THE INTL. JOURNAL OF LISTENING, 23: 21-43, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ^ISSN: 1090-4018 print/ 1932-586X online § \ TaylorS.Francis'CroiipDOI: 10.1080/10904010802591904

Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizesthe World of 'the Other'

John ShotterDepartment of CommunicationUniversity of New Hampshire

Usually, in our talk with others, we listen for opportunities to express our own point ofview, to add it to or to contrast it with theirs. Ethically and politically, we feel we havea right for our voice to be heard. V/hile we can be satisfied that we have managed to"say what's on our mind," there are reasons for thinking that even then, what we havemanaged to say and what the others have heard from us, may still not put those aroundus fully "in touch," so to speak, with what our world is in fact like for us. Drawing onwork from Bakhtin (1986), Voloshinov (1986. 1987), Wittgenstein (1953), Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Todes (2(X)I), I want to explore a very different form of listening, aform of listening that not only goes with a particular way of responsive talking—a wayof seeking in one's talk to afford one's interlocutors opportunities to tell of, and toexplore further, events and experiences that have mattered to them in their lives—butwhich can arouse within them a distinctive and recognizable "feeling of being heard."All these issues are fundamentally ethical issues in the sense that: If I need you in orderto be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth dependsupon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethicalvalues are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others and othernessesaround us. But what is it to respect the uniqueness of what can be heard in another'svoice (as well as what can be heard in one's own voice)?

Monologism, al its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of anotherconsciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equalrights (thou). With a monotogic approach (in its extreme pure form) another personremains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another conscious-ness. No response is expected from it that could change anything in the world of my

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John Shotter, Emeritus Professorof Communication. Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH03824-3586. E-mail: jds@hypatia.unh.edu

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consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to other's response, does nol expectit and does not aclinowledge in it any force.

—Bakhtin, (1984, pp. 292-293)

Tite 'otherness' which enters into us makes us other.—Steiner, (1989, p. 188)

Ail these types of expression, each with its basic intonations, come rife with corre-sponding terms and corresponding forms of possible utterances. The socialsituation in all cases determines which term, which metaphor, and which form maydevelop in an utterance expressing la felt experience] out of the particular intona-tional bearings of the experience.

—Voloshinov, (1986, p. 89)

Logicians use exampies which no one would ever think of using in any other con-nection. Whoever says: 'Socrates is a man'? I am not criticizing this because itdoes not occur in practical life. What I am criticizing is the fact that logicians donot give these examples any life. We must invent a surrounding for our examples.

—Wittgenstein, (2001, p. 124)

There is a certain kind of moment in human affairs, when a second person sponta-neously responds to the utterances (or other expressions) of a first—by bothlistening and responsively replying—that a 'living connection' between them bothcan be created, a moment that, following Bakhtin (1986), we might call a 'dialogi-cal moment'—or which, originally, I called a moment of "joint action" (Shotter,1980), and later, an "interactive moment" (Shotter, 1993). Central to the occurrenceof such moments, is the spontaneous, living responsiveness of our bodies, both tothe others and to the "othernesses" around us, a responsiveness to which we canbecome inattentive but which we cannot wholly eradicate within ourselves. As aconsequence of our embodied living responsiveness to events in our surroundings,aspects of our utterances (and other responsive expressions) can be 'shaped' byinfiuences in our immediate situation, as well as by those we also embody from ourpast experiences. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it, in such dialogical moments, ''theimmediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine—anddetermine from within—the structure of an utterance" (p. 86, his italics)—the orga-nizing center is neither wholly within the individual psyche, nor within the linguis-tic system, "each and every word expresses the 'one' in relation to the 'other.'I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the pointof view of the community to which I belong" (p. 86). As a consequence, the sur-roundings of our utterances—or, their bacicground^—must be accounted as "deter-mining surroundings," in the sense that, in our being unavoidably responsive to

'"Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the back-ground against which whatever 1 could express has its meaning" (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 16).

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events occurring within them, they exert "calls" upon us to act responsively in rela-tion to them in "fitting" ways.

Thus, if it is the case that (in at least some of their aspects) all our activities are to anextent 'shaped' by our body's ineradicable responsiveness to the unique character oftheir surrounding context, then any inquiry into their nature that fails to take account ofthis—any inquiry that is driven by 'ready-made' textbook-methods, say, or any 'inter-views' conducted in accord with pre-established 'schedules'—will inevitably missimportant aspects of our activities. Indeed, they will miss just those aspects that makepeople's activities and their utterances unique, both to the persons concerned and tothe situations within which they occur. They will fail to do justice to what a personmeant by saying what they did at that particular moment in time and space—an ethicalfailure not only to fully respect how, what they expressed in their utterance, matteredto them, but, as we shall see, an ethical failure also to sustain the sense of an 'us', of acollective-we, of all those of us who are involved in the communication in question,being influenced in the same way by the same determining surroundings.

Voloshinov (1987) gives a nice example of the depth and complexity of whatcan be heard in the utterance of even a single word, and the character of what,relationally, it can achieve.^ He describes a situation in which there are twopeople sitting in a room. They are both silent. Then one of them says, "We//!" ina strongly intonated voice. The other does not respond.

As Voloshinov notes, for us, as outsiders, this entire "conversation" is utterlyopaque. Taken in isolation, the utterance "Well!" is empty and unintelligible.Yet, for the two people involved, this single expressively intoned word makesperfect sense; it is a fully meaningful and complete utterance. How can this be?

At the time the utterance took place, the two Russians involved, looked up at thewindow and saw that it had begun to snow; both knew that it was already May and thatit was high time for spring to come; finally, both were sick and tired of the protractedwinter—they both were looking forward to the spring and both were bitterly disap-pointed by the late snowfall. "On the 'jointly seen' (snowflakes outside the window),'jointly known' (time of year—May) and 'unanimously evaluated' (winter wearied of,spring looked forward to)—on all this the utterance directly depends, all this is seizedin its actual living import—is its very sustenance. And yet all this remains without ver-bal specification or articulation. The snowflakes remain outside the window; the date,on the page of the calendar; the evaluation, in the psyche of the speaker; and neverthe-less, all this is assumed in the word weir (Voloshinov, 1987, p. 99).

But what is the point of such an utterance, what is achieved in its voicing? For it isperfectly obvious that it does not at all reflect, accurately describe, or represent theextraverbal situation confronting the two Russians. Nevertheless, it achieves some-thing of great importance. As Voloshinov (1987) so rightly remarks, the utterance here

^Here, 1 am following Voloshinov's text quite closely.

