Published in British Journal of Sociology, June 1996. Electronic version copyright Rob Shields, 1996.

One of the significant aspects of Verstehen is that it poses the problem of intersubjective and intercultural access to meaning and the understanding of an Other's viewpoint. How does one escape from the particularity of one's own understanding as a researcher and 'comprehend' the understanding of another person, group or historical culture? Although this has been a constant theme of hermeneutic and phenomenological theory, it is crucial to re-examine the limitations on intersubjective understanding imposed by the impossibility of every fully vacating ones own subject position -"stepping out of one's own shoes" - to occupy or align oneself perfectly another's social viewpoint. At some level, this possibility is assumed in the theories of intersubjectivity and the anthropological premises upon which Verstehen depends (Burger 1977). Where this assumption is not made, the impact of imperfect understanding of or 'alignment' with an Other's understanding is never theorized beyond the implication that sociologists are limited to producing 'one' interpretation out of a possibly finite set of coherent interpretations.⁽¹⁾

Equivocal understandings: Empathetic Verstehen

Verstehen, often called a method of 'empathetic understanding', has suffered from an equivocal definition wavering between Rickert's and particularly Dilthey's romantic sense of empathy and the more empirical and contextual 'interpretive understanding' derived from Weber (1949:160; 1968:5; 1975:163-86).⁽²⁾ Despite constant warnings and caveats that Verstehen should not be confused with an easy empathy with another person or cultural group, such descriptions abound in the literature of social science. Oliver has noted that one of Gadamer's main contributions (1975; compare Giddens 1976) has been the critique of this European, romantic heritage which 'made empathy a hallmark' by equating verstehen 'with the re-living of experiences' (Oliver 1983:524). In the pre-1970s English-language sociological literature Verstehen was rejected on this basis. Abel's seminal 1948 article consigns Verstehen to a heuristic tool. Verstehen was reduced to the level of inductive interpretations used in generating functionalist hypotheses (see also the assessment of Jules-Rossette 1986). Abel formulates this in the following way: 'Why are people protesting? Perhaps it is because they...' (Abel 1948:211). As such Verstehen was called a heuristic 'operation' of discovery rather than validation of a case. Abel's examples remain at the level of the inter-personal, but in history and sociology Verstehen is more directly concerned with the inter-group and inter-cultural scales.⁽³⁾ In the 1960s for example, Hughes explains Verstehen suggesting that it "involves the effort to 'feel oneself into' a historical or social action by putting oneself in the place of the actor or actors" (Hughes 1961:311).

In its crudest sense 'Verstehen' has been parodied as a matter of "putting oneself in someone else's shoes" to see social situations from 'their' point of view. This formula is dismissable as an oversimplified "straw-man" (even though it is often the sort of "operation" not only practised in everyday life but lamentably taught in first-year social science courses)⁽⁴⁾. However, this vulgarization clarifies some of the difficulties such an idealist, pre-semiotic understanding of social meaning and intersubjectivity puts us in. Such an approach is consistent with the "empathetic aspect" of nineteenth century, pre-Weberian Verstehen. For Dilthey (1977), Verstehen was at first a methodical process of grasping an other person's dynamic and historical cultural understanding - a subjective, interested, and self-modifying form of knowledge (Emerson and Morson 1986:119). At its most basic: '"Life grasps life"' (Dilthey in Rickman 1976:181). This was,

not a matter of establishing causal regularities but rather of experiencing...[others'] thoughts and emotions from the inside by "putting oneself in their shoes" (sich hineinverstezen) and reliving their experiences (nacherleben) (Outhewaite 1975: 27-28).

