early] stage of development thinks in family names, as it were; the universe of individual objects becomes organized for him by being grouped into separate, mutually related 'families'(6). In a complex, the bonds between its components are concrete and factual" (p.113). And ii) "Mental acts based on the child's speech do not coincide with the mental acts of the adult, even if they are uttering the same word... [The child's word] is rather a picture, image, mental sketch of the concept. It is a work of art indeed" (p.133). In other words, the kind of thinking we all go in for in the early stages of our involvement in a new activity (not just the child in developing toward adult forms of thought and understanding), works much more in terms of images than concepts, in terms of a grasp of certain concrete circumstances than in terms of orderly abstractions from them.
- 3) When we are uninvolved or disengaged from a circumstance - when, say, we confront a picture described by the sentence: "The cat sat on the mat, the mat is red, the cat is black," in isolation from the flow of any particular, ongoing activity - then, as Wittgenstein puts it, "the picture in view by itself it is suddenly dead,... it is as if something that had been taken away from it, which had given it life before... it remains isolated, it does not point outside itself to a reality beyond" (1981, no. 236). For, "only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning" (1981, no.173). Thus, if we present our cases, make our claims, state our principles, in ways disengaged from any involvement with the practices to which our cases, claims, or principles are meant to relate, then they can all "be variously interpreted" (1981, no.273). For, in not pointing outside themselves to anything in particular in a reality beyond them, their meaning (their use) is utterly unclear.
- 4) In this view of things, then, our relational understandings are grounded in our practical dealings with our circumstances; they in fact point outside themselves to specific, concrete details in our circumstances. However, because of this, we cannot turn the background from out of which we think into an object of knowledge for us; we cannot 'picture' it. We must conceive our task differently: that of coming to a practical grasp of its nature, an embodied knowledge that we can come to 'display' or 'show' in our acting, in the improved quality of our practices.
- 5) Our practical dealings with our circumstances, begin with our spontaneous reactions and responses to them. These are intially vague and indeterminate, but not wholly so. It is the partial vagueness of the meaning of our initial reactions that makes activity in this sphere so very interesting. It is its lack of complete specificity, its lack of any pre-determined order, and thus its openness to being further specified by those involved in it, that is its central characteristic feature.
Below, then, in the body of this article, we shall first discuss in more detail further aspects of what is involved in a group of people coming to a more articulate grasp of their practices from within their ongoing conduct of them. And then in conjuction with this article, we shall turn briefly to a discussion of the conduct of a mentorship program instituted in a major medical school in the Boston area by one of us (AMK), to highlight in more concrete detail the inseparable nature of the different 'phases' and 'moments' constituting the practice in question - the doing of it; its teaching; its elaborating; its appreciation; the 'spelling out' of its detailed characteristics; its relating to other, surrounding, support activities; and so on. However, we would first like to turn to a discussion of the stances we can adopt toward 'those others' we study, as well as the stances we can adopt toward our professional colleagues as we talk with and write to each other, usually, 'about' those we study.
Relational stances:
to our 'subject matter' and to each other
As we see it, there are two quite different styles of speaking and writing within which we, as academics, relate to the people around us: i) one way is the supposedly 'objective', 'realistic', 'formal' or 'professional' style of speech or writing within which we currently present to our colleagues, the theories and the true facts our studies are meant to reveal; ii) the other is a more 'informal' or 'conversational' style that, traditionally, is thought to be in tension with it. They each involve the adoption of a quite different relational stance, i.e., a different set of both methodological and ethical commitments, not only to those to whom we address ourselves, but also to the supposed subject matter of our talk. While the former works in terms of us understanding them intellectually, as if from afar, in terms of representations, i.e., in terms of supposed similarities of form. The latter works in terms of us sensing in our living, embodied relations with them, up close, differences, differences that arise as they respond to our actions with actions of their own, differences that, initially at least, we can only voice poetically and metaphorically. In other words, in the second, our understanding of other people comes about through a quite different route than that through which we understand them in the first: it comes about dialogically, in a way which we are all responsive in a living, embodied way to each other, and in which the others can respond back to us in way denied them in the first.
