Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self

Canadian Psychology, Feb 2003 by Leendert Mos

John Shotter, in his contribution, "Towards a Third Revolution in Psychology: From Inner Mental Representations to Dialogically Structured Social Practices" (chap. 10), claims that in understanding another our task is to "do justice to the uniqueness of their otherness" (167). According to Bruner, the problem of the self in cultural psychology requires that we consider not only the meanings of self defined by the individual and held in common by the culture but, also, in our encounter with others, the practices in which the meanings of self are achieved in the possibilities of its projects. It is in the performances of our meaning together that we create new meanings between us and, so, new selves. Shotter asks how are we to understand such performances of meaning in view of our currently theory-- driven monological and individualistic methods of research? Following up on Harre's defense of Bruner's second discursive revolution, Shotter proposes a third "dialogical revolution," in his "conversation with otherness," that finds its roots in Bruner's early writings "for the left-hand" (p. 171). Nevertheless, Shotter suggests that Bruner failed to engage these "particularities of otherness" in favour of abstractive explanation of meaning-making processes rather than in a description of dialogical performances. Instead of explaining our narrative practices, Shotter turns to "a much more direct form of understanding, the kind of relational understanding in fact at work, spontaneously, in our everyday practices" (p. 172).

The point is a subtle one reminiscent of questions surrounding hermeneutical theory, namely, in what manner do we "subjunctivize" narratives in creating possibilities of unique meanings, if not by appeal to those conventions wherein we constitutive of our cultural being (p. 172)? But since the performance of meaning in our practices is essential to Shotter's dialogical approach of the uniqueness of the self, he rejects, following Wittgenstein, Bruner's appeal to mentalistic explanation of narrative meaning in articulating deviations from what is held to be culturally common. In place of this explanatory folk psychology of reasons, the uniqueness of meaning is for Shotter a "dynamic interactive process in which embodied agents continuously react in a living, practical way to each other and to their circumstances" (p. 174). Nevertheless, the meaning performed in our "joint action" is immersed in the unsayable workings of cultural history in a manner that changes our relations to the past, present, and future (p. 177). Following Bakhtin, Shotter refers to the possible uniqueness of such "variational" meanings "as movement." The movement of meaning is the "non-referential, non-representational, non-conceptual, `moving,' 'poetic' nature of ... practical forms of meaning and understanding" in the "once-- occurrent" present (p. 173). Our dialogical practices are a preconceptual, pretheoretical "style of knowing ... exemplary for certain ways of going on" (p. 175). Thus, whatever explanations may be eventually forthcoming, these are already always embedded as language games in forms of life. However, these practices are not empirical objects of investigation requiring theoretical explanation, but rather the terms in which explanation is possible at all.