“Coherence and closure are deep human desires …”

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“Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. “Falling in love,” characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.”
A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

Sometimes the topics that I write about catch me by surprise. This one, the third of Ken Gergen and his co-authors’ suggestions for better ways of understanding dialogue, is a good example. On the surface the idea that dialogue creates coherence appeared straightforward. Surely this is exactly what dialogue, as we generally understand it, is all about. Much the same as the often used phrase “getting on the same page”. But … somewhere I had a nagging doubt. Did I really understand? What is really being argued here? What is it that we think that dialogue really creates? Agreement? Common ground? Something else?

In the article Gergen and his co-authors argue that what dialogic coherence creates is “a singular, ordered world about which to organize.”

For me this is something way beyond simple agreement. What they seem to be saying is that without some form of dialogue or conversation we do not have a basis on which to act. What seems to me to be fundamental about all this is the role of conversation and dialogue in enabling the recognition between and among people that the other people and the material world they are relating to, and the stories, propositions, concepts and frameworks they use to make sense of what happens in those relationships, are sufficiently similar that, by and large, others are responding and acting in the ways that are anticipated as the conversation progresses.

That is why we are so “put off” when someone responds in a conversation in a way that seems completely unrelated to the flow of topics and references. My daughter told me today of a conversation she was involved in at school recently in which a number of her classmates were discussing how many students there were in the school whose names were also the names of countries, when someone who had been silent up to that point said, “I know how to make chips.”

Ken Gergen and his co-authors suggest that among the common inputs contributing to the creation of coherence in and through dialogue are:

• Repeating conversational topics,
• Offering comments relevant to a recognized issue,
• Providing answers to preceding questions; and
• Metonymic reflection which refers to the use of a fragment in the conversational response that refers back to what the previous speaker has said.

I think there is more to be said about this but will come back to it next week.

For the present I think three things are worth emphasising:

1. The central role of conversation/dialogue in actively creating a world that enables us to “go on together”.
2. The reality that we often don’t need to agree completely, just enough to be able to know what to do next.
3. The importance of noticing and inquiring into those often fleeting moments when the responses are not what we anticipated. Perhaps they won’t be as incongruent as “I know how to make chips,” but in each of these disconnects there is the possibility of learning something new about each other and of creating a new way to “go on together” as a consequence.