In L. Holzman and J. Morss (Eds.) Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice and Political Life. New York; Routledge, 2001, pp.100-129.

FROM WITHIN OUR LIVES TOGETHER:

WITTGENSTEIN, BAKHTIN, AND VOLOSHINOV,

AND THE SHIFT TO A PARTICIPATORY STANCE

IN UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING

John Shotter

Department of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH 03824-3586

U.S.A.

Abstract: What makes the approaches of Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein to understanding meaning and understanding in human affairs so distinctive, compared with mainstream approaches, is their emphasis on our living, bodily responsiveness to each other and to the rest of our surroundings. Indeed, as they see it, our responsive activities are often not the result of, but prototypes for, unique and distinctive ways of thinking. For them, our ineradicable embedding in an unending flow of spontaneous, living activity is crucial, and is the source of everything psychic later to be found inside us. Bakhtin and Voloshinov see this flow as dialogically-structured. Thus we find ourselves, not only involved as participants in a collective-reality which we construct and update spontaneously between us without ever being quite aware of how we do it, but which also ‘calls on’ us to perform certain kinds of activities within it rather than others - it has a grammar or a style to it, it provides us with orientation, we make sense of things in ‘its’ terms. To understand how we might mean and understand things ‘from within’ such a reality, we need a rather different kind of stance toward it than is usual. Discussed in the paper are features of what might be called a participatory stance, to contrast with the disengaged, uninvolved stance we adopt toward a classical, ‘external’ reality.

"My participative and demanding consciousness can see that the world of modern philosophy, the theoretical and theoreticized world of culture, is in a certain sense actual, that it possesses validity. But what it can see also is that this world is not the once-occurrent world in which I live and in which I answerably perform my deeds" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.20).

“Words have meaning only in the stream of life” (Wittgenstein, 1982, no.913).

“Living life has fled you, only the formulas and categories remain, and that, it seems makes you happy. You say there’s more peace and quiet (laziness) that way...” (Dostoevsky’s answer to a critic, quoted in Bakhtin, 1984, p.97).

A woman friend approaches me, downcast, I take her hand, and just as I feel something of her in her hand, so she feels something of me in mine . I feel her hand in mine as soft, small, limp, and lifeless, and in an attempt to cheer her up, I look into her eyes, smile, and squeeze her hand. But for her, as we approach each other, I seem to loom over her, blotting out her light, intruding into her grief. She feels my hand as strong and rough, as vigorously moving in a way that is, so to speak, ‘out of tune’ with the ‘tone’ expressed in her’s. She feels I’m in a hurry to be elsewhere. I feel I’m not ‘getting through’, and we stand for a moment wondering if we are still friends. She feels somehow that her feelings have not been properly respected; I feel I have (morally) failed her in some way. Feeling concerned (but also obligated), I say: “Can I help?... We can go and have a coffee if you like, I can do my stuff some other time.” She smiles, and we go off to talk. And in this initial part of our meeting, as a result of our reactions and responses to each other’s expressions, we each gain a vague, outline sense of the current ‘shape and vectors’, so to speak, of each other’s unique ‘inner worlds’: besides the sensitivities we share, there are things she notices to which I am insensitive, things which she connects which are unconnected for me, and vise-versa. And as our talk continues, focused more but not wholly on her inner world rather than mine, its initial vague outline - as a world of grief and suffering - will be internally articulated and developed further. Perhaps, even, between us, we will create some new pathways within it leading out into a new, less grief stricken world. In what follows below, I want to explore those aspects of the work of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov which bear on us coming to a more well oriented grasp of our experiences in involvements with the others (and othernesses) around us such as the one above - where, by the phrase ‘more well oriented grasp’, I do not mean an increased ability to make truth-claims about such phenomena that others cannot gainsay, but an increased practical ability to conduct our own human affairs without, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, becoming “entangled in our own rules” (no.125). For, as we know, it is only too easy for us to set out explicit rules and principles, and then in our attempts to follow them, finding things not turning out in our daily affairs as we had assumed from our academic inquiries they should.

Spontaneous orientations while ‘at home’ in our everyday lives

Mostly, however, in our daily affairs, we do not need to make any reference to any explicit guides, mostly we are able to conduct our unfolding performances without it being necessary for us to pause for more than a few brief moments to gain the orientation we need to take our next steps. We see the ways ‘forward’ offered or ‘afforded’ us (to use the term given currency in Gibson’s (1979) “ecological” approach to psychology) by our surroundings, directly and immediately, from within our living involvements with them. Indeed, just as in driving my car, I see the other cars around me each moment, directly, as near and far (rather than just as large or small ) and can orient my own car in relation to them accordingly, so it is the same in my human affairs. As long as I am engaged or involved with those around me, I can, so to speak, get a sense of how, to some extent, to “go on” in my own unfolding activities in ways appropriate to our shared circumstances at each moment. I do not just experience the scene before me as a dead shape or form needing deliberate interpretation by me, but as spontaneously offering me, as it were, a set of ‘action guiding advisories’, a ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of where I am, where I have come from, and where I can (and should) go next. What is ‘in front’, and what ‘behind’ me, what is ‘in reach’ and what ‘out of reach’, and so on, is immediately apparent to me; I see objects in terms of what aspects they will present next as I move in relation to them - only if I am brain-damaged is this shaped and vectored orientation to my surroundings lost (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). It is as if each event in my involvements with them comes, so to speak, with ‘strings attached’ to it, with a sense of ‘what or can go with, or leads to, what’, a ‘grammar’. At each moment, it is as if there are rules as to what I should do next, but they are of a kind that, when I obey them, I do so immediately and spontaneously, in a way that is “not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.201). The rule is of a kind that, when I obey it, “I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” (no.219).             

