First draft of a paper to be given at the Taos Institute Conference: Social Construction: A Celebration of Collaborative Practices, Oct 6th - 9th, 2005.



Hearing things in the temporal contours of people’s talk:

transitory understandings and action guiding anticipations



John Shotter

KCCF

London, England





In setting the tone for this symposium, Harlene noted: “This ‘thing called psychotherapy’ is becoming more and more medicalized and problem-saturated in today’s marketplace. Pervasive is the language of best practices, evidence based practices, and techniques. These trends speak from an authoritarian or expert voice. The client’s voice is left behind.”


              In these comments, Harlene is responding to a move which we can now see, I think, being made by administrators everywhere in the Western world – in England under the Blair government, it is simply being called: ‘modernization’. It involves the ‘rationalization’ of existing practices to make them both ‘accountable’ (in a budgetary but not in an ethical sense) and ‘controllable’ (by central government). It rests on the easy and wholly unexamined assumption that what in the past has been done rather haphazardly, in different ways in different local conditions, and thus in what must, inevitably, be in wasteful ways, can be done more ‘effectively’, ‘efficiently’, and ‘controllably’ by practitioners having to satisfy externally imposed criteria in their practices (all in the service, of course, of tax cuts for the rich – for the poor everywhere are getting poorer). In other words, it is assumed that doing something for the second or third or fourth time, is no different from doing it for the first time.... It is this easily made, never tested, assumption, that I think is, in almost all human affairs, utterly wrong... In almost all human affairs, everything we do is continually being done for a yet another first time. It is the uniqueness of the situations we deal with that everywhere is being lost. While individualism thrives, there is a contempt for individuality


              Harlene notes the loss of the client’s own unique voice and personal experience. But what can also be easily lost, in my estimation, is the psychotherapists’s own unique use of their own spontaneously expressive being. For what should occur every time afresh – for yet “another first time,” as Garfinkel (1967, p.9) so nicely puts it – are the embodied, expressive utterances of the psychotherapist as she or he speaks in a way that is spontaneously responsive to the unique, embodied, expressive utterances of a client. For it is only in this atmosphere, the spontaneously responsive atmosphere of a truly dialogically-structured exchange, that possibilities for novel ways of acting, uniquely relevant to participant’s concerns, can be created. They cannot be created according to deliberate plans.


              Thus there is something very special, I think, that people can do in their haphazard collaborations with each other that they cannot do apart. But the uniquely new possible ways of going on in their lives together with the others and othernesses around them that they can create between them is only made possible by them, as living embodied beings, being spontaneously responsive to each other. This much, as we will see, is basic to our being in any kind of open dialogue with each other.


              But what seems to me especially distinct about psychotherapeutic dialogues is that in them, therapists both speak to and listen to their clients in certain special ways – ways that are often poetic ways – and in so doing, ensure that many of the new ways of going on created are fashioned from their clients’s own resources. New ways forward are fashioned in their terms, not in our’s. So what I want ultimately to discuss here today are the understandings and anticipations that can be generated in us by certain features in the ongoing micro-dynamics of therapeutic encounters – intonation contours, bodily postures and movements, patterns of breathing, etc. – currently being studied by Arlene Katz and myself that might make this focus on their potentialities possible.


              As some of you may know, very much under the influence of Tom Andersen’s emphasis on noticing and treating as significant the spontaneous occurrence of fleeting bodily events – as well as the writings of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin and Voloshinov – we have begun to outline a non-systematic set of methods, the methods of what we call a “social poetics,” for making sense of, as Bakhtin (1993) puts it, “once-occurrent events of Being” (p.2). Tom Andersen (1996) describes his interest in such events thus: “The listener who sees as much as he or she hears will notice that various spoken words ‘touch’ the speaker differently. The speaker is touched by the words as they reach his or her own ears. Some words touch the speaker in such a way that the listener can see him or her being moved” ( p.121).


              So, if I was allowed only one word to sum up this section of my talk, it would be the word “responsive,” being immediately responsive to the actual expressive movements of the others around one. And if I was allowed a second word, it would be the word “spontaneous.”


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Now, if one is speaking and listening to another only in accord with an internalized general schematism of one’s own – speaking in terms only of one’s own logic, and listening only for opportunities to apply it – it is easy to ignore, to bypass, one’s capacity to notice and to be spontaneously responsive to such events.


