1First draft of paper for: Dialogue, Disruption and Inclusion; Qualitative Research in Management and Organization Conference (QRM), March 22nd - 24th, 2016, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.http://www.bradford.ac.uk/management/qrm2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpKQO5azM1Y

Deep Dialogicality, Human Becomings,and Leaders as ‘Founders of Discursivity’

John Shotter

“Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way. As we have intimated, we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency toward its conception. We do not know what ‘Being’ means. But even if we ask, ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact” (Heidegger, 1967, p.25).

“What has to be accepted, the given – it might be said – are facts of living” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, I, no.630).

As both Heidegger (1967) and Wittgenstein (1980a) make clear in the quotations above, a lot has already gone on between us and within us as we grow and develop into the many different linguistic communities around us, prior to our more deliberately carried out activities, in which we can be said to ‘know what we are doing (or at least, are trying to do)’. It is the importance of this, all too often ignored set of ‘background resources’ that I want to try to bring to light below, and how we can, by becoming aware of what it makes available to us, overcome many of the ‘disruptions’ we bring about on ourselves by our need — for practical reasons — to conduct our activities within limitations of our own making.

In other words, my task here, as Harold Garfinkel (1967) put it long ago, is “to try to catch the work of ‘fact production’ in flight” (p.79). It is also to try to make clear the limits and the horizonal boundaries we establish in our academic disciplines and professional organizations, that allow us when working within them to produce, on the one hand, remarkable, practical achievements, but which, on the other, render them liable to ‘disruptions’ because such achievements are bought at the cost of ignoring the “everyday necessities,” as Garfinkel calls them, that make such achievements possible — where, by such necessities, he means, for instance, “recognizing what a person is ‘talking about’ given that he does not say exactly what he means, or in recognizing such occurrences and objects as mailmen, friendly gestures, and promises” (p.78) — for, what something before us “is,” is not always immediately clear to us. Often we need to do some exploration, some testing and checking before being sure enough to take our next steps in relation to it. But he then goes on to point out such everyday necessities are also at work in sociologists recognizing various occurrences of events as falling into one or another conceptual category of their own devising1.

For clearly, as living beings, we do not move like dead things, in terms of measurable ways as a result of the ‘impacts’ upon us from the movements of the others around us, but in accord with what their movements mean to us... meanings, not impacts, matter to us. It is the remarkable achievement of these rather taken-for-granted “everyday necessities” that is often ignored, for it is not just a matter of immediate evidence that we judge the ‘fittingness’ of an account to current circumstances, but also whether, if we ask: “Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.4).

In other words, in deliberately expressing verbally what we call our ‘ideas’, ‘thoughts’, ‘hypotheses’, etc., we draw upon in their formulation a whole intra-connected realm of ‘background

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materials’, a meshwork of intra-twined fibres (as in a piece of felt) in which each short fibre is held in place by all the others twisted in with and around it; we do not just describe the immediate ‘shape’ of the thought, so to speak, but its meaning or significance, in the circumstances of its expression. But to do this, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, that what “we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature: such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality” (p.56)2. And what is, perhaps, hard to accept and the bend our minds to studying, is the pre-reflective, pre-conceptual nature of this resourceful background of everyday necessities which we share with all those around us, making these very general facts of nature possible.

First Hinge: The Importance of What Just happens to Us

“... we can see from their actions that they believe certain things definitely, whether they express this belief or not...” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.284).

I am going to rotate my talk around two “hinges,” so to speak — two maxims that “stand fast” for me, to use a phrase from Wittgenstein (1969, no.152) — one is from Gadamer (2000): “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, my italics), and he goes onto remark that he is “seeking to discover which... methodological dispute serves only to conceal and neglect, something that does not so much confine or limit modern science as precede it and make it possible” (xxiv). In other words, there are in our lives important influences, ‘things’, that just happen to us, whether we like it or not, ‘things’ over which we have no choice. The importance of this, as we shall see, is that in certain forms of talk, of speaking, ‘things’ are not just said to us, they are done to us.

It is this emphasis on our spontaneously performed reactions to activities and events occurring around us, as a result of experiences that just happen within us, that is crucial to what I want to call “deep dialogicality” — that is, to those effortless involvements in activities with others in which we each spontaneously develop ways of relating ourselves to all the others and othernesses around us, without any textbooks or special classroom teaching, as we ‘grow into’ this, that, or some-other particular, human way of life. It is the continuation into our later lives of this kind of “deeply dialogical” involvement that we currently need to study, for it is only in this kind of spontaneously responsive “concernful absorption,” as Heidegger (1962, p.101) calls it, that we can come to do what is fitting within a current circumstance of worry to us, that makes sense to the others around us.

It is the importance of what just happens to us that I want to place at the centre of my talk here today. For, in our human “bio-social becomings,” as Ingold & Palsson (2013) call us — in wanting us to think of ourselves as becomings rather than simply as beings — they say that: “Each of us is instantiated in the world along a certain way of life or ‘line of becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p.323), understood not as a corpus of received tradition but as a path to be followed, along which one can keep on going, and which others will follow in their turn... human becomings continually forge their ways, and guide the ways of consociates, in the crucible of their common life” (p.8, my italics) — for we although we may seem always to be living within boundaries, within describable horizons and contexts, this is not the case. We are the ones who make for ourselves such bounded regions of thought and action, as a result of our conducting our practical affairs in terms of conceptualizations and definitions.

Thus, while concernful absorption is at the heart of our first-language learning as children, as we shall see, as soon as we begin to be ‘schooled’, to begin a life of classroom training in which we attend only to abstractions — represented to us by symbols on black- or white-boards — our concernful absorption is displaced and comes to function as the unnoticed ‘background’ to our more self-consciously deliberated upon and planned activities. And then, as we go on to be trained further, in one or another professional skill, we begin to leave our original unbounded ‘ways’ and ‘paths’ far behind, and come deliberately to situate ourselves within limitations of our own making.

But even within these limitations, under the illusion that ‘we know what we are talking about’, we still find ourselves with all kinds of taken-for-granted ‘convictions’, with a lot of certainties that quite

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literally, we do not knows how to doubt — that there is, for instance, actually only one world, that it is inhabited by men and women and animals, that it contains plants, rivers, streams, and seas, and so on, and so on — which, as Wittgenstein (1969) points out, function as “the substratum of all [our] enquiring and asserting” (no.162). But the trouble is, we cannot get this substratum easily ‘into view’; it sits in the dark, in the ‘background’ to our lives; we can only get ‘fleeting glimpses’ of it in some of our more spontaneous uses of language.

