Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of the "Other."

THE INTL. JOURNAL OF LISTENING, 23: 21-43, 2009 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1090-4018 print/ 1932-586X online DOI: 10.1080/10904010802591904

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Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of 'the Other' John Shotter Department of Communication University of New Hampshire

Usually, in our talk with others, we listen for opportunities to express our own point of view, to add it to or to contrast it with theirs. Ethically and politically, we feel we have a right for our voice to be heard. V/hile we can be satisfied that we have managed to "say what's on our mind," there are reasons for thinking that even then, what we have managed to say and what the others have heard from us, may still not put those around us fully "in touch," so to speak, with what our world is in fact like for us. Drawing on work from Bakhtin (1986), Voloshinov (1986. 1987), Wittgenstein (1953), MerleauPonty (1962), and Todes (2(X)I), I want to explore a very different form of listening, a form of listening that not only goes with a particular way of responsive talking—a way of seeking in one's talk to afford one's interlocutors opportunities to tell of, and to explore further, events and experiences that have mattered to them in their lives—but which can arouse within them a distinctive and recognizable "feeling of being heard."

All these issues are fundamentally ethical issues in the sense that: If I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others and othernesses around us. But what is it to respect the uniqueness of what can be heard in another's voice (as well as what can be heard in one's own voice)?

Monologism, al its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monotogic approach (in its extreme pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change anything in the world of my

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John Shotter, Emeritus Professor of Communication. Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3586. E-mail: jds@hypatia.unh.edu

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consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to other's response, does nol expect it and does not aclinowledge in it any force.

—Bakhtin, (1984, pp. 292-293) Tite 'otherness' which enters into us makes us other.

—Steiner, (1989, p. 188) Ail these types of expression, each with its basic intonations, come rife with corresponding terms and corresponding forms of possible utterances. The social situation in all cases determines which term, which metaphor, and which form may develop in an utterance expressing la felt experience] out of the particular intonational bearings of the experience.

—Voloshinov, (1986, p. 89) Logicians use exampies which no one would ever think of using in any other connection. Whoever says: 'Socrates is a man'? I am not criticizing this because it does not occur in practical life. What I am criticizing is the fact that logicians do not give these examples any life. We must invent a surrounding for our examples.

—Wittgenstein, (2001, p. 124)

There is a certain kind of moment in human affairs, when a second person spontaneously responds to the utterances (or other expressions) of a first—by both listening and responsively replying—that a 'living connection' between them both can be created, a moment that, following Bakhtin (1986), we might call a 'dialogical moment'—or which, originally, I called a moment of "joint action" (Shotter, 1980), and later, an "interactive moment" (Shotter, 1993). Central to the occurrence of such moments, is the spontaneous, living responsiveness of our bodies, both to the others and to the "othernesses" around us, a responsiveness to which we can become inattentive but which we cannot wholly eradicate within ourselves. As a consequence of our embodied living responsiveness to events in our surroundings, aspects of our utterances (and other responsive expressions) can be 'shaped' by infiuences in our immediate situation, as well as by those we also embody from our past experiences. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it, in such dialogical moments, ''the immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine—and determine from within—the structure of an utterance" (p. 86, his italics)—the organizing center is neither wholly within the individual psyche, nor within the linguistic system, "each and every word expresses the 'one' in relation to the 'other.'

I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong" (p. 86). As a consequence, the surroundings of our utterances—or, their bacicground^—must be accounted as "determining surroundings," in the sense that, in our being unavoidably responsive to

'"Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever 1 could express has its meaning" (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 16).

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events occurring within them, they exert "calls" upon us to act responsively in relation to them in "fitting" ways.

Thus, if it is the case that (in at least some of their aspects) all our activities are to an extent 'shaped' by our body's ineradicable responsiveness to the unique character of their surrounding context, then any inquiry into their nature that fails to take account of this—any inquiry that is driven by 'ready-made' textbook-methods, say, or any 'interviews' conducted in accord with pre-established 'schedules'—will inevitably miss important aspects of our activities. Indeed, they will miss just those aspects that make people's activities and their utterances unique, both to the persons concerned and to the situations within which they occur. They will fail to do justice to what a person meant by saying what they did at that particular moment in time and space—an ethical failure not only to fully respect how, what they expressed in their utterance, mattered to them, but, as we shall see, an ethical failure also to sustain the sense of an 'us', of a collective-we, of all those of us who are involved in the communication in question, being influenced in the same way by the same determining surroundings.

Voloshinov (1987) gives a nice example of the depth and complexity of what can be heard in the utterance of even a single word, and the character of what, relationally, it can achieve.^ He describes a situation in which there are two people sitting in a room. They are both silent. Then one of them says, "We//!" in a strongly intonated voice. The other does not respond.

As Voloshinov notes, for us, as outsiders, this entire "conversation" is utterly opaque. Taken in isolation, the utterance "Well!" is empty and unintelligible.

Yet, for the two people involved, this single expressively intoned word makes perfect sense; it is a fully meaningful and complete utterance. How can this be?

At the time the utterance took place, the two Russians involved, looked up at the window and saw that it had begun to snow; both knew that it was already May and that it was high time for spring to come; finally, both were sick and tired of the protracted winter—they both were looking forward to the spring and both were bitterly disappointed by the late snowfall. "On the 'jointly seen' (snowflakes outside the window), 'jointly known' (time of year—May) and 'unanimously evaluated' (winter wearied of, spring looked forward to)—on all this the utterance directly depends, all this is seized in its actual living import—is its very sustenance. And yet all this remains without verbal specification or articulation. The snowflakes remain outside the window; the date, on the page of the calendar; the evaluation, in the psyche of the speaker; and nevertheless, all this is assumed in the word weir (Voloshinov, 1987, p. 99).

But what is the point of such an utterance, what is achieved in its voicing? For it is perfectly obvious that it does not at all reflect, accurately describe, or represent the extraverbal situation confronting the two Russians. Nevertheless, it achieves something of great importance. As Voloshinov (1987) so rightly remarks, the utterance here

^Here, 1 am following Voloshinov's text quite closely.

