The Situation of Social
Constructionism
Its ‘Imprisonment’ within the Ritual of TheoryCriticism-and-Debate
John Shotter and John W. Lannamann
University of New Hampshire
Abstract. In a recent exchange in Theory & Psychology, in which (mostly
Gergen’s) social constructionism was the subject of some criticism, Gergen
(2001a) remarked toward the end of his response, ‘I no longer find the
tradition of argumentation a viable one. . . . Yet in order to sustain
the dialogue, I find myself nevertheless drawn into the ritual’ (p. 431). He
does not, however, expand any further on this comment. Yet, as he is
someone committed to the view that constructions are ‘social artefacts,
products of historically situated interchanges among people’ (Gergen,
1985, p. 267), we feel that he should. For, to the extent that he is a
participant in ‘the Ritual’ (the ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate), it is
constitutive of his own identity. Indeed, there is thus something strangely
paradoxical in all discussions of social constructionist theory and metatheory within the Ritual. For participant theorists still all center their talk—
talk of theoretical concepts and ideas, of theoretical structures, and of how
such structures might explain human conduct—within their own selfcontained consciousnesses. As a consequence, although many would like to
think of themselves as having moved away from a philosophy centered in
the thought and ideas of individuals, such talk fails to achieve its aim. In
ignoring the fact that the topics of their talk, their debates, exist only as
joint achievements, they pass each other by. In this article, we explore what
is entailed in re-situating social constructionism within the dialogically
structured, spontaneously responsive, living events occurring between
ourselves and the others and othernesses around us.
Key Words: debate, Descartes, social constructionism, theory-criticismand-debate, Wittgenstein
Although the reality of the word, as is true of any sign, resides between
individuals, a word, at the same time, is produced by the individual
organism’s own means without any recourse to any equipment or any other
kind of extracorporeal material. . . . Indeed, consciousness could have
developed only by having at its disposal material that was pliable and
expressible by bodily means. (Vološinov, 1986, p. 14)
Theory & Psychology Copyright © 2002 Sage Publications. Vol. 12(5): 577–609
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We would like to respond to some of the recent exchanges between Kenneth
Gergen and his critics concerning the nature of the social constructionist
movement, its relation to current disciplinary practices, and its ultimate
goals. As we see it, the exchange itself, ironically, illustrates many aspects
of the very process of social construction under attack. While each position
has been developed and nurtured in the conversational worlds of its
exponent’s professional lives, each claims in its own terms to be a separately
valid way of making sense of our shared, social lives. Thus the careful
elaboration of the various views expressed by each author is a testament to
the wildly divergent social realities we, as individual theorists, inhabit.
Indeed, at first sight, in the peculiar interaction ritual (Goffman, 1967) of
academic theory-criticism-and-debate (which from now on we will mostly
call just ‘the Ritual’1), these opposing positions appear so contradictory that
the possibilities for continued disagreement seem endless. Yet, in spite of
their apparent dissimilarities, owing to the unnoticed discursive style2 embodied in the Ritual, Gergen and his critics all couch their explicit claims in
accordance with its implicit requirements, a set of requirements in fact
structured in terms of a whole set of Cartesian presuppositions. This is so
because, as Taylor (1995) points out, the Ritual is still, culturally and
historically, situated within ‘the epistemology project’: that is, it is still
situated within a tradition of inquiry that ‘assumes wrongly that we can get
to the bottom of what knowledge is, without drawing on our never-fullyarticulable understanding of human life and human experience’ (pp. vii–
viii). Thus those in the thrall of the epistemology project still define ‘their
ontology, their view of what is, on the basis of the prior doctrine of what we
can know’ (p. viii).3
As such, then, the Ritual is embedded in a tradition that seriously
disadvantages anyone hoping to defend what we want to suggest in this
article are crucial aspects of social constructionist inquires: namely their
rooting within that realm of reciprocally interwoven, living, embodied
activity, spontaneously and continuously occurring out in the world between
people, and their focus on events that have their existence only within the
dynamic of this ongoing interaction. In short, the requirements of the Ritual
make impossible what we term conversational inquiry. This is because the
Cartesian tradition it embodies allows talk of processes and events expressible only in terms of clearly identifiable, isolated objects, and of the causal
relations between them, subjectively understood. It is, so to speak, rationally
blind to the dynamic world of interwoven, reciprocally responsive, ceaseless
living activities within which we all have our being, and from within which
many of our understandings originate as bodily understandings. It relegates
it to an unnoticed background. Indeed, to the extent, as Taylor (1995) notes,
that our ‘never-fully-articulable’ understandings of our own everyday lives
are excluded from our inquiries in our adherence to the requirements of the
Ritual, the world of our everyday conversation-intertwined activities and
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practices—from out of which social constructionism as an academic field
must itself have arisen, if our stance toward it is appropriate—is also, by the
same token, excluded from study.
How can we begin actively to relate ourselves appropriately to this
unacknowledged background, and to responsively display its influence in
our inquiries? As Taylor (1995) notes, ‘we can’t turn the background against
which we think into an object for us’ (p. 12)—for, as we have observed
above, as a discursive style, it exerts a coercive4 or compulsive force upon
our thinking. To treat it as simply another aspect of the environment we each
as individuals experience, and thus open to conceptualization in the same
way, is to misconceive its role in the constitution of our very being in the
world as the individuals we are entirely. Indeed, as a number of philosophers
are now beginning to claim (e.g. Bakhtin, 1986; Dreyfus, 1991; Searle,
1983, 1995; Taylor, 1995; Vološinov, 1986; Wittgenstein, 1980), this flow
of relationally responsive activity ceaselessly unfolding between us and the
others and othernesses around us is among the preconditions necessary for
the emergence of the very intellectual capacities central to the conduct of the
epistemology project.5 Consequently, if we are to inquire into the nature of
this unending flow, ‘the task of reason has to be conceived quite differently:
as that of articulating the background, of “disclosing” [in Heidegger’s sense]
what it involves’ (Taylor, 1995, p. 12). We must begin now to examine in
some detail the circumstances of our activities, the surrounding conditions
and preconditions in response to which they are shaped, and without which
they would fall apart into incoherence.
The unexamined Cartesian presuppositions embodied in the Ritual, however, shift attention away from the spontaneous, responsive quality of
our everyday talk-intertwined activities—and in so doing, lead either to quite
inappropriate formulations of the nature of talk, or, even worse, to the
complete disregard for crucial features of the process of social construction.
Indeed, what is crucially neglected, as we have already indicated and shall
argue in more detail below, is the nature of the living, embodied, reciprocal
spontaneity that constitutes social interaction. The utterly novel, philosophical sui generis nature of such joint or dialogically structured activity is not
accorded any ontological primacy; indeed, it is disregarded as such. Consequently, as we have also already intimated above, the enveloping realm of
being that emerges in such joint action, and that, as a discursive style, exerts
a compulsive force on the thinking of participants, is also ignored.6 Instead,
within the Ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate, social construction is
presented as something done wilfully and self-consciously, as something
inter-individual, as if the interaction involved were a kind of cooperative
code game in which each of us separately must cudgel his or her brain to
find the appropriate decoding conventions. Indeed, in this Cartesian version
of social constructionism, language is treated as a lexicon of word-forms
along with a system of pre-established conventions for their use, as like a
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tool that we can choose to use or to change. Ontologically, it exists for us as
a separate system, an object or thing-like body of knowledge, that we can
wilfully put to use for our own purposes. Speech and textual forms of
expression are treated as having an existence separate from their interpretations.
By contrast, in this article we take it that social construction, although
occasionally done wilfully, is much more often something that happens to us
in the course of becoming an ‘us’. It is something in which we are
immediately and spontaneously involved, willy nilly. Construction is an
inseparable aspect of the already existing, shimmering dynamic of the
ceaseless flow of relational activity within which we are inextricably
embedded. When this spontaneous responsiveness is left out, social constructionist inquiry is reduced to a vocabulary for naming the residues or
outcomes of social interaction. Our response, then, is not only a response to
Gergen and his critics. We want to question the whole academic interaction
ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate. In the course of our response, we will
move away from social constructionist inquiry conducted as debate to a
more conversational form of inquiry.
Descartes and Wittgenstein: Theories or Reminders?
Views or Forms of Life?
Is such a move possible? How can an academic journal, containing a
finished text, a sequence of signs not obviously punctuated by the responses
of others in the course of its expression, be the medium for a ’conversational’ form of inquiry? For the assumptions of the epistemological project
embodied in the Ritual require our speech acts, if they are to be taken
seriously within it, to be formulated as propositional statements within
which things, and the necessary relations between them, are represented. The
task we have set ourselves here would seem to call to mind jazz pianist
Thelonious Monk’s comment that ‘Writing about music is like dancing
about painting’, or Frank Ramsey’s response to Wittgenstein’s (1961
[1922]) Tractatus: ‘But what we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t
whistle it either’ (Ramsey, 1931, p. 238). Wouldn’t it be better just to start
this article simply with the claim that, in the language game of theorycriticism-and-debate, social constructionist inquiry is indefensible and leave
it at that? To present a series of statements, a set of utterances, situated
nowhere in particular (in an effort to avoid the compulsions of ‘the Ritual’),
seeming to offer speculations about things that might not exist, seems to
reproduce the very kind of abstract idealism that we would like to avoid.
