Abstract
Among the many analytical categories bequeathed by linguistics to the study of dialogue, some inadvertently conceal more than they reveal. In addition to instantiating such fictions as speaker and listener or langue and parole, these categories tend to privilege the study of syntax over semantics, utterance over gesture, speaking over listening, and words over everything else. Moreover, our underlying models tend to depict dialogue spatially as a series of sequential exchanges between individual subjects wherein voices are construed in terms of positions, utterances as message-objects, and time as a unidirectional linear sequence. To open up this seemingly solid spatiality, this article reckons with the polymodal, polyphonic, and polychronic aspects of human communication by introducing a concept I call interlistening: movements of dense interactional synchrony wherein listening, speaking, and thinking co-occur with rhythmically textured and cacaphonously con-fused temporality.
We have become accustomed to hearing in the English word dialogue di as dual or two and logos as speech or argument. Hence we typically think about dialogue as two or more people speaking together, exchanging observations and ideas back and forth. But an etymological listening also hears in dia the Greek prefix for through or by way of, as can be heard in words such as diagram (through drawing) or dialect (a way of speaking). The word logos, similarly a conceptual inheritance from the ancient Greeks, “has been interpreted in various ways: as Ratio, as Verbum, as cosmic law, as the logical, as necessity of thought, as meaning and as reason” (Heidegger, 1959/1966, p. 60), and makes its way into such everyday words as logic, logistics, and of course as suffixes for academic disciplines such as sociology, psychology, biology. Fiumara (1990) reports that logos “is presented as a verbal noun, common in all periods in prose and verse” (p. 199) and groups the meanings of logos into 10 different categories such as computation, relation, law, narrative, listening. Thus if we can listen closely, we may hear in the word “dialogue” echos of something occurring through or by way of listening, thinking, and speaking. 1
In this way, and more, words matter. More specifically, metaphors matter. While perhaps obvious to scholars of dialogue, it nevertheless bears reminding every once in a while (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Johnson & Lakoff, 2003; Reddy, 1979; Ricoeur, 1974). For among the many ways metaphors matter—be it opening up new worlds or reframing existing ones in new ways—one underlying way they matter is their very transparency: how quickly they tend to become invisible. For example, scholars have long noted how visual dominance sits at the center of western epistemology, wherein metaphors for sight and vision are “seen” as synonyms for “understanding.” Thus words like vision, view, outlook, and perspective “appear” to govern acts of cognition such as thinking, comprehending, and understanding—mental pictures to be seen by the mind’s eye. Aurality, or listening, in contrast, is understood as a subordinate modality, most useful for bringing invisible events and objects to light, as when radio astronomy and ultrasound transpose sonic phenomena into visual images making sounds into “anticipatory clues for ultimate visual fulfillments” (Ihde, 1976, p. 55). McLuhan (1962) and Ong (1958, 1982) have illustrated the ways in which the visual bias arose historically through the introduction of writing. When words are written they become part of a visual world that silences the sound of language, “splits thought and action” and cleaves speaker from addressee. “In this economy where everything having to do with speech tends to be in one way or another metamorphosed in terms of structure and vision … speech is no longer a medium in which the human mind and sensibility lives” (Ong, 1958, p. 291).
In this paper I first draw attention to several generally inconspicuous metaphors about dialogue in order to render audible a few of its many less observed, non-spatial dimensions. Next, I introduce the concept of interlistening as a way to theorize dialogue from a less spatial, speech-centric, and subjective perspective to one that is more intersubjective, interactive, and interrelational. In so doing, I build upon theories of language and communication that conceptualize language as itself constitutive of selves-in-relation (e.g., Bertau, 2012a, 2012b; Shotter, 1993, 1996; Vygotsky, 1934/1986). In this view, the self is always already a communicative intersubjectivity born into the shared social worlds of language. And this brings us to the question of communication and its relation to language and the self.
Communication
Definitions of communication very much influence how we communicate and what we “do” with communication. Structural linguists such as Saussure (1916/1959) and Chomsky (1992, 2002) view speech communication as a “special use” of language and tend to downplay, if not deny, a relationship between speech communication (Saussure’s parole) and language (his langue). In fact Chomsky flatly rejects the “view that the purpose of language is communication” (1980, p. 230) or that the essence of language is communication” (1992, p. 215). Hermeneutic phenomenologists such as Heidegger (1927/1962, 1969/1971b), Gadamer (1960/2003), and Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968, 1973), in contrast, conceive language as communication, and, moreover, as the very ground of being itself: “Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subject into the interior of another” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 205).
