For those who might be put-off, initially or even ultimately, by the subject matter discussed here, I would refer to that old adage, that “if all you know well is one thing, then you really don’t even know that very well.”

Part 3 of the analysis of

John Shotter’s “Social Accountability and the Social Construction of ‘You”

IV.  The Unit of Observation viewing persons in relation to one another is Differanced to Observation of Situated Usage; and the Antatylitic unit that is the (first and third) Person and Voice is Differanced to Analysis of Second Persons and Voice

From Social Constructionism’s Observational field constituted of persons in discursive relation relation to one another Observation is moved to the continual activities constituting identity in situations of ordinary language; and against the analytic background of this panorama, the unit of Analysis is changed to examine situated usages of Person and Voice of the verb.

 

From this stance of Harre’s, i.e., toward the discursive field of everyday moral orders constituted of empirical person positions analyzed as locations in conversation to one another and themselves, JS differs to smaller, more active Units of Observation 1.Continual Commotion – in situations of ordinary language use within the continual commotion of everyday activity, utterances make available pronominal positions on a moment to moment basis. And Analysis 2. Data is as Data Does – Differing from formally analyzed third person panorama of individuality, JS treats data of individuality as nothing outside of the differences of activity. In the momentary transience of these situations of ordinary grammatical use he analyzes what Voice (active or acting into) and Person (1rst, 2nd or 3rd) of the verb are doing.

1.Continual Commotion – Shotter continues the de-reification by using a smaller, more active unit of observation: in situations of ordinary language use within the continual commotion of everyday activity, utterances make available pronominal positions on a moment to moment basis, i.e., make available practically applicable texts of identity. Being as malleable as it is in Social Constructionism, Data are difficult to talk about – data is what data does, and the only certain data is within a language game (L.W.). Deriving Hegel, Pierce, James, Dewey, and post WWII “Ordinary Language Philosophy”, Shotter holds the notion that data of individuality is not something “objective” like empirical geneticism, nor is it subjective experience, it is rather shared ordinary linguistic experience conducted within community standards. In contrast to those who might take a larger frame of analysis, say of the episode, as their preferred unit of observation, examined in terms of “obligation, legitimacy and prohibition”, Shotter uses a smaller unit of time, the moment, and less precise deontic standards – usually how data afford and constrain activity within those moments. Shotter is trying to distinguish an extremely practical, though not especially concrete application of texts of identity within situations of ordinary language use – it is not even so static as Deweyan “intersubjectivity.” More on the order of the Hegelian notion of self and objects emerging together, the self is only as determinate as its objects are – in these relations are a variety of types of consciousness, each of which reflects a different version of reality (Wittgenstein makes a similar point in On Certainty #65) – but away from the Hegelian notion of mediation and its implication of a distance between self and objects and self to itself in an effort to attain complete self knowledge – any sort of individuality is to be characterized as shared and corrigible linguistic activity conducted according to “continually susceptible” (i.e. accountable) personal and cultural history.

In this highly practical focus, he pays particular attention to what goes on between people as first and second persons as they continually coordinate the available resources within the social orders into which they have been socialized. Differing from his previous focus on conjoint creation, he attends here to second person address, how their utterances within given situations constantly articulate the character of the relationship and function to afford and constrain activity in ways appropriate to their momentary positionings. These discursive activities are like mobile regions of occurrence – and since this is not at all like a cognitive or propriotoral, causal, centralistic way of talking, however practical, according to Shotter, this new manner of speech is awkward as it lacks social “currency.” Unlike empiricism, one can neither observe nor do away with these data of involvements, but only authenticate what they do on a moment by moment basis.

2.Data is as Data Does – Rather than the appropriation of a formally analyzed language game of individuality, Shotter differentiates, in the momentary transience of these situations of ordinary language use, the functioning of Voice, whether active or acting-into (passive and possessive forms have little to do with the Story Lived) and Person, whether 1rst, 2nd, or 3rd of the verb. Unlike the static pictures of cognitivism’s first person possessive voice and behaviorism’s third person passive voice, “in situations of ordinary language use, at least, to address a person grammatically is straight-away to say something about what you take their status to be – to address them wrongly has serious practical consequences.” Therefore, we proceed directly to the final consideration -

V. Appropriating Data of individuality as Counting toward accountability and Differancing to accountability as Counting in the Data of individuality

The Social Constructionist data of individuality as praxis in moral orders socially constructed by persons, is differanced to consider data of individuality as they continually reconstruct the deontical grammar of changeable moral rules.

