WorldShare Books

WITTGENSTEIN IN PRACTICE:
His Philosophy of Beginnings,
and Beginnings, and
Beginnings
JOHN SHOTTER

A Taos Institute Publication

WITTGENSTEIN IN PRACTICE:
His Philosophy of Beginnings,
and Beginnings, and Beginnings

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- CONTENTS -
Prologue: A strange new world
Part I: UNDERSTANDING FROM WITHIN
CHAP 1. Inside the moment of speaking: the quiet weighing of linguistic
facts
CHAP 2. Wittgenstein and his philosophy of beginnings and beginnings
and beginnings
Part II: THE PRACTICAL AIM - TO BE ABLE TO GO ON
CHAP 3. 'Now I can go on': Wittgenstein and communication
CHAP 4. Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the
hurly-burly of everyday life
Part III: PROBLEMS WITH THE WAY OF THEORY WHEN NOTHING
IS HIDDEN
CHAP 5. Wittgenstein in practice: from 'the way of theory' to a 'social
poetics'
CHAP 6. Problems with 'the way of theory'
CHAP 7. Wittgenstein and the everyday: from radical hiddenness to
nothing is hidden; from representation to participatory talk
and thought
Part VI: GESTURAL COMMUNICATION AMONG PARTICIPANTS
CHAP 8. Talk of saying, showing, feeling, and gesturing in Wittgenstein
and Vygotsky
CHAP 9. Wittgenstein and Bakhtin: on coming to know our way about
inside our inner lives together
CHAP 10. From within our lives together: Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and
Voloshinov, and the shift to a participatory stance in
understanding understanding
Epilogue: Dialogical realities: the ordinary, the everyday, and other
strange new worlds
References:
Page
1
10
26
34
43
58
66
73
84
100
112
129
139
I first put this collection of previously written papers together in this volume for KCC M.Sc. students
1
of both Management and Family Therapy in 2005, as prelude to editing them and having them commercially
published. I have now agreed with Ken Gergen to have them published as a free-book by the Taos Instititute.
Because they are in a pre-edited state, there will be lots of repetitions and overlaps. Sorry about that.
-1-
PROLOGUE:
A STRANGE NEW WORLD
... if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought
that we had a mind (Rorty, 1979, p.239).
Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy
wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite)
longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips This inversion of our
conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp
the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be
sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it
may well be done, if one means a cross-strip. But in that case we never
get to the end of our work! Of course not, for it has no end. (We want to
replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of
linguistic facts) (1981, no.447).
... sound doctrines are all useless... you have to change your life. (Or the
direction of your life.)... wisdom is all cold... you can no more use it for
setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold... The
point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it
as you would a doctor's prescription. - But here you need something to
move you and turn you in a new direction [emphasis - js]... Once you have
been turned around, you must stay turned around. Wisdom is passionless.
But faith is what Kierkegaard calls a passion (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.53).
Like an earlier pre-book , this is a pre-book for practitioners, for people who, like crafts-
1
persons or sports-people, must continually shape or fashion their conduct both to the
immediate allowances or opportunities for action afforded them by their circumstances,
whilst at the same time, aiming at an overall goal of bettering those circumstances in
some way.
The overall approach taken in these essays is not wholly social constructionist, at
least, it is not related to those versions of social constructionism that are closely
associated with Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, or Deconstructionism (see Gergen,
1999, pp.24-29, for an account), which have been influenced by Saussures (1911)
structuralist account of language as a self-contained system. These approaches, which
are often characterized as exhibiting a linguistic turn (Rorty, 1967) or an
interpretative turn (Rabinow & Sullivan, 1987), ignore or preclude the spontaneous,
expressive-responsiveness of our living bodies, and the fact that such responsiveness is
always to an extent anticipatory that is, we are responsive not only to what has
occurred, but also to what has not yet occurred but is expected or anticipated as going to
occur. It is this emphasis on what happens to us bodily, over and above our self-
conscious wanting and doing, that makes this pre-book on Wittgenstein also not wholly a
text in social constructionism.
In an earlier pre-book (now published as Shotter, 2004), I introduced the idea of
the very strange chiasmic, intertwined, indivisible or non-separated nature of our
-2-
everyday realities, and something of the nature of the kind of thought required to think,
not just about them, but also from within, with, and back into such chiasmic
realities. Here I want to introduce more directly the strange and utterly novel ways of
thinking Wittgenstein pioneered, upon which I drew on in varying degrees of explicitness
in that first pre-book. There, I attempted to lay the ground work necessary to make
explicit a distinction I drew between what I called aboutness-thinking and withness-
thinking. This is a distinction between the kind of thinking familiar to us as self-
conscious, individual thinkers trained to think in logical, mathematical, or geometric
terms, a kind of thinking that works in terms of static forms, patterns, or shapes, and
the kind of thinking that occurs within and between us spontaneously, as we
expressively respond to each other in the ongoing course of a conversationally structured
activity with them. With regard to the kinds of understanding involved, we can make this
distinction in other terms, as distinction between a passive, representational-referential
kind of understanding, in which get the picture, so to speak, as to what someone is
talking about, and a relationally-responsive kind of understanding that occurs when, as
Bakhtin (1986) puts it, a listener takes an active, responsive attitude toward an
utterance, and either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it,
applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on (p.68). And where a speaker also is
oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect
passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone
else's mind. Rather he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution,
and so forth... (p.69). Indeed, to the extent that speakers and listeners are continuously
responsive to each other in their talk, a speaker is himself a respondent [i.e., a listener]
to a greater or lesser degree (p.69), while the listener [also] becomes the speaker
(p.68), that is, as well as the more obvious sequential nature of our conversational
exchanges, there are also simultaneous influences at work too in shaping our utterances.
What is crucial in these dialogical processes is the gap, the pause, the space, the
moment when one speaking person, one expressive agency, pauses sufficiently in their
activity to orient themselves toward being responsive both to anothers resultant
responsive expressions toward them, and to other influences in the circumstances of
their talk. For it is in the bridging of this gap, and only in this gap, in this moment of
joint exchange, that meanings unique to the exchange can occur. What we have here,
then, is a kind of thinking that not only goes beyond the positive idea that it is the task
of (scientific) thought to correctly represent or portray reality but which also goes
beyond social constructionist notions that reality is for us in terms of the schematisms
of our own construction that we can impose on it. For both these approaches work in
terms of pre-existing static forms or structures that we can think with, in separation from
the particular practical circumstances to which they may be applied and which are thus
unresponsive to the uniqueness of those circumstances. What Wittgenstein and Bakhtin
describe, it seems to me, is a dynamic kind of thinking that can go on from within the
particular circumstances within which we are involved, a kind of thinking that in being
intertwined in with them as they unfold in time, is responsive to, and expressive of, the
contours of their unfolding. Hence the relevance of Wittgensteins (1953) remark that:
Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than
one may think... Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One
would like to say Because I know what its all about(no.527).
Thus here, I want to show how this special style of dynamic, chiasmic thinking
and understanding that not only goes beyond thinking and understanding in term of
forms, patterns, and shapes, but in fact is already at play in the background to such a
style of thought, making it possible is also the kind of thinking Wittgenstein introduces
us to in his Philosophical Investigations, and in other of his later works.
One feature of it that I think is very special in this kind of thinking, is that it
works in terms of unique, first-time, once occurrent, never to be repeated novel events.
All our willful, intentionally exected activities must also be accountable activities, and to this extent,
2
must be describable, and justifiable to others, within an already shared vocabulary of terms. Thus, as Searle
(1969) notes about attempts to describe the Background: The fact that we have no natural vocabulary for
discussing the phenomena in question and the fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought
to arouse our interest... There is simply no first-order vocabulary for the Background, because the Background
is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye which sees is invisible to itself (pp.156-157).
-3-
This is connected, I think, with the feature of all living, human activities which makes
them quite distinct from dead, mechanically organized ones that I have already
mentioned above: that is, that they always function within an atmosphere, not only of
what has already occurred, but also of what has not yet occurred but is expected or
anticipated as occurring. Thus the future, strangely, enters into the determination of the
present. Again, as Bakhtin (1981) puts it: The word in living conversation is directly,
blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it
and structures itself in the answers direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the
already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been
said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the
situation of any living dialogue (p.280, my emphasis). It is this presence within each
present moment of a tendency, an already shaped and vectored opening reaching out
toward a specific kind or style of future, that makes our momentary being within each
such moment so very special.
Thus, living as we do on the edge of unrepeatable, irreversible time, living always
in the present moment, means that we are always, to an extent, living with novelty, with
the unique and particular, the unrepeated and unrepeatable. As a consequence, events
continually occur within the realm of our lives together, some in which we are involved,
some not, that cannot easily be described, explained, or understood in familiar
aboutness terms, within already existing schemes for making sense of events in which
the future is seen as an orderly continuation of the past. For such schemes always
occlude, stand in the way of, or pre-shape unique and once-occurrent events, and
assimilate them to already existing categories.
I make all these preliminary comments because, in his Philosophical
Investigations, and in his other later works, Wittgenstein introduces us to a way of
thinking and talking of our selves and of our living relations to our surroundings, which, I
think, functions within this strange realm of our living, bodily activities, along with their
strange, chiasmicly structured, living processes that are inexplicable within any of our
currently familiar schemes of explanation. Thus, as you gradually become more and
more used to the special kind of thinking Wittgenstein embarks on in the Investigations,
you begin to realize how wholly new and unusual it is indeed, it is new to an extent
that even Wittgenstein (who thought of himself as much misunderstood) does not wholly
realize. For it begins to articulate in a reflexively self-aware manner, from within the
moment of speaking, acting, thinking and looking out on the events occurring both
within us and around us, while are in fact speaking, acting, thinking, and looking out on
our surrounding world in an effort to make sense of it, not only to ourselves but also to
the others around us. And he conducts these investigations, not by seeking generalities,
universal laws or principles couched in special terms as in previous philosophies, but by
discussing the particular details of events occurring within especially selected
interpersonal episodes in the ordinary everyday terms that, spontaneously, make sense
to us all so that no special interpretations of these terms are at stake.
Indeed, in discussing events within these episodes, he is not so much concerned
with what we ourselves do consciously, with our thoughtfully planned and willful
activities, as with what just happens to us spontaneously, over and above all our
wanting and doing . In doing this, he wants to try to bring to light, to bring into the
2
foreground of our thought and talk, what is usually left unnoticed in the background
-4-
that is, what has become embodied within us as a result of everything that has
previously happened to us, as well as what is currently happening within us, that gives
what we are now doing and saying a certain style. As he himself puts it: Perhaps what
is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background
against which whatever I could express has its meaning (1980, p.16). This mysterious
something in the background eludes all easy description, for it has its being not in
actualities but, as I noted above, in tendencies, in the shaped and vectored openings
which, in each present moment we occupy, reach out toward a specific kind or style of
future. It is the presence of these tendencies, these openings which, as Wittgenstein
notes, makes our describing anything possible, and which in the past have, so to speak,
remained rationally-invisible. Yet, nonetheless, just because they exert a certain kind of
coercive or compulsive force upon us in all our culturally determined activities, can be
rendered visible to us in terms of their effects on us visible in our actions to all around
us.
As in the famous mime of Marcel Marceau, in which he comes upon a massive but
invisible entity whose shape he gradually limns out before our eyes in his reactions to it
as he attempts to circumvent it, so can we in our creative stumbling around in language,
come to limn out the unique shape, the unique contours, of the tendencies and openings
at work in the unique present moments we occupy in our lives together. Thus his use of
ordinary everyday talk, situated in particular concrete circumstances, is not just an
arbitrary affectation, his cocking a snook at the achievements of his philosophical
predecessors, it is crucial to his whole endeavor, to his changed conception of what
philosophy is, and what his kind of philosophical problems look like.
His aim in his investigations is thus quite specific. He sets it out in the following
question and answer session: 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 is to bring words back from their metaphysical
to their everyday use (1953, no.116). Once we sit down in our seminar rooms or
committee rooms and begin to use language theoretically, i.e., not in an immediately
spontaneously responsive way to actual events occurring around us, then, as he puts it,
language goes on holiday (1953, no.38). We are functioning in a disengaged manner
and talking, as an individual thinker, in a way unrelated to our current surroundings. And
in doing this, we are also taking our ways of talking as given and simply applying them
unexamined to whatever problems we feel ourselves currently to be facing.
But this post-Cartesian, post-Newtonian way (if I may call it that) of talking about
our surroundings and the problems we face within them, leads to a back-to-front, or up-
side-down conception of the world in which we become the products, so to speak, of our
own conceptions, of our own ways of talking of our selves and the others and
othernesses around us. Marx and Engels (1971) outlined the strange position we can get
ourselves into, thus: Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. real,
active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces
and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest form... If in all ideology
men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera-obscura, this
phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of
objects does from their physical life-process (p.47). We find all of a sudden, in the
Cartesian-Newtonian world within which we have been trained to conduct our thoughtful
talk, that when we come to talk of mental processes or of other so-called psychological
processes, we must conceive of them as being of the same cause-and-effect kind as
those we can observe out in that world only now, they are occurring mysteriously
hidden away inside our heads somewhere. And we feel the need to invent a special kind
of theory driven science like physics but different from it to devise and test theories
to represent these hidden processes underlying our overt activities.
-5-
But we can, I think, say about this whole back-to-front, upside-down, theory
driven approach, that it is both beside that point and after the fact:
It is beside the point for, in orienting us toward regularities, toward already
existing forms and patterns, it diverts our attention away from those once-
occurrent, those unique first-and-only time moments in which we have the
chance of noting new reactions in ourselves, previously unnoticed responses that
might provide the beginnings of new and unique ways we need if we are to orient
toward what is uniquely new in the current circumstances we face.
It is also after the fact, for our aim is to understand the character of what has not
as yet happened, the influences of what is expected or anticipated in the not-as-
yet-existing activities involved in approaching nature differently, and this cannot
be done simply by proving theories true or false.
Theories are aimed, ultimately, at justifying or legitimating a proposed course of action
by providing it with an already agreed grounding or basis. Whereas, what we require in
our daily affairs, is not so much legitimation in terms of an already agreed status quo, as
clear guidance in how to act in unique and novel circumstances: we wish to know in an
unconfused, incontestable sense, in this or that particular, never-before-occurring
situation, what is the right thing to do. A theorys focus is retrospective: from within it,
we look back on successfully completed events with the aim of finding an order or
pattern in them that can be instituted mechanically, unthinkingly, according to rules or
recipes. Whereas, in our daily affairs, we need to focus, not on their final outcome, but
on the particular, moment-by-moment unfolding, constructive details of our practical
activities. We need to come to a grasp of all the influences that might be at work in any
one moment as we make our way toward such outcomes. To represent this loose-
textured, temporal, disorderly process in which many possibilities are considered but
few are chosen as an already orderly and coherent process is to hide from ourselves
the character of the social negotiations, navigations, and struggles productive of its
order.
In other words, if we want to adopt a more participatory, practical approach in
our inquiries, concerned not merely with criticizing the theories or systems of others to
replace them with our own, but with taking a particular next step in a particular practical
situation, we arrive on the scene too late, and then look in the wrong direction, with the
wrong attitude:
too late, because we take the basic elements in terms of which we must work
and conduct our arguments to be already in existence, awaiting precise
determination by an appropriate, academically approved, theoretical structure;
in the wrong direction, because we look backward toward supposed already
existing actualities, rather than forward toward possibilities entertained in
peoples expectations and anticipations of what is to come;
and with the wrong attitude, because we seek a stable, static theoretical
representation, a picturable image of a phenomenon, over there, rather than a
living sense of it as an active agency within our lives now.
Thus, to re-orient ourselves intellectually in relating ourselves to the actual situations
within which we ourselves have our own very being, we require another mode of inquiry,
a mode of inquiry that elsewhere (Shotter 1993a&b) I have outlined as giving rise to a
knowing of the third kind, a knowing-from-within. But where might we begin our
explorations in our search for such a kind of knowing, if we cannot begin, as in our
theoretical inquiries, with assumptions and suppositions?
As Wittgenstein (1953) put it, we must let the use of words teach you their
meaning (p.220), and this is his primary method. We can only begin from where we are
-6-
now, from within our use of language. Thus, if we look at some of his opening remarks
we find him straightaway saying to us: Now think of the following use of language...
(no.1); Let us imagine a language... (no.2); It is as if someone were to say... (no.3);
Imagine a script... (no.4). And what we are confronted with as we follow his
instructions, that is, as we spontaneously respond to his instructive talk, is the
impossibility of encompassing the sheer complexity of what is happening in each such
concrete episode as it unfolds within a simple systematic framework. No generalities are
possible.
Early on in the Investigations, because a particular picture of the essence of
human language that the individual words in language name objects, and
sentences are combinations of such names has dominated much of our philosophical
talk about how language exerts its influence upon us, after he has introduced us to the
idea of language games and their many different forms, he confronts us with a whole
range of specific examples in which he questions whether the words used work to
name anything. One such sequence (nos.37-38) runs thus: He begins by asking the
question: What is the relation between name and thing named; Well, what is it? And
he notes that if we look at some of the language games he has already described, we will
see the sort of thing this relation consists in. But, he goes on to note: This relation
may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls
before our mind the picture of what is named; and it also consists, among other things,
in the names being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is
pointed at (no.37). In other words, there is no one single thing that naming as such
consists in. Indeed, the fact is, we call very different things names; the word name is
used to characterize many different kinds of use of a word, related to one another in
many different ways... (no.38). But it is only too easy for us to arrive at a conception
of naming as, so to speak, an occult process. Naming appears as a queer connection of a
word with an object. And you really get such a queer connection when the philosopher
tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of
him and repeating a name or even the word this innumerable times. For philosophical
problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming
to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also
say the word this to the object, as it were address the object as this a queer use of
this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy (no.38).
Once we do this, once we stop being reflexively self-aware in our own use of our
words that is, ceasing to ask ourselves what we are doing in our saying of them and
begin to respond to what we say to ourselves in terms of its prima facie meaning for us,
then we can very easily become entangled in our own rules. Again, as he puts it: The
fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then
when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are
therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what
we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of) (no.125). For always in meaning
something, we are anticipating something, expecting something, and when something in
the future turns out other than we had meant, i.e., foreseen, that is just when we say:
Oh, I hadnt meant it like that!, or, if I am a scientist testing a theory,Oh, my theory
must be wrong in some way.
Indeed, the ability to match the actual outcomes of our actions with their
anticipated outcome is not only crucial in everyday life, it is absolutely crucial in science:
for, it is only because scientists can sense, when acting in accord with their theories as to
what the world might be like, whether the results of their actions accord with or depart
from the expectations engendered by their theories, that they can ever put such theories
to empirical test this is the only way of establishing a theory*s purchase on reality. If
people were unable to distinguish between what happened as a result of their intentional
activity and what just happened, by itself, there would be no basis for scientific inquiries
By a shaped and vectored feeling, I mean a feeling that works not only as a shaped standard
3
against which to measure the success of ones attempts to give it adequate linguistic expression, but which
also provides a sense of where one should next go, i.e., it is a feeling that points beyond itself. In other
words, we have a sense of how we stand and how things are going for us, of how we are placed or positioned
and the point of our actions. We gain from such a feeling, not only an evaluation of how we stand, but also an
action guiding advisory as to how next we might move.
-7-
at all. Thus, no other more fundamental basis for deciding the truth of empirical matters
exists; nor will one ever be found not as some have proposed, in the organizational
complexity of matter for how could it ever be established as a true basis? But, as we
shall see, as living beings, that unresponsive, observational way of relating ourselves to
our surroundings, in which it is treated as an external world existing separately from
us, is not the only way of relating open to us from within our responsive, living
relations to our surroundings, a whole quite different form of understanding becomes
available to us. It is a form of understanding which consists in, as Wittgenstein (1953)
puts it: seeing connections (no.122).
************
Overall, then, this collection of essays, as the title indicates, is about a special
kind of thinking that can occur when we allow the otherness of the other to enter us and
make us other it is a kind of thinking that I have come to call withness (dialogical)-
thinking, to contrast it with the aboutness (monological)- thinking that we have become
very used to in our academic and intellectual lives in the West.
Aboutness-thinking works in terms of pictures and perspectives, in terms of
frameworks and positions, repetitions and regularities, bodies of systematically
connected knowledge. Withness-thinking is quite different, in that it is continually
concerned with unique, once-occurrent events of being (to use a phrase of Bakhtins,
1993), events unfolding in time that do not give rise at all to anything picturable, but
only to shaped and vectored feelings to the kind of immediately sensed
3
understandings that are needed, if one is to understand the unique individuals or unique
circumstances one confronts everyday as a practitioner.
I have only just recently become aware of withness-thinking as a distinct style in
peoples inner movements of thought although, in an implicit way, it has been
known to me for some time.
I am putting the essays included in this book together for students of KCC, as I
think that this way of thinking is especially apposite to practitioners, who must, so to
speak, think on the hoof, think while in motion, think from within the ongoing midst
of things. It is especially apposite because it works as I will make clear in these essays
not in terms of static images or pictures, in terms of fixed shapes or forms, that can be
seen to correspond to, or to be like a state of affairs out in the world, but in terms of
another kind of likeness altogether. It works in terms of dynamic likenesses that arise
for us within sequences of unfolding movements, the unfolding interplays, that occur
when, in some sense, we resonate with, or move in accordance with, or follow in a
musical, rhythmic sense, the temporal contours anothers expressive movements.
Withness-thinking becomes available to us, I think, only as a result of our
spontaneous responsiveness, as living-growing-embodied beings, to temporally unfolding
events occurring around us. As living-growing beings, we cannot not be bodily
responsive to these events in this direct and immediate, unthinking fashion.
For the moment, I will mention four important features of the movements (more
will be mentioned in the chapters below) in which such spontaneous responsiveness is
-8-
manifested: 1) in their very occurrence, they place us, bodily, in one or another style or
kind of relationship to such events; 2) the bodily movements we exhibit in response to
such events are expressive in some way to the others around us; 3) they are expressive
of both what the relevant events are, and, in what way they matter to us, i.e., in being
expressive in this way, they point beyond themselves; and 4) they are what we might
call identity preserving movements, in that the concomitant changes occasioned in us by
their occurrence do not lead as they might in a machine to our wearing out or to our
physical degradation. In fact, just the opposite, they in fact lead to our becoming more
able to fit ourselves to our surroundings. Indeed, we could call all living activities telic
activities in that they all aim, so to speak, at becoming in their activity more fully
themselves.
As is perhaps now readily apparent, almost everything of interest in the study of
such spontaneously responsive living activities, is apparent out in the relations occurring
between such activities and their surroundings. Hence, perhaps surprisingly and
unexpectedly, we end up being interested in the uncanny amazingness of our living
bodies, rather than in mysterious minds hidden inside peoples heads the deep
enigmas of our lives together lie in what is in fact visible before us, not in what the
invisible and in what is hidden from us.
Continuing here with the focus on striking or moving moments, let me begin to
end this short introduction to the work contained in this pre-book by pointing out, that
in chapter 10, I discuss in detail what, possibly, is involved in being influenced,
touched, moved or struck, by an others words. In it, I compare what I call withness-
thinking with aboutness-thinking:
Withness (dialogic)-thinking is a dynamic form of reflective interaction that
involves coming into living contact with an others living being, with their
utterances, with their bodily expressions, their words, their works. It is a
meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of skins, or of two kinds of flesh as Merleau-
Ponty (1968) puts it, such that in coming into touch with each other, in the
dynamics of the interaction at their surfaces, another form of life in common to
all, in which all participate, is created. All both touch and are touched, and in the
relations between their outgoing touching and resultant incoming, responsive
touches of the other, the felt sense of a moving sequence of difference emerges,
a sequence with a shaped and vectored sense to it. In the interplay of living
movements intertwining with each other, new possibilities of relation are
engendered, new interconnections are made, new shapes of experience emerge.
A reflective encounter of this kind is thus not simply a seeing of objects, for what
is sensed is in fact invisible; nor is it an interpretation (a representation), for it
arises directly and immediately in ones living encounter with an others
expressions; neither is it merely a feeling, for carries with it as it unfolds a bodily
sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to ones momentary
placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction. In short, we are
spontaneously moved toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking.
And this where another thinkers words in their saying can be helpful in entering
into our inner dialogues, they can help to orient us, help us to be responsive to
what we might otherwise ignore.
While in aboutness (monologic)-thinking, (in its extreme pure form) another
person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another
consciousness... Monologue is finalized and deaf to the others response, does not
expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force (Bakhtin, 1984,
p.293). It works simply in terms of pictures, thus, even when we get the
picture, we still have to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action. But in
thinking with an others voice, with their utterances, in mind, we can begin to
see another very different way in which what we call theory can be an influence
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose
4
(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.127).
-9-
on us. Literally, the words in which the theorist expresses his or her theory can,
by moving us this way and that, instruct us in our practical actions out in the
world of our everyday, practical affairs. Then, if we respond to their words is this
way, instead of turning away from the events of importance to us to bury
ourselves in thought, in order to think of an appropriate theoretical scheme into
which to fit them in order to respond to them, we can turn ourselves responsively
toward them immediately. Indeed, we can begin an intensive, i.e., in detail, and
extensive, exploratory interaction with them, approaching them this way and that
way... moved to act in this way and that in accord with the beneficial
reminders issued to us by others to us, as a result of their explorations. In
4
other words, seeing with anothers words in mind can itself be a thoughtful,
feelingful, way of seeing, while thinking with anothers words in mind can also be
a feelingful, seeingful, way of thinking a way of seeing and thinking that brings
one into a close and personal, living contact with ones surroundings, with their
subtle but mattering details.
One final word before turning to the main body of the material gathered together in this
pre-book. I emphasized above the strange way in which living human activities always
function within an atmosphere both of what has already occurred (in the past), as well as
in terms of what is expected or anticipated as occurring, the future, strangely, enters
into the determination of the present. But also, as if this degree of strangeness was not
enough to cope with, due to the spontaneous, unintended and unaccountable character
of all our truly responsive activities, unbeknownst to us, all our living activities imply
consequences that are utterly unforeseeable to us (or to any others for that matter) at
the time of their performance. Often, we know what are doing when we are acting, and
why we are doing it, but what we dont know and cannot know, is what new next steps
our current doings will make possible in the future for others as well as ourselves. Thus
each present moment besides what it carries in its complexity into the present from
the past carries specific implications for the future too. I make these comments here
because, having already mentioned Wittgensteins (1953) remark, that we must let the
use of words teach you their meaning (p.220), we can now avail ourselves of
Wittgensteins words, and let their use teach us his meaning.
This, then, is the topic of this book: to outline a way of thinking that brings into
view the immense landscape (1980, p.56) of the usually unnoticed, just happening
background to our lives together, the background that makes everything else that we
deem to be of importance in all our lives possible. I will turn first, in the Introduction, to
something of what is involved in the quiet weighing of linguistic facts the quiet
weighing of facts that only occur within our speakings with the others around us.
5. All date only citations throughout this pre-book are to Wittgensteins works.
-10-
- Chapter One -
Inside the Moment of Thinking and Speaking:
The quiet weighing of linguistic facts
The present the concreteness of the present as a phenomenon to
consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold
on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without
knowing what we have lived (Kundera, 1993, p.129).
Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning, (1981,
no.173) .
5
And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said
Now I understand because I understood?! And if I say it is hidden then
how do I know what I have to look for? I am in a muddle (1953, no.153).
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right
tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly (1980a, p.57).
Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in
music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies
nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical
theme. Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One
would like to say Because I know what its all about (1953, no.527).
My aim in this first chapter is to try to show how very strange the world is that Wittgenstein
introduces us to in his later works even though it is the world of our everyday lives
together. I grew up in my intellectual life, like many others, in what might be called the age
of the Cartesian-Newtonian corpuscular mechanical world of forms and patterns, a world
dominated by the idea that movement and motion had to be understood in terms of a series
of lawfully connected static structures of differently positioned particles a world that
Heidegger (1977) captured nicely in his essay, The age of the world picture, in his
suggestion that it was an age in which the world, essentially, is conceived and grasped as
a picture (p.129). It was an age in which understanding and scientific explanation were
equated for understanding could only be thought of as possible, if our actions exhibited
certain regularities due to them being governed by rules or laws of some kind. Thus, if our
practices were to be improved, the production by an academic, or other intellectual, of an
appropriate framework of thought within which the requisite moves could be formulated in
advance of their implementation by practitioners, was a necessary way-station the very
idea of practitioners themselves being able to implement a critical developmental practices
within their own practices, was simply not then on the agenda.
In Wittgensteins works, however, we begin to back away step by step from this
mechanical world of dead forms and structures. And as that world begins to recede into the
distance and we begin bodily to move out of it, we find it becoming more and more alien
-11-
and strange to us, until one day, we feel able to turn around. Then we find ourselves face
to face with a wholly new horizon, a world no longer of dead and static spatial forms and
patterns, but a new world of life and living processes. Although the movement has been
very gradual and slow, and we have struggled with this, that, and many other particular
issues to do with the use of language along the way issues in which we have had to orient
ourselves toward particular new ways of talking and thinking the time comes when we can
begin to put our heads up to survey the landscape of the new world around us as a whole,
and it is amazing!
Nothing in it retains its old character. Not only is everything is so much more than
it was previously, but completely unnoticed aspects of our lives together, that lay invisible
in the temporal unfolding of our joint activities, now emerge into the light of day. We now
see the intellectual veils, the static forms, systems, patterns, and logics that we have in the
past taken for The Reality within which we must live our lives, as a set of circumscribed,
separate, and frozen drapes thrown over a throng of diverse beings in continual living
interaction with each other. We now realize that these stiff and frozen dust sheets hide from
us all the ways in which such beings live in unceasing responsive relations with each other.
They hide from us what in fact has continually always already been there before our eyes
to see, the interactive expressiveness of living movement, the expressions on the face, so
to speak, of the entities before us (see below for more on the nature of living movement as
distinct from the movements of dead things). Indeed, as certain inanimate entities begin
to play more than merely a neutral, objective part in our lives, they can themselves come
to have a expressive function that reaches way beyond their merely formal shape. Words
in particular can come to have an expressive face for us: The familiar face of a word; the
feeling that a word is as it were a picture of its meaning... (1980b, I, no.6; cf, PI, p.218).
The very word Wittgenstein as a shape on the page can, of course, come to be such a
word for us, as if there was something wonderous and awesome in it. But, as we shall see,
it is in the actual living voicing of our utterances as they unfold in time, that the events
crucial to our understanding each other reside and have their being our attention must
shift from static forms to living movement, from representations to expressions and artistic
portrayals.
We live our lives and grow old together within this unceasing sphere of living,
spontaneously expressive-responsive movement. It is the enabling (and constraining)
background making everything else that occurs between us in our lives together possible.
As I mentioned in the Preface to this pre-book, Wittgensteins project is important to us as
it is aimed at bringing this usually unnoticed background into the foreground of our thought
and talk. But to do this, to bring this background into the foreground, is not easy. As he
himself lamented: Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able
to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning
(1980a, p.16). For, to repeat, this mysterious something in the background eludes all easy
description, and is, perhaps, not expressible in any direct and immediate way. For it has its
being not in actualities, but, as I previously noted, in tendencies, in the shaped and vectored
openings which, in each present moment we occupy, reach out toward a specific kind or
style of future. It is the presence of these tendencies, these openings which, as Wittgenstein
notes, makes our describing anything possible, and which in the past have, so to speak,
remained rationally-invisible. Yet how might they themselves be described, how might they
be rendered visible?
What Wittgenstein realized is that these tendencies the spontaneous ways of
reacting that have become embodied within us as a result of, so to speak, growing into the
spontaneous ways of reacting of those around us gives what we are doing and saying in
each present moment of our acting, a certain distinctive style. And it is just because these
embodied ways of reacting exert (whether we like it or not) a certain kind of coercive or
compulsive force upon us in all our culturally determined activities, that they are in fact
rendered visible to those around us, in terms of the influences they exert on us in giving
6. See the quotations from Voloshinov which appear later in this chapter.
-12-
shape to our actions. Indeed, it is just the visible expression of both these normatively
accountable forms (along with the unique deviations from them) in our unique utterances,
6
that makes it possible for us to be effortlessly intelligible to each other. Thus, by focusing
on dialogically-structured activities as they unfold between people, what we spontaneously
express in response to the others and othernesses around us, we can make such tendencies
visible to ourselves.
But from where should we conduct our inquiries? Is there an Archimedean standpoint
point, so to speak, from which we can begin our investigations? Well, yes. The present
moment, wherever we are when we are actually engaged in an interaction that matters to
us. As he remarks: I might say: if the place I want to get to could be reached by way of a
ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is the place
I must be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me
(1980a, p.7). If you want to go down deep you need not travel far; indeed, you dont have
to leave your most immediate surroundings (1980a, p.50). Where others go on ahead, I
stay in one place (1980a, p.66).
In short (without explicitly saying so), he situates his thinking and talking within the
dynamic realm of our everyday living activities, a realm that is structured, not in terms of
static, picturable patterns and structures, nor in terms of theories or frameworks, nor in
terms of any aids to thought that need to be imposed upon a puzzling circumstance, but
which is self-structuring in the same way that all living processes are self-structuring
according to their own inner, identity preserving dynamic.
This switch in intellectual standpoint from thinking about something that we are
not now immersed in but which was over there a while ago, in short, from aboutness-
thinking to withness-thinking is not easy to achieve. As Wittgenstein (1980a) notes:
Working in [his kind of] philosophy... is really more a working on oneself... On ones way
of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (p.16). It entails continual
conversations, with others and most importantly with oneself, reflective conversations within
which once an utterance has been voiced one can inquire into the nature of ones
reactions to it, to find out what ones expectations had been within ones understanding of
it. This is the power of Wittgensteins remarks. Indeed, reading his later works
(Wittgenstein, 1953, 1963, 1969, 1980a,b, and c,1981), I never cease to be amazed. I find
a previously unnoticed remark, often formulated as a question, that suddenly, now, stops
me in my tracks, and confronts me with a new orientation toward a formerly familiar
circumstance. Now it seems to contain within itself a whole new realm of previously
unnoticed, unexpected relations (links, connections, affiliations, etc.) an unforseen
relation, perhaps, between understanding that both utterances and musical phrases can
been seen as expressive bodily gestures, a connection that had previously been unthinkable.
But even here, we can note, there is also a difficulty: ones way of seeing things is not an
intellectual matter that can be remedied by acquiring a bit of new knowledge or information.
Coming to embody the appropriate reactions can only be achieved by living responsively
within circumstances that call them out from you in the first place; they cannot be acquired
simply by wilfully intending to acquire them.
Indeed, my original copy of Philosophical Investigations (now held together by duct
tape... I now have three further copies), has Nottingham 1968 written inside the front cover
and yet, even now, I feel that there are still many parts in it that I have still to benefit
from, many parts to which I have still not yet found a response, a re-orienting response. Yet
I feel sure that once I do, once I discover how to be sensitive to the topic he is trying to
bring to my notice as a reader, then I will be amazed once more. The character, the nature
of a new and previously unexplored region of region of our lives in the world the lives we
-13-
live with along with the others and othernesses around us will slowly come into view, as
if the fog in which it was shrouded was dispersing, or a new day dawning for the first time.
The experience is just as T.S. Eliot (1944) puts it in Little Gidding: We shall not cease from
exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know
the place for the first time. And this is what is so peculiar about Wittgensteins
investigations, his explorations of our everyday ways of understanding each other and our
everyday world, they are, in fact, so everyday... no big deal... Yet... as he himself
anguishedly expressed... The relations between these concepts form a landscape which
language presents us with in countless fragments; piecing them together to too hard for me.
I can make only a very imperfect job of it (1980a, p.78). The goal of being able to talk
about that landscape, to portray it in its full glory, still eludes him. My goal here, however,
is to show how much can still be achieved if we can learn to talk with a sense of it in mind.

Reading Wittgenstein (with a little help from Whorf)
In coming to his view of philosophy, as entailing a critical description of the facts of
language use, Wittgenstein was deeply influenced by the comments of the physicist,
Heinrich Hertz [1857-1894], to do with what he saw as a special set of problems in science:
those which arise, not out of any lack of empirical knowledge, but out of painful
contradictions in our ways of representing empirical knowledge to ourselves. In wondering
why the same wearisome questions that arose time and time again to do with the
mysterious natures of electricity and force, were not asked as to the nature of gold or
velocity, Hertz answered:
I fancy that the difference must lie in this. With the terms velocity and
gold we connect a large number of relations to other terms; and between all
these relations we find no contradictions which offend us. We are therefore
satisfied and ask no further questions. But we have accumulated around the
terms force and electricity more relations than can be completely reconciled
amongst themselves. We have an obscure feeling of this and want to have
things cleared up. Our confused wish finds expression in the confused
question as to the nature of force and electricity. But the answer which we
want is not really an answer to this question. It is not by finding out more
and fresh relations and connections that it can be answered; but by removing
the contradictions existing between those already known, and thus perhaps
by reducing their number. When these painful contradictions are removed,
the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our
minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions. (Hertz 1956,
pp.7-8, my emphasis).
In other words, there is a crucial difference between empirical cause-and-effect relationships
(A causes B) and conceptual implications (A implies B): Causal relations involve logically
independent phenomena which can be explained as causally connected with each other in
terms of an explicit theoretical structure externally imposed on the phenomena in question.
Whereas, conceptually implied relations involve already logically interdependent
phenomena, that can only be understood as mentally connected with each other, by our
reflecting on our spontaneous anticipatory reactions to their use, from within our use of
them in our practices. No externally imposed theoretical framework can bring those
anticipatory reactions to light. As mentioned in the Preface, all such externally imposed
frameworks are after the fact and beside the point. Such anticipatory reactions make their
existence known to us only from within our practices as we are actively engaged as
participants within them. Conceptually, A in itself implies B, without any theory.
A couple of examples, one correct the other misleading, may help to make this clear:
Wittgenstein (1953) notes that: It is correct to say I know what you thinking, and wrong
7. This is a most crucial issue. Resonances with Rousseaus social contract immediately come to mind. Still
in line with the idea of a contract, albeit an implicit one, Whorf here is still bewitched by the idea that our
understanding each other is only possible if our actions exhibit a certain already agreed regularities, already
agreed patterns. Wittgenstein (1953), however, changes our focus. He moves us away from our fixation on
something already agreed, to something that can do afresh, at each moment, according to the necessities of
the moment. First, he moves us away from prior agreements: So you are saying that human agreement
decides what is true and what is false? It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in
the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life (no.241). In other words, prior to
anything deserving of the name agreement, people share ways of acting, practices, not thoughts or ideas.
Talk of agreements comes after the fact (of shared practices) and is thus beside the point. He next moves us
away from communication relying on already existing cognitive frameworks for our understanding each other
to be possible, toward a focus on peoples judgments in the moment of communicating: If language is to be a
means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound)
in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so (no.242). It does not do so, because, even the
doing of logic is a practice, something that we as human beings carry out in a more or less skillful way, and in
which we correct each others mistakes, and call each other to account. Logic is not a natural force over which
we have no control. But for the moment, I will leave this issue on one side, and follow the logic of Whorfs
account.
-14-
to say I know what I am thinking. (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of
grammar.) (1953, p.222). In other words, a speakers utterance is inseparably intertwined
in with the unfolding relations between it and his or her surroundings, such that the speaker
must only make use of his or her language as that relation allows speakers cannot be
Humpty-Dumpties, and just use words completely as they please. If they do, then we can
get into the kind of mess Lewis Carroll depicts in Alice in Wonderland: Just look along the
road, and tell me if you can see either of them? I see nobody on the road, said Alice. I
only wish I had such eyes, the King remarked in a fretful tone. To be able to see Nobody!
And at that distance too! Why, its as much as I can do to see real people by this light
(xxxx, xxx, p.xxx). As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: The problems arising through a
misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep
disquietudes; their roots go as deep in us as the forms of our language. - Let us ask
ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep?(no.111).
But, instead of pursuing these examples from Wittgenstein further, it will perhaps
be useful to see how others have approached this issue in a similar way, a way friendly to
his concerns. In this connection, I would like to mention Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), an
american fire-insurance inspector turned anthropologist, who studied Native American
languages (Navaho, Hopi, etc.), with the general aim in mind of showing that peoples ways
of thinking are not independent of the languages they speak. Aware of the very different
character of the Native American cosmos when compared with Western worldviews, Whorf
(1956) suggested that: We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe
significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this
way an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the
patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its
terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the
organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees (pp.213-214) . But
7
what might these patterns be like?
Like Wittgenstein, Whorf was critical of what he called the view of the natural logic,
which takes it that: Talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to express what is
essentially already formulated nonlinguistically. Formulation is an independent process,
called thought or thinking, and is supposed to be largely indifferent to the nature of
particular languages. Languages have grammars, which are assumed to be merely norms
of conventional and social correctness, but the use of language is supposed to be guided not
so much by them as by correct, rational, or intelligent thinking. Thought, in this view, does
not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same
for all observers of the universe-to represent a rationale in the universe that can be found
independently by all intelligent observers, whether they speak Chinese or Choctaw (pp.207-
-15-
208). Thus also like Wittgenstein, he noted that the phenomena of a language are to its
own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness
and control of the speaker who is expounding natural logic (p.211).
Thus, most importantly, as Whorf (1956) notes, when anyone, as a natural logician,
is talking about reason, logic, and the laws of correct thinking, he is apt to be simply
marching in step with purely grammatical facts that have somewhat of a background
character in his own language or family of languages but are by no means universal in all
languages and in no sense a common substratum of reason (p.211). And he goes on to
point out, also like Wittgenstein, how easily we mislead ourselves into ignoring these
grammatical facts, and take it for granted that we already know perfectly well the steps
involved in executing our actions in ways intelligible to others. Thus, he comments: Two
fluent speakers, of English let us say, quickly reach a point of assent about the subject
matter of their speech; they agree about what their language refers to. One of them, A, can
give directions that will be carried out by the other, B, to As complete satisfaction. Because
they thus understand each other so perfectly, A and B, as natural logicians, suppose they
must of course know how it is all done. They think, e.g., that it is simply a matter of
choosing words to express thoughts. If you ask A to explain how he got Bs agreement so
readily, he will simply repeat to you, with more or less elaboration or abbreviation, what he
said to B. He has no notion of the process involved. The amazingly complex system of
linguistic patterns and classifications, which A and B must have in common before they can
adjust to each other at all, is all background to A and B (p.211).
Thus in his studies of this grammatically structured background, Whorf distinguished
between what he called overt and covert grammatical categories, or phenotypes and
cryptotypes in the following manner: Overt or phenotypical grammatical categories are
syntactically marked in some explicit, formal way within the sentence in which they appear,
where their formal nature is determined their place in the formal patterning of that
sentence, e.g., in English, as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, plurals, etc. In other words,
they are the explicit kinds of categories linguists formulate in setting out the syntax of
whatever language they happen to be studying. While of some interest Western languages
are more noun-languages, while Native American are verb-languages in being explicitly
marked, such categories are out there amenable to study.
Covert categories, or cryptotypes, however, are quite different. The class
membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it... then we find
that this word belongs to a class of words requiring some sort of distinctive treatment... This
distinctive treatment we may call the reactance of the category (p.89, my emphasis). Thus
here, like Wittgenstein, Whorf is emphasizing the fact that these categories only make
themselves known to us, not in terms of any explicit shapes, forms, or patterns, but
implicitly, only in terms of the active influence they exert in shaping our actual acts of
speech, our utterances, our use of language. He called them cryptotypes because they are
hidden categories and as such they easily escape notice and may be hard to define, and
yet may have a profound influence on linguistic behavior (p.92).
Such a covert category is, for example, Whorf notes, represented by English gender.
Each common noun and personal given name belongs to a certain gender class, but a
characteristic overt mark appears only when there is occasion to refer to the noun by a
personal pronoun in the singular number or in the case of the neuter class it may be
marked by the interrogative and relative pronouns what, which. We say Jane went to her
house*, Whorf (1956) notes, because we know that Jane is a female. Actually we need not
know anything about Jane, Jane may be a mere name; yet having heard this name, perhaps
over the telephone, we say What about her? Common sense may then retreat a step
further and say that we know the name Jane to be given only to females. But such
experience is linguistic; it is learning English by observation. Moreover it is easy to show
that the pronoun agrees with the name only, not with the experience. I can bestow the
8. Here, of course, Whorf is talking about the already existing rapport between words in our knowledge of
language. And indeed, we can find Wittgenstein (1953) making a similar point in the Investigations many
time over. For instance, with respect to the important issue about agreements and rules he notes: The
word agreement and the word rule are related to one another, they are cousins. If I teach anyone the use
of the one word, he learns the use of the other with it (no.224). But we should also raise the possibility of
such a rapport occurring within our actual uses of language, at the time of its use. Thus, as Wittgenstein
(1980a) remarks: Philosophers who say: after death a timeless state will begin, or at death a timeless state
begins, [often] do not notice that they have used the words after and at and begins in a temporal sense,
and that temporality is embedded in their grammar (p.22). Thus first, paradoxically, in the background of
their talk about timelessness is the ineradicable temporality embedded in the grammar of our language. But
second, the two phrases give rise to two, so to speak, different temporal movements of thought, different
rhythms of anticipated next occurrences: a fixed and finished timeless state compared with an open and
unfinished one. We may call the use of, and sensitivity to, the different rapport that can exist between words
at the oftlinetime of their usage, a poetic usage of, and sensitivity to, language. Fare well! A whole world of
pain is contained in these words how can it be contained in them? It is bound up with them. The words are
like an acorn form which an oak tree can grow (1980a, p.52). What makes philosophy poetic is its potential
-16-
name Jane* on an automobile, a skeleton, or a cannon, and it will still require she in
pronominal references. I have two goldfish; I name one Jane* and one Dick.* I can still say
Each goldfish likes its food,* but not Jane likes its food better than Dick. I must say Jane
likes her food. The word dog belongs to a common gender class with a preference for he*
and it,* hut the gender-classed given name of a dog determines its own pronoun; we do not
say Tom came out of its kennel,* but Tom came out of his kennel, Lady came out of her
kennel, The female dog came out of its (or her) kennel. Doggish names like Fido* are of
the he* class: Towser came out of his kennel.* We say See the cat chase her tail,* but
never See Dick chase her tail.* The words child, baby, infant* belong to the common class
and can take it, but the given names of children take either he or she. I can say My baby
enjoys its food, but it would be linguistically wrong to say My babys name is Helen see
how Helen enjoys its food. Nor can I say My little daughter enjoys its food, for daughter,
unlike baby, is grammatically in the feminine class (pp.91-92).
In English, transitive verbs, i.e., verbs that do not take an object, also constitute
such a hidden or covert category. This shows up in the fact that we cannot substitute verbs
of this class, e.g. verbs such as go, lie, sit, rise, gleam, sleep, arrive, appear,
rejoice*, into such transitive sentence forms as I cooked it, It was being cooked, I cooked
the fish to order. They would give rise to such strange utterances as I appeared it, I sat
it, It was being appeared, I arrived the table to order. While in various Native American
languages, certain classes of nouns that are based actually or ostensibly upon shape may
be either overt or covert. In Navaho, Whorf (1956), they are covert. Some terms belong
to the round (or roundish) class, others to the long-object class, others fall into classes not
dependent on shape. No overt mark designates the class in every sentence. Thus, just as
the class mark as in English for gender is in a reactance, so one must learn as a part of
learning Navaho that sorrow* belongs in the round class (p.91).
We thus find here, in Whorfs work, an exactly similar concern with the role of
linguistic influences in our thinking as in Wittgensteins writings. For, in criticism of the
behaviorists notion that silent thinking is merely inaudibly mumbled words or silent
laryngeal agitations, we find him noting that such simplistic views are unaware that talking
itself means using a complex cultural organization, just as [they are also] unaware of
cultural organizations in general. Sense or meaning does not result from words or
morphemes but from patterned relations between words or morphemes... It is not words
mumbled, but rapport between words, which enables them to work together at all to any
semantic result. It is this rapport that constitutes the real essence of thought insofar as it
is linguistic... (p.67, my emphases). In other words, the basis of this shadowy, abstract,
and wordless adumbration of a sex classification [or of any other cryptotype - js] is not a
word like sex or female or women; it is a linguistic rapport as distinguished from a
linguistic utterance (p.69) . And there is not way in which a study of finalized linguistic
8
for the invention of new and unforseen connections and relations.
-17-
forms in a language can reveal the character of this rapport between the uses of words in
a language. It is an awareness of the existence of the unique relations that govern in a
way that is absolutely obligatory the linkages of one word form to another, and which
shape the channels of our thinking, but which do not correspond to any verbalizable
concepts. Any inquiry into a grammar of reactances is necessarily a deep analysis into
relations.
Indeed, in this respect, Whorfs (1956) account of cryptotypes, working only in terms
of a grammar reactances, can be compared with Wittgensteins (1953) comment about what
he calls depth grammar: In the use of words one might distinguish surface grammar from
depth grammar. What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the
way it is used in the construction of the sentence, the part of its use one might say that
can be taken in by the ear. And now compare the depth grammar, say of the word to
mean, with what its surface grammar would lead us to suspect. No wonder we find it
difficult to know our way about (no.64).
