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Authors name
Peripheral Vision
‘Inside the Moment of Managing’:
Wittgenstein and the Everyday Dynamics of
Our Expressive-Responsive Activities
John Shotter
Abstract
John Shotter
Emeritus Professor
of
Communication,
University of New
Hampshire, USA
It is easy to ignore small, concrete, and idiosyncratic details as unimportant in our
inquiries into management processes. Indeed, at the moment, we feel that if we are
to improve them and to avoid mistakes, then we must still seek a better understanding
of them in the same way that we seek a better understanding of all else in the world
around us in the proposing of theories of the supposed ‘hidden’ causes responsible
for the outcomes of the management process, and in seeking and discussing evidence
in favor of (and against) such explanatory theories. In other words, we adopt the same
mode of inquiry toward other people (and other living things) as toward inert, physical
objects. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, however, is oriented toward showing us that if
we fail to distinguish between the relations we can have with living beings as
compared to those with dead things, then we can mislead ourselves in ways that can
disastrous consequences for us. With respect to the process of managing, instead of
achieving an easy familiarity with it, our current methods of inquiry can lead us to
achieve only the power of manipulation and control. Rather than our understanding
regularities and repetitions, Wittgenstein’s methods can help us understand how we
can arrive at unique understandings of unique persons and events – the kind of
understandings that enable us to ‘go on’ in a practical situation.
Key words: Wittgenstein, management, the background, knowing of the third kind,
responsive understanding
‘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.’
(Wittgenstein 1980: 16)
‘Giving grounds, ... justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but 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)
Organization
Studies
26(1): 143–164
ISSN 0170–8406
Copyright © 2005
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks,
CA & New Delhi)
www.egosnet.org/os
Ann (interviewer): ‘so the problems you deal with are different to those you dealt
with in manufacturing?’
Rob (a program manager): ‘Problems are at a much higher level of abstraction;
nothing is designed, nothing is given, everything is what you decide it is. If you ask
somebody, “What is this product going to do?” – “Well I don’t know, you tell me.”
“When is it going to be finished?” “Well I don’t know – you tell me.” “How much is
it going to cost?” “Well I don’t know – you tell me.”’1
DOI: 10.1177/0170840605049718
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“What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into
words.’ (Wittgenstein 1953: 227)
Grasping the import of Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1969, 1981) later philosophy
is an odd experience. It is like entering into an unknown and strange new
world, except, as we slowly come to realize, the strange new world is in fact
the ordinary world of our everyday lives together – thus, as T. S. Eliot (1944)
puts it, ‘the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and
know the place for the first time.’ In the past, in the search for a solid basis
for our claims to knowledge, we have looked to an ideal realm located
somewhere beyond our social and historical relations to each other, a world
located in mathematical, logical, mechanical, or organic systems.2 What
becomes central in our strange new world is, as we shall see, simply our
bodily ‘livingness’, our living relations to our surroundings. Instead of
thoughts and ideas hidden inside our individual heads, the central focus
of our inquiries will become the spontaneously expressed, living, responsive,
relational activities occurring out in the world between us for all to see.
And many of these relations will be of a kind quite unfamiliar to us, relations
like, say, our binocular seeing of depth: we know that it can emerge out
of the chiasmic3 intertwining of the two slightly different views from our
two slightly differently placed eyes – but we have no understanding of the
processes by which the mixing or blending takes place, such that a sense of
depth rather than a blurred averaging of the two views occurs.
In line, then, with this focus on relational events, instead of the stable
characteristics of individuals, ephemeral events occurring in our meetings
with each other, and with other entities in our surroundings, will become
central. Unique, first-time events, rather than regularities and repetitions, will
come to occupy our attention – an experience very familiar to managers, as
the interview with Rob (quoted above) suggests. But at the same time, we
must also have another focus. For, whether we like it or not, the fact is that
we are always ‘entangled’ or ‘entwined’ in a ceaseless flow of relational
background activity going on between ourselves and the realities of the others
and othernesses4 around us. Thus, not what we do deliberately, or what we
think we ought to do, but what just happens to us over and above our wanting
and doing, is also what Wittgenstein wants to bring to our attention. For it is
due to our bodily embedding in this background activity that we come to feel
the compulsions and urges we do, the ‘authoritative callings’ we feel we must
answer, if we are to be accounted by those around us as responsible and
competent members of our community. Thus strangely, under the influence
of his claim that ‘the origin and primitive form of the language game is a
reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop’ (Wittgenstein
1980: 31), we shall not be seeking orderly regularities and repetitions that can
be set down in rules of principles, but to work with unique, only onceoccurring, first-time events.
Indeed, to go further, we shall find in following his remark – ‘But what is
the word “primitive” meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behavior
is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype
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of a way of thinking and not the result of thought’ (Wittgenstein 1981, no.
541) – a clue as to how, in our meetings with others, with their own unique,
every-day-changing ‘inner lives’, we can still come to understand them afresh
from within each new meeting. For, to the extent that our spontaneous
reactions are not the result of thought, not the result of following an already
existing system or framework, they can sometimes provide the beginnings of
entirely new and novel language-games (Shotter 2001 ).
In this article, then, I want explore the relevance of Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy to our understanding of management processes, and the usually
unnoticed tacit or background understandings upon which such processes
draw and to which they ‘answer’ in their conduct. But in particular, I want to
show how these usually unnoticed understandings in practice, arise in the
course of our spontaneous, living, bodily expressed reactions to the similar
such responsive-expressions of others. And my aim in doing this is to show
how we can use his philosophic methods to make rationally visible, so to
speak, the subtle but crucial features of these usually unnoticed understandings – features which, although in fact crucial to the management process,
can easily pass us by and be ignored as trivial and as unimportant, sometimes
with the most unfortunate consequences. Thus, in following Wittgenstein
(1953), we are seeking to understand the spontaneously responsive relations
to the others and othernesses in our surroundings that make it possible for us
to influence them through our use of words. Instead of seeking the supposed
general causes of a human social process, we are seeking the localized reasons
that it might have, in the context of this or that particular circumstance.
Wittgenstein’s Worries about Our Current Approach to Knowledge
and Understanding
Although only once-occurring subtle details may be regarded as unimportant
to management processes, the process overall is not. Indeed, there is much that
continually troubles us in its conduct: conflict, mis-communication, the stifling
of creativity, a full understanding of one’s customers, the creation of new
markets, and so on. So much uncertainty, so much confusion, so few landmarks
providing orientation. Thus, because so much hangs on these processes, if we
are to avoid mistakes and to improve them, we must still seek a better understanding of them in the way that is currently best known to us: in proposing
theories of the ‘hidden’ causes responsible for management success, and in
seeking and discussing evidence in favor of (and against) them.
Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1969, 1981) whole philosophy, however, is oriented
toward showing us that in adopting this approach, we are misleading
ourselves in ways that can in fact have quite disastrous consequences for
us. Instead of us achieving that kind of easy familiarity with the activity
of managing – that kind of familiarity we can have when feel ‘at home’, or
‘know our way around’, and how to ‘go on’ in a place or circumstance – we
achieve the power of manipulation and control instead. While this power of
mastery and control is not without its attractions, it still leaves us ignorant
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of the ordinary, everyday ways in which we do in fact relate ourselves to the
others and othernesses around us, the ways in fact in which we first learnt to
be functioning members of the everyday communities within which we live
our lives.
Indeed, we do not need to be able to explain our everyday actions
scientifically, i.e. analyze them into a certain set of elements that combine
in repetitive patterns to produce observed outcomes, to be able, through
everyday reflection and inquiry, to improve them. To make this claim is not
to reject the value of science in our lives. It is simply to note such facts, for
instance, as the fact that parents (informally) teach their children, not only
their mother tongue, but also countless other aspects of acceptable and
intelligible behavior, without having any idea of the laws by which their
children’s minds and bodies are governed. In the course of their everyday
involvements with them, in being spontaneously responsive to their children’s
actions in a living, bodily, expressive manner, parents can (but do not always)
influence their child’s development considerably. In other words, at work
here in the spontaneous, living bodily interactions occurring unceasingly
between them, is another kind of process of understanding, and of acting
expressively, quite different from that at work when we act deliberately
as scientists.
Crucial to this process is the realization that there are, as Wittgenstein
(1953) puts it, ‘countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols”,
“words”, “sentences”’ (no. 23), and that, besides people’s talk about states
of affairs, in which something is pictured or portrayed, we need also to
understand (among its many other uses) the expressive use of our embodied
talk. Indeed, unless we can understand how others as 1st-persons, as ‘I’s’,
manifest or exhibit crucial aspects of their ‘inner’ lives to us, e.g. their surety
and confidence, their uncertainty or humility, their pomposity and arrogance,
their respect or contempt for us, and so on, in the present moment of their
acting, we cannot understand how, so to speak, to ‘relate’ to them.
Elsewhere (e.g. Shotter and Cunliffe 2002), I have called our understanding
of these expressive aspects of people’s behavior toward us, of their utterances
and of their other bodily expressions, a relationally responsive kind of
understanding, to contrast it with the referential-representational kind
of understanding we are more used to in our professional lives. There are many
differences between these two kinds of understanding, but for the moment,
the most important ones are to do with (1) their embodiment, in that they are
understood as ‘moving us toward action’, (2) their only once-occurring,
unique and fleeting nature, and (3) the fact that such understandings occur
spontaneously without our having to ‘work them out’. Simple commands
like ‘Stop!’, ‘Look!’, ‘Listen!’ (along with other aspects of the speaker’s
expressive, bodily behavior) work on us in this way, when in a shared context
with those voicing them, to produce immediate bodily reactions in us of a
quite specific kind.
Speakers uttering such commands may, and usually do, have an ‘intention’
in so doing, but we do not need to see inside their heads to see it. We stop
walking, look toward the tree branch they are already looking toward, see the
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bird, and ready ourselves to hear its song. Everything we need to know to
understand their intention is there in our shared situation. Hence Wittgenstein’s
(1953) remark:
‘If it is asked: “How do sentences manage to represent?” – the answer might be: “Don’t
you know? You certainly see it, when you use them.” For nothing is concealed ... For
nothing is hidden. But given this answer ... one would like to retort “Yes, but it all goes
by so quick, and I would like to see it as it were laid open to view’.’ (no. 435)
He is drawing our attention here to how much one can notice, all the small
but very relevant details, that contribute toward our understanding of another
person’s meaning in a particular practical context.
These, then, are my tasks in this article: (1) to bring into view and
render rationally discussable the usually unnoticed, background details of
ordinary, everyday interactions with the others and othernesses around us that
we continually use in dealing with them; and (2) to set out the methods
Wittgenstein (1953) uses in laying these details ‘open to view’.
But let me put the special nature of these tasks more in his own words:
The task is, says Wittgenstein (1953, no. 89), not
‘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 ... something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously
something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)’
But, if it is something we already know and only need to be reminded of
by someone describing it or by pointing it out to us (i.e. ‘That is what you do
in this situation’), why is it so difficult for us to orient ourselves toward such
a merely descriptive task? Because, besides it all going by so quickly, a major
prejudice ‘stands in the way of [our] doing this’ (no. 340). For presently, we
are committed to conducting all our inquiries into the essence of things as
scientific inquiries. Thus, for example, in our inquiries into the nature of
language, we search for ‘a final analysis of our forms of language, and [for]
a single completely resolved form of every expression’ (no. 91). But in so
doing, as he sees it, we mislead ourselves; we send ourselves off in the wrong
direction with the wrong aim in mind:
‘For [currently, we] see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view
and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the
surface ... “The essence is hidden from us”: this is the form our problem now assumes.
We ask: “What is language?”, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these
questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience.’
(no. 92)
Here, then, Wittgenstein is reminding us that currently, if we want to claim
that we properly5 understand something, officially, we must show that we
possess an ‘objective knowledge’ of it, and are not expressing a merely
subjective opinion. And to do this, we must be able to picture or represent its
nature as existing independently of any relation that we might have to it.
We must be able, so to speak, to look at it as if from a distance so as not to
be influencing its behavior in any way. Just as we can be captivated by the
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depictions of possible worlds in science-fiction novels, so we have become
captivated by the words of past philosophers, and have subjugated ourselves
to their goal of completely specifying every relevant element of reality, in
itself, with absolute certainty. In other words, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts
it, we are suffering from ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by means
of language’ (no. 109).6 But for us continually to aim at this goal is, as
Wittgenstein sees it in his later philosophy, for us to aim at creating – per
impossible – a pure, ideal, inhuman, value-free world of total logical rigor
and exactitude, a world within which human life as we know it would be
impossible. We are always already involved, and can never wholly extract
ourselves from our living involvements with the others and othernesses
around us. It is our ineradicable embedding in this ceaseless flow of
spontaneously responsive, expressive activity that we need now to describe
in a way that allows us to survey its nature, and to survey it in a way that is
witnessable by others.