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''resolves the situation, bringing it to an evaluative conclusion, as it were" (p. 100), and in so doing, it works to join the partieipants in the situation together as co-participants who know, understand, and evaluate the situation in a like manner—for the other, the listener expresses his or her agreement hy being silent! In other words, rather than achieving something representational and intellectual in each of the individuals separately, the utterance achieves something bodily and relational in both together; it works to create a shared orientation toward their shared situation—a moment of common reference. Both now know that they feel the same in relation to the situation; they share it, and to this extent, they can share various expectations of each other regarding each other's actions in their shared situation. Indeed, if one person responds to another in a way sensitive to the relations between their actions and the actions of the other, so that they can come to act in anticipation of each other's responses, then they can be said, in some small degree, to trust each other. If a second person feels the first to be pursuing an agenda of his or her own, then not only will that second person feel ethically offended at the first's lack of respect for them, they will also feel ethically offended at that persons' lack of respect for 'their' joint endeavors (Goffman, 1967).

Thus, far iTom the extraverbal situation being merely the external cause of the utterance—by, say, exerting an impact on the speaker—it "enters the utterance" says Voloshinov (1987), "as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import" (p, 100). It enters it, in influencing the intonational contour in the voicing of the word •Weir. Indeed, the speaker could almost equally as well have uttered not a word at all, but simply an "Ughh!" In other words, in general, the influence of interest to us is an infiuence exerted not in a pattern of already spoken words; it is in the unfolding temporal contours of words in their speaking. But how can the unfolding temporal contours of people's utterances work, not only to achieve such an evaluative sharing of a situation, but also to express a person's own relation to their own expressions within it—whether they mean them to be taken seriously, treated as mere proposals, or even to be ridiculed (or so on)? And further: In situations in which our talk is not intertwined in with aspects of an immediately shared context, but in which we only talk with each other—as in academic seminar rooms, organizational conference rooms, or in psychotherapy, say—and so nothing else, is it still possible for us to gain, from the pausing, pacing, and intoning of their talk, a good sense of the invisible world of an other, and of their relations to it?

If it is, in what kind of world must we live for such hapf)enings to be possible, for the temporal contours of people's expressions to work on and in us to such effects?

THE SWITCH FROM MECHANICAL MOVEMENT TO LIVING MOVEMENT: FROM DIFFICULTIES OF THE INTELLECT TO DIFFICULTIES OF THE WILL Western thought has very largely operated in terms of visualized static patterns (forms) in space, with time as a fourth dimension of space. We can see this very

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clearly manifested in Heinrich Hertz's 1894 famous account of our use of symbolic representations in scientific thinking. He describes their role thus: "In endeavoring . . . to draw inferences as to the future from the past, we always adopt the following process. We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form that we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured. In order that this requirement may be satisfied, there must be a certain conformity between nature and our thought" (1954, p. 1). Thus, in such a world as this, a "clockwork," mechanical world, consisting of discrete, self-contained particles, arranged in describable patterns at each instant in time, events do not develop or emerge in an unfolding flow of time. Instead, time unfolds in a series of "jumps" or "jerks" from one static configuration to the next, with each change being as significant as any other. Indeed, to talk of ethical issues within such a world is to run into the is-ought problem, raised by David Hume (1711-1776), who was among the first to note that many claims as to what ought to be were made on the basis of statements about what is.

But, as we switch to a focus on living beings and their activities, everything changes.

There is something very special about the movement of living beings that makes it different from the mere locomotive movement of things and objects in space, from their merely taking up different positions in space at different instants in time. First, rather than it being simply the re-arrangement or reconfiguration of separately existing parts, which at each instant in time take up a new configuration (according to preexisting laws or principles), the movements of living beings are the movements of indivisible, unitary, self-structurizing, living wholes, each one utterly unique in itself. And besides moving around in space, such living wholes can also be sensed as moving within themselves, that is, as making expressive movements, and such expressive movements can be sensed as occurring through time, even if the bodies of the relevant living beings stay steadfastly fixed in space; for example, they can be sensed as breathing, as making noises, they wave their limbs about, and so on. In so doing, they seem to display both short-term expressive "inner" movements—smiles, frowns, gestures, vocalizations, etc., the expressions of a "thou," that is, of their own living identity—as well as more long-term "inner" movements, that is, they age, they grow older. Indeed, all such living wholes endure through a whole continuous, sequential life process: A process that begins with their initial conception (in a two-being interaction); that leads to their birth (as an individual being); then their growth to maturity (as an autonomous being); and then their death.^ So, while A developmental process—of first creation, then growth and development—that we will find relevant when we turn to a discussion of "forms of life," with their associated "language-games" (Wittgenstein, 1953), and their beginnings in our being 'stuck by' certain events in our discussions of expressive-responsive forms of communication below.

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dead assemblages can be constructed piece by piece from objective parts—from parts that retaiti their character irrespective of whether they are a part of a whole or tiot—living beitigs, as indivisible wholes, cannot. On the contrary, they grow.

And in the course of their exchanges with their surroundings, they tratisform themselves, intertially, from simple individuals into richly structured ones. In this growth, their 'parts' are not only a constant state of change,^ but they owe their very existence both to their relations to each other and to their relations to themselves at some earlier point in time. Thus the history of their structural transformations in time is of more consequence than the logic of their momentary structure(s) in space.

Thus, there is not only a kind of developmental continuity involved in the unfolding of all living activities, but all living entities also imply their surroundings, so to speak; in their very nature, they not only come into existence ready to grow into their own appropriate environment, or Umwelt (von Uexkull, 1957), they also come to embody a whole set of readinesses to respond to events iti their surroundings in appropriate ways. There is thus a distinctive 'inner dynamics' to living wholes not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages, such that the earlier phases of an activity are indicative of at least the style of what later is to come' — we can thus respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion. Thus, in always giving rise to what we might call identity preserving changes, they and their "parts" are always "on the way" to becoming more than they already are. This is why their special, living nature cannot be captured in a timeless, "everything-presenttogether," spatial structure or a single order of logical connectedness.