              Roger Lowe (2005), who has explored just this tension between “listening in order to speak” and “speaking in order to listen” – a distinction he took from Lynn Hoffman (2002) – gives a nice example that came to light on looking at the video-tape of one of his own therapy sessions: Beth is a 39 year old woman who has struggled for many years with debilitating panic attacks. He begins by following a systematic solution-focused sequence in an attempt to build a sense of evolving purpose and possibility, and he asks her to reflect on what would be a clear sign to her that things were improving:

 

“Beth: I’d be able to go shopping with my husband in a strange store without having to check out where the nearest medical facilities are first.

Therapist: How would that make a difference for you? (a typical follow up in this sequence)

Beth: I wouldn’t feel so helpless. I wouldn’t be clinging onto his arm for dear life . . . (pause) (as I hear these words, I immediately think of a typical “well-formed goal” question: what would you be doing instead? I begin to rehearse the wording of this question in my inner conversation and tune out to the end of Beth’s sentence which continues,... and he wouldn’t have to cling on to me any more. (Beth’s voice goes very quiet and her expression turns sad as she almost whispers these final words. But I do not attend to this as I have already begun to ask, “What would you be doing instead?”)” (p.70, his italics, my emphases).


Lowe goes on to comment that because at this point he was “listening in order to speak,” he ignored the expressive force of spontaneous changes occurring in Beth’s bodily demeanor and tone as she talked, which, if he had been more responsive to them, might have taken the conversation in a more significant direction. This comment is very apposite, as later in the session – while still resolutely following “well-formed goal” questions – Lowe went on the question Beth about yet further possible events that would signal her increased confidence. And, after having said that not caring about having a panic attack while with a friend, in answer to yet another possible-events-question from Lowe, Beth said that a difficult step would be for her to allow this to happen when she was with her husband. “Noticing her pensive look, I invited elaboration,” says Lowe (2005, p.73, my emphasis). Suddenly her utter resentment at being so dependent on her husband bursts out. “The intensity of her own reaction surprises her and she reflects that, irrespective of the severity of the attacks, her marriage, in some fundamental way, may be over. Staying with these reflections seems more important than the prosaic pursuit of further signs of change. Exploring the unanticipated resonance of a single question takes precedence over the completion of a sequence” (p.74).


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Now I noted above the tension between “listening in order to speak” and “speaking in order to listen.” But this is just one small aspect of a major tension in the whole of western thought: that between things we ourselves as individuals desire, want, and do, and things which just happen to us. The great power and attraction of Descartes’ philosophy in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1637, is that it promised us that if we followed his method, we could be “masters and possessors of Nature” (Descartes, 1968, p.78). In other words, without going into all the subtle details of the issue, we inherited the idea that only what we did deliberately and voluntarily was significant in our lives, and that our deliberate control over the conditions of our lives could be expended indefinitely – “there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it” (p.41), Descartes claimed. Hence the cultural shock to the West with Freud’s insistence on the unconscious influences in our lives, a shock, it seems to me, that we have still not got over – we are still searching for mastery in our own terms rather than seeking to be sensitive and knowledgeable participants in, and beneficiaries of, processes with as yet still ill-understood powers.


              Be all that as it may, what I want to emphasize here today is well put by Gadamer (1989), when he notes that his concern in his dialogic philosophy is with “not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (p.xxviii). And I do want to underline this, for it is so difficult to pay attention to what is just happening to us, spontaneously, in the background to our lives. But this is precisely, I think, the great power of the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, Mead, William James, Bergson, Bateson, Goethe, and many, many others. Rather than a focus on command and control, on visible, mechanistic forms of cause and effect activity, events that can be pictured, they direct our attention differently, toward in Bergson’s (1911) terms “the inner becoming of things” (p.322), toward the unfolding temporal contours of continuously evolving and developing events – think here of a tone of voice, a piece of music, the style of a person’s walk, a firework bursting in the sky – events with a real and distinct but invisible relational-structure to them that can only be, we say, ‘intuited’ or felt. Note here also, Lowe’s comment about Beth’s “pensive look” – he takes it absolutely for granted that we all know what a pensive look looks like, and that he also knew it and could sensitively respond to it when he saw it too. Indeed, if there were no shared spontaneous beginnings of this kind for our understandings, all our communicating with each other by spoken and written words would be impossible.