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''resolves the situation, bringing it to an evaluative conclusion, as it were" (p. 100), andin so doing, it works to join the partieipants in the situation together as co-participantswho know, understand, and evaluate the situation in a like manner—for the other, thelistener expresses his or her agreement hy being silent! In other words, rather thanachieving something representational and intellectual in each of the individuals sepa-rately, the utterance achieves something bodily and relational in both together; it worksto create a shared orientation toward their shared situation—a moment of commonreference. Both now know that they feel the same in relation to the situation; theyshare it, and to this extent, they can share various expectations of each other regardingeach other's actions in their shared situation. Indeed, if one person responds to anotherin a way sensitive to the relations between their actions and the actions of the other, sothat they can come to act in anticipation of each other's responses, then they can besaid, in some small degree, to trust each other. If a second person feels the first to bepursuing an agenda of his or her own, then not only will that second person feel ethi-cally offended at the first's lack of respect for them, they will also feel ethicallyoffended at that persons' lack of respect for 'their' joint endeavors (Goffman, 1967).

Thus, far iTom the extraverbal situation being merely the external cause of the utter-ance—by, say, exerting an impact on the speaker—it "enters the utterance" saysVoloshinov (1987), "as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import"(p, 100). It enters it, in influencing the intonational contour in the voicing of the word•Weir. Indeed, the speaker could almost equally as well have uttered not a word at all,but simply an "Ughh!" In other words, in general, the influence of interest to us is aninfiuence exerted not in a pattern of already spoken words; it is in the unfolding tempo-ral contours of words in their speaking. But how can the unfolding temporal contours ofpeople's utterances work, not only to achieve such an evaluative sharing of a situation,but also to express a person's own relation to their own expressions within it—whetherthey mean them to be taken seriously, treated as mere proposals, or even to be ridiculed(or so on)? And further: In situations in which our talk is not intertwined in with aspectsof an immediately shared context, but in which we only talk with each other—as in aca-demic seminar rooms, organizational conference rooms, or in psychotherapy, say—andso nothing else, is it still possible for us to gain, from the pausing, pacing, and intoningof their talk, a good sense of the invisible world of an other, and of their relations to it?If it is, in what kind of world must we live for such hapf)enings to be possible, for thetemporal contours of people's expressions to work on and in us to such effects?

THE SWITCH FROM MECHANICAL MOVEMENT TO LIVINGMOVEMENT: FROM DIFFICULTIES OF THE INTELLECT

TO DIFFICULTIES OF THE WILL

Western thought has very largely operated in terms of visualized static patterns(forms) in space, with time as a fourth dimension of space. We can see this very

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clearly manifested in Heinrich Hertz's 1894 famous account of our use ofsymbolic representations in scientific thinking. He describes their role thus: "Inendeavoring . . . to draw inferences as to the future from the past, we alwaysadopt the following process. We form for ourselves images or symbols of exter-nal objects; and the form that we give them is such that the necessary conse-quents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessaryconsequents in nature of the things pictured. In order that this requirement maybe satisfied, there must be a certain conformity between nature and our thought"(1954, p. 1). Thus, in such a world as this, a "clockwork," mechanical world,consisting of discrete, self-contained particles, arranged in describable patterns ateach instant in time, events do not develop or emerge in an unfolding flow oftime. Instead, time unfolds in a series of "jumps" or "jerks" from one static con-figuration to the next, with each change being as significant as any other. Indeed,to talk of ethical issues within such a world is to run into the is-ought problem,raised by David Hume (1711-1776), who was among the first to note that manyclaims as to what ought to be were made on the basis of statements about what is.But, as we switch to a focus on living beings and their activities, everything changes.

There is something very special about the movement of living beings thatmakes it different from the mere locomotive movement of things and objects inspace, from their merely taking up different positions in space at differentinstants in time. First, rather than it being simply the re-arrangement or re-configuration of separately existing parts, which at each instant in time take up anew configuration (according to preexisting laws or principles), the movementsof living beings are the movements of indivisible, unitary, self-structurizing,living wholes, each one utterly unique in itself. And besides moving around inspace, such living wholes can also be sensed as moving within themselves, that is,as making expressive movements, and such expressive movements can be sensedas occurring through time, even if the bodies of the relevant living beings staysteadfastly fixed in space; for example, they can be sensed as breathing, asmaking noises, they wave their limbs about, and so on. In so doing, they seem todisplay both short-term expressive "inner" movements—smiles, frowns, ges-tures, vocalizations, etc., the expressions of a "thou," that is, of their own livingidentity—as well as more long-term "inner" movements, that is, they age, theygrow older. Indeed, all such living wholes endure through a whole continuous,sequential life process: A process that begins with their initial conception (in atwo-being interaction); that leads to their birth (as an individual being); then theirgrowth to maturity (as an autonomous being); and then their death.^ So, while

A developmental process—of first creation, then growth and development—that we will findrelevant when we turn to a discussion of "forms of life," with their associated "language-games"(Wittgenstein, 1953), and their beginnings in our being 'stuck by' certain events in our discussions ofexpressive-responsive forms of communication below.

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dead assemblages can be constructed piece by piece from objective parts—fromparts that retaiti their character irrespective of whether they are a part of a wholeor tiot—living beitigs, as indivisible wholes, cannot. On the contrary, they grow.And in the course of their exchanges with their surroundings, they tratisformthemselves, intertially, from simple individuals into richly structured ones. In thisgrowth, their 'parts' are not only a constant state of change,^ but they owe theirvery existence both to their relations to each other and to their relations to them-selves at some earlier point in time. Thus the history of their structural transfor-mations in time is of more consequence than the logic of their momentarystructure(s) in space.

Thus, there is not only a kind of developmental continuity involved in theunfolding of all living activities, but all living entities also imply their surround-ings, so to speak; in their very nature, they not only come into existence ready togrow into their own appropriate environment, or Umwelt (von Uexkull, 1957), theyalso come to embody a whole set of readinesses to respond to events iti theirsurroundings in appropriate ways. There is thus a distinctive 'inner dynamics' toliving wholes not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages, such that the earlierphases of an activity are indicative of at least the style of what later is to come' —we can thus respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion. Thus, in alwaysgiving rise to what we might call identity preserving changes, they and their "parts"are always "on the way" to becoming more than they already are. This is why theirspecial, living nature cannot be captured in a timeless, "everything-present-together," spatial structure or a single order of logical connectedness.