Indeed, if we only ever interpret what we hear according to conventions we
all already possess, then, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, ‘it seems at
first sight true that consciousness can find in its experience only what it itself
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has put there. Thus the experience of communication would appear to be an
illusion’ (p. 178). It would seem that we can never learn anything uniquely
new, never understand another’s thought beyond our own current powers of
thought.
Yet we know this not to be so. What if, along with its indirect,
mediational function of representation, language were also to possess a
much more direct way of communicating? Then our task might not be so
utterly inconceivable as it might seem. What is missing from our current
Cartesian ways of thinking about language, with its subjective–objective
dichotomy, and its consequent focus on finalized, objective forms or patterns
and their subjective interpretations, are our corporeal motions. All our
abstract linguistic signs only exist in the world as material expressions, as
responsive bodily movements. While currently we tend only to think
in terms of patterns of already spoken words, in actual conversation it is
impossible to separate these pure forms from the complex effects of words in
their speaking (see Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 197). Indeed, uttering-forth our
whole meaning with our whole bodily being, from within an already
ongoing, spontaneously established, living relation with an other, involves
very much more than the mere recognition of word-forms. As Vološinov
(1986) points out, our words have their meaning only in terms of their
‘position between speakers . . . in the process of active, responsive understanding’ (p. 102). But crucial at that moment is not the recognition of the
word’s shape as the repetition of an identical form, but understanding of its
‘specific variability’ (p. 69), an aspect of which is its ‘expressive intonation’
(p. 103)—tentative, authoritative, inviting, rapturous, disdainful, abusive,
chilling, and so on. Indeed, often, our utterance may be no more than an ‘uhuh’ (indicating agreement and inviting continuation). As Merleau-Ponty
(1962) notes, there is in fact a direct, bodily, gestural meaning in our
utterances, guiding us as to how, bodily, ‘to go on’ with them, and it is this
which sets the scene, so to speak, for people’s more intellectual responses to
them. As he puts it:
There is . . . a taking up of others’ thought through speech, . . . an ability to
think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the
meaning of words must be finally induced by the words themselves, or
more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of
deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And, as
in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words from their
place in a context of action, and by taking part in communal life—in the
same way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing
discloses to me at least a certain ‘style’ . . . which is the first draft of its
meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its
existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.
. . . There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who
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speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected
by intellectualism. (p. 179)
We hope to allow for the kind of back-and-forth movement found in
conversational inquiry by putting positions in dialogue with each other
through the use of examples and comparison.
As a first step in our comparative inquiry, we would like to bring
Descartes and Wittgenstein into contact with each other. It is difficult to
imagine two thinkers who, at first sight, differ more radically. Descartes
(1986), in searching for a solid grounding for his inquiries, begins his
Meditations with the claim that:
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had
accepted as true in my childhood. . . . I realized that it was necessary, once
in the course of my life, to demolish everything and start again right at the
foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was
stable and likely to last. (p. 12)
Being prepared only to admit to himself what he finds to be ‘necessarily
true’, he goes on to accept that ‘I am, . . . in the strict sense, only a thing that
thinks; that is, I am a mind or intelligence, or intellect, or reason—words
whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now’ (p. 18). Wittgenstein too
was concerned to find a clear starting point for his investigations. But in
contrast to Descartes, he found one that is prior to thinking and to reasoning.
For him, ‘in the beginning was the deed’[Goethe]’ (1980a, p. 31). Language
is a refinement within an already functioning form of communication: ‘The
origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this
can more complicated forms develop,’ he writes (1980a, p. 31). ‘Language
did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination’ (1969, no. 475). Such
primitive reactions are ‘the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result
of thought’ (1981, no. 541). In other words, just like Merleau-Ponty,
Wittgenstein also finds starting points for our uniquely new understandings
of events occurring around us (including the expressions of others) in our
spontaneous bodily reactions to them.
The character of such spontaneous bodily reactions is truly collective or
social, for everyone’s activity is to an extent shaped by the activities of those
around them; no person’s activity can be accounted as wholly his or her
own. Descartes’s conceptual incision, dividing mind from body, also divided
the possibility of understanding the truly collective nature of our spontaneous reactions, for they are neither components of a self-conscious intellect, nor the objective movements of a non-reflective body. His confident
rooting of his own search for certain knowledge within the operations of his
own, self-conscious intellect set the scene for academics and intellectuals in
the West for the next 350 years. As we seek a better understanding of the
nature of our lives together, our training into this discursive style (Fleck,
1979) leads us to think it quite natural that our own self-thought ideas
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matter, that our own individual efforts to ‘see’, reflectively, more deeply into
the hidden workings of our social lives are crucial to helping us overcome
our problems and difficulties. This concentration on the hidden workings
of our social lives, however, leaves us blind to those responsive aspects of
interaction that dwell somewhere in that mysterious realm in-between mind
and body.
In clear contrast to Descartes’s self-possessed certainties, Wittgenstein
(1969) remarks that ‘Giving grounds, 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 [deliberately adopted theoretical] seeing on our
part; it is our [spontaneous] acting, which lies at the bottom of the languagegame’ (no. 204). Although differing from Descartes, clearly Wittgenstein
also shares here a goal with him. He seeks a grounding, a foundation, a basis
in terms of which to root one’s descriptive utterances, one’s accounts, that
such and such is so. However, unlike Descartes, he is not suggesting an
indubitable certainty, an eternal law or universal principle, he is not
proposing a thesis, arguing a point, or attempting to make a necessarily true
statement. He feels no such compulsion. He is trying to remind us of
something that in some sense we all already know, and all express,
spontaneously, in our practical activities.7 Prior to any theoretical suggestions or proposals that we (or Descartes, for that matter) might wilfully or
deliberately make, we all presume the existence of a shared social world, a
language-game intertwined with its associated form of life (as Descartes
clearly presumed in writing his treatises for publication), toward which to
address such proposals. These, and many other such, orientations are already
there, implicit in the ordered structure of our shared activities. Almost all of
us know already that we can address only certain of our utterances to certain
groups of people around us, that certain other groups will lack the kind of
responsive understandings necessary to understand (without interminable
explanations) what we want to say. We all already know that language as an
abstract system does not already contain these crucial interconnections, but
that they are a part of the ways in which groups of speakers respond to each
other in their everyday coping with each other in their shared group life. It is
the character of these already existing, internally inter-related connections
that is missed (ignored) in the Ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate.
In other words, Wittgenstein reminds us that we cannot just use our words
like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty, to mean what we alone want them to
mean, to expect others to respond to our utterances simply as we intend them
to respond. If communication between us is to be possible at all in our
practical lives together, we must join with the others around us in spontaneously judging our shared meanings mostly as they do, according to our
jointly shared contexts of action. We can now see Descartes’s claim above—
that he had been ignorant as to the meaning of mind, intelligence, intellect
and reason up until his moment of insight, that he is solely a thing that
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thinks—in a new light, that is, as frankly disingenuous. His claimed
ignorance is feigned. How could he even know that it was precisely the
meaning of these words of which he had been ignorant? The ordinary,
everyday meaning of these terms—in Descartes’s time, as for us all now—is
to be found out in the spontaneous, everyday, relational practices within
which they have their uses. And all of us can establish there, from within
those practices, whether their use is an appropriate use or not, part of a
truthful claim or not. No specialist group can establish their meaning ahead
of time, no matter how clever or justified we might feel those people
(Descartes included) might be in arriving at their ‘true’ meaning. The truth
of our everyday talk resides in our activities, in how we ‘go on’ with each
other in our practices, and cannot be negotiated in isolation from them.
Doing the Same Again for ‘Another First Time’8
Indeed, if we turn attention to our simple, everyday, sequential interactions
with each other, we find it difficult to ignore Wittgenstein’s basic point that
certain of our spontaneously responsive ways of ‘going on’ with each other
are basic to our forms of life, that is, it is our already structured ways of
acting that lie at the bottom of the language-game. Such unplanned or
unthinking9 ways of acting are already ‘there’ in the background to
everything that we do in our more self-consciously planned and deliberate
activities. More than merely a discursive style, our already structured ways
of acting shape our whole way of being in the world, every aspect of our
ontology, including the ways in which we see something directly and
immediately as this thing or event (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 379), as
connected or related to its surroundings in this way. However, given the way
in which the Ritual focuses our attention only on our deliberately expressed
knowledge claims, these orientations, these immediately expressed attitudes
or evaluative stances toward our circumstances, have long been unnoticed. It
is an aspect of Wittgenstein’s originality to have focused our attention on
this whole realm of shared, spontaneous activities and practices—which, as
he puts it, forms the almost inexpressible ‘background against which
whatever I could express has its meaning’ (1980a, p. 16)—and also, to
suggest that our actions are shaped as a result of them occurring in response
to events happening out in their surroundings, rather than by prior causes
hidden within us.
