Draft paper of talk given at KCC Management Summer School, Kent, July 4^th-8th, 2005

INSIDE PROCESSES:

WITHNESS-THINKING AND ACTION-GUIDING ANTICIPATIONS

John Shotter

ABSTRACT: To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy. Many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to think about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe as happening ‘over there’, but few have helped us to think in terms of our own, spontaneously responsive involvement in ongoing processes from the inside. Yet practitioners need a style of thought and talk that allows them uniquely to affect the flow of processes from within their own unique living involvements with them. Crucially, I will argue, this kind of responsive action and understanding only becomes available to us in our relations with living forms if we enter into dialogically-structured relations with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers. I will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or “withness-thinking,” to contrast it with the “aboutness-thinking” that is more familiar to us. In articulating its nature, I will draw on the work of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein, along with Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi. Central to it and quite unavailable to us in aboutness-thinking, is our subsidiary awareness (Polanyi, 1958) of certain “action guiding anticipations” that become available to us within any ongoing processes in which we happen to be engaged, such that we always have an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what next might occur.

Key words: action research, process, withness-thinking, action guiding anticipations, dialogically-structured relations

“Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself...Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us” (Bergson, 1911, pp322-323).

“It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed to escape... This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinematographical method aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits... it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow... by accustoming [the mind] to install itself within the moving, but by developing also another faculty, complementary to the intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real... a life of the real” (Bergson, 1911, pp.343-344).

Currently, there is much discussion of the concept of process (Chia, 2002, 2003; Chia & Tsoukas, 2002, 2003). Indeed, “Theorizing Process in Organizational Research” was the focal topic in a recent European Organization Studies Summer Workshop . There was, however, an important caveat in the original call for papers for that Workshop: all the offered attempts to theorize process should keep in mind the aim of rethinking appropriate styles of empirical research. On the face of it, from a rational point of view, this would seem to be both a highly desirable aim as well as a quite unexceptional one. What else could possibly be one’s goal in organizational research? Prior to our inquiries into a something, we need to know what that something is, and surely, that is best accomplished by the systematic formulation of an explanatory theory as to its nature?

Losing the phenonomena

Below, however, I want to discuss some major difficulties with the adoption of this approach in this instance, when we are concerned with processes within which we ourselves are, or at least can be, embedded as practitioners. For, as I see it, as (action) researchers, as co-practitioners along with those with whom we are conducting our inquiries, our task is to develop styles of thought and talk that allow those primarily involved in the particular processes in question, to uniquely affect the flow of those processes from within their own unique living involvements with them. Thus, to pose the difficulty we face as that of theorizing process in relation to empirical inquiry, may be wholly misleading: it can lead us into beginning our inquiries with a quite inappropriate orientation toward our own overall aims. For, if as action researchers we are interested in adopting a more collaborative or participatory approach in our inquiries, it can lead us instead to seek our own wilful, manipulative, and individualistic control over the processes in question – for this, after all, is the practical aim of scientific investigations (see Shotter, 1999). But more than this, it can mislead us in our inquiries to arriving on the scene too late and to looking in the wrong direction with the wrong attitude in mind: too late, because we take the ‘basic elements’ in terms of which we must work and conduct our arguments to be already fixed in existence; in the wrong direction, because we look backward toward supposed already existing actualities, rather than forward toward possibilities; and with the wrong attitude, because we seek a static picture, a theoretical representation, of a phenomenon, rather than a living sense of it as an active agency in our lives. In short, in Garfinkel’s (2002, pp.264-267) terms, we “lose the phenomena.”

              We lose the phenomena because mainstream theory-driven research portrays practitioners as people who simply choose and reflect (or reflect and choose) in the performance of their actions. It fails to portray them as participants already caught up in a ceaselessly ongoing process who – in the face of the constraints and limited resources it affords them, as well as the responses it ‘calls for’ from them – must produce from within that ongoing process, both recognizable and accountable utterances and actions, recognizable sounds and movements. In moving on inside a world that is making them whilst they are making it, they are not able to reflect on that world as a finished object: they know what they are doing, i.e., they can account for it to others if challenged; they know why they are doing it, i.e., they have a reason for it; but what they still don’t yet know, is what their doing has done – it may in the end all turn out badly. An overall evaluation of the outcome of their actions is possible only on their final completion (whenever that may be). Theory-driven research, however, approaches the process of people acting as a sequence of already completed actions, and reflects back on them with the aim of mastering their rational reproduction. In so doing, their sequential unfolding is represented as a sequence of static, well-defined, already existing states or positions, occurring juxtaposed with each other like beads on a string (with time being seen as a fourth dimension of space). It fails to account for the myriad situated details to which an actor must attend and respond in their struggles to creatively produce their actions in the first place.