Finally, and this is perhaps their most important characteristic, all living beings cannot not be in a spontaneously responsive relation to their surroundings.

Thus, they cannot not be influenced in some way by the others and othernesses around them. Indeed—and this is the basis of Bakhtin's (1984, 1986, 1993) dialogism, as we will see below—when two or more such forms of life "rub together," so to speak, in their meetings, they always create a third or a collective form of life within which (a) they all sense themselves as participating, and which (b) has a life of its own, with its own voice, and its own way of "pointing" toward the future. Indeed, life only comes from life. It cannot be put together '*Hence the need to put the word 'parts' in scare quotes. While, perhaps, analytically separable, the 'parts' of a living, indivisible whole cannot be substantially separated.

'AS Merleau-Ponty (1962) remarks, with respect to the workings of intentionality in our living activities: "Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is. it is true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come. . . . [M]y perceptual field itself, . . . draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its protentions. 1 do not pass through a series of instances of now. the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change . . . Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities" (pp. 416^17).

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from a set of self-eontained, separate parts. This new "form of life" (Wittgenstein, 1953), that results from the meeting together of two or more different, but related activities, has, as we shall see, a strange, chiasmic quality to it (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Just as, so it is said, the meeting of the two slightly different but related views of our surroundings from our two eyes are intertwined in the optic chiasma in the brain which creates for us the "relational dimension" of depth, thus enabling us to judge things as being "near to or far from" us, bodily, so we shall find similar such creative intertwinings occurring in other spheres of our lives together.

Indeed, in the eyes of our bodies doing this 'for us', so to speak, there is, as Todes (2001) argues, an unnoticed, primary human motivation at work: a need for us to feel "at home" in our surroundings, so to speak, a need that is very basic to the kind of being that we are in the world—a need very different from the individualized need for self-actualization, say, that tops Maslow's (1943) "hierarchy of needs." As Todes (2001) would say, what Maslow sets out in his hierarchy are not needs, but desires, things that we already icnow we want. Whereas, "a need, unlike a desire, is originally given as a pure restlessness; as the consciousness of one's undirected activity. It begins with the sense of a lack in oneself, without any sense of what would remove that lack . . . It begins with a sense of loss of something one has never had; whereas the Moss' of desire is always of something once had. Now the whole sense of our exploration and discovery of the world is prompted by the sense of having been initially lost in the world. We came into the world 'lost'" (p. 177).

In other words, what Todes' remarkable work brings to our attention, is the fact that we are continually concerned with how to 'be' in the world. We must continually puzzle as to "where" we are, and how we might relate ourselves to the others and othernesses around us, for what we sense as being "the environment" of our actions, determines the character of our deliberations in deciding "what to do next," how to "go on" with our lives. Thus Todes focuses our attention on our orientational or relational needs—our need to know the nature of the context we are currently in, and what it requires of us, what it calls upon us to do.

In the light of these discussions, then, it becomes clear that there are two very different ways in which we can conceive of the difficulties we can face in our attempts to understand another person's expressions: (I) There those we can call problems, and think of ourselves as solving them by the application of a method, a process of reasoning; but there are others we need to call (2) difficulties of orientation or relational difficulties, in which we seek to resolve on a line of action, a style, or a way of proceeding with respect to each other and/or to our shared circumstances.

Our ways of proceeding, our methods, or the steps we must take in relating ourselves to these two very different kinds of difficulty will also be quite different.

Difficulties we can eall problems occur in relation to an array of data from which

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we can derive unknown relations from among those already known. A relational or orientational difficulty, however, presents us with almost the reverse of this situation—for it is only after we have discovered/created a way of relating ourselves to and attending to our surroundings, that the data relevant to our achieving our goal can be brought to light (and then, be applied in solving problems).

But to resolve on a line of action, we must first arrive at a way of "seeing" or otherwise spontaneously responding to the phenomena before us, a perceptual rather than a cognitive achievement is required.

This distinction is not easy to grasp, for differences between difficulties of orientation and difficulties of the intellect cannot be captured formally, they can only be captured in practice with respect to practical criteria. Wittgenstein (1980) calls these two kinds of difficulty, respectively, difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will: "What makes a subject hard to understand . . . is not that before you can understand it you need to be trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see .. .

What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect" (p. 17). Thus, as he puts it, what work in (his kind of practical) philosophy is aimed at, is not to provide any new information, but to change one in oneself, to change "one's way of seeing things (and what one expects of them)" (1980, p. 16). Thus, if these changes cannot be effected by giving people good reasons to adopt new beliefs, by argument, how can one be changed? One must be changed in one's very being, and that can only be effected by being moved by an other or otherness in ways that one is unable to move oneself

WHAT CAN BE "HEARD" IN A LIVING VOICE All the remarks above, as I hope is now becoming clear, begin to orient us very differently toward our use of language than the more usual referentialrepresentational accounts. Taken altogether, they begin to suggest that, not only what a unique person takes his or her unique world to be, at the moment of their utterance, but also how what they take to be their unique relation to it at that moment, also enters into and shapes the intonational contours of their utterance, and can thus, in some sense, be "heard" in the utterance. Let me emphasize, however, that all these aspects of people's utterances are largely uttered as an aspect of the living responsiveness of our bodies to the others and othernesses around us. As a consequence, this stream of spontaneously responsive, living activity

''Elsewhere, Arlene Katz and I (Katz & Shotter, 1996, 1998, 2004) have developed a whole approaeh to soeial inquiry, what we call the methods of a social poetics, built around being 'struck by' the occurrence of certain events.

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constitutes the constantly changing background of activity from out of which our more deliberately conducted activities can be drawn, and into which their results can return—what earlier I called the determining surroundings of our activities.

