Dialogue, narrative and time.

… every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Martin Heidegger (Philosopher)

The last aspect of Gergen and his co-authors proposed new language for understanding dialogue is termed narrative and temporal integration.

By this I take them to mean that as a conversation or a dialogue is occurring, past conversations and events are referred to and used as reference points for current purposes. Their argument is that this helps create a “… reality with historical depth.”

This raises interesting questions for me and links to some other stuff I have been exploring that proposes two contrasting views of time.

On the one hand any conversation or dialogue is part of a sequence of conversational “events”. A narrative can therefore be constructed to help us make sense of that sequence. You might, for example, be holding a series of meetings with stakeholders to develop an action plan. As these meetings progress a narrative might develop that makes sense of what is happening in that sequence of meetings. This might be a narrative about “making progress”, or “being stuck” or “overcoming resistance” or perhaps “resisting attempts to impose something that is not acceptable“. The sense of time that is most relevant here is what might be described as common sense sequential time.

On the other hand, in the ”moment“ of the conversation or dialogue, all sorts of stories and fragments of story come into play, or not. This sense of time is more uncommon and might be termed synchronous time. That is, all the things that are happening now, or that we are making use of, in our conversation somewhat simultaneously. In ”real time“ might be a phrase that we would use.

Both senses of time are present and operative in conversation and dialogue. Sometime the order or sequence in which events have occurred and the recurrence of conversational themes is significant, but more often than not it is the un-sequenced and sometimes confused fragments of stories, propositions and frameworks that are integrated as tools to be used in this present dialogue.

What is most significant for me in this is what can be learned from paying attention to both aspects of time as they play out in conversation. This enables us to ask questions like:

• What is being chosen to continue in the conversation?
• How is it being used?
• What purpose does it serve in this conversation?
• What is being omitted?
• What is lost as a result of that omission?
• How does this change the conversation?

For someone who originally studied the history of the ancient world this feels both familiar and completely against the grain. The familiarity comes from the acceptance that all we have is fragments, not the whole picture. The sense of working against the grain comes from, at least for the moment, not privileging chronological sequence.

What is important for me is this focus on the other side of the coin, if you like. It is not so much about focusing on the ”content“ of the conversation and therefore recognising the continuities and discontinuities of the themes. It is more about focusing on the relational processes at work – what fragments and themes people make part of the conversation and what purpose(s) that serves. There is certainly a sense in which narrative and temporal integration creates ”historical depth“. There is another sense though in which each time we converse we are taking fragments or bits from the past and creating something new as we “integrate” them in different ways in the present.

In this way, it seems to me, our conversations and dialogue can be part of a thread of continuity that gives us a basis to go on acting and talking together and at the same time be the ”sites“ within which we adapt and co-create something original.  To put it another way, in any conversation or dialogue we are both formed by the flow of sequence and continuity and forming the flow of the future.

Next week I’ll say some more about what we might pay attention to in these circumstances to give us a keener sense of forming and being formed by the flow.