              It is, I think, the achievement of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov to have all in their own different ways brought to our attention the architectonic importance of this special kind of practical-moral understanding: the fact that we continually and spontaneously ‘shape’, ‘build’ or ‘construct’ our performances in our daily affairs as we act ‘into’ the opportunities offered us by our surroundings. The kind of understanding we display in such activity, is an active, relational-responsive kind of understanding which, unlike the representational-referential form of understanding more well-known to us, gives rise to more than just a ‘picture’ of the speaker’s meaning in another person’s head . It spontaneously shapes our practices, and is ‘carried’ in them, so to speak, in such a way that we can ‘carried across’ a certain way of acting from one situation into another. This is where the importance of Wittgenstein’s work lies. He has emphasized the importance of the fact that, as we have seen, events within the stream of our living involvements with those around us carry with them their own “logical grammar,” as he terms it. Thus, from within each such involvement, each aspect of our surroundings does not lie “dead” before us - as would a car, if we saw it merely as small or large rather than as also as ‘advising’ us of its nearness to or distance from us - but it also points “outside itself to a reality beyond” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.236). Thus, in spontaneously responding to such events, we do not act just in terms of what, objectively, they are, but also in terms of the next possible actions they offer or make available to us. The meaning of what we do in so reacting, is in what we achieve in what we say or do, by the use to which we put our actions. Although often ignored, we are in fact never not embedded in such an action-shaping flow of activity. And it is Wittgenstein’s achievement alone, to have developed a number of methods for bringing the architectonic influences at work within this flow into rational visibility when required.

              He has brought to our notice a vast array of continually changing ‘action guiding advisories’ spontaneously at work everywhere in both our ordinary, everyday activities and in our academic disciplines, influences which, so to speak, are only hidden from us “because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one’s eyes.)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.129). And in his work, he wants to bring to our attention subtle and fleeting events occurring in and around us that currently we tend to ignore, “distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no.132). Indeed, he wants to suggest to us that, to the extent that understanding each other linguistically is a human achievement, something that we do between ourselves spontaneously, without noticing, it is not something for which we need a special explanation. It is something which in one sense is already known to us, something of which we need to remind ourselves. Thus, he suggests, “if it is asked: ‘How do sentences manage to represent?’ - the answer might be: ‘Don’t you know? You certainly see it, when you use them?’ For nothing is concealed. How do sentences do it? - Don’t you know? For nothing is hidden” (no.435). It is just that we need to attend to events which usually pass us by unnoticed (see Shotter, 1966, and Shotter and Katz, 1996, where a number of Wittgenstein methods for bringing the relevant events to our notice are outlined in some detail).

              Crucial in these methods, is the emphasis on the fact that the ceaseless flow of spontaneous background activity between us is dialogically-structured , a fact brought to our attention by both Bakhtin and Voloshinov. Dialogically-structured activity can neither be understood in cause-and-effect terms, nor in terms of logic or systems of calculation, nor reasons and interpretations. It is a sui generis realm of living activity with its own special, open, only-partially-specified, or primordial nature, such that the reactions and responses occurring to us within it have the form of prototypes, or candidates for all our more well-developed, separately characterized, deliberately conducted activities: all that we ever do or say in the special disciplines, in the arts, humanities, or sciences, has its origins in this ceaseless flow of dialogically-structured activity occurring between us. Wittgenstein’s methods depend on it having this originary, primordial character . Thus, taken together, the work of these three can, I think, show us a whole new approach to what we think of as our problems in psychology, an approach so new and strange that, as I see it, it marks a radical break with what has gone before. It is this new approach that I want to try to outline in this paper.

              Rather than an objective approach, concerned to increase the different representational knowledges ‘about’ the nature of things acquired by the exercise a research expertise, knowledges which to an extent we can each come to possess independently of who or what we are, i.e., which are ‘external’ to our being, so to speak, it can be called a participative approach. Its primary concern is with us constructing ways of relating ourselves to each other and the rest of our surroundings, which are not only of use to us in some way in ‘pointing outside themselves to a reality beyond’, but which are also ‘internal’ to who and what we are. In other words, rather than with bodies of knowledge to do with an external reality, which, in being ‘set over against us’ as ‘dead’ bodies of objective knowledge, still require our ‘interpretation’ if we are to apply them. It is concerned, as we shall see, with us coming to feel and to know how to act in ways more ‘at home’ in our own humanly made surroundings than at present - where those who all live in a common home implicitly know directly from within it, its exits and entrances, its front and back, where guests are likely to appear, its upstairs and downstairs, its placement in relation to the rest of its surroundings, what things there are inside it, where they are, and how to help others confused for a moment to reorient themselves appropriately, as well as knowing that they know of things in the ‘outside’ world in a way different from those within their home . Those who know how to think participatively, notes Bakhtin (1993), “know how not to detach their performed act from its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity” (p.19). They know how to think of things from within “a domain of intimacy” (Bachelard, 1992, p.12 - see note 7) with them, from within a tonalized space of involvement which ‘calls out’ certain actions from us. It is to the dialogically-structured character of this living context as an indivisible unity that I will now turn.

.

