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Speaking, Actually: Towards a New 'Fluid' Common-Sense Understanding of Relational Becomings

Author(s) : John Shotter

Reviews and Endorsements

John Shotter is a thinker. Thinking has become quite unusual in academic psychology nowadays, dominated as it is by a narrow empirical perspective, and a distrust of philosophical reflection.
This book in required reading for all family therapists who are interested in the dialogical perspective. But be warned… this is far from a manual. It is food for reflection. This book of Shotter's is important, as it urges us to be careful with the language we use. The words we casually speak can keep us captive in our usual, individualistic-rationalistic-mechanistic ways of dealing with things; resulting in a world of fragmentation and separation.
It is a rich book, that (not withstanding its urgency) should be savored slowly. Like a good wine.
Peter Rober, Professor of Family Therapy, KU Leuven, Belgium

It is impossible to capture in a few words all the fine detail and nuances of this carefully and beautifully crafted book. The title brings together the key themes of John's work across time, themes that invite and challenge us to go beyond taken-for-granted ways of thinking to engage differently with our social world, our place within it, and our ways of generating knowledge about it. Beginning with a critique of normal science and mainstream psychology - the limitations of rationalization, representation, fragmentation, individualization, mental cognition, etc. - John goes on to offer a social world that is holistic, chiasmic, unbounded, and always becoming. and a way of being in this world as 'participant', in which we create a shared sense of our circumstances and anticipate the consequences of our everyday conversations and actions. Crucially, he argues we need to develop a discursive consciousness, to notice and to pay attention to what our talk with others does and to the potentialities of its movement. By doing so we become open and responsible to ourselves and others. The key ideas we need to focus on are: making a difference that matters and 'humanifying' ourselves as practitioners and researchers.
Ann Cunliffe, Professor of Management, University of Bradford, UK

In this significant book, Shotter further develops his challenge of our dependence on existing theoretical perspectives and their representations. He suggests these orient us to and reinforce the familiar, and blind us to the nuances, uniqueness, and previously unseen or ignored details of our everyday lives and the people in it. Shotter's illuminated challenge draws on his remarkable grasp and interpretation of classic philosophers such as Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and contemporary critical thinkers such as Barad, Bertau, and Lipari. Speaking, Actually is a fascinating and compelling invitation to pause, step-back, notice, and think: to open ourselves to the emerging practical possibilities for understanding and navigating our relationships and everyday life situations when we can develop a different orientation to them.
Harlene Anderson, Ph.D, founding member of the Houston Galveston Institute and Taos Institute, USA

John Shotter generously shares with us his rich and illuminating conversations with a host of textual friends. Indeed, these conversations - with their flowing forms without formulations, disclosings without closings - exemplify the major thrust of this inspiring work. Life and love are to be found in sensitive, sensual, and unceasing dialogue.
Kenneth Gergen, Senior Research Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College and Taos Institute USA