John Shotter, PDSP Notes, KCCF, Oct 2006

Practical-descriptive theory: ‘accounts’ or ‘portrayals’ as guides to perception

“If it is true, as has been argued, that writers are willing to call master are those who seem finally to be saying what we feel we have long had on the tip of our tongue but have ourselves been quite unable to express, those who have put into words what are for us only inchoate motions, tendencies, and impulses of mind, then I am more than happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as my master” (Geertz, 2000, p.xi).

The task of characterizing the nature of conversational realities is not, if Wittgenstein is correct, a task for explanatory theory – concerned as it is with trying to present a finally ‘correct or true view’ of the nature of our human being as linguistic creatures. Indeed, along with Wittgenstein and Rorty, I think we are deceiving ourselves in pursuing that as a still possible goal. The dream of such a ‘view’ is an impossible dream. But a project of a much more partial and particular kind is possible: by the use of objects of comparison, we can throw light on the facts of our use of language in our conversation-intertwined-activities, not only by way of similarities but also of differences. And by attending to features of our language use through, or guided by, certain general concepts – functioning, in Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) terms, as psychological tools or instruments – we can become both sensitized to paying attention to features of our own activities that we would not otherwise notice, as well as motivated into ‘making or creating possible connections’ between of that have not occurred to us before.

              This is the power and the worth of certain crucial terms (words) expressed in philosophical writing (particularly in Wittgenstein’s and Bakhtin’s writings): as psychological instruments they can ‘instruct’ us in new ways of “learning to direct [our] own mental processes” (Vygotsky, 1986, p.108), and function as “means of focussing one’s attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them” (p.106), thus to bring otherwise unarticulated aspects of our own activities into rational-visibility, and thus render them amenable to critical discussion and further collaborative investigation. In this, the power of words, of certain particular words – our own words as well as those of others – to call out from us, spontaneously, precise responses of some kind or other, to motivate particular consequential actions of some kind, is crucial. In other words, in opposition to the generalities of explanatory theory, the answers to our most general questions are, seemingly paradoxically, to be found in the fine details of our lived lives, especially in the particular words we use.

              To this end, as aids in noticing such details, I have, among others, introduced the following notions (some from Wittgenstein, others from Bakhtin and Voloshinov, also from Vygotsky, along with others of my own): Besides those of perspicuous representations and psychological instruments, I have also introduced those of joint action, Bakhtin’s notions of the utterance, of responsive understanding, and speech genres; Billig’s extension of responsive understanding into a rhetorical contexts; Vico’s notions of sensory topics, imaginative universals, and his concern with “ars topica,” i.e., with rhetorical enthymemes in which an argumentative structure, unavailable to an individual speaker, is completed by the speakers audience as an aspect of joint action. In previous chapters, I have also introduced the concepts of “knowing from within,” “rational-invisibility,” “traditions of argumentation,” the “negotiated nature of social phenomena,” and other such notions.

              All these are examples of what elsewhere (Shotter, 1984, p.40) I have called practical-theory, but should have called practical-descriptive theory : for these ways of speaking, terms of art, metaphors, or images, can all function as “objects of comparison,” as “measuring-rods,” as probes or prostheses through which, like blind person’s sticks or like telescopes or microscopes in other sciences, to ‘see’ influences at work which would remain otherwise rationally-invisible to us. They are ‘tools’ for use by us in accounting for our claims as what is actually occurring in the disorderly zones of uncertainty in which we conduct the politically negotiable aspects of our everyday social lives – where an account can be distinguished from an explanatory theory in this sense: “an account of an action or activity is concerned with talking about the action or activity as the activity it is ... In other words, an account is an aid to perception, functioning to constitute an otherwise indeterminate flow of activity as a sequence of recognizable events, i.e. events of a kind already known about within a society’s ways of making sense of things” (Shotter, 1984, p.3).