Second Hinge: Language as the House of ‘big B’ Being

If we are to get ourselves out of our entanglements within the rules and techniques of our own making (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.125), then as Ingold & Palsson (2013) remark: “The scale of the rethinking... call[ed] for here can scarcely be overestimated” (p.9).

This leads me into my second maxim, from Heidegger’s (1977) Letter on Humanism: “Language is the house of [‘big B’] Being. In its home man dwells,” he says, “Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of [‘big B’] Being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying” (p.193, my italics) — where, by ‘big B’ Being, Heidegger means the everyday, ‘background Reality’ that we so take-for-granted that, more often than not, its role in shaping everything else we do and say is left there, in the ‘background’, unexamined; while by ‘little b beings’, he means the ‘things’ that we think of ourselves as actually talking ‘about’, because of their seeming importance to us in our everyday lives.

I have emphasized that it is only through their saying that Heidegger feels that those who are to be the guardians of our ‘at homeness’ in ‘big B Being’, of our ‘rootedness’ in the actualities of our everyday lives, rather than in an illusory ‘reality’ of our own constructing, can ‘bring home’ its nature to us. This, as we shall see, connects with the final third topic of my talk, to do with Foucault’s “founders of discursivity’.

Both these maxims will, thus, lead us to value the ordinary, mundane, unproblematic and unremarkable activities and events continually happening all around us as we live out our everyday lives along with all the others around us — in fact, to more than merely ‘value’ them, they can lead us to see the ordinary and mundane actually as amazing; as giving rise to processes that are, at least, if not more, mind-boggling than the workings in physical reality of ‘black-holes’ in structuring galaxies, that produce planets like the earth, that in turn go on to produce us. In just the same way that physicists have been surprised by the ‘fecundity’ of ‘back holes’, so we, I think, can also be surprised by the similar fecundity of what we, almost disparagingly, have up till now simply called ‘the background’3.

As Wittgenstein (1980b) puts it: “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (p.16). In other words, as Heidegger tries over and over again to make clear (as indeed, also does the later Wittgenstein), we leave this ‘background’ unexamined in the dark at our peril; for it is only by coming ‘to feel at home’ in ‘big B Being’ — that is, fully at home in both the nooks and crannies of our surroundings, as well as in all the main-streets of our own constructing — will feel able to ‘move about’ in the world without finding ourselves continually ‘disrupted’ or ‘disoriented’ by unanticipated events that make no sense to us. For in the end, it is only a sense-making that is ‘rooted in ‘big B Being’ that can reveal to us why the ‘little b beings’ that we work with in our analyses exist in the form that they do, and why they are related to one another in the way that they are. Without their proper rooting in the ‘big B’ Background to our lives, we are continually trying to impose upon them, characteristics and relations to one another that they do not have, while failing to grasp those that they do have.

Indeed, to go a step further here, as Ingold & Palsson (2013) remark, the ontological nature of ‘big B Being’ is such that we need “to focus not on networks of connection between final objects, but on the meshwork4 of lines of material flow” (p.19) — for talk of ‘networks’ gets us, yet again, into after-the-fact talk.

I emphasized in my quotation from Heidegger, that it is “through their saying” that certain people can exhibit at least some aspects of the nature of ‘big B Being’ to us in their ‘speakings’, in the ‘wording’ of their experiences. This is why I said in my abstract that I am interested in words in their speaking (not in

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analyzing patterns of already spoken words). For sequences of spoken words have the power, not only to direct our attention to previously unnoticed aspects of our immediate circumstances, but also to arouse anticipations within us as to what might follow next, along with what not to expect as following (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Shotter, 2005). And strangely, even though we might take deliberate thought before we speak, our words, or better, the wordings we will use in expressing our thoughts to those around us, as Gadamer puts it, mostly just happen to occur to us, spontaneously.

As Merleau-Ponty (1964) so nicely puts it, making a similar point to Gadamer’s above: “Expressive speech does not simply choose a sign for an already defined signification, as one goes to look for a hammer in order to drive in a nail or a claw to pull it out. It gropes around for a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text. If we want to do justice to expressive speech,... we must consider speech before it is spoken, in the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing” (p.46, my italics). And he goes on later to say: “There is a ‘languagely’ [‘langagiège’] meaning of language which effects the mediation between my as yet unspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought. Organized signs have their immanent meaning, which does not arise from the ‘I think’ but from the ‘I am able to’” (p.88, my italics).

Words in their Saying, not Patterns of Already Spoken Words

But to repeat, we do not take these happenings — which not only happen to us, over and above our wanting and doing, but also happen before all our wantings and doings — anywhere seriously enough. In fact we need, as Ingold & Palsson (2004) put it: “to rebuild our understanding of life and its evolution, and of our human selves, on entirely different ontological foundations” (p.9), on foundations that take into account the fact that ‘big B Being’ has already determined for us, ahead of time, as a result of experiences that happen within us, literally, not of our own making, the nature of what we take to be the ‘little b beings’ in our lives.

For currently, we are far too much in the thrall of the experimental, problem solving, hypothesis testing ways of the physics laboratory, that we seem not to have noticed what Niels Bohr (1950) called complementarity: that what we appear to ‘discover’ in our experiments depends upon what we think we are looking for, which determines the apparatus we design and make to reveal its properties to us. In other words, we do not sufficiently take notice of the fact that so powerful are our words in their speaking, that they can create abstract imaginary realities within us, that may, in fact, not actually exist as ‘distinct, nameable things as such’ in the ‘natural’ world.

Failing to appreciate the prior influence of ‘big B Being’ on us, like Descartes (1968) in his 1637 Discourse on Method, we often feel the need he then felt, to resolve “to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and to let her act according to his established laws” (p.62). We thus, in our more deliberate thinkings and writings we currently, think of ourselves as having to analyze the circumstances of our concern into their component ‘parts’, and of having to represent these ‘parts’ within a conceptual system, or theoretical schematism of some kind, so that we can then think about them in a rational manner.