Wittgenstein designates his investigations into the influences from our
surroundings, which work on us to shape our actions, as ‘grammatical’
investigations, for they are aimed at clarifying the conditions (‘rules’) that
determine the assembling or sequencing of our actions into a meaningful
whole of one kind or another. He talks of that whole as being like a
‘landscape which language presents us with in countless fragments’ (1980a,
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p. 78). It is, we would like to add, an exquisitely inter-related world, both
with its own ‘effective history’ (Gadamer, 1989), and with its own unique
openings and possibilities for the social construction of future relations.
What Wittgenstein is aiming at in his grammatical investigations into the
architectonics of this ‘immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings’
is to ‘erect signposts . . . so as to help people past the danger points’ (1980a,
p. 18). He is ‘not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having
a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings’ (1980a, p. 7).
He wants to provide hints that might be a help in showing us our ‘way
around’ (1980a, p. 56) within these possibilities. And, in line with the fact
we mentioned above, that prior to any theses or explanatory theories we
might propose, we all presume specific ‘practice certainties’ in our exchanges with each other, he wants us to focus on these. For if we forget them
and act as if all that mattered to us are our own, individually expressed
theories, it is then quite easy for us to be at odds with ourselves. We can find
ourselves explicitly claiming something to be true while the very structure of
the claim itself, its ‘logical grammar’, manifests the fact that the opposite
is the case. Problems of this kind, in which we might be misleading
ourselves, in which we have become ‘entangled in our own rules’ (1953, no.
125), ‘are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we
have always known’ (1953, no. 109).
As an example here, we might simply note the fact that we do not have to
‘negotiate’ by explicit agreement to speak one at a time every time we talk.
Turn-taking is done on the fly, but it is neither controlled by a mental
steering mechanism nor is it random. Jointly accomplished, the conversational order embodies a whole network of situated relational responses of
central importance to us as we orient ourselves to the others around us. We
do not have to ‘figure out’ when to speak as if planning an entrance in a
scripted play. Similarly, we do not need to access a set of rules to know how
to greet each other, or how a ‘greeting’ should be intoned if it is to perform
its interpersonal function appropriately; executing such salutations and other
ritual felicitations at appropriate moments in the ceaseless flow of reciprocally responsive activity between us is a part of us being, ontologically, the
kind of people we are. These ‘agreements’ are consensual ways of ‘going
on’ and are displayed in our actions. They are manifested in the spontaneous
or ‘natural’ reactions we provide to the activities of the others around us, in
virtue of our participation with them in the language-game-interwoven
forms of life into which both they and we have been trained. We are coerced
or compelled to act by the momentary social realities within which we are
enveloped. We resist their influence on us at our peril.10
In studying the order we exhibit while turn-taking in conversation, Harvey
Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974, 1978) lay out what they
term as ‘a simplest systematics’ for its organization. In it, they identify a set
of rules (conditions) describing the local management of holding the floor
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during conversation. There are two very different ways we can understand
these rules. A Cartesian way of understanding them would be to treat them
as the theoretical underpinnings of talk, as a prior set of internal cognitive
rules that speakers must first learn and then apply at every moment in
conversation. Yet such an understanding has an after the fact quality to it
and is of more value to someone building talking robots than to persons in
conversation. An alternative to treating the rules as the prior, determinate
cause of our present forms of talk is to instead treat them as generated in our
ongoing actions and as providing a ‘ “here and now” definition of the
situation to which subsequent talk will be oriented’ (Goodwin & Heritage,
1990, p. 287). Rather than following a ready-made order, our speech
accomplishes it. To do that, we must talk in accord with on-the-spot
judgements we share with the others around us. Such practical judgement
allows us to orient to the jointly produced reality that we unreflectively take
to be the ‘here and now’.11
Contrasting these two approaches to conversational turn-taking highlights
the differences between the Cartesian-influenced version of social construction and the responsive, embodied version that we are proposing. A
commitment to representations, interpretations and the rules connecting
them, though apparently constructionist, reinscribes the mind v. body,
subjective v. objective binaries that are the legacy of Cartesianism. It is not
surprising, then, that Gergen’s critics engage him in the realist v. relativist
argument since representation and interpretation imply a sort a of twoworlds puzzle that begs to be resolved. But, from a responsive, embodied
standpoint, the binary dissolves. What is ‘real’ can only emerge from the
interplay of voices, and these transcend the arbitrary Cartesian distinction
between minds and bodies, subjects and objects. As Bakhtin (1981) reminds
us:
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 answer’s 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)
This is true of silence as well. The meaning of a particular period during
conversation when nothing is said emerges from the participation of the
interlocutors as they orient, moment by moment, to the unfolding sequential
organization of the conversation. Silence is not something ‘out there’ to be
interpreted. For example, the one second in which no sounds are made in
line 2 below has no meaning until the participants jointly orient to it. It
might be a gap in the conversation, or it might be a lapse of the conversation,
or it might be an attributable silence (Levinson, 1983), depending on
subsequent moves in the conversation in response to it, as in the third and
fifth lines below:
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2
3
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A: Is there something bothering you or not?
(1.0)
A: Yes or no
(1.5)
A: Eh?
B: No.
(Atkinson & Drew, 1979, p. 52, as quoted in Levinson, 1983, p. 300)
That A speaks again in lines 3 and 5 interactively marks A’s (and B’s)
silence as something potentially meaningful, a moment when, seemingly, A
has driven B to make a crucial decision, one way or the other. The silence of
16 seconds in line 5 below is of quite a different kind. It is treated as a lapse
in the conversation, as a period in which participants are reorienting toward
a new topic:
1
2
3
4
5
6
C: Well no I’ll drive (I don’t mi//nd)
J: hhh
(1.0)
J: I meant to offer.
(16.0)
J: Those shoes look nice . . .
(H. Sacks et al., 1978, p. 25, as quoted in Levinson, 1983, p. 299)
It is significant that the co-constructed meanings in these excerpts are not
representations of already existing things or events in an external world, for
silence is precisely the absence of a thing or an event. The meaningful silences generated here have no referents in a real world external to the
conversation. They simply call for responsive action within the conversation
at the moment of their occurrence, and function to open a landscape within
it of next possible actions. Here the silences set up a ‘conditional relevance’
(Schegloff, 1972), a ‘shaped expectancy’ that whoever speaks next must, so
to speak, speak ‘into’.
Thus, as an interlocutor within a conversational reality, the academic
debate as to whether, prior to one’s inquiries, one should adopt an overall
realist or constructionist position or approach is irrelevant. As the above
examples make clear, it is only within joint action, in the unfolding,
sequential interplay between interlocutors, that silences become significant
silences, each with its own unique meaning, and, along with the bodying
forth of one’s words, they and one’s utterances come to exert a real
influence the others involved in that interplay. In other words, the kind of
reality we are dealing with here is an emergent reality, a dynamic reality in
the process of coming-to-be, a reality in which, in Gadamer’s (1989) terms,
there is ‘the coming into language of meaning’ (p. 476).12 Here, it is only
after sense has been accomplished that the character of the accomplished
order can be known, and only then, from within the doing of what was done.
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Uninvolved external observers can neither stipulate what must next occur in
interaction, nor, once it has occurred, stipulate (solely on the basis of its
shape or form) its categorial membership. Verbal formulations of ‘practice
certainties’ (constitutive norms) can be applied after the fact to justify claims
to knowledge only within the practices of which they are constitutive.
The Implicit Cartesianism Subsisting in the Ritual of TheoryCriticism-and-Debate
For Wittgenstein (1980a), then, as we have already noted, this whole realm
of events in the course of coming-to-be-orderly, of events occurring for yetanother-first-time, forms the ‘background’ from out of which all our more
self-conscious and deliberate activities arise, and into which they must return
if their significance is, in practice, to be understood. It is ‘the inherited
background against which I distinguish between true and false’ (Wittgenstein, 1969, no. 94). ‘What determines our judgment, our concepts and
reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the
whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see
an action’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 567). While for Descartes (1986), it is
our thoughts and ideas, our theories and beliefs, that provide the foundations
for our actions, for ‘I am’, he says, ‘only a thing that thinks’ (p. 18).
This contrast between Wittgenstein and Descartes sets the scene for the
contrasting approaches to social constructionism that we wish to explore in
this article. What is at the bottom of all intelligible argumentation between
people and is thus incontestable—practice certainties or theoretical certainties? As we see it, the contrast is between investigations actually rooted in
shared, dialogically structured, relational practices, and those rooted in what,
as self-conscious, rational thinkers and actors, we can intellectually and
willfully argue for individually. It is a comparison between acting in a
spontaneously responsive, embodied manner in ways others find immediately intelligible, and acting in a deliberately thoughtful manner, in terms
of representations that mediate between ourselves and our surroundings,
which others must interpret.
But, so stated, exploration of such a contrast is surely beside the point.
What social constructionist would even want to begin to argue for this latter
approach? It seems to fly in the face all social constructionist convictions, to
be a contradiction in terms. For social constructionism, as the very term
implies, is surely to do only with constructions that are ‘social artefacts,
products of historically situated interchanges among people’ (Gergen, 1985,
p. 267). Talk of acting as an individual in terms of one’s own mediating
representations would seem to be utterly irrelevant to current controversy.