              Wittgenstein (1953) captures the ease with which we can mislead ourselves into adopting an inappropriate way of thinking about and looking at the phenomena around us and within us in our inquiries in the following remark: “How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states... arise.? – The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) – And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them” (no.308, my emphasis).

              So, if we want to “attach ourselves to the inner becoming of things,” as Bergson (1911, p.322) suggests we should, if we want to gain a more direct apprehension of the passing reality within we have and live our lives, what can we do? As I see it, there is an important distinction to be made between what, loosely, we might call the relation of useful conversational talk to the conduct and development of organizational processes, and the attempt to formulate rigorous (scientific) theories appropriate to these tasks. Indeed, I want to go so far as to argue for the inappropriateness of strict, systematic theories and special terminology in attempts to understand and to produce change in organizations, and for the appropriateness of everyday conversational talk (Shotter and Cunliffe, 2002). For, as I see it, such talk works to un-relate us to the very events occurring around us that – if we were to re-relate ourselves appropriately to them – could in fact provide us with the very the “action guiding” sensibility we require if we are to ‘go on’ to respond to such events appropriately. But clearly, for everyday conversational talk to be useful in this way, it must be related in certain crucial ways to the processes within which it can exert its influence. It is the nature of these special relations, and how they have in fact been already illuminated by a whole galaxy of concerned writers, that I want to explore further below.

Talk that can influence our ‘ways of seeing’

Whilst there are quite a number of writers oriented toward helping us think about the inner movements occurring in processes “from the outside,” so to speak, that is, about the inner movements occurring in processes that we can observe as happening over there – and here I have in mind the brilliant work of such writers and thinkers in the recent past as William James, Henri Bergson, and Gregory Bateson among many others – there is another set of writers who, I think, can more immediately help us in gaining an understanding “from within” those processes in which we are, or can be, involved, and which, because of our involvement, we can affect. And here I have in mind, and will be drawing on the work of such writers as Bakhtin and Wittgenstein, along with Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi.

              They can, I think, be of a more immediate help to us, because they have realized that there are other ways of seeing, understanding, thinking, and acting that becomes available to us in our relations with living forms, if we can enter into responsive, dynamic or dialogical relations with them – a relational-responsive way of understanding that is quite different in kind from the referential-representational form we are used to in our more intellectual dealings with our surroundings. Elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a & b), I have called this kind of understanding and thinking, an understanding-from-within, but here I will call it simply, withness-thinking. It is a kind of momentary knowledge that one can only have from within one’s active, ongoing relations with the others and othernesses in one’s surroundings, and which disappears as soon as one’s active involvements with them cease.

              In Polanyi’s (1958) terms, in withness-thinking, we might say that instead of thinking with a focal awareness of the end point of a process in mind, we think along with a subsidiary awareness of certain felt experiences as they occur to us from within our engaged (or responsive) involvement in a particular unfolding process, and that these responsive inner feelings play a crucial role in guiding our actions – or, as I will put it from now on, we experiencing ourselves in our engaged or involved activities as being issued with “acting guiding calls or advisories.” As is well-known, Polanyi (1958) introduced his notion of “tacit knowledge” as exerting an action guiding function thus: “When we use a hammer to drive a nail, we attend to both nail and hammer, but in a different way... When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail. Yet in a sense we are certainly alert to the feelings in our palm and the fingers that hold the hammer. They guide us in handling it effectively, and the degree of attention that we give to the nail is given to the same extent but in a different way to these feelings... They are not watched in themselves: we watch something else while keeping intensely aware of them. I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail” (p.55). To repeat, the feelings of which we are subsidiarily aware in our palm and fingers are required to guide us in our handling of the hammer effectively; it is impossible to hammer skilfully with anaesthetized hands.

              But let me also note, it is only those of us who have had a great deal of hammering experience – my own early background was in carpentry and engineering – who will find Polanyi’s written account capable of re-arousing such feelings in them, capable of reminding them of the nature and role of such subsidiary awarenesses. I make this comment here, as later, I want to discuss the relevance of Wittgenstein’s (1953) use of an everyday, conversational kind of language to remind us of things that are already “already in plain view” (no.89) in our interactions with the others and othernesses around us, things which we already ‘know’ in our practical doings, but which we cannot easily give an account of when asked. For, as I indicted above, there is a certain kind of conversational talk that can be a powerful help to us in further refining and developing our practices, in reflecting back to us at crucial moments, important aspects of our practices from within our own conduct of them.