              In other words, then, as I see it, there is something very special about living movement, about what we can call expression that we have failed to attend to in our official philosophies, something that makes it very different from the mere physical or locomotive movement of things and objects in space. I have been trying to bring these differences out into the open for the last 30 years or so (Shotter, 1975, 1984), and there is insufficient time to outline them fully here.


              Suffice it to say here that, rather than simply being the re-arrangement or re-configuration of separately existing parts which, at each instant in time, take up a new configuration (according to pre-existing laws or principles) in space, expressive movements are quite different. They are the movements of indivisible, dynamic, self-structurizing, unitary, living wholes, each one utterly unique in itself. Thus, besides their moving around in space, such living wholes can also be sensed as moving within themselves. Indeed, such expressive movements, such gestures, can be sensed as occurring through time, even if the bodies of the relevant living beings stay steadfastly fixed in space – they breath, they make noises, they wave their limbs about, and so on. In so doing, they seem to display both short-term expressive ‘inner’ movements – smiles, frowns, vocalizations, and other such gestural movements – both the expressions of a ‘thou’, i.e., expressions of their own living identity, as well as more long term ‘inner’ movements, i.e., manifestations of their growing up, maturing, and aging.


              In other words, although not necessarily moving around in space at all, all such living processes, inevitably, are always irreversible ‘motions in time’, and such living motions are expressive of their own unique identity, their own unique way of ‘coming into being’ and of ‘becoming older’ within their surroundings.


              If I had to sum up this section in two words, my first word would be “unique,” for unlike current inquiries in science, we must concern ourselves with unique, unrepeatable, once-off, invisible, fleeting events. And my second word would be “creative,” for each such unique event, if it is to be a relevant event appropriate to the conditions of its occurrence, it has to be created for yet another first time – it cannot ‘produced’ or ‘manufactured’ by the setting in motion of a mechanism or by deducing consequences from a logical schematism.


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In turning now to events occurring between us in our everyday use of language, we find that Bakhtin (1986) nicely captures some aspects of the special nature of what I have called the “spontaneous responsiveness” at work in our untroubled ways of understanding each other. In such circumstances, he suggests that: “All real and integral understanding is actively responsive... And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth...” (p.69).


              In other words, we do not have to wait for speakers to complete their utterances before we can understand their speech sufficiently to respond to it in practice. For present to us in our spontaneous bodily responsiveness to their voicing of their utterances as they unfold, are action guiding anticipatory understandings of what they might possibly say next. For again, as Bakhtin (1986) notes: “The utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communication... [F]rom the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created... From the very beginning, the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response” (p.94).


              And all these relationally-responsive, “transitory understandings” happen spontaneously, as a result no doubt of the countless hours of training we have had in our prior involvements in our culture. We do not have to ‘work them out’, self-consciously and deliberately. Indeed, in always being fashioned in a responsive relation to local circumstances they can never be merely mechanical repetitions of previous utterances. They can be heard in the unfolding temporal contours of a person’s talk. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it: “The task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity” (p.68). It is not its precise repeatability that is important but its “specific variability” (p.69) – or in Bateson’s (1972) terms, it is “a difference that makes a difference” (p.286) that matters. And it is this that allows us to move on from what a speaker’s words mean generally, to what unique a speaker means by their use of them.


              Indeed, it is precisely these unique transitory understandings (that give us a sense of ‘where we stand’ in relation to the others around us) and action guiding anticipations (that give us a sense of ‘where we might go next’ in relation to them) that give us our orientation in expressing our own unique, once-off, creative responses to them, that are lost when we re-fashion our responses as in accord with a rational schematism as wilfully planned de-contextualized actions. What originally occurred as a unique ‘answer’ to a unique ‘question’ coming to us from our surroundings, is re-composed into an action that can be executed by any isolated individual, anywhere, at anytime, irrespective of the needs and requirements of our surroundings.


              Following Bakhtin (1984), we can call these one-way relations – in which we “constrain nature to give answers to questions of reason’s own determining” (Kant, 1781/1970, p.20) – monological forms of relation, for: “Monologue is finalized and deaf to other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (p.293). While those relations in which our expressive-responsive activities are spontaneously intertwined or interwoven with those of the others with whom we are engaged or involved, we can call dialogically-structured relations, for: “The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue... 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).


              As Jaako Seikkula (2002) puts it: “Monological dialogue refers to utterances that covey the speaker’s own thoughts and ideas without being adapted to the interlocutors. One utterance rejects another. In dialogical dialogue utterances are constructed to answer previous utterances and also to wait for an answer fro utterances that follow. New understanding is constructed between the interlocutors” (p.268) – this is a major condition for the possibility of Open Dialogue.