From within the dialogically-structured context of life

Bakhtin (1984) introduces the sui generis nature of dialogic or dialogically-structured relations to us by asking us to consider the two judgmental utterances: “Life is good.” and “Life is bad.” As he points out, considered logically, one is simply the negation of the other, and between them as they stand “there are not and cannot be any dialogical relationships; they do not argue with one another in any way... Both these judgments must be embodied, if a dialogic relationship is to arise between them and toward them” (p.183, my emphasis). When that is the case, when these two judgements issue from the mouths of two different people, one in response to the other, then they can come to play very different and unique roles in people’s lives. For example, someone who cannot see a single, available step ahead of them to take, may say, ironically, “Life is good;” another, who appreciates the gravity of his or her position says, by way of admonishing them for their inappropriate irony, “Life is bad, my friend... let’s face it.” Indeed, one can imagine an indefinite number of dialogical scenarios in which the second judgment is uttered in response to the first, with a very different use being served by each utterance on each occasion, each contributing to many different overall achievements. Where people’s living, responsive understandings of each other’s utterances do not depend on the passive recognition of samenesses from the position of a spectator, but the active noticing of differences and othernesses from within an ongoing, living involvement with each other. Indeed, this is why in the exchange above it is people’s embodied judgments which are crucial, for it is only in our living, embodied relations to each other that we are spontaneously responsive to each other’s activities - we cannot not be. But this does not mean, of course, that we understand each other completely and immediately in such exchanges, only that at each moment a sufficient understanding is achieved to make the next move in a still ongoing dialogue. Thus, as Bakhtin (1986) sees it, dialogically-structured understanding is not something that occurs in an instant, but is constructed or developed over time, by each participant from within their unfolding, mutual involvement with each other.

              And from within that unfolding involvement, when a “listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he [or she] takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He [or she] either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the speaker’s first word... And the speaker him-[or her-]self is oriented precisely toward such responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he [or she] expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth... Moreover, any speaker is him- [or her-]self a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker to disturb the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances... Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (pp.68-69). Thus, what is developed here, in the back-and-forth of agreement, disagreement, supplementation, execution, augmentation, application, and so on, is a practical understanding negotiated between participants as adequate to current purposes - where such an understanding may still not be a complete and final, cognitive understanding (an exact correspondence between the speaker’s and listener’s inner mental representations). But what can also be developed here, if we attend to the uniquely spontaneously responsive aspects of our dialogically-structured utterances, is a ‘shaped sense’, so to speak, of each other’s ‘inner world’. And it is this grasp of the ‘inner’ structure, so to speak, of an alien world, its ‘shaped and vectored’ form, that is of central interest to Bakhtin, and to us in our inquiries into our own socially constructed worlds.

              To introduce the dialogically-structured nature of our involvements with our surroundings through the use of examples drawn solely from spoken dialogues between us, however, is to court the danger of focusing to narrowly on speech communication alone to the exclusion of the larger context of our involved bodily activities. Out of my office window the other day, I watched four telephone workers erect a four legged 'pergola' structure over an open manhole: two held two of the uprights each, while the other two lowered and slotted a four limbed 'roof structure' onto them. It was all over in about 5-10 seconds, but their wordless responsive-responding to each other as they coordinated their collective endeavor was also a perfect example of dialogically-structured joint action. Clearly, people who are in living, embodied, responsive contact with each other's activities in this way do not coordinate their activities cognitively and deliberately, continually having to stop to ‘work out’ what to do next according to a theory-like structure, but are interrelating their activities in an immediate, precognitive and spontaneous, feelingful way: they feel resistances to their pulling in the pushes of the others, they look to where the others are looking to find ‘where the collective action is’, and so on, in terms of a myriad of small and detailed events. In other words, joint or dialogically structured activity occurs whenever a first person-I is responsively sensitive in their living bodily actions to how the second person-yous around them are bodily responding to what they do (or say). Indeed, as soon as a second living human being responds to the activities of a first, then what the second does cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity - for the second acts in a way that is partly 'shaped' by the first (while the first's acts were responsive, not only to the existence of the language system he [or she] is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances, as Bakhtin pointed out above). It is this that makes the dialogically-structured nature of the background flow of spontaneous activity between us so special.

              In the past in social theory, we have focused on the two major realms of human activity most visible to us as individuals: supposedly natural happenings (Behavior) and the actions (Action) of individuals. Dialogically-structured or joint activity, however, cannot be assimilated to either of these two categories. It cannot be understood simply as Action, for it is not done by individuals alone, and cannot be explained by giving any person’s reasons for it ; nor can it be treated as a ‘just happening’ event, for although very like such events, it is intelligently ‘shaped’ to fit the circumstances of its occurrence, and thus cannot be explained as a naturally happening regularity in terms of causal principles either. In fact, what is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences - as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, at work at the same time in every one of our utterances, are both 'centripetal' tendencies inward toward order and a unitary language, as well as 'centrifugal' ones outward toward diversity and heteroglossia. It is thus next to impossible to definitively characterize the nature of dialogically-structured, joint activity: it has neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, a neither completely stable nor an easily changed organization, a neither fully subjective nor fully objective character. More than just a static kind of complexity, dialogically-structured activity has a dynamic, continually changing, oscillating, pulsating character, such that its structure at any one moment is very different from its structure at another. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that, it is its very lack of specificity, its lack of any pre-determined order, and thus its openness to being specified or determined yet further only by those practically involved in it, that is its central defining feature. So, although in one of its aspects - in terms of its centripetal tendencies - it can be seen as an endless repetition of already existing forms, in another - centrifugally - it can be seen as the endless emergence of unrepeatable novelty. This will be crucial when we come to examine Wittgenstein’s work below.

              Another crucial feature important at this juncture, however, arises from the impossibility of being able to trace the overall outcome of any exchange back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved in it: because of this, the ‘situation’, the ‘dialogical space’, or the ‘reality’ constructed between them, is experienced as, to an extent, an ‘external’ reality, or as a ‘third agency’ with its own (ethical) demands and requirements. “Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of an invisible third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.126). Thus instead of acting within a neutral (mechanistic) reality, we find ourselves within a ‘living’ reality with an agency of its own, an agency which can make claims on us, demands of an ethical kind, an agency which ‘calls’ in a vectored way for us to respond to it. This arises out of the fact that, if you respond to me in a way sensitive to the relations between your actions and my responses to them, and I respond to you in a way sensitive to the relations between my actions and your responses to them, then we can act together as a ‘collective-we’; but if I sense you as not being sensitive in that way, as not responding to my responses to you, then I feel immediately offended in an ethical way - I feel that you lack a proper care or respect for ‘our’ joint ‘goings on’. As Goffman (1967) puts it, the maintaining between us of our “joint spontaneous involvement” (to use his phrase), requires we continually satisfy various “involvement obligations.” I will return to this issue again, in a moment, for it leads, as we shall see, to a number of very important points to do with the necessary spontaneity of our background activities, but for the moment, let me remain with related but somewhat more basic issues.