If this is the case, the consequences are prodigious! It means that all spoken utterances contain within themselves the reciprocal, as it were, of the particular circumstances in which, for the speaker, they are uttered, and thus written (or otherwise recorded) utterances can also—in their style—manifest aspects of the circumstances in which they might at flrst have been uttered. Thus, if we know how to listen for it, we can hear in a written or recorded utterance—if not the actual, original conditions that worked to shape it in its speaking—but at least the possible human situations, etc., of its use.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) makes a similar set of points in claiming that in everyday, spontaneous talk, listeners do not need to interpret a speaker's utterances to grasp his or her thought, for "the listener receives thought from speech itself (p. 178), It is present in the way in which speakers give shape to their utterances. Thus the ••conceptual meaning" of a speaker's words ••must be formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. As in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in a context of action and by taking part in communal life" (p, 179).' In effect, we must ask ourselves: What kind of person, in what kind of situation, to what other kind of person, for what reason, would say such things? And when we do this, if we can reproduce the tone and accent of the speaker, we can begin to feel, he suggests, our way into their existential manner, the way speakers are using their words. We can begin to understand the meaning of their words in terms of their role in a particular context of In fact, all our speech (and writing) carries its relational meaning in its tone. ••There is thus," Merleau-Ponty (1962) concludes, ••either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism" (p. 179).

It is at this point that I would like to turn in more detail to Bakhtin's (1986) dialogical account of the responsive character of our utterances. As he remarks: ••Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker^ . . . Of course, an utterance is not always followed immediately by an articulated response . . . [But] sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent

'"In the same way," Merleau-Ponly (1962) continues, "an as yet imperfeetly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain 'style'—either a Splnozist, criticist or phenomenological one—which is the first draft of its meaning. 1 begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher" (p. 179).

In that listeners, with their nods, facial expressions, and 'uhm uhms', indicate back to a speaker, while he or she is speaking, that they are 'following'—and, perhaps, even anticipating—the speaker's speech.

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speech or behaviour of the listener... Thus, all real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualized). The speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind . . . Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth . . . " (pp. 68-69).

In other words, among the many other features of such responsive talk, is its orientation toward the future: "The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.

Such is the situation of any living dialogue" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 280, my emphasis).

Being able to talk with those around one with an expectation of, say, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth, and to have one's expectations in large part satisfied, is a part of what it is, as I have already mentioned above, to trust those around one. But our sensibilities within such exchanges can be even more subtle and shaded than mere agreement, sympathy, and so forth.

Hearing the sounds of agreement, we can often also hear them as sympathetic agreement, as patronizing agreement, as hurried agreement, as inconsequential agreement, as reluctant agreement, as unexpected or surprised agreement, and so on. Similarly with all other heard responses.^ They are all subtly shaded, nuanced, or intonated in such a way as to enable us, mostly, to 'go on' with those to whom we must respond in reply, with at least decorum and courtesy, and sometimes, to 'go on' in ways appropriate to much more complex aims: ". . . the word does not merely designate an object as a present-on-hand entity, but also expresses by its intonation my valuative attitude toward the object, toward what is desirable or undesirable in it, and, in so doing sets it in motion toward that which it yet-to-be-determined about it, turns it into a constituent moment of the living, ongoing event. Everything that is actually experienced," says Bakhtin (1993), "is experienced as something given and as something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has emotional-volitional tone, and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing event encompassing us" (pp. 32-33, my emphasis).

'"One cannot . . . understand dialogic relations simplistically or unilaterally, reducing them to contradiction, conflict, polemics, or disagreement. Agreement is very rich in varieties and shadings.

Two utterances that are identical in all respects ("Beautiful weather!"—"Beautiful weather!"), if they are really two utterances belonging to different voices and not one, are linked by dialogic relations of agreement. This is a definite dialogic event, agreement could also be lacking ("No, not very nice weather," and so forth)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 125).

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Thus in his use of the expressioti "emotiotial-volitional totie," Bakhtin is

suggestitig that at every moment, as we voice an unfolding utterance, there is a degree of personal choice as to the different turns we might take, the intonational time-contouring that we might give our utterances. So, although "the word in language is half someone else's," Bakhtin notes, "it hecomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.

Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), hut rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own" (1981, pp. 293-294, my emphases). Indeed, what makes a person's words their own words are the efforts they exert in their expressions of them, the efforts we can sense them as making in their speech to make their talk conform to 'a something' they are trying to express—and we can hear these efforts 'in' their time-contouring of their intoning of their expressions.

Indeed, the effort required to voice something becomes a measure of its worth to the speaker, and listeners need, ethically, to take that into account, if they are to do the utterances of an other's justice. But besides the effort, one can also hear how interested a person is in what he or she is saying; or how calm and confident they are in themselves; sometimes excitement gets into the voice, as does curiosity, anticipation, wonder, sympathy, neediness, despair, and desire. On the other tack, you can also, sometimes, hear how uninterested people are in what they are saying; while, of course, there are those who have a stake in seeming uninterested when they are not. There is also, as I will discuss at greater length below, the ethics of being heard as speaking (or not, as the case may be) in one's own voice.

Thus the emotional-volitional tone of a person's utterances is not something that can be just "tacked onto them" as an optional extra. It is crucial to organizing the pragmatic conduct of all our communicating—one cannot give another person a piece of information (without insulting them) until one has set up an information giving relationship with them—an expectant orientation toward something yet to come—first (see Schegloff, 1995). Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, all complex human activities which involve in their organization, both the sequencing and the simultaneous combining of a whole multiplicity of different, (often) individually performed activities, require—as in the performance of a piece of music by an orchestra—the continually re-orienting and re-relating of these many different activities with each other. And people coordinating their actions in with each other in this way, in pursuit of a common goal, require them to anticipate each other's responsive contribution toward that goal.

Bakhtin's turn away from a referential-representational account of language use to a more relationally responsive account, thus opens up for us a vast new "terra incognita"—the vast sphere of the many different evaluative relations.

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orientations, or approaches that we might adopt to the others and othernesses around us—that now awaits our further explorations.

