In Rosalie Burnett, P. McGhee,and David Clarke (Eds.) Accounting for Personal Relationships: Social Representations of Interpersonal Links. London: Methuen, 1987, pp.225-247.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF AN “US”: PROBLEMS OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND NARRATOLOGY.
John Shotter
Department of Psychology
University of Nottingham
“There was no plot,” said William, “and I discovered it by mistake.” Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose, 1980, p.491.
Accounting for and in the making of personal relationships.
As Duck and Gilmour (1981) and Mikula (1984) point out, early interpersonal relationships research was concerned with interpersonal attraction phenomena, with first impressions, and with superficial encounters. However, it has become clear that initial attraction, as typically studied, is at best of limited value for a proper understanding of the dynamics of real-life relationships: 1) it did not take into account the fact that even an initial attraction is a developmental phenomenon; 2) it also neglected the social context in which personal relationships are embedded. To attempt to make good both these deficiencies is my concern below.
Two ways to make an “us:” personal and community relations.
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1984, 1986b), I have discussed the origins of the developmental processes involved in the socially creative construction of social identities, i.e., the development of an “us” and of the individual identities constituting that “us.” There, I was concerned with accounting for [end 225] as the growth (the social making) of infant members of a community into distinctive, morally autonomous individuals; I wanted to understand how it was possible, in a vague and uncertain world, for people to develop an ability to act deliberately, to sense themselves as knowing what they are doing, and to be able to account for at least some of their behaviour as their own, experiencing it (and allowing for others to experience it) as issuing from within themselves rather than as caused in them by external forces. Central to that discussion was the concept of joint action and its formative powers (see Ginsburg, 1985, for a very succinct and clear outline of my position and of the central concepts I introduce).
Here, I want make a central use of the concept of joint action again in discussing the process of people’s further growth together, and the ways in which, in the course of that growth, they account for their behaviour to one another. For the fact is, that under certain conditions, people who can already be considered to be morally autonomous individuals (if not psychologically autonomous), can continue their psychological development by beginning to form, in interaction with others, a new “us,” an enclave within the larger “us” of which they are already a part, an “us” in which they themselves can be further psychologically and morally transformed - an “us” relative to which and in terms of which they can account for themselves to each other (and to themselves).
In particular, I want to discuss problems to do with accounting for the different transformations possible in certain kinds of what have now come to be called “close” personal relationships (Kelley et al., 1983), especially, with accounting for what seems to be involved in “falling in love.” But also, I want to discuss very generally the accountability problems to do those kinds of social movements in which a new reality is created, and I say “accountability” rather than “attributional” problems, because the issue is not only to do with locating the relevant influences, but with formulating a characterization of them. For in many such movements, a reality of an extraordinarily vital kind is created which gives rise to new powers and possibilities of being, and which seems, if not to subvert, to at least violate one’s current mundane reality - for the new unity breaks with something in the old. For this, and for other reasons, accountability problems arise with social movements which tend to create new social realities. And it is my purpose in this chapter to attempt to clarify some of these accountability problems.
The “psychologist’s fallacy,” and the unaccountable outcomes of joint action.
Accountability problems can arise because, from the point of view of the old, displaced reality, the active positing of a new reality is disturbing, unintelligible, unexpected; it calls the old reality into question in the most powerful way possible, i.e., not theoretically, but practically. Faced with such a threatening form of activity, the tendency has been to act as if it is [end 226] invisible; it is as if its true nature must be repressed; it is either ignored or described (i.e., misdescribed) as mundane, when in fact it is quite extraordinary.
But this is not the only, nor the major reason why such behaviour is so difficult to account for. Another reason - and this is a difficulty people themselves face in accounting for their own behaviour from within transitional relationships - is that they are involved in a creative or developmental process which is still in progress, rather than in an outcome or product of such a process. In other words, whatever has been so far achieved, practically, in the relationships is still incomplete. As such, it is still open to, or able to take on, or be ‘lent’ further specification. And this is exactly what happens in our attempts to describe it: we describe incomplete processes by their supposed final product.
William James (1890, p.196) describes this tendency as “the psychologist’s fallacy,” saying that “the most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means.” The form of the fallacy is as follows: A vague event E occurs. What was it? As it could come to completion, say, as an A, there is a tendency to label it as such. In reality, however, it is still the event E, what it was originally. Wittgenstein (1980, I, no. 257) also warned against the unwarranted completion (in our descriptions) of essentially incomplete human activities still in progress; often one must just accept, he says, that: “Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it.)”
However, the “psychologist’s fallacy” is still not the main reason for our difficulties. That is to be found in the fact that the activity involved is joint action, i.e., it is activity between people, in which not only unintended joint outcomes are produced (rather than outcomes intended by the individuals involved), but as a part of that outcome, a ‘situation’ is created which the participants experience themselves as being ‘in’ (Shotter, 1984). The realm of joint action is, in fact, quite common, almost the rule rather than the exception; for in almost all face-to-face activities involving concerted social action, individuals cannot produce an outcome according to a prearranged plan of their own. There would be no point to conversations, negotiations, to mothers playing with their children, to games, or the writing and reading academic papers, etc., unless there was a possibility of an unforeseen, creative but contingent outcome. An outcome appropriate to a joint ‘situation’ is required - an intelligent response to it as it changes moment by moment. And often, we clearly can respond as required. Yet such a process is difficult to account for. Why?
Joint action has two major features:
1. As all human action, whether autonomous or joint, has an intentional quality to it, it always seems to ‘point to’, or ‘to indicate’, or ‘to be related to something other than or beyond itself’; in joint action,howver, something is created that is not ‘in’ any of the people involved, but is apparently ‘in’ (or ‘of’) the situation constituted between them [end 227]
2. As people must co-ordinate their activity in with that of others, and are constrained to ‘reply’ to others in their actions, what they as individuals might desire and what actually results in their exchange are often two different things; in short, joint action produces unpredictable and unintended consequences.
