First draft of a
very long, written version of a paper for the Psychologies and Identities Conference, University of Bergamo, Italy,
October 3rd - 4th, 2003... a much shorter version will be delivered on the day.
INSIDE THE MOMENT OF SPEAKING:
IN OUR MEETINGS WITH OTHERS, WE CANNOT SIMPLY BE OURSELVES:
John Shotter
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3586
“The child begins to practice with respect to himself the same forms of behavior that others
formerly practiced with respect to him” (Vygotsky, 1966, pp.39-40).
“Hence, we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to
the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function” (Vygotsky,1966,
p.43).
“(meaning is a physiognomy)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568).
“There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in
speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.179).
“It is not experience that organizes expression. but the other way around - expression organizes
experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction”
(Voloshinov, 1986, p.85).
“Each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of
the given sphere of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.91).
“For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other
social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more
immediately available” (Williams, 1977, pp.133-134).
Over the last 15 years or so, my major interest has been in trying to spell out in some detail, what life is like for us
from within the “interactive moment,” what it is like for us to be acting dialogically, to be reacting in a spontaneous
and bodily way to the expressive-responsive activities of the others and othernesses around us. Today, however, I
want to focus on just one aspect of our lives within such dialogical involvements: what is life like for us as speaker-actors within them? What is going on inside us as speaker-actors within the moment of speaking and acting? How
might we chart or map the ‘inner movements’ occurring within us as we give ‘shape’ to the contributions we make to
the activities in which we are participating?
Crucially, there is something about the way in which, in living activities, there is always a kind of
developmental continuity involved in their unfolding, such that earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least
the style, the physiognomy, i.e., the unique living identity, of what is to come later – something, we shall find, to do
with the ‘shape’ of the living being’s activities in time, their temporal unfolding. Just as acorns only grow into oak
trees and not rose bushes, and eggs only produce chickens and not rabbits, so all living activities, it seems, give rise
to what we might call identity preserving changes or deformations – their possible ends are already ‘there’
is their
beginnings. In other words, our spontaneous, expressive-responsive bodily activities ‘point beyond’ themselves. In
being responsive to their surrounding circumstances, they not only have an indicative or mimetic relation to them,
even if their surroundings are invisible to those who merely witness them, but in so doing, they have an internal,
rather than an external relation to them – rather than simply an ‘add-on’ extra, they are ‘participant parts’ in a larger
whole
. Hence the possibility of their gestural nature, and the fact that others can, so to speak, ‘follow’ us, and link
their actions in an intelligible manner in with our’s. For others also live out their lives from within the same
surroundings as we ourselves, and can be, or are, oriented toward and sensitive to their features in the same way as
ourselves also. Later, I will link these comments on style, and physiognomic-expressive meaning, and on the
importance of internal relations, in with the different ways in which both Vygotsky’s and Wittgenstein’s writings
direct our attention to the importance of syntax and of logical-grammar in our use of language and speech. Because I
will be referring to this feature of our living activities over and over again, I will call it the intrinsic identity
preserving nature of our living activities.
What is also, I think, crucial – also arising out of the special nature of living things – is that many things of
importance to them occur only in meetings of one kind or another. Something very special occurs when two or more
living beings meet and begin to respond to each other (more happens than them merely having an impact on one
another). As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it: “our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our
reactions are different” (no.284). But more than this, there is in such meetings the creation of qualitatively new, quite
novel and distinct forms of life, which are more than merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing.
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1980, 1984) I have discussed this under the heading of “joint action,” and more recently
(Shotter, 1993a&b) as “dialogically-structured” activity, but here I want to go a step further and talk of it as
“chiasmically-structured” activity, following Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) account of its nature in his last book. In just a
moment, we will find that the notion of “real presences” and that of the “chiasmic structuring” of our socially created
realities, are directly connected. — But just to give a hint here of their relation, let me remind you that Bateson
(1979), in Mind and Nature, noted that the chaismic interweaving of our visual relating to our surroundings through
our two eyes, gave rise to the presence of depth in our looking.
But I will return to these topics later. Let me here return to more preliminary issues, to the influence of the
Cartesian tradition on our thinking. Due to its influence we have become accustomed to ignoring our own inner
workings. Cartesian forms of reflection seem to suggest to us that our bodies are merely the sum of all their separate
parts with no ‘interior’; while subjectively, we are wholly present to ourselves without there being any distance, so to
speak, between our thoughts and our selves, as if we are to ourselves nothing but what we think we are. It does not
occur to us that we are not as transparent to ourselves as we think; that on many occasions we are more transparent to
others; or that often we can only find out what we think by living out our ‘thoughts’ – or that often we must “let the
use of words teach you their meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.220).
Who or what is the ‘I’ that speaks and acts in a dialogical setting? What kind of being — in other words,
what kind of psychology, personality, what kind of identity — does an actor-speaker have in the moment of speaking
and acting?: that is the question I want to explore today. Although I am going to draw a lot of what I am going to say
today from the works of Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, let me give an intimation of the direction I am going to take by
referring to some comments of John Austin’s (1970) in his essay, A plea for excuses. In that essay he discusses, for
instance, the subtle inner judgments we must be making in saying that we did one thing by mistake while we did
another by accident – for, to act by mistake is have the outcome of one’s act within one’s own control throughout its
execution, while to do something by accident is not to have been in control throughout. He points out that such
‘grammatical’ studies of why one word is used rather another can give us a sense of the inner distinctions people
must be making in such choices, particularly in their adverbial expressions – when they say that someone acted
voluntarily, inadvertently, spontaneously, impulsively, recklessly, etc. And he goes on to comment that:
“Not merely do adverbial expressions pick out classes of actions, they also pick out the internal
machinery of doing actions, or the departments into which the doing of actions is organized. There
is for example the stage at which we actually carry out some action upon which we embark –
perhaps we have to make certain bodily movements or to make a speech. In the course of actually
doing these things... we have to pay (some) attention to what we are doing and to take (some) care
to guard against (likely) dangers: we may need to use judgment or tact: we must exercise sufficient
control over our bodily parts: and so on. Inattention, carelessness, errors of judgement,
tactlessness, clumsiness, all these and others are ills (with attendant excuses) which affect one
specific stage in the machinery of action, the executive stage, the stage where we muff it. But there
are many other departments in the business too, each of which is to be traced and mapped through
its cluster of verbs and adverbs. Obviously there are departments of intelligence and planning, of
decision and resolve, and so on...” (p.193).
In other words, we are not as transparent to ourselves as we assume. Speaking is a tremendously complex activity in
which more simple or basic component acts are ‘orchestrated’ – i.e., sequentially interleaved or interwoven into each
other at the appropriate temporal moment, and also into events and other’s actions occurring in one’s surrounding
circumstances – in our accomplishing of our contribution to the ongoing activities in which we are involved.
What kind of being must we be to be able to do this? It is only too easy for us to think of our inner selves as
being like our outer selves, as like a person surrounded, say, by books in a library so that when we need a word for a
particular job, we simply look up and down the shelves according to reference system well-known to us until we find
the word we need, to which we then – while looking at it on the reference book page – give voice. I want to suggest a
quite different image for the nature of our inner lives.
