January 2006

Mid-fall I put a break on .. just as someone would who was approaching a fork in the road. I became intensely involved with questions related to analysis. It has been important for me to do 'research' in a way that fits with our ways of therapy practice, and our ways of being in the world. Indeed, I wished the feel of these research dialogues to resemble and 'live up to' the very aspects of practice dialogues you have all described so eloquently in your reflections, and in our live conversation in Playa. This past fall, I felt I needed to make a choice: to situate our project within an established, pre-determined research tradition .... or to continue in a manner intricately congruent with the postmodern, collaborative inquiry that is central in our everyday lives. I also noticed something like a nesting impulse! Your reflections were arriving in my email, and I still had not chosen a (methodological) place for them ... except, I knew I wanted to be in dialogue with each of you. This I knew and never have doubted!

"Analysis" seemed in some ways like an external element ... an activity derived from other practice traditions less resonant with dialogical ways of being. When postmodern, collaborative therapists want to deepen understanding, they do not generally turn to analytical methods. They engage in a process of inquiry that is dialogical. They listen to understand. Their understanding is open-ended, 'hard-won' through the relational 'back and forth' of conversation ... they do not want to understand too quickly. Possibilities are inherent in such a mutually influencing process, but they can not be known ahead of time, nor can all the twists and turns of the dialogue be pre-figured .. a 'genuine' conversation has a life of its own.

In early winter, Harlene asked me what I would do instead of analysis. I began to search earnestly for alternatives to data analysis and the production of research by-products such as frameworks, models, theories, a system of some kind .... all static pictoral representations that derive from distillation procedures designed to legitimize knowledge, and bring order and a sense of completion. (Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty,Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Vico, Wittgenstein and others, John Shotter articulates these ideas extensively.) In a post-Enlightenment, postmodern perspective, analysis functions to reduce the complexity of inquiry, pronouncing the shape and character of it from the outside. For me, mainstream qualitative analysis is about "doing to" (from positions outside of our conversation) rather than "doing with" (from within our conversation.)

Does traditional qualitative analysis fit in a postmodern, collaborative process of inquiry? Does it have an organic place within a dialogical, unfolding, relational process?

To quote Wittgenstein: "Mere description is so difficult because one believes one needs to fill out the facts in order to understand them. It is as if one saw a screen with scattered colour-patches, and said "the way they are here, they are unintelligible; they only make sense when one completes them into a shape. Whereas I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it)"

I am continually drawn to musical metaphors in my understanding of social practices .. and consider postmodern, collaborative inquiry as a movement towards improvisation.

"In improvised music there is a creative and inter-active dialogical relationship between performers, whereas a composed work acts as a medium between the various instrumental components. The relationship between musicians loses its social significance; lessened by the agency of ... the composition" (Eddie Prevost)

"I'm attracted to improvisation because of something I value. That is a freshness, a certain quality that can only be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get by writing (composition). It is something to do with the "edge." Always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means, but it is a leap into the unknown." (Steve Lacy)

" ... there is a kiind of fluidity in conversation that is lacking in a theory-driven inquiry ...If we are to let "something" speak to us of itself, of its own inner "shape," we need to follow where it leads, to allow ourselves to be moved in a way answerable to its calls." (Katz & Shotter)

So.....I return now to our correspondence, to all the writing you kindly sent, as well as to our spoken dialogue in Playa. The spoken and written words within our conversation will teach me how to respond .. so that all my writing will be relationally responsive writing, rather than 'report' writing ... and our conversation itself will define the limits and possibilities available to us. My aims are not simply to tolerate complexity and remain within it, but further, to add complexity, just as dialogue adds to understanding. I move ahead with this approach, trusting that conversation is inherently generative and transforming, and that possibilities will emerge from our dialogue together that might be unavailable to us previous to our project. Perhaps I am assuming a "stance" moreso than adopting a method.

I return to the ISI this June (06) and hope to see many of you there. Then, off to Merida, to join colleagues at Kanankil for several days - and I can't wait.

Warmest wishes to each and all of you,

Janice