Sheep do have Opinions

Extracts from the article, Sheep do have opinions, by Vinciane Despret on the work of Thelma Rowell.

The twenty-third bowl is part of a device that, in Bruno Latour's tems, should give all the chances to the sheep: It should allow them to be more interesting.

The way we study primates is rather different from the way classical ethology was carried out, with long-term research, individual-based studies looking for relationships, looking for ways of communication.

Interesting research is research on the conditions that make something interesting.

Long-lasting relations between mothers and daughters were so obvious that she wanted to find out in which situations these relations were not maintained. She discovered that this was usually the case when the daughters had their own lambs. Rowell thus inverted the question: instead of, "Are ewes capable of maintaining bonds with their daughters?" she asked "in which particular circumstances do they not do so?"

our results show that such-an-such a variable determines such-and-such an event, and its absence leads to its disappearance. In Rowell's work this question rises from a downstream position to an upstream one, loses its status as a variable and becomes a condition:

"in which conditions are we most likely to be able to make visible that which hitherto could not exist?"

"What are the conditions that sheep require to expand their repertoire of behaviors?"

"How are we going to afford them the opportunity to give us the chance to talk differently about them?"

The question here is which of these two hypotheses is the most interesting: that of an animal strictly determined by its hormones and by hierarchical rules, fighting blindly for problems of competition, or that of an animal articulating its body to other bodies, in a spirit of both competition and coordination to invent a solution to several problems? this is certainly a political choice ... it is political in the sense of posing the problem of the collective that we form: Do we prefer living with predictable sheep of with sheep that surprise us and that add other definitions to what 'being social' means? .. I think the cooperation is much more interesting. And this is the thing that makes the social living animals different and interesting, which we all agree that they are.

Today  these methods are criticized because most of them are criticized because most of them accentuate competition among animals, which are often not provided with enough resources compared to their numbers. Consequently, that which was designed to make visible not only restricts the repertoire of animals observed but also considerably  disrupts the way in which they organize themselves.

The twenty-third bowl is meaningful in relation to this problem. it is intended not only to avoid disrupting relations but also, above all, to expand the repertoire of hypotheses and questions proposed to the sheep.

The idea is not to prevent them from entering into competition around the supply of food; it is to leave them the choice of doing so, to ensure that competition is not the only possible response to a proposition. If the sheep chooses competition, the hypothesis of scarcity of a resource can no longer account for their behavior. It is then necessary to conceive of other, more complicated explanations and to ask the sheep other questions on their social behavior. To be sure, there is competition, but expanding the repertoire of possible motives allows far more sophisticated explanations.

The role of this ethology is legible in this emblematic twenty-third bowl: it is responsible for inventing, with the generosity of intelligence, polite ways of entering into relationships with non-humans.

Social poetics and Dialogical approach

Extracts from Daniel W Clarke' PhD thesis work:
Social Poetics of Place Making

Cunliffe notes that this is where the difference between social poetics and linguistics lies: whereas social poetics focuses on these taken-for-granted relationships, linguistics studies the relationship of various elements of language. For Cunliffe (2002: 129), social poetics is a research “practice” that “attempts to embrace and enact a dialogical approach ”. The five reminders are:

• the use of metaphors, images, and analogies that allow or provoke us into seeing
  connections
• the use of instructive forms o f talk to move others, such as “do this,” “look at that,”
  “listen ,” and “fin sh this by tomorrow ”
• forms of talk that reveal possibilities or new ways of connecting: “imagine,” “suppose we
  look at it like this,” and “think what would happen if . . . ?”
• the use of gestures: pointing, shrugging, and thumping the desk as we speak
• the use of comparisons, different language games, or juxtaposing words or phrases in
  unusual ways, so that we are struck or moved to see new connections

Towards an Ontological Social Constructionism

Some extracts from John Shotter's talk:

“What we come to form, and thereafter understand (both the formed and the forming), emerge from us being in language in conversations in movements in relationships in culture in nature (we do not have language etc ‘in us’). The Being ‘in’ these various ins can best be understood by letting ‘the feeling that comes’ (by being in these various ins) create its own metaphors, and let those metaphors be part of the language one searches through in order to find a meaning.” (Tom Andersen, no date).

In this, Tom’s thinking was, we might say, comprehensively ‘ecological’ –

from Bakhtin (1986) – one of the originators of the whole dialogical approach to human relations:
“An utterance,” he says,
“is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable... But something created is always created out of something given... What is given is completely transformed in what is created” (pp.119-120).