Setting the scene..... 1962 – 1984
As some of you may know, in the two books I published in 1993 (Shotter, 1993a and b), I called this kind of
“insider’s” understanding, “knowing of the third kind.” I called it this because, following Ryle (1949), it is not
“knowing-that,” knowledge that can be formulated in terms of facts or general principles, nor is it “knowing-how,”
knowledge of a craft or a skill, for it is the kind of unique, particular knowledge that one has “only from within a
social situation, a group, or an institution, and which thus takes into account (and is accountable to) the others in
social situation within which it is known” (Shotter, 199a, p.7). But how might we inquiry into its nature?
For: (1) articulating its nature is not a phenomenological task – for it is not a matter of penetrating inside an
individual’s consciousness; (2) nor is it a matter of bringing out into the open something merely subjective – for if
we are to act in ways understood by those around us, we must act in accountable ways (Shotter, 1984); (3) nor is it a
matter of proposing and arguing for theoretical representations of its nature – for, as we shall see in a moment below,
all such theories rest on our possession of such an inner sense of our own functioning as communicating agents
(Shotter, 1975, Shotter & Lannamann, 2002). Another form of articulation is required: to the extent that it is a matter
of making something already displayed in practice as known, but not yet as such discursively known, into something
everyone can talk about. We need to articulate it in terms of what Wittgenstein (1953) calls “reminders.”
This
provision of a set of methods for providing such reminders is, as I see it, Wittgenstein’s (1953) great achievement,
and I will describe the methods he has suggested to us – and their relations to Vygotsky’s developmental psychology,
in a moment.
But let me first make some very general orienting comments to do with my own intellectual history: Let me
begin by saying that I am no longer a fan either of postmodernism, or of post-structuralism, or of a social
constructionism formulated within postmodernist or post-structuralist terms. My dalliance with these fashions in the
later 1980's and early 1990's was a mistake: I thought, at last, there was going to be a turning toward the interests that
I had been pursuing for some time. But it wasn’t to be. These movements still all retain the elements of Cartesianism
– especially the privileging of completed texts over living speech, of theoretical thought over ongoing practical
activity – that I had for some long time been trying, and am still trying, to overcome.
Since my article’s – Men, the man-makers: George Kelly and the psychology of personal constructs in
1970, and What is it to be human? in 1974, and then later in my Images of Man in Psychological Research in 1975,
and my Social Accountability and Selfhood book in 1984 – I have been pursuing four themes (to while lately I have
added a fifth and a sixth):
‒ (Theme 1) I have been focusing on our spontaneously responsive, living, bodily reactions to the others and
othernesses around us as the source of all our later mental capacities — I have been viewing our embedding
in this kind of activity as the source of our ‘minds’, as some people might put it;
‒ (Theme 2) As I see it, all our higher mental capacities (Vygotsky) arise and have their being within these
intrinsically relationally-responsive activities;
‒ (Theme 3) Hence, the kind of knowledge that is of practical use to us – unavoidably living as participants in
these activities – must be a kind of ‘insider’s’ knowledge; we need to know ‘from within’ the moment of
acting (Shotter, 1993) how to ‘go on’ to take our next step.
‒ (Theme 4) And the major point in gaining this kind of knowledge, is to become more responsible, i.e.,
accountable, autonomous individuals within our own communities.
The two themes I will add later are:
‒ (Theme 5) The power of the speaking voice
‒ (Theme 6) The exploration of two styles of writing: ‘withness’ versus ‘aboutness’ writing
But to return now to theme 4: In an early article (Shotter, 1974), I suggested that, while certain accounts of what we
call the ‘external world’ might enable us to increase our abilities to make ‘manipulations’ within it, they utterly fail to
the nature of our inner experience of our own functioning within such a world. Thus, because of this — but also
because of the frankly speculative character of such accounts — I then suggested there an alternative basis for our
investigations in psychology: we should base all our inquiries in the sense of responsibility which we all have for our
own actions. I argued for this basis along the following lines:
“We all distinguish, and indeed if we are to be accounted reasonable human beings we all must be
able to distinguish, between that for which we as individual personalities are responsible [i.e.,
doings] and that which merely happens, irrespective of our agency [i.e., happenings]. This
distinction is fundamental not only in everyday life but also in science, where it is absolutely
fundamental: it is only because we can sense, when acting in accord with theories of what the
world might be like, whether the results of our actions accords with or depart from the expectations
engendered by the theories, that we can ever put such theories to empirical test. No more
fundamental basis for deciding the truth of empirical matters exists, nor will another ever be
found... for how could it ever be established as a true basis? It would still rest upon the basis of our
ability to recognize the consequences of our own actions. Our sense of responsibility is, then, at the
very basis of science itself; lacking any sense of their own functioning scientists would be unable
to do experiments” (Shotter, 1974, p.57)
.
My interest in the growth of autonomous, responsible action grew from my reading, first, of Luria’s 1961
book, Speech and the Regulation of Behavior, and then, of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language published in 1962.
Later I discovered his essay, Development of the higher mental functions (in Leontyev, Luria, and Smirnov, eds,
1966), and then later, of the collection of Vygotsky’s essays published under the title of Mind in Society in 1978.
There are a number of different themes in these writings which have occupied me all my academic career.
And although I have devoted much time to reading the writings of others – Wittgenstein, Vico, Bakhtin, Voloshinov,
Merleau-Ponty, Macmurray, Garfinkel, Goffman, James, Dewey, etc... – it has always been with these themes from
Vygotsky in mind. Let me introduce these themes in terms of the quotations from Vygotsky’s works that act as
“reminders” (in Wittgenstein’s, 1953, sense) for me, in orienting my attention toward what seem to me (in their light)
to be crucial features in our individual development toward our own moral and intellectual autonomy.
The first quote is of crucial importance (I will use the 1962 translation, as that is the form in which I first
encountered these remarks):
(Vygotsky quote 1) About a general law of development, Vygotsky notes that: “consciousness and
control appear only at a late stage in the development of a [mental] function, after it has been used
and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and
volitional control, we must first possess it” (1962, p.90, slightly different translation in 1986,
p.168).
In other words, what earlier is spontaneously ‘called out’ from us by others according to their requirements, we can
later come to ‘call out’ from ourselves according to our own requirements. But how is all this ‘calling out’ done?
(Vygotsky quote 2) “All the higher psychic functions are mediated processes, and signs are the
basic means used to master and direct them. The mediating sign is incorporated in their structure as
an indispensable, indeed the central, part of the total process. In concept formation that sign is the
word, which at first plays the role of means in forming the concept but later becomes its symbol”
(1962, p.56, this paragraph is missing from 1986 translation).