The Centrality of Our Embodied, Living Meetings
Before turning to what is involved in surveying a scene in a witnessable
fashion, let us as a first step just consider the simple activity of just looking
over, visually, the scene before us, a room, say – with the aim in mind of
readying ourselves as embodied beings to move about within it. As our eyes
‘flick’ from one fixation point to the next, looking at a ‘distant’ point to the
right, next at a ‘near’ point to the left, seeing something as easily ‘graspable’
and another as ‘out of reach’, we nonetheless get a sense of a seamless whole,
of an indivisible ‘something’ that is not just ‘there’ before us as a picture is
there, but is there for us as a set of ‘invitations’ and ‘resistances’, as a set of
openings and barriers to our actions – all given in relation to our present
‘position’ within ‘it’. And consider further the fact that, to the extent that we
share certain embodied ways of looking with those around us, in such a
surveying activity as this, we can all – more or less – see the same whole, the
same room, corridor, street, landscape, etc., as stretching out before us.
So, although I might look from the door to the left to see the window, and
you might look from the window to the right to see the door, from within the
overall time-space we share, everything is similarly ordered. Thus if there are
some disagreements over exactly what it is before us, we can make use of
what we do agree on to discuss the features we see differently.7
In other words, in many such temporally unfolding circumstances as this
(but not in all), there is something special in the sequencing of our activities
– not so much in how we order them, as in how the ‘something’ out there
requires us to order them. It is as if the aspects of the scene we encounter
unfold in a special way, not just haphazardly, but according to a certain style.
They give rise in all who encounter them, spontaneously, i.e. prior to any
thought or deliberation on their part, a shared (or at least shareable) sense of
the shared surrounding circumstances in which all our individual actions can
be seen as playing a part, as making ‘a difference that makes a difference’
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(Bateson 1979). They are, we might say, ‘participant parts’ in a larger, living
and growing whole, and it is in this role that they can have meanings
intelligible to others.
This claim, then, that the sequencing of our human activities is not just
formless, that not just anything can follow or be connected with anything, is
clearly connected with Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim, that most of our
activities on investigation seem to have a ‘grammar’ to them. And as he sees
it, it is their shared grammar that we must observe if our expressions and
utterances are to be intelligible to those around us. It is this – not the
constraints imposed on us externally by a physical reality – that makes it
impossible for us just to talk as we please: ‘Grammar is not accountable to
any reality,’ he claims, ‘it is grammatical rules that determine meaning
(constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent
are arbitrary’ (1974: 184, no. 133).
Thus, as already indicated above, what he wants to bring to our attention
is what just happens to us over and above our wanting and doing. He wants
to chart the source and the character of our compulsions and urges, what we
feel we must do, or are tempted to do, in meeting the customs and conventions,
the communal ways of acting,8 that make our cultural life possible. In short,
what is at issue here is our spontaneous ways of responding to events in our
surroundings judgmentally;9 that is, Wittgenstein wants to show that it is the
shared background of normative expectations and anticipations embodied in
our shared ways of acting, our shared forms of life, that provide us with the
agreed ‘standards’ or ‘criteria’ in terms of which we judge the meaning and
value of each other’s actions. While these shared (or shareable) criteria cannot
in themselves be justified,10 they determine for us whether we think something
that is offered as a justification – ‘I ordered extra materials as the record sheets
showed we were low, but I didn’t actually go to the warehouse to look, usually
the records are right’ – is in fact acceptable as a justification. Are we to accept
it? ‘What people accept as a justification – is shown by how they think and
live,’ says Wittgenstein (1953, no. 325). And in a manager’s judgment, this
is would probably not be accepted as a justification – ‘Well, you should have
gone to the warehouse!’
As we have seen (see note 5), it is these ‘conditions of intelligibility’ (Taylor
1993) that determine what is to count for us as an action or utterance of a
certain kind. It this sense, to buck another tenet of current linguistic forms of
social constructionism,11 to the extent that these conditions are shared – and
that is a matter, as we shall see, of what is involved in constructing inclusive
communities of practice – these provide the foundations, the bases, in terms
of which we can judge each other’s claims (in practice) as being necessarily
true. No other deeper or stronger necessity than that which structures our
spontaneous ways of responding to each other’s expressions is needed or
required – for how else could we judge its validity other than by the agreements
between us expressed in our shared, judgmental responses to it?
But to bring into witnessable view the details of the activities happening
between us, spontaneously, without our wanting or intending them, is not
easy. As Wittgenstein realizes, he cannot simply present us with his opinion,
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his hypothesis, as to what he thinks is the most appropriate analysis of this
kind of activity, and then argue with us as to its correctness. For in so doing,
he would once again be leaving unexamined in the background all the features
of the interactional processes that make the presentation between us of such
hypothetical analyses, and consideration of the arguments for and against
them, possible in the first place. This is why, to repeat, he sees his task as that
of merely reminding us of the kinds of things that already go on between us.
He needs to bring to our attention our already agreed ways of spontaneously
judging and responding to the expressions of those around us, but to do this
in a way which makes our use of them in understanding each other surveyable,
to make it as if we could ‘look over’ a common ‘landscape’ with him that has
all the relevant phenomena arrayed in it.12 And just as we can look over any
such landscape from one point of view, with one end in mind, and gain one
kind of useful knowledge, and then move to another point of view with
another end in mind to gain another kind, so can we here – even though, as
forever participants within it, there is no overall point of view that can provide
us with the final perspective on the landscape. Hence, Wittgenstein (1953)
sees his task here as that of establishing ‘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’ (no. 132). By this he means an arrangement or
an ordering of what we already know, an ordering that is not a final correct
ordering, but a really possible one that will help us out of our current
difficulties. Thus, he adds, with this possibility in mind, he will ‘constantly
be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language
easily make us overlook’ (no. 132).
In other words, at the center of Wittgenstein’s whole approach is the fact
that, even if we can never completely depict every aspect of the shared
background landscape to our lives together, with the appropriate verbal
directives, we may still be able to notice crucial distinctions, i.e. differences
that might make a difference in our lives (Bateson 1972), distinctions that
previously would have passed us by unnoticed. In short, rather than analysis
to dig out the previously unknown, hidden elements of things, Wittgenstein
seeks to remind us of what is actually already visible to us in our coming to
the understandings we do in our daily lives. Thus, instead of inventing theories
to explain the workings of supposed hidden elements, he seeks by the use of
rearrangements (by the use of poetic connecting, as I shall call it) to make the
essence of what is important to us in our living relations to our surroundings,
open to our view. So, in the next section, with Wittgenstein’s aims in mind,
I will try to make ‘open to view’ what it is actually like to be there, living in
the moment of managing.