Wittgensteins dialogically-structured mode of inquiry:
from categories and regularities
to life inside only-once-occurrent events
Like Wittgenstein, in talking of the reactance of a category, or the rapport between
words, Whorf (1956) outlines a whole realm of language influenced activity that only
becomes visible to us from within our actual, particular uses of language. To repeat, he
draws our attention to the fact that: The class membership of the word is not apparent
until there is a question of using it... then we find that this word belongs to a class of
words requiring some sort of distinctive treatment... This distinctive treatment we may
call the reactance of the category (p.89, my emphasis). But unlike Wittgenstein, Whorf
is still oriented here toward the scientific tasks of a linguist, that is, in using the results
of his inquiries in trying to codify a language. He is not, like Wittgenstein (1953), who, in
wanting to bring words back from their metaphysical [or other kinds of academic uses]
to their everyday use (1953, no.116), trying to get inside the unique, actual moment of
their use. Thus, to an extent, Whorf is still in the thrall of the very illusion bewitching the
natural logicians he described above, that is to say (to repeat): The amazingly
complex system of linguistic patterns and classifications, which A and B must have in
common before they can adjust to each other at all, is all background to A and B
(Whorf, 1956, p.211). In other words, Whorf still essentially positions himself, I feel, in a
world in which understanding and scientific explanation in terms of regularities are
equated.
So, even with the inroads into he made into the amazing complexity of the
linguistic background to our lives, the full extent of that complexity, as exhibited in our
actual everyday encounters with each other, still remains to be described. This, as I see
it, is the task Wittgenstein set himself: We remain unconscious of the prodigious
diversity of all the everyday language-games, he said, because the clothing of our
language makes everything alike (p.224). The stiff and frozen dust sheets thrown over
peoples unceasing responsive relations with each other by our compulsive need to seek
generalized explanatory frameworks of one kind or another, hides from us the complex
details of what is in fact there in each actual moment of our speaking before our eyes to
see.
Thus, for the later Wittgenstein, there is something very basic, primordial even,
about our conversational realities (Shotter, 1993). He takes it that they are the very
9. See: Chapter 8: Being moved by the embodied, responsive-expressive voice of an other, in Shotter
(2004).
-18-
basic realities within which we live our lives together and I will expand on this issue
much further in the rest of these essays. Hence, because of this, as I intimated above, if
you are to conduct his kind of inquiries, you dont have to leave your most immediate
surroundings (1980a, p.50). You must situate your thinking and talking within the
dynamic realm of your everyday living inter-activities along with the others around you.
But how can one do this, how can one carry on an ordinary everyday conversation, while
at the same time conducting within oneself a reflective inquiry into how one is in fact
conducting oneself? We seem to face a version of the centipede problem the problem
of how something only occurring as an unceasing flow of spontaneously inter-connected
activity can partitioned up into a sequence of separate, component parts for the purpose
of... what? Well, phrased like this, we seem to face the intellectual task of giving an
explanation in answer to the question: How did you do that [that being the action one
has just performed]? But is answering that kind of question of any help here, if our aim
is not to explain our past actions, but to see whether, in the present moment of our
acting, there are other ways forward than those that occur to us spontaneously and
immediately. Here, it would seem, our task is one of a less intellectual more practical
kind: we must first take pause, and then, so to speak, ask ourselves the question as to
whether other possibilities are available to us. Then, at this point, because other voices
may ask questions that we ourselves would not ask, or have reminders to offer us that
we ourselves would not remember, we might turn to other of our own inner voices in an
inner dialogue with them . Indeed, about his investigations, Wittgenstein (1980) says
9
that Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to
myself tte--tte (p.77).
In other words, in Bakhtins (1986) sense of the dialogical already discussed in
the Preface to this pre-book, the Investigations is a thoroughly dialogical work. But its
dialogical character extends beyond the mere concern with reactances, with the the
rapport between words that only become visible to us from within our actual, particular
uses of language. It works, i.e., exerts its influence on us, only in terms of what happens
in the living, voicing of words, in their saying, not in what lies in the pattern or forms of
already spoken words, not in what is said. In other words, to repeat what I said above,
Wittgenstein is not talking about such influences. But he is showing us in practice what
we can achieve if we can learn to talk with a sense of their nature in mind. Thus, to
translate what I noted earlier, in the Preface, about Bakhtins distinction between
passive representational understanding and active responsive understanding, to
Wittgenstein as a speaker, as a writer, we can say that in his writing, he does not
expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in
someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection,
execution, and so forth (p.69) from his readers. And he is oriented in his style of writing
precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. Thus, as he wonders out
loud, addressing us an imagined interlocutor, as we read his words, they call out from us
an active response to his utterances, to his expressions, responses which as members
of his speech community responding to his use of everyday words we find ourselves
obliged to express (cf. Whorf above). And it is in our own active responding to his
expressions in this way that we can find ourselves unexpectedly confronted with novel
connections within our experiences that we had not previously noticed.
But he is not depicting or representing the state of affairs we notice in his talk, he
is not depicting for us his picture of it. It is only, to repeat, in our active embodied
responding to his voicing of his words that we come to see the relevant circumstances in
a new light. Thus, just as a blind person senses the shape of the terrain ahead of them
through their interrogations of it with their long cane the sensed or sensuous image
10. See all the comments in the Preface about arriving on the scene too late, and then looking in the wrong
direction with the wrong attitude.
-19-
of the terrain ahead being there for them in the relations between their outgoing
actions in sweeping their cane over the ground before them and the incoming rejoinders
to their actions provided by the terrain so a sensuous image of a meaning, a sensed
way of going on, a sensed next step to take in ones ongoing exchange with an other,
is formed in a dialogic process with them in the same way.
Thus, what is crucial in any dialogical process is the gap, the pause, the space,
the moment when one speaking person, one expressive agency, pauses sufficiently in
their activity to orient themselves toward being responsive to anothers resultant
responsive expressions toward them. For it is in the bridging of this gap, in this pause, in
this moment of exchange, and only in this gap, that meaning occurs. Thus as listeners,
as readers of Wittgensteins utterances, if we take an active, responsive, out-going
attitude toward them, toward his expressions (uerungen), we can also, like the blind
people I alluded to above, can gain through our responsive understanding of them, a
sense of the shape of the terrain he is exploring. But it is only in this gap, in these
dialogically-structured moments, that the possibility of sensing the actual terrain ahead
of us, becomes possible.
In the past, in being concerned only with aboutness talk, we have ignored the
importance of these dialogically-structured moments of exchange. As Bakhtin (1986)
remarked about the famous diagrams, depicting two heads, listening and talk, with
dotted lines joining mouths to ears to brains: The listener who understands passively,
who is depicted as the speakers partner in the schematic diagrams of general linguistics,
does not correspond to the real participant in speech communication. What is
represented by the diagram is only an abstract aspect of the real total act of actively
responsive understanding, the sort of understanding that evokes a response, and one
that the speaker anticipates (p.69). Without that active responding, the schema
distorts the actual picture of speech communication, removing precisely its most
essential aspects. The active role of the other in the process of speech communication is
thus reduced to a minimum (p.70). Indeed, speaking is mostly taken as something that
speakers alone do, and they are assumed to be doing it by sequencing together certain
language units, phonetic (phonemes, morphemes, etc.) and lexical (words and
sentences) segments of language, that have been arrived at by breaking down the
speech flow into its separable and distinct, component parts. But, as I noted earlier, to
the extent that speakers and listeners are continuously responsive to each other in their
talk, as well as the more obvious sequential influences at work shaping the nature of our
conversational exchanges, there are simultaneous influences at work also. Both these
continuous (and thus not well-defined) influences at work in the moment of exchange
are preclude indeed, destroyed by the analysis of the speech flow into separable
units of a well-defined kind. No wonder that we now feel the need to theorize about the
supposedly hidden forces at work shaping our utterances, for they have now become a
complete mystery to us.
What we have failed to grasp here, is the crucial role of passing events in our
lives, as passing events, that is, as events which are, so to speak, in motion, and as
such are on the way to somewhere else other than where they are at present. In trying
to characterize their nature, we only too easily fall into the trap of describing them
retrospectively, in terms of where they have got to so far : hence the description of the
10
units of language in terms of nouns and verbs, etc., and our attempts to explain the
influences at work in shaping our utterances in terms of, say, mysterious valences
supposed to be at work between these two classes of words. But Wittgenstein (1953)
refuses to analyze the speech flow into separate, well-defined units. As he sees it, the
11. I will say something further elsewhere (see Chap XX) about the importance of the word family here, and
the central role played by the concept of family resemblance in Wittgensteins later philosophy. Suffice it
here to say that Wittgenstein (1953), after having shown by way of a long list, that what we talk of as games
do not all have an essential feature in common, but that the as a result of this examination we see a
complicated network of similarities overlapping and cries-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes
similarities of detail (no.62). Goes on to say that: I can think of no better expression to characterize these
similarities than family resemblances; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build,
features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way. And I shall
say: games form a family (no.67). Of course, if we know already that we are dealing with members of a
family familiar to us, i.e., with a group of people who in fact have an ineradicable relation with each other,
then, when confronted with an individual member, we do not have to recognize from scratch who they are, it
is sufficient for us to distinguish him or her from all the others with whom they might be confused.
12. Intonation always lies on the border of the verbal and the nonverbal, the said and the unsaid. In
intonation, discourse comes directly into contact with life. And it is in intonation above all that the speaker
comes into contact with listener or listeners intonation is social par excellence. It is especially sensitive to all
the vibrations in the social atmosphere surrounding the speaker (Voloshinov, 1987, p.102).
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task is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words (1953, p.227).
For, words say something in their saying that is not still there, i.e., not represented, in
the said, in the finished sentence form printed on a page.
Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov:
evaluative expression, intonation, and dialogical relations
But why is this the task? Because, as he points: If it is asked: How do sentences manage
to represent? the answer might be: Dont you know? You certainly see it, when you use
them. For nothing is concealed... But given this answer: But you know how sentences do
it, for nothing is concealed one would like to retort Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I
should like to see it as it were laid open to view (no.435). In other words, on the one hand,
he wants to indicate to us that we do not in fact, in understanding each other, go behind the
scenes, so to speak, and make use of any theoretical moves in understanding anothers
utterance; all influences there, on the surface, in its actual uttering. Yet, on the other hand,
he also wants to indicate to us that the urge we have to see it all as it were laid open to
view stands in the way of us being able to appreciate what is there for us to be
appreciated in the unfolding surface of the utterance. In attempting to get at its essence by
striping off the seemingly trivial, unique particularities of the utterance, we stripped it of the
very features which in fact made it meaningful. As he remarks in connection with an
investigation into a particular circumstance in which we might saying that what someone
was doing was a case of deriving something from something else, that it was a special
case of deriving. But then he goes on to say: what is essential to deriving, however, was
not hidden beneath the surface of this case, but this surface was one case out of the
family of cases of deriving (no.164).
11
But what is there at work in the surface of an utterance that is so important in our
being able to understand it appropriately? Here again, I think, Bakhtin (1986) can be of
great help to us. As he notes: There can be no such thing as an absolutely neutral
utterance. The speaker's evaluative attitude toward the subject of his speech (regardless
of what his subject may be) also determines the choice of lexical, grammatical, and
compositional means of the utterance (1986, p.84). One of the means of expressing the
speakers emotionally evaluative attitude toward the subject of his speech is expressive
intonation, which resounds clearly in oral speech... It does not exist in the system of
language as such, that is, outside the utterance (p.85). Expressive intonation belongs to
the utterance and not to the word (p.86) . In other words, as Wittgenstein points out to
12
us over and over again, we can only understand the meaning of a word in relation to a
particular actual reality, in relation to the actual conditions of speech communication. We
-21-
cannot understand a given word merely as a word in a language. We must actively relate
to it in some way by assuming an evaluative attitude toward it, an active responsive position
with respect to it (Are we in sympathy, agreement or disagreement with it? Is it a stimulus
to action or not, and so on?). Indeed, much more than that, for it is only within a specific
kind of relationship within another person friendly or hostile, patronizing or assisting,
telling or asking, suggesting or informing, ordering or requesting, offering or requiring, etc.,
etc. that we can understand in any practical way what another is saying to us.
What we require then, is a way of approaching the study of language, the study of
the speech flow, very different from our past approaches, i.e., from those approaches which
to an extent have ignored speech, and assumed it to be a capacity of individuals based on
their possession of a self-contained, systematic body of objective knowledge that they have
acquired, ready-made and complete, from growing up within the speech community around
them. For what we seek, is the seemingly paradoxical possibility of, on the one hand, our
acquiring certain ways of expressing ourselves that oblige others to respond us in ways that
accord with shared, normative expectations, but which, on the other hand, do not constrain
us from expressing ourselves in ways which are responsive to the unique circumstances in
which we find ourselves at each moment in our lives.
It is at this point, that I think we can turn to Voloshinovs (1986) dialogical work in
the philosophy of language. He outlines two major past approaches, terming them as
individualistic subjectivism (the creative approach of the romantics) and abstract
objectivism (the systematic approach of the scientific linguists), and seeks to transcend
them, not by criticizing their errors and mistakes, but by dialogically allowing the positive
themes in each to illuminate each others overall projects. For individualistic subjectivism,
as Voloshinov (1986) see it, the basis of language (language meaning all linguistic
manifestations without exception) [is] the individual creative act of speech (p.48). Taking
this seriously, Voloshinov (1986) then goes on to ask: Does language really exist for the
speakers subjective consciousness as an objective system of incontestable, normatively
identical forms? Has abstract objectivism correctly understood the point of view of the
speakers subjective consciousness? Or, to put it another way: Is the mode of being of
language in the subjective speech consciousness really what abstract objectivism says it is?
(p.67). And he goes on to answer it in the negative. That system of normatively identical
forms is not, and cannot be, a real influence in a speakers consciousness, for it is merely
an abstraction, a product of academic deliberation on language of a kind quite different from
that carried out by the consciousness of the native speaker for the immediate purposes of
speaking.
What matters to [a native speaker], says Voloshinov (1986), is applying a
normatively identical form (let us grant there is such a thing for the time being) in some
particular, concrete context. For him, the center of gravity lies not in the identity of the form
but in that new and concrete meaning it acquires in the particular context. What the speaker
values is not that aspect of the form which is invariably identical in all instances of its
usage... [but] what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a
stable and always self-equivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable
sign (p.67). The basic task of understanding does not at all amount to recognizing the
linguistic form used by the speaker as the familiar, that very same, form, the way we
distinctly recognize, for instance, a signal that we have not quite become used to or a form
in a language that we do not know very well. No, the task of understanding does not
basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular,
concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to
understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity (p.68). In other words, to the
extent that we are always already situated within the speech flow, and all our
understandings must take place from within it, we do not have to start from scratch every
time. We know we must already be at home within familiar surroundings, somewhere. Thus,
rather than having positively to recognize a specific and finalized linguistic form as such, in
-22-
itself, completely, we face a very different, much less daunting kind of task. Knowing
already where we are within a familiar speech flow, at each ensuing moment in its flow, we
must locate whereabouts within the landscape of possibilities actually open to us precisely
we have got to, and where next we might go but only to an extent sufficient to distinguish
these places from all the others with which they might be confused (see in this connection
note 7). To do this, we only need to know the specific variability (p.69) an utterance works
to produce within the specific context of its use, i.e., the specific difference we make at that
point in the speech flow by its use, in relation to the range of possible differences open to
us at the moment of its utterance.
What we find here, then, is Voloshinov (1986) making an exactly similar point to
Wittgenstein as to the practical nature of the kind of understanding involved here. For,
rather than it being a cognitive or inner mental matter of recognizing a present linguistic
shape or form as a token of a type, the constituent factor for understanding the linguistic
form is not recognition of the same thing, but understanding in the proper sense of the
word, i.e., orientation in the particular, given context and in the particular, given situation
orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not orientation in some inert state
(p.69). In other words, in Voloshinovs account here, we do not need to see or feel an
experience mentally or cognitively to understand it, if we can understand it practically in
being able to go on bodily with our practical activities in an unconfused manner just as
we can move around within our own home town without a map, or the need to consult one.
Likewise, Wittgenstein (1953) sets out the practical aspect of a philosophical problem as
having the form: I dont know my way about (no.123). And if we are properly to
understand what we mean when we say someone has understood something, then we must
study those passing moments, those moments of transition, when people can now go on
correctly with a task which previously they said they could not do. For instance, if we say
that B understands the principle of a series of numbers, Wittgenstein (1953) remarks that
surely doesnt mean simply: the formula an... = .... occurs to B. For it is perfectly
imaginable that the formula should occur to him and that he should nevertheless not
understand. He understands must have more in it than: the formula occurs to him. And
equally, more than any of those more or less characteristic accompaniments or
manifestations of understanding (no.152). And he continues: Try not to think of
understanding as a mental process at all. For that is the expression which confuses you.
But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, Now I
know how to go on, when, that is, the formula has occurred to me? (no.154).
In other words, what Wittgenstein and Voloshinov are pointing out to us here is that,
on many occasions, our response to being confused or bewildered should be, not the
intellectual one of trying to formulate our confusion as a problem to be solved by the
application to it of a systematic (logical) framework, but a more exploratory one, one in
which we try a whole number of different ways of relating ourselves to the troubling
circumstance with the aim of trying to orient ourselves toward it appropriately. Indeed,
as he remarks about overcoming what he calls a characteristic difficulty in philosophy:
... 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... 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 (1981, no.314).
Too often we take it that the data constituting a problem are objectively there prior to its
solution, and that what we must then do, is to bring the appropriate framework of thought
to bear which will interlink them all for us into an intelligible form or structure as if they
had no meaning for us prior to this operation. Whereas, what he is suggesting is that, rather
than as a thinker, trying to find a picture to correspond with, or to impose upon our
-23-
surroundings, our role should be much more that of an interlocutor, a participant prepared
to clarify the meaning of a circumstance that is troubling us by dwelling in a conversational
back and forth with it. In this role, it is not just our intellect that is at stake, our judgments
are also.
Withness-thinking and the strange role of the Will
In other words, there is something at work in our attempts to understand living speech
which has to do with, not so much with what we know about the world around us, as
with how we actively relate ourselves to it, with the stance or attitude we take toward it
where by stance or attitude we mean something quite complicated, to do with a whole
dynamic set of background expectations, anticipations, and readinesses to respond to
events occurring around us in a certain way, in a certain style. But if this is not to do
with our knowledge about the world, what is it to do with? Here another issue emerges
that can, perhaps, take us by surprise: some important aspects of our talk can influence
people, not so much in their intellect, as in their will!
Wittgenstein (1980a) puts this distinction thus: What makes a subject hard to
understand if its something significant and important is not that before you can
understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast
between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this
the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand.
What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the
intellect (p.17). Indeed, we face precisely such a problem of the will in the circumstance
he describes above in which we wrongly expect an explanation, whereas the solution to
our difficulty is a description, if we grasp how to insert that description at the appropriate
point in our considerations. We can find an example in the case cited below, in which
Wittgenstein (1953) discusses the question of whether asking (ordering) or reporting
(stating) is occurring in a persons utterance:
Imagine a language-game in which A asks and B reports the number of slabs
or blocks in a pile... Such a report might run: Five slabs. Now what is
the difference between the report or statement Five slabs and the order Five
slabs!? Well, it is the part which uttering these words plays in the language-
game. No doubt the tone of voice and the look with which they are uttered, and
much else besides, will also be different. But we could also imagine the tones
being the same for an order and a report can be spoken in a variety of tones of
voice and with various expressions of face the difference being only in the
application (1953, no.21, my emphases).
Just as when someone says to us, Theres an interesting movie on at the cinema
tonight, and we reply, Are you asking me or telling me?, so here too: it is a matter of
our appropriately judging the role of the persons utterance within our ongoing
relationship if we are to understand them aright.
Hence, more than merely thinkers, the role of the living, active, embodied
individual must fundamentally be that of an unceasing judge, who must deliberate on
how best to orchestrate within him- or herself an appropriate set of inner mental
movements to make sense of their ongoing confrontation with passing events in their
surroundings. This involves us in the wilful inner organization of our attitudes to our
surroundings (Luntley, 2003), and that organizing is done by allowing ourselves to be
responsive to the interplay occurring between our own outgoing (responsive) expressions
toward the other (or otherness) and their equally responsive incoming expressions
toward us as the activity occurring between us unfolds and, perhaps later, seeking a
degree of mastery over our own spontaneous reactions. But the crucial first step is in
allowing ourselves to be actively responsive (Bakhtin, 1986) to the others and
-24-
othernesses around us if we are to understanding the meaning of their expressions in our
lives.
In this connection, Merleau-Ponty (1964) discusses the special kind of looking we
might employ when looking at a painting (he considers paintings by Cezanne). He says:
I would be at great pains 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 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). In other words, instead of factual, aboutness-seeing, what Merleau-Ponty
describes here in saying we see according to it, in line with what I have called
withness-thinking above is what we might call a withness-seeing. For, after having
seen one Cezanne, we can begin to look over other paintings with the image of that first
Cezanne in mind to shape and instruct our looking. Similarly, with certain pieces of
reading in mind, as Steiner (1989) suggests, the streets of our cities are different after
Balzac and Dickens (p.164). Indeed, it is not that after reading Wittgenstein we see
language as a game, or as a city, and thats the end of it, but with cities in mind which
city: Paris (wheel and spoke), New York (grid), London (mess)? we now look to see if
language also has within it different regions (like business, entertainment, university,
sports, etc.), or whether it has a centre, suburbs, a countryside, archeological layers,
etc., etc. Our looking is now primed, so to speak, to notice the occurrence of possible
connections and relations between momentary features of our surroundings that we
might otherwise have missed.
But even more than this, with regard to anothers speech or writing, as Merleau-
Ponty (1962) remarks, more than readying ourselves in anticipation to respond, there is
also a taking up of others thought through speech, ... an ability to think according to
others which enriches our own thoughts... [where] their conceptual meaning must be
formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech...
[So that, as] in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through
their place in the context of action, and by taking part in a communal life in the same
way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at
least a ceratin style... which is a first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a[n
unfamiliar] philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the
tone and accent of the philosopher (p.179).....There is thus, either in the man who
listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of
which is unsuspected by intellectualism (p.179).
This, then, is what Wittgensteins talk can do for us. He is not at all concerned
with giving us any new information, but with bringing to life new movements in
thinking (1980a, p.20, my emphasis). In both an indicative way, he gestures in his talk
toward what weve not previously noticed, as well as in a mimetic manner, in gestures
that limn out for us the contours of what is otherwise invisible to us, creating new
anticipations within us, new attitudes my might take in relating ourselves to our
surroundings, attitudes that have not previously been available to us. There is thus a
thought in his speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism, and it is
in accord with that gestured thought that we can come to see our own everyday
circumstances afresh.
Concluding remarks: Wittgensteins poetic talk
In the examples discussed above, language is being used more than just metaphorically.
In speaking metaphorically, we carry across a verbally structured way of relating and
responding to our surroundings. Behavior learnt in one sphere of our lives is carried across
into another (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). But we do not always use Wittgensteins images
like this (the images created in our reading of his remarks), we do not just see and
-25-
experience something unknown as like something already known to us. Sometimes
something utterly different occurs: his words can lead us to attend to features in our
surroundings that are utterly new to us. We see these new features through his words, so
to speak. Here, instead of a metaphor providing an image of something already well known
to us, it provides an image for seeing something for the very first time. Central to talk of this
kind, is the use of poetic forms of talk which, to repeat the comments above about the
importance of the gaps, the pauses, the moments in which another voice responds to a first,
works to create such dialogical moments moments in which our routine realities are put
on freeze frame, so to speak, so that we can then search over that freeze frame for ways
in which to relate ourselves responsively to aspects of it that we might not otherwise have
noticed.
The kind of writing which can achieve this, is writing about concrete details, quoting
actual voiced utterances, using similes and metaphors, making comparisons, in short,
writing in such a way that, in juxtaposing ordinary words in extraordinary ways, a writer
creates an occasion in which a reader must creatively complete dialogically, not cognitively
the process of understanding. This is, of course, exactly the style of Wittgensteins writing.
As he remarked: I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy
ought really to be written only as poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible
to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was
thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot do what he would like to be able to do
(1980a, p.24). For one of the troubles with a gesture, as he himself remarked, a gesture
we would like to say tries to portray, but it cannot (no.434). Like the invisible
immovable object outlined in the Marcel Marceau mime mentioned in the Prologue, what is
the gestures are in response to remains invisible.
But, nonetheless, much can still be achieved. To understand both the workings of
poetic forms of talk in our lives, as well as the realm of spontanous, non-rational, impulsive
conduct within which it has its being, we must now turn in more detail to Wittgensteins
poetic methods. And we shall find, as the text above might lead us to expect, that his
methods work, not in terms of concepts or theories worked out ahead of time in seminar
rooms or research laboratories by experts, but in terms of certain very practical, but poetic,
uses of very ordinary words at critical points within the ongoing conduct of our practices.
Crucially, this way of using language leads us to focus not on regularities but on novelties,
on new but unnoticed possibilities for going on available to us in our present, socially
shared circumstances but present to us only at particular times in fleeting moments. If,
by the use of striking words we can be brought to notice these novelties, i.e., to be struck
by them, so that we bodily react to them in new ways, then we can often go on, not to
solve what had been seen as a problem, but to develop from our new reactions new socially
intelligible ways forward, in which the old problems become irrelevant.
Paper given at the American University, Washington DC, March 26 2000, at a Wittgenstein
th 13
Conference in honor of Rom Harr, published in Concepts and Transformations, pp.349-362, 2001.
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-Chapter Two-
Wittgenstein
and his Philosophy of Beginnings
and Beginnings and Beginnings
13
Abstract: Traditionally, compared with Wittgenstein, philosophers have
begun their investigation too late in the day. They have thought of people as
being already self-conscious, self-contained individuals, acting in a willful and
intellectual manner. Indeed, they have interpreted Wittgensteins latter
philosophy, and his claim that the meaning of a word is it as use in the
language, in this way: as if he was concerned with language only as a tool,
or as move in a language-game, with words said willfully and intellectually.
In this view, words have meaning only if they are systematically connected
with states of affairs and/or states of mind. There is, however, another side
to Wittgenstein: a concern with the beginnings of language-games in
spontaneous bodily reactions, and with such reactions as being the
prototypes for new ways of thinking rather than as the results of ones already
in existence. Here, meaning is understood in terms of ones direct and
immediate responsiveness to ones surroundings. This paper explores this
side of Wittgensteins thought, and relates it to practical methods for
beginning new practices, by noticing the presence within our old practices of
such, usually unnoticed spontaneous bodily reactions.
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to
express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its
meaning (C&V, p.16).
T
he revolutionary nature of Wittgensteins philosophy has still not been fully appreciated.
We have still not been sufficiently struck by its very practical nature, by its highlighting
of our ordinary, everyday ways of making sense and of understanding, and by the very
different way of seeing our world and ourselves in our world that it requires of us, as well
as the new methods for understanding he introduces to us. If we had been, as a group of
specialists in talk and its relations to its surrounding circumstances, we would not in all
likelihood be sitting here today in a conference room sitting listening to a lot of
decontextualized, closely reasoned talk. We would, I think, as co-practitioners of one or
another kind of social practice, be talking in the context of the practice with other co-
practitioners, drawing each others attention to previously unnoticed aspects of it, thus to
elaborate and refine its character.
Beginnings
Indeed, we would be focusing on a number of his remarks, and reminding ourselves of
where we should look if we want to see new possibilities, new beginnings, for the refining,
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and changing (!), of our practices, occasions when we make first-person declarations
seemingly out of the blue:
The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; he
says (C&V, 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).
The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also
have been a word (PI, pp.218).
But what is the word primitive meant to say here? he asks, Presumably
that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on
it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought
(Z, no.541).
When I say I am in pain... What I do is not, of course, to identity my
sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end of
the language-game: it is the beginning (PI, nos.208, 209).
In all these remarks, he is drawing our attention to a possible role in our lives for our
spontaneous bodily responses to events occurring around us or to us. He is concerned not
with the beginning of our current ways of understanding things, but with occurrences
happening for yet another first time, events unique to the unique circumstances of their
occurrence.
The background: a precursor world
Illustrated here is one aspect of the new way of seeing our world to which Wittgenstein
introduces us. He draws our attention to what goes on in the background to our lives, that
there is a whole unnoticed world there which is a precursor to the projects and
consciousness of individuals, existing prior to any thoughts, perceptions, actions,
evaluations, or words of our own. In fact, as he sees it, we owe our very being as the kind
of individuals we are to our embedding in a ceaseless stream of spontaneously responsive,
living, bodily activity going on between the others and the othernesses in our surroundings,
intrinsically relating us to them I will call it relationally-responsive activity or joint action.
Words have meaning only in the stream of life, he claims (1990, no.913). Not only do we
owe what stable forms of life we live between us to their continual reproduction in this
stream of spontaneously responsive activity, but also, strangely, whatever possibilities that
there are for their development and change. This background stream of activity, this
precursor world, is full of beginnings and beginnings and beginnings.
In the past, in our studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great realms of
activity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our agency to control, to
be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on action, on events for which we as
individuals take responsibility, and explain in terms of our reasons. Further, without going
into the whole Cartesian history of it, we have treated the world around us, not only as an
external world, but as a dead world of mechanisms, consisting in an assemblage of
externally related objective parts parts which can exist as the entities they are whether
they are a part of a mechanism or not. This precursor world of spontaneous, relationally-
responsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action, constitutes a third realm of internally
related activities quite distinct from these other two, a realm in which my activity only has
the character it has in relation to yours, in relation to your response to it.
It is this kind of momentary and contingent existence, in which an activity only exists
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as the activity it is, appropriate to the circumstances of its occurrence, which makes such
internally related activities so very special, and so very strange.
It is within this unfamiliar, third realm of living, responsive activity, this background,
precursor world, that I think we should see Wittgensteins philosophy as operating. When
he remarks that our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our
reactions are different (PI, no.284), I think we should take him very seriously. It is
precisely the move from a dead, mechanically connected world to a living world of
responsive relations, that is so crucial.
The dialogical
Recently, this third realm of spontaneously responsive activity has come to the fore in the
work of Voloshinov (1986, 1987) and Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986), and their emphasis on
the dialogical, and dialogically-structured relations -- and I would like to construct an optic,
so to speak, based on their work, through which to see Wittgensteins philosophy in the light
of the dialogical. Let me do it simply by listing a number of crucial points about it:
S As soon as a second living human being responds to the activities of a first, then
what the second does cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity - for the
second acts in a way that is partly shaped by the first (and the firsts acts were
responsive also)
S Thus, what I do now is related to what, overall, we are doing it is internally related
to it.
S Further, activity of this kind between us, is not yours or mine but ours... and this
is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins (joint action - Shotter, 1984,
1993a and b).
S What we produce between us is a very complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable
influences - as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, at work within it are both centripetal
tendencies (inward toward order and unity), as well as centrifugal ones (outward
toward diversity and difference).
S Influences from vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell, as well as our body senses,
our own and our responses to those of others, are all mixed in together -- any bodily
activities to which others might respond can become sign material.
S Joint action is in fact a complex mixture of many different kinds of influences.
S This makes it very difficult for us to characterize its nature: it has neither a fully
orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, a neither completely stable nor an easily
changed organization, a neither fully subjective nor fully objective character.
S Indeed, we could say that it is its very lack of complete specificity, its lack of any
fully-determined human order, and thus its openness to being specified or
determined yet further by those involved in it, in practice, that is its central defining
feature.
Wittgenstein, of course, understood this, and remarked on the partially-this-partially-that,
always unfinished character of our socially created realities thus: What is most difficult here
is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words (PI, p.227). Or: Mere
description is so difficult because one believes that one needs to fill out the facts in order
to understand them... Whereas I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you
falsify it.) (RPR, I, no.257). No wonder that he said that When you are philosophizing you
have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there (C&V, p.65).
Awaking to wonder
In saying this, he is suggesting that previous philosophers have come on the scene far too
late and have looked in the wrong direction for the wrong thing: currently, we have started
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as self-conscious, intellectual individuals, trained in an academic tradition, and we look back
in its terms to discover supposed already existing, but hidden sovereign centers of influence
as giving our activities their organization. Further, we are trained as children in doing
Euclidian geometry, and in developing a sense of what certainty in formal reasoning
working in terms of seeing that two formal patterns, although located at different places
at different times, are identical feels like. Hence, later, we find it natural to accept
Descartess (1968) appeal to a self-given certainty and his resolve to study no other
science than that which [he] could find within himself or else in the great book of the world
(p.35). Whereas, says Wittgenstein, I want to regard man here as an animal... As a
creature in a primitive state... Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination
(OC, no. 475). He wants to consider peoples activities in the background, precursor world,
prior to their individual willful and intellectual acts; and further, rather than inward and
backward, he wants to look outward and forward, toward how we responsively create and
establish between us, in our spontaneous and non-deliberate acts, ways to go on, ways to
act intellectually and willfully.
In moving to a new starting point, and in reorienting himself toward influences which
determine the structure of our expressions, internally, from within the event and moment
of their expression, he introduces us bit-by-bit to an aspect of the world between us that,
although it is our world, we have not previously noticed it in this way before.
But in what way? How should we see it, if we are not just to see it as merely the
place within which we can live our lives? Not as something to be explained, nor to be coped
with, nor to be used as material in our projects, but as something to wonder at, to celebrate,
to be startled at or struck by, in which to find new beginnings and beginnings and
beginnings. We must be ready to awaken to wonder (C&V, p.5).
What is striking about the dialogical?
So what is striking about the dialogical, about our spontaneous relationally-responsive
activity? Well, one thing that is striking is that, because the activity between us is not yours
or mine but ours, what we jointly do is out there in public space. As Wittgenstein remarks:
Nothing is hidden (PI, no.435). Thus, although I respond to anothers words as their
words, to an extent also, I must respond to them as our words, as just as much theirs over
there as yours and mine here. In growing up among a crowd of others already reacting and
responding to each other in their practical, everyday affairs in characteristic ways, like a
professional tennis player condemned to practice 24 hours a day, I too become practiced in
anticipating their responses to my expressions. And what I first do spontaneously in
response to their calls upon me, I later come to do deliberately, in response to my own
commands (Vygotsky, 1986).
Indeed, although I am always putting to use public property in my speaking, to an
extent, I can put it to use in my own way: Life's infinite variations are essential to our life.
And so too even to the habitual character of life (C&V, p.73). Thus, it is not in our repetition
of linguistic forms, our use of them according to an already established system of rules, that
we give our words their meaning, but in how we make varied use of an already existing,
public set of anticipated responses, to provoke to an extent novel responses in those we
address. We express our meaning, our own unique meaning, in the use we make of our
utterances in the circumstances of their use.
But in varying our use of words, juxtaposing them in our own combinations, pausing,
intoning, unfolding our speech in a responsive movement characteristic in some way of our
own unique circumstances, we cannot just speak in any old way we please. Why not?
Because and here, perhaps, we come upon an even more striking aspect of joint action
or the dialogical it seems as if there is a third living agency at work in the space we create
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between us in our interactions, beyond the other person immediately before me, an agency
that calls upon us with demands of its own, a public evaluator who calls me to use to use
our words as we use them. Bakhtin (1986) calls it the superaddressee (p.126) or a
superperson, a supra-I, the witness and the judge of the whole human being (p.137).
Wittgenstein too remarks in a similar fashion that symbols appear of their nature to be
unsatisfied, and he goes on to remark about a proposition, that it seems set over against
us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. It seems to demand that reality be compared
with it (PG, no.85, p.132).
Obeying rules and obeying calls upon us
Given our rationalistic, Cartesian heritage, we find it easy to assimilate this aspect of our
shared activities that we cannot just act in relation to the others around us as we please
to the pre-existence of a set of shared rules, existing in some hidden, transcendental,
platonic world somewhere, to which we must conform, if we want the others around us to
follow us. We feel, like Saussure (1959) and Chomsky after him, that because an individual
speech act is willful and intellectual (p.14), it can only be properly meaningful and
understood by others if it is properly ordered. And to do this we must explicitly or tacitly
refer to an inner mental representation of a rule system in structuring it.
But as Wittgenstein remarks, we hardly ever speak in this self-conscious way, with
an inner, intellectual reference to a system of rules. Mostly for us, obeying a rule is a
practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule... otherwise thinking one
was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it" (1953, no.202).
Indeed, if we did, we would still have to interpret how to apply the general rule in
this particular situation, and where might we find the rules to do that? In finding ourselves
in a situation which seems to require a certain kind of response from us, stating rules as
such doesnt seem much of a help What I should have said, says Wittgenstein, in
response to such a circumstance, is that This is how it strikes me. When I obey a rule, I do
not choose. I obey the rule blindly" (1953, no.219). A rule as a patterned form is no help;
it lies dead on the page, so to speak. It is a matter of me responding to a public situation
with the kind of publicly anticipated responses into which I have been trained. What this
shows, he suggests is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation,
but which is exhibited in what we call obeying the rule and going against it in actual
cases (no.201). Most of what we do is not done by us deliberately and intellectually, by
reference to an already existing, framework of rules, external to our current circumstances,
but in spontaneous response to calls upon us from within our immediate circumstances.
Invisible presences
But how can this be? How can it seem that there is a third agency making demands on us
like this, when we are in interaction with our surroundings? Because, as we saw above, the
outcome of a second persons spontaneous responses to the expressions of a first can be
attributed to neither of them; what is produced is public property, it is theirs, or to put it
another way, it belongs to their world. Further, because it has been shaped by their
responsive reactions, both to each other and to their surroundings, it shows intelligence in
its calls, in its requirements; it offers them invitations, so speak, as to their next possible
steps. Indeed, it seems to show to display or manifest in the unfolding contour of our
expressions in response to it the presence of an invisible field of force, so to speak. It
is as if in moving about in the dialogically-structured spaces we create between us (in our
spontaneous, relationally-responsive activities) a shaped and vectored sense of a dynamic
landscape possible places to go next. Just as in driving down a multi-lane interstate
highway, we sense those cars here as near, and those there as far away, this one as
-31-
requiring us to move away as it is moving too close, and possess a synoptic sense of how
at any one moment we are placed, so we can come to such a synoptic grasp of how to go
on in a skillful way many other spheres of our lives. Similarly, after enough experience in
tramping the streets of our own home town, we can bring a synoptic sense of its
interconnected streets to mind, if someone stops us to ask directions. Although invisible, its
presence is shown in the directions we give.
I emphasize the notion of a presence here because, as we move away from the idea
that we can locate what we feel to be important about language in a single (hidden) center
of organization, in one comprehensive essence (Z, no.444), in a theory or in a set of rules,
we must rethink the whole nature of our intellectual inquiries into humanly organized
wholes.
Rather than thinking that it is the discovery of a hidden system of rules, say, that is
needed to join the infinite possibilities of language into a finite whole, another tack entirely
is needed. We can come to a recognition of the workings of our language as a whole, not
by giving new information, he notes, but by arranging what we have always known (PI,
no.109) and as we do this, we come to realize that there is no one single source of the
meaning of our words, but that language is variously rooted; it has roots, not a single root
(Z, no.656). Indeed, as we move around inside such an arrangement of facts, as we move
from fact to fact, a sense of a characteristic something there begins to make itself felt. We
can create a way of looking such that, as we look over each part of what is publicly there
before us, we can begin to see each part as owing its character and its existence to its
relations to all the other parts in constituting a unified whole. We can look from one to the
next with an anticipatory sense of their connectedness, a sense of their grammar. Thus once
this occurs, our actions can become informed, not by an inner hidden center of influence,
but by the unseen presence of such a whole. It is of this kind of clear view of the use of our
words, that Wittgenstein speaks. He seeks just that understanding which consists in
seeing connections (PI, no.122) a whole ramifying, unending, unfinished system of links,
connections, and relations, all known from within our living involvement with them.
Poetry and drama
How might we do this? How might we achieve such a view, such an understanding? Indeed,
what does Wittgenstein do in his writings? It is here that Wittgensteins philosophy is clearly
a philosophy of beginnings, for he wants to move us on to doing something quite new, but
not just once for a very first time, but again and again for a first time if, that is, we want
to live more than just a life of mindless routines. Hence his claim that ... philosophy ought
really to be written only as a poetic composition" (C&V, p.24) acts of poeisis, of making,
of creating, of bringing something new into existence, rather than merely discovering
already existing things is involved. For every instance of us being able to go on in our
practical lives, is an act of this kind. And what poetic uses of language can do, is by
juxtaposing words in unusual combinations, cause us to pause, to cease our current project
for a moment, to put reality on freeze-frame, so to speak, to look over the circumstances
before us in a new light. At the heart of his style of writing is the realization that the linear,
static, geometrical structure of rational argumentation is quite inadequate to display, to
show, the dia-logical grammar of the primeval, chaotic world he has come to inhabit. He
needs a way to express, and to show in his expression, the configurations of a mobile, open
reality in which contradictory events are co-implicated in a steady, ongoing, conversation
between all concerned.
Central to his methods, then, is a concern with striking, moving, or arresting
moments, with first times, with beginnings where, as we have noted, the beginning of
something new, a new language game, is in a reaction. To refine or elaborate our forms of
life, we must be struck by something that has not struck us before. Where, being struck is,
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as he remarks, a complex phenomenon. Is being struck looking plus thinking? he asks.
No, he replies, Many of our concepts cross here (PI, p.211).
With the Cartesian idea of a self-given certainty, in which we take it that a kind of
seeing on our part... lies at the bottom of the language-game (OC, 204), we have sought
general, foundational principles of a metaphysical kind. But what Wittgenstein suggests to
us, with his descent into the primeval chaos of the world that is a precursor to the world of
our self-conscious and intellectual projects, is that it is our acting, that lies at the bottom
of the language-game (OC, no.204). In other words, the real foundations of our inquiries
can only be found in unique, fleeting, only once-occurrent, dialogically-structured moments,
in specific concrete circumstances, when in responsive contact with others around us. It is
this which has not struck us before.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of
their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because
it is always before ones eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not
strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. And this
means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most
powerful" (1953, no.129).
But if he is in his writings to strike us in ways in which we not been struck before,
besides being poetic, Wittgenstein must also be dramatic. More than merely touching on a
something and then moving on, as we do in our daily routines, he must make the invisible
currents, the dynamic structures in the streaming of our lives, visible to us in some way. He
must, as in an artistic presentation or performance, dramatize them in some way. For what
is done in a dramatization, is to foreground and make sensibly graspable the shape and
character of a presence a something which, nonetheless, still remains invisible - its
presence as a unitary whole is portrayed, displayed, or shown in ones performance (just as
Marcel Marceau shows the existence of an invisible wall in his hand movements as he
struggles to find an opening in it). If one is primordial enough (in ones stance) and original
enough (in ones words), then one can express the fleeting presence of new possibilities
merely glimpsed at in such a way that others cannot only glimpse them too, but dwell on
them long enough to make them items of public discussion and attention. To do that, we
have to describe them in memorable ways, in ways that enables all of us to notice them too.
Concluding comments:
the practicality of Wittgensteins philosophy
With this task in mind, let me end here with two relevant remarks: The first is to do with
our initial orientation to our tasks in philosophy:
... 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... 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 (Z, no.314).
Being able to stop the background flow, to look over what is before us, and to see in it
relational possibilities not seen before, is what is at stake here. But the task is not to do this
in general, for all time, but in this and that particular circumstance: to see where one is
now, and to see it afresh, with wonder: ...the place I really have to get to is a place I must
already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me
(C&V, p.7).
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This relates directly to my own practical interest in Wittgensteins methods. Arlene
Katz and I (Katz and Shotter, 1997, 1997; Shotter and Katz, 1997; Shotter and Gustavsen,
1999) have been engaged in outlining how a group of practitioners such as doctors,
workers, managers, stakeholders in regional development, etc. can, while in fact still
engaged in their practices, draw each others attention to new facets of each others
activities, which, once noted in public space, can become a shareable resource by all.
Indeed, once noticed, being struck by such facets can by carried over, so to speak, from
one to another context of the practice. And, just as Wittgenstein (1969) remarks, not only
rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our practice leaves loop-
holes, and the practice has to speak for itself (OC, 139), so we find that talk of striking
events helps in establishing a new practice. The new practice tells us of its own basic
nature in how such examples strike us: they establish a basic way of seeing, a form of
perception, for use in making sense of all the other objects we encounter in the sphere of
the practice.
This kind of small scale development in our practices was suggested by Wittgenstein
thus:
Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy
wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite)
longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips This inversion of our
conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the
unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure
it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may
well be done, if one means a cross-strip. - But in that case we never get to
the end of our work! - Of course not, for it has no end. (We want to replace
wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts)
(Z, no.447).

Here we are back, as philosophers, to being co-practitioners with a group of others, and to
a set of methods that may be of help to them in elaborating, refining, and sustaining their
practice from where they already are, at any one moment, within it. Again, as always, the
task is to move from what is done spontaneously, and unthinkingly, to what might be done
willfully and intellectually. It is the removal of Wittgensteins philosophy of beginnings and
beginnings from the academy and its re-situating out in the everyday world, that is the truly
revolutionary move I am advocating here.
Paper given at University of Calgary, Department of Communication, Sept 30th, 1994
14
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-Chapter Three-
'Now I can go on':
Wittgenstein and Communication
14
"People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they
do; but what they don't know is what what they do does" (Foucault, in
Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986, p.187).
"What counts as its [an empirical proposition's] test? - 'But is this an
adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?' -
As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not
in an ungrounded presupposition: it is in an ungrounded way of acting"
(no.110: Wittgenstein, 1969).
"Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual
person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the
process of their dialogic interaction" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.110).
There is something strange about language and communication: Although, in practice,
we use language everyday, and manage not to mislead each other most of the time, if
someone asks us how we do it, we are nonplussed. We can't seem to 'see', i.e., to say
explicitly, how it works. Yet we do not feel that its nature or essence is wholly hidden
from us. For, we seem aware of all kinds of hints and intimations of it as already existing
somewhere, in an as yet undisclosed form, awaiting our discovery. Hence, all our
unending research efforts. This discrepancy between the lucidity of the awarenesses we
already possess, in practice, and our difficulty at putting them into words (in this case
with respect to temporal phenomena), was expressed in St Augustine's famous saying:
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to
one that asketh, I know not."
Wittgenstein refers to this epigram in characterizing the really weird nature of his own
investigations into language and communication (you'll see why I call them 'really weird',
in a moment): They are not concerned "to hunt out new facts," he says, "it is, rather, of
the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We
want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in
some sense not to understand," he remarks (1953, no.89). Thus, he goes on to say, "we
may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our
considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take
its place" (1953, no.109). For anything hypothetical in our considerations, he feels,
means that we are failing to take account of what is actually before our eyes, in the
circumstances of our talk, and we are referring instead to nonexistent, mythical entities
of our own invention.
Elsewhere, he remarks about his kind of philosophy, that it "simply puts
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everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies
open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no
interest to us" (1953, no.126). "How do sentences do it [i.e., manage to represent]? -
Don't you know? For nothing is hidden" (1953, no.435). In other words, his concern is
with a certain kind of immediate clarity or perspicuity, with the removal of "painful
contradictions" that lead one to ask "illegitimate questions" (as Hertz put it). "For me...
clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a
building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings,"
he says (1980, p.7e).
Why his claims here are so weird - so weird that I do not expect you to
understand me, or if you do understand me not to believe me, or if you do believe me
not to like the consequences - is that they call not only the whole nature of what we
think knowledge to be into question... they also expose us as being responsible for
continually deceiving ourselves in many ways, for falling victim to temptations, for
having unjustified cravings, and so on, as we shall see. Where, if the foretaste of this
weirdness provided above is not enough - I mean his all but incomprehensible claim
that, as "nothing is hidden" and "everything lies open to view," no theories as such are
required, they distort things in fact - let me just add the following remarks he makes,
about where any claims we might make about 'things' are grounded: "Giving grounds,"
he says, "justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not in certain
propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it
is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game" (1969, no.204). Where,
"you must bear in mind," he continues, "that the language-game is... not based on
grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our life" (1969, no.559).
In other words, all our talk about 'things' as such, is grounded within certain of
our relational ways of talking and acting, and... in nothing more!
This may not seem weird at first sight. For we all agree - don't we? - that all our
claims about 'things', all our theories, must be tested in practice. Yet this does not
prevent those of us interested in studying language and communication, from still being
tempted into a wholly theoretical way of talking, and thus, into searching still for a basis,
a foundation for our claims to truth beyond our practical relations to each other, beyond
our human histories and institutions, in a special transcendental, metaphysical, or in
biological 'realities', supposedly underlying (the usual term) or hidden behind
appearances: in innate grammars, in rules, in conventions of usage, and so on. But to
repeat, if Wittgenstein is right, and nothing is hidden: all these theoretical entities are
after the fact and beside the point; they distort the reality before our eyes.
What we need is a way of seeing, or an aid to seeing, that so far we have failed to
see the need for: "How hard I find it," he says, "to see what is right in front of my eyes!"