 ‘deep’ changes in that they are not just changes in what we ‘think about’, they are not to do with learning some new and previously unknown facts or bits of information, but changes in what ‘we think with’, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward our surroundings, and as a result – as Tom might put it – to find ourselves immersed ‘in’ a situation quite different from what we felt ourselves to be ‘in’ previously.

 there are two kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one: There are those kind of difficulties that we might, following Wittgenstein (1980), call “difficulties of the intellect” (p.17). These are difficulties that we can formulate (or form) as problems and solve by constructing an appropriate theoretical system within which to ‘think them through’. But overcoming orientational or relational difficulties requires a quite different approach... and that, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of our difficulty:
What actually is involved in our approaching a situation or circumstance that we at first find quite bewildering or confusing or dis-orienting?
 Wittgenstein (1980) calls these kind of difficulties, “difficulties of the will” (p.17) – making use of a word, I venture to surmise, with a very bad press among us here in this conference. But by it, he means, he says, to draw attention to “what people want to see” (p.17), what it is they look for or expect to see as they begin to try to get a sense of ‘where’ they ‘are’, and how they might ‘go on’ within the situation within which they ‘find themselves’.

 a basic bodily need for orientation that is continually at work within us; we need to know ‘where’ we are, ‘what’ actually ‘is’ the situation that we are ‘in’. Thus, the “whole quest of discovery is thus initially... ‘directed’ not to get what we want but to discover what we want to get”(p.177).

[trad psycho.] It has only discovered there what happens when men are led to behave as if they are rats, machines, information channels, etc.... Constructing a true image of ourselves demands a radically different approach,”

. We need first to be ‘introduced’ to them, to meet them face-to-face’, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole range of our actions in our relations to them.


Learning theory-talk, on the other hand, is like learning a second language. It is not concerned with things and activities as they are in themselves; its function is not to help those confronted with raw appearances make a first sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which things and events, which already make one kind of sense to us, may be talked of as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be – for instance, a theorist might tell us that what we talk of as ‘love’ is really ‘object cathexis’.

a theory is of use to third-person outsiders, standing over against and uninvolved in the personal situation of the first- and second-persons. Thus, rather than being context-dependent and personal, theoretical talk, strictly, must be context-free and impersonal. Consequently, these really rather strange and unusual forms of talk must always be accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how they should be understood and put to use; in other words, we must be especially taught, as specialists, to put our everyday ways of understanding and acting on one side, and to function as our theories require.

Wittgenstein,
shows us how easily we can (mis)recognize the unique what-ness of the things or events before us: how, for example, we can treat something that is a living and still developing organism as if it was something dead and finished, how we can treat something that arouses an anticipatory response in us (a tense feeling of expectation) as simply presenting us with a picture (an image, shape, or form) that requires our ‘interpretation’, and so on

Descartes:
thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78). It bothers me for one very obvious reason: It is aimed at the exploitation of Nature, not in our own interests, but for our own desires. This might be excusable in our search for energy resources, for instance, but when other people are studied for ‘the uses fro which they are appropriate’, the unethical nature of this aim is clear.

In line with our ‘separatist’, Cartesian forms of thought, it is only too easy for us to think of ourselves as occupying the world, with the earth beneath us and the sky above (as depicted in (a) above). But a world that is merely occupied, he argues, “is furnished with already-existing things;” whereas, one that is inhabited, within which we and many others exist as living beings, “is woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being” (p.1797).  He calls such a world, which, as such, is still coming into being (as depicted in (b) above), a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, intermingle, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, “the weather world.” I will just call it a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.

, if I was allowed only one word in which to express what I think to be most important in our lives together, it would be the word: responsiveness. But if I was allowed to add another word to it, I would say spontaneous responsiveness, or to offer a whole phrase, I would say that it is the way that our living, bodily responsiveness to the movements and  activities the others and othernesses around us that is expressive of the meaning of those movements and activities to us, and thus crucial to our being able to communicate with each other