The formula of 'reliving' the experiences of others is Rickert's. but even if one stresses the more 'moderate' thesis-we can all imagine that we are someone else in another time and place-instead of naively putting ourselves in someone else's shoes-it is not unproblematic. The moderate versions do not imply access to another person's consciousness but each depends on temporarily forgetting or eliding one's own position. The alternative is of course that mutual understanding is made possible by a shared 'horizon of values' (cf. Gadamer 1975). Emotions and intentions can be comprehended because they are typical to an intersubjective space (cf. Husserl, Schutz) are part of a consensus (cf. Rickert), part of a shared spirit (cf. Dilthey) or based on participation in a linguistic community (cf. Wittgenstein) (Outhewaite 1975:43). 'Typical' here must imply shared, or at least that an observing researcher will have experienced another person's emotions and motives themselves. This consensus of experience is grounded in the Eurocentric assumption that 'the understanding of the spiritual and historical world is in itself homogeneous, from its general conception down to the methods of criticism and individual investigation' (Reidel cited in Outhewaite 1975:36). Such a presumption is clearest in Dilthey's value consensus but shared also by other forms of Verstehen-including Weber's deployment of it as a sociological method.

Weber attempted to move away from Dilthey's psychologistic stress on understanding someone's 'inner-motives' for action to a sociological method which attempts to more empirically understand the meaning of significance of action for individuals (Herva 1988). Winch sums this up as a dilemma in which either every form of life is shut off from every other, or else one must postulate a metalanguage to mediate the different language-games (1958:115-7). However, this need not be put as a dilemma. A middle way would acknowledge that whatever the quality of our understanding of others, we continue to attempt interpretations, to experimentally impute motives and feelings as a way of making sense of the social world. A researcher's understanding of another person's action remains his or her interpretation, it is not necessarily shared unless the authority of the interpretation authored by the person being investigated is simply accepted at face value. Even when unsuccessful in our attempts to understand, we might say that our discourses interact at 'dialogical angles' with others actions and self-interpretations, and these trade between each other (Bakhtin 1973:150).

At both the inter- and intra-group levels of Verstehen, there is an enduring emphasis on the relation between two subjects: the investigator and a historically and spatially located actor. The actor-subject who becomes a medium by which the investigator may fully appreciate foreign events and actions in their social, material and cognitive context. For this to be possible, a close intersubjective relation must be achieved. There must be a consensus of experience-some sort of asymptotic merging of two sets of personal and cultural understandings. It is for this reason that sociologists have stressed the creative aspects of Verstehen as an art. Simmel argued that an investigator with a limited imagination will have a restricted scope of appreciation: 'Experience seems to show that someone who has never loved or hated cannot understand lovers or enemies, nor a cool practical man the behaviour of an idealistic dreamer, a phlegmatic type the mental processes of a sanguine person and vice versa' (Simmel 1957:61-2 cited in Outhewaite 1975:32). While his intention was to show that understanding depended on practical empathy, Simmel's statement exposes the limited scope for understanding that our circumscribed personal position and experiences affords us. Yet, to resort to anecdote, we all can remember situations in which we were able to communicate despite disagreement and despite not being able or willing to 'identify with' some person. To colloquially 'identify with' a person is not a necessary precondition of understanding but the product of the establishment of some type of ethical relationship. Its elevation to the position of the essence of understanding is the uncritical product of a Romantic definition of communication.

Abel's assessment followed from one aspect of these and of Weber's presentations in which he stressed that the use of Verstehen to build hypotheses contributed only, 'plausibility... [It] clearly does not make...[the hypothesis] "the causally valid interpretation".' (Weber 1968:9). Parsons argues that Weber correctly restricted the Verstehen method because 'the intuitionist position made possible the evasion of responsibility for scientific judgements' (Parsons 1937:589) whereas Weber sought an empirical sociology grounded in rationalism (Albrow 1990:102). But following Dilthey, Weber also claimed in a second line of argument that Verstehen is of central importance to the human sciences because, 'a causal explanation is deficient as a sociological explanation unless the process it purports to describe can be "verstanden": 'Our need for a causal explanation (unser kausales Bedürfnis) demands that where an "interpretation" (Deutung) is in principle possible, it be carried out; that is, for the interpretation of human behaviour it is not sufficient for it to be related to a mere empirically observable law (Regel des Geschehens), however strict that law might be.' (Weber 1922:69 cited in and trans. by Outhewaite 1975:49; see also Bulhof 1980).⁽⁵⁾ Here Verstehen designates an 'interpretative method' of understanding (cf. Mannheim) independent of and in contrast to methods of causal explanation (cf. Comte and Parsons) (Outhewaite 1975:10-13). Yet for an interpretation to be objective, it had to conform to methodological rules and values of the sceintific community:

the choice of the object of investigation...are determined by evalutive ideas (Wertideen ) which dominate the investigatore and his age. ....the guiding "point of view" is of great importance for the construction of the conceptual scheme which will be used... (Weber 1949:84).