Needless to say, the word communication is typically understood in structuralist terms as a transmission or exchange of information through a system of symbols. Thus communication is largely conceived, both in everyday parlance and among scholars in many fields, through what Reddy (1979) called “the conduit metaphor” that envisions language in terms of a “sealed pipeline” or “conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another” (p. 290). Reddy catalogues dozens of examples from everyday English speech that reflect an underlying metaphorical structure of the conduit, such as “you can’t get your concept across that way,” or “that’s a loaded statement” or “that sentence was filled with emotion.” For most of the 20th century at least, communication has been understood with the conduit metaphor, or what Carey (1988) calls the transmission model, which conceives communication as a means by which message-objects are transmitted over space and time from senders to receivers, whether along a telegraph wire, a wireless packet of binary code, or your lips to god’s ear. We can hear this metaphor in ways such as calling the internet an “information superhighway” or a conversation an “exchange,” or in studying how advertisements “deliver” messages. We also invoke the transmission model of communication when we consider education as a means for teachers to “send” ideas to students who “receive” them, and, hopefully, “retain” them. Thus the conduit perspective conceives of communication as a kind of tool that creates mental impressions “inside” our minds to represent things “outside” our minds. So deeply has the conduit metaphor dominated western thinking about communication that it was not until recently that some languages even conceived of it in any other way. A good example is given by Wierzbicka (2006) and bears quoting at some length. Discussing the historical nuances of the concept dialogue in cross-cultural perspectives, Wierzbecka writes: The current international career of the concept “communication” is a good case in point. It is a concept well entrenched in the English language (especially, it seems, in America …) and quickly spreading into other languages, including, for example, my native Polish. During my student days, in colloquial Polish the word komunikacja referred to transport and traffic, not to speech, and when I started to teach a course on cross-cultural communication I couldn’t translate this readily into Polish, because there was no (non-technical) word in Polish for “communication” in that sense. (2006, p. 281)
When viewed as information transfer, communication becomes a largely mechanical routine wherein things like the accuracy of the message, the efficiency of delivery, the precision of reception, are in the foreground while other much more interesting and important aspects of communication are missed. An altogether different way of thinking about communication derives not from the conduit metaphor, but from the cognates of the word communication, such as communion and community. Carey (1988) calls this the ritual model of communication, and describes how it brings people together in communion over shared words and meanings. In this way, everything (from place names to legal terms and from racial categories on a census to the contents of a literary canon or public school curriculum), reverberates with stories about community and, along with it, histories both hidden and plain, of social and political struggle, ideological and cultural transformation, and ethical ideals about “the good.” Such stories echoing within our everyday communicative interactions not only serve to regulate economic, social, and cultural norms, but they bring a shared sense of a “we,” a collectivity and a polis, into being. Thus a second departure from the conduit metaphor describes how communication constitutes “worlds” (Heidegger, 1959/1971a, 1969/1971b; Stewart, 1996). Shotter (1993), for instance, gives the example of the phrase “I love you.” When uttered in a romantic sense, information is not merely transferred from a speaker to a listener, but a whole new world—be it of delight, discomfort, or perhaps even unrequited despair—arises. In this way, communicating is how we co-construct worlds with ourselves and others, from groups as small as two people to organizations as large as an international congress and everything in between. Thirty-nine influential and wealthy white men sign a piece of paper and a new country is “constituted.” The Catholic Church refuses to annul King Henry the VIII’s marriage to Catherine, and a whole new state religion is born. Moreover, we cannot date someone who is not dating us—both of us must share the intention. And even should we agree to marry, we won’t be able to do it without society taking part through the voice of a legitimated social agent who is authorized to sanction the union. Thus our communicative acts give birth to worlds—declaring war brings a world of war into being, declaring an enemy creates an enemy, verbally harassing someone brings a hostile environment into being, and so forth. In these and myriad other ways, communication brings ideas, relationships, organizations, governments, and laws into being. In short, communication is more than a matter of exchanging symbols or decoding representations; “Communication means to bring others, and oneself together with others, into such being-in-the-world and to dwell in it” (Heidegger, 1924/2011, p. 23).
And yet, it is not that the conduit metaphor and its spatialized offspring are wrong; it’s that they are partial and incomplete. Certainly we use communication to transmit messages in space, to encode and decode signs, to celebrate and repair community, and to construct shared social worlds. Each of these perspectives on communication enables us see different things and ask different questions. And while no single view captures the whole, each captures something important. Unfortunately, however, the cultural dominance of the conduit metaphor keeps us from understanding communication in this other vitally important way—as our “house of being” (Heidegger, 1946/1993, p. 217) wherein we first produce a world and “then take up residence in the world we have produced. Alas, there is magic in our self-deceptions” (Carey, 1988, p. 21). As Gadamer so eloquently puts it: “Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all” (1960/2003, p. 443).
Spatial dominance
Not surprisingly, the conduit metaphor is part of a larger system of metaphors that tend to posit human interactions in spatial terms. Thought of as a back and forth series of “turns,” i.e., rotation in space, dialogue appears as a sequence of separate individual word-objects that we volley back and forth like a tennis ball: if by chance one of us misunderstands or misspeaks, we pick up the ball and resume the volley. In this way, the conduit metaphor depicts dialogue in spatial terms wherein not just content, but time itself, moves linearly from point to point, in one direction: from past to present to future. Echoes of spatiality can be heard in metaphors for dialogue such as point, position, side, foundation, and floor, as well as in face to face, back channeling, uptake, and triangulation, to name but a few examples. What is lost in these spatialized conceptions are the incessant intrusions of thoughts and interruptions, the disjointed overlaps, and the strategic and poetic ambiguities that tend to characterize both dialogue as well as thought. Depicted spatially as linear movement back and forth, dialogue appears to be a relatively straightforward process of succession, wherein one person speaks at a time and each utterance is followed by a responding utterance, and so on. But of course dialogue is rarely so neat and tidy; often people speak at the same time, interrupt one another, think about something else while others are speaking, get lost in thoughts and memories, or imagine a future that is yet to exist.