Answerability within “once-occurrent events of Being”

Dialogically-structured activities come into being only when agents go out to meet and to interact, actively and bodily, with aspects of their surroundings. Only then is it possible for them to get a sense of the relations between their outgoing activity toward the othernesses around them and the incoming activity that results. But to able to do that, agents must be able to distinguish between those aspects of their outgoing activities for which they themselves are responsible and direct toward an other (its “addressivity” to use Bakhtin’s (1986, p.95) phrase), and those aspects of their activities which merely happen irrespective of their agency. Just as in feeling one of our fingers over with another, it is the shape of the passive finger which is felt through the agency of the active one (not the shape of the active finger through ‘impressions’ received by the passive one); or in a handshake, the shape of the other’s hand is felt through our hand-shaking activity, while they feel the shape of ours through theirs; or from within a greeting, we get a sense of an other’s attitude toward us in their reply (whether friendly or hostile, joyous or downcast) while they get a sense of ours toward them, so in all such encounters, in which we take up an active, living, unfolding involvement with our surroundings, we get a sense of what our surroundings mean for us from within those of active relations toward them for which we ourselves are responsible (Shotter, 1974, 1975, 1984) .

              The basic structure displayed here, in our responsible engagements with our surroundings, is the from-to structure of “tacit knowing” as outlined by Polanyi (1963): we attend from a secondary or subsidiary awareness of the moment-by-moment unfolding details of the relations between our outflow of responsible activity toward an other and the inflowing results, to an overall focal awareness of the continuously changing, ‘vectored shape’ disclosed in those relations - its physiognomy, as both Polanyi (p.12) and Wittgenstein (e.g., p.210) call it. We attend from bodily processes occurring within us to qualities in our surroundings; these qualities are what the internal processes mean to us. In doing so, we tend not to notice what is going on in our own bodies . We displace the qualities disclosed away from ourselves, and locate them out in that aspect of the world from which the incoming responses to our outgoing activities emanate. A paradigm instance of such a displaced and vectored form of disclosure, is our sense, say, of us as feeling the road ‘dangerously slippy’ beneath our tires when driving on a wet day, and the mood of apprehension, along with the now careful movements of the steering wheel, such a sense of calls out from us as a result. What the details are to which we sensitive in such circumstances would be difficult to say - and it must be emphasized that all such sensitivities take time to develop, and seem only to be developed by those ‘interested’ in driving well - but there is no doubt that it is not too difficult for us to learn what they can ‘mean’ or ‘point to’ for how we should handle our driving in such situations. And in the light of this example, we can now, perhaps, see, that the sense in which we do respond responsibly, is not (at least, not immediately) anything to do with being responsible to others, but to do with being responsible, so to speak, to the ‘call’ coming from our circumstances to act in a particular way. Hence the importance of being ‘interested’ in driving well. Bakhtin (1993) calls such a form of responsibility, an act’s answerability: “In its answerability, the act sets out its own truth [pravda] as something to-be-achieved - a truth that unites both the subjective and the psychological moments, just as its unites the moment of what is universal (universally valid) and the moment of what is individual (actual)... The actually performed act in its undivided wholeness is more than rational - it is answerable. Rationality is but a moment of answerability,...” (p.29). Without an immediate and unequivocal responsive understanding that, on at least some occasions, a person’s current response is (or is not) answering what questions put to him or her ‘call for’, and us ‘going on’ with them, practically, on that basis, rational discussion amongst us would be impossible. “The end is not,” says Wittgenstein (1969), “certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (no.204). It is in how we ‘go on’ with people that we display our relationally-responsive understandings.

               But just as we may turn to or go up to someone or some thing, so we may also turn from or go away from someone or some thing, and cease our responsible, responsive actions toward them, and become involved elsewhere. Our involvements need not be continuous nor solely of one kind; they have the form of events with a beginning, middle, and an end. Because of their unique, unrepeatable character, and because, even if the world around us was utterly static and unchanging, we would change and develop as a result of our encounters with it, Bakhtin (1993) calls the time-period when we are in a state of responsible or answerable involvement with an aspect of our surroundings, a “once-occurrent event of Being” (p.2). What is crucial about such events is that it is only from within them, from within their unfolding and from within their unfolding alone, that we can bring the past into contact with the present in a way shaped by the anticipation of a particular future: we can bring an already determined and integral aspect of ourselves or of the world, or of both, into contact with a unique, never-before-existing and never-to-be-repeated, lived experience; we can bring an objective and general domain of culture into relation with a set of unique, concrete circumstances; we can bring “the already spoken” into contact with the “not yet said” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.28); and, “in the novel,” which is of course of especial interest to Bakhtin (1981), “the ‘already bespoke quality’ of the world is woven together with the ‘already uttered’ quality of language, into the unity of the world’s heteroglot becoming, in both social consciousness and language” (p.331). In all these cases, within once-occurrent events of Being, we can bring a whole range of diverse influences into relation with each other, to bear on each other not in a logical or causal way, but in a moving, living, dialogically-structured fashion. “The answerability of the actually performed act knows a unitary plane, a unitary context in which [a] taking-into-account is possible - in which its theoretical validity, its historical factuality, and its emotional-volitional tone figure as moments in a single decision or resolution. All these moments, moreover (which are different in their significance when viewed from an abstract standpoint), are not impoverished, but are taken in their fullness and in all their truth [pravda]. The performed act has, therefore, a single plane and a single principle that encompasses all those moments within its answerability” (p.28).