(1980, p.39). The aid to seeing he offers us - to help you, and himself, to notice what so
far we have failed to notice - are simply special ways of talking that draw our attention
to connections between phenomena that we would otherwise let pass us by, special ways
of talking that he simply calls "reminders" (1953, no.127)... where sometimes they are
as simple and as brief as saying (if you happen to think that all games must have
something in common): "don't think, but look!" (1953, no.66)... just as he remarks
about Indian mathematics saying at a crucial point in a proof 'Look at this' (1953,
no.144).
Wittgenstein's world: 'Now I can go on'
But how should we react to such 'reminders'? What are they meant to remind us of? For
a philosopher so concerned with clarity, what he has to say seems peculiarly difficult to
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understand. He seems unable to talk about anything directly; nothing is fixed or
finalized. He even finds it difficult to say with any directness, what his aim is: "What is
your aim in philosophy?," he asks himself, "To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,"
he replies (1953, no.309). But he makes no strong arguments, comes to few if any
conclusions, and presents no theories or models. Indeed, as we have seen, he rails
against such ways of proceeding: they introduce something 'illusory' that goes beyond
and distorts the 'reality' that is actually 'there' before us, like the already open way out
of the fly-bottle - if only we could 'see' it.
The reality that we are failing to see, the reality right in front of our eyes,
everyday, is, I want to claim, the reality of us living our lives in practice. It is this that
we do not know how to see for what it is, without continually distorting it, without
continually telling ourselves that it must have this of that kind of nature to it.
But if we are even to begin to 'see' this, to see why he talks as he does, we need
an 'optic' to view him, an 'hermeneutic' through which to read him: that hermeneutic, I
claim, can be found in such remarks as the following: that "understanding is like
knowing how to go on, and so it is an ability: but 'I understand', like 'I can go on', is an
utterance, a signal" (1980, I, no.875); that it is "particular circumstances, which justify
me in saying I can go on," (1953, no.154); or, "a philosophical problem has the form: 'I
don't know my way about" (1953, no.154). Here we can see him trying to put issues,
that we might be tempted to put into 'theoretical' terms, more practically. Why? Because
he wants to avoid what he calls a "general disease of thinking which always looks for
(and finds) what would be called a mental state from which our acts spring as if from a
reservoir" (1965, p.143, my emphasis), and it is precisely this - talk of any 'thing' that
we cannot in some sense actually point to - that he wants to avoid.
Thus in his investigations, although it is strange to say it, he is not necessarily
concerned with us 'understanding' each other, nor necessarily with us sharing
'agreements', with us 'communicating' with each other (i.e., sending each other
messages), discovering the 'true' nature of our surrounding circumstances, or with us
necessarily doing any 'thing' in particular, let alone anything that is 'basic' to us being
human. For, as he sees it, communication - as a special, but as yet not fully explained
unitary process - cannot be considered as basic to us being human: "Not: 'without
language we could not communicate with one another' - but for sure: without language
we cannot influence other people in such-and-such ways; cannot build roads and
machines, etc. And also: without the use of speech and writing people could not
communicate" (1953, no.491). He is simply concerned with us being able to 'go on' with
each other (1953, nos.146-155), with us being able merely to make 'followable' or
'responsible' sense to each other - simply reacting or responding in ways that makes it
possible to continue our relationships is sufficient for him. To communicate (i.e., to send
messages); to fully understand each other; to routinely and skillfully discourse upon a
subject matter; to be able to 'reach out', so to speak, from within a language-game and
talk about the 'contacts' one has made; all these abilities are, or can be, later
developments.
Thus, as I see it, his prime concern is to explore the nature of those initial
embodied responses and reactions that make it possible for us sensibly, simply to 'follow'
or to 'grasp' the 'tendencies' in each other's conduct, to study those circumstances in
which we can 'go on' with each other in practice. "It disperses the [mental] fog," he says,
"to study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can
command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words" (1953, no.5). "Bring
this," "Look at that," and so on. For, although we assume that we do in fact
communicate with each other pretty well, and that our task as academics is thus to
explain how we do it, to repeat, he does not assume that at all: he assumes that in our
'goings on' together, we often mislead and misunderstand each other (Taylor, 1992).
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Thus his concern is with seeking ways of talking in which we can avoid such confusions
and misunderstandings, in which we can avoid inventing mythologies and empty theories
- or the "bewitchments of our intelligence by means of language" (1953, no.109), as he
calls them. It is with this project in mind, that he is interested in the embodied
knowledge we exhibit both in our more orderly social practices, and in the more
disorderly activities of our lives together when simply in conversation with each other -
where, as far as he is concerned, there is no one single order to be discovered in our
lives or in their surroundings.
[Note 1: Even in the Tractatus (1988 [1922]), he is convinced that "There is no
order of things a priori" (T: 5.634); that "at the basis of the whole modern view of the
world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural
phenomena" (T: 6.371). And in the Investigations, while he is concerned "to establish an
order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; [it
is] one out of many possible orders; not the order," (PI: no.132) - because there is no
such single order to be had. Whatever orders there are, are orders that we ourselves
make...]
As he sees it, our ways of 'going on' with each other in a sensibly followable way
are foundational, because it is in doing so, that we can achieve all the other things we
think of as being important to us - including the constructing of theories in terms of
which we claim to be able to explain the nature of the things around us. But how we do
this, how we 'social construct' or 'develop' different possible talk intertwined ways of
'going on' with each other... well, that is up to us to work out. We do not need to find
some already existing but hidden 'laws of social relation' to which to submit ourselves.
"To invent a language could mean to invent an instrument for a particular purpose on
the basis of the laws of nature (or consistently with them); but it also has the other
sense, analogous to that which we speak of the invention of a game..." (1953, no.492).
Indeed, how we talk about how-we-talk-in-'going-on'-with-each-other is up to us. If,
then, this is his project - attempting to draw our attention to our embodied use of words
in our everyday, background ways of 'going on' with each other - we must note a
number of important features of this activity to which he draws our attention.
Features in our 'background' ways
For a start, this activity (of 'going on') is in itself fluid, indeterminate; it points toward
possibilities in excess of actualities, so to speak; it is 'playful' and is the proper
preliminary to the playing of games (Shotter, 1973). While it may seem to be a 'basis',
or to provide a 'grounding', for many of our more definite forms of talk, it also provides
the 'grounds' for many other much more indefinite forms too. It seems to be an
inexhaustible source of new possibilities, and all attempts to give it any final, definitive
articulation, in itself, seem to fail. Indeed, they must fail, for, our 'going on' with each
other is, like life itself, unending, unfinalizable. We are continually doing the things we
do, so to speak, 'from within the stream of life'. So, although we may invent all kinds of
'theories' as to what it is that we are doing - 'idealist', 'materialist', 'social
constructionist', 'realist', 'communitarian', 'intentionalist', or whatever - no theory as
such could ever be a final account of what it is that we are in fact doing in simply 'going
on' with each other. Indeed, any theories as such will only have their sense, their 'life',
within the 'ongoing' stream of social life from within which they arise and within which
they have their application. They cannot be turned around to depict or portray the
'stream' itself.
Thus, attempting to attribute the nature of this embodied, practical use of words
in 'going on' with our activities to any specific kinds of 'knowledge' inside the heads of
individuals, leads us either into an infinite regress of interpretation, or, into
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geometrically expanding accounts of contextual detail. For our ways of using words in
doing what we do are "countless" (1953, no.23); there is no single, principled way in
which we must talk. Indeed, how we name or describe what we are doing as we relate
ourselves to each other and our surroundings through our use of words, well... that too is
up to us also. So although we may formulate what we call 'theories', 'laws', 'principles',
'propositions', 'beliefs', 'ideas', 'rules', 'conventions', etc., and claim to be acting 'in
accord' with these 'inner' things - as if our practices must be dependent upon them -
Wittgenstein would claim, rather than this way of talking about ourselves being
dependent upon, or, representing mysterious things hidden within us, its meaning is
already dependent upon our existing practices. These terms cannot actually refer to any
'things'. Their use is perhaps best thought of as poetic, as again, drawing our attention
to features in the circumstances of their use that we would otherwise not notice. "When
philosophers use a word - 'knowledge', 'being', 'object', 'I', 'proposition', 'name' - and try
to grasp the essence of the thing," he comments, "one must ask oneself: is the word
ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? - What
we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (1953,
no.116). What are the different particular actual uses of these abstract terms, in
practice, in different particular situations? That is what we must study.
What Wittgenstein brings to our attention, then, is the extent and power of the
taken-for-granted, usually unnoticed, 'background' activities constituting the everyday
lives we live as non-intellectualizing, non-deliberating, embodied beings reacting and
responding to those around us - the 'things' we just do because of the forms of social life
within which we have grown up. In this kind of activity - what elsewhere I have called
joint action (Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993), and what here we can just call our responsive
ways of 'going on' - what we do is 'shaped', not so much by us acting 'out of' our own
inner plans or desires, as by us acting 'into' the social circumstances into which we must
fit our actions. So, although participants respond to each other in a 'fitting' manner, to
the extent that they influence each other's actions in a moment-by-moment fashion, its
nature is intrinsically unpredictable and indeterminate; none of the participants will
contain within themselves a complete grasp of its nature.
Our focus upon the strange nature of these 'joint' or 'dialogical' forms of activity is
perhaps blurred, however, both by our tendency as academics to take our own individual
intellectual activity as paradigmatic of all 'normal' activity, and by the fact that
Wittgenstein himself also often chose to study seemingly individual intellectual activities
- like the continuing of number series, or the theorizing of philosophers. Whereas, the
complexity of what we 'just do' spontaneously, without any prior deliberation, problem-
solving, interpretation, or other inner intellectual 'working out', might have been more
forcibly brought home to us, if he had noted the nature of some of our more complex,
but less orderly, bodily, social activities: simply activities like hand-shaking, or dancing,
or negotiating other people's movements upon side-walks or at door-ways; playing ball
and racquet games; or, how we maneuver furniture with the help of others, for instance.
[Note 2: Helen Keller somewhere talks of being able to recognize a person (remember
that she was both blind and deaf) from their hand-shake up to two years after first
meeting them.]
Following rules
I make these comments because, central to Wittgenstein's investigations is the notion of
'following a rule'. Indeed, more than us merely 'following' rules is at stake, for he is
concerned with us "being irresistibly inclined to say" (1953, no.299) certain things in
certain circumstances - the 'rules' in question (if such they be) have a strange power
over us: we can in some circumstances be 'charmed' or 'bewitched' by them. His talk of
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'rules' here is thus, not easy to follow. In some of our more orderly, 'established' or
'institutionalized' activities, it is as if we are (or could be) following general rules of a
fixed kind, existing prior to the practice - as if the general rule 'causes' or 'determines'
the particular activities making up the practice - in other circumstances, there could be
no such fixed, prior, external rules. In these other more 'spontaneous' or 'everyday'
circumstances, whatever sense of 'rightness' there is in the activity in question, flows
from a practical understanding that is as yet unarticulated, that is employed in the doing
of the activity.
So, although we may talk of ourselves as if we are following rules in our practices,
whatever rules we might formulate as characterizing our practices, the knowledge we
make use of in our practices, he points out, goes way beyond them: "'But how can a rule
show me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in
accord with the rule' - That is not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation
still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.
Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning" (1953, no.198). "To think one
is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule" (1953, no.202). "My symbolical expression
['explaining' how it seemed to me that I followed the rule] was really a mythological
description of the use of a rule" (1953, no.221). For the fact is, "... 'obeying a rule' is a
practice" (1953, no.202). Giving reasons is not enough, for "... my reasons will soon give
out. And I shall then act, without reasons" (1953, no.211). "'How am I to obey a rule?' -
if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following
the rule the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and
my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do'" (1953, no.217,
my emphasis), "I obey the rule blindly" (1953, no.219). This, in practice, is simply how it
is (it cannot be explained further, except... by relying upon it again, in practice.
Yet, in all the everyday activities I mentioned above, there is a changing,
moment-by-moment sense of 'getting it right', and a sensing of differences and
discrepancies, that flows out of and accords with the 'situation' in which the activity
occurs. It is as if 'it' - the 'situation' - is a third agency on the scene that is, as Bakhtin
(1986) puts it, "the witness and the judge" (p.137) of what occurs. And those involved in
the above kinds of 'joint' activities, sense their involvement in these kinds of 'common
moments' - what could be called 'interactive moments' - moments in which one just
knows that the other is bodily involved at the same time as one's self, in which a 'jointly'
shared 'situation' is involved. Thus in these circumstances, obeying 'rules' - that is,
following the 'requirements' of the 'joint' situation or circumstance (actual or imagined)
in which one is involved - does not involve ultimately anything intellectual. Indeed,
"...just where one says 'But don't you see...?' the rule is no use, it is what is explained,
not what does the explaining" (1981, no.302). Although we may be tempted to say
something about mysterious process in people's heads - that 'He grasps the rule
intuitively', for instance - we could equally well say simply that 'He knows how to
continue', 'how to go on', that he has learnt a practice.
In other words, we act as we do because it is implicit in the kind of people we
are; it has become embodied in the character of our being in the world, not simply
through what we have been told, but because of the doings we have done as a result of
such tellings. And our task, then, becomes that of attempting to formulate or to
articulate the as yet unarticulated background ways of 'going on' with each other that we
have invented, or might invent, for ourselves between ourselves, to make linguistically
explicit that which is implicit in our embodied forms of life.
Conclusions
In shifting attention away from our theoretical talk, and directing it more toward the
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practical nature of our as yet unarticulated background ways of 'going on' with each
other, my concern has been to direct attention toward those moments in our talk that
are of very great importance to us: those moments in which we as ordinary people can
participate in the constructing of our own realities - so that we do not have forms of life
constructed by elite-others imposed upon us.
For at the moment, it is only too easy for us to accept that, when we talk of such
things as 'speech', 'language', 'thought', 'perception', 'desire', 'the individual', 'the self',
'identity', the 'person', 'power' (even!), 'society', our 'biology', etc., in our disciplines,
that such things exist, and that were we to plan a research project into any one of them,
we would all know perfectly well what the 'it' is that we were researching into. We find it
unthinkable that 'objects' such as these are not already 'out there' in the world in some
primordial, naturalistic sense, awaiting our study of them. The idea that stable reference
to such objects is only possible from within an already agreed, disciplined and ordered
language game - a language-game ordered in terms of the values and preferences of a
certain elite group, namely, us - does not occur to us. In thinking of ourselves as simply
seeking after the truth, we are not always aware of Descartes's aim in the setting out of
his 'method' - that if we had it, "we could be masters and possessors of Nature," that is,
that it has the domination of that to which it is applied as one of its core values.
Still less are we aware of the possibility that, like a good piece of science fiction,
our mere talk of such entities as those I've mentioned, can create an illusory or
imaginary sense of their reality in us - a state of affairs we can easily fail to detect, if we
are satisfied with truth as being a kind of seeing on our part.
The idea that all such concepts as those I've mentioned are "essentially contested
concepts" (Gallie, 1962), that they have a whole range of possible meanings, and that
they only come to make a definite kind of sense as we develop them in living out the
discourse into which they are interwoven, in practice, is, to say the least, something of
an unusual notion for us. For, to repeat, it is a kind of seeing on our part that we value,
that we think of as being at the end of our labors. "We feel," he remarks, "as if we had to
penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards phenomena,
but, as one might say, towards the 'possibilities' of phenomena" (1953, no.90) - it is this
contrast that I think is the key to the practical importance of his work. For, if we study
our use of our words with the task in mind of describing the different possibilities they
create for how one might 'go on' with the others around us in the circumstances of their
use - then we can begin to see how, in practice, we might create with them new ways of
'going on'.
For instance, by talking about understanding as not being a process inside the
head of an individual, but as a practical social phenomenon, between people, to do with
them knowing how 'to go on' with each other, we can create a new form of
understanding between us, in practice. But to work in this 'vague' or 'blind' kind of way,
as Wittgenstein seems to recommend, is hard for us to imagine, for us to envision, to
stomach even. But this is precisely Wittgenstein's point in bringing all the messy details
of our practices to our attention: he wants to remind us that all these properties of our
understanding(s) in practice, are in fact already familiar to us. For instance, just as we
can 'get into' the new and strange practices of mathematics at school by learning what is
being proved in being put through the activity of doing proofs, so we can also 'get into'
new ways of talking in the same way: we must "let the use of words teach you their
meaning," he says (1953, p.220e). We must continually 'discover' the meaning of our
words to ourselves in their use, whether the uses are new or old uses.
While it may seem that certain usages in some contexts are fixed and finalized,
this is only so by human effort to make it so - this is where politics and power is at work.
But there is no end to the possibility of finding new meanings (uses) for old words, when
new circumstances arise - including different new meanings (new uses) for the words
-41-
'meaning', for instance - to do with our ability to 'call out', or simply 'say', new forms of
human life, with their associated 'world's and 'ways of being', into existence between us.
Currently our 'obsession' with theoretical talk obscures the practical nature of the
dialogic talk between us within which we jointly construct the 'realities' in which we find
ourselves 'placed' as individuals, and into which, and out of which, we situate much of
our talk and action. We do not yet know how to explore what is involved, practically, in
opening up new spaces, new possibilities for being human, between us. As professional
academics, we must find ways to extend our grasp of what goes within relationships, to
extend our grasp of what might on within individuals 'positioned' or 'placed' within them
- even if it means giving up the theories we can each get inside our own heads. Only
then, can we help to create a truly dialogic 'space' within which, not only the creation of
new meanings will be possible, but within which everyone (not just the 'seeing' elite) can
participate in the interplay of voices.
Let me end by gesturing toward what I think are a number of the properties of
that 'space', the conditions making it possible. They are as follows:
- 'Voices' become the loci of linguistic agency; and problems of agency - who is
responsible for what - become problems of whose voice is being heard.
- Subjects (and objects) are not ontologically prior to people's linguistic activities;
indeed, no such 'things' are, or can be prior. For although we may say that our
surroundings stay materially the same from one moment to the next, that is a
way of talking, and no way of talking is ever an innocent matter of mere
description: all our ways of talking are the product of quite peculiar kinds of
disciplinary discourses, with their own cultural, ethico-political, and historical
dimensions.
- Thus, the instability of a word's meaning is not in the 'free play of signifiers', but
in the ethico-political interplay of voices in the different circumstances of life.
- Instabilities are decided in practice, however. And it is just at that moment of
uncertainty - in 'joint action' at the 'interactive moment' - that a politics of ethics
(to do with whose being is respected, and whose form of life is to go on), that
politics is at its most intense.
- Indeed, to the extent that our 'inner' lives are not a matter of tranquil, private
calculation within already decided systems of meanings, but reflect in their
functioning the same ethico-political and rhetorical considerations as those
influencing our transactions with others out in the world, they too are not exempt
from the same conflicts and struggles.
- Thus, the center of gravity, so to speak, of what we talk of as our thinking, is not
deep within us at the center of our being, but at its boundaries. Where, the way
in which we are a responsive addresser of others (actual or imagined), 'shapes'
how we 'answer' for our sense of our own position in our relations to those others.
- Thus in this sense, our use of psychological terms does not work by reference to
an already existing inner state, but, as Mills (1940) put it so long ago, as an
indicator of possible future actions, as a gesture toward the future that allows
others (or not) to coordinate their actions in with ours.
- But, "monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another
consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal
rights (thou). With a monologic approach (in its extreme form) another person
remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness. Monologue is finalized and
deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it
any decisive force" (Bakhtin, 1984, pp.292-93). In the past, however, it has been
the task of professional elites to produce such monolgues (Bauman, 1987); now
our task is changing.
- "The single adequate form of verbally expressing authentic human life is the
open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to
participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so
-42-
forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life:
with his or her eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, and with his or her whole body and
deeds" (p.293).
- The institution of a dialogic practice, entails a new focus (upon the 'interactive
moment'), a new method (Wittgenstein's methods for directing our attention), a
new basis (in the conversational realities of everyday life), and a new politics (in
the interplay of voices).
- For, in our talk, we are concerned i) to be responsive to what has gone before; ii)
to appropriately address those around us; but also iii) to be answerable for our
own unique position in the world, and to have it make a difference in the world
we share with others.
These are just some of the conditions necessary, it seems to me, if we all, both those of
us here in this auditorium, and those others our in the world at large, are going to be
able to participate in the discursive construction of knowledge.
In setting them out, rather than attending to language considered in terms of
previously existing patterns or systems, formed from 'already spoken words', I have
focused upon the formative uses to which 'words in their speaking' can be put. My
concern has been with the nature of the relationships and relational situations thus
created between those in communicative contact with each other in their speakings.
Such a focus attends precisely to the political influences at work in deciding the form of
connections and contacts made, the possibilities and tendencies they open up, and those
they close down. Within systems of already spoken words (in what one might call
already-decided-forms-of-talk), those tense moments of uncertainty and instability,
when the constructing of those possibilities is decided, is ignored. We study only what
has been done, the implications in the system of possibilities already decided - and we
can do that as isolated individuals. But we were excluded from the originary interplay of
voices that decided the system; if we are not content to live out, or 'work out', its
possibilities, we find ourselves powerless to do other than complain. Thus, if we want
actively to enter into the constructing of our own forms of life, then we must both: i)
locate those sites, those moments when, in the interplay of voices, our voice can count;
and, ii) increase our grasp of what what-we-do does (with apologies to Foucault, 1982,
p.187). And my concern here today, has been with the ways of talking, the practical
means appropriate to a more dialogical way for us, still as professional academics, of
conducting our affairs that is not so exclusive of all the others around us.
Human Studies, 19, pp.385-407, 1996
15
All date-only citations are of Wittgensteins works.
16
-43-
-Chapter Four-
Wittgenstein and our Embodied Embeddedness
in the Hurly-Burly of Everyday Life
15
Abstract: Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside
peoples heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to
inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others,
in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send
messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within
language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical terms of the contacts one
has made, as an individual, with what is out there; and so on all these abilities are, or can
be, later developments. Wittgensteins investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical,
embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast realm for
empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the
background to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical,
Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities and the way in which they display us as seeing
connections from within a synopsis of trivialities is explored through the paradigm of
currently fashionable 3-D random dot autostereograms.
We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the
whole business of seeing puzzling enough (1953, p.212e) .
16
What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only
science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously
difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of
trivialities (1980a, p.26).
Unlike computers and other machines, as living, embodied beings, we cannot be indifferent
to the world around us. We continuously react and respond to it, spontaneously, whether
we like it or not; that is, we respond directly and immediately, without having to work it out.
And in so doing, we necessarily relate and connect ourselves to our surroundings in one way
or another. As the kind of people we are, according to the kind of culture into which we have
been socialized, we come to embody certain more elaborated ways of reacting to our
surroundings immediately and unthinkingly than those we are born with. [end 385] Certain
sounds, movements, physical shapes, smells, etc., occurring around us, move us. They call
out vague, but wholly undifferentiated responses from us; we find movements of this or that
kind, originating from others or an otherness outside of ourselves at work in us. Where,
what we do later, individually and deliberately, originates in what we do earlier, socially and
spontaneously: The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; says
Wittgenstein (1980, p.31), only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language
- I want to say - is refinement, in the beginning was the deed. Yet somehow, in all our
current disciplinary practices in the human and behavioral sciences, the way in which our
immediate reactions are necessarily related to our surroundings, has remained
rationally-invisible to us; as professionals, we have mostly ignored our embodied
embeddedness in this living flow of spontaneous responsive activity. Not only have we let
-44-
it remain unnoticed in the background to everything that we do, but we have ignored its
importance as a sustaining, supportive, ever-present background in all our ways of making
sense in and of our lives there is something about its nature we have failed to see!
The failure to take proper account of the nature of this background activity, is of
especial importance in the newly emerging social constructionist movement (Berger and
Luckman, 1966; Coulter, 1979, 1989; Gergen, 1991, 1995; Harre, 1983, 1986; Shotter,
1993a and b). For, critics and exponents alike, both still face the special task of telling us
how, by intertwining talk of a certain kind in with our other more practical everyday
activities, it is possible for us to draw each others attention from within such talk, to events
beyond it. Indeed, this is precisely my task in this paper: to attempt to point out from within
the text as it unfolds below, toward the nature of the spontaneous, embodied
understandings occurring in our conduct of our everyday practices, as they occur. As
Wittgenstein (1980, II) puts it: Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly,
is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our
concepts, and our reactions (no.629); and, it is to the nature of these pre-cognitive,
embodied, background responses and reactions, both to each other and to our surroundings,
that I want to draw attention - through some of the special methods (forms of talk)
Wittgenstein himself offers us mainly in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), but in his
other works also (Wittgenstein, 1969, 1980a,b, and c, 1981). [end 386]
Indeed, this is what I take to be so very special in Wittgensteins philosophy: That,
on the one hand (as he himself puts it, what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and
am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its
meaning (1980, p.16); but yet, on the other, he nonetheless shows us how, from within our
own talk entwined activities themselves, we can still come to a grasp of their nature, in
practice. We can do it through, or from within, our talk itself, even when a vision of it as a
whole, in theory, is denied us. And it is the character of his practice of clarifying our
practices in practice that I want to explore in this article.
Clarifying our practices in practice (not in theory): Wittgensteins methods
In so doing, I shall adopt what we might call a relational approach to these issues, an
approach common, I think, to both social constructionism and to Wittgensteins
investigations. It suggests that, instead of turning immediately to a study of how as
individuals we come to know the objects and entities in the world around us, we should
begin in a quite different way: by studying how, by interweaving our talk in with our other
actions and activities, we can first develop and sustain between ourselves variously many
ways of linking, relating, and connecting ourselves to each other, in what he calls our
different forms of life, with their associated language-games. And only then, should we turn
to a study of how we reach out from within these forms of life, so to speak, to make various
kinds of contact - some direct and some indirect - with our surroundings, through the
various ways of making sense of such contacts that our forms of life provide. In such an
approach as this, as I shall argue in this article, our studies should be focused, not on
individual people, nor on any abstract (eternalized) systems beyond or underlying our
socio-historical lives, but on what might be called, the momentary relational encounters, or
on successions of such momentary encounters, that occur on the boundaries between us and
our surroundings. And they should focus on the nature of the spontaneous, uninterpreted,
responsive, bodily reactions blindly called out within these marginal spheres or boundary
regions. Where, the reactions and responses in question should be treated, not as natural
or as in any way pre-linguistic, but simply as occurring prior to the establishing of any
particular language games between us, as constituting, in fact, the root or the origin of any
such games. We might call them Urphnomena, the proto-phenomenain terms of which one
plays a particular language-game (1953, no.654).
Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself
17
tte--tte (1980b, p.77). Their conversational, or dialogical, character, however, opens them up to us, too.
.And we could insert here, that he wants to give prominence to distinctions, and relations and
18
connections, which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook.
-45-
Taking this stance toward Wittgensteins own grammatical remarks that he is
concerned with clarifying a practice from within the practice itself we notice that whatever
he says (or does), he always talks of himself as [end 387] saying or doing it from within one
or another kind of ongoing activity, from within one or another kind of relationship with his
surroundings (that always include us as interlocutors) . Where, in simply bringing to our
17
attention what is before our eyes, so to speak, he wants to cure us of our will to explain, to
theorize, to cure us of our obsessions with nonexistent, mythical entities of our own
invention. We must attend to what we actually do do, in practice, to what our natural
reactions and responses are, in relation to the circumstances of our talk with the others
around us. Thus, in characterizing the nature of his own investigations into our talk
entwined activities, he suggests that they are not concerned to hunt out new facts; it is,
rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it.
We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem
in some sense not to understand, he remarks (1953, no.89). Thus, we may not advance any
kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do
away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place (1953, no.109), for our
studies must leave everything as it is (1953, no.124). It is way of looking at things (1953,
no.144) that must change; he wants to give prominence to distinctions which our ordinary
forms of language easily make us overlook (1953, no.132) . Thus his aim is not to attempt
18
to do better what other philosophies have failed to do; he is uninterested in constructing a
great, systematic account of human knowledge and understanding. His interest is in moving
us in some way, of changing our relationship to our surroundings, changing our sensibilities:
the things we notice and are sensitive to, the things we seek and desire, and so on. Hence,
his talk is never idle or free-floating, unrelated to a specific context; for that, as he sees it,
is when we get ourselves confused: confusions arise when language is like an engine idling,
not when it is doing work (1953, no.132). Indeed, when he is talking about a word, he is
continually asking himself (and us): is the word ever actually used in this way in the
language game which is its original home? - What we do is to bring words back from their
metaphysical use to their everyday use (1953, no.116).
This emphasis upon the situated uses of our everyday words, gives us a first clue to
Wittgensteins methods. For, although they are as many and as various as those we use in
life itself, many of them work in just the same way as our instructive or directive forms of
talk in everyday life work. For example, we point things out to people (Look at this!); give
them commands; remind them (Think what happened last time); change their perspective
(Look at it like this); and so on. All these instructive forms of talk direct or move us, in
practice, to do something we would not otherwise do: to relate ourselves to our
circumstances in a different way, to look them [end 388] over in a different manner.
Wittgenstein uses these forms, in drawing our attention to what is there, in the
circumstances of our talk, before our eyes, that we clearly use in our practices, but fail to
see in accounting for our practices. He calls his remarks, reminders: for, something that we
know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account
of it [cf. Augustine], is something we need to remind ourselves of (1953, no.89).
In fact, his methods, his reminder-remarks, seem to work as follows: i) They first
arrest or interrupt (or deconstruct) the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing
activity to give prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make
us overlook (1953, no.132). As instructive gestures, they provoke us into stopping to
consider a circumstance, to examine it to see whether there is more to it than we expected.
-46-
Then, ii) by the careful use of selected images, similes, or metaphors, he suggests to us new
ways of talking that can lend or give a first form to the newly sensed, previously unnoticed
distinctions, thus to make reflective contemplation of their nature possible. Then finally, iii)
by the use of various kinds of comparisons with other possible ways of talking (other
language games), he establishes an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order
with a particular end in view; one of many possible orders; not the order (1953, no.132)
thus to render the otherwise unnoticed distinctions in our activities and practices publicly
discussable and teachable. Thus, his kind of philosophy, simply puts everything before us,
and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view there is
nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us (1953, no.126).
Where, the kind of grasp of the workings of our language he wants, is of an immediate and
unproblematic kind: the clarity he aiming at is complete clarity. But this simply means that
the philosophical problems [troubling us] should completely disappear (1953, no.133). But
what is the nature of this urge for complete clarity? What does he mean by it? How could
it possibly be achieved?
In being confronted with such questions, we are often tempted to seek the hidden
mental states and processes (thought to be in our minds), supposedly responsible for us
doing what we do. Things will be clarified, once we know accurately what they are. Hence,
our explanatory theories. But for Wittgenstein, they are irrelevant: not because there is no
public way in which any theories of such supposed inner events could ever be checked for
their accuracy (which is true), but because he simply wants us to acknowledge or notice
something else altogether. For what matters publicly, is how people interweave, interrelate,
or interconnect what they say and do to their surrounding circumstances; and how the
practical [end 389] implications of what they say now are played out in the future. It is how
people react or respond, practically and bodily, both to each other and their circumstances
in practice, that is of importance to him, how they go on with each other. Thus, what some
inner thing is for us, our sense of it, can only be discovered from a study, not of how we talk
in reflecting upon it, but of how it necessarily shapes those of our everyday communicative
activities in which it is involved in practice. Where its influence is only revealed in the
grammatical structure of such activities: Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is
(1953, no.373). Where his grammatical remarks are aimed, not at accurately representing
the correspondence between our talk and our activities, but at drawing our attention to how
our talk is in fact interwoven, moment by moment, in with other of our activities. Or, to put
it another way: His remarks work by giving prominence to our moment by moment changing
sense of the relation between our talk and its circumstances, a sense that our ordinary
forms of language easily make us overlook.

But what is this kind of fleeting, continuously changing, embodied clarity like? And
what would it be like for us to be able to see the phenomena of importance to us, in this
kind of plain view? What does he mean here? He seems to have in mind the kind of direct,
unproblematic, spontaneous seeing we embody in our everyday, practical activities, in which
we see things, spontaneously and unthinkingly, in terms of the role or possible roles they
might play in our lives. Thus, with respect to the flow of our everyday, talk entwined
activities, rather than trying to discover the supposed component events underlying such
talk, i.e., what they truly are, he seeks another kind of understanding altogether, a certain
kind of immediate, unquestioned, clarity or perspicuity, a kind of embodied understanding
that consists in directly seeing connections (1953, no.122). Thus, in his kind of
investigations, rather than seeking to penetrate phenomena (1953, no.90), to find
something that lies beneath the surface (1953, no.92), he seeks something else much more
fundamental: he is seeking, I suggest, a special form of life, an inquiring or investigatory
form of life, within which we specifically direct ourselves toward drawing our own attention
to how we construct our own forms of life. And to do this, we need to seek the same kind
of direct, unproblematic, spontaneous, continually changing, embodied seeing (and acting)
within which all our everyday forms of life are grounded.
What is a telling ground for something is not anything I decide (1969, no.271).
19
My eyes tend to diverge naturally, so to speak, as soon as I cease to focus on the surface of the
20
paper. So I can see one of the merged views that way quite easily. A trick that works with most people to get
divergence, is to start with the page touching ones nose. Then, to try to get a view with each eye of the same
thing (in this case an X), and then to move the page away until a fused version of the thing (i.e., an X) comes
into clear focus. To get ones eyes to converge in front of the paper, a trick I use is to hold up a ball pen point
-47-
Coming to look over phenomena in new and unusual ways
To do this, we must find a new way or ways of surveying (of looking over) phenomena
before us that we have previously overlooked; we must [end 390] appreciate their
previously ignored or unnoticed relation to, or connection with, the rest of our lives. How
might this be possible? What exactly is it that we have to do, if we are to see what we have
previously failed to see? Before turning to discuss Wittgensteins investigations any further,
it will be useful to explore peoples attempts to see the 3-D virtual realities seemingly in
currently fashionable, single-picture, random-dot stereograms (see for example, Horibuchi,
1994). For such a phenomenon may help to provide something of a shared experiential
paradigm, in terms of which to see the point in some of Wittgensteins remarks, and their
connection with what I have called momentary relational encounters above. For, to see a
3-D reality in these displays, it is not a new way of thinking we have to learn; nor how to
interpret them. Being instructed in theories, principles, or laws, or being told of models of
what is supposedly hidden in them; or being told how to judge or consider them; or having
the processes involved in seeing them explained; all are of no help. Such information might
help to convince us (and to justify us arguing) that there is something there in particular
to be seen; but it will not help in us actually seeing it! For to see something in such displays,
as we shall find in practice below, involves us in developing a new way of looking, in which
what is seen, is seen in relation to a whole specific range of embodied reactions and
anticipatory responses. Yet, it is not something we can adopt deliberately, just because we
personally want to do it we come to find the relevant reactions and responses occurring
within us (or not, as the case may be) spontaneously.
Nothing less than a new form of life in relation to the printed page is involved; we
have to learn a new embodied skill. Yet, what is so exasperating and bewildering about it,
is that we cannot develop the skill required deliberately; the new way of looking required
must first occur blindly, so to speak, in certain, momentary relational encounters between
ourselves and our circumstances. And in being produced jointly, as a novel outcome of
nothing either wholly within ourselves or within our circumstances, but of our special
relations to our surroundings, we can often be surprised by their unexpected strangeness
the nature of the 3-D displays visible in autostereograms being a case in point. In coming
to such new ways of seeing, it is as if we must first just let our bodies react or respond to
the call of their new circumstances, thus to let them manifest to us the possibly new ways
in which we (as self-conscious individuals) might relate ourselves to what is before us; they
(our bodies) demonstrate possibilities to us that we might make use of as the grounds of
a language game .
19
To acquaint ourselves with such a phenomenon, let us begin quite practically:
Consider the two black Xs below:
1 2
X X
If we do not look at them directly, so to speak, but go cross-eyed - by relaxing our eye
muscles, and focusing on an appropriate point either in front of them (with eyes
converging), or behind them (with eyes diverging) - we can see the 1X seen with one eye,
20
in line with the Xs and look at that, while noticing that my vision of the Xs has doubled. Then to adjust the
position of the point while still fixating upon it, until you can notice the appearance of the three-Xs display in
the background. Now gradually transfer your interest, so to speak, to the middle, fused X.
The two-picture random-dot stereogram was developed in 1959 by Bela Julesz (Julesz, 1971). A
21
matrix of small black and white squares in equal numbers but in random distribution is first generated - call it
the left field. The right field is then formed by shifting a central region (a square region, say) a few dots to the
left. This region will then be seen as standing out from the background when both fields are viewed by
divergence (and in from the background, by convergence).
-48-
superimposed on the 2X seen with the other eye. When this occurs, we can still see both
1X and 2X, but in the middle, a third (virtual) fused or merged 1&2X appears in quite a
different plane of depth to the other two Xs. Try to focus upon the middle X. If it is seen by
convergence, then it is sensed as seemingly further from us, and if by divergence, then as
seemingly nearer to us. To use the terms introduced by Polanyi (1958, 1967) in his
discussions of tacit or bodily knowing, we are attending from the separate views of 1 and
2, in attending to a fused version of 1&2 of which, he says, we have a focal awareness. In
such a process, he claims, it is our subsidiary awareness of the particular workings of our
eye muscles (in and around the eye), and other imponderable factors, contribute to our
sense of the focal, fused Xs distance from us. Indeed, the fused 1&2X image, once it
becomes focal, can be seen as quite sharp, while the separate 1X and 2X images, in
subsidiary view, are more vague and noticed only peripherally. Indeed, it is worth spending
a few moments, even on this simply display, exploring its phenomenology - the ability to
see the displays in autostereograms is built on this basic ability.
In a second, intermediate move toward that skill, we can now play with the two-picture
random-dot stereogram above in the same way. As in the previous display, a third, fused,
21
1&2 version of the whole display will appear. In divergence, it will appear as standing out
toward you from the page, with a smaller central square within it, as even closer; while in
convergence, the whole display will appear as if behind the page, with the smaller central
square even further away. But where is such a square to be located? For there is no sense
in either of the two fields, separately, of the contours of any object being present in them
at all, let alone a square as such - the dots are after all quite random. What we see here is
something that inheres in what Wittgenstein (1953) calls an internal relation between the
two 1X and 2X squares. Again, try to focus on the fused version, for it is worth exploring
this display for some time in making oneself aware of its many features.
And even at this preliminary stage in our explorations here, it is worth pointing
toward the already very strange nature of the events occurring in these encounters, and how
they relate to Wittgensteins overall project. For, although we can imagine the sameness of
Indeed, as we shall find below, it is an important result of his method of investigation (making
22
comparisons, using metaphors, confronting us with bersichtlichen Darstellungen) that it produces just that
understanding which consists in seeing connections (1953, no.122).
-49-
the two dot patterns above being [end 392] detected, upon them being merged together,
why do their differences (in the central region) not just give rise still to a 2-D region, but
of an uncoordinated or chaotic kind? Why are the dots in the central region coordinated also,
but now... as a region at a different distance away from us, in a seeming three dimensional
space? Indeed, as Wittgenstein remarks about 3-D vision in general, it is anything but a
matter of course that we see three-dimensionally with two eyes. If the two visual images
are amalgamated, we might expect a blurred one as a result (1953, p.213e). But that is not
what happens. Instead of the different views to the two eyes resulting simply in a vague and
indistinct 2-D image, our subsidiary awarenesses of the differences and samenesses
between them, is constituted spontaneously and bodily, as a focal sense of a 3-D scene
(seemingly seen even more sharply that the separate 2-D displays). However, our
development of this special way of looking over or surveying the relations between the
elements in such displays, and interconnecting them or rearranging them in such a way, so
as to see them as having a three dimensional quality, is something our body happens to do
for us, so to speak: It is what might be called a proto-phenomenon (1953, no.654),
something in itself groundless that just happens to be there, like our life (1969, no.559).
It is unique, practical, just happening, ungrounded meanings such as these, that he thinks
of as the crucial grounds, or originary moments, for our language games.
But how should we talk of the special kind of seeing involved here? In surveying such
circumstances as those above (and many others), Wittgenstein straightaway points out that
we use the word see in two quite different ways: The one: What do you see there? - I see
this (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: I see a likeness between these
two faces - let [end 393] the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself
(1953, p.193e), where in the latter, due to ones particular way of looking, one sees
likenesses, relations, or connections in a circumstance not seen by others. We might call the
former kind of seeing, representational-seeing, while this latter form of seeing - half visual
experience, half thought (1953, p.197e), that we can to an extent be talked into or trained
in - he calls aspect-seeing, and I shall call practical relational-seeing. It is this kind of seeing
in which we can see a circumstance differently even though the total perception remains
unchanged, that is important for us . For what changes in aspect-seeing or
22
relational-seeing, when we see a circumstance differently, are the subtle reactions and
anticipatory responses of a practical kind, the gestures, in terms of which we relate
ourselves bodily to our surroundings. The relational-meaning of what we see is, thus, always
unfinalized and incomplete, in always pointing toward further possibilities in the
circumstances.
Thus, for me, when I say such a thing, it gives others a basis for judging what things are like for
23
me: ... This is how I act... My judgments themselves characterize the way I judge, characterize the nature of
judgment (1969, nos. 148, 149).
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What is special in relational-seeing, then, is that in each case it involves a particular
orchestration of acting (looking, attending), perceiving, responding, and thinking; it is a way
of seeing into which has been interwoven a whole complex of linguistically shaped
spontaneous, living responses to the situation in question; we thus see it as a situation of
a certain kind. For instance: In viewing the famous faces-vase figure, looking with a
vase-way-of-looking, we expect to look down to a possible base, up to a possible rim, with
a possible stem in the middle; similarly, with a faces-way-of-looking, we expect to look
down from a possible forehead region, to a possible eye region, to a possible nose region,
and so on. It is against the background of such structure of expectations, that we might
want to say that The drawing youve given me is nearly like the faces-vase figure, but this
middle region here is too featureless for me to see any proper faces in it - for such
structures of expectation provide us with the standards, so to speak, against which we judge
what we see ; they are the Ur- or proto-phenomena in terms of which we can make sense
23
of our circumstances. Indeed, without the ability always to see such immediate connections
and relations in a circumstance, if we were what he calls aspect-blind (1953, pp.213-4),
then, although we might still learn already established, conventional meanings, we should
not be able to respond in our own unique ways to the meaning of what for us, were our own
unique circumstances.
To return, then, to the task of coming to embody (we can now say) a new way of
seeing - thus to elaborate further a shared experiential basis in terms of which to make
sense of Wittgensteins remarks about the momentary, [end 394] relational origins of
language games - we can introduce a further figure: The stereogram below (Fig.2), can be
seen by first merging the 1X and the 2X as before, and while focused upon the fused 1&2X,
slowly transferring ones interest to the random-dot display below: Diverging, one can see
a cross-shaped, conical hole going into the page; converging, it will come out of the page.
It is constituted on thirteen (!) different planes of depth (notice also, how its definition
become sharper in 3-D!).
Without going into the theory of such displays in any great detail, it is worth
Either in front of or behind the printed page, according to whether one is converging or diverging.
24
Sure evidence is what we accept as sure, it is evidence that we go by in acting surely, acting
25
without any doubt (1969, no.196).
-51-
appreciating the complexity of the activity involved here: For their nature is such that to
achieve a common, overlaid focal point - as in the 1&2X example, but now in whatever
direction one might look as one scans over the page - the sight lines of ones two eyes must
be continually crossing at different distances in front of one . It is this moment by moment
24
changing sense of where that common point of overlay lies, continually sensed from within
our active involvement with the display, that creates the impression within us of looking out
over a 3-D scene. For, just as one does not see an actual 3-D scene all at once, but must
survey and integrate its features over a period of time, in a secession of momentary
encounters, so also one does not see what is exhibited in an autostereogram all at once
either - ones perception of it takes time to develop or dawn, so to speak (1953, p.194e).
Indeed, it is only after one has learnt how to look over such displays in a certain way, i.e.,
as possible 3-D spatial orders, and can sustain that way of looking while surveying the [end
395] whole scene, that one can one begin to discern the patterns or entities they present
to us directly and instantly. Indeed, from within a now embodied way of looking, a fully
embodied structure of anticipations and expectations, we can come to come to survey or
look over such displays with a sense of the whole scene as being all there before one.
But why is it a sense of only an apparent 3-D reality? Why does it still only have an
as if quality to it? Because, although we can go out to meet our visual environment, so to
speak, with some of the appropriate kinds of anticipatory responses - like being ready to
adjust ones focus and convergence as the distance away of a 3-D feature changes - we
cannot satisfy other of the more usual expectations we have in a real three-dimensional
space. As Wittgenstein remarks: an inner process stands in need of outward criteria (1953,
no.580). So although we may have the visual impression of a 3-D reality, that in itself is
not enough; we expect, for instance, to be able to reach out to touch the objects it contains
also! Indeed, although we cannot always specify such criteria ahead of time i.e., other
internal relations between otherwise disparate events in our particular ongoing
circumstances it is always possible from within a form of life (actual or imagined) to be
(fairly) sure of the moment by moment criteria in terms of which we claim our perceptions
as veridical even if the evidence is of an imponderable (1953, p.228) kind.
This is what Wittgenstein wants to bring to our attention: That we function in this
complex manner, in a way crucially related to the circumstances or surroundings in which
our activities occur, spontaneously, unselfconsciously, without effort or deliberation; that
is so doing, we form mysterious internal relations between otherwise unconnected events
occurring within them; that theses Ur-phenomena form an order of possibilities in terms of
whcih we understand the actualities around us; and that we fail to grasp this fact when we
come to reflect on the nature of our own practical activities or practices. When we view a
circumstance from with a particular relation to it, we do so from within a whole background
set of embodied, unthinking anticipations and expectations as to what its yet unencountered
aspects might be like. And we show (and experience) the nature of these embodied
anticipation in our reactions (and feelings) of surprise or oddness when our expectations are
dashed . It is in our own spontaneous reactions and expectations - both in our tactile,
25
auditory, and visual, etc., responses to our physical surroundings, and in our verbal and
linguistic responses to our social surroundings - in our momentary relational encounters with
our surroundings, that we show ourselves the nature of our relations to them. It is these
activities, these compulsive, involuntary, spontaneous, and very subtle embodied responses
and reactions, that we shall explore further below. These are what lie open to view in our
relational encounters with each other (and the rest of our circumstances), if only could see
them - or at least, so Wittgenstein claims.
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Seeing Wittgensteins Relational World Relationally
Just as we found a way of looking over the myriad random-dots making up an auto
stereogram display to see a surprising order of internal relations in it, something like a 3-D
visual scene, so we also need a way of surveying the myriad relational encounters making
up the bustle or hurly-burly of our everyday lives. For we want to see there too, connections
and relations between momentary events in our lives that so far are without meaning for
us, that we do not at present understand. We want a synopsis of trivialities that allows us
to see relationally what we have not seen before. So, in the light of our momentary
relational encounters with the 3-D virtual realities in random-dot stereograms, and their
capacity to call out new forms of relational-seeing from us, let us now turn to a further
consideration of Wittgensteins remarks about language-games and their origins: First, it
is worth pointing out that he suggests that, what makes it difficult for beginners to see what
he is getting at in them, is what he calls the craving for generality (1965: 17), as well as,
the contemptuous attitude [they often have] towards the particular case (1965: 18) two
attitudes that we come to embody in being trained into our current forms of scholarly life.
Encountering his remarks, we still tend not to respond to them with the appropriate,
embodied reactions and expectations; we still do not know how to apply them to or in our
scholarly practices; we do not know how to embody them in our lives; we still do not see
their point; , we dont quite know what he is telling us about how language works. Due to
the influence of science in our training, we are still often tempted into thinking that, if we
are to understand how language works, we must discover a hidden order underlying or
behind a seemingly chaotic array of observable linguistic phenomena, and must account for
its existence in terms of explanatory theories. We still feel compelled to seek something that
lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the
thing, and which analysis digs out (1953, no.92). Thus often, we still look at what he has
to say in terms of the pictures or models it provides. And finding them often trivial and
unexplanatory, we fail to see the point of his remarks. In other words, trained primarily in
representational-seeing or looking, we fail to be sensitive to the possibility of
relational-seeing or looking.
Indeed, academically, we often act like those who have not yet experienced the
sudden Oh, wow! reaction of actually seeing 3-D random-dot [end 397] stereograms. For
those lacking the actual experience can still be tempted into accepting that a theory (or a
model, or a 2-D perspective drawing, say) of what such displays contain will help them.
They might even to tempted to go so far as to claim that, on the basis of all kinds of data
analyses and calculations upon the distribution of the dots in the display, they can in fact
prove that they correctly knew what is hidden in the dots. And they might be tempted to
leave the matter there - except, perhaps, to claim that other objects could be found in the
distribution of the dots also - without feeling driven to seek the experience itself. Yet once
one has seen a 3-D scene in such a display, everything changes. Confronted with new
displays, we are no longer content with such indirect, theoretical indications as to what they
might contain; we feel new urge or compulsion to see them all directly, in the same way;
and we are not content until we can. And once we can, we feel a sureness about it; that that
(the convergence or the divergence version) is what the display contains; it is not a matter
of contestable interpretation.