But as soon as we do that, we not only put a boundary around our field of study (see Appendix), thus to ‘look at it from the outside’, so to speak; we cease to work ‘from within’ the sensed circumstance of concern to us. In short, we ‘close’ its ‘openness’, and thus close ourselves to that sense possessed by all truly engaged practitioners, that there is always a ‘something more’ to be brought to light within the sphere of their engagement. Indeed, in our retrospect or after-the-fact analyses of already spoken speech, we can only ever succeed in talking about ‘little b beings’, mostly in fact of our own devising (hypothesizing), while it is in our spontaneous speakings, in our spontaneous absorption in the ‘movements of feeling’ occurring within us that we can begin to bring to light the nature of ‘big B Being’ — the ‘background’ upon which all our sense-making in fact depends.

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The fact is, we must devise for ourselves another way of ‘bringing to light’, so to speak, the unnoticed and largely ignored workings of ‘big B Being’ in influencing how, in fact, we conduct what we are pleased to call our more self-controlled activities. This other way, as I see it, depends upon the power of our words in their speaking, on our living speech to bring about in those we speak to, in those we address, quite specific and distinctive movements of feeling within us. Rather then focussing on its representational-referential character, we need to attend to its relational-responsive function in influencing our immediate activities in relation to the others and othernesses around us. As Heidegger (1971) puts it:

“To speak to one another means: to say something, show something to one another, and to entrust one another mutually to what is shown. To speak with one another means: to tell of something jointly, to show to one another what that which is claimed in the speaking says in the speaking, and what it, of itself, brings to light. What is unspoken is not merely something that lacks voice, it is what remains unsaid, what is not yet shown, what has not yet reached its appearance” (p.122).

“The essential being of language is Saying as Showing. Its showing character is not based on signs of any kind; rather, all signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs” (p.123).

In others words, there is a way of talking here in which we are not simply talking about some ‘thing’ already well-known both to us and our listeners; we are bringing something into our joint view for a very first time. It is the important role of these ‘first time’ events that we constantly ignore in our constant ‘pattern-seeking’ studies.

As Ann said about me in the advertisement for the conference, worrying about this other way, and how to portray in writing the nature of these first time events that can happen in our speakings, has been an interest — or better, a concern of mine — for a very long time. As she put it, I have been concerned with “disrupting and refiguring inquiry from ‘aboutness’ to ‘withness’ thinking, to a kind of before-the-fact ‘in process’ thinking5, instead of the after-the-fact ‘cause & effect’ thinking we do currently in response to events that have already happened” — or another formulation that I have sometimes used, is trying to shift from ‘up in the air’ to ‘down on the ground thinking. And the fact that, as I mentioned above, that the concepts, theories, frameworks, etc., that seem to legitimate the need for after-the-fact thinking are imposed by a few experts ‘from the outside’ on the ways of life of us all, has inevitably led me to a worry about forms of governance, in which representatives assume that with their ‘good ideas’ they can devise ‘ways of doing things’ that constitute ‘best practices’ for all of us. Hence, again as Ann puts it, my interest “in participatory forms of life and inquiry in a world of living, embodied beings: to movements of feeling and moments of judgment. Both are embedded in working with communities in inclusive dialogical ways.”

First Language Learning, not Translation

Ann’s mention here of my concern with “movements of feeling,” and my mention of such movements above, leads me into another major topic of central importance: A feeling that we have no where near paid enough attention to the fact that we are living bodies, living in the midst of a continuously flowing, spontaneously responsive contact with our surroundings. Thus, on a dimension from computers to plants, as I see it, we are in many ways much more like plants, spontaneously growing and developing as creatures continually adapting ourselves to our surroundings in relation to the sunshine and winds occurring in the ‘social weather’ within which we must live our lives. And just as just as tornados and tsunamis can sometimes occur ‘naturally’ as outcomes of certain extreme atmospheric occurrences, so can certain ‘disruptions’ in the social weather within which are immersed occur quite ‘naturally’ — although often unexpectedly, due to their infrequence.

However, the ‘social weather’ occurring in our surroundings is very different from the weather affecting the growth of plants, for the flow of social activity in which we are immersed is languaged-activity; a fact that is, at the same time, both a source of many of our troubles, as well as providing the

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resources we need in seeking a ‘cure’ for them.

In ‘setting the scene’ for how we might go about seeking a cure, I want to mention first that no special positive talent seems, in fact, to be involved at all; what we actually seem need is Keats’ “negative capability” — the capacity not simply to live in the midst of uncertainties, but to find them intriguing and attractive as sources of creativity. And to go further, to be prepared to continue into adulthood the processes at work, within us, and amongst us, in our first language learning6.

So, in this view, although it may seem utterly strange to say it, it is our activities that shape our brains, and as a result, our further ways of acting — rather than our brains wholly shaping our actions. As I said above, it is our bodily movements that are primary; not only are they spontaneously responsive to events occurring around us, they are also spontaneously expressive to the others around us, and it is this that allows around us to teach us how to communicate, with our eyes, facial expression, bodily postures and movements, and with certain voiced exclamations. In other words, there is a lot going on in our first few months of growing up into a linguistic community, long before language as such begins to come on the scene.

For, in learning our first language, we do not just learn that ‘particular words stand for particular things’. Within the flowing stream of events and activities within which we live our lives, we must learn to pick out some aspects of that flow as ‘nameable things’, while leaving other aspects unattended to ‘in the background’. And we do this with very little ‘deliberate’ teaching, without any special ‘classroom’ instruction by those around us. Along with learning to be ‘lookers’ and ‘listeners’ — by bodily using our eyes and ears to look at and to listen to, for instance, ‘birds’, or ‘dogs’ and ‘cats’, along with the sounds and sights of many other ‘things’ pointed out to us by others — we also learn, in our other bodily expressive responsive movements, the nature of our connections and relations to our surroundings. In other words, in our first language learning, we must come to relate ourselves in a certain manner to at-first-indeterminate ‘somethings’ in our surroundings, to distinguish them, not only in terms of what, bodily, they mean to us, but also to act towards them as having the character of Xs, i.e., as like Xs — as those around us ‘call’ them — rather than, say, as like Ys.