              In turning then to events occurring between us, to our everyday use of language, which is much more familiar to all of us than (perhaps) hammering nails, we find that Bakhtin (1986) nicely captures some aspects of the special nature of what I called above withness-knowing, when he suggests that: “All real and integral understanding is actively responsive... And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth...” (p.69). In other words, we do not have to wait for speakers to complete their utterances before we can understand their speech sufficiently to respond to it in practice. For present to us in our spontaneous bodily responsiveness to their voicing of their utterances as they unfold, are action guiding anticipatory understandings of what they might, possibly say next. For again, as Bakhtin (1986) notes: “The utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communication... [F]rom the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created... From the very beginning, the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response” (p.94). And all these relationally-responsive understandings happen spontaneously , as a result no doubt of the countless hours of training we have had in our prior involvements in our culture . We do not have to ‘work them out’, self-consciously and deliberately.

              To see the relevance of Bakhtin’s remarks above to the special nature of withness-knowing, consider a speaker asking us the following complex question: “What crucial features of a dynamic, interactive process are lost in attempting to represent such a process as a sequence of static configurations of separate parts joined to each other as a sequence in terms of the laws of motion of such parts?” In answering any such question, we must continually think with the question’s voice in mind to guide us in our attempts to formulate (to write out) answer to it; and of course, as soon as we begin the process of producing an answer, we must also think with what we have already written in mind as well, to guide in our further thinking as to what an appropriate answer requires. We repeatedly voice the question to ourselves in the hope of it calling new responses from us. It is precisely these unique action guiding anticipatory understandings arising out of our acting with a question in mind – which arise, in fact, in our voicing the question again to ourselves in our “inner speech” (Vygotsky, 1986) – that are lost when our unique, once-off, creative responses to the ‘questions’ posed to us by the others and othernesses in our surroundings are refashioned as a willfully planned de-contextualized actions. What originally occurred as a unique answer to a unique question coming to us from our surroundings, is re-composed into an action that can be executed by any isolated individual, anywhere, at anytime.

              But, as I indicated above, if we are to respond appropriately to the unique events occurring around us, we need to re-relate ourselves to them in such a way that they arouse in us the uniquely appropriate “action guiding anticipations” that can enable us to ‘go on’ to respond to them appropriately. And this, I suggest, is precisely how we might best relate ourselves to a theorist’s utterances when they are talking of human communication and other human practices familiar to us: not by making use of his/her generalized representational meaning, i.e., what the theorist is supposedly talking about, what they are attempting to picture as an essential state of affairs ‘over there’; but by our responding to and thinking with his/her relationally-responsive meanings in mind as guides, as “reminders,” as to how best, practically, to ‘go on’ in relation to the unique events currently occurring around us. For it is their utterances in the course of their speaking (when, that is, they are speaking of situations with which we are all familiar) that can guide us in acting effectively. For, if we can keep their voicing of their utterances in mind, like the powerful voices of our parents who instructed us in our first ways of acting in our community (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), they can arouse in us the possible action guiding advisories that can give us a sense of how to ‘go on’ in the situations of which they speak in their talk.

              As an example of what I mean here, we can take Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark, to do with how, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ what you are trying to teach them, you sometimes simply put another example in front of them: “I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being 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 things. (Indian mathematicians: “Look at this.”)” (no.144). Looking now with the action guiding awareness aroused in him by the new example, he now ‘gets it.’ But we are all familiar with teachers saying to us, while watching over our attempts to carry out a skilled practice, “Not like that (repeating in exaggerated form our still not quite right attempt), but like this (executing the act now with emphatic finesse).” Thus to bring to our attention the crucial differences between our own attempt to ‘get it’, with what a poised or self-possessed ‘getting it’ consists in, where sure a confident ‘getting it’ consists in, as we shall see, a performance that meets a complex multiplicity of intertwined and not wholly articulable criteria.

              Thus, to the question as to whether there a form of inquiry, with associated ways of talking and thinking, that can capture the character of such action guiding anticipations, and recreate them when necessary in such a way that they can, so to speak, be ‘carried over’ into new circumstances different from those in which they were originally created, then I think we can answer: there is! Indeed, it will be precisely the inserting, or the chiasmic intertwining (see Shotter, 2003), at an appropriate moment of an event that arouses an “action guiding subsidiary awareness” at that moment in a practice, that can, I think, lead to a correction, a refining, or an elaboration of the practice in question. Thus it is on inserting events of this kind at appropriate moments into a practice that we need to focus, I suggest, if we are to rethink the styles of empirical research appropriate to our re-visioning of organizational processes.