Knowledge and ‘Knowing of the Third Kind’
Above, I credited Wittgenstein with directing our attention toward a kind
of understanding in action, not ‘officially’ recognized as such in previous
philosophical discussions, a kind of understanding quite distinct from the kind
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of cognitive and intellectual understanding that has dominated modern
philosophical thought. But we must not be misled by this into thinking that,
because it is not represented in official thought, it is unavailable to us in our
everyday thinking. Indeed, the opposite is the case. As Wittgenstein (1953)
wants to remind us, the distinctions are already there in our everyday dealings
with each other. But, to repeat, they are ‘distinctions which our ordinary forms
of language easily make us overlook’ (no. 132) – indeed, their lack of
‘accreditation’ by professional ‘theory experts’ can often make us feel shifty
and awkward in our attempts to express their nature. Nonetheless, a sensitive
interviewer, attuned to the possibility of such distinctions, can invite ‘groping’
attempts at their expression. We can see this in the comments of Mike, the
Vice President of a Health Care organization, quoted by Shotter and Cunliffe
(2002)13 In fact, he is extremely eloquent in his ‘groping’ attempts to express
the differences between knowledge as something factual and objective, and
knowing as something that is an aspect of one’s being (one’s identity), to do
with how one is able to orient toward one’s circumstances, the different ways
in which one might approach them:
Mike: ‘Knowledge is like an asset you can acquire, and file and go back to – it’s there.
While it’s not concrete, its objectifying information and owning it – take it off the
shelf, use it and put it back on the shelf – right? Whereas knowing is an ongoing
process, it’s more synthetic, contextual, what you’re doing at the time, almost with
that knowledge and the experience you’re having at the time – almost the intersection
of experience, environment and knowledge becomes knowing.’
Ann: ‘Something that’s not graspable?’
Mike: ‘It happens in time, it affects your future knowing but it’s not like knowledge
in the sense that you can take it off the shelf. Knowing changes you – knowledge
gives you more bricks to build your wall out of.”
Ann: ‘It could change you on a moment by moment basis because it’s something you
react to ...’?
Mike: ‘Well, I was thinking in the way you know things in the future, it’s kind of ...
I don’t think knowing is something that happens and you forget it and it had no impact
on the next event in your life ... it seems to me your very ability to know is continually
being re-informed by your experiences of knowing, and the content of what you know
is always being impacted by your knowledge base – so you take it off the shelf and
put it away. In the process you are changing the shape of the vessel.”
Indeed, in remarking that ‘your very ability to know is continually being
re-informed by your experiences of knowing,’ Mike is setting out here
one of the most basic features of this kind of knowing: the fact that all
the distinctions we ‘bother our heads about’ – say, between the ‘real’ and the
‘illusory’, between ‘mere opinion’ or ‘objective fact’, etc. – have, before any
analysis, already been made by us in practice, out in our daily dealings with
the others and othernesses around us. And any analysis as such only draws
its authority, i.e. its capacity to be accounted as an analysis by those to whom
it is presented, by being judged by them as providing an explicit account
of what is in fact already there implicitly in the situation shared by all
concerned.14
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Elsewhere (Shotter 1993a, 1993b), I have called this kind of situated
knowing or understanding, upon which all our more explicit formulations are
based, a practical knowing from within, a ‘knowing of the third kind’. I have
called it this with Ryle’s (1949) claim in mind, that there are only two basic
kinds of knowledge: ‘knowing that’, to do with knowing facts, and ‘knowing
how’, to do with knowing skills. But, it is not a matter of knowing that, for it
is a form of practical knowledge, relevant only in particular concrete situations. Neither is it a practical knowledge in the technical sense of a craft or a
skill, a knowing how, for it is knowledge which has its being only in our
relations with others. It is a separate, special kind of knowledge, sui generis,
which is prior to both, and, in being linked to people’s social and personal identities, determines the available forms of these other two kinds of knowledge.
But more than this, unlike the other two kinds of knowledge, it is also
knowledge of a moral kind, for it depends upon the judgments of others as to
whether its expression or its use is actually fitting in the situation or not – one
cannot just use it or express it on one’s own, wholly within one’s own terms.
It is the kind of knowledge that one can only have from within a social situation,
a group, or an institution, and thus takes into account (and is accountable to)
the others in the social situation within which it is known. And it is because its
content is primarily derived from its circumstances – for it is do with a proper
grasp of what they will ‘afford’, ‘permit’ or ‘allow’ – that I call it a ‘knowing
from within’, to contrast it both with ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’.
Knowing from within owes its special nature to the fact that in all living
activities, there is always a kind of developmental continuity involved in their
unfolding, such that earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least the
style, the physiognomy, i.e. the unique living identity, of what is to come
later. Just as acorns only grow into oak trees and not rose bushes, and
eggs only produce chickens and not rabbits, so all living activities, it seems,
give rise to what we might call identity-preserving changes or deformations
– their possible ends are already ‘there’15 in their beginnings. In other words,
our spontaneous, expressive-responsive bodily activities ‘point beyond’
themselves. In the past, this inherent ‘directionality’ present in temporally
unfolding activities, and their inevitable gestural expressiveness – in ‘pointing
from this past toward that kind of future’ – has been ignored. But, in being
responsive to their surrounding circumstances in this ‘shaped’ and ‘directional’ way, they not only have both mimetic and indicative (gestural)
relations to them, even if their surroundings are invisible to those who merely
witness them, but in so doing, they have an internal, rather than an external
relation to them – rather than simply an ‘add-on’ extra, they are ‘participant
parts’ in a larger whole.16 Hence the possibility of others being able, so to
speak, to ‘follow’ us and to link their actions in an intelligible manner in with
ours. For others also live out their lives from within the same surroundings
as we ourselves, and can be, or are, oriented toward and sensitive to their
features in the same way as we are.
As I put it elsewhere (Shotter 1984: 144): ‘In its very occurrence, then,
human action, human being “in” action, implies or indicates something beyond
itself. It posits a realm of meaning or reference’ which makes its appearance
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even as the actions occurs, and can thus function as the context in which the
sense of the action can be understood.’ In other words, along with the joint
activity occurring in a meeting, is the creation of a ‘reality’ or ‘world’ within
which that meeting occurs, and within which its work is conducted.
But, as if this was not startling enough, perhaps the most startling quality
of our understanding in these spheres is its relational nature: the fact that
it has its being only in between those to whom it is relevant. For, in such
spontaneously responsive spheres of activity as these, instead of one person
first acting individually and independently of another, and then the second
replying, by acting individually and independently of the first, people act
jointly, as a collective we. This means that when someone acts, their activity
cannot be accounted as wholly their own, for each person’s acts are partly
‘shaped’ by the acts of the others around them. Thus no one can be held
individually responsible for what happens. Yet clearly, without the activity
of all involved, nothing would happen. This gives rise to one of the most
puzzling questions about this strange new world of everyday life: how might
we make changes to it, if responsibility for its nature is non-locable? (I will
return to this issue in the final section of this paper.)
