KCC: A
day of classes with John Shotter: 11th May, 2001
Class 1: Foregrounding Athe Background:@ Wittgenstein, Bakhtin,
Voloshinov, and Merleau-Ponty on the unnoticed, rationally-invisible background
to all our activities together.
APerhaps 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@ (LW in C&V, p.16).
Class 2: Ethics and the >violence= of theory: on our
response-able/ive relations to the Others and othernesses around us.
AThere is, then, a taking up of an
other=s thought through speech, a
reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which
enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must finally be induced by
the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed
by a kind of deduction from their gestural meaning, which is immanent in
speech. And, as in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of
words from their place in a context of action, and by taking part in communal
life...@ (M-P, 1962, p.197)
Class 3: Methods of inquiry in the refinement,
elaboration, and extension of shared, social practices (against the traditional
Western way of Atheory criticism@)
- Wittgenstein=s Asocial poetics@
- Voloshinov=s Adialogically-structured,
appreciative mode of inquiry@
Class 4: Styles of writing: Monological-retrospective-objective
versus Dialogical-prospective-relational writing:
In our
official, academic, monlogical style, we talk to and write for fellow
professional academics, about what happened earlier, when we were involved with
Athose others,@ whose activity is now the topic
of Aour@ talk. We provide other
professionals with a linguistic representations (theories, pictures, shapes,
forms) of the nature of that activity, from a position now outside that
involvement, looking back upon it as a completed process. Such talk or writing
is aimed at identifying those features to which professional observers, with a
certain set of professional methodological commitments, should attend. In the
other dialogical style, we would be talking/writing from within an
ongoing involvement with those we are trying to help - while we do >look= back on what had been achieved so
far, we also anticipate (prospectively) the possibilities open to us for our
next 'steps'. Our concern in such talk/writing is in attempting to 'show' or
'make manifest' to our co-participants moments in our practices when we all
might, justifiably, be able to make a new and/or more elaborate sense of
our activities in such moments.