Moments of Meeting , livre ebook

Chapter Title i
MOMENTS OF MEETINGii Chapter Title
SUNY series in Communication Studies
Dudley D. Cahn, editorChapter Title iii
Moments of Meeting
Buber, Rogers, and the Potential
for Public Dialogue
Kenneth N. Cissna
and
Rob Anderson
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESSiv Chapter Title
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2002 Kenneth N. Cissna and Rob Anderson
The photograph of Martin Buber was provided by his granddaughter,
Judith Buber Agassi, and is reproduced with her permission. Photo
credit: M. Huttman. The Carl Rogers photograph was provided by his
daughter, Natalie Rogers, and is used with her permission. Photo credit:
Louise Barker.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cissna, Kenneth N.
Moments of meeting: Buber, Rogers, and the potential for public
dialogue / Kenneth N. Cissna and Rob Anderson.
p. cm.—(SUNY series in communication studies)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5283-2 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-7914-5284-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Buber, Martin, 1878–1965. 2. Rogers, Carl R. (Carl Ransom), 1902–
3. Dialogue. I. Anderson, Rob, 1945– II. Title. III. Series.
B3213.B84 C57 2002
150'.92'2—dc21 2001031354
10 987654321Contents
Foreword vii
Barnett Pearce
Introduction xv
1. Dialogue in Public Space 1
2. A Rhetorical Approach to Dialogue 15
3. Buber and the Philosophy of Dialogue 35
4. Rogers and the Praxis of Dialogue 59
5. Historical Context and the Buber–Rogers Meeting 99
6. Interhuman Meeting 123
7. Theorizing Dialogic Moments 173
8. Conversations of Democracy 209
9. The Next Voices 243
Notes 267
References 277
About the Authors 309
Author Index 311
Subject Index 317
vvi Chapter TitleForeword
Barnett Pearce
Moments of Meeting: Buber, Rogers, and the Potential for Public
Dialogue addresses an important topic; it is a work of serious scholarship;
it makes a useful contribution for practitioners; and—perhaps
surprisingly, given the characteristics just cited—it tells a good story and tells
it well.
I want to start with that enigmatic, oxymoronic phrase with which
their title ends: “public dialogue.” As the founding member of a
nonprofit organization called the Public Dialogue Consortium, I do not
come to this issue without certain commitments. But just that
experience sensitizes me to questions like these: What is “dialogue” anyway?
Is dialogue-in-public the same thing as “public dialogue”? When and
for whom and for whose purposes is dialogue desirable?
At one level, the questions above seem naïve. Conventional
wisdom has developed remarkable sophistication in recent years about the
importance of forms of communication and the need to
institutionalize better forms of communication as the way of doing democracy,
conflict resolution, management, and interpersonal relations. For example,
Tannen’s (1998) The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to
Dialogue demonstrates convincingly that confrontational, adversarial
communication practices are the standard operating procedure throughout
our culture, and that this has deleterious effects. A book describing how
to improve “difficult conversations” has been surprisingly successful
(Stone, Patton, & Heen, 1999).
The preferable alternative is often termed “dialogue” (see Arnett &
Arneson, 1999; Bohm, 1996; Ellinor & Gerard, 1998; Flick, 1998; Isaacs,
1999; Saunders, 1999; Tannen, 1998; and Yankelovich, 1999). However,
a close reading of these books and, to the extent possible, an observation
viiviii Foreword
of the practices of those working in these traditions, reveals that there
are some important differences in what counts as “dialogue”; when,
where, and how one would go about bringing it into being; and what
functions one would hope to achieve by it (see Pearce & Pearce, 2000). As
I unpack the apparently naïve questions above, these become some of the
most interesting and socially important questions that we might ask:
• How should we understand “dialogue”? Is it a way of
being-in-relationship to another, a specific form of
communication, a quality of communication, a certain kind of
interpersonal relationship, an experience, or something
else?
• How does dialogue happen? Is it an innate ability that all
or only some of us possess? Is it the result of skillful
practice? Is it something that just happens in a mystical way,
for which we should be grateful but which we cannot
expect to produce at will? Is it something that happens—or is
more probable—in certain kinds of situations?