Spatial metaphors are also tightly bound up with conceptions of the self as a separate and independent subject/object which encounters and interacts with other subject/objects in the world. A striking example is the concept intersubjectivity, which is virtually immobilized under the weight of spatial metaphors. Often described as a space of shared understanding, or common ground, between persons wherein people, as individual subjects, collaboratively create and share meaning. Thus even in spite of efforts to complicate if not overcome simple self–other binarism, the idea of intersubjectivity can inadvertently reinforce a spatial conception of selves as separate subject–objects who somehow transcend their individuality to collaborate in shared “spaces” of interaction. Spatial conceptions of intersubjectivity thus limit our thinking about dialogue not only by imposing a separatist/individualistic framework on our conception of the self, but also by binding our conceptions of dialogic interaction to a model wherein language is depicted as an exteriority that moves through spatialized temporality in linear sequence.
The term intersubjectivity originates with Husserl’s (1917/1964) explorations of how the world of shared social constructs, objects, and meanings transcends the clearly bounded separation between selves. According to Husserl, the consciousness of the experiencing subjective self, or I, requires other subjective selves, or Is, to mediate and confirm the self’s understanding of the world. Bringing communication more explicitly into play, Buber (1958, 1998), developed Husserl’s insights about intersubjectivity into a philosophy of dialogue that centers on a study of the I–Thou relation and the constitutive power of the between. For Buber “real living is meeting” whereby in every interaction among human beings there exists a between, a real place located not in individuals or in the general world, but in a space between self and other.
The concept of intersubjectivity is not completely bound by spatiality, however. Just as the ubiquity of the transmission model overshadows but does not supersede the constitutive model of communication, so the quotidian spatial model of intersubjectivity does not preclude other possible conceptions. For example, Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls dialogue a place of “dual being” wherein the speech and thought of both people in conversation is “interwoven into a single fabric … of which neither of us is the creator” (p. 413). This conception of speech and language as a shared medium of interaction is echoed by Soviet scholars in linguistics and language psychology, such as Jakubinskij, Bakhtin, and Vološinov, who theorized that meaning resides neither in our individual intentions nor in words themselves, but in the shared co-created space of intersubjectivity where “the utterance always binds the participants of the situation together, as co-participants” (Vološinov, 1930/1983, p. 11). In this view, selves are a kind of polyphonic chorale of everything one has heard, said, and read throughout one’s life. And, as exemplified by the power of metaphor, these culturally dense echoes of communication influence us no less than our ancestral genes. The shared emphasis on spoken utterance enabled the Soviet scholars to employ non-spatial metaphors for dialogue such as voice, polyphony, intonation, contrapuntality, responsiveness, and answerability.
Perhaps even more important is how this Soviet perspective on dialogue brings temporality into relation with, but not domination by, spatiality. Dialogue is thus understood to obtain both spatial and non-spatial qualities. Bakhtin’s chronotope (1981), for example, is an imaginary portmanteau to describe the complex inter-relationships between time and space. The chronotope is a time laden place: it is a road, a castle, a threshold, a square—each a rich artistic construct alive with historical contingency. Thus dialogue is not temporally bound to an autonomous present but can stretch far into the past and into the future, and into worlds both familiar and strange. Dialogue reverberates with the echoes of every utterance ever spoken, or what Bakhtin (1981) calls “the internal dialogism of the word” (p. 279). But when we conceive dialogue from a solely spatialized perspective we lose touch with the non-spatial aspects of communication—most significantly the polyphonic musicality and rhythm of voice, the interanimated reverberations of intersubjectivity, as well as the non-linear interpenetrations of time. And the metaphor of spatiality is perhaps nowhere more firmly embedded in our thinking than in linear conceptions of time.
Time
As touched upon above, one of the things that gets left out of spatial conceptions of dialogue is time, or rather, non-linear, non-spatialized conceptions of time. Ever since Aristotle, western thinking about time has been conceived as a succession of nows that flow unidirectionally from past to present to future. In the words of Aristotle (2001), the present time is the indivisible “extremity of the past (no part of the future being on this side of it) and also of the future (no part of the past being on the other side of it)” (pp. 321–322). The now stands still like a stone in the river of time. But if we are to take the idea of dialogicality seriously we will have to think more carefully about time; if the dialogic means we are always in conversation with present, past, and future speakers, then the tennis model of communication is not enough. Thinking of dialogue in terms of non-linear temporality enables us to contemplate the vast interlacings of time in terms of past, present, and future in the communication process. In Faulkner’s famous words “the past is never dead. In fact, it is never past” (1975, p. 73). Our past lives inside us, nested like Mandelbrot fractals, where the seeming chaos of thoughts, reveries, and unconscious memories swirl in an unaccountably random fashion until deep structures of self-similarity are revealed. The accumulation of these past, present, and future voices blend and interact to make us who we are. For the present always presents what is not—what has been and what is yet to come. Even absence manifests itself as a mode of presence. What has-been which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of what is to come which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present. (Heidegger, 1972, p. 17)
Thus the spatial view of time as an insistent river flowing eternally from past to present to future obscures the many ways the lives of our minds are a tangle of braided melodies, leitmotifs, refrains, and ostinatos, of memory and anticipation which sparkle with occasional visits to the present moment. There is a sonorous musical dialogicality to every moment, echoing with words from the past and modulating in anticipation of words from the future often below the surface of awareness. And just as each moment rings with both tacit and explicit voices of culture and memory, so our communicative interactions with others create new synchronies of non-conscious coordination. In the early part of the 20th century, Bergson (1911, 1889/1960) disputed the idea that time could be rendered only in terms of mechanistic quantification as a continuous linear movement through the unbounded homogeneous medium.
