Real Conversation - A Sketch

Here are some atheoretical observations on what I think of as 'real conversations'. These types of conversations can arise in many contexts - between friends, in seminars, in administrative meetings, in contract negotiations, in laboratories and in therapy sessions.

They are conversations in which we feel something has happened, progress has been made, a perspective has been achieved; in which honest interaction has been seriously attempted ...

Here are some things I think are characteristic of such conversations:

(I will refer to the participants using the first person plural 'we').

1. We value exploration over demonstration and discovery over narrative.
• All demonstrations, all narratives, are treated as hypothetical: 'Our statements, interpreted this way, seem to lead us here?'
• Ultimately, our explorations and discoveries will be about the nature of what can be made intelligible within the conversation
2. In particular, 'Rules of intelligibility' are mutually explored, and not dictated. We do not tell each other 'how to talk'. This exploratory process cannot be curtailed by any appeal to externalities (e.g.'metaphysical fundamentals').
• This is a complex and kaleidoscopic issue, full of self-reference. At bottom, our sense of whether the 'rules' are being complied with will be kinaesthetic - it will be the same sense as our sense of whether we can talk at all, of whether we are going 'mad' ... 
• Some 'facts' (e.g. about the world, or about what we had said in the course of the conversation) are actually kinds of rules about how we are expected to talk.
3. The boundaries of the conversation are explored within the conversation.
4. There are no tacit assumptions that cannot be explicitly addressed when the occasion arises.
• What we do by engaging in the conversation must be congruent with the explicit content of what we say. Any sense of incongruence here can be explored explicitly within the conversation.
5. Uncomfortable silences are taken as seriously as incontrovertible arguments. We know that hearing a convincing argument for a conclusion that we cannot accept is a creative moment
6. We treat each other as honest and competent interlocutors. We do not accuse each other of bad faith.
• Each of us, however, must take responsibility for the amount of effort we are prepared to put into making sense of each other. If we exit the conversation, we obviously leave behind any forum within which we might 'explain' our exit. This has ethical consequences which must be appreciated by all participants, to a minimal extent.

I'll come back to this periodically, and adjust it.

Wordlessness

We can only ask questions in a language we understand. We can, however, feel wordlessly miserable, confused, fearful, and incongruent.

And yet being able to speak is itself, viscerally and computationally, a knowing how. We are neither aware of any 'internal linguistic machinery' nor can the metaphor of internal machinery be unpacked without generating paradoxes that render the unpacking itself incoherent. We cannot give a demonstrably intelligible account of why our accounts are, in general, intelligible ...

But our attempts to speak are not vain. If they were, we could not intelligibly say so ('Our attempts to give an account are vain' is an account ...)

And so we experiment and discover. We cannot map the whole landscape, but our feelings of incongruence guide us to those areas that it would be most productive to explore. We find new ways to use our words, and, where necessary, we find new words.

This is science, as well as therapy.

Talking about talking ...

A story about language is a linguistic artifact. Any story about how language connects with 'reality' is also a linguistic artifact ...

Any possible answer to the question 'Why do our stories make sense?' must be a story that makes sense.

Our visceral feeling that the words we use to describe the world are directly connected with that world through our own experience is inclined to make us feel that there must be some story we can talk about this that validates our language use. Unfortunately, our individual phenomenological spaces are somewhat insulated from one another. I cannot directly look into your internal world of experience, and you cannot directly look into mine.

Insofar as we can share this phenomenological content, we do it through language - in the widest sense. We do it with descriptions, stories, theories, facial expressions, gestures, furtive looks ...

This means that however confident I might be that the way I speak is related to the world that I experience, I cannot point this link out to you. You can only hear what I say. You cannot directly share the experience that, for me, makes it seem valid, congruent, and real.