While the first way of talking, in which people relate themselves to each other cognitively and intellectually, can be thought of as a closed, finalized, monologic way of talking, functioning in an already existing and sustained 'disciplinary space', making use of fixed and finalized concepts. The other, in which people are in a more sensuous contact with each other, is an open, unfinalized, responsive form of talk in which new 'spaces' may be opened up, and others closed down, freely, moment by moment. Here, a much more 'primitive' form of talk than conceptual talk is at work. It is "the functional use of the word, or any other sign [such as gestures - JS and AMK], as a means of focusing one's attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that play a central role in concept formation" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.106). Until recently, this second, nonconceptual, nonrepresentational, nondisciplinary, everyday form of talk has been very unfamiliar to us. We have been captivated by the picture of ourselves we outlined above, that is, of ourselves as isolated individuals, inhabiting an otherwise inert, mechanical body that, as a 'mind' we, so to speak, 'animate'. What this picture does, however, is to divert our attention away from those dialogic moments of free and living, nonrepresentational contact between two people in which dialogical, "joint action" occurs (Shotter, 1984, 1993a and 1993b). Where, in joint action, we do not act 'out of' our own individual, inner plans, intentions, or desires, but 'into' a context 'shaped' by the actions of the others around us; that is, we simply act in a way that is responsive to their actions. And, for those around us to sense us as being responsive to them, our activities must be such that are (at least to an extent) interlaced in with their actions. Thus, their moment-by-moment actions are just as much a formative influence shaping what we do as anything within ourselves. In other words, in joint action, the influences determining the moment by moment 'movement' in our actions cannot be found wholly in our own individual heads, nor can they be found in the fixed rules a supposed linguistic system. In joint action, the organizing center, so to speak, of communicative activity is neither in the individual, nor in the linguistic system, but in the momentary situation, in the 'interactive moment', within which communication is taking place. And what is occurring in the 'interactive moment' is to be discovered, not by studying patterns or orders of already spoken words, but by studying the influences at work in the very fashioning of our words in their speaking.
In other words, our relating ourselves to, and our understanding of other people, comes about through quite a different process to that through which we understand things and objects: it comes about in a nonintellectual, embodied, dialogical or conversational manner, in which an embodied, temporally unfolding, responsive form of understanding (denied us in our more monological, intellectual forms of talking and writing) is at work. And what especially important about this dialogical form of practical understanding, is that it is not an individual achievement. It is an understanding that can begin in a vague way, and which can then be further developed and negotiated with others in the circumstance of its use. Vygotsky (1986) gives a nice example of how, in the gestural sign-language of deaf-mutes in Russia, the three meanings of touching a tooth - "white," "stone," and "tooth" - are further elucidated by additional pointing or imitative gestures to indicate the object meant in each case: "A deaf-mute touches his tooth and then, by pointing at its surface or making a throwing gesture, tells us to what object he refers in a given case" (p,.134). And in a similar manner, as we shall indicate, we can as speaking-hearing adults, come to further differentiate and articulate our meanings in the concrete circumstances of our practices.
But let us turn now to how our methodological and ethical involvements with each other, both with those we study as well as our professional colleagues, are played out in these two different styles of writing and talking: (1) In our official, academic style, we would be talking/writing to you as fellow professional academics, about what happened earlier, when we were involved with those whose activity is now the topic of our talk. We would provide you with a linguistic representation of the nature of that activity, but now from outside that involvement, looking back upon it as a completed process. In separating the activity from the people whose activity it was, and from its surrounding circumstances, we would be separating it from the practical part it played in their lives, its point from them. But this is not our concern. Our concern is with what logically 'can be said' about the patterning or form of that activity, an order that we can claim to have 'discovered' in it. We shall call this kind of writing, monological-retrospective-objective writing. Here, what we say or write is located in our professional relationship and is directed toward identifying that to which, as professional observers with a certain set of professional methodological commitments, we should attend. It is aimed at producing explanatory theories, i.e., representations of states of affairs that enable those in possession of them to predict and control the events they represent.