Finally, and this is perhaps their most important characteristic, all livingbeings cannot not be in a spontaneously responsive relation to their surroundings.Thus, they cannot not be influenced in some way by the others and othernessesaround them. Indeed—and this is the basis of Bakhtin's (1984, 1986, 1993)dialogism, as we will see below—when two or more such forms of life "rubtogether," so to speak, in their meetings, they always create a third or a collectiveform of life within which (a) they all sense themselves as participating, andwhich (b) has a life of its own, with its own voice, and its own way of "pointing"toward the future. Indeed, life only comes from life. It cannot be put together

'*Hence the need to put the word 'parts' in scare quotes. While, perhaps, analytically separable, the'parts' of a living, indivisible whole cannot be substantially separated.

'AS Merleau-Ponty (1962) remarks, with respect to the workings of intentionality in our livingactivities: "Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I cansee and perceive, there is. it is true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is carried forward bylines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come. . . . [M]yperceptual field itself, . . . draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into thefuture with its protentions. 1 do not pass through a series of instances of now. the images of which Ipreserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessorundergoes a change . . . Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities" (pp. 416^17).

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from a set of self-eontained, separate parts. This new "form of life" (Wittgenstein,1953), that results from the meeting together of two or more different, but relatedactivities, has, as we shall see, a strange, chiasmic quality to it (Merleau-Ponty,1968). Just as, so it is said, the meeting of the two slightly different but relatedviews of our surroundings from our two eyes are intertwined in the optic chiasmain the brain which creates for us the "relational dimension" of depth, thusenabling us to judge things as being "near to or far from" us, bodily, so we shallfind similar such creative intertwinings occurring in other spheres of our livestogether.

Indeed, in the eyes of our bodies doing this 'for us', so to speak, there is, asTodes (2001) argues, an unnoticed, primary human motivation at work: a needfor us to feel "at home" in our surroundings, so to speak, a need that is very basicto the kind of being that we are in the world—a need very different from the indi-vidualized need for self-actualization, say, that tops Maslow's (1943) "hierarchyof needs." As Todes (2001) would say, what Maslow sets out in his hierarchy arenot needs, but desires, things that we already icnow we want. Whereas, "a need,unlike a desire, is originally given as a pure restlessness; as the consciousness ofone's undirected activity. It begins with the sense of a lack in oneself, withoutany sense of what would remove that lack . . . It begins with a sense of loss ofsomething one has never had; whereas the Moss' of desire is always of somethingonce had. Now the whole sense of our exploration and discovery of the world isprompted by the sense of having been initially lost in the world. We came intothe world 'lost'" (p. 177).

In other words, what Todes' remarkable work brings to our attention, is thefact that we are continually concerned with how to 'be' in the world. We mustcontinually puzzle as to "where" we are, and how we might relate ourselves tothe others and othernesses around us, for what we sense as being "the environ-ment" of our actions, determines the character of our deliberations in deciding"what to do next," how to "go on" with our lives. Thus Todes focuses our atten-tion on our orientational or relational needs—our need to know the nature of thecontext we are currently in, and what it requires of us, what it calls upon us to do.

In the light of these discussions, then, it becomes clear that there are two verydifferent ways in which we can conceive of the difficulties we can face in ourattempts to understand another person's expressions: (I) There those we can callproblems, and think of ourselves as solving them by the application of a method,a process of reasoning; but there are others we need to call (2) difficulties oforientation or relational difficulties, in which we seek to resolve on a line ofaction, a style, or a way of proceeding with respect to each other and/or to ourshared circumstances.

Our ways of proceeding, our methods, or the steps we must take in relatingourselves to these two very different kinds of difficulty will also be quite different.Difficulties we can eall problems occur in relation to an array of data from which

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we can derive unknown relations from among those already known. A relationalor orientational difficulty, however, presents us with almost the reverse of thissituation—for it is only after we have discovered/created a way of relatingourselves to and attending to our surroundings, that the data relevant to ourachieving our goal can be brought to light (and then, be applied in solving problems).But to resolve on a line of action, we must first arrive at a way of "seeing" orotherwise spontaneously responding to the phenomena before us, a perceptualrather than a cognitive achievement is required.

This distinction is not easy to grasp, for differences between difficulties oforientation and difficulties of the intellect cannot be captured formally, they canonly be captured in practice with respect to practical criteria. Wittgenstein (1980)calls these two kinds of difficulty, respectively, difficulties of the intellect anddifficulties of the will: "What makes a subject hard to understand . . . is not thatbefore you can understand it you need to be trained in abstruse matters, but thecontrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see .. .What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather thanwith the intellect" (p. 17). Thus, as he puts it, what work in (his kind of practical)philosophy is aimed at, is not to provide any new information, but to change onein oneself, to change "one's way of seeing things (and what one expects ofthem)" (1980, p. 16). Thus, if these changes cannot be effected by giving peoplegood reasons to adopt new beliefs, by argument, how can one be changed? Onemust be changed in one's very being, and that can only be effected by beingmoved by an other or otherness in ways that one is unable to move oneself

WHAT CAN BE "HEARD" IN A LIVING VOICE

All the remarks above, as I hope is now becoming clear, begin to orient usvery differently toward our use of language than the more usual referential-representational accounts. Taken altogether, they begin to suggest that, not onlywhat a unique person takes his or her unique world to be, at the moment of theirutterance, but also how what they take to be their unique relation to it at thatmoment, also enters into and shapes the intonational contours of their utterance,and can thus, in some sense, be "heard" in the utterance. Let me emphasize, how-ever, that all these aspects of people's utterances are largely uttered as an aspectof the living responsiveness of our bodies to the others and othernesses aroundus. As a consequence, this stream of spontaneously responsive, living activity

''Elsewhere, Arlene Katz and I (Katz & Shotter, 1996, 1998, 2004) have developed a wholeapproaeh to soeial inquiry, what we call the methods of a social poetics, built around being 'struckby' the occurrence of certain events.