• That there are two kinds of difficulties in life, not just one, and that before we can turn to solving problems, we need to gain orientation, to gain a sense of what in fact is the situation we are in;
• That the search for repetitive patterns can be misleading, each new circumstance we confront is uniquely itself and we need to meet it face-to-face, so to speak, to become acquainted with it; 4. That as result of the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, we can learn about events and happenings in our surroundings that we can learn in no other way;
• – but we must be careful, words are not innocent, and no single metaphor can capture all its aspects (and metaphors conceal as well as reveal);
• That, as a consequence of all of this, we must give up Descartes’ nice clear and distinct idea of a world of ‘matter in motion according to laws’, and embrace the very strange, flowing, turbulent world of our everyday lives in which we, like plants growing from a seeds, have our existence within a special confluence of flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are continually working to organize, to intertwine or to ‘orchestrate’ into the unbelievably complex forms of our human achievements and behaviours to come.
• All his life, Tom retained his disquiets with what seemed to be finished and finalized stabilities in our treatment of others: What other ways might be open to us? What might we do instead? And those disquiets have motivated me also – and indeed, I venture to suggest, that same restlessness, that need to know: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (Gauguin’s questions) still sits with us all here in this hall, now.

Difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

In exploring it – the choice to stop doing something along with the spontaneous emergence, i.e., the non-choice, of a better alternative to it – I want to distinguish between two kinds of difficulties we can face in our practical affairs: What Wittgenstein (1980) called difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems, for as we shall see, talk of problems is much more to do with arriving at answers to clear questions, while talk of difficulties is more to do with overcoming confusions and disorientations in practical life.  

We can formulate difficulties of the intellect, then, as problems which, with the aid of clever theories or appropriate frameworks of thought, we can solve by the use of reasoning, by rational methods. Difficulties of the will, however, are quite different. For they are to do with how we need to find a way of relating ourselves (bodily, i.e., sensitively and emotionally) to the others and othernesses around us, how we orient ourselves or take up an attitude or stance towards them, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for it is these ways that determine what possibilities for action we can perceive in the situation we are in, they determine or ‘give shape’ to the lines of action we finally resolve on carrying out. And unlike the static contemplative thinker, we must do all this from within our engaged activity with the others and othernesses we encounter within the situation of our action, either actual or imagined.

> (1) First, problem-solving: Approaching a newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved requires us to first analyze it into a set of identifiable elements; we must then find a pattern or order amongst them; and then hypothesize a hidden agency responsible for the order (call it, the working of certain rules, principles, or laws, or the working of a story or narrative). We then seek further evidence for its influence, thus to enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system. We go on to make use of such theories in giving shape to our actions. In other words, we manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce an advantageous outcome which we call ‘the solution’ to our problem, and we then turn ‘to apply’ the theory elsewhere.

As investigators, we ourselves remain unchanged in the process; we remain outside and separate from the other or otherness we are investigating; rather than being engaged or involved in with it we are ‘set over against’ it; in acquiring extra knowledge about it – in the form of facts or information – we gain mastery over it. // in fact no

(2) Alternatively, in resolving on a line of action: Instead of immediately trying to analyze it into its elements, we can treat the other or otherness as a being that is still radically unknown to us, and, by ‘opening’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved’ by it, we can ‘enter into’ a living, dialogically-structured relationship with it – In other words, we can become involved or engaged in an active, back and forth relationship, with it, a relationship in which, if we go slowly, and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion to take place, we can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape’, the ‘invisible landscape of possibilities’ confronting us to become “visibly-rational” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii) to us.

- We enter a new situation; (3 secs)

- We are confused, bewildered, we don’t know our way about; (3 secs)

- However, as we ‘dwell in’ it, as we ‘move around’ within the confusion, a ‘something’, an ‘it’ begins to emerge;(3 secs)

- It emerges in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the dynamic relations we can sense between our outgoing activities and their incoming results; (3 secs)

- An image comes to us, we find that we can express this ‘something’ in terms of an image; (3 secs)

- But not so fast, for we can find another, and another image, and another – Wittgenstein uses a city, a toolbox, the controls in the driving cab of a train, and many different types of games, all as metaphors for different aspects of our experiences of the use of language (3 secs)....

Having gone through a number of images, we can come to a sense of the landscape of possibilities giving rise to them. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes, that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on ways of going on within them.   

