The
Background: the dialogical, joint nature of human activity
AIt is in the intricate >orchestration= of the interplay occurring in such living
relations, between our own outgoing (responsive) expressions toward them and
their incoming, equally responsive expressions toward us, that a very special
kind of practical understanding becomes available to us. We shall call this a relationally-responsive
understanding to contrast it with the representational-referential
understanding more familiar to us in our traditional intellectual dealings.@
S
We cannot not
be responsive both to those around us and to other aspects of our surroundings.
S
Thus, in such
spontaneously responsive sphere of activity as this, instead of one person
first acting individually and independently of an other, and then the second
replying, by acting individually and independently of the first, we act
jointly, as a collective-we.
S
And we do this
bodily, in a 'living' way, spontaneously, without us having first 'to work out' how to respond to each other.
S
This means
that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own
activity - for a person=s acts are partly 'shaped' by the acts of the others around them B this is where all the strangeness of the
dialogical begins ("joint action" - Shotter, 1984, 1993a and b).
S
Our actions
are neither yours nor mine; they are truly >ours=.
S
If we are to
sustain the sense of a collective-we between us, we find ourselves with certain
obligations to >our= joint affairs:
S
Indeed, only
if 'you' respond to 'me' in a way
sensitive to 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, then I feel immediately offended in an ethical way - I feel that you
lack respect for >our= affairs.
S
As Goffman
(1967) puts it:
A...cannot act in order to satisfy
these obligations, for such an effort would require him to shift his [sic]
attention from the topic of the conversation to the problem of being
spontaneously involved in it. Here, in a component of non-rational
impulsiveness - not only tolerated but actually demanded - we find an important
way in which the interactional order differs from other kinds of social order@ (p.115).
S
What is
produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex mixture of not wholly
reconcilable influences - as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both 'centripetal'
tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as
'centrifugal' ones outward toward diversity and difference on the
borders or margins.
S
Further,
because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the
intentions of any of the individuals involved, the 'dialogical reality or
space' constructed between them is experienced as an 'external reality' or a
'third agency' (an >it=) with its own (ethical) demands and
requirements.
S
AThe
word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a
trio)@ (Bakhtin, 1986, p.122)... a third agency is
at work in dialogical realities.
S
Thus, such
activity is not simply action (for it is not done by individuals; and
cannot be explained by giving people's reasons), nor is it simply behavior
(to be explained as a regularity in terms of its causal principles); it
constitutes a distinct, third sphere of activity with its own distinctive
properties.
S
This third
sphere of activity involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or
embodied form of practical-moral (Bernstein, 1983) understanding, which,
in being constitutive of people's social and personal identities, is prior to
and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us.
S
Activities in
this sphere lack specificity; they are only partially determined.
S
Indeed, it is
precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to
being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice -
while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so - that is their central
defining feature. And: it is precisely this that makes this sphere of
activity interesting... for at least two reasons: 1) to do with practical
investigations into how people actually do manage to 'work things out', and
the part played by the ways of talking we interweave into the many
different spheres of practical activity occurring between us; but also 2) for
how we might refine and elaborate these spheres of activity, and how we might
extend them into novel spheres as yet unknown to us.
S
It is only from
within a living involvement in such an ongoing flow of dialogical activity,
that we can make sense of what is occurring around us.
S
These are not
understandings of a situation, which allow it to be linked to realities
already known to us, but new, first-time understandings which are constitutive
for us of what counts as the significant, stable and repeatable forms within
that flow.
Goffman, E. (1967) Alienation from interaction. In Interaction Ritual. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp.113-136.