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p.1 In our living contacts with an other or otherness, then, our
mere surroundings are transformed into ‘a world’, or at least, into a partially shared world that we sense ourselves
as being in along with the others and othernesses around us. And besides having an ethics and politics to
it – besides our having expectations within it as to how the others around us should treat us and are likely to treat
us – our partially shared world has, we feel, a unique culture to it. For each of us, it is full of a certain
set of interconnected ‘things’ (seemingly) that matter to us, that have certain values for us, and in relation
to which we each take on a certain identity and adopt a certain stance
p.2 Joint action: As living beings, as open systems, we cannot
not be responsive to events happening around us. In such a sphere of spontaneously responsive activity as this, instead
of one person first acting individually and independently of an other, and then the second replying, by acting individually
and independently of the first, we act jointly, as a collective-we. In other words, instead
of inter-acting, we intra-act, i.e., we act from within a dialogic
situation, and ‘it’ is a crucial influence in how we act... when someone acts, their activity
cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for a person’s acts are, among other influences, partly ‘shaped’
by the acts of the others around them – this is what makes joint actions, dialogical intra-actions so
special: they are continuously creative of new responses, both to their circumstances and to each other.
To the extent that the overall outcome of a joint action is not up
to any of the individuals concerned in it, its outcomes can seem to have ‘come out of the blue’.
p.2 As Bakhtin (1986) sees it,
"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). And 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" (p.69).
p.3 it is our actual or imagined ways of relating ourselves
to each other – what, as we have seen, Wittgenstein calls our "forms of life" – that are the basis for
our ways of talking, which ultimately provide us with our ways of thinking. These are the constraints
we must take into account and struggle with in attempting to answer for ourselves; we cannot just respond
as we please.
p.4 Bakhtin (1981) puts the issue thus:
"Every word is directed toward an answer and
cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates. 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" (p.280).
p.4 Thus we cannot, unless we are uttering the mere formulaic
repetition of a fact, issuing an official command, or expressing some other entirely conventional utterance, simply
utter a sequence of pre-decided words. For, to emphasize the seemingly paradoxical point already made above yet again,
we cannot know ahead of time exactly what words we need to utter to achieve our desires. The ‘something’
we desire, the ‘lack’ we are trying to remedy, cannot already be known to us in its practicalities, i.e., its
character, in these circumstances. We must – with the aid of the others around us – search
to discover, step-by-step, what it is that will satisfy the impulse to act we feel.
p.7 Our understandings of what reality is,
and what it is to be objective, are a consequence not the cause of our obligations to and respect
of others. Indeed, what Goffman (1967) confronts us with here, is not simply a difference between the intra-actional order
and other kinds of social order, but with something so fundamental that
without it, we cannot be ourselves. For in fact, we owe the very possibility of our having a life of our own to the dialogical responsiveness of those others toward us.
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