Thus its results, appearing to be independent of any particular individual’s wishes or intentions, appear to be nobody’s; they cannot be attributed to an author (Heider, 1958). They must therefore, have an ‘external’ or ‘objective’ quality attributed to them; and rather than their reasons, one feels that one ought to seek their causes. For rather than being deliberate actions done by an individual for a purpose, in their ‘objective’ nature, they have the quality of events which just happen (see, for instance, Buss, 1978, on the causes-reasons distinction in attribution theory). Yet this is still an unsuitable attribution, for although their nature is independent of the wishes of any individuals, they lack the completeness of truly objective entities. In their incomplete or open nature, they are intentional in so much that what so far is ‘rationally-visible’ in them (to use a phrase of Garfinkel’s, 1967), specifies what further developments they will permit, afford, or allow (see also Eco, 1981, for an extended account ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts in this same respect).
In other words, although such outcomes lack an author, they none the less have the quality of ‘authored’ things; they cannot just be treated as caused events - that is to ignore their developmental or historical nature, and the fact that they have a significance to people. Thus when viewed retrospectively, they seem to have the appearance of unfolding as if in accord with an as yet untold story or design, authored by an individual - but they are not! As occurrences, they are neither done by anyone in order to bring about an end, nor caused in any clear way by antecedent events; at the time of their occurrence, their nature is truly vague (see Gavin, 1976; James, 1890, p.254; and Shotter, 1983, on the central importance of the ‘vague’ in human affairs). This means that, while their significance may be accounted for practically, in the context of their occurrence, logically, it cannot be accounted for in any context-free way without distortion: they are “ordering processes” still in progress, rather than already “ordered structures;” they still on their way towards a structure, so to speak.
Ex post facto facts.
The consequences of such a state of affairs are profound: it means, as we shall see, that even the attempt to describe the making of relationships in terms of narratives, stories and plot structures runs into trouble. Witness the making of sexual approaches. “I’m just off to the cinema,” says a woman in the vicinity of a man she is attracted to, in the hope that he will respond as she desires. The significance of her utterance is not yet complete, [end 228] however. If he says, “Oh, can I come too?,” then he has completed its significance as an “invitation,” and she is of course happy to accept it as having been as such. If he just says, however, “Oh, I hope you enjoy the film,” then he completes it simply as an “informative statement.” Embarrassment has been avoided by her not having to issue a direct invitation which might risk a direct refusal. The real indeterminacy of utterances often allows for their significance to be determined retrospectively.
But if he did turn her down, was it because to go to a film at that time was truly impossible for him, or because he truly did not want to be with her? Clearly, the significance of the situation between them is still somewhat vague, and thus requires further practical investigation between them if they are to clarify it further. Let us imagine that he did accept her invitation, and as they walk out of the cinema after the film, she then says: “Would you like to come back for a coffee?” He says, “Oh, yes please!,” and goes to put his arm around her. But she draws back and says: “Whatever gave you that idea?” He is taken aback. He knows what gave him the idea, it was the whole way she offered the original ‘invitation’: it seemed to imply an invitation to greater intimacy - but at the same time, as both she and he were aware, it did not explicitly request it. The character so far of the relationship they are in, is ‘open’ to such reversals as these; while perhaps unexpected, they are not unintelligible.
Relevant here too is Sartre’s (1958, pp.55-6) analysis of “bad faith,” in which he discusses the example of a woman who, in conversation with a man whom she knows cherishes certain sexual intentions regarding her, allows him to take her hand, but leaves it limp within his, “neither consenting nor resisting - a thing” (p.56). Her “bad faith,” as he sees it, is in not treating the event with its proper significance. For, by allowing him to take her hand, she lets him risk requesting a greater physical intimacy: “To leave the hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible” (p.55). Sartre does not say how the relationship went on, but perhaps she shortly afterwards broke it off. But isn’t that what she intended to do all along? Not necessarily, perhaps originally she had intended it to flourish. While that is what later it resulted in, that is not what it begun as; its significance later was not the same as at the time of its origin.
Again, an accountability problem arises in such circumstances, one of a very special kind. Ossorio (1981) calls it the “ex post facto facts” paradox. It is a much more complex version of the “psychologist’s fallacy:” it is the claim that something, which has already occurred, must have had a certain significance, because of what occurred later. The fallacy has the following form: The vague event E could be seen as signifying either A or B; if X follows from it, it must have been A; if, however, Y results, then it must have been B - in fact, of course, it was and still is the vague event E. The [end 229] fallacy is in seeing the origin of a process being an event of a definite kind because of what followed from it, of assigning a particular form to an earlier event because of the form of a later one, even though at that earlier time the event did not have that form. It is a very obvious fallacy but none the less a very beguiling one: in occurs in seeing human actions, or human history, retrospectively, as simply a progression of events through time with each event possessing its own “correct” interpretation. And, finding ourselves puzzled as to why an outcome occurred (because of the real indeterminacy of the factors involved), we feel that “correct” interpretation must exist somewhere. Thus the project of searching for it appears to be quite a legitimate one. But, if Ossorio is right, there are no such “correct” interpretations to be found. In human affairs, things do not happen in time in a simple progression, as if according to rules, scripts, plots, etc. - there are no plots, and if we discover them we discover them by mistake.
There are many dangers of the ex post facto kind. They can occur even in attempts to use the most innocuous, undramatic kinds of plots - in, say, the story that people are like isolated atoms in motion according the certain laws. For instance, in the language of Kelley et al (1983), “two people are in a relationship with one another if they have an impact on each other, if they are “interdependent” in the sense that a change in one person causes a change in the other and vice versa” (p.12, my emphasis). And the relationship is “”close” if the amount of mutual impact two people have on each other is great or, in other words, there is high interdependence” (p.13) - the image of billiard balls is not far beneath the surface here, with changes caused by “impacts.” They then go on to say that, “a causal analysis of interaction regularities requires the inference of relatively stable “causal conditions” that act on the relationship to produce and maintain these regularities” (p.14, my emphasis). But if what Ossorio has to say about ex post facto facts is correct, such changes cannot be predicted on the basis of such a “causal analysis.” For, although once an event has taken place and been seen as an instance of a “regularity,” as a useful “relationship descriptor,” and tied “to properties of the interconnected activity pattern that can be recorded and agreed on by impartial investigators” (p.13), this does not mean that along with all such other instances it was occasioned by the same circumstances. In other words, ignoring the ex post facto fallacy, they infer from outcomes what their causes must have been. Upon what justification? Well, they say that the causal analysis “requires” it. Rather than responding to demands arising from practical involvements in personal relationships, and justifying their claims by appeal to those involvements, they use another framework of interpretation altogether, with quite a different justification:
“We believe that the basic framework itself is largely dictated by the common principles and assumptions that underlie all scientific endeavours” (p.15).
Quite! [end 230] Being true to science is more important than being true to the phenomena: but it engenders a way of seeing which leaves one blind to the genuinely interpersonal processes involved.
There are other dangers also of the ex post facto kind. It is the danger, for instance, in the appeal to retrospective reports, in empirical investigations of the growth of personal relationships: because of what seems to be a current outcome, what in reality could still be open to many interpretations is treated as if it had already become something clearly identifiable. This problem is discussed, for instance, by Duck and Miell (1984): they are quite aware that “the drawback of retrospective accounts...is that the final known outcome of a relationship will inevitably colour the retrospective accounts given by the subjects in specifiable and predictable ways” (p. 236). But they go on later to raise what they call a “pseudo-methodological problem,” i.e., whether asking people in a developing relationship to provide data upon it by keeping diaries, will not only ‘colour’ the data gathered, but also disrupt in some way the developmental course of the relationship. They rule this possibility out, however, on the following grounds, that:
“Might it not be the case that, even at the time of the interaction, the subjects are reviewing the information available to them, and trying to place any incoming information about the partner or the relationship into the broader context of its history and expected future?” (p.238).
Indeed! This is exactly what they might be doing - but not if they are engaged in genuine joint action. Only if they are acting individualistically would they be acting in such a reflective manner. A truly joint exchange is best analyzed, as we shall see, as being passionate, i.e., as neither simply caused, nor as reflective.
Thus, to sum up this section: the concept of joint action is important in attempts to the account for the development of social and personal relationships for the following reasons: 1) within the relationship, each person’s action produces an “new organized setting or situation” into which the others must direct their next actions; 2) thus the formative influences on people’s actions (the enabling-constraints provided by the momentary setting) are not to be found wholly within themselves, i.e., they are not completely aware of the determinants of their own conduct and thus logically, cannot give a clear account of it; 3) however, that does not mean that they lack an awareness of their immediate circumstances and are unable to act in a way inappropriate to them; 4) it simply means that people must, in every instance, respond in a moment by moment fashion to the specific, local contingencies arising, moment by moment in the settings they create between themselves, and account to one another for what they do in terms of such contingencies. This means that, in attempting to account for occurrences within still continuing processes, not only can one fall foul of the simple mistake of describing processes by their [end 231] products, but one can also mistakenly see the workings of an author’s intention where none such exist - thus to seek the as yet untold story, or design, or rules, guiding the progression of the action.
Passionate exchanges and accounting.
Above, it was suggested that, although the origins of joint action are vague, it unfolds progressively over time, and as it does so, it introduces a greater and greater degree of specificity into its outcome, i.e., into the “relationship” it produces. Thus a relationship in progress, while having so far produced a certain degree of specification in itself, still leaves itself open to yet further specification, but now, only of an already specified kind (Shotter, 1980). What occurs next must ‘fit in with’ the totality so far specified or determined. Thus each new action must be directed into a context, the situation produced by previous actions, and fitted in with what that situation invites, affords, or allows, thus to develop it further. In such circumstances, we cannot be held wholly responsible for what we do: for what we do is not wholly up to us, other people’s actions are just as much a formative influence in what we do as any plan, rule, or script within ourselves. Thus, to an extent, our actions can be said to be of a passionate nature (the term “passion” being derived from the Latin pati which means “to suffer” or “undergo change”). We simply find ourselves happening to act in a certain way, spontaneously; and this passive aspect of passionate activity is expressed colloquially by such phrases as “falling” in love, being “gripped” by anger, “seized” by fear, “torn” by jealousy, “transported” by joy, etc. (Averill, 1980a). We do not happen to act as we do, however, out of mere subjective impulse, for we act in a reasonable manner, i.e., in terms of a practical awareness of our circumstances. And the criteria we use in judging whether people have understood the nature of the exchange they are involved in, do not depend upon what occurs in their heads, but upon what they actually do in relation to their situation, the appropriateness of their actual response to it. The traditional disassociation of reason from emotion, and emotion’s placement in opposition to it, at least in the realm of practical activities, is a serious mistake.
Passionate actions, practical reason, and transitory social roles.
We can see this, i.e., practical reason at work in people’s passionate exchanges in, for instance, a passage taken almost at random from Marilyn French’s (1978, p.171) The Woman’s Room. The central character Mira is speaking about Natalie’s husband, Hamp:
‘...And he hates. God, he hates. All of us. All women.’ ‘Not quite all,’ an acid voice behind her put in. She turned. Natalie was glaring at her, slowly waving the rest of the packet [of letters]. ‘There’s one woman he likes. Just one.’ [end 232] Mira frowned. She didn’t understand Nat’s tone. “What do you mean?’ Don’t tell me you don’t know!’ Natalie accused. At Mira’s look of incomprehension, she burst out. ‘They’re to you! Are you going to say you didn’t know?’ Mira sank into a chair. ‘What?’ ‘Love letters. Oodles of them...”
Here, Mira is at first puzzled by Natalie’s tone and responds to it with a request for clarification. Natalie at first refuses to respond to the request, she treats it as false. Mira is still confused, her look of incomprehension suggests her innocence. So finally Natalie accounts for her tone by telling Mira about the love letters to her (Mira) she had found among her husband’s possessions. But Mira had never received any such letters.
Three points are illustrated by this exchange: 1) Mostly, the activities depicted are not actions, each momentary response is just that: a response and not an action, i.e., it is not properly accounted as an activity done deliberately, upon reflection, according to a prior plan in order to bring about a particular outcome; 2) in other words, in such exchanges people’s expressions are mostly indexical expressions, i.e., they make the particular sense they do only in relation to the context of activity in which they occur; and 3) thus it would be odd to ask Mira why she had “decided,” for instance, to be puzzled by Natalie’s tone; for she would say that it wasn’t something she had decided to do at all, but that it was Natalie’s tone which had made her puzzled. In other words, the exchange above is best analyzed as a passionate one (which it clearly is), for the activities involved have the general form of passions - for, as I said above, a passion is accounted as something for which we ourselves are not wholly responsible, we didn’t plan to act that way, we say that something “made” us act as we did. Yet they are activities appropriate in some way to their circumstances. Following Averill (1980a and b), who focusses upon what practically people do in such situations rather than upon what they might think or experience, I shall treat passionate activities as like the performance of, as Averill puts it, transitory social roles.
The metaphor of transitory social roles for passions is very appropriate. For consider the moral nature of the social world: it is simply not open to us to do what we want when we please. What we have a right to do on one occasion we have no right to do on another; conditions we have no obligation to satisfy here we must attempt to satisfy there; privileges accorded to us now may be taken away from us tomorrow; and so on. The moral setting for our activities is thus an ever changing sea of opportunities and limitations, risks and invitations, enablements and constraints - with our “place” or “status” within it transformed by each of our and other people’s activities within it. Now Goffman’s (1971, p.27) definition of a social role is that it is “the enactment of the rights and duties attached to a given status,” i.e, it is the way one responds to the enabling-constraints [end 233] afforded one by one’s momentary situation. Given Goffman’s definition, we can see the point of Averill’s description. He takes passions as neither opposed to reason, nor to social convention; he treats them as intelligent activities whose sense is grounded in their immediate social context.
Barthes (1983) also expresses a similar view to Averill: “I take a role.” he says (p.161), “I am the one who is going to cry; and I play this role for myself, and it makes me cry: I am my own theatre.” As Averill points out, people who say to others “that makes me angry” or “I love you” are not simply labelling an internal state; they are entering into a complex relationship with another person, as if playing a role which makes” them act as they do (1980b, p.314). So, from a practical point of view, acting emotionally is not just a matter of “labelling an internal state” (Schachter, 1971), it is behaving in a certain kind of, as Averill puts it, “socially constituted way.” Passions then, are much more common in social life than we care to admit; furthermore, many of them are positive, i.e., they are the major currency, so to speak, in terms of which, as I mentioned above, most of our face-to-face exchanges are conducted. Why is it so difficult for us to admit this?
Averill has discussed the paucity of terms in our language for the description of positive emotions (Averill, 1980a). He concludes that, compared with actions, passions are thought to be uncharacteristic of the individual in question, irrational, intuitive, impulsive, intense, and persistent, and that most of these connotations have a slight negative quality. Such terms are thus less applicable to positive behaviours. But this is not the only reason for the paucity of positive emotions: behaviour” (pp.24-5). While the typical act of courage has many of the characteristics of a passion, the individual is praised and honoured for it; thus only if it is not treated as passion, not treated as beyond the person’s control, but as an action, can the praise be justified. This, Averill suspects (and I agree), is why there is a reluctance to describe an emotional responses which lead to a positive outcome as passions - they undermines our hard won, modern conception of our individuality and moral autonomy. However, if Averill is right, only if we reinstitute passionate activity between people as activity on a par with the supposed rational actions of individuals, have we a chance of properly understanding joint action as a non-instrumental, creative activity, and thus the making of personal relationships (Unger, 1984). How might such passionate interpersonal processes - processes which, if they could ever come to completion in their own terms, would disturb established social realities - how might the nature of such processes be properly described? [end 234]
Narratives.
Gergen and Gergen (1983), noting that they involve historical processes, entailing changes through time, suggest that a narrative structure is required for a proper explanatory account of such real-life developments. And here one must agree: it is only within a narrative order - which allows for the description of different conflicting forces and different points of view, and their attempted resolution - that the human drama can be properly characterized; a theoretical order, which demands a single, supposedly universal, context-free standpoint for the description of an orderly, sequential progress towards an outcome, is quite inadequate to the task. Gergen and Gergen go on, however, to claim that the narratives required must be coherent narratives; that unless we can see systematic connections between life-events, we are prone to see our lives as a rather meaningless sequence, as just “one damned thing after another.”
Gergen and Gergen’s requirement of coherency, however, suggests that we treat a person’s life as if it contained an untold story, one which requires discovering as “the” story of that person’s life - as if they possessed an already determinate history which guided them in the living out of their life, and the project of accurately discovering it was a possibility. Another objection I have to it is that, rather than each action in a sequence of action being in response to local and contingent conditions, a matter of practical reasoning about one’s social circumstances, it again makes people’s actions a matter of individual reflection, a matter of planning, plotting and deciding, as if the intelligent adaptation to contingencies as they occurred played no part in them living their lives.