(2) In the other style, we would be talking/writing to you of the character of our ongoing involvements with certain other people, from within that involvement - while both looking back on what had been achieved so far, and forward prospectively, toward the possibilities open to us for our next 'steps'. Our concern in such talk/writing would be with attempting to 'show' or 'make manifest' to you (metaphorically) how you might, justifiably(7), be able to make sense of the character of such involvements. I shall call it dialogical-prospective-relational writing. What I say originates in the interactive relationships from within which I speak, and is directed toward instructing you, as ordinary everyday persons now involved in the relationship in some way (perhaps watching a videotape of it, or reading a transcript, or whatever), in noticing and making within in similar such connections and distinctions. To contrast with the aim of the previous style, we might say that it is not aimed at explanatory theory, but at providing practical theory - or, as we shall later claim, at giving what are best called avowal-accounts: account-talk is talk that is useful in a tool-like way to those involved in a situation; it enables those involved to make and to notice differences in their activities, thus affording them with opportunities to coordinate their activities in with each other in an intelligible way.
Thus in these two styles, although you as the addressee of our writing might seem to be the same you, our 'positioning' of you would be different; and our 'ethical stance' toward those who are the 'subject matter' of our talk/writing is quite different too: In monological-retrospective-objective writing, we would have no need (at least, not immediately) to be accountable or responsive to the absent others of whom we speak. Indeed, we look upon them as if from a distance, as if we have a God's-eye view of them in some way. While in dialogical-prospective-relational writing, as a part of us being involved with those others, we cannot not be accountable to them; we have a sense of our responsibility toward them. And if asked by them as to why we make the claims we do about them, we feel we must respond to their request; we must justify ourselves to them in ways that they can accept (or can give good reasons for rejecting). Thus, in the former style, our first (ethical) responsibilities are to you as a professional reader and to our shared discipline, and we must write in a way justifiably connected with our supposedly shared theoretical interests (as sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, etc.). While in the latter style, one of our major responsibilities is toward those of whom we speak and write, simply as ordinary people involved with each other. Thus in this dialogical-prospective-relational writing, we cannot write simply in relation to a fixed and constant theoretical interest; we must write in a way that respects our currently shared but changing conversational relation to them. In other words, our style of writing must be more tentative and open, and less definitive and authoritative, couched in terms of possibilities rather than claimed actualities.
In other words, the monological, objective style of writing is, in its performance, "finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.293). And in being unresponsive to the people it represents - as indistinguishable, isolated 'atoms' of disembodied, unlocated subjectivity, encased in an essentially mechanistic body - it cuts off the possibility of them being able to challenge the politics of its relational ethics. Indeed, in claiming to be solely a representational medium, and thus denying access to what is revealed in a relationally-responsive way in it, it also renders the social relations of its writers and readers 'invisible,' so to speak. That is, it precludes any rhetorical discussion of its own rhetorical workings (Billig, 1991). Like spectators in a museum (or prisoners(!) in Plato's cave), we have no other choice but to 'view' the 'pictures' it provides, as being pictures of the 'hidden, ideal forms' supposedly underlying everyday appearances. Our dialogical responsive style of speaking and writing, however, is not primarily at all representational (although it makes that kind of writing possible). In not being disciplined by certain shared theoretical interests, it is far more disorderly or informal, it lacks a common vocabulary of fixed concepts, and as a result, it can only be used contextually and conversationally, to 'point out' and to 'make' distinctions and differences in the ongoing flow of activity in which we are involved. It is a very concrete, situated, practical use of language, in which, by the use of our words we 'direct' people's attention to something they might otherwise overlook.
Life in 'Wittgenstein's world':
the origin of new language-games in reactions and gestures
Above, we discussed two styles or ways of talking and writing in terms of the two different kinds of relations they implied for us, in both relating ourselves to our addressees, and in relating ourselves to the subject matter of our talk or writing. In Wittgenstein's (1953) terms, we could be said to have been discussing two different "language-games," where the complex of relations implied in each language-game specified two different quite distinct "forms of life(8)." In what follows below, we want further to explore the significance of Wittgenstein's remarks, not so much to illuminate the properties of already established language-games, as to get a grasp of the possible new forms of life that might be originated and developed from within them. Where our interest here, of course, is in exploring whether what Wittgenstein has to say, can be of any help us in grasping how we might develop new professional practices out from within the context of our old ones.