In what way might words be a means in this process? And what does it mean to say that all our higher psychic
functions are mediated processes? To tackle question of words as means first:
(Vygotsky quote 3) “Learning to direct one’s own mental processes with the aid of words or signs
is an integral part of the process of concept formation,”
notes Vygotsky (1962, p.59; 1986, p.108). And in the 1986 edition, the following remark is added:
(Vygotsky quote 4) “Our experimental study proved that it was the functional use of the word, or
any other sign, as means of focusing one’s attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing
and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation... Words and other signs are
those means that direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the
solution of the problem confronting us” (1986, pp.106-107, not present in 1962 translation, my
emphasis).
Words as means: words as disrupting, commanding, directing, distinguishing, and integrating
Some of the most important things we can say to another person if we are to bring about any changes in them is, it
seems to me, “Stop!, Look!, Listen!” – we can break into the routine flow of their activity; we can ‘deconstruct’
(Derrida, 1977) their practice in practice; and in so doing bring their attention to aspects of their own activity
previously unnoticed by them. To see why this is so, let me refer you to my comments above about the identity
preserving, physiognomic nature of our routine activities; the fact that they all tend to belong together and to display
a particular style. If we are to change anyone in their very being, we must transform that style in some way, it needs
to be deconstructed in its current form. To do this, and this is the power of Vygotsky’s (and Wittgenstein’s) methods,
the others around them must explicitly ‘call out’ reactions from them that they cannot yet call out from themselves
.
Indeed, this drawing of our attention to previously unnoticed aspects of our own ongoing behavior, is one of
Wittgenstein’s (1953) central methods: “... we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our
ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no.132) – like the distinction Austin mentions above, between
why we say on some occasions that we did something by accident, while on others, that we did it by mistake: we
bring to people’s attention aspects of a person’s action of which they themselves are unaware. About the temptation
we feel to say: “There must be something in common [amongst all games], or they would not be called ‘games’,” he
replies (Wittgenstein, 1953), “but look and see whether there is anything common to all.... To repeat: don’t think, but
look!” (no.66) – pay attention to the actual details.
So, to turn to a more detailed example of what Vygotsky might mean here – in speaking of words as the
means for controlling, directing, and channeling, etc., as person’s actions – we can imagine a mother saying to her
son, as he comes into the kitchen from the garden, leaving dirty footmarks from not having wiped his feet on the
doormat: “Stop! Just look what you’ve done! There... behind you... on the floor... all those dirty footmarks! Wipe
your feet next time.” Imagine the sequence, her pausing, her pacing, intonation, her exaggerated facial expressions,
her body postures. Imagine her son’s reactions. Imagine him not turning to look behind him: “Look behind you... on
the floor... look when I tell you to look... what do you see? Tell me... tell me out loud!” She doesn’t just issue her
talk toward him with her eyes and ears closed to his reactions. Only if he reacts bodily at each moment as she expects
him to react as she expresses her displeasure toward him, only if he acknowledges that he understands her as she
wants him to understand her, will she go on to her next step in ‘teaching him to behave’!! By the use, her expression,
her gestural use of words, she commands and directs various aspects of her son’s behavior: she stops his ongoing
movement, disrupts his pursuit of his own aims, re-focuses his attention and leads him to select distinctive features of
his own behavior, and to link or synthesize them to other spheres of behavior in his life – the evaluative dimension of
clean/dirty.
That is the power of her bodily expressive use of her words. Indeed, so expressive is her bodily sequencing
of her expressions in response to his, that her actual utterance of her words as such plays almost a negligible part –
indeed, we could almost play out the whole episode in silent mime... (I will play this episode out on the day... )
Such is the power of one person’s living, expressive-response activity on the actions of another – they can
be directly and immediately affected in a spontaneous fashion, as a consequence of their nature as living beings,
always, on the one hand, open to influences occurring in their surroundings, but on the other hand, only by influences
that, so to speak, ‘touch them in their being’, i.e, influences to which they already have a ‘readiness’ to respond, to
which they can, so speak, ‘resonate’. There is something very basic about our spontaneous fear of angry words, our
attraction to smooth, caressing, rhythmic movements and sounds, and so on. Our living bodies are there first in world
providing us with an initial ‘teaching’ of the things that matter to us.
Mead (1934) puts it thus: “The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of
consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the
gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78). In other words, most crucially, people’s activities have
meaning for us, not because we are conscious, not because we can reason, and can ‘figure out’ or ‘interpret’ a
person’s meanings by referring to the ‘rules’ or social ‘conventions’ they must be following in acting as they do.
Their activities have meaning for us primarily because, just as one dog in a dogfight responds in anticipation to
another drawing back in getting ready to lunge (Mead’s example of a dog fight...pp.42-46), so do we – drawing on
the identity preserving, physiognomic nature of all living activity mentioned above – respond in anticipation of
‘where’ an other’s act is ‘leading’
.
Merleau-Ponty (1964) emphasizes that it is the creativity of our living, bodily responsiveness to events
occurring around us, and not the mere workings of our subjective minds that is involved in us understanding other
people, as follows: “For more clearly (but not differently) in my experience of others than in my experience of
speech or the perceived world, I inevitable grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know
in any other way except through it. Positing another person as another myself is not as a matter of fact possible if it
is consciousness that must do it” (p.93). For, as he explains at length, that would leave us dealing only with our ideas
of others, and not with the actual persons themselves.
But in our actual, bodily dealings with the others and othernesses around us, due to the impossibility of our
not being spontaneously responsive to their activities, we must to an extent answer to their ‘calls’. Thus it is that, as
Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it so well:
“It happens that my gaze stumbles against certain sights (those of other human and, by extension,
animal bodies) and is thwarted by them. I am invested by them just when I thought I was investing
them and I see a form sketched out in space that arouses and convokes the possibilities of my own
body as if it were a matter of my own gestures or behavior. Everything happens as if the functions
of intentionality and the intentional object were paradoxically interchanged [or reversed – js]. The
scene invites me to become its adequate viewer, as if a different mind than my own suddenly came
to dwell in my body, or rather as if my mind were drawn out there and emigrated into the scene it
was in the process of setting for itself. I am snapped up by a second myself outside me; I perceive
an other” (p.94).
I perceive an agency, an agency other then my own, an agency that can make calls on me at work in my surroundings
– like the mother in the example above made on her son – to which I must respond. I may feel that when I look, it is I
who does the looking, but if Merleau-Ponty is right here (and I think he is), a strange kind of reversal can occur here,
in which an other or othernesses in my surroundings can lead me toward its kind of looking, a looking of a kind
previously unknown to me. Thus it is that novelties, first-time creative events can occur within us in unforeseeable
and unpredictable ways.
“Inner speech” and “mastering one’s own reactions”
Let me at this point return to Vygotsky, to his 1996 essay. In it he outlines the process in which the child, gradually,
comes to act in a self-controlled manner:
(Vygotsky quote 5): “The child begins to practice with respect to himself the same forms of
behavior that others formerly practiced with respect to him... Hence, we may say that we become
ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also
to the history of every individual function... The personality becomes for itself what it is in itself
through what it is for others... The means of influencing oneself is originally a means of
influencing others or a means of influencing the personality by others” (1966, pp.43-44).
.