              But so far, it will have been noticed, within the plane of the once-occurrent event of Being, we have considered mostly the experience of a single agent becoming involved with an aspect of his or her surroundings, and have not yet begun properly to consider the relations within such events when two (or more) consciousnesses become involved with each other. As Bakhtin (1984) points out: “It is one thing to be active in relation to a dead thing, to voiceless material that can be molded and formed as one wishes, and another thing to be active in relation to someone else’s living, autonomous consciousness. This is a questioning, provoking, answering, agreeing, objecting activity; that is, it is a dialogic activity no less active that the activity that finalizes, materializes, explains, and kills causally, that drowns out the other’s voice with nonsemantic arguments” (p.285), i.e., arguments (from within a speaker’s own scheme of abstractions) which do not arouse a responsive understanding of any kind in their listeners, which lie ‘dead’ before one. It is once we begin to consider the relations between two (or more) consciousnesses, and the ability of another’s voice to ‘call out’ responses from us, whether we like it or not, that we can begin to examine more closely people’s practical understanding of each other’s actions, and to turn toward issues to do with people appreciating both each other’s ‘inner’ lives and their own. For, just as in touching and caressing another’s hand, although we mostly feel their hand and not our own, they will react to ours as rough or smooth, as fleshy or bony, as strong or weak, and so on, and we get to know about our own hand through their responses to it, so we can get to know more about other aspects of ourselves through the responses of others to our responses to them. Indeed, as Bakhtin (1984) remarks: “I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another... I cannot manage without another, cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance)” (p.287). But it is only from within once-occurrent events of Being, those events in which we are involved with, or engaged with, the others around us, that the possibility of me coming to be conscious of myself, arises. It will be useful to dwell for a moment on the relation of such events to our already existing practices.

Unrepeatable, first-time reactions in relation to “regular ways of action”

As we have seen, central to Bakhtin’s, Voloshinov’s, and Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and understanding is the fact of our living, bodily responsiveness to events in our surroundings. For them, meaning and understanding are not first to be found inside people’s heads and then, later, in their actions, but the other way around: what is later to be found in their heads appears first in their actions. “To understand another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words... Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of dialogue is to the next” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.102). As Wittgenstein (1980) sees 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’” (1980, p.31). Where by the word primitive here, Wittgenstein (1981) means that “... this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1981, no.541). Such living, bodily responses are, thus, the primitive beginnings from which our more refined and elaborated meaningful behavior and our understandings of it are developed. It cannot be emphasized too much, that at the heart of us becoming language users is us being trained by those around us to react and respond in various ways, spontaneously and directly. Where training us to respond in this way does not depend on us first understanding, but rather, our later understanding depends on it. At the heart of all our ‘mental’ activities are our practices, practices which meet certain public norms and criteria of successful performance. “Only in learning a foreign language does a fully prepared consciousness... confront a fully prepared language which it need only accept” suggests Voloshinov (1986). “People do not ‘accept’ their native language - it is in their native language that they first reach awareness” (p.81).

              Let me emphasize the radical nature of what all three are claiming here. Rather than beginning with anything in our heads, they are suggesting that the origin or source of everything that is meaningful for us can be found out in the world between us, in our living, bodily reactions to events in our surroundings. What may seem to end up residing inside our individual heads, in our minds, and to have its whole existence there without any obvious relation to our surroundings, starts out in the living, bodily responsive relations between us and the world around us. And furthermore, our meaningful ways of so acting are in fact sustained in existence by us unceasingly exhibiting in our spontaneous responsive reactions certain characteristic ways of acting and forms of expression, in relation to certain very general facts of nature: “If there were, for instance, no characteristic expression of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception and exception rule; or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency - this would make our normal language-games lose their point. - The procedure of putting a limp of cheese on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its point if it frequently happened for such lumps to suddenly grow or shrink for no obvious reason” (1953, no.142). It is not that we have certain “instincts,” as if we were automatons who exhibited fixed and innately patterned, sequences of behavior, released from us solely by the occurrence of specific stimuli. It is just that the immensely varied relations between us and our surroundings depend on us being able to depend on certain regularities, sureties, certitudes, in the world around us. Where these everyday certitudes and sureties are not claims to knowledge, in the sense that we can offer criteria for our belief in them, but, are once again, the basic but ungrounded terms which are constitutive for us of who and what we are; they are the terms in which we make sense of everything else around us; they constitute “the element in which [our] arguments have their life” (1969, no.105). Hence, in contrast to the Cartesian claim that any proper knowledge of things must begin in doubt, Wittgenstein (1993) suggests: “The primitive form of the language-game is certainty, not uncertainty. For uncertainty could never lead to action. I want to say: it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting... The basic form of the game must be one in which we act” (p.397). “What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.226).

              Thus, as we have seen, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein, all draw our attention to the fact that, whether we like it or not, we live our lives embedded within one or another strand of a ceaseless flow of living, unrepeatable, dialogically-structured activity: where, “this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.11). And, it is only from within our own living, spontaneous involvements or engagements within such a chain of activity, that we can make sense of what is occurring around us. Indeed, as we are socialized into such activity-flows, into the already established practices going on around us, we become trained in the practical, relationally-responsive forms of understanding required in spontaneously ‘going on’ with those who are already ‘at home’, so to speak, within such practices. “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” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.81). To repeat, such spontaneous ways of acting with their ‘grammar’ are, thus, constitutive for us of who and what we are, and what counts for us as the stable, repeatable, and significant forms within that flow, and as such, they cannot be explained, for they constitute the basis in terms of which all our explaining of things to each other is done. For us, they are foundational.