Harré takes this praxis wherein individuality is constructed through rules within relatively stable moral orders arrayed with persons and pronominal positions, and argues for 1. Accountability through individuality – to be accountable, one must be able to conceive of themselves as an agentive individual 2. JS takes a contradictory stance. Individuality is constructed through accountability – individuality is continually reconstructed through deontical grammar of vicissitudinous pronominal positions.

Individuality Through Accountability versus Accountability Through Individuality

Shotter elaborates the view that pronouns function moment to moment to create “intra-linguistically reconstructed positional fields”, giving individuals both structure and means of structure (Benvenistine); they “indicate not only who (1rst, 2nd, 3rd person of the verb) but what (agent or addressee voice) one is at the same time.” The vicissitudinous nature of discursive structuring is resolved by “these mobile signs” which each speaker can “relate to their person…such a knowledge shows itself in the ability to use all pronouns appropriately, as none have sense except in relation to one another – the uses of the I do not in any unitary way refer to what we are.” But their use is far from arbitrary or trivial – second, third, and first persons are assigned different affordances and constraints.

For the most crucial example, the relationship of detached third person passive and voice of behaviorism and positivism fails to acknowledge moral relations among those studied (inasmuch, mischaracterizes the social life that is supposed to be so unaffectedly represented). “They” might not even be considered pain feeling creatures, but an “it.” Further, self reflexive accountability is outside its rules, and outside the rules of the observer. To make up for this culpable social scientistic position, most recent attention has been paid to the agency of personified “I”‘s, “a subject doing something to someone else.” Harré, for example, wants to disabuse the third person stance of empiricism, avowing that “personal identity is symbolic of social practices, not of empirical experiences. It has the status of a theory.”

Accountability through individuality: As Harré (1983) describes events, behaviorism as an attempted positivistic reduction failed and led to cognitivism; this school has held fastly to the positivist dream of an ideal literal minded grammar; as its subpersonal modules lack social criteria, they fail to provide the unified synthesis of individuality – whereas social constructivism moves in the behavioral direction of positivism, leading it unwittingly back into mechanistic coherence and causal necessity. The byproductive ramification in either case is non-accountability. Thus, to render accountability meaningful to corporeal persons, they must be able to conceive of themselves as unitary self reflexive agents. This may be accomplished through possession of a unified theory based on a Gödel-like transcendent notion – an open ended heirarchy of taken for granted grammars.

According to Harré, from the social linguistic realm, corporeal persons – self referential “I’s” (I # 1) - may appropriate and possess an open ended transcendental theory unifying one as a source of linguistic formulations – part of the theory cannot be in conscious attendance, viz., the non- referential I #2, but it can be acted out from and applied according to rights of display; e.g., having their “definienda are referents to concepts of a very high order of sophistication” - the linguistic implication being in accordance to rules of third person relations - “which are properly ‘applied’ only in the dyad or other group created by the symbiotic relationship (p. 106).” This is not meant to besmirch Harre’s opus – I would be an idiot – briefly stated, what Harré accomplishes with the metaphor of “position” is to counteract the non-qualitiative, non-ecological, equalitarian view that all persons perceptual capacities are equally valid. In place of that, Harré brings to the forefront the notion that persons occupy different “positions” in public discursive orders; thus, different positions create moral orders entailing different rights, privileges and obligations. But this metaphor of “public positions” does display a tendency of inquiry which Shotter is trying to redress – Harre’s transformation of the Cartesian dichotomy to a distinction between “public and private” elaborates a pronominal duality – a manner of speaking which tends back to first person possessive mechanism -  e.g., “appropriation” from the third person detached observational stance, “theoria”, which he seeks to disavow (as with critique of Harre’s I #1 and I #2). In this effort to wrest individuality from the third person passive of behaviorism, “that’s just the way it is”, what Harre’s unit of analysis, the vestigial first person possessive, is doing is reconstructing its subjective relativism with cognitivism’s artificial remnant of “that’s just my/their preference” (I to I). Therefore, in order to deconstruct the subjectivist relativism of what the I #1 accounting to a sovereign relation to I #2 constructed through the data of individuality appropriated from a detached third person public realm is doing, Shotter takes the data of individuality to be “done”, i.e. constructed in direct and intimate accountability you and I. ...in the internally related, Heisenbergian reflexivity of jointly negotiated, you and I.