When as social constructionists we talk of ‘negotiated understandings’,
surely we mean social negotiations that creatively give rise to collective
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outcomes of a unique, indivisible kind. The outcomes of these social
negotiations are appropriate to their circumstances and cannot be simply
analyzed back into the contributions made by each of the individual
participants. We do not mean an inter-individual activity in which a
‘negotiation’ is deliberately ‘managed’ or ‘coordinated’ according to a set of
pre-set conventions, a set of already existing procedures designed to ensure
the smooth inter-leaving of participants’s activities. Not only would such
inter-individual negotiations not be free and open, that is, not genuinely
socially arranged, but in our studies, instead of being oriented toward events
actually occurring out in the world between people, we would still find
ourselves primarily focused on events hidden inside the heads of individuals.13 In other words, the social constructionist revolution would have
been stillborn. It would merely be the adoption of a new vocabulary aimed at
attaining the same ends as before.
Yet ultimately, this is precisely and profoundly the position many social
constructionists (along with their critics) still do adopt as they participate in
the central institutional activity of their discipline: the academic ritual of
theory-criticism-and-debate. For along with an extensive set of other Cartesian values embedded implicitly in this ritual activity is the central belief
that, as scientists and theoreticians, our actions are grounded in, and arise out
of, the (justified true) beliefs that we individuals hold within our heads
somewhere. As a consequence, whatever we might want to claim in our
arguments—and many social constructionists, ourselves included, do want
to claim the primacy of relational practices over ideas in the heads of
individuals—as theorists, we remain inescapably entrapped in an institutional activity that implicitly reiterates the centrality of ideas in the heads of
individuals. This is the picture that emerges if we reflexively examine our
own activities as discussion participants in journals such as Theory &
Psychology—for the style of linguistic exchange demanded by the ritual
constructs us as such beings. Why is this?
Because the implicit Cartesianism embedded in ‘the Ritual’ requires
theorists to talk as subjective onlookers, as disembodied minds, observing
objective situations. In other words, they must talk from afar about situations within which they are not, and cannot be, bodily engaged as participants. We shall call such talk as this—which works in terms of principles,
categories, abstractions, generalities, and so on; in short, in terms of
representations—‘aboutness-talk’. Below, in a moment, we will contrast this
form of talk with another, the ‘withness-talk’ of participants, which relies on
being intertwined with the concrete circumstances of its occurrence for the
understanding of its meaning. But here we will focus on the pivotal role of
aboutness-talk in the Ritual. For it is its taken-for-granted centrality
that justifies such journals as Theory & Psychology in publishing articles
discussing general theories, completely abstracted from what they represent.
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Indeed, even Gergen, who celebrates the relationally embedded character
of knowledge, is seduced by the allure of such talk. In his response to
Hibberd’s (2001) and Maze’s (2001) calls for a direct realism that does not
require the invention of intermediary representations, Gergen (2001a) writes:
‘It is very difficult to see what kind of psychology Hibberd envisions if we
abandon methods, truth claims (within context) and the practical forging of
correspondence between words and our activities’ (p.426). And in his book
also, Gergen (1999) sets out the transformative goals of social constructionism in representational terms:
Transforming ourselves, our relationships, or our culture need not await the
intervention of some expert, a set of laws, public policies or the like. . . .
New patterns of social life are not secured simply by refusing or rejecting
the meanings as given. . . . Rather, the strong invitation is for the emergence of new forms of language, ways of interpreting the world, patterns of
representation. (p. 49)
Why is representational talk so highly valued in our intellectual inquiries?
To understand why, we must turn to a more detailed account of the implicit
Cartesianism at work in the Ritual. Taylor (1995) traces many of the reasons
for its sovereignty back to Descartes’s attempt to base the security of his
knowledge in his own introspective self-certainty. But he argues that it is not
so much foundationalism—Descartes’s attempt to find basic principles from
which to begin—that characterizes his project,14 but the special concept of
knowledge assumed by Descartes that made such a project possible: ‘If I had
to sum up this understanding in a single formula,’ says Taylor, ‘it would be
that knowledge is seen as correct representation of an independent reality. In
its original form it saw knowledge as the inner depiction of an outer reality’
(pp. 2–3). In other words, representationalism, along with its concomitant
assumption—that we are in a subject–object relation to our surroundings—is
at the heart of the epistemology project, the enveloping context for the
compulsive discursive style exerted upon us by the Ritual. As Wittgenstein
(1953) puts it: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it,
for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’
(no. 115).
But more than a simply felt or seeming congruence between ideas in the
mind and external reality was required for properly based and formulated
scientific knowledge. For complexly structured ideas, the congruence must
be arrived at by a method, a method that can generate certainty. This was
Descartes’s achievement. He found that by rejecting all his previous
‘knowledge’, and by ordering his remaining thoughts correctly—according
to clear and distinct ideas—he could generate within himself ways to
establish the certainty of complex claims to truth. Taylor (1995) writes
that
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Descartes is thus the originator of the modern notion that certainty is the
child of reflexive clarity, or the examination of our own ideas in abstraction
from what they ‘represent’, which has exercised such a powerful influence
on western culture, way beyond those who share his confidence in the
power of argument to prove strong theses about external reality. . . . [T]he
ideal of self-given certainty is a strong incentive to construe knowledge in
such a way that our thought about the real can be distinguished from its
objects and examined on its own. (p. 5)
Thus it is that, when we stand as uninvolved observers from afar and
maintain a subject–object relation to our surroundings as we do in the
Ritual,15 representations must become the focal topic of our discussions.
For, lacking any immediate bodily responses to events around us, the only
guides available to us as to how we should act in a given circumstance are
our symbolic representations. In everything we do within the Ritual, it is our
theoretical representations—be they ideas in the mind, states of the brain,
sentences we accept, or whatever—of ‘external’ reality that suggest to us,
ahead of time, what acts are in fact possible and are not possible for us in
relation to our surroundings. Representations of one kind or another are,
thus, currently what are at stake in our academic arguments with each other.
For Cartesianism has it that representations are our only way of relating
ourselves to our surroundings (given that we are only minds). The issues
rehearsed in the Ritual are thus whether it is the world that determines our
representations of it (realism), or the reverse, that it is our representations
that determine the world (the Cartesian version of constructionism). As long
as representations are the central focus of our debates, both realism and
constructionism are merely permutations of the Cartesian tradition.
Gergen and His Critics
We can find many of the lineaments of the Cartesianism we have outlined
above present in both sides of the recent exchange in Theory & Psychology,
where (mostly Gergen’s) social constructionism was the focus of criticism.
Sometimes it is present in participants’ explicit formulations of their claims.
But also it is often present in the unquestioned ‘certainties of practice’ to
which they must appeal in the Ritual in order to justify their claims. Below,
we critically examine three of these certainties.
Traditions
Constructionists maintain that traditions are not a luxury, an optional
accessory that can be deleted when placing an order for meaning. Gergen
(2001) emphasizes the importance of traditions when he argues quite
strongly that his critics’ claims—he calls them their ‘various proclamations’
(p. 424)—have no clear meaning in themselves; they make sense only within
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a community, a tradition. We agree. But this tendency to situate sensemaking invites critics to charge that Gergen’s approach reduces language to
‘nothing more than a set of social conventions’ (Hibberd, 2001, p. 301).
Implicitly accepting the Cartesian assumption that language relates us to our
surrounding only indirectly through the mediation of representations, Hibberd then goes on to complain that ‘this precludes the possibility of external
reference’ (p. 302). And here, because of a shared Cartesian interest in
representations, the differences between Hibberd, the critic of social constructionism, and Gergen, the advocate of social construction, begin to
dissolve.
A tradition, as Gergen sees it, is to be understood in terms of a set of
already existing linguistic conventions for the use of words.16 But to talk
of a tradition in this representational way is to deny or to ignore two of
Wittgenstein’s most basic points: (1) that it is our already structured ways of
acting that lie at the bottom of the language-game; and (2) that, because of
this, our actions are shaped by them occurring in spontaneous response to
events happening out in our surroundings, rather than by prior causes hidden
within us. It is to ignore our embedding in what we have been calling above
the unnoticed background flow of spontaneously responsive activity within
which everything we do consciously and deliberately has its significance.
This leads Gergen to treat a tradition as, so to speak, an external resource
upon which we can draw in seeking to make our own chosen sense of
something. Rather than ‘tradition [being] a genuine partner in dialogue’, as
Gadamer (1989, p. 358) puts it, it is treated by Gergen as an artifact that we
can impose on some other as-yet-not-structured material to give it form. But,
if tradition ‘expresses itself like a Thou’, as Gadamer (1989, p. 358) claims,
then while in ‘its’ presence—and we can never not be in its presence—we
must judge as to how we will respond to its expressions, its commands and
its requirements as we go on acting. To choose not to respond to it is to
choose not to belong to it. In this sense, a tradition is dynamic and shapes
our actions the way a friendship shapes the words on our tongue as we
engage our friends.