To begin with, as he saw it, "the origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'" he remarked (1980b, p.31), quoting Goethe. Where, "the primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word," he suggested (p.218). On some occasions, a single word, or the mere flicker of an eyebrow at an appropriate moment is all that is needed to 'speak volumes'. In other words, as he sees it, all our new ways of relating ourselves, both to each other and to our circumstances, emerge out from us noticing new features and aspects of our own current, ongoing activities and practices. For him - as for Goethe, and also for Vygotsky - our spontaneous, living activities and practices are primary. They constitute the unacknowledged, but very necessary background in relation to which all of what we do makes sense: i) it is from out of this background that all our activities emerge; ii) it is back toward aspects of it that they are all directed; and iii) it is against it that they are judged as to their fittingness(9). Where, not only is our positioned involvement in this great flow of background activity usually unacknowledged, but, in Polyani's (1963) terms, we have difficulty in principle in attending to it, for we 'subsidiarily attend from' our positioned involvement in it, in 'focally attending to' our circumstances.
However, as we suggested above, we can get to know its nature indirectly from how its 'shape' shows up in our actions, in those aspects of our actions in which we spontaneously respond to our circumstances. Hence, the importance of Wittgenstein's 'grammatical investigations', for, it is "grammar [that] tells us what kind of object anything is" (1953, no.373). Or, to put it in another way: When it comes to trying to grasp the relation between our behavior and its surroundings, to suggest that we behave as we do because of certain hypothetical mechanisms within us, is to ignore the part played by just those aspects of our behavior in which we relate ourselves to our circumstances spontaneously. Whereas: if we are to develop new livable forms of life, new ways of relating ourselves to our suuroundings, it is precisely amongst those spontaneous aspects of our activities, where we are already acting successfully, in practice, that we can find the new possibilities we require. It is only within the flow of our practices that we can say or do anything that can make a difference to them; we must work outwards from within them. Indeed, as Wittgenstein puts it, "we talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life" (1953, p.209); thus, you must "let the use of words teach you their meaning" (1953, p.220). And in all of this, of course, Wittgenstein is not concerned with telling us how to see the supposedly true nature of what something actually is, in our contemplation of it. He wants to draw our attention to "observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes" (1953, no.415). He wants to 'move' us into a new position, not just to get some new information about our lives, but to 'see' something within them we have not seen before, to see them from within a new form of life, a new way of living, a form of life he wants to 'show' us in his 'poetic' remarks - remarks that 'strike' us, that we cannot not respond to(10)
.
Indeed, it will be useful at this point to remind ourselves of the very practical way in which he tried to view our everyday world - the world before our very eyes that we such difficulty in seeing. We can call his revisioning of it: 'Wittgenstein's world'. In 'his world', as we have already said, mysterious goings on inside our heads are irrelevant. Indeed, he claimed that "one of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with or in our heads" (1981, no.605)(11). Thus, in attempting to help us overcome our urge always to theorize whenever we find ourselves faced with questions as to why we act as we do, he tries to redescribe many topics and events, that we might be tempted to put into theoretical terms, more practically. For instance, he attempts to draw our attention to the practical nature of even philosophical problems: "A philosophical problem has the form," he says, "'I don't know my way about'" (1953, no.123). Or, concerning the understanding of mathematical formulae, he suggests: "Try not to think of understanding as a 'mental process' at all... But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, 'Now I know how to go on'..." (1953, no.154). Indeed, in practice, "understanding is like knowing how to go on, and so is an ability: but 'I understand', like 'I can go on' is an utterance, a signal" (1980c, I, no.875). For, in practice, such utterances indicate to those to whom I address them, something of my changed relation to both my own circumstances, and also to them. In other words, as he sees it, our talk of 'understanding' is not simply, if at all, related to events occurring inside a person's head; but for us, "it is the circumstances under which [the person] had such an experience that justify him in saying... that he understands, that he knows how to go on" (1953, no.155). It is as if we are 'positioned' on a great 'relational landscape' of possibilities, and that we only become 'stuck' in our movements over it, if we become disoriented, loose our way, or become 'lost in a fog'.
