p.6 We must notice what it is that we are already actually
doing in our relations to and with each other; we must recognize and attend to how we ourselves in fact do the work
of making sense of ourselves and our world to each other. If we can do this, then how our ways of making
sense to each other work, i.e., how and why we take each step in the unfolding sequence of 'moves' we make
in our interactions with each other, will become apparent to us.
p.16 a special kind of knowledge... It is a kind of knowing
that cannot be finalized or formalized in a set of proven theoretical statements, nor need it be to be applied; for it
shows itself only in the dynamics of our interactions with each other. Thus it is not a theoretical knowledge...
for it is a knowing, a knowledge-in-practice... it is joint knowledge, knowledge-held-in-common with others;
it is an intersubjectively shared form of knowing... the kind of knowledge one has from within a situation,
a group, social institution, or society; it is what we call a 'knowing-from."
p.17 While there are many activities in which we as individuals know what
we are doing and why, in joint action we can remain deeply ignorant as to what exactly it is that we are doing.
This is because in such joint activity, people must, in their spontaneously responsive reactions to those around them,
interlace what they do in with the activities of others. In such circumstances we remain ignorant of quite what we
are doing, not because the 'plans' or 'scripts', etc., supposedly in us somewhere informing our conduct are
too deeply buried to bring out easily into the light of day, but because they are not the major influences on our
conduct. The actions of others determine our conduct just as much as anything within ourselves. As a result, the overall outcome
of the exchange is simply not up to us. In fact, it cannot be traced back to the intentions of any individuals.
p.29 the roots or foundations of our actions are to be found generally within the unfolding
dynamics of ordinary people's everyday activities (including the uncompleted "tendencies" to action they contain)
p.37 Joint action comes into being when, in their meetings with each other, people's activities become spontaneously
and responsively intertwined or entangled with those of the others around them.
p.38 joint action produces unintended, and unpredictable outcomes... Although such a setting is unintended
by any of the individuals within it... it seems... to have... a horizon to it, that makes it 'open' to their actions...
to... 'invite' and 'motivate', their next possible actions... the 'situation' comes itself to be an agency in shaping people's
actions within it.
p.39 In other words, our joint actions can provid[e], from within themselves, the very conditions required
for their own continuation - our 'going on' within them.
p.42 We come to 'instruct' ourselves as others instruct us: They 'point things out to us'
("Look at this!"); 'change our perspective' ("look at it like this"); 'order' our actions ("Look at the model first, then
at the puzzle pieces"); ... we can form such instructions into sequences, to construct step-by-step programmes
of perception and action
p.43 what it is to have formed a concept is to have formed for ourselves, from the words
of others, a "psychological instrument" through which we can both perceive and act, i.e.,
an instrument aid in terms of which we can both 'instruct' ourselves in a program for gathering and organizing perceptual
data, as well as, for ordering and sequencing a plan of action.
p.64 If I can become familiar, say, with the nature and character of joint action
- if I can come, so to speak, to know 'my way around' inside it as a concept - I may not be able to predict exactly what will
happen... between two or more people... But my knowledge of joint action can, nevertheless, play a real part in my practical
understanding of the events occurring in such a meeting... Thus, with my knowledge of what joint action is, I
can learn both to attend knowledgeably, and to interact meaningfully, with an event of joint action even though I cannot mechanically
predict the details of its actual unfolding.
p.98 [Wittgenstein] "try not to think of understanding as a 'mental process' at all... But ask yourself:
in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, 'Now I know how to go on'..." (1953, no.154).
p.117 as we have seen in relation to the phenomenon in joint action, or in dialogically-structured
activities - in which participants are unable to separate out their own contributions from the overall intertwined
activities involved - it is quite usual for participants to have no conscious grasp of the unfolding details of the
interplay involved.
p.130-131 such moments... we call them 'striking'... moments. Such moments seem to matter
to us in that, in our lived experience of them, they [unfold] in such a way as to accommodate novelty
or to resolve a difficulty. In other words, in conjunction with what earlier we called difficulties of orientation
or relational difficulties, such 'striking' moments seem to provide us with the kind of exemplars we need,
in moments of disorientation on encountering something unexpected, to remind us ways of relating or modes of orientation,
or styles of address, that might be helpful in re-orienting us.
p.131 now has no place in a narrative account except as a point of reference. In a narrative, the
now that is being talked about has already happened. It puts past and future nows in relation. It is not
a direct experience. Only the telling is happening now
p.131 "Vitality affects emerge as the moment unfolds," says Stern (2004).
p.160-161 Bakhtin (1986) nicely captures some aspects of the special nature of what I call the "spontaneous
responsiveness" at work in our untroubled ways of understanding each other. In such circumstances, he suggests that: "All
real and integral understanding is actively responsive... 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. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution,
and so forth..." (p.69).
p.175 a major feature of joint action is its creation of once-occurrent outcomes, unintended by
any of the participants, and it is the creation of these ephemeral entities which can provide us both with transitory
understandings and action guiding anticipations of what next might happen
p.183 As we have seen, if we can enter into living, dialogically-structured
relations with such human beings, events, or circumstances, and allow them to call out spontaneous reactions
from us, then an engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us from within the unfolding dynamics of
such relationships - a kind of understanding that is utterly unavailable to us if we adopt only
a monological approach to them and treat them as dead forms.
p.184 Lacking in our purely intellectual relations to our surroundings,
but central to our experiences in withness-thinking, is the 'shaped' and 'vectored' sense of our moment-by-moment
changing placement or position within our current surroundings to which it can give rise. Indeed,
just as we can gain in our practical perceptions, as we move around within a situation, a sense of where
we now are within the circumstances with which we must deal, along with both anticipations as to what might next happen to
us as well as with certain 'action-guiding-anticipations' as to what actions we next might take, so can we do this within
our thinking. This is, I think, what Wittgenstein (1953) means when he says that the kinds of difficulties that concern
him have the form: "I don't know my way about" (no.123), and the criterion of them being overcome, is a person both being
able to say, "Now I can go on," and in fact being able to go on in a way others can recognize as appropriate.
p.184 we need to remind ourselves that it is only through a process,
essentially, of creative discovery that, when we experience a need, we do not at first know what it is that will satisfy it.
We must cast around to discover, while being guided by variations in degrees to which we feel satisfied, what in fact will
alleviate it. Thus this cannot be found by comparing an objectively represented, desired state of affairs with objective
in one's surroundings - for no such well-defined, desired state of affairs exists. It is thus a specific, concrete, bodily
felt need that structures our first-time explorations, and it is the satisfaction of this specific need that is experienced
as the discovery of what we needed all along.
p.188 the kind of learning involved here begins by our being spontaneously "struck by" an event... it can
begin with our noticing... "a difference that makes a difference to us."
p.196 The path into the future is often "not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction"
(p.3). Thus the task we face here, on the edge, cannot be planned ahead of time, for the relevant
features influencing each step only become present to us as we take each step, as we bodily move around within our
surroundings. Thus, we must always create the relevant, sequentially unfolding ways of relating ourselves
to events in our circumstances for another next first time from within what I have called "the interactive
moment."
p.196 Clearly, the explorations in this book have been oriented in a quite different direction:
toward overcoming orientational or relational difficulties - difficulties that we have to overcome, perhaps in a step
by step manner, but certainly in the course of creating (dialogical) ways of 'going on' with the
others around us, when we are all (both they and us) are oriented toward finding ways to resolve a unique
practical difficulty we happen to face at a particular moment in the living of our lives together.
p.208 As I see it, one of its [joint action] major features is the creation of unique, once-occurrent outcomes,
unintended by any of the participants.