Gergen (2001a) sometimes neglects this aspect of traditions. This neglect
is apparent in his response to Liebrucks’ (2001) claim against him that while
facts are socially constructed, they cannot be constructed ‘against the
resistances of the natural (and social!) order’ (p. 369, citing Knorr-Cetina,
1995, p. 148). Gergen (2001a) replies: ‘For the constructionist there is, in
principle, nothing about what is the case that demands or constrains any
particular array of words’ (p. 422). And he then proceeds to argue very
generally that, rather than the unique requirements of a particular context of
use, a consideration of ‘the social conventions necessary’ is what is required
to draw ‘confident conclusions’ (p. 422). Gergen feels nothing of the
compulsions (Fleck, 1979) or coercions (Berger & Luckmann, 1971) others
claim as central to our membership within a tradition.
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What Gergen passes by here is what Taylor (1995) calls ‘agent’s
knowledge’. This is to do both with the reflexive awareness we have from
within our performance of own actions as to ‘how they are going’—as to
whether they are achieving their point, as to whether their relation to their
surroundings is unfolding satisfactorily, whether others are finding us
intelligible, and so on—and with the criteria in terms of which we make
such ongoing judgements or evaluations. One of Gergen’s critics, Jenkins
(2001), touches on this issue. But, under the influence of the Ritual, he
formulates his criticism of Gergen in terms of ‘a rigorous humanistic
conception of psychological agency’ (p. 359, our emphasis). In other words,
like all the others involved in this exchange, rather than as something
special, sui generis, that might play a unique and central role in our
inquiries, that he might draw on as a source for a quite different kind of
inquiry, Jenkins sees our agency as yet another abstract object that needs to
be taken into consideration in our explanatory theories.
Meta-theoretical Talk
The Cartesian inheritance underwrites us as patrons of abstraction. It makes
possible the luxury of moving away from the buzzing confusion of social
action into the distant hills of theory, where it is only a short passage into the
realm of meta-theory. For example, as we outlined above, this Cartesian
upward mobility results in treating the conditions for working out conversational turn-taking in terms of abstract ‘rules’ instead of jointly created, onthe-spot judgements that orient the participants to the emerging situation.
Similar abstractions drawn from social action allow for claims about ‘social
conventions’. Once conventions or rules are abstracted from the joint action,
theoretical talk may begin, and this quickly leads to the further abstractions
of meta-theory. Here again we find that though Gergen and his critics
disagree about social construction, the form of the debate suggests that they
share a common commitment to the value of a theoretical or meta-theoretical
approach to language and social action. To disentangle social constructionism from this Cartesian inheritance, it is useful to examine how both Gergen
and his critics approach the idea of language-games.
Wittgenstein (1953) calls ‘the whole, consisting of language and the
actions into which it is woven, the “language-game” ’ (no. 7). For him,
the term is a term of art, a contrivance aimed at bringing ‘into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity’ (no. 23).
In using it, he is not proposing an abstract thesis, a principle, a sure starting
point that we can take as always being the case. Sometimes language is like
a game, and sometimes games do have sets of pre-established rules or
conventions. But not always.17 And when they do, it is never the rules as
such that guide us in our actions, but the people who voice the rules in the
course of the guidance they give us. We note, however, that Gergen (1999)
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uses the term ‘language-game’ (along with many others in the general area
of studies of language and discourse) in a quite different way. He argues that
when we talk, we talk as we do because somewhere—whether in our heads
or out in the dialogical space between us—there are ‘implicit rules—just as
in games’—that shape what counts for us as ‘a proper description’ (p. 36) of
what is happening.18
To talk of implicit rules in this way is to talk in a metaphysical or, Gergen
would say, a meta-theoretical way about language. But there are a number of
things wrong with thinking about Wittgenstein’s remarks on languagegames in this way. Gergen’s following of Wittgenstein—along with his
critics Hibberd and Maze—is one-sided. Because of their concern with
theory and meta-theory, they all recruit Wittgenstein into the ranks of
theorists. We note that if he were a theorist, the confusing multiplicity
of similes and images he introduces would invite nothing but ridicule and
dismissal.19
Wittgenstein’s remarks are not being offered theoretically. Yet the implicit Cartesianism at work in that realm obliges participants to ‘see’ such
remarks as theoretical statements, as representations, which must as such be
evaluated accordingly. Indeed, in exchanges within the Ritual, participants
express unique theoretical positions, viewpoints, frameworks, or such like,
and then go on to criticize (or to praise) what is said in terms of its clarity,
coherence, unambiguousness, adequacy, and so on. The overall assumption
is that such forms of commentary are crucial in evaluating the importance of
theoretical talk. But to engage in controversy of this kind is still to assume
that the basic things that matter begin inside people’s heads as ‘ideas’ and
involve individuals ‘seeing’, ‘thinking’ something or playing a languagegame. Indeed, it is often to go further and to assume, curiously, that such
new points of departure are of a kind that they could be methodically
assessed ahead of time, that is, prior to inquiry, as serious candidates for
later adoption as ‘justified true beliefs’. There is, then, something strangely
paradoxical about the use of theoretical talk in discussions of social
constructionism. For although many social constructionists would like to
think of themselves as having moved away from a philosophy centered in
the thought of individuals to one focused more on events occurring out
in the relations between them, in complying with the requirements of the
Ritual, their talk fails to achieve its aim. For in theorizing about what goes
on between people in their controversies with their fellow theorists, they
themselves still remain within the realm of ideas.20
We can see some of the contortions this paradox gives rise to played out
in Gergen’s exchange with Maze (Gergen, 2001a, pp. 428–429). We cannot
treat this exchange in the detail it deserves here. But in outline, Maze (2001)
asserts that when Gergen and other like-minded persons say that ‘the
concepts of knowledge in general, of truth and objectivity in general, have
no referents, have no foundation outside (or indeed inside) discourse’, then
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‘they are asserting those statements as factual’ (p.402, our emphasis). And
Maze cleverly tries to catch Gergen out in making a self-contradictory
statement, a contradiction that holds ‘between the content of [an] assertion
and the act of asserting it’ (p. 395).
But as we read Gergen’s (1985) claim that ‘what we take to be experience
of the world does not in itself dictate the terms by which the world is
understood’ (p. 266), we see two quite unexceptionable possibilities. First,
such terms as knowledge, truth, objectivity, and so on, do not have simple,
single referents, but they have different meanings, different uses, in different
contexts, as Wittgenstein (1953) suggests. The second follows immediately
from this. It is simply to suggest that sometimes new things come into
existence in the world, and what we might call our knowledge-talk and our
truth-talk are involved in that process. Why is Maze so upset by such
suggestions?
Because, it seems to Maze (and to Hibberd too) that Gergen—like Derrida
and Saussure—is an idealist, someone who does not talk about facts, about
things external to language. Thus he does not talk about facts, only the fact
that they are talked about.21 In other words, as Maze see it, all Gergen’s talk
is internal to language. To counter this, Maze has no hesitation in asserting
that he already knows the character of the world within which we live: it is
a world of classes and categories. This must be the case, he states, because
Intelligible discourse requires that all the objects of knowledge or belief are
propositional in form. . . . That is not just a grammatical requirement; it
reflects the structure of the world. There are no monads and no pure
particulars. Everything cognizable is of a kind . . . . (Maze, 2001, p. 397)
And Maze concludes from this, astoundingly in this day and age, that it is
thus necessary to reinstitute the belief in the existence of a prior, languageindependent, external reality as foundational to our fact-talk.
In contrast, Gergen chooses to remain in the flux of social process and to
embrace the possibility that out of the polyphony new voices will emerge
and be sustained. This choice illustrates Gergen’s pragmatic orientation.
Convinced that psychology will not provide foundational truth, he maintains
a pragmatic eye on the consequences of ways of talking about psychological
processes. He writes, ‘For me, pragmatic concerns are focal for the constructionist, and the outcomes are nothing less than the forms of life in
which we all have a stake’ (Gergen, 2001a, p. 428). His concern is that no
single discourse annihilate other discourses. His ‘chief aims are’, he says,
‘transformative’ (p. 419).
Our paper here, however, cannot be a Festschrift for Gergen. Although we
cannot follow his critics in their flight back into the pre-social constructionist world some of them seek, we must point out how his claims to
be transformative may mask a more subtle erasing of the differences
between his social constructionism and ours.
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Dueling Dualisms
While he reverses the standard Cartesian relation between the world and our
representations of it, Gergen still retains the duality of mind and body. For
example, in a recent discussion of embodiment (Gergen, 2001b), he seems to
suggest that the only way in which to discuss bodily matters in social
constructionism is in terms of how it is represented in our talk about it.
Trapped within the Cartesian duality of mind v. body, Gergen superimposes
another binary, ‘constructed v. unconstructed’, over the first, thereby framing embodiment as a concern for those ‘who wish to hold to remnants of an
unconstructed world’ (p. 10).22
Here, Gergen conflates the arguments of those who object to his languagecentered approach to constructionism with those of his realist critics mentioned above. Lumped together with their assertions, claims about the
materiality of embodied interaction are read as the pretense of ‘ “sure
knowledge”—where bodies just are what they are’ (Gergen, 2001b, p. 10).