I emphasize the bodily aspect of this early learning to bring to attention the fact that, to the extent that such ‘somethings’ are never identical to previously encountered ‘somethings’, but are always unique and particular — such that we can only respond to them ‘as themselves’, so to speak — we cannot be ‘told about them’ in words representative of ‘things’ already well known to us. In other words, in learning to act towards the unique what-ness of a previously unencountered ‘thing’ in the same way as the others around us also act towards it, we must also learn to make judgments similar to their judgments as to what, linguistically, that ‘something’ is like.

In other words, the languaged thinking that just happens to us and within us as we assess the whatness of the situation confronting us – the thinking that we allow to occur within us as languaged adults without our seeking to modify it in any way – 'sets the scene’ for the kind of thinking that we ourselves can then go on to do in that situation deliberately. But to do it, a kind of inner dialogical activity is required in which we must at first ‘wander around’ within it, testing possible ways in which to express its nature in words, while listening to (sensing) how it ‘talks back’ to us as to whether our words are fitting or not. And this is something that our body does for us, so to speak, in a hermeneutical/holographic-like process in which the sense of, or feeling for, a particular unitary, multi-dimensional whole gradually emerges, prior to our being able to use language in that situation in a 'fitting' representational fashion. And it is on the basis of this unitary, shared ‘background’ to all our talking and thinking that we can coordinate our activities in with those of others, and they with ours, that shared social lives become possible.

However, it is not wholly hermeneutical, because — as Merleau-Ponty (1964) notes above — no pre-written text exists. It is dialogical, in the sense that it involves a back-and-forth, unfolding process in which each new step opens up a new space of new possibilities, just like that precisely involved in the process of writing a text. Thus all we have to go on at each step, as I have put it elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), are the action guiding anticipatory feelings at work in us as a result of what has so far just happened to us. As William James (1890) has put it: “The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs

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of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (pp.252-253). Indeed, the “feelings of tendency” they can arouse within us, and within those whom we address, are, as James goes on to say, are “often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (p.254) — yet, to repeat, they can function within us in an acutely discriminative sense.

The working of this acutely discriminative sense within us, is of crucial importance as we listen to the unfolding sequencing of someone’s ‘wordings’ as they speak to us, with each different word working both to ‘move’ and to ‘further articulate’ the unique ‘time-shape’ or contour of the particular ‘movement of feeling’ occurring within us. Where we try to understand the meaning of what we are experiencing in terms both of what the distinctive ‘movement’ is like as well as its differences from experiences well-known to us from our past.

This is why, I think, the creative task we continually face — of having to make sense of a circumstance as like an X, but not like a Y or Z — is not at all a matter of our translating new experiences into a second, theoretically-structured, calculational language, thus to be able to reason about them within it. The creative task we face is simply a continuation of the original task we faced as children: that of coming to feel the ease of being completely ‘at home’ in whatever new surroundings we might find ourselves to be in.

Indeed, in our task as children, in coming to relate ourselves to our surroundings as those around us do, we not only find ourselves listening to and acting upon their words — we not only ‘stop’, ‘look’, and ‘listen’ as they ask us to, we also hear all their talk of ‘little b beings’, and in the process learn what, bodily, they mean to us, so that we come to act towards ‘little b beings’ as being like Xs, as they do, rather than as like Ys, or Zs. Thus, as Heidegger (1971) remarks, speaking is “in advance” a listening and as a result, a hearing: “... it is a listening not while but before we are speaking... We do not merely speak the language — we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking” (pp.123-124) — we hear ‘big B Being’ at work in shaping people’s particular, social intelligible activities.

Overcoming Disruptions: a Necessity of Nature within a Social Group

A ‘disruption’ occurs when things occur unexpectedly, whenever which way one turns, no correct next step comes to mind. Indeed, because such moments can, within a social group, be frightening, as Vico (1968) points out, they can give rise to a social necessity for the group to come to a shared grasp of such experiences. The social necessity in question arises from the fact that, when a fragile sense of reality created by an incipient social system at stake, a sense of reality that is drawn upon in rendering each social encounter intelligible, anything which threatens it leaves participants disoriented, disorganized, not knowing any longer how to relate themselves, not only to their surroundings, but to each other — as sociologists put it, individuals will become anomic, i.e., norm-less, and cease in providing ethical and political orientation for each other.

How can we respond to such upsets, to such disruptions? Conventionally, we simply begin to make sense of what is unknown to us, of new experiences, as being like other ‘things’ already well-known to us; in other words, we begin to use metaphors; we turn to understanding ‘things’ poetically, or imaginatively; where such imaginative work is clearly prior to our theorizing. For without a shared sense within a research community of a ‘subject matter’, a distinct ‘something’ into which to research, members of a research group would be continually at ‘cross-purposes’ with each other; there would be no agreement as to what their theories were ‘theories of’.

Perhaps one of the most famous images of all time, is Niels Bohr’s “planetary model” of the atom, often symbolized in terms electrons orbiting around a nucleus much like planets orbiting the Sun. While, to repeat, here I have taken ‘plants’ growing and developing within a world of continuously changing ‘social weather’. But also, elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), like Ingold & Palsson (2013), I have taken fluid activities as providing the guiding metaphors we need; as they put it: “We could regard the organism from a complex process perspective as a kind of eddy or ‘whirl’, endlessly creating itself in the current of life, just as the water of a stream, without any kind of template or central direction, forms itself into ripples,

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droplets and vortices” (p.18) — we could regard organizations in the same light also.

All this means that, in short, poetry is prior to prose; or at more length, relationally-responsive talk is prior to referential-representational talk.

For me, one of the first people to recognize this, is Giambattista Vico (1968) in his Scienza Nuova of 1744. As he put it there: “We find that the principle of these origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the early gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters... [we] with our civilized natures we cannot at all imagine and can only understand by great toil the poetic nature of these first men... the sources of all poetic locution are found to be two: poverty of language and necessity to explain and make oneself understood” (para.34).

Why we cannot easily imagine and come to understand by great toil the poetic nature of ‘these first men [and women]’, is because they could not, as we do now, make such easy, ‘after-the-fact’, comparisons ‘from outside’ the circumstances currently in question for them; they could not easily turn to the notion of planetary obits, plants growing in an atmosphere of ‘social weather’, or ‘things’ as existing with fluid streams of activity as ‘whirls’ or ‘eddies’. Realizing this, Vico (1968), in his “imaginative metaphysics,” makes a surprising suggestion: “that man becomes all things by not understanding them;.... for when man understands, he [simply] extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand, he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them" (para.405).

In other words, like the first peoples facing the task of creating their socially shared ways of relating themselves both to each other and to their surroundings, we also must find the likenesses we need ‘from within ourselves’ as members of a social group — each one of the easy comparisons that we can, as individuals, each make, will leave us as a group still limited, still within the boundaries, of a definition or concept fashion by just one of us; we need a guiding metaphor that we can all agree on; we need to extend what we all take to be the “common sense”7 that resides in our everyday language use. Our task is to understand how what we take as ‘given’ ever comes to be as such; without our shared background of ‘big B Being’, no ‘little b beings’, that we could discuss with others, could exist as contents of our individual minds at all.

In moving from ‘after-the-fact’ to ‘before-the-fact’ thought and talk, from closed realms of deliberately constructed concepts and definitions into the always ‘unfinished’ and ‘open’ realms of our particular everyday human practices — within which everything is being seen and done, uniquely, as Garfinkel (1967) so nicely puts it, “for another first time” (p.9) — I want to bring attention to the movements of feeling that our speech can arouse both in others (and in ourselves), and to the power of our different wordings in making/creating/sculpting ‘distinctions’, ‘comparisons’, ‘connections’, and many, many other such unfolding ‘time-shapes’ occurring within us.

While Ann Cunliffe and I focussed a great deal of attention on being poetic and metaphorical in our paper, The manager as practical author (2003), we did not in fact, make the distinction I have just made above: between being easily poetical (by our making use as individuals of already existing similarities), and being poetical by necessity as members of a social in the face of coping with ‘disruptions’ (in which we have to find the resources we need from what already exists within the group, in such a way as to achieve accord within the social group). In other words, to repeat, by finding the resources that we need from within and amongst ourselves, as a linguistic group, means that we, as a group, must extend our ordinary, everyday, taken-for-granted, ways of talking — and that, to repeat, requires us to undertake a continuation, as Kuhn (2000) and Ingold & Palsson (2013), of our first-language learning.

From definitions, concepts, and good ideas to memorable phrases.

But how can we do that? Many proposals are made, but few survive for long enough to become a taken-for-granted aspect of our everyday talk, to become a part of the unnoticed ‘background’ to our more self-consciously deliberated upon and planned activities.

Foucault (1986), in discussing What is an Author — as himself such a ‘founder’ — discusses what

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he calls “founders of discursivity.” What is special about what they say and write, he says, is that “they are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts” (p.114); they have created genres, or styles of talk and texts that open up not previously available expressive possibilities to others. In other words, in line with the claim I have been pursuing here, they bring to light other aspects of ‘big B Being’ that have not before been articulated in sufficient ‘down on the ground’ detail as to render them “visibly rational and reportable for all practical purposes” (to use Garfinkel’s, 1967, p.vii) apposite phrasing here).

Elsewhere (in particular Shotter, 2010a) I have discussed in some detail what is at stake here, so I will not say much in detail here, except to point out how the style of talk required differs in almost very respect to the unambigous, technical, objective ‘aboutness’ talk in well-defined terms, required in scientific texts.

In line with the focus, not on ‘ideas’, ‘theories’, ‘concepts’ or ‘definitions’, but on words in their speaking, my interest has been on what I would like to call, memorable, instructive phrases, and also on vignettes which often provide a context for such phrases — where the function of such phrases is arouse in listeners a distinctly felt “movement of feeling” (Shotter, 2010b) that can be shared with others within a social group, a movement that can be shared because it ‘draws upon’, ‘resonants with’, or is ‘attuned to’ the ‘big B Being’ within which they are all immersed. It is in such ‘touching’ or ‘moving’ moments’ as these, when something is said which

Although Heidegger (1962) was concerned in his writing “to bring us face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with language... we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making... that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. It is this something itself that comes about, comes to pass, happens” (p.57), I still find it difficult to find within his writings any memorable phrases, any word sequences which work to ‘bring me in touch with’ the very basic nature of my ‘big B Being-in-the-world’.

In my Conversational Realities (Shotter, 1993, p.123), I used an example from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame; the line was: “Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!” — a powerful line, I think you'll agree. But what does it mean? What does it do? It doesn't tell us anything we didn't in some sense already know. It imparts no new knowledge. But it does ‘move’ us in the sense of ‘re-orienting’ us in relation to our own way of being-in-the-world, so that we come to ‘re-see’ it in a new light. It ‘breaks the flow’ of our mundane thoughts and interests, and, in contrasting with them, confronts us afresh with an occasion, perhaps, for a re-evaluation of our lives.

Thus in Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein's terms, it does not so much ‘say’ anything, but ‘shows’ us something about ourselves. It reminds us of something we in fact already know but — with many of our other more mundane interests in mind — we usually ignore; it thus provokes us into seeing the ‘things’ before us as 'other than' what at first they seemed to be, into seeing new (but in this case tragic) possibilities, both within them, and in the relations between them.

Many such phrases from Wittgenstein (1953) strike me in the same way — not though as tragic, but as he himself says, to remind us of what we usually ignore, so as to make such things, to repeat, visibly rational and reportable for all practical purposes. He has many methods for doing this: a major method is the making of comparison — “think of the tools in a toolbox,” he says, “there is a hammer, pliers...,” etc., etc., along with “a glue-pot, glue, nails and screw. — The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects” (no.11). His talk is also full of such expressions as “Think of...,” “Imagine...,” “It is like...,” “So one might say...,” “Suppose...,” “Ask yourself...,” and so on, in which he confronts us with a concrete scene or vignette featuring a particular aspect of human conduct, designed to draw our attention to the fact that we are capable of imagining something in a new way, where a person’s “acceptance of the [new] picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at thing” (1953, no.144).

He also presents many particular, concrete exemplary activities and events, for such illustrations, etc., if they are presented 'dramatically' or 'poetically' can also arouse particular orientational feelings within us; while the mere presentation of just rules and principles still leave us ‘up in the air’ as to how

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we might apply them in practice. As he put it: “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.139).

These, and many other ways of talking, can ‘touch us’ and ‘move us’ in our very way of being-in-the-world, thus to change us in what we are sensitive or attuned to. What a phrasing, a ‘wording’, a chosen sequence of words can impose on us, is a unique and singular, unfolding movement or trajectory of feeling; moving not simply in a straight line from A to B, but hither and thither over an inner terrain of possibilities, many of which are considered, but only one of which is actually chosen at each step. And the fact is, listeners in hearing our hesitations, our re-tracings and re-phrasing, our pauses for thought and our special emphases, our repetitions, attention to detail and choice of images, can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape’ of our thinking, even when we cannot explicitly describe its nature. Where, to repeat, what is conveyed here is not information, i.e., not talk about some ‘thing’, but a shared unfolding movement of feeling, brought about by shared or shareable, unfolding of expressive bodily movements — in what Wittgenstein (1953) calls the “physiognomy” (p.181, p.210) of an expression; “meaning is a physiognomy” (no.568), he says.

In other words, a meaning is not a ‘thing’, but a ‘doing’, an active event that emerges ‘in the course of our dialogically-structured expressive movements’ — just as our experience of a friend or close acquaintance can never be dissolved into the experience of a mere, objective ‘it’, or captured in a complex conceptualization. Those that, essentially, I say ‘thou’ to exist for me as real presences (Shotter, 2003), as quite particular and unique unitary wholes, little b beings that can still surprise me, that exists for me as sources of “ceaselessly unforeseen originality” (Barthes, 1978, p.34). In other words, there is a livingness immanent even in ‘entities’ created in our expressive activities — in, say, paintings, pieces of architecture, or texts. Such works of art can, as it were, speak to us, they can exert an influence on us, not simply as a static forms, as pictures or representations of something other than itself; but in themselves, in calling out living responses from us all, similar responses, so that we can come to act in concert with each other.

Hence Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark that: “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think” (no.527)8. For what is achieved within a group of people making music, is a bodily sharing of a sense, not only of where one has been but also of where one is headed; it is that shared bodily sense that holds all participants together in a mutual attention to the ongoing situation — as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, we are all participants in a similar way “going on” (no.154). Heidegger (1971) similarly talks of what it is that poets reach, along the way, in undergoing various experiences with language: “What is it that the poet reached?” he asks. “Not mere knowledge. He (sic) obtains entrance into the relation of word to thing” (p.66, my italics).

Involved here, then, is a particular style of talk very different from the attempts at unambiguous, representational, technical talk in which are one’s terms are well-defined, aimed at systematically describing ‘things’ and ‘entities’ out there in an ‘objective’ world set over against us as ‘subjects’. Thus, in place of the coherence and personal detachment, as well as the monological nature of much ‘after-the-fact science talk’, the style of talk needed in our attempts at giving a before-the-fact account of the exploratory trajectories occurring in the emergent processes involved in our coming to perform an act is, by contrast, indirect, allusive, hesitant, expectation creating, and above all, dialogical, in the sense that it is always open and unfinished talk, in that speakers can never offer fully defined meanings, and listeners need to offer tests and checks as to whether they have sufficiently well understood the speaker’s meaning (or not).

Such a style of dialogically-structured speaking, then, may seem somewhat unprofessional, in that it is necessarily characterized, perhaps paradoxically, both by personal involvement, and by fragmentation, by our continually seeking with our listeners that special kind of ‘in touchness’ or ‘attunement’, that creates between us a felt in common movement of feeling, providing us all with a shared structure of anticipations enabling us all to coordinate our actions in with those of the others around us.

But we each begin from a different ‘place’ in the world, ‘seeing’ it in different ‘ways’. Thus the exploratory trajectories we must each undertake in establishing projects in common with the others around us, will involve us in offering ‘memories’, ‘places’, ‘things’, ‘activities’, ‘ideas’, etc., etc. along with various ‘words’ or ‘wordings’ that might (and often, might not) ‘resonant’ with our listeners. Our talk will

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thus of necessity be ‘vague’, ‘ambiguous’, and always ‘incomplete’. For we will need to be ‘flexible’, ‘versatile’, and ‘not too certain’ in our talk, if we are gradually to ‘negotiate’ with the others around us, a sphere of common concern, thus to work along with them within a ‘shared reality’. In other words, what I am claiming here is that any ‘real state of affairs’ is open and indeterminate, and remains so, until it is ‘seen’ from within a certain circumscribed or bounded region of shared human activity — hence our need for what we call the separate ‘disciplines’ circumscribing our inquiries.

Thus what I have been attempting to establish here is not to set up an alternative to scientific methods of inquiring, far from it. But to get clear about the nature of the necessary preliminaries to any such inquiries (even in physics). We cannot begin in our social, human, and behavioural sciences as physicists in the already bounded and circumscribed ‘realities’ of their physics laboratories begin. The problem of what is meant by what is said, cannot any longer be simply solved by our stipulating unequivocal ‘literal’ meanings for our ‘words’ or ‘wordings’ in particular situations out in the world of our everyday social lives together.

In other words, our scientific inquiries into human behaviour cannot be simply be assumed to produce generalities, true for all time (Shotter, 2015), as has been assumed in the past. While still powerful and effective, they will, of necessity, be limited by always being situated. Thus, amongst the social group confronted by a particular ‘disruption’, by an unforeseen worry, as a necessary preliminary to any attempts to take themselves into a new ‘reality’ which, so to speak, ‘takes them beyond’ it, or ‘leaves it behind’, they must undertake amongst themselves some new ‘first language learning’ (Kuhn, 2000). In short, to recognize that ‘works of art’, which have been disparaged in the past as mere ‘pass-times’ or ‘entertainment’, serve a crucial function for us. To become ‘engaged in’ a work of art can, first, enable us to become detached from our immediate, mundane world of ‘little b beings’ and then, due to its ‘moving’, ‘touching’, almost ‘magical’ quality, it bring us into contact with the world of ‘big B Being’, thus to render us more open, but in still-to-be-articulated manner, to a new way of ‘going on’... with A NEW WAY, but never with THE ONE RIGHT WAY.

Final Short Conclusion: What Must Come Before All Our Socially Shared Inquiries

“If man is to find his way once again into the nearness of [big B] Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (Heidegger, 1977, p.198).

In arguing for the need for before-the-fact thinking, I have not been wanting to argue that it is a replacement for the after-the-fact thinking that we employ with powerful effect in our more practical, everyday affairs. What I have been trying to argue is that that way of thinking is limited, that it can be applied only within a bounded sphere of activity of our own creating; it is no where near as general as we often take it to be. Thus, I want to end where I stated. As Gadamer (2000) described his aim, in wanting to study what just happens to us over and above our wanting and doing: it was to seek “to discover [that] which... methodological dispute serves only to conceal and neglect, something that does not so much confine or limit modern science as precede it and make it possible” (xxiv).

Wittgenstein (1953) also states his aim in a similar manner, after his efforts at trying “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (no.116) — where the ways in which we use them are continually available to us to observe — he goes on to remark: “Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us./ One might also give the name “philosophy” to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (no.126). Without a way of getting ‘in touch with’, so to speak, ‘Big B Being’ — the mysterious, social shared ‘background’ in terms of which what I can express has its meaning — to repeat, we are in danger of trying to impose upon ‘little b beings’, characteristics and relations to one another that they do not have, while failing to grasp those that they do in fact have in their proper, everyday home in ‘big B Being’.

Appendix: from “concepts” and “definitions” to “difference making” speech

“When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have

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fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours'; this connexion excludes that connexion – and so on indefinitely; whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not” (James, 1909/1996, p.254).

“Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it” (James, 1909/1996, p.218).

$ In ordinary everyday life, as a social group, people live within ‘circumstances of practical concern’ to them — and what they ‘care about’, what ‘matters to them’, works to organize what they attend to and respond to in those circumstances.

$ As result of their living immersion, their engagement with those circumstances, as they ‘move around’ within them — attending to a fragment here at this moment in time, another fragment there at that moment in time — they gradually come to a unitary sense of ‘its’ nature in its mattering to them, what Heidegger calls ‘big B Being’.

$ The unity is a particular, unique, unity, still open to further development, that we need to understand in terms of itself, rather than in terms of another, external, eternal, ideal world of our own creation as academics.

$ These movements of feeling arouse quite specific action guiding anticipations within me9 — where my task is to ‘go on’ to take a next step in the circumstance in question, that is intelligible to all the others around me.

$ To do this, I must act in an accountable fashion, that is, in a way that can be verbal described in such a way that the others around me — living within the same ‘circumstances of concern’ — can find my actions as ‘fitting into’ that specific circumstance.

$ Here, it is my ‘speakings’, my utterances, my expressive bodily movements that work to arouse in those around me tensions, “feelings of tendency” (James), “anticipations” (Bakhtin) of what might ‘come next’ in my language intra-twined activities, my language intra-twined practices.

$ This is all quite different from what is of concern to academics, living intellectually rather than practically.

I write all this to bring prominence/attention to the power of our talking, to the activity of it, to the movement of it, and to leave in the background the static forms of the already said, the supposed hidden entities — ‘standing (in)’ for what we call our ‘ideas’, ‘thoughts’, ‘theories’, etc., etc. — that we claim are really shaping our actions. As I see it (along with Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, etc., etc.) the meaning of our speakings is ‘in’ their speaking, not in the ‘content’ of what is said. And this is where we meet all the trouble of academic and professional ways of working. Each discipline and each profession has its own subject matter — the what our inquiries. “How shall we define it?” — we say; “How can we conceptualize it?” — we also say. And this is how we take it out of the everyday lives of ordinary people; this is how we disconnect it from the lives in which it has its proper home; this is how we create a fantasy world, which for us as professionals or academics, is more ‘real’ than the everyday world of ordinary people.

We use a new word; people are puzzled — the notion of a person’s concern or interest, for example, or of their orientations or ontological skills. Theses notions are often seen, not just as uncomfortable but as, literally, unthinkable. ‘Yes, but what do you mean by an interest or concern, by their ways of orienting or ontological skills?’ people say, puzzlement written all over their faces; ‘Can you define these terms for me?’” — with the implication that, if you cannot, then you should stop using these words in your talking. But we need to note that when we use a word in our speaking, then our immediate understanding of what someone is saying to us, does not proceed by our trying to relate each distinct sound, or word, to a particular sound-concept, so to speak; we simply find that people’s spoken words

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work in us, step-by-step, as they unfold in time, to produce a sequence of differences (see endnote 4), or what elsewhere I have called, a distinctive movement of feeling, whose possible meaning is immediately apparent to us — we then, of course, turn to testing and checking that ‘understanding’ as to its appropriateness.

The crucial difference here, then, is that understanding spoken language is necessarily prior to our understanding happenings and events in terms of concepts; not only do speech-sounds require no prior definition or independent characterization for us to be distinctly influenced by them, but also, in having their being only as an aspect or distinctive feature of a larger indivisible whole, in relation to all the other aspects of that whole, they are know to us just as much, if not more, in term of what they are not, as in terms of what they are. In other words, they work within us in terms of differences, whereas concepts work only in terms of well-defined samenesses10.

Concepts, definitions:

$ they work ‘from outside’ a circumstance of concern’$ they are ‘pre-emptive’ in the sense of decreeing ahead of one’s inquiries, the basic entities one is

going to discover11.$ they also work to put a boundary around of field of study$ they work only in terms of samenesses, ‘identities’ even$ we see the world only through them, as corresponding to definitions of our own devising$ their power is supposed to be in their general nature, true for all time, and all places.$ in other words, they work in an ‘after-the-fact’ manner to decree the whatness (ontology) of what

we have already observed as having happened in a situation or circumstance.$ they are ‘in our interest’ of explaining events in terms of their causes.$ ordinary people experience themselves as lacking the ‘expert’ knowledge of academics, but at the

same time experience it as lying outside of what matters to them.$ thus academic ‘knowledge’ can all too easily work to disable those who are already enabled (in

many different ways of their own devising).

Is there an alternative? — Yes, the difference making distinctions at work in our speakings

$ they work ‘from within’ a sensed circumstance of concern, ‘from within’ a phenomenon$ they work to ‘internally articulate’ it into a more richly structured ‘landscape of possibilities’$ they leave the circumstance open to further development$ we can thus not define in any precise way the nature of the circumstance — but, noting James’

comment that “we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense” of the “signs of direction in thought” it provides us with, we can (by the use of images and metaphors, and other carefull crafted ways of talking, say very precisely what they are like so that others can related to their nature.

$ but they do not place any boundaries on the realms of our inquiry — this means that we are always left with a sense of there being a ‘something more’ that we might bring into out later inquiries

$ most importantly, they work, not in terms of identities, but in terms of similarities and differences12, thus to produce, to repeat the point made above, an internally articulated landscape of possible ways forward.

$ this enables inquirers to inquiry into this, that, or some other particular situation in terms of itself, in terms of features within it of relevance to the concerns of those living within that circumstance.

$ they work on listeners by ‘pointing out’ features in the listener’s surroundings to attend to — features that they themselves may not yet have responded to.

$ what is most crucial here, though, is both the ethical and political function of our wordings in the speaking of our utterances.

$ different words arouse different anticipations of what next might happen.$ different intonations indicate a speaker’s own relations to their own words — confident, hesitant,

offered, demanding, etc, etc.$ our textual formations matter if we are to inquire into the uniquely particular situations within

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which we all live in our everyday lives.$ in other words, they can work in a ‘before-the-fact’ manner to ‘point out’ possible steps in a

‘developmental trajectory’ in our exploratory efforts, aimed at determining, along with the others around us, what collectively we come to call the ‘facts of the matter’.

In other words, our task is to seek to understand what we experience and perceive only in terms of what we experience and perceive, to understand it in terms of itself, rather than in terms of another, external, eternal, perfect, hidden world, in fact, of our own creation — to explain what is real for us only by what is real for us, and the situated and time-bound only by the situated and time-bound. That is, to talk from within our lives, rather than from an illusory place outside them.

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“What we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs. Since the same can be said for all other signs, we may conclude that language is made of differences without [positive] terms; or more exactly, that the terms of a language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them. This is a difficult idea, because common sense tells us that if term A and term B do not have any meaning at all, it is hard to see how there could be a difference of meaning [but there isn’t, it is a difference that occasions or makes a meaning] between them; and that if communication really did go from the whole of the speaker’s language to the whole of the hearer’s language, one would have to know the language in order to learn it. But the objection is of the same kind as Zeno’s paradoxes; and as they are overcome by the act of movement, it is overcome by the use of speech. And this sort of circle, according to which language, in the presence of those learning it, precedes itself, teaches itself, and suggests its own deciphering, is perhaps the marvel which defines language” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.39).

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Notes:

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1. Where by such categories he means: “Goffman's strategies for the management of impressions, Erickson's identity crises, Riesman's types of conformity, Parsons' value systems, Malinowski's magical practices,Bale's interaction counts, Merton's types of deviance, Lazarsfeld's latent structure of attitudes, and the U.S. Census' occupational categories” (pp.78-79).2.“I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize — then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.230).3. As Ingold & Palsson (2004) remark: “The scale of the rethinking we are calling for here can scarcely be overestimated. It is not a matter of tinkering around the edges, or of adding a few more varieties of selection or tracks of inheritance, to complicate the standard neo-Darwinian picture. It is to rebuild our understanding of life and its evolution, and of our human selves, on entirely different ontological foundations. Without wishing to attach too much weight to the analogy, it is akin to the replacement of classical mechanics by the general theory of relativity. For most mundane purposes, Newton’s laws of motion work well enough, since any differences between the results obtained from the application of these laws and from the principles established by Einstein would be vanishingly small” (pp.9-10).4. Heidegger (1971) too, in suggesting that the formula for our finding a way into ‘big B Being’ is to speak about speech qua speech, goes on to remark that: “If we attend without further thought only to the words of our formula, it expresses a mesh of relations in which language becomes entangled” (p.130) — the choice of the word ‘mesh’ over ‘network’ is an important choice.5. Rather than the after-the-fact analyses of people’s completed actions that we currently seek, we need to be concerned, I think, with giving an account of the exploratory trajectories occurring in the emergent processes involved in them coming, finally, to act as they did, which for short, I will call a before-the-fact account — a distinction Chia (1996) makes in distinguishing downstream from upstream thinking, in which we need to “move away from the ‘givenness’ of facts, to revealing the organizing processes involved in the construction of a fact” (pp.12-13).6. As I noted above, many have claimed that it is only when we have translated our experiences into the theoretically-structured, technical-calculational language, and are thus able, unambiguously to reason about them within it, are properly functioning as scientists. Whereas, Kuhn (2000) claims: “What is prerequisite to such understanding [of scientific statements]... is not translation but language learning” (p.61) — we first need a characterization of our experience, prior to any our attempts to conceptualize or to theorize it. 7. About the nature of this “common sense,” or sensus communis, as he calls it, Vico (1968) notes that it “is judgement without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race” (para 142).8. Merleau-Ponty (1962) discusses a brain-damaged person called Schneider, who lacks this hermeneutical/ holgraphic/ dialogical perceptual capacity: “This subject-object dialogue, this drawing together, by the subject, of the meaning diffused through the object, and, by the object, of the subject’s intentions — a process which is physiognomic perception — arranges round the subject a world which speaks to him of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world. Since this function is impaired in Schneider’s case, it is foreseeable that, a fortiori, perception of human events and other people will show deficiencies, for these presuppose the same taking up of external by internal and of internal by external. And indeed if a story is told to the patient, it is observed that instead of grasping it as a melodic whole with down and up beats, with its characteristic rhythm or flow, he remembers it only as a succession of facts to be noted one by one” (pp.132-133).9. Indeed, one of the best accounts of how such anticipations work within us know to me, is William James’ (1890) account in his famous Stream of Thought chapter: “The truth is,” he says, “that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever... These bare images of logical movement... are psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another... [These] 'tendencies' are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (vol.1, pp.252-254).10. The crucial point about ‘distinctive features’ or ‘distinctive aspects’, is that they work to ‘internally articulate’ what is otherwise is a particular, but not-yet-fully-organized, holistic circumstance or event, i.e., leaving it still open to yet further differentiation or articulation. They do not, like concepts, lead to boundaries being created around a sphere of concern.11. “... the world of the [laboratory] experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and this, while it may increase man's power of making and acting, even of creating a world, far beyond what any previous age dared to imagine in dream and phantasy, unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more forcefully – into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created” (Arendt, 1959, p.261).12. “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences [i.e., the making of distinctions]. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure, 1911/1959, p.120, my itals).