Geertz’s method

Someone who has explicitly adopted this Wittgensteinian approach is Clifford Geertz. He talks of what I have called above, following Vygotsky, “psychological instruments,” as falling into two distinct classes: “experience-near” and “experience-distant” concepts:

“An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone – a patient, a subject, in our case an informant – might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others. An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or another – an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist – employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims. “Love” is an experience-near concept, “object cathexis” is an experience-distant one. “Social stratification” and perhaps for most peoples in the world even “religion” (and certainly “religious system”) are experience-distant; “caste” and “nirvana” are experience-near, at least for Hindus and Buddhists” (p.57).

While we cannot perceive precisely what others perceive, what we can perceive is they perceive ‘with’, ‘by means of’, or ‘through’. Thus as Geertzian investigators into the ‘inner lives’ of others, the idea is to make sense of their ways of life, their experience-near concepts, ‘through’ our experience-distant concepts: Where we “grasp concepts that, for another people, are experience-near... [by placing] them in illuminating connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life” (Geertz, 1983, p.58, my emphasis).

              But how can they be used to do this, how can that produce the kind of illumination we require? Well, a part of the task is the familiar hermeneutical one, that of “hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole that motivates them” (1983, p.69, my emphases) .

Accounts or portrayals rather than explanatory theories

As presented here, this ‘circular’, back-and-forth, hermeneutical process might seem a simple alternative to our usual attempts to make sense of something by fitting it into an already existing theoretical schematism of some kind. In practice, however, it is not that simple. Indeed, it is quite different. While an explanation is something we can have ‘in a flash’, so to speak, by fitting an event into theory, the gaining of an illuminating account, the fashioning of an appropriate portrayal, is something we must do, step-by-step. It requires far more orientational work on our part, i.e., the inter-relating of ourselves to the events occurring in our surroundings, than the fashioning of an explanation. For, if our accounts or portrayals are to be illuminating ones, they must in their telling ‘move’ us over the details of the ‘terrain’ of the topic in question (all the relevant details) in a way sufficient for us to gain a conceptual grasp of their interconnections, and thus of their nature as a meaningful whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it. But to gain this ‘inside view’, we must, to repat, ‘live’ in it, just as we must in getting to ‘know our way around’ inside our own town or city. Thus rather than being able to see it all at once from a single external standpoint (in terms of a single, logical order of connectedness), it is a grasp that allows us to ‘see’ all the different aspects of the topic in question as if it were arrayed before us as a ‘landscape’, each detail of which we can only see by our choosing to focus on it.

              This is where our more academic knowledge of experience-distant concepts can come to play a crucial role. If I can become familiar, say, with the nature and character of joint action – if I can come, so to speak, to know ‘my way around’ inside it as a concept – I may not be able to predict exactly what will happen in an actual meeting between two of more people (as in predicting the Newtonian trajectory of the docking of a space shuttle with a space station). But my knowledge of joint action can, nevertheless, play a real part in my practical understanding of the events occurring in such a meeting: it will set me up with, sensitize me to, various expectations and anticipations which, if they are not fulfilled, will, in appropriate circumstances, enable me to say: “Yes, that is just like what I expect of joint action; these people are truly acting jointly” or “No, that is not at all what one would expect of joint action in this situation; there is something missing from the picture; one is not reciprocally responding to the other.” Thus, with my knowledge of what joint action is, I can learn both to attend knowledgeably, and to interact meaningfully, with an event of joint action even though I cannot mechanically predict the details of its actual unfolding.