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constitutes the constantly changing background of activity from out of which ourmore deliberately conducted activities can be drawn, and into which their resultscan return—what earlier I called the determining surroundings of our activities.If this is the case, the consequences are prodigious! It means that all spoken utter-ances contain within themselves the reciprocal, as it were, of the particularcircumstances in which, for the speaker, they are uttered, and thus written (orotherwise recorded) utterances can also—in their style—manifest aspects of thecircumstances in which they might at flrst have been uttered. Thus, if we knowhow to listen for it, we can hear in a written or recorded utterance—if not theactual, original conditions that worked to shape it in its speaking—but at least thepossible human situations, etc., of its use.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) makes a similar set of points in claiming that in everyday,spontaneous talk, listeners do not need to interpret a speaker's utterances to grasphis or her thought, for "the listener receives thought from speech itself (p. 178),It is present in the way in which speakers give shape to their utterances. Thus the••conceptual meaning" of a speaker's words ••must be formed by a kind of deduc-tion from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. As in a foreigncountry, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in acontext of action and by taking part in communal life" (p, 179).' In effect, wemust ask ourselves: What kind of person, in what kind of situation, to what otherkind of person, for what reason, would say such things? And when we do this, ifwe can reproduce the tone and accent of the speaker, we can begin to feel, hesuggests, our way into their existential manner, the way speakers are using theirwords. We can begin to understand the meaning of their words in terms of theirrole in a particular context of In fact, all our speech (and writing) carries itsrelational meaning in its tone. ••There is thus," Merleau-Ponty (1962) concludes,••either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thoughtin speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism" (p. 179).

It is at this point that I would like to turn in more detail to Bakhtin's (1986)dialogical account of the responsive character of our utterances. As he remarks:••Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in oneform or another: the listener becomes the speaker^ . . . Of course, an utterance isnot always followed immediately by an articulated response . . . [But] sooner orlater what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent

'"In the same way," Merleau-Ponly (1962) continues, "an as yet imperfeetly understood piece ofphilosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain 'style'—either a Splnozist, criticist orphenomenological one—which is the first draft of its meaning. 1 begin to understand a philosophy by feel-ing my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher" (p. 179).

In that listeners, with their nods, facial expressions, and 'uhm uhms', indicate back to a speaker,while he or she is speaking, that they are 'following'—and, perhaps, even anticipating—the speaker'sspeech.

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speech or behaviour of the listener... Thus, all real and integral understanding isactively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatorystage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualized). The speaker himselfis oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He doesnot expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her ownidea in someone else's mind . . . Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of aresponse, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth . . . " (pp. 68-69).In other words, among the many other features of such responsive talk, is itsorientation toward the future: "The word in living conversation is directly, bla-tantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipatesit and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in an atmosphereof the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which hasnot yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.Such is the situation of any living dialogue" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 280, my emphasis).

Being able to talk with those around one with an expectation of, say, agree-ment, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth, and to have one's expecta-tions in large part satisfied, is a part of what it is, as I have already mentionedabove, to trust those around one. But our sensibilities within such exchanges canbe even more subtle and shaded than mere agreement, sympathy, and so forth.Hearing the sounds of agreement, we can often also hear them as sympatheticagreement, as patronizing agreement, as hurried agreement, as inconsequentialagreement, as reluctant agreement, as unexpected or surprised agreement, andso on. Similarly with all other heard responses.^ They are all subtly shaded,nuanced, or intonated in such a way as to enable us, mostly, to 'go on' with thoseto whom we must respond in reply, with at least decorum and courtesy, andsometimes, to 'go on' in ways appropriate to much more complex aims: ". . . theword does not merely designate an object as a present-on-hand entity, but alsoexpresses by its intonation my valuative attitude toward the object, toward whatis desirable or undesirable in it, and, in so doing sets it in motion toward thatwhich it yet-to-be-determined about it, turns it into a constituent moment of the liv-ing, ongoing event. Everything that is actually experienced," says Bakhtin (1993),"is experienced as something given and as something-yet-to-be-determined, isintonated, has emotional-volitional tone, and enters into an effective relationshipto me within the unity of the ongoing event encompassing us" (pp. 32-33, myemphasis).

'"One cannot . . . understand dialogic relations simplistically or unilaterally, reducing them tocontradiction, conflict, polemics, or disagreement. Agreement is very rich in varieties and shadings.Two utterances that are identical in all respects ("Beautiful weather!"—"Beautiful weather!"), if theyare really two utterances belonging to different voices and not one, are linked by dialogic relations ofagreement. This is a definite dialogic event, agreement could also be lacking ("No, not very niceweather," and so forth)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 125).

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Thus in his use of the expressioti "emotiotial-volitional totie," Bakhtin issuggestitig that at every moment, as we voice an unfolding utterance, there is adegree of personal choice as to the different turns we might take, the intonationaltime-contouring that we might give our utterances. So, although "the word inlanguage is half someone else's," Bakhtin notes, "it hecomes 'one's own' onlywhen the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when heappropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral andimpersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker getshis words!), hut rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's con-texts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take theword, and make it one's own" (1981, pp. 293-294, my emphases). Indeed, whatmakes a person's words their own words are the efforts they exert in their expres-sions of them, the efforts we can sense them as making in their speech to maketheir talk conform to 'a something' they are trying to express—and we can hearthese efforts 'in' their time-contouring of their intoning of their expressions.

Indeed, the effort required to voice something becomes a measure of its worthto the speaker, and listeners need, ethically, to take that into account, if they areto do the utterances of an other's justice. But besides the effort, one can also hearhow interested a person is in what he or she is saying; or how calm and confidentthey are in themselves; sometimes excitement gets into the voice, as does curios-ity, anticipation, wonder, sympathy, neediness, despair, and desire. On the othertack, you can also, sometimes, hear how uninterested people are in what they aresaying; while, of course, there are those who have a stake in seeming uninterestedwhen they are not. There is also, as I will discuss at greater length below, theethics of being heard as speaking (or not, as the case may be) in one's own voice.

Thus the emotional-volitional tone of a person's utterances is not somethingthat can be just "tacked onto them" as an optional extra. It is crucial to organizingthe pragmatic conduct of all our communicating—one cannot give anotherperson a piece of information (without insulting them) until one has set up aninformation giving relationship with them—an expectant orientation towardsomething yet to come—first (see Schegloff, 1995). Indeed, as we shall see in amoment, all complex human activities which involve in their organization, boththe sequencing and the simultaneous combining of a whole multiplicity of differ-ent, (often) individually performed activities, require—as in the performance of apiece of music by an orchestra—the continually re-orienting and re-relating ofthese many different activities with each other. And people coordinating theiractions in with each other in this way, in pursuit of a common goal, require themto anticipate each other's responsive contribution toward that goal.

Bakhtin's turn away from a referential-representational account of languageuse to a more relationally responsive account, thus opens up for us a vast new"terra incognita"—the vast sphere of the many different evaluative relations.

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orientations, or approaches that we might adopt to the others and othernessesaround us—that now awaits our further explorations.