Why? Because we feel that there is something special about this kind of embodied
seeing. There is something real in it for people like us, with bodies like ours, for people who
can reach out in certain ways to grasp things, move in order to get things further away, or
turn to avoid walking into things, and so on; such a kind of understanding is relevant to
people who can do things in the world. It is to do with us knowing different ways of how to
orient and relate ourselves to the world, with knowing practically how to go on within it -
not only physically, as we shall see, but with the other people around us too. And a similar
compulsive desire can be generated, I want to suggest, on grasping the revolutionary nature
I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their
26
way around (1980, p.56).
Indeed, as he sees it, communication in the sense of message-sending is not in fact basic to us
27
being human: Not: without language we could not communicate with one another - but for sure: without
language we cannot influence other people in such-and-such ways; cannot build roads and machines, etc. And
also: without the use of speech and writing people could not communicate (1953, no.491).
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of Wittgenstein s whole project. Once we have grasped its essentially existential nature, we
can become no longer content with arguing about theories and interpretations. We begin to
wonder if it is possible to change our practices such that we can come to see what he claims
is there, in plain view, for us all to see too.
A Hermeneutic: Now I Can Go on
If we are to understand Wittgensteins remarks, what is the structure of expectations
and relations appropriate to seeing what he sees, to seeing those aspects of our lives that
usually pass us by, that we must come to embody? What is the reality he claims lies before
us, open to view? What is the nature of Wittgensteins world, so to speak? Well, whatever
it is, to repeat, it is not something intrinsically hidden from us, but something at work
everywhere in the daily bustle ( 1980c, II, nos. 625,626) of life around us. And if we are to
see its nature, like coming to see the virtual realities in autostereograms, we need a simple,
initial way of entering into the seeing of what he means here. However, because the reality
in question here is not [end 398] merely a 3-D spatial reality in which a spatial shape is in
question, but a practical-social one (that has a whole temporal and/or historical dimension
as well) to do with meanings, we need a hermeneutic through which to read him, a unitary
vision of a human form of life that will allow us to place a whole set of fragmentary parts
within an orderly whole.
That hermeneutic, I claim, can be found in such remarks as the following: Try not
to think of understanding as a mental process at all. -For that is the expression which
confuses you. But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we
say, Now I know how to go on. .. (1953, no.154). Or: A philosophical problem has the form:
I dont know my way about (1953, no.123); or, it is the circumstances under which he had
such an experience that justify him in saying in such a case that he understands, that he
knows how to go on, (1953, no.155). Indeed, in practice, understanding is like knowing how
to go on, and so is an ability: but I understand, like I can go on is an utterance, a signal
(1980c, I, no. 875). In other words, as he sees it, it is as if we are often lost in an immense
landscape (perhaps with hills and valleys, cities and villages, and so on), immersed in a fog,
trying to find landmarks, attempting to get our bearings, thus to continue with our
movements and motions over it and within it - whatever they may be . Thus, in adopting
26
this image, I shall assume that in his investigations, he is not primarily concerned with
cognitive events within our heads, with us doing anything intellectual. Nor is he concerned
with us necessarily understanding each other, nor with us sharing agreements, nor with us
necessarily communicating with each other (in the sense of sending any immaterial ideas
or concepts from the mind of one person into that of another, by the use of material signs
such as vibrations in the air or ink- marks on paper), nor with us necessarily discovering the
true nature of our surrounding circumstances. In fact, he seems unconcerned with us doing
anything in particular at all, let alone anything that is seemingly basic to us being human.
27
For, from within our spontaneous ways of going on with each other in a sensibly followable
way, we can achieve all the other things we think of as being important to us. Given the
possibility of us being able to go on in certain ways with each other, our other capacities-to
communicate (send messages), to fully understand each other, to routinely and skillfully
discourse upon a subject matter, even the constructing of theories in terms of which we
claim to be able to explain the nature of the things around us, and to establish the truth of
things -such abilities as these are (or can be) much later developments.
Even in the Tractatus ( 1988 [1922]), he is convinced that there is no order of things a priori (T:
28
5.634); that at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of
nature are the explanations of natural phenomena (T: 6.371 ). And in the Investigations, while he is
concerned to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in
view; one out of many possible orders; not the order (PI: no. 132) because there is no such single order to
be had. Whatever orders there are, are orders that we ourselves make.
This is, of course, our commitment to foundationalism.
29
-54-
In other words, rather than researching into all the complicated intellectual things
we can do as individuals, he suggests that we should begin all our studies by focusing on
those moments in which all of our activities, we simply [end 399] go on with each other in
a spontaneous, unthinking, unproblematic fashion (1953, nos. 146-155). As academics, as
scientifically inclined intellectuals, we are used to thinking that pictures, that inner mental
representations, underlie all our thinking, and that such pictures must constitute the basis
for all our activities. But what is crucial for him, is simply the character of reacting and
responding bodily in ways that make the continuation of our relationships with each other
possible. Thus, rather than with describing pre- vailing actualities, his investigations are
directed towards the possibilities of phenomena (1953, no.90), that is, toward grasping the
nature of the connections and relations that our actions and utterances point to or gesture
toward beyond themselves. Particular actualities can be established later, through a set of
testings and checkings, etc., which again will involve us in going on with each other
appropriately. Indeed, particular language games are of interest to him only in relation to
their particular uses. For, we can invent forms of life and language-games that later we
abandon, forms we no longer feel to be right for us: new types of language ...come into
existence, others become obsolete and get forgotten (1953, no.23). Where again, it is our
simply being able to go on with each other, as embodied beings, that makes this possible.
Thus ultimately, all our problems must find their solution in us again being able to go on
with our activities in an unproblematic, unthinking way, with us again being able to relate
ourselves directly to our surroundings, and to find a grounding or rooting for our actions in
a way of living out our lives. But how do we do this, how do we in fact develop or socially
construct ways of going on between us that we can trust, that we can rely on?
We do not seem to do it (nor do we need to do it) by discovering any already existing
but hidden laws of social relation to which we must submit ourselves; for no such laws seem
to exist. How we do it, must somehow be up to us. There must be something in a form of
28
life that stands fast for us: the particular proto-phenomenon (1953, no.654) constituting the
basis, the originary moment, for its language-game. It is that in which we can ground our
talk. It must be something we can point toward or show in our talk within it. But how?
Going On. Blindly: Momentary Practical Meanings in Momentary Relational Encounters
In attempting to characterize the nature of the spontaneous, unthinking compulsions we feel
to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, we can study what Wittgenstein has to say
about us following rules: In this, we can begin by noting that he is not at all interested in
rules formulated as abstract principles, those that we have to think how to apply- to think
one is obeying a [end 400] rule is not to obey a rule (1953, no.202), at least, not in the
sense of obey in which Wittgenstein is interested. The rules of interest to him are those at
work in us, tending to shape our conduct whether we like it or not. Indeed, he is continually
concerned with what, within a particular circumstance, we feel we must say, or are inclined,
or have a temptation, an impulse, compulsion, or an urge to say. However, used to thinking
of rules as something written down somewhere, like premises that we must make a wilful
and intellectual effort to apply, to follow, or to implement, we find his talk of rules not easy
to follow. Indeed, if we begin with some of our more orderly, established or
29
institutionalized activities, it may seem as if we are (or could be) following general rules of
a fixed kind, like premises existing prior to the practice: in these activities, it is as if such
These are, in fact, activities of great complexity. Helen Keller somewhere talks of being able to
30
recognize a person (remember that she was both blind and deaf) from their hand-shake up to two years after
first meeting them. This is amazing!
Elsewhere, I have called such activity joint action (Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993).
31
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rules cause or determine the particular activities making up the practice. However, if we
consider some of the joint, everyday activities we just do spontaneously, without any prior
deliberation, problem-solving, interpretation, or other inner intellectual working out -
seemingly simply activities like hand-shaking or dancing or negotiating other peoples
30
movements upon side-walks or at door-ways; playing ball and racquet games; or, how we
manoeuver furniture with the help of others, for instance- there are clearly no such fixed,
prior, external rules, nor could there ever be.
Yet, nonetheless, although changing moment by moment, in such activities as these,
there is a clear sense of rightness of it, a clear sense of sometimes getting it wrong, and
of us as sometimes ending up embarrassed and having to apologize. So, although we may
talk of ourselves in some of our practices as if we are following clear, fixed, and general
rules, what in fact influences us in our practices, Wittgenstein points out, often seems to go
way beyond them. Indeed, in discussing the moment by moment execution of a particular
activity in a particular circumstance, he asks: But how can a rule show me what I have to
do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule - That is
not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with
what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not
determine meaning (1953, no. 198); ...there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an
interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call obeying the rule, and going against it
in actual cases ( 1953, no.201). In these kinds of joint, momentary relational encounters,
there is a changing, moment-by-moment sense of getting it right, a sensing of differences
and discrepancies that flows out of and accords with the situation in which the activity
occurs. So, although participants respond to each other in a fitting manner in such
situations, to the extent that they influence each others actions in a moment-by-moment
fashion, the situation, [end 401] between them is intrinsically unpredictable and
indeterminate; none of the participants contain within themselves an explicit grasp of its
nature.
Thus, in these kinds of spontaneous social activities , where what we do is shaped
31
just as much by the social context into which we must fit our actions, as any inner plans or
desires from out of which we act, it is as if it -the situation -is a third agency that calls out
reactions, spontaneously, from us. Hence Wittgensteins remark that, on those occasions
when someone has failed to grasp a rule, and you repeat it to them by saying, But dont
you see. ..?, the fact is the rule is no use, it is what is explained, not what does the
explaining (1981, no.302). For their failure to grasp what to do is a practical failure, a
failure to react or respond to the circumstances in the right kind of way. Hence also, his
remark that: Giving grounds, ...justifying the evidence, comes to an end; -but the end is
not in certain propositions striking us as immediately as true. i.e., it is not a kind of seeing
on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game (1969, no. 204).
Ultimately, just spontaneously being able to act in a certain way is what justifies our claim
to understanding; there can be no question of justifying ones understanding of a
language-game, if one can play ones part in it, one understands it.
Thus, obeying rules in Wittgensteins sense is, strangely, what we might call a
pre-intellectual rather than an intellectual matter. For, following the requirements, so to
speak, of the circumstances or situation (actual or imagined) in which one is involved, is
simply to react in certain ways, bodily and spontaneously, to do what it calls out from one.
It is not something one chooses to do, but something one finds oneself doing as the kind
Monk ( 1990, pp.301-304) points out that Wittgensteins urge to replace theory with a synopsis of
32
trivialities, is in the same tradition as Goethes Die Metamorphose der Pflanze and Spenglers Decline of the
West. All of them want to capture the nature of living forms: the problem is solved by the constitution of a
synoptic presentation, of a perspicuous representation (see note 7), in which something already lying open to
view, becomes surveyable by a rearrangement (1953, no.92).
-56-
of embodied being one is. So: When I obey a rule, he says, 1 do not choose. I obey blindly,
(1953, no.219). Thus, if I am asked, How am I to obey a rule? -if this is not a question
about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule the way I do. If I
have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I
am inclined to say: This is simply what I do ( 1953, no.217). In other words, we act as we
do because it is implicit in the kind of people we are or have become; it is or has become
embodied in the character of our being in the world. Where, it is not through simply being
told things that we have become like this, but through the doings we have done as a result
of such tellings - themselves the result of our already existing social practices. Hence his
claim that, as he sees it, obeying a rule is a practice (1953, no.202). If I must give reasons
for why I act as I do, ...my reasons will soon give out. And I shall then act, without reasons
(1953, no.211). In other words, there is something at work shaping our actions in such
circumstances not in us as individuals, but, as it were, centered in the space between us and
our circumstances. Where, it [end 402] could be said, that it is something in that space that
calls a reaction out from us, i.e., the internal relations we constitute between us within it.
Conclusions
At this point, it is perhaps worth repeating the remark with which we started - that in
Wittgensteins view the origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction;
only from this can more complicated forms develop ( 1980b: 31) - but now, to emphasize
four facts: 1) That all the reactions in question are unthinking, blind reactions; 2) that by
their very nature, they relate and connect us both to each other and our surroundings; 3)
that the formative influences shaping them are not wholly in any of us as individuals, but
are located in the momentary relational encounters between us and our circumstances; and
4) that all that we in fact do as individuals, we do against the usually unnoticed background
of these relational reactions. Thus, with respect to the seeing of the fused 1 and 2X
discussed above (in which we experienced what we saw as either above or below the plane
of the paper), we can now say that we saw it in this way against, or in relation to, the
background of our usual, everyday ways of seeing in the world. And it is in this way that the
aspect-seeing, or, the practical relational-seeing involved, is something that we can to an
extent be talked into or trained in. For it consists in a contrived way of calling out a
sequence of reactions from us, of putting into an arrangement a set of reactions already
spontaneously available to us. In a similar fashion, our thoughts and actions take place,
32
neither simply within our heads, nor out in their circumstances as an inert container, but
also centered in the space between them and their circumstances. Hence his remark that
thought is surrounded by a halo (1953, no.97); at each moment, it presents an order of
possibilities, seemingly common both to world and thought, an order of what else in the
circumstances ought to be, i.e., of links and connections with, say, the past, the future,
other things, events, people, and so on. It is within such circumstances as these -in our
momentary relational encounters-that I think Wittgensteins notion of what it means to obey
and to understand a rule can be grasped.
What Wittgenstein brings to our attention, then, is the relational character, the
extent, and the influence of the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted background activities
constituting the everyday lives we live as non-intellectualizing, non-deliberating, embodied
beings - the things we just do because of the forms of social life within which we have grown
-57-
up. We easily tend to forget both these background activities -the important accompanying
phenomena of talking ( 1953: 218) -and the different structures of feeling, or the
sensibilities, woven into our different language games with their asso-[end 403]iated forms
of life, and how they both shape our spontaneous, embodied ways of responding to each
other. We tend to think of ourselves as doing all these things naturally, while, to outsiders,
they seem uniquely historical and cultural. They are all so momentary and fleeting, so
intricate and elaborate, so spontaneous and immediate, that we find it difficult to attend to
them. But in Wittgenstein s view, it is precisely the extent and complexity of our embodied
reactions to each other and our surroundings, that distinguishes us from other living
creatures, not our ability to have inner mental representations - language is a refinement
of more primitive reactions. Indeed, one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the
language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense (1953, no.257).
Thus, in wanting us to look into the workings of our language, and that in such a way
as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them (1953,
no.109), what he wants us to see, I have suggested above, is the immense complexity of
the spontaneous, momentary bodily reactions and responses, in tenns of which all that
stage-setting is done. For without it, none of our social practices, both everyday and
academic, would work. How we in fact do this stage-setting is always in some sense -a
practical sense- in plain view to us. Yet it is this that intellectually and academically we have
so far failed to notice. This is why I think Wittgenstein s work here is, to repeat, utterly
revolutionary. For: i) it not only orients us toward an entirely new task; ii) it also introduces
to us an entirely new set of methods relevant to its pursuit; and iii) it also opens up a
strange new, creative space, a relational-space in which we can originate new forms of life,
new living connections and relations between aspects of our lives not before noticed.
In an article of this length, it is impossible to range over the immense landscape (1980b:
56) he brings to our awareness (but not wholly into view) in his work. We can never picture
it as an integrated whole. Indeed, his aim is to cure us of wanting what we cannot have: for
we can never see all our own possibilities ahead of time. But, we can explore the specific
nature of the circumstances in which it is possible for us, simply and sensibly to follow or
to grasp the tendencies in each others conduct now available to us. We can bring to our
awareness the tendencies we show each other in our activities, those that enable us to go
on with each other in the spontaneous, unreflective ways we do in our current daily affairs.
Correspondingly, he is also concerned to seek ways of talking in which we can avoid
misleading each other (and ourselves) into confusion. He wants to avoid ways of talking
about how we understand talk, that - because they forget their circumstances, because they
fail to exhibit any clear connections with their surroundings - lead us into
misunderstandings, or into inventing mythologies or empty [end 404] theories. For we far
too easily forget (especially as academics) the original relation of our talk to its background
circumstances; we forget its use or uses; we forget its original home, so to speak; we often
confuse ourselves in making sense of it by placing it in a new home, in a theoretical
framework , of our own devising. The import of Wittgensteins focus on our practical,
embodied goings on, however, is that our investigations can never come to an end in us
achieving such a framework, in us as individuals finally seeing something as true. They can
only in fact come to an end in us all as a social group coming to do something new, in us
all devising between us a new practice, one that at least to an extent overcomes some of
the dissatisfactions of the old.
In C.W. Tolman, F. Cherry, R. van Hezewijk, and I. Lubek (Eds.) Problems of Theoretical
33
Psychology. York, Ontario: Captus Press, 1997.
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-Chapter Five-
Wittgenstein in Practice:
from 'the way of theory' to a 'social poetics'
33
I
W
ittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and other of his later works offer us
individualistic and scientistic moderns - obsessed with knowledge and with information
- something radically new: a renewed sense of our connectedness and relatedness, both
with each other, and with our larger surroundings. They are not, however, easy to read or
to understand. They are written as a sequence of numbered remarks, not always apparently
connected with each other. They point or gesture toward ends that are somewhat alien to
our current preoccupations. In fact, they are written in terms of 'striking similes' and
'arresting moments'; they have a 'poetic' quality; their function is to change our "way of
looking at things" (1953, no.144), that is, their function, I shall argue, is ontological not
epistemological: Their aim is not to attempt to do better what other philosophies have failed
to do, but to do something else entirely: to change us in our being, in our sensibilities, in
the things we notice and are sensitive to, the things we seek and desire, and so on.
Thus, these works are important to us, in that they suggest a very different kind of
focus for our studies than that assumed in the traditional epistemology project: i) instead
of studying the inner dynamics of the individual psyche; or, ii) the supposedly already
existing laws or principles of an assumed external world; iii) the central methodological
assumption of both social constructionism and Wittgenstein's works, is that we should study
the continuous, contingent flow of language intertwined interaction between people. For, it
is in the continuously changing 'spaces' between people that everything of importance to
us our studies should be seen as happening. Where, what is of importance to us there,
should be seen, not in terms of pictures or representations, but in more practical terms: that
is, in terms of the momentary reactions and responses, the momentary relations, the
possible links or connections people continuously create both between themselves and other
people, and other features and aspects of their surroundings. For, it is in these disorderly,
everyday, background, conversational activities - in what elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a and
b) I have called our self-other relationships - that we create between ourselves, dialogically,
certain, particular person-world relations; that is, we create within these activities, different
particular ways of being, in relation to our surroundings. Or, to put it another way (using
the terminology made available to us in Gibson's (1979) ecological approach to perception),
we 'make available to', or 'afford' ourselves certain ways of being-in-relation-to, or, of
being-with, what is around us. Thus, what I want to explore below, is not so much what
objectively these different relations 'are', but their related subjectivities: the different ways
of being-in-relation-to our surroundings our dialogues make available to us - where, as I
have already pointed out, such an exploration is an ontological rather than epistemological
issue (Shotter, 1984).
Currently, however, we are still in the thrall of the epistemology project in which, not
only do we take the ontological nature of our own self-centered, self-contained,
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individualistic subjectivity for granted as fixed, but we also take our language, our speaking,
as having only a representational-referential function. As a result, we still treat our ordinary
everyday, creative use of language - what we do continuously and spontaneously in our
daily practical affairs - as an utter mystery, quite unamenable to any kind of rational study
known to us. The idea that we make different ways of being ourselves to ourselves available
to ourselves in our dialogues, is inaccessible to us. Thus Chomsky (1975), for instance,
claims that: "What I have called elsewhere 'the creative aspect of language use' remains as
much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context
of the problem of 'other minds'. Some would reject this evaluation of the state of our
understanding. I do not propose to argue the point here, but rather to turn to the problems
that do seem to me to be amenable to rational inquiry" (pp.138-139) - and we all too easily
all follow suit. And we come to treat as utterly problematic something that our everyday
activities ought to convince us is not problematic at all (Hacker and Baker, 1984). For, in
our everyday practical lives together, we (almost) all have no difficulty in learning to use
language in the ways required to continuously create the links and relations making up our
practical lives together.
How do we do it? Do we really have to wait for something - like, but better than
Chomsky's explanatory analyses - that will finally explain us how to do what we already
have little trouble in doing? Aren't we missing something here? As Wittgenstein (McGuiness,
1979) said about his arguments with G.E. Moore: "Can only logical analysis explain what
we mean by the propositions of ordinary language? Moore is inclined to think so. Are people
therefore ignorant of what they mean when they say 'Today the sky is clearer than
yesterday?' Do we have to wait for logical analysis here? What a hellish idea!" (p.120). Of
course we must be able to understand such propositions in practice without knowing their
supposedly proper logical analysis. So: Is there must be another sense in which we can be
said to understand them? And if there is, in what other terms might we articulate the kind
of knowledge involved?
II
At this juncture, it is worth pointing out that our sense of ourselves as self-centered, self-
contained, individualistic subjectivities - the Cartesian paradigm of the self - although not
actually taught us, is implicit in most of what is actually taught is in our academic
disciplines. In Wittgenstein's (1922, 1953) terms, although not 'said, we 'show' it (the
Cartesian paradigm) to ourselves in most of our disciplinary sayings and doings. And
furthermore, if we are not careful, although we might talk very skillfully about our
subjectivities relationally, it is only to easy for us still to do so in ways 'in-formed' by the
self-same Cartesian paradigm as before. For, to understand and argue for a concept
intellectually, is not equivalent to us 'dwelling in' (Polyani, 1967), or 'living out', the
differences and distinctions involved in its practical application. If we are to switch not just
the focus of our studies - from what is 'in' or 'outside' people, to what is 'between' them -
but also to begin to think and to act dialogically and relationally in our practices, then a
new, relational paradigm must come to inform our basic ways of knowing and acting,
practically. Thus, instead of, as in the past, turning immediately to a study of how
individuals come to know the objects and entities in the world around them, we should now,
perhaps, attempt to bear a quite different paradigm in mind - one much more to do with the
relations between people - and to studying how to play it our in practice. We should focus
on how, by interweaving our talk in with the other activities between us, we first develop
and sustain different, particular ways of relating ourselves to each other - that is, we should
first study our constructing of what Wittgenstein calls our different forms of life with their
associated language games. And only after that, once we properly understand the nature
of these relational forms, should we then turn to the study of how we can 'reach out' from
within them, so to speak, to make various kinds of contact - some direct, some indirect -
with our surroundings through the various ways of making sense of such contacts, the
resources our forms of life provide.
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In this relational paradigm, among the first things we come to recognize, is the way in which
other people 'move' in relation to us, whether they are friendly or hostile, strange or
familiar, inviting us to act in certain ways or obstructing, or silencing us; later, we come to
sense, when someone asks us a question, what kind of utterance would be answer to it, and
so on, relating ourselves to them and to our surroundings in certain subtle and nuanced
ways in the process. Indeed, in simply learning just to be this, that or some other kind of
person in our own culture, in learning to live as if in an "immense landscape" (as
Wittgenstein, 1980, p.56), puts it), we acquire certain sets of sensibilities. Indeed, 'shown'
in what we say or do, are certain different ways of sensing differences and distinctions in
our surroundings, certain ways of being-with, or of relating-to, them - where the switch
from one way of being-with to another, is a switch of possibilities in relation both to the
others around us, and to the rest of our surroundings. Hence the complexity of the fluid,
complex, continuously changing landscape of everyday life... that, in fact, is perhaps best
thought of as a seascape requiring navigational skills!
This new dialogical or relational paradigm puts the primary emphasis on our knowing
of other people, where, as Lorraine Code (1991) suggests, "it is surely no more preposterous
to argue that people should try to know physical objects in the nuanced way that they know
their friends than it is to argue that they should try to know people in the unsubtle way they
know physical objects" (p.165).
III
If we now turn to this paradigm, the task of us constructing meaningful and worthwhile
relationships between us, seems to consist in the task of making connections between things
that might, at first sight, seem to have no connection at all: new connections and relations
between ourselves and different kinds of others (or Othernesses); between us and our past
or our future; between us and what we talk of as merely the imaginary, or the
transcendental; and so on. But, if who we are, or can become, depends on how we can
relate ourselves to each other, and through these forms of relation to other aspects of our
surroundings, then our practical exploration of these relational possibilities becomes a
startling new task - requiring, in all likelihood, new methods yet to be invented. For the
required methods must have at least these four features:
- i) they must be 'practical' methods in the sense of changing, not just people's
thoughts and ideas, but their actual way of being in the world - that is, they must
be capable of changing people's spontaneous, taken for granted, embodied, 'natural'
ways of reacting and responding to their surroundings and to each other;
- ii) to do this, they must not be Utopian, i.e., they must not seek ideal connections
of an impossible kind, but realistically possible connections and relations that in a
sense already exist, unnoticed, in our current circumstances;
- iii) but also, if they are to work, not just on our 'minds' but on our embodied
sensibilities, they must to an extent work in the same way as our ordinary everyday
developmental practices 'create' us as the specific adults we now are, from the
multipotentialed children we once were;
- iv) indeed, it must be possible for us, as ordinary people, to participate and to be
affected by such methods, without first having to learn a special or particular
discipline, or to meet standards, or to pass exams set by those already
acknowledged as experts.
In being multidimensional, indeterminate, fluid, flexible, unfinished, contested, changeable,
and still developing, the kind of knowledge involved must, in itself, be unamenable to
disciplinary confines: that is, these practices must be continuous with, and work from
within, our ordinary everyday practices, without it being necessary, so to speak, to step
outside them. Hence, theoretical explanations are not only unnecessary, but inimical to what
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is required. Their aim is simply to make the subtleties and nuances we sense, in dealing
with the unique relational moments in which are involved, rationally-visible to us. But how
might we do this? How can we reveal the nature of these - in one sense, already known -
subtleties to ourselves?
This, I think, is where Wittgenstein's studies become of very great relevance to us:
In his investigations, as we all know, he does not propose any particular theories of
language or communication, for he is explicitly not concerned to find or to discover anything
utterly unknown to us. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that he is not concerned "to hunt
out new facts; it is the essence of our investigation that... we want to understand something
that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand"
(1953, no.89). He wants simply "to give prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms
of language easily make us overlook" (1953, no.132), but nonetheless, to leave "everything
as it is" (1953, no.124). Indeed, his kind of philosophical work "simply puts everything
before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view
there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us"
(no.126). "if it is asked [for instance]: 'How do sentences manage to represent?' - the
answer might be: 'Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you use them'. For nothing
its concealed... nothing is hidden..." (no.435). It is clearly something that, in practice, we
have learned to do without it being problematic to us (hardly) at all.
So what is it that he wants to say to us? If nothing is hidden, what is it that he still
thinks worth saying? Well, his concern is not with finding anything radically new, but with
seeing something that is difficult to see for other reasons: either i) because "... like a pair
of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to
take them off" (1953, no.103); or ii) because it all "'...goes by so quickly, and [we] should
like to see it as it were laid open to view'" (no.435), thus to be able to survey it at one's
leisure, reflectively; or iii) because it seems "inexpressible" as it is in the "background
against which whatever I could express has its meaning" (1980, p.16); or iv) because it is
"a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect" (1980, p.17), for
example, at the moment, we willfully look for general theoretical principles hidden behind
appearances, instead of particular practical details we use in following the immediate
activity between us. Where it is precisely the details that are always before us, the details
we fail to notice, that he wants us to study.
In other words, what Wittgenstein wants is to study what Chomsky (and many others) think
is unstudiable: our language intertwined creative performances, in the course of our
performance of them! And Wittgenstein's achievement is to show us how in fact we can do
this. We can study the incomplete and the momentary without in fact stepping out of the
moment in question, without feeling that the next moment is the location from which we
must study the previous moment, looking back on it retrospectively as something now
complete. And what he also shows us further, is that in so doing, we can develop (from an
already old kind of understanding) a further, new kind of understanding: instead of seeking
something hidden, something that will explain a circumstance to us, intellectually and
passively, he provides us with a more active kind of practical understanding, an
understanding that will allow us to 'go on' in an activity in a socially concerted and
unconfused manner, in practice. It is this emphasis on our social practices that makes
Wittgenstein's stance toward our talk of things, and our understanding of our own behavior,
so distinctive... strange even! For, he wants us to see what our talk entwined practices in
fact look like in practice... rather than in theory. But how can he achieve this? What are his
methods?
IV
If we turn to his works, he find him writing 'poetically', in terms of 'striking phrases'
and 'arresting moments'. He talks of language as a 'game', as an 'ancient city', as a
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'toolbox', of words as like the levers in 'the cabin of a locomotive', and so on, without any
specificity as to which game, which city, which toolbox, or locomotive cab he means. Thus,
the first question we might ask about such talk is: How can such vague, confusing talk,
'coming out of the blue', outside the confines of any obvious language game, without any
clear understanding of what it represents or to what it refers, making no use of any
particular paradigms, or rules, or other schemes or frameworks, be of any help to us at all?
What is the character of such talk and writing? How should we react to it? Well, perhaps the
first thing to say, about it, is that, in being 'confusing', it is both 'deconstructive' and
'revealing': it both works to destabilize the often philosophically reinforced meanings already
in place in our lives, thus to see their practical, relational nature more clearly.
Indeed, in this respect, it will be useful to remind ourselves of the very practical
nature of Wittgenstein's 'world': that he is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious
going on inside our heads, but simply with us 'going on' with each other, with us being able
to sensibly 'follow' each other, to intertwine our activities with those of others. "Language
did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination" (1969, no.475), he remarks. "The origin
and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated
forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'"
he says (1980, p.31), quoting Goethe. And it is this emphasis on the reactional, relational
nature of our deeds, of our social practices, that makes Wittgenstein's stance toward our
understanding of our own behavior (and our talk of 'things') so distinctive... and strange...
even! For he is not so much concerned with us seeing the supposedly true nature of what
something is, contemplatively... as with attempting to articulate how, moment by moment,
we in fact conduct our practical, everyday affairs - something we usually leave
unacknowledged in the background to our lives.
Thus a part of their strangeness arises out of the simple fact that, in reacting to the
actions of others, our replies are never wholly our own; in being always, to an extent, both
reactions to their 'calls', and to the larger circumstances in which they occur, they are half
'shaped' by influences beyond our control. Thus, in such 'joint' or 'relational' circumstances
as these, no outcomes can be wholly attributed to the desires or plans of any individuals
involved, nor can they be attributed wholly to any outside agencies, either: As a function
of the particular relations between oneself and others, any outcome is an entirely unique,
novel, unforeseeable, and spontaneous creation - including both our subjectivities and the
'point' of our talk! For, in joint action, rather than us existing as already fixed subjectivities
stating and fixing the objective content of our utterances, monologically, we have between
us to 'dance' or to 'navigate' toward the common point of our dialogue - and toward our
'positions' in relation to it and to each other.
It is such joint activities as these that, in wanting us to see what our talk entwined practices
in fact look like in practice (rather than in theory), he wants us to notice. For it is activities
such as these that we do not know how to see for what they are without continually
distorting them, without continually telling ourselves that they must have this or that kind
of special nature to them, a nature that we feel must be captured within an orderly,
explanatory theory. Thus a part of Wittgenstein's philosophy, is to do with trying to help us
overcome this urge to turn to "the way of theory," whenever we find ourselves faced with
questions as to why we act as we do.
To this end, he tries to redescribe many topics and events, that we might be tempted to put
into theoretical terms, more practically. For instance, he attempts to draw our attention to
the practical nature of even philosophical problems: "A philosophical problem has the form,"
he says, "I don't know my way about" (1953, no.154). Or, concerning the understanding of
mathematical formulae, he suggests, "try not to think of understanding as a 'mental
process' at all... But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we
say, 'Now I know how to go on'..." (1953, no.154); that is, question yourself as to the
nature of the surrounding social conditions! In other words, as he sees it, our talk of
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'understanding' is not simply, if at all, related to events occurring inside a person's head;
but for us, "it is the circumstances under which he had such an experience that justify him
in saying... that he understands, that he knows how to go on" (1953, no.155). Indeed, in
all our practices, as he points out, saying "'I understand', like [saying] 'I can go on' is an
utterance, a signal" (1980, I, no.875); such utterances work in practice to indicate to those
to those around us, something of our changed relations, both to our circumstances, and to
them.
Thus, in his much more practical view of our everyday world and our activities within
it - although it may seem very strange to say it - he is not necessarily concerned with us
'understanding' each other in the sense of us sharing any 'ideas', nor with us
'communicating' in the sense of sending each other any clear messages, nor with us
discovering the 'true' nature of our surrounding circumstances, nor with us necessarily doing
anything in particular, let alone anything that is 'basic' to us being human. He is simply
concerned with us being able to 'go on' with each other (1953, nos.146-155), with us being
able merely to make 'followable', 'responsible', or 'answerable' sense to each other - simply
reacting or responding in ways that makes it possible for us to continue our relationships
is sufficient for him. To send messages; to fully understand each other; to routinely and
skillfully discourse upon a subject matter; to be able to 'reach out', so to speak, from within
a language-game and talk about the 'contacts' one has made, and to formulate 'theories'
as to the nature of what is 'out there'; all these abilities are, or can be, later developments.
Thus, as I see it, his prime concern is to explore the nature of those initial, pre-ordinary,
pre-intellectual, embodied responses and reactions that make it possible for us sensibly,
simply to 'follow' or to 'grasp' the 'tendencies' in each other's conduct; to study those
circumstances in which we can 'go on' with each other in practice, thus to socially construct
our forms of life. Indeed, as he sees it, our ways of 'going on' with each other in a sensibly
followable way are foundational because, it is in doing so that we can achieve all the other
things we think of as being important to us.
But, if we are to follow Wittgenstein, upon what should we 'focus' in our studies?
'Where' might such 'spaces of possibility' come into view? What should be the 'site' of our
investigations?' And what methods might be available to us, in such investigations?
V
As I have already indicated, his concern in studying our actual practices or forms of life, is
with understanding how we can 'reach out' from within them, through the various ways of
making sense of things they provide, to make contact with our surroundings. And what
Wittgenstein draws to our attention in his methodological suggestions, is that in studying
how we do in fact do such things, we can make use of the very same methods we use in
doing them in the first place! Indeed, as he remarks at the outset of his 'later' philosophy:
"One thing we [i.e., LW] always do when discussing a word is to ask how we were taught
it," (1966, p.1). For such a consideration brings to our attention the way in which words are
used as "a characteristic part of a large group of activities... the occasions on which they are
said..." (1966, p.2). This, then, gives us with an important first clue as to the nature of his
methods. For, although they are as many and as various as those we use in life itself, they
all have something in common: they all work in just the same way as our 'formative' and
'instructive' forms of talk in everyday life work. For, although they are as many and as
various as those we use in life itself, they do in fact all have something in common: they all
work in just the same way as our forms of talk in everyday life work.
For example, we 'point things out' to people ("Look at this!"); give them 'commands';
'remind' them ("Think what happened last time"); 'change their perspective' ("Look at it like
this"); and so on. All these instructive forms of talk 'direct' or 'move' us, in practice, to do
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something we would not otherwise do: to relate ourselves to our circumstances in a different
way. Wittgenstein uses these forms, in drawing our attention to what is there, in the
circumstances of our talk, before our eyes, that we fail to see. He calls them "reminders:"
For, "something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are
supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine], is something we need to remind ourselves
of" (1953, no.89).
His methods, then, are as follows: They work, first: i) To arrest or interrupt (or
'deconstruct') the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity; they provoke
us into examining whether there is 'more to it' than we expected. ii) Then, by the use of
certain 'instructive' forms of talk, they aim at giving "prominence to distinctions which our
ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (1953, no.132). As 'instructive
gestures', they provoke us into attending to aspects of a circumstance, and to ways of
relating ourselves to them, that otherwise would go unnoticed. iii) Next, by the careful use
of selected images, similes, or metaphors, he suggests new ways of talking that can lend
or give a first form to such sensed but otherwise unnoticed distinctions, thus to make
reflective contemplation of their nature possible. And finally, iv) by the use of various kinds
of comparison with other possible ways of talking ("other "language games"), he establishes
"an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view;
one of many possible orders; not the order" (1953, no.132) - thus to position these new
possibilities, these otherwise unnoticed distinctions in our activities and practices, in relation
to others, and to render them publicly 'do-able', discussable, and teachable.
To appreciate further what Wittgenstein was after here, it might be useful at this stage also
to mention Vygotsky's project: As is well-known, he discussed what he called "an enabling
theory-method" (p.8), a method that is "simultaneously prerequisite and product, tool and
the result of the study" (p.65). Where, such an enabling theory-method consists simply in
an 'instructive' way of talking in relation to development such that: a) as a tool, it will lead
us "to concentrate not on the product of development but on the very process by which the
higher forms are established" (p.64), i.e., it will give prominence to distinctions our ordinary
forms of language easily make us overlook; and ii) as a product, it will itself be "a
qualitatively new form [or practice] that appears in the process of development [or
research]" (p.65) - a new practice that will, of course, now work to further direct our
attention and to guide our conduct in new ways.
IV
This, then, is the challenge in Wittgenstein's work: He seeks - what for us professionals, but
not for us as everyday, ordinary human beings - is a new kind of understanding - "just that
kind of understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" (1953, no.122). Rather than
simply passively seeing what something 'is' in terms of a 'picture' - for the trouble with mere
pictures (or representations) is that "when one has the picture in view by itself it is suddenly
dead... it remains isolated, it does not point outside itself to a reality beyond" (1981,
no.236) - he seeks a much more active kind of understanding, in practice. We want to
grasp, in practice, how to anticipate what appropriately should 'follow' from what, thus to
'go on' with others in an immediate, unconfused, concerted manner (without it being
necessary to have to argue or to have to give evidence as to what is the 'right' interpretation
of their actions).
So, although it will not be possible to use his methods to 'say' explicitly what the
nature of the supposed 'processes' actually involved (either in us, or between us) 'are' - and
the nagging feeling that there 'must' be explanations to be found 'somewhere' will still
remain - people will nonetheless be able to use his methods to 'instruct' others as to how,
in practice, to 'see' their nature from within their own practices. Where, to do this, we do
not need any new theories as the nature of our talk, but new practices. Thus, instead of
helping us 'find' something already existing but supposedly hidden behind appearances, his
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methods help us grasp something new, as yet unseen, in the emerging articulation of our
speech entwined activities as they unfold in our very ears (if not before our very eyes!). His
similes, his "perspicuous representations," etc., work to draw to our attention aspects of our
own activities with which we are already in fact conversant, but for which they act as
'reminders'. And they 'move' us toward a new way of 'looking over' the 'play' of appearances
unfolding before us so as to see them practically, as being embedded in a network of
possible connections and relations with their surroundings, and as 'pointing toward' the
possible roles they might play in our lives.
We can call his concern here, then, a concern with a "social poetics" - where, rather
than simply with the spontaneous occurrence of 'arresting', 'destabilizing', 'originary'
moments in individuals, he is interested in the deliberate creation of the social
circumstances conducive to such moments occurring between us; and with the further task,
of also creating new networks of connections and relations between the events within them,
thus to give those events new roles, new parts to play in our lives. Thus, instead of seeking
what might be called representational understandings, such a social poetics would be
concerned with seeking what we can call new relational understandings. And what is new
in all of this, is us coming to a more direct and immediate understanding of how to deal with
our practices in practice - using methods that by-pass the whole attempt to first understand
them in terms of theories (as at present we feel we must). Where again, it is worth
reminding ourselves that we are not seeking, as already developed individuals, to discover
what something is, but different possible ways in which, by us being different kinds of
person, we might relate ourselves to our surroundings differently - how, by being different
in ourselves we can live in different kinds of worlds.
(Paper given at the ISTP Annual Conference, Berlin, 27 April - 2 May, 1997). In W. Maiers, B.
34
Bayer, B. Duarte Esgalhado, R. Jorna and E. Schraube (Eds.) Challenges to Theoretical Psychology. North
York, CA: Captus Press.
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-Chapter Six-
Problems with 'The Way of Theory
34
"I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a
ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get
to is the place I must already be at now. Anything that might be reached by
climbing a ladder doesn't interest me" (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.7).
"How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life!... If you want to go
down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave
your most immediate and familiar surroundings" (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.50).
In 1995 at this meeting, I gave a paper on Wittgenstein's methods, called "From the way
of theory toward a social poetics" (1997). In it I claimed, that if we are to gain a clearer
view of the complex inter-relations between our everyday, practical actions and the
influences on them in their surrounding circumstances, then we must turn away from the
way of theory and espouse Wittgenstein's new 'poetic' methods of inquiry: For their precise
point is to do with bringing to our attention, the living, responsive-relations between aspects
of our own human activities, previously unnoticed in the everyday, here-and-now,
background 'hurly-burly' to our lives.
However, I now realize that my celebration of these new methods was somewhat
premature: my claim that we must turn away from the way of theory - if we are develop
both new methods of inquiry and new social practices more suited to our currently more
diverse and pluralistic social circumstances - simply provoked incredulity. I was insufficiently
critical of the way of theory to make it clear why a turn away from it is so necessary. Here,
I want to try to put that right, and to try to say why, if we are to tackle some of the most
pressing problems we currently face, we must make that turn.
I
Let me begin by acknowledging that there is no doubt that we feel driven to inquire into how
'things hang together', so to speak, that we all share a feeling that we would like to be more
'at home' in the world, to know our 'way around' inside it, in every part at every moment,
somewhat better. We would like to have a "synoptic" sense of it as a "surveyable" whole -
as Wittgenstein (1980a, 1953) puts it - in a way somewhat similar to the unconfused,
familiar, and intimate way we know how to conduct ourselves inside our own homes (see
Bachelard, 1992, for an account of how the house is "the human being's first world" (p.7)).

In the Western world, however, although this desire has been realized in many
practical ways - through exploration, and the accumulation of many forms of practical
knowledge - it seems to have been primarily manifested in an urge to theorize: that is, in
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an urge to collect diverse phenomena (to do both with our world and ourselves) together
within a framework of belief. We have been driven by the idea that somewhere, there is a
simple 'something' to be discovered hidden beneath or behind appearances which, in some
way, will work to interconnect diverse phenomena into a hierarchically ordered, timeless
unity. And we dream, that if we can gain a cognitive grasp of this hierarchically ordered
unity, if we can see into its inner workings sufficiently clearly (as if with a God's eye), then
we might be able, 'calculationally', to 'play through' possibly important sequences ahead of
time, thus to know what to do to control them according to our desires.
As a result of our until very recently questioned commitment to this belief in all our
intellectual inquiries, we seem to have been in the thrall of what - because it involves us in
a whole complex form of life (LW) with its motivations and perceptions, desires and
compulsions; its ways of acting, speaking, thinking, and valuing; its basic ways of
separating, and hierarchically interrelating and ordering the things it deals with, in order to
simplify its vision of the world - I have called "the way of theory."
Where, by the "way of theory," I mean, the urge i) to bring a unity to things ii) in
terms of a belief, supposition, hypothesis, or theory, iii) formulated in terms of a small set
of hierarchically related formal elements, iv) thought of as representing states of reality, v)
which can be cognitively manipulated to produce other representations of logically possible
states. With the whole enterprise, as Rorty (1980, 1989) points out, undergirded by a
simple, often literalized, image (currently in psychology, the computer).
II
Now our applications of the way of theory to the natural world surrounding us has brought
us great dividends - no doubt about it. And I would be foolish to want to criticize its use in
general. Indeed, there are also ways in which it is useful for us to use it to elaborate in more
technical detail some of our already developed forms of life.
But it is when we try to turn the way of theory around upon ourselves and to use it
to come to an ordered, overall, synoptic sense of what it is to be a human being, in terms
of one or some of our own beliefs about ourselves, hierarchically ordered into a calculational
system, or, when we try to use it to develop new forms of life, utterly new ways of relating
ourselves both to each other and our surroundings - it is then, I think, that we are on very
dangerous ground. For, if we feel that we can simply argue, either from evidence or from
supposed 'first principles' that our theories are true, then - without the need for any 'first-
hand', 'on the spot', sense of the relevant circumstances - we feel justified in seeking to
apply our theories in practice. And this is where the danger lies. In trying to make manifest
my worries here, let me focus on three issues (although it will become clear that a whole
complex of intertwined issues is at stake in this sphere). The issues are to do with: i)
locating the origin of all human activities in mental representations in the heads of
individuals; ii) attempting to form human communities by 'putting theories into practice';
and iii) conducting the behavioral 'sciences' as if they are religions!

III
i) First, let me simply remark that the way of theory suggests to us that the primary source
of all of our human activities is, supposedly, to be found in mental representations inside
the heads of individuals.
We thus take it that, rather than acting in response to unique and subtle details in
their circumstances, people act from their own inner thoughts or ideas. Our relations to our
immediate circumstances - and their moment-by-moment, changing constitution as we
consider and reconsider what is of relevance to us, in what we might call the dialogical
Many of our political 'discussions' - even so-called 'discussions of the issues' - rather than to do
35
with detailed inquiries into actual, prevailing circumstances and the opportunities they may (or may not) afford
for any new steps forward, are in fact unresolvable arguments over beliefs. Once in power, governments act,
not in accord with their professed beliefs, but pragmatically, in accord with current circumstances and the
received ideology of the day - hence, all their supposed 'broken promises'.
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moment - are ignored, suppressed in fact. No attention is paid to those of our activities
spontaneously 'called out' from us by the Others in our surroundings, due to our existence
in the world as living bodies. Instead of as a radical otherness, occupying a 'world' radically
different from our own, an Other is treated as simply yet another in 'the world' like
ourselves.
This leads on to a second worry, a worry to do with the forming of human
communities: For the way of theory suggests to us that - given that, though we may have
different beliefs about it, we are all nonetheless already in the same world - they come into
being through the forming of rational agreements, through Rousseauian 'social contracts'.
In other words, it suggests that new forms of social relations can be argued or administrated
into existence.
But, as Richard Bernstein (1983) remarks, all attempts to implement "the idea that
we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form [new] communities... have been
disastrous" (p.226). Indeed, as Sir Isaiah Berlin remarks, while many of our "great liberating
ideas" initially open up a surge of new opportunities, they "inevitably turn into suffocating
straitjackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by new, emancipating, and at the same
time, enslaving, conceptions" (Berlin, 1981, p.159) .
35
Why is this? Because, as Bernstein points out: "A community or polis is not
something that can be made or engineered by some form of techne or by the administration
of society. There is something of a circle here, comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The
coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, and a commitment
to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life" (p.226, my
emphasis).
In other words - and relates to my central point here today - there is something in
the very nature of human relationships that so far we have failed to recognize and to
acknowledge, something that is prior to everything we think of as being of importance to
us as individual human beings: Our personal and social identities, our awareness and
conceptions of the world about us, our forms of rationality, our ability to theorize, and so
on, are all made possible and emerge out of the fact, that we are spontaneously responsive
to each other, bodily, in a dialogical fashion - we cannot not be, although we may fail to
notice and rationally to acknowledge the fact that we are. This, as I shall argue in a
moment, is where all that is of importance to us in our social lives together begins.
But if this is the case, if all our relations with each other (and from within them all
our dealings with the world) only begins in these pre-theoretical, radically contingent, non-
hierarchically ordered forms of dialogical activity, why do we still persist in claiming that our
ways of relating ourselves to each must be a matter of ratiocination, of rational planning,
a matter of fitting our human relations into hierarchically ordered, calculational schemes?
Why do we still persist, in our attempts to regulate our social lives, in the few try to devise
beliefs, hypotheses, or principles for implementation by the many? Why do we remain so
blind to the nature of our basic, living, bodily relations to the Others and othernesses around
us?
iii) This brings me to my third worry about the way of theory, to do with it working
in terms only of beliefs: As Kitto (1951) (along with many other commentators) claims, our
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sensitivities - the things we notice and acknowledge as well as the things we fail to notice -
have their roots in forms of life which have been developed from those of the ancient
Greeks. Central among them is the tendency, in spite of diverse appearances to the
contrary, to believe that the world consists not of many things but one. Like them, we also
seemingly take it for granted that: "the universe, both the physical and the moral universe,
must not only be rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple; the apparent multiplicity
of things is only apparent" (p.179).
Indeed, in discussing the contemporary style of Thales's thought, Kitto comments:
"Could Thales have meet a nineteenth century chemist and heard that the elements are
sixty-seven (or whatever the number is), he would have objected that this was far too
many. Could he have met a twentieth-century physicist and heard that these are all
different combinations of one thing, he might reply, 'That's what I always said'" (pp.179-
180).
Richard Webster (1996) - in his book Why Freud was Wrong - psychologizes this urge
(to ground our actions in simple, systematic unities), and notes its relation in 'scientific'
psychology to the essentially religious need to reduce the complexities of the human soul
to simple matters of belief. He quotes Jung's (1963) characterization of Freud's following of
the way of theory as reflecting this: "In place of the jealous God he had lost," says Jung of
Freud,
"he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no
less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening and morally ambivalent
than the original one... The advantage of the transformation for Freud was,
apparently, that he was able to regard the new numinous principle as
scientifically irreproachable and free of all religious taint" (p.179, quoted in
Webster, 1996, p.379).
And indeed, Webster goes on to note that Jung himself, "instead of dismissing religion as
part of the problem, ...saw it as a potential solution and as a source of healing" (pp.386-
387) - the problem of "finding a religious outlook on life" (Jung, 1960, p.264) was, he
claimed, central for all his patients in "the second half of life."
