A Critical Appreciation Of Humberto Maturana

Human Systems: The Journal of Systemic Consultation & Management

From Observers To Conversers: A Critical Appreciation Of Humberto Maturana1 John W. Lannamann University of New Hampshire, USA

John Shotter KCC Foundation, England

Abstract We examine some of the many parallels between Maturana’s (and Varela’s) work and social constructionism.

However, rather than wanting to frame human communication within another formal and rigorous discourse, to replace Maturana’s biological version, we want to argue that it should be framed within the sphere of human talk itself, i.e., based in conversation not biology. Crucial to our account, however, is the idea of people inescapably always being in an embodied, responsive relation both to each other, and to the rest of their surroundings. As a consequence, not only do people ‘show’ their relation to their overall circumstances in their spontaneous responses to them, but they are able to ‘call out’ entirely new, ‘first time’ responses in those around them - which is crucial to us understanding how we can develop “new constellations of relation” between us.

“We have said many times - lest we forget - that all behavior is a relational phenomenon that we, as observers, witness between organisms and environment” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.171).

“Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.173).

“When one has the picture in view by itself it is suddenly dead, and it is as if something had been taken away from it, which had given it life before... it does not point outside itself to a reality beyond” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.236).

The social historian, Russell Jacoby, writes that “today, criticism that shelves the old in the name of the new forms part of the Zeitgeist; it works to justify and defend by forgetting” (1975, p.

2). As social constructionists, we hope that by undertaking a critical appreciation of an important aspect of Humberto Maturana’s work, we can place and supplement it rather than forget it - while at the same time realizing that remembering is a social activity, which thus requires us to enter into a conversational relation with what he has to say (Middleton and Edwards, 1990).

1 Note: A shorter version of this paper was presented as a plenary address at The American Society for Cybernetics Annual Conference, Philadelphia, November, 1993

© LFTRC & KCC

Volume No. 17, 2006, pp.53-66

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We do this, however, with some trepidation, since Maturana uses a very precise vocabulary that demands, or calls for, a certain kind of linguistic orthodoxy in its usage. For example, Maturana writes that “... we scientists become scientists while operating under the passion for explaining, when we constitute science as a particular domain of explanations by being rigorous in our endeavor to be always impeccable in the application of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations as we generate explanations that we call scientific explanations” (p.30).

The very comprehensiveness and coherence of the explanatory system used to show how the “phenomena proper to living beings arise” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.239), with its intrinsic “operational closure” (1987, p.89), makes it very difficult for us to point toward what is not actually being said within it. Yet, as Lyotard (1984) suggests, in these Postmodern times, we require “an aesthetic of the sublime,” a way of pointing toward what cannot be explicitly presented; “it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (p. 81). Thus the task we shall set ourselves, is that of trying to make clear what the social factors are that we think ‘allow’ or ‘make it possible’ for us ‘to see’ the systems presented by Maturana (and Varela) as they want us to ‘see’ them: that is, as representing the very phenomena that make such systems as they present possible.

Our goal, then, is to examine several of Maturana’s invented allusions and to open up a conversational domain in which his biological allusions, rather than being understood as representations of reality (to be judged, if not as true or false, then as practically useful), can be understood as moves or turns in a larger, ongoing dialogue, to be judged for the kind of world and kind of person they would tend, conversationally, to construct.

A compelling rhetoric against certainty If we now turn to the biology of observing, language, and cognition proposed by Maturana (and

by Varela also), we first want to note that like social constructionists, in offering an account of “a world brought forth in coexistence with other people” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.239), they also offer a compelling rhetoric against certainty. Indeed, about this, Maturana is quite vehement: “I consider that the greatest spiritual danger that a person faces in his or her life is to believe that he or she is the owner of a truth, or the legitimate defender of some principle,... because he or she immediately becomes blind to his or her circumstances, and enters into the closed alley of fanaticism” (Maturana, 1991, p.51). The blind alley of fanaticism allows only one-sided ways of looking at things, and hides the two- or many-sided ways in which living processes grow, work, and change. Maturana and Varela (1987) write that their purpose is to “walk on the razor’s edge, eschewing the extremes of representationalism (objectivism) and solipsism (idealism)” (p.