Bergson argued that human consciousness does not experience time as a series of equally spaced intervals that can be isolated from one another and arbitrarily divided into discrete entities. In contrast to a spatial view of time, Bergson conceives time without space—without quantification and measure—and instead considers temporal experience (which he called durée) as a “confused multiplicity” rather than an ordered homogeneity. Counting, argues Bergson, requires and implies space and infinite divisibility. Durée is time without measure, differentiation without quantification. “Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states” (1889/1960, p. 50). Bergson describes, for example, how when listening to a symphony, the notes of a musical phrase are not heard as discrete spatial intervals, but as sounds melting together into an organic whole. He writes, “Even if these notes succeed one another, we perceive them in one another. And their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another because they are so closely connected” (1889/1960, p. 100).
Perhaps one of the best metaphors for thinking about time non-spatially is to conceive of dialogue as an event rather than a measured interval. Unlike calculated or clock time, event-based time does not require spatialized metaphors to conceptualize or express (though they are, for westerners, quite difficult to avoid). Event-based time is qualitative, and like Bergson’s durée, need not be conceived as space. As Ricoeur (1974) writes: “All discourse occurs as an event; it is the opposite of language as ‘language,’ code, or system; as an event it has instantaneous existence, it appears and disappears” (p. 97). And according to the linguistic field research of Sinha, Sinha, Zinken, and Sampaio (2011), there are currently indigenous cultures (such as the Ainu people of Japan and Russia, the Amondawa of Brazil, and the Nuer of Sudan and Ethiopia), who live, conceptualize, and speak about time without reference to space. The language of “Amondawa seems to contradict the idea that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion” (Sinha et al., 2011, p. 137). In these cultures, time is an event-based happening not tied to spatial relations or preset temporal frames; “speakers regularly talk about events in the past and future, but [these conversations] are not derived from terms expressing spatial location and motion” (p. 158). What this research suggests is that although the metaphor of time as the fourth dimension of space has taken seemingly everlasting root in the spatialized western imagination, it is not necessarily natural or inevitable. In order to acknowledge and work with this dimension of non-linear temporality we need a non-spatial concept that can express the polychronic, polyphonic, and polymodal dimensions of dialogue, which I here propose to call interlistening.
Interlistening
As mentioned above, the phenomenological hermeneutics of Gadamer, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty conceive of language and communication neither as a sequence of transmitted signs and signals, nor as a universal structuralist grammar or predicate calculus. Rather, language and communication are understood to be constitutive of human life-worlds themselves. As Heidegger (1969/1971b) poetically writes: “Language speaks … the speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language” (p. 206). But here we come to a question—does language, and do mortals, speak and only speak? Where art thou, oh listening thinking being? Yet even in our most sophisticated thinking about dialogue, listening is all too often a second thought dragged along as speaking’s necessary, but slightly embarrassing, dull partner. As a result, listening has been relegated to a shadowy penumbra or black box—something both there and not there, obligatory but irrelevant. Whether contrasting phonemes with graphemes, distinguishing performatives from behabitives or identifying irony, ideographs, and anaphora, our eyes are on the written and spoken word. 2 Whether it be Plato’s dialogues, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Bakhtin’s dialogism, or Burke’s dramatism, our studies of dialogue have tended to favor the voice over the ear. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that dialogue is principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of dialogue’s other (Lipari, 2012). It is not even clear whether or how we would begin to describe, let alone punctuate, the listening act: does it have a beginning, a middle, or an end? An inside and an outside? Does it even have a form? And are we sure that listening is separate from speaking, let alone a merely subordinate shadow of speech? Where, one might ask, is the listening in the dialogic? Thus whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the western conception of the logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening. And as Fiumara (1990) rightly argues, a logos without listening is no logos at all.