Living expression

Why have we not been aware of this possibility before? What has prevented us from “attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things” (Bergson, 1911, p.322)? In Bergson’s view, it is because we have approached our difficulties as intellectual difficulties, and it is “the function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little provided the end is attained... and thence it comes also that only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our mind: the movements constituting the action itself either elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly” (Bergson, 1911, p.315). In other words, in being concerned with practical affairs, we have thought only in terms of visible objects, identifiable positions in space, and sequences of self-contained actions – and this, of course, is essentially the “external world” of the intellect as set out in Descartes’s Discours of 1631 (Descartes, 1968).

              Elsewhere (Shotter, 2003), I have set out the characteristics of the Cartesian world view in detail, so I will not repeat them here. Suffice it here to mention two of its central ideas: One is the idea of the universe (and everything in it) as being made up of an aggregate or configuration of independently existing, unchanging, separate parts, which, at each instant in time, can be found to have taken up one or another configuration according to an now absent God’s externally imposed laws of motion. The other is the idea that inquiries based in this divide and rule approach, will enable us to put the things in nature “to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78). And clearly, it is a view of the world around us that has enabled us to exploit it extensively to our own ends. But, as Milic Capek (1961) remarks with regard to the classical world view: “When we speak of the classical picture of physical reality, we are indicating by the very choice of the word its most significant character: its pictorial nature” (p.3). And it is the action guiding advisories implicit in this Cartesian discourse (Foucault, 1969) that is constitutive of the current mainstream consensus as to what proper research is.

              Indeed, regarding his own difficulties in this respect, Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (no.115). In other words, because the urges and compulsions, the inclinations and temptations, the anticipations and expectations that guide our everyday actions are implicit in the spontaneous flow of our ordinary everyday talk of practical things, they are extremely difficult to overcome. They cannot be “solved” as intellectual problems. As Wittgenstein (1980) also notes: “What makes a subject hard to understand – if its something significant and important – is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.17). So, although we often think that our problems can be solved by doing yet more research, an important set of problems are not of that kind at all: they are orientational problems, problems of the will, to do both with how we relate ourselves to events occurring in our surroundings, and with our relations to our own responses to them.

              In other words, it is not because we lack knowledge, data, or information that we fail to attach ourselves to the inner becoming of things; it is because we approach them with a whole set of inappropriate, taken for granted intellectual expectations and anticipations in mind (of which we are often unaware, and remain unaware). As a result, we often ignore something that in fact is very obvious to us indeed. We ignore the very special nature of living expression , and we fail to understand what it is that makes it very different from the mere locomotive movement of things and objects in space, that we describe in terms of a collection of independent particles taking up different positions in space at different instants in time. Let me make eight points:

1.           First, rather than simply being re-arrangements or re-configurations of separately existing parts, which at each instant in time take up a new configuration (according to pre-existing laws or principles), expressive movements are the movements of indivisible, dynamic, self-structurizing, unitary, living wholes, each one utterly unique in and to itself.

2.           Thus next, besides their moving around in space, living wholes as such can also be sensed as moving within themselves. Such expressive movements can be sensed as occurring through time, even if the bodies of the relevant living beings stay steadfastly fixed in a particular location in space – they breath, they make noises, they wave their limbs about, and so on.

3.           Thirdly, in so doing, they seem to display both short-term expressive ‘inner’ movements – smiles, frowns, gestures, vocalizations, etc. – the expressions of a ‘thou’, i.e., of their own living identity, and more long term ‘inner’ movements, i.e., of their aging. Indeed, all such living wholes endure through a whole continuous, sequential life process: A process that begins with their initial conception (in a two-being interaction); that leads to their birth (as an individual being); then their growth to maturity (as an autonomous being); and then their death.

4.           So fourthly, while dead assemblages can be constructed piece by piece from objective parts – that is, from parts that retain their character irrespective of whether they are a part of the assemblage or not – living, indivisible wholes cannot. On the contrary, they grow. And in the course of exchanges with their surroundings, they transform themselves, internally, from simple individuals into richly structured ones. In this growth, their ‘parts’ are not only a constant state of change , but they owe their very existence both to their relations to each other and to their relations to themselves at some earlier point in time. Thus the history of their structural transformations in time is of more consequence than the logic of their momentary structure(s) in space.