              This, however, is what is so difficult for us to accept. If Wittgenstein is right, then our actions are not rooted or grounded in any supposedly, already existing, objective structures out in the world, nor in any subjective structures in our minds, but simply in the ‘grammars’ currently existing in our forms of life, i.e., in the immediate and ‘blind’, but sure and unquestioned, ways of acting, in terms of which we spontaneously relate to the others and othernesses around us. In other words, our ways of acting are not themselves based on grounds; they are not reasonable (or unreasonable); they are simply ‘there’ as an aspect of our lives together. And their ‘grammar’, their physiognomy, the set of ‘action guiding advisories’, the ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of where I am, where I have come from, and where I am going to that they continuously provide to us from within our participation in them, is crucial in giving intelligible shape to everything we do. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, “grammar tells us what kind of object anything is” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.373). But, as we have seen, in lived space, objects are known to us in terms of what aspects they will present to us next as we move in relation to them. In other words, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, his investigations are not so much directed toward phenomena in themselves, “as one might say towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena... Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one” (no.90). It is to do with the possible connections and relations between things, whether already realized or not.

‘Going on’ from where we are

In the past we have developed our language-game entwined forms of life, collectively, without being aware of how (or why) we have brought about such changes, from the primitive and myth laden forms of earlier times to what they are today in all their complexity and refinement. What Wittgenstein’s work now allows us to do, however, is to come to a much more aware grasp of how such changes occur. This is crucial. For, although our language-game entwined forms of life may seem to be utterly arbitrary and without foundations, and thus just to be ‘there’ without any explanation, this does not mean to say that we cannot, from within our living of them, criticize or improve them. Indeed, just as we argue that the transition from us seeing our world in terms of myths of our own devising to seeing it in the more objective terms of science was an improvement in that we now orient ourselves toward our ‘external’ world in less confusing, more instrumentally effective ways, so we can argue that Bakhtin’s, Voloshinov’s, and Wittgenstein’s work can help us orient ourselves in similar more ‘vectored’, less confused and confusing ways ‘inside’ our social lives together. Thus, even though their work cannot be justified in terms of any explicit foundational principles, it can nonetheless still be counted as critical and their attention directing statements as not simply arbitrary, if in their application they can lead to forms of life which, by comparison, can be accounted better than previous forms.

              But more than just at this global level, their work is also crucial in bringing to our attention the importance of details; they have made rationally-visible to us, the immensely varied and subtlety detailed ways in which it is possible for us to bring about such changes in our forms of life. Above, I have emphasized the importance of the steady ways of living and regular ways of acting within which our language is rooted. If we lived in a wholly mechanistic world, that would once again be an invitation to focus on the importance of repetitions and regularities - for in a world in which earlier states can be repeated exactly, all traces of the passage of time could be eradicated. But in a living world, in which time is real and irreversible, so that the world as a whole can never take up again a previous configuration, to sustain repeatability at least within portions of it, takes energy and effort. In other words, as we are now beginning to realize, from, say, Prigogine’s (1980; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) work on what he calls “dissipative structures” and other work in complexity and chaos theory (Waldrop, 1992), living stabilities are dynamic stabilities sustained within a constantly changing, unrepeatable, surrounding flow of activity, and as such, are in fact, strangely, sources of ceaseless novelty (see Shotter, 1984, p.197). For there must be an irreducible, qualitative difference between the successive moments of such a stability for it to be recognizable as a flowing (rather than as a frozen) stability. As Wittgenstein (1980) puts it: “Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life. And so too even to the habitual character of life” (1980, p.73). We thus find that what is repeated in “once-occurrent events of Being,” are not dead, identical forms, like each tooth of a cogwheel, but unique living events which although all different from each other can be ‘counted as’ the same as each other; they are such that we can spontaneously respond to each in the same way (but which we can, should we so choose to orient ourselves differently, respond to differently also).

              Everyone’s voicing of the greeting “Hello,” for example, is different from everyone else’s; and we can recognize a friend’s voice as greeting us while knowing that other greetings are uttered by strangers. But, as Bakhtin (1986) points out, what makes an utterance and utterance, and not just the voicing of a linguistic form, is “the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude toward it (for example, executing an order)” (p.76). That is, it is in the realm of doings and deeds that an utterance has its being. And as speakers we not only express our own particular position and evaluative attitude toward both the topic and toward our addressee (friendly-unfriendly, official-intimate, etc.) in the ongoing action between us, but we determine in our tone, their responsive position (subservient, equal, superordinate, etc.). In being shaped in accord with a speaker’s responsive relations to their surroundings, every utterance expresses in its intonation a speaker’s momentary evaluative orientation and in so doing, also positions listeners in relation to it. And listeners respond accordingly, from within the position they now find themselves placed. Thus, rather than first recognizing the repetition of a regular form, and then going on to interpret its particular meaning in a particular context, the opposite is the case: as living beings, we first find ourselves spontaneously responding to another as friendly or unfriendly, as of higher or lower social rank, as keeping us at a distance or as being intimate with us, and so on, without it at all being apparent to us precisely what it is in the form of their behavior that positions us in relation to them. As we have seen above, such spontaneous responses are the primitive beginnings from which most refined and elaborated understandings are developed. To emphasize the point again: these initial forms of response do not depend on cognitive acts occurring inside our individual heads, on thought, understanding, or acts of interpretation. Rather, our individual acts of cognition depend on our acting - “in the beginning was the deed.” Thus, as Voloshinov (1986) puts it: “The basic task of understanding does not at all amount to recognizing the linguistic form used by the speaker as the familiar, ‘that very same’, form, the way we distinctly recognize, for instance, a signal that we have not quite become used to or a form in a language that we do not know very well. No, the task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity... Thus the constituent factor for the linguistic form, as for the sign, is not at all its self-identity as signal but its specific variability; and the constituent factor for understanding the linguistic form os not recognition of ‘the same thing’, but understanding in the proper sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the particular given context and in the particular, given situation - orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not ‘orientation’ in some inert sense” (p.68, and p.69).