Another who has turned in this direction is, of course, Wittgenstein (1953). As he sees it, we are, so to speak, victims of an unexamined compulsion to treat certain important words (I'll call them "big words")—especially when we turn to philosophical talk—as already having a meaning. But these words were, of course, once the words in the mouths of particular people in particular situations, saying them to particular other people, with particular purposes in mind, words which have become "authoritative words" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342).'" Indeed, if Todes (2001) is correct, then they were uttered within the overall context of our trying to make ourselves more 'at home' in the world—that was their point. So we find ourselves saying things to ourselves like: "'The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.' That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times," says Wittgenstein (1953, no. 114), and in so doing, we feel that we are stating an undeniable fact. But are we? Or are we merely repeating to ourselves the voices of past others that, so to speak, still 'haunt' our language? To exorcise "the bewitchment of our intelligence" (1953, no. 109) by these disembodied uses of words, he recommends the following deliverance: "When philosophers use a word—"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—What we (i.e., those who practice as form of Wittgensteinian philosophy) do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (1953, no. 116). In so doing, we must try to specify the nature of the (possible) surroundings within which the utterances in question would make sense, for their unique shape emerged as a consequence of their unique and detailed responsive relations to features in their original surroundings.

Wittgenstein (1953) gives the following example: He asks, "The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?" (no.

412). He then goes on to suggest that our experience of it as a seeming paradox, might arise when we turn our own attention onto our own consciousness in general, and with no particular practical purpose in mind, only the urge to try to solve a philosophical problem, say to ourselves in an astonished voice and with a vacant look: "THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!?" But, as he notes, "Bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox

'""The authoritative word demands thai we acknowledge it, that we make it our own . . . we encounter it with its authority already fused into it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers . . . It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact . . . It is akin to taboo, that is, a name that must not be taken in vain" (Bakhtin. 1981. p. 342).

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(THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. I could have said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to shew that an effect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of the brain.—But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look would have been intent, not vacant.)" (no. 412, my emphasis).

What is ethical in all of this, is that by recovering the living context of our words, by restoring them to their ordinary places, in their ordinary surroundings, we can begin to sense the workings of a form of life within our living speech, a form of life that we can share with others. Just like the utterance of the word "Well!" in Voloshinov's (1987) example above, surrounded as it was by so much that was "jointly seen," "jointly known," "jointly desired," and "jointly evaluated:— a shared form of life, at that moment, of miserable resignation—other such utterances can give rise to an immediately sensed significance, an immediate sense of us both (or all) being "in there together." To repeat: When this is the case, those involved can share various expectations of each other, regarding each other's actions in their shared situation; that is, they can be said, in some small degree, to trust each other. Divorced from their relation to shared determining surroundings, how our utterances in fact exert their specific influence on us in specific situations can become a complete mystery to us.

One of Wittgenstein's (1953) illustrations of how we can bamboozle ourselves, by phrasing our philosophical questions to ourselves inappropriately, is as follows: "If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give him signs. And I should never say: this is only words, and I have got to get behind the words. Equally, when I have asked someone something and he gives me an answer (i.e., a sign) I am content—that was what I expected—and I don't raise the objection: but that's a mere answer. But if you say: 'How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?' then I say: 'How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?'" (no. 504).

What we lose—what philosophers lose—when we and they try to explain the meaning of an isolated utterance, divorced from the surroundings in which it can have a life, is not what the words mean (in the dictionary sense of word-meaning), but what a particular person, in a particular situation, meant in saying them.

SOME INQUIRIES INTO LISTENING 'INTO' THE 'INNER WORLDS' OF OTHERS: TOM ANDERSEN AND THEODORE TAPTIKLIS Below, I want to explore two situations in which a form of listening—what we might call "listening into" (just as we say "looking into") the unique inner world of a unique individual—is carried out. Clearly, it is not an immediate, one-pass

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form of listening, but a back-and-forth, dialogically structured task in which, crucially, everything which is said and done, is done in response to something that happens within the situation of the listening. For, when this is the case, it is possible to create a shared set of determining surroundings within which all concerned can find a mutual orientation toward the task in hand.

Tom Andersen Tom Andersen was a much beloved Norwegian family therapist renowned for his introduction of the "reflecting team,"" later to be called, simply, the "reflecting process," in which those who earlier had been offering their thoughts and observations to the practising therapist from behind a one-way screen were (in 1985) moved into the therapy room itself (Andersen, 1991). Previously, "observers" had offered "theories," "explanatory thoughts," "plans of action," etc., in short, intellectual comments, along with a smattering of "nasty" remarks. But when the shift was first tried, "my early fears were not fulfilled. The 'nasty' words did not appear, nor did this conversation require any strong effort from us to avoid 'nasty' words" (Andersen, 1992, p. 58). Further, and more importantly, Andersen further remarks: "When we suggested to the family that we share our ideas, it was natural for us to say, 'Maybe our talk will bring ideas that eould be useful for your conversation.' We did not say, 'useful for you,' but 'useful for your conversation'" (p. 58). He also went on to pay attention to the different "languages" used by professionals when alone and when with families, for all the "intellectual" and "academic" words use among themselves are "foreign" to most other people. As a consequence, he went on to develop some important rules of procedure: The first and major rule was that the team's reflections should be based on and start with something actually expressed during the conversation, not from somewhere inaccessible to others in the conversation—a crucial step in establishing determining surroundings shared by all. Further, by reflectors phrasing their musings as expressions of uncertainty—for example, by saying: "When I heard ...," or "When I saw . . . I had this idea," or "I am not sure but I had the feeling . . .," or "Maybe you heard something else but I heard ...," or "When I thought of this or that this question came to my mind . , ."—families were afforded opportunities themselves to reflect further on what had so far been expressed in the session in ways relevant to concerns they had voiced, not concerns voiced by professionals in professional terms.

It is important to note three further (among the many more) aspects of Tom Andersen's work: One is simply his concern to slow down the process of communication, to provide time and opportunity for people—in their own "inner

"The removal, on ethical grounds, of the group of therapists often hidden in family therapy tjehind a one-way screen, into the therapy room.

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dialogues"—to conduct their own inner reflections. Thus his response to what has just been said does not take place immediately. "I have to wait and see how the other responds to what I say or do before I say or do the next thing. The next thing I say or do must be influenced by the other's response to what I have just said. I have to go slowly enough to be able to see and hear how it is for the other in the conversation" (Andersen, 1995, p. 15).