In this more practical view of our everyday activities, being able simply to 'go on' with each other, to make 'followable', 'responsible', or 'answerable' sense to each other - simply reacting or responding in ways that makes it possible for us intelligibly to continue our relationships - is sufficient for him. In other words, although it may seem very strange to say it, he is not primarily concerned with us 'understanding' each other in the sense of us sharing any 'ideas', nor with us 'communicating' in the sense of sending each other any clear messages, nor with us discovering the 'true' nature of our surrounding circumstances, nor with us necessarily doing anything very special, let alone anything that in the past has been thought 'distinctive' to us being human. To send messages; to fully understand each other; to think conceptually; to routinely and skillfully discourse upon a subject matter; to be able to 'reach out', so to speak, from within a language-game and talk about the 'contacts' one has made, and to formulate 'theories' as to the nature of what is 'out there'; all these and more are abilities that are, or can be, later developments. Crucially, given the importance that we have attached to events that 'strike' us, the initial vagueness of their meaning need not worry us either. Their meaning too, can be worked out as we go along.
As we have already mentioned, these 'striking' forms of talk, in pointing toward features or aspects of our circumstances, are gestural forms of talk. Some 'gestures' - like us pointing a finger, or saying 'look at that' - carry with them immediate commitments. We expect those to whom we point out something or say 'look at that', to respond by looking in the appropriate direction, while they expect us to go on to say or do something with respect to it. We don't expect them just look at the end of our finger expectantly. Such a practice is a routine, normative practice, a custom into which we have been trained. Other gestures and indicative or indexical meanings, however, are much less conventional and much more momentary and vague. Their meaning will depend both on their precise momentary placement in a flow of activity, and on what one says or does subsequently; their meaning must be made clear in the circumstances of their occurrence. But, as Wittgenstein (1953) illustrates, we do this in subtle ways all the time. For instance: "If you say 'As I heard this word, it meant... for me' you refer to a point in time and to an employment of the word. - The remarkable thing about it of course is the relation to the point in time... And if you say 'I was wanting to go on...' - you refer to a point of time and to an action" (1980c, I, nos 175, 176). The momentary, vague meanings of people's spontaneous responses to each other, are skillfully worked out, unproblematically, in terms of one's subsequent doings and sayings as one goes along.
This emphasis on the gestural, poetic nature of unique, only once occurrent events, events that can 'strike' or 'arrest' us, makes Wittgenstein's stance toward our understanding of our own behavior (and our talk of things) quite distinctive... strange even! For usually, we have concerned ourselves only with what is repeatable and lawful. But there is another way in which his whole approach is quite distinctive also. His emphasis on the beginning of new language-games being in people's spontaneous responses and reactions, means that in being replies to something other than oneself, one's replies are never wholly one's own. In being 'called out' as 'responses' to the activities of others, our activities are always, to an extent, 'shaped' by these other activities. Thus what any one individual does is a part of what of what a 'we' is doing. Such joint activities have a dialogical or mixed character to them. In such circumstances, their outcomes cannot be attributed to the desires or plans of any of the individuals involved, neither can they be attributed to any outside agencies. It is as if the particular situation itself were a third, living agency in the exchange, a superaddressee in Bakhtin's (1986, p.126) sense with 'its' own unique requirements (see Shotter, 1980, 1993a and b, 1995, for further discussions of the strange nature of joint action). "Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue... 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" (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.126-127).
In 'Wittgenstein's world', then, our talk and other activities take on a more practical, relational nature. In such a 'world' it is worth noting that:
- 1) Instead of, as in the Cartesian-modernist approach, turning immediately to a study of how individuals come to know the objects and entities in the world around them, we must begin our studies in a quite different way: by studying how, by interweaving our talk in with our other actions and activities, we first develop and sustain between us, different, particular ways of relating ourselves to each other in our activities in the world - that is, that we should first study how we construct what Wittgenstein calls our different forms of life with their associated language-games. And only then, turn to a study of how might 'attend out' from within those forms of life, so to speak, to take explicit notice of the various ways we can make contact with our surroundings through the forms of talk (the language-games) our forms of life make available to us.
- 2) "The term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life" (1953, no.23); or, to put it another way, "our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings" (1969, no.229). Thus, in our practical usage of words, they draw their influence very little from our saying of the words, in themselves, so to speak, but from our use of them at crucial moments, to make crucial differences, in the larger flow of activity within which we are involved. Thus, it is always our situated use of our words that is important, in practice.
