Speaking, Actually:: Towards a New 'Fluid' Common-Sense Understanding of Relational Becomings

by John Shotter

This is a philosophy book for psychotherapists, psychologists, organisational consultants and scholars who are interested in the construction of each other and our social worlds, how we make meaning together and move along with people in dialogue. It is a book written to get beyond superficial and fake talking practices. John Shotter goes further than a purely cognitive understanding of what it means to be human and shows us different ways of appreciating the nuanced movements in acts of developing relational know-how to create new ways of being - and becoming. Ann L. Cunliffe, Professor of Management, University of "It is impossible to capture in a few words all the fine detail and nuances of this beautifully crafted book, it invites careful reading. The title brings together the key themes of John’s work across time, themes that invite and challenge us to go beyond taken-for-granted ways of thinking to engage differently with our social world, our place within it, and our ways of generating knowledge. Crucially, he argues we need to develop a discursive consciousness, to make a difference that matters by ‘humanifying’ ourselves as practitioners and scholars." Harlene Anderson, PhD, Houston Galveston Institute and Taos Institute, "Shotter develops his challenge of our dependence on existing theoretical perspectives and their representations suggesting these orient us to, and reinforce, the familiar, blinding us to the nuances, uniqueness, and previously unseen or ignored details of our everyday lives and the people in it. His illuminated challenge draws on his remarkable grasp and interpretation of classic philosophers such as Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and contemporary critical thinkers such as Barad, Bertau, and Lipari." Peter Rober, Professor of Family Therapy, KU Leuven, "John Shotter is a thinker. Thinking has become quite unusual in academic psychology nowadays, dominated as it is by a narrow empirical perspective, and a distrust of philosophical reflection. This book is required reading for all family therapists who are interested in the dialogical perspective. But be this is far from a manual. It is food for reflection. This book of Shotter’s is important, as it urges us to be careful with the language we use. The words we casually speak can keep us captive in our usual, individualistic-rationalistic-mechanistic ways of dealing with things, resulting in a world of fragmentation and separation. It is a rich book, that (not withstanding its urgency) should be savored slowly. Like a good wine." Jim Wilson, Systemic Psychotherapist & past Chair, The Family Institute, "Take this book, read it and ponder on how it influences your ways of meeting in social relations in your life. Shotter's strong and committed voice of dissent towards academic modernist psychology rings throughout the text. Instead of grand claims toward generalised truths, he emphasises the significance of local, proximal and familial, as the sites of fresh beginnings and new possibilities. In Shotter's eyes we can see optimism in achieving important human connections in the apparently ordinary ways of being and becoming. In this comprehensive text, he sets out to challenge the over-emphasis in the fields of modernist research that would have us believe that science will provide the necessary answers to complex matters of human livingness." Kenneth Gergen, Senior Research Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College and Taos Institute "John Shotter generously shares with us his rich and illuminating conversations with a host of textual friends.

Genres: Philosophy

210 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 31, 2016

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We should begin our inquiries by being prepare to ‘go into’ our perplexities and uncertainties, to ‘go into’ our feelings of disquiet at what we already know, to ‘go into’ our confusions and bewilderments. For strangely, it is precisely within these feelings, if we take the trouble to explore them further, that we can begin to find the guidance we need in overcoming our disquiets.”

This is a book with an important message. But it requires stamina to work through its argument. I read the book quickly, squinting as it were, to avoid being bogged down by endless repetition and an overdose of philosophical jargon. Maybe it’s only my ‘extractive’ reading habits that kept me from immersing myself fully in this richly nuanced, effusively punctuated tapestry of words. Intriguingly, it is the way we use language, or, better, the way we language (as a verb) that is at the center of the author’s focus. John Shotter (1937-2016) argues that over the last four centuries we have progressively enclosed ourselves in an epistemological hall of mirrors. We have adopted a way of speaking, of understanding the use of language, and consequently, of thinking and building knowledge that is in effect highly constraining. But we are not aware of it.

We have taken to rely on a representational use of language. We think of words as signs linking to external objects. When everyone in our group agrees on what sign links to what object, we can have a conversation. This ‘bounded space of sameness’ makes possible agreement and working towards a common goal. But as Wittgenstein states with aplomb: “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” It’s that rough ground that Shotter lays out for us in his book. While such way of thinking may be useful in the context of the physical and the natural sciences, it is less helpful in working through our relations to each other and to ourselves. Living out of our heads offers only a ‘thin’ objectivity,

Shotter advocates another way of being in the world, one that in fact connects very closely to the mundane, but upon closer scrutiny often disorderly, non-rational and contradictory experience of the felt interactions within our physical and social environment. Rather than to start with a set of predefined, conceptual identities, Shotter wants us to work ‘from within’ a sensed situation. This is a dialogically-structured process of relating to a flowing flux of activity, oriented towards discovery of how to act in unique and novel circumstances. “Instead of expecting our thinking to turn inwards to tell us what next to do, we must turn outwards to ‘see’ what is before us afresh, with the hope that a new way forward can be opened up, and a blocked way left behind.”

Shotter’s point seems a very valid one. Indeed, why on earth would the distinctive way we have developed to relate to the world through language be the only possible one? It is the result of contingent experiments, and path dependency. There must be other modes of relating, as indigenous people provisionally demonstrate (in this book there is some reference to anthropological research, but not a lot). Or other life forms. “We are more like plants growing from seeds, existing within a special confluence of different flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are continually working to organize in sustaining us a viable human beings."

Shotter draws profusely on other thinkers, particularly the late Wittgenstein, and also Mikhail Bakhtin, William James, Ernst Cassirer, Tim Ingold, and others. I see also very productive resonances with the work of Judi Marshall (First Person Action Research: Living Life as Inquiry) and Lois Holzman The End of Knowing: A New Developmental Way of Learning.

All in all an intriguing, but puzzling and demanding book that I will continue to explore for a while.