But the process of resolving cannot simply be a matter of calculation, it involves judgement, a moving around on the landscape of possibilities, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and judging which one (or combination of moves) best resolves the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – for, to repeat, we are operating here, not in the realm of actualities but of possibilities.

while we can decide very precisely what not to do, resolving on a new line of action, gathering together all the relevant features of the now new situation one faces, takes judgement – for, to repeat, we have to consider, not facts, but possibilities. And a moment of judgement – the 3 to 5 second ‘present’ moment of a judgment (Stern, 2004) – entails, I want to suggest, some judgemental work, work in which we go out, imaginatively and feelingfully, to relate ourselves to various aspects of our current circumstances, aspect-by-aspect, sequentially, over time, with the aim of gathering them all together into what we might call an inner landscape of possibilities. Only once we have done this, only when we know our “way about” within such a landscape can we feel some confidence in “going on” (Wittgenstein, 1953).


It is what the nature of that imaginative judgmental work feels like, looks like, and sounds like that, if time allowed, I would like to discuss further. For, I would want to claim, that coming to act in a way that seems to be for the best in a particular situation is not something we can decide upon simply within ourselves, we must turn towards the now new situation to which we have chosen to relate ourselves, and open ourselves to being spontaneously responsive to it – if we can do that, we will then find that various crucial happenings simply will occur quite spontaneously in the complex processes at work in the emergence of alternatives.

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

, we need to recognize that we face two kinds of difficulty in our lives: those of the intellect and those of the will (Wittgenstein, 1980), difficulties we can formulate as problems which we can solve by creating a priori frameworks or perspectives in terms of which to ‘work out’ solutions, and orientational or relational difficulties require a different, hermeneutical-phronetic approach, aimed at resolving on a line of action. Resolving or overcoming difficulties of this kind requires us to exercise judgment in conducting a kind of inner imaginative work, work aimed at exploring the unique details of our current situation in terms of criteria appropriate to the different dimensions of our concerns, and with gathering them all together into a common focus. Such work involves a process to do both with ways of paying attention (listening, noticing, being open to being ‘touched’, etc.) to contextual details, and with negotiating, in dialogue with others, a line of action recognized by them to be both intelligible, legitimate, and ‘fitting’ in the situation in question.

Attention to such issues as these is not at all easy to sustain, for it entails our trying to capture things ‘in motion’, which means trying to capture them while they are on the way to being other than they already are – in other words, we cannot easily name the things of our concern, for they have the character of, as William James (1890) put it a long time ago, “signs of direction in thought”.
However, although we cannot easily name them, we “nevertheless,” says James, “have an acutely discriminative sense” (p.253) of their direction and ‘shape’. Indeed, as I have outlined elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), they continually give rise both to the happening of “transitory understandings” and “action guiding anticipations.”

Indeed, once we turn in this direction, once we adopt this practice-based approach – and move away from the static thinking subject towards the active, moving around agent – we realize that we can face a kind of difficulty very different from that of solving intellectual puzzles. The image we need is, I think, something like this: It is as if we are living and trying gain our orientation, our ‘at homeness’ in our surroundings, while always living within a thick fog, and we must work like blind persons in terms of ‘touchings’ rather than in terms of ‘seeings’. However, what we have to gain a sense of through our touchings and feelings, is not of what actual objects are there before us, but of the possibilities these actualities present to us for our next possible steps.

In exploring the character of this tense restlessness further – and the way in which it involves the choice of stopping doing something, along with the non-choice, spontaneous emergence of a better alternative to it – I want explore what Wittgenstein (1980) calls difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) further – and I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems


: the need to work within a landscape of possibilities, as well as actualities

Remembering the motivations of cultural probes

Some extracts from the original text by Gaver et al.

• Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
• None of these tasks (or any of the others we used) produced returns that were easy to interpret, much less analyze. How could you compare two photographs, even if you knew both were meant to show “the spiritual centre of the home?”
• Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint.
• When we finally receive the results it is clear that they are incomplete, unclear, and biased. We do not ask volunteers to explain their responses. Instead, we value the mysterious and elusive qualities of the uncommented returns themselves. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
• We are forced into a situation that calls for our own subjective interpretations. We have to see our volunteers in terms of our own experiences, understanding their responses empathetically, not intellectually.
• Rather than producing lists of facts about our volunteers, the Probes encourage us to tell stories about them, much as we tell stories about the people we know in daily life. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
• the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences.

• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising. 
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring. 
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns. 
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.

We like this analogy. If Probes are collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time, then “probology” is an approach that uses Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design. We accept that Probes, the technique, may be appropriated for a variety of different ends. We hope, however, that other researchers and designers will embrace “probology” as well as Probes in pursuing design for everyday pleasure.