This general predicament is what Ludwig Wittgenstein was drawing attention to in his 'beetle' parable. Imagine, he suggests, that each of us has a box that only we can look into. No one else can see its contents. Imagine, also, that there is a public word for what each of us has in our box - we call it a 'beetle'. When we use this word in our conversations with each other, we know exactly what we mean, and we each have a private experience of examining the contents of our own boxes when we think about this meaning. The word 'beetle', however, would work in exactly the same way in the public language whether or not we each had the same things, or indeed anything at all, in our boxes.

Reflecting on this parable can be both disturbing and reassuring. It challenges some comforting assumptions we make about our shared language and shared world. On the other hand, it gives some insight into how things can go wrong, when one's phenomenological space suddenly seems to disconnect from the shared reality in a mystifying and unintelligible way: When what we see in our boxes makes the way we use the public word 'beetle' feel uncomfortable to ourselves and to others - uncomfortable in a way that sometimes cannot, itself, be shared.

Why might this insight be reassuring? Because it reminds us that real conversations are not just reassemblages of well-understood tokens - Lego-brick words that we all know how to use. Real conversations also incorporate experiments with meaning - sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit - which can help us to bring the language world and the phenomenological space back into congruence.

This exact process is what we see in 'focussing' episodes in the counselling room - where time is made to let some troubling experiences come fully into awareness, and to find or create the words that are needed to explore this with another human being, with an engaged and competent interlocutor.

I think it is also what happens when children learn to speak - when they first discover the relevance of their internal worlds to the way others interact with them. Learning to speak is a necessarily kinaesthetic process, however much it is demonstrated by 'knowing-that' capacities to articulate and describe. After all, we cannot learn to speak by having the rules and meanings explained to us!

The roots of incongruence can be even deeper and harder to articulate than the beetle parable suggests. Wittgenstein himself failed to reflect on the consequences of his investigations for the actual language that he used to carry them out - this was always treated as, somehow, transparent.

The counselling room is not a seminar - we cannot appeal to any kind of 'transparency'. In this place, all rules, relationships, meanings, are tentative.

It is a place where we may find ourselves having to explore the possibility of having the kind of conversation within which these other things - rules, meanings, explanations, narratives - can also be explored. The kind of conversation within which we can talk about how we talk.

(And so I leave these marks and squiggles here, imagining an interlocutor?)

Boundaries of Intelligibility

It's odd, or perhaps it's not odd, that we use the same word for 'extremely angry' and 'deranged'. Perhaps angry mad is more likely to be transitive: mad at ...

Psychotic mad is conventionally less intelligible, but in both cases the principle of charity is involved - we have either withdrawn it, or are threatening to. Someone who is mad cannot be, or possibly cannot be, 'reasoned' with - they are, or may be, outside our 'language community'.

Our desire to explain this to them is, of course, evidence of bad faith. Or, at least, of lack of imagination. If we can't talk to someone, we can't tell them this either. By itself, this should make us cautious of our judgments in this area.

The experience of leaving a 'language community', or of experimenting with its boundaries, may be disturbing, depending on how the community is policed. A shared idiolect may be comforting while at home, but unless it is 'open' it will require wholesale rejection of  'others'. Some online information silos are like this.

A closed language community will always appear liturgical to an outsider, because the 'why?' questions that they need explicit answers to cannot be asked within the community - they would make it 'open', rather than 'closed', and make its members feel unsafe. The cult convert is always odd because they have had to explore the boundaries of the liturgy in a somewhat self-aware way (even if they don't share this exploration with other cult members once they are inside). In order to join the cult, they have had to translate the liturgy - render it (minimally) intelligible, as well as simply tractable.

The experience of being near a boundary, being forced to explicitly address the issues it raises, can simply feel like incongruence. We don't know whether the people on the other side are being perverse, or ignorant, or whether they might even know something we don't. And they might feel the same (we have no shared tools for exploring this symmetry at this point).

I suppose I'm feeling my way towards a conception of 'mental illness' that has to do with language acquisition - feelings of being 'unable to make sense'. And contemplating the consequences of finding ourselves without a language we can use to discuss this ...

Some Thoughts on Over-Thinking ...