Rejecting what he takes to be the ‘unconstructed’ body, Gergen’s only
option is to return to ‘the enormous emancipatory potential’ of social
constructionism, hoping that it will allow us
. . . to step outside the taken-for-granted and to break loose from the
strangulating grip of the commonplace . . . [in being] prompted to explore
alternative understandings of ‘what is the case’, and to locate meanings that
enable us to go on in more adequate ways. (p. 10)
But here, like Jenkins (2001) above, Gergen simply seeks to insert talk of the
body as an extra conceptual category in his theorizing, just one more
question of representation. The body, however, resists the simple dichotomy
of ‘constructed v. unconstructed’ that slips into his discussion courtesy of
the lingering influence of Descartes.
It is in our embodied responsivity to others that we adjust to novel settings
and carry forward a history of previous embodied responses with others.
These then shape the emerging conversation. This is not to claim, as do
Hibberd and Maze, that there are factually real, material limits to construction, that the body is a prior reality outside discourse.23 Embodied responsiveness is a joint action that cannot be adequately probed with the blunt
Cartesian duality of mind and body, for the responsiveness exists in a realm
of mindful social bodies, the ‘material’ conditions that create and limit the
possibilities of social action. A responsive version of embodiment is not a
return to unconstructed realism. To the contrary, it is sensitive to the subtle
cultural and historical inscriptions on the social body. But when Gergen
(1999) says that ‘we could use our language to construct alternative worlds
in which there is no gravity or cancer’ (p. 47), and that we must become
‘poetic activists . . . [seeking to generate] new forms of language, ways of
interpreting the world, patterns of representation’ (p. 49), we are left, we
must say, quite breathless. While we would like to agree with him that ‘the
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potential for creative reconstruction is a continuous treasure’, and that ‘a
new domain of dialogue on health and disease’ (Gergen, 2001b, pp.10–11)
can be opened up, embodiment is not a matter of games with words. There
are limits to creative reconstruction when it comes to human embodiment;
but there is scope too (Goodwin, 1995; Sabat, 1994; O. Sacks, 1985).24 And
both the scope that there is and the limits to what can be are hidden by the
implicit Cartesian assumption that what is at issue are merely mental
representations of one kind or another. We suggest that the crucial issue is
the other way around—that it is our embodied reciprocal responsiveness that
comes first—and our knowledge, along with the conventions for its representation, arises within the space that is opened up in its sequentially
organized, dialogically structured unfolding.
The Ritual, and the Scope and Limits of Language-Games
Let us summarize where we have got to so far. In reviewing the contributions made by the participants in the exchange in question, we find that both
sides to the dispute miss, bypass, neglect or otherwise fail to take into
account important aspects of what it is for us to owe our being, as a
particular kind of person in the world, to our belonging to a social group.
Our being and belonging arise from the condition of being embedded in an
ongoing flow of spontaneous, reciprocally responsive, living activity, occurring between us and the others in the group. This entails us acting not
primarily in terms of the conventions of the group, but in terms of a
background set of taken-for-granted ‘vocabularies of motives’ (Mills, 1940)
or ‘expectancies and anticipations’ (Scott & Lyman, 1968), which we must
observe in our actions, and to which we can appeal if our actions appear to
others untoward in any way. Indeed, to go further, as Gadamer (1989) puts
it, this taken-for-granted background set of expectancies, the group’s living
tradition or culture, ‘expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it
relates itself to us’ (p. 358, our emphasis), and in so doing, it makes ‘calls’
on us. Hence, like any other dialogue partner, it sets up conditional
relevancies to which we find ourselves obligated to reply. This is what it is
for us to be in an internal relation both to the others around us and to the rest
of our surroundings. It allows us to respond to events occurring around us in
terms of the common sense of the group. In other words, we owe our being,
our ontology,25 as the kind of persons we are, to our embedding within the
ceaseless overall background of group activity. Our expressive possibilities
and our sensibilities are both constituted as a result of involvements in with
it, and, along with our obligations, are only known to us from within that
involvement.
This engagement from within with the ontologically constitutive character
of our relational embeddings seems to us crucial. However, with respect to
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the current debate, both sides seem to miss this. When discussing relational
issues—and Gergen’s critics are more vociferous in asserting this than is
Gergen himself26—both sides seem only to consider relations of an external
kind, that is, relations between already separate, independently nameable
entities, which possess a specific character irrespective of their involvement
within a network of relations. This is to miss the fact that to be drawn into
the Ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate is to be drawn into a certain way of
reading, hearing, talking, thinking, judging, connecting and evaluating both
one’s own utterances and those of the others involved in it. If one does not
meet these obligations, one cannot participate.
None of Gergen’s critics come close to appreciating this. Gergen does.
Although he explicitly denies that anything in our surroundings can compel
his (our) use of words (as we have illustrated above), he does in some of his
more unbuttoned remarks acknowledge these pressures of participation.
Thus we find him remarking, for instance, that he employs ‘realist expository conventions because to participate in the academic sense-making
process I can do little else’ (Gergen, 2001a, p. 423). But then, in case he
seems to be acknowledging a ‘something’ that might be constraining his use
of words, that might restrict his poetic activism, he continues by remarking
that ‘[t]o employ a mode of writing, however, is not to subscribe to any
particular philosophy (metaphysics, ontology, epistemology) that wishes to
claim the conventions as their private reserve’ (pp. 423–424). But then
again, toward the end of his article, he remarks with regard to academic
conventions and traditions:
In the end I find myself caught up in deliberations about the nature of
argumentation itself. On the one hand, so much of the criticism treated here
is lodged within a tradition of argumentation committed to a goal of
truth—either rational, empirical or some combination of the two. The
critics interpret my constructionist writings within this frame, and seem
eager for a duel to the death. Issuing from the content of these writings,
however, I no longer find the tradition of argumentation a viable one. The
grounds are no longer compelling, and the rationale for participation
unclear. Yet in order to sustain the dialogue, I find myself nevertheless
drawn into the ritual. (p. 431, our emphasis)
Clearly, Gergen is marching to a different drum. But what, precisely is its
beat? Is it one that others too could follow? Is there a shareable sense, a
common way of sensing, how we others should actually take his claims? Is
there (the beginnings of) a tradition here that is relating itself to us, making
‘calls’ on us?
Like an Escher drawing, like a Derridean deferred structure, that can
never be grasped as a stable whole, we cannot quite grasp what it is that
Gergen is claiming. We agree with him when he claims that (a) social
realities are socially constructed, and also (b) that ‘the rules of reference . . .
are so loose’ (Gergen, 2001a, p. 421) that our representations can be
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interpreted to mean almost anything. Like him, we also feel that it is only
from within our own living relations to our surroundings that we can
(collectively) investigate what we call our reality, and whether it makes
sense to us as such, or not. But when he goes on to set aside the worries of
his critics as ‘revelation[-]inspired . . . proclamations’, and to suggest that,
for him, ‘the most important question is: what follows when we make these
kinds of proclamations? To what forms of social life do we contribute?’
(p. 424), then we have a sense of intellectual vertigo. For if there is no way
in which we can all share in a set of direct and spontaneous ways of relating
ourselves both to each other and our surroundings, but we are all, of
necessity, entrapped in an unending play of interpretations, with no (in
principle?) possibility of achieving a stability—albeit, of a dynamic kind—
then his questions seem to us futile. If all our talk is representational, and all
representations are open to interpretation, how could our talk ever establish
a form of social life?
In claiming language to have only a representational function, and yet all
representation is open to infinite interpretation, Gergen is denying that his
kind of constructionism can lead to the development of a new common
sense. Neither can it constitute a new tradition of inquiry. Living traditions
are not monologic indices for generating infinite interpretations and reinterpretations. They compel us to engage. Gergen’s approach leaves us with
no sharable ways in which participants engaged in talk with each other can
determine a ‘ “here and now” definition of the situation’ to which their
subsequent talk can be oriented. It is our contention in this article that, were
he to turn his attention toward this academic ritual of theory-criticism-anddebate, Gergen would discover that, irrespective of what he, personally and
individually, claims as the intended meaning of the statements he makes, all
such statements, his own and those of his critics, have a ‘life of their own’
within the Ritual. He alone is not and cannot be the sole author of the
meanings of his utterances ‘within the game’. Indeed, this is precisely what
Gergen (1999) himself would and does claim: ‘our modes of description,
explanation and/or representation are derived from relationship’, he writes
(p. 48). And we are in agreement when he remarks that ‘my realism is
essentially situated. . . . My own accounts . . . are . . . markers within a local
conversation’ (Gergen, 2001a, p. 424). But when he remarks as noted above:
‘In part I employ realist expository conventions because to participate in the
academic sense-making process I can do little else’ (p.423), we feel that he
doth protest too much. For Gergen still situates almost all his writing
relevant to psychology in the sphere of theory and meta-theoretical discussion. Thus, by his own choice, he subjects himself to what he takes ‘the
Ritual’ to be. Indeed, to go further, we feel that when Gergen says above that
he writes as he does, because ‘I can do little else’, we take him seriously.
But we wish to respond by saying that this is so precisely because he writes
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as if the only use of language is representational. Indeed, it is here that
Gergen’s closet Cartesianism is most apparent.