• Can we increase the probability that dialogue will occur?
Is the ability to engage in dialogue learnable? Is it
teachable? It is contagious?
• How can we make dialogue the standard operating
procedure in our world, nation, organizations, families, schools,
and interpersonal relationships? Can we:
• Command it to happen?
• Coach people to do it better and more often?
• Facilitate it?
• Train/educate people to be more skillful?
• Regulate our patterns of discourse to make it more
likely?
• Create contexts that contain the preconditions for it?
• Infect others with a preference for dialogue?
• Is dialogue in public possible, or is it so fragile that it can
occur only in sheltered, private places? Is it possible to
engage the public in dialogue, or does it require participants
who are “ready”? Can the full range of persons and groups
in the public arena participate in a public form of
communication that has the characteristics of dialogue?
The meaning of dialogue cannot be taken for granted. The term is
used loosely, for example, in so-called dialogue boxes on computer
screens that prompt (not quite “ask”) the user to click on “OK” orForeword ix
“Cancel.” Even though it serves useful purposes, the popular contrast
between dialogue and monologue blissfully disregards its etymology.
Those of us who carefully parse words for a living also have several
different conceptualizations of dialogue. For example, a considerable
tradition of practice centered in the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Dialogue Project is grounded in the work of David Bohm
(Bohm, 1996; Ellinor & Gerard, 1998; Isaacs, 1999). In this tradition,
“dialogue” names particular episodes of communication in which
interpersonal dynamics are deliberately set aside and personal
assumptions are suspended so that groups can think together. Another
tradition of thought and criticism is grounded in the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin (Sampson, 1993; Shotter, 2000). The key insight for these
scholars is that persons, utterances, and actions do not occur as
singletons but are always inherently in relation to all other persons,
utterances, and actions. They respond to what other people have said
and done, and elicit responses from them. Remembering that persons
and all human things are dialogic confers a sensibility (Shotter, 2000)
or dialogic wisdom (Barge & Little, in press) that prevents us from
acting in a way that is inconsistent with the reality in which we live. My
own work uses the adverb “dialogically” more than the noun
“dialogue.” This usage signals a conceptualization of dialogue as a quality
with which we perform the whole gamut of speech acts that comprise
social life. This stands in contrast to concepts of dialogue as a specific
communication episode (Isaacs), an inherent characteristic of social
being (Bakhtin), or a certain kind of experience (Cissna and Anderson’s
understanding of Buber and Rogers).
Cissna and Anderson develop a distinctive concept of dialogue as
moments of meeting. They locate this concept in Martin Buber’s
philosophy of dialogue and in Carl Rogers’s praxis of dialogue. While it
would be hard to ignore Buber in any discussion of dialogue, Rogers is
not so obvious a choice. For Buber, dialogue is a special kind of meeting
in which people allow the other to happen to them (Stewart & Zediker,
2000). The term “dialogue” did not loom large for Rogers, but his
person-centered approach to therapy and other forms of practice focused
on being congruent, striving for empathic understanding, and
extending unconditional positive regard.
In my own learning history, I read Rogers before I read Buber and,
to an extent I had not realized, read Buber through the lens of Rogers.
While I think this is a particularly good way of reading Buber, my study
of chapters 3 and 4 helped me realize that I had been using Buber’s
language to name Rogers’s practices, and that they are not quite the same
things. Among other good consequences of reading this book, I havex Foreword
begun to distinguish Rogers and Buber more, to acknowledge how
much of my practice is Rogerian (although I had called it Buberian), and
to add Rogers to my personal list of seminal figures in the development
of dialogue.
In their rhetorical analysis of the encounter at the University of
Michigan in 1957 (see also Anderson & Cissna, 1997), Cissna and
Anderson find Buber and Rogers agreeing on a concept of dialogue as
moments of meeting. Against the prevailing interpretation of Buber and
Rogers as disagreeing about the ability of achieving mutuality in
asymmetrical relationships, both agreed—so Cissna and Anderson
argue—that dialogue is “essentially momentary and fleeting” (see
also Cissna & Anderson, 1998). Among other implications, this
means that dialogue is possible even when the persons involved are
unequal in role, status, or prestige and that dialogic moments can
occur in public conver