Given its relational nature, we can now see why, unlike the two other forms
of knowledge, it is not, so to speak, self-contained knowledge;17 it is not
knowledge that you can ‘take ... off the shelf, use it and put it back on the
shelf,’ as Mike puts it. Indeed, Wittgenstein (1969) is reluctant to call it
knowledge as such at all (and this is why I have called it knowing or
understanding). For knowledge as such is arrived at through a process of
intellectual consideration, it is something that requires us as individuals to
justify it to the others around us. Whereas, as we have already seen, what is
at issue here is our shared, spontaneous ways of responding to events in our
surroundings judgmentally – we all need to agree that what is being offered
to us as a justification is in fact a justification.
Besides its constitutive role in giving shape and direction to our spontaneous
responses to events in our surroundings, such a kind of knowing has many
other special properties. I have only space to mention a few, briefly, here.
Above, in discussing Wittgenstein’s attempts to make the flow of spontaneously responsive activity constituting the background to all our more
deliberate acts surveyable in a witnessable way, I pointed out that he talked of
it as a landscape. If we continue for the moment with that metaphor, we can
bring out other aspects to do with not only what is involved in our ‘knowing
our way about’ in such a landscape, as well as with feeling ‘at home’ within
it, but also to do with its existential or ontological ‘resourcefulness’ for us. In
other words, such a landscape is not just full of inert material awaiting our
manipulation in ways useful to our projects, but, in surrounding us with ‘calls’
to which we feel we ought to respond, we find ourselves ‘invited’ to act – not
out of our own inner plans or desires – but into a context shaped by an other,
and thus to act creatively, in new ways not already embodied as a part of one’s
ways of being in the world. Hence Mike’s comment above: ‘Knowing changes
you ... your very ability to know is continually being re-informed by your
experiences of knowing ... you are changing the shape of the vessel.’
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The ‘Formative’ Function of Language
Lisa (a project manager18): ‘So the understanding of what’s real and what’s ... um ...
it isn’t OK to do, is not well understood ... I have no control over the information and
it really gets uncomfortable when you think the construction company has a whole
lot of subcontractors they pull in, so you’re left with a lot of fuzziness ... and the whole
project has that from start to finish ... I was saying to someone yesterday that a lot of
what I do at work is I have conversations with people and sometimes I feel I should
be having more output, and they said to me, “well ... you tend to be in jobs with a
high degree of ambiguity and in those circumstances, talking things out with people
and discussing them, that probably is your job. It’s to help figure out where are you
in those circumstances and what needs to get done.” So a lot of what I have been
doing in my job is calling together meetings which say we need to grapple with these
issues, we need to confront this stuff, or ... I need to question these things.’ (my
emphases)
Lisa makes these comments in the context of already possessing ‘systems
dynamics maps ... that had looked at 16 behaviors [analysts] had identified’,
but in the context of knowing also that ‘R&D would go off on projects before
marketing was involved ... and what would happen is there’d be various ways
in which [others] would not cooperate down the road’, so that the systems
maps were little help. They only made her feel guilty for ‘wasting’ her time
in talking to people, instead of implementing the maps. But what is the nature
of the ‘reality’ in which Lisa is operating? Is it, perhaps, the kind of ‘living’
reality in which, if it is to change by a ‘growth-like’ process, everyone involved
needs to be a ‘participant part’ within it? If it is, then all involved in it
must be responsive moment-by-moment to each other’s activities in such a
way as to preserve their project’s ‘identity’ in the course of its ‘development’
(see the comments above on the ‘internal’ relations at work in the identitypreserving nature of living changes). And to do that, they must be in constant,
intelligible contact with each other.
Elsewhere (Shotter 1980, 1984, 1993a, 1993b), I have made a fairly
extensive exploration of the joint or dialogically structured nature of the flow
of spontaneously responsive activities within which all our more deliberate
activities are embedded, and of the strange properties of the ‘worlds’ to which
they give rise. Here, I will make brief comments on just five of these features,
those which I think are to do with how, even though we can never be wholly
responsible for their nature, we might make changes within them, in the
course of our communications with each other:
1
2
Precursor worlds, or the primordial: The ‘worlds’ or ‘realities’ constructed
in such spontaneously, expressive-responsive, joint activities, have the
character of what we might call ‘precursor worlds’, in that, as Wittgenstein
(1981) puts it, they can provide us with ‘prototypes’ for many of our later,
more deliberately performed, intellectual activities.19
A complex mixture, chiasmically organized: Activities in this sphere lack
specificity; they are only partially determined. Indeed, what is produced
in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex mixture of not wholly
reconcilable influences – as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’
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4
5
155
tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, and ‘centrifugal’
ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins,
are at work. This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature:
they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither
a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully
subjective nor fully objective character. They are neither ‘inside’ people,
nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in that space where inside
and outside are one. Nor is there a separate before and after (Bergson),
neither an agent nor an effect, but only a meaningful whole which cannot
be divided, or divide itself, into separable parts.
The situation as agentic: because the overall outcome of any exchange
cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved,
the ‘dialogical reality or space’ constructed between them is experienced
as an ‘external reality’. But because it is not a neutral space, but exerts
‘calls’ on those within it, it is experienced as a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’)
with its own (ethical) demands and requirements: ‘The word is a drama
in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio)’ (Bakhtin
1986: 122). But it exerts its ‘calls’ on different people in different ways:
‘I occupy a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable
for anyone else’ (Bakhtin 1993: 40).
Their unfinished, partial, still open nature: Indeed, it is precisely their
lack of any predetermined order, and thus their openness to being
specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice – while
usually remaining quite unaware of having done so – that is their central
defining feature. And it is precisely this that makes this sphere of activity
so important to us in our talk. For it is a matter of how our talk is
interwoven or inter-tangled into such activity, both in terms of to what
it is responsive, and to what it ‘points’ in the future, that it can be effective
in refining, elaborating, or changing the language-games within which
it occurs.
The ‘essential references’20 of ‘this’ and ‘that’ in the moment of acting:
Relying on the directionality inherent in the temporal unfolding of living
activities, we are able at certain crucial moments in our exchanges with
others to use such expressions as ‘Look at that’, ‘Listen to this’, ‘Do like
this’, ‘This is what I meant’, and so on. The crucial nature of the moment
of utterance cannot be overemphasized: in coming at a particular moment
in the already ongoing flow of contingently intertwined activity occurring
between them and us, in pointing in their gestural expressiveness
from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’, people’s activities allow us
to intervene at that moment, and in doing so, to point them toward
‘another kind of future’, toward seeing a connection between events of
a previously unnoticed kind.
