p.1 Our basic way of being in the world, it seems to me (and to Ken
Gergen too), is to be constantly in motion, we live continuously in the midst of change.
p.2 as he [Gergen] now sees it, we not only can live with
the incompleteness, its still-forming nature, we do in fact live within its ‘not yet finished’ nature every
day without too much trouble. Indeed, the more we can become engaged, immersed in the flow, the more we can feel
‘in touch’, feel that we are ‘where the action is’; we can even come to feel ‘at home’
within the still emerging incompleteness.
p.2 what the field can and should provide is research informing the inquirer
of a number of possible occurrences, thus expanding his sensitivities and readying him for more rapid
accommodation to environmental change" (p.317, my emphasis). To this end he offers the "concept of relational being" as what
I will call a descriptive concept (see Shotter, 2009), a concept which can function in Wittgenstein’s
(1953) sense as a "reminder" (no.127), which can work to draw our attention to specific events and features
occurring around us in the background that might be of possible importance that would otherwise pass
us by unnoticed.
p.3 The actual term "emergent" in its modern sense was coined long
ago by the American/British philosopher and man of letters G. H. Lewes (1875) who wrote: "...although each effect
is the resultant of its components, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode
of operation of each factor. In the latter case, I propose to call the effect an emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies,
but in a form which does not display the agents in action" (pp. 368-369) – and it is the impossibility of being able
to identify any actual individual agents as being responsible for the outcomes of co- or joint-action that makes their nature
so very strange and unusual.
p.5 Actions are meaningful units within practices, and practices give
(seemingly) individual actions their meaning.
p.6-7 if our actions are to have their actually intended
meaning, they are at the same time determined by what is in fact anticipated by those who will respond
to what we say and do... our actions have no meaning in and of themselves, only within an
ongoing confluence of joint- or co-action can they begin to have a practical meaning, otherwise, they are simply
empty rhetorical gestures toward a never-to-be-actualized future.
p.7 a remark of Foucault’s (1982) has long intrigued me: "People know
what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does"
p.8 Where, then, is the life of the oak tree?
Is it in the tree itself ? No. It is in the unfolding relations of the tree to its
surroundings. Similarly for us: we too live within the midst of a somewhat turbulent
earth/water/air (wind) mix, as the recent spate of earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes has reminded us only too
well.
p.8 if our living activity is truly determined by that which has
not yet been achieved, but which is in fact anticipated (as at least possible) in the flow of already occurring events,
then we must contemplate the possibility of a world that is still coming into being, a world
within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, become entangled with each other,
and then, sometimes, separate, a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.
p.8 the whole field of psychological inquiry must take on a new cast –
especially if it is to take on the relational responsibility for the practical creation of worlds which sustain, rather
than merely exploit, the relational flow within which the confluences responsible for their emergence occur. We must
conduct our inquiries from within the midst of turbulent, flowing processes, within which the only stabilities available to
us are – like the eddies and vortices that form in confluences in which two or more flowing processes meet
together – dynamic stabilities dependent for their very existence upon their embedding within the continuous
flow of relational activity in their surroundings.