In other words, the very means used by others – the expressive-responsive voicings and utterances that they, so to
speak, ‘throw’ into the child’s activities at certain appropriate moments in their unfolding (the timing is crucial), to
stop their own anticipated next steps, and to direct their attention toward unnoticed aspects of their surroundings to
which they need to respond – can become the means by which the child can control his or her own behavior.
Three thinkers were influential on Vygotsky in developing his views here: One was Frederick Engels, who
in his Dialectic of Nature noted that the natural scientific approach in academic Psychology “forgets that ‘man also
reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself’”(Vygotsky, 1966, p.21, quoting
Engels). Thus as a result, ignores the way in which we can introduce tools and other seemingly arbitrary aids into our
activities, thus to elaborate them in all kinds of artificial ways. Another in Karl Marx who notes a similar tendency:
“By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his
slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway” (Vygotsky, 1966, pp.27-28, quoting Marx in
Capital, vol.1, p.177). But it was Pierre Janet [1859-1947] who was, perhaps, most influential. His influence is
illustrated in the following quote:
(Vygotsky quote 6) “In general we may say that the relations between the higher mental functions
were at one time real relations among people. I act with respect to myself as people act with
respect to me. As verbal thinking is a transfer of speech within, as reflection is a transfer of
argumentation within, so can the mental function of the word, as Janet has shown, never be
explained other than by using for the explanation a vaster system than man himself. The original
psychology of the functions of the word is a social function, and, if we want to trace the function of
the word in the behaviour of the personality, we must consider its former function in the social
behaviour of people.
We are not deciding beforehand the question of how essentially correct the theory of
speech suggested by Janet is. We merely want to say that the method of investigation suggested by
him is entirely incontestable from the point of view of the history of the child̓s cultural
development. According to Janet, the word was originally a command for others, then it passed
through a complex history consisting of imitations, change in functions, etc., and was only
gradually separated from the action. Janet holds that it is always a command and that is why it is
the principal means of mastering behaviour. That is why. if we want to elucidate genetically
whence comes the volitional function of the word, why the word subordinates to itself the motor
reaction, whence the power of the word over the behaviour, we shall inevitably arrive in the
ontogenesis, as well as in the phylogenesis, at its actual commanding function. Janet says that
behind the power of the word over the mental functions stands the actual power of a superior over
an inferior and that the relations of the mental functions must be ascribed to the actual relations
among people” (p.41).
In other words, Vygotsky sees children developing, not by ceasing to be reactive to events in their surroundings – we
must still retain our spontaneous reactivity if we are develop the ability to follow each other’s speech instantaneously
and unthinkingly – but by learning to master one’s own reactions by deliberately directing one’s own attention to
certain features in one’s surroundings rather than others. “It is surprising to us,” Vygotsky (1966) remarks, “that
traditional psychology has completely failed to notice this phenomenon which we can call mastering one’s own
reactions. In attempts to explain this fact of ‘will’ this psychology resorted to a miracle, to the intervention of a
spiritual factor in the operation of nervous processes, and thus tried to explain the action by the line of most
resistance, as did, for example, James in developing his theory of the creative character of the will” (pp.33-34, my
emphasis).
The child does this through, so to speak, beginning to use speech, not so much for others, as for him- or
herself. This is ‘inner speech’. It has its own dynamic, its own structure, and its own special course of development.
Vygotsky (1978) outlines its development, and its relation to our activities, thus:
(Vygotsky quotation 7) “The relation between speech and action is a dynamic one in the course of
the child’s development. The structural relation can shift even during an experiment. The crucial
change occurs as follows: At an early stage speech accompanies child’s actions and reflects the
vicissitudes of problem solving in a disrupted and chaotic form. At a later stage speech moves
more and more toward the starting point of the process, so that it comes to precede action. It
functions then as an aid to a plan that has been conceived but not yet realized in behavior... At a
later stage, however, when speech is moved to the starting point of an activity, a new relation
between word and action emerges. Now speech guides, determines, and dominates the course of
action; the planning function of speech comes into being in addition to the already existing
function of language to reflect the external world” (p.28).
This, then, is the developmental process that Vygotsky sets out for our gradual ‘incorporation’ of our own speech
into our own behavior. In other words, just as other agents can exert a powerful responsive influence upon us through
their expressions, so we can exert a similar influence in our own behavior: Beginning with a slight sense of ‘not-quite-rightness’ in what we are about to do, we can tell ourselves: Stop! Look! Listen! Is there a different way of
‘going on’ open to us here? And these processes need not come to an end with the end of childhood.
Katz (1991) explores exactly this aspect of the power of the speech of others upon us, in discussing with
clients, mostly couples, their experience of a therapeutic reflecting team
consultation, some three months after the
original meeting. She was interested in exploring the way in which the experience had affected their subsequent
lives. As she puts it: “I wondered, what was the effect on this couple of listening to two, three, or more perspectives?
Did it have an impact on how they now talked to each other?” (p.118). A husband, Daniel, reflected on the
experience as follows:
A: So those would be two instances where it was almost generative, where the idea generated other
ideas?
D: That̓s correct; it produced a kind of line of thought or action, or thought that could lead to action.
A: So it wasn̓t only generative in terms of other ideas, it was generative of ideas leading to actions.
D: Yes. I̓ve used both of those two approaches in the intervening time...I’m aware of being able to do that
now. What it gave me was a kind of new vocabulary or language to be able to talk to myself, to say “wait a
minute:̓ or ‘what about...?” Or ‘it doesn̓t have to be perfect, let̓s take a look at what isn̓t perfect - . It was
really a vocabulary that was being developed. The interesting thing was, it was a vocabulary about two
specific individuals, that is, Karen and myself. And, therefore, the images had a lot more personal
relevance... So, I felt it was the process in which you did have this focused attention (p.119).
And later, Daniel went on to remark, in reply to Katz’s question: “So, in a way it had an effect on the way you talk to
yourself?”
D: It had an effect on the outcome which was a process, and my willingness, my internal willingness.
[I think] by presenting an interactive process in which the two people are incorporated on an equal
basis, everybody has an opportunity to reflect, everybody has an opportunity to say something.
And it doesn̓t appear to be hierarchical.
What we can observe happening here, I think, is exactly what Vygotsky (1962) means when he says, to
repeat, “words and other signs are those means that direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel
them toward the solution of the problem confronting us” (pp.106-107). But how is it that words – or more properly,
the uttering or speaking of words – can make such a difference? This is because:
“(Vygotsky quote 8) It was taken for granted that the relation between two given functions never
varied; that perception, for example, was always connected in an ideal way with attention, memory
with perceptions, thought with memory... Yet all that is known about psychic development
indicates that its very essence lies in the change of the interfunctional structure of consciousness.
Psychology must makes these relations and their developmental changes the main problem, the
focus of study, instead of merely postulating the general interrelation of all functions” (1986, pp.1-2, my emphasis).