              In other words, in adopting the orientational stance of knowledgeable professionals, intent upon bringing our professional expertise to bear on the circumstances in question before us, we can be tempted to un-relate ourselves to the people before us as the unique individuals they are, and instead of relating to them in terms of who they are and to their needs, we begin to treat them merely as instances of a type. But, as I indicated above, only if we can allow ourselves to respond spontaneously to the unique expressions they spontaneously express, can we re-relate ourselves to them in such a way that they arouse in us the uniquely appropriate transitory understandings and action guiding anticipations that can enable us to ‘go on’ to respond to them in an appropriately therapeutic manner. But what does that entail?


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Lowe (2005), quite rightly in my estimation, suggests that what has proved most appealing about the use of structured methods, is that “they provide clear direction and a sense of purpose,” and that they are “definable and teachable” (p.67), and they provide a “vocabulary... of directionality and stepwise movement as particular themes are developed and enriched” (p.68). This is clearly true and important, but, as I have already suggested, the transitory understandings and action guiding anticipations continually arising in our exchanges with others can give us a moment-by-moment shaped and vectored sense both of how things ‘hang’ for us and where we might ‘go next’ in our ongoing coping with the world around us. In other words, the need for a sense of direction and stepwise movement can, at least partially, be satisfied in other ways – I will return in a moment to how those steps might be therapeutically directed.


              What I want to point out here, is something else that is also true of structured methods, but is usually so taken for granted that it is not usually remarked on: all such structured methods are seen as problem-oriented methods, or as problem-saturated approaches, as Harlene put it in setting the scene for this symposium. And this is understandable: if it’s not problems we face, what do we face? Well, this is exactly what I now want to question: Is it appropriate to talk of the difficulties we face as “problems,” as circumstances that can be overcome by “solutions”? I think not.


              Interestingly, although Lowe adopts the vocabulary of problems and solutions in his theory-talk, in both the cases he discusses in his paper – Beth and Wayne – he talks of them as struggling with something, Beth with debilitating panic attacks, and Wayne with peer pressure at school; he also talks of himself as “struggling to engage Wayne in a question sequence” (p.73).


              I think this is significant. I think Lowe’s sense of logical grammar here is very apposite: struggling to overcoming a difficulty is an activity with a very different grammar, a quite different set of implied expectations associated with it, than those linked with the activity of solving a problem. Instead of simply selecting among a set of logically independent elements to combine them into an appropriate sequence, a struggle involves navigating within an often overwhelming sea of unique details, and somehow creating a unique course of action related to them all.


              In dealing with the kind of circumstances both Beth and Wayne face, and in trying to engage Wayne in a question sequence – i.e., to engage him in a way that involves him so deeply that he is ‘moved’ or ‘touched’ and thus changed in his very being by at least some of the events occurring in the engagement – there is nothing comparable to the solution of a logical or mathematical problem. For in such problems, we have to cudgel our brains to devise ways of working out something unknown from what we already know about the situation in question. Problems of that kind can be solved by ‘calculation’ because they are already well defined as such. Here we are in the realm of reaching what is unknown or hidden from us in the realm of the already known. Thus, “problem solving” of this kind entails the application of what Schön (1983) calls a “technical rationality.”


              But, as all these cases make clear – Lowe’s own difficulty with engaging Wayne included – what is involved is not the conducting of a process of producing a result from a set of rational calculations, but a struggle, the process of creating the appropriate form of action in the first place.


              Mainstream theory-driven research portrays practitioners as people who simply choose and reflect (or reflect and choose) in the performance of their actions. It fails to portray them as participants already caught up in a ceaselessly ongoing process who – in the face of the constraints and limited resources it affords them, as well as the responses it ‘calls for’ from them – must produce from within that ongoing process, both recognizable and accountable utterances and actions, recognizable and accountable sounds and movements.


              In moving on inside a world that is making them whilst they are making it, they are not able to reflect on that world as a finished object: they know what they are doing, i.e., they can account for it to others if challenged; they know why they are doing it, i.e., they have a reason for it; but what they still don’t yet know, is what their doing has done – they must live with the anxiety that it may, in the end, all turn out badly. An overall evaluation of the outcome of their actions is possible only on their final completion (whenever that may be!!).