241). They go on to identify their purpose as the attempt to “find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions” (Maturana and Varela, 1987. p. 241). Indeed, they want their model to tell us, “that the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of

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regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.241). This emphasis on the unfinalized and unfinalizable, two-sided nature of all the issues involved here is, we feel, of the utmost importance, and we wish to endorse it, to celebrate it, in fact.

Maturana constructs the two-sided via media by asserting the impossibility of external validation. Maturana (1988) proposes that references to objectivity need to be placed in parenthesis since objectivity is always-already a linguistically constructed entity. At the center of this rhetoric against certainty is an emphasis on what he calls “the path of objectivity-inparenthesis:” where, in that path, “existence is constituted with what the observer does, and the observer brings forth the objects that he or she distinguishes with his or her operations of distinction as distinctions of distinctions in language” (Maturana, 1988, p.30). In this approach to knowledge, the “observer finds him- or herself as the source of all reality through his or her operations of distinction in the praxis of living” (Maturana, 1988, p.31). The observer cannot justify explanations by reference to independently existing external objects.

Maturana points out, however, that “even though each standard observer lives his or her experiences in the total loneliness of his or her structural determinism as a living system,” (Maturana, 1991, p.33), the extreme of solipsism is also avoided. It is avoided because “all human activities are operations in language, and as such they occur as coordinations of coordinations of consensual actions in conversations...” (Maturana, 1991, p.30). Human activities, then, occur in social systems where: membership in the community of standard observers does not depend on the individual ability of making reference to an independent objective reality that the observer as a living system cannot do, but on the consensual participation in the domain of scientific explanations (Maturana, 1991, p.33).

Thus, Maturana constructs his argument both against absolute objectivity, and complete, selfcontained solipsism, using the language of biology. Indeed, he and Varela (1987) in their book, The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding develop a comprehensive account of human consciousness by tracing the organization of living from simple cells through metacellulars and social vertebrates, culminating with a biological account of human language and the ethical implications of love. This account is embedded in a text replete with photographs and drawings of entities ranging from spiral nebula to electron micrographs of the structure of single cells. The centrality of the biological account in Maturana’s work is evident in his claim that “once the biological condition of the observer is accepted...any statement about entities that exist independently of what he or she does... becomes nonsensical or vacuous because there is no operation of the observer that could satisfy it” (Maturana, 1988, p.30). It is as if the initial biological principles he states provide the indubitable foundations for all his other claims. Thus, as a rhetorical move, Maturana’s use of a biological vocabulary and frame would seem to endow

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his argument with increased ethos, since appeals using scientific discourse currently command additional authority in our culture. It would seem hard to refute it. It is to this that we wish to object.

A dialogical-discursive response If one is drawn into accepting his ‘foundations’, and one reads his account, step-by-step, then, Maturana’s case is compelling. But, even by its own assertions, it can only be, to paraphrase Maturana himself, an explanation told by an observer to an observer. These explanations are “propositions presented as reformulations of experiences that are accepted as such by a listener in answer to a question that demands an explanation” (Maturana, 1991, p.31, our emphasis). The questions that intrigue us here, are: ‘Why are such propositions accepted as such by a listener?’; ‘How are people trained in such a practice?’

A difficulty we encounter in approaching Maturana’s work is that even though he attempts to position himself on the razor’s edge between objectivism and idealism in his theory, he does not, we feel, avoid the problem of a purely Cartesian-representationalist understanding of biology in practice. In other words, he seems to adopt the Cartesian assumption that (as disembodied minds) we have no direct contact of any kind with the ‘outside world’, and only ever know it indirectly, in terms of our inner, mental representations of it. Thus we seem to find ourselves standing before his theory as if merely disembodied observers of it, viewing it as a ‘still-picture’ that does not in itself ‘move’ us, facing the task of trying to work out how we might put it to some kind of use. For it does not seem in itself to ‘call out’ an immediate ‘living’ response from us.