Where by the term “interfunctional structure” here, Vygotsky means the “dynamic” movement that occurs in our
verbally self-instructed thought between the different kind of responses that can occur – remembering, looking,
thinking, relating, judging, etc. – to our utter of different words to ourselves in our “inner speech.” Thus we find:
“The connection between thought and word, however, is neither preformed nor constant. It emerges in the course of
development, and itself evolves. To the biblical “In the beginning was the Word,” Goethe makes Faust reply, “In the
beginning was the deed.” The intent here is to detract from the value of the word, but we can accept this version if
we emphasize it differently: In the beginning was the deed. The word was not the beginning— action was there first;
it is the end of development, crowning the deed” (1986, p.255).
But how is it that words can do this? How is it that words can exert this kind of ‘inner’ function in our
thinking, in our structuring of our actions? As I see it, there is something in our words in their speaking that is not
present in the patterns of our already spoken words (Shotter, 1993b, p.4, pp.117-118) – even though, as we shall
see, there is something of importance in the completed patterns of our speech also. It is to these aspects of our speech
that I will turn in the next two sections.
Speech and the constitution of subjectivity: Benveniste and Wittgenstein
It is only too easy to think of language as a tool, as a humanly constructed or fabricated instrument for our own use.
Indeed, it is also only too easy to think and talk of our subjectivity – our capacity to attend to, and to render
accountable, aspects of our own inner experiences – as something that we first find present in ourselves, and then
express to others once we have acquired the appropriate language. And this leads us on to an idea of consciousness
as a mysterious inner ‘theater-space of the mind’, in which depicted events are ‘viewed’ by us by use of a strange
‘inner eye’. But both these views – of language and of the nature of our consciousnesses – are, I think, wrong. What
we think and talk of as our subjectivity, as our consciousness, is, I think, established in language. Vygotsky (1986),
although he did not explore it head-on, was aware of this. He ends Thought and Language on this note:
“We cannot close our study without mentioning the perspectives that our investigation opens up.
This is even more momentous a problem than that of thinking; what I mean is the problem of
consciousness... If language is as old as consciousness itself, and if language is a practical
consciousness-for-others and, consequently, consciousness-for-myself, then not only one particular
thought but all consciousness is connected with the development of the word. The word is a thing
in our consciousness... that is absolutely impossible for one person, but that becomes a reality for
two. The word is a direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness.
Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun in drop of water. A word relates to consciousness
as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a
microcosm of human consciousness” (p.256).
In other words, it is only in and through language that people constitute themselves as subjects, as con-scio, i.e., as
able knowingly (-scio) to account for their experience in ways witnessable with (con-) others
.
Central to this account of subjectivity, as Benveniste (1971) points out, is the function in our language of
personal pronouns – I, you, he/she/it, we, us, you, and they – and also of other classes of pronouns – the
demonstratives, adverbs, and adjectives, which, as indicators of deixis, organize the spatial and temporal
relationships – ‘this, here, now’, and their numerous correlatives – around the speaking subject taken as referent.
What is most important to realize here is that, as Benveniste (1971) put it, not only are personal pronouns present in
all languages
, but they are also “distinguished from all other designations that a language articulates in that they do
not refer to a concept or to an individual” (p.226). “What then is the reality to which I or you refers?” he asks
(p.218), “It is solely a ‘reality of discourse’, and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of
“locution,” not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of
the discourse containing I’.”
Two important interrelated points follow from this: (1) one to do with the dialogical nature of subjectivity,
(2) the other to do with the importance of what is done in specific “moments” in speech – for consciousness (i.e.,
con-scio, witnessable knowing along with others) is only possible if speakers can orient others to a sharable ‘this-here-now’ in their shared circumstances)
.
(1) In the approach to language we have taken, the primary function of our utterances is not referential, but
expressive-responsive. Following Vygotsky, speakers initially ‘instruct’ others, not by reporting facts to them, or by
telling them of ideas or principles, but by drawing their attention to features of their momentary circumstances not
yet noticed by them. This form of communication is only possible because each speaker sets him- or herself up as a
subject by not only referring to himself as I in his or her discourse, but by also making use of ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘there’
and ‘now’, etc., and by expecting the other – designated you in the discourse – to be able orient toward the entities
within the currently shared discursive or conversational reality. The speaker I thus projects or posits another person,
an other who is completely other than ‘me’, an other to whom I say you and who says you to me. In Benveniste’s
(1971) words:
“Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am
speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is
constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who
in his turn designates himself as I. Here we see a principle whose consequences are to spread out in
all directions... This polarity of persons is the fundamental condition in language, of which the
process of communication, in which we share, is only a mere pragmatic consequence. It is a
polarity, moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is
encountered nowhere else outside of language... [Although] neither of the terms can be conceived
of without the other; they are complementary... and, at the same time, they are reversible. If we
seek a parallel to this, we will not find it. The condition of man in language is unique... It is in a
dialectic reality, that will incorporate the two terms and define them by mutual relationship that the
linguistic basis of subjectivity is discovered” (p.225).
(2) Indeed, we rely on our children orienting in this spontaneous way to our expressions in teaching them
the contingently intertwined (and thus seemingly orderly) linguistically structured practices we think of,
philosophically, as our rule-governed practices. Relying on words as the means for controlling, directing, and
channeling our children’s actions, as mentioned already above, we utter at certain crucial moments in the course of
this teaching, along with a whole set of exaggerated facial expressions and other bodily gestures, such verbal
expressions as ‘Stop!’, ‘Listen’, ‘Look at that’, ‘Listen to this’, ‘Do like this’, ‘Do it like that’, and so on. The crucial
nature of the moment of utterance cannot be over emphasized: in coming at a particular moment in the already
ongoing flow of contingently intertwined activity occurring between them and us, in pointing in their gestural
expressiveness from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’, our children’s activities allow us to intervene at that
moment, and in doing so, to point them toward ‘another kind of future’, toward seeing a connection between events
of a previously unnoticed kind
. And it is within such a process as this that our children can “grow into the
intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88). Indeed, we might say that it is this – the ability to
prevent ourselves from responding impulsively to events occurring in our surroundings by giving ourselves the same
verbal commands as those given us by our parents in such situations: “Stop,” “Look,” “Listen”, “See if there’s
something else to attend to...” – that is a major part of our becoming self-determining individuals with a ‘will’
of
our own.
It is thus crucial that we do not divorce our talk of our utterances from the surrounding circumstances within
which they are uttered
. As Benveniste (1971) remarks:
“No matter what the type of language, there is everywhere to be observed a certain linguistic
organization of the notion of time. It matters little whether this notion is marked in the inflection of
the verb or by words of other classes (particles, adverbs, lexical variations, etc.); that is a matter of
formal structure... But the line of separation is always a reference to the “present.” Now this
“present” in its turn has only a linguistic fact as temporal reference: the coincidence of the event
described with the instance of discourse that describes it... there is no other criterion and no other
expression by which to indicate “the time at which one is” except to take it as “the time at which
one is speaking.” This is the eternally “present” moment, although it never relates to the same
events of an “objective” chronology because it is determined for each speaker by each of the
instances of discourse related to it. Linguistic time is self-referential. Ultimately, human
temporality with all its linguistic apparatus reveals the subjectivity inherent in the very using of
language... In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of
discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person,” at the same time defining
himself as I and a partner as you “ (p.227).