              Theory-driven research, however, approaches the process of people acting as a sequence of already completed actions, and reflects back on them with the aim of mastering their rational reproduction. In so doing, their sequential unfolding is represented as a sequence of static, well-defined, already existing states or positions, occurring juxtaposed with each other like beads on a string (with time being seen as a fourth dimension of space). It fails to account for the myriad situated details to which an actor must attend and respond in their struggles to creatively produce their actions in the first place.


              But again, as Schön (1983) points out, rather than a process of “problem-solving,” it is a process of “problem-setting” that is central: “The process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen... Problem-setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them” (p.40).


              It is in situations of practice that “problem setting” becomes so crucially important, because “the situations of practice are not problems to be solved but problematic situations characterized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy” (pp.15-16). In other words, what we face in practice are not problems presenting themselves as something already well-defined in relation to the kind of technical ingenuity required for their solution, but situations in which a struggle to realize an effective outcome in the face of often unpropitious circumstances is required. And it is appropriate to call it a struggle, for, as we have already seen, in expressing each sequential movement in an ongoing course of action, we have to negotiate a passage within an often overwhelming sea of unique details, and to somehow take them all into account in the unique course of action we actually take.


              As Bakhtin (1993) puts it: “The performed act concentrates, correlates, and resolves within a unitary and unique and, this time, final context both the sense and the fact, the universal and the individual, the real and the ideal, for everything enters into the composition of its answerable motivation. The performed act constitutes a going out once and for all from within possibility as such into what is once-occurrent” (pp.28-29).


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So, as I intimated above, if we can allow ourselves to be spontaneously responsive to the others around us in a dialogically-structured manner, the conversation itself will provide us with a sense of where to go next. For everything that occurs will be sensible connected to everything else – nothing can come into the conversation from the ‘outside’, so to speak, without being in response to, in answer to, events occurring within it. That “no conversations or decisions about [a] case are conducted outside the presence of the network” is, let me add, another of the major conditions set by Jaakko Seikkula for the conduct of Open Dialogues (OD) (see Seikkula and Arnkil, 2005) – besides the one I mention ed above.


              But while this gets us into Open Dialogue and the creative power for all kinds of other projects that becomes available within such exchanges, it still doesn’t give us direction in how to be therapeutic in our dialogical exchanges.


              Here, I’m going to draw on some comments about the nature of love, by Max Scheler, that I first drew on many years ago when my main focus was in child development, and I was interested in a mother’s attention to her child. Now I’m aware of Maturana’s long standing claims, also, that love is what does makes the world go around. But for our purposes, an account of love that states that: “Being in love means making a space for one another so that each becomes part of the domain of existence of the other, and within their continuous recurrency of interactions they form a system in which they have a co-ontogeny” (Maturana and Varela, 2002), doesn’t do it for me. We need an account that gives us some direction...that works in practice, both to direct our attention toward what, in another person’s behaviour, is relevant to their further growth and development, and to help shape our responses to them. As I see it, Scheler’s (1954) account does help us in this regard. He says:

 

“If we love any human being, we certainly love him [sic] for what he is; but at the same time we love him also for what he might be, according to the possibilities of perfection inherent in his being. Our eyes are fixed upon his ideal image which we grasp in, through and behind his empirical traits; yet we are indifferent as to how far it is reflected and realized in his actual state. At the same time, our love is the most potent force that can lift him from one to the other. It carries before him his own purified, and, as it were, redeemed and transfigured likeness, as a challenge to follow and to reach it; it is like a voice calling: become what you are! become in reality what ideally you are in design!” (p.153).

 

In other words, what another person can do that is crucial to a child’s development, to a sports-person’s development, or to help a disoriented or disturbed person to feel more ‘at home’ in the world, is to notice and be responsive to the possibilities of perfection inherent in his or her being – to be the voice calling: “Become in reality what ideally you are in design!”

 

              But to be able to do this, either to become this kind of voice, or – which is perhaps more important – to introduce to the client another voice or other voices that can exert that kind of influence of them, we must attend to the other person’s behaviour, he suggest, not objectively, not just in terms of its observable and countable aspects, but in terms of what it is gesturing toward, what it is points toward as a possibility for the future. “Love does not simply gape approval, so to speak, at a value lying ready to hand for inspection,” he says.

