Conversation and
Causes of its Degeneration
Klaus Krippendorff
Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture
The Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
kkrippendorff@asc.upenn.edu
Morphology of “conversation”
Con-versa-tion
tion – makes a verb into a noun and a process into a thing
“conversing” might be preferable
versa – to turn something into verse, into multiple versions
Con – together, a joint accomplishment, participatory
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Conversation ?
• When is conversation? And for whom?
• How does conversation arise?
• When does conversation become a concern?
• Some familiar explanations
• Cybernetics of conversation
• Conversational space. How does it arise?
• When do conversations degenerate
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When is conversation? And for whom ?
From the position of its observer:
• A mundane activity of which everyone is capable
• Embodied in participants’ practices – presence required
• Locally managed, self-organizing
• Creates its own history (topics, conventions, actions)
• Observationally incomprehensible.
No test for understanding
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When is conversation? And for whom?
From the position of its participants:
• Effortless togetherness. Feeling of mutual understanding
• A sense of participation
• Turn taking flows naturally – not by rules, no theory
• Dialogical equality for everyone
• All topics are open
• Respect for individual contributions
• Understanding = successful participation in its continuation
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Its ontogenesis ?
• We are born in ongoing processes of coordinating our body,
language, equipment and nature with others
• Coordination comes naturally, moving from kinesthetic to speech
– imitating and testing for being in tune
• Bootstrapping experiences into language use –
from kinesthetic metaphors to interpersonal metaphors
• Mature language competence + playful togetherness =
Conversation
• Awareness of conversation arises when it degenerates into stressful
and constrained communication
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When does conversation become a concern ?
When it turns problematic, difficult:
• Physical constraints
• Outside impositions, assignments
• Transgressions of the taken-for-granted languaging
• Irresolvable differences between expectations and
perceptions
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Content metaphor
• Transmission metaphor
• Ecological
• Hermeneutic
• Game metaphor
• Dialogue
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Content metaphor
Messages as containers of content
Content is entered by an author and removed by a
recipient
Conversation amounts to everyone getting the same content
out of messages that an author entered
Reading same messages = sharing the same contents
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Transmission metaphor
The information of a message is what is maintained in
processes of encoding, transmission and decoding from one
medium to another
Conversation is using the same code
Using the same code implies the sharing of information
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Ecological
Interactions among many constituents who, by distinguishing
among kinds, organize themselves into families, cultures, and
species and enact their own local and positional understanding of
their worlds
Interspecies communication consists of predatorial,
parasitical, or cooperative/competitive effects
An ecology is always larger than the world of any of its
constituents
Does radical constructivism invoke an ecological model of society ?
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Hermeneutic
Aim of conversation is understanding, achieved in the
recursion of the so-called hermeneutic circle –
an iterative process of merging horizons of understanding
Understanding is never finished
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Game metaphor
Games consist of moves that collaboratively change
(construct) configurations of objects, complying with
rules, and have a point (goal)
Conversations consist of speech acts (performatives) that are
validated by their responses and accomplish something
To be felicitous, speech acts
(promises, requests, commands, expressives, assertives)
must satisfy preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, the relation
between speaker and addressee, and the point of the act
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Some familiar explanations
• Dialogue
A way to find truths behind appearances (Plato)
Ongoing communication without aiming at a conclusion or
expressing a viewpoint (Martin Buber)
A group jointly explores assumptions of thinking, meaning and
social effects (David Bohm)
Acknowledging multiple perspectives, voices that create a myriad of
possibilities (Mikhail Bakhtin)
A pedagogy in which students learn from each other in mutual
respect and equality leading to liberation from oppression (Paulo
Freire)
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Cybernetic explanations
• Taking second-order cybernetics to heart, conversation must be
seen as embodied in its participants’ practices
• Wittgenstein might say it is a particular language game. Austin might
add it is performative (I’d say constitutive)
• Conversations create their unique con-sensual histories of
participation – recursive networks of expectations,
coordinations of understanding and interactions
• As interactors, participants create spaces for each other
• Conversations are radically self-organizing, collaboratively managed
and dialogically equal
• Conversations preserve the possibility of their continuation
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Space ?
Possibilities – created by (human) actors – ability to act
Moving one’s body (and tangible objects) creates material spaces
Changing one’s stages of life, profession, position, moving from one
role to another creates social spaces
Envisioning new technology creates design spaces
Using browsers and following links from documents to other
documents creates cyberspace
Choices among speech acts and choices to respond creates
conversational spaces
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Material (geometrical) space ?
