Conversation and Causes of its Degeneration

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Conversation andCauses of its Degeneration

• Klaus Krippendorff
• Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics,
  Language, and Culture
• The Annenberg School for Communication
• University of Pennsylvania
• Philadelphia
• kkrippendorff_at_asc.upenn.edu

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Morphology of conversation Con-versa-tion
tion makes a verb into a noun and
a process into a thing
conversing might be preferable
versa to turn something into verse, into
multiple versions Con together, a joint
accomplishment, participatory
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Conversation ?

• When is conversation? And for whom?

• How does conversation arise?

• When does conversation become a concern?

• Some familiar explanations

• Cybernetics of conversation

• Conversational space. How does it arise?

• When do conversations degenerate

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When is conversation? And for whom ?
From the position of its observer

• A mundane activity of which everyone is capable

• Embodied in participants practices presence
  required

• Locally managed, self-organizing

• Creates its own history (topics, conventions,
  actions)

• Observationally incomprehensible.
• No test for understanding

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When is conversation? And for whom?
From the position of its participants

• Effortless togetherness. Feeling of mutual
  understanding

• A sense of participation

• Turn taking flows naturally not by rules, no
  theory

• Dialogical equality for everyone

• All topics are open

• Respect for individual contributions

• Understanding successful participation in
  its continuation

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Its ontogenesis ?

• We are born in ongoing processes of coordinating
  our body, language, equipment and nature with
  others

• Coordination comes naturally, moving from
  kinesthetic to speech imitating and testing for
  being in tune

• Bootstrapping experiences into language use
  from kinesthetic metaphors to interpersonal
  metaphors

• Mature language competence playful togetherness
  Conversation

• Awareness of conversation arises when it
  degenerates into stressful and constrained
  communication

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When does conversation become a concern ?
When it turns problematic, difficult

• Physical constraints

• Outside impositions, assignments

• Transgressions of the taken-for-granted
  languaging

• Irresolvable differences between expectations and
  perceptions

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Some familiar explanations

• Content metaphor
• Transmission metaphor
• Ecological
• Hermeneutic
• Game metaphor
• Dialogue

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Some familiar explanations

• Content metaphor

Messages as containers of content
Content is entered by an author and removed by a
recipient
Conversation amounts to everyone getting the same
content out of messages that an author entered
Reading same messages sharing the same contents
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Some familiar explanations

• Transmission metaphor

The information of a message is what is
maintained in processes of encoding, transmission
and decoding from one medium to another
Conversation is using the same code
Using the same code implies the sharing of
information
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Some familiar explanations

• Ecological

Interactions among many constituents who, by
distinguishing among kinds, organize themselves
into families, cultures, and species and enact
their own local and positional understanding of
their worlds
Interspecies communication consists of
predatorial, parasitical, or cooperative/competiti
ve effects
An ecology is always larger than the world of any
of its constituents
Does radical constructivism invoke an ecological
model of society ?
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Some familiar explanations

• Hermeneutic

Aim of conversation is understanding, achieved in
the recursion of the so-called hermeneutic circle
an iterative process of merging
horizons of understanding
Understanding is never finished
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Some familiar explanations

• Game metaphor

Games consist of moves that collaboratively
change (construct) configurations of objects,
complying with rules, and have a point (goal)
Conversations consist of speech acts
(performatives) that are validated by their
responses and accomplish something
To be felicitous, speech acts (promises,
requests, commands, expressives, assertives) must
satisfy preparatory conditions, sincerity
conditions, the relation between speaker and
addressee, and the point of the act
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Some familiar explanations

• Dialogue

A way to find truths behind appearances (Plato)
Ongoing communication without aiming at a
conclusion or expressing a viewpoint (Martin
Buber)
A group jointly explores assumptions of thinking,
meaning and social effects (David Bohm)
Acknowledging multiple perspectives, voices that
create a myriad of possibilities (Mikhail
Bakhtin)
A pedagogy in which students learn from each
other in mutual respect and equality leading to
liberation from oppression (Paulo Freire)
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Cybernetic explanations

• Taking second-order cybernetics to heart,
  conversation must be seen as embodied in its
  participants practices

• Wittgenstein might say it is a particular
  language game. Austin might add it is
  performative (Id say constitutive)

• Conversations create their unique con-sensual
  histories of participation recursive networks
  of expectations, coordinations of understanding
  and interactions

• As interactors, participants create spaces for
  each other

• Conversations are radically self-organizing,
  collaboratively managed and dialogically equal