Although we can ‘see’ it as “a system that generates all the phenomena proper to a living being” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.48), and (in all likelihood) does so accurately, we are still unsure of our own evaluative relation to it. Referring to a similar problem, Wittgenstein (1981) remarks that any self-contained system “does not point outside itself to a reality beyond” (no.236).

Indeed, that it does not do so, follows from Maturana’s explicit intent to keep descriptions quite separate from what it is they claim to represent. He writes: “Through language we interact in a domain of descriptions within which we necessarily remain even when we make assertions about the universe or about our knowledge of it. This domain is both bounded and infinite; bounded because everything we say is a description, and infinite because every description constitutes in us the basis for new orienting interactions, and hence, for new descriptions” (Maturana, 1980, p. 50, his emphases).

Thus, in insisting that we always remain in the realm of descriptions, the new “orienting interactions” they occasion do not point us out toward previously unnoticed details and nuances in a reality beyond them, but only inward, toward yet further descriptions. Indeed, as Maturana and Varela (1980) write: “a phenomenological domain is defined by the properties of the unity or unities that constitute it,” (p.116). Hence, the domain of biological phenomena is an “independent

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phenomenological subdomain of mechanistic phenomenology... [that is] fully defined and selfcontained” (p.116). As a result, the origin and the organization of the individual are “fully explainable with purely mechanistic notions which are valid for any mechanistic phenomenon in any space” (p. 116).

A prime objective of their book, then, is not to bring readers to make sense of their own activity, from within its own ongoing, unfinished, practical, historical context. The intent is not to ‘see’ possibly new relations between aspects of their circumstances not before noticed.

Rather, it is to bring readers to make sense of their activities from within the ahistorical, formal, self-contained, closed, mechanistic context Maturana and Varela offer in their work. Thus, it is no surprise to read Maturana and Varela (1987) as saying, that: ... if the reader has followed seriously what was said in these pages, he will be impelled to look at everything he does - smelling, seeing, building, preferring, rejecting, conversing - as a world brought forth in coexistence with other people through the mechanisms we have described. If we have lured our reader to see himself in the same way as these phenomena, this book will have achieved its first objective. (pp. 239-240, their emphasis).

In other words, however you might have experienced a situation, uniquely and practically, in a way relevant to ‘going on’ with it practically, after reading their text ‘seriously’ - that is, by reading all that they have to say in its ‘proper’ order, taking it as they intend it to be taken, noting its foundational statements, and how their other claims are derived from them - they hope that you will be persuaded to see what is going on in any practical situation in which you might be involved, in terms of criteria or standards other than those that are actually being used in the situation.

However, by both invoking biological examples and privileging the discourse of biology, Maturana obscures, we suggest, the linguistically constructed nature of his own account. In fact, compared with theories, such as Moscovici’s (1981) theory of social representations, for instance, which claim their grounding in social processes, where the theory and its roots as linguistic constructions are never too distant to be noticed, Maturana’s biological account increases this distance: biology becomes the superordinate explanatory term, giving rise to language. Once this reversal is made, it is tempting to reify biology, and to treat a linguistically constructed story about biology as a naturally discovered, self-produced fact. What tempts us to ‘see’ what they have ‘constructed’ in their text in this way?

At this point we would like to call attention to work in the poststructuralist movement in literary theory known as ‘deconstruction’. Derrida (1976, 1982), for instance, (although in our opinion locked in the same Cartesian-representationalist scheme as Maturana’s work), has shown that every attempt to represent a closed, self-contained system of meanings linguistically must fail: signifiers promise but indefinitely defer reference to a particular signified; they defer a final, clear