And cast into an intellectual environment of rationalistic positivism that is ostensibly
is hostile to all forms of religious belief, many western intellectuals still feel themselves, as
Webster (1996) puts it, "under a profound psychological compulsion to immerse themselves
once more in belief" (p.384).
Rorty (1980, 1989) too notes this, and wants to try and cure us of our compulsive
need to "eternalize" or "divinize" the ideology of the day in our quest for a basis for our
actions somewhere "beyond history and institutions" (p.198) - a lesson all those currently
indulging in the triumphalism associated with cognitive science might do well to note.
Religious zealotry and fundamentalism can be found just as much outside as inside
churches.
IV
This compulsive psychological aspect of the way of theory noted here by Webster and Rorty
is, I think, worth taking seriously (Wittgenstein too talks of our "cravings" and "impulses,"
and sees his philosophy as "therapeutic" in its function of "curing" us of them). For, if
nothing else, it helps to explain why the difficulties associated with current attempts to
move away from the way of theory - away from forms of life in which the few with clear
convictions and beliefs, are appointed to devise 'theories' to be 'put into practice' by the
more wayward many - are not all simply intellectual difficulties. For the way of theory is a
'sacred' part of our social identities, a part of who we in the West take ourselves to be.
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V
Yet, in committing ourselves to a form of inquiry that can only be conducted from within the
framework of an intelligibly shared belief or hypothesis, we limit our inquiries to phenomena
that can only appear within such frameworks - and what is excluded in such inquiries is, of
course, just the very phenomena that are now of interest to us in these postmodern, social
constructionist times: otherness, diversity, differences, multiplicity, duplicity, instability, and
the nature of the complex, joint, creative, disorderly, dialogical processes involved in socially
constructing our frameworks of belief, and forms of order in the first place.
In other words, we overlook just those events to do with what Bernstein calls "the
incipient forms of communal life" upon which the development, of a type of public life in
which all are committed to rational persuasion instead of violence in settling their affairs,
depends.

Thus, if this is our desire, our pursuit of it through the way of theory is now, as I see
it, both beside the point and after the fact:
- 1) It is beside the point in the sense that the way of theory is aimed ultimately at
justifying or legitimating a proposed action by providing it with an already agreed
grounding or basis. Whereas, what we require in our daily affairs, is not so much
legitimation in terms of an already agreed status quo, as clear guidance in how to
act in unique and novel circumstances: we wish to know in an unconfused,
incontestable sense, in this or that particular, never-before-occurring situation, what
is the right thing to do. (The practitioner's problem - and they make us only too well
aware that they find our theories of little help in their daily practices.)
- 2) The way of theory is thus after the fact in the sense of that its focus is
retrospective: from within it, we look back on successfully completed events with the
aim of finding an order or pattern in them that can be instituted mechanically,
unthinkingly, according to rules or recipes. Whereas, in our daily affairs, we need to
focus, not on their final outcome, but on the particular, moment-by-moment
unfolding, constructive details of our practical activities. We need to come to a grasp
of all the influences that might be at work in any one moment as we make our way
toward such outcomes. To represent this loose-textured, temporal, disorderly process
- in which many possibilities are considered but few are chosen - as an already
orderly and coherent process is to hide from ourselves the character of the social
negotiations, navigations, and struggles productive of its order.
Thus, it is in at least these two senses that theories are beside the point and after the fact.
To orient ourselves intellectually in relation to such phenomena, we require another mode
of inquiry. But where might we begin our explorations in the search for it... if we cannot
begin from assumptions and suppositions?
VI
Classically, in the way of theory, we have thought of ourselves as being influenced by the
objects and events around us monologically, that is, we have thought of ourselves as self-
contained individuals (Sampson, 1993), related to our surroundings as if viewing them from
a distance - almost as if viewing them through a plate-glass window that prevented us
having any actual, living contact with them. And this has led us to think of the world around
us as being an external world.
However, as I have already noted, as living, embodied beings, we cannot not be
responsive to the world around us. Unlike computers and other machines, we must
continuously react to our surroundings directly and immediately, in a 'living' way, without
us first having 'to work it out' as to how to respond; and, in so doing, of necessity, we relate
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ourselves to our surroundings, in one way or another, spontaneously.
But once we allow for this possibility, once we do notice, do acknowledge the fact
that people are intrinsically in a continuous, living contact with each other, we can no longer
sustain the idea of ourselves as being separate, self-contained entities, nor that of our world
as being an 'external' world. For as soon as a second living human being responds to the
acts of a first, that is, as soon as I act in a way that depends on your acts... then my
activities cannot be accounted as wholly my own: as spontaneous responses to the activities
of an Other, my activities must be partly shaped by their otherness, by their difference from
me. And this is where all the strangeness of our dialogically responsive relations to each
other begins.
VII
A whole new realm of study can open up to us with this entirely non-necessary
acknowledgment of people's responsive relations to each other. Indeed, as Wittgenstein
(1969) brings to our attention: "Knowledge in the end is based on acknowledgment"
(no.378) - if initially we fail to notice a phenomenon, clearly, we shall fail to take it into
account in any of our further inquiries.
In the way of theory, we tend to assume that what explains our openness to our
surroundings, are fore-structures of pre-understandings we already possess (to use
Gadamer's, 1975, terms); these are what determine to what we can or cannot be
responsive. But this is why I think the remarks in Wittgenstein's late philosophy are so
important to us: the radical otherness of his words can - as a first step - 'call out' new
responses from us to our surrounding circumstances, responses that go way beyond our
current, intellectual, pre-understandings, which confront us both with new mysteries as well
as with hints as to how to develop our relations to them further.
Like a stranger's responses to us across a Park, they can work to specify a
circumstance partially - an annoyance, say - but leave it open and still somewhat
mysterious as to how we might 'go on' yet further with them, but yet again, not so open
that we find ourselves hopelessly disoriented. No wonder that in grappling with these issues,
without the resort to simplifying and limiting theoretical frameworks of belief, Wittgenstein
(1953) groaned to himself: "What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness,
correctly, and unfalsified, into words" (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.227).
But without a framework of belief, we at least need an orientational landmark or two
to return to every so often in one's explorations of the vast landscape now opened up, one
would soon become disoriented and confused: Such an initial landmark can be found, I
believe, in a focus on our simple, responsive relations to Others (as in the stranger across
the Park example I have used here), a focus on what in the past I have called "joint actions"
(Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993, 1995).
What has always struck me about joint actions, is that they contain an ethics: only
if you respond in a way sensitive to the relations between 'mine' and 'your' movements can
'we' act together as a 'collective we': in dancing, say, or moving furniture, or what ver. If
I sense that you are not interrelating your activities in with mine - if another person is
looking at their own reflection in my eyes, rather than looking at 'me', we not only can sense
it immediately, but we feel offended. Goffman (1967) talks of these as offences against
one's "involvement obligations," and Garfinkel (1967) talks of the "righteous hostility"
occasioned people's transgression of the "seen but unnoticed" interpretational co-operation
they feel entitled to expect from others.
Indeed, if we do re-image to ourselves the meeting of the eyes of a stranger across
the Park, if we do acknowledge how the presence of an Other can 'strike' us and become 'a
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presence' in our presence, and we pause there for a while to dwell on the richness (the
'fractal fullness') of what can be found in such a fleeting moment, then, I think, we will be
forced to admit that, although we can formulate what occurs in this way and that according
to one or another of our own schemes of interpretation, the event still nonetheless has its
own in exhaustible character. Yet, on the other hand, as both Bakhtin (1986) and Levinas
(1969) point out - and we have seen with other examples - once we do acknowledge an
Other's presence (even a stranger across the Park), we find ourselves obligated to them in
some mysterious way. And it is only from within this obligation that we can begin to
discover the unique nature of their 'inner world' - that is, we can only fully experience the
complex and rich diversity of reality through the ethical relations established in our initial
acknowledgments of the Others around us. Ethics is prior to, not a consequence of, our
knowledge.
This, I know, is not a place to end this talk. Indeed, the claim that ethics is prior to,
not a consequence, of knowledge, remains an empty claim, until we can begin to see how
the beginnings of new practices of inquiry can grow out of the kind of fleeting
acknowledgments I have alluded to here - examples are provided in Katz and Shotter (1996,
1997) and Shotter and Katz (1997). But my main point here has been, that as long as we
persist in the way of theory we will remain blind to this fact, and unaware of the kind of
explorations we in fact require, if we are to develop our own practices of intellectual inquiry
further. And of especial importance to us, instead of more democratic forms of relation, we
will still persist in following the way of theory, we shall still find ourselves trying to organize
our social lives in terms of simple systems of belief imposed on the few by the many - with
all the forms of exclusion associated with trying to maintain such systems from being
subverted by non-believers.
From the Journal of Mundane Behavior 1(2), pp.116-134, 2000
36
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-Chapter Seven-
Wittgenstein and the Everyday:

from radical hiddenness to nothing is hidden;
from representation to participation
36
Abstract: Wittgenstein (1953) claims that grammar tells us what kind of thing anything
is. Rather than any realities as such determining our forms of life, it is the grammars of
our forms of life our inner sense of their relational structure which determine for us
what can possibly count as a reality within them. Thus, if we can come to a surveyable
grasp of the possibilities offered us by the grammars of our forms of life, it should be
possible to become so well oriented within them, that one can see ahead of time, so to
speak, what is possible within it (and what is not). Although requiring a good deal of
labor, for the pathways, so to speak, offered within a form of life are somewhat
arbitrary rather than systematic, the task is nonetheless doable, for nothing is hidden.
Like a city that one can only familiarize oneself with from ones involvements within it, so
we must enter into it and explore its possibilities actively. This whole approach of
Wittgensteins contrasts markedly with our current approach in the social and behavioral
sciences. There, we usually follow what might be called the way of theory, with its
central assumption of the radical hiddenness of unitary sources. The contrast between
these two approaches is explored below, and some of the radical consequences for the
character of our inquiries in the social disciplines outlined. Central to the way of theory is
how it leads to the imposition of an order from the center (James C. Scott, 1998), and
destroys the possibility of local, participation.
All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in
human practice and in the comprehension of this practice (Marxs eighth
thesis on Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, 1977, p.122).
The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world
is turned into the problem of descending from language into life (Marx
and Engels, 1977, p.118).
Grammar is not accountable to any reality. It is grammatical rules that
determine meaning (constitute it) and so they themselves are not
answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary
(Wittgenstein, 1978, p.184).
Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is (Wittgenstein, 1953,
no.373).
Words have meaning only in the stream of life (Wittgenstein,1990,
no.913).
I
f Wittgenstein (1953) is correct, all of our more self-conscious, individual activities have
their being within a stream, or mingling streams, of spontaneously responsive activity
Here I have in mind Marxs first thesis on Feuerbach, that the chief defect of all hitherto existing
37
materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form
of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively... (Marx and
Engels, 1977, p.121).
Hurly-burly and bustle are terms used by Wittgenstein (1980, II, nos.625, 626, 629) to
38
characterize the indefiniteness of the background that determines our responses to what we experience, and
against which we judge events in our everyday life.
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flowing continuously between us, unnoticed in the background of our lives together.
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a and b), I have discussed this third sphere or realm of
relationally responsive activity, as being of a kind still very unfamiliar to us. It cannot be
explained either as behavior in terms of causes, nor as action in terms of reasons. Until
recently, this sphere of diffuse, sensuous or feelingful activity, this unordered hurly-
37
burly or bustle of everyday social life, has remained unnoticed in the background to our
38
lives. If we have noticed it at all, we have not attached much importance to it; we have
assumed that it will one day all be explained in terms of timeless, yet to be discovered,
orderly principles of mind and/or world. Central to the whole philosophy underlying this
stance, is the assumption that everything should be understood in terms of orderly
systems. Thus our utterances have meaning only because they are linked in an orderly
way with other kinds of event (with states of mind, states of affairs), otherwise, they
would just be meaningless noises. Indeed, as Saussure (1959) claims in discussing
speech, Speaking... is an individual act. It is willful and intellectual (p.14); it can only
be meaningful and understood by others if it is properly ordered by a speaker in a self-
conscious manner.
For Wittgenstein (1953), however, the meaningfulness of our language does not
initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous, living, bodily
responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. Indeed, when he remarks that
our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are
different (PI, no.284), I think we should take him very seriously. For, although we can
only come to an understanding of a dead forms behavior in terms of objective theories
representing the sequence of events supposed to have caused it, a quite different form of
involved, responsive understanding becomes available to us with a living form. It can call
out spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite impossible with a dead form. And
it is this that is crucial for Wittgenstein. As he puts it: The origin and primitive form of
the language-game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language - I want to say - is a refinement, in the beginning was the deed (1980a,
p.31). Where by the word primitive here, Wittgenstein (1981) means 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). In saying this,
Wittgenstein (1969) remarks: I want to regard man here as an animal... As a creature in
a primitive state... Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination (no. 475).
The presence of a public evaluator
But more than us merely responding to the others immediately around us, what is special
about our spontaneously responsive relations to the others around us, is that this kind of
activity between us is not yours nor mine but ours. Such dialogically-structured activity
(if we can call it that), is out there in public space. Thus, when I understand a persons
speech, it is a matter of me responding to a public situation with the kind of publicly
anticipated responses into which I have been trained. Most of what we do is not done by
us deliberately and intellectually, as individuals, by reference to an already existing,
framework of rules, external to our current circumstances, but in spontaneous response
to calls upon us from within our immediate circumstances. In other words, out there in
For just where one says But dont you see...? the rule is no use, it is what is explained, not what
39
does the explaining (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.302).
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the space between us, it is as if a public evaluator is at work in our interactions with each
other who calls on each of us to use to use our public words as we collectively use them.
Thus it is not in our mere repetition of public linguistic forms that we give our words their
meaning, it is not a matter of using them according to an already established system of
rules. What matters is how we make our own varied use of them. And we rely upon an
already existing, public network of anticipated responses to provoke in those we address,
a-to-an-extent-novel response. We express our own unique meanings in the unique uses
to which we put our utterances in the specific circumstances of their use.
Here, then, we have two very different approaches to language and to our
intelligent, knowledgeable behavior. In one approach, running in a line from Descartes,
through Saussure and Chomsky, all the way to current cognitive psychology, there is the
view that our linguistic utterances can only be meaningful and understood by others if
they are properly ordered, and we can only achieve this by explicitly or tacitly referring to
an inner mental representation of a system of rules (our linguistic competence) in our
performance of them. The other view is Wittgensteins. As he remarks, we hardly ever
speak in the self-conscious way required by the first approach, with such an inner,
intellectual reference to a system of rules. Indeed, if we did self-consciously bring such a
rule schematism to mind, we would still have to interpret how to apply it in this, that, or
another specific situation. And where might we find the rules to do that? In finding
ourselves in a situation which seems to require a certain kind of appropriate response
from us, simply stating a rule doesnt seem of much help to us . As a patterned form or
39
schematism, it lies dead before us, so to speak; it does not call out a response from us;
it does not point outside itself to a reality beyond... (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.236). So,
how should we make sense of such meaningful activity?
In exploring what it is like for us to feel as if we are following rules in our actions,
Wittgenstein (1953) first suggests that it is as if one no longer had any choice in what to
do. But if that really were so, how could one ever justify acting in one way rather than
another? While not exactly willful and intellectual, acting as ones surroundings seem to
demand is not choice-less either. I should have said, suggests Wittgenstein (1953),
This is how it strikes me. When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly
(no.219).... obeying a rule is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey
a rule... otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying
it (no.202). To repeat, it is a matter here of me responding to a public situation with the
kind of publicly anticipated responses into which I have been trained. What this shows,
he suggests is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but
which is exhibited in what we call obeying the rule and going against it in actual cases
(no.201).
Most of what we do is not done by us deliberately and intellectually, by reference
to an already existing, framework of rules, external to our current circumstances, but in
spontaneous response to calls upon us from within both our immediate circumstances,
and from the larger surroundings within which they are embedded. In growing up among
a crowd of others already reacting and responding to each other in their practical,
everyday affairs in characteristic ways, like a professional tennis player condemned to
practice 24 hours a day, I too become practiced in anticipating their responses to my
expressions. And what I first do spontaneously in response to their calls upon me, I later
come to do deliberately, in response to my own commands or instructions
(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.243; Vygotsky, 1986).
Although Wittgensteins use of the term grammar here is entirely justified - for he wants to talk of
40
how saying or doing one thing, can only follow from and lead onto certain other things - it is clearly a use of
the term very different from what linguists mean by the grammar of a language. Linguists mean by it a certain
abstract object of knowledge (Chomsky, 1975), representing, usually, knowledge of or about a languages
syntactic structure - based, of course, on sentence structures native speakers find acceptable. Wittgenstein
wants a much more experiential account, one which provides in particular, practical contexts of involvement,
an immediately shaped and shaping, or vectored sense (in all its complex richness and detail) of how one
must continue ones practical activities in such situations, if one is to meet their unique requirements. In this
sense, a logical grammar provides, so to speak, the proto-grammar upon which a linguists grammar can be
based as an idealized abstraction.
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The different characteristic ways in which we are spontaneously responsive to each
other within the mingling streams, Wittgenstein (1953) suggests, might be termed forms
of life, and the influence of the public evaluator that inevitably makes an appearance
within them he wants to explore in terms of the form of lifes logical grammar. Below,
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I want to make a case for this claim: that it is the seemingly arbitrary, ungrounded, and
in fact not very systematic grammars structuring the background streams of activity
(forms of life) within which we are inextricably involved, which provide the grounds for
everything sensible we do and say. Along with this claim goes another, that in wanting to
come to a grasp of their nature, the essence of our investigation is that we do not seek
to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain
view (1953, no.89). But we must add, it is not in plain view to outside observers,
responsively uninvolved with the others and othernesses around them; it is only in plain
view to those responsively involved with their surroundings who are able to see the
something in question. They are able to see it from within their involvement with it.
The radical hiddenness of unitary sources
The assumptions above are unusual ones to make. Usually, in our inquiries in psychology
(and in the other social sciences), we pursue another quite different path. I shall call it
the way of theory. In following the way of theory, rather than seeking to understand
something arbitrary and unsystematic that is in plain view, we make just the opposite
assumption: we seek an orderly ideal, and in seeking it, we represent the matter as if
there is something one couldnt do, suggests Wittgenstein (1953). As if there really
were an object [a mental state or process, a social structure or set of rules or norms, a
certain State apparatus], from which I derive its description, but I were unable to show it
to anyone (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.374, my additions). I shall call this, the assumption of
the radical hiddenness of a unitary source. In other words, when following the way of
theory, we act as if the crucial influence or influences which really shape our actions are
so deeply hidden from us that we can never directly observe them, and that our only
recourse is a mode of inquiry which assumes that we must proceed by first offering
hypotheses, interpretations, suggestions, or conjectures of one kind of another, whether
we go on later to merely to argue for their correctness, or to test them empirically, or not.
Even in social constructionism, discursive psychology, conversational analysis,
enthnomethodology, and other kindred enterprises, we have no hesitation in talking of
unitary hypothetical entities - such as narratives, frameworks, rule-structures, relational
scenarios, language-games, etc. - which (once constructed) either function as special
arenas or sites within which certain processes take place, or are assumed to exist as
entities (things) which exert a determining force of some kind on peoples behavior.
How else could we proceed, if we didnt conduct our inquiries in this way? What
other way or ways of making better sense of our lives could there possibly be?
In what follows, if it is the improvement of our own practical conduct of our own
social affairs that we seek, I want to be very critical of us following the way of theory in
our inquiries - as if our task was to discover the nature of something (some single thing)
still as yet unknown to us. Indeed, I want to argue that the assumption of radical
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hiddenness of a unitary source upon which it rests, stands in the way of us realizing that
the crucial influences shaping our lives are all, in fact, readily visible to us, in front of our
eyes (and our ears). They exist out in the world in the spaces both between us and each
other, and between us and the rest of our surroundings, and in the living responsive-
relations we exhibit to these facts. In fact, mostly, we find it difficult not to be responsive
to peoples joy and suffering, to peoples arrogance and pride, their humility and
humbleness, their greed and generosity, their unfair applications of power, their
resignation or resistance, etc.. We see these qualities directly and immediately in the
ways in which they carry themselves in their actions, and find ourselves spontaneously
moved in one way or another. We do not need theories, whether proved true or not, to
tell us of a persons misery or joy, of their anger and resentment, their sense of being
treated unfairly.
If Wittgenstein (1953) is correct in his claims above, and I shall argue below that
he is, two things of importance follow immediately: 1) One is, that if nothing is hidden,
(no.435), if everything is in plain view, and people show their supposed inner mental
states in their responsive reactions to what is occurring around them, then there is
nothing to theorize about, nothing to explain. The bewilderment and disorientation we
face must be dealt with in some other way. 2) The other is, that if a grammar is
constitutive of our relations to our surroundings, if it shapes what we do and say, then it
is not in itself accountable to any reality. If this is so, then it is not at all difficult for us to
mislead ourselves, for us to be convinced that certain things are real because our talk
provides us with the grammatical illusion (no.110) or grammatical fiction (no.307) of
them as being real. Indeed, so adept are we in creating a sense of reality in our talk and
writing, that it is not at all difficult (as in a good piece of science fiction writing) for us to
create theoretical entities which must - like the ghosts and spirits in medieval times - we
are convinced, have such a crucial influence over our lives that we must devote some
effort to dealing with them in some way. But theorizing, the invention of theoretical
entities, even by those who wish most for social justice and want to expose the real
injustices that others want to hide, to the extent that it rests on confusions and
misunderstandings, on meanings only shared by the small group of theorists in question,
and is not sensitive to the possibility of grammatical illusions or fictions in our talk, will
always obfuscate more than clarify the issues at stake.
The tendency of our current way of theory to eradicate grammatical
orientations
As mentioned above, I shall call our current way of conducting our inquiries the way of
theory. By wanting to raise problems with this way of proceeding, I do not mean to
suggest that it is the mere use of theoretical talk as such that is the problem, for after all,
the original sense of the word theory (Gr. theors = envoys sent to bring back accounts
of spectacles seen in foreign countries) is to do with talk that makes it possible for others
to visualize absent events - and almost all our talk here is of that kind. The problem is
with the whole set of procedural assumptions which at present set the scene, so to speak,
and shape the uses of theoretical talk in our humane inquiries, for, in setting the scene,
we model our inquiries on those in science, and in so doing, we produce knowledge of our
external world, not orientations internal to our involvements. It is easy to list these
assumptions:
1) First, is the assumption that everything we talk of in our theories, is a thing
which has a nature of its own, in isolation, and independently of any relation that
we might have or take up with it; we thus seek objective knowledge of its nature.
2) This leads us to assume that questions to do with us gaining a better
understanding of what we speak of as mental phenomena - such as meaning,
thinking, understanding, and so on - instead of being treated as conceptual or
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1998), I have outlined the importance of first-time, novel events rather than
41
repetitions in us understanding language, but there is not space to argue that point again here. Voloshinov
(1986) puts the matter succinctly, thus: The task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing
the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in
a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity (p.68).
It is the use, to put the matter in Wittgensteinian terms, of a linguistic form which is always in some respects
unique.
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grammatical questions, to be answered by studying how in practice we make use
of, and react to, such talk in our daily affairs, should also be treated as empirical
questions; thus we seek explanations of the nature of meaning, understanding,
etc.
3) In seeking such explanations, we study observable phenomena, e.g., peoples
talk, taking its patterning as indicative of the existence of hidden but substantive,
unitary things which are the source of the patterning.
4) In making our observations from the position of uninvolved, external observers,
we ignore the (in fact, central) way in which people are answerable for their talks
significance from within their involvements.
5) Ignoring peoples answerability for their talks significance, we treat its meaning
as something related to it externally, as a kind of add-on extra - here peoples
words, there their meaning (as the content of their words).
6) Thus we assume that peoples linguistic expressions can only have meaning by
being grounded or framed in a preexisting, systematic structure of some kind or
other - in an a priori system of rules, or in some other kind of unitary systematic
structure.
7) The rules or principles of the system of thought of as constituting a base or
foundation, in terms of which all its operations can be understood (as if rules can
mysteriously orient themselves toward their own proper application).
8) As meaning, clearly, only inheres in what is regular and repeatable, unique,
first-time events cannot play a meaningful part in our lives .
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9) Indeed, along with all these assumptions, is the assumption that at the heart of
such mental phenomena as meaning and understanding, are certain mysterious
processes or activities of a unitary kind which, once understood, will explain all
cases of the phenomena in question. If one proposition is a picture, then any
proposition must be a picture, for they all must be of the same nature. For we are
under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation
consists in grasping one comprehensive essence (1981, no.444).
Besides all the assumptions I have listed above, however, there is in the sphere of mental
phenomena a crucial master assumption which, it seems to me, legitimates all the others,
and which seems to suggest that only a scientific approach has any chance of success: it
is the assumption of radical hiddenness of unitary sources which I have already
mentioned above. This assumption, that the mind is a mysterious, nonmaterial but
unitary entity, radically unobservable in itself, is an assumption that has been with us
since the ancient Greeks. It is an assumption which, at first blush, may not seem very
important, for, given our adoption in science of empirical methods and what we might call
the causal criterion of existence, we do not need to be able to directly perceive an entity
to feel justified in ascribing reality to it. We feel it quite legitimate to ascribe reality to
entities if we can predict observable effects in relation to our manipulations. Thus, like
many other phenomena we investigate in science, whose original sources are too small,
too large, too far away, too diffuse, etc., for us to be able to directly perceive them, we
feel that we can get a grip on mental phenomena also in the same way: indirectly,
through inference and interpretation, guided by a theoretical framework of some kind.
And thus we feel it quite legitimate to ascribe reality to mental processes (and to many
other entities and agencies said to be at work in shaping peoples behavior), if our
theories of their nature predict effects we can in fact observe in peoples conduct. It is this
Kitto (1951), along with other commentators, discusses the roots of our sensibilities in Greek
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thought. Central is the belief, despite diverse appearances to the contrary, that the world consists in one not
in many things. Kitto, in commenting on the contemporary style of Thaless urge to seek unitary essences,
remarks: Could Thales have meet a nineteenth century chemist and heard that the elements are sixty-seven
(or whatever the number is), he would have objected that this was far too many. Could he have met a
twentieth-century physicist and heard that these are all different combinations of one thing, he might reply,
Thats what I always said (pp.179-180).
There is a gulf between an order and its execution. It must be filled by the act of understanding.
43
Only in the act of understanding is it meant that we are to do THIS. The order - why, that is nothing but
sounds, ink-marks.- (1953, no.431).
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assumption, aided and abetted by an orientation toward the desire for simple, unified
orders (both benign assumptions in the physical sciences), which licenses most of the
42
current scientific research in psychology into the nature of mind.
From a central, administrative grasp of realities
to a participatory, distributed understanding of possibilities
It is the assumption of radical hiddenness which leads us totally to ignore crucial,
relationally-responsive phenomena - to do with us meaning and understanding things
between us - which occur out in the world between and around us, and which call out
immediate responses from us. We pay them no heed. For after all, we tell ourselves, if
the real source of mind is in mysterious, unitary processes going on inside peoples
heads, all these different detailed events that we can sense must be mere side-effects,
just arbitrary reactions irrelevant to our understanding of the main event, hidden in our
minds somewhere . It is Wittgensteins (1953) rejection of this assumption that makes
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his whole approach so utterly revolutionary and so very different from the
representational, theoretical approach stemming from Descartes. If we want to
understand what we are doing when we make use of such terms as meaning,
understanding, states of mind, and suchlike in our talk with each other, then we do
not need special techniques to search for the hidden mental processes involved. We must
first study all the events that happen, and have happened between us in the past (in
training us to be responsive in the same way as others around us), which make it possible
for us to talk as we do.
What Wittgensteins approach does have in common, though, with the Cartesian
representational approach is, seemingly, the same overall aim, namely, the desire to
achieve a synoptic grasp of how certain sets of events hang together as organized
wholes. Indeed, for Wittgenstein (1953) the notion of an bersichtlichte Darstellung (a
perspicuous representation) is central, for what we lack, he says, is a clear view of our
use of words, and a perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which
consists in seeing connections (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). But, while Saussure wants
the whole of our knowledge of language (our linguistic competence, in Chomskys terms)
to be laid out on a page before us, in terms of an abstract schematism, Wittgenstein
seeks something very different. He wants something much more practical: we must each
come to an inner surveyable sense of the limited possibilities open to us at each moment
in our use of language, a clear sense of our way about inside our knowledge of language,
an unconfused sense of how to go on wherever we might be placed in our involvements
with others. This kind of understanding cannot be laid out on a page in terms of a formal
schematism; it can only be shown, manifested, or displayed in our practical activities.
We can thus begin to distinguish the two approaches to seeking a synoptic view of
a whole set out above, in terms of a number of questions to do with what, practically, is
involved in achieving it:
Scott (1998) puts it this way: The shorthand tools through which... officials must apprehend
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reality are not mere tools of observation. By a kind of fiscal Heisenberg principle, they have the power to
transform the facts they take note of (p.47).
Toulmin (1992) also remarks: Claims to certainty... are at home within abstract theories, and so
45
open to consensus; but all abstraction involves omission, turning a blind eye to elements in experience that do
not lie within the scope of the given theory, and so guaranteeing the rigor of its formal implications (p.200).
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1) To achieve it, must we draw back from it to view it as a whole from a distance,
or must we do just the opposite: enter into it, and in passing from part to part and
responding to each in turn, come to a sense of how they all connect together into
a whole by, so to speak, living within in it, just as one comes to know a house or a
city intimately by living within it?
2) Is there a single central vantage point from which an organized whole can be
seen as such, or is a sense of it as a whole distributed throughout the whole?
3) Who has access to the view or sense of it as a whole? Is it just a ruling elite or
everyone?
4) Is the view arrived at a static and complete view, or is it dynamic and
incomplete, and accompanied by a sense of the style of what is yet to come?
It will be worthwhile to explore these questions in relation to some concrete
examples. Someone who has explored just these kinds of issues with respect to particular
rational schemes for the betterment of humanity, is James C. Scott (1998). Going back
into the history of the pre-modern State, he finds, as he puts it, that it was partially
blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and
yields, their location, their identity... It lacked... a measure, a metric that would allow it
to translate what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view (p.2).
But as modern statecraft began to emerge, so officials took exceptionally complex,
illegible, and local practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and
created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored (p.2). He
shows, not only how maps and other spatial schematisms were developed, which could be
laid over a region to make its controllable features readable in central offices, but how
the urge to make a region or a State legible often acts back on its natural and social
ecology to completely restructure it - and often, as he shows, to render it no longer self-
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sustaining.
More than merely an urge to master and control, however, the urge to view ones
surroundings indirectly, from a distance, in terms of such simplified, stripped down,
decontextualized, ordered schematisms can, of course, be justified in much more high
minded terms. In accord with the dreams originating at the time of Descartes and Newton
- who assumed that reality was fundamentally mechanical and that everything that
occurred within it could be understood in terms of cause-and-effect processes - thinking
in terms of such schematisms or frameworks, organized in relation to a single position,
standpoint, or perspective, was to think rationally. Any other, less well organized forms of
reasoning - mere reasonableness (see Toulmin, 1992, pp.198-201) - could easily be ruled
out of court. What changes as we move beyond such a modernist world into
Wittgensteins world, is that we move from a dead, mechanistic order of one-way cause
and effect relations, into a living responsive order of detailed, unique and particular two-
way, dialogically-structured relations.
However, as Scott (1998) very comprehensively shows: Designed or planned
social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real,
functioning social order... [And] schematic authoritarian solutions to production and social
order inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable local knowledge embodied in
local practices (p.6) . Indeed, Scott goes so far as to suggest that it is a characteristic
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of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be
anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that order... [a]
nonconforming practice is an indispensable condition for formal order (pp.351-352). As
an initial illustration of his point, Scott uses the invention of scientific forestry in late 18
th
century Prussia and Saxony. As the need to exploit forests, economically, increased, wild
forests, with a diversity of different trees, undergrowth, all manner of animals and
insects, were regimented: The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks, as
it were, to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of
lookalike conscripts... At the limit, the forest itself would not have to be seen; it could be
read accurately from tables and maps in the foresters office (p.15).
It took about a century for troubles with such stripped down forests to become
clear. A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered German vocabulary. An
exceptionally complicated process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic
relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora - which were all disrupted, and which
are still not all well understood - had, unwittingly, been eradicated by the planting of
single-species, simplified, and cleaned up forests. The organization of the forest in terms
of the production of a single commodity, implacably eliminated everything that was
deemed as interfering with that aim. By replacing the forest as a natural habitat with the
forest organized solely as an economic resource, to be managed efficiently for profit, the
unnoticed ecological capital that had been developed and accumulated in the wild over
many generations, was eliminated within one or two. But the administrators forest can
never be the ecologists forest. Even if the ecological inter-dependencies at work in wild
forests could all be identified, they would constitute a reality so complexly intertwined
and variegated as to defy easy schematic description. Scott continues in his book to show
how in very many other spheres of human endeavor, similar such fiascos, disasters, and
catastrophes have been produced by such centralized, decontextualized, rational
planning.
Wittgensteins approach to the attainment of a synoptic sense of a whole is very
different. As already mentioned, a form of involved, responsive understanding of their
inner being becomes available to us with a living form quite unavailable to us with dead
things. As complete and finished forms, built up from a set of externally related static
parts, which (like the bricks of a house, or cogs of a machine) only belong together
because of their similarity to one another, they lack an inner being. Whereas, living
things, which are still growing and developing, still unfinished, seem not only to have an
inner complexity, but its structure is quite different from that of dead forms. Its parts, if
that is at all the right word, are all internally related; they only exist as the parts they are
in terms of their relations to all the parts currently constituting the whole, but also, in
terms of their relations to the parts of an earlier whole, from which they have developed
- thus their history is just as important in characterizing their current nature as the logic
of their present inter-relations. In other words, in their very nature, they come, so to
speak, with strings attached. To the extent that any organic, living whole is always on
the way to becoming other than what at present it is, it cannot (with justice to its living
nature) be represented in terms of a static picture, a purely spatial structure, at all. If this
is so, how can its living nature, a shaped and vectored sense of its emerging existence,
the grammar of its possibilities, be grasped?
This where Wittgensteins notion of an bersichtlichte Darstellung (a perspicuous
representation) comes in, for, a perspicuous representation produces just that
understanding which consists in seeing connections (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). And
this is what Wittgenstein was attempting to produce in his writing. Instead of a
theoretical framework - which we can now see as only being of use to us in making sense
of those (dead) entities to which we only have a passive, unresponsive, external observer
relationship - we can begin to embody within ourselves a living sense of an organic whole
from a whole collection of disparate involvements with it (a set of disparate parts), if our
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involvements occur in an appropriate sequence. For note, as we learn our way about in
our own homes and home-towns, each part we encounter leads on to another and
another, and so on, such that we can come to a grasp of possible paths ahead of time.
Only if we were beamed down for a moment here, and for a moment there, would our
experience consist in a patchwork of disjoined parts (to use a graphic 1896 phrase of
John Deweys) a dead and static structure of only externally related, self-contained parts,
which do not in any way call for, so to speak, certain relations rather than others with
the other parts of a whole. Luckily, this is not the case for us in our social lives together.
The spontaneous background flow of responsive activity between us, and between us and
the rest of our surroundings, is unendingly connected. We are never not immersed in it,
and (mostly, except as we mentioned above, during moments of disorientation) it has a
grammar to it such that every event in which we are involved (as noted above) comes
with strings attached such that it leads onto, points toward, or calls out a next
possible way for us to relate ourselves to it. And to the extent that the inner structure of
this flow of activity changes only slowly, we can come to discursive a grasp of its
grammar.
Conclusions
Above, then, we have explored two very different approaches toward the task of
achieving a synoptic grasp of how the things around us hang together as an organized
whole. In the Cartesian approach, we are tempted into thinking that it must be done by a
specific inner something which, although it is in itself radically hidden, nonetheless
underlies the shaping of all our behavior. Such a belief still licenses much of our thinking
in social matters today. Scott (1998) shows many of its pernicious consequences in our
practical lives now. Many years ago, Marx and Engels (1977, p.67) discussed its
pernicious effects on us intellectually, in The German Ideology. It leads us into tricking
ourselves into allowing ourselves to be dominated by our own inventions. As they point
out, a sequence of three efforts works to produce this trick: As a first effort, they say,
we must separate what people do and say from those doing and saying it, and from the
context in which they say and do it; next, we must find an order or pattern in the data
so gathered and represent it in a concept; finally, the concept is changed into a person,
an agency, which is said to be responsible for producing the now observed order or
pattern. And the trick effected by these three efforts, is the production of a ruling
illusion. An elite group invents an abstract entity (a concept, an idea) which it tells us, is
responsible for how we behave - and in so doing, hide their own part and power in the
process.
It is precisely this tendency, to project our lack of understanding of our own social
activities into a theoretical realm of activity with its own (to be discovered) mysterious
properties that Wittgenstein is trying to block. In telling us that nothing is hidden, he is
telling us that all the details (with the grammatical threads of their possible links to
other details hanging off them) that we need, if we are to understand our own activities,
are readily available to us out in the everyday world of our relations to the others and
othernesses around us. But we cannot understand how they all hang together in a flash of
insight, as we can sometimes understand things theoretically. If we are properly to chart
the ways around available to us inside the landscape of our language and culture, then
we must put in the care, the effort, and the hard, hard work required in circling around
inside it sufficiently, so to speak, to become truly well oriented, to be able to see ahead of
time the possible places available to us to go within it. This, I take it, is what Wittgenstein
means when he says that, although everything of importance to us already lies open to
view, it only becomes surveyable by a rearrangement (no.92, my emphasis). So,
although the things that are hidden from us, are hidden because of their simplicity and
familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before ones eyes.)
(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.129), coming to see them is not simply a matter of sudden
revelation; unending labor is required.
T.S. Eliot, East Coker, 1944, p.27.
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But the labor required is doable. We are not separated by an insurmountable
ontological gap between the sources of influence on our behavior and our influence on
those sources. And elsewhere, I have outlined some of the methods Wittgenstein provides
for its achievement (Shotter, 1996; Shotter and Katz, 1996). Others, too, are pursuing
similar such methods (Gustavsen, 1992; Kjellberg, Edwardsson, Niemela & Oberg, 1995;
Seikkula, Aaltonen, Alakare, Haarakangas, Keranen & Sutela, 1995; Toulmin &
Gustavsen, 1996). The task may be likened, and Wittgenstein did so liken it, to that of
getting better oriented in ones own home by tidying it up - home is where one starts
from . It does not - like the way of theory - promise exciting new and miraculous
46
revelations (and is, of course, not meant to be a replacement for it everywhere, the way
of theory has it own different sphere of application), but it does suggest a multitude of
different practical things that might usefully be done in different practical situations by
those involved in them to ameliorate their lives within them. And it does wake us up to
the fact that the miraculous processes we had hoped to discover through our theories (to
do with meaning, thinking, understanding, remembering, and suchlike), are things which
- amazingly - are already in fact being achieved by us in ways we had never thought
possible.
In Review of Communication, 1, pp.471-495, 1997.
47
All date-only citations are from Wittgensteins writings.
48
Although he regains his body at the end of his Meditations, the I who asserts Cogitio, ergo sum
49
is not embodied, but is merely a thinking thing (Descartes, 1986, p.18), a disengaged spectator, whose links
to his own body, and the bodies of others, is merely contingent, a matter to be worked out mentally: I now
know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect
alone, and that this perception derives not from being touched or seen but from their being understood
(p.22).
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-Chapter Eight-
Talk of Saying, Showing, Feeling, and Gesturing
in Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
47
One thing that is immensely important in teaching is exaggerated gestures
and facial expressions (1966, p.2) .
48
But evidence here includes imponderable evidence... [which] includes
subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone (1953, p.228e).
When the mother comes to the childs aid and realizes his movement
indictates something, the situation changes fundamentally. Pointing becomes
a gesture for others (Vygotsky, 1978, p.56).
The gesture is the initial visual sign that contains the childs future writing as
an acorn contains a future oak (Vygotsky, 1978, p.107).
Traditionally in the social sciences, seeking a single, unified, orderly form of talk, we have
spoken and written about ourselves as disembodied, isolated, self-contained individuals. We
think of ourselves as existing in a fixed world of objects that we come to know, primarily, in
a visual-intellectual manner, through our observations of them . As such, we have assumed
49
that we can only come to know our own true nature in such a world by our empirical testing
of possible representations of it for their accuracy. Below, however, I want to explore a very
different image of ourselves in tension with that above, an image (though it may make very
little sense to say it at this stage) of a dialogical rather than a monological kind. I want to
explore the strange possibilities that emerge in us attempting to talk of ourselves and others,
as living out our lives as embodied agents, where everything we do is interwoven in with the
activities the others around us. In other words, I want to explore the consequences of us
talking of ourselves as having our existence both in relation to the others around us, while
still talking of ourselves also as being unique, distinct persons, existing in seeming isolation
from all the others around us. And what I want to argue below, is that in exploring talk of
ourselves in this way (among other changes in our ways of talking), we shall not only find
it very useful to introduce talk of feeling and feelings, as well as gestures and gesturing, but
that without such talk - to do with our spontaneous, corporeal responding to each other, i.e.,
to do with how we find ourselves going out to meet the activities of those around us, so to
speak, with a certain structure of embodied expectations of what in the circumstances I can
do - we shall find it very difficult to make sense of certain crucial aspects of our own,
everyday activities. For we shall find that from within this way of talking, certain crucial
These quotations are from a passage in Heinrich Hertzs Principles of Mechanics ([1889] 1956, p.8)
50
which was to have served as the motto for Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations.
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phenomena usually disregarded in our more traditional talk of ourselves - to do with the
irresistible (pre-personal) power of the embodied human voice to move those to whom it
is addressed in some way; with how we make sense to others (and ourselves); with the
creation of shared or dialogical spaces of discussion; and so on - come into focus.
This corporeal aspect of our being in the world is easily ignored. Used to thinking of
ourselves as wholly free agents, the anonymous, pre-personal life of our bodies remains
somewhat invisible to us. We fail to notice, for instance, what makes us feel the urge to
question what a speaker has just said, or, what determines the terms of our question. In our
spontaneous, i.e., unselfcontrolled, bodily responses to our circumstances, we show
ourselves aspects of their nature that we cannot perceive in any other way. It is the special
nature of this form of active, responsive understanding, exhibited, say, by someone
listening to a speakers speech, in which he or she either agrees or disagrees with it
(completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on
(Bakhtin, 1986, p.68), that I want to explore. It is in what we might call those interactive
moments, when a second person manifestly shapes their response to what a first is doing
in relation to them, that the second shows their understanding to the first.
Before embarking upon this exploration, however, as I want to conduct it within the
contours of an essentially Wittgensteinian stance toward these issues, I would like to begin
with a somewhat dogmatic outline of what I take to be some of the important lessons to be
learned from, what he calls, his grammatical investigations of our current everyday being
in the world. I will then discuss a number of comparisons between his writings and
Vygotskys on these issues. For, as Wittgenstein himself makes clear, it is in terms of such
comparisons that we come, practically, to see connections between their different aspects,
thus to learn our way about in relation to them. This is because, as he sees it, a main
source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our
words (1953, no.122). If we are to acquire such a (synoptic) view, it can only be acquired
practically, through a review of many different particular cases, with them all seen, so to
speak, through a special hermeneutic, way of looking, or, what Wittgenstein calls, a
perspicuous representation (1953, no.122). It is to the outlining of just such an hermeneutic
for the viewing of his work that I will now turn.
Wittgensteins world: Now I can go on
Wittgensteins concern is with a certain kind of clarity, perspicuity, with the removal of
painful contradictions that lead one to ask illegitimate questions (as Hertz put it). For
50
me... clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a
building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings, he
says (1980, p.7e). However, for a philosopher so concerned with clarity, what he has to say
seems peculiarly difficult to understand. He seems unable to talk about anything directly;
nothing is fixed or finalized. He makes no strong arguments, comes to few if any conclusions,
and presents no theories or models. Indeed, he rails against such ways of proceeding: they
introduce something illusory that goes beyond and distorts the reality that is actually
there before us - if only we could see it: We want to understand something that is already
in plan view, he says (1953, no.89). Just like someone who wants to show us the 3-D
forms seemingly hidden in currently fashionable autostereograms - computer generated
random dot patterns (see, e.g. Horibuchi, 1994) - so he too seems to want to introduce us
to a reality that is, in some sense, already present in what is directly before us. But what
is that reality? The trouble is, it is like the virtual realities in autostereograms: one can either
see them clearly, or not at all, according to whether we can enter upon, so to speak, the
One has to learn to look at such patterns cross-eyed while allowing ones eyes focus themselves,
51
not upon the fixed, flat surface of the paper, but dynamically, at the differently distanced points where
features of a virtual 3-D scene appear. In this way, due to the pre-arranged nature of the dots, the left and
the right eyes see the kind of slightly different perspectives usually presented to one as one scans over a 3-D
scene. Just as one does not see an actual 3-D scene all at once, but by ranging over (some) of its different
features, moment-by-moment, almost at random (Yarbus, 1967), so one does not see what is exhibited in an
autostereogram all at once - ones perception of it dawns or develops, so to speak, over time. Indeed (and
this is most remarkable and mysterious), one (ones eyes and brain?) seems to integrate the results of ones
(random) movements over the scene in terms of a virtual or possible 3-D spatial order (the elements of which
are not related in any orderly way to each other in time!). But it is only after such an order has developed
that one can survey the whole scene, entity, or pattern with a way of looking, in which ones focus and
convergence changes as the distance away of the 3-D features change. But when one can survey it in this
way, then one has a sense of it as if possibly being there before one, as if one could reach toward it with a
sense of the different distances away of its different features, and of their relations to each other, along with
indefinitely many other relations it might have to its circumstances. Seeing something like this, a possible or
virtual reality, as everyone knows, is not without its frustrations. If one cannot see it, (although hints may
help) no explanations of its principles will not make it comprehensible; if one can see it, then there comes a
point where all explanations are superfluous - there is no need any fundamental explanation.
We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards
52
phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the possibilities of phenomena (1953, no.90).
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way of seeing appropriate to them . In the same way, we too need a way of looking, a
51
hermeneutic, if we are to see the reality he is attempting to put before us.

That hermeneutic, I claim, can be found in such remarks as the following, that a
philosophical problem has the form: I dont know my way about (1953, no.123); or: it is
particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I can go on, (1953, no.154). It is as
if he is imagining us in a great landscape (perhaps with hills and valleys, cities and villages,
and so on), but lost in a fog, and groping around trying to find landmarks, attempting to get
our bearings, thus to continue with our projects - whatever they may be. In other words, I
shall assume that in his investigations, he is not particularly concerned with events within
our heads, with us doing anything intellectual. Nor is he concerned with us necessarily
understanding each other, nor with us sharing agreements, nor with us necessarily
communicating with each other (in the sense of sending an immaterial idea or concept from
the mind of one person into that of another by the use of material signs such as vibrations
in the air or ink-marks on paper), nor with us necessarily discovering the true nature of our
surrounding circumstances. In fact, he is not concerned with us necessarily doing anything
at all in particular, let alone anything that is basic to us being human. Indeed, as he sees
it, communication in the sense of message-sending is not in fact basic to us being human:
Not: without language we could not communicate with one another - but for sure: without
language we cannot influence other people in such-and-such ways; cannot build roads and
machines, etc. And also: without the use of speech and writing people could not
communicate (1953, no.491). In other words, rather than all the complicated intellectual
things we can do as individuals, he wants to begin with very simple, practical-social
activities. He is simply concerned with us being able to go on with each other (1953,
nos.146-155).
Simply reacting or spontaneously responding to each other in ways that make it
possible for us to go on with each other in a sensibly followable way are foundational for
him, because, it is from within such unreflective, aboriginal ways of going on, or our forms
of life as he calls them, that we achieve all the other things we think of as being important
to us. Thus, as he sees it, our different ways of talking and thinking - both about our selves
(our subjectivities) and about our world (what we take to be objective) - are not there,
prior to us going on with each other, but are called into being in the different forms of life
we try to establish between ourselves. In this, however, is not concerned with describing
prevailing actualities, but with seeing possibilities - actualities can be established later,
through a set of testings and checkings, etc., which again involve us in going on with each
other appropriately . But how we actually do this, how we in fact socially construct or
52
Even in the Tractatus (1988 [1922]), he is convinced that There is no order of things a priori (T:
53
5.634); that at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of
nature are the explanations of natural phenomena (T: 6.371). And in the Investigations, while he is
concerned to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in
view; [it is] one out of many possible orders; not the order, (PI: no.132) - because there is no such single
order to be had. Whatever orders there are, are orders that we ourselves make.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of discussion (1980, p.2e).
54
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develop different possible ways of going on with each other (with differing kinds of order
to them), well... that is up to us to work out, to invent, according to the forms of life we feel
we want (and are able) to live. For, as far as he is concerned, there is no single, pre-existing
order to be discovered in our lives or in our surroundings . Thus we do not do it (nor do we
53
need to do it) by discovering some already existing but hidden laws of social relation to
which we must submit ourselves. We can invent forms of life and ways of talking that later
we abandon, forms we no longer feel to be right for us: new types of language... come into
existence, other become obsolete and get forgotten (1953, no.23).