Explanatory theory and its dreams

The search for explanation, typically, is driven by our search for causes – precise, unambiguous, absolutely determining causes. We want to be able to say, “Ideally, X causes Y – all other things being equal.” We gain our precision by quantifying these causes and effects, by ignoring or allowing for ‘side-effects’, and putting them into the form of ideal mathematical laws. Unfortunately, all other things never are in fact equal. Not only do we need friction, and other inconvenient, detailed features in and of our surroundings to survive as the beings we are, but we cannot treat our surrounding, as Descartes (1968) hoped, as merely composed of different parts of matter, “agitate[d] diversely and confusedly” according to God’s “established laws” (p.62). Things all seem to be interconnected. Thus every strict, mathematical formulation of a law, principle, or rule said to be governing our living behaviour, indeed, the behaviour of any living process, inevitably leaves out something of what is happening in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, as we have already seen, if what we are after is only the most exact mathematical prediction possible, it is as if we want only to walk on ice; we resolutely ignore the friction we need to walk in the real world: “Back to the rough ground” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.107). And to find the kind of ground most suitable to our walking, we must examine the ground itself: “The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize that the ground that lies before us as the ground” (Wittgenstein, 1978, p.333).

              But the task, though, of gaining a familiarity with the general characteristics of the groundings that become available to us in our meetings with each other, is not an easy task. It involves the continual inter-relating – the chiasmic intertwining (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), as I will later call it – of the myriad details that become available to us as we survey, or hermeneutically ‘look over’ (in Geertz’s sense), the landscape of activities in which people engage, in living out their lives together. At stake in our doing this, our aim in surveying this landscape, is to arrive at, as Wittgenstein (1953) has put it, “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections” (no.122). Indeed, just as in looking out of the window at the landscape before us, we can as we range over it pick out a detail here or a detail there, first to focus on, and then to explore the possible connections between them, so in our hermeneutical ‘looking over’ here: rather than to the single, logical order of connectedness of a systematic, explanatory theory, it can give rise to an unending multiplicity of “relational dimensions” – and in this sense, of course, just as our surveying of a visual scene, we arrive a ‘view’ that has a certain “depth” to it, in the sense of things only coming into focus as we fixate on them (I will treat these complex issues at much greater length in Chapter 5).

              Although (metaphorically) possessing depth, unlike a visual scenes arrayed only in space, the hermeneutical landscapes we can arrive at in our hermeneutical explorations have their being in time as well as space. Indeed, they are open-ended in the sense of not only being open to further specification – albeit, of an already specified kind – but also able to exert “calls” upon us motivating us (in terms of arousing expectations and anticipations with us) to seek such further articulations – thus providing us with, in the jargon of the day, “actionable knowledge.”

              Because it is open-ended, and thus in relation to explanatory theory not well defined, it does not lack rigour. The rigour required to range over the depths it makes available to us, to bring into focus the different particular relational dimensions among the multiplicity it makes available to us, is at least as great as the rigour demanded of the mathematicians. As Goethe (1995), who in outlining what was involved in seeing a growing, developing whole in this indivisible way (he was interested in what we might call the dynamic portrayal of plant forms, so that he could ‘think’ though, both forward and back, a plant’s growth), noted that all the details must align with each other and constitute a demonstrated unity in the same compelling way as the steps in a mathematical proof: “From the mathematician we must learn the meticulous care required to connect things in unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step by step. Even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest of geometricians,” he said (p.16).

              The difficulty of doing this, though, must not be ignored. While the quantitative preoccupations of explainers allow them to focus on a one-dimensional focus on measurable things, and on the construction of a single, logical order of connectedness, portrayers, by contrast, have a much more taxing task. They must attend to many differently detailed facts, which they must somehow inter-related in a dynamic, developing whole ; as such, they must attend, not so much to things as to the relations between them.

              Although it is perfectly legitimately view human expressive events in their fixed and measurable aspects, if we do, then we tend to ignore the larger whole, the background of ongoing, living movement within which they have their being as the expressive events they are. But if we are truly to do such events justice, as the expressive events they are, we cannot legitimately ask the question: How much? We can only ask: What is it like?

              The urge to explain events in terms of their causes leads the ‘natural’ scientist into a single-minded analysis of things into separate parts. And it is the external relations between these parts that are then construed as explaining the behaviour of the things. Such explanations work in a bottom-up fashion, with a thing’s behaviour depending on the individual properties just of its parts – so that a society’s social order, for instance, depends on the beliefs and values of the individuals of which it is composed. In a portrayal, by contrast – as Geertz (1983) makes clear – the attempt is to grasp a whole that in-forms its parts through their internal relations to it, for they owe their character (their so-called ‘properties’) and their very being, to their participation within it.

              Indeed, the (chiasmic) interweaving of parts into a unified, living whole is necessarily qualitative, i.e., non-quantitative. Quantitative entities, if they are to be countable, must be entirely self-contained and have all their properties within themselves, so to speak. They cannot owe any aspects of their character to their placement within a larger whole. On the other hand, qualitatively characterized events can interpenetrate, or become dynamically entangled with each other, with one playing into, altering, and becoming inseparable from, i.e., qualifying, another. Without such mutual entanglement, we can have parts existing side by side, but no unity of the whole. In every case, say, of sexual reproduction, we see in the offspring an intertwining of the qualities of the parents so as to create a new unity. There is no mere side-by-side aggregation of separate parental traits here; rather, each parent qualifies the whole. Such is also the case in joint action: it is qualified by all who participate in it.

Conclusions: dialogical versus monological practices

Above, then we have been exploring a form of rationality-achieved-through-contrasts, rather than rationality-as-representation. In it, we bring out the nature of what we do, our practices by comparison with what others (actual and invented) do, or don’t do. So, for example, we make use of the notion of language games, or of joint action, not to explain our use of language, but simply to note what in certain situations of language use we seem to be actually doing; and often, if the portrayal we offer brings out unnoticed connections between aspects of that situation, that is sufficient to give us the kind of understanding we need to conduct our practical affairs more effectively – for some things we just do spontaneously understand in practice without the need of any analysis or explanation. If we had always to understand a person’s reply to our questions by use, say, of a logical or scientific analysis to explain them, then the ordinary play of questions and answers in everyday life (as well as the understanding of the logical or scientific analysis) would be impossible.

              But clearly, this form of relationally-responsive understanding – that consists in seeing connections – depends upon the use of that special form of true rhetorical speech that, as Vico and Grassi suggest, relies upon its dialogical and metaphorical nature. It is not a form of reasoning that can be conducted by individuals alone, nor can it be mechanized. Thus, in the current atmosphere, in which such forms are valued, we cannot expect the transition to such dialogical and metaphorical ways of reasoning to be to an easy one. We can expect a struggle: with current monological forms of reasoning at the centre attempting to repel or expel dialogical forms out onto the margins. For, “monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (1984, pp.292-3).

              And this is, of course, is exactly the implicit power exerted over us by the traditional scientific view of things: it leads us to treat what we are studying as an object of thought in order to form theories to guide our further, deliberate actions in relation to it. Our representations of things suggest to us ways in which they can be manipulated and give us power over them. Lacking such ‘inner’ pictures, we feel an uncertainty, a lack of confidence in an our knowledge; we don’t quite know were we stand. If our traditional approaches cannot give it us, we tend to seek it in our ne approaches.

              But this urge for certainty cannot be satisfied by a turn to dialogic approaches either! For traditions of argumentation, the multivoiced polyphony of a world in dialogic discussion with itself cannot ever be accurately ‘pictured’. Its open, unfinished, still developing nature intrinsically precludes that possibility.

              However, instead of certainty (as accuracy of representation), we can concern ourselves with adequacy, with doing justice to the being of what we are studying (Shotter, 1991, 1992). Where, according to Bakhtin (1984), “the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. 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).

              For too long in our social sciences, we have hidden these essentially political struggles – between a natural scientific approach in terms of explanatory theories and a more dialogical approaches in terms of practical-descriptive theories – from publicly debatable investigation by simply assuming that social life just is a ‘natural’ phenomenon, awaiting our discovery of its ‘laws’ in the same way that we discover those governing the movements of fundamental particles in physics. Thus, as social scientists, we have treated our topics of inquiry, as if they all already exist as ready-made entities out in our ‘external’ world – rather than as still developing socio-historical constructions, constitutive of our own being as the individuals we currently experience ourselves as being. We have not realized that what we experience ourselves as being, and what we experience as the being of our world, are both determined by us, and for us, in all the self-other relationships in which we are involved. Nor have we realized the degree to which current social scientific traditions of investigation and debate have come to permeate our ordinary everyday forms of thought and talk, and to constitute the ‘standards’ or ‘norms’ for what its considered to be a ‘proper’ discussion.

              For us in the West, enthralled by the power of theory, it has long seemed as if we can individually investigate the character of the ‘world’ around us. We now must begin to face the fact that such an activity is only possible if what we study is already ordered. In the movement to a nonmodernist science of mental life, the assumption that we all live within the same (socially) ordered world can no longer be sustained; we have to accept that there is no single, already-made meaningful order to be found in our social lives. But if that is the case, if there is no a priori social order, if our practical, everyday activities take place in, and deal with, a pluralistic, only fragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world, then we must turn away from the project of attempting to understand our social lives through the imposition of monologic, theoretical systems of order, and turn to a study of the more dialogic forms of practical-moral knowledge in terms of which they are lived. For the task now is to invent appropriate practical-theoretical devices, i.e., the apposite perspicuous representations, that work to render rationally-visible the influences at work upon us, thus to fashion them as topics of public discussion and debate.

              Thus, within a research tradition organized around dialogical, rather than monological practices, instead of the simple Darwinian struggle for the survival of the supposedly fittest theory (representing an already existing order), we can expect to see a whole host of other and new kinds of struggle. Especially, we can expect struggles to do with claims of an ethical kind, to do with what is involved in treating others (and otherness) with due respect - to replace the struggles we have had in the past over how they (and it) might best be manipulated. Thus, we can expect a concern with fashioning new orders of relationship (out of chaos). Consequently, we can expect contests between different perspicuous representations, i.e., between different metaphorical accounts which ‘give form’ to our circumstances in ways which have not been ‘seen’ before, providing novel understandings ‘making new connections’ . We can also expect to see such representations, and claims for their worth, issuing from many different ‘positions’ in the tradition other than from within the mainstream (center). Further, such claims will not just critical of the mainstream, but of each other also. There will be struggles too between different genres of writing, and the form-producing ideologies, i.e., the ‘imaginary worlds’, they embody. Indeed, the study of writers’s practices, rather than their content, can be expected to extent to a study of the tone in which they write, for the different dialogical opportunities for relationship (and being) offered to readers by authors, will become important . Finally, there will be political struggles over which representations of a ‘worldview’ should be ‘literalized’ (Rorty, 1980) into an ‘world-order’. For, in what is now becoming an almost world-wide phenomenon, those who are concerned with finding a ‘history’ or a ‘tradition’ of their own, have begun to object to the monological, ahistorical systems of ‘central-planning and administration’ which exclude them.

              Indeed, as we move out of a political world of supposed equals, of people existing as indistinguishable atoms, psychologically, all in competition with one another for power, and move into a political world of people possessing psychological characteristics according to their ‘positions’ in relation to each other, we begin to see a whole different dynamic at work. Instead of a ‘politics of power’, a new ‘politics of identity’ is beginning, a politics of access to or exclusion from a political economy of ontological opportunities for different ways of being. If one is to participate in this political economy with equal opportunity, then ‘membership’ of the community of struggle, the tradition of argumentation, cannot be conditional: one must feel one has a right, unconditionally, to ‘belong’. And these claims to ‘belong’ are now being posed by a whole host of groups previously marginalized by professional academics: not only women, black and other ethnic movements, ecologists, and so on, but also many others without ‘expert’ or ‘professional’ credentials. We are moving into a new world of problems posed by a genuine recognition of the importance of differences rather than similarities, and, the importance of that world in influencing the character of the questions we now feel it crucial to pursue.

Reference:

Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Notes: