A very long and rather rough first draft of a paper for the 8th International Meeting on the Treatment of Psychosis,
Tornio, Finland, August 27th-31st, 2003... it will be much shorter on the day!
BEING ‘MOVED’ BY THE EMBODIED, RESPONSIVE-EXPRESSIVE
‘VOICE’ OF AN ‘OTHER’
John Shotter
Abstract: While we can think about the changes taking place in a thing’s movement as
consisting solely in a sequence of self-contained, discontinuous configurations (as in the frames
of a movie), our perception of movement if different. We perceive all movements as ‘pointing’
toward possible next steps, as if they possessed a ‘grammar’. But there is nothing in each static
thought-picture to arouse in us any sense of anticipation of what ‘must’ or ‘ought’ to come next.
Nonetheless, we still tend to think of our talk, our speech with each other, as working in this way,
as representing or picturing a state of affairs, so that how others act in relation to what we say is
always up to them, a matter merely of their interpretations. But we are not always taking about
states of affairs external to ourselves. Rather, an important aspect of our verbal communication
with those around us, is our uttering or voicing (as 1st-person agents, as an ‘I’) of certain
expressions that ‘tell’ them of ourselves, of our feelings and judgments, of our ways of relating
ourselves to our circumstances. Such expressions are of a physiognomic kind, in the sense that
although they are changes in our bodily forms, in their unfolding through time they preserve all
the interrelations within our bodies that constitutes it as the living whole it is. Rather than being,
per impossible, moment by moment changing, instantaneous configurations of all our body parts
in space, they are identity preserving deformations. Thus, when confronted with the expressive
movements of a living being, besides the changes in its spatial structure from one instant in time
to another (which we say we can ‘picture’), there is a whole collection of dynamically interrelated
events – to do with what is expected or anticipated at each moment in their temporal unfolding –
which we cannot ‘see’, which are in fact ‘invisible’ to us, but which are crucial in determining
their ‘meaning’ for us. It is in terms of the expectations and anticipations engendered by an
other’s movements, that we ‘go on’ in relation to them. While we can represent states of affairs
external to our selves in the static patterns or forms present in our spoken words, i.e., in words
used in accord with existing conventions, in the unique, unfolding temporal ‘movement’ of our
words in their speaking we can reveal of own unique ‘inner lives’. This is the power, so to speak,
in Wittgenstein’s (1953) appeal to what we say in our ordinary, everyday talk. For there, in their
everyday use, it is not a question of what a person’s words mean, but what the person means in
saying them – the sense in which their words are an expression of what matters to them in their
own inner worlds, their own inner lives. My paper explores this distinction between what is said
in an utterance, and what is achieved in the saying of it, further, mostly making use of the work
of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Merleau-Ponty.
“Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different”
(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.284).
“... ((meaning is a physiognomy))” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568).
“... physiognomic perception – ranges round the subject a world which speaks to him of himself,
and gives his own thoughts their place in the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.132).
My comments here today will, I think, be very close to those of Tom Andersen. For we both see the pernicious
neglect of the living body in modern Western thought – the repression of the uncontrollable, living human being in
favor of dead, controllable mechanisms – as something which, if we are to arrive at an adequate understanding of
our special nature as dialogically-interrelated beings, must now be overcome. Like him, I shall suggest that we
must pay more attention to our spontaneous, bodily, expressive-responsive activities as living beings; we must
focus on the unique concrete details of our living, bodily involvements – or participations – in the world around us.
If we do this, if we do begin to take our living bodily activities as basic, then quite amazing new possibilities of a
quite surprising kind are opened up. The ordinary is not only more peculiar than we imagine, but even more extra-ordinary than we can ever imagine – a world in which things can have ‘faces’ and the words of others can exert a
compulsive force on us.
Two kinds of understanding:
disengaged representational understandings and involved responsive understandings
To begin at a rather elementary level, two things will, initially, I suggest, become apparent to us: (1) One is, that
something very special can occur on those occasions when two or more of us approach each other bodily, face-to-face, and engage in a meeting, in a dialogue. For it is in such face-to-face meetings, such dialogues, that we can
create between us and the others (and all the other othernesses around us) certain, particular ‘inner worlds’ of
shared meanings. And it is the particular kind of unique understandings that we can have from within our ongoing
participation within such meetings that can enable us – unlike the theoretical understandings of general laws or
principles that we can have as stand alone individuals – to go on in practical situations in an unconfused,
well-oriented fashion. For within such situations, rather than repetitions and regularities of a general kind, we need
to know the specific, unique connections and relations existing between specific, unique aspects of our
circumstances, if we are to feel ‘at home’ in them. (2) The other thing that will become apparent to us, I suggest, is
the fact that we are always embedded within an ever present background flow of spontaneously unfolding,
reciprocally responsive inter-activity between us and our surroundings. We are never not embedded in a whole set
of reciprocally responsive relations to our surroundings. We always have our being only as participants within a
ceaseless flow of ongoing activity.
In other words, rather than as separate, self-contained elements, that might be constructed – by being
glued or screwed together – into an externally-related, static, mechanical whole, we are all already internally-related to or with each other as ‘participant parts’ of a living whole. Thus there is no problem to explain how we
might get in contact with one another; we are never not in some kind of living relation to those around us. Our
problem can only be to investigate the quality of those relationships, and how they might be refined, elaborated, or
transformed. Indeed, it is to utterly pervert our being as living beings for us to represent ourselves to ourselves as a
mechanisms, or as parts of a larger mechanism, as separate, self-contained entities that do not owe their character
to their relations, to their place, within a larger scheme of things. We cannot exist as such isolated entities, as non-relational beings.
Indeed, whilst we might talk of ‘mechanisms’ is biology, strictly, mechanisms are ‘man-made’ entities.
They do not grow from simple into complex structures, but are constructed piece by piece from objective parts,
from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the system or not – to
this extent, they are static structures constructed from externally related parts. Such structures only attain their
character when they are complete: we put in the last engine part, switch on, and drive away; any attempt to drive a
car before all its parts have been installed is the court disaster.
We, however, are not constructed in this way, from externally related parts. Not only are we all ‘born’ into
existence as simple, already living individuals – as the result of a special kind of ‘meeting’, a coming together of
others already living – but once born, we then go on to develop ourselves into richly structured individuals. We do
not have to wait until we are ‘complete’ before beginning our lives and expressing ourselves. Indeed, for us as
living beings, all our ‘participant parts’ already have a living (internal) relation with each other – they all already,
from the moment of our conception, constitute a dynamically emerging or growing structure, a structurizing
structure one might say. And we go on to develop in such a way that all our ‘parts’ (if we are still justified in using
such a term?) at any one moment in time – our features, characteristics, or capacities – owe not just their character
but their very existence both to one another and to their relations with our characteristics at some earlier point in
time. In other words, their history – i.e., where they have come from and where they have been headed, their
unfolding temporal shape – is just as important as their instantaneous structure in understanding their nature.
Thus, when confronted with a living being, besides its spatial structure at an instant in time, which we say
we can ‘picture’, there is a whole collection of dynamic events – those to do with the temporal unfolding of their
activities, with their ‘shape’ in time, its ‘beat’ or ‘movement’ – which we cannot ‘see’, which are in fact ‘invisible’
to us. It is these kinds of the events occurring around us, the expressive bodily movements of living beings, that we
first make sense of, not intellectually, but bodily, in our spontaneous responses to them. This is where people’s
spontaneous, living, bodily, expressive-responsive activities become of importance – especially in those aspects of
their responsive expressions they manifest in the voicing of their utterances. For, sometimes, a kind of relationship
or relatedness, something about the way in which the world is present to us, and we to the world, can be expressed
in the unfolding (intonational) contours of our talk. We body forth of our responses to the world around us in the
‘movement’ of our expressions. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it:
“... the location of the organizing and formative center [of an utterance] is not within (i.e., not in
the material of inner signs) but outside. 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...The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is...
in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” (p.85, p.93).
This is not to say, however, that this is always the case. This is, for Voloshinov, what it is to speak dialogically,
i.e., in such a way that our utterances are responsive to, and expressive of, the surroundings (the ‘world’) within
which they are uttered. Thus, in speaking dialogically, our utterances are internally related to and expressive of the
world they are meant to utter – they “sing the world,” as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it
. But we need not speak (or
listen) in this responsive way. We can speak monologically, we can separate ourselves from our surroundings,
ignoring our bodily responses to them, and speak ‘out of our heads’, as it were, in an external relation to our
surroundings. As Bakhtin (1984) puts it: “Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect
it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some
degree materializes all reality” (p.293). This is how we speak as intellectuals, as academics, as scientists
‘enthralled’ by a theory, of as philosophers still ‘captivated’ by the unexamined metaphysical assumptions dwelling
in our language
. As with our two forms of understanding, we might call these two ways of speaking,
representational or ‘aboutness’ talk, and responsive or ‘withness’ talk.
Intimations regarding ‘involved responsive understandings’ in the remarks of others
As I have already noted, as academics and intellectuals, we have not been very alive to ‘withness’ talk, to talk
shaped by ‘invisible’ influences at work on us within the circumstances of our talk. To help in orienting toward the
nature of these ‘invisible’ influences, let me begin with some quotations from some well-known thinkers.
The first two are from Freud (1966/1917): In the New Introductory Lectures, he notes that: “Nothing takes
place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an exchange of words between patient and the analyst... The uninstructed
relatives of our patients... never fail to express their doubts whether ‘anything can be done about the illness by
mere talking’... [But] words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient
magical power. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men” (pp.19-20).
In the next quote, Freud is rebutting the criticism that psycho-analysis is “nothing more than a particularly well-disguised form of suggestive treatment” (p.562). He does this by agreeing that a doctor has no difficulty in
“Making him [a patient] a supporter of some particular theory... [and] in this respect the patient is behaving like
anyone else – like a pupil – but this only affects his intelligence, not his illness. After all, his conflicts will only be
successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with what is real in him”
(pp.562-563).
My third quote is from Levi-Strauss’s (1963) account of a song sung by shaman to Cuna women – the
Cuna are a tribe of people living in the Panama Republic – to facilitate a difficult childbirth. The song is about a
mythic uterine world peopled with dangerous animals and fantastic monsters all involved in invasions and
struggles with each other. “The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical
animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded,” he notes.
“[But] once the sick woman understands [the song]... she does more than resign herself [to her difficult child
birth]; she gets well” (p.197). He then goes on to comment: “But no such things happens to our sick when the
causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs, or viruses. We shall perhaps be
accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not. And yet,
the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is cause-and-effect
relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to the mind, whether conscious or
unconscious...The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and
otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed” (pp.196-197, my emphases).
I begin with these quotations, as each one draws our attention to something crucial about the powerful
influences one person’s living expressions, the utterances of their voice, can sometimes – but not always – exert
upon an other. Once words were ‘magic’ and ‘to this day have retained much of their ancient magical power’,
suggests Freud. But they do so, only if when we utter them ‘the anticipatory ideas’ we offer the other ‘tally with
what is real’ within them, he claims. But the ‘anticipatory ideas’ we offer can only have this kind of magic,
suggests Levi-Straus, if the language we use in expressing them is ‘internal to the mind’ of the person to whom
they are offered – whatever this may mean? Indeed, these words – Freud’s words and Levi-Strauss’s words – can,
perhaps, to an extent, exemplify in themselves something of the magic of which Freud speaks. For such words can
influence us, not in our intellects, but in our ‘illness’. That is, they can help us ‘cure’ ourselves, in Wittgenstein’s
(1953) sense, of those (mostly metaphysical) habits of mind that mislead and confuse us, that stand in the way of us
coming to an unimpeded understanding of the parts we play in the constitution of our own lives.
Indeed, we can already point to the power of the words of others – those especially of Bakhtin,
Voloshinov, and Vygotsky – in contributing toward the dramatic success of the adoption of the Open Dialogue
(OD) approach to the treatment of psychotic crises by Jaakko Seikkula, Jukka Aaltonen, Birgitta Alakare, and their
colleagues. This, I think, is what has brought us all together at the this workshop in Tornio. For we need to discuss
the special nature of such OD further, to understand what it is precisely that makes this approach is such a
powerful influence in the treatment process. Psychotic people are not the only ones to find the voices of others as
powerful as their own in influencing what they do.
My original intention, when Jaakko suggested that I participate in the workshop more than a year ago,
was to discuss how the special nature of OD entails all involved – but especially those in the treatment team – in
exhibiting a respect for the otherness of the other. And I will in a moment say something about that. Today,
however, because of having done quite a lot of reading in the meantime of Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) work on the
chaismic nature of the bodily relations we have with the others and othernesses around us, I want to talk about that.
For I think we can use Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the intertwined, and reversible (!), nature of these relations,
to enrich our understanding of dialogical-structured relations we have taken from the work of Bakhtin (1986) and
Voloshinov (1984). Indeed, I want to suggest that it is the chiasmic nature of Open Dialogue that gives it its power
in the treatment of psychotic crises.
Chiasmic structures and physiognomic perception
As a first step in understanding the concept of the chiasmic, its intertwined and reversible nature, consider first just
the simple activity of looking over, visually, the scene before us – with the aim in mind of readying ourselves to
move about within it. As our eyes ‘flick’ from one fixation point to the next, looking at a distant point to the right,
next at a near point to the left, we nonetheless get a sense of a seamless whole, an indivisible ‘something’ that is
not just ‘there’ before us as a picture is there, but is there for us as a set of ‘invitations’ and ‘resistances’, as a set of
openings and barriers to our actions – given our present ‘position’ within ‘it’. Thus each ‘stopping point’ does not
provide us with a static scene, but invokes in us various expectations and anticipations of what might ‘come next’.
In other words, our looking has a certain ‘grammar’ to it, and if our next fixation is not as we expect, we can be
surprised or disoriented. But further, in such involvements as these, we all – more or less – see the same whole, the
same landscape, the same face, etc. Thus if there are some disagreements over exactly what it is before us, we can
make use of what we do agree on to discuss the features we see differently.
In other words, in many temporally unfolding circumstances (but not in all), there is something special in
the sequencing of our activities – not so much in how we order them, as in how ‘the something’ out there requires
us to order them. It is as if the separate elements we encounter seem to unfold in a special way, not just
haphazardly but according to a certain style. They give rise in all of us who encounter them, spontaneously, i.e.,
prior to any thought or deliberation on our part, a shared (or at least shareable) sense of the shared surrounding
circumstances in which all our individual actions can be seen as playing a part, as making “a difference that makes
a difference” (Bateson, 1979). This is to look on our surroundings, I will say, with a certain respect for their own
nature, for what, so to speak, they have to say to us, rather than for what we have to say to them.
This, let me note briefly, is very different from how we are supposed to look out on our world as
experimental scientists concerned with the testing of explanatory theories. In this way of looking (gazing –
Foucault, 1970), we see our surroundings – not in terms of their requirements – but in terms of ours, their degree
of conformity to our pictures. We concern ourselves, not with their detailed intricacy, but simply with how the
configuration of a picture of a static state of affairs is changed, as the result of a manipulation, into another static
configuration. But we can now, I hope, see what is lacking in such formulations. For, although movement and
change are seemingly of central concern within them, the changes involved consist solely in sequences of self-contained, discontinuous configurations (as in the frames of a movie) – ‘indications’, ‘pointings’ toward what
might come next are missing, they lack a ‘grammar’. There is nothing in each static picture to arouse in us any
sense of anticipation of what ‘must’ or ‘ought’ to come next. The subjective and cognitive element of expectation
and anticipation occasioned in us, in our ‘real’ looking out on our actual surroundings, is missing. The privileging
of space and the visible, and the lack of attention to time and the invisible, has been characteristic of Western
philosophy ever since the Greeks – with their claim that an eternal, ideal reality is to be found hidden behind the
mere contingencies of appearances.
But more is missing from this intellectual sleight of hand (which serves us well in the physical sciences
)
– in which a sequence of juxtaposed dead, spatial representations are substituted for the indivisible temporal
unfolding of living movement – than merely a supposed subjective or cognitive component. What is also missing is
any attention to what our bodies ‘do for us, spontaneously’, so to speak, without us having deliberately and
mentally ‘to work it out’. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) makes clear: “It is not the object which obtains movements of
accommodation and convergence from my eyes. It has been shown that on the contrary I would never see anything
clearly, and there would be no object for me, if I did not use my eyes in such a way as to make a view of a single
object possible. And it is not the mind which takes the place of the body and anticipates what we are going to see.
No; it is my glances themselves – their synergy, their exploration, and their prospecting – which bring the
imminent object into focus; and our corrections would never be rapid and precise enough if they had to be based on
an actual calculation of effects” (pp.66-67).
Let us now move from simply looking over the visual scene before us to what occurs when we look over a
photograph, a painting, a sculpture, or an art object of any kind. Clearly, there are different styles or ways in which
we might do such looking, different bodily ways of using our eyes, and of ‘orchestrating’ into our eye movements
other basic bodily capacities – we can move up closer to the painting or further away, adopt a new angle, pause for
a moment to make a comparison (in fact, or from memory), we can stop to ask a friend’s opinion or to recall
something said by a teacher or a text, and so on, and so on. And if in these orchestrated movements we open
ourselves out to the ‘calls’ coming into us from the object as look over it, we find ourselves not so much looking at
it – as in our instrumental gaze when looking at something as a professional person – as looking according to it.
Then, over time, if I do the work of art ‘justice’, if I ‘dwell with’ it responsibly, a “real presence” (Steiner, 1989)
will emerge between it and myself with ‘its’ own requirements, with ‘its’ own calls, to which I must be responsive.
And what is of crucial about such real presences – or “relationally-responsive” understandings, as I will call them
in a moment – is not that you ‘get the picture’, so to speak, but that as gestures, as expressive movement, they
spontaneously ‘call’ us or ‘move’ us immediately to respond in a certain way. We have a bodily experience of an
opening or invitation, of a barrier or resistence, in the situation to the continuation of our actions. In other words,
although invisible, the real presences generated in our active relations with our surroundings have agency and, like
another person, can exert that kind of personal force upon us.
To experience events in one’s surroundings in this way – as providing one with ‘action guiding
advisories’, with orientation as to one’s next possible actions – is to say, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it, that they
have a physiognomy for us, that each event has a ‘face’, so to speak, that is immediately expressive of the event’s
meaning. Wittgenstein (1953) notes that, in particular, we often have the feeling that certain words – those of us at
this workshop might think of the words ‘dialogue’ and ‘psychosis’ – are as if ‘charged up’ with a special meaning:
“The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual
likeness of its meaning.. [and] these feelings [are] manifested among us... by the way we choose and value words”
(p.218). “The familiar face of a word; the feeling that a word is as it were a picture of its meaning” (1980, I, no.6).
When we ‘look over’ or ‘look with’ a picture or a sculpture in this way, “I would be at great pains,” says
Merleau-Ponty (1964), “to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do
not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according
to it, or with it, than that I see it” (p.164). Rather than looking at it, I look beyond it, or through it, to see other
things in my world in its light. It is, would could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking. It gives me a
way of looking. Here, in this respectful, intertwined way of looking, is the reversibility that Merleau-Ponty (1968)
wants to draw our attention by calling it chiasmic. In it, “the seer is caught up in what he sees... the vision he
exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the
things, my activity is equally passivity... not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one
inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated,
alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which
sees and which is seen” (p.139)
.
Indeed, it will be useful to add here, that we can characterize the ‘realities’ within which our variously
called, joint, dialogically- or chiasmically-structured activities occur, as a primordial realities, in that they afford
or offer us precursors to, or prototypes for, all our more conscious projects. Indeed – if we can get our from under
the “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1970) imposed on us by our academic colleagues – for the conduct of our
practical affairs, all we need assume about the ‘realities’ we create in our meetings, is that they are a vague,
complex, multi-dimensional, intertwined mixture of indefinitely many different kinds of influences. It is thus next
to impossible to give them any fixed or finalized characterization: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully
disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor
fully objective character. They are also non-locatable - for they are ‘spread out’ among all those participating in
them. They are thus neither ‘inside’ people, but nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in that space where
inside and outside are one. Nor is there a separate before and after (Bergson) within them, neither an agent nor an
effect, but only a meaningful whole which cannot be divided into separable parts. Indeed, it is precisely their lack
of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in
practice – while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so – that is their central defining feature. In other
words, long before anything occurs in our heads, in our conscious experience, we ‘show’ its precursors or
prototypes in the very ‘shape’ of those of our expressive-responsive bodily activities we perform spontaneously, in
responsive to the contingencies of our life’s circumstances. These are the precursors or prototypes for what later we
will talk of in mental or cognitive terms.
It is in this sense that we can – following Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein – call the world surrounding us
in our ordinary daily affairs, a primordial world, in that, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) puts it: “For if I am able to talk
about ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’, to bother my head about the distinction between imaginary and real, and cast doubt
upon the ‘real’, it is because this distinction is already made by me before any analysis; it is because I have an
experience of the real as of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one of not asking how critical thought can
provide for itself secondary equivalents of this distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge of the
‘real’, of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is for ever based” (p.xvi). In
other words, the unarticulated “real presences” that emerge and make themselves felt in our expressive-responsive,
dialogicaly-structured exchanges with the others and othernesses in our surroundings can, so to speak, provide the
‘standards’
against which our explicit formulations of their nature may be judged by the others around us as to
whether they are adequate characterizations or not. These are the shared ‘criteria’ or ‘foundations’ in terms of
which – when in our ordinary, everyday conversations with others – we can call them to account and challenge
whether their talk is truly in accord with its own surrounding circumstances or not, or whether – as we shall see –
their talk is inhabited by other voices than their own.
This is the power, so to speak, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) appeal to what we say in our ordinary, everyday
talk: “When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp
the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the
language-game which is its original home? – What we do,” he said, “is to bring words back from their metaphysical
to their everyday use” (no.116). There, in their everyday use, it is not a question of what a person’s words mean, but
what the person meant in saying them – the sense in which their words were an expression of their inner world,
their inner lives.
I suggested at the beginning of my talk that once we embark upon the project of taking our living bodily
activities as our basic focus, then new, and quite extra-ordinary possibilities open up. Let me end this section of my
talk with a brief account from Ernst Cassirer (1957) of the physiognomic nature of the world of mythic thought. In
this kind of world, he says, “essence does not recede behind the appearance but is manifested in it... Here the
phenomenon as it is given in any moment never has a character of mere representation, it is one of authentic
presence...When water is sprinkled in rain magic, it does not serve as a mere symbol or analogue of the “real” rain...
The demon of the rain is tangibly and corporeally alive and present in every drop of water... Here the essence is not
distributed over a number of possible modes of representation, each of which contains a mere fragment of it, but is
manifested as a whole, as an unbroken and indestructible unity in the phenomenon....[T]he world of mythical
experience is grounded in experiences of pure expression rather than in representative or significative acts. Its
reality is not an aggregate of things endowed with definite characteristics by which they can be known and
distinguished from one another; it is a vast diversity of original physiognomic characters. As a whole and in its
parts the world still has a distinctive face, which may be apprehended at any moment as a totality and can never be
dissolved into mere universal configurations, into geometrical and objective lines and shapes” (p.68). It is this world
of living, bodily expression that we have almost forgotten, so immersed have we become in Descartes’s world of
mere particles of matter in motion according to God’s established laws, understood only indirectly in terms of our
theoretical representations of them – a world we desire to master, rather than merely to participate in.
Intimacy and respect: being with an addressee ‘without rank’
As I said a moment ago, my original intention was to speak at this meeting about what it might be exhibit a respect
for the otherness of the other in one’s speech. In suggesting that topic, I was originally influenced by Bakhtin’s
(1986) work, and it is Bakhtin who – without explicitly foregrounding bodily activity – has brought us back to the
physiognomic understanding of expression discussed above. For, central to his whole approach, as we know, is the
contrast he makes between what we might call relational-responsive understanding, the kind of taken-for-granted
understanding we have of each other’s speech in our everyday affairs, and the referential-representational
understanding that is more familiar to us is our academic and intellectual endeavors. As he pointed out, in our
everyday talk, we do not just speak out into the blue beyond, as if to a generalized (objective) other: “From the very
beginning, the speaker expects a response from [an other], an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance
is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response. An essential (constitutive) marker of the
utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity... [Many] varieties and conceptions of the
addressee are determined by that area of human activity and everyday life to which the given utterance is related.
Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is
addressed...” (pp.94-95).
In other words, to emphasize the point made above – that there is nothing in a static, representational or
‘theoretical’ understanding to arouse in us any sense of anticipation of what ‘must’ or ‘ought’ to come next – we
must already to some extent be ‘inhabited’ by the otherness of an other, if we are to begin to speak to them at all. As
we approach them, we become spontaneously involved with them – think here of the way in which our eyes ‘meet’
with an other’s in friendly, apprehensive, or hostile ways, even before we say a word. But then, if we are to speak
with them, we must at least begin by treating them as being from the same speech community as ourselves, able to
respond spontaneously and unthinkingly to our utterances as Bakhtin (1986) suggests, i.e., with “an active
responsive understanding” (p.94). All our utterances must be, if they are to be meaningful at all, in Wittgenstein’s
(1953) terms, from within a “language-game.”
But – and this is the most crucial question in my whole paper – must the language-games from within
which we address an other, be always of an already existing kind? Is it in fact the case, as Ken Gergen (1999) puts
it, that Wittgenstein claims solely that, “language games are embedded in broader patterns of actions and objects,
which he calls forms of life”? Is it always the case that they get their meaning by being embedded in already
existing patterns of life? I think not. If this were always so, then genuine novelty and creativity would be impossible.
No new language-games could ever come into existence. But even more to the point for us, our coming to an
understanding of the unique ‘inner life’ of an other, someone who at first was a stranger to us, through our
spontaneous responsiveness to their expressions, would be impossible. For we could only ‘interpret’ their
expressions in terms of already existing conventions of meaning.
It is here, again, that our spontaneous, living, bodily reactions become important: Indeed, as Wittgenstein
(1953) notes, “our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different”
(no.284). In other words, something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin to respond
to each other – much more happens than them merely having an impact on one another. Something special occurs
that begins thus: As soon as we enter into such mutually responsive relations with those around us, then, instead of
one of us first acting individually and independently of all the others, and then an other replying to us in the same
way, the actions of us all are to an extent ‘shaped’ in the course of their performance by our spontaneous
responsiveness to the actions of all those others (and the other things) around us. Thus as a consequence, none
involved can in fact account their actions as wholly their own – besides ourselves, events issuing from the others
and othernesses in our surroundings exert a formative influence in shaping our expressions. “The origin and the
primitive form of the language game is a reaction;” he says (1980, p.31), “only from this can more complicated
forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (quoting Goethe)’.” “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). Thus, although many of our daily interactions may very well be routine and conventional, if we are
not to respond to them merely in terms of our representational (theoretical) understandings of them, but are to be
responsive to them in the detailed and subtle way that allows them to express their own unique ‘inner lives’ to us,
then we must be prepared to divest ourselves (as best we can, for it is not easy) of our conventional habits of
understanding.
Again, some remarks of Bakhtin’s (1986) are relevant here, as to the style of speaking (and listening)
involved in those encounters in which people reveal their inner lives to each other: “Finer nuances of style,” he says,
“are determined by the nature and degree of personal proximity of the addressee to the speaker’s various familiar
speech genres, on the one hand, and in intimate ones, on the other... [but both these styles] perceive their addressees
in exactly the same way: more or less outside the framework of the social hierarchy and social conventions, “without
rank,” as it were” (pp.96-97). In their 1995 paper setting out their OD approach, Jaakko and his colleagues put it
thus: “During the course of a dialogue the speaker, in a way, takes off his/her clothes and is naked while waiting for
the interlocutors to do the same. Both parties need each other, as they create the context and content talked about”
(p.73). As a result of their mutual, interactional ‘nakedness’, an intimate speech style outside of social hierarchy and
social conventions, i.e., ‘without rank’, becomes possible. Such “intimate speech is imbued with a deep confidence
in the addressee, in his sympathy, in the sensitivity and goodwill of his responsive understanding. In this
atmosphere of profound trust, the speaker reveals his internal depths” (p.97).
It is precisely the move beyond existing conventions of meaning by those that disturbed people must
address – the social workers, nurses, psychologists, therapists, or doctors in the crisis intervention team (as well as
the patient and his or her family, perhaps) – that allows the conditions Jaakko and Jukka and their colleagues have
created in the Open Dialogue treatment situation to prevail.
Jaakko Seikkula (from Katz, Shotter & Seikkula, in press) describes it in the following terms: “... having
the social network now included in the crisis, means that it is now possible for all those who have been involved in
the life and perhaps even in the incidents of which the patients is speaking in his/her psychosis, to start together to
create words for those experiences which have not yet had any other words than psychotic hallucinations.
All this forms an exciting tension at the very beginning, and this “nuclear loading
” is verified in the
meeting, in that most often the one behaving in a psychotic way discontinues this way of behaving in the meeting.
He/she becomes heard and psychotic-speak is no longer needed in the context of the meeting. When therapist are
working as a team, they have to become responsive to and thus connected with each other’s language in the
presence of the context of the patients social network. The patient too is speaking in the presence of those who most
probably are the core persons in the difficult experiences in their lives. Together with the therapists, they form a
new, mutually responsive community for, not only living through the crisis, but able also to construct a new, joint
language for the not-yet spoken experiences.
Here, instead of thinking that psychosis is caused by something for which there is a logical or general
systematic reason, psychotic forms of behaviors become seen as responses to the actual situation within which the
patient, with his/her network, is present. Most often it is an ongoing, dialogical response to immediate
circumstances and past experiences, along with the emotions connected with them.