Thus, if it not to how we actually do talk, to what does he want draw our attention?
And how does he try to do it? Perhaps of first importance, to emphasize the point already
made about practical-social activity and the power of words to move us, is how he attempts
to get us to notice precisely this by introducing a new term : language-game. Where the
54
term language-game is meant to bring into prominence that the speaking of language is
part of an activity, or a form of life (1953, no.23) - imagine, perhaps, the forms of life in
question to be those taking place in the different regions of a city: residential, shopping
malls, business, theater, banking, schools, transport, etc.; or the different forms of work and
leisure in the more rural regions of a county. It is in such spheres of activity as these, not
with inner, mental representations, that we began our linguistic lives. If, in our practical
activities, we seem to be picturing (or imagining) the nature of our circumstances to
ourselves, such pictures are not primarily present to us as contemplative (seeable) images
in our individual heads, but in the expectations and anticipations, the responses and
reactions, in terms of which we shape our practical activities. Just as in dogs fighting - the
example that Mead (1934) uses to introduce his notion of a conversation of gestures - it is
in the way that living beings continually shape their activities in a characteristic way, both
in response to, and in anticipation of, the activities of the others around them, that reveals
how in practice they imagine the nature of those others to be (if that is a right way, i.e.,
non-misleading, way of talking about it at all!). In the same way, Wittgenstein wants to get
us out of the habit of thinking about what might go on in our heads, and to center us back
in the forms of life, in the linguistically shaped bodily activities within which we grew up and
in the language-games they make possible. For him, they are the given (1953, p.226e):
The language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on
grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our life (1969, no.559). It
is with what we spontaneously and bodily show each other in our language games - not with
the pictures or images called into our individual minds in such language games - that we
must start.
Now we could say that what we show in each language game, is a certain way of
making sense of each others (and our own) actions, in our actions. But, as Wittgenstein
points out, we need to be careful not to think of such sense here as being simply an inner
process, much more is involved in such sense making than us each merely having our own
inner feelings. We exhibit something much better termed as a sensibility: for what we show
in our activities are continuously changing sensings in which we reach out, so to speak, with
different anticipatory gestures and responses (often of very subtle and unique kinds) to
connect with our changing circumstances in quite specific and precise ways. An inner
process stands in need of outward criteria, he says (1953, no.580); an expectation is
imbedded (sic) in a situation, from which it arises (1953, no.581); our living gestures and
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responses are not merely reactions to our immediate circumstances, but ones that also
connect or link our reactions to other possible circumstances in sometimes very complex
ways - in taking up a past, incorporating the present, and linking to a future, in a quite
specific way. And Wittgenstein is concerned to bring out the intricacy of the specificities
involved here. For, just as in listening to music with thought and understanding, we seem
to know in advance what is to come, so that we can be surprised when it doesnt, so here
too, we seem to have a sense of the possibilities involved. As practiced, practical
interlocutors, we seem to be well aware of the different possible meanings of each others
responses and reactions in a situation, thus to question each other quite precisely to avoid
being misled.
As a case in point, Wittgenstein (1953, p.217e) describes just such a situation in
which one person says to another: Why did you look at me at that word, were you thinking
of...? - when for a moment, perhaps, we were struck by a connection between what the
person was saying and something else (quite specific) in our experience. The speaker
wonders what that connection was, and would like it explained. So there is a reaction at
a certain moment, Wittgenstein comments, and it is explained by saying I thought of...
or I suddenly remembered (p.217e). But what is involved here is quite detailed, quite
unique, and quite specific to the situation in which it occurs. To emphasize this, he points out
that In saying this [I thought of... or I suddenly remembered] you refer to that moment
in the time you were speaking. It makes a difference whether you refer to this or to that
moment. Mere explanation of a word does not refer to an occurrence at the moment of
speaking. The language-game I mean (or meant) this (subsequent explanation of a word)
is quite different from this one: I thought of.. as I said it. The latter is akin to It reminded
me of... (1953, p.217e). It is through the use of these essential references of the
utterance (1953, p.175e) that we can, in the circumstances, make its unique meaning clear.
It is in such subtle responses and reactions as these (and the grammar of their
possible links to other reactions), that we show ourselves how to shape our lives in our
talk. And, irrespectively of what might be going on privately inside our heads, it in these
subtle responses and reactions that we influence each other in our practical goings on with
each other. The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from
this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, in the
beginning was the deed (1980, p.31e). This, I think, is the primary lesson he has to teach.
What Wittgenstein brings to our attention, is the extent and power of the taken-for-granted,
usually unnoticed, background activities constituting the everyday lives we live as
non-intellectualizing, non-deliberating, embodied beings reacting and responding to those
around us - the things we just do because of the forms of social life within which we have
grown up. In this kind of activity - what elsewhere I have called joint action (Shotter, 1980,
1984, 1993) - what we do is shaped just as much by the social context into which we must
fit our actions, as any inner plans or desires from out of which we act. So, although
participants respond to each other in a fitting manner, to the extent that they influence each
others actions in a moment-by-moment fashion, its nature is intrinsically unpredictable and
indeterminate; none of the participants embody a complete reflective grasp of its nature.
This focus upon the strange nature of these joint or dialogical forms of activity is
perhaps blurred, both by our tendency as academics to take our own individual intellectual
activity as a paradigm for all normal activity, and by the fact that Wittgenstein himself also
often chose to study such seemingly individual intellectual activities, like the continuing of
number series, or the theorizing of philosophers. Whereas, the complexity of what we just
do spontaneously, without any prior deliberation, problem-solving, interpretation, or other
inner intellectual working out, might have been more forcibly brought home to us, if he had
noted the nature of some of our more complex, but less orderly, bodily, social activities:
Helen Keller somewhere talks of being able to recognize a person (remember that she was both
55
blind and deaf) from their hand-shake up to two years after first meeting them.
Where in this case, it is possible to specify the conditions, for it is a specifically contrived
56
arrangement that makes such perceptions possible (see Horibuchi, 1994).
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simply activities like hand-shaking or dancing or negotiating other peoples movements
55
upon side-walks or at door-ways; playing racquet or other ball games; or, how we maneuver
furniture with the help of others, for instance.
This, then, orients us toward a new task: that of attempting to formulate or to
articulate the as yet unarticulated, socio-cultural background ways of going on with each
other that we have so far invented (and might further invent) for ourselves between
ourselves, to linguistically explicate (aspects of) what is implicit in our currently embodied
forms of life to see it as it is. He is concerned to explore the specific nature of the
circumstances in which it is possible for us, simply and sensibly to follow or to grasp the
tendencies in each others conduct; he wants to bring to our awareness the tendencies we
show each other in our activities that enable us to go on with each other in spontaneous,
unreflective ways. Correspondingly, he is also concerned to seek ways of talking in which we
can avoid misleading each other (and ourselves) into confusion. He wants to avoid ways of
talking about how we understand talk, that - because they forget their circumstances,
because they fail to exhibit any clear connections with their surroundings - lead us into
misunderstandings, or into inventing mythologies or empty theories. Try not to think of
understanding as a mental process at all. - For that is the expression which confuses you.
But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, Now I know
how to go on,... (1953, no.154).
The problem is this: that there are important accompanying phenomena of talking
which are often missed when one talks without thinking (1953, p.218e). Thus, as we easily
do forget the relation of our talk to its background (especially as academics), we often do
confuse ourselves in making sense of it. Thus another of his concerns is with inventing
therapeutic methods to help us extract ourselves from such confusions and
misunderstandings, from what he calls the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of
language (1953, no.109). For, just as with the virtual realities that present themselves to
us in 3-D autostereograms (if we can ever see them in the first place, that is!), we do not
see through them, to recognize what it is about them that allows us to see them as we do ,
56
so with our talk: we see what our talk says not how it says it through what it shows.
He wants us to look into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make
us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are
solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known (1953,
no.109), but known only in practice, not intellectually. Thus to repeat: Our task is to draw
attention to the unarticulated, and usually ignored, possible ways of going on that we have
so far invented between ourselves, and to do this from within the conduct of our own
embodied, conversational activities, even when a vision of the whole, in theory, is denied us.
Understanding new ways of talking:
feeling and gesture in Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
In a moment, below, I want to draw attention to the importance of talk of feeling and
feelings, and of gestures and gesturing, in making sense of (i.e., following) what
Wittgenstein and Vygotsky have to say to us. When I do so, however, I do not want to be
heard as trying to talk about feeling and gesturing (as already completed and existing things
or activities). Nor do I want to be heard as claiming any kind of theoretical centrality for such
talk. For in the end, as I suggested above, the criterion of whether our talk is sensible or not,
When we do philosophy, we should like to hypostatize feeling where there are none. Here
57
explanation of our thinking demands a feeling! (1953, no.598).
As Cavell (1969, p.71) remarks, a great deal of the Investigations is written in the genre of a
58
confession: I want to say...; I feel like saying...: Here the urge is strong...; etc. Where in confessing, you
do not explain or justify, but just describe how it is with you.
Bakhtin (1981, p.342) distinguishes between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. In
59
each epoch..., there are always authoritative utterances that set the tone - artistic, scientific, and journalistic
works on which one relies, to which one refers, which are cited, imitated, and followed (p.88). One can
disobey such authoritative discourse, but as long as it remains hegemonic, one cannot argue with it. Whereas,
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 (1981, p.346). It is of
course, precisely this openness that we are trying to avoid in our linguistic theories when we assert that our
words must already have a meaning.
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is evaluated in terms of whether we can go on with each other in it or not . Yet
57
nonetheless, a central feature in us making 1st-person claims to others, is us avowing or
declaring what we see, feel, or sense, our position to be -I see the autostereogram, I
feel happy, Im afraid I cant see it, I feel hungry, I love you - where we show in such
avowals the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. Indeed, Wittgensteins own
claims to importance issue from his strong sense of dis-ease, his sense that there are
problems to do with our use of words that cannot by resolved by us simply finding out more
about our world: they have the form of deep disquietudes, he says (1953, no.111). And
he makes an attempt to articulate their nature . Vygotsky (1986) too begins with a
58
1st-person claim to see something that has not been seen before, to do with the relation
between psychological functions (such as perception, attention, memory, thought, language,
etc.): Interfunctional relations have not yet received the attention they merit (p.1). But
their 1st-person right to attempt to articulate such feelings - indeed, everyones 1st-person
right to make avowals as to how things are for them - depends crucially upon us knowing
how to react to such talk appropriately, to go out to meet it, so to speak, with the right kind
of sensibility or responsive understanding (Bakhtin).
Thus my aim below is to explore what is involved, academically and practically, in us
beginning to draw each others (and our own) attention to these more embodied, less
cognitive, aspects of our own human activities in the world. And I want to show what is
involved in us being able to follow each other, so to speak, in such explorations, and to
describe the possibilities they might open up for us going on with each other in new ways.
I want also to bring to your attention the power of our embodied voices in doing this, in
influencing how we do in fact go on with each other in such matters as these. In short, the
question is: What is (bodily) involved in us taking such 1st-person talk, that shows us new
worlds, seriously? What is involved, practically, in doing it?
A part of what is involved, I want to suggest, is us paying attention to how, in certain
circumstances, the unfolding temporal process of words-in-their-speaking can influence us
in our conduct, as thinkers, talkers, listeners, readers and writers. For, if we are to
understand how our speaking shows the world in which we find ourselves - where that world
is a world which both constructs, and, is constructed in, our speakings - then we need to
understand how our speakings can move us bodily to respond in certain ways. Currently,
we are fixated upon the notion of words as neutral forms mentally representing outer or
inner states of affairs. As a result, we tend to think always and only of relations (of
correspondence) between patterns of already-spoken-words and their circumstances, as if
such words already had their meanings - where we think of the meaning as a thing of the
59
same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the
meaning (1953, no.120), as if a language was an already well structured system. With
Wittgenstein, my concern is to break the hold upon us of this form of talk of language as a
system. To this end, we must attend to all the other things we can do with words, besides
Elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a and b), I have talked of such a form of knowing - knowing from within
60
a circumstance or situation about how to go on within it - as a knowing of the third kind, not in Ryles (1949)
terms a knowing-that, not a knowing-how. I will not elaborate these distinctions further here.
The quote is from Goethes Faust. See also (1953, no.546).
61
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using them in a merely referential-representational way: e.g., to direct attention or to
provoke a thought (Look at...; think of...); to provoke the creation of a certain space of
possibilities (It was winter..., The small figure hesitated in front of the iron gates...); to
suggest the creation of a character (I am a sick man...); and so on. In all these examples,
others can be moved, directed, or instructed in certain ways of responding (i.e., reacting
in an anticipatory fashion) in what we write (or say).
Thus, whatever it is that I may seem to be writing about (in the activity of my writing,
or talking, here), this will not be my main concern. I shall first want to focus upon the
practical-social ways in which we interrelate ourselves to each other in such forms of writing
and talk, and the different forms of life and living to which they might give rise. Only after
that, will I be interested in the different ways of making sense, of both ourselves and our
surroundings, that become available to us from within such forms of life, such ways of
60
going on with each other. It is to the making of such ways of going on, and the relations
between Wittgenstein and Vygotsky in this respect, that I would now like to turn.
Relations between Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
1. On words as deeds: An immediate point in favor of such a comparison of Wittgensteins
and Vygotskys works emerges directly from one of Wittgensteins (1966) remarks upon an
aspect of his philosophical method: One thing we always do when discussing a word is to
ask how we were taught it... [This] gives you a primitive language in which the word is used.
Although this language is not what you talk when you are twenty, you get a rough
approximation to what kind of language game is going to be played, he says (pp.1-2). The
importance of this as a methodological recommendation issues from his claim that,
language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination (1969, no.475). Indeed, to
repeat, quite central to his whole approach to language, is the assumption that: Language
- I want to say - is a refinement, in the beginning was the deed he suggests (1980,
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p.31e). In other words, for him, there is not a discontinuity between ourselves and other
animals; language is not a primarily a code, whose creative power lies in the (infinite)
calculational or computational nature of its syntax; its power lies in how it is embedded or
woven into the rest of our activities. Only in the stream of thought and life do words have
meaning, says Wittgenstein (1981, no.173). Our talk, he says (1969, no.229), gets its
meaning from the rest of our proceedings.
Vygotskys (1986) stance is exactly similar. He also refers to Goethes claim. He
suggests that: The connection between thought and word... is neither preformed nor
constant. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves. To the biblical In the
beginning was the Word, Goethe makes Faust reply, In the beginning was the deed. The
intent here is not to detract from the value of the word, but we can accept this version if we
emphasize it differently: In the beginning was the deed. The word was not the beginning -
action was there first; it is the end of development, crowning the deed (p.255). Indeed, as
we know, Vygotsky talks of the different genetic roots of thought and speech, of a prespeech
phase in the development of thought (of problem solving) and of a preintellectual phase in
the development of speech: Indeed, like Wittgenstein, Vygotsky also sees the child at first
as relating to its surroundings in terms of whatever basic biological or animal capacities of
attention, perception, memory, motivation, learning, etc., it may have. But also, children
begin to be related to the others around them through speech, through their own babbling
and crying, as well as through the otherss use of words, particularly words of an instructive
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kind, words that can influence their behavior. It is this instructive use of words that is
crucial. Words like Look, Look here, See, heres the catch, Listen, Listen for the stroke
of twelve, Hark, the lark, Stop, Think, Stop and think, Careful, Watch out for the mud,
Have you added in the ten you carried forward yet? and so on.
With regard to usages of this kind, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, there are
countless different kinds of use of what we call symbols, words, sentences (no.23) -
there are countless different kinds of ways in which we might have an influence upon each
others (and our own behavior). But what Vygotsky emphasizes that Wittgenstein partly
misses, I think, is the importance of the boot-strap function of this kind of talk in our
cultural development - the way in which it can shift us from an unaware, spontaneous usage
of words in a practical context, to a deliberate, selfconscious use of them in a solely
intralinguistic (or disciplinary) context. Although Wittgenstein does, as I have already
indicated, suggest that our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings, he does
not study the detailed character of our proceedings in different circumstances. In not
emphasizing the importance of instructional or educational talk in Vygotskys more specific
way, he does not attend to the linguistically-shaped capacities or resources available (or not,
as the case may be) in the circumstances (the rest of our proceedings) required for such
instruction to be possible. For as Vygotsky (1986) notes: The general law of development
says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the
development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and
spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control one must
first possess it (p.168).
Drawing attention to the function of our special instructional forms of talk is to draw
our attention to two important activities: First, we can note that a teacher (an other human
being) can call us, so to speak, into (what for us) is a new practice, into a new activity, into
new ways of making links and connections between things that we have not done before -
so that in response to their actions, we do come to do spontaneously what we have never
done before. We can then note, secondly, that they can then point out to us what it is that
we are already doing spontaneously, and cause us to attend to its details and features. Thus,
such callings are a form of instructional talk that makes it possible to make assertions,
issue injunctions, point out features, etc., in a subject matter. Were, perhaps, as
Wittgenstein says about the central importance of perspicuous representations, that they
produce just that understanding which consists in seeing connections (1953, no.122). In
other words, an important aspect of such talk is the use of poetic metaphors that lead us to
see something as present to us as something which we can talk about. Where both
Vygotsky and Wittgenstein see the speaking of words here as interwoven with our living
activities, as emerging out of how we simply react or respond to each others speech in
relation to the rest of our goings on.
2. Preintellectual speech and preverbal thought: As Vygotsky sees it, then, there is both a
preintellectual phase of speech development and a prelinguistic phase of the development
of thought, an aspect of speech in which people react to each other in an embodied, animal
way, and aspects of our thinking, remembering, perceiving, etc., that are uninformed by our
talk. But a point comes when these two lines of development begin to run together. At a
certain moment about the age of two the curves of thought and speech, till then separate,
meet and join to initiate a new form of behavior (p.82). This crucial instant, when speech
begins to serve intellect, and thoughts begin to be spoken, is indicated by two unmistakable
objective symptoms: (1) the childs sudden, active curiosity about words, his question about
every new thing, What is this? and (2) the resulting rapid, saccadic increases in his
vocabulary (p.82). In other words, speech that used to relate the child only to others, and
to their world, begins to be seen (more properly sensed) by the child as relating them to
their own surroundings in an important way. Indeed, in growing up within linguistically
structured and sustained relationships, as Vygotsky (1978) says, the child begins to
perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech.
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And later, it is not just their seeing but their acting that becomes informed by their words.
Relevant here too, is a well known claim of Vygotskys (1978). It goes as follows: Every
function in the childs cultural development appears twice: first on the social level, and later,
on the individual level; first, between people..., and then inside people... All higher [mental]
functions originate as actual relations between human individuals (p.57).
Vygotsky (1986) demonstrates some of the ways in which we can use words in this
way, to direct and organize our own activities. He points out that about the age of six, the
talk that was used by others to control the childs behavior can become talk that can be used
by the child him or herself to control his or her own behavior. Vygotsky demonstrates this
by setting the child the task, say, of drawing a picture in frustrating or difficult
circumstances: For instance, when the child was getting ready to draw, he would suddenly
find that there was no paper, or no pencil of the color he needed... [In such circumstances]
the child would try to grasp and to remedy the situation by talking to himself: Wheres the
pencil? I need a blue pencil. Never mind, Ill draw with the red one and wet it with water; it
will become dark and look like blue (p.30). In such circumstances the childs speech comes
to serve specifying, planning, and organizing functions. In this connection, Wittgenstein also
remarks, a human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and
punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. We could even imagine human
beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to
themselves (1953, no.243).
It is as if in a horizontal dimension of spontaneous, everyday, unselfconscious,
conversational activity between ourselves and others, that we can seem to create (to socially
instruct or inform) a vertical dimension of relations that we can talk of as being between
individual persons and their world. But what Vygotsky does not emphasize in such claims
as those above, that Wittgenstein does, is the relation of all such higher mental functions to
forms of life, and language games, to a momentary or to a long-term social relationship of
a specific kind, and the fact that they only have their currency, so to speak, from within it.
3. The functional use of words: In our use of words to direct and organize our own activities
discussed above, we can come to use the speaking of words as an embodied prosthetic
device, an auxiliary means, a tool or instrument, through which to shape both our
perceptions and actions. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating
with signs (1965, p.6). Thus words that others have used as a means by which to direct our
mental processes as children, become the means by which we can develop the ability to
direct our own mental processes: Our experimental study proved that it is the functional use
of the word, or any other sign, as means of focussing ones attention, selecting distinctive
features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept
formation... Words and other signs are those means that direct our mental operations,
control their course, and channel them toward the solution to the problem confronting us
(pp.106-7). Thus, as for children, so for us too: Learning to direct ones own mental
processes with the aid of words or signs is an integral part of the process of [new] concept
formation, claims Vygotsky (1986, p.108). Thus, according to Vygotsky, what one has
learned in thinking conceptually is not how to compare the configuration or form of a mental
representation with the configuration or form of a state of affairs in reality, but something
else in one way more complicated, and in another more simple: one has grasped how to
organize and assemble in a socially intelligible way (one that makes sense to the others
around one), disparate features of ones surroundings, occurring in different places at
different times, but to which one nonetheless knows how to attend, in accordance with
instructions these others provided, and which now a supposed concept provides.
But as Vygotsky (1986) says about the running together of these two lines of
development - the biological and the social - the resulting development is not a simple
continuation of earlier forms. The nature of the development itself changes, from biological
to sociohistorical. Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form of behavior, but is
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determined by a historical-cultural process and has specific properties and laws that cannot
be found in the natural forms of thought and speech (p.94). It is to such a mixed,
indeterminate circumstance as this that, I think, that Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are trying
to draw our attention: That many of our forms of talk are not primarily used by us to refer
to or to represent events in the world; that is a secondary, derived function. Primarily, we
use words in socially constructing and socially sustaining different forms of life between
ourselves. Where the forms of life in which are embedded and which surround us, call us
into various practices, into certain ways of acting and being, that otherwise we would not
exhibit. And that it is from within such practices that it makes further sense to refer and
represent circumstances in our use of words.
Indeed, to the extent that people come to embody different intralinguistic ways of
relating themselves to their surroundings, in different ways, in different forms of life, they
can be seen as (or better, talked of as) having, not just different ideas in different
circumstances, but as being different kinds of subjectively self-conscious persons, inhabiting
different kinds of objective worlds (Shotter, 1993a and b) - that is, we do not just possess
the different knowledges involved within ourselves, for such knowledge is not detached from
our being, but is determinative of what we are in the process of becoming (Bernstein,
1992, p.25; Gadamer, 1975, p.278). It is at first an embodied knowledge, and, to repeat,
it is to the nature of this embodied knowledge that I wish to draw our attention and to
discuss a method for its exploration.
4. Gestural/affective language: Now central to everything that I have said so far, is the focus
upon speech, upon the activity of voicing linguistic utterances - to repeat, instead of being
interested, as in linguistics, in forms or patterns of already-spoken-words, I am interested
in words-in-their-speaking, in the part they play, not in some abstract system, but in the
stream of thought and life. For as I see it, when we study forms or patterns of
already-spoken-words within a system, we are also studying already decided meanings. What
might or could occur in the interactive moment of the use of words is already over. The
influences at work in that uncertain moment, when a first person stops speaking and a
second person must creatively respond, are bypassed, ignored. But it is in terms of the
influences at work in that moment that we shape our response. Thus, how might we talk
about our responsive talking here? For although nothing is hidden, and our task is merely
that of describing the nature of something that we are already doing, spontaneously, the
difficulty of the task consists in our having the describe phenomena that are hard to get hold
of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind (no.436). How do
we show in the voicing of our words, our utterances, our sense of our circumstances? How
does our linguistic sense of our circumstances linguistically shape our conduct?
It is here that I want to begin to talk about the gestural nature of our talk, and how
we might talk about feeling and feelings. For a clue as to how we might proceed can found,
I think, in what Wittgenstein says about language beginning in reactions, in responses, that
it is a refinement, that in the beginning was the deed. Indeed, let me at this point quote
G.H. Mead (1934) who seems to me to put the matter well when he says: The mechanism
of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness
of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture
of the first organism the meaning it has (pp.77-78). But as second organisms ourselves,
how might we linguistically characterize the supposed inner occurrences that shape our
responses or reactions to the gestures of 1st-person others? To what within ourselves
should we attend? For another clue, I think we can turn to what Vygotsky has to say about
why it is not at first easy for a child to learn to write. For: Even its minimal development
requires a high level of abstraction. It is speech in thought and image only, lacking the
musical, expressive, intonational qualities of oral speech. In learning to write, the child must
disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images [or forms]
of words (p.181). Our task, it would seem, is to reverse that process: If we are to speak of
the different uses to which words are put, we must learn to ignore their forms - what
Do they have an appearance when they are spoken? Clearly, even Wittgensteins logical grammar
62
is at fault here.
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confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them
62
in script and print (1953, no.11, my emphasis) - and to attend again to the sensory quality
of words, to the responsive feelings generated by musical, expressive, and intonational
qualities. It is this sense or sensing of the nature of our own responding to our circumstances
that we must interrogate. We must not replace peoples living words by images or forms or
shapes, but appreciate the way in which such images, forms, or shapes, can be used to refine
- to direct, specify, control, and organize - our living reactions and responses to our
circumstances.
Indeed, in this respect, Vygotsky (1986) remarks upon the serious errors produced
by ignoring the unitary nature of the process under study. The living union of sound and
meaning is broken into two parts, which are assumed held together merely by mechanical
associative connections (p.5). When we approach the problem of the interrelation between
thought and language and other aspects of mind, the first question that arises is that of
intellect and affect. Their separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional
psychology, since it makes the thought process appear as an autonomous flow of thoughts
thinking themselves, segregated from the fullness of life, from personal needs and interests,
the inclinations and impulses of the thinker. Such segregated thought must be viewed either
as a meaningless epiphenomenon incapable of changing anything in the life or conduct of the
person or else as some kind of primeval force exerting an influence on personal life in an
inexplicable, mysterious way... [E]very idea contains a transmuted affective attitude toward
the bit of reality to which it refers (p.10). But here we must be careful, as I have already
indicated, not to locate the final source of a persons expressed or realized thought solely
within their individual heads. For as Wittgenstein (1953) points out, that saying Now I
understand the principle does not mean the same thing as The formula... occurs to me. An
inner feeling is one thing, realizing or formulating it in a socially intelligible manner is
another. Saying Now I understand, or Now I can go on is not a description of a process
occurring behind or side by side with that of saying the formula. To repeat: If there has to
be anything behind the utterance of the formula it is particular circumstances, which justify
me in saying I can go on - when the formula occurs to me (no.154). What begins as an
affective attitude has, in the course of its realization, to be transmuted into a socially
intelligible and legitimate form.
Here, then, is the gestural issue to which I wanted to draw attention: For in effect,
I have wanted to argue that, what others hear us as saying in our speech depends upon
what, gesturally, we show in it, and that what we show (gesture or point toward) in it
depends upon what we bodily feel or sense from within our living involvement in the whole
speech process. Thus, to repeat the formulation above, rather than us acting out of an inner
plan or schema, we can think of ourselves as acting just as much into our own present
circumstances, in terms of the opportunities and barriers, the permissions, prohibitions,
callings, rejections, requestings, refusals, and other voicings it offers us. Where each
voicing moves us in a certain way, and we go on from previous voicings to respond with
further voicings. Indeed, as Mead (1934) notes, being aware of what one is saying to
determine what one is going to say thereafter - that is a process with which we are all
familiar (p.140). In other words, what we show or begin to realize at any one moment in
our speakings, is one of the tendencies among the field of possibilities within which we
sense ourselves as being placed or positioned. And the problem is for us not only to grasp
the nature of that field of possibilities in some way, but for us to express to the others around
us, how we ourselves individually experience it.
5. On method: Here, I think, is where some of Vygotskys (1978) comments on method,
along with Wittgensteins (1953) method in investigating the logical grammars implicit in
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our usage of words, can help us understand what is involved here. Let me begin with a
remark from Vygotsky: The search for method becomes one of the most important problems
of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity,
he says (p.65). And he suggests (cryptically) that a part of what is involved is us learning
how to study such temporal phenomena historically, where, to study something historically
is not to study something in the past, or the past of something, but to study it in the process
of change... for it is only in movement that a body shows what it is (p.65). But what is the
nature of the thing, the body, that he wants to show itself in its movement? Here, it is
useful to remind ourselves of his earlier comment, that to explain the higher forms of human
behavior, we must uncover the means by which man (sic) learns to organize and direct his
behavior (Vygotsky, 1986, p.102, my emphasis). In other words, somewhere, subsisting in
peoples activities, are historically accumulated and institutionalized voicings, ways of
speaking and acting, that serve as a means, as tools, or (in Vygotskys terms) as the
psychological instruments, that enable people to shape their own and other peoples
activities in the world. Perhaps our task in coming to a grasp of the nature of human
understanding is, so to speak, to re-voice processes that have become de-voiced and
abstracted from their proper habitats, to re-see or to re-envision them in their living
contexts.
But what kind of method might we employ here? And what might the result of its
application be like? For whatever it is that is in us somewhere, it is something really
peculiar, something we cannot visualize as an object, something that we cannot picture
mentally, something that cannot be grasped within the head of a single individual; it is quite
unlike any other kind of knowledge with which we are familiar. For, it is to do, not only with
our own continuously changing anticipations and expectations, desires and aims, as we
conduct our own practical activities in a social context (actual or imagined), but also, the
changing anticipations, expectations, desires, and aims of the others in that context, and the
relation between our expectations and theirs - and how these expectations shape our
conduct. Yet, as I have already indicated, it need not remain wholly rationally-invisible to us.
There are ways in which we can draw our attention to important aspects of its nature. And
the provision of an appropriate set of methods for such investigations, is Wittgensteins
achievement.
He calls them grammatical investigations, or investigations in philosophical or logical
grammar. They depend upon exploring the feelings of anticipation and expectation that
shape our conduct in relation to its circumstances in quite precise ways. What Wittgenstein
realized was, that although we cannot say what these feelings are, to the extent that they
do shape our conduct - what we do and what we say - then those feelings of tendency, of
expectation and anticipation, are shown by the expectancies and anticipations in our conduct
in quite precise ways. Thus one of his methods in these explorations is simply to say: Look
at this - to draw our attention to what we have in the past ignored. Another, is confront us
with comparisons, with why we say this rather than that; why such and such feels the right
things to say, while so and so evokes feelings of surprise and awkwardness. For instance:
If we say, From what he says, that seems to be his intention, but I doubt it, it raises no
problems with us; however, if we say: From what I say, that seems to be my intention, but
I doubt it, it sounds distinctly odd. Although there are occasions in which we might say such
a thing, ordinarily, we find such an utterance senseless: we do not know how to respond to
it, how to anticipate the behavior of the person speaking, how to coordinate our actions in
with theirs. Again, if someone says to us: I really mean every word I say, but please dont
take me seriously. The anticipations raised by the first part of the utterance are dashed by
the second; it is its logical grammar that is all wrong. Indeed, his method in many of these
comparisons is of a dialogical kind: he compares what is said in one circumstance with
another; what you (as a follower of the Augustinian picture of language say) with what he
(LW) wants to say; what you might be tempted to say with what is done in a particular
language-game; and so on. As Cavell (1976, p.71) points out, the voice of temptation and
the voice of correctness are the antagonists in Wittgensteins dialogues. (Cavell could have
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pointed also, to the voice of what can be said and the voice of what can only be shown, as
well as to the many other more subsidiary voices at work in Wittgensteins dialogues.)
Where Wittgensteins purpose in all of this is not to get us to see a new picture of language,
of our speakings, but to get us to see in a new way that leads us into making connections
that we have not made before.
This is what Wittgenstein (1953) means, I think, when he says: Grammar tells us
what kind of object anything is (no.373). Only here, the object is not anything like a
physical object as such at all, but some thing momentarily within both us and our
circumstances, to do with anticipating, with sensing or feeling, what next might be a fitting
continuation. Where, it is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact,
he says (1953, no.445). In Vygotskys sense, the thing we need to study is a special body
that only shows itself only in its movement, that is, only in the activity of us responsively
or sensibly speaking our words into an appropriate linguistically responsive context. Here
again, what is meant by such a body, can perhaps be understood in terms of what occurs
in our perception of 3-D autostereograms where, what we see, is not actually itself
objectively there before us (in the sense of just anybody being able to see it). We construct
it in the special way of looking we have had to develop to see, not as an actual but as a
possible reality, one that, in this case, would of course fail many of the tests for an actual
3-D reality. For again, what is important in such ways of looking is not so much what we
think of ourselves as seeing, but its possible consequences, i.e., how in fact we would be
prepared to act in relation to such a reality.
His method(s) then in his grammatical investigations, is not to discover something
special and hidden to which to appeal in proving his claims to be true, or even to justify
them. He simply wants us to see something in what is unhidden before us, the connections
between our doings and sayings and their circumstances. Thus to wake us up to the
practicalities of our own relating, to how we do what we do, to our own living responding to
what is going on around us, to our sensibilities.
6. On our sensibilities: In other words, what Vygotsky and Wittgenstein draw to our
attention, is the importance of the different sensibilities associated with the different forms
of life we establish and sustain between ourselves in our everyday talk together. And that,
to the extent that we owe our higher mental functions to such forms of life, not just any way
of talking will do. For, it is in our use of words that we arouse (in others and in ourselves)
certain feelings of anticipation and expectation, a sense, as to the possible nature of our
future conduct - how we will relate what we do both to the others around us, and, to the rest
of our circumstances. It is this sense that shapes how it is felt appropriate to respond. And
what Wittgenstein realized was, that although we cannot say what these feelings of
tendency, of expectation and anticipation, are, to the extent that they do shape our conduct
- what we do and what we say - then they are shown in the temporal unfolding of our
conduct in quite precise ways. In relating ourselves both to our own circumstances, and, to
the others around us, we show the movement of our minds (so to speak), in the pitch,
pacing, pausing, and intonation of our speech. And if, as Volosinov (1986) puts it, meaning
only belongs to a word in its position between speakers [at the moment of its utterance]
(p.102), then the tone in which it is uttered is, for instance, a part of the constructing of the
relation between speaker and listener: whether the relation demands submission, invites
collaboration, requests refutation (please say Im wrong), etc. It also expresses our relation
to our own position, our confidence, happiness, uncertainty, and so on. And others - although
they may not in any way be conscious of the fact - sense the tendencies toward which a
speakers words gesture. In our responsive talk we are concerned, not only properly to
address those to which we talk, but also to be answerable for our own, unique, momentary
sense of our position in existence. Where, if we do not or cannot voice, i.e., realize, that
sense, then - as Vygotsky (1986) quotes Osip Mandelstam as saying - The word I forgot/
which once I wished to say/ And voiceless thought/ returns to shadows chamber (p.210).
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In this connection, I think it is important to point out Wittgensteins comments in the
Preface to the Investigations. There he says that he could not weld my remarks together
into [a natural order without breaks]... my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force
them on any single direction against their natural inclination (p.ix). Such a sense or feeling
of linguistic inappropriateness is central to his whole method. Indeed, Wittgensteins
philosophy clearly emerges from, and is passionately shaped by vague but strong feelings
of dis-ease, troubles to do with our use of words that cannot by resolved simply by finding
out more about our world. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the
forms of our language and their significance as great as the import of our language, he says
(no.111). To the extent that our different ways of talking draw our attention to things in
different ways, his concern is with whether our current ways of talking lead us to see (hear)
things aright. Do they lead us to heed the world around us and others with the right kind or
quality of attention? As Wittgenstein sees it, our current ways of talking may not only be
leading us to overlook possibilities in our circumstances that we perhaps ought also to be
considering when deciding what to do for the best in our lives, but it may be that there is
something deeply wrong in us all in seeing, thinking about, and talking of matters in the
ways that we do - we may be deceiving ourselves as to what we take the value of these ways
to be. In short, rather than with technical problems, Wittgenstein confronts us ethical
worries, issues to do with what in fact he sees as the poverty and darkness of our times
(1953, p.xe). Rather than to do with how best we might, as individuals, exploit this or that
possibility we see as already existing in the circumstances around us, they are to do with
assessing whether that is what we, as members of a social group, ought to be doing at all.
For Vygotsky too, ones thought begins as an inner sense that does not express itself
in words, but rather realizes itself in them (p.251). Indeed, Vygotsky feels that what can
be said about the long term relation of thought to language, can be said equally well of their
short term, momentary relation: The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a
process, a continual movement backward and forth from thought to word and from word to
thought. In that process, the relation of thought to word undergoes changes that themselves
may be regarded as developmental in the functional sense. Thought is not merely expressed
in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought tends to connect something
with something else, to establish a relation between things. Every thought moves, grows and
develops, fulfills a function, solves a problem (p.218). Thus, the structure of speech does
not simply mirror the structure of thought; that is why words cannot be put on by thought
like a ready-made garment (p.219). Behind words, there is the independent grammar of
thought, the syntax of word meanings (p.222). The relation between thought and word is
a living process; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing...
But thought that fails to realize itself in words remains a Stygian shadow [O.
Mandelstam]... The connection between thought and word, however, is neither preformed
nor constant. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves (1986, p.255).
Conclusions
Here, then, we have a new focus of study for human agency and the site of its operations:
in peoples responsive activities in an interactive moment. In the past, we have attempted
to locate human agency either in the individual subject (Kant, for instance), or in recent
times, in discourses. For example, as Foucault (1986) claims: The author function is [a]
characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses
within a society (p.108) - as if now, instead attending to subjects, we should attend only
to discourses of a certain kind, for only within such discourses is authorship as such
possible. In other words, the originary I of Kant, the Cogitio of Descartes, taken as given
prior to discourse, is seen by the post-structuralists as constituted only in and through
language as (not ever quite) a closed system. But both these above ways of talking seem to
me to be equally blind (or deaf?) to the fact that ones talk is never a matter of innocent
description: both ways of talking are the product of quite peculiar kinds of disciplinary
discourses, with their own cultural, ethico-political, and historical dimensions. Indeed, they
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are both exclusionary, professional ways of talking that have been carved out (not without
violence, let it be said) of the ordinary, everyday conversational background to our lives.
They both work, in fact, to render what I have called the interactive moment, and the right
of 1st-persons to manifest their feelings in such moments, i.e, to make them
rationally-invisible by what they show in their actions. And they claim to be justified in this,
as Wittgenstein points out, in terms of revealing something hidden behind appearances that
is worth revealing. Whereas, to repeat, nothing is hidden (no.435), for our task is notice
and to articulate what it is that in some sense we are already doing in the everyday practical
living of our lives. However, instead of placing the real social and historical processes at the
center of our attention, we seduce ourselves with our own talk. Like good novelists or science
fiction writers, we easily (mis)lead ourselves into talking to each other (as a professional
elite) about supposed theoretical events occurring (within abstract frameworks of our own
devising) that do not actually exist. Instead of in the play of voices in our actual talk
together, we talk of certain special processes and structures, of the play of signifiers or the
movement of differance, taking place in an impersonal, imaginary, theoretical realm behind
appearances. If only we could heighten our sensibilities to what is actually happening
between us, then perhaps we could see ourselves at work within such activities - or, at least,
if not to see ourselves, then to hear our own voices at work in how we can and do shape
our own lives.
First draft of a paper that appeared in Philosophical Explorations, 1, pp.185-200, 1998, under the
63
title: The dialogical nature of our inner lives.
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-Chapter Nine-
Wittgenstein and Bakhtin:
on coming to know our way about inside
our inner lives together
63
Abstract: Talk of such things as meaning, understanding, thinking,
imagining, remembering, wanting, wishing, etc., is important to us in our
everyday lives as persons. It enables us to express aspects of our own
unique inner lives to each other, to tell others of the unique place or
position in existence which we, and we alone, occupy. Classically, it has
been assumed that such talk is about mental states assumed to exist as
real entities inside peoples heads. In the dialogical, relational-responsive
view of language use presented in this paper - centrally influenced by
Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov - an entirely different view of such
talk is presented. Instead of being about entities hidden inside us, we can
see such talk as enabling us to relate and connect ourselves both with
other people and with our surrounding circumstances in immensely
complicated ways, ways impossible without such talk. Hence, in this view,
our inner lives are not to be found as objective structures hidden inside
us as individuals somewhere, but in the unfolding, living encounters
occurring between us and the others and othernesses around us as we live
out our lives with them. They have their being within a realm of activity yet
to gain our attention in psychology and the philosophy of psychology, the
realm of dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive activities,
continually occurring between us in the background to everything we do. It
is the foregrounding of this usually unnoticed background activity that is
the prime concern of this article.
A philosophical problem has the form: I dont know my way about
(Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123).
I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they
cannot possibly know their way around (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.56).
Dialogic interaction is indeed the authentic sphere where language lives
(Bakhtin, 1984, p.183).
We talk of mental states and processes, and we seem able to make sense of our own and
each others inner lives in terms of such talk. If we study such talk from the outside, so
to speak, as uninvolved observers of it, it would seem to be about actually existing things
or entities hidden inside peoples heads. What I want to argue in this paper, is that this
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way of thinking about such talk (although not wrong in itself) is often misleading; it
directs our attention away from other events of importance in us understanding each
other, events occurring between us. There is something very special, I want to claim,
about the experiences we can have, both of others and of ourselves, from within our
conjoint spontaneous involvements with each other (to use a phrase of Goffmans
(1967)), experiences which are quite inaccessible to us when outside of such an
involvement. It is the inner structure of these involvements and the experiences to which
they give rise, that I want to explore below.
From within our conjoint spontaneous involvements
We can get a sense of their special nature by considering the simple example of making
eye contact with another person. Many of us are familiar with eye-movement records
(e.g., those made by Yarbus (1967)), which show that when we look over another
persons face, our eyes move hither and thither in a most haphazard way; the records
look almost like the random scribblings of a child. From an examination of the objective
record, there would seem to be little order or pattern in our looking: we would be unable
to say from the trajectory of our eye movements alone, whether a person is looking at
us or not. Yet, as soon as we become engaged with each other, we can have an almost
immediate and very subtle sense of whether the other person is with us or not, whether
their expressions are responsively related to ours or out of sync with them. Below, I will
mention Goffmans (1967) account of the subtle involvement obligations (and
offenses) we sense as arising in our spontaneous involvements with each other in more
detail. But here, to emphasize the crucial contextualizing role played by our spontaneous
sense of anothers relation to us in making sense of the rest of their behavior, let me refer
to Oliver Sackss (1985) well know case of Dr P. - the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Sacks begins by noting that in his initial meeting with Dr P. there was something
very odd in how Dr P. related to him: He faced me as he spoke, was oriented toward me,
and yet there was something the matter - it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with
his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. These, instead of looking, gazing at me,
taking me in, in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations - on my nose, on my
right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye - as if noting (even studying) these
individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its changing expressions, me, as a
whole. I am not sure I fully realized this at the time - there was just teasing strangeness,
some failure of the normal interplay of gaze and expression (p.8). And, beginning with
Dr P.s strange, but not wholly unspecifiable, spontaneous way of responding to him,
Sacks concluded (without going into the neurological details of Dr P.s affliction), that
what was wrong with Dr P. was that, in the visual sphere, he could not make a cognitive
judgment, though he was prolific in the production of cognitive hypotheses. A judgment is
intuitive, personal, comprehensive, and concrete - we see how things stand, in relation
to one another and oneself. It was precisely this seeing, this relating, that Dr P. lacked
(though his judging, in all other spheres, was prompt and normal) (p.17). Visually, while
Dr P. could focus on isolated details, he could not see them as parts of a comprehensive
whole.
The objective tests that Sacks at first did on Dr P. in Sacks own consulting rooms,
however, did not help Sacks make sense of Dr P.s problems. They told him what was
wrong with Dr P., but not how Dr P. still in fact managed to go on in his life. And Sacks
arranged to see Dr P. again. This time in his own familiar habitat, at home (p.10). Dr P.
was a music teacher, and, without going into the details, it became apparent to Sacks
that in his own familiar surroundings, Dr P. linked his activities to each other by singing
to himself. Observing these and other such events, unlike Dr P., Sacks was able to see
how things stood in relation to each other and himself, to come to a global grasp of the
relations and connections between events occurring within his relationship to Dr P. - and
Each phase of such spontaneously linked activity cannot properly be called a part as such. For, in
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being responsively shaped both by the actions of others around one to which it is a rejoinder, and by
anticipations of the rejoinders it will occasion in turn from those others, each phase owes its character, and its
very being, to the place it occupies within the ongoing involvement as a whole. Hence its designation as a
part.
Dialogue as such is not necessary for our exchanges to be dialogically-structured. Just as Sacks
65
noticed that the failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression exhibited in Dr P.s, so we exhibit
such spontaneous, conjointly organized activities in many other spheres of our lives.
Mikhail Bakhtin [1895-1975] is a Russian literary theorist. I mention only Bakhtin in the title of this
66
article as many credit Voloshinovs work also to Bakhtin (see e.g., Clark and Holquist, 1984). This dispute is
not relevant here, however.
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he gives us some sense of their overall nature (as we have seen above) in employing a
certain, somewhat poetic style of writing. And it is against (our synoptic grasp of) the
relational-structure of this background that we, as readers of Sackss account of Dr P.,
can orient ourselves, make sense of, and give meaning to, the more explicit factual
claims about Dr P.s behavior that he makes within it. But to repeat, it was only from
within his living involvements with him, that Sacks came to make this kind of inner
sense of Dr P.s failings - an inner sense that we as readers of Sackss account can to an
extent enter into also.
It is precisely upon this realm of spontaneously responsive activity between
people, and the kind of understanding of it that we have from within it - to do with
seeing connections within a global whole - that I want to focus in this article.
What is special about such activity, as we shall see in more detail below, is that in
spontaneously responding to our surroundings, we necessarily relate or connect ourselves
to them in one way or another. And furthermore, each phase or part of such activity is
64
in some way related, both to the phases or parts preceding it, while at the same time
limiting what parts or phases can follow from it. In other words, in being spontaneously
related to each other, it is as if each phase or part comes with strings attached to it, as
if each part is embedded in a shared local grammar decreeing the style of its possible
connections to its surroundings. Further, in being related to our surroundings n this way,
events occurring around us can move us. They can call out vague but not wholly
undifferentiated responses from us. Thus we can find movements of this or that kind,
originating from outside of ourselves at work within us whether we like it or not. It is this
realm of what I shall call - following Bakhtins (1981, 1986) and Voloshinovs (1976,
1986) emphasis on the dialogical - dialogically-structured spontaneously responsive
65
activity, that I want to explore below.
Besides the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov , also central to the account I would
66
like to give of the nature of this kind of activity, is Wittgensteins (1953) later work. For
all three, as we shall see, emphasize the importance of our living, responsive relations to
each other. Indeed, all three take it that everything else that we think of as having to do
with our mental capacities - with us thinking, meaning, and understanding things
together, with us having feelings, or being in one or another state of mind - has its
origins or roots and only makes sense from within its embedding in such a flow of
dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive activity between us. Indeed, just as
Sacks begins with the failure of the normal interplay of gaze and expression, in making
sense of Dr P.s strange behavior, so all three suggest that any noticed event within this
flow of activity can come to have meaningful significance for us. As Wittgenstein (1953)
remarks: What is the primitive reaction with which the language-game begins - which
can then be translated into words? How do people get to use these words? The primitive
reaction may have been a glance or gesture, but it may also have been a word (p.218).
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Indeed, any organic activity or process can, Voloshinov (1986) suggests, become the sign
material of the psyche: breathing, blood circulation, movements of the body,
articulation, inner speech, mimetic motions, reaction to external stimuli (e.g., light
stimuli) and so forth (p.28). We are sensitive to and make use of much more than just
the abstract forms of peoples words in making sense together within the spontaneous
flow of our daily life activities.
Thus, if Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein (BV&W) are correct, then, what we
have so far failed properly to attend to, in our attempts to understand ourselves, is the
shaped and vectored sense we can have of things in our surroundings when we, so to
speak, enter into one or another kind of living involvement with them. If BV&W are right,
then unnoticed in the background to our lives together is a ceaseless stream of entwined,
spontaneously responsive, dialogically-structured activities continuously unfolding
between us. And at any one moment in time, it is as if we each occupied our own unique
place or position on a shared relational-landscape of possible places to be; or, to put it
another way, it is as if we each inhabited our own niche within a dynamic ecology of
different, partly stable and partly changing, internally interconnected forms of life, with
each form of life having its being and drawing its sustenance from its embedding in this
ongoing, overall, stream of responsive activity. Where, in being so embedded, rather than
having deliberately to act out from within our own plans, intentions, or ideas, we act
spontaneously into our surroundings, in answer to the calls, the demands, so to speak,
they exert upon us - hence my claim above, that in our involvements with our
surroundings, we gain a shaped and vectored sense of what the next moves available to
us might be, and of the directions in which they might lie. Our task is thus that of gaining
an orientation, so to speak, within the landscape of our inner lives together. Thus, what I
want to do in this article, is to try to bring some of the crucial features of this unending,
background flow of intermingled, responsive activities between us into view. I want to try
to set out what is involved in us coming to a synoptic sense of its inner structure, thus to
find our way about inside it without continually misleading ourselves into labyrinths of our
own making.