 

“It does not reach out towards given objects (or real persons) merely on account of positive values inherent in them, and already ‘given’ prior to the coming of love. For this idea still betrays that gaping at mere empirical fact, which is so utterly uncongenial to love. Love only occurs when, upon the values already acknowledged as ‘real’ there supervenes a movement, an intention towards potential values still higher than those already given and presented. In so doing, love invariably sets up an ‘idealized’ paradigm of value for the person actually present” (p.153).

 

And it is the unique transitory understandings (that also give us a sense of ‘where they stand’ in relation to us) and unique action guiding anticipations (that also give us a sense of ‘where they might go next’ in relation to us) that can only arise in our spontaneously responsive, dialogically-structured relations with another person – understandings and anticipations that are unique to that other person – that give us the possibility of either being that the voice, or of introducing another voice, that calls to them: “Become in reality what ideally you are in design!”

 

              But these unique transitory understandings and unique anticipations only arise out of fleeting, “once-occurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin); or as Tom Andersen (1996) puts it: “... the life in which we therapists are particularly interested in comprises meanings and feelings which shift all the time; they are there for a second and have passed away the next second” (p.119). Thus: “Life is... "composed" of small events, which each happen only once” (p.122).

 

              Thus, if an open dialogue is to turn into a therapeutic dialogue, to become a healing dialogue, a dialogue oriented toward making a person an integrated ‘whole’ again, then, it seems to me, there is a need to introduce into it a voice or voices that notices and responds to these fleeting hints in a person’s behaviour, a voice that ‘arrests’ the routine next step a person is about to take in accord with their own ‘rational’ logic, and which introduces to them another possibility – but not just any old possibility, but one already clearly inherent in his or her being. This is Peggy’s move in talking, to quote her, in aiding her client to “introduce a chosen protective figure into the flashback, which has the effect of interrupting the old scenario.” And in her “participant text” paper with Marilyn Frankfurt (1994), she also shows how introducing new voices, and reorienting clients toward addressing them, “opens a space for felt meanings” (p.230). Harlene Anderson (1998) too notes: “I want to create and facilitate a learning environment and process where participants can access, elaborate on, and produce their own unique competencies” (p.66). While White and Epston (1990) focus, of course, on what they call “unique outcomes.”

 

              Jaakko Seikkula (2002), in his strikingly successful crisis intervention team approach to the treatment of psychotic episodes, also notes the necessity to see psychotic reactions “as attempts to make sense of one’s experience and to cope with experiences so difficult that it has not been possible to construct a rational spoken narrative about them... An open dialogue, without any preplanned themes or forms seems to be important in enabling the construction of new language in which to express difficult events in a person’s life... [and] to allow different voices to be heard concerning the themes under discussion including the psychotic experience” (p.264).

 

              What, as I see it, is common to all these different approaches, is that the resources for change emerge, or arise out of, the unique answering responses from an other to the unique responsiveness of client’s in those of their expressions related to their distress. It is “the ‘otherness’ [of the other] which enters into us makes us other,” says Steiner (1989, p.188).

 

              But it is precisely these unique understandings and anticipations that arise only in our spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us that are lost if we re-fashion our responses as wilfully planned de-contextualized actions to accord with a rational schematism.

 

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Now Arlene Katz and I (Katz & Shotter, 1996, 1998, 2004), as I’m sure many of you know, have tried to capture the general style of all of these approaches in terms of a focus on “arresting, moving, striking, etc., moments,” and the idea of a set of “social poetic” methods – methods derived very much from Wittgenstein’s (1953) later philosophy. But I want to add here, that our concern in our articles has been not just to draw attention to the ‘workings’ of such striking moments in people’s communications with each other, and how they create shared understandings to do with people ‘going on’ with each other. We have also experimented with a certain style of ‘instructive’ or ‘formative’ writing – in terms of such moments – which we think of as also itself an aspect of a research practice.

 

              Indeed, we can already find some aspects of this new style of writing in Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1969, 1980) later works. Indeed, there is much use now, as Geertz (1983) has put it, of “blurred genres,” in which meanings are seen as “performed meanings” (p.29), which are achieved by writers leading readers through a sequence of movements as they “tack back and forth between ludic, dramatistic, and textual idioms” (p.33), and in which explanation is regarded more “as a matter of connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants” (p.34). We can call it an ‘instructive’ or ‘formative’ style of writing in that exerts its influence on us, not by depicting a true state of affairs to us in our thought, but by ‘moving’ or ‘striking’ us in such a way that, not cognitively but perceptually, we ‘grasp’ or ‘see’ something in our surroundings entirely new to us. We achieve that kind of “understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’,” says Wittgenstein (1953, no.122). And it does this by “tacking back and forth” between understandings from academic language games – especially from Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and so on, because they are also concerned in their own different ways with those crucial ‘poetic’ moments when one is ‘moved’, ‘arrested’, or ‘struck’ by the working of certain words within oneself, and in conversation with others – and our everyday understandings.

