Sampson (1993) Chapter 7: “Celebrating the Other” the Dialogic Turn”
Central theme: Language as Communication in Action, or as Communicative Action – doing things together is an interactional achievement.
‒ Time to take conversation seriously – four features:
‒ 1) Betweenness – not events inside single individuals
‒ 2) Public – out in the world
‒ 3) Addressivity – “recipient design” (CA)
‒ 4) Encompass verbal, nonverbal, spoken and written material – always embedded in a flow of already ongoing interaction
‒ In the past, in the West – the celebration of Sameness
‒ (see slide 1 below)
‒ Six prominent thinkers relevant to the ‘dialogical turn’:
‒ G.H. Mead [1863-1931]
‒ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]
‒ L.S. Vygotsky [1895-1934]
‒ M.M. Bakhtin [1896-1975] & V.N.Voloshinov [189?-19??]
‒ Lorraine Code [1942...]
‒ Wittgenstein’s (1958) challenge to “the Private Inner World:”
‒ “There is a kind of general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir” (p.143).
‒ “The thing to do in such cases is always to look how the words in question are actually used in our language” (p.56).
‒ Gergen (1989), like Krippendorff (1995), notes (about emotion-words):
‒ none are “anchored in, defined by or ostensively grounded in real-world particulars” (p.71).
‒ these terms do “not mirror or map and independent reality but [are] a functioning element in social process itself” (p.71).
‒ they are the terms used by “various interest groups within the culture [as they] seek to warrant or justify their accounts of the world” (p.72).
‒ L. S. Vygotsky – “Thought and Language” (1962); “Mind in Society” (1978)
‒ Basic process – two versions of it
First version
‒ 1) “... awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously” (1962, p.96).
‒
Second version
‒ 2) “Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)... All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals (1978, p.57).
‒ Example: the developmental trajectory of “pointing.”
‒ Phase 1) Child reaches for but fails to grasp an object (treated by caretaker as a gesture – “pointing”)
‒ Phase 2) Caretaker responds to ‘failed grasp’ as if a meaningful gesture
‒ Phase 3) Caretaker completes the social or joint act in giving the child the object – gives meaning
‒ G.H. Mead – “Mind, Self and Society” (1934)
‒ Social Behaviorism
‒ The example of a dog-fight
‒ A “conversation of gestures”
‒ Two quotations:
‒ “The meaning of what we are saying is the tendency to respond to it” (Mead, 1934,p.67).
‒ “A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship... and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises” (Mead, 1934, p.76) – i) a gesture, ii) a response, iii) a meaning is “given in terms of” the response to the gesture.
‒ Ideas shared by both Vygotsky and Mead
‒ The social process – dialogue and conversation – is the source of all our mental processes
‒ Everything in our mental lives grows from our relations to OTHERS
‒ For CONSCIOUSNESS, even!
‒ “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).
‒ “Organisms may be conscious without being self-conscious...
‒ [Only when] when [a person] not only hears himself but responds to himself... as truly as the other person replies to him, that we have behavior in which individuals become objects to themselves” (p. 139)... and thus self-conscious.
‒ Lorraine Code (1991) – “What Can She Know? Femininist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge” (and Sandra Harding (1986) – “The Science Question in Feminism”)
‒ Instead of knowledge of objects, it is of knowledge of PEOPLE that we should take as our basic model
‒ “It is surely no more preposterous to argue that people should try to know physical objects in the nuanced way that they know their friends
‒ than it is to argue that they should try to know people in the unsubtle way that they claim to know physical objects.”(p. 165)
‒ Some points about knowing people:
Our knowledge is:
‒ 1) multidimensional and multiperspectival
‒ 2) an ongoing, communicative, interpretative process
‒ 3) always unfinished
‒ 4) yet, clear enough to ‘go on’
‒ Emergence of the “SELF” I:
Sartre’s 1946 play, Huis Clos (No Exit) – “Hell is other people.”
‒ The “looking-glass-self” – we only know ourselves in terms of other people’s responses to us
‒ Emergence of the “SELF” II:
Mead’s (1934) account of the ‘I’and the ‘me’:
‒ ‘I’ (as a subject) do things – you see ‘me’ (as an object) doing them
‒ Thus, you reflect my ‘me’ (not my ‘I’) back to me
‒ “If you ask, then, where directly in your own exprience the ‘I’ comes in, the answer is that the ‘I’ comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the ‘I’ of the ‘me’” (p.174).
‒ Emergence of the “SELF” III:
Bakhtin (1986) – “Speech Genres”
‒ “As we know, the role of the others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great... The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response” (p.94).
‒ “Thus, addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist” (p.99).
‒ Constructing Social Reality
Voloshinov (1929/1986) – “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”
‒ “No such thing as experience outside of embodiment in signs”
‒ “The location of the organizing and formative center is not within... but outside”
‒ “It is not experience that organizes expression... but expression organizes experience” (p.85).
‒ Voloshinov’s example:
Three expressions (and experiences) of hunger:
‒ 1) As a lone beggar – shameful hunger
‒ 2) In a peasant village – resigned but unashamed hunger
‒ 3) Among a group of ‘locked out’ workers – self-confident protest and anger at hunger
‒ Two quotations from Sampson (1993) to end:
‒ “The other is a vital co-creator of our mind, our self, and our society”
‒ “Without the other, we would be mindless, selfless, and societyless...” (p.109).
Slide 1... CMN 457, Spring 2003
Celebrating the Other
An event occurs: What’s happening?
(It’s vague, it’s unclear, we need to make sense of it, or with it.)
Two Approaches
As a sameness As an otherness
Treat it as a problem Treat it as a new and unique otherness
Treat it as made up of Enter into a dialogue with it
already well-known parts
Analyze it Notice “struck by’s” – unique events that matter to you, that you respond to, can relate to
Select features
Look for regularities Move hither and thither in relation to it
Fit it into a framework, a theory Become familiar with its world
Fit it into our world: solves the problem Come to feel ‘at home’ with it
The continual re-discovery of sameness The continual re-orientation toward Otherness
(To gain knowledge) (Simply to acknowledge, i.e., say ‘Hello’)
My Chinese grad-student made and interesting and profound comment about this kind of difference: “In a Chinese dialogue, the other forms the context for the self. I see first others and then I know who I am. In western dialogue, individuals begin with self-knowledge or awareness in order to see the other” (Donal Carbaugh, UMASS, Communication).