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meaning “by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces” (Derrida, 1982, p.29). This reference to Derrida’s work is not meant to imply, however, that we eat, breathe, or bleed language or linguistic constructions; that we are biological subjects is not being questioned. Rather, our point is that as discursive subjects, any attempt to (re)present our biological nature within a self-contained system is necessarily going to be forever stuck in a linguistic regress, a continual process of story telling. So, although Maturana’s biological discourse is seductive in seeming to point in a precise way, beyond the language processes used in its own presentation, to the biological fundamentals described in its own foundational statements, in practice, its point terminates only in yet further talk. It does not have, and, due to its self-contained nature, it cannot have, its ‘life’ in us shaping our own practices (whether in new ways or not). The point of the account is to look back, retrospectively, to help us ‘see’ regularities already in existence that can be used to explain the ‘supposed mechanisms’ at work in us, as they say, bringing forth a world. Its failure in helping us devise utterly new practices for ourselves is, however, revealing, and crucial to us grasping what it is that they are not actually talking of within it: that is, the special, ‘once off’, non-recurrent, creative social factors that make it possible for us ‘to see’ the system presented to us by Maturana and Varela as they wish us to ‘see’ it. Indeed, as they themselves have to admit: “Biologically, there is no way we can be put in front of what happened to us in obtaining the regularities we have grown accustomed to: from the values or preferences to color qualities and smells [or, presumably, from any other kinds of evaluative responses - JWL & JS]” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.242). They go on to argue that the “business of living keeps no records concerning origins... Only when some interaction dislodges us... and we reflect on it, do we bring forth new constellations of relation that we explain by saying that we were not aware of them, or that we took them for granted” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p. 242).

Yet, the claim that we cannot confront ourselves with the events occasioning a new, ‘firsttime’ practice in us seems to contradict our experiences. How else could we could bring forth new “constellations of relation,” at least to an extent, by our own efforts? Without some kind of skilful grasp of how to how to bring forth a new world of regularities that has never before existed, there would be little point in Maturana and Varela writing their book - for they want us to ‘see’ ourselves and our surroundings in, what for us, is an entirely new way.

Whether they explicitly realize it or not, like all theories, or theoretical representations that to an extent suggest that things are other than what at first sight they seem to be, Maturana and Varela must also accompany theirs by an informal, conversational kind of account of how it should be understood and used. For the terms of a theory are not self-specifying; what was at first seen in one way, i.e., as ordinary, must come to be seen in another i.e., as extra-ordinary.

Indeed, learning how to make sense of an academic discipline’s special, theoretical vocabulary

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- how it must be used and applied in practice - is a part of what all new students must learn in passing their exams, and in becoming socialized into the discipline’s theoretical practices.

If Maturana and Varela have been successful in persuading us of the biological foundations of language, and have persuaded us into ‘seeing’ everything we do through the mechanisms they have described, how have they done it? Was the presentation of just their formal theory enough?

Didn’t they surround their telling of it to us with a whole host of other stories about multicellular organisms, evolution, structural coupling, etc.? How did all this informal, rhetorical, and poetic writing, which always surrounds the presentation of any formal, systemic theory, work to talk us into their vision of things? If the meanings created in their text, arise out of the intertextual relations between their formal theorizing and the rest of its surroundings - if, as they say, “all behavior is a relational phenomenon” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p.171) - then is that something that can be explained by their theory, in terms of regularities? We think not: it requires a grasp of how ‘first time’ occurrences can work to create new “constellations of relation.”

From observers to conversers: from autonomous systems to dialogic relations We find ourselves very much in agreement with many of Maturana’s assertions. The ultimately social nature of mind; the importance of people’s identities; the two-sided, incomplete, unfinalizable nature of our world; the impossibility of certainty in it; and indeed, many of his other emphases and values resonate with social constructionist themes. We now wish to discuss the nature of social action both from a different position, and in very different terms than his.

We want to orient to the unique, ‘once off’, ‘living’ activities rather than recurrent, self-identical, autopoietic forms. Where he talks in abstract terms of organisms as suffering “perturbations,” and of “structural coupling” occurring between them “whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to structural congruence between two (or more) systems” (p.75), we wish to talk of the relations between people simply in terms of them being bodily unable to avoid being responsive to each other’s activities. Further, instead of exploring the consequences of this assumption as third-person observers, we wish to explore them as embodied, second-person participants, or conversants, from within the ongoing flow of conversationally intertwined activity.