Another who has turned in this direction is, of course, Wittgenstein (1953). Ashe sees it, we are, so to speak, victims of an unexamined compulsion to treatcertain important words (I'll call them "big words")—especially when we turn tophilosophical talk—as already having a meaning. But these words were, ofcourse, once the words in the mouths of particular people in particular situations,saying them to particular other people, with particular purposes in mind, wordswhich have become "authoritative words" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342).'" Indeed, ifTodes (2001) is correct, then they were uttered within the overall context of ourtrying to make ourselves more 'at home' in the world—that was their point. Sowe find ourselves saying things to ourselves like: "'The general form of proposi-tions is: This is how things are.' That is the kind of proposition that one repeats tooneself countless times," says Wittgenstein (1953, no. 114), and in so doing, wefeel that we are stating an undeniable fact. But are we? Or are we merely repeat-ing to ourselves the voices of past others that, so to speak, still 'haunt' ourlanguage? To exorcise "the bewitchment of our intelligence" (1953, no. 109) bythese disembodied uses of words, he recommends the following deliverance:"When philosophers use a word—"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposi-tion," "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must ask oneself: isthe word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its originalhome?—What we (i.e., those who practice as form of Wittgensteinian philoso-phy) do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use"(1953, no. 116). In so doing, we must try to specify the nature of the (possible)surroundings within which the utterances in question would make sense, for theirunique shape emerged as a consequence of their unique and detailed responsiverelations to features in their original surroundings.

Wittgenstein (1953) gives the following example: He asks, "The feeling of anunbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it comeabout that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?" (no.412). He then goes on to suggest that our experience of it as a seeming paradox,might arise when we turn our own attention onto our own consciousness ingeneral, and with no particular practical purpose in mind, only the urge to try tosolve a philosophical problem, say to ourselves in an astonished voice and with avacant look: "THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!?" But,as he notes, "Bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox

'""The authoritative word demands thai we acknowledge it, that we make it our own . . . we

encounter it with its authority already fused into it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced

zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the

word of the fathers . . . It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact . . . It is

akin to taboo, that is, a name that must not be taken in vain" (Bakhtin. 1981. p. 342).

LISTENING TO RECOGNIZE THE WORLD OF THE OTHER 3 3

(THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. I couldhave said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to shew that aneffect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of thebrain.—But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it wouldhave had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not suchas would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my lookwould have been intent, not vacant.)" (no. 412, my emphasis).

What is ethical in all of this, is that by recovering the living context of ourwords, by restoring them to their ordinary places, in their ordinary surroundings,we can begin to sense the workings of a form of life within our living speech, aform of life that we can share with others. Just like the utterance of the word"Well!" in Voloshinov's (1987) example above, surrounded as it was by so muchthat was "jointly seen," "jointly known," "jointly desired," and "jointly evaluated:—a shared form of life, at that moment, of miserable resignation—other such utter-ances can give rise to an immediately sensed significance, an immediate sense of usboth (or all) being "in there together." To repeat: When this is the case, thoseinvolved can share various expectations of each other, regarding each other'sactions in their shared situation; that is, they can be said, in some small degree, totrust each other. Divorced from their relation to shared determining surround-ings, how our utterances in fact exert their specific influence on us in specificsituations can become a complete mystery to us.

One of Wittgenstein's (1953) illustrations of how we can bamboozleourselves, by phrasing our philosophical questions to ourselves inappropriately,is as follows: "If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give himsigns. And I should never say: this is only words, and I have got to get behind thewords. Equally, when I have asked someone something and he gives me ananswer (i.e., a sign) I am content—that was what I expected—and I don't raisethe objection: but that's a mere answer. But if you say: 'How am I to know whathe means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?' then I say: 'How is he toknow what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?'" (no. 504).What we lose—what philosophers lose—when we and they try to explain themeaning of an isolated utterance, divorced from the surroundings in which it canhave a life, is not what the words mean (in the dictionary sense of word-meaning),but what a particular person, in a particular situation, meant in saying them.

SOME INQUIRIES INTO LISTENING 'INTO' THE 'INNER WORLDS'OF OTHERS: TOM ANDERSEN AND THEODORE TAPTIKLIS

Below, I want to explore two situations in which a form of listening—what wemight call "listening into" (just as we say "looking into") the unique inner worldof a unique individual—is carried out. Clearly, it is not an immediate, one-pass

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form of listening, but a back-and-forth, dialogically structured task in which, cru-cially, everything which is said and done, is done in response to something thathappens within the situation of the listening. For, when this is the case, it is possi-ble to create a shared set of determining surroundings within which all concernedcan find a mutual orientation toward the task in hand.

Tom Andersen

Tom Andersen was a much beloved Norwegian family therapist renowned for hisintroduction of the "reflecting team,"" later to be called, simply, the "reflectingprocess," in which those who earlier had been offering their thoughts and obser-vations to the practising therapist from behind a one-way screen were (in 1985)moved into the therapy room itself (Andersen, 1991). Previously, "observers"had offered "theories," "explanatory thoughts," "plans of action," etc., in short,intellectual comments, along with a smattering of "nasty" remarks. But when theshift was first tried, "my early fears were not fulfilled. The 'nasty' words did notappear, nor did this conversation require any strong effort from us to avoid'nasty' words" (Andersen, 1992, p. 58). Further, and more importantly, Andersenfurther remarks: "When we suggested to the family that we share our ideas, itwas natural for us to say, 'Maybe our talk will bring ideas that eould be useful foryour conversation.' We did not say, 'useful for you,' but 'useful for your conversa-tion'" (p. 58). He also went on to pay attention to the different "languages" used byprofessionals when alone and when with families, for all the "intellectual" and"academic" words use among themselves are "foreign" to most other people. As aconsequence, he went on to develop some important rules of procedure: The firstand major rule was that the team's reflections should be based on and start withsomething actually expressed during the conversation, not from somewhere inac-cessible to others in the conversation—a crucial step in establishing determiningsurroundings shared by all. Further, by reflectors phrasing their musings as expres-sions of uncertainty—for example, by saying: "When I heard .. . ," or "When I saw. . . I had this idea," or "I am not sure but I had the feeling . . .," or "Maybe youheard something else but I heard ...," or "When I thought of this or that this questioncame to my mind . , ."—families were afforded opportunities themselves to reflectfurther on what had so far been expressed in the session in ways relevant to concernsthey had voiced, not concerns voiced by professionals in professional terms.

It is important to note three further (among the many more) aspects of TomAndersen's work: One is simply his concern to slow down the process of com-munication, to provide time and opportunity for people—in their own "inner

"The removal, on ethical grounds, of the group of therapists often hidden in family therapytjehind a one-way screen, into the therapy room.

