Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of ‘the Other’

Abstract

Usually, in our talk with others, we listen for opportunities to express our own point of view, to add it to or to contrast it with theirs. Ethically and politically, we feel we have a right for our voice to be heard. While we can be satisfied that we have managed to “say what's on our mind,” there are reasons for thinking that even then, what we have managed to say and what the others have heard from us, may still not put those around us fully “in touch,” so to speak, with what our world is in fact like for us. Drawing on work from Bakhtin (1986), Voloshinov (1986. 1987), Wittgenstein (1953), Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Todes (2001), I want to explore a very different form of listening, a form of listening that not only goes with a particular way of responsive talking—a way of seeking in one's talk to afford one's interlocutors opportunities to tell of, and to explore further, events and experiences that have mattered to them in their lives—but which can arouse within them a distinctive and recognizable “feeling of being heard.” All these issues are fundamentally ethical issues in the sense that: If I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others and othernesses around us. But what is it to respect the uniqueness of what can be heard in another's voice (as well as what can be heard in one's own voice)?

Notes

¹“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 16).

²Here, I am following Voloshinov's text quite closely.

³A developmental process—of first creation, then growth and development—that we will find relevant when we turn to a discussion of “forms of life,” with their associated “language-games” (Wittgenstein, 1953), and their beginnings in our being ‘stuck by’ certain events in our discussions of expressive-responsive forms of communication below.

⁴Hence the need to put the word ‘parts’ in scare quotes. While, perhaps, analytically separable, the ‘parts’ of a living, indivisible whole cannot be substantially separated.

⁵As Merleau-Ponty (1962) remarks, with respect to the workings of intentionality in our living activities: “Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come… . [M]y perceptual field itself, … draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its protentions. I do not pass through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change … Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities” (pp. 416–417).

⁶Elsewhere, Arlene Katz and I (Katz & Shotter, 1996, 1998, 2004) have developed a whole approach to social inquiry, what we call the methods of a social poetics, built around being ‘struck by’ the occurrence of certain events.

⁷“In the same way,” Merleau-Ponty (1962) continues, “an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain ‘style’—either a Spinozist, criticist or phenomenological one—which is the first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher” (p. 179).

⁸In that listeners, with their nods, facial expressions, and ‘uhm uhms’, indicate back to a speaker, while he or she is speaking, that they are ‘following’—and, perhaps, even anticipating—the speaker's speech.

⁹“One cannot … understand dialogic relations simplistically or unilaterally, reducing them to contradiction, conflict, polemics, or disagreement. Agreement is very rich in varieties and shadings. Two utterances that are identical in all respects (“Beautiful weather!”—“Beautiful weather!”), if they are really two utterances belonging to different voices and not one, are linked by dialogic relations of agreement. This is a definite dialogic event, agreement could also be lacking (“No, not very nice weather,” and so forth)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 125).

¹⁰“The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own … we encounter it with its authority already fused into it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers … It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact … It is akin to taboo, that is, a name that must not be taken in vain” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342).

¹¹The removal, on ethical grounds, of the group of therapists often hidden in family therapy behind a one-way screen, into the therapy room.

¹²See footnote 6.

¹³In line with our interest in difficulties of orientation, Wittgenstein (1953) characterized the kind of difficulties he faced, so: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don't know my way about’” (no.123). Mary beginning to find her ‘way about’ inside her own experiences gives her a chance of being able to find a ‘way out’ of her current plight.

¹⁴The ‘narrator’ in this excerpt is David Boje—see Taptiklis (2008) for a commentary on David Boje's work on ante-narrative.

¹⁵In this sense, although they may not share any foundational beliefs, they can ground their remarks and claims in their shared experience in their shared situation.