This suggests a second point: To hear is also to see. "The person who listens, besides listening to all the spoken, also sees how this is uttered" (1995, p, 23). As Todes (2001) would suggest, our spoken and other bodily activities occur together in a unity and cannot be separated, thus the listener who also sees as well as listens, will notice that various spoken words "touch" the speakers to such an extent that one can see them being "moved" by their own words.'^ All this leads Andersen (1995) to note, in line with our interest in what words in their speaking express (not what we can interpret as being their underlying or hidden meaning once they have been expressed), that often "a person who is given the opportunity to talk undisturbed quite often stops and starts over again, as if the first attempt was not good enough. The client searches for the best way to express him/herself; the best words to tell what he/she wants to tell, the best rhythm, the best tempo, and so on" (p. 24). Thus, if on those occasions a client if visibly moved by a word in their own utterance but does not eventually elaborate on it further, Andersen often finds it nonetheless useful to let it be the natural starting point for a next question: "I noticed that you I said this or that. If you were to search for something more in that word, what might you find?" Or: "If you were to look into that word, what might you see."

Here is a case from Andersen (pers. Comm): Mary, who had been sick and tried to take care of herself. (T: me, M. Mary): "T: How do they . . . your family . . . see you? Do they see you as a person who should never ask for something . . . or do they see as a person who deserves to ask for something for yourself . . . How do they see you? M: I am not sure.. I,, uhm,. I don't think that they look in terms ofthat, . , I think tliat. , . you know . . . look at. . . I guess that the family I grew up in . , . we were supposed to be self-reliant. . . independent was the big word in my family . . , Self-reliant? What? Independent? (nods) yes. Independent was the really big word. And, .. You know I feel that I got the message there, 1 am sorry, you feel that . . . I feet thai I got that message there , . , right, . . and Ifeei that that was something I did realty incorporate in my life , , . I have , . , no . . . as soon as they were not responsible for me, it became , , . there was no longer an issue, I mean they don't talk ofthat any more, you know... but it is still there . . ."

12

See footnote 6.

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The word "independent" was mentioned two times, and as she said and heard the word the voice went down, and a sad look came over her face. It was as if she was hit and moved by the word. I determined to investigate that word hut had to wait since she wanted to say something first. Then asked: "How was that word independent expressed? Was it in the open or was it implicit?

Or. . .? How was it expressed? Wetl. . . it was verbally. Verbally? The word independent? Yes. In the way you should be independent or independence in general, o r . . . ? We should be independent. They wanted us to be independent. . . and we should be independent. They wanted us to be independent. . . and . . . So how . . ,

along the route when you came to be acquainted with the word and let that word be pan of yourself. . . what do you see in that word if you look into the word independent? / don '; like it. I personally don't like that word very much. Partly . . . (she starts to move on the chair) Do you see things that . . . say more, what don't you like when you see into the word, or look into the word?

As a consequence of Andersen's responsive listening and questioning, here and after, all Mary's utterances are responsively connected to each other in an interconnected unity, a unity that Mary has begun to explore in detail. Thus, what Andersen is doing here is, I suggest, in these questions that invite Mary to hear herself putting her own experiences (along with the inter-connections both between them and with the surrounding circumstances in which they were first experienced) out loud into words, letting her gain a felt of her own past experiences as an interconnected unity, a unity in which—as result of her explorations—she can now find her own "way about"'"* inside her own experiences.

If this is so, then we seem to have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that it is not, seemingly, necessary for therapists to understand their clients in order to help them therapeutically. Seemingly, the therapist's task is simply to help them understand themselves better!

Theodore Taptiklis After seven years as a consultant with McKinsey and Company, Taptiklis worked in senior roles in large corporations for the next 25 years. He began the Storymaker Foundation in 1998 to help professionals in organizations develop their practice by recording and exchanging vignettes of work experience in terms of spoken-word narrative fragments. The fragments are chosen as tellings of a

"in line with our interest in difficulties of orientation, Wittgenstein (1953) characterized the kind of difficulties he faced, so: "A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about'" (no. 123). Mary beginning to find her 'way about' inside her own experiences gives her a chance of being able to find a 'way out' of her current plight.

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"striking" or "moving" kind, in Andersen's (1995) discussed above. Thus the fact that they are spoken-word fragments is central to Taptiklis's whole approach. For one of his modes of inquiry is to call on listeners to listen to a fragment and then to spend time reflecting among themselves on it for a number of replayings. He finds, as we shall see, that what is heard on each listening and reflecting is very different.

As an example of his work, we can take the following excerpt from his 2008 book, taken from a conversation at a recent workshop on complexity and storytelling: Questioner I. Narrator.

Questioner 2: Narrator:

"What are the connections between story writing and story telling?"

"Um. . . . " "For you." (without hearing) "—there's, there's certain exceptions to what I'm going to say, but, um,—like Dostoevsky, perhaps, but— there's, uh, writing is oppressive in its imposition of, uh . . . paragraphing, as Gertrude Stein calls it, or textualizing as Illich, and . . .

Questioner I : (emphatically) "For you."

Narrator: ". . . Ong would call it. . ."

Questioner I : (more emphatically): "For you."

Narrator: (exclaims) "Writing!... (silence) What's the question? (laughter) Questioner I : "What are the connections and the comparison between story writing and story telling, for you?"

Narrator: "I'm gettin' there. . . ."

Questioner I : "Without anybody else. Just you."

Narrator: He—eck! . . . (loud laughter).

U m . . . . Let's see, (sounds of hands slapping thighs)... for me, uh . . . I think, uh, my PhD education desu-oyed me as a writer, and I've had to unlearn it, every day since, y' know, and, and I, I guess writing has just taken me all my life to try to figure out how to do it, and then to have some—uh, relationship to orality, y'know, so that to me the textual—textualizing and orality are part of my life, um . . . I don't know if that answers . .." (voice drops) Questioner 2: "Yes—how, what—what were you destroying in your dissertation writing?"

Narrator: "Well. . ."

Questioner 2: "What was — " Narrator: "Like you caught me puttin' all these names at the ends of sentences, but, um.." (p. 158).'''

'"•The 'narrator' in this excerpt is David Boje—see Taptiklis (2008) for a commentary on David Boje's work on ante-narrative.