A sensitivity to local grammars
Central to this flow of activity, as I have already claimed, is its joint or dialogical
character: the fact that anything I may do is always done in response to events occurring
in my surroundings. So, although it may seem, for instance, that when I think a thought,
I alone think it, if BV&W are correct, there is in fact a living interplay between what I do
and what occurs in or to me, and it is this living interplay that we need to study.
Currently, however, we are tempted by the grammar of our language to ascribe thinking
to a thinker, to talk of thinking as a doing which requires a doer. And in its thrall, we
puzzle over the kinds of hidden, inner psychological processes that must go on inside
individual thinkers to make what we talk of as thinking, meaning, and understanding
possible. Indeed, finding ourselves amazed that we can in fact portray (absent) states of
affairs by use of our utterances, we might, as Wittgenstein (1953) suggests, confront
ourselves with such a question as: How do sentences manage to represent?, and go on
to think, that in order to answer it we must discover some new and as yet unknown facts
of nature (the inner mechanisms of our minds). For how else is the gap between the
speakers voicing of an utterance and listeners understanding of it to be bridged?
As if overhearing us cudgeling our brains with such questions about the workings
of our sentences, Wittgenstein (1953) admonishes us: Dont you know? You certainly
see it, when you use them. For nothing is concealed. How do sentences do it? - Dont you
know? For nothing is hidden (no.435). In saying this, rather than in psychological
processes hidden inside our individual heads, he wants to suggest to us that everything of
importance to us in coming to a grasp of what it is involved in us understanding each
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other and the rest of the world around us, is in fact visible to us out in out in our
ordinary, everyday, living encounters with the others and othernesses in our
surroundings. To do this we may need to take into account a great deal that happened
before the event in question, as well as events which followed it. But, to come to a grasp
of how we do in fact manage do these things, we do not need to discover facts of a kind
utterly new to us. We need to remind ourselves of something that in some sense we
already know, with which we are already familiar. For such questions are of a kind quite
different to scientific questions, to do with discovering something not yet known to us: a
things nature in and of itself.
Wittgenstein illustrates the special status of such questions by using as an
example, St. Augustines famous response to himself over his perplexity about the nature
of time: If no one asks me [what time is] I know, if I wish to explain it to one that
asketh, I know not. In putting it this way, Augustine made it clear that, although he may
be said not to know what was time is as a thing in itself, he had no trouble at all in
making sense of, or with, talk of time in his daily affairs. About this response of
Augustine, Wittgenstein remarks that: This could not be said about a question in natural
science (What is the specific gravity of hydrogen? for instance). Something that we know
when no one asks, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is
something we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for
some reason it is difficult to remind oneself) (no.89).
He means by this remark, that if we want to come to grips with questions of this
kind, we must begin to pay attention to what we usually let pass us by in the background
to our lives together, something more basic than the knowledge we each have
individually in varying degrees of the world in which we live: the fact that in our everyday
practical activities together, we spontaneously exhibit between us a fairly sure grasp of a
vast network of interconnections between countless aspects of our lives. Or, to put it
another way: more than just being knowledgeable about the possible kinds of objects and
events that can play are part in our lives, we also have an extensive sense of what
Wittgenstein (1953) called their logical grammar, a feeling that they come (as already
mentioned) with strings attached, so to speak, so that what goes with what, what is
connected with, or leads to, what has a certain shape to it. So, although we cannot
predict the future in detail, we at least have a sense of the style of what is to come. If we
neglect the established logical grammar(s) of our lives, not only do we fail to draw on an
important resource for help and guidance as to what is possible in our more intellectual
and academic activities, but we can in fact end up, as it were, entangled in our own
rules (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.125). We can find things not turning out in our daily affairs
as we predict they should in our academic inquiries. In other words, unnoticed in our
everyday practical dealings with each other, are a number of already very well
established orders of life, so to speak - orders which we have invented and established
between us in our cultural histories - ordered ways of living which become visible to us if
we know how to look for them. Thus, if we are to act in ways that others can follow, in
ways that spontaneously arouse certain kinds of responses in others, we cannot just act
as we please: we must be sensitive to what the local grammar, so to speak, will allow.
This might seem to suggest that a grammatical sensitivity essentially consists in
a sensitivity to regularities. However, it is important to emphasize that there is also
another side to BV&Ws grammatical sensitivities, to do with crucial significance of first-
time, unique events - once-occurrent event[s] of Being, as Bakhtin (1993, p.2) calls
them. Once embedded in the unrepeatable stream of life, although our actions and
utterances clearly have recognizably repeatable features, they must of necessity also
have particular features unique to the circumstances of their occurrence. BV&W bring
these to attention also. Again, it is worth referring back to Sackss case of Dr P.: at the
time of his examination of Dr P., Sacks was unaware of any other similar cases; Dr P. was
unique - yet somehow, Sacks still managed to enter into his strange world. We can find
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the beginnings of entirely new understandings in the new responses called out from us
by new kinds of events our surroundings. We have already met this issue above, in
Wittgensteins comment about the primitive reaction with which the language-game
begins - which can then be translated into words? Voloshinov (1986) makes the point
thus: What is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable
and always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign
(p.68). In other words, in reminding us of our grammatical sensitivities, BV&W not only
bring some of the order in our spontaneous activities to our attention, they also point out
the fact that some of our ways of talking are not about things or events already actually
existing in the world around us. They are in fact formative or constitutive for us of forms
of life, sometimes of forms of life that exist only for the duration of a brief encounter
between a couple of us, and sometimes of forms of life that endure and stretch over many
generations between us. This is especially the case, I want to suggest, when we talk of
our inner mental states. Often, rather than wanting to refer to already existing,
generalized states of affairs - whether within people or between them - our aims are of a
much more particular kind: we want to know a unique him or her, to know precisely his
or her view of things, and so on. Thus, if BV&W are correct, when we talk of what we
think or feel, of our needs or wishes, of our memories, imaginings, cravings, impulses,
and so on, rather than about generalized things we find already existing within us,
naturally, we are often constructing quite specific and particular ways of relating
ourselves to each other and the rest of our surroundings, ways of relating to the present
circumstances which have not existed before.
Displacing disengaged Cartesian thought:
the move into a participatory world
Central to the approach toward our talk of mental states and psychic processes that I
want to take in this article, then, is that Wittgensteins claim above - that the questions
we face are not at all like questions in natural science (such as: What is the specific
gravity of hydrogen?) - is correct. Rather than yet more abstract knowledge as such
about the nature of our surroundings, it is a new orientation toward them that we seek;
we need a more well articulated grasp of the (partially-structured) relational-landscape
within which we are placed in our lives together with the others around us. If we are to
conduct ourselves in less confused, more socially intelligible ways, by use of our mental
talk-entwined ways of being in the world, we have no need of abstruse knowledge or
abstract theories accessible only to experts with esoteric training. It is not to empirical or
scientific questions about the nature of such things as mental states and processes that
we must seek answers, but questions as to how we all do in fact make sense of, and with,
our talk of such things in our ordinary, everyday, talk-entwined practices. And the
methods we need in giving answers to such questions as these are in fact, Wittgenstein
claims, already present among us.
Thus, what I want to suggest below, is that the further development of this kind of
understanding - which, in Wittgensteins (1953) terms, we can characterize as having to
do with us coming to a better grasp of our way about inside our own ways of going on
with each other (like coming to know our way around inside our own home-towns better)
- is not only a kind of understanding available to us all, as ordinary people, but is in fact
something we are all already doing in our daily social affairs without us, cognitively and
self-consciously, quite realizing it. We are doing it so continually and so easily, in such
spontaneous, bodily ways, that we fail to notice its presence and functioning in everything
we do. Such activities are hidden from us, not because of an insurmountable, ontological
barrier between them and us, but because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is
unable to notice something - because it is always before ones eyes.) (no.129).
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Thus, instead of attempting to provide new theories of the supposed realities
underlying our behavior, BV&W focus on the amazing and almost infinitely complex
nature of what previously has passed us by, unnoticed: the spontaneous, unthinking,
responsive activity going on between us in the background to our ordinary, everyday
lives. This shift of focus brings a number of new topic areas relevant to the conduct of our
inquiries into view. In reorienting ourselves toward these issues, toward the inner
structure of our lives together, seven such foci are, I think, worth noting straightaway:
S i) BV&W all take it that there is something quite special about us being alive and
embodied.
S ii) They all take it that we cannot not be spontaneously, i.e., directly, responsive
to each other and our surroundings in one way or another.
S iii) Thus, they focus on the complexity and fullness, so to speak, of those fleeting
moments when we are in a direct, living contact with others or an otherness in our
surroundings; the local grammar prevailing at the moment of action is crucial.
S iv) Among the consequences of us being immersed in such a flow of living
activity, is the fact everything we do and say has its being and makes sense only
from within this unceasing stream of life in which we also have our being.
S v) The focus on events within the stream of life leads BV&W to emphasize internal
rather than external relations, to emphasize relations between events sensed as
existing within our involvements rather than on theoretically possible relations
between events observed outside of any involvements with them. This distinction
between internal and external relations is of great importance, and I shall return
to it below.
S vi) To adopt this stance toward living things and activities is to adopt what Bakhtin
(1993) calls a participative (p.8) or unindifferent (p.44) style of thought. It
means that whatever one might say with respect to our communicative activities,
for instance, must be said from within ones living involvement in them, rather
than as a disinterested external observer of them.
S vii) All this finally leads to what we might call a performative mode of inquiry, a
mode of inquiry in which the proof of a result, an outcome, is not in participants
being now able to make true claims, but in them now being able to carry out new
practices successfully between them - they now know how to go on with each
other in unconfused ways. As Wittgenstein (1969) puts it: the end is not certain
propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our
part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game (no.204) - a
way of acting with a flowing sureness to it.
To these themes in common to them all, Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) and Voloshinov
(1986)) add what I think is another, quite distinct, and very important eighth, dialogical
theme:
S viii) That, in bridging of the momentary gaps occurring between us as we turn
from addressing others and invite them to address us, the outcomes of the
responsive activity occurring in the space between us, as different beings, have a
special kind of unique, open, complex, and mixed quality to them that makes
them utterly distinct from any other kind of events in existence.
Although early on, Bakhtin emphasized the importance the special moments that happen
on the boundaries, in the space between a consciousness and its surroundings, and
especially between two consciousnesses (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993), it was only later that he
came to talk of the special, sui generis nature of such moments as being moments of a
dialogical kind (Bakhtin, 1984).
As BV&W see it, then, the spontaneously responsive relations that we have to each
other and to the rest of our surroundings are prior to, and provide the background for,
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everything else of a more self-conscious and deliberately controlled kind that we do as
individuals. This unceasing background flow of activity constitutes for them (and for us),
the basic social reality within which we live our lives. But to come to a grasp of its
nature, to properly orient ourselves in relation to its inner structure, we cannot approach
it with a style of thought and inquiry appropriate to us gaining knowledge of our
surroundings while uninvolved in them. The style of thought and inquiry required, is,
Bakhtin (1993) suggests, best called a participatory style of thought, where: Those who
wish and know how to think participatively, know how not to detach their performed act
from its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context
of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity (p.19).
This is where point v) above is of crucial relevance: For, unlike the externally
related parts of a dead structure, a machine, which have a nature to them whether a part
of the machines structure or not, the parts of a living unity are indivisible from the
whole within which they have their being. All the parts of a living unity are internally
related in that they owe, not just their character but their very existence at every
moment, not only to their relations to the other parts within the whole, but also to its
earlier parts from which they have developed - thus, as well as their momentary spatial
relations, their temporal (historical, developmental) relations are of importance also. They
only exist in terms of their (dynamic) interrelations to their surroundings. And this is the
nature of the task we face in coming to a grasp of the relations between the parts of the
dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive activities with which we have our being:
we want to grasp their inner structure, the internal relations between the events around
us.
However, these events inevitably only ever occur in that momentary in-between
world of peoples actual, ongoing living relations to particular others or othernesses in
their surroundings, and furthermore, they occur there only once, unrepeatably. Thus we
can never gain an explicit, systematic understanding of such events or activities, an
understanding of them within a unitary, systematic order of connectedness. The kind of
understanding we can have of them, cannot be formulated in terms of general facts or
theoretical principles. Thus it cannot be styled as a knowing that (Ryle,1949). But
neither can it be like the understanding we can have of a particular craft or skill, a
knowing how, for clearly, it is a kind of understanding which is uniquely relevant to the
particular concrete, dialogically-structured situation within which it makes its appearance:
it has its being only within our ongoing, living, participative relations to others. As such, it
depends on our grasp of particular relations and connections internal to the specific
situation in which we are involved. It is, we shall say, a knowing-from-within, a kind of
understanding that one has only from within a social situation, and which takes into
account (and is accountable to) the others in the situation within which it is applied.
Indeed, it is a co-developed kind of understanding, an understanding of a participatory
kind that we only come to as a result of our responsive contact with the responsive
contact of others with us; it is, we can say, a dialogically-structured kind of
understanding. To contrast it with the monological, representational-referential form of
understanding more well-known to us as stand-alone, Cartesian thinkers, we can call it
an understanding of a relational-responsive kind. Rather than to do with the passive
picturing of a state of affairs, it is to do with articulating or disclosing further, over time,
in an active and dialogical fashion, the initial living impulses called out in us by the
others and othernesses around us. It is to do with seeing connections (Wittgenstein,
1953, no.122), and with spontaneously grasping how, practically, to go on with the
others (and othernesses) around us from within our involvements with them in terms of
those connections.
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A third major realm of events:
the necessary spontaneity in our everyday, dialogically-structured encounters
Central to peoples activities in the sphere of dialogically-structured activity is their
spontaneity, the fact that in them, people are directly and immediately responsive to one
another without it being necessary for them to deliberate before acting. Until recently in
psychology, in our attempt to grasp the nature of peoples inner lives, two great realms
of activity have occupied our attention: peoples individual actions, and their behavior.
And, in seeking unity in the midst of diversity, we have sought to understand these two
realms by explaining them in terms of supposedly already existing, but radically hidden,
systematic orders of existence, thought in some way to underlie them - orders of
existence which are so hidden from us that their elements can never be directly
perceived, but can only be grasped indirectly, through inference and interpretation guided
by a theoretical framework of some kind. Dialogically-structured activities, however,
constitute a third, distinct domain of events, sui generis, occurring conceptually
somewhere in between these other two: 1) Although very like actions, they cannot be
accounted as such, for they are not done solely by individuals alone; thus they cannot be
explained by giving a persons reasons. 2) And, although they are very like just
happening events, they cannot be treated as such either, for they are intelligently
shaped to fit the circumstances of their occurrence; they cannot thus be explained by
discovering their supposedly natural causes. 3) They have their own kind and realm of
existence. Rather than arising out of those of our ways of talking and thinking of which
we are consciously aware, they are, BV&W suggest, more primal or basic.
About the originary or constitutive nature of such activity, Wittgenstein (1980)
remarks that the origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction; only from
this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, in
the beginning was the deed (p.31). Where by the word primitive Wittgenstein (1981)
says that he means 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
(no.541). This is why such activities as these cannot be explained, cannot be pictured
prior to their occurrence. For such talk, as we have already seen, is to do with what is
repeatable, with what can be talked and thought about among a group of people once a
language-game entwined form of life has been established between them. Whereas, the
kind of reactions and responses of importance to us in this third, participatory realm of
activity are not of this kind. They are prototypes, candidates, for entirely new ways of
thinking, of reacting and relating to each other and to our surroundings. Thus the events
of interest to us in this sphere, are those which strike us or move us, spontaneously,
which have a unique, first-time quality to them. As Steiner (1989) so succinctly puts it,
such events are to do with the otherness which enters us and makes us other (p.188).
In other words, although these events may each be fleeting, in making a difference to us
and to our surroundings, they contribute to who and what we are and become. They are,
to repeat, once-occurrent event[s] of Being. And to the extent that we now show,
display, or carry the effects of past once-occurrent events in our present behavior - to
the extent that they have made us other than what we were before their occurrence - we
can now carry over their effects into other aspects of our lives. Yet what is so difficult for
us to accept, is that they are spontaneously expressed novel creations, appropriate in
some way to the unrepeatable circumstances of their original occurrence. It is their
spontaneous, first-time nature that makes them so hard to characterize.
Someone who has taken the spontaneity of our conversational involvements with
each other seriously and described them in some detail, however, is Erving Goffman
(1967). Indeed, he suggests that the spontaneous involvements which can occur between
people in conversation can be liken to a socialized trance (p.113). For they can give rise
to an in-between state in which impulses called out by others can occur within us, whilst
we can also put into action certain of our own plans - as to how the impulsive reactions
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they call out in us might be further articulated, for instance. Thus, in such spontaneously
responsive sphere of activity as this, instead of one person first acting individually and
independently of an other, and then the second replying, by acting individually and
independently of the first, we act conjointly, as a collective-we. And we do this bodily, in
a living way, spontaneously, without us having first to deliberate on how to do it.
Indeed, as Goffman (1967) points out, if we are to sustain the sense of a collective-we
between us, then there are certain ways in which we must act: in our joint affairs, we
find that we have certain obligations to each other whether we like it or not.
Only if you respond to me in a way sensitive to the relations between your
actions and mine can we act together as a collective-we; and if I sense you as not
being sensitive in that way, then I feel immediately offended in an ethical way - I feel
that you lack respect for our affairs. Thus a participant ...cannot act in order to satisfy
these obligations, for such an effort would require him to shift his [sic] attention from the
topic of the conversation to the problem of being spontaneously involved in it. Here, in a
component of non-rational impulsiveness - not only tolerated but actually demanded - we
find an important way in which the interactional order differs from other kinds of social
order (p.115). That is, we must act in ways that those around us sense as having been
spontaneously called out from us by what they are doing. If the others around us sense
the lack of this kind of living relation between their activity and ours, then they feel us to
be misinvolved in some way and take offense.
What this illustrates, is that the dialogically-structured nature of our
conversational activity has more than just a static kind of complexity to it; it has a
dynamic, continually changing, oscillating, or pulsating character, such that at any one
moment its structure is very different from its structure at another. At one moment, we
can find ourselves acting as a unique individual within a unique, unitary, once occurrent
event of Being, in living contact with the others and othernesses in our surroundings,
with our own unique responsibility at the point of action to the calls coming to us from
our surroundings. Whilst at another, we can also find ourselves a member of a collective-
we, called upon to act as everyone else acts. Thus what is a plurality of separate wholes
at one moment can become an organic whole at another. In some moments, particularly
as listeners, we can open ourselves to being touched or moved by the speaking others
around us. But at other times, especially when speaking ourselves in elaboration of
impulses called out in us by them, we cease to be at one with them, and turn toward our
own distinct and separate inner world. It is only in each unique, interactive or dialogical
moment, as one individual ceases to address him- or herself to the others and becomes
him- or herself an addressee, that living unities are formed.
Conclusion:
coming to a synoptic sense
of the inner landscape of anothers inner life
It is in such uncertain moments, in such once-occurrent events of Being - whether such
events occur in a fleeting moment or are stretched out, as in Sackss examination of Dr
P., over a long period of time - that we can encounter and come to a sense of others
radically different and distinct from ourselves. For they can call out responses from us
which we are incapable of calling out from ourselves (and, of course, we can call out such
responses from them). It is in these responses to an others responses, that we can
begin to enter into and get a sense of their inner lives: we experience their actions, not
as lifeless, just happening events, but from within as responsive in some way, and thus
indicative of, to the rest of the persons surroundings as an integral whole. In orienting
ourselves toward our surroundings in this way, in taking an involved or participative
stance toward them and viewing them from the inside, so to speak, we open ourselves
to spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can find ourselves unthinkingly
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moved or directed by their calls. And this occurs irrespective of any natural rules,
laws, or principles, independently of any already established regularities; it is in the
intrinsic power of our bodily expressions taken as signs to be able to do this. But if we are
to move on from this, and to come to a much more well articulated grasp of (if not the
whole at least an aspect of) a persons inner life, we need more than just the experience
of a set of disconnected, unique, fleeting moments, more than a compendium of
disconnected particularities. In wanting to know how to go on with them, we want to be
able, so to speak, to see all the possible relations between such moments, as it were,
"laid open to view" (to use the phrase Wittgenstein (1953, no. 435) uses to express our
concern here); we want to know their logical grammar, how one detail leads on to
another, We would like to have that kind of understanding of their lives which allows us to
see connections.
At this point I would like to return to Goffmans (1967) observation - that an
aspect of non-rational impulsiveness is not only tolerated but actually demanded in our
interactions - to note its importance now in a new light. If all the events between us were
only externally related, like the parts of a machine, and we had continually to work out
possible connections for them, then we would be just as Sacks describes Dr P.: only ever
seeing possible details but never a whole within they have their being and make sense.
Our spontaneous responsiveness to each other ensures that each, unique, once-occurrent
event of Being is sensibly connected to the next, and that we act in ways which afford
each other the making of such connections, so that together we form unitary
involvements from within which we can make sense of each occurring detail. If the details
of a persons inner life were presented to us only as a disconnected set of externally
related fragments, we would be unable to sense them as all hanging together to form a
living landscape. But, if presented in a conversation, in which each response is sensed as
having an unbroken, spontaneous, relational connection both with the next response, and
with the conversations impulsive origin, then those involved in it can follow it, and some
to a sense of it as a comprehensive whole.
Thus the demand for spontaneity outlined by Goffman above, connects, I think,
with the centrality of the notion of a perspicuous representation (der bersichtliche
Darstellung ) in Wittgensteins (1953) whole approach. Instead of a theoretical framework
- which we can now see as being of use to us in making sense only of those entities to
which we only have a passive, unresponsive, external observer relationship, to which we
lack an active, responsively engaged relationship - we can begin to embody within
ourselves a living sense of an organic whole from a collection of disparate parts, only if
we encounter the parts in an appropriate, responsive sequence a sequence that makes
their grammar available to us also. Thus, as he puts it, our aim cannot be "... to hunt
out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to
learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view"
(no.89), something which becomes surveyable by rearrangement (no.92). The
emphasis here on the sequencing of our experiences is pivotal. For note, if we had to
learn our way about our own homes and home-towns by being beamed down, as in
Star Trek, for a moment here and a moment there, without any sense of the spatial and
temporal relations between here and there either to our home base or to each other,
our experience would consist only in "a patchwork of disjoined parts" (to use a graphic
phrase of John Deweys (1896)). In going to a new town, it is only as we learn what
leads to what in the places and spaces it makes available to us that we gradually learn to
dwell in it, to be at home in it. Its relational grammar is important to us. And this is
what Wittgenstein is trying to do in his writings: to display to us the shape of the vast
new (intellectual) landscape of our everyday social practices, which, unfortunately, is
shrouded in a fog.
Once one comes to a grasp of Wittgensteins achievement here, one begins to
realize not only its awesome nature, but how radical it in fact is. For although, on the one
An inner process stands in need of outward criteria (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.580).
67
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hand, he truly shows us how, the aspects of things which are most important for us are
hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity... we fail to be struck by what, once
seen, is most striking and most powerful (no.129). On the other, we have to stand back
in amazement at the wonderful world in which we do actually live: the fractal fullness of
its unending detail; the continual coming into being of novelties; the creative moments
when the Other comes to call on us (Steiner, 1989). Indeed, the detailed complexity of
our living, spontaneous, responsiveness to our surroundings is emphasized also by
Bakhtin and Voloshinov (and by Goffman too). They all in their work help to bring to our
attention that pervasive third realm of dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive
activity which, because it is so continually before our eyes, has until recently remained
unnoticed in the background to everything we do. Thus, with the work of Bakhtin,
Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein now before us, we can begin to see that peoples inner
lives are not so radically hidden within them as we have thought. Rather than
geographically inside peoples heads, the content of their inner lives is out in the
unfolding, dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive process occurring between
them and others as they live out their lives together. Thus, instead of helping us to
discover something already existing, but supposedly hidden behind appearances
somewhere, Bakhtin and Wittgenstein help us to attend to something else, to something
which has yet to be studied extensively in recent times: the grammatical movements
that we can sense as unfolding within us in the course of our responsive involvements
with the others and othernesses around us - where all such inner processes are of course
related to outer events observable by all participants in the interaction . It is these inner
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movements that change us, that make us what we are.
We know this, and when we tell others of our lives, these are the moments that we
relate to them: the turning points in our lives. Diverted by the search for repetitive
processes radically hidden beneath the surface, we fail to celebrate the endlessly
complex, unceasingly creative character of events occurring out in the world between us
in our lives together. We turn the wondrous spectacle before our very eyes from a
fountainhead of new possibilities for going on with each other, into a perplexing
problem for which we (that is, some experts) can continually search for a hoped-for
miraculous solution.
In L. Holzman and J. Morss (Eds.) Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice and Political Life.
68
New York; Routledge, 2001, pp.100-129.
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-Chapter Ten-
From within our Lives Together:

Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov,
and the shift to a participatory stance
in understanding understanding
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Abstract: What makes the approaches of Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and
Wittgenstein to understanding meaning and understanding in human affairs
so distinctive, compared with mainstream approaches, is their emphasis on
our living, bodily responsiveness to each other and to the rest of our
surroundings. Indeed, as they see it, our responsive activities are often not
the result of, but prototypes for, unique and distinctive ways of thinking.
For them, our ineradicable embedding in an unending flow of spontaneous,
living activity is crucial, and is the source of everything psychic later to be
found inside us. Bakhtin and Voloshinov see this flow as dialogically-
structured. Thus we find ourselves, not only involved as participants in a
collective-reality which we construct and update spontaneously between us
without ever being quite aware of how we do it, but which also calls on us
to perform certain kinds of activities within it rather than others - it has a
grammar or a style to it, it provides us with orientation, we make sense of
things in its terms. To understand how we might mean and understand
things from within such a reality, we need a rather different kind of stance
toward it than is usual. Discussed in the paper are features of what might
be called a participatory stance, to contrast with the disengaged,
uninvolved stance we adopt toward a classical, external reality.
"My participative and demanding consciousness can see that the world of
modern philosophy, the theoretical and theoreticized world of culture, is in
a certain sense actual, that it possesses validity. But what it can see also is
that this world is not the once-occurrent world in which I live and in which I
answerably perform my deeds" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.20).
Words have meaning only in the stream of life (Wittgenstein, 1982,
no.913).
Living life has fled you, only the formulas and categories remain, and that,
it seems makes you happy. You say theres more peace and quiet (laziness)
that way... (Dostoevskys answer to a critic, quoted in Bakhtin, 1984,
p.97).
Helen Keller, it is said somewhere, could recognize people again up to two years after having
69
shaken their hands just once (remember, she was deaf and blind). Although this is no more remarkable than
those of us who are hearing people being able to recognize people again from their voices.
This is an experience I had once when, after having broken a lens in my eyeglasses, I tried driving
70
with just one lens: although the cars around me were clearly different distances from me, I found myself
feeling very unsure of what, for driving purposes, that distance was. And it was of course impossible to puzzle
it out consciously in a way that gave me any surety in my driving. There is also the experience related by
Helmholtz somewhere, that when young, while out in the town square with his mother, he noticed some
workmen high up on the church: he asked his mother to reach down some of the little dolls for him to play
with.
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A woman friend approaches me, downcast, I take her hand, and just as I feel something
of her in her hand, so she feels something of me in mine . I feel her hand in mine as
69
soft, small, limp, and lifeless, and in an attempt to cheer her up, I look into her eyes,
smile, and squeeze her hand. But for her, as we approach each other, I seem to loom
over her, blotting out her light, intruding into her grief. She feels my hand as strong and
rough, as vigorously moving in a way that is, so to speak, out of tune with the tone
expressed in hers. She feels Im in a hurry to be elsewhere. I feel Im not getting
through, and we stand for a moment wondering if we are still friends. She feels
somehow that her feelings have not been properly respected; I feel I have (morally)
failed her in some way. Feeling concerned (but also obligated), I say: Can I help?... We
can go and have a coffee if you like, I can do my stuff some other time. She smiles, and
we go off to talk. And in this initial part of our meeting, as a result of our reactions and
responses to each others expressions, we each gain a vague, outline sense of the current
shape and vectors, so to speak, of each others unique inner worlds: besides the
sensitivities we share, there are things she notices to which I am insensitive, things
which she connects which are unconnected for me, and vise-versa. And as our talk
continues, focused more but not wholly on her inner world rather than mine, its initial
vague outline - as a world of grief and suffering - will be internally articulated and
developed further. Perhaps, even, between us, we will create some new pathways within
it leading out into a new, less grief stricken world. In what follows below, I want to
explore those aspects of the work of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov which bear on
us coming to a more well oriented grasp of our experiences in involvements with the
others (and othernesses) around us such as the one above - where, by the phrase more
well oriented grasp, I do not mean an increased ability to make truth-claims about such
phenomena that others cannot gainsay, but an increased practical ability to conduct our
own human affairs without, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, becoming entangled in our
own rules (no.125). For, as we know, it is only too easy for us to set out explicit rules
and principles, and then in our attempts to follow them, finding things not turning out in
our daily affairs as we had assumed from our academic inquiries they should.
Spontaneous orientations while at home in our everyday lives
Mostly, however, in our daily affairs, we do not need to make any reference to any
explicit guides, mostly we are able to conduct our unfolding performances without it
being necessary for us to pause for more than a few brief moments to gain the
orientation we need to take our next steps. We see the ways forward offered or
afforded us (to use the term given currency in Gibsons (1979) ecological approach to
psychology) by our surroundings, directly and immediately, from within our living
involvements with them. Indeed, just as in driving my car, I see the other cars around
me each moment, directly, as near and far (rather than just as large or small ) and can
70
orient my own car in relation to them accordingly, so it is the same in my human affairs.
As long as I am engaged or involved with those around me, I can, so to speak, get a
sense of how, to some extent, to go on in my own unfolding activities in ways
This is Bernsteins (1983) term. He links it to Aristotles notion of phronesis, which is that kind of
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practical knowing which is not detached from our being but is determinative of what we are in the process of
becoming (Bernstein, 1992, p.25).
This is the kind of passive understanding familiar to us in our current, mechanistic theorizing in
72
psychology and other social sciences: we assume the passive reception of inputs or impressions from the
external world, and their understanding is said to depend on certain relations holding between what is out
there and the inner mental states these inputs are said to cause in us. We have no initially active relation to
such inputs, prior to their understanding.
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appropriate to our shared circumstances at each moment. I do not just experience the
scene before me as a dead shape or form needing deliberate interpretation by me, but as
spontaneously offering me, as it were, a set of action guiding advisories, a shaped and
vectored sense of where I am, where I have come from, and where I can (and should)
go next. What is in front, and what behind me, what is in reach and what out of
reach, and so on, is immediately apparent to me; I see objects in terms of what aspects
they will present next as I move in relation to them - only if I am brain-damaged is this
shaped and vectored orientation to my surroundings lost (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). It is as
if each event in my involvements with them comes, so to speak, with strings attached to
it, with a sense of what or can go with, or leads to, what, a grammar. At each
moment, it is as if there are rules as to what I should do next, but they are of a kind
that, when I obey them, I do so immediately and spontaneously, in a way that is not an
interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call obeying the rule and going against
it in actual cases (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.201). The rule is of a kind that, when I obey
it, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly (no.219).
It is, I think, the achievement of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov to have
all in their own different ways brought to our attention the architectonic importance of
this special kind of practical-moral understanding: the fact that we continually and
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spontaneously shape, build or construct our performances in our daily affairs as we
act into the opportunities offered us by our surroundings. The kind of understanding we
display in such activity, is an active, relational-responsive kind of understanding which,
unlike the representational-referential form of understanding more well-known to us,
gives rise to more than just a picture of the speakers meaning in another persons
head . It spontaneously shapes our practices, and is carried in them, so to speak, in
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such a way that we can carried across a certain way of acting from one situation into
another. This is where the importance of Wittgensteins work lies. He has emphasized the
importance of the fact that, as we have seen, events within the stream of our living
involvements with those around us carry with them their own logical grammar, as he
terms it. Thus, from within each such involvement, each aspect of our surroundings does
not lie dead before us - as would a car, if we saw it merely as small or large rather than
as also as advising us of its nearness to or distance from us - but it also points outside
itself to a reality beyond (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.236). Thus, in spontaneously
responding to such events, we do not act just in terms of what, objectively, they are, but
also in terms of the next possible actions they offer or make available to us. The meaning
of what we do in so reacting, is in what we achieve in what we say or do, by the use to
which we put our actions. Although often ignored, we are in fact never not embedded in
such an action-shaping flow of activity. And it is Wittgensteins achievement alone, to
have developed a number of methods for bringing the architectonic influences at work
within this flow into rational visibility when required.
He has brought to our notice a vast array of continually changing action guiding
advisories spontaneously at work everywhere in both our ordinary, everyday activities
and in our academic disciplines, influences which, so to speak, are only hidden from us
because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because
Elsewhere, I have called this kind of activity joint action (Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b,
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1995).
We can think of it as containing not only a proto-logic, a proto-physics, a proto-drama, literature,
74
and poetics, and especially, a proto-civil law, but also as continually giving rise to entirely new and unique
relations between us, such that from within them, we can also come to a grasp of alien worlds previously
utterly unknown to us (Shotter, 1998). Often, when faced with such a circumstance, our mistake is to look
for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a proto-phenomenon (Wittgenstein, 1953,
no.654), i.e., we look for repetitions of what already exists, rather than for something unique and novel.
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it is always before ones eyes.) (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.129). And in his work, he wants
to bring to our attention subtle and fleeting events occurring in and around us that
currently we tend to ignore, distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily
make us overlook (no.132). Indeed, he wants to suggest to us that, to the extent that
understanding each other linguistically is a human achievement, something that we do
between ourselves spontaneously, without noticing, it is not something for which we
need a special explanation. It is something which in one sense is already known to us,
something of which we need to remind ourselves. Thus, he suggests, if it is asked: How
do sentences manage to represent? - the answer might be: Dont you know? You
certainly see it, when you use them? For nothing is concealed. How do sentences do it? -
Dont you know? For nothing is hidden (no.435). It is just that we need to attend to
events which usually pass us by unnoticed (see Shotter, 1966, and Shotter and Katz,
1996, where a number of Wittgenstein methods for bringing the relevant events to our
notice are outlined in some detail).
Crucial in these methods, is the emphasis on the fact that the ceaseless flow of
spontaneous background activity between us is dialogically-structured , a fact brought to
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our attention by both Bakhtin and Voloshinov. Dialogically-structured activity can neither
be understood in cause-and-effect terms, nor in terms of logic or systems of calculation,
nor reasons and interpretations. It is a sui generis realm of living activity with its own
special, open, only-partially-specified, or primordial nature, such that the reactions and
responses occurring to us within it have the form of prototypes, or candidates for all our
more well-developed, separately characterized, deliberately conducted activities: all that
we ever do or say in the special disciplines, in the arts, humanities, or sciences, has its
origins in this ceaseless flow of dialogically-structured activity occurring between us.
Wittgensteins methods depend on it having this originary, primordial character . Thus,
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taken together, the work of these three can, I think, show us a whole new approach to
what we think of as our problems in psychology, an approach so new and strange that,
as I see it, it marks a radical break with what has gone before. It is this new approach
that I want to try to outline in this paper.
Rather than an objective approach, concerned to increase the different
representational knowledges about the nature of things acquired by the exercise a
research expertise, knowledges which to an extent we can each come to possess
independently of who or what we are, i.e., which are external to our being, so to speak,
it can be called a participative approach. Its primary concern is with us constructing ways
of relating ourselves to each other and the rest of our surroundings, which are not only of
use to us in some way in pointing outside themselves to a reality beyond, but which are
also internal to who and what we are. In other words, rather than with bodies of
knowledge to do with an external reality, which, in being set over against us as dead
bodies of objective knowledge, still require our interpretation if we are to apply them. It
is concerned, as we shall see, with us coming to feel and to know how to act in ways
more at home in our own humanly made surroundings than at present - where those
who all live in a common home implicitly know directly from within it, its exits and
entrances, its front and back, where guests are likely to appear, its upstairs and
downstairs, its placement in relation to the rest of its surroundings, what things there are
Of great relevance here are Bachelards (1992) claims that the house is one of the greatest
75
powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind (p.6), that it is the human beings
first world (p.7), and his designation of certain spaces as domains of intimacy (p.12) which, in imaginatively
returning to them, allow us to relive, phenomenologically, certain experiences - for example, the polarity of
the cellar and the attic, what is up, airy, clear, and light compared with what is dark, damp, down, and
mysterious (the one-sided walls that have the entire earth hidden behind them). There is insufficient space to
explore the power of these images further here.
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inside it, where they are, and how to help others confused for a moment to reorient
themselves appropriately, as well as knowing that they know of things in the outside
world in a way different from those within their home . Those who know how to think
75
participatively, notes Bakhtin (1993), know how not to detach their performed act from
its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context of
life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity (p.19). They know
how to think of things from within a domain of intimacy (Bachelard, 1992, p.12 - see
note 7) with them, from within a tonalized space of involvement which calls out certain
actions from us. It is to the dialogically-structured character of this living context as an
indivisible unity that I will now turn.
.
From within the dialogically-structured context of life
Bakhtin (1984) introduces the sui generis nature of dialogic or dialogically-structured
relations to us by asking us to consider the two judgmental utterances: Life is good.
and Life is bad. As he points out, considered logically, one is simply the negation of the
other, and between them as they stand there are not and cannot be any dialogical
relationships; they do not argue with one another in any way... Both these judgments
must be embodied, if a dialogic relationship is to arise between them and toward them
(p.183, my emphasis). When that is the case, when these two judgements issue from the
mouths of two different people, one in response to the other, then they can come to play
very different and unique roles in peoples lives. For example, someone who cannot see a
single, available step ahead of them to take, may say, ironically, Life is good; another,
who appreciates the gravity of his or her position says, by way of admonishing them for
their inappropriate irony, Life is bad, my friend... lets face it. Indeed, one can imagine
an indefinite number of dialogical scenarios in which the second judgment is uttered in
response to the first, with a very different use being served by each utterance on each
occasion, each contributing to many different overall achievements. Where peoples
living, responsive understandings of each others utterances do not depend on the
passive recognition of samenesses from the position of a spectator, but the active
noticing of differences and othernesses from within an ongoing, living involvement with
each other. Indeed, this is why in the exchange above it is peoples embodied judgments
which are crucial, for it is only in our living, embodied relations to each other that we are
spontaneously responsive to each others activities - we cannot not be. But this does not
mean, of course, that we understand each other completely and immediately in such
exchanges, only that at each moment a sufficient understanding is achieved to make the
next move in a still ongoing dialogue. Thus, as Bakhtin (1986) sees it, dialogically-
structured understanding is not something that occurs in an instant, but is constructed or
developed over time, by each participant from within their unfolding, mutual involvement
with each other.
And from within that unfolding involvement, when a listener perceives and
understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he [or she] takes an active,
responsive attitude toward it. He [or she] either agrees or disagrees with it (completely
or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution. And the listener adopts
this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and
understanding, from the speakers first word... And the speaker him-[or her-]self is
Functionalist accounts attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of basic human interests and
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needs peoples actions must satisfy if they are all to fit together into a systematic whole. Neither Bakhtin,
Voloshinov, or Wittgenstein is a functionalist. Indeed, Wittgenstein (1969) expresses his anti-functionalism
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oriented precisely toward such responsive understanding. He does not expect passive
understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone elses mind.
Rather, he [or she] expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and
so forth... Moreover, any speaker is him- [or her-]self a respondent to a greater or lesser
degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker to disturb the eternal silence of the universe.
And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also
the existence of preceding utterances... Any utterance is a link in a very complexly
organized chain of other utterances (pp.68-69). Thus, what is developed here, in the
back-and-forth of agreement, disagreement, supplementation, execution, augmentation,
application, and so on, is a practical understanding negotiated between participants as
adequate to current purposes - where such an understanding may still not be a complete
and final, cognitive understanding (an exact correspondence between the speakers and
listeners inner mental representations). But what can also be developed here, if we
attend to the uniquely spontaneously responsive aspects of our dialogically-structured
utterances, is a shaped sense, so to speak, of each others inner world. And it is this
grasp of the inner structure, so to speak, of an alien world, its shaped and vectored
form, that is of central interest to Bakhtin, and to us in our inquiries into our own socially
constructed worlds.
To introduce the dialogically-structured nature of our involvements with our
surroundings through the use of examples drawn solely from spoken dialogues between
us, however, is to court the danger of focusing to narrowly on speech communication
alone to the exclusion of the larger context of our involved bodily activities. Out of my
office window the other day, I watched four telephone workers erect a four legged
'pergola' structure over an open manhole: two held two of the uprights each, while the
other two lowered and slotted a four limbed 'roof structure' onto them. It was all over in
about 5-10 seconds, but their wordless responsive-responding to each other as they
coordinated their collective endeavor was also a perfect example of dialogically-
structured joint action. Clearly, people who are in living, embodied, responsive contact
with each other's activities in this way do not coordinate their activities cognitively and
deliberately, continually having to stop to work out what to do next according to a
theory-like structure, but are interrelating their activities in an immediate, precognitive
and spontaneous, feelingful way: they feel resistances to their pulling in the pushes of
the others, they look to where the others are looking to find where the collective action
is, and so on, in terms of a myriad of small and detailed events. In other words, joint or
dialogically structured activity occurs whenever a first person-I is responsively sensitive
in their living bodily actions to how the second person-yous around them are bodily
responding to what they do (or say). Indeed, as soon as a second living human being
responds to the activities of a first, then what the second does cannot be accounted as
wholly their own activity - for the second acts in a way that is partly 'shaped' by the first
(while the first's acts were responsive, not only to the existence of the language system
he [or she] is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances, as Bakhtin pointed
out above). It is this that makes the dialogically-structured nature of the background
flow of spontaneous activity between us so special.
In the past in social theory, we have focused on the two major realms of human
activity most visible to us as individuals: supposedly natural happenings (Behavior) and
the actions (Action) of individuals. Dialogically-structured or joint activity, however,
cannot be assimilated to either of these two categories. It cannot be understood simply
as Action, for it is not done by individuals alone, and cannot be explained by giving any
persons reasons for it ; nor can it be treated as a just happening event, for although
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(and antifoundationalism) thus: You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something
unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our
life (no.559).
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very like such events, it is intelligently shaped to fit the circumstances of its occurrence,
and thus cannot be explained as a naturally happening regularity in terms of causal
principles either. In fact, what is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex
mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences - as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, at work at the
same time in every one of our utterances, are both 'centripetal' tendencies inward toward
order and a unitary language, as well as 'centrifugal' ones outward toward diversity and
heteroglossia. It is thus next to impossible to definitively characterize the nature of
dialogically-structured, joint activity: it has neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly
structure, a neither completely stable nor an easily changed organization, a neither fully
subjective nor fully objective character. More than just a static kind of complexity,
dialogically-structured activity has a dynamic, continually changing, oscillating, pulsating
character, such that its structure at any one moment is very different from its structure
at another. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that, it is its very lack of
specificity, its lack of any pre-determined order, and thus its openness to being specified
or determined yet further only by those practically involved in it, that is its central
defining feature. So, although in one of its aspects - in terms of its centripetal tendencies
- it can be seen as an endless repetition of already existing forms, in another -
centrifugally - it can be seen as the endless emergence of unrepeatable novelty. This will
be crucial when we come to examine Wittgensteins work below.
Another crucial feature important at this juncture, however, arises from the
impossibility of being able to trace the overall outcome of any exchange back to the
intentions of any of the individuals involved in it: because of this, the situation, the
dialogical space, or the reality constructed between them, is experienced as, to an
extent, an external reality, or as a third agency with its own (ethical) demands and
requirements. Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of an invisible
third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners) (Bakhtin,
1986, p.126). Thus instead of acting within a neutral (mechanistic) reality, we find
ourselves within a living reality with an agency of its own, an agency which can make
claims on us, demands of an ethical kind, an agency which calls in a vectored way for us
to respond to it. This arises out of the fact that, if you respond to me in a way sensitive
to the relations between your actions and my responses to them, and I respond to you in
a way sensitive to the relations between my actions and your responses to them, then we
can act together as a collective-we; but if I sense you as not being sensitive in that way,
as not responding to my responses to you, then I feel immediately offended in an ethical
way - I feel that you lack a proper care or respect for our joint goings on. As Goffman
(1967) puts it, the maintaining between us of our joint spontaneous involvement (to
use his phrase), requires we continually satisfy various involvement obligations. I will
return to this issue again, in a moment, for it leads, as we shall see, to a number of very
important points to do with the necessary spontaneity of our background activities, but
for the moment, let me remain with related but somewhat more basic issues.
Answerability within once-occurrent events of Being
Dialogically-structured activities come into being only when agents go out to meet and to
interact, actively and bodily, with aspects of their surroundings. Only then is it possible
for them to get a sense of the relations between their outgoing activity toward the
othernesses around them and the incoming activity that results. But to able to do that,
agents must be able to distinguish between those aspects of their outgoing activities for
Bakhtin (1986) also talks of addressivity as the quality of turning to someone (p.99).
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Wittgenstein (1953) makes a similar observation in noting that he wants to say: .... When we mean
something, its like going up to someone, its not having a dead picture (of any kind). We go up to the thing
we mean (no.455).
We all distinguish, and indeed if we are to be accounted reasonable human beings we all must be
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able to distinguish, between that for which we as individual personalities are responsible and that which
merely happens irrespective of our agency. This distinction is fundamental not only in everyday life but also in
science... lacking any sense of their own functioning scientists would be unable to do experiments (Shotter,
1974, p.57).
Our own body is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object, but
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experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body. It is by making intelligent
use of our body that we can feel it to be our body, and not a thing outside us (Polanyi, 1963, p.16).
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which they themselves are responsible and direct toward an other (its addressivity to
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use Bakhtins (1986, p.95) phrase), and those aspects of their activities which merely
happen irrespective of their agency. Just as in feeling one of our fingers over with
another, it is the shape of the passive finger which is felt through the agency of the
active one (not the shape of the active finger through impressions received by the
passive one); or in a handshake, the shape of the others hand is felt through our hand-
shaking activity, while they feel the shape of ours through theirs; or from within a
greeting, we get a sense of an others attitude toward us in their reply (whether friendly
or hostile, joyous or downcast) while they get a sense of ours toward them, so in all such
encounters, in which we take up an active, living, unfolding involvement with our
surroundings, we get a sense of what our surroundings mean for us from within those of
active relations toward them for which we ourselves are responsible (Shotter, 1974,
1975, 1984) .
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The basic structure displayed here, in our responsible engagements with our
surroundings, is the from-to structure of tacit knowing as outlined by Polanyi (1963):
we attend from a secondary or subsidiary awareness of the moment-by-moment
unfolding details of the relations between our outflow of responsible activity toward an
other and the inflowing results, to an overall focal awareness of the continuously
changing, vectored shape disclosed in those relations - its physiognomy, as both Polanyi
(p.12) and Wittgenstein (e.g., p.210) call it. We attend from bodily processes occurring
within us to qualities in our surroundings; these qualities are what the internal processes
mean to us. In doing so, we tend not to notice what is going on in our own bodies . We
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displace the qualities disclosed away from ourselves, and locate them out in that aspect
of the world from which the incoming responses to our outgoing activities emanate. A
paradigm instance of such a displaced and vectored form of disclosure, is our sense, say,
of us as feeling the road dangerously slippy beneath our tires when driving on a wet
day, and the mood of apprehension, along with the now careful movements of the
steering wheel, such a sense of calls out from us as a result. What the details are to
which we sensitive in such circumstances would be difficult to say - and it must be
emphasized that all such sensitivities take time to develop, and seem only to be
developed by those interested in driving well - but there is no doubt that it is not too
difficult for us to learn what they can mean or point to for how we should handle our
driving in such situations. And in the light of this example, we can now, perhaps, see,
that the sense in which we do respond responsibly, is not (at least, not immediately)
anything to do with being responsible to others, but to do with being responsible, so to
speak, to the call coming from our circumstances to act in a particular way. Hence the
importance of being interested in driving well. Bakhtin (1993) calls such a form of
responsibility, an acts answerability: In its answerability, the act sets out its own truth
[pravda] as something to-be-achieved - a truth that unites both the subjective and the
psychological moments, just as its unites the moment of what is universal (universally
valid) and the moment of what is individual (actual)... The actually performed act in its
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undivided wholeness is more than rational - it is answerable. Rationality is but a moment
of answerability,... (p.29). Without an immediate and unequivocal responsive
understanding that, on at least some occasions, a persons current response is (or is not)
answering what questions put to him or her call for, and us going on with them,
practically, on that basis, rational discussion amongst us would be impossible. The end
is not, says Wittgenstein (1969), certain propositions striking us immediately as true,
i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the
language-game (no.204). It is in how we go on with people that we display our
relationally-responsive understandings.