I had a recent realisation - or perhaps a deeper realising - about the 'hamster wheel' of anxious cogitation. It can feel like a process of hunting for a solution, visiting every possibility, checking again that none of them work ...

The realisation, which can seem cruel, was that when I am in this state I am sometimes working harder at not looking at something than I am at solution-hunting. Often there is a perspective that I am not willing to consider, and it is this unwillingness that is feeding my anxious search. Before I go through the dark door, I must first just check that none of the others lead to anything worthwhile. Maybe there is something behind one of them (something apart from an empty room or a brick wall...) that I didn't see the first time around.

For me, the 'dark door' opens towards the possibility that some solution I need to work may not work. Some fantasy, some aspiration, some self-perception, may not be reliable.

There is a big difference between having a potential solution that you can't put in place (because of opportunity or resources), and having no solution at all. Or between feeling that something would be a solution ('if only ...') and discovering that it might, after all, not be.

The dark door, which looks like despair, may open on a dream relinquished, something that feels like a defeat, a final judgment...

How did it come to feel like this?

There are certainly doors we would not want to go through - bereavements, injuries, betrayals, losses - but not all of these carry censure. They come with pain, but not necessarily shame. There is shame behind the dark door. If I cannot have this, do this, be this, then I am worthless. I have been pretending. I have been deceiving myself and others. I have been vain and stupid. I have failed - not just to meet an objective, but to choose an appropriate objective in the first place.

The rat run of feverish checking, the internal OCD, can feel like security by comparison.

Intelligibility, again ...

There is always something perverse about trying to explain the law of non-contradiction to someone. If they don't minimally observe it - at least performatively, if not explicitly - then they don't know how to speak, and so, arguably, are beyond the reach of any explanation whatsoever ...

The common thread in various types of 'gaslighting' is that it puts people in the position of trying to make sense of maliciously unintelligible behaviour. From colonial exploitation to domestic abuse to playground bullying, coarse power has been expressed through making the powerless go through hell trying to learn the language of the oppressor, however capriciously that oppressor may play hide and seek with the grammar.

The illusion of narcissistic superiority, the ground of psychopathic internal shame-avoidance fantasies, is maintained by keeping people in the dark and manipulating them. Power exercised through deception is, absurdly, valued above the ability to make sense.

Intelligibility Pressures

I've been becoming dimly aware of a pattern that I think I see in some clients' responses to grief, and my own responses to strong negative emotions - 'black hole' emotions ... and perhaps to some other things less obviously malign.

Places that act like points of repulsion - we start to approach them and suddenly find ourselves going somewhere else - ritual, denial, distraction, comfort behaviours. Even 'interpretation' can be a kind of diversion. What is hard, is just to live in them for a while. To experience them as places that a whole human being can find themselves in ...

The black hole is so 'obviously' a horrible place, that avoiding it might hardly seem to require explanation. But as well as the repulsion, there is a puzzle - why are these places there, unless they have some organismic purpose? Why do none of our diversionary tactics quite work?

How can we feel that these locations of the soul, of imagination, of metaphor, might overwhelm us? How can they seem, like monsters of nightmare, both insubstantial and catastrophic? Places that do not exist in our 'physical world', but contemplating whose existence might snuff out our engagement with that world?

A clue might be in the loneliness of our visits to them - we often go there with neither a witness nor a companion. But is there a step beyond loneliness here? We can describe loneliness, we can (a little paradoxically) even share feelings of loneliness. But can the horror of the black hole be beyond even this? Do we feel that it cannot be made intelligible - that nothingness, confusion, ambiguity, the edge of the map is, after all, more terrifying than 'dragons'?

And do we feel we might be abandoned there exactly because we cannot make it intelligible to another?

How did we come to associate intelligibility with emotional contact? How did we learn that we had to explain ourselves or we would be left alone?

How did we learn we had no right to feelings that we could not explain, or justify, or otherwise render potent?

How did we learn to fear these quiet places beyond the world of words?