Long abstract for a submission to PROS symposium: Dualities, dialectics and paradoxes in organizational
life, Corfu, 16th -18th June, 2016.
Primordial Socio-Material Being, Deep Dialogicality, and the
Ephemeral Nature of (what we call) “Dualities,” and “Paradoxes.”
John Shotter
“Things do not settle or endure out of their natural state” (Vico, 1968, para.134).
“Indeterminism admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things
not yet revealed to our knowledge may in themselves really be ambiguous.... It says there
is a certain ultimate pluralism in [the world]; and, so saying, it corroborates our
unsophisticated view of things. To that view, actualities seem to float in a sea of
possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such
possibilities exist, and form a part of truth (James, 1917/1956, pp150-151).
“Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content,
but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.43).
Abstract: My submission will be concerned with re-thinking the nature of our everyday social lives in
terms of how it appears to us, not as academics, as authorities functioning at an institutional centre of it —
as operating rationally within an orderly system, or a plurality of such systems — but to us when, as
ordinary people, ‘on the margins’, we must in particular moments relate ourselves to the others and
othernesses around us, practically, in a spontaneously responsive fashion, in relation to one or another
situationally shared, collective “end in view” (Dewey, 1910; Wittgenstein, 1953).
Overall, my contention will be that while what as professional academics we name as ‘dualities’,
‘dialectics’, and ‘paradoxes’ can often seem to play a major part in our intellectual lives, they have their
existence only in our thinking as after-the-fact outcomes of our feeling the need to conduct ourselves from
within pre-established, self-devised and self-imposed, orderly “thought-styles” of the institutional “thought
collective” (Fleck, 1979) into which we have been trained — they have their existence only within what we
often call ‘frameworks’, ‘perspectives’, or ‘conceptual structures’, where such ‘frameworks’ consist in a set
of logically or systematically connected basic elements, i.e., they have a ‘pictureable’ character.
Switching our way of being-in-the-world, from just looking at it from a fixed point of view (in
terms of a flat, one-eyed, 2D perspective, provided by a pre-established framework), to being in it as an
active, two-eyed, two-eared, feelingingful, embodied participant, continually having to respond —
irrespective of the ‘end in view’ at which we are aiming at in our actions — to unforeseen and unforseeable
events as we move around in a 4D (time-space) world, means that we have to re-think what is involved in
what we call our thinking. We need to distinguish between the thinking that we do deliberately, and know
of ourselves as doing, and the thinking that just happens within us (without our being aware of it) as an
emergent process, unfolding in time, giving rise at each step to a particular languageable experience
occurring within us.
Thus, out in the more everyday, non-institutional moments of our lives, when we no longer feel
‘subject to’ a particular set of institutional norms — leading us to ‘shape’ our actions in accordance with a
particular, meaning-giving, logically-structured, selective framework — in acting in a much more
spontaneously responsive manner to the exigencies of immediate circumstances, we act in a way that
requires us ‘to work out’ where we are and what is required of us ‘as we go along’. To understand this much
more spontaneously responsive way of acting, we need an account, I will argue, of the kind of thinking that
goes on, from within the step-by-step, collective emergence of the fact-constituting process at work within a
social group engaged in achieving a particular end-in-view (a kind of thinking which, in short, I will call
‘before-the-fact thinking’).
It is kind of thinking that, rather than occurring within an orderly conceptual framework, relies on,
what I will call, the embodied dialogical-hermeneutical structures of understanding we acquire as we grow
up while engaging in the myriad everyday practicalities required of us in the many different spheres of our
social lives. Thus what we come to call ‘dualities’, ‘dialectics’, and ‘paradoxes’, I want suggest, cannot be
simply ‘defined’, or ‘conceptualized’ in a simple 2D, picture-like ideal forms or structure to which they are
meant to correspond.
Consider Chomsky’s (1957) infamous example: While we can perceive that both “Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously,” and “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” are nonsense, the first is grammatically
correct nonsense while the second is nonsense tout court. As we read each sequence, word-by-word, a
sense of a unitary whole is formed by the first, but not the second. Similar is our perception of a musical
rhythm; at any moment there is only one beat to be heard; but one beat is not a rhythm. Only a whole set of
beats, all in a certain relationship to one another, constitutes the perception of rhythm. In other words, it
seems to be a very basic human capacity to combine a whole set of fragments, ‘picked up’ here then and
there now, as we continuously move around in the world, into particular unitary wholes — as when we
look hither and thither over a particular visual scene.
We can get a sense of what is happening here, I suggest, on analogy with the hermeneutical
process occurring in our reading and making sense of a particular text: The reading of the opening
sentence forms a particular, partially formed hermeneutical whole that creates a uniquely shaped,
anticipatory tension/expectation, into which our next steps in reading need to fit. And so the process
continues, with this kind of just-happening-within-us-thinking continually ‘setting the scene’ for what we
expect should happen next.
But in setting out to read a particular text, we already know its genre and already have a particular
end-in-view. But if we are to live our daily lives without continually falling into bewilderment and
confusion, we must create practical connections between aspects of people's lives and their surroundings,
as required, on the spot. This means that the primordial socio-material reality in which we live has an
ontology, that Chia (1996) calls, following Cooper (1986), who follows Bateson (1972/1987), with a “zero
degree of organization.”
This shift in our thinking, away from thinking within systematic frameworks that we try to
imposed from the outside on our everyday social lives, to trying to think from within their midst, requires
an enormous upheaval in everything we currently take for granted. It means that, as Bateson (1972/1987)
remarks: “‘Information’ and ‘form’ resemble contrast, frequency, symmetry, correspondence, congruence,
conformity, and the like in being of zero dimensions and, therefore, are not to be located” (p.416); nor can
they be thought of a ‘pictureable’ objects. They are as Gibson (1987) puts it, “formless invariants”, or as I
have put it elsewhere, ephemeral “dynamical stabilities” (Shotter, 2013) that have their existence and their
function only within the ongoing, dialogically-structured relations we have within the surrounding flow of
activities within which we have our being. In short, they are all essentially indeterminate, open to being
determined in different ways, in different contexts, according to the end-in-view of one’s thought collective
— existing only in the unfolding relations between our outgoing activities towards our current
surroundings, and their incoming results.
This means, especially, that we need to re-think the nature of language and thought, as possessing
in the moments of its use, over and above its representational function, a formative or creative function.
For, to repeat, we have the ability to create practical connections between aspects of people's lives and
their surroundings, more or less as required, on the spot. This is to privilege the role of rhetoric, the power
of words in their speaking to ‘move’ people, to motivate and to direct their situated perceptions and actions
in these moments, over that of logic — as a pre-established, representational system of signs for use in
thinking while withdrawn from, or prior to, acting. This will also lead to a re-thinking of ideology and
power: as being to do, not with ideas, but with the practical shaping (or not) — in moments when in
practical communication with others — of collective, sharable forms of life. Where it is in such moments, in
which different people meet each other in socially constructing their lives together, that political struggles
are their most intense, and where ideology can be detected at work.
As I see it, the nature of our still-in-process social lives together, and the primordial nature of its
socio-material ‘background’ — with its zero degree of organization, making the richness of our everyday
social lives possible — requires a whole new style of thought and (artistic form of) expression to bring its
nature into rational visiblity. It is towards this end that I hope to make some small contribution in this
submission.