Thus it is that subjectivity is created in language, but not as a geometrical or geographical ‘inner’ space, but as a
specific ‘aspect’ or ‘region’ in the shared moment of speaking, i.e., in the present instance of discourse (Benveniste),
involving the speaker and his or her addressee, to do with them being able to ‘follow’ each other in their interactions.
For all involved must possess an invisible sense of each other’s momentary expectations and attitudes, judgments and
evaluations, etc., if they are to ‘go on’ with each other.
What we need, if we are to appreciate the nature of this moment, is not a spatialized view of time, but a
dynamized view of space (Capek, 1961), a dynamic notion of time-space, one in which each moment (not an instant)
has a ‘thickness’, so to speak, in that it provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of what – in its indivisible
dynamic continuity, i.e., in its flow – is likely next to emerge into existence as a novel creation. In our privileging of
space over time, however, we hide this creation of novelty from ourselves. For, although “succession is a real fact
perceived in the concrete form of ‘not yet’ feeling, we spontaneously adopt [in our verbal expressions of this feeling]
a compromise solution: we claim that, although the future positions of the moving body exist now, they are still not
yet occupied” (p.184). We ‘see’ the yet-to-be-achieved as somehow already achieved, but in a Platonic space of
ideas, or in some other such timeless space. While I might feel that others have an inner space hidden from me, and
that their beliefs are just as hidden from me in that space as their feelings, is this really so? Does talk of feelings and
beliefs refer to actually hidden entities and processes, or to aspects of the future that are not yet in existence?
Why do we say on one occasion I feel such-and-such while on another I believe so-and-so? Although the
form, the pattern of the utterances in which they appear my seem to be exactly the same, are the uses of the
utterances just the same?
When I say, “I feel...X...,” I am describing a sense, an impression, or intuition that in fact
I have. Whilst when I say, “I believe...X...,” I am not describing myself as in fact undergoing an inner act of
believing; I am changing an impersonally asserted fact – “X is the case” – into a subjective utterance, i.e., changing a
supposedly true and thus unchallengeable fact into one that is just a fact for me, and thus a mere possibility for
others. We can call such assertions avowals. In making such avowals to others, we are orienting them toward how to
anticipate our actions in the future. As Johnston (1993) notes, it is not that such 1st-person expressions are accurately
linked to a mysterious inner realm which would not otherwise see the light of day, “the account has a use quite
independently of whether or not it accurately reproduces some supposed inner event” (p.14). Irrespective of whether
certain ‘inner events’ are accurately ‘depicted’ in a person’s outer speech, what their 1st-person avowals tell us, is
what their anticipations and expectations are as to how we should ‘go on’ with them, how we respond to them, how
we should treat them. Whether we ourselves can actually ‘see’ the (perhaps previously quite unforseen) connections
a friend is now making between certain circumstances in her surroundings, by spontaneously expressing herself in
the way that she does, she is allowing us to relate ourselves to her and her circumstances in ways that would
otherwise be quite impossible. She grimaces. But until she says, “I’m puzzled,” “I’m in pain,” “I feel dizzy,” “I don’t
like that music,” “That’s a very ugly dog,” or whatever, we remain disoriented as to how to respond to her grimace.
The power of living expressions, then, is that persons can ‘call out’ responses from those around them, and
in so doing, inaugurate a meeting, begin a new language-game. “The origin and primitive form of the language-game,” says Wittgenstein (1980a), “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’ [quoting Goethe]” (p.31). “The primitive reaction may
have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word,” he notes (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.218). “But what
is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?” he asks, (Wittgenstein, 1981). “Presumably 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” (no.541). Thus, just as a visual scene “invites me to become its adequate viewer, as if a different mind than
my own suddenly came to dwell in my body” (see the quote from Merleau-Ponty (1964, p.94) above), so others can
‘tell’ us of their unique ‘inner lives’ in their responsive expressions.
To elaborate: Even with something as simple as our looking over a visual scene, a picture, a painting, a
sculpture, an art object of any kind, there are different styles of looking, different bodily ways of using our eyes, and
of ‘orchestrating’ into those movements (cf., Vygotsky above), other basic bodily capacities – we can move up closer
to the painting or further away, adopt a new angle, pause for a moment to make a comparison (in fact or from
memory), we can stop to ask a friend’s opinion or to recall a text’s account, and so on, and so on. And if in these
movements we open ourselves to the ‘calls’ coming to us from the object as look over it, we find ourselves not so
much looking at it – as in our instrumental looking at our neighbor – as looking according to it. Then, over time, as
we ‘dwell with’ the work of art, between it and ourselves, a real presence emerges with ‘its’ own requirements, with
‘its’ own calls to which we – if we are to do the work ‘justice’ – must be answerable. It is as if, as we shall see, all
our meetings gave rise to a grammar in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense; as we move on from one act to the next, only
certain possible moves are open to us if we are to be answerable to ‘its’ requirements.
When we ‘look over’ or ‘look with’ a picture in this way, “I would be at great pains,” says Merleau-Ponty
(1964), “to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its
place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it,
than that I see it” (p.164). Rather than looking at it, I look beyond it, or through it, to see other things in my world in
its light; it is, would could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it can give me a new way of looking.
Indeed, it may be that a painting can do that as the painter, him- or herself, painted, not as they themselves desired,
but in accord with an otherness that came to dwell in them from their surroundings: as Paul Klee himself remarked:
“In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were
looking at me, were speaking to me... I was there listening...” (quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.167).
As we noted at the beginning of this article, very little of our behavior is under our own control – indeed,
my concern has been with “what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (Gadamer, 1989, p.xviii). But
it is just because this is so, that the influence of others – especially of our predecessors and ancestors, or parents and
other teachers, the writers and artists – who in giving themselves over to the ‘calls’ exerted upon them by events in
their surroundings, if we give ourselves over to their ‘calls’, can influence us in the same way. It is not by learning
yet more facts, yet more information about what already exists that we can radically change our lives, but by learning
new ways of orienting, new ways of styles addressing and making ourselves answerable to our surroundings, that we
can come to explore what else might come into existence.
Grammar in speech, and syntax in language: Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
Thus, just as a painting can ‘instruct’ us in a possible style or way of looking, a possible way of relating ourselves
visually to our surroundings, so can an appropriate piece of text can also ‘instruct’ us in different possible styles or
ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings as well. Just as all those listening to a piece of music being played in
a concert hall can, to an extent, be ‘moved’ in the same way by sequential unfolding over a period of time, so can we
all also be ‘moved’ to a similar shared extent in responding sequentially to any aspect of human expression – for, to
repeat, what is at issue here is not the ‘seeing’ of a finalized form or pattern, but the intertwining of one’s own living,
bodily responsiveness with influences from something other than ourselves to create a “real presence” between us, an
influence that can instruct us in a new, possible way of going on. Instead of seeing only static spatial shapes and
forms, substantial and objective things ‘over there’ subjectively perceived by us as ‘in here’ (in some coded or rule-regulated form), we can also be influenced, spontaneously and responsively, as well as unconsciously and
involuntarily, by a temporal succession of unfolding, directionally vectored events. And perhaps there is nothing
more powerful in achieving this affect on us than another’s voice – it is here that I shall begin to make contact with
what I called my theme 5 above.