              Thus, just as I recognize that it is ‘your’ voice as my friend on the telephone now, and not that of a stranger, irrespective of what you might say, or you recognize that it is ‘my’ writing, irrespective of what is actually written there, so we recognize in the continuously changing ‘vectored shapes’ disclosed in the events occurring around us a physiognomy, a quality to which we can orient - like suddenly hearing our native tongue spoken in a foreign land. Here is something very particular to us, something we are ‘at home’ in, to which we can relate, something that gives us a set of possible paths forward. We feel that we have a sense of what to do next, that here is a situation in which we know how to ‘go on’. As intellectuals and academics, due to our mechanistic upbringing, we think that without an accumulated experience of very general repetitions, we lack all orientation, like Descartes (1968), we feel “as if [we] have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles [us] around so that [we] can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the surface” (p.16). But this is to forget the anchoring that we can have, in certain situations, in our sense of our responsibility for our own actions: we need to remind ourselves of the fact that we can distinguish in at least some cases those occurrences for which we, and we alone, can be said to be responsible, from those just naturally happening, and of the proto-phenomena making this possible. It is this which allows us to orient ourselves, even in what are for us unique, first-time events. For to repeat: “The actually performed act in its undivided wholeness is more than rational - it is answerable. Rationality is but a moment of answerability,...” (Bakhtin, 1993, p.29). And it is in spontaneously finding ourselves answerable to specific ‘calls’ coming to us from our surroundings, along with (more or less elaborated) ‘action guiding advisories’ of some kind, their ‘grammar’, that gives us the orientation we need. To that extent, even as very young babies, we are never not oriented, to put the matter rather awkwardly. Indeed, as is well-known, babies react to complex qualities, such as friendliness and joy, unfriendliness and anger, long before they distinguish between simple forms, such as between triangles and squares. What cultural and linguistic forms are seen and accounted by us as constant in our lives, are achieved by us. So, while we may be tempted to suggest that the norm is constancy, and that it is in variations from the norm that we can express our own, unique ‘inner lives’, ourselves. More properly, we should say, that variation is the norm, and that exceptionally, besides expressing our own uniqueness, we can on occasions, if we have been trained properly so to respond, understand in another’s unique behavior, aspects of it which we all share, which we can count as constant. Thus, what is important to us in our lives together then, are the fleeting, one-off, unique, unrepeatable events, events which, as Garfinkel (1967) so wonderfully puts it, continually occur for yet "another first time" (p.9). It is ‘within’ these unique, 1st-person expressions, these once-occurrent events of Being, that we make our ‘inner’ lives ‘visible’ to the others around us. We become present to each other ‘from within’ them, ‘from within’ our ongoing involvements with each other, ‘from within’ our forms of life.

Conclusions: the shift into a participatory world

Instead of attempting to provide any new theories, then, of the supposed mechanical and repetitive realities underlying our behavior, Voloshinov, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin focus on the amazing and almost infinitely complex nature of what previously has passed us by, unnoticed, in the background to our lives: the flow of spontaneously responsive, living, relational activity within which everything we do in our ordinary, everyday lives is embedded. The perspective... no, the form of life they offer us, is one very different from the essentially Cartesian form of life we have adopted and trained ourselves in, in our intellectual inquiries in modern times. Primarily, they have shifted our attention away from what is supposed to be radically hidden inside us somewhere, and toward what occurs out in the world between us, which is only hidden from us because we fail to attend to it. They have also drawn our attention to the fact that, as living beings, we cannot not be responsive to our surroundings, and thus always in one or another living relationship to them. They have also shifted our whole standpoint, from that of disengaged, outside observers, to being interested, involved participants. Indeed, a whole galaxy of changes is involved - a shift into a world very different from the modern, ‘external’ world in which we have now lived for three hundred years or so. We can list some of the more prominent, i.e., those that most clearly contrast with (almost as mirror images of) our current assumptions:

‒            i) They both take it that there is something quite special about us being alive and embodied .

‒            ii) Both take it that we cannot not be spontaneously, i.e., directly, responsive to each other and our surroundings in one way or another.

‒            iii) Both focus on the complexity and fullness, so to speak, of those fleeting moments when we are in a direct, living contact with others or an otherness in our surroundings.

‒            iv) We live as responsive parts of a larger, living, responsive whole.

‒            v) Among the consequences of us being immersed in such a flow of living activity, is the fact everything we do and say has its being and makes sense only from within this unceasing stream of life in which we also have our being.

‒            vi) Indeed, in ‘calling out’ certain actions rather than others from us, we spontaneously find ourselves oriented within the flow.

‒            vii) The focus on events within the stream of life leads both to emphasize internal rather than external relations: that is, while the parts of a dead structure have a nature to them whether a part of the structure or not, those of a living, organic unity owe their very nature at every moment, not only to their relations to the other parts within the whole, but also to its earlier parts from which they have developed - thus, as well as their momentary spatial relations, their temporal (historical, developmental) relations are of importance also.

‒            viii) To adopt this stance, to distinguish between internal and external relations, is to distinguish between those aspects of a scene which stand before us ‘dead’, so to speak, and those which ‘call’ something from us, to which we are ‘answerable’.

‒            ix) Also, to adopt this stance toward living things and activities is to adopt what Bakhtin (1993) calls a “participative” (p.8) or “unindifferent” (p.44) style of thought. It means that whatever one might say with respect to our communicative activities, for instance, must be said from within one’s living involvement in them, rather than as a disinterested external observer of them.