Psychotic behavior is a good example of an embodied action. Hallucinations are possible to every one of
us in a stressful enough situation, and there is no precondition to psychosis (Karon, 1999; Karon & Vandenbos,
1981; Seikkula et al., 2001). In hallucinations people often speak of incidents that actually have happened in the
past. Actually this means that a psychotic behavior may be the first time that these experiences, which could only
be expressed in psychotic speech, become possible to handle. This means that we as therapists should be extremely
sensitive to the task of listening to those parts of the narrative which are presented in a psychotic form. For at that
point, the patient reaches something that has been living in the memory of his/her body, and which now, in
becoming formulated into both spoken narrative and thought, affords or allows the patient to become more of an
agent in his/her own difficult experiences. But such experiences are always unique experiences. Thus, we have to
orient ourselves in the landscape of the patient to have an alliance with them and the possibility of sharing in their
reality – this is a presupposition for their becoming “cured” from psychosis.
In dialogue this means not at all challenging the reality of the patient, or becoming “reality oriented,” as
was said in the past. It is the opposite: in speaking of psychotic experiences or behavior in a way in which one
wonders even if it is a psychotic act, allowing ‘it’ to become one voice among all the other voices in the present
dialogue, is to treat psychotic-talk as one treats the talk of any other voice... Initially confusing behavior can start
to be seen as a “normal” response to stress situation, and not as an symptoms of schizophrenia illness. In other
words, although we perhaps are speaking of a phenomena not possible to understand, we have begun now to speak
of it in a way similar to any other phenomena.
On being ‘moved’ by an other’s ‘voice’
Without attempting to account in any comprehensive fashion for psychotic behavior, it will perhaps now be useful at
this point, given the approach outlined above, to explore how people can sometimes feel compelled to act by
(meaningful) influences having their source in the expressions of others. As we have already seen – in Freud’s
comments on the ‘magical’ nature of words, Levi-Strauss’s remarks on the power of linguistic relations that are
internal to a person’s mind, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on works of art, and Wittgenstein’s on the face of words, and
the influence of Bakhtin’s, Voloshinov’s, Vygotsky’s and Wittgenstein’s words on our gathering here – the words of
others can exert a powerful influence in every one of our own individual lives. Indeed, besides the influence Bakhtin
(1986) has exerted on us in bringing the active, responsive nature of our everyday understanding of speech to our
attention, he is also well known to us for the emphasis he has placed on the polyphonic nature of our talk (Bakhtin,
1984): the fact that much of everyday talk (and writing), merely in the fact that is addressed to an other and is
shaped in anticipation to their responses to it – their objections, evaluations, points of view, etc. – an other’s voice is
there, present, in any speaker speaking dialogically.
Given our special interest here in understanding the degree to which we can be controlled more by an
other’s voice than by our own, it will be useful to discuss two topics to which he devotes detailed attention further:
1) One topic is the phenomenon of “hidden dialogicality” in a person’s speech (Bakhtin, 1984); 2) the other, is the
important distinction he makes between “internally persuasive” and “externally authoritative” speech (Bakhtin,
1981). Crucial here will be the distinction we have already made above: how we can reveal our ‘inner lives’ in their
unfolding temporal ‘movement’ of our words in their speaking, and how we can only represent states of affairs
external to our selves by the use of the static patterns or forms present in our already spoken words – and how we
continually want, in the (scientific) search for knowledge, to replace contingent, dynamic movements with static,
permanent forms.
To discuss hidden dialogicality first: As an example, Bakhtin (1984) discusses the speech of Makar
Devushkin, a poor man, a copying clerk, depicted by Dostoevsky in one of his stories in Poor Folk. He illustrates the
‘dialogical’ nature of Devushkin’s speech in the following quote from the novel. Devushkin talks of meeting
someone (Yevstafy Invanovich), who said that “morality consists in not being a burden to anyone.” “Well,” says
Devushkin, “I’m not a burden to anyone. My crust of bread is my own//; it is true it is a plain crust of bread, at times
a dry one; but there it is, earned by my toil and put to lawful an irreprocable use.// Why, what can one do? I know
very well, of course, that I don’t do much by copying; but all the same I am proud of working and earning my bread
in the sweat of my brow.// Why, what if I am a copying clerk, after all? What harm is there in copying , after
all?//...” (p.207). Here Devushkin’s account of himself unfolds against the background of other consciousnesses that
(he feels) are socially alien to him (or he to them); and he continually senses the ‘ill look’ of these others, their
reproachful glances, or – perhaps even worse – their mocking glances. Under the glances of these others (marked in
the text above by //), “even Devushkin's speech cringes,” says Bakhtin (1984, p.206).
So, although Devushkin’s speech may seem to be a monologue, other speakers are invisibly present in its
dynamic structure, in its speaking. Their words may not be explicitly present in his speech, but deep traces left by
their words exert a powerful influence in shaping what he has to say. In other words, although only one person is
speaking, “we sense that this is a conversation,... and it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each present
uttered word responds and reacts with its every fiber to the invisible speaker, points to something outside itself,
beyond its own limits, to the unspoken words of another person” (Bahktin, 1984, p.197). Indeed, we can add here
that, in our everyday dealings with each other, “we very sensitively catch the smallest shift in intonation, the
slightest interruption of voices in anything of importance to us in another person’s practical everyday discourse. All
those verbal sideward glances, reservations, loopholes, hints, thrusts, do not slip past our ear, are not foreign to our
own lips. All the more astonishing, then, that up to now all this has found no practical theoretical cognizance, nor
the assessment it deserves!” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.201) – at least, we do in those of our relations in which we are
intimate with those with whom we are speaking. For, to repeat, it is in this dynamic aspect of our speech – what is
present in our saying of our words not in what is said – that we reveal our unique inner lives to each other. And in
his saying of his utterances, their movement, that Devushkin reveals himself as someone who quite certainly does
not feel ‘at home’ at all in the world in which he must live.
Bakhtin (1984) describes the structure of Devushkin’s consciousness of himself thus: “the hero’s self-awareness was penetrated by someone else’s consciousness of him, the hero’s own self-utterance was injected with
someone else’s words about him; the other’s consciousness and the other’s words then give rise to specific
phenomena that determine the thematic development of Devushkin’s self-awareness, its breaking points, loopholes
and protest on the one hand, and on the other the hero’s speech with its accentual interruptions, syntactic breaking
points, repetitions, and long-windedness” (p.209). He is, in short, not someone who feels as yet able to speak for
himself wholly in his own voice – and we can ‘tell’ this, or he ‘tells’ us this, in the unfolding dynamics of his
expressions.