In order to describe these more hidden aspects of dialogue, the name interlistening is chosen in part to inhibit the speech-centricity of our thinking about dialogue and partly to bring the connotations of both spatial and non-spatial intersubjectivity into the foreground. In short, interlistening describes speaking and listening as irretrievably con-fused aspects of the dialogic—the polymorphic, polychronic, and polyphonic multiplicity of dialogue that vivifies Bahktin’s (1981) insight that “the word is inter-individual” (p. 121) and Vološinov’s (1929/1986) idea that “the word is a two sided act” (p. 102). Just as intersubjectivity describes the way dialogic interactions transcend simple boundaries between self and other, so interlistening describes the ways dialogue transcends boundaries of time, place, and person. Interlistening thus aims to describe how listening is itself a form of speaking that resonates with echoes of everything heard, thought, said, and read. In the words of Heidegger (1969/1971b), “every word of mortal speech speaks out of such a listening, and as such a listening. Mortals speak insofar as they listen” (p. 206). Interlistening thus brings multiple emphases on the inter of interaction, interdependency, interrelation, intersubjectivity as well as an acknowledgment of the attunement, attentiveness, and alterity always already nested in our processes of communication. Every speaking is at the same time a listening, and every listening a speaking. We can hear prior strains of these ideas when Bakhtin (1979/1986) refers to the distinction between speaking and listening as a “fiction that produces a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication” (p. 68) and when Bergson (1889/1960) asks: “Has it not been said that to hear is to speak to oneself?” (p. 28). So here I suggest: When one talks and one listens,
two talk and two listen.
When one talks and thousands listen,
thousands talk and thousands listen.
When one talks and there is no one to listen,
one still listens.
To grasp the multiplicity of interlistening, we will attend to the plurality of modalities, temporalities, and sonorities that coalesce in the ongoing gestalt of dialogic consciousness. These phenomena arise in multiple modes and forms and center on the body and lived materiality, the historical/cultural echoes of the dialogic, and the unceasing circulation of past, present, and future voices that mingle together in each moment. At this point it should be noted that I will not explicitly engage here with questions of meaning and interpretation, for which theories and analytical tools (such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, speech act theory, hermeneutics, rhetorical criticism, and socio- and psycho-linguistics), are abundant and well suited. 3
Further, meaning arises contingently in dialogue. As Gratier and Bertau (2012) note, “meaning is a co-produced temporal gestalt with socio-cultural and linguistic specificities” (p. 113). My aim in this essay is to describe those aspects of dialogue that are often concealed by our spatialized metaphors of communication and temporality and thereby merit further analysis and interpretation. To this end, we might say that interlistening is polymodal (occurring across multiple sensory modalities such as seeing, tasting, touching), polyphonic (occurring through the voices of different characters and roles, both real and imagined), and polychronic (occurring between and among nonlinear temporalities of past, present, and future). Interlistening is thus a dense pattern of movements co-arising and passing away within a holistic gestalt—it is not something to do or not, or to do more or less—it is something we are always already doing. Interlistening, like intersubjectivity, describes some of the ways in which how, in Shotter’s (1996) words, “meaning originates between us not from within us.”
Polymodality: Physicality and embodiment
Polymodality pertains to the embodied dimension of interlistening. It involves movement and proprioception, and the interacting and mutually influencing patterns of breathing, posture, and gesture. It also involves the sensory dimensions of smell, taste, and touch, as well as body movement and energy. Fuchs and De Jaegher (2009) describe what they call mutual incorporation, where the interacting bodies of people in communication extend beyond each “individual’s” boundary and “form a common intercorporality.” This is far more than a kind of body language conceived as a sending and receiving of nonverbal messages—it is embodied communication that circulates in an interdependent cycle of what Clark (1998) calls “continuous reciprocal causation” where everything affects everything—from movements, to gestures, to posture—in a continuous circle of interactive complexity or “phased and inter-animated parallelism” (p. 361). As an example, Clark describes how a dancer’s “bodily orientation is continuously affecting and being affected by his neural states, and [his] movements are also influencing those of his partner, to whom he is continuously responding” (1998, p. 356). Given sufficiently slowed audio/video recordings of dialogue, we would likely observe many levels of bodily as well as linguistic continuous reciprocal causation—be it the job interview that goes horribly wrong or a workplace discussion that spins out into new and unforeseen directions.
The kind of unconscious physical coordination that people do when communicating with others has been found in a number of empirical studies. Condon’s (1976) microanalysis of sound films of listener behavior led to the surprising and unsuspected observation that listeners move in precise synchrony with the articulatory structure of speaker’s speech … it is as if the listener’s whole body were dancing in precise and fluid accompaniment to speech. (pp. 305–306)
As Fuchs and De Jaegher (2009) describe it, “when two individuals interact in this way, the coordination of their body movements, utterances, gestures, gazes, etc., can gain such momentum that it overrides the individual intentions, and common sense-making emerges” (p. 476). Other forms of physical synchrony include ducking, wincing, leaning, walking, and yawning (Saarela & Hari, 2008). One of the best examples of this physical form of interlistening occurs in those funny moments when one approaches another in a narrow space and each inadvertently mirrors the other’s movements, continuing to block rather than easily circumnavigate one another. Our well-honed yet unconscious patterns of synchronous interlistenings are hard to break, even when we wish to avoid a collision.
Generally speaking, the more physical synchrony occurring in interaction, the greater the sense of connection and empathy among interlisteners. In a recent study of therapist–patient interaction, Ramseyer and Tschacher (2008) found that doctors and patients who unconsciously coordinated their postures and gestures experienced a greater sense of connection and therapeutic quality in the work. And according to Condon (1976) “The more two interactants share movements or posture together, the greater the rapport between them. Such rapport contributes to a sense of acceptance, belonging, and well being” (p. 311). Thus gesture is not just an embellishment, but an integral part of listening, thinking, and speaking.