This is how those of you who read Wittgenstein can – if you take the appropriate dialogical stance or
attitude toward his texts – experience his voice at work in his writing: not as giving us new information we lacked,
but as giving us orientation... helping find our ‘way about’ when we didn’t know ‘how to go on’... helping us in this
or that practical situation to make a link, connection, or relation that we might not otherwise have made.
Here, then, if we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us,
and allow ourselves to enter into an inter-involvement with them – due to the expressive, responsiveness of all the
living bodies involved in such meetings – a very different form of understanding becomes available to us in our
relationships with living things, a relationship unavailable to us with dead things. This ongoing, practical
understanding of how to ‘go on’ in the interaction, arises in the intricate ‘orchestration’ of the interplay occurring
between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward those others (or othernesses) and their equally responsive
incoming expressions toward us.
In that interplay at each moment, as in a dance, or a hand-shake, or an orchestral symphony, distinctive,
dynamically changing forms emerge, in which all involved are, so to speak, ‘participant parts’. The uniquely
distinctive forms emerge in an unfolding sequence of changes (or differencings’), each differencing giving rise to a
uniquely ‘shaped’ circumstance which, although invisible, is felt by all who are involved as participants within it in
the same way.
But what is the nature of the interplays involved here? They are dialogically-structured or chiasmically-structured; they are a complex and intricate intertwining of not wholly reconcilable, mutually influencing movements
– with, as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well
as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins. This makes it very difficult
for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a
completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. Indeed,
to the extent that the temporal unfolding of intertwined activity in this realm is shared in by all, it is non-locatable; it
is neither ‘inside’ people, but nor is it simply ‘outside’ of them; it is ‘spread out’ or distributed amongst all those
participating in it. Indeed, to the extent that it is undifferentiated as to whose it is, we could say that they all have
their being ‘within’ it. And to the extent that it is has a temporally unfolding pattern to it — ***/ ***\ ***/ ***?? —
it gives rise to a ‘grammar’, to a structure of feeling to do with ‘ways of going on’.
In other words, most importantly, the invisible forms created in the interplay of living activity between us
are neither wholly alive (as self-maintaining organisms) not wholly dead (as self-contained, inert objects) – taking
my lead from George Steiner (1989) I will call these invisible forms “Real Presences.” Following Bakhtin (1986), I
have called these understandings relationally-responsive understandings, to contrast them with the representational-referential understandings more familiar to us in our traditional intellectual dealings. And what is of crucial
importance about a “real presence” or a “relationally-responsive” understanding is, not that you ‘get the picture’, so
to speak, but that it ‘calls’ you to respond in a certain way: a greeting with a greeting; a question with an answer; a
request with a compliance, etc... In short, a real presence, although invisible, has agency, and can exert the force of
an other agent upon us.
But to grasp this further, let me return to the example of binocular vision: Just as we don’t actually see
leftness and rightness as objective features of our surroundings, we don’t ‘see’ depth as such either – in that sense, it
is invisible – we see in depth. Depth is constitutive of how we see the world before us and of the possibilities for
bodily motion it affords us. Hence I can’t practically expect to reach the back of this hall in ‘one bound’. As we look
out over the scene before us, we achieve an amazing, and currently quite inexplicable, ‘synthesis’, i.e., a chiasmic
intertwining, of fragments of information, gathered from here and these, at different moments in time, to constitute
for ourselves the “relational dimension” of depth. As our two eyes work together in looking over the visual scene
before us (like an autofocus camera), first finding a common fixation and focus on this point at that distance, then on
that point at this distance, and so on, and so on, the continuously unfolding sequence of ‘looks’, darting hither and
thither, back and forth, over what is before us, results eventually in our seeing of both a unified and indivisible visual
scene ‘out there’, and a sense ‘in here’ of how we are placed within it. I call ‘depth’ a relational dimension for,
simply, it is to do with seeing relations between things – and we when we call a conversation or a piece of writing
‘deep’ we use the word, I think, in the same way, to indicate the fact that we are in a circumstance with many cross
connections present within it.
This brings me to the final two themes I want to introduce: (1) one to do with the grammar of speech; (2)
the other with the syntax of language.
(1) Grammar of speech: Having focused on the importance of events occurring in our meetings, it is
necessary to focus on the nature of people’s initial stance or initial attitude as they approach each other in such
meetings – the ‘acorn’ from which an oak tree and not a rose bush can grow. For one’s initial stance or attitude can
‘set the scene’, so to speak, the ‘way of going on’, the ‘style’ or ‘relational dimensions’ in terms of which participants
will react to everything occurring within the event of their meeting. It clearly makes an enormous difference if we
approach another person on meeting them with a clenched fist ready to strike, or with an open hand ready to shake
their’s. Indeed, in many temporally unfolding circumstances (but not in all), there is something special in the
sequencing of our activities, in their temporal succession. If the separate elements we encounter seem to unfold in a
special way, not just haphazardly but according to a certain style, they give rise in all who encounter them, prior to
any thought or deliberation on their part, i.e., spontaneously, a shared or at least shareable background sense in
terms of which all our individual actions in such circumstances, can have meanings intelligible to others.
[Performance of rhythms... of temporal sequencings... ***\/ ***/\ ***\/ ***??... what is our expectation of the
movement in this last phrase? \/ or /\?]
The claim that our human activities are not just formless, that not just anything can follow or be connected
with anything, is clearly connected with Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim that most of our activities, on
investigation, seem to have a “grammar” to them. And as he sees it, it is their shared grammar that we must observe
if our expressions and utterances are to be intelligible to those around us. And it this – not the constraints imposed on
us externally by a physical reality – that makes it impossible for us just to talk as we please. “Grammar is not
accountable to any reality,” he claims, “it is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are
not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein, 1974, no.133, p.184). Bakhtin (1986)
also expresses a similar notion in his claim that “the word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a
duet but a trio)” (p.122) – three, not just two, active agencies are at work in shaping an utterance. And, as I have
been trying to show above, Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of a logical grammar is oriented toward our being
answerable to the agentic “real presences” we feel at work in our meetings with the others and othernesses around
us.
In this view, in which our spontaneous living responsiveness to each other is seen as the source of our being
able to understand each other’s expressions, it not because we are mechanisms working according to laws, rules, or
principles that we can understand each other. Indeed, it is the other way around: it just because we can understand
each other’s living expressions that we can devise rules and hold each other to their observance. Indeed, as I
intimated above, we rely on our children orienting in this spontaneous living way in teaching them our rule-governed
practices.
(2) The syntax of a language: We rely on our expressions, then, as the means for controlling, directing, and
channeling our children’s actions. In them, we reveal to them both our own unique inner lives, and, what is of the
utmost importance as members of a larger community, how we see our outer circumstances in ways we share with
those around us. For, the mostly spatially arrayed and already visible aspects of our surroundings, those we call
‘objective’ – like the visual scenes we view with others at our side – can give rise not only to sharable styles, ways,
or grammars of looking, talking, and acting, but to styles or grammars that can be institutionalized
, can give rise to
social conventions.