Let us examine the influence that other voices can have on us further: In his book, The Dialogical
Imagination, Bakhtin notes that “the topic of a speaking person” can take on a very special significance in “an
individual’s ideological becoming” (p.342). For, “another’s discourse [can] perform here no longer as information,
directions, rules, models and so forth – but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations
with the world, the very basis our behavior; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive
discourse” (p.342). And it can do this – to repeat a point made above – without our bing aware at all of the degree
to which our own voices are being shaped by our spontaneous responsiveness to the discourse of another.
In bring out the important distinction between these two forms of discourse, Bakhtin (1981) suggests that:
“The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own... The authoritative word is
located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to
speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is prior discourse...” (p.342),
“...it demands our unconditional allegiance” (p.343). Here, the past words of others work in us as real presences,
and as such, although they are invisible, they have agency, and like the actual words of another person, can exert a
commanding personal force upon us. But: “When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for
us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up. Such discourse is of decisive significance in the
evolution of an individual consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world
of alien discourse surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself; the process of distinguishing
between one’s own and another’s discourse, between one’s own and another’s thought, is activated rather late in
development. When thought begins to work in an independent, experimenting and discriminating way, what first
occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a
rejection of those congeries of discourse that do not matter to us, that do not touch us” (p.345).
But how can certain words work on us in this way, work to separate internally persuasive discourse from
externally authoritative discourse, wake us up to our bewitchment (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.109) by the dead and
alien linguistic forms of others? How can we come to a realization that it is in the unique, embodied movements of
our words, in our living expression of them, that we express our selves; we cannot do it by the use of already
established forms (no matter how special
we feel such forms may be)? What is it about a certain person’s words –
perhaps the words of a special writer, words encountered in one’s reading – that can awaken us to an “independent
ideological life,” that can reanimate the static forms ruling our linguistic lives, and put them back once again into
movement?
A special kind of writing would seem to be involved. Merleau-Ponty (1970) describes it thus: “Just as the
painter and musician make use of objects, colors and sounds in order to reveal the relations between the elements of
the world in a living unity – for example, the metaphorical correspondences in a marine landscape – so the writer
takes everyday language and makes it deliver the prelogical participation of landscapes, dwellings, localities, and
gestures, of men among themselves and with us... For this reason, the writer’s work is a work of language rather
than of ‘thought’. His task is to produce a system of signs whose internal articulation reproduces the contours of
experience; the reliefs and sweeping lines of these contours in turn generate a syntax in depth, a mode of
composition and recital which breaks the mold of the world and everyday language and refashions it” (pp. 24-25,
my emphasis).
In other words, at work in the expressive unfolding of such responsive speech, such responsive writing, are
gestures, both indicative toward and mimetic of, the ‘style’ or ‘shape’ of the world in which they unfold. And, on
being exposed to these ‘movements’ of an other (just as they are to mine), I can find myself ‘moved’ in the same
way, that their conversation, so to speak, pronounces itself in me. Indeed, if as a listener I give myself over to it
sufficiently, I can find it enveloping and inhabiting me to such an extent that I cannot tell what comes from me and
what from it. Thus there can be, as we have seen, a reversibility between the seer and seen, there can be the same
reversibility between a reader and a text, such that – just as with paintings, as we saw above – certain texts can (in
their tone or style) function as guiding or directing agencies in the style of our inquiries. We come to investigate our
surrounding circumstances according to Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Vygotsky, or Merleau-Ponty. “There is
thus,”say Merleau-Ponty (162), “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” (p.179).
Intellectually, we have banished living, embodied, spontaneous expression, as a special phenomenon in its
own right, from our philosophies and thus from our human sciences. In pursuit of a certain kind of mad rationality –
in which only weighing, counting, and measuring are the permitted operations – we have sought to devise
comprehensive or complete theoretical systems of a general, explanatory kind, representative of an ideal, eternal
order supposedly hidden behind appearances. “For we are under the illusion,” says Wittgenstein (1981), “that what
is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence” (no.444).
We thus find ourselves, after having undergone the requisite training, bewitched or haunted by voices expressive of
our compulsions, urges, wishes, and desires for knowledge – the aim stated so clearly by Descartes (1968/1637) in
his Discourse on Method, was to find a “practical philosophy” to “thereby, as it were, make ourselves masters and
possessors of nature” (p.78). And we have, in a sense, become haunted by this philosophical project. Its character
has been nicely set out by Marx and Engels (1977/1846) in The German Ideology in terms of three tricks, as they
put it, for the production of ruling illusions.
In brief, they go like this: (1) First, separate people’s doings and sayings from the people saying and doing
them, and the conditions under which they do and say them. (2) Next, find an order in the ‘data’ so collected. (3)
Then propose a theoretical agency that can be said to be responsible for the ‘observed’ order, to be its explanation.
But what is ignored by suppressing our ordinary, everyday, spontaneous responsiveness to the others and
othernesses about us, are our living relations to our surroundings and to other voices. We then try to recapture them
in ideal structures, with an ideal ordering of precise expressions, in theories of linguistic structures and principles
laws of discourse analysis. In other words, the living voices that philosophy has tried to banish from inquiries in our
use of language, as merely subjective or as too idiosyncratic, keep reappearing to face us with yet another problem in
our unceasing effort to make words as regular as the order of things is supposed to be.
To give people’s doings and saying back to them, to give people the possibility of speaking ‘in their own
words’ to express their own inner lives (rather than only being able to talk in an alienated way about things external
to them), we must reverse these moves. We must: (1) Re-locate what people do and say back in the unique
interactive relations in which they do and say them. (2) In other words, we must de-systematize their activities, and
look in detail at the actual concrete circumstances within which their interactions take place, at their actual
speakings and expressing, along with the responses of others to them, etc. (3) And instead of supposedly hidden
agencies invoked to explain the phenomena so observed, we must (as best we can) try to describe the actual
circumstances involved, the actual people, and the actual surroundings – but we must describe them, not in
objective, external terms, but in internally ‘moving’ ways, ways that give others a sense of the ‘inner’ nature of
people’s circumstances.