But just as we may turn to or go up to someone or some thing, so we may also
turn from or go away from someone or some thing, and cease our responsible,
responsive actions toward them, and become involved elsewhere. Our involvements need
not be continuous nor solely of one kind; they have the form of events with a beginning,
middle, and an end. Because of their unique, unrepeatable character, and because, even
if the world around us was utterly static and unchanging, we would change and develop
as a result of our encounters with it, Bakhtin (1993) calls the time-period when we are in
a state of responsible or answerable involvement with an aspect of our surroundings, a
once-occurrent event of Being (p.2). What is crucial about such events is that it is only
from within them, from within their unfolding and from within their unfolding alone, that
we can bring the past into contact with the present in a way shaped by the anticipation
of a particular future: we can bring an already determined and integral aspect of
ourselves or of the world, or of both, into contact with a unique, never-before-existing
and never-to-be-repeated, lived experience; we can bring an objective and general
domain of culture into relation with a set of unique, concrete circumstances; we can
bring the already spoken into contact with the not yet said (Bakhtin, 1981, p.28);
and, in the novel, which is of course of especial interest to Bakhtin (1981), the
already bespoke quality of the world is woven together with the already uttered quality
of language, into the unity of the worlds heteroglot becoming, in both social
consciousness and language (p.331). In all these cases, within once-occurrent events of
Being, we can bring a whole range of diverse influences into relation with each other, to
bear on each other not in a logical or causal way, but in a moving, living, dialogically-
structured fashion. The answerability of the actually performed act knows a unitary
plane, a unitary context in which [a] taking-into-account is possible - in which its
theoretical validity, its historical factuality, and its emotional-volitional tone figure as
moments in a single decision or resolution. All these moments, moreover (which are
different in their significance when viewed from an abstract standpoint), are not
impoverished, but are taken in their fullness and in all their truth [pravda]. The
performed act has, therefore, a single plane and a single principle that encompasses all
those moments within its answerability (p.28).
But so far, it will have been noticed, within the plane of the once-occurrent event
of Being, we have considered mostly the experience of a single agent becoming involved
with an aspect of his or her surroundings, and have not yet begun properly to consider
the relations within such events when two (or more) consciousnesses become involved
with each other. As Bakhtin (1984) points out: It is one thing to be active in relation to
a dead thing, to voiceless material that can be molded and formed as one wishes, and
another thing to be active in relation to someone elses living, autonomous
consciousness. This is a questioning, provoking, answering, agreeing, objecting activity;
that is, it is a dialogic activity no less active that the activity that finalizes, materializes,
explains, and kills causally, that drowns out the others voice with nonsemantic
arguments (p.285), i.e., arguments (from within a speakers own scheme of
abstractions) which do not arouse a responsive understanding of any kind in their
listeners, which lie dead before one. It is once we begin to consider the relations
between two (or more) consciousnesses, and the ability of anothers voice to call out
responses from us, whether we like it or not, that we can begin to examine more closely
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peoples practical understanding of each others actions, and to turn toward issues to do
with people appreciating both each others inner lives and their own. For, just as in
touching and caressing anothers hand, although we mostly feel their hand and not our
own, they will react to ours as rough or smooth, as fleshy or bony, as strong or weak,
and so on, and we get to know about our own hand through their responses to it, so we
can get to know more about other aspects of ourselves through the responses of others
to our responses to them. Indeed, as Bakhtin (1984) remarks: I am conscious of myself
and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with
the help of another... I cannot manage without another, cannot become myself without
another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection
and mutual acceptance) (p.287). But it is only from within once-occurrent events of
Being, those events in which we are involved with, or engaged with, the others around
us, that the possibility of me coming to be conscious of myself, arises. It will be useful to
dwell for a moment on the relation of such events to our already existing practices.
Unrepeatable, first-time reactions
in relation to regular ways of acting
As we have seen, central to Bakhtins, Voloshinovs, and Wittgensteins account of
meaning and understanding is the fact of our living, bodily responsiveness to events in
our surroundings. For them, meaning and understanding are not first to be found inside
peoples heads and then, later, in their actions, but the other way around: what is later
to be found in their heads appears first in their actions. To understand another persons
utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the
corresponding context. For each word we are in the process of understanding, we, as it
were, lay down a set of our own answering words... Any true understanding is dialogic in
nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of dialogue is to the next (Voloshinov,
1986, p.102). As Wittgenstein (1980) sees it: The origin and primitive form of the
language-game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language - I want to say - is a refinement, in the beginning was the deed (1980,
p.31). Where by the word primitive here, Wittgenstein (1981) means 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). Such living, bodily
responses are, thus, the primitive beginnings from which our more refined and
elaborated meaningful behavior and our understandings of it are developed. It cannot be
emphasized too much, that at the heart of us becoming language users is us being
trained by those around us to react and respond in various ways, spontaneously and
directly. Where training us to respond in this way does not depend on us first
understanding, but rather, our later understanding depends on it. At the heart of all our
mental activities are our practices, practices which meet certain public norms and
criteria of successful performance. Only in learning a foreign language does a fully
prepared consciousness... confront a fully prepared language which it need only accept
suggests Voloshinov (1986). People do not accept their native language - it is in their
native language that they first reach awareness (p.81).
Let me emphasize the radical nature of what all three are claiming here. Rather
than beginning with anything in our heads, they are suggesting that the origin or source
of everything that is meaningful for us can be found out in the world between us, in our
living, bodily reactions to events in our surroundings. What may seem to end up residing
inside our individual heads, in our minds, and to have its whole existence there without
any obvious relation to our surroundings, starts out in the living, bodily responsive
relations between us and the world around us. And furthermore, our meaningful ways of
so acting are in fact sustained in existence by us unceasingly exhibiting in our
spontaneous responsive reactions certain characteristic ways of acting and forms of
expression, in relation to certain very general facts of nature: If there were, for
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instance, no characteristic expression of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception
and exception rule; or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency - this
would make our normal language-games lose their point. - The procedure of putting a
limp of cheese on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its
point if it frequently happened for such lumps to suddenly grow or shrink for no obvious
reason (1953, no.142). It is not that we have certain instincts, as if we were
automatons who exhibited fixed and innately patterned, sequences of behavior, released
from us solely by the occurrence of specific stimuli. It is just that the immensely varied
relations between us and our surroundings depend on us being able to depend on certain
regularities, sureties, certitudes, in the world around us. Where these everyday
certitudes and sureties are not claims to knowledge, in the sense that we can offer
criteria for our belief in them, but, are once again, the basic but ungrounded terms which
are constitutive for us of who and what we are; they are the terms in which we make
sense of everything else around us; they constitute the element in which [our]
arguments have their life (1969, no.105). Hence, in contrast to the Cartesian claim that
any proper knowledge of things must begin in doubt, Wittgenstein (1993) suggests: The
primitive form of the language-game is certainty, not uncertainty. For uncertainty could
never lead to action. I want to say: it is characteristic of our language that the
foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting...
The basic form of the game must be one in which we act (p.397). What has to be
accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.226).
Thus, as we have seen, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein, all draw our
attention to the fact that, whether we like it or not, we live our lives embedded within
one or another strand of a ceaseless flow of living, unrepeatable, dialogically-structured
activity: where, this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign
to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a
semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another
link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does
the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs
(Voloshinov, 1986, p.11). And, it is only from within our own living, spontaneous
involvements or engagements within such a chain of activity, that we can make sense of
what is occurring around us. Indeed, as we are socialized into such activity-flows, into
the already established practices going on around us, we become trained in the practical,
relationally-responsive forms of understanding required in spontaneously going on with
those who are already at home, so to speak, within such practices. Individuals do not
receive a ready-made language at all, rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal
communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to
operate (Voloshinov, 1986, p.81). To repeat, such spontaneous ways of acting with their
grammar are, thus, constitutive for us of who and what we are, and what counts for us
as the stable, repeatable, and significant forms within that flow, and as such, they cannot
be explained, for they constitute the basis in terms of which all our explaining of things
to each other is done. For us, they are foundational.
This, however, is what is so difficult for us to accept. If Wittgenstein is right, then
our actions are not rooted or grounded in any supposedly, already existing, objective
structures out in the world, nor in any subjective structures in our minds, but simply in
the grammars currently existing in our forms of life, i.e., in the immediate and blind,
but sure and unquestioned, ways of acting, in terms of which we spontaneously relate to
the others and othernesses around us. In other words, our ways of acting are not
themselves based on grounds; they are not reasonable (or unreasonable); they are
simply there as an aspect of our lives together. And their grammar, their physiognomy,
the set of action guiding advisories, the shaped and vectored sense of where I am,
where I have come from, and where I am going to that they continuously provide to us
from within our participation in them, is crucial in giving intelligible shape to everything
we do. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, grammar tells us what kind of object
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anything is (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.373). But, as we have seen, in lived space, objects
are known to us in terms of what aspects they will present to us next as we move in
relation to them. In other words, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, his investigations are
not so much directed toward phenomena in themselves, as one might say towards the
possibilities of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement
that we make about phenomena... Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one
(no.90). It is to do with the possible connections and relations between things, whether
already realized or not.
Going on from where we are
In the past we have developed our language-game entwined forms of life, collectively,
without being aware of how (or why) we have brought about such changes, from the
primitive and myth laden forms of earlier times to what they are today in all their
complexity and refinement. What Wittgensteins work now allows us to do, however, is to
come to a much more aware grasp of how such changes occur. This is crucial. For,
although our language-game entwined forms of life may seem to be utterly arbitrary and
without foundations, and thus just to be there without any explanation, this does not
mean to say that we cannot, from within our living of them, criticize or improve them.
Indeed, just as we argue that the transition from us seeing our world in terms of myths
of our own devising to seeing it in the more objective terms of science was an
improvement in that we now orient ourselves toward our external world in less
confusing, more instrumentally effective ways, so we can argue that Bakhtins,
Voloshinovs, and Wittgensteins work can help us orient ourselves in similar more
vectored, less confused and confusing ways inside our social lives together. Thus, even
though their work cannot be justified in terms of any explicit foundational principles, it
can nonetheless still be counted as critical and their attention directing statements as not
simply arbitrary, if in their application they can lead to forms of life which, by
comparison, can be accounted better than previous forms.
But more than just at this global level, their work is also crucial in bringing to our
attention the importance of details; they have made rationally-visible to us, the
immensely varied and subtlety detailed ways in which it is possible for us to bring about
such changes in our forms of life. Above, I have emphasized the importance of the
steady ways of living and regular ways of acting within which our language is rooted. If
we lived in a wholly mechanistic world, that would once again be an invitation to focus on
the importance of repetitions and regularities - for in a world in which earlier states can
be repeated exactly, all traces of the passage of time could be eradicated. But in a living
world, in which time is real and irreversible, so that the world as a whole can never take
up again a previous configuration, to sustain repeatability at least within portions of it,
takes energy and effort. In other words, as we are now beginning to realize, from, say,
Prigogines (1980; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) work on what he calls dissipative
structures and other work in complexity and chaos theory (Waldrop, 1992), living
stabilities are dynamic stabilities sustained within a constantly changing, unrepeatable,
surrounding flow of activity, and as such, are in fact, strangely, sources of ceaseless
novelty (see Shotter, 1984, p.197). For there must be an irreducible, qualitative
difference between the successive moments of such a stability for it to be recognizable as
a flowing (rather than as a frozen) stability. As Wittgenstein (1980) puts it: Lifes
infinite variations are essential to our life. And so too even to the habitual character of
life (1980, p.73). We thus find that what is repeated in once-occurrent events of
Being, are not dead, identical forms, like each tooth of a cogwheel, but unique living
events which although all different from each other can be counted as the same as each
other; they are such that we can spontaneously respond to each in the same way (but
which we can, should we so choose to orient ourselves differently, respond to differently
also).
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Everyones voicing of the greeting Hello, for example, is different from everyone
elses; and we can recognize a friends voice as greeting us while knowing that other
greetings are uttered by strangers. But, as Bakhtin (1986) points out, what makes an
utterance and utterance, and not just the voicing of a linguistic form, is the possibility of
responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude toward
it (for example, executing an order) (p.76). That is, it is in the realm of doings and
deeds that an utterance has its being. And as speakers we not only express our own
particular position and evaluative attitude toward both the topic and toward our
addressee (friendly-unfriendly, official-intimate, etc.) in the ongoing action between us,
but we determine in our tone, their responsive position (subservient, equal,
superordinate, etc.). In being shaped in accord with a speakers responsive relations to
their surroundings, every utterance expresses in its intonation a speakers momentary
evaluative orientation and in so doing, also positions listeners in relation to it. And
listeners respond accordingly, from within the position they now find themselves placed.
Thus, rather than first recognizing the repetition of a regular form, and then going on to
interpret its particular meaning in a particular context, the opposite is the case: as living
beings, we first find ourselves spontaneously responding to another as friendly or
unfriendly, as of higher or lower social rank, as keeping us at a distance or as being
intimate with us, and so on, without it at all being apparent to us precisely what it is in
the form of their behavior that positions us in relation to them. As we have seen above,
such spontaneous responses are the primitive beginnings from which most refined and
elaborated understandings are developed. To emphasize the point again: these initial
forms of response do not depend on cognitive acts occurring inside our individual heads,
on thought, understanding, or acts of interpretation. Rather, our individual acts of
cognition depend on our acting - in the beginning was the deed. Thus, as Voloshinov
(1986) puts it: The basic task of understanding does not at all amount to recognizing
the linguistic form used by the speaker as the familiar, that very same, form, the way
we distinctly recognize, for instance, a signal that we have not quite become used to or a
form in a language that we do not know very well. No, the task of understanding does
not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a
particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e.,
it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity... Thus the
constituent factor for the linguistic form, as for the sign, is not at all its self-identity as
signal but its specific variability; and the constituent factor for understanding the
linguistic form os not recognition of the same thing, but understanding in the proper
sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the particular given context and in the particular,
given situation - orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not orientation in
some inert sense (p.68, and p.69).
Thus, just as I recognize that it is your voice as my friend on the telephone now,
and not that of a stranger, irrespective of what you might say, or you recognize that it is
my writing, irrespective of what is actually written there, so we recognize in the
continuously changing vectored shapes disclosed in the events occurring around us a
physiognomy, a quality to which we can orient - like suddenly hearing our native tongue
spoken in a foreign land. Here is something very particular to us, something we are at
home in, to which we can relate, something that gives us a set of possible paths
forward. We feel that we have a sense of what to do next, that here is a situation in
which we know how to go on. As intellectuals and academics, due to our mechanistic
upbringing, we think that without an accumulated experience of very general repetitions,
we lack all orientation, like Descartes (1968), we feel as if [we] have fallen
unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles [us] around so that [we] can neither
stand on the bottom nor swim up to the surface (p.16). But this is to forget the
anchoring that we can have, in certain situations, in our sense of our responsibility for
our own actions: we need to remind ourselves of the fact that we can distinguish in at
least some cases those occurrences for which we, and we alone, can be said to be
responsible, from those just naturally happening, and of the proto-phenomena making
Our attitude to what is alive and what is dead, is not the same. Our reactions are different
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(Wittgenstein,1953, no.284).
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this possible. It is this which allows us to orient ourselves, even in what are for us
unique, first-time events. For to repeat: The actually performed act in its undivided
wholeness is more than rational - it is answerable. Rationality is but a moment of
answerability,... (Bakhtin, 1993, p.29). And it is in spontaneously finding ourselves
answerable to specific calls coming to us from our surroundings, along with (more or
less elaborated) action guiding advisories of some kind, their grammar, that gives us
the orientation we need. To that extent, even as very young babies, we are never not
oriented, to put the matter rather awkwardly. Indeed, as is well-known, babies react to
complex qualities, such as friendliness and joy, unfriendliness and anger, long before
they distinguish between simple forms, such as between triangles and squares. What
cultural and linguistic forms are seen and accounted by us as constant in our lives, are
achieved by us. So, while we may be tempted to suggest that the norm is constancy, and
that it is in variations from the norm that we can express our own, unique inner lives,
ourselves. More properly, we should say, that variation is the norm, and that
exceptionally, besides expressing our own uniqueness, we can on occasions, if we have
been trained properly so to respond, understand in anothers unique behavior, aspects of
it which we all share, which we can count as constant. Thus, what is important to us in
our lives together then, are the fleeting, one-off, unique, unrepeatable events, events
which, as Garfinkel (1967) so wonderfully puts it, continually occur for yet "another first
time" (p.9). It is within these unique, 1st-person expressions, these once-occurrent
events of Being, that we make our inner lives visible to the others around us. We
become present to each other from within them, from within our ongoing involvements
with each other, from within our forms of life.
Conclusions: the shift into a participatory world
Instead of attempting to provide any new theories, then, of the supposed mechanical and
repetitive realities underlying our behavior, Voloshinov, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin focus
on the amazing and almost infinitely complex nature of what previously has passed us
by, unnoticed, in the background to our lives: the flow of spontaneously responsive,
living, relational activity within which everything we do in our ordinary, everyday lives is
embedded. The perspective... no, the form of life they offer us, is one very different from
the essentially Cartesian form of life we have adopted and trained ourselves in, in our
intellectual inquiries in modern times. Primarily, they have shifted our attention away
from what is supposed to be radically hidden inside us somewhere, and toward what
occurs out in the world between us, which is only hidden from us because we fail to
attend to it. They have also drawn our attention to the fact that, as living beings, we
cannot not be responsive to our surroundings, and thus always in one or another living
relationship to them. They have also shifted our whole standpoint, from that of
disengaged, outside observers, to being interested, involved participants. Indeed, a
whole galaxy of changes is involved - a shift into a world very different from the modern,
external world in which we have now lived for three hundred years or so. We can list
some of the more prominent, i.e., those that most clearly contrast with (almost as mirror
images of) our current assumptions:
S i) They both take it that there is something quite special about us being alive and
embodied .
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S ii) Both take it that we cannot not be spontaneously, i.e., directly, responsive to
each other and our surroundings in one way or another.
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S iii) Both focus on the complexity and fullness, so to speak, of those fleeting
moments when we are in a direct, living contact with others or an otherness in
our surroundings.
S iv) We live as responsive parts of a larger, living, responsive whole.
S v) Among the consequences of us being immersed in such a flow of living activity,
is the fact everything we do and say has its being and makes sense only from
within this unceasing stream of life in which we also have our being.
S vi) Indeed, in calling out certain actions rather than others from us, we
spontaneously find ourselves oriented within the flow.
S vii) The focus on events within the stream of life leads both to emphasize internal
rather than external relations: that is, while the parts of a dead structure have a
nature to them whether a part of the structure or not, those of a living, organic
unity owe their very nature at every moment, not only to their relations to the
other parts within the whole, but also to its earlier parts from which they have
developed - thus, as well as their momentary spatial relations, their temporal
(historical, developmental) relations are of importance also.
S viii) To adopt this stance, to distinguish between internal and external relations, is
to distinguish between those aspects of a scene which stand before us dead, so
to speak, and those which call something from us, to which we are answerable.
S ix) Also, to adopt this stance toward living things and activities is to adopt what
Bakhtin (1993) calls a participative (p.8) or unindifferent (p.44) style of
thought. It means that whatever one might say with respect to our
communicative activities, for instance, must be said from within ones living
involvement in them, rather than as a disinterested external observer of them.x)
The ultimate realm in which we live and have our being, and in which we must
find the final arbitration as the value of our achievements, is the realm of doings
and deeds.
S xi) All this finally leads to what we might call a performative mode of inquiry, a
mode of inquiry in which the proof of a result, an outcome, is not in participants
being now able to make true claims to knowledge, but in them now being able to
carry out new practices successfully between them. To repeat: the end is not
certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing
on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game
(Wittgenstein, 1969, no.204).
To these themes in common, Bakhtin and Voloshinov add, as we have seen, another,
quite distinct, dialogical theme:
S xii) That, in bridging of the momentary 'gaps' occurring between us as we turn
from addressing others and invite them to address us, the outcomes of the
responsive activity occurring between us have a special kind of unique, open,
complex, and mixed quality to them that makes them utterly distinct from any
other kind of events in existence.

Clearly, as Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Wittgenstein see it, the spontaneously
responsive relations that we have to each other and to the rest of our surroundings,
which are prior to, and provide the background for, everything else of a more self-
conscious and deliberately controlled kind that we do as individuals, have a very special
nature: in being proto-phenomena, candidates for later, more well-defined forms of
behavior, they have what we might call a primal, originary, or constitutive character. It is
this which makes them amenable only to a certain kind of understanding: what, as we
have seen, Bakhtin (1993) calls a participatory style of thought and understanding. And I
would like to end this article with some comments as to its nature.
In the past, we have thought of our inquiries as making reality apparent to us,
with the hope that if we knew the true nature of our surroundings, we could act in ways
What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an
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individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any
action (1981, no. 567).
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better fitted to them. Thus, as uninvolved, disinterested, objective observers, we could
just pass on the results of our findings for everyones benefit. But, it is impossible for us
to conduct any inquiries without us at some point, voicing claims, opinions, theories,
etc., as to their nature. And, as Bakhtin (1986) remarks: An utterance is never just a
reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and
final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new
and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the
good, the beautiful, and so forth). But something created is always created out of
something given (language, an observed phenomenon of reality, an experienced feeling,
the speaking subject himself, something finalized in his world view, and so forth). What
is given is completely transformed in what is created" (pp.119-120).
In other words, because we live in a world of dialogically-structured events,
peoples utterances always and inevitably make a difference in and to our lives; they
make history. They cannot be unsaid. It is not a matter simply of us possessing, or not, a
certain body of knowledge. Another kind of understanding is at work. It is not the kind of
understanding which can be formulated in terms of general facts or theoretical principles;
it is not a knowing that (Ryle,1949). But neither can it be the understanding of a
particular skill or craft, a knowing how. For clearly, it is a kind of understanding which is
uniquely relevant only to the particular concrete, dialogically-structured situation within
which it makes its appearance. It has its being only within our ongoing, living,
participative relations to others. As such, it depends on our grasp of particular, only
once-occurrent connections and relations internal to the specific situation in which we are
involved, and in occurring only once, unrepeatably, we can never gain an explicit,
systematic understanding of such relations within a unitary order of connectedness. As I
have suggested elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a and b), it can be called a knowing-from-
within, a kind of understanding that one has only from within a social situation, and
which, in being answerable to its situation, takes into account (and is accountable to) the
others in the situation within which it is applied. Indeed, it is a co-developed,
dialogically-structured, kind of understanding, an understanding of a participatory kind
that we can only come to as a result of our responsive contact with the others and
othernesses around us. It does not give us what we have sought in the past, an
objective, independent, picture of how it is.
But that monological, representational-referential form of understanding, as we
have called it, into which we were trained as stand-alone, Cartesian thinkers, only gives
us its supposed, objective pictures, against the background of, or in relation to, the
unceasing flow of spontaneous, living activity between us which constitutes for us, the
basic social reality within which we all live our lives . Within that reality, the relational-
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responsive kind of understanding we employ is to do with more than the passive
picturing of a state of affairs. It is to do with articulating or disclosing further, over time,
in an active and dialogical fashion, from within our living involvements with the others
and othernesses around us, the vectored shape of the initial living impulses called out
in us by those involvements. And it is a kind of understanding which is improved by
seeing connections not before noticed (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). For the seeing of
such connections orients us in how further we might go on with what or who is in our
surroundings. Indeed, due to its origination in living impulses of one kind or another,
such a form of understanding always matters to us, it always has some relation to
value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth) ( Bakhtin 1986, p.120). It is the
ineradicably evaluative and orientational aspect of our living relations to our
surroundings below which distinguishes the embodied, participatory stance Bakhtin and
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Wittgenstein take in their studies, which contrasts markedly with the disembodied,
disinterested, disengaged ways of being currently demanded of us by our training as
objective scientists. But it is precisely this which allows us to continually improve it from
with our involvements in it.
Thus, to summarize the general shift in stance entailed in moving from a
disengaged, Cartesian stance toward a more participatory style of thought, we can say:
It entails a shift from the attitude of the uninvolved, disinterested, external observer, to
that of the engaged, interested participant in a language-game entwined form of life.
Where, within such forms of life, participants are interested, at any one moment, in
grasping (perceiving) in an action relevant manner, what can be effected within them,
the possibilities for action they allow or afford us. For we want to act in ways which are
not at odds with our surroundings, in which, among the many other barriers to effective
and proper action, we do not become entangled in our own rules. Where, in the long
term, of course, we are interested in extending what abilities we have to move in ways
which are in tune with our own immediate surroundings, out further into the larger
world around us. In other words, as a participant in all aspects of human life at large, I
want, as Wittgenstein (1953) put it, to know my way about (no.123), unendingly,
inside more and more aspects of it. I want to be more at home in the complicated
landscape of human phenomena without the continual need to consult and puzzle over
maps - to be at home in human life at large in ways which I can continually extend as I
actively engage myself in elaborating yet further the calls I receive from my
surroundings.
First given as Senior Faculty Fellow's Lecture, Center for the Humanities, University of New Hampshire, October 9,
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1996. I have retained its character as a spoken text. Published in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27:2/3, pp.345-
357, 1997
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-Epilogue-
Dialogical Realities:
The Ordinary, the Everyday,
and Other Strange New Worlds
82
What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts,
only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is
enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fast
the synopsis of trivialities (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.26).
Finally, I want to talk about some of the very strange characteristics of our everyday
lives together, of the conversational spaces we open up between us, and of the equally
strange dialogical realities they create - strange, because we are very unused to trying to
talk about the nature of our own practical doings, sayings and understandings, from
within the course of our own doing of them. And after having said something about their
strange nature, I want to go on to try to say something about Wittgenstein's equally
strange, nontheoretical, poetic methods or intellectual practices, for investigating how
we can in fact get a grasp of what it is we (and the others around us) are actually doing,
without having to step outside the ongoing flow of our activity to view it as if from a
distance, in terms of a theory - thus to reduce its rich and continuously innovative
diversity, seemingly, to an orderly, fixed and repetitious process.
In the past in social theory, in our search for a supposedly fixed order behind
appearances, two distinct spheres of activity have occupied our attention: peoples
individual actions, and their behavior. However, as I see it, dialogical phenomena
constitute a third sphere of events, occurring somewhere in between these other two: (1)
They cannot be accounted simply as actions (for they are not done by individuals, thus
they cannot be explained by giving a persons reasons); nor (2) can they be treated as
simply just happening events (to be explained by discovering their causes). (3) They
occur in a chaotic zone of indeterminacy or uncertainty in between the two - Winnicott
(1986, p. 133) called entities in this sphere transitional phenomena; Vygotsky (1986)
talked of a child as thinking in complexes (p. 112), and said that: Family names are
perhaps the best example of this ... [Where] in a complex, the bonds between its
components arc concrete and factual rather than abstract and logical (p. 113); while
Wittgenstein (1953), as we know, suggested that the similarities between those of our
everyday [end 345] activities we often talk of as being activities of the same kind, are
not complete and are also best characterized as being like family resemblances (no.
67). Indeed, although our joint or dialogical activities contain aspects of each of the
other two categories, occurrences in this sphere do not seem amenable to any clear
characterizations at all - like the determinate indeterminacies in chaos theory, only
oxymoronic, partly-this and partly-that, both-and kinds of designation seem appropriate.
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Indeed, it is their very lack of specificity, their lack of any pre-determined order,
and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in
practice, that is their central defining feature. And it is precisely this that makes this
sphere of activity interesting, for at least two reasons: one is to do with our more
practical investigations into our conduct of such joint, dialogical activities; the other is to
do with the ways available to us for talking of their still unfolding, incomplete, only
partially specified nature.
Turning first to our practical inquiries, it is their very lack of specificity that opens
up such joint activities to our empirical inquiries. For instance, we can study (i) how
people do in fact manage to coordinate their activities together; (ii) what it is that makes
such coordinations possible, or impossible; (iii) who benefits in such transactions; (iv)
what resources they may or may not have available; (v) how their exchanges may or
may not benefit a social groups culture at large; and so on. While we, as academics,
may not be able to specify and make determinate the forms of peoples self-other
relations ahead of time (and have no right to impose our own completions), we can study
how they themselves manage to specify and determine them. And this is the sphere in
which discursive and rhetorical psychology, and ethnomethodology and conversational
analysis in sociology are currently flourishing (e.g. Billig, 1996; Potter and Wetherell,
1987; Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson, 1996).
While this is where all the practical payoffs of this approach lie at the present
time, it is not, I think, where the most radical changes lie. They will lie in our changed
attitude to our talk of certain things - and I mean our talk of things, not our talk about
them: things such as (i) our talk of language; (ii) of persons (and their psychological
make-up); (iii) of society; (iv) culture, etc. These are all things of which we cannot
seem to form a single, fixed and distinct picture upon which to base a practice; things
that are always inadequately represented in our theories about them. Indeed, they often
exist as mere grammatical phantasms of our own talk rather than as properly substantial
entities - even though they may, nonetheless, play a very real part in both our daily and
in our academic activities (see the account of the imaginary in Shotter, 1993a, Ch. 5). It
is in our investigations into entities occupying this strange, third, dialogical, joint,
transitional or practical realm of phenomena that I think Wittgensteins remarks are most
relevant.
But in what way? For, as is also well-known, his books are written only in terms of
numbered remarks; they are not about anything. He does not try - [end 346]
like Descartes - to present us with a new world, to wipe the slate clean, and to give us
some new foundations upon which to base our studies. He is not a modernist
philosopher, seeking to provide us with general, universal, formal, timeless, systematic
pictures (supposedly true representations) of states of affairs. Instead, what he tries to
do is to supplement or refine what we already know, by offering us some reminders of
aspects of it that we have not yet noticed - remarks intended to bring such aspects to our
attention. (Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we
are supposed to give an account of it, is something we need to remind ourselves of -
1953, no. 89.) Thus his work can only make sense to us in a context. Hence, trying to
talk about it - as I am now - may seem to be something of a paradox; but luckily, the
kind of contexts we need are out in the very conversational spaces existing between us,
here and now, as speakers and listeners, as writers and authors of texts; they exist in
those interactive moments when a second person must react or respond in some way to
the activities of a first.
Indeed, Wittgenstein searched for those points in our lives where language had its
life, moments in which amazing things can happen - as they can in some special
moments between people. On the face of it, his life was terrible, and he made the lives of
others a misery. Yet, on his death, he said: Tell them I had a wonderful life. So, in
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talking to you today about some of the very strange characteristics of joint or dialogical
realities, I want to try to convey to you some of that wonder, to say something about the
amazing fractal fullness of the momentary events occurring between us: their
inexhaustible richness of detail; their strange, mixed character; their only once
occurrent nature (as Bakhtin, 1993, p. 1, puts it), and so on.
A changed view of language
Central to the dialogical approach to language - and the practical, nontheoretical,
refinement view of the growth of knowledge Wittgenstein offers us - are, I think, four
major points. (1) Instead of it being something computational, a matter of ratiocination,
we must begin to treat it as something to do with living beings responding and reacting
to each other, rather than as something occurring between essentially dead, mechanistic
entities. This, as Tom Stoppard (1993) in his new play Arcadia puts it, is, of course, the
attraction that Newton left out (p. 74); and he exemplifies it in his play especially in
peoples embodied, erotic, and sexual reactions to each other. The opening line of the
play is (Tomasina): Septimus, what is carnal embrace?. Wittgenstein draws our
attention to the responsive nature of our initial forms of relation to each other in the
following series of remarks: Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination
(1969, no. 475). The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only
from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I [end 347] want to say - is a
refinement, in the beginning was the deed says Wittgenstein (1980, p. 31) quoting
Goethe. Where the primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may
also have been a word, he suggests (1953, p. 218).
(2) Another point is that we see language as primarily rooted in peoples
embodied, dialogical activities, in their social activities, and not as grounded either in
their minds or in the worlds around them. Only in the stream of thought and life do
words have meaning (1981, no. 173). (3) A third is that all the human phenomena of
importance to us are initially relational phenomena; thus we arent seeking to explain
what they really are in themselves, but to grasp their point, how they work to relate us
to each other and to our surroundings, the possible connections and relations that such
events might have with the rest of our lives. (4) And a final point is that some (many, in
fact) of these phenomena are what Wittgenstein (1953) would call proto-phenomena
(no. 654) - or, following Goethe, Ur-phenomena. They are original or firsttime
phenomena - a crucial part of what we can call for short, the usually unnoticed
background to our lives. The references to Goethe here are important, and I will return to
them later when, towards the end of my talk, I want to talk about some methods for
understanding joint, dialogical or relational phenomena.
It is these novel, non-repetitive expressions that make it possible for us to
understand each other, and to explain certain things to ourselves even though our
explaining cannot in itself be explained! Thus we must come to a grasp of their nature by
some other means, by, suggests Wittgenstein, poetic means: Philosophy ought really to
be written only as poetic composition (1980, p. 24). This is what is so special about his
methods, his remarks: they do not work in terms of abstract concepts, but practically, by
sensitizing us to the character of the fleeting and momentary seen but unnoticed
(Garfinkel, 1967, p. 7) events, that in fact influence our conduct. He brings them to our
notice through remarks which render them now striking in some way. And when we
attend to them fully, in all their nuanced detail, we realize that they are novel and
unrepeatable events, events which, in Bakhtins (1993, p. I) terms are, to repeat, only
once-occurrent events, or, in Garfinkels (1967, p. 9) terms, they are events occurring
for yet another first time, shaped more by peoples unique responsiveness to the
context of their occurrence than by any strict rules or principles.
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Thus what is important about such events is that instead of a representational-
referential understanding which can be formulated in terms of laws, principles or rules
supposedly governing repetitive events, they provoke a wholly different kind of
understanding: a relational-responsive kind of understanding, not to do with what
something is in itself, but with a practical grasp of the changing, momentby-moment
links and relations between such events and their surroundings as they unfold in all their
details and nuances. [end 348]
Dialogical phenomena:
their unknowable, mixed, background nature
To see why this kind of relational rather than representational understanding is required,
let me try to spell out some of the strange characteristics of dialogical phenomena -
consider first, the location of the influences shaping peoples activities. (1) Classically, we
have thought of ourselves as being influenced by the objects and events around us
monologically, that is, we have thought of ourselves as self-contained individuals
(Sampson, 1993), related to our surroundings as if Suing them from a distance ... almost
as if viewing them through a plateglass window that prevented us from having any
actual, living contact with them. And this has led us to think of the world around us as
being an external world. (2) However, as living, embodied beings, we cannot not be
responsive to the world around us. Unlike computers and other machines, we must
continuously react to our surroundings directly and immediately, in a living way,
without us having to work it out how to respond; and, in so doing, we relate ourselves
to our surroundings, in one way or another, spontaneously.
But once we allow for this possibility, once we allow people to be in a continuous,
living contact with each other, we can no longer sustain the idea of ourselves as being
separate, self-contained entities ... or of our world as being an external world. For,
when a second living human being responds to the acts of a first, and thus acts in a way
that depends on their acts ... then the activities of the second person cannot be
accounted as wholly their own activity. As responses to the activities of the first, the
second persons activity must be partly shaped by the firsts. And this is where all the
strangeness begins.
For instance, in discussing the power relations in such circumstances as these - in
which outcomes are jointly produced - Foucault (1980) remarks that, although no power
is exercised without a series of aims and objectives, this does not mean that it results
from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters
that presides over [a discourses] rationality ...; the logic is perfectly clear, the aims
decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them ...
(p. 95). This is because, in such joint action (as I have called it elsewhere - Shotter,
1980, 1984, 1993a,b), we must act into the already existing requirements of the
situation between us as much as out of any prior plans or desires of our own - if, that is,
we are to act in ways the others around us sense as appropriate to our common
situation.
But as a result, the formative influences shaping our conduct cannot be wholly
there within us, prior to our actions, available for discovery ahead of time. And our
conduct is not wholly called out from us by our surroundings either. Indeed, as
individuals, we must of necessity remain deeply ignorant in such circumstances of quite
what it is that we - as a we - are doing. Not because the plans or scripts, etc.,
supposedly in us somewhere informing our conduct are too deeply hidden to bring out
easily into the light of day, but because the [end 349] formative influences shaping our
conduct are not wholly there within us to be brought out: the momentary actions of
others determine our conduct just as much as anything within ourselves. Thus in such
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circumstances as these, the overall outcome of the exchange cannot be traced back to
the intentions of any individuals involved at all.
Thus, rather than being experienced as a product of those actually producing it,
as arising in the momentary relations existing both between us and between us and our
circumstances, as something created there on the spot, in the living intersection or
space between ourselves and our world, it is made sense of as an event which just
happens, as an event in an external world.
This is another aspect of the strangeness of the ordinary: we cannot find in our
own individual experiences any sense of our involvement in such joint activities - we are
just like those in a spiritualist, Ouija board session who look at each other asking Are
you doing it, because Im not? Again, Foucault (in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982) has
captured this nicely when he says: People know what they do; they frequently know
why they do what they do; but what they dont know is what what they do does (p.
182). Indeed, this points to something else to do with the strange nature of genuinely
dialogical, social activity - that has of course been previously laughed at in social theory -
but that now needs explication: and that is that these unnoticed background spaces that
appear between us - between you and I - in all our dealings with each other, are like a
third living agency that does not just simply call out certain responses from us, but
seems to confront us with certain requirements. We can only do what IT allows; IT
shapes what we can do within IT; IT shapes us more than we shape IT. Thus, to act in
such a space is to participate in a set of distinctive practices, to live a certain form of
life, in which what, at any moment, I do, is a part of what, overall, we are doing. It is to
live in a participatory way, a way in which ones life is connected on to, or related to a
larger whole.
Thus, in such forms of life there are (i) shared ways of making sense of peoples
utterances; (u) shared ways of making sense of perceptions; (iii) shared structures of
feeling, desires, cravings, impulses, forms of thought and judgement, and so on, in
short, shared forms of consciousness; (iv) shared ways of reaching out, so to speak, to
make intelligible contacts with aspects of our surroundings not yet well-known; (v) as
well as other communal resources, such as basic poetic images structuring our
institutions - and so on, and so on; (vi) as well as normative sanctions at work requiring
everyone involved in them to properly sustain the shared ways in the form of life.
Yet what is strange, of course, is that the ways of going on, the forms of talk
intertwined activities that make up our forms of life, are not based on any grounds: You
must bear in mind that the language-game is, so to say, something unpredictable. I
mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable) It is there - like
our life (Wittgenstein, 1969, no. 559). [end 350]
Theories and models are products not grounds
Thus we cannot, as individuals, simply turn our language-games, our everyday ways of
relating ourselves to each other, into determinate objects of thought, to be explained like
anything else in our world ... in terms of a theory or model. For it is only in terms of how
we, as a group, work out ways to constitute something as an object, and to relate a
theory or model to it, that we can (within the group) justifiably say what any theory
or model is supposed to be a theory or model of.
Indeed, being able first to discuss them conversationally with each other is a part
of us being able to justify that we are indeed applying such theories or models aright.
Thus theories or models can never be representative of the prior conditions for such joint
discussions. Rather, they must be a consequence of them. The intelligible shaping or
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structuring of such discussions must be due to other means. However, our intellectual
practice of always seeking theories as such, misdirects our attention. They are, we can
say, both after the fact and beside the point we look at finished outcomes rather than
into the details of the unique, dialogical process producing them, and we describe their
structure rather than the daily human struggles and influences at work between us, the
producers.
Indeed, once one has grasped the measureless extent of all the productive activity
in the background to our daily lives, and how we are shaped by it in everything we do,
then all the attempts we have been making to understand ourselves and our behavior in
terms of this, that, or some other theory or model - as if one day, we might hit on the
correct one - as pathetically paltry. As Wittgenstein (1953) put it: The real foundations
of a mans inquiry do not strike him at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.
- And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most
powerful (no. 129).
Dialogicality and joint action:
methods in creating an understanding
But if we cannot understand the nature of the dialogical backgrounds to our lives through
theories or in terms of models, how can we come to a grasp of them? Well, through the
new poetic methods - not a methodology - offered us by Wittgenstein.
The landscape of the background
Here, perhaps, is a first useful method: just amass a number of different but particular
examples to look over, to survey. It is as if, in coming to a knowledge[end 351] of the
houses and cities in which we live, we must visit all the rooms, look in all the drawers,
tramp all the streets ourselves, and come m a knowledge of their nature through
intertwining our encounters with them into the practicalities of our lives - we cannot have
someone else live in them for us, and then try to tell us what they saw, and what
connected to what, and what was do-able for us within them. That would never give us
the detailed, all all-at-once surveyable kind of knowledge we have of our houses and
cities.
As academics and intellectuals, we are very used to always thinking of ourselves
as knowing what things are, in terms of fixed concepts, defined in terms of what is
common to all instances. But very often - as in the case of our own homes or cities - this
cannot be the case. A paradigm instance here - of a whole set of common activities that
we do in fact see-as-related, but cannot grasp in terms of a single, fixed concept that
will encompass them all - are those human activities we call games. If we ask, What is
common to them all?, we find, strangely, that they do not in fact have anything in
common,
Dont say, says Wittgenstein (1953), that There must be something
common, or they would not be called games but look and see whether
there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see
something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a
whole series of them at that. To repeat: dont think, but look! ... And the
result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities
overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes
similarities of detail ... I can think of no better expression to characterize
these similarities than family resemblances , (nos 66-67; my emphasis).
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What Wittgenstein draws to our attention here, of course, is that all our thinking in
concepts is conducted from within - or against the background of - another kind of
thought and understanding of a much more everyday practical kind. And it is from
within, or against this background landscape, that we judge the adequacy of our
concepts:
Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the
background against which we see an action, and it determines our
judgment, our concepts, and our reactions (1980, II, no. 629).
Misunderstandings concerning the use of words
The idea of the background to our lives as being like an interconnected landscape of
actual and possible activities that we, to an extent, know our way around in, is central
to Wittgensteins philosophy - I like to think of it as an ecology of different regions and
moments, containing mutually interdependent and reciprocally defining activities,
different, practical ways of carrying on with each other, different ways of reacting and
responding to each other in practice [end 352] (see Shotter, 1984). Further, we can
carry over ways of going on from one sphere of activity in our lives to another; this is
where both our strengths and our weaknesses lie. For we cannot always be sure that our
carried over ways are, collectively, good for us, that all our doings and sayings are
coherent. It is this coherency that Wittgenstein (1980) seeks: The way to solve the
problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear
(p. 27) - the conflict, contradiction, confusion is overcome by seeing that the way carried
over from elsewhere is unsuitable, that a new way is needed:
Such [grammatical investigations) shed light on our problem by clearing
misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words,
caused, among other things, by certain analogies between forms of
expression in different regions of language use (no. 90).
Learning the possible landscapes
In practice, however, the living, responsive landscapes or spaces created between
people might take on any one of a whole indeterminable range of possible shapes or
characters, each one inviting or motivating further responses of many, uniquely
different kinds. Thus, as we body forth our wordings into this space, the kind of
understanding that others have of our actions is not of an individualistic, cognitive kind,
to do with having an inner, mental picture, but of a practical, dialogically responsive
kind, to do with us knowing how to respond m others, with how to go on with them in
practice. And we not only have a sense of how we stand with them, we also have a
sense of how to find our way about in relation to the others around us.
We might call such a sense as this a scenic sense of where we are - for it is as if
we can, in a single act of looking over the whole landscape, so to speak, survey all the
possibilities open to us, given our current particular position on it. It is this kind of all
all-at-once, mental visibility that Wittgenstein sought in his grammatical investigations
of our daily lives: The relations between these concepts form a landscape which
language presents us with in countless fragments; piecing them together to too hard for
me. I can only make a very imperfect job of it (1980, p. 78). How do we learn to live
within such a landscape - or an ecology of such landscapes?
Well, the fact is, in our ordinary everyday lives together, we can point out to
ourselves crucial features of our own conversational circumstances - that would
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otherwise escape our notice - from within the activities themselves. Thus another of
Wittgensteins methods is simply to remind us of this: he reminds us that we are all
continually saying to each other such things as: Look at this! (we point things out to
each other); Look at it like this (change each others perspective); Think what you did
last time (remind each other); Go back to what you said a moment ago (move around
in our talk); Imagine this, suppose [end 353] that (connect, relate, link to other
things); Try again (encourage); Dont be too hasty (restrain); Thats not right
(evaluate); and so on, and so on, for a countless number of functions. Our talk acts as a
practical prosthetic (Freud - prosthetic gods; Vygotsky - psychological instruments),
enabling us to order our own activities, to attend to features in our surroundings, and to
make connections between them, that otherwise would pass us by unnoticed - indeed,
we use utterances of this kind especially in teaching our children our practices.
For noticing these routinely seen but unnoticed features (Garfinkel, 1967) of
everyday talk - as I have already noted - Wittgenstein (1953) provides us with a whole
arsenal of reminders.
What lies open to view, and becomes surveyable by a rearrangement
But we have to do more than just to notice this, that, and some other detail; we have to
be able to connect them all in a meaningful way - Only connect, says Miss Schelgel to
Henry Wilcox in Forsters Howards End. If we are to go on in ways in which we are not
at odds with ourselves, then we must come to a grasp of how all the details of our lives
hang together, so to speak - and this is why I mentioned Wittgensteins interest in
Goethe earlier: because Wittgenstein was very influenced both by Goethes and
Spenglers idea (see Monk, 1990, pp. 302-3) of getting an overall grasp of living events
- not by gathering facts and providing explanations of them (as if coming to a grasp of a
city by being told about it) - but by us developing an embodied way or a practice of
seeing them, such that the connections and relations between them become
immediately apparent to us in our confident performance of a practice (as we
demonstrate in finding our way around in our house or town).
The special kind of understanding involved here is not to do with us grasping what
something is, as an instance of a general category, but an understanding of a quite
different kind. The kind of understanding we seek is, as Wittgenstein (1953, no. 122)
puts it: just that understanding which consists in seeing connections. As I have
already called it, we want a relational-responsive kind of understanding.
But how are we to arrive at it? Goethe, in his study of plant forms, thought that
all plant-life could be studied in an orderly fashion if all plants could be seen under the
aspect of a single Gestalt, a single form of arrangement, an Urphnomen, of which all
instances of a type could be seen as a metamorphoses. In the case of plants, this
Urphnomen would be the Urpflanze (the original plant) - an imaginative creation within
oneself that gives us an bersicht (a synoptic view) of the whole field of plant-life as
developing from the leaf-form through a series of intermediate forms. The Urpflanze is
going to be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself shall envy me, said
Goethe (1970, p. 310). With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on
inventing [end 354] plants and know their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do
not actually exist, they could. Thus, one can put the Urpflanze up against Nature as a
measure of its possibilities.
And this is what Wittgenstein is after in his philosophical practice: to produce that
kind of understanding that allows us to grasp the real possibilities available between us,
in our practices, in our lives now, instead of us continually trying to market spurious
theories that impose this, that, or some other individuals single order upon us. He
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wants us not to make progress in the modernistic sense of always being able to
manufacture something new, but to be able to move forward into the future in an
unconfused way. In other words, rather than simply passively seeing what something
is, he seeks a much more active kind of understanding in practice, one which will allow
us to anticipate what appropriately should flow from what, thus to go on in an activity,
or m follow anothers actions, in a concerted manner (without it being necessary for
panels of expert witnesses to have to argue the matter out in a court of law) - for all of
us would be living on the same landscape of possibilities, within the same public
sphere.
A perceptive grasp in practice?
There is so much more to say here. I have barely begun to discuss the enormous
landscape of possibilities this work begins to open up. But let me end with another
reference to Tom Stoppards play Arcadia. Among its many comparisons - between 1809
and the present day, for instance - is the difference between the contemporary literary
academics, Bernard Nightingales orderly methods in arguing for plausible, but - as we
see in the play - totally spurious truths, and thirteen-year-old Tomasinas methods in
1809 arising out of her being struck by certain wondrous facts.
She has been struck by this phenomenon: When you stir your rice pudding,
Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a
meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together
again ... Do you think this odd? (pp. 9-5). Septimus, her tutor who is teaching her
mathematics, doesnt. But she does ... and she mediates on it:
Septimus, she says, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there
must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a
rose? ... And she goes on to say, I will start with something simple. I will
plot this leaf and deduce its equation (p. 37) ... And later, she talks of her
rabbit equation ... [an equation that] eats its own progeny (p. 77).
Later, two present-day researchers are talking: lend me a finger, says one to the other,
and he puts her finger on a certain key on a computer keyboard. [end 355] See?, he
asks, Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I cant show you how deep it goes.
Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. And so on ... Indeed, its an
example of the fractal fullness, I mentioned above. Interesting. Publishable, the
researcher continues - but its not his: Its Tomasinas, he says.
I just pushed her rabbits-equations through the computer a few million
times further than she managed to do with her pencil (p. 76). She didnt
have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead,
like seeing a picture ... Like a film (p. 93). What did she see. the other
asks. That you cant run the film backwards ... (p. 93) ... And
everything is mixing the same way all the time, irreversibly ... (p. 94).
And the play ends with Tomasina and Septimus waltzing.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
(T.S. Eliot)
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Concluding Remarks
If your head is now full of a myriad possibilities, new images through which to see new
possibilities in the extra-ordinary nature of our ordinary everyday lives together, then
that is the kind of all all-at-once, poetic-relational understanding that I have been trying
to talk in relation to today. The capacity to notice, to be more aware of aspects of our
practices in our own performing of them, will not allow us to control or predict their
outcomes ahead of time, but it will help us to notice important details - often thought of
as trivialities - to do with refining them into better ones. And to stop trying to base our
practices on simple, theoretical suppositions, in the belief that underlying all our human
activities is a single unifying principle of one kind or another.
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