Crucial to our view, then, is the assumption that as living, embodied beings, we cannot be indifferent to the world around us: we continuously react and respond to it, spontaneously, whether we like it or not. While we might often delay taking self-controlled action until we have ‘worked out’ what to do, we nonetheless still find ourselves responding bodily to what happens around us, directly and immediately, in a way we do not have ‘to work out’; and in ‘calling out’ vague, but not wholly undifferentiated responses from us, we find ourselves necessarily related to - or ‘positioned’ in - our surroundings in one way or another, spontaneously. Indeed, it is in relation to how we find ourselves spontaneously ‘positioned’ that we self-consciously act. Thus, in one way or another, we cannot not be always in a continuously changing, living relation to our

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circumstances; it constitutes the ‘background’, so to speak, to everything that, as self-conscious individuals, we think of ourselves as doing. This is the ongoing stream of living, interactive activity within which all the rest of our proceedings have their ‘life’.

It is at this point that Wittgenstein’s (1953) work becomes relevant. Aware that we often fail to notice the momentary, particularities of our own immediate circumstances, and aware that we tend to see the world just as much through our words as through our eyes--that we “tend to predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it” (1953, no.104)--Wittgenstein wants to divert us away from describing our particular, practical activities as we think they must be (in theory). Through remarks of a ‘poetic’ nature, through ‘striking images and similes’, and by ‘arresting phrases’, Wittgenstein draws our attention to “observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes” (1953, no.415).

The function of Wittgenstein’s remarks is to change our “way of looking at things” (1953, no.144), to “produce just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (1953, no.122), but nonetheless, to leave “everything as it is” (1953, no.124). Indeed, as he says, he is not concerned “to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that... we want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand” (1953, no.89). In other words, rather than us being concerned to see everything through our disciplinary eyes, he wants us to notice or to attend to how we do (or could) in fact ‘go on’ with each other, in our actual everyday activities, in practice, from within the actual ‘doing’ of them. It is this that usually escapes our notice, not only because it all flies by so quickly, but also because a certain ‘picture’ of our own devising, with all its ramifications, “stands in the way of our seeing [our] use of [a] word as it is” (no.305). In short, what it is that we find so hard to grasp, is the momentary, changing character of the ‘background’ stream of life to which our use of our words is related.

As our space here is limited, we must restrict ourselves to exploring only a few of the properties of this inescapable, responsive relating of people by their bodies to their surroundings. We want to first point out the transitory, momentary, changing nature of this responsive form of relating.

We have a fleeting sense of our relation, of our ‘position’ in relation to our surroundings, only from within what we might call a momentary relational-circumstance; and we reveal our sense of that immediate circumstance as we act ‘into’ it in ‘reply’ to the responses it ‘calls out’ in us. We sense, for instance, in a person’s bodily and facial expressions, their tone of voice, their pauses, etc., how we might relate ourselves to them. As a result, strangely, whatever we do in such a circumstance cannot be wholly attributed to us alone, it is (more or less) half-shaped both by our momentary relation to them, and to the rest of our surrounding circumstances, and we ‘show’ that in how we body forth our words and actions out ‘into’ those circumstances.

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The strange nature of this kind of ‘responsively shaped’ activity can be described as a form of “joint action” (Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b, 1995). In joint action or dialogic relations (Bakhtin, 1986), first person speakers and actors not only orient toward second person listeners and recipients, but also, remarkably, toward “an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue... [who] is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, [and] who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.126-7). Thus, rather than simply ‘in’ the actions of first-persons, or ‘in’ the responses of second-persons, ‘it’ exists as an active, ‘third party’ in the dialogue because ‘it’ makes its appearance as a momentary ‘evaluative circumstance’ only ‘in’ the ongoing, dialogic relations between people’s actions and responses.

