"(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).
 

About it, Wittgenstein (1980) remarks: "Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning" (p.16); while Merleau-Ponty (1962) notes, most importantly, that "... for the normal person every movement is, indissolubly, movement and consciousness of movement. This can be expressed by saying that for the normal person every movement has a background, and that the movement and its background are 'moments of a unique totality'"(p.110). In short, central to this new movement of thought, is a recognition of the importance of life and living processes, of their character as indivisible, internally differentiated, growing or unfolding wholes, of the ineradicable irreversibility of time, and, as a consequence, the ceaseless creation of novelty. Instead of seeking laws of order and repetition, our focus shifts to fleeting first-time, only-once-occurrent, 'moving' or 'arresting' events - events which are not simply changes in the position of our bodies in space, a reconfiguration of a set of externally related elements, but are physiognomic changes within our bodies, through which we express (in our spontaneous responses to the events occurring around us) our feelings to each other. Where such physiognomic expressions - such as smiles and frowns, reluctances and enthusiasms, etc. - work to communicate in a gestural fashion, i.e., in both an indicatory and mimetic manner.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) gives a nice example of what is meant by such a form of communication: "I beckon across the world," he says, "I beckon over there, where my friend is: the distance between us, his consent or refusal are immediately read in my gesture; there is not a perception followed by a movement, for both form a system that varies as a whole. If, for example, noticing that there is no response to my move, I vary my gesture, we have here, not two distinct acts of consciousness. What happens is that I see my partner's unwillingness, and my gesture of impatience emerges from this situation without any intervening thought" (p.111). Out in the open, in the world between us, I can 'see' my friend's feelings of unwillingness, and he can 'see' my impatience.

It is precisely such events as these, that we are now seeking to understand in our inquiries. Instead of seeking supposed "realities behind appearances," as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, "it is... the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand" (no.89) - "nothing is hidden" (no.435). And what we seek is "just that [kind of] understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" (no. 122). For it is this kind of uniquely particular understanding from within our ongoing participation within an active meeting that - unlike the theoretical understanding of a general law or principle - that enables us to go on in a practical situation in an unconfused, well-oriented fashion. For rather than repetitions and regularities of a general kind, we need to know connections and relations between specific aspects of our circumstances, i.e., their qualities, if we are to feel 'at home' in them.

In general, then, the approach I am outlining here has much in common with Reason and Goodwin's (1999) "science of qualities." They also emphasize our embedding in a ceaseless, unfolding flow of becoming, and the need to focus on "complex emergent wholes" (p.281). They too suggest that "our feelings in response to natural processes are not arbitrary but can be used as reliable indicators of the nature of the real processes in which we participate" (p.293). They also focus on the importance of the contrast between participatory understandings occurring in meetings, and objective forms of understanding in which we place ourselves at a distance from, or over against those we presume to study. "Participation now enters as a fundamental ingredient in the human experience of any phenomena, which arises out of the encounter between two real processes that are distinct but not separable," they say. "The human process of becoming and that of the 'other'', what ever this may be to which the human is attending. In this encounter wherein the phenomenon is generated, feelings and intuitions are not arbitrary, idiosyncratic accompaniments but direct indicators of the nature of the mutual process that occurs in the encounter. By paying attention to these, we gain insight into the emergent reality in which we participate" (p.293).

And this also is precisely what I want to emphasize in my talk: the joint, dialogical, or chaismic (i.e., complexly intertwined) nature of the activities occurring in such meetings. But, in having introduced this emphasize on the importance of such meetings, I want to emphasize even more the nature of their initial approaches to such meetings. For these 'set the scene', so to speak, for how 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.

What we are concerned with here, then, to repeat, is not so much with repetitions, with laws and regularities. They are - or could be said to be - important to the extent that the background flow of spontaneous activity in which we are embedded and have our being, has an already historically developed style or character to it, a tradition in which a certain set of already instituted routines or practices have been established. But what is important are not, to repeat, merely changes of the configuration in space of a set of externally related elements, but internally inter-related, emergent changes of a physiognomic kind within a complex whole in time-space. Within the complexly organized emerging wholes in which they occur, such changes are "coherent deformations" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.54), or a "specific variability" (Voloshinov, 1986, p.69), or an "already specified further specifiability" (Shotter, 1980, p.45; Shotter, 1984, p.187) which - although they may produce quite drastic changes within the whole - nonetheless preserve its identity as the wholes it is.

