SETTING RHETORIC IN MOTION:
FROM THE FORMALITIES OF THOUGHT TO THE DIALOGICS OF SPONTANEOUSLY RESPONSIVE EXPRESSION

John Shotter

ABSTRACT: As Merleau-Ponty (1962) suggests, in the mimetic and indicatory, in the gestural aspect of our living bodily expressions, there is “a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism” (p.179). There is a certain physiognomy expressed in the 'style' or unfolding 'movement' of our expressions which allows a form of relationally-responsive, bodily (felt) understandings which 'set the scene' for our more intellectual forms of understanding. Following leads originally outlined by Vico [1668-1744], I want in my paper to explore the pre-intellectual, pre-cognitive origins of our communicative activities. In particular, I want to set out the special sui generis qualities of dialogically structured activities, and to make clear how they are – in their reciprocally responsive bodily character – quite distinct from either formal (logical) or causal relations. I then want to argue that it is only within the dynamic unfolding of such dialogically structured relations that the kind of physiogomic understandings of which Merleau-Ponty speaks are possible.



“(meaning is a physiognomy)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568).

“It is not experience that organizes expression. but the other way around - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction” (Voloshinov, 1986, p.85).

“Each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.91).

“The 'otherness' which enters us and makes us other” (Steiner, 1989, p.188).


A central theme of the Rhetoric Culture project is an exploration of the constitutive interplay occurring between culture and rhetoric – to retrieve, explore, and to make full use of “the ancient insight that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric” (Strecker, Meyer & Tyler, 2001). What I want to do in what follows is to try to do just that, to try to take this theme out of the seminar room and conference hall, and to re-situate it – as is clearly required – out in the dynamics of ordinary people's everyday activities. Someone who some long time ago saw the necessity of just this move, was Vico (1964). In his Scienza Nuova of 1744, he outlined a “conceit of scholars” to which we (inexperienced as we are in what is involved in everyday practical activities) can easily fall victim: for, as he saw it, scholars “ will have it that what they know must have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, [and this] makes us despair of getting [the understanding we seek] from philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world" (para. 330). Indeed, just as many such as Frazer (1890) and Levy-Bruhl (1926) have in the past, so we today far too easily see the 'thought' of 'primitive mentalities' as a crude and mistaken attempt to think in what we now think of as a correct, scientific manner. Vico, however, to break the hold of such a formalistic framework, suggested a developmental view of our cultural history, with higher, more self-consciously conducted forms of mentality emerging “providentially” from lower, more spontaneously responsive forms. And it is precisely this developmental approach that I would like to explore here today.

        Its general character is very nicely summarized by Michael Mooney (1985) who, in commenting on Vico's achievement, suggests its essential assumptions are as follows: “That language has primacy in human life; that poetry is prior to prose, and image to concept; that society takes form as a growth of human senses; that human actions and arrangements are the first statements of ideas, and that mind and society, with language as a means, share a common history... That society is a structure of sentiment and thought as well as a cluster of rites and forms, and that its gods and heroes, its customs and laws, its words and its sciences depend for their plausibility as much on the common and collective sense of the people as on the refined ideas of intellectuals is as golden a principle today as when Vico urged it in the eighteenth century” (pp.262-263).

        Thus, to an extent, I want to follow Vico in re-situating rhetorical speech out in the dynamics of ordinary people's everyday activities. This was not, of course, easy for Vico to do. With the current institutional structures of our intellectual and academic lives in the West, it is now even more difficult. For, given our training as rational, modernist thinkers, rather than responding to events occurring around us in spontaneously expressive, 'poetic' and 'moving' ways, i.e., rhetorically, we are much more used to treating the others and othernesses we encounter as presenting us with a problem to be analyzed and solved by us as the individual expert thinkers we are. The steps involved are well known: (1) treat the newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved; (2) analyze it into already known elements; (3) find a pattern or order amongst them; (4) hypothesize a causal agency responsible for the pattern (call it, say, THE MIND or some other such entity); (5) find further evidence for its functioning; 6: enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system; (6) manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce outcomes advantageous to us; (7) call the theory 'the solution' to the problem, and turn now to 'apply' the theory elsewhere. Nowhere, currently, is this attitude expressed more vociferously, than with regard to the 'problems' said to be occurring between us within our social lives together (for reactions against, see Bernstein, 1992; Scott, 1998; Freidman, 2000; Toulmin, 2001). We are thus fixated on the idea that social change can only occur by putting the results of such thought – in the form of empirically tested theories – into practice. In my paper here today, perhaps surprisingly to some, I want to object to this whole approach. For, in emphasizing only the representational function of language, not only does it ignore its rhetorical functions of disclosure and persuasion, the constitutive rather than representational function of language, it also ignores the two-way, dialogically-structured, reciprocally responsive nature of our already existing, everyday, social practices (upon which it relies for its functioning). In fact, in conducting itself in a monological, one-way, mechanical, question and answer fashion, it does more: it eradicates these features of language from rational view. Our immediate, spontaneous, living responses to the others and othernesses in our surrounding circumstances are completely discounted and ignored as unimportant.