Thus, for instance, your feeling that our claims here about the nature of ‘responsively shaped’ activity are (perhaps) ‘unjustified’, say, belongs neither to your feelings alone, nor to our claims alone, but, to the ‘momentary situation’ in which your responses are related to our claims.

Similarly, our ‘feeling’ that Maturana and Varela’s claims fail to grasp the importance of unique, ‘once off’, ‘living’ events, lies ‘in’ the active relations brought forth in our reading of their text.

We ‘find’ it (the feeling) emerging as a ‘third party’ in a ‘relational space’ occurring between us (JWL & JS) and them (HM & FV).

Thus, in this Bakhtinian, dialogic view of things, it is not just simply our expectation of how the others immediately around us will respond to our actions that influences what we do, but how we sense ourselves as ‘placed’ in a whole situation, and how our actions will relate to that whole situation. This is what makes this kind of relational knowing so very special. In only coming into existence ‘in’ the ongoing relations between both people and the rest of their surroundings, it is what we might call an ‘active’, ‘living’, embodied, social, practical, relational kind of knowledge - to be contrasted with knowledge of a ‘passive’ or ‘dead’ kind. Indeed, more than a mere matter of us sensing the immediate situation, we can, as first-persons, come to act in anticipation of the responses the second-person others around us will give to our actions. Again, this is because in being ‘done’ in the ‘living’ bodily presence of these second-persons, who cannot not respond to us in some way, we are afforded the opportunity of learning how, as first-persons, to shape our actions accordingly, in anticipation of receiving such responses.

In this stance, our ‘active’, ‘practical’ everyday forms of responsive understanding of people’s actions in their doing of them, and of their words in their speaking of them (as they body them forth), is of quite a different kind compared to our ‘passive’, ‘intellectual’ forms of understanding, in which we contemplate the ‘trace’ or ‘record’ of a now disembodied ‘pattern’ of already completed acts or spoken words. It is, of course, just this kind of passive, intellectual understanding of an already completed pattern, that Maturana is presenting to us as the form of understanding both represented in his system, and that is required for coming to a grasp of its nature. However, as we have seen, it is a kind of understanding, “that excludes active response in advance and on principle... [and it] is not at all in fact the kind of understanding that applies in language-speech” (Voloshinov, 1973, p.73)... nor, in any of our other practical-moral understandings of others, for that matter, either. But, in our ongoing, living interactions with

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others, we are not so intellectually concerned with what, ultimately, they ‘did’ or ‘said’--the final representational content or meaning of their actions or utterances--as with how their ongoing, embodied ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ moves us, with how it ‘places’ or ‘positions’ us (evaluatively) in relation both to them and our circumstances; and, with how we feel we must respond, moment by moment, to being so ‘positioned’. That is, we are concerned with grasping the relational functions or roles of their activity, its links or connections with its surroundings. And it is the existence and development of this kind of on-going, ‘living’, ethico-relational way of knowing that has been almost totally ignored in all our human sciences to date. It is to this that we wish to bring attention.

Conclusions Instead of treating human behavior as making sense within the situation, then, formal theories such as Maturana’s, concerning the biological foundations of human behavior, remove what we ordinarily take to be the ‘relevant behavior’, and make sense of it by placing it within an exoteric and ‘exotic’ cognitive system in which the essence of the behavior can be revealed. However, as Rorty (1980) says, in expressing his anti-foundationalist views: “If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (p.389). And this of course, is the approach we are proposing here, also. A conversational account of knowledge is not based on physical, biological, or any other kind of space-time realities, supposedly already existing beyond us, deep within us, or outside of our own humanly constructed socio-historical realities. Again as Rorty (1989) puts it, in situating ourselves in an ongoing dialogue with others, “we try not to want something which stands beyond history and institutions” (p.189). This requires that we abandon the great Enlightenment urge to find a pre-existing but hidden general order of things behind appearances, and that we look for a grounding for our own human activities within our own everyday activities themselves - again agreeing with Maturana in this.

