Writing: two relational stances and styles, to our 'subject matter' and to each other

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As we see it, there are two quite different styles of speaking and writing within which we, as academics, relate to the people around us:

 

-           i) Professional: one way is the supposedly 'objective', 'realistic', 'formal' or 'professional' style of speech or writing within which we currently present to our colleagues, the theories and the true facts our studies are meant to reveal;

-           ii) Conversational: the other is a more 'informal' or 'conversational' style that, traditionally, is thought to be in tension with it.

 

They each involve the adoption of a quite different relational stance, i.e., a different set of both methodological and ethical commitments, not only to those to whom we address ourselves, but also to the supposed subject matter of our talk.

 

-           i) Cognitive: While the former works in terms of us understanding them intellectually, as if from afar, in terms of representations, i.e., in terms of supposed similarities of form.

 

-           ii) Participatory: The latter works in terms of us sensing in our living, embodied relations with them, up close, differences, differences that arise as they respond to our actions with actions of their own, differences that, initially at least, we can only voice poetically and metaphorically.

 

In other words, in the second, our understanding of other people comes about through a quite different route than that through which we understand them in the first: it comes about dialogically, in a way which we are all responsive in a living, embodied way to each other, and in which the others can respond back to us in way denied them in the first.

 

But let us turn now to how our methodological and ethical involvements with each other, both with those we study as well as our professional colleagues, are played out in these two different styles of writing and talking:

 

-           i) Monological-retrospective-objective writing: In our official, academic style, we would be talking/writing to you as fellow professional academics, about what happened earlier, when we were involved with those whose activity is now the topic of our talk. We would provide you with a linguistic representation of the nature of that activity, but now from outside that involvement, looking back upon it as a completed process. In separating the activity from the people whose activity it was, and from its surrounding circumstances, we would be separating it from the practical part it played in their lives, its point from them. But this is not our concern. Our concern is with what logically 'can be said' about the patterning or form of that activity, an order that we can claim to have 'discovered' in it. We shall call this kind of writing, monological-retrospective-objective writing. Here, what we say or write is located in our professional relationship and is directed toward identifying that to which, as professional observers with a certain set of professional methodological commitments, we should attend. It is aimed at producing explanatory theories, i.e., representations of states of affairs that enable those in possession of them to predict and control the events they represent.

 

-           ii) Dialogical-prospective-relational writing: In the other style, we would be talking/writing to you of the character of our ongoing involvements with certain other people, from within that involvement - while both looking back on what had been achieved so far, and forward prospectively, toward the possibilities open to us for our next 'steps'. Our concern in such talk/writing would be with attempting to 'show' or 'make manifest' to you (metaphorically) how you might, justifiably be able to make sense of the character of such involvements. I shall call it dialogical-prospective-relational writing. What I say originates in the interactive relationships from within which I speak, and is directed toward instructing you, as ordinary everyday persons now involved in the relationship in some way (perhaps watching a videotape of it, or reading a transcript, or whatever), in noticing and making within in similar such connections and distinctions.

 

To contrast with the aim of the previous style, we might say that it is not aimed at explanatory theory, but at providing practical theory, or, at giving what are best called avowal-accounts: account-talk is talk that is useful in a tool-like way to those involved in a situation; it enables those involved to make and to notice differences in their activities, thus affording them with opportunities to coordinate their activities in with each other in an intelligible way.

 

Thus in these two styles, although you as the addressee of our writing might seem to be the same you, our 'positioning' of you would be different; and our 'ethical stance' toward those who are the 'subject matter' of our talk/writing is quite different too:

 

-           i) Uninvolved writing: In monological-retrospective-objective writing, we would have no need (at least, not immediately) to be accountable or responsive to the absent others of whom we speak. Indeed, we look upon them as if from a distance, as if we have a God's-eye view of them in some way.

-           ii) Participatory-involved writing: While in dialogical-prospective-relational writing, as a part of us being involved with those others, we cannot not be accountable to them; we have a sense of our responsibility toward them. And if asked by them as to why we make the claims we do about them, we feel we must respond to their request; we must justify ourselves to them in ways that they can accept (or can give good reasons for rejecting).

 

-           i) Responsibility to colleagues: Thus, in the former style, our first (ethical) responsibilities are to you as a professional reader and to our shared discipline, and we must write in a way justifiably connected with our supposedly shared theoretical interests (as sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, etc.).

-           ii) Answerable to those others or an 'otherness': While in the latter style, one of our major responsibilities is toward those others, or othernesses, of whom or of which we speak and write. Thus in this dialogical-prospective-relational writing, we cannot write simply in relation to a fixed and constant theoretical interest; we must write in a way that respects our currently shared but changing conversational or dialogical relations to them, or to 'it', that respects 'who' they 'are' or 'what' it 'is'.

 

In other words, our style of writing must not only be more tentative and open, less definitive and authoritative, and couched in terms of possibilities rather than claimed actualities, but it must in some way be a responsible responding to the otherness of which we speak. We must write dialogically... write a responsible response... and be prepared to wait for a reply before writing more.