5.           Thus fifthly, there is not only a kind of developmental continuity involved in the unfolding of all living activities, but all living entities also imply their surroundings, so to speak; in their very nature, they come into existence ready to grow into their own appropriate environment, or Umwelt (von Uexkull, 1957). There is thus a distinctive ‘inner dynamic’ to living wholes not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages, such that the earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least the style of what is to come later – we can thus respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion.

6.           Thus sixthly, in always giving rise to what we might call identity preserving changes, they and their ‘parts’ are always ‘on the way’ to becoming more than they already are. This is why their special, living nature cannot be captured in a timeless, ‘everything-present-together’, spatial structure or a single order of logical connectedness (systematic theories won’t do it!).

7.           And seventhly, when two or more such forms of life ‘rub together’, so to speak, in their meetings, they always create a third or a collective form of life a) in which they all sense themselves participating, and b) which has a life of its own, with its own ‘voice’ and ‘callings’, and its own way of ‘pointing’ toward the future.

8.           And finally, eighthly, the meeting together of two slight different, but not too different, forms of life, or processes, has a chiasmic, or complexly intertwined quality to it – it is the optic chiasma in binocular vision which creates the ‘relational dimension’ of depth; the two slightly different views from the two eyes are chiasmically related, i.e., dynamically intertwined (Bateson, 1979; Merleau-Ponty, 1968).

It is no wonder that in commenting on the nature of living movement as a continuously flowing process, Bergson (1911) suggested that “... there is more in a movement than in the successive positions attributed to the moving object, more in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, more in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one after another. Philosophy can therefore derive terms of the second kind from those of the first, but not the first from the second: from the first terms [Bergson’s own intuitive form of] speculation must take its start. But the intellect reverses the order of the two groups; and, on this point, ancient philosophy proceeds as the intellect does. It installs itself in the immutable, it posits only Ideas” (p.333). We can now perhaps get a sense of what is lost when we install ourselves in the immutable in order to gain a wholly cognitive/intellectual grasp of the others and othernesses in our surroundings in solely in the interest of mastery.

What is lost in trying to theorize process ‘from the outside’

As I have already mentioned, one reason is that I am troubled by the very notion of trying to “theorize” process is that (at least it seems to me) such a term carries with it an enormous amount of implicit and unexamined conceptual baggage (Shotter, 1999). Besides requiring us to address the subject(s) of our inquiries as if we ourselves are disembodied, disinterested creatures able to adopt a God’s eye view (Haraway, 1991) – and to treat our subjects as if they were not subjects at all but objects – we also find ourselves committed to searching for something radically hidden, for something that can only be arrived at as an “interpretation,” as a “reading,” or as a “representation,” a something that has become so utterly unavailable to us just as a result of our cutting ourselves off from our access to it ‘in’ the events that are unfolding around us (Shotter, 2000). In short, “theorizing” leads us to cut ourselves off from being spontaneously responsive to people’s expressions.

              As I have already suggested, we do not understand people’s expressions intellectually, in a referential-representational manner; we understand them bodily in a relationally-responsive manner. It is a kind of historical or gestural understanding which primarily takes their temporal ‘movement’ into account. Rather than an instantaneous ‘getting the picture’, it arouses within us an unfolding inner movement that occurs over time, and which – like a piece of music – has a unique temporal ‘shape’ or ‘identity’ to it that points us toward a future yet to come that has a particular style to it.

              It is our sense of this ‘future indicating shape’ that is lost in our adoption of the Cartesian-Cinematographical (C-C), pictorial way of relating ourselves to our surroundings (Bergson, 1911). For strangely, an important aspect of their ‘shape’ that is lost to us, is their open, unfinished nature that ‘points’ us, so to speak, toward their ‘horizons’. Describing our surroundings solely in terms of spatial (or pictorial) configurations (mis)leads us into forgetting, not only the essential differences between dead assemblages of externally related parts, but also the essential difference between, in Bergson’s (1911) terms, changes of succession, i.e., the continuous emergence into being of a living unity, and changes of juxtaposition, i.e., the mere changes of standing side-by-side, such pictorial representations imply. And this then leads us on, only too easily, into reducing the differences between past, present, and future merely to differences of position, with ‘past’ events being thought of as lying to the left of a point representing the ‘present’, with ‘future’ events to the right. In other words, the irreversible flow of time is forgotten, and we forget that a successive or expressive movement has continually, in each of its successive moments, to struggle to come into existence – for, at each moment of its realization, it is, so to speak, navigating in a sea of possibilities, all of which must be excluded in its own unique realization.