Such changes, Wittgenstein (1980) notes, begin with our spontaneous responses to events occurring around us: "The origin and the primitive form of the language game is," he says (p.31), 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)'." "The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word" (1953, p.218). "But what is the word 'primitive' meant to say here?" he asks, "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" (1981, no.541).

Central to Wittgenstein's (1953) approach to language here (as with Merleau-Ponty's) is our direct, conceptually unmediated, responsive understanding of the gestural (i.e., indicatory or mimetic) aspect of our bodily expressions. We find it first outlined in his account of "pain behavior." "When I say 'I am in pain'... What I do is not, of course, to identity my sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end of the language-game: it is the beginning" (nos.208, 209). But he carries it on to suggest that "the characteristic mark of all 'feelings' is that there is expression of them, i.e., facial expression, gestures, of feeling" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.513). We do not just see facial contortions, hear the cries and disturbed breathing, "and make an inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. - Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. This is essential to what we call 'emotion'" (Wittgenstein, 1980, II, no.570). Indeed, we can go further. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) points out, "I know unquestionably that the man over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eyes' grasp of the scene" (p.169). In other words, there is a realm of spontaneous understanding here which is well expressed in Merleau-Ponty's (1962) claim that: "Every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously. I cannot say that I see the blue of the sky in the sense in which I say that I understand a book or again in which I decide to devote my life to mathematics. My perception, even when seen from the inside, expresses a given situation: ... So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say one perceives in me, and not that I perceive..." (p.215). As Mead (1934) puts it, event prior to our coming to consciousness of the fact, "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).

The concern with the spontaneous, almost magical power of expression here, ties in with Levy-Bruhl's (1926) sensitive characterization of the nature of participatory thinking among what he calls 'primitive' peoples. In sensing their world as containing invisible presences, he suggests that there is of a mystical nature, in which "'mystic' implies belief in forces and influences which, although imperceptible to the sense, are nevertheless real" (p.38). I want to suggest, however, that this aspect of participatory thought - our spontaneous, non-conceptually mediated responsivity to invisible influences felt as momentary "real presences" within our engagements - is exactly the notion we need if we are to adequately understand in a dynamic fashion our social lives together.

Elsewhere (Shotter, in press), I have outlined in detail the nature of dialogically-structured, chiasmically⁽¹⁾ organized activities (and I will bring some of this material to the workshop). But here, let me end by drawing on Raymond Williams's (1977) account of what he calls the "structures of feeling" holding a society together as a complexly organized, still emerging whole. About the qualitative changes occurring in a society held together by such a structure of feeling: "They are social in two ways that distinguish them from reduced sense of the social as institutional and the formal," he says, "first, in that they are changes of presence (while they are being lived this is obvious; when they have been lived it is still their substantial characteristic); second, in that they are emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action" (pp.131-132). Where, in being concerned with a structure of feeling, "we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations... We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity... [And] we are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension... We are also defining a social experience still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies" (p.132).

And most importantly, Williams (1977) notes that such a structure of feeling "is at the very edge of semantic availability, [and] has many characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations - new semantic figures - are discovered in material practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact minority) generation: this often, in turn, the generation that substantially connects to its successor" (p.134). This sets the task for our further inquiries here.

Thus to conclude: In focusing on the ever present background flow of spontaneously unfolding, reciprocally responsive inter-activity between us and our surroundings within which we all have our being as 'participant parts', we have seen how, as we come to feel 'at home' within it, we can learn how to answer to the distinctive 'calls' it exerts on us, without our need for external force to move us around inside the 'worlds' they present to us. Yet, clearly, to become familiar with such 'inner worlds', even if we cannot accumulate a body of principled knowledge, we must acquire various 'ways' or 'styles' of knowing. Just as we can learn how to intertwine the views from our two eyes to see a landscape before us 'in depth', so we can also learn how to see the world of human social practices 'in depth' too. Instead of the passive kinds of representational-referential knowledge with which we are familiar as academics, we can call this form of currently unfamiliar knowledge, relationally-responsive knowing or participatory knowledge. For, instead of acting merely in relation to an already fixed (inner) representation of an outer state of affairs, we can be said to be participating intimately in with the others and othernesses around us, as we dialogically unfold between us, intricately intertwined relationships of many, uniquely different kinds.