One of the pioneering scholars of gesture, David McNeil (1992), describes how “gestures do not just reflect thought but have an impact on thought. Gestures, together with language, help constitute thought” (p. 245). Beyond using gestures to point, describe spatial relationships, direct our interlocutors’ attention, and so forth, research has found that gesture plays an important role in cognition. In their research into how children learn math, for example, Francaviglia and Servidio (2011) consider gesture as “cognitive scaffolding.” They found that gestures used by a student to express concepts are repeated by others in the group who then use them to continue development of ideas. The gestures thus develop through the conversation not simply as symbols that come to be adopted by the group, but as shapers of knowledge that inter-animate the participants in the conversation. Similarly, Lindblom and Ziemke (2008) describe in detail how “bodily actions operate both outwardly and inwardly in meaning-making activity” (pp. 57–58).
Similarly, Rosenblum describes speech perception as a “multimodal phenomenon” wherein “auditory and visual information is functionally never really separate” (2008, p. 406). Other research illustrates how speakers unconsciously rely on listeners’ non-verbal movements and gestures for a number of things, including memory. For example, Pasupathi, Stallworth, and Murdoch (1998) found that when talking to non-attentive listeners, speakers remembered less and told their stories less well. They found that attentive listeners facilitate long-term memory in speakers in ways not attributable to mere rehearsal—and that attentive listeners elicited more information, detail, and elaboration from speakers even when no questions or interruptions occurred. Similarly, Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson (2000) have demonstrated the ways in which telling stories is a “joint-activity” wherein “the narrator needs a listener to tell a good story; a good listener is a collaborator, a partner in storytelling” (p. 945). These insights were also noted by the Soviet language thinkers who observed how listeners influence speakers such that “the tone of speech, its temperature, varies, depending on the extent that the speaker warms up or cools down by the mimicry of the listener. If the listener attends closely, the speech process is facilitated” (Jakubinskij, 1923/1979, p. 326). Thought of in this way, the boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, speaking and listening, become less distinct. As Humboldt long ago noted: “it is very natural for man to re-utter at once what he has just understood” (1836/1999, p. 28–29).
Polychronicity: Temporality and tempus
Temporality involves the rhythmic aspects of interlistening such as timing, coordination, syncopation, repetition, punctuation, etc., as well as the tensed aspects of grammar and narrative time, and the nonlinear psychological movements where “the past and present lie ‘at once’ in temporality” (Heidegger, 1924/2011, p. 49). As described above, a transmission model of dialogue limits us to spatial thinking wherein language and time are conceived of solely in linear sequential terms, leading to the kind of amnesia that forgets to remember that the past is never past and that the voices and thoughts we hear are not purely our own. But still further, the transmission view leads to an erroneous conception of discursive thought in terms of tensed and linear syntactically structured language (Luria, 1981; Vocate, 1987, 1994). The fifth century Indian philosopher of language, Bhartrihari (trans. 1971), theorized speaking and listening as a transformation of consciousness wherein the initial stages of speech are an integrated gestalt without temporal sequence or differentiated parts. To Bhartrihari thought and language are one and the same thing; “there is no cognition without the operation of the word; shot through and through is cognition by the word” (trans. 1971, p. 321). Further, Bhartrihari’s listener is not a passive absorber of words but an active creator of meaning, which instantaneously arises from the whole gestalt of Sphota, the integrated non-dualism of speaking and listening from which meaning “bursts forth.” Similarly, the Soviet psychologist Luria developed a model of speech production that is remarkably analogous, though seemingly unrelated, to Bhartrihari’s model. Neither model depicts speech as a simple conversion of thoughts into words. Rather, both models describe how complex non-linguistic conceptual intuitions are gradually transformed into full blown, grammatically correct, speech. Thus, rather than merely reflecting pre-existing thoughts, the processes of speaking and listening bring thoughts to fruition. As Luria (1981) writes, “There is every reason to agree with Vygotsky that thought is completed, rather than embodied in speech and that the transition from thought into speech involves several stages” (p. 158). Consider how in the socially shared speech of dialogue, our words and thoughts constantly shift between verbal tenses, creating a past for a future that has not yet become while our imaginations project a future that we remember and which thus becomes our past. As the scholar of self-as-storyteller Schafer (1980) describes psychoanalytic narrativity, one “works in a temporal circle … backward from what is told … and forward from various tellings of the past to constitute that present and that anticipated future” (p. 48). As interlisteners, our “inner ears” stitch and sew meanings outside of linear time with a reversal of beginning and end, as the first words uttered inevitably become those last heard, and understanding unfurls in a flash of comprehension. Vygotsky offers a wonderful example of the instantaneous flash-like intuition of meaning that arises co-terminously with speaking: Thought, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. When I wish to communicate the thought that today I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street, I do not see every item separately: the boy, the shirt, its blue color, his running, the absence of shoes. I conceive of all this in one thought, but I put it into separate words. (1934/1986, p. 251)
Similarly, in a letter of uncertain veracity, but reprinted in many biographies, Mozart describes how musical ideas come to him seemingly from nowhere, tout ensemble: “I [do not] hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich alles zusammen)” (Holmes, 1845, pp. 267–268). That is, before he lays it out in the linear succession of musical notation, Mozart hears everything all at once, a flowing undifferentiated gestalt that is later transformed into linear sequence. Thus our persistent insistence on a linear spatial conception of language and time betray us by “giving a fixed form to fleeting sensations” (Bergson, 1889/1960, p. 59). Moreover, these psychological and narrative displacements in time are not unusual or uncommon, we use them daily to interpret ourselves and one another, to recount stories, to ponder imponderables, or to shift between subjunctive worlds. This psychological temporality of listening is akin to Martin’s (1986) “Janus faced reader” who is “always looking backward as well as forward, actively restructuring the past in light of each new bit of information” (p. 127) in cycles of what Clark (1998) calls continuous reciprocal causation and Fiumara (1990) calls “circular causality in the dialogic field” (p. 117).