It is the very vagueness of their structure, their moment-by-moment
indeterminacy in the process of their unfolding ‘development’, that opens
such activities up to the influence of our expressive-responsive, embodied
talk within them. Without the indeterminacy in their structure, they would
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not be open to being changed, to being linguistically specified further, by the
talk-intertwined activities of those within them. For, although they may at
each moment have an objectively vague structure, by directing our attention
appropriately, a person’s words can refer us to a definable moment of a special
kind, one that can be noticed, remembered, formulated in description,
something that can be separated from what came before and after it. Within
an ongoing conversation, objectively vague though they may be, this and that
can have very precise and unique references.
And we can now, perhaps, begin to see why more traditionally based
attempts – in which a whole is analyzed into self-contained, externally related
parts, thought to be operating in accord with stable, unchanging functions that
can be charted – are not as helpful as might be expected. If a person’s
utterance is to have an application in a situation, it must both have a responsive relation to already existing aspects of the situation, as well as ‘pointing’
toward the really possible ‘next steps’ available to participants; and it must
do this in terms of a tacitly shared background anticipations and expectations
they all rely on for understanding it without confusion or bewilderment. We
can see these issues manifested in Rob’s comments below:
Ann: ‘How did you feel about the lack of clarity when you took this job?’
Rob: ‘In manufacturing I was a Process Engineering Manager and one of the reasons
I was asked to take this job was the feeling that product development was lacking some
process, and that someone who understood how to apply processes, how to develop
processes, needed to come in and help. So I was explicitly told coming in that “your
strength in designing and implementing processes is why we chose you”’ ...
There was a class offered through Corporate on “Managing Complex Projects” and
some textbooks they suggested, so I get a lot of ideas from those and try to apply them
to this organization ... If I look back, there are probably six or seven different
techniques I’ve picked up in different places and courses that I’ve applied, some
successfully and some unsuccessfully ... and I think I’ve probably never taken
everything I’ve learned from class and applied it – it’s always been I learned ten things
and came back and applied two. Picking the right two is what determines how
successful you are, I guess.’
There is no doubt that as ‘reminders’, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense of the
term, textbook ideas can sometimes be important in functioning as beforethe-fact, action-guiding advisories, that work to draw our attention to aspects
of our circumstances that might otherwise pass us by unnoticed. But, in trying
to apply ideas from textbooks, ‘some successfully and some unsuccessfully,’
Rob realizes that its ‘picking the right two is what determines how successful
you are.’ To do that, however, judgment is still needed, and as we noted
above, that is not a matter of knowledge that can be learnt ahead of time in
textbooks, but of that third kind of knowing that can only be gained in one’s
expressive-responsive participation in the circumstances in question. And to
participate appropriately in the relevant circumstances, talk is required. As
Lisa the project manager realizes, it is only by ‘talking things out with people
and discussing them ... [That you can] help figure out where are you in those
circumstances and what needs to get done.’
Thus, the linguistic task of the ‘good’ manager, then,
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‘is something to do with a complex of issues centered on the provision of an
intelligible formulation of what has become, for the others in the organization, a
chaotic welter of impressions ... [“Good” managers] create a “landscape” (a) of
enabling/constraints (Giddens 1979) relevant for a range of next possible actions, (b)
a network of “moral positions” or “commitments” (understood in terms of the rights
and duties of the “players” on that landscape), and (c) are able to argue persuasively
and authoritatively for this “landscape” amongst those who must work within it ...
[T]hey must be more than just a “reader” of situations, more than just a “repairer” of
them. Perhaps a good manager must be seen as something of an “author” too.’ (Shotter
1993: 148–149; see also Shotter and Cunliffe 2002).
But this is not a kind of authoring that can be done sitting at a desk all alone,
concerned solely with bringing new conceptual meanings into existence.
Other people’s living, embodied practices are at issue. All involved must
come to act, practically, in a concerted fashion, to exhibit in their different
actions relations of the same style to the overall project in which all are
engaged. How is this possible?
Again, if we follow Wittgenstein here, we find ourselves in strange
territory, for his suggestions point us, surprisingly, in the opposite direction
to that which we might expect. Their flavor can be caught in the following
set of remarks to do with teaching someone to do ‘multiplying’ – where, as
we shall see, he suggests that, rather than learning to follow rules being the
cause of our being able to multiply, it is our learning the practice of
multiplying (by other means) that allows us as a consequence to formulate
rules. His account of teaching someone to multiply is as follows:
‘With the words “This number is the right continuation of this series’ I may bring
it about that for the future someone calls such-and-such the “right continuation”.
What “such-and-such” is I can only show in examples. That is, I teach him to continue a series (basic series), without using any expression of the “law of the series”;
rather, I am forming a substratum [a background set of shared expectations – js]
for the meaning of algebraic rules or what is like them. He must go on like this without a reason. Not, however, because he cannot yet grasp the reason but because
– in this system – there is no reason. (“The chain of reasons comes to an end”)
And the like this (in “go on like this”) is signified by a number, a value. For at
this level the expression of the rule is explained by the value, not the value by
the rule. For just where one says “But don’t you see ...?” the rule is no use, it is
what is explained, not what does the explaining.’ (Wittgenstein 1981, nos 300,
301, 302)
Crucial here are the particular concrete examples used, for, to the extent
that our more elaborate skills are extensions of our more primitive reactions,
their task is to provoke appropriate initial reactions in the pupil spontaneously.
The linguistically skilled manager is the one who can use vivid metaphors
and similes, who can arouse in his or her listeners that ‘point’ from this kind
of past toward that kind of future. As Rob puts it:
Rob: ‘We provide that leadership in saying, “this is where we’re heading”, “this is
what is important”, “this is what we need to do together.” To get different people to
put their part in place and make it fit and then integrate that over time to make sure
all the pieces continue to fit.’ (my emphases)
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There is insufficient space to give any detailed examples of this kind of
management talk, of the often quite poetic metaphors used in expressing their
sense of where a company is at present, and where next it should go, but see
Cunliffe (2002b). Instead, what I would like to do is to finish this section by
setting out in summary form a set of methods drawn from Wittgenstein’s later
work (1953), that can help us in understanding, in simply noticing, how we
do in fact improve our own everyday practices from within our conduct of
them:
1
2
3
4
5
6
Noticing in practice: Simply by saying: ‘Stop!’ ‘Look!’ ‘Listen to that!’
we can interrupt, i.e. ‘deconstruct’, people’s routine ways of responding,
by pointing out features of the background flow of activity to them
from within that flow. Thus, ‘we shall constantly be giving prominence
to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us
overlook’ (no. 132);
Suggesting new connections and relations: As is well known, all metaphors conceal as well as reveal; thus, we need constantly to use new
metaphors to reveal new possible connections and relations between events
hidden by the dead metaphors in routine forms of talk: ‘A picture held us
captive ... and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ (no. 115);
We must continue to gather concrete examples: It is not by learning new
principles that we can be ‘moved’ in new ways. Thus, admonishes us,
‘don’t think, but look!’ ... ‘and the result of this examination is: we see
a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ (no.