                                         
Individuality through accountability – Shotter takes the data of individuality to count as they continually reconstruct the deontical grammar of pronominal positions. Rather than calling the “I” an open ended theory, he portrays it as a lexically empty concept which blinds individuals to a notion of direct accountability; thus, little is to be said of possessive individuality before it is accountable to the addressivity of specificatory structures which constrain and afford negotiation, shaping and crafting within the continual activity of reconstructing internally related, immanently taken for granted (as opposed to transcendent) depth grammatical rules. That is, individuality is constructed through accountability.

Nevertheless, as the use of language creates and sustains dominant social orders (Mills), we feel of necessity that we must reproduce a scientistic and individual way of talking and thus fail to register our involvement and moral obligations with others; as a result, current conceptions, though supposedly objective, are, in fact, imbued with relativistic subjectivism. Therefore, Shotter moves from Harre’s notion of Appropriation in favor of Differances embedded in communicative activity. As W “makes clear, the retrieval metaphor lacks accountability since we have to assure people and ourselves that our claims are justified, that we can institute checks as to their fittedness to the circumstances in question. Not only is such a process unnecessary, in many instances it is impossible (W 1965:3)” Thus, Shotter does not so much inflect subtle moral orders as he does the fact that we must talk within the requirements of deontical speech genres, the medium of cultural resources within which we live. The dominant speech genre is not to be replaced by appropriating public knowledge to a self theory utilized in accordance with the private subjectivity of the individual – but in the practical social processes going on “between” people – our difference as second persons. In the Story Lived (if lived responsibly) “it does not matter how ‘I” can use language that matters so much as the way in which I must take “you” into account in my use of it; by acting into accepted grammars of specificatory formings within mediums of communication – primarily vague and only partially structured events and states of affairs in the world can be specified further. Such devices or procedures, although of course structured (at least partly), are used not primarily as pictures, as copies, or representations of one’s surroundings. The primary function of language is formative or theoretical, and only secondly and in a derived way referential and representational. It works by people materially moving one another by its use to behave in certain ways.”

Summary: With the notion that data count as praxia of socially constructed rules within relatively stable moral orders, which, in the case of individuality, are arrayed with persons and pronominal positions, Harré (1983) argues for 1. Accountability through individuality – that for accountability to make sense, one must be able to conceive of themselves as an agentive individual – this is accomplished through possession of a unified theory based on a Gödel-like transcendent notion of taken for granted grammar. 2. JS takes a contrary stance: Data count as they continually reconstruct the deontical grammar of pronominal positions. Individuality and agency are constructed through accountability; for this to happen persons must be accountable to act-into the internal relation of Heisenbergian reflexivity, in mutable, immanently taken for granted depth grammars.

Thus, Shotter addresses the relativism inherent in Harre’s appropriation of the enlightenment’s first to third personage accountability of the verb. As the appropriated from occidental text’s first person possessive voice acting toward third person passive voice (behaviorism and cognitivism can be constructed from either grammar) has reconstructed dubious moral orders by transforming recognition from social indebtedness into the objectivist/ subjective – relativist notions of mechanistic coherence [specifically, the relativism of artificial possession (that’s just their/my prerogative”, “god given ability” etc.) and the pseudo objectivity, really, just more relativism, of causal individual necessity – (the “truth of that’s just the way it is”, “natural ability” etc.)] Shotter differences in this article by taking the necessity of how data count away from a picture of the world and into direct putative accountability as second person yous.