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On a first listening to the extracted utterance, one listener said: "I'm almost overwhelmed by the sadness of that passage. To me it's almost a metaphor for how our education, uh, destroys our ability to learn." While another remarked: "But I think it's that that makes it un-sad, is the battle occurred and it was recognized . . . " Yet another said: "It's interesting how we try so hard to get put into those roles, we want to be what there is, whether its being a Ph.D., or as for me, becoming a librarian" (p. 160), and so on. On the first hearing, the conversation drifts on, and becomes increasingly detached, cerebral, and abstract. The topics of discussion are to do with what response is evoked by the utterance for each individual, speaking as it were from "inside" themselves. After around ten minutes of discussion, the extract is played again. This time, the discussion turns to the details of the utterance. Someone says: "One of the interesting things is how that piece . . . the, the talking of it, reflects the meaning . . . that conversation is, is imperfect, and that there's a beauty and expressiveness in the imperfection . . ."

Another responded: "The event mirrored what the narrator was describing . . .

The 'Heck' came, and immediately after, it was like: Stop talking like a Ph.D. and tell your story. He was reliving what he was talking about." Yet another added: "There was something about breath, that this time around, I noticed that until the pause, I actually was sort of holding my breath . . . then after the pause, there was breathing . . . " A further participant adds: "When you hear it the second time, it's different and you're different" (p. 161).

On a second listening to the utterance, there is already an increased energy and engagement in the room, and an appetite for a third listening becomes apparent: "What really struck me about this time . . . I almost wasn't listening to the words, I was listening to the sounds, and when it opened, the words oppression and paragraphing, I almost felt like the narrator was being pulled down . . . and then there was the pause, and he raced through and was able to re-experience i t . . . the sound is so much richer than the words themselves" (p. 163). Another responded: "I, uh, want to say something about, um, the question, to pay attention to something the narrator said about going back to get the question, to reach after the question . . . You can use what metaphor you want, about opening the door a crack to expose the threshold, or slipping the window a little: the story has to listen to the question . . . I don't think we pay attention—I mean, really pay attention . . . because what questioning requires of us is something we are so not good at, which is listening, and listening is what the story demands" (pp. 164-165).

After the shift of focus onto the feeling-shape of the utterance in the second listening, the level of people's concentration noticeably increases, Taptiklis (2008) claims, and become more animated and start to act together. On the third listening, it is as if the participants "now inhabit the recorded utterance" (p. 165), and in so doing, because they now begin to share a "determining context" for their discussions. "What is going on now," Taptiklis (2008) says, "sounds and feels like a process of collaborative sense making. The room is electric with the

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energy of this movement. Afterwards, people say that this was one of the striking moments of the event. They leave reflecting on possibilities that seem newly open to them" (p. 165). For clearly, now the group shares a number of moments of common reference, and because of this, can recognize the relevance and force of each other's comments.'"^ In both these cases, then—in Andersen's "hearing" of something of importance to be explored further in Mary's uttering of the word "independence," and in Taptiklis's collaborative exploring of what can be "heard" in a person's recounting of their own relations to their writing skills, as well as how hard it is to listen precisely to what it is that a question is demanding of one—in both these cases we have an illustration of a listening that develops that isn't a one-pass affair. Indeed, it takes place in a special context in which there is a dialogie back-and-forth between a responsively expressive listener (or listeners) and a narrator whose invisible inner world is being explored.

CONCLUSIONS Above, I have been exploring two things: One is the way in which a set of "determining surroundings or circumstances" can enter into and influence the unfolding "shape" of our utterances. The other is the nature of what we might call dialogically responsive listening, in which, instead of hoping to hear immediately what a person is saying, a slowly developing process of listening and hearing takes place, a process which can result in both speakers and listeners coming to share a set of determining surroundings for their utterances, and thus not to talk with each other at cross-purposes. It is a process in which listeners, by taking "an aetive, responsive attitude" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 68) toward a speaker's speech, reflect back to the speaker in one way or another—moment by moment, in the course of his or her speaking—what, uniquely, the speaker's speech is meaning to the listener in that particular circumstance, at that particular moment. In this sense, as Bakhtin (1986) remarks, "the listener becomes the speaker" (p. 68).

What is central to all this, is the move away from the idea of speech communication as being a process of information transmission, of the speaker as a source of information, of speech being a common code into which one puts one's thoughts, and of listeners as simply being decoders who have to task of arriving at the speaker's thought. This "model" of the communication process eradicates the role of two major aspects of the communication situation: One is the spontaneous, living, expressive-responsiveness of our bodies, thus leaving listeners as

In this sense, although they may not share any foundational beliefs, they can ground their remarks and claims in their shared experience in their shared situation.

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passive listeners. "The active role of the other in the process of speech communication is thus reduced to a minimum," says Bakhtin (1986, p. 70). The other is the role of what I have called the "determining surroundings" of our utterance, the (often invisible) surroundings which, in our being spontaneously responsive to them in the voicing of our utterances, on the one hand, give shape not only the intonational contours of our utterances, but also to their whole style, to our word choices, to the metaphors we use and so on. But which, on the other, orient us toward the "place" of our utterances in our world, toward where they should be located or toward what aspect they are relevant, and toward where next we might we might go, that is, \.\\t\r point.

Thus, bringing the words of people speaking in committee and seminar rooms, in psychotherapy, and in just general conversations in sitting rooms, back to from their "free-floating" use to their use within a set of determining surroundings that are (or can be) shared by all concerned in listening to them, is crucial if we are to understand an individual speaker's unique "inner world," and the unique "point" they want to make in uttering them. This is Wittgenstein's (1953) in wanting to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (no. 116).

But it is not just their unique meaning that is at stake here, ethical issues are also at stake. For, without a shared of determining surroundings, people, literally, do not know "where they are," they lack orientation, they do not know what to expect of those around them. In other words, if we and our interlocutors are to communicate readily and easily, we rely on those with whom we are involved to sustain between us the sense of a collective-we, a shared reality that is our jointly shared reality. And it is only in relation to such a jointly shared reality that we can express to each other who we are, express the nature of our unique inner lives to each other. Thus, we owe our very being, our identity, to it. If it collapses, if there is a lack of a jointly shared reality, then it is quite easy for us to feel unheard, or unable to express ourselves. Is there something wrong with us, or, perhaps, with our world?

