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For many years, Newman has presented
an annual lecture at Town Hall in Manhattan where he shares
a philosophical perspective on broad topics in popular
culture. |
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 A
Review of Fred Newman and Lois Holzman's The End of Knowing
By Tom Strong, Division
of Applied Psychology at the University of Calgary
In The End of Knowing readers are asked to imagine a world
where language is more important for what it does in relationships
than for what people are talking about. This, authors Fred
Newman and Lois Holzman claim, is ultimately where the postmodern
revolution is taking us.
Whereas modernist conversation required a grounding in epistemological
claims about why we think and feel the way we do when we try
to influence each other, Newman and Holzman see that view of
language as a kind of "aboutness" and as limiting.
In contrast, they propose a view of language as something we
perform in relationships, and they take readers beyond John
Shotter's position that all meaning-making conversation occurs
in a context of justification and argumentation. They suggest,
instead, that new meaning is best created in a shared performance
of meaning, and they discourage recitations or negotiation
of meanings that we bring from our prior forms of "knowing".
Newman and Holzman describe themselves as radicals whose roots
go back to the tumultuous sixties. They have been active in
alternative education, community development and theatre as
means of promoting social change. Their point of view comes
from their unique readings of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky and Marx.
Specifically, they regard social constructionism (especially
writers they still admire such as Gergen and Shotter) as probably
anachronistic for holding to enduring meaning, even meanings
derived from conversational and unscientific means. This they
suggest needlessly creates "fetishized and fossilized" forms
of meaning or knowing.
Their view reminds me of a quote from David Abrams' Spell of
the Sensuous: "The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim
to nature by staking it down." For them, the "shelf-life" of
any form of knowing is found in the immediacy of the relational
use of that knowing. Knowing, in the ways that concern the
authors, is an attempt to generalize the utility of meaning
beyond the context in which it is spontaneously required. This
is their concern with most social constructionist writing:
whether the knowing is generated in laboratories or in playground
interaction, any attempt to carry it forward as Truth or "truth" results,
they tell us, in problematic generalization.
What Newman and Holzman have done is merge the contextual specificity
implied by Wittgenstein's notion of "language games",
and Vygotsky's developmental notion of the ZPD (zone of proximal
development). They suggest that these contexts of interaction
are where we not only perform what we know, but this (and here's
where they Marx in) is where we change both what we know and
the relationships where we are doing that knowing. Put differently,
a language game, developed in the interactions between people,
is also a context of developing development, in a developing
relationship that changes its forms of interaction, along with
the characters and relationships between them, through the
performance of changing meanings.
They are hypothesizing a basis for knowing that is process-contextual/relationally-developmental,
as opposed to knowledge that, in Marxist terms, would be "commodified",
or adhered to as static generalizations people could apply
to their varied life circumstances. In their view, we become
who we are by continuously "being who we are not" and
they contend that the ultimate postmodern shift will be away
from having to regard our world as knowable, for relationships
of successful performance.
"Can we learn to give up knowing?" is their combined
question and challenge. Their detailed answer is that we find,
in the immediacy of our circumstances (not in commodified knowledge),
what we have to perform, and accounting for that successful
performance is not as important as doing it.
Newman and Holzman regard language as being important for its
rhetorical potentials, its ability to "move" its
users. It is in performing our language that we learn of our
influence in relationships. But we don't do that performing
alone, we also continually create our relationships in what
and how we talk and, as we do, we, our relationships, and our
subject matter all change too. This is how they tie together
Vygotsky's ZPD and language games; there is an essentially
non-reflexive (i.e., non-justificatory, non-epistemologically
based) meaning to engaged activity, a Zen-like wu-wei-ness
("no-mindedness"), people are doing without self-
or other-consciousness. As people are acting or performing
in this manner there is little "aboutness" mediating
their subsequent performance; it would be like stopping an
intimate moment and asking out loud "why am I kissing
you?" But it is in the course of this activity that we
transcend our previously held meanings and the spontaneity
of the moment moves us to new ways of being.