- 3) In consequence, everything that we think of, and talk of, as being the case about ourselves and our language - that we have 'minds', that we 'think in our heads', that 'words stand for things', that we can 'explain' occurrences 'in the world' in terms of 'theories', and so on - all these things can only make clear and intelligible sense from within the confines of specific language-games. This does not mean that language itself is unusable outside of a language game. Far from it. But it does mean that all such talk is, by its very nature, initially, of indeterminate meaning, open to determination only in the context of its use.
All these points will be important below in appreciating the practical, nontheoretical nature of Wittgenstein's methods.
Wittgenstein's methods
Why do we say nontheoretical? Because for him, theories as such are both beside the point and after the fact: 1) They are beside the point, in that they hide from us the actual forms of life from within which our talk makes sense (and whether they are, for instance, of an official, an equal, or of unequal kind, of an instrumental, a mechanical, or of a properly living and personal kind). 2) And they are after the fact, in that they also divert our attention away from those fleeting moments in which the essentially ethical and political struggles are (or would be) at work in their initial formation - struggles which are not pre-linguistic, by the way, but are to do with establishing new forms of life within old forms. Indeed, as he sees it, it is the very insistence on the classical search for an already existing order hidden behind or beyond appearances, and our belief that we ought to convince others of the truth of our claims by systematic argument, that deflects or precludes us coming to a grasp of what is utterly unique and novel in the moment by moment emergence of appearances (our voicings) as they unfold before our very eyes (or, better, in our ears). Where it is just the nature of these moment by moment 'movements' of language that is Wittgenstein's concern.
But what, exactly, is his problem with them? What can he tell us about them that we do not already know? For although we are seeking a better understanding our everyday activities, in one sense... a spontaneous practical sense... this does not seem to be our problem at all. So, what kind of understanding are we seeking here? In this connection, it will be useful to remind ourselves again: i) of the 'gestural' nature of our practical, embodied understandings; ii) of our concern with the tensions, the ambiguities, and thus the struggles at work in the gaps between us; iii) of the possibility of us constructing new relations between us from the resources available to us in such 'gaps'; and iv) of our concern with how, in the making of such new connections and relations, we are projecting various, possibly new, forms of life. It is in this sense, then, that as we said above, his methods are in some sense, destabilizing and critical.
Yet, what Wittgenstein draws to our attention in his remarks, strangely - in talking of "words as instruments characterized by their use" (1965, p.67) - is that to gain an explicit understanding of our everyday, practical activities, we can make use of the very same methods we used in gaining that practical kind of understanding in the first place - that is, he can use the self-same methods for drawing our attention to how people draw each other's attention to things, as they themselves (we all?) in fact use!
This, then, gives us a crucial clue to Wittgenstein's methods. For, although they are as many and as various as those we use in life itself, they do in fact all have something in common: they all work in just the same way as our 'directive', 'instructive', 'organizational', and 'educative' forms of talk in everyday life work. For example, we 'give commands' ("Do this," "Don't do that"); we 'point things out' to people ("Look at this!"); 'remind' them ("Think what happened last time"); 'change their perspective' ("Look at it like this"); 'organize' their behavior ("First, take a right, then..."); and so on. All these instructive forms of talk 'move' us, in practice, to do something we would not otherwise do: in 'gesturing' or 'pointing' toward something in our circumstances, they cause us to relate ourselves to our circumstances in a different way - as if we are continually being 'educated' into new ways. Where it is the 'gestural' function of these 'instructive' forms of talk that is their key feature, that gives them their 'life', that gives them their function 'within' our lives(12).
He calls the forms of talk, the remarks he uses to draw our attention to what is, in fact, already known to us, "reminders:" For, "something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine], is something we need to remind ourselves of" (1953, no.89), he says. Their function as 're-minders', as 'mind-making' remarks, gives us some further set of clues as to his 'poetic methods'. They work, first:
- 1) To arrest or interrupt (or destabilize or deconstruct) the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and, to repeat, to give "prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (1953, no.132). Thus his talk is full of such expressions as "Think of...," "Imagine...," "It is like...," "So one might say...," "Suppose...," and so on, all designed "to draw someone's attention to the fact that he [or she] is capable of imagining [something]" (1953, no.144); that is, they show us other possibilities present in a circumstance. Where, in imagining something new, a person is "now ... inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at thing" (1953, no.144), he says.
- 2) A second method that is sometimes important is, that by the careful use of selected images, similes, analogies, metaphors, or 'pictures', he also suggests new ways of talking that not only orient us toward sensing otherwise unnoticed distinctions and relations for the first time, but which also suggest new connections and relations with the rest of our proceedings. Here, his notion of a "perspicuous representation (portrayal) = Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung)" is central: "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation [portrayal] produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" he says (1953, no.122). To know our 'way about' inside our own, language entwined forms of life, we require relational-responsive rather than representational meanings.
- 3) To do this, however, we need a grasp of an order in their inner 'landscape', to grasp their 'grammatical geographies', so to speak. Thus a third method is, that by the use of various kinds of objects of comparison, e.g., other possible ways of talking, other "language games" both actual and invented, etc., he tries "to throw light on the facts of our language by way of not only similarities, but also dissimilarities" (1953, no.130). For, by noticing how what occurs differs in a distinctive way from what we otherwise would expect, such comparisons can work, he notes, to establish "an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one of many possible orders; not the order" (1953, no.132). What we then establish is, as he puts it elsewhere, is a "synopsis of trivialities" (see epigraph above) i.e., a knitting together of all the details and subtleties into a great overall network of possible concrete ways of 'going on'.
- 4) Finally, we can note the fact that none of these methods ever leads to a final, fixed account of what something 'really' means. One's investigations are never over. There is always 'more' to come. By shifting one's stance and position in relation to one's surroundings, yet further unnoticed aspects become visible: "A main cause of philosophical disease - a one-sided diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example" (1953, no.593). "I find it important in philosophizing to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not too get stiff" (1980b, p.27). Indeed, once one accepts the dialogic nature of any process of inquiry, its unfinalizable nature becomes apparent: "Question and answer are not logical relations...; they cannot be placed in one consciousness (unified and closed in one itself); any response gives rise to a new question. Question and answer presuppose mutual outsidedness..." (Bakhtin, 1986, p.168), that is, distinct, unmerged, differently positioned consciousnesses in dialogue with each other. In such circumstances, "there is neither a first word nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogical context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) - they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future developments of the dialogue" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.170).
By the use of these methods, then, we can achieve a kind of understanding in practice, an understanding that, in Wittgenstein's (1953) terms, brings the kind of clarity to our proceedings that makes them unproblematic, that allows us to anticipate what appropriately should 'flow' from what, thus to 'go on', or to 'follow' each other's actions in an unconfused, concerted manner (without it being necessary for panels of expert witnesses to have to argue the matter out in a court of law). It is that kind of understanding which consists, as we have said, in 'seeing connections'.
Activity informed by this kind of understanding is to be contrasted with acting in relation to a theory: In that situation, instead of being able to directly and immediately sense the fittingness of one's actions to one's circumstances, bodily, one is in the position of having to act 'blindly'; one must work things out, cognitively, step-by-step, as if by inference. And furthermore, in such circumstances, one always has to argue and to justify one's interpretation of the theory in question to others. Instead, Wittgenstein wants us to bypass all that, and to come to an immediate, practical grasp of our talk entwined activities, and how we make sense of them to each other, of the kind that, say, of practiced musicians who have perfect pitch, or of artists who know their colors, or of racquet ball or tennis players who move and hit the ball without needing to stop for any calculations - a kind of understanding that does not provoke those who have it into continually questioning its nature.