Opening up to possibilities rather than probabilities: A relational constructionist approach

Extracts from Hosking and Pluut's original text:
(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach

relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity:
(a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question
(b) how are we ‘going on’ together, and therefore paying attention to
(c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so
(d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims.

 

• Our relational constructionist meta-theory implies that the processes that some call “research” are processes in which the identities of researcher, research object and related realities are in ongoing re-construction.
•  The centring of construction invites a view of research as intervention, the centring of relating implies that ethics and responsibility be re-constructed and centred e.g., through reflexive dialogues, and talk of multiple forms of life invites attention to multiple local ways of knowing and “power to.”
• Research as intervention:
• our relational premises imply that participating in inquiry inevitably (re)constructs peoples' lives in some degree (McNamee, 1994) and imply that all participants – including scientific researchers – construct and reconstruct their local (community-based) knowledges, identities and relations. From this it follows that research may be practised in ways that construct researchers as copractitioners and practitioners as co-researchers (Cunliffe & Shotter, 2006). Viewing research (or, as we prefer to call it, inquiry) as intervention, and shifting reflexive attention to the research process itself, enables a relational conception of ethics and responsibility.

• Relational ethics/ Relation responsibility
• our relational premises imply that inquiry is intervention.
• Sheila McNamee speaks of this as a matter of relational (rather than individual) responsibility (McNamee, 2004) – relational responsibility for the research process – and the kinds of people and worlds it (re)produces.

• Ongoing Reflexive Dialogues Directed at the Research Process
• Gergen outlined three important "overtures to innovation."
• deconstruction - “wherein all presumptions of the true, the rational, and the good are open to suspicion” (Gergen, 1994, p. 62).
• democratization or "relational responsibility",
• reconstruction – “wherein new realities and practices are fashioned for cultural transformation” (Gergen, 1994, p. 63).

• Reflexive dialogues are a way of putting these "overtures" to work in research. This can be done by inviting communal reflection (Gergen & Gergen, 1991) throughout the inquiry.

• Reporting strategies:
• Meta-theoretical assumptions offer a different view – the process is the product (Brown & Hosking, 1986)
• Alternatively, the style, form and content of the reporting strategy can be more open and, for example, oriented towards processes, possibilities and generative theorising.
• Another possibility is that full and equal participation is attempted in the
  writing of the report. Participative research practices can be extended to include "cogenerated reports" (Allard-Poesi, 2005)
• Notions of symmetry: all research participants to share responsibility for learning.
• Instead it becomes an ongoing relational process of “turning back” on the construction
  of the ”inquiry.” Reflexive dialogues, directed at the research process, can open up
  new ways of going on together by mobilizing local knowledges and communally
  reflecting on research identities and relations.
• These dialogues can all be considered attempts to construct soft self-other differentiation. In this way reflexivity is not a slide into infinite regress, but an opening up to multiple local forms of life and to possibilities rather than probabilities (Gergen, 1994; Hosking, 2008).

Expressing and legitimating ‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:

Expressing and legitimating‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

"In this paper I distinguish between two kinds of speech/writing: ‘withness (dialogic)’ -talk and ‘aboutness (monologic)’ -talk . Crucial in this distinction is our spontaneous, expressive, living, bodily responsiveness.While monological aboutness-talk is unresponsive to the activities of the others around us, dialogical withness-talk is not. In being spontaneously responsive both to the expressions of others, as well as our own, as I show in the paper, it engenders in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do"

"To turn to Bakhtin’s (1986) contribution first: He introduces us to the idea of a previously unnoticed kind of understanding spontaneously occurring within our ongoing involvements in our ordinary, everyday, practical activities, a relationally-responsive understanding, that can contrasted with the representational- referential forms currently more familiar to us."

"It is a kind of thinking that takes place, not like geometric reasoning, in episodic moments in terms of static, spatially arrayed shapes and forms; nor in terms of measuring spatial like up against spatial like to achieve a correspondence or not. Indeed, it is a style of thought that, metaphorically, is not best described as a kind of ‘seeing’ at all. Instead, it is a style of thought that only takes place in motion, that works in terms of felt, living, inner, expressive-responsive ‘movements’ unfolding in time—above, I have called it ‘withness’- thinking to contrast it with our more usual style of ‘aboutness’-thinking."