66). Only if we walk the shop floor, go out into the field, etc, will we as
managers get a sense of the real complexities ‘out there’ – the concrete
complexities out of which new relations can emerge.
Bring order to our experiences by making comparisons: We can
‘establish an order in our knowledge ... an order with a particular end in
view; one out of many possible orders; not the order’ (no. 132). And we
can do this by making comparisons using (sometimes invented) ‘objects
of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language
by way not only of similarities but dissimilarities’ (no. 130);
To create a surveyable ‘landscape’: Our task is not to see something
behind or underlying appearances, for ‘nothing is hidden’ (no. 435), but
to see ‘something that lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by
a rearrangement’ (no. 92);
Knowing one’s ‘way about’, how to ‘go on’: And the aim of all these moves
is to achieve a ‘perspicuous representation’ (German: obersightliche
Darstellung), a way of surveying a sequence of experiences (as if they
were moments of fixation in one’s visual scanning over a landscape) with
the aim of producing ‘just that understanding which consists in “seeing
connections’’’ (no. 122). So that we know how to move around within
it, not only with ease and familiarity, but also with sure expectations as
to where our movements will take us.
But note, producing that understanding which consists in seeing connections
is not done without effort, without taking some or all of the steps above. For
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his aim, to repeat, is not to see already existing but hidden realities, but new
possibilities, to move us from following mindless, dead, and mechanical
routines, toward re-enlivening our activities, towards acting for yet another
first time, time and time again. Hence Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘philosophy
ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’ (1980: 24), acts of
poeisis, of poetic connection, of making, of creating, of bringing something
new into existence, rather than merely discovering already existing things, is
involved in his kind of inquiries. So that with this capacity to see previously
unseen possibilities, to create livable links and relations between previously
unconnected aspects of our surroundings, we can move around within them,
not only with ease and familiarity, but also with sure expectations as to where
our movements will take us.
Conclusions
Mike: ‘I think the essential management skills – as I use the term, the management
of people – reside on this continuum that has things about communication, your ability
to communicate your ideas, to empathize with other people... you make meaning with
them jointly ... you present ideas that are powerful – but you can’t do that unless
people have faith in you.’
As I have already noted, we do not need to be able to explain our practices
to be able to refine or improve them in some way within our communications
with each other. We simply need to understand them better; the roles that
we play or can play within them better; and to know our ‘way about’ within
them better. Strangely, it is within our informal and open conversations with
the others who are also involved in them, that we can gain this kind of
‘orientation’. To try to evade the complexities of ordinary everyday utterances
by divorcing them from their actual conditions of use, and re-situating them
in explicit systems of rules or systematic frameworks of some other kind, will
not lead us, as in physics, to more effective ‘idealizations’ that will give us
the power of mastery over them. It is to fail to grasp how a myriad of small,
unnoticed details, to do with the living, bodily, expressive-responsive activities
occurring each moment spontaneously between us, is responsible for our
being able to mean things to each other. Indeed, as I noted above, it is the
very fact that we live in indeterminate, multi-dimensional, and only partially
known and partially shared ‘conversational realities’ (Shotter 1993b), that
makes their further ‘development’ open to influence by our talk. The very
vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness that makes ‘scientific’ analysis
seem hopeless, in fact allows for the moment-by-moment versatility,
flexibility, and negotiability that we need in our talk, if we are to make clear
the this or that to which at each moment we are referring.
Instead of taking it for granted, then, that we understand another person’s
speech simply by grasping the inner ideas they have supposedly put into their
words, that picture of how we understand each other must now be seen as the
exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, in practice, we do not fully
understand what another person says. Shared understandings occur only
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occasionally, if they occur at all. And when they do, it is by people testing
and checking each other’s talk, by them questioning and challenging it,
reformulating and elaborating it, and so on. For in practice, shared understandings are developed or negotiated between participants over a period of
time, in the course of an ongoing conversation (Garfinkel 1967). But if people
are not simply putting their ideas into words, what are they usually doing in
their talk? Primarily, it seems, they are responding to each other’s utterances
in an attempt to link their practical activities in with those of the others
around them; and in these attempts at coordinating their activities, people are
constructing one or another kind of social relationship (Mills 1940). Thus,
even apparently simple objects and events can remain enigmatic and undetermined as socially shared realities, i.e. realities to which we spontaneously
react in the same way, until clarified in the back-and-forth of talk – that is,
until ‘a substratum for the meaning’ of our talk, as Wittgenstein (1981, no.
300) puts it, has been established between us. To treat language as a code, as
a self-contained system for representing realities in our talk that are already
well known to us in some other non-linguistic way, is to misunderstand its
nature entirely.
Here, then, is the major difference that Wittgenstein is introducing into our
practices of intellectual inquiry. As he sees it, our current, ‘official’ mode of
inquiry – what we might call the theoretical, analytic-explanatory approach,
aimed at bringing hidden ‘realities’ to light – ignores that already existing
substratum, the forms of life already existing between us, and historically
developed, cultural resources they offer or afford us. His own mode of inquiry
– what I have called poetic connecting – not only orients our attention toward
the meaningful connections and relations we do in fact make between events
occurring around us, but also toward possible connections that we have not
yet made, but might make. For, if Wittgenstein is right, meanings are not
hidden in people’s heads, but occur out in the ceaseless flow of living,
language-interwoven relations between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us.
Our successes in the physical sciences have beguiled us into believing
that the same process – in which individual thinkers at their desks devise
theoretical frameworks which they then pass on to experimentalists or
practitioners to ‘apply’ – can be successfully pursued here, in our efforts
to develop our shared forms of life. But, to repeat, thinkers at their desks
completely ignore the concrete, local details that make this situation, and this
person, particular and unique in the flow of activity between us, and it is to
their particular and unique nature that we must be responsive.
Thus, odd though it may be to say it, it is our new, first-time understandings
that not only give us the possibility of coming to grasp the uniqueness of the
circumstances we encounter, but are constitutive for us also of what counts
as the significant, stable, and repeatable forms within that flow. They provide,
to repeat, the ‘conditions of intelligibility’ (Taylor 1993) that determine what
is to count for us as an action or utterance of a certain kind. In other words,
our communal ways of acting are the source of the various normative
‘pressures’ on us that ‘motivate’ us to act in ways that are accountable to those
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around us (Mills 1940; Scott and Lyman 1968). The shaped and vectored
pressures they exert on us, that Wittgenstein (1953) describes as having a
‘grammar’ or as ‘founded on convention’ (no. 355), function as the foundations, the grounds, in terms of which we can judge each other’s actions
as necessarily correct or fitting. No other deeper or stronger necessity than
that which structures our spontaneous ways of responding to each other’s
expressions is needed or required – for how else could we judge its validity
other than by the agreements between us expressed in our shared, judgmental
responses to it? So, although it may also seem odd to say it, this means that
physics does not derive its legitimacy from its rooting in physical realities,
but from its rooting in agreements amongst physicists about the theoretical
equations that select certain formal aspects of physical reality, i.e. those that
appropriately idealize these aspects as being lawful. We work in terms, not
directly of our knowledge of physical reality, but indirectly, in terms of the
knowledge that depends on our ways of knowing that reality.
