p.136 We cannot, I think, plan genuine innovative
change, but we can prepare ourselves for it. Indeed, we can go further, we can occasion it, in the
sense of ‘setting the scene’ for the happening of change. We can prepare ourselves by gaining some detailed,
first hand experience of the actual situation in which the change is required. We can prepare ourselves also by learning
what might be relevant ‘descriptive concepts,’ that is, concepts which can be used to ‘remind’ (Wittgenstein
1953: �127) us of specific events and features in that situation that might be of importance, that might otherwise
pass us by unnoticed.
p.136 there are two very different kinds of difficulties that
we can face in life. Some are intellectual difficulties that we can formulate as problems and can solve by the application
of clever and methodical thought. Others, as I see it, are difficulties of orientation or of relationship, to do with
the kind of expectations with which we approach and relate ourselves to a particular situation, expectations
that work selectively to influence what we notice and what we are prepared to respond to.
p.139 I want to describe in some detail ways of speaking in which
we make use of poetic metaphors, images, direct quotations of an other’s talk, special modes of intonation,
use of pauses and many other vocal devices for influencing the way in which a listener is influenced, not in their
thinking, but in how they pay attention to events in their surroundings.
p.139 what I want to suggest here is that, only if we are prepared to live
‘on the edge’, that is, in the present moment, in the midst of complexity, can we find the new openings, the new
possibilities we need to truly bring about innovative change. Not only shall I make this claim in this chapter, but I shall
also try to describe what is actually entailed in doing so.
p.139-140 as Kundera (1993: 129, emphasis original) notes, currently,
given our present modes of factual and rational expression, ‘the concreteness of the present - as a phenomenon
to consider, as a structure, is for us a unknown planet: so we can neither
hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination’. This is so because it is still emerging
- that is what makes it so difficult for us to speak of its nature.
p.140 if we are to concern ourselves with describing emergent
phenomena, not as observers of them from the outside, but from within them while participating in their emergence,
then we must concern ourselves with ‘... meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt...’
(Williams 1977). We must concern ourselves with things that cannot be counted, that cannot be represented in the discrete
symbols of a logical theory that cannot be manipulated experimentally. We must capture in some way the character of
social experiences still in process
p.142 intrinsic to all living activities, is their spontaneous responsiveness
to events occurring in their surroundings.
p.143 it is the way which persons look or listen that in
large part determines what they will hear or see. Hearing something, or seeing something, is an outcome, an achievement,
of how they approach the tasks of listening or looking, what anticipations they have brought, as a result of their preparations,
to the situation in which what they can hear or see is important.
p.144 we must return to talking always from within a
context or situation. If we can, then say, as Wittgenstein (1953: �435) puts it, ‘nothing is hidden’.
Everything that we need to witness, if we are to understand the working of our communicative activities ‘lies
open to view’ (ibid.: �435). In other words, as Schumacher (1977) notes, while the instructional sciences
are concerned with how certain things can be manipulated to produce certain kinds of result, that is, they are based
on evidence produced in experimental conditions, the descriptive disciplines primarily concerned with what can in
fact be seen or otherwise experienced in everyday life settings.
p.148 Central to our living out our lives from within the midst
of complexity, is the task of acting for the best in this or that unique,
concrete situation. While the instructional sciences deal with situations in general, and seek theories representative
of the ‘logic’ of the repetitive patterns that can be perceived as occurring within them, the fact is, as Harold
Garfinkel (1967: 9) so nicely termed it, in our everyday lives, everything always happens ‘for “another
first time”’
p.149 in our everyday dealings with each other, only once occurring,
first time events are the rule rather than the exception. Or, to put it in the terms already introduced above, we
must deal with emergent phenomena... emergent phenomena are produced in interactions between two or more agencies in
such a way that we cannot discover, from an examination of their outcomes, the part or parts played by each separate
agency in their production.
p.150 I want to talk in relation to complexity ‘from the inside’.
Thus I will not at all be concerned with explanations (especially ones of a generalised kind). I want to work ‘from
within the midst’ of an already existing circumstance, towards ‘evolving’, ‘unfolding’ or ‘articulating’
the particular potentialities for development implicit in that circumstance in relation to the ‘ends
in view’ of all those involved in it. My concerns will thus be of a quite local and particular kind. As I indicated
above, for us to do this, to gain a ‘feel for’ what is involved in ‘seeing’ what to do from
within the midst of complexity, we must be especially attentive to the practicalities involved... to notice, and
to be ready to respond to, certain kinds of subtle events that usually pass us by unnoticed, events
that are (possibly) conducive to the development of new ways in which people might relate or
orient themselves both to each other and to other features in their surroundings. But to
do this, we must somehow gain a sense of a ‘something’ that,
at the moment of acting, is still invisible to us, still in an unrealised state.
Our task is thus to approach each new circumstance with an appropriate readiness, an appropriate openness,
ready to allow that ‘something’ to ‘call out’ from us appropriate embodied anticipations as
to how we next might act in relation to ‘it’. Thus central to our functioning in this sphere
of activity is our ability to sense, so to speak, the ‘shape’
of a circumstance, in everyday parlance to ‘intuit’ its character - what is involved in our doing
this, to feel our way forward, will occupy much of our attention
p.153 As people coordinate their activity in with the activities
of others, and ‘respond’ to them in what they do, what they as individuals desire and what actually results
in their exchanges, are often two very different things. In short, such joint action produces unintended and
unpredictable outcomes.
p.158 Crucial to ‘deep’ change happening, that
is, changes in how our more basic skills are ‘glued’ together in constituting more complex skills, is
the occurrence of events that ‘touch’, ‘move’, or ‘strike’ us in such a way that we respond,
spontaneously, in a bodily manner, in a new way. Suddenly, something unexpected, unanticipated, ‘shows us’
a new, previously unnoticed possibility. Such events give us a new feeling
p.159 At each unfolding step of our everyday, routine, taken-for-granted
actions, our lookings and listenings, and so on, it is our anticipation of what might occur next,
and where as a result we might go next, that is crucial. This is what makes our actions routinely skillful. As we
‘gaze’ at a ‘something’ in Foucault’s (1973) sense of the term, we look from one expected feature
of it to another, to see if ‘it’ conforms to what we want to see... Accidents can occur when we
think we already know, that is, can anticipate, everything of relevance in the situations
in which we work.
p.160 Striking, touching, moving, arresting events
can compel our attention, can direct our attention towards aspects of our
surroundings that we have not before noticed.
p.160 An otherness that can enter us and
make us other than we already are, is needed if we are to undergo any ‘deep’ changes within ourselves. I will
call such striking events, events that matter to us, to distinguish them from events that
we observe, but which leave us quite unchanged in our ways of being in the world.
p.161 how can we prepare ourselves to be open to such mattering events,
and keep ourselves open?
p.161 Clearly, we possess a spontaneously operative, embodied, perceptual
mode of understanding, an understanding of the specific field of possibilities in which we are, in each changing
moment, embedded. For without it, we would lack all orientation. In other words, it is a kind of
understanding to do, not with facts or information, but with our grasp of what kind of
context we are in, with what our surroundings require of us, with the
‘calls’ they exert upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways - a kind of knowing
that shows up in our readiness to respond in a particular way, spontaneously, to a unique and particular
circumstance. It is a readiness that shows up in how we next act in a situation ‘to put an end
to the ambiguity of its merely anticipated, suspected, character’ (Todes 2001: 64).
p.162-163 Wittgenstein (1980a: 17) notes that there are
two very different kinds of difficulties we can face in our lives: difficulties of the intellect,
and difficulties of the will. We can formulate difficulties of the intellect as problems
which, with the aid of clever theories, we can solve by the use of reasoning. Difficulties of the will,
however, are of a quite different kind. For they are to do with how we orient ourselves
bodily towards events occurring around us, how we relate ourselves to them, the ways in
which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them - for these are the ways that determine,
that ‘give shape to’, the lines of action we further resolve on carrying out. But we must
do all this while we are already in action, in motion, in spontaneous responsive contact with our surroundings.