"that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity—for a person’s acts are partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of all the others around them. Thus, because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, the ‘dialogical reality’ or ‘space’ constructed between them is experienced as an ‘external reality’, a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’, a ‘something’) with its own (ethical) demands and requirements: “The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio)” (Bakhtin 1986: 122)—in other words, it is as if this third agency, this something, has a ‘voice’ of its own to which dialogue participants must also respond. This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins."

"such inter-activity cannot be simply described as a sequence of actions (for it is not done by individuals; and cannot be explained by giving people’s reasons ), nor can it be simply described as behavior (as it cannot be explained in terms of causal principles either); it constitutes a distinct, third sphere of dynamically intertwined activity, sui generis , with its own distinctive properties. It involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or embodied form of practical-moral (Bernstein 1983) understanding, which, in being constitutive of people’s social and personal identities, is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us. What is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex ‘orchestration’ of not wholly reconcilable influences — as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins."

Their complex intertwined nature makes it very difficult for us to characterize them: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. As a complex dynamic ‘orchestration’ of many different kinds of influences, they lack specificity, they are only partially determined: they are just as much material as mental; just as much felt as thought; in being ‘spread out’ amongst all those participating in them, they are ‘non-locatable’; they are neither ‘inside’ people, but nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in a ‘dialogical space’ where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are, seemingly paradoxically, one. Due to their living continuity, they do not allow for the spatialization of time into a sequence of events each with a separate ‘before’ and ‘after’ (Bergson), nor do they allow for separable agencies or effects; they consist only in meaningful wholes which cannot divide themselves into separable parts."

"Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those participating within them in practice (while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so), that is their central defining feature."

"this is precisely what makes this sphere of activity interesting to us, for at least the two following reasons: (1) to do with in situ practical investigations, i.e., action research, into how people actually do in fact manage to ‘work things out’ effectively between themselves, and the part played by the ways of talking/ writing we interweave into them in so doing; but also (2) for how we might refine and elaborate these spheres of talk intertwined activity, and how by an appropriate use of such talk, we might extend them into novel spheres as yet unknown to us."

"I began with a comparison of two styles of writing: 3rd-person reportings and 1st-person tellings, a comparison between talk/writing that leaves us ‘unmoved’ with that which ‘moves’ us. While objective, reporting-style of writing may serve an important authoritative function in setting the outside limits, so to speak, within which an institution must function. To the extent that action research has to operate within the ordinary, ongoing, everyday life activities of organizations, institutions, businesses, and all the other everyday spheres of worklife, each unique in its own way, it is the second telling-style that will give rise to actionable knowledge.While the first style attempts to capture the nature of life in another world independent of us, it is the second that enables us to enter into another world, with a life of its own, not independent of us, but in relation to us —thus to gain a sense of its movements relative to ours."

"While 3rd-person reports of research, represent important regularities and de-contextualized universals, i.e., facts, about the groups in question researched into by outsiders to the groups, 1st-person tellings work in a different way. They are related to the experiences of insiders to those groups, and they work so that in their telling they ‘move’ listeners into paying attention to previously unnoticed particularities within the ‘world’ of the insiders—and it is in this way, in making the unnoticed noticeable, that, although the cases described might seem to be utterly unique and particular, they can in their telling give rise, nonetheless, to transferrable or actionable knowledge."

"a distinction between ‘withness-‘ and ‘aboutness-thinking/talking/writing’: Withness (dialogic)- thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. It gives rise, not to a ‘seeing’, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor to an interpretation, for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions; but to a ‘shaped‘ and ‘vectored‘ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings—engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do.While aboutness (monologic)-thinking, however, is unresponsive to another’s expressions; it works simply in terms of a thinker’s ‘theoretical pictures’—but, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to interpret it, and to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action"

"While Sacks’s account works in terms of unfinished, fluid or flexible varieties of possibilities. And while he leaves it open as to how Dr P. might respond—for he issues invitations not commands—it is the relation of Dr P’s unique responses to Sacks’s invitations, that are revealing of the unique nature of Dr P.’ s ‘world’.  Furthermore, in engaging us, Sacks’s style of writing is ‘moving’, we are ‘moved’ by it in the sense that provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of Dr P.’ s ‘world’, i.e., a sense of how, practically, to find out ‘way about’ within it, thus to ‘go on’ with him in practical ways that make sense to him (Wittgenstein 1953)."