As we see it, the radical nature of social constructionism has not yet been
fully appreciated. It is one thing to reverse the relation between the world
and representations of it. But it is quite another to broaden that reversal out
into opening up a whole new avenue of expressive relationships between
ourselves and our surroundings—so that as participant parts of a living,
dynamically developing world, we can from the inside begin to articulate it,
materially, into more intricate forms. Gergen (2001a) would like to explore
these possibilities too. ‘Are there other forms of interchange’, he asks, ‘that
might enable us to build forward from common visions of a better psychology?’ (p. 431). But, as a theorist entrapped within ‘the Ritual’, Gergen can
never wholeheartedly take the steps toward the relational practices he
advocates in his theories, for the only steps he can legitimately support in his
discussions are the ones that have their beginnings as ideas in the heads of
individuals, and issue in new representations, not in new practices. What is
needed is a turn from monlogical to dialogically structured forms of talk.
This move begins to be possible when engaged practices from within
relationships supplement talk about representations (whether the ‘realist’
version or the Cartesian constructionist version).
Conclusions
In criticizing the Cartesianism still implicit in ‘the Ritual’, and in emphasizing the importance of the background, we have mainly followed Wittgenstein (1953). But Gadamer’s (1989) formulation of his project also captures
our concerns nicely: ‘My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we
do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our
wanting and doing’ (p. xxviii). In its approach to the task of understanding
the others and otherness around us, the Ritual places far too much emphasis
on our powers of reflective, systematic and theoretical thought as individuals, and almost totally excludes attention to the workings in us and on
us of what Gadamer calls ‘effective history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte)—that
aspect of the background that provides us not only with all our taken-forgranted urges, compulsions, goals and desires motivating our actions, but
also with all the values (pre-judgements, prejudices) in terms of which we
judge their outcomes. Taken together, Wittgenstein’s and Gadamer’s philosophic task is to describe the workings of this background, the ‘eventfulness’
of our being in the world, what ‘happens’ to us, over and above our selfconscious doing and desiring. And mainly, they are both concerned with
what happens to us not as objects suffering causal impacts from other
objects, but as living, responsive, embodied beings involved in dialogically
structured encounters with other such beings. Because we cannot escape our
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living, responsive embodiment, we cannot live our lives disembedded from
such an ongoing stream of engagements.
When we position ourselves as self-conscious, self-contained, monologically oriented thinkers, as the implicit Cartesianism embodied in ‘the
Ritual’ demands, we fail to acknowledge our embeddedness in the stream of
ongoing engagements. We tend not to notice how much of the scene of our
action, its staging and its scripting is already set and in motion before we
even step into the theater. Rather than individual initiators de novo of new
courses of actions, we are at best ‘participant parts’ in an already ongoing
drama not of our own authoring, a drama that until very recently has
remained almost unscripted and unstaged. Our task, as Peter Brook (1968)
the theater director once put it, is ‘to capture in our arts the invisible currents
that rule our lives . . .’ (p. 45).27 These currents are invisible in the Ritual,
but emerge as real presences in dialogic inquiry. Academic writing does not
need to surrender to the iron fist of the Cartesian Ritual and cast these
invisible currents as determining structures. Academic discourse can also
enter into the relational currents of our lives. A participatory understanding
from within such a wholistically organized form of life has two aspects to it:
on the one hand, we can gesture to (point out) unnoticed aspects of it from
within our involvements within it, thus to articulate our awareness of its
inner structure further; but, on the other, we can also partake of it, that is, we
come to embody aspects of it (its providential resources) within ourselves,
thus to have it work as an agency in us in shaping our actions.
It is in their ‘writerliness’, in their style of expression, in its physiognomy,
that the writers we have been discussing—Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Bakhtin,
etc.—can help us understand how, in certain poetic uses of language, we can
carry across ‘real presences’ arising in our own practices, to give others a
sense of how they might shape theirs. Eldridge (1997) discusses this aspect
of Wittgenstein’s writings:
Philosophical Investigations thus instructs us or moves us more by
example or by call than by thesis or doctrine. Its poetic dramatizations of
ongoing struggle show us the character of our humanity, reflects to us the
standing problems of expressive freedom in culture (p. 91)
—what we can wilfully do against a background of what spontaneously is
possible for us. We cannot in our inquiries just put our arbitrary theories into
practice ‘out anywhere in space’ and write up our supposed ‘objective
results’ in lifeless reports. Our writing must become an active, participant
part of our involved inquiries while engaged in our practices. And it will be
in the interwoven complexity of its detail, in pointing (gesturing) beyond
itself to something in its surroundings, that it will achieve its effects.
Instead of an ideal order, necessarily schematic but divested of detail, we
envision a fragile web of relations, a paradoxical unsystematic system,
wherein struggling differences are not repressed but find common ground
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around the value of the shared, pluralistic, dialogical truths produced.
Bakhtin (1984) elaborates on this possibility:
It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a
plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within
the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very
nature full of event potential [sobytiina] and is born at that point of contact
among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one of the possible ways. It arises only where
consciousness is placed above existence. (p. 81)
Such truths are not to be found inside the heads of individuals. Rather, as
Bakhtin (1984) suggests, they are ‘born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction’ (p. 110).
This kind of practical philosophy needs to be contrasted with the
traditional account of philosophy as metaphysics. Traditionally, philosophy
is seen as the handmaiden or under-laborer (John Locke) to science. It makes
use of reason and argument to establish the truth of certain speculative
theories, thus to claim them as representing our knowledge of reality,
especially our knowledge of the causes and nature of things. In conducting
it, we stand at a distance from what we seek to understand—we act as if the
truth had still not yet been established and something entirely new
remained to be discovered. Its results are achieved by ‘putting its theories
into practice’. They provide the ‘foundations’ for our further inquiries in a
particular field, for example in psychology, as a purely intellectual matter.
By contrast, Wittgenstein’s practical philosophy inquires into the range of
possible ways of making sense open to us in the many different practical
activities we share in our everyday lives together. It makes use of many of
the methods available to us in daily life for developing our ways of doing
things, and training others in such ways.28 And it aims at seeking their
improvement in at least these two respects: (1) by avoiding confusions and
other ways in which our attempts to ‘make sense’—i.e., to follow each other
and to ‘go on’ to act in the confident expectation of a particular outcome—
do not ‘misfire’ or ‘run aground’; and (2) by being elaborated, refined or
extended into novel spheres of activity. Working as participants in what we
seek to understand, we already embody it in all of our responses to events in
our surroundings—hence Wittgenstein’s (1953) recommendation: ‘We must
let the use of words teach you their meaning’ (p. 220). We are not seeking to
discover anything entirely new. The value of the results are to be found in us
being able to conduct our practices—both our everyday practices and those
of an academic kind—in a less confused and misleading manner.
What we have been doing, then, in our inquiry is to explore what happens
when we make the shift from centering our inquiries in the self-conscious
subject (with its concomitant world of externally related objective entities),
to a more primordial, responsive and situated world of inter-related, living,
embodied, responsive beings. This is a realm much more social than
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subjective mental states with their intentionality, and the objects of their
intentionality. With such a shift, our problematic changes completely, from a
concern with the reliability of our knowledge of what exists objectively in
itself, to the justice of our understanding of that which can only express its
nature to us while in relation to us, otherness. No longer concerned to extend
our already well-known categories of existence into new spheres, we wish to
extend ourselves: ‘To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a
matter of putting oneself forward and asserting one’s own point of view, but
of being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we
were’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 379). No longer centrally concerned with the
contents of our minds, with representations, we become concerned with
the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, and the ‘real presence’ of
otherness they make available to us. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) notes, ‘I
inevitably grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could
not know in any other way except through it’ (p. 93).
It is this inevitable creativity of mutually responsive conversation that we
feel is missed in social constructionism as it appears in the Ritual of theorycriticism-and-debate. It is missed because our spontaneous bodily responsiveness is missed. But again, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) puts it, owing to our
spontaneous bodily responsiveness,
. . . the child understands well beyond what he knows how to say, responds
well beyond what he could define, and this after all is as true of the adult.
A genuine conversation gives me access to thoughts that I did not know
myself capable of, that I was not capable of, and sometimes I feel I
followed in a route unknown to myself which my words, cast back by the
other, are in the process of tracing out for me. (p. 13)
And, because the otherness that enters us and makes us other cannot ever be
predicted or controlled, social constructionism as conversational inquiry
must remain forever unfinished, unfinalized and unfinalizable. Although this
kind of constructionism is open-ended, it is not open-ended in the same way
as Gergen’s constructionism, which is based on a sense that there are infinite
ways to represent the world. Tears follow an unpredictable path, but carry
with them a history of the face as they drop.
Notes
1. We do so because, as we shall find in a moment below, this is the term Gergen
(2001a) uses when he comments that he ‘no longer [finds the tradition of
argumentation a viable one]. The grounds are no longer compelling, and the
rationale for participation unclear. Yet in order to sustain the dialogue, I find
myself nevertheless drawn into the ritual’ (p. 431). We quote the passage in
which this appears at length later in the article.