p.164 conventional [social science] research insists on portraying actors
as choosing and reflecting on already existing achievements (see section on ‘Category mistakes...’ above),
rather than as struggling to organise and sequence the tasks involved in
the very making/ doing of an activity, successfully, for ‘another first time’ (Garfinkel 1967: 9).
p.165 What traditional [social science] research misses, and must
always miss, in taking the events depicted in its objective transcripts or records as representative of already completed
activities, are not only the invisible action guiding anticipations (Shotter 2005) felt by
each of the participants, moment by moment, as they judge how best to take the next step in developing or progressing an activity
towards its desired end, but also all the other ‘background’ features of our embodied perceptions of our current
circumstances. Thus the way in which our judgments are tailored to the momentary local circumstances in which they
are made - taking all those background features into account - is rendered invisible. We ‘lose the phenomena,’
to repeat Garfinkel’s (2002) phrase mentioned above.
p.166 how can we prepare ourselves afresh to approach yet
another uniquely new, complex situation, for yet another first time? ...our task here, is not ‘to hunt out
new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we... want to understand something that is already
in plain view. For this is what we seem in some senses not to understand’ ...To keep what we want to understand
in plain view, we too must do that by assembling for ourselves here the appropriate reminders.
p.167 our aim has been to arrive at a grasp from within of dynamically
unfolding phenomena that we can sense as occurring only in the course of our meetings with the others and othernesses
around us... we must focus on certain special but rare, transitory experiences that can provide us with ‘openings’
in which new steps can be taken, the ‘striking’ moments when an otherness that matters to us can enter
us and make us other than we ‘are’ already - only if we can be sensitive to the new opportunities offered
us in these rare moments, can we avoid simply relating ourselves yet again to our surroundings in our old ways ‘dressed
up’ in new forms.
p.170 The task is to capture the concreteness of the present moment.
p.170 our task in capturing the concreteness of the present moment, is...
to create... moments of kairos, of times in relation to circumstances, as a series of juxtaposed ‘presents’,
of fragmentary events that in their occurrence motivate a sequence of tensions that those who experience them must resolve
into meaningful wholes.
p.172 each striking moment is quite unique, a singularity,
a first-time event. We need a way of characterising the kind of influences they exert on us both in
shaping our actions at the moment of their occurrence, and in providing memorable resources that we can draw on in
different ways at a later date. This is the function of the descriptive concepts I have outlined. Their task is to
illuminate the general features of such unique events.
p.173 I have been concerned to describe in some detail, what might
be involved in working out (in practice, not in theory) how to act ‘from within the midst’ of an actual, already
existing circumstance, to ‘develop’, ‘refine’, ‘evolve’, or ‘unfold’ further
‘its’ particular potentialities for development in relation to what our ‘end in
view’ might be in that particular circumstance. But to do this, as we have seen, we must somehow gain
a sense of a ‘something’ that, at the moment of acting, is still invisible
to us, that is, available to us only as a feeling, a possibility, a felt tendency
in a still unrealised state. Our task is thus to prepare ourselves to approach each new circumstance
with an appropriate readiness, an appropriate openness, ready to allow that
‘something’ to ‘call out’ from us appropriate embodied anticipations as to
how next to act in relation to ‘it’. My concern, then, in all the remarks making up the different sections
in this chapter, is thus to do with ways of disciplining or of composing ourselves to act
in this spontaneous fashion, and to do with appropriate preparing activities conducive
to our coming to embody relevant readinesses. They are not at all concerned with making plans. They
are also concerned with ways of ... acting... that can exert a formative or an organisational influence
within our practical collaborative activities as they unfold or emerge in this, that, or another
particular surrounding.