              Indeed, even more is lost or forgotten. For, not only are unique, irreversible changes, with their own unique character, taking place, but novel changes of an inevitably creative, only once occurrent kind are occurring; they cannot not occur – this is what is implied in the very notion of the irreversible flow of time, i.e., in Bergson’s (1911) notion of “duration” (see note 3).

              But it is not just our anticipations of that which has not yet occurred, that we lose in C-C accounts of change, we also lose our sense of other people (and things) as having an ‘inner life’ of their own! Bergson (1911) puts it thus:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially” (p.322).

It is the “inner becoming” of indivisible things, including our surrounding circumstances, that is lost to us. For, for as I indicated above, in C-C accounts, all movement is treated merely as observed differences in position (to and from positions that are in fact already in existence). As Bergson (1911) puts it, this because we try to re-compose living movement from a sequence of “possible immobilities” (p. 327) . And after our many years of training in our everyday world of practical activities, in which so much of our talk is oriented towards dealing with visibly describable and manually tangible entities existing in a ‘picturable’ world, it is terribly difficult for us to undo (deconstruct) these habits of thought within ourselves.

Gaining ongoing understandings of how to go on

Yet, I want to claim, there is a way, and it is a way that does not entail our inventing a whole set of new methods de novo. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, it is not a matter of “hunt[ing] out new facts... [or of] seek[ing] to learn something new.. We want to understand something that is already in plain view... Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it” (no.89). For example, if were now to ask a question – say, “What so far seem to be the relation between Shotter’s approach here, and Bergson’s account of creative evolution?” – you could all make a good shot at giving an answer. But if then asked: “What seemed to be involved, what movements of thought, so to speak, did you undertake in formulating your answer?” – that would be a much more difficult question to answer. About such a circumstance, in which we perform a complex action fairly effortlessly (in which in Polanyi’s (1967, p.8) phrase, we show that we “know more than [we] can tell”), Wittgenstein (1953) suggests that we must start by “reminding” ourselves of what it is that we already know – where that something of which we need to remind ourselves, is “obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself” (no.89).

              It is with Wittgenstein’s (1953) voicing of these remarks in mind, that I want to begin to claim, that there is, “parallel to... physics, a second kind of knowledge,” which (to rephrase Bergson a little) does retain what physics has allowed to escape, that is, a second kind of knowledge that sets the cinematographical method aside and does actually follow the very flux of the real by installing itself within the life, within the living movement of the real (Bergson, 1911, pp.343-344). In adopting it, instead of thinking about changes in a living, indivisible state of affairs from the outside in terms of them going through a sequence of separate immobile spatial configurations, we can begin to think in accord with their changing nature from within our living relations with them. For, if we can allow ourselves to be spontaneously responsive to the temporal unfolding of their expressive movements, then we can find that same unfolding movement within our own bodily-felt experience.

              But we can only find that same unfolding movement within our own bodily-felt experience if we are prepared to enter into, what I will call, a living relation with the others and othernesses around us. And action guiding sense of an other’s or otherness’s inner life can become available to us if we enter into an embodied, spontaneously responsive relation with them, a relation in which we are continuously responsive (in a reciprocally expressive manner) to their expressions, their ‘inner’ movements as they unfold in time.

              Following Bakhtin (1984), we call these two-way relations, in which our expressive-responsive activities are spontaneously intertwined or interwoven with those of the others with whom we are engaged or involved, dialogically-structured relations – to contrast them with monological forms of relation. For: “Monologue is finalized and deaf to other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (p.293). Whereas: “The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue... To live means to participate in dialogue” to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds” (p.293).

              In the recent past (and still amongst many cognitive scientists), the main function of language is thought to be that of conveying our thoughts to another person in the form of a “mental representation,” a picture as it were. And, to understand the other person’s utterance, we must ‘get the picture’! Hence, we study sentence forms to try to understand how they manage to represent their content. Bakhtin’s (1986) approach could not be more different. Rather than seeking meaning in terms of patterns of already spoken words, i.e., in what is said, he seeks it in our very words in their speaking, i.e., in our embodied uttering of them, as we utter them.

              Above, I have characterized these two forms of understanding, of the saying and of what is said, as being of a relationally-responsive (withness) or representational-referential (aboutness) kind, but what I want to emphasize here, is that crucial amongst the many other distinctions between these two forms of understanding, is the orientation of relationally-responsive, or withness-talk, toward the future. Let me underline this with another of Bakhtin’s (1981) remarks:

“The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue” (p.280, my emphasis).