I would, therefore, like to put forward a third view: One which accepts to an extent that life just “is” one damned thing after another, but which also recognizes the importance of the human storytelling capacity. In my view it works retrospectively, to make some sense of what has happened so far, to gain hints as to what one might do next. While the raw material of a biography, the facts (in which any narrative we may produce must be grounded), may at first appear as an “...and then...and then...and so on’ chronicle of events, this does not preclude their retrospective embedding in a narrative, to give or lend them structure, a structure which they do not in themselves possess but which none the less they will afford or allow. Indeed, we may embed them in any one of an indefinite number. However, to repeat what I have already said above, this is not to say that can embed them in any narrative we please; stories not grounded in facts are fictions.
To repeat: While a fictional narrative creates its own free-floating but none the less ordered mental space, the ordered mental space created by a historical narrative must be grounded or rooted in actual facts - whose nature is not wholly predetermined - i.e., they are vague facts which are thus given or lent a determinate nature and ordering by the story in which they are embedded. As White (1978) and Mink (1978) persuasively argue, this is the case in historiography; the bare chronicle of the historical record can [end 235] be “emplotted” in different ways - as comedy, romance, tragedy, or as satire - where the ways chosen (but not the content) depend, not upon evidence, but upon irreducible imaginative preferences or choices, i.e., upon the existential projects or the projected forms of life envisaged in the accounts constructed. The same is clearly the case in accounting for the making of relationships; no plot is “the” plot. All grounded plots can be explanatory in some way; though none of them tell us “the” way it was, only “a” way (Goodman, 1972).
But is this good enough? In the light of what I said above about the distortions introduced by “plot structures” about their suppression of local and momentary contingencies, and their valorizing of individual reflection - should we refer to plots at all? Doesn’t this leave us in the position of Eco’s hero William: “I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe” (Eco, 1983, p.492). By imagining an erroneous order, we may still discover something, Adso his assistant says to him in trying to console him. But William is not convinced; we are not prepared to accept its erroneous nature and to throw it away after use: “The only truths that are useful,” he says (p.492), “are instruments to be thrown away” - but the trouble is people are prepared to die for them...and live by them. People warrant their actions by reference to them, rather than to the facts, to their beliefs rather than their circumstances. A story is treated as the Truth. Is there an alternative to plots and the distortions they introduce?
Lexicons and “image repertoires”.
Is there an alternative way of presenting what it is one knows - when one knows about something such as love, say - which makes the knowledge available to others as a practical resource without distorting its nature? Barthes (1983, pp.7-8) in discussing this problem says:
Is there an alternative way of presenting what it is one knows - when one knows about something such as love, say - that makes the knowledge available to others as a practical resource without distorting its nature? Barthes (1983, pp. 7-8), in discussing this problem, says:
Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning: it is generated, develops, and dies; it follows a path which it is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality - even if need be, which can be moralized ... this is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must `get over’ ... the love story ... is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.
What then is an alternative to it, to the ‘love story’? Barthes (1983) says:
Very different is the discourse, the soliloquy, the aside which accompanies this story (this history), without ever knowing it. It is the very principle of this discourse (and of the text which represents it) that its [end 236] figures cannot be classified: organized, hierarchized, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement): there are no first figures, no last figures.
What it is one knows is known in an unformulated way. There can be, in other words, no story, no order, no rules, or principles, no completeness to the lover’s life in actual fact. This does not mean to say that none can be constructed. But if one is, then it cannot be the story.
Hence, to avoid falling into the traps discussed above, Barthes refuses to provide a narrative account of love, yet he wants to write about love only in a way that the facts will allow. How, if not as a narrative? Well, as indicated above, he thinks the knowledge possessed by the lover of the loved one, of the other (indeed, of any kind of ‘otherness’) is, he claims, `atopos’, i.e. unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality. It can be given or lent whatever form its nature will allow by the use of tropes, figures of speech, metaphors and suchlike. And the figures available to the lover for the ordering of the lover’s experience, constitute what Barthes calls the lover’s ‘image-repertoire’, a body of knowledge without any pre-imposed order. Thus, ‘to let it be understood’, he says (p. 8), ‘that there was no question here of a love story (or of a history of a love), to discourage the temptation of meaning, it was necessary to choose an absolutely insignificant order’. Indeed, such knowledge has the same character as that claimed by many writers for the nature of all everyday, practical common-sense knowledge. Common-sense knowledge in general is, says Heider (1958, p. 2), ‘unformulated and only vaguely conceived’; ‘it embraces the most heterogeneous kinds of knowledge in a very incoherent and confused state’ (Schutz 1964, p. 72); it is ‘immethodical’ (Geertz 1983, p. 90), i.e. it caters both to the inconsistencies and diversity of life, it is ‘shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. It comes in epigrams, proverbs, obiter dicta, jokes, anecdotes contes morals,- a clatter of gnomic utterances - not in formalized doctrines, axiomatized theories, or architectonic dogmas’. (ibid.). Yet strangely, as Geertz goes on to say, for all its disorder, such knowledge has ‘accessibleness’ as another of its major qualities or as Barthes (1983 .p 214) says `the power of the Imagerepertoire is immediate: I do not look for the image, it comes to me all of a sudden’, on occasion after occasion, called out by (internal or external), accidents of one’ .sltuation, at ‘the whim of trivial, aleatory circumstances’ (Barthes 1983, p.3).
Rather than as a particular story, what it is one knows when one knows about such a topic as love should be presented, Barthes feels, not as a representation, a `picture’ of love, but in such a way as to communicate ,the very substance I employ in order to speak [the lover’s discourse]’ (Barthes 1983, p. 59). The figures he provides function as a set of instructions or devices for constructing, so to speak - from different moments and situations dispersed in space and time - the different affects felt by lovers. The active principle of a figure is not, he says,[end 237]
what it says but what it articulates: by and large, it is only a `syntactical aria’, a `mode of construction’. For instance, if the lover awaits the loved object at a rendezvous, a sentence-aria keeps running through .his head: ‘All the same, it’s not fair ...’ ;’he/she could have ...’; `he/she knows perfectly well ...’; knows what? It doesn’t matter, the figure `Waiting’ is already formed. Such sentences are matrices of figures precisely because they remain suspended: they utter the affect, then break off, their role fulfilled. (p. 6).
Hence, instead of an account of love, what Barthes provides is a kind of lexicon or dictionary of love’s figures – the forms of order it will allow – with entries in an alphabetical order, figures that merely indicate in a metonymical manner the ‘topics’ or ‘sites’ where, as he says, “each of us can fill in the code according to his own history; rich or poor, the figure must be there, the site (the compartment) must be reserved for it” (p.5). It is as if there is an imaginary space whose ‘places’ or (topos) topics ‘lend’ it an existence. It is as if the nature of love - what the transitory roles played by those in love are - can only be grasped by locating them somewhere. While in fact, of course, in reality, it cannot be so located; it is essentially non-locatable - “An emotion has duration; it has no place; it has characteristic ‘undergoings’...” (Wittgenstein, 1980, vol.1, no. 836).
Here Barthes’s concerns parallel those discussed by Mink (1978), who points out that in historiography generally now, while one would not want to deny that there was “something” for historiography to be about, most would want to deny that its task was the telling of the as yet untold, single story of what actually happened. History no longer has a unified subject matter; there are histories but no History. As there is no universal history, argues Mink, there is no universal historiography either, i.e., no one single kind of story about human cultural development.
“One simply cannot generalize over cultural histories as easily as one can over political history. The history of mankind thus becomes dispersed into an encyclopedia of biographies, customs, ideas, local institutions, languages, peoples, and nations. The dispersal was summed up in Carlyle’s dictum that history is “the essence of innumerable biographies”“ (p.139).
In other words, there is a past, but it is we who determine its significance, and we do it by locating it in an order of relationships represented only in the construction of one or another kind of narrative form; it is we who make the past determinate according to our concerns of the moment.
Summary: I have set out what seems to me to be the main problem in accounting for interpersonal relationships: that many such relationships are creative ones, continually involving passionate exchanges, with people as if in transitory [end 238] social roles. In other words, they involve still incomplete social movements or processes. And what has to be accounted for, are the moment by moment changes, this way and that, as the process develops. In such developments, however, the momentary state of affairs so far achieved is incomplete; it is open to, invites, or affords further specification. Within a medium of communication, when a still incomplete state of affairs must be described, it is specified further. For the purposes of communication, it is treated as if complete, and described either in terms of its supposed final product, or, in terms of the plan or plot an individual would have to follow to produce such a product. Thus, for example, as “being in love” is the end result of “falling in love” (if all goes well, although very often it doesn’t), the transitory, passionate process is described in terms, either of the much cooler, more stable, reasoned state, or, in terms of “the love story” - the process is described in terms of the product of the process, or the process as a sequence of products. In short, the circumstances are given or lent a structure which they do not in fact have; a reality is described in terms of a fiction, a fiction which preserves our other individualistic fictions about ourselves. But couldn’t we write other kinds of stories, ones which emphasize more or interdependencies with other people? How might we best account for ‘falling in love’, relationships in motion, so to speak? If we are still to have recourse to stories, why should some stories be judged as better than others; what are the criteria for “good” stories? What should such stories be about; what should be their substance; what their point?
“Falling in love” and “being in love.”
In his novel Mother Night - of which, incidently, the moral is, he says, that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” i.e., be careful about the stories we tell ourselves - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1973, p.23) writes of a young playwright thinking of his next play:
“I was sitting alone on a park bench in the sunshine that day, thinking of a fourth play that was beginning to write itself in my mind. It gave itself a title...- ‘Nation of Two’.
It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves - a nation of two.”
The intuition Vonnegut expresses - that lovers, who are in one sense already complete individuals, can begin to constitute between themselves something which they experience as a third entity with its own nature, a “nation,” or something very like a nation, which then becomes are part of their identity, a part of what they are to themselves - is apposite here. For etymologically, a nation is a unity with a sensible continuity and a common origin (or birth), a unified region of social activity whose unity is so strong that, no matter [end 239] what might disturb it, it is continually reborn as that same unity. In other words, falling in love is not sui generis; it is, as I have already said, a special kind of joint action, and extreme case of a social movement.
Accounting relative to being in a two-person “us.”
What makes falling in love to an extent special, however, is that it is only a two-person relationship, and two person relationships are special because the thirdness created between the two of them is not a thirdness on behalf of which for which a third party can speak. So, although it is a thirdness which provides the terms in which the couple must discuss and account for the details of their relationship together; it is not a thirdness which can in itself create a discord - by authorizing one person’s version of “the facts” over the other’s. In other words, all expressions in two-person exchanges are, and must remain, “indexical” expressions, i.e., they can work only by indicating something in the context of their usage. They cannot be reconstructed as “objective” expressions, i.e., as intelligible to anyone, to third-person observers. For that would require of an expression: a) that it be not only be about something which “forces” itself upon one, i.e., it “makes,” or “compels” one to feel this or that way; but also, b) it is about something which all others can experience in the same way also, i.e., it is independent of people’s (emotional) involvements with one another, independent of any situation existing only between two people. It is this second criterion which cannot be met in two-person relationships. Hence, occurrences in two-person relationships cannot be made sense of “objectively;” they are accounted for in terms solely relative to the implicit ‘situation’ the two persons constitute between themselves; third-person, uninvolved observers, who are not party to that situation, must make sense of events between the two by embedding them in another framework.