CONCLUSION

In this article Shotter has sought to deconstruct The Story Told through the (“the”) Enlightenment text(s) by disabusing its grammatical starting point, the first person possessive. Because accountability to this text reverts practitioners to its inherent blindness to factual and moral indebtedness, to its own textuality, Shotter differances from the rigorous social constructionist emphasis on asking “how” to ask instead “why” not create differently structured means so that individuals might discover different aspects of [their] surroundings in relation to [themselves]? In order to rectify the Enlightenment’s legacy of brutal relativism, he leaves the constructionist fray momentarily for some Platonic “why-ning.” Thus, in lieu of this grammatical emphasis of agency acted out of the first person possessive, he proffers an amelioratively overcompensating counter text toward identity and agency creation in The Story Lived through second person address.

However, as serious consideration of the possessive and detached relational grammar of The Story Told falls outside of JS’s language game, he differences not so much from the Cartesian context, but tacitly makes his actual point of departure from Rom Harre’s thesis of the necessary condition for social construction of the pronoun “I.” That is, the acquisition of capacity for pronominal address. As in most attempts at deconstruction of the traditional text’s grammatical coherence, that is first person possessive “I”, and its detached notion of relation, that is to the third person passive “they”, it has begun with the same first person starting point and has thereby only changed the relational (really non-relational) emphasis from a possessive to a more active voice – a grammatically insufficient emancipation from non-accountable individuality through the Story Told of a-temporality.

Harré and Shotter both seek to rescue individuality and accountability from the inherent ramifications of mechanistic and or automatically causal, behaviorist or cognitive models. The difference in their analysis should be characterized with heuristic sequentiality; each has focused on a different phase in a synthetic process. Harre’s frame is to answer how individuality can be possible – for accountability to make sense, persons must be able to conceive of themselves as conscious, unified agents. By contrast, in this article, Shotter argues that for individuality to make sense, we must first answer why we feel so strongly that there must be a “unitary and total way to refer to what we are.” He argues that it has to do with our accountability to the cultural text we are enmeshed in. Rather than trying to fit an obsolete notion of individuality into The Story Lived, we might do better to change The Story Told. However, since subjective passivity (just as much as mechanical objectivity) is rejected in social constructionism, it falls outside of Shotter’s language game of coherence; for him that grammatical position is taken up in the manner of precursive “addressivity of specificatory structures.” These are discursive logics presented by second persons which, when acted into, provide pre-nominal persons with the means of identifying themselves as first persons. The usage of something like the second person passive voice in his counter text then, is an “acting into” voice. His observations, not having recourse to passivity, thus function mostly beyond his basic purpose of deconstructing the first person points of relationality in terms of the active and acting into discourse between first and second persons. In the performance of this article that takes the form of his “crafting the specificatory structures” of Harre’s “addressive” text, “Personal Being”, shaping away some traditional stylisms and crafting some of his hypotheses of necessary relatedness.

This has been primarily a descriptive piece. Shotter maintains the coherent theme of activity, the awkward logic of second person involvement, etc. All technical aspects are exquisite, and Shotter’s purpose remedial – if it were not primarily so, I would be concerned to assert that a life lived rigorously through texts of second person accountability might be a neurotic affair of the most strangely labyrinthic entanglements. I would agree that indeed physical being’s significance must be learned within the pre-eminent social context; but while I may offer assent that Shotter’s language game does not move so rapidly to the radical extreme that Gergen (1991, p. 156) has taken of dissolving the “I” into a collective “Us”, the momentary unit of individuality does, nevertheless, head toward behaviorism by not sufficiently unifying and marshaling longer-term individual language intentionality (Although in fairness to Shotter, it must be said that in his pentadic survey, he is careful to note accountability to historical, familial and genetic predecessors). While addressivity (like the notion of altercasting) does represent a narrative improvement over the Lockeatinism of Cissna and Sieberg’s confirmation research, it does not address the kinds of stability and complexity of various, simultaneously functioning narratives, its theoria outlook neglecting terms of the multi-interactive qualities of poesis and phronesis in contextings. But beyond the question that in moving toward the end of fully relational selves – do I’s risk trivializing a critical non-idealist aspect of corporeality (?) - the sensibility of depending upon altercasting, still worse, confirmation, to allay venal constraint compares dubiously to the assertion of even a fairly gleaned language of propriotorial significance and a unified language game of intentionality. Shotter depicts circumstances necessitating an imaginary “you”, but it is the “I” in these situations which marshals the important task of coherence. Taking that fact to the practicality of the more pervasive conventions within a given life form, not all “yous” will be addressed with esteemed or even useful specifications, if barely at all. Similarly, while ordinary language has had and will continue to have many emancipating uses, it also runs the risk of heading discourse toward a Lockeatine type realism (“don’t use fancy words with me, I just want the straight facts”). In another theoretical framework, the matter might be subsumed within a new overview – grammars of the Cartesian paradigm itself treated as one natural facet, internally related (albeit unwittingly) to alternative moralities – wherever a possible criteria for evaluating these orders, there must be a unified grammar, which, at least by analogy, can coordinate talk among them. That is to say, we might subsume the difference between Shotter’s stronger concern for the consequences of Cognitive style self reflexivity and Harre’s stronger concern for the ramifications of Behaviorist enmeshment within a new language game – and like Harré, approximate flow between polarities.

Sources:

1. Harré, R. (1983) Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
2. Shotter, J. and Gergen K.J. (1989) Texts of Identity – Inquiries in Social Constructionism Series, v 2 Sage Publications Ltd. London.

Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”  apparently played a part in this discourse; though I had not not read it until after this was written.

Footnotes:

{1} Constructionism – like Constructivism insist the social world is made, but Constructionism goes farther to insist that the social world is made real, not just made-up in those activities - by focusing on the process by which social worlds are made as opposed to focusing on institutions, that is the products of those practices (which is the focus even, of most social constructionst approaches). Moreover, the emphasis on the significance of rules is one of the points which removes it from the behaviorism of the constructivist approach.

{2} Harré, in a 1993 address (wherein he quipped that “the mind is a four letter word and it shouldn’t be used”) marked a distinction between the first and second cognitive school. The first cognitive school, as elaborated in institutions such as M.I.T., has sought to establish an objective map of the human mind and its functions. Harré argued that this amounts to a formal language game about a language game (they are drawing maps of maps) and not a model of the “mind.” In what he designated the second cognitive school, a discursive approach prevails – cognitive activity would be of the private, intrapersonal use of publicly acquired interpersonal discourse. Shotter may have a point that there is still too much residual of the first cognitivism in Harre’s argument.

{3} Frequent usages are (see as listed in Part 1)

{4} For more news of “difference”Harré (1993) states that one cannot know molecules (the only a-priori extant besides people in discourse) outside of what they are doing.”

{5} In order to facilitate the English middle class participation in equal education to the Aristocracy, Locke did away with the notion of “class” in favor of an empirical notion of “individual rights”; there was no “class.” That was not sensibly empirical. There was nothing besides sensory perceptions which got “stamped” onto the brain and formed into “associations” by the “individual.” One person’s sense impressions, being of equal source, were just as valid as another’s. Therefore, they should have equal individual “rights” (Hannah Arendt held this enlightenment text to be “far from innocent.”). It would seem to me that this kind of “positivism” would have a prejudicial bias very much favoring the quantification of those individuals not so disposed to recognizing need for others – the powerful, the demoralized, sociopaths, etc.

Social Constructionism contends that there is no such thing as an individual apart from interactivity with others in situated circumstances as mediated through language. Further, as opposed to the neutrality of “perceptions”, persons will be in different “positions” in moral discursive orders, giving them unequal skill and knowledge. As mentioned in this article, maintaining the fallacy of individual sovereignty calls for rational blindness to factual and deontical indebtedness to others. Accountability to this text constructs the moral void of subjective relativism (that’s just my, or their, preference – its moral ramifications of artificial possession, paranoia and the revenge of deprivation or great loss) and pseudo objectivism (that’s just the way it is – as the elements of behavior are detached from social creation there is no responsibility for their ramifications). In either case, whether empirical or transcendent, activity is treated as being beyond the negotiated social construction of rules.

In my initial writing of this article, I neglected to articulate the critical reason why Harré uses the position metaphor – i.e., to counteract the Lockeatine notion of personal immediacy, its empirical skepticism of differing abilities, that the judgments of some will be better than others due to their position.