This, then, as I now see it, is the major feature shift in focus in action research that we need: 1) to shift our attention away from the deliberate thought and actions of individuals (especially those of theorists), and turn toward events happening spontaneously out in the world between us and the others and othernesses around us ; and further, 2) to attend to those events as aspects or as embedded in larger indivisible wholes within which we ourselves are also embedded.

              Where our goal in doing this is, so to speak, re-relate ourselves intellectually to the actual events that are spontaneously influencing the shape of our actions, to re-relate ourselves in fact to the events that can issue us with the very “action guiding calls” we need if we are to ‘go on’ appropriately in response to them (Shotter, 2003). But this can only be done if, in Bakhtin’s (1984) terms, we enter into dialogically-structured relations with the others and othernesses around us, and literally treat them as beings ‘who’ can issue such ‘calls’ to us.

Conclusions

Here, then, we can begin to see another way in which what we call ‘theory’ – but I will call it the voicing of ‘theory-talk’ to ourselves – can influence us in our practical actions out in the world of our everyday, practical affairs. The words of the theorist, i.e., his or her utterances, can ‘instruct’ us, can ‘direct’ our attention toward this or that aspect of events occurring around us in our surroundings. As Vygotsky (1978) puts it: “The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech” (p.32) – and we as adults can also come to see the world around us through our speech as well.

              Hence, instead of turning away from such events, and burying ourselves in thought in an attempt to explain them within an appropriate theoretical scheme (thus to respond to them in general terms of our own), we can turn ourselves more responsively toward them, to open ourselves to responding to aspects of them in their own terms. Indeed, we can begin an extensive and intensive, i.e., nuanced and detailed, two-way exploratory interaction with them, approaching them this way and that way... while being ‘moved’ to act in this way and that in accord with the beneficial ‘reminders’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.127) or ‘pointers’ donated to us by those who have found such ‘pointers’ useful in their own similar such explorations.

              In other words, seeing with the saying of another’s words in mind can itself be a thoughtful, feelingful, way of seeing, while thinking with the saying of another’s words in mind can also be a feelingful, seeingful, way of thinking – a way of seeing and thinking that brings one into a close and personal, living contact with one’s surroundings, with their subtle but mattering details. Hence, this is a style of seeingful and feelingful thought that can be of help to us in our practical daily affairs, and in further explorations of our own human lives together. It can be used in ordinary interpersonal communication, psychotherapy, intercultural communication, management, administration, government, etc., and, in fact, we need to note, it is also needed in science, in understanding how ‘aboutness (monological)-thinking’ can actual work.

              The specific words of another, if they are uttered at a timely moment as a ‘reminder’ as to the possible character of our next step within an ongoing practical activity, can thus be a crucial influence in the development and refinement of that activity. The kind of knowledgeable inquiry involved here begins with our being “struck,” with our noticing of, to use Bateson’s (1979) phrase, a “differences that make a difference” (p.453). Elsewhere (e.g., Shotter 1996, 1997, 2001), I have discussed in particular the suitability of Wittgenstein’s (1953) methods for inquiries of this kind – inquiries into unique, only once-occurrent circumstances, in which participants within them are concerned to elaborate and refine. For, as he notes: “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’[Goethe]” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.31). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?,” he can be heard as going on to ask himself: “Presumably,” he answers, “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” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.541).

              In other words, it is precisely from, and only from, such striking events that new ways of thinking, seeing, talking, valuing, and being, can begin and be developed. And indeed, Dr. Arlene Katz and I (Katz and Shotter, 1996a & 1996b; Shotter and Katz, 1996; Shotter, 1998), making use of Wittgenstein’s remarks (along with remarks from any others), have begun to develop a set of methods that we call the methods of a “social poetics.” Its overall aim is the development within a collaborating group of appropriate ‘ways of looking’, i.e., of paying attention, to subtle and fleeting once-occurrent events of importance in their shared practice, along with an appropriate vocabulary for not only creating and sustaining these ‘ways of looking’, those sensitivities, but also for sustaining the open, dialogical forms of relationship within which such forms of spontaneous responsivity are possible. If they can be sustained, then, in such forms of co-operative, synergistic, or collaborative practices, it is possible to develop self-reflecting, self-critical, self-researching, and thus self-developing practices. But to say this, is not to say anything very revolutionary, for such a form of ‘research’ is already a part of our everyday practices ; it is only revolutionary to recognize that fact.