"In dialogical-prospective-relational styles of writing, however, we would be talking/writing to our readers of the character of our ongoing involvements with certain other people, as if from within that involvement - while both looking back on what had been achieved so far, and forward prospectively, toward the possibilities open to us for our next ‘steps’. Our concern in such talk/writing would be with attempting to ‘show’ or ‘make manifest’ to readers (metaphorically) how they might, justifiably , be able to make sense of the character of such involvements."

"People’s sense of their own responsibility for their actions is, then, at the very basis of science itself. Scientists lacking any sense of their own participation in events occurring around them would be unable to do experiments. So, although Sacks’s style of writing may seem ‘anecdotal’, may seem to be merely about single, peculiar particularities, it is an unavoidable style of communication that all scientists must indulge in, if they are to instruct one another in how the categories of their theories should be used and applied—for the categories of such un-involving, such ‘non-moving’ forms of talk, do not apply themselves."

Voloshinov's dialogical approach by John Shotter

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:
"INSTEAD OF THEORY CRITIQUE AND DEBATE:  VOLOSHINOV'S UNENDING, DIALOGICALLY-STRUCTURED PARTICIPATORY MODE OF INQUIRY"

"what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign."

"Listeners, also, do not look for identical forms in order to make sense of a speaker's talk. In the real-life practice of social exchange, a second person simply shows their understanding of the expressions of a first in how they spontaneously respond to them. The task of understanding a verbal utterance "does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context,... i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity"

""Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all," claims Voloshinov (1986), "rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate" (p.81). Initially, that is all that matters: being able to enter into the spontaneously responsive stream of activity already occurring amongst those around us."

"Instead of taking people's willful and intellectual acts as basic, and looking back to discover a supposed already existing but hidden source of organization with ourselves, he starts by considering people's activities prior to their individual willful and intellectual acts. And furthermore, rather than inward and backward, he looks outward and forward, toward how people responsively create ways to 'go on' in their spontaneous and non-deliberate acts."

Three Paradigms of HCI

A very good article by Harrison et al 2006

Harrison, S., Tatar, D., and Sengers, P. The three paradigms of HCI. In Alt. chi, Proc CHI '07. ACM Press (2006). 

My research is situated in Paradigm 3. I think I can structure my discussions on approach according to these three paradigms.

 

An updated, extended and refined version of Harrison et al's article has been published at Interacting with Computers Journal: Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science.

Materiality of Learning - Spatial Imaginaries

Some extracts from Estrid Sørensen's book Materiality of Learning

"... instead of predefining the specific ways in which humans and materials relate to one another, I analyse the particular forms of technology, knowledge and presence that are performed out of particular socio-material arrangements.The question of how parts relate to one another is an empirical question."

"a minimal methodology, which applies the theoretical technologies of imaginaries, performance and participation. I develop the notion of spatial imaginaries as a sensitivity to describing how participants relate and what spatial formation is thereby created. The spatial imaginary of a socio-material arrangement describes the pattern, landscape, or shape that is formed spatially by and through relations and the parts they connect.
It is a methodology that attempts to know as little as possible in advance.
Definitions are results, not beginnings."

"Spatial metaphors, suggested by Mol and Law (2001), help characterize the different patterns of relation in which the computer program and other materials participated in practice.
1. the metaphor of network indicates the connectedness
2. fluid, the varying character of the ways in which components are related
3. region, the grouping of elements in containers.
One particular aspect of spatial imaginaries is that they enable us to describe how one technology participates in different ways, forming different patterns of relations. "

"
Participation: is the concept that allows us to ask how material and other participants participate in practice. We should not focus on participants; instead we should follow participation, which is the way in which components take part in practice. Is the relationship between the pupil and the room really "noticing"?
Performance: allows us to ask what is achieved through an arrangement of interrelating parts, of participations. If the relationship between the boy and the room is of "noticing", we may say that through this relationship he is performed as "observer" and his knowledge of the room is performed as "impression."
Imaginary: Concepts and sensitivities are thus developed in the course of research process, not as representational knowledge about the empirical practice but as methodological concepts that embody and translate the empirical experiences. .. appreciation for the materiality of doing research
"

Knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision

Extracts from the book called After Method: Mess in Social Science Research

• This book is about what happens social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy. .. it tends to make a mess of it.. This is because simple clear descriptions don't work if what if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. the very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. The aim is to remake social science in ways better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.
• Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity.
• If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all… How might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing? Can we know them? Should we know them? Is "knowing" the metaphor that we need? And if it isn't, then how might we relate to them? 
• No single response to these questions. The book is intended as an opening rather than a closing. In any case, if much of reality is ephemeral and elusive, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we're going to have to give up on simplicities.
• If we want to think about the messes of the reality at all then we are going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate and to know in new ways. We will need to teach our selves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual to or unknown in social science.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through 'private emotions' that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, fears and betrayals. These would be forms of knowing as emotionality or apprehension.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas of clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight. Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations, and if so how.This would be knowing as situated inquiry.
• We will need to think hard about our relations with whatever it is we know, and ask how far the process of knowing it brings it into being. 
• and we should certainly be asking ourselves whether 'knowing' is the metaphor we need.
• a way of thinking about method that is broader, looser, more generous and in certain respects quite different to that of many of the conventional understandings.
• While standard methods are often extremely good at what they do, they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral. the indefinite and irregular. The problem is not so much the standard research methods themselves, but the normativities that are attached to them in discourses about method. We are being told how we must see and what we must do and when we investigate.
• It is that methods, their rules, and even more methods' practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand.
• Particular sets of rules and procedures may be questioned and debated, but the overall need for proper rules and procedures is not. It is taken for granted that these are necessary. The kinds of facts we need to gather and the appropriate techniques for gathering and theorising data. 
• The task is to imagine methods when they no longer seek the definite, the repeatable, the more or less stable.
• Events and processes are not simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp (though it is certainly often the case). Rather they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them.

• The need, then, is for heterogeneity and variation. "~playing with the capacity to think six impossible things before breakfast." 
• It is about creating metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable. 
• Slippery, indistinct, elusive, complex, diffuse, messy, textured, vague, unspecific, confused, disordered, emotional, painful, pleasurable, hopeful, horrific, lost, redeemed, visionary, angelic, demonic, mundane, intuitive, sliding and unpredictable. Each of these metaphors is a way of trying to open space for the indefinite. Each is a way of apprehending or appreciating displacement. Each is a possible image of the world, of our experience of the world and indeed of ourselves. But so too is their combination
• The world as a generative flux that produces realities.

• To remake methods that imagine and participate in politics and other forms of the "good" in novel and creative ways; and that start to do this by escaping the postulate of singularity and responding creatively to a world that is taken to be composed of an excess of generative forces and relations.
• to do this, we will need to unmake many of our methodological habits! including
• the desire for certainty;
• the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are;
• the belief that as researchers we have special insights that allow us to see further that others into certain parts of social reality; 
• the expectations of generality that are wrapped up in what is often called 'universalism'
• but first of all we need to unmake our desire and expectation for security.

• Method hopes to act as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible way with reality, and allow us to return more or less quickly from that reality to our place of study with findings that are reasonably secure. But this, most of all, is what we need to unlearn. Method, I am proposing, will often be slow and uncertain. A risky and troubling process, it will take time and effort to make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy. 
• it takes longer to do things
• it takes longer to understand, to make sense of things.
• it, stop, erodes the idea that by taking in the distance at a glance we can get an overview of a single reality. So the stop has costs. We will learn less about certain kinds of things. But we will learn a lot more about a far wider range of realities. And we will participate in the making of those realities.

• Method is not a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produce realities. Enactments and the realities that they produce do not automatically stay in place. Instead they are made and remade. Thus they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways.
• One way or another, it makes things more or less different. The issue becomes how to make things different, and what to make!
• What would it be to practise methods that were slow, uncertain, that stuttered to the stop.. attention to process? What would it be to practise quiet method? Method with fewer guarantees? Method less caught up in a logic of means and ends? Method that was more generous?
• So what are the kinds of issues we might debate?
• Process
• Symmetry
• Multiplicity
• Reflexivity
• Goods
• Imaginaries
• Materialities
• Indefiniteness
• Re-enchantment

• What realities are being made manifest or Othered in this or that mode of inquiry? Why do we make realities in this way or that?
• After the subdivision of the universal we need quite other metaphors for imagining our worlds and our responsibilities to those worlds. Localities. Specificities. Enactments. Multiplicities. Fractionalities. Goods. Resonances. Gatherings. Forms of craftings. Processes of weaving. Spirals. Vortices. Indefiniteness. Condensates. Dances. Imaginaries. Passions. Interferences. That is metaphors for quiet and more generous versions of method.