However, in contrast to Maturana, we want to resist the Cartesian temptation to talk in terms of ‘looking at’ and ‘seeing’ the relevant phenomena as disinterested, disembodied minds, contemplating ‘things’ only at a distance, knowing them only in terms of representations, bodily ‘out of touch’ with them. In moving from ‘observing’ to ‘conversing’, we want to move away from visual and ocular metaphors, and to talk of people as necessarily being ‘bodily responsive’ to each other; of them as both ‘responsively listening’ and as ‘responsively voicing’ their utterances out ‘into’ their circumstances. We want to speak of them as ‘bodying forth’ their utterances with certain ‘evaluative intonations’ that ‘show’ how they are related to their surroundings; of the ‘relational gaps’, or ‘relational spaces’, or ‘relational moments’, they open up between them, as one listens while another speaks; and so on. In other words, instead of the epistemological paradigm of the isolated individual knower confronting a world of objects, the conversational orientation we would like to introduce, calls attention to groups of dialogically related knowers who bring forth both themselves and their world in their dialogues together. And, in place of the

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I-eye used by Maturana in his diagrams of observing systems, we want to offer the metaphor of the conversation - a tricky metaphor because it cannot be pictured... but then again, we all know what a conversation is, don’t we? Perhaps, that must remain under discussion!

Yet, it is useful to consider the effect of switching metaphors from the ocular to the oral/aural.

The visual implies simultaneity and completeness, the oral implies sequence and contingency, an ongoing incompleteness still under discussion; it implies a switch from an uninvolved knowledge at a distance, to an interested, concerned knowledge ‘in touch with’ its circumstances. Thus, if we substitute for the uninvolved, third person observer, conversation (or better, gossip, since gossip is a relational dance including almost everyone) as an involved ‘third party’ in all our activities together, then we are better able to understand how the concrete, material conditions of social life might be shaping people’s actions. For we can then ask each other what it is that our, or others’s, conversational surroundings are momentarily ‘calling out’, ‘asking’, or ‘demanding’, from them or us: Why we or they are motivated to celebrate or riot; why we or they find sport exciting and academic life, mostly dull; why selfish individualism has grown and social responsibility diminished; and so on. It re-introduces what Toulmin, in his argument for the recovery of practical philosophy, termed “the contingent, the particular, the local, and the timely” (1988, p.338).

For us, conversation is not just one of our many activities in the world, but is the activity in which we constitute both ourselves and our worlds. It is “the site where the identities of the communicators are fashioned in interaction with other people” and is the process in which “the events and objects of our social worlds are created” (Pearce, 1994, p. 22); it is the relational activity in terms of which we make sense of all else constituting our circumstances, and what possibilities are afforded us within them to go on with our lives. Thus, in replacing mechanisticsystem-talk with conversation-talk in relating ourselves to our circumstances, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) point out, we come to ‘see’ things and events through this way of talking concealed by our previous forms of talk. Instead of focussing immediately upon how individuals come to know the objects and entities in the world around them, as social constructionists, we become much more interested in how people first develop and sustain certain ways of relating themselves to each other in their talk, and only then, from within these ways of talking, and forms of life, reach out to make contact with, and to make sense of, their surroundings. But, to repeat: this move resists theoretical closure; it ‘shows’ us the power of the ‘poetic’ in our affairs; and, in confronting us with the impossibility of certainty, with the lack of a secure basis for discussions, it faces us once again with the crucial question: ‘On what basis, or in what terms, can we regulate the conversations and discussions between us?’ Indeed, the question is now even more pressing than before. For, instead of autonomous systems, we find incompleteness, instead of observation, we find participation in the dialogue... and if ‘we’ construct both ourselves and our social worlds in ‘our’ discussions, who is the ‘we’ who in fact participates?

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Human Systems

John W. Lannamann and John Shotter

Please address correspondence about this article to: John W. Lannamann, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, 20 College Road, Durham NH 03824-3586, U.S.A. e-mail: John.Lannamann@unh.edu.

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