              We have here, then, a process of inquiry in which practitioners become co-researchers, and researchers become co-practitioners, as each articulates what they have been ‘struck by’ in the unfolding process. It is a process in which both researchers and practitioners alike are engaged in creating with each other an “action guiding” sense from within their lived and living experience of their shared circumstances. But such an action guiding sense can emerge only in the collaborative dialogical activities occurring between them; once it ceases, such a guiding sense ceases to exist. While it is in existence, practice, teaching and research can all be enfolded within each other, while one in-forms and creates the other in a ever evolving, generative fashion. Both inquiry and learning in this process thus becomes a matter of “practical authorship” (Shotter and Cunliffe, 2003) in which managers and workers, researchers and practitioners, all co-construct that which they create and learn together. But in such a process, it is not only the participants’ shared circumstances that are refined and further developed, participants also change in their identities – for the changes within them are not only epistemological, they are also ontological (Shotter, 1984). It is our spontaneous, embodied ways of seeing and acting in the world that we change.... we change in who we ‘are’.

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bateson, G. (1973) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin.

Bergson, H. (1911) Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan.

Capek, M. (1961) The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics. New York: Van Nostrand.

Chia, R. (2002) Time, Duration and Simultaneity: Rethinking Process and Change in Organizational Analysis. Organization Studies, (2002) 23/6, pp.863-868.

Chia, R. (2003) From Knowledge-Creation to Perfecting Action: Tao, Basho and Pure Experience as the Ultimate Ground of Performance. Human Relations, 56/8, pp. 953 - 981.

Chia, R. and Tsoukas, H. (2002) On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science, Sept/October , pp. 567-582.

Chia, R. and Tsoukas, H. (2003) Everything Changes and Nothing Endures… Process Studies, 32/2, pp. 196-224.

Cunliffe, A.L. (2001) Everyday conversations: a social poetics of managing. Concepts and Transformations, 6:3, pp.295-315.

Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. with introduction by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications.

Gadamer, H-G (1989) Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition, trans J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall. New York: Continum.

Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology's Program: Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, edited and introduced by Anne Warefield Rawls. New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Hertz, H.H. (1956) The Principles of Mechanics. New York: Dover (orig. German pub. 1894).

Katz, A.M. and Shotter, J (1996a) Hearing the patient’s voice: a social poetics in diagnostic interviews. Social Science and Medicine, 43, pp.919-931.

Katz, A.M. & Shotter, J. (1996b) Resonances from within the practice: social poetics in a mentorship program. Concepts and Transformations, 2, pp.97-105.

Katz, A.M., Siegel, B.S., and Rappo, P. (1997) Reflections from a collaborative pediatric mentorship program: building community of resources. Ambulatory Child Care, 3. pp.101-112.

Katz, A.M., Conant, L., Inui, T., Baron, D. and Bor, D. (2000) A council of elders: creating a community of care. Social Science and Medicine, 50. pp.851-860.

Katz, A.M. and Shotter, J. (2004) On the way to “presence:” methods of a ‘social poetics’. In Glenn Larner and David Pare (Eds.) Critical Knowledge and Practice in Psychology and Therapy Hawthorne Press, pp.69-82.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968)

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, also New York: Harper and Row Torchbook, 1962.

Polanyi, M. (1967) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Shotter, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shotter, J. (1999) Problems with the ‘way of theory’. In W. Maiers, B. Bayer, B. Duarte Esgalhado, R. Jorna and E. Schraube (Eds.) Challenges to Theoretical Psychology. North York, CA: Captus Press.

Shotter, J. (2000) Wittgenstein and the everyday: from radical hiddenness to “nothing is hidden;” from representation to participation. Journal of Mundane Behavior, 1(2), pp.116-134.

Shotter, J. (2003) Cartesian change, chiasmic change – the power of living expression. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts, Spring 2003, 6(1), pp.6-29.

Shotter, (2003) The intellectual legitimacy of action research: its grounding in ‘the interactive moment’. Human Systems, 14(1-4), pp.95-116.

Shotter, J. & Katz, A. M. (1996) Articulating a practice from within the practice itself: establishing formative dialogues by the use of a 'social poetics'. Concepts and Transformations, 2, pp. 71-95.

Shotter, J. and Cunliffe, A.L. (2002) Managers as practial authors: conversations for action. In R.Thorpe and D. Holman (Eds.) Language and Management. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Uexkull, J. (1957) A stroll through the world of animals and men. . In C.H. Schiller (Ed.) Instinctive Behaviour. London: Methuen.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (Eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language. Translation newly revised by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L.W. (1974) Philosophical Grammar. Edited by Rush Rees, tanslated by Anthony Kenny. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980a) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980b) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Notes: