FinlandWork

KCC Workshop: Exploring Living, Bodily, Spontaneous, Responsive-Expression: the Chiasmic Structure of Social Life in a Post-Cartesian world, Nov 2003

John Shotter

Preliminary comments:

-Livingness
-Living change: qualitative changes - unique events
-Internal not external relations
-Meetings: beginnings
-Chiasmically organized: precise, dynamic intertwining ('orchestration'), not a merging, mixing, or blending
-The creation of 'third agencies': real agentic presences
-Accountability and legitimacy

The dialogically- or chaismically-structured nature of all living, expressively responsive human bodily activity:

-Dialogically- or chiasmically-structured phenomena occur only in meetings.
-They occur only in the 'orchestration' of the interplay between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us; hence, they are humanly created or constructed.
-Collective or joint action, 'our' action; hence the impossibility of finding their reasons or causes.
-Meaning present in such activity prior to our conscious knowing (con {with}-scio {knowing}: witnessable knowing along with others) occurs.
-Obligations: involvement obligations (Goffman, 1967)
-Chiasmically organized: binocular vision (Bateson, Merleau-Ponty) as a paradigm... creation of new "relational dimensions," i.e., depth
-The sui generies nature of chiasmic realities: not reducible
-The accountable nature of human conduct: the specificatory or constitutive nature of language in a 'languaged' reality.

Cartesianism:

-We are only a thing that thinks.
-Bodies are perceived only by the intellect alone.
-The search for a method for obtaining certain knowledge.
-To demolish everything and start agin right from the foundations.
-Long chains of reasonings (geometry)... calculation (Socrates).
-Masters and possessors of Nature
-Create a new world: separate particles of matter set in motion according to God's pre-established laws.
-Ideals: innate ideas put into us by God.
-No emergence, no growth, no development - a dead, mechanical world.
-A picturable world - the world as a picture (static).

The difference between mechanically-assembled wholes and living, self-developing, indivisible wholes:

-Socrates (Republic Part 10): quantitative way of seeing the world
-Measuring, counting, and weighing... calculations performed by the 'better part' of the mind
-Mechanically assembled wholes: constructed piece by piece from parts external to one another, from parts which retain their character unchanged, whether they are parts of the system or not.
-Any such assemblage is an externally related, static unity, i.e., a structure whose parts are all joined by third entities (glue, nails, etc.) into unified structures.
-Such static solely 'spatial' objects have their being in classical, neutral space and in classical, neutral time, which are both treated as empty, unchanging 'containers', simply 'there' for things to happen within them.
-But whole people as natural systems are certainly not constructed piece by piece; on the contrary, they grow.
-They develop from simple individuals into richly structured ones in such a way that their 'parts' at any one moment in time owe not just their character but their very existence both to one another and to their relations with the 'parts' of the system at some earlier point in time.
-Their history is just as important as their logic in their growth, and because of this it is impossible to picture natural systems in spatial diagrams.
-"Here 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" (PI,1953, no.23) - speaking is internally related to the form of life within which it has its meaning.

Why these differences matter:

-Cartesian forms of thought - in our conceptions of space, time, matter, and motion - are still pervasive in all our everything thought and talk.
-Much of our arguing assumes that sense experience can be understood in terms of an idea of some external reality whose spatially separated parts are independent realities, in the sense that they depend on each other only via connections that respect space-time separation in the usual way (this is often what is meant by REALISM!).
-The idea of a chaismically structured reality demands a radical change in what we mean by physical reality - a change in our ideas of space, time, matter and motion [and indivisible time-space, and a living matter capable of physionomic, expressive changes].
-The whole notion of separate "elements of reality" ceases to have any precise meaning.
-What is important are the conditions (approaches) in terms of which meetings occur.
-Choose one set of conditions, and one particular aspect [set of relations] of human possibilities is revealed, choose another, and a complementary aspect is exhibited - with no one aspect being superordinate (see Wittgenstein, 1953, on "aspect-seeing").

The importance of after-the-fact "justificatory rhetorics:"

-An account is an aid to perception - works on puzzling or vague events to enable us to fir them into what is familiar and well-known to us... accountable action is legitimate action.
-Our "enthno-methods" (Garfinkel, 1967) enable us to make the same kind of sense as each other of different, first-time, events in our surroundings.
-Theories take what already makes one kind of sense to us, and suggests that its real nature is hidden from us.
-Accounts are to do with constitutive expectations, i.e., with orienting us toward future possibilities.

"In fact, to give a proper account of what something is, of what it is to be a person, say, neither a theory nor a model of persons will do: if we are to talk about persons as persons (which indeed is a part of what it is for human beings to be treated as persons), then we must not talk about them as really being something else, as really being entities requiring an unusual description in special theoretical terms; nor can we talk about persons as being to an extent like something else (information-processing devices, say) which, in other respects, are not actually like persons at all. For both these ways provide only partial views, ways of 'seeing' from within instrumental forms of activity, and our task is to talk about persons as persons. We must collect together in an orderly and systematic manner what people must already know as competent, autonomous members of their society - and to do this, they do not need to collect evidence as scientists, as competent persons, they should be a source of such evidence (Cavell, 1969). Drawing upon the knowledge we already possess, what we need is an account of personhood and selfhood in the ordinary sense of the term 'account': as simply a narration of a circumstance or a state of affairs. Something which in its telling 'moves' us this way and that through the current 'terrain' of personhood, so to speak, sufficiently for us to gain a conceptual grasp of the whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it - it is a view 'from the inside', much as we get to know the street-plan of a city, by living within it, rather than from seeing it all at once from an external standpoint. It is a grasp which allows us to 'see' all the different aspects of a person as if arrayed within a 'landscape', all in relation to one another, from all the standpoints within it" (Shotter, 1984, pp.183-184).