April 2007

I am still enamoured with the word responding. If responding is the primary activity of dialogue as Shotter and others suggest, and if active response is crucial to understanding as Bakhtin holds, then responding must be the primary activity of dialogical processes 'in therapy', and responding must similarly be the primary activity of dialogical research methods.

Usually researchers pose questions and "respondents" respond. In this project I have not only come to see myself as a respondent, but because we speak/write across tremendous geographical distances, we have all become "co-respondents" - with each other, within the dialogues featured in this project, and within the subject of our shared inquiry.

To participate in co-respondence is to allow some other or otherness to call some tangible action from us we could never produce on our own.

So today, when I read Merleau-Ponty's writing of "the painter" who "lives in fascination" within a reversal of roles, I thought of of our project:

"The painter lives in fascination. The actions most proper to him - those gestures, those paths which he alone can trace and which will be revelations to others - to him they seem to emanate from the things themselves, like the patterns of the constellations. Inevitably the roles between him and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them..." Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin

Best wishes to everyone this month of May,

Janice