2. Fleck (1979) uses the term ‘thought style’ to capture this unnoticed constraining
quality of collective thinking. To highlight the socially embedded character of
thinking, we have substituted the term ‘discursive’ in place of ‘thought’, hoping
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to keep the contingent, situated quality of thinking in the foreground. Like a
social constructionist, Fleck sees scientific claims to knowledge as having
currency only within a ‘thought collective’. Such a collective is a community
of persons that acts as a ‘ “carrier” for the historical development of [a] field of
thought, as well as for a stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have
designated the thought style’ (p. 39). But, as Fleck notes, ‘the individual within
the collective is never, or hardly ever, conscious of the prevailing thought style,
which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon his thinking
and with which it is not possible to be at variance’ (p. 41). Similarly Gergen
(1985) notes that as ‘the process of understanding is not automatically driven by
the forces of nature, but is the result of an active, cooperative enterprise of
persons in relationship . . . inquiry is invited into the historical and cultural bases
of various forms of world construction’ (p. 267).
3. Also entailed, as we shall see,
. . . is a temptation here to a kind of self-possessing clarity, to which
our culture has been almost endlessly susceptible. . . . If I am right
about this, then loud denunciations of Descartes are not in themselves
a sign of a writer’s having escaped Descartes’s baleful influence.
(Taylor, 1995, p. viii)
4. As Berger and Luckmann (1971) note, in discussing an individual’s experience
of the ‘objective reality’ of social institutions: ‘He cannot wish them away. They
resist his attempts to change or evade them. They have coercive power of
him . . .’ (p. 78).
5. Without wanting to recruit Searle (1983) wholly to our cause, it is worth noting
that he expresses the matter thus: ‘The Background is a set of nonrepresentational mental capacities that enable all representing to take place’ (p. 143).
6. For Gergen (1999),
. . . to say that meaning resides within a relationship . . . [is to say] that
meaning is an emergent property of coordinated action . . . [that is,] the
way you coordinate yourself to my action functions as a supplement
that begins to grant meaning to what my action lacks in itself’
(p. 145).
7. We might call them ‘practice certainties’, or ‘certainties of practice’, to contrast
with Descartes’s ‘theoretical certainties.’
8. The phrase is from Garfinkel (1967). He uses it in the context of discussing what
we, as members [of a community] doing sociology’, need to do ‘to make [our]
accomplishment [of making sense] a topic of practical sociological inquiry’. We
must not, he suggests, make our observations as strangers from afar, but must
reflexively use in our professional activities exactly the same ‘accounting
practices’ as those used by the other members of our community. For, it is ‘by
his accounting practices [that a] member makes familiar, commonplace activities of everyday life recognizable as familiar, commonplace activities’. And ‘on
each occasion that an account of common activities is used, . . . they [are]
recognized [as such] for “another first time” ’ (p. 9, our emphasis).
9. Some might want to say here that such ways of acting are unconscious—we
don’t. It is not a matter of people being in any way unconscious while acting; it
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is a matter of their not possessing that kind of understanding that, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, ‘consists in “seeing connections” ’ (no. 122). In other
words, the kind of change brought about by Wittgenstein’s investigations is not
epistemological—coming to know something new—but ontological—becoming
responsive and sensitive to something that previously passed us by.
10. As Scott and Lyman (1968) point out, we must account to others for our
untoward acts.
11. As Wittgenstein (1953) notes: ‘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’ (no. 242). Indeed, a major part of what it is to share a
common sense with the others around us is that we make similar connections to
them. We relate separate aspects of our surroundings to each other in a similar
fashion.
12. The overall theme that Gadamer (1989) is pursuing at this point in his writing is
worth making explicit: understanding is not, he suggests,
. . . a methodic activity of the subject, but . . . something that the thing
itself does, and which thought ‘suffers’. . . . We can now see that this
activity of the thing itself, the coming into language of meaning, points
to a universal ontological structure, namely the basic nature of everything to which understanding can be directed. Being that can be
understood is language. (p. 476)
13. Some cognitive psychologists do propose such intellectually conducted, interindividualistic processes of coordination to account for joint action. Clark
(1996), for instance, suggests that,
. . . in each joint action, the participants face a coordination problem.
. . . To solve this problem, they need a coordination device. . . . [One
such is] solvability. . . . : The participants can assume that each
coordination problem has a unique solution they can figure out with
the available information. (p. 91)
Social constructionists of all ilks would feel a certain unacceptability inherent in
such an account.
14. As Rorty (1979), for instance, has argued.
15. But the effects of the epistemology project go deeper, suggests Taylor (1995).
The ‘ “overdetermination” of the epistemological construal’ (p. 6) is at work in
shaping
. . . some of the most important moral and spiritual ideas of our
civilization . . . [such that] to challenge them is sooner or later to run
up against the force of this tradition, which stands with them in a
complex relation of mutual support. Overcoming or criticizing these
ideas involves coming to grips with epistemology. (p. 8)
For example, aspects of ‘the Ritual’ are present in our dinner-party conversations, talk-shows, political controversies and administrative policy discussions.
16. Indeed, in this respect, Hibberd’s (2001) claim that ‘the tacit recognition of the
general meaning of terms is not consistent with the identification of meaning
with use’ (p. 338) is difficult to accept as a criticism of Gergen’s view of word
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meaning—to use words only according to conventions of word use is, necessarily, to use them in terms of general meanings. Gergen (2001a), however, does
not respond to this criticism of Hibberd’s in this manner. But we will not pursue
this issue further here.
17. As Wittgenstein (1965) remarks:
Remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict
rules—it hasn’t been taught us by strict rules either. We, in our
discussions on the one hand,** constantly compare language with a
calculus proceeding according to exact rules. . . . We are unable clearly
to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their
real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them. To
suppose that there must be would be like supposing that whenever
children play with a ball they play a game according to strict rules.
(p. 25)
18. Wittgenstein (1980b) discusses precisely this point along the following lines:
It depends on whether what one calls a ‘wrong description’ is a
description that does not accord with established usage—or one which
does not accord with the practice of the person giving the description.
Only in the second case does a philosophical conflict [i.e. a conflict in
philosophical grammar] arise. (no. 548)
19. Hibberd (2001) continually talks of Wittgenstein’s ‘theories’ and ‘theses’, and
berates him for either being unclear and inconsistent, for being idiosyncratic in
his use of terms, or for failing in his ‘arguments’ to establish his ‘creed’. Maze
(2001) also talks of ‘the Wittgensteinian “language-game” theory’ (p. 399). But
Hibberd and Maze are not alone. Almost all social scientists who draw on
Wittgenstein’s works do so within ‘the Ritual’. In ‘starting again with a clean
slate’, the grammar of the ‘effective-history’ at work in a situation is ignored,
and the new ‘rule-system’ supposed by a theorist is substituted.
20. They remain also within the realm of the monological, in which one’s talk ‘is
finalized and deaf to the other’s response’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293).
21. Like Maze, Hibberd (2001) sees Gergen as involved in here in a performative
contradiction: he ‘admits implicitly what he denies explicitly’ (p. 315).
22. Gergen’s comments are part of a critique of an article by one of us, ‘Social
Construction and Materiality’ (Lannamann, 1998), which he selected as a
‘convenient textual forum’ to illustrate his cautionary arguments against a
materialist account of social constructionism.
23. Where discourse is considered to consist in, as we have indicated before, a
lexicon of word forms along with a system of pre-established conventions for
their use.
24. All these workers pick up on other bodily responsive forms of expression when
purely linguistic skills are damaged.
25. While Gergen (2001a) wishes ‘constructionism [to] remain ontologically mute’
(p. 425), we don’t. But our talk of ontology here in no way sets up our ontology
as an a priori basis for any claims to truth. It is open to construction, where both
its scope and its limits remain to be discovered in the course of the process of
construction.
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26. Indeed, Maze (2001) claims that
Realism founds itself . . . on the requirements of coherent, intelligible
discourse. One of these [is that a] . . . relation can only be meaningfully spoken of as holding between at least two independent
terms—independent in the sense that each must have an intrinsic
nature such that it could be identified without needing to speak or
know of its relations to other things. (p. 395)
27. To make the invisible currents of our lives visible to us as ‘real presences’ in
their writings is what philosophers such as Gadamer, Wittgenstein and MerleauPonty have sought to do.
28. Elsewhere, one of us (Shotter, 1996, p. 301) has outlined how Wittgenstein’s
methods are hardly different from the mundane, conversational methods parents
use in teaching and training their children new skills and practices.
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John Shotter is Professor of Interpersonal Relations and Chair in the
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire. He is
the author of Social Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984),
Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and
Knowing of the Third Kind (Open University, 1993) and Conversational
Realities: The Construction of Life through Language (Sage, 1993).
Address: Department of Communication, Horton Social Science Center,
University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3586, USA. [email
[email protected]]
John Lannamann is Associate Professor of Interpersonal Communication
in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire.
His published work critically examines the ideological assumptions embedded in contemporary communication research and appears in such
journals as Family Process, Communication Theory, The Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs and The Journal of Strategic and
Systemic Therapies. Address: Department of Communication, Horton
Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
03824-3586, USA. [email: [email protected]]