‒            x) The ultimate realm in which we live and have our being, and in which we must find the final arbitration as the value of our achievements, is the realm of doings and deeds.

‒            xi) All this finally leads to what we might call a performative mode of inquiry, a mode of inquiry in which ‘the proof’ of a result, an outcome, is not in participants being now able to make true claims to knowledge, but in them now being able to carry out new practices successfully between them. To repeat: “the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.204).

To these themes in common, Bakhtin and Voloshinov add, as we have seen, another, quite distinct, dialogical theme:

‒            xii) That, in bridging of the momentary 'gaps' occurring between us as we turn from ‘addressing’ others and ‘invite’ them to address us, the outcomes of the responsive activity occurring between us have a special kind of unique, open, complex, and mixed quality to them that makes them utterly distinct from any other kind of events in existence.

              Clearly, as Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein see it, the spontaneously responsive relations that we have to each other and to the rest of our surroundings, which are prior to, and provide the background for, everything else of a more self-conscious and deliberately controlled kind that we do as individuals, have a very special nature: in being proto-phenomena, candidates for later, more well-defined forms of behavior, they have what we might call a primal, originary, or constitutive character. It is this which makes them amenable only to a certain kind of understanding: what, as we have seen, Bakhtin (1993) calls a participatory style of thought and understanding. And I would like to end this article with some comments as to its nature.

              In the past, we have thought of our inquiries as making reality apparent to us, with the hope that if we knew the true nature of our surroundings, we could act in ways better fitted to them. Thus, as uninvolved, disinterested, objective observers, we could just pass on the results of our findings for everyone’s benefit. But, it is impossible for us to conduct any inquiries without us at some point, voicing claims, opinions, theories, etc., as to their nature. And, as Bakhtin (1986) remarks: “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). But something created is always created out of something given (language, an observed phenomenon of reality, an experienced feeling, the speaking subject himself, something finalized in his world view, and so forth). What is given is completely transformed in what is created" (pp.119-120).

              In other words, because we live in a world of dialogically-structured events, people’s utterances always and inevitably make a difference in and to our lives; they make history. They cannot be unsaid. It is not a matter simply of us possessing, or not, a certain body of knowledge. Another kind of understanding is at work. It is not the kind of understanding which can be formulated in terms of general facts or theoretical principles; it is not a ‘knowing that’ (Ryle,1949). But neither can it be the understanding of a particular skill or craft, a ‘knowing how’. For clearly, it is a kind of understanding which is uniquely relevant only to the particular concrete, dialogically-structured situation within which it makes its appearance. It has its being only within our ongoing, living, participative relations to others. As such, it depends on our grasp of particular, only once-occurrent connections and relations internal to the specific situation in which we are involved, and in occurring only once, unrepeatably, we can never gain an explicit, systematic understanding of such relations within a unitary order of connectedness. As I have suggested elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a and b), it can be called a ‘knowing-from-within’, a kind of understanding that one has only from within a social situation, and which, in being answerable to its situation, takes into account (and is accountable to) the others in the situation within which it is applied. Indeed, it is a co-developed, dialogically-structured, kind of understanding, an understanding of a participatory kind that we can only come to as a result of our responsive contact with the others and othernesses around us. It does not give us what we have sought in the past, an objective, independent, picture of ‘how it is’.

              But that monological, representational-referential form of understanding, as we have called it, into which we were trained as stand-alone, Cartesian thinkers, only gives us its supposed, objective pictures, against the background of, or in relation to, the unceasing flow of spontaneous, living activity between us which constitutes for us, the basic social reality within which we all live our lives . Within that reality, the relational-responsive kind of understanding we employ is to do with more than the passive picturing of a state of affairs. It is to do with articulating or disclosing further, over time, in an active and dialogical fashion, from within our living involvements with the others and othernesses around us, the ‘vectored shape’ of the initial living impulses ‘called out’ in us by those involvements. And it is a kind of understanding which is improved by ‘seeing connections’ not before noticed (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). For the seeing of such connections orients us in how further we might ‘go on’ with what or who is in our surroundings. Indeed, due to its origination in living impulses of one kind or another, such a form of understanding always matters to us, it “always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)” ( Bakhtin 1986, p.120). It is the ineradicably evaluative and orientational aspect of our living relations to our surroundings below which distinguishes the embodied, participatory stance Bakhtin and Wittgenstein take in their studies, which contrasts markedly with the disembodied, disinterested, disengaged ways of being currently demanded of us by our training as objective scientists. But it is precisely this which allows us to continually improve it from with our involvements in it.

              Thus, to summarize the general shift in stance entailed in moving from a disengaged, Cartesian stance toward a more participatory style of thought, we can say: It entails a shift from the attitude of the uninvolved, disinterested, external observer, to that of the engaged, interested participant in a language-game entwined form of life. Where, within such forms of life, participants are interested, at any one moment, in grasping (perceiving) in an action relevant manner, what can be effected within them, the possibilities for action they allow or afford us. For we want to act in ways which are not at odds with our surroundings, in which, among the many other barriers to effective and proper action, we do not become entangled in our own rules. Where, in the long term, of course, we are interested in extending what abilities we have to move in ways which are ‘in tune with’ our own immediate surroundings, out further into the larger world around us. In other words, as a participant in all aspects of human life at large, I want, as Wittgenstein (1953) put it, to “know my way about” (no.123), unendingly, inside more and more aspects of it. I want to be more ‘at home’ in the complicated ‘landscape’ of human phenomena without the continual need to consult and puzzle over maps - to be ‘at home’ in human life at large in ways which I can continually extend as I actively engage myself in elaborating yet further the ‘calls’ I receive from my surroundings.

Notes:

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