• Conversations preserve the possibility of their
  continuation

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Space ?
Possibilities created by (human) actors
ability to act
Moving ones body (and tangible objects) creates
material spaces
Changing ones stages of life, profession,
position, moving from one role to another creates
social spaces
Envisioning new technology creates design spaces
Using browsers and following links from documents
to other documents creates cyberspace
Choices among speech acts and choices to respond
creates conversational spaces
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Material (geometrical) space ?
Observed variation, described in logically
distinct dimensions creates observational spaces
In the natural sciences the experiential origin
of space is ignored if not denied, leaving no
place for human observers in the spatial accounts
they provide, much less for actors
This disembodied construction of space,
institutionalized in the discourse of physics and
formalized in mathematics, is celebrated as the
only measurable, hence real space, claiming all
other spaces to be merely metaphorical and
non-existing
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Conversational space ?
Possibilities for speaking and responding to
others
The confidence in ones ability to interact
naturally without fear of experiencing breakdowns
or running into obstacles
Obstacles in and limits of conversational space
are constructed as inabilities, whether due to
past experiences, received warnings or
threat-induced fears
There are speech acts that facilitate
conversation and speech acts that shut
conversation down
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Spatial notions in cybernetics
Cybernetics is the study of all possible systems.
It is informed when some have not been build or
evolved in nature W. Ross Ashby (1956)
Act always so as to increase the number of
choices Heinz von Foerster (1973)
When communicating, preserve or increase the
possibilities relevant and open to others Klaus
Krippendorff (1985)
As a condition for conversation, Participants
create spaces for each other to be, act, and
explore
Conversation is cybern-ethics in human interaction
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How does conversational space expand ?
Acknowledging the radical constructivist notion
of cognitive autonomy of participants in
conversation, conversational space can expand
by

• Using new vocabularies (Richard Rorty)

• Creating metaphors that draw heretofore unrelated
  empirical domains into conversations (George
  Lakoff)

• Attentive listening, not fearing challenges
  (David Bohm)

• Coping with a polyphony of voices (Mikhail
  Bakhtin), second-order understanding (the
  understanding of others understanding) (KK),
  living in multi-versa (Maturana)

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Conversational space
Lesson from Politeness theory (Brown Levinson
et al.) Politeness f (Inclusion X Distance X
Power) Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) Being
excluded
Being defined by others
Being
imposed upon
Face-enhancing acts support the desire
to be
included, understood
to be respected,
affirmed
to be able to define ones own
identity
to make own decisions and reduce the
risk in venturing into new spaces
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Obstacles to maintaining conversations

• In conventional terms
• Fear
• Display or exercise of power
• Mistrust
• External influences
• Distractions
• Poor communication conditions

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When do conversations degenerate ?

• In cybernetic/conversational terms
• Threats to self-organization
• Threats to dialogical equality
• Threats to cognitive autonomy
• Threats to openendedness

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When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to self-organization
Speaking as

• as representative of absent others

• as advocate of (for) absent others

• as office holders (in the name of an institution)

• as an authority with privileged access to a
  reality denied to participants

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When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to dialogical equality

• Claiming expertise in conversation, attempts to
  manage the process

• Monopolizing dialog

• Interrupting (being insensitive to) its natural
  flow

• Changing topics without acquiescence or listening
  to the speech act I understand

• Declaring participants incompetent

• Unwilling to repair untoward speech acts

• Denying accountability, restricting the use of
  certain speech acts exerting power

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When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to cognitive autonomy

• Categorizing (typing) participants using
  generalizations without their consent

• Disqualifying participants genuineness

• Speaking about present participants telling
  their stories in third person terms

• Not responding to a participant

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When do conversations degenerate ?
Threats to openendedness

• Insisting on convergence, a goal

• Insisting of consistency someones

• Ruling certain speech acts out of order

• Leaving the conversation or threatening to do so

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Where do conversations degenerate into ?
Conversation ? Discourse ? Mechanism
Constrained conversation institutionalized,
purposive, rule governed E.g., legal, business,
scientific discourse, including formal
presentations
Causally or structurally determined system
computationally, mathematically or biologically
describable. No human agency, no own space
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A dispensable ideal? An intellectual luxury?
Recap conversation

• To me it is the site where
• Pure being-with is embodied, experienced
  practiced

• Humans become aware of being social beings
  language naturally, without theory, without
  obligations

• Social hierarchies, oppressive regimes can be
  examined, undermined, rearticulated and changed

• It also provides
• The reference against which constraints in
  language use (discourse) are noticeable and
  addressable

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Thank you for listening
kkrippendorff_at_asc.upenn.edu