It is this kind of ease and clarity that he seeks, but... only after he has brought us up against many things that we take for granted and made us see them as surprising. For instance, he remarks: "Don't take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narrative give us pleasure, occupy our minds. ('Don't take it as a matter of course' means: find it surprising, as you do some things which disturb you. Then the puzzling aspect of the latter will disappear, by your accepting this fact as you do the other.)" (1953, no.524). To be able to do this, the philosopher must not be "a citizen of any community of ideas," he says (1981, no.455), or else he or she is too easily tempted to focus only on how current problems might be solved, rather than on how new possibilities might be opened up(13); and to talk only within the currency of its fixed concepts, rather than to risk the misunderstandings occasioned by the use of 'striking', 'poetic', but vague expressions. All these methods taken together, can be called a 'social poetics' (Katz and Shotter, in press)(14). And what a social poetics can do for us when put to work within our practices, is to give us a better knowledge of our 'way about' inside them, and to enable us to see in their details and subtleties, possibly new ways forward - ways that are easily obscured by the rules and principles we already have in place for their 'good ordering'. In the next article, written in conjunction with this one, readers will, we hope, find resonances between these remarks and events occurring in the practical setting of a mentorship program co-directed and conducted by one of us (AMK), but continuously discussed and studied (in our viewing of video-tapes) by us both.
Notes:
References:
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1. All date only references are to Wittgenstein.
2. Gustavsen (1992, p.94) mentions a number of points that seem to characterize the most advance organizations in the field of development today, that emerged from a statistical survey of 1,350 Swedish workplaces. We wish to highlight two of them here. Firstly: "Change and development are permanent and widespread parts of the activities of the organizations are initiated, steered, and run as a part of the ordinary, ongoing activities. And: "The individual organization is in principle able to provide the resources needed for steering and executing its own development process. External resources have largely support functions." While what we shall have to say will resonate well with all of Gustavsen's other points (see his 1996 article), these are two points which we shall also especially emphasize.
3. See in this connection the useful discussion by Vygotsky (1986, pp.96-145) of what he calls, thinking in complexes, a form of thinking rooted in concrete situations: "The principle function of complexes is to establish bonds and relations. Complex thinking... creates a basis for later generalizations" (p.135). "The adult constantly shifts from conceptual to concrete, complex thinking. The transitional psuedoconceptual form of thought is not confined to the child's thinking; we too resort to it very often in our daily lives" (p.134). Indeed, this is linked to what, we feel, Wittgenstein (1953) meant when, in attempting to make sense of what occurs when something 'strikes' us, he said: "Is being struck looking plus thinking? No. Many of our concepts cross here" (p.211). We shall return to this issue later.
4. "Philosophy," says Wittgenstein (1980), "ought really to be written only as a poetic composition" (p.24). And Bachelard (1992), intrigued by the way in which "the poetic image poses the problem of the speaking being's creativeness" (p.xx), asks: "How - with no preparation - can [a] singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds, and in other hearts, despite all the barriers of common sense, all the disciplined schools of thought, content in their immobility?" (pp.xiv-xv).
5. "The general law of development says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.168).
6. Wittgenstein (1953) too, suggests that many of our everyday notions, such as that of 'games' has a similar such complex structure: "... we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than 'family resemblances'" (nos.66,67).
7. Later, we shall turn to a discussion of how accounts work, not only in justifying courses of action, but in indicating a way forward in otherwise puzzling circumstances (Mills, 1940; Scott and Lyman, 1968).
8. "... to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (1953, no.19).
9. "And how could human behavior be so described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions" (1980, II, no.629).
10. If we are to be changed by Wittgenstein's writings, we must allow ourselves to be moved by his striking phrases, by his poetic ways of talking. For, in his talk about language as a 'game', as an 'ancient city', as a 'toolbox', of words as being like the levers in 'the cabin of a locomotive', and so on, he talks without any specificity as to which game, city, toolbox, or locomotive cab he means. Such vague and confusing talk, 'coming out of the blue', outside the confines of any obvious language game, without any clear understanding of what it represents or to what it refers, making no use of any particular paradigms, or rules, or other schemes or frameworks, can only be of any help to us if we use it gesturally, as an aid to us paying attention to aspects our own activities that might otherwise escape our notice.
11. "I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing" (1980, p.17).
12. "Our experimental study proved that it is a functional use of the word, or any other sign, as a means of focusing one's attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.106).
13. This is said in criticism of Frank Ramsey, who Wittgenstein called "a bourgeois thinker." In that "he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community... He wanted to get down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations - of this state..." (1980, p.17).
14. In this paper, we show how these methods can be used to illuminate events occurring in medical diagnostic interviews.