But to act like this - with a continuous responsive sensitivity to the response of others to one's actions - is to act in a way very different from traditional scientific experimentalist-observers, who implement a 'manipulation' or 'intervention' and then wait to see whether it results in an expected state of affairs or not. As Bakhtin (1984) sees it, traditional scientific forms of interaction are monologic - where, "monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force" (p.293). Whereas, as we have already noted, the meeting and intertwining of two consciousness can give rise to 'a world'. A complex unity emerges, a "unity not as an innate one-and-only, but as a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples" (p.289). And it is from within this complex unity that we as individuals act, and shape what we do there in answer to the 'calls' it exerts on us. Thus - and this is relevant to our concern with democratic action - from within such a complex unity, "it is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential [sobytiina] and is born at that point of contact among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one of the possible ways. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence. (Bakhtin, 1984, p.81). "Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.110).

What does this mean for our institutional forms of inquiry? Traditional notions of inquiry treat it as a primarily a cognitive activity taking place inside our heads: our task is to discover the 'best' representations available to us of the world around us. But here, prior to any inquiries if this kind is another kind of inquiry with another aim altogether: that of becoming familiar with, coming to be 'at home' with, a sphere of activity. Involved here is, as I termed it a while ago (Shotter, 1984), is an "ontological skill" - for, in knowing how to be, say, a musician, painter, mathematician, company director, or regional developer, one must acquire certain sensibilities and attunements, one must come to know one's "way about" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123) inside the requisite, conversationally sustained 'reality' or 'inner world'. To do this, we must learn how to see what is around us 'in depth', as offering us a 'space of possibilities' for our actions. Such a sense only emerges for us from within our dialogically or chiasmically-structured meetings with the others around us.

The kind of learning involved here begins by being "struck," with our noticing of, as Bateson (1979) puts it, the "differences that make a difference" (p.453). With more space, I would have liked to have explored the method of "social poetics" (Katz and Shotter, 1996; Shotter and Katz, 1996; Katz and Shotter, 1996a; Shotter, 1998; Cunliffe, 1999), for use in developing within a collaborating group, not only a sensitivity to subtle and fleeting events of importance in their shared practice, but also a vocabulary for creating and sustaining the appropriate 'ways of looking', i.e., of paying attention. But to sum up, in such self-reflecting and self-developing practices:

• -Practitioners become co-researchers, and researchers become co-practitioners, as each articulates what they have been 'struck by' in the unfolding process.
• -Both researchers and practitioners alike are engaged in creating sense about lived experience. This sense emerges in the collaborative dialogical activity between them. As a result, practice, teaching and research are all enfolded with each other, as one in-forms and creates the other in a evolving, generative fashion.
• -Both inquiry and learning in this process becomes a matter of "practical authorship" (Shotter, 1993) in which teachers and students, managers and workers, researchers and practitioners, all co-construct what is they create and learn together.
• -And in such creative/learning conversations, participants may develop "practical theory" together - Goethe: "Let us not seek for something beyond the phenomena - they themselves are the theory".

References:

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

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

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

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

Brulin, G. (1998) The new task of the Swedish universities: knowledge formation in interactive cooperation with practitioners. Concepts and Transformations, 3. pp.113-127.

Cunliffe, A.L. (1997) The Manager as Practical Author: a Social Poetics of Managing and the Implications for Management Inquiry and Learning.

Cunliffe, A.L. (1998) Everyday conversations: a social poetics of managing.

Gustavsen, B. (1992) Dialogue and Development: Theory of Communication, Action Research and the Restructuring of Working Life. Van Assen, Netherlands: Gorcum.

Katz, A.M. and Shotter, J. (1996) Hearing the patient's voice: towar a 'social poetics' in diagnostic interviews. Social Science and Medicine, 46. pp.919-931.

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

Levy-Bruhl, L. (1926) How Natives Think (Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieurs), trans. by L.A. Clare. London: George Allen and Unwin.

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

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.

Reason, P. and Goodwin, B. (1999) Toward a science of qualities: lessons form complexity theory and postmodern biology. Concepts and Transformations, 4(3), pp.281-317.

Shotter, J. (1980) Action, joint action, and intentionality. M. Brenner (Ed.) The Structure of Action . Oxford: Blackwell.

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

Shotter, J. (in press) "Real presences:" meaning as living movement in a participatory world. Theory & Psychology

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

Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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

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

1. In using the term chiasmic, I am following the lead of Merleau-Ponty (1968) who entitles chapter 4 - in his book The Visible and the Invisible - "The Intertwining - The Chiasm." I cannot pretend to say what "chiasmic or intertwined relations" in fact are. But what is clear, is that here is a sphere of living relations of a kind utterly different from any so far familiar to us (such as causal or logical relations) and taken by us as basic in our intellectual inquiries. All I can do here, is to begin their exploration.