Two kinds of talking

On dialogue and dialectics

I should begin this with a caveat. I have known about the concept of dialogic versus dialectic speech for years, and I still cannot reliably call the right thing by the right name. I will check this piece three times and one will slip through the net anyway, and for this I apologise.

I first came across the idea in Richard Sennett's book Together. The terms dialectic and dialogic draw a distinction between two types of conversation: in the first, dialectic speech, each person comes with their own point of view, and tries to persuade the other of its correctness. The intention is to arrive at a common understanding through a process of reasoned argument; it's a familiar form, appearing in everything from political debate to essay structure (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) to arguments about who takes the recycling out more often.

It would be nice if the words' etymologies gave clues as to which was which, but they both come from the same roots: dia, meaning across, or between, and legein, meaning speech. The distinction comes instead from who used the words to mean what, which is more slippery to hang on to.

We've had dialectics since Socrates and Plato; this is why it's so embedded in our ways of learning. Dialogic didn't come along until the 1800s, and was picked up by a Russian philosopher and literary scholar to name the kind of discussion where a final agreement is not the intention. Here, the people talking still have their own opinions and perspectives, but the conversation begins from the perspective that nobody, at this stage, is correct. The goal of dialogic speech is to piece together a shared reality from the viewpoints of everyone who contributes.

There will, of course, be disagreements, bits missing or left out, and in Bakhtin's view this is sort of the point: nothing is 'finalisable' in this way; meanings are subjective, plural, contextually-determined and continually revised.

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Dialectic conversations are fast, when they work. If I think I've taken the recycling out three weeks in a row, and you point out that I wasn't actually in the city for two of them, I can (usually) concede that perhaps I was wrong. It's for this reason, I think, that this is the assumed format of most work meetings, alongside the fact that senior people in many organisations are senior precisely because they have been on the winning side of the conversation more often than not, that they have in this way 'got things done' despite obstacles; or at least this is what is believed.

When it doesn't work, though, it's interminable. This inability to find common ground is compounded by a cognitive bias, naïve realism, which makes us believe that we see the world clearly, and if only we could expose others to the same information, they would come round to our way of thinking. So, instead of listening, we explain. And, of course, so do they.

In my professional and personal experience, this is the way it usually plays out. Most people, myself included, don't hold their opinions lightly, for a bunch of reasons it's very difficult to switch off. The problem is, of course, that everyone involved is usually right, at least partly. We rarely believe something totally erroneous.

Dialogic speech, on the other hand, allows us to put all the things we collectively believe into the pot. We can stir it around a few times and emerge with something stronger, more robust, than anything any one person had to start with.

Like the ontological divide, this distinction is another thing that having the language for helps me to notice, to actively work with. I can use it to nudge groups from stand-off to collaboration.

A lot of 'design work', I think, is long-form dialogic conversation: taking people to one side, one-by-one, and finding out what they believe. Writing things down, and saying them out loud. Gluing multiple perspectives together and presenting the malformed whole for critique. Making the invisible visible. Gradually and painstakingly assembling a new and collective truth.

For a while, inspired by Ross Gay's wonderful Book of Delights, I've been noticing my own delights and writing them down. I shared a few with some friends recently and they said such lovely things, I thought I'd start including one here.

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August (4)

FIGS

I’m on top of the garden wall, balanced on a fence post, testing a curving branch to see if it’ll hold my weight. My thumb is bleeding – there are brambles up here – and possibly my shins, too, and I’ve dropped the secateurs somewhere into the thicket. I am in my element. 

The next-door garden to ours is a beautiful old one, full of trees with swings in and flowers that sometimes drift in seed form onto my much scrappier borders. It’s tended by Cat and Huw, who know the habits of the squirrels and where the foxes live under the roots of the big apple tree two doors down. I went round to borrow a mattock once (theirs is the kind of house you can be sure of a mattock) and came back with also four allied tools I couldn’t name, just in case, plus a story about our garden’s history. 

When we moved in, Cat leaned over the fence and said sorry about the fig tree, it’s got a bit sprawling, and did we want her to make sure it didn’t encroach over into our garden? When I said no, absolutely not, I was beyond delighted to have a few branches of figs volunteering in the corner, who wouldn’t be, she smiled and said: well, if you can reach ‘em, you can have ‘em! Which is why, four years later, I’m on top of a fence post on top of a wall covered in bramble scratches, two figs stored safely on one of their leaves on top of the wild honeysuckle and another on the next post along, one in the canopy just slightly out of reach and one already in my belly.

Like everything – tomatoes brought indoors, washed, and eaten on warm toast with flaky sea salt; runner beans snapped off the vine and eaten next to the veg beds, reminding me always of my grandfather’s garden – figs are sweeter, more deeply flavoured, more satisfying, if you can eat them straight off the tree with twigs still in your hair.

This is a praise song for figs, yes, and August, but also for neighbours and a body that climbs and also, slightly, for having a spare pair of secateurs.