If we are to sustain the sense of a collective-we, then we find ourselves with, as Goffman (1967) notes, certain "involvement obligations," or "interactive responsibilities," to our joint affairs: only \i you respond to me in a way sensitive to the relations between your actions and mine can we act together as a collectivewe; and if I sense you as not being sensitive in that way, that is, as not being responsive to me, but as pursuing an agenda of your own, then I will feel immediately offended in an ethical way. I will feel not only that you lack respect for our affairs, but a lack of respect for me too. In such circumstances, not only do I feel insulted, but I lack the social conditions necessary to express myself, the nature of my own inner life. In other words, if I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others around us.

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Thus, truly understanding another is not just a technical matter, it is fundamentally an ethical issue.

This all raises, for me, a central concern with the nature of our talk in academe and the nature of our own relations to it—and it is with a short exploration of that, that I would like to end this article.

Not only are ethical issues involved in truly understanding others, they are also involved in understanding ourselves. For there are perhaps surprising consequences of inappropriately taking an unethical attitude toward ourselves. In becoming increasingly objective and detached in relation to ourselves we may become unable, as it were, to treat even ourselves ethically. We may cease to think even of ourselves as beings who act in relation to interests and values of our own, who have both the ability and the right to monitor and evaluate our actions as we perform them in relation to our own personal ends. Viewing ourselves as merely the product of external causes, we may mistrust and debunk even our own judgements, and become afraid to say what we think, what we feel, what we want. Perhaps we do not even bother to think certain things through to their end for ourselves—for, after all, who are we when there are "experts" for so many of life's really important problems. Unable to commit ourselves to a position, to something in which we really believe, we lose the capacity for sustained, selfdirected, purposeful action (heteronomy rather than autonomy becomes our prevalent tnode of being).

Further, just as we are cast in the role of observers of others (rather than as co-participants in life with them), so we can find a part of ourselves always seems to be standing to one side and to be observing objectively what we ourselves are doing; such self-consciousness not only prevents that effortless, spontaneous coordination possible in more unselfconscious interchanges, it also prevents us from making ourselves truly responsible for ourselves. For even as we take a stand we are aware of the social influences upon us, the possibility of our having unconscious motives, an ideologically distorted or false consciousness, and so forth. We are not sure whether our views are really ours. There seems to be an absence of any clear points of reference to guarantee the validity of what we have to say. The narrator in Taptiklis's study above, displays, to a degree—along with much of my own work here—the difficulty of a speaker to be present in his or her own speaking.

Gould (1998), explores this issue very nicely in his commentary both on Stanley Cavell's (1969, 1979) study of Wittgenstein's voice, and his concern with what is entailed in philosophy's "loss of voice, and ultimately [its] repression of the voice" (p. 53). Central in Wittgenstein's writing, Cavell (1969) notes, is that he writes a dialogue in the genre of Confession: "It contains what serious confessions must: the full acknowledgment of temptation ('I want to say . . .', 'I feel like saying . . .'; 'Here the urge is strong . . .') and a willingness to correct them and give them up ('In everyday use . . .,' 'I impose a requirement which

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does not meet my real need'). (The voice of temptation and the voice of correctness are the antagonists in Wittgenstein's dialogues.)" (p. 71). In other words, we continually feel ourselves called by the world we inhabit to meet certain demands, to seek completeness, generality, or an explanation, or a certain sublime order behind or within our language or our bodies. We seem to be inhabited or haunted by other voices than our own. As Gould (1998) puts it: "Long before Cavell depicted us as haunting our own lives, he had noticed that Wittgenstein portrayed us as haunted by voices containing our wishes for knowledge. As philosophers we make ourselves into the spokesmen of our project to know the world. We become the ventriloquists of a knowledge that we have yet to achieve.

The philosophical project can accordingly be characterized like this: first you suppress the ordinary connections of mind to things, and of voice to things and to other voices. Then you try to recapture them in an ideal structure, with an ideal ordering of precise expressions" (pp. 79-80).

In the service of this urge, we first collect data that is divorced from the particular individuals and particular situations in which the thing we are measuring occurs, we then find a supposedly hidden order in the data so collected, we then form a theory to explain that order. Why do we feel that this is the right thing to do in all of our inquiries into the difficulties we face? Or, as Gould (1998) puts this question in his study of Gavell's work: "What is it about the world or about human thinking that elicits this voice of temptation—or, as Cavell will later put it, this temptation to voice a kind of emptiness, a modern version of madness" (p. 79). My aim in this paper has been not so much to give an answer this question but rather to show that if we do not give in to this temptation, other rich possibilities for other forms of inquiry can be opened up.

REFERENCES Andersen. T. ( 1991 ). The reflecting team: Dialogues and dialogue.'! about dialogues. New York: Norton.

Andersen, T. (1992). Reflections on reflecting with families. In S. McNamee & K. J. Gergen (Eds.).

Therapy as social construction (p. 58, 60). London: Sage Publications.

Andersen, T. (1995). Acts of forming and informing. In S. Freidman (Ed.), The reflecting team in action: Collaborative family iherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

Andersen. T. (1997). Researching client-therapist relationships: A collaborative study for informing Ihtvaçy. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 16(2). 125-133.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogical imagination. M. Holquist (Ed.) (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. C. Emerson (Ed. and trans.). Minneapolis.

MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (Vem W. McGee, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act, with translation and notes by Vadim Lianpov.

M. Holquist (Ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Cavell. S. (1969). MiLst we mean whai we say?: A book of essays. Cambridge. UK: Cambridge Universily Press.

Cavell. S. (1979). The claim of reason: Wiiigenstein. skepticism, morality and tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goffman, E. (1967). tnteraction ritual. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Gould. T. (1998). Hearing things: Voice and method in the writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hertz, H. H. (1956). The principles of mechanics. New York: Dover (orig. German pub. 1894).

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