LISTENING TO RECOGNIZE THE WORLD OF THE OTHER 3 5

dialogues"—to conduct their own inner reflections. Thus his response to whathas just been said does not take place immediately. "I have to wait and see howthe other responds to what I say or do before I say or do the next thing. The nextthing I say or do must be influenced by the other's response to what I have justsaid. I have to go slowly enough to be able to see and hear how it is for the otherin the conversation" (Andersen, 1995, p. 15).

This suggests a second point: To hear is also to see. "The person who listens,besides listening to all the spoken, also sees how this is uttered" (1995, p, 23). AsTodes (2001) would suggest, our spoken and other bodily activities occurtogether in a unity and cannot be separated, thus the listener who also sees as wellas listens, will notice that various spoken words "touch" the speakers to such anextent that one can see them being "moved" by their own words.'^ All this leadsAndersen (1995) to note, in line with our interest in what words in their speakingexpress (not what we can interpret as being their underlying or hidden meaningonce they have been expressed), that often "a person who is given the opportu-nity to talk undisturbed quite often stops and starts over again, as if the firstattempt was not good enough. The client searches for the best way to expresshim/herself; the best words to tell what he/she wants to tell, the best rhythm, thebest tempo, and so on" (p. 24). Thus, if on those occasions a client if visiblymoved by a word in their own utterance but does not eventually elaborate on itfurther, Andersen often finds it nonetheless useful to let it be the natural startingpoint for a next question: "I noticed that you I said this or that. If you were tosearch for something more in that word, what might you find?" Or: "If you wereto look into that word, what might you see."

Here is a case from Andersen (pers. Comm): Mary, who had been sick andtried to take care of herself. (T: me, M. Mary):

"T: How do they . . . your family . . . see you? Do they see you as a person whoshould never ask for something . . . or do they see as a person who deserves to askfor something for yourself . . . How do they see you? M: I am not sure.. I,, uhm,. Idon't think that they look in terms ofthat, . , I think tliat. , . you know . . . look at. .. I guess that the family I grew up in . , . we were supposed to be self-reliant. . .independent was the big word in my family . . , Self-reliant? What? Independent?(nods) yes. Independent was the really big word. And, .. You know I feel that I got themessage there, 1 am sorry, you feel that . . . I feet thai I got that message there , . ,right, . . and Ifeei that that was something I did realty incorporate in my life , , . Ihave , . , no . . . as soon as they were not responsible for me, it became , , . there wasno longer an issue, I mean they don't talk ofthat any more, you know... but it is stillthere . . ."

12See footnote 6.

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The word "independent" was mentioned two times, and as she said and heard theword the voice went down, and a sad look came over her face. It was as if shewas hit and moved by the word. I determined to investigate that word hut had towait since she wanted to say something first. Then asked:

"How was that word independent expressed? Was it in the open or was it implicit?Or. . .? How was it expressed? Wetl. . . it was verbally. Verbally? The word inde-pendent? Yes. In the way you should be independent or independence in general,o r . . . ? We should be independent. They wanted us to be independent. . . and we

should be independent. They wanted us to be independent. . . and . . . So how . . ,along the route when you came to be acquainted with the word and let that word bepan of yourself. . . what do you see in that word if you look into the word indepen-dent? / don '; like it. I personally don't like that word very much. Partly . . . (shestarts to move on the chair) Do you see things that . . . say more, what don't youlike when you see into the word, or look into the word?

As a consequence of Andersen's responsive listening and questioning, here andafter, all Mary's utterances are responsively connected to each other in aninterconnected unity, a unity that Mary has begun to explore in detail. Thus, whatAndersen is doing here is, I suggest, in these questions that invite Mary to hearherself putting her own experiences (along with the inter-connections bothbetween them and with the surrounding circumstances in which they were firstexperienced) out loud into words, letting her gain a felt of her own past experiencesas an interconnected unity, a unity in which—as result of her explorations—shecan now find her own "way about"'"* inside her own experiences.

If this is so, then we seem to have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that itis not, seemingly, necessary for therapists to understand their clients in order tohelp them therapeutically. Seemingly, the therapist's task is simply to help themunderstand themselves better!

Theodore Taptiklis

After seven years as a consultant with McKinsey and Company, Taptiklisworked in senior roles in large corporations for the next 25 years. He began theStorymaker Foundation in 1998 to help professionals in organizations developtheir practice by recording and exchanging vignettes of work experience in termsof spoken-word narrative fragments. The fragments are chosen as tellings of a

"in line with our interest in difficulties of orientation, Wittgenstein (1953) characterized the kindof difficulties he faced, so: "A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about'"(no. 123). Mary beginning to find her 'way about' inside her own experiences gives her a chance ofbeing able to find a 'way out' of her current plight.

LISTENING TO RECOGNIZE THE WORLD OF THE OTHER 3 7

"striking" or "moving" kind, in Andersen's (1995) discussed above. Thus the factthat they are spoken-word fragments is central to Taptiklis's whole approach. Forone of his modes of inquiry is to call on listeners to listen to a fragment and then tospend time reflecting among themselves on it for a number of replayings. He finds,as we shall see, that what is heard on each listening and reflecting is very different.As an example of his work, we can take the following excerpt from his 2008 book,taken from a conversation at a recent workshop on complexity and storytelling:

Questioner I.Narrator.

Questioner 2:Narrator:

Questioner I :Narrator:

Questioner I :Narrator:

Questioner I :

Narrator:Questioner I :

Narrator:

Questioner 2:

Narrator:Questioner 2:

Narrator:

"What are the connections between story writing and story telling?""Um. . . . ""For you."

(without hearing) "—there's, there's certain exceptions to whatI'm going to say, but, um,—like Dostoevsky, perhaps, but—there's, uh, writing is oppressive in its imposition of, uh . . . para-graphing, as Gertrude Stein calls it, or textualizing as Illich, and . . .(emphatically) "For you."". . . Ong would call i t . . ."(more emphatically): "For you."

(exclaims) "Writing!... (silence) What's the question? (laughter)"What are the connections and the comparison between storywriting and story telling, for you?""I'm gettin' there. . . .""Without anybody else. Just you."He—eck! . . . (loud laughter).