This is radically different from a narrative perspective that
would suggest we bring some consistency to our social encounters
by re-enacting our stories of who we are. Instead, in performing
meaning and experiencing what self-relations Therapist Stephen
Gilligan calls the "relational field", the previous
meanings of our 'self-stories' develop according to the relatedness
found in spontaneous performance. In the words of Newman and
Holzman:
Play and performance subvert truth and truth-telling, for the
presumed truth value which utterances have in ordinary discourse
is suspended in performatory activity. Two year olds manage
quite well without being held accountable for the truth, indeed,
without having any awareness of it at all. Their learning and
developing happens at a fantastic rate as they participate
in creating life activities with their families and caregivers
in an environment that is, to a large extent, performatory
and, thereby, unconstrained by truth-referentiality (p.128)
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Language activity in our culture has been so thoroughly 'thingified" (objectified,
reified, fetishized, commodified) that we must play a game
with (perform) it in order to see that it is activity" (p.138).
Newman and Holzman take the postmodern discussion beyond its
usual focus on words, discourses and narratives to more closely
examine what it means to communicate in transformative ways.
They ask us to regard conversation as an activity where we
simply talk and allow ourselves to get caught up in that talk,
while freeing ourselves from the breaks in our conversational
relatedness we create when we incessantly tie our talking to
requirements for "aboutness".
In their postmodern world, meaning is performed in the circumstances
in which it is required. This is quite different from common
notions that our meaning or knowledge is acquired then later
implemented or negotiated into the circumstances in which it
seems required. Words and manners of speaking then become performance
tools although I was uncertain how the authors distinguished
these tools from the forms of knowing they rail against. I
was also unclear about how Newman and Holzman regarded the
effect of perceived power differentials in the performance
of meaning. The authors are describing a dialogic world in
which people find their optimal co-existence through efforts
to share and create meanings that are mutually transformative.
Power in relationships, as I've come to understand it, is about
the continued application of privileged meaning.
I yearn for the world the authors are describing but still
can't abandon Shotter's view of the "cultural politics
of everyday living". In such "cultural politics",
discourse seems tied to Truth or "truth" claims in
rhetorically insisting and accepting meaning. In any event,
the position of Newman and Holzman is provocative to say the
least: imagine again their challenge that we give up our need
for 'aboutness'.
How do our present conversational practices seem to require
this "aboutness," and what does this do to the transformative
potentials that could otherwise arise in activity and play?
We reference too much of our conversation to forms of explanation
or justification and lose the spontaneity and relatedness that
allows meanings to be coordinated and co-created in the moment.
Newman and Holzman's comment that we become who we are by being
who we are not reminds me of the creative use of play used
by family therapist, Peggy Papp. It also reminds me of that
common relationship therapy technique of requesting participants
do what they can to stay in dialogue. What typically breaks
the dialogue are the claims of "aboutness" that concern
the authors. Rather than deconstruct the meanings (or "aboutnesses")
brought to therapy, Newman and Holzman see the focus of therapy
as leaving behind our fossilized and fetishized meanings for
what we are able to create with each other in the conversational
encounter. They ask us to think beyond continually situating
our language use in positions for the relatedness and spontaneity
that the moment requires, to think beyond our normal individuality
to what it means to co-exist relationally/ contextually. In
Fred Newman's words:
We are so caught up in our individuated minds as producers
of language which then bears truth. So, indirectly we are producers
of truth; what we want to convey a whole lot when we speak
to each other is that this is truth." (p. 152)
The thing to understand about alienation is that it transforms
processes, activities, etc, not simply into temporary objects,
but into permanent object of truth. (p.156)
The End of Knowing is a challenging and provocative read. It
asks us to reconsider the foundation of our rhetorical practices:
why must we regard, as primary in our communications, the need
to ground our attempts to influence and co-exist with each
other in "aboutness"? Reflecting back on this challenge,
it makes me wonder how so many efforts to feel influential
and well-regarded in our relationships seem to rely on meanings
we bring from outside, or previous to, the immediacy of those
relationships.
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