This kind of knowing may not seem, on the face of it, to have the kind of
legitimacy that satisfies scientific experts. However, it has in fact a legitimacy
of a much deeper kind, one which comes from everyone involved in the
situation being able to judge its relevancy to their lives. Indeed, this is
the kind of legitimacy upon which science itself is based. But strangely, deep
though this legitimacy may be, the authority for the formulations one offers
is gained in the moment of acting. Rob’s claim above, then, that to provide
leadership managers must be able to say, ‘this is where we’re heading’, ‘this
is what is important’, ‘this is what we need to do together’, needs to be
modified slightly. Mike’s comments – that ‘you make meaning with them
jointly ... you present ideas that are powerful – but you can’t do that unless
people have faith in you’ – need taking into account too. The claim that ‘this
is what we must do’ cannot just be an arbitrary claim, a mere form of words.
While pointing toward the not-yet-existing future, it must also be responsive
to all the relevant local details that those to whom it is addressed sense as of
importance. Unless it is, they will respond with, ‘yes, but what about ...?’,
and will not feel faith in their leader.
Notes
1
2
3
4
My own empirical research, especially in the field of management, is very limited. But
I have been especially blessed by having had a number of very sensitive and knowledgeable co-workers who have made their data available to me. Here, I have Ann Cunliffe’s
permission to make use of data from her management research (see the relevant citations
to her work).
Rorty (1989: 189) urges us ‘to try not to want something which stands beyond history and
institutions’ in seeking authoritative justification for our claims.
The optic nerves from our two eyes intertwine within the brain in the optic chiasma. Both
Bateson (1972) and Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968) take the new relational dimensions made
available to us in binocular vision as paradigmatic of, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, ‘that
kind of understanding which consists in “seeing connections’’’ (no. 122).
In choosing to talk of both others and of othernesses here (rather than of other persons
and of objects or things), I mean to signal a distinction which will become of increasing
importance in the course of this article. The distinction is to do with the way in which
we deal with our sense of how something is real for us, of how its nature is not just open
to any interpretation we wish to put upon it. While scientific or objective realism wants
to talk of things in our surroundings as having a life of their own independent of us, I want,
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following Rudd (2003), to talk of them as having a life of their own in relation to us. Rudd
(2003) calls this ‘expressive realism’, and as I see it, it is quite consistent to hold to an
expressive realism within the context of a thoroughgoing social constructionism (Shotter
1984, 1993a, 1993b).
To show we properly understand something, we must be able to demonstrate that we have
in fact followed the proper, agreed, official methods or procedures in the acquisition of
our understanding, i.e. the methods I go on to elaborate.
‘The propositions that one comes back to as if bewitched – these I should like to expunge
from philosophical language’ (Wittgenstein 1969, no. 31). ‘Thus we expunge the sentences
that don’t get us any further’ (no. 33).
But what is crucial here is that in our meetings or engagements with our surroundings, we
find – in relation to our occupancy of a certain place or position within them – that our
bodies give us directly and immediately a shaped and vectored sense of the possibilities
of action open (and closed) to us. We have only to think of what is involved in driving at
speed on a multi-lane highway, to appreciate the importance of this bodily sense of where
we are, and where next we might move – without it, we would lack orientation. Taylor
(1993: 319) calls these most important background conditions the ‘conditions of
intelligibility’. It is our view of ourselves as needing to be disinterested, disengaged,
objective observers of an ‘external’ world if we are to acquire a proper account of ‘reality’,
that stands in the way of our seeing the existence, never mind the importance, of these
background conditions of intelligibility.
Talk of our communal ways of acting as being conventional may seem to suggest, and to
many social constructionists and post-structuralists does suggest, that if our talk is founded
on mere convention, that reality is relative to our talk. Thus, to change reality we merely
need to change the way we talk. This is to misunderstand the depth, or perhaps better, the
entanglement or chiasmic interwovenness (Shotter 2002) of such conventions in every
aspects of our social lives together. While they are arbitrary and thus open to change, their
interwovenness makes it all but impossible. Often, what seems like a radical change is
not! The old ways of going on have just been dressed up in new words. Wittgenstein’s
(1953, 1969, 1981) achievement is to have provided us with the means for breaking out
of those situations in which we are ‘as it were entangled in our own rules’ (no. 125). I will
return to this most important issue later in the article, for it relates in a crucial way to the
realism versus social constructionism debate.
‘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’ (Wittgenstein 1953, no. 242).
And, what judgments are is already manifested in our judging in practice: ‘My judgments
themselves characterize the way I judge’ (1969, no. 149).
‘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 there – like our life’ (Wittgenstein 1969, no. 559).
See note 1, in which I suggest that an ‘expressive realism’ is quite compatible with a form
of social constructionism that takes embodiment seriously.
‘The relations between these concepts form a landscape which language presents us with
in countless fragments’ (1980: 78).
Again I am grateful to Ann Cunliffe for this quotation.
See the remarks above as to what counts as a justification for us.
‘There’ as an invisible but ‘real presence’ in them (see Shotter 2003).
While mechanically assembled wholes can be constructed piece by piece from externally
related parts, that is, from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of
whether they are parts of the system or not, living beings cannot. On the contrary, they
grow. They develop from simple individuals into richly structured ones in such a way that
their ‘parts’ at any one moment in time owe not just their character but their very existence
both to one another, and to their relations with the ‘parts’ of the system at some earlier
point in time – as well as being ineradicably, dynamically intertwined with their
surroundings. As such, they can have only a dynamic existence, as ‘participant parts’ in
a larger, internally related unity.
Besides not being separable from the situation within which it has its application, it is also
not separable from who one is in the relevant situation, from one’s identity. Thus we find
a project manager, Lisa, saying: ‘I’m either the virgin or the whore – as a woman you
either get to be tough or nice but somehow you can’t be both.’ See Cunliffe (2002a, 2002b)
and Shotter and Cunliffe (2002) for further discussion of the identity issue.
Interviewed by Ann Cunliffe.
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John Shotter
John Shotter is Emeritus Professor of Communication, University of New Hampshire,
USA.
Address: Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham,
NH 03824–3586, USA.
Email: [email protected]