Observed variation, described in logically distinct dimensions
creates observational spaces
In the natural sciences the experiential origin of space is ignored if not
denied, leaving no place for human observers in the spatial accounts
they provide, much less for actors
This disembodied construction of space, institutionalized in the
discourse of physics and formalized in mathematics, is celebrated as
the only measurable, hence real space, claiming all other spaces to
be merely metaphorical and non-existing
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Conversational space ?
Possibilities for speaking and responding to others
The confidence in one’s ability to interact naturally without fear of
experiencing breakdowns or running into obstacles
Obstacles in and limits of conversational space are constructed
as inabilities, whether due to past experiences, received
warnings or threat-induced fears
There are speech acts that facilitate conversation
and speech acts that shut conversation down
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Spatial notions in cybernetics
Cybernetics is the study of all possible systems. It is informed when some have
not been build or evolved in nature
W. Ross Ashby (1956)
Act always so as to increase the number of choices
Heinz von Foerster (1973)
When communicating,
preserve or increase the possibilities relevant and open to others
Klaus Krippendorff (1985)
As a condition for conversation,
Participants create spaces for each other to be, act, and explore
Conversation is cybern-ethics in human interaction
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
How does conversational space expand ?
Acknowledging the radical constructivist notion of cognitive
autonomy of participants in conversation,
conversational space can expand by:
• Using new vocabularies (Richard Rorty)
• Creating metaphors that draw heretofore unrelated empirical
domains into conversations (George Lakoff)
• Attentive listening, not fearing challenges (David Bohm)
• Coping with a polyphony of voices (Mikhail Bakhtin), secondorder understanding (the understanding of others’ understanding)
(KK), living in multi-versa (Maturana)
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Conversational space
Lesson from Politeness theory (Brown &Levinson; et al.)
Politeness = f (Inclusion X Distance X Power)
Face Threatening Acts (FTAs): Being excluded
Being defined by others
Being imposed upon
Face-enhancing acts support the desire:
to be included, understood
to be respected, affirmed
to be able to define one’s own identity
to make own decisions
and reduce the risk in venturing into new spaces
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Obstacles to maintaining conversations
In conventional terms:
• Fear
• Display or exercise of power
• Mistrust
• External influences
• Distractions
• Poor communication conditions
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When do conversations degenerate ?
In cybernetic/conversational terms:
• Threats to self-organization
• Threats to dialogical equality
• Threats to cognitive autonomy
• Threats to openendedness
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to self-organization
Speaking as
• as representative of absent others
• as advocate of (for) absent others
• as office holders (in the name of an institution)
• as an authority with privileged access to a reality
denied to participants
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to dialogical equality
• Claiming expertise in conversation,
attempts to manage the process
• Monopolizing dialog
• Interrupting (being insensitive to) its natural flow
• Changing topics without acquiescence or listening to the
speech act “I understand”
• Declaring participants incompetent
• Unwilling to repair untoward speech acts
• Denying accountability, restricting the use of certain speech
acts = exerting power
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to cognitive autonomy
• Categorizing (typing) participants – using generalizations
without their consent
• Disqualifying participants’ genuineness
• Speaking about present participants – telling
their stories in third person terms
• Not responding to a participant
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to openendedness
• Insisting on convergence, a goal
• Insisting of consistency – someone’s
• Ruling certain speech acts out of order
• Leaving the conversation or threatening to do so
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Where do conversations degenerate into ?
Conversation

Discourse

Mechanism
Constrained conversation – institutionalized,
purposive, rule governed
E.g., legal, business, scientific discourse, including
formal presentations
Causally or structurally determined system –
computationally, mathematically or biologically
describable. No human agency, no own space
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Recap conversation: A dispensable ideal?
An intellectual luxury?
To me it is the site where
• Pure “being-with” is embodied, experienced & practiced
• Humans become aware of being social beings – language
naturally, without theory, without obligations
• Social hierarchies, oppressive regimes can be examined,
undermined, rearticulated and changed
It also provides
• The reference against which constraints in language use
(discourse) are noticeable and addressable
Conversation and causes of its degeneration – Vienna 2007.11.18
Thank you for listening
kkrippendorff@asc.upenn.edu