It is important to appreciate, the artificial, contrived, i.e., arbitrary, nature of such conventions though:
Without going into a complete historical account of how human linguistic institutions might be established, sustained
(by elder members correcting younger and holding them accountable for ‘mistakes’ in talking, etc.), and elaborated
(by older forms being forgotten and new forms added)
, it is not difficult to see how (at least the belief) in the
existence of an underlying syntax (Saussure, 1911; Chomsky, 1965) can arise. For it truly seems as if there is an
underlying system of rules governing our use of words. Attempts to discover it, however, require a number of rather
strict assumptions. As Saussure (1911) notes in rejecting speech as amenable to study, and suggesting that it is
language as an objective system that we must investigate: “Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and
heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – physical, physiological and psychological – it belongs both
to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language
first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural (sic) order into a mass that lends itself to no other
classification” (p.9). In other words, the order that we introduce into the mass presented to us by the facts of speech,
is not a natural” order at all, but an artificial one – one arrived at by ignoring all the expressive-responsive
characteristics of words in their speaking, and by paying attention to those features of words observable only in
patterns of already spoken words – and this is where I will begin to make contact with my last theme 6 mentioned
above.
To fault the existential status of the syntactical system ‘discovered’ (rather, ‘invented’ or ‘contrived’) by
Saussure and Chomsky, is not, however, to fault the practical importance of syntax, particularly in its relation to
written language. Indeed, as Vygotsky (1986) sees it, writing transforms speech utterly, in a way which seems not
only to ‘disconnect’ it from its origins, but which also gives us the ability to use our linguistic skills deliberately, to
our own ends. Indeed, we might say that it is the ability, not this time to prevent ourselves from responding
impulsively to events occurring in our surroundings by giving ourselves the same verbal commands as those given us
by our parents, but to ‘orchestrate’ the unfolding sequencing of our own basic psychological functions – their
“interfunctional relations” (Vygotsky) – thus to constitute them into higher, more complex forms in accord with the
syntax of a particular linguistic system. If we can talk in this way, in terms of (written) word patterns or forms, rather
than in terms of their living expression, then we can begin to use language in a wholly decontextualized way – to use
it theoretically, in a way that can precede action. This form of (writing based) speech can, to repeat, guide,
determine, and dominate the course of action; “the planning function of speech comes into being in addition to the
already existing function of language to reflect the external world” (1978, p.28) – but in this wholly decontextualized
form, instead of being responsively connected with its surroundings, it relies wholly upon our knowledge of our
language as a system. Vygotsky (1986) outlines the nature of the child’s task in learning to write thus:
(Vygotsky quote 9) “Written speech is a separate linguistic function, differing from oral speech in
both structure and mode of functioning. Even its minimal development requires a high level of
abstraction. It is speech in thought and image only, lacking the musical, expressive, intonational
qualities of oral speech. In learning to write, the child must disengage himself from the sensory
aspect of speech and replace words by images of words” (1986, pp.180-181).
– it is it’s abstract, formal quality that is the main stumbling block to its use. Instead of working in the expressive-responsive, physiognomic realm of meanings, we have to learn ‘the rules of the game’, to speak ‘properly’, according
to those treated as linguistic ‘authorities’ (see the Preface to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the origins of the
‘King’s English’).
However, once we have learnt the ‘rules’, or at least their explicit codification, then there are payoffs in our
other skills. Vygotsky (1986) gives the following example: “[The child] may not acquire new grammatical or
syntactic forms in school but, thanks to instruction in grammar and writing, he does become aware of what he is
doing and learns to use his skills consciously. Just as the child realizes for the first time in learning to write that the
word Moscow consists of the sounds m-o-s-k-ow and learns to pronounce each one separately, he also learns to
construct sentences, to do consciously what he has been doing unconsciously in speaking” (1986, p.184). Indeed, in
written speech, “we are obliged to create the situation, to represent it to ourselves. This demands detachment from
the actual situation” (1986, p.182). This is our ability too in literate speech or in expert of professional speech: we
speak, not in response to actual events in our surroundings, not in response to the speech of others, but on our own,
so to speak, in relation to an inner scheme of our own devising. Thus “we may conclude,” notes Vygotsky (1986),
“that the essential difference between written and oral speech reflects the difference between two types of activity,
one of which is spontaneous, involuntary, and nonconscious, while the other is abstract, voluntary, and conscious”
(p.183).
In the past we have been entranced with theories and with theoretical frameworks and/or perspectives, with
systems exhibiting a single, logical order of connectedness, so that it is possible to understand how everything ‘hangs
together’ in a way that can be explained in terms of a small number of basic principles. But the true (practical,
workable, everyday) meanings of the events out in the daily living of our lives cannot be properly understood within
the confines of such an order. They are only to be found out there, in the not wholly orderly, actual living of our
lives. And the meanings they have there are different from the meanings assigned to them within an imaginary story-world, with its one, coherent order. In such imaginary worlds, as one very well-known creator of many such worlds,
C.S. Lewis (1939), said:
“The percentage of syntax masquerading as meaning may vary from something like 100 per cent in
political writers, journalists, psychologists, and economics, to something like 40 per cent in the
writers [like himself] of children’s stories” (p.156).
What retrospectively and intellectually may seem to be an unintelligible fragment of a ‘hidden order’, is made sense
of in everyday life in many different ways, in different contexts, at different moments. The grammar of speech –
occasioned by each of our meetings creating a dialogical space with ‘its’ (our own collective) requirements to which
we must be ‘answerable’ – should not be confused with the syntax of a language, or with other so-called ‘proper
forms’ of writing, which are the invention of ‘authorities’. Indeed, although there is no space at all to investigate this
issue here, it is possible to write in ways which are not subservient to already established forms (see Shotter, unpub).
Conclusions: ‘inner speech’ in ‘the speaking moment’
I began with a focus on our spontaneous, living, responsive, bodily expressions. While our verbal expressions, our
utterances, our use of words, seem to be a crucial part of what it is for us to be human beings, we must avoid thinking
of words as already completed forms or patterns – it is the living expression of our words that matters, our words in
their speaking, not our use of word-forms. Why? Because, to repeat Vygotsky (1962) again, “all the higher psychic
functions are mediated processes, and signs [mostly words] are the basic means used to master and direct them. The
mediating sign is incorporated in their structure as an indispensable, indeed the central, part of the total process”
(p.56) – not signs or words as objective shapes or forms, but words as physiognomic expressions, as agentic real
presences able to exert ‘calls’ upon us to which we must be answerable. Thus the flow of voiced utterances is such
that during any ‘conversational’ exchange – whether in ‘inner speech’ or ‘outer talk’ – at the moment when one voice
finishes, a shaped and vectored sense of what appropriately might next be said, is shared amongst all participants
alike. Thus, if it is the case as Vygotsky (1966) suggests, that “the original psychology of the functions of the word is
a social function,” if we want to t