So, to end this section, let me touch on what it is in dialogue that makes it possible for the mere words of
another person to ‘move’ a person in this way, for a new word to be, as Wittgenstein (1980) puts it, “like a fresh
seed sown on the ground of discussion” (p.2), enabling new growth to take place. Bakhtin (1981) describes the
internally persuasive word thus: “[It] is half-ours and half someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist
precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words
from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is
further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating
relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally
persuasive discourses...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each
of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean” (pp.345-346). And this
is precisely both what the texts of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, etc., etc., have done for us, and what Jaakko and Jukka and
colleagues in understanding how to institute Open Dialogue into their treatment procedures have been able to do for
psychotically afflicted people: The introduction of new language into otherwise ossified or fossilized schemes of
self-expression, new language that in struggling with such sedimented forms succeeds in dialogizing them and to
put them back ‘into motion’; they can ‘remind’ one, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense, of what it is once again to make
a dynamic use of language in expressive response to one’s circumstances. Words which are expressive by being
responsive to the contours of our experience, can reveal to us, to repeat, ever new ways to mean.
Concluding comments
Central to the approach taken above, is a focus on the spontaneous, bodily responsivity of growing and living
beings, both to each other and to the othernesses in their surroundings, and on the expressiveness of their own
particular and unique ways of coming-into-Being – spontaneous (because it is not pre-meditated), living (because it
involves continuos open exchange with surroundings), bodily (because it is not hidden in prior thought), expressive
(because it moves others to respond), and responsive (because it is responsive to other’s expressiveness, to events
occurring in one’s surroundings). If we do this, if we begin to take our living bodily activities as our basic focus,
then, as I mentioned at the outset, new possibilities of a quite novel and surprising kind are opened up. Especially
surprising, perhaps, is the extra-ordinary nature of our ordinary everyday social activities, and hitherto unnoticed
ways within them that come to an understanding of each other’s unique judgments and evaluations, and gradually,
to an understanding of each other’s ways or styles of judgment – the ways we relate ourselves to both the others and
othernesses in our surroundings. For, as we have seen, when confronted with a living being, besides its spatial
structure at an instant in time that is visible to us, we are also ‘moved’ by their ‘movement’, by the invisible ‘shape’
of the temporal unfolding of their activities in time.
While we can come to a passive, uninvolved kind of understanding of dead forms from a distance, in terms
of a general, explanatory theories representing the sequence of events which are supposed to have caused the
changes in their configurations visible to us, a quite different form of engaged, active, responsive understanding
becomes available to us with living beings. They can express themselves in ways that are quite impossible for dead
forms. And they can do this by calling out spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite impossible for a dead
form. It is this that makes these two kinds of understanding – of dead forms and living beings – so very different
from each other. While we can study an already completed, dead form from a distance, seeking to understand the
pattern of past events that caused it to come into existence, we can enter into a relationship with a living being, and,
in making ourselves open to its movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to it. In other words, instead of
seeking to explain a present activity in terms the past, we can understand it in terms of its present meaning for us,
i.e., in terms of our current spontaneous responses to it. It is only from within our involvements with other living
things that this kind of meaningful, responsive understanding becomes available to us (Shotter, 2000).
I must now return to this first, rough draft, to hone it and to shorten it for presentation. But to give it a
termination as it is, let me just list some of the new concepts I think we need if we are to more fully understand how
we can be ‘moved’ by the embodied, responsive-expressive words of an ‘other’. We need to understand the
difference between disengaged representational understandings and involved responsive understandings; the
difference between externally related parts of a whole and internally related ‘participant parts’ of a whole; between
patterns of already spoken words and words in their speaking. To understand how words can still retain much of
their magical power, we need to understand the chiasmic, physiognomic, reversible, and primordial nature of our
ordinary, everyday realities, and the degree to which they still resemble the mythic realities as described by Cassirer
(1957). Indeed, if we are to take our bewitchment by the fossilized words of dead philosophers seriously, then we
must take seriously the agentic powers of the real presences we can create between us in our meetings, all unaware
of our own role in their creation. To bring these dead, but nonetheless externally authoritative words back to life, we
must re-dialogize them, bring them into living (dialogical) contact with others words. And we can do this by the use
of new words that spontaneously provoke new expressive-responsive reactions, that can begin new language-games.
Thus the task we face is not a task of thought, not a matter of creating the appropriate concepts or
theoretical terms, but a task of ‘writerliness’ – the task, to repeat Merleau-Ponty’s (197) account of it, “is to produce
a system of signs whose internal articulation reproduces the contours of experience; the reliefs and sweeping lines
of these contours in turn generate a syntax in depth, a mode of composition and recital which breaks the mold of the
world and everyday language and refashions it” (pp. 24-25, my emphasis).
The privileging of space and the visible, and the lack of attention to time and the invisible, has been
characteristic of Western philosophy ever since the Greeks – with their claim that an eternal, ideal reality is to be
found hidden behind the mere contingencies of appearances. But if the approach adopted here is correct, what is
eternal in life is to be found in the fleeting, in the mere contingencies of appearances. For what is ignored by
suppressing our ordinary, everyday, spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses about us, are our
living relations to our surroundings and to other voices. Here, instead of trying recapture them in ideal structures, in
theories of linguistic structures and principles laws of discourse analysis, we can adopt another strategy, one
outlined by Wittgenstein (1981) thus: “... the difficulty – I might say – is not that of finding the solution but rather
that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. ‘We have already said
everything. – Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!’ This is connected, I believe, with
our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right
place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it” (no.314). In other words, the
solution to a difficulty, this unique difficulty, is to enter into Open Dialogue with it in the context in which this
difficulty arises.
.
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Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of
Texas Press.
Bateson, G. (1979) Mind in Nature: a Necessary Unity. London: E.P. Dutton.
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John Shotter
Emeritus Professor of Communication
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3586
Tel: (603) 862 3035 office; (603) 664 7404 (home); (603) 862 1913 (fax)
e-mail: jds@hypatia.unh.edu web-site: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds
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