Rhythmic tempo and timing involve yet a third polychronic dimension of dialogue. As mentioned above, Condon (1976) discovered remarkably precise simultaneity of movements between speakers and listeners that seem to defy linear temporality. These findings have been confirmed by a number of scholars (e.g., Bertau, 2012a, 2012b; Cummins, 2009; Loehr, 2007; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009; McNeil, 1992). The extensive research of McNeil (1992), for example, reports a consistent rhythmic pulse with repetitive and periodic recurrence between gestures and speech of both speakers and listeners. More recently, Loehr (2007) found that “the tempos used by hand, head, and speech during conversation are consistent with a common human tempo” (p. 201) and that “eyeblinks typically happen on the rhythmic pulse of the speakers speech” (p. 209). Similarly, Bertau (2012b) describes how not just specific thoughts, but consciousness and the self, come into being through the rhythmic patterning of dialogue. She writes, “Time as mutual synchronisation is the central aspect to all these types of speech, reaching into preverbal proto-conversations and into exchanges and adjustments of two bodies. Self comes to be within the rhythm of intersubjectivity” (p. 77).
While rhythm and timing could be considered linear expressions of calculated abstract time, they also register the non-linear phenomenological temporality that abides in the movement of body and material world. Insofar as rhythm and tempo create forms of vibrational attunement, they cross boundaries between inner and outer, self and world. The rhythmic tempos and vibrations of the voice, the body, or the seasons do not stand outside the embodied self, but intertwine with it as a holistic and participatory gestalt. In an essay that traces the etymology of the Latin tempus, Benveniste (1940) contends that for the Romans, the Latin tempus was a dual concept with a concrete living and material aspect combined with an inheritance from the Greek conception of time as an abstract, objective, and inanimate succession of moments. His essay reveals the multiple semantic fields of tempus that resonate with embodied and material attunement: meteorological (temps, tempestus, temperatura, intemperies), proportion or ratio (temperare, temperament, tempestuous), and occasional (printemps, temporary, extempore, in tempore). To these we could of course add others such as tempo, temper, temptation, and so forth. Thus does the living materiality of time reveal itself not as a series of spatialized temporal positionings but as embodied polyrhythmic and polychronic temporal movement in our dialogic interactions.
Polyphony: Sonority and musicality
The musical dimensions of interlistening pertain to all of the auditory and sonic qualities of the communicative interaction. It involves the texture or timbre of the sound, its density and multiplicity, to silence or repetition, to harmonic cadence or motion, or to contrapuntal themes that arise and pass away in fugue-like motion. It pertains to the volume—a whisper vs. a shout—or the tonality—assonance vs. dissonance—or to the prosodic echoes of voices past or present. We all know the sense of disorientation when vocal intonation clashes with words, or when rising or falling intonation patterns violate culturally specific linguistic conventions. For as Bertau (2012a) theorizes, the voice itself is “a form of vivid materiality, it offers a meaningful structure in so far as it is always turned toward somebody. And it is meaningful because of its participation in the inter-individual interactional world it is rooted in” (p. 62). But sonority also includes the musicality of words themselves. We can hear the polyphonous exhuberance of sonority in Finnegan’s Wake—as “confused a multiplicity” as ever written—where language is a stream of consciousness sound play, and meaning resonates with polysemous polylingual puns in Sanskrit, Greek, Gaelic, and Hebrew, etc., and allusions to texts such as the Bible, the Upanishads, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead abound. To read Joyce’s (1922/1976) stream of consciousness novel Finnegan’s Wake is to listen to the sound of the words, the rhythmic cadences of its musicality, its droning or incandescent melody.
Recent research illustrates how the musical dimension of language is central to the development of language in children. Powers and Trevarthen (2009) use the term proto-conversation to describe how infants “start the journey as innately musical/poetical beings, moving and hearing with pulse and rhythm, immediately sensitive to the harmonies and discords of human expression” (p. 209). Similarly Brinck (2008) describes how reciprocal musical forms of proto-conversation are decisive for the development of intentional communication, and is active reciprocation or “proto-conversation” between infant and care-taker. It is a kind of dyadic engagement, consisting in vocalisations and episodes of repeated, rhythmic exchanges of gaze and facial expressions that reflect emotional states such a smiling. (p. 121)
In an empirically grounded study of the pre-lexical musical polyphony of self–other relations between infants and mothers, Gratier and Bertau (2012) detail what they call the “deep dialogicality” of early interaction. They make apparent how the infant is “not facing the world with the (referential) tool of language, but within the world and language, together with Other” (p. 111).
Introducing the core term of “communicative musicality,” Powers and Trevarthen (2009) write that “the main message is that normal happy infants and their mothers use their voice tones cooperatively, with ‘communicative musicality’ to sustain a harmony and synchronicity of emotional ‘narrative envelopes’” (p. 232). As infants grow into languaging children, this musicality makes its way into children’s play, as the singsong of teasing and calls attests, as well as the classroom. With regard to school children, Erickson (2009) describes the importance of musicality—in terms of volume, pitch, timbre, contours, rhythm, cadence, and pitch patterns—to the learning environment created by classroom interaction: When teachers and students share a similar implicit musical signaling system for the coordination of attention and action in talk, they tend to understand one another clearly and have positive feeling toward one another. When the mutual signaling system is not working well and interactional stumbles happen, negative affect and misunderstanding often occur … Our capacity to think with and feel with one another seems to be tied to our capacity to dance and sing in smooth, predictable, rhythm with each other in our talk. (2009, p. 38)
Conclusion
In the thought experiment of this paper, we have played with the supposition that dialogic interlocutors were interlisteners by examining the ways in which speaking/listening are not two separate processes, but two facets of a single integrated process. Why, a reader might wonder, do we need a new term like interlistening rather than simply the word listening? The reason is because, given our speech-centric cultural milieu, the word listening alone and unmodified fails to either challenge dualist distinctions between speech and listening or to advance an understanding of listening as a mode of communicative action. Moreover, listening unmodified by inter fails to challenge the underlying but unacknowledged ideas of transmission, monomodality, linearity, and spatiality that are entailed in many of our metaphors about language, communication, and dialogue. By recasting language, speaking, listening, and intersubjectivity as interrelated and fundamentally nondual phenomena, we have described the ways in which dialogic interlistening involves multiple modalities, temporalities, and sonorities of a language that is not merely our own, but belongs to the generations of ancestors and the gatherings of our everyday experiences. In the poetic phrasing of Walt Whitman (1987), “through me many long dumb voices, voices of the interminable generations of slaves, voices of prostitute and of deformed persons, voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs” (p. 38). Interlisteners are thus always already engaged in dialogue with past, present, and future words that can never be disentangled from what Bakhtin (1981) calls the “thousands of dialogic threads” that make up the social dialogue.
The idea of interlistening thus introduces a way of thinking about language and the self that reveals dialogue as a moving, recursive, and iterative enactment of intersubjectivity wherein language is understood as a verb not a noun and the self is understood to be plural and relational rather than singular and separate. In short, dialogue is anything but the isolated interaction of sovereign individuals. As Baxter (2007) describes it, dialogue “isn’t even a duet between two speakers. It is more like an ensemble in which the simultaneous interplay of multiple, different discourses—distant and proximal, already spoken and not-yet-spoken—produce meaning at the moment” (p. 123).
As living processes, language and the self are not objects, but moving symphonic waves of past, present, and future meaning possibilities, always vibrating with traces or echoes of the resonance of other meanings and dialogic relations. That is, dialogic processes can be heard as a singing network or a densely woven fugue made up of many voices and connections, any one of which might be drawn into a new set of melodic or harmonic relations at any moment. The interlistening dimensions of language are therefore “not a thing, but rather the eternally mobile, eternally changing medium of dialogical intercourse … [that] never coincides with a single consciousness or a single voice” (Bakhtin, 1929/1973, p. 167). The notes of these antiphonal dialogic relations, whether dissonant, sonorous, or simply out of key, vibrate or pulsate as new notes and melodies arise and pass away, though none ever truly pass away; the “saying” of language always already “is.” In the words of Taylor (1999), every participant in the conversation arrives there with a repertoire of textual elements, as a result of learning to speak his or her own language—a conceptual scaffolding made up of words, phrases, turns of speech, metaphors, anecdotes, all of which are there because of the distillation, stored in language in the memory of participants, of their personal and collective history of previous interactions. (p. 26)
In conclusion, the idea of interlistening presented here is neither an injunction nor a directive. It is, rather, an invitation, a sharing, like partaking of a bowl of soup or pointing out a sunset or a soaring hawk. We observe what is there always knowing there is more we have missed. Interlistening is thus a descriptive and not a prescriptive term. It is not a norm, or an instrument to accomplish a goal or achieve an end. In fact, we might even say that interlistening is not, but rather, that interlistening occurs, it is largely unintentional, uncontrollable, unforeseeable, and it occurs with a plurality of qualities that we can choose to notice or ignore, dismiss as folly, relish with delight, or simply regret. Wherever we go, whatever we do, interlistening is occurring. Whether we notice is up to us.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks this journal’s editors, anonymous reviewers, and commentators on this essay for their valuable questions, suggestions, and thoughts.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.