Consider the episode below extracted from Tom Stoppard’s (1982, p.19) play, The Real Thing, in which Stoppard exploits this fact: Henry: No, no - buck’s fizz all round. I feel reckless, extravagant, in love, and I’m next week’s castaway on Desert Island Discs. Max: Are you really? Henry: Head over heels. How was last night, by the way? Charlotte: Hopeless. I had to fake it again. Henry: Very witty woman, my present wife. Actually, I was talking about my play. Charlotte: Actually, so was I. I’ve decided it’s a mistake appearing in Henry’s play. Max: Not for me it isn’t. Charlotte: Well, of course not for you, you idiot, you’re not his wife. Max: Oh, I see what you mean. Charlotte: Max sees what I mean. all those people out front thinking, that’s why she got the job. You’re right Max. Max: I never said anything! [end 241] Three people are involved in this somewhat opaque episode; it will perhaps become somewhat less opaque if you know that Max and Charlotte (who is married to Henry), are actors in a successful play by Henry. The episode mostly consists in a succession of two-person exchanges. Their nature is such, however, that the most obvious “topic” constituted by the audience to the play (from the actor’s utterances on stage), is not the one constituted by the characters in the play. They (the characters) seem to suffer from continual misunderstandings (and so do we, although ours are different from their’s).
For them (and for us), their continual misunderstandings are a) understood as such, and b) successfully repaired without impairing the flow of conversation between them. At every point, a topic, or topics are constituted between a speaker and a listener which has (emotional) currency only in the situation between them. For instance: 1) when Max says “Are you really?,” we as third-person outsiders can see that, implicated in this response, is a reference to Henry’s appearance on Desert Island Discs. Henry, however, misunderstands, and takes it that the implication is a reference to him (Henry) saying he feels “in love.” And this is the point: it is because people within the flow of a two-person exchange make sense to one another only in terms of what goes on within the exchange, that such misunderstandings can arise. But what about the next exchange? 2) Here, Stoppard surely plays an ex post facto trick on us. Henry says to Charlotte, “How was it last night?” We, still with love in mind, interpret her utterance - “Hopeless, I had to fake it again” - as to do with their love life as husband and wife. But Henry had switched in his previous utterance (had he?) from the topic of him being in love to his play. 3) Consider next Charlotte saying, “You’re right Max,” and Max’s reply, “I never said anything!” Again a possible topic - that of an audience thinking about Charlotte being Henry’s wife - appears to be implicated in their exchange. Max appreciates the implication but declines to allow it.
These rather brief remarks are inadequate to unpack the complexity implicated in the episode above, but limitations on space will not allow further analysis here. I cannot go further here, either, into the special qualities of two-person exchanges compared with three-person ones, and what it is which makes for the kind of “objectivity” we seek in science, and why that is impossible to achieve in relation to two-person relationships without distortion. Suffice it to say that there are some relationships whose understanding depends upon local and momentary contingencies. And “procedures of inquiry,” in which a class of speakers (scientists) are privileged, by being allowed to speak with an authority way beyond the range of their merely personal situation and power - i.e., to speak as if their utterances were context-free - are quite unsuited to their proper (undistorted) understanding. If we continue to act simply as if in all close relationships there just “are” (to be found somewhere) sets of events which a) are in themselves objective, and b) will explain the conduct of the relationship, but which c) we have not yet discovered, then shall trap ourselves in paradoxes and illusions of our own making. And: we shall [end 241] prevent ourselves from ever discovering the fact that fact. To see how such illusions can come about, I would like finally to turn to an analysis of why “falling in love” is even more special than just being a two-person relationship.
Falling in love: illusions of passion.
Love is blind; the wisdom of the fool and folly of the wise; like a ghost which everybody talks about and few have seen; the encounter of two weaknesses; the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion: thus is love disparaged and derided. But: Falling in love with someone is much more than being fascinated by, or enfatuated with a person’s features. Such perceptions are no more than a starting point. If we love another person, we certainly love him or her for what he or she “is;” but at the same time we love them for what they might be - as Plato points out in The Symposium. Indeed, he goes further: he suggests that it is love which works to produce the movement from what is to what might be. Although from a mundane point of view, lover’s may be ‘blind’ to one another’s imperfections, in another sense, they are far from blind: they see new possibilities in each other’s activities and being. Their love for one another allows them to detect within the vague incomplete responses they give one another, satisfying and gratifying ways of completing those responses; in their intense involvement with one another they see details in each other missed by those less concerned. With our eyes fixed upon an image of them we construct, we are indifferent as to how far it is reflected and realized in the actual state of our loved ones; for we see through, in, and behind what our loved one “is,” what he or she can become - mothers see their child’s facial movements as if their child is “smiling at them,” and respond to it as such (Shotter, 1974), and so on. We measure our loved one against our own ideal image of them, and continually present it to them as their ideal, as their project: to become fully what so far they are only partially - as if, ex post facto, they must become what in fact they have been all along. This creates the illusion that, as researchers, we can study retrospectively, in mundane terms, what it was which made for happiness between them (Argyle and Henderson, 1985) - when the characteristics studied are the outcome of such processes of concern and attention, not their cause. The practical result of such research is information about how to describe the criteria met by happy couples (in case one needed a written account to help one recognize happiness), but no practical help at all in recognizing the circumstances which might allow or afford the occurrence of happiness.