 

              Thus, this is not a straightforwardly ‘interpretive’ or ‘theory informed’ style of writing, in the sense of introducing formal academic theorizing through which to view ‘empirical’ data. Nor is it a social constructionist style of writing, to do with trying to infer things about the world through the language (Gergen, 1999). Nor is it of the kind inspired by critical theory where the ideological influences structuring the text becomes a part of the text itself (Parker, xxxx). Nor is it simply instantiation of Tannen`s (1989) “involvement strategies.” It works by juxtaposing – in a hermeneutical back and forth as outlined by Geertz (1983) – “experience near” accounts from the field with “experience distant” insights from these writers which works to ‘arrest’ or ‘interrupt’ our usual, critical way of reading academic articles. For usually, we read them as arguments to which we must continually raise objects and offer counter arguments. Instead, we invite readers to read our writing dialogically – with particular writings in mind as reminders (Wittgenstein (1953) – that offer suggestions for the possible beginnings of new language games, beginnings to which readers can spontaneously respond, thus to create within themselves the appropriate transitional understandings and action guiding anticipations that might enable them to sense how to ‘go on’ in the situation depicted.

 

              As depicted here, our approach is primarily “practice rooted,” not “theory rooted,” and all the questions of concern to us, and to which we seek answers in our juxtaposing of concrete events occurring in a particular practice with pieces of academic literature that might illuminate them, are also particular and detailed questions and not general ones. But the results of our work is presented in terms of suggestions, offers, possibilities, and other first parts of a dialogical exchange to which second part replies are invited, and it is a reader’s own response that (possibly) transitional understandings and action guiding anticipations relevant to a readers own difficulties and struggles (but not their problems) might be created.

 

 

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Currently, however, as I discover more and more as I begin to consult with health care practitioners and managers, their practices are becoming “administratively rooted.” In other words, rather than their practices being constitutive of their actions, their actions are being shaped more and more by administrative frameworks and category systems – CAFs, KPIs, APAs, OPMs, etc...

 

              No doubt commenting on the coming age of Stalinism in Russia, Voloshinov (1929/1986) captured our current age of command and control, of formalism and systematicity, brilliantly well. He describes it as follows: “The typical distinguishing marks of [this] kind of thinking [is that it is] focused on a ready-made and, so to speak, arrested object... Characteristically, what undergoes systematization is usually (if not exclusively) someone else’s thought. True creators – the initiators of new ideological trends – are never formalistic systematizers. Systematization comes upon the scene during an age which feels itself in command of a ready-made and handed-down body of authoritative thought. A creative age must first have passed, then and only then does the business of formalistic systematizing begin – an undertaking typical of heirs and epigones who feel themselves in possession of someone else’s, now voiceless word. Orientation in the dynamic flow of generative process can never be of the formal, systematizing kind... Formal, systematic thought about language is incompatible with living, historical understanding of language. From the system’s point of view, history always seems merely a series of accidental transgressions” ( p.78). And as we can all see at the moment, much of the writing now becoming available to us – in manualized versions of family therapy Endnote , for instance – is leading us all in exactly this direction.

 

              But as I have already indicated, it is precisely these unique understandings and anticipations that arise in our spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us that are lost if we re-fashion our responses as wilfully planned de-contextualized actions to accord with a rational schematism. And there is no way to get these back, except in a return to the original everyday, conversational relations from which our formalisms and systems arose in the first place.

 

References:

 

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Anderson, H. (1998) Collaborative learning communities. In McNamee, S. & Gergen, K.J. (Eds.), Relational responsibility: Sources for sustainable dialogue. (pp. 65-70). Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publications: Thousand

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

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Katz, A.M., Shotter, J. and Seikkula J. (2004) Acknowledging the otherness of the other: peotic knowing in practice and the fallacy of misplaced systematicity. In T. Strong & D.A. Pare (Eds.) Furthering Talk: Advances in the Discursive Therapies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press.

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

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: