From:   Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: Sage Publications Ltd, pp.1-5.

Preface

The aim of this book is to attempt to describe crucial features of the conversational world or worlds within which we have our being. For conversation is not just one of our many activities in the world. On the contrary, we constitute both ourselves and our worlds in our conversational activity. For us they are foundational. They constitute the usually ignored background within which our lives are rooted. But they need not remain so. For, from within our conversational activities themselves, we can draw attention to certain of their crucially important features that would otherwise escape our notice. Thus, we can come to grasp aspects of their nature, through our talk itself, even when a vision of it as a whole, in theory, is denied us.

Introduction: A Relational-Responsive Version of Social Constructionism

“The primary human reality is persons in conversation” (Harré, 1983: 58).

“Conversation flows on, the application and interpretation of words, and only in its course do words have their meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1981: no. 135).

“Conversation, understood widely enough, is the form of human transactions in general” (Maclntyre, 1981: 197)

Our talk (and our writing) about talk is beginning to take a dialogical or a conversational turn. Instead of taking it for granted that we understand another person's speech simply by grasping the inner ideas they have supposedly put into their words, that picture of how we understand each other is coming to be seen as the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, we realize, we do not fully understand what another person says. Indeed, in practice, shared understandings occur only occasionally, if they occur at all. And when they do, it is by people testing and checking each other's talk, by them questioning and challenging it, reformulating and elaborating it, and so on. For in practice, shared understandings are developed or negotiated between participants over a period of time, in the course of an ongoing conversation (Garfinkel, 1967).

             But if people are not simply putting their ideas into words, what are they usually doing in their talk? Primarily, it seems, they are responding to each other's utterances in an attempt to link their practical activities in with those of the others around them; and in these attempts at coordinating their activities, people are constructing one or another kind of social relationship (Mills, 1940). It is the character of these conversationally developed and developing relations, and the events occurring within them, that [end p.1] are coming to be seen as of much greater importance than the shared ideas to which they might (or might not) give rise. For it is from within the dynamically sustained context of these actively constructed relations that what is talked about gets its meaning. Thus, instead of focusing immediately upon how individuals come to know the objects and entities in the world around them, we are becoming more interested in how people first develop and sustain certain ways of relating themselves to each other in their talk, and then, from within these ways of talking, make sense of their surroundings.

             For, although our surroundings may stay materially the same at any one moment in time, how we make sense of them, what we select for attention or to act upon, how we connect those various events,

dispersed in time and space, together and attribute significance to them, very much depends upon our use of language. In other words, instead of understanding our thoughts and ideas being presented to us as if visually, like we see bounded, material objects, in an instant, we are coming to talk of them as having more the quality of an extended sequence of commands or instructions as to how to act. Indeed, as I shall argue below, it is as if such commands or instructions are presented to us dialogically or conversationally by the voice of an other, one who responds to each phase of our action by indicating to us a next feature to which we should attend (see Part I). Thus, instead ofin visual and ocular metaphors, we are coming to make sense of our talk in terms of metaphors drawn from the realm of talk itself.

Linguistically constructed relationships and our disciplinary practices

We can perhaps see the importance of such linguistically constructed relationships if we begin by taking an extreme case: what happens at a certain moment in a relationship, when one person says to another, ‘I love you.' Quite apart from its function as a statement of fact, such a statement can function (if appropriately responded to by the other) to reconstitute the whole character of the speaker's relation to the person to whom it is addressed. Indeed - and this is especially important - the changed relationship acts back upon the speaker to change the nature of the speaker too. For not only will the speaker now take on new duties (in exchange for new rights) regarding the person of the other, but what he or she will notice and care about in the other will also change: she or he will be changed in their moral sensibility, in their very being, in the kind of person they are. While the speaker was solely responsible for trying to initiate the ‘creation' by the couple of a new form of their relationship, and in that sense, made the disclosure out of the blue, in another sense, the speaker will not have acted out of the [end p.2] blue at all.

             They will have acted at a crucial moment in the changing context of their developing relationship.

             Usually, he or she will have noticed certain incipient tendencies in their relationship with and to the other: the other might have spent more than a usual time gazing at them, or is disconcerted by their presence, and so on. And they have decided that when in the right situation - when in an appropriate interactive position in relation to the other, at the right interactive moment - to risk making their declaration. For, unless the whole enterprise is bungled, its meaning, its unique meaning for those involved, will be apparent in the flow of activity in which it appears.

             The words ‘I love you' will then draw their power - to change the whole character of the future flow of essentially conversational activity between the partners - very little from the words themselves. They merely function to make a crucial difference at a crucial moment, one that arises as a result of the history of its flow so far; their meaning is mostly in their use at that moment. But to use them thus, takes judgment; hence the speaker's feelings of apprehension and risk.

             However, if managed well, the ‘declaration of love' works to create a whole new kind of relationship with the other. Where, from within that new kind of relationship, a new kind of ‘reality' becomes apparent - for those in love which each other attach a quite different kind of significance to even small tendencies in each other's actions: the lover is enraptured by the loved one, finding them to be a source of ‘ceaselessly unforeseen originality' (Barthes, 1983: 34). For being in love is more than just being friends. It is distinctive in that we feel suddenly seized by passions that wrench us out of the mundane flow of everyday life, we are transported into another, special reality, in which things happen in seemingly extraordinary ways.

             Thus, just as ‘the world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man' (Wittgenstein, 1961: remark no. 6.43), so the world of those in love is different from those who are not:

‒           (i) they are in control of themselves (or not) in different ways;

‒           (ii) they expect different things of, notice different things in, and have different motives regarding, each other;

‒           (iii) they also use different ways of judging each other's worth.

In other words, they are different in their ways of being. And it is against this new background, this new structure of feelings, that certain acts are judged by those involved as fitting or not. Thus, as a result of their declarations of love for each other (assuming the initial declaration to have been reciprocated), they will expect different things of each other in the future. If they take their utterances seriously and are concerned about their (moral) implications, they will not now expect, for instance, often to be left alone, while the other goes off with other friends, and so on. Indeed, speakers not honoring the moral commitments implicit in their avowals can be [end p.3] shamed by being confronted with that fact by those to whom they addressed them.

             While not perhaps so emotionally intense, nor quite so exclusive of others, many of our other activities in everyday life take place within the context of such conversationally developed relationships. Some are fleeting, others are more long term. Some are more open and disorderly than others; conversations among friends are less constrained than those in which we have to get some ‘business' done; in some contexts - in offices, businesses, bureaucracies, educational establishments, etc. - knowing the order of talk required is a part of one's social competence as an adult. Indeed, so powerful is our talk in affecting our relations to others, that certain ways of talking take on an ‘official' or ‘sacrosanct' form, and one is sanctioned for talking ‘against' them, so to speak.

             Talk that undermines the boundaries between our categories of things in the world, undermines ‘us', the stability of the kind of beings we take ourselves to be and the shape of the desires, impulses, and urges we have; thus such talk is dangerous (Douglas, 1966). It is not easy to question or to change our ‘basic' ways of talking.

             In the West, in our everyday, practical talk about ourselves, we take a great number of things for granted. And in our traditional forms of inquiry into ourselves and the nature of our everyday social lives, in psychology and sociology, we have codified these ‘basic' ways of talking into a number of explicit assumptions: for instance, we take it that we are self-contained individuals, having minds that contain ‘inner mental representations' of possible ‘outer' circumstances, set over against other such similar individuals, and against a social and natural background lacking such a cognitive ability (Sampson, 1985, 1988).

             Indeed, so ‘ingrained' is this way of thinking about ourselves, that in our everyday conversations it is difficult for us intelligibly to talk about - and thus to imagine - ourselves in any other way. In fact, we hold each other to these forms of talk; to talk otherwise is considered a bit strange, it is as if one did not quite know what is involved in being a normal person. This is the source of our assumption that to understand something means ‘having something like a picture of it in our heads'. And when, prior to the problem of attempting to explain it as a psychological process, we are faced with the problem of saying what understanding ‘is', we say to ourselves, that is how it ‘must' be - how [end p.4] else could it be?

             Yet, as the anthropologist Geertz (1975: 49) remarks about this whole conception we have of ourselves, ‘however incorrigible it may seem to us, [it is] a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures'. Other peoples seem to have developed very different ways of accounting for themselves to each other: as Lienhardt (1961: 149) reports for the Dinka, for instance, that they seem to have ‘no such interior entity [as a ‘mind'] to appear, on reflection, to stand between the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence upon the self. Could it be that our talk of people as having inner mental stales, and of them as always understanding things in terms of such states, is less universal than we think?

             Yet, as we have seen, it is ‘basic' for us. It arises out of a whole set of, to an extent interlocking, everyday practices in terms of which we live and make sense of our lives together. Thus, although new ways of talking can be proposed, unless a way of fitting them in with those already existing can be found, difficulties will be raised. In this regard, of particular interest to us as professional academics, are the disciplinary relationships we share with our professional colleagues. Although we have been used in the past to thinking of our disciplines as concerned with dispassionate knowledge, it is clear that this is only so in the center of the discipline, so to speak. Those who operate there, who have passed their examinations well, who know not only how to draw upon certain already fixed meanings in an order of meanings but how to critically reject all those that do not fit, find an orderly, tranquil world with everything in its expected place.

             But as Foucault (1972) points out, at the boundaries, on the margins of our academic disciplines, there are a whole range of exclusionary practices working to sustain the limited and orderly nature of its subject matter. And so it has been in the history of the human sciences (Danziger, 1990). Each new approach has had to struggle in from the margins to a place in the center. For, to those who currently occupy the center, new approaches can often seem like dangerous monsters on the prowl around outside the discipline, intent, if allowed in, upon destroying any order so far achieved within it. Thus, like friends posed on the brink of being lovers, can we (should we) risk shifting our disciplinary relations onto a new footing? While we might experience what we have never experienced before, we might also lose the basis of all the gains we have made so far. But also like the lovers above, perhaps the risk is not so great as feared. Perhaps we are only required to recognize what it is that we already doing in our relations to and with each other: to recognize and attend to ourselves at work where, before, we thought ‘mechanisms' beyond our control must be. [end p.5]