Conversational Realities Revisited: Life Language Body and World

Conversational Realities Reloaded is a new edition of John Shotters 1993 book Conversational Realities. Like the first edition it contests the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological realities of a systematic and structured kind are to be discovered underlying appearances. Instead it claims that such orderly realities are both socially constructed and sustained in existence only within the context of peoples disorderly everyday conversational activities. However this second edition is much more oriented toward practical issues than the first. Central to it is a focus on peoples spontaneous living bodily responsiveness to the expressive movements of the others around them and the dialogically-structured nature of the events occurring in the meetings between them. Due to the irreversibility of living processes of growth and development such events occur always for another first time. Thus instead of patterns and regularities instead of seeking to solve problems our task becomes the more practical one of struggling to create new pathways forward into the uniquely new circumstances we create for ourselves as we all live out our lives together. Among the works of many others who have emphasized the importance of unique only once occurrent events in human affairs the works of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein are key resources in this book. Along with a new Preface describing some of my changed views on Social Constructionism this new edition contains four completely new essays along with a thorough reworking of five of the original chapters (while five of the old chapters have been dropped). They explore the logical poetic and rhetorical nature of our conversation intertwined practices in the spheres of psychotherapy management and everyday life as well as in other more extraordinary circumstances. In particular they are concerned to highlight the socially contested but imaginary nature of many of the things we talk of in social life as well as the nature of the social processes in which they are constructed.