U m . . . . Let's see, (sounds of hands slapping thighs). . . for me, uh. . . I think, uh, my PhD education desu-oyed me as a writer, andI've had to unlearn it, every day since, y' know, and, and I, I guesswriting has just taken me all my life to try to figure out how to doit, and then to have some—uh, relationship to orality, y'know, sothat to me the textual—textualizing and orality are part of my life,um . . . I don't know if that answers . . ." (voice drops)"Yes—how, what—what were you destroying in your disserta-tion writing?""Well . . .""What was —"

"Like you caught me puttin' all these names at the ends of sen-tences, but, um.." (p. 158).'''

'"•The 'narrator' in this excerpt is David Boje—see Taptiklis (2008) for a commentary on DavidBoje's work on ante-narrative.

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On a first listening to the extracted utterance, one listener said: "I'm almost over-whelmed by the sadness of that passage. To me it's almost a metaphor for howour education, uh, destroys our ability to learn." While another remarked: "But Ithink it's that that makes it un-sad, is the battle occurred and it was recognized . . . "Yet another said: "It's interesting how we try so hard to get put into those roles,we want to be what there is, whether its being a Ph.D., or as for me, becoming alibrarian" (p. 160), and so on. On the first hearing, the conversation drifts on, andbecomes increasingly detached, cerebral, and abstract. The topics of discussionare to do with what response is evoked by the utterance for each individual,speaking as it were from "inside" themselves. After around ten minutes of dis-cussion, the extract is played again. This time, the discussion turns to the detailsof the utterance. Someone says: "One of the interesting things is how that piece. . . the, the talking of it, reflects the meaning . . . that conversation is, is imper-fect, and that there's a beauty and expressiveness in the imperfection . . ."Another responded: "The event mirrored what the narrator was describing . . .The 'Heck' came, and immediately after, it was like: Stop talking like a Ph.D.and tell your story. He was reliving what he was talking about." Yet anotheradded: "There was something about breath, that this time around, I noticed thatuntil the pause, I actually was sort of holding my breath . . . then after the pause,there was breathing . . . " A further participant adds: "When you hear it thesecond time, it's different and you're different" (p. 161).

On a second listening to the utterance, there is already an increased energyand engagement in the room, and an appetite for a third listening becomes appar-ent: "What really struck me about this time . . . I almost wasn't listening to thewords, I was listening to the sounds, and when it opened, the words oppressionand paragraphing, I almost felt like the narrator was being pulled down . . . andthen there was the pause, and he raced through and was able to re-experience i t . . .the sound is so much richer than the words themselves" (p. 163). Anotherresponded: "I, uh, want to say something about, um, the question, to pay attentionto something the narrator said about going back to get the question, to reach afterthe question . . . You can use what metaphor you want, about opening the door acrack to expose the threshold, or slipping the window a little: the story has tolisten to the question . . . I don't think we pay attention—I mean, really pay atten-tion . . . because what questioning requires of us is something we are so not goodat, which is listening, and listening is what the story demands" (pp. 164-165).

After the shift of focus onto the feeling-shape of the utterance in the secondlistening, the level of people's concentration noticeably increases, Taptiklis(2008) claims, and become more animated and start to act together. On the thirdlistening, it is as if the participants "now inhabit the recorded utterance" (p. 165),and in so doing, because they now begin to share a "determining context" fortheir discussions. "What is going on now," Taptiklis (2008) says, "sounds andfeels like a process of collaborative sense making. The room is electric with the

LISTENING TO RECOGNIZE THE WORLD OF THE OTHER 3 9

energy of this movement. Afterwards, people say that this was one of the strikingmoments of the event. They leave reflecting on possibilities that seem newlyopen to them" (p. 165). For clearly, now the group shares a number of momentsof common reference, and because of this, can recognize the relevance and forceof each other's comments.'"^

In both these cases, then—in Andersen's "hearing" of something of importanceto be explored further in Mary's uttering of the word "independence," and in Tap-tiklis's collaborative exploring of what can be "heard" in a person's recounting oftheir own relations to their writing skills, as well as how hard it is to listen preciselyto what it is that a question is demanding of one—in both these cases we have anillustration of a listening that develops that isn't a one-pass affair. Indeed, it takesplace in a special context in which there is a dialogie back-and-forth between aresponsively expressive listener (or listeners) and a narrator whose invisible innerworld is being explored.

CONCLUSIONS

Above, I have been exploring two things: One is the way in which a set of "deter-mining surroundings or circumstances" can enter into and influence the unfolding"shape" of our utterances. The other is the nature of what we might call dialogi-cally responsive listening, in which, instead of hoping to hear immediately whata person is saying, a slowly developing process of listening and hearing takesplace, a process which can result in both speakers and listeners coming to share aset of determining surroundings for their utterances, and thus not to talk witheach other at cross-purposes. It is a process in which listeners, by taking "anaetive, responsive attitude" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 68) toward a speaker's speech,reflect back to the speaker in one way or another—moment by moment, in thecourse of his or her speaking—what, uniquely, the speaker's speech is meaningto the listener in that particular circumstance, at that particular moment. In thissense, as Bakhtin (1986) remarks, "the listener becomes the speaker" (p. 68).

What is central to all this, is the move away from the idea of speech communi-cation as being a process of information transmission, of the speaker as a sourceof information, of speech being a common code into which one puts one'sthoughts, and of listeners as simply being decoders who have to task of arrivingat the speaker's thought. This "model" of the communication process eradicatesthe role of two major aspects of the communication situation: One is the sponta-neous, living, expressive-responsiveness of our bodies, thus leaving listeners as

In this sense, although they may not share any foundational beliefs, they can ground theirremarks and claims in their shared experience in their shared situation.

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passive listeners. "The active role of the other in the process of speech communi-cation is thus reduced to a minimum," says Bakhtin (1986, p. 70). The other isthe role of what I have called the "determining surroundings" of our utterance,the (often invisible) surroundings which, in our being spontaneously responsiveto them in the voicing of our utterances, on the one hand, give shape not onlythe intonational contours of our utterances, but also to their whole style, to ourword choices, to the metaphors we use and so on. But which, on the other, orientus toward the "place" of our utterances in our world, toward where they shouldbe located or toward what aspect they are relevant, and toward where next wemight we might go, that is, \.\\t\r point.

Thus, bringing the words of people speaking in committee and seminar rooms,in psychotherapy, and in just general conversations in sitting rooms, back to fromtheir "free-floating" use to their use within a set of determining surroundings thatare (or can be) shared by all concerned in listening to them, is crucial if we are tounderstand an individual speaker's unique "inner world," and the unique "point"they want to make in uttering them. This is Wittgenstein's (1953) in wanting to"bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (no. 116).

But it is not just their unique meaning that is at stake here, ethical issues arealso at stake. For, without a shared of determining surroundings, people, literally,do not know "where they are," they lack orientation, they do not know what toexpect of those around them. In other words, if we and our interlocutors areto communicate readily and easily, we rely on those with whom we are involvedto sustain between us the sense of a collective-we, a shared reality that is ourjointly shared reality. And it is only in relation to such a jointly shared reality thatwe can express to each other who we are, express the nature of our unique innerlives to each other. Thus, we owe our very being, our identity, to it. If itcollapses, if there is a lack of a jointly shared reality, then it is quite easy for us tofeel unheard, or unable to express ourselves. Is there something wrong with us,or, perhaps, with our world?

If we are to sustain the sense of a collective-we, then we find ourselves with,as Goffman (1967) notes, certain "involvement obligations," or "interactiveresponsibilities," to our joint affairs: only \i you respond to me in a way sensitiveto the relations between your actions and mine can we act together as a collective-we; and if I sense you as not being sensitive in that way, that is, as not beingresponsive to me, but as pursuing an agenda of your own, then I will feel imme-diately offended in an ethical way. I will feel not only that you lack respect forour affairs, but a lack of respect for me too. In such circumstances, not only do Ifeel insulted, but I lack the social conditions necessary to express myself, thenature of my own inner life. In other words, if I need you in order to be me, if myappearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon yourresponsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethicalvalues are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others around us.

LISTENING TO RECOGNIZE THE WORLD OF THE OTHER 41

Thus, truly understanding another is not just a technical matter, it is fundamen-tally an ethical issue.

This all raises, for me, a central concern with the nature of our talk in academeand the nature of our own relations to it—and it is with a short exploration ofthat, that I would like to end this article.

Not only are ethical issues involved in truly understanding others, they arealso involved in understanding ourselves. For there are perhaps surprising conse-quences of inappropriately taking an unethical attitude toward ourselves. Inbecoming increasingly objective and detached in relation to ourselves we maybecome unable, as it were, to treat even ourselves ethically. We may cease tothink even of ourselves as beings who act in relation to interests and values of ourown, who have both the ability and the right to monitor and evaluate our actionsas we perform them in relation to our own personal ends. Viewing ourselves asmerely the product of external causes, we may mistrust and debunk even our ownjudgements, and become afraid to say what we think, what we feel, what wewant. Perhaps we do not even bother to think certain things through to their endfor ourselves—for, after all, who are we when there are "experts" for so many oflife's really important problems. Unable to commit ourselves to a position, tosomething in which we really believe, we lose the capacity for sustained, self-directed, purposeful action (heteronomy rather than autonomy becomes our prevalenttnode of being).

Further, just as we are cast in the role of observers of others (rather than asco-participants in life with them), so we can find a part of ourselves alwaysseems to be standing to one side and to be observing objectively what weourselves are doing; such self-consciousness not only prevents that effortless,spontaneous coordination possible in more unselfconscious interchanges, it alsoprevents us from making ourselves truly responsible for ourselves. For even aswe take a stand we are aware of the social influences upon us, the possibility ofour having unconscious motives, an ideologically distorted or false conscious-ness, and so forth. We are not sure whether our views are really ours. Thereseems to be an absence of any clear points of reference to guarantee the validityof what we have to say. The narrator in Taptiklis's study above, displays, to adegree—along with much of my own work here—the difficulty of a speaker tobe present in his or her own speaking.

Gould (1998), explores this issue very nicely in his commentary both onStanley Cavell's (1969, 1979) study of Wittgenstein's voice, and his concernwith what is entailed in philosophy's "loss of voice, and ultimately [its] repres-sion of the voice" (p. 53). Central in Wittgenstein's writing, Cavell (1969) notes,is that he writes a dialogue in the genre of Confession: "It contains what seriousconfessions must: the full acknowledgment of temptation ('I want to say . . .', 'Ifeel like saying . . .'; 'Here the urge is strong . . .') and a willingness to correctthem and give them up ('In everyday use . . .,' 'I impose a requirement which

4 2 SHOTTER

does not meet my real need'). (The voice of temptation and the voice of correct-ness are the antagonists in Wittgenstein's dialogues.)" (p. 71). In other words, wecontinually feel ourselves called by the world we inhabit to meet certaindemands, to seek completeness, generality, or an explanation, or a certain sub-lime order behind or within our language or our bodies. We seem to be inhabitedor haunted by other voices than our own. As Gould (1998) puts it: "Long beforeCavell depicted us as haunting our own lives, he had noticed that Wittgensteinportrayed us as haunted by voices containing our wishes for knowledge. Asphilosophers we make ourselves into the spokesmen of our project to know theworld. We become the ventriloquists of a knowledge that we have yet to achieve.The philosophical project can accordingly be characterized like this: first yousuppress the ordinary connections of mind to things, and of voice to things and toother voices. Then you try to recapture them in an ideal structure, with an idealordering of precise expressions" (pp. 79-80).

In the service of this urge, we first collect data that is divorced from the partic-ular individuals and particular situations in which the thing we are measuringoccurs, we then find a supposedly hidden order in the data so collected, we thenform a theory to explain that order. Why do we feel that this is the right thing todo in all of our inquiries into the difficulties we face? Or, as Gould (1998) putsthis question in his study of Gavell's work: "What is it about the world or abouthuman thinking that elicits this voice of temptation—or, as Cavell will later putit, this temptation to voice a kind of emptiness, a modern version of madness"(p. 79). My aim in this paper has been not so much to give an answer thisquestion but rather to show that if we do not give in to this temptation, other richpossibilities for other forms of inquiry can be opened up.

REFERENCES

Andersen. T. ( 1991 ). The reflecting team: Dialogues and dialogue.'! about dialogues. New York: Norton.Andersen, T. (1992). Reflections on reflecting with families. In S. McNamee & K. J. Gergen (Eds.).

Therapy as social construction (p. 58, 60). London: Sage Publications.Andersen, T. (1995). Acts of forming and informing. In S. Freidman (Ed.), The reflecting team in

action: Collaborative family iherapy. New York: Guilford Press.Andersen. T. (1997). Researching client-therapist relationships: A collaborative study for informing

Ihtvaçy. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 16(2). 125-133.Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogical imagination. M. Holquist (Ed.) (C. Emerson and M. Holquist,

trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. C. Emerson (Ed. and trans.). Minneapolis.

MN: University of Minnesota Press.Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (Vem W. McGee, trans.). Austin, TX:

University of Texas Press.Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act, with translation and notes by Vadim Lianpov.

M. Holquist (Ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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