To turn now to our lover’s effect upon us. Again, there as a puzzling ex post facto outcome. When we fall in love, we fall in love with a particular person; but it was not that particular person we needed before falling in love with them. They became the needed person in the process of us ‘falling for them.’ And as our ‘falling’ progresses, and we ‘discover’ our relationship with them to be both satisfying and gratifying, our vague need for a relationship becomes specific - as a need for that particular person. But what is the nature of this discovery about ourselves, for we [end 242] neither simply discovered it, for it occurred in a process of ‘falling’, nor was it constructed, made, or arbitrarily chosen by us. Indeed, “we” as such change in the process, we come to need the other person in our very being. None the less, we often this discovery is as if we had simply made a discovery about ourselves: ex post facto, we view ourselves as having lacked and needed this relationship all along, as if it was something only to do with us. This illusion is, what might be called, an “illusion of discourse,” for it arises out of a need to talk in a particular way, to talk in the currently acceptable language of self-explanation. And that way of talking requires that we make sense of all our activities in terms of events and actions, happenings and doings, located either ‘in’ us, or ‘outside’ of us, not floating somewhere mysteriously ‘between’ us. In the idiom I am employing here, however, in my attempt to speak practically, as if from a position of involvement in two-person relationships, the matter looks different. Our relation to our circumstances becomes of crucial importance: and we must characterize the ‘discovery’ as a creative discovery, for in our relationship to the other person we find that the making of a new order of significance is allowed us not ever before encountered.
Those who treat close relationships as consisting in merely a succession of states, of causal events, have failed to recognize its nature as a formative movement, of which Plato was already shrewdly aware - “a cause whereby anything proceeds from that which is not, into that which is.” It is a creative process involving novelties. As Scheler (1954, p.153) puts it:
“Love does not simply gape approval, so to speak, at a value lying ready to hand for inspection. 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.”
It is the imaginative order, and its function in producing “images,” “paradigms,” and “figures” in terms of which to give form to one’s feelings, and the use of such forms in guiding the developmental movements involved in personal (and social) transformations, that are ignored, derided, distorted, and ultimately repressed by current empirical approaches aimed at understanding (for the purposes of their management) interpersonal relations. For, in fact, in a practical reality, their extraordinary features are not amenable to an orderly, coherent account of a mundane kind.
Concluding remarks.
My concerns in this chapter have been of both a positive and of a negative kind: Positively, I have tried to describe what a social world, and [end 243] especially a two-person, interpersonal world might look (or feel?) like from the practical (rather than theoretical) point of view of first- and second-person participants in it, and especially to describe its formative nature, i.e., the circumstances it affords for personal development. Negatively, I have been concerned to point out some of the distortions introduced into the attempt to understand interpersonal relationships within the current scientific framework, which views such relationships as manifesting a merely causal sequences of events, requiring description from a third-person, external observer point of view. I have been especially concerned to emphasize the way in which it suppresses concern for both the developmental and social context of such relations. I have argued that currently, the “image repertoire” from which we draw what we call our experiences of ourselves, psychologically, is that provided to us in the common sense language of psychological explanation - the language we use when we are called upon to reflect upon our actions to justify them to others. In place of it, I have been attempting to talk in the same idiom as that we use in conducting our activities, our language in practice.
Why is this not done in the rest of psychology? Why do we, as professional psychologists, persist in basing ourselves only in the language of justification? We do it in the service of retaining unchanged a whole set of established procedures in terms of which many other aspects our everyday social activities are regulated and coordinated (Foucault, 1979). And our accounts are thus concerned with a) fitting what otherwise seems a marginal activity into an already existing framework, and (most importantly) b) rendering it as if marginal because of its formative creative nature, because of its potential disturbing effect upon established social orders. We are, I think, wrong in taking this approach. And above I have given my reasons for saying this. Here, I want to add that I think we are wrong in a way which is dangerous to us all. For at least at the moment, love functions in the gaps, so to speak, of the current ‘disciplinary matrix’, as Foucault (1979) calls it; we are thus still able to experience in our personal relationships what has, as MacIntyre claims, been obliterated from our social life at large: i.e., a continually renewed sense of surprise at other people’s ceaselessly unforeseen originality and at the novel situations in which they involve us. And this can be compared with the desperate experience of turning continuously the wheel of routine, and function as a hint of better things.
To be more explicit: the current project of making interpersonal relations an object for science, can be seen as the continuation of a project concerned with the reconstitution of all human relationships as power relations - with, as MacIntyre puts it, the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations - with eradicating joint action and its passionate, creative tendencies. Those such as Kelley et al. (1983), who are determined, as a result of their observation of close relationships, to describe them as if caused, by certain conditions, possess (quite possibly unconsciously) an implicit aim [end 244] in their method. It is to make the prediction and control, the disciplining and regulation of other people’s activity possible, i.e, to make it possible for people deliberately to act as if in a ‘close’ way according to rational principles, i.e., to simulate a close relationship, but without the subversive threat to the dominant social order presented by the creative nature of genuine relationships. To make close relationships mundanely accountable is to make them - if they are to be proper close relationships, that is - as if they ought to be conducted with certain rules in mind. And:
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1979, pp.202-3).
If we did, however, allow ourselves to recognize the real formative nature of such relationships, we would be recognize the character of our loss: the loss of the creativity of passion. But we don’t. Even though it is because of the practices already existing between us that we call certain of our relationships “relationships” and treat others as not worthy of the name. What we need is a ‘better’ story, a better way of formulating the nature of personal relationships than the current “causal story,” a story which makes “rationally-visible,” so to speak, the processual, formative nature of such relationships, and which reveals what certain “illusions of discourse” at the moment repress. We need a story which ‘fits in with’ the practice of personal relationships, rather than in with the established practices of science - for in personal relationships too, we can check, evaluate, and elaborate the truths we make, as we make them. Practically, even love is not blind.
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