For example, in Weber's deviation from a strictly motivational hypothesis to proposing a normative ethic which is used heuristically to interpret (and supposedly to explain) social phenomena such as those glossed under the rubric of the 'Protestant Ethic' or the 'Spirit of Capitalism' (Weber 1958; Von Schelting 1934:327n).⁽⁶⁾ When Weber inferred global 'concrete meaning structures' (konkrete Sinngebilde - cf. von Schelting 1934) such as 'the spirit of capitalism' he proposed social totalities which gave meaning reflexively and from the viewpoint of the modern European¾to the various historical beliefs and actions of which it was made up (Outhewaite 1975:52). While it is true that this introduces an circular form of argument to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the importance of von Schelting's point is that it reveals the social science observer's imputation of a general normative schema to others, such as the 'concrete meaning structure'¾"The Protestant Ethic". This issue was of a central interest for Weber, who sought to maintain a 'dualism of theoretical value-relations and practical evaluations' (See note 6, above; Bryant 1985:101). While Weber acknowledged the untestable character of such normative concepts and devoted considerable attention to interpretation, he nonetheless assumed that explanatory understanding itself was unproblematic (Bryant 1985:85-6). Even in its Weberian sense, Verstehen thus carries the flaws of its "empathetic aspect" despite Weber's incorporation of historical analysis as well. That is, it is predicated upon access to the motivation and intended meanings of other people's action based on a comparative, heuristic, ideal-type grid of rational or substantively-rational motives (Weber 1968 Vol. 1). '"incalculability"...is the privilege of¾the insane' (Weber 1949: 124-5). Gadamer similarly refers to a 'horizon of understanding'. This hermeneutic grid is the ground of, and the necessary condition for understanding. Alfred Schutz⁽⁷⁾ argues that Weber,

took for granted the meaningful phenomena of the social world as a matter of intersubjective agreement in precisely the same way as we all in daily life assume the existence of a lawful external world conforming to the concepts of our understanding... [But] far from being homogeneous, the social world is given to us in a complex system of perspectives (A. Schutz 1972:8f).

Such a method provides a series of often-Eurocentric assumptions regarding the values and outlook of agents, culturally and physically distant in space and/or time (it is thus by no means a slippery slope argument to conclude that this monological view of 'understanding of the world' is a manifestation of ethnocentrism at the epistemological level). To state this issue in slightly different terms, Outhewaite (1975) argues that the empathetic aspects of Verstehen were developed by Dilthey with reference to Hegelian notions of dialectical synthesis arising out of antithetical elements of, in this case, self and other.⁽⁸⁾ We thus draw the conclusion that, in essence, Verstehen rests on the possibility of synthesis¾a 'negation of differences' which subsumes the different formal identities of thesis and antithesis in itself.⁽⁹⁾ It is with this that we must disagree: such a possibility does not always exist a priori. Empathy predicated on synthesis is the mark of particular historically-dominant culture. This form of empathy silences or suffocates the Other by masking the difficulty which lies in the difference between Self (investigator) and Other (respondent or subject of investigation). Some sort of pre-existing understanding or access to the authentic, unalienated imagination of another person or group is the precondition and guarantee of the interpretive enterprise of Verstehen. Understanding is a priori - it is never impossible, there are never radical and insurmountable differences. The history of the twentieth century suggests otherwise. Thus, Verstehen only begs the central question! The need for Verstehen arises out of discovering that achieving understanding by an interpretive, empathetic method is deeply problematic and shot through with relations of power and difference. Understanding is not already-achieved. There is no guarantee of arriving at the correct interpretation¾at the actor's intended meaning or point of view.

Historical Verstehen

From the 1960s onward a consistent effort was made to distance Verstehen from its empathetic aspects and focus on its empirical and historicist aspects. The North American literature has attempted to escape from the 'empathy' problem by constructing a positive Verstehen through 'selective intellectual borrowing' (Jules-Rosette 1986:403) from the older European tradition which is held to stress the "empathetic aspects" of Verstehen. Stressing its empirical and "historical aspects", Verstehen has been argued to be an empirical concept (DiQuattro [] 39-40) or an empirical method (Herva 1988:151), a positivistic tool (Burger 1976; 1977; Bryant 1985) or a limited aspect of sociological research (Abel 1948; 1967).

Much of the debate has since centred around rescuing the sociological Verstehen of Weber from its empathetic roots by showing the importance of verstehen's "historical aspect" both for Weber and even for his theoretical forebears, Rickert and Dilthey (Oakes []; eg. Bryant 1985). This involves critiquing Abel's caricature of verstehen which focusses on the empathetic as well as Gadamer's portrait in which he argues that the empathetic aspect of Verstehen was uppermost in 19th century Geistwissenschaften which featured a hermeneutic oriented to method, in contrast to a 20th century orientation to a hermeneutics of truth. Thus Oliver comments of the main nineteenth century proponents of Verstehen, Dilthey, Rickert, and Schliermacher that, 'none of the writers examined rely exclusively on empathy. Understanding in a historical and social context is characteristic of historicism and dominates Weber's view of verstehen, even allowing for comments he makes on the value of empathy' (Oliver 1983:543). Thus Weber rejects both the positivist project of reconstructing the past as it was and the idealist hermeneutic of rethinking the Other's thoughts (see Weber 1975:163-180).¹⁽¹⁰⁾

However, the fundamental problems remain today. First, what is the role of empathy? Can a better theorization of the empathetic contact or bond between investigator and research subject be proposed, which would avoid the problems of empathetic Verstehen? If the 'empathetic aspect' of verstehen is argued to have been outflanked or minimized in professional-quality interpretive sociological approaches, then Verstehen denotes primarily the 'understanding in context' (achieved by being value-relevant) and adequate causation (explanation at the level of causality characterized by jurisprudential understanding, as opposed to merely a statistical sketch of cause and effect). This is what I am calling Verstehen's "historical aspect".

Second, how does one go about overcoming 'not only our own particularity but also that of the other' (Gadamer 1975:272)? The process of overcoming returns us to the question of, if not empathy in the emotive sense, then empathetic understanding. Weber suggests that this is not a re-living or an epistemological placing of ourselves 'inside' another person's experience. Weber's empathetic understerstanding is based on figuratively placing ourselve's alongside or amongst the reserarch subjects which gives researchers a partial capacity to make sense of others' actions' (Oliver 1983:533) by creatively using, for example, 'rules of experience' (Erfahrungsregeln) (Weber 1949:173) and making explicit the value relation betwen the researchr and the research material or subjects. It is not a case of 'becoming Caesar', but rather of placing the Roman and modern worlds in a dialogue (Oliver 1983:536 italics added). However, this 'operation called "dialogue"' remains untheorized in sociology. It must be objected that in the rush to escape from or deny the empathetic aspects of Verstehen, the process of understanding is implicitly reduced to an positivistic description of historical context (the geographical typically being neglected by sociologists). The fundamental question concerns the manner in which the agency of action is creatively reconstructed - even if only for the purposes of a research hypothesis (cf. Abel 1948).

The empathetic aspect of Verstehen is thus still with us as a problem and is worth reconsidering. I will argue that a solution takes one byond the traditional Weberian material which has been the site of a veritable circus parade of sociological theory. We need to retrieve its original sense of a response to the other, a 'giving-meaning-to' the alterity presented by an other culture or person's understanding and action rather than a scopic penetration and sublation-an overcoming-of the difference of the Other. Such a stress either drives research in the direction of 'reporting' the 'authentic' words of Others (which privileges the subjective viewpoint of the 'eye-witness'); or refocusses attention on the difference and dialogue between the researcher and the research-subject.

The Operation called Dialogism

The implicit models of a Western, patriarchal subject and of a rational intersubjectivity would seem to make of Verstehen a house of cards doomed to collapse at the slightest whisper of more alienated voices and models of subjectivity. Yet there is still a need for theorizing our position as interpreting subjects professionally driven, it would seem, to wonder, speculate and even gossip about others. This involves moving beyond the pundits of difference and 'radical alterity', as indeed the best of them recognize (bell hooks 1990, Minh-ha 1991). Alterity, although much celebrated as a means by which subaltern groups might find 'their own voices' outside of the institutionalized discourses of, for example, North American social science, is a sort of societal 'degree zero'. In this chill, mutuality and responsibility toward the other atrophy. Beyond strategic withdrawal and self-development, the development of ethical relationships demands, of course, that we return to critical interaction and engagement.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) developed his literary theory of the dialogical relation in the context of a philosophical meditation on literature and linguistics. However, Bakhtin's work is a social theory inasmuch as it was also intended as a critique of dialectics and of the totalitarian Soviet Marxist ideology of the 1930s which imposed a univocal, 'monological' hegemony like a blanket over the social diversity, heteroglossia (his term for "multi-voicedness") and polyphony of individual views and aspirations. Against officialdom, Bakhtin privileges the heterogeneous interaction of individuals in a multi-voiced 'dialogue'. This is not, however, elaborated into a theory of divergent class or even ethnic discourses. Typically, Bakhtin's philosophical system was never formalized into a theory per se and may even have been partly published pseudonymously and collaboratively under a variety of assumed names including those of colleagues, V.N. Volosinov and P.N. Medvedev.¹⁽¹¹⁾ The specificity of the group and the analytical level of society are displaced in Bakhtin's work by the crowd of individuals. Indeed, the social is curiously unelaborated in Bakhtin's thought except implicitly in the critical theorization of language. It is language which is the realm of shared interpersonal relations. Language is sui generis social and empirically found in the everyday life of individuals. While Bakhtin's work is thus at first hostile to a sociological stance with its own monological theories and homogenizing generalizations, it is revealed to be deeply social in spirit. This extends to the degree that Clark and Holquist argue that Bakhtin considers the relation between the self and an other human being not merely a moral imperative, but an epistemological requirement. (Clark and Holquist 1984:208). 'Every understanding of living speech, of living expression, bears an actively responsive character' (Bakhtin 1990: 246-7). Weiss operationalizes Bakhtin's argument (1986a:86-95)check these pages in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays to foreground this already-implicated character of human action: 'the participants in any dialogue know that any word utterance or gesture they select is ideologically freighted...and so provokes a response. Each party to the conversation anticipates the effects of the gesture chosen, whether inflammatory, conciliatory...and plans her/his response carefully' (Weiss 1990:426).

'Dialogism' is a generic term which has been imposed in translation to label the applications of Bakhtin's ideas. These applications stresses interaction and develop Bakhtin's original metaphor of differing points of view presented in a conversation. Rather than tending to merge these points of view, Bakhtin places the emphasis on their difference and the richness of the resulting weave of interacting ideas and positions. This "dialogical schema" is an implicit critique of the reductionism inherent in the over-reliance on Hegel's dialectics. The dialectical model is teleologically motivated by the assumed inevitability of a synthesis out of opposing positions. This is often simplistically reduced to a single synthesis.¹⁽¹²⁾ Dialogism thus expands the analytical options for research on complex interactions and exchanges.

The dialogical schema affirms that we are always em-bodied, always anchored in our own unique subject-position, facing a barrage of different Others, all in their own positions, interpreting and speaking about their or rather our shared world in a babble of voices and tongues. Interpretation becomes a difficult process of contact and translation. Even if we communicate deeply, we cannot leave our own embodied position. We cannot have the assurance of completely partaking in the viewpoint of another person. In Bakhtin's work, praxis and the polyphonic author have in common a continuing existential act of auto-situation - an ongoing self-positing which at once presupposes similar acts in others and opens a place for those others to situate and empower themselves. The Achilles Heel of Bakhtin's approach is the potential that it may be abused in the name of essentializing and separatist positions on the fixity of social identities. These may appear to be pitted against each other with not hope of conflict resolution in the dialogical model of social interaction. However, in Bakhtin's original notion he avoids implying a monist and essentialistic conception of subjectivity whereby each and every person is anchored in his or her own subject position, inaccessible to all others. Subjectivity too is dialogical: malleable, in flux, and defined along multiple axes.¹⁽¹³⁾ However, most importantly, all subjects are positioned within heterodox social systems of language, action and tradition. There is no monological tendency to a shared univocal 'horizon of values' at any level. That is that all subjects are cultural hybrids to some extent and always learning new approaches and formulating new ideas and meanings.

Like Levinas (1981), even subjectivity itself is a dialogical relation for Bakhtin: the person 'never coincides with himself. One cannot apply the formula A=A...The genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself' (Bakhtin 1973:59). Assuming the self-sufficient status of the Enlightenment subject, Verstehen silences the movement of the self (and of Dasein) by objectifying the position of self with universal truth, so the fluid reality of Self is obscured. Yet, there is never a 'complacent' self-identity, for in the 'monological sleep of the dative case-...an existence ruled by "to me" and "for me"-...a person becomes an It equal to himself, a zero equal to zero, closed in on himself' (Patterson 1988:102); instead, subjectivity is understood as a 'one-for-the-other', absolutely different from the other, yet offered to (turned-toward, to use Heidegger's expression) the other.

Bakhtin's dialogism has been taken up in ethnography (Clifford 1986) to challenge the conception of ethnographic representations and, as noted, to better include cultural Others.¹⁽¹⁴⁾ Clifford (1986) has advocated,

fictions of dialogue [which] have the effect of transforming the "cultural text" (a ritual, an institution, a life history, or any unit of typical behaviour to be described or interpreted) into a speaking subject, who sees as well as is seen, who evades, argues, probes back. ...the principle of dialogical textual production obliges writers to find diverse ways of rendering negotiated realities as multisubjective, power-laden, and incongruent (Clifford 1986:14).

In such texts, Clifford hopes that 'many voices clamour for expression' (Clifford 1986:14). Earlier, Bakhtin described dialogism in the novel as:

The intersection, consonance, or interference of speeches in the overt dialogue with the speeches in the heroes' interior dialogues are everywhere present. The specific totality of ideas, thoughts and words is everywhere passed through several unmerged voices, taking on a different sound in each. The object of the author's aspirations is not at all this totality of ideas in and of itself, as something neutral and identical with itself. No, the object is precisely the act of passing the themes through many and varied voices it is, so to speak, the fundamental, irrescindable multivoicedness and varivoicedness of the theme (Bakhtin 1973:226).

However, Clifford offers no analysis of how this will be an effective correction to abuses of ethnographic authority and one-sided representations of cultures. That is, it is assumed in his next sentence that, 'Once dialogism and polyphony are recognized as modes of textual production, monophonic authority is questioned, revealed to be characteristic of a science that has claimed to represent cultures' (Clifford 1986:15). In any case, one would hope that Clifford would agree that revelation is only the first step toward changing current practices.

Clifford's challenge to the poetics of ethnography is matched by more political challenges arising out critiques of the orientalising specification of other cultures and subjects using the yardstick of the European, Enlightenment subject (Said 1991, Minh-Ha 1991). There is a danger of fetishizing authentic voices. Speaking of ethnographic film, Trinh T. Minh-Ha notes that,

Factual authenticity relies heavily on the Other's words and testimony. To authenticate a work, it becomes therefore most important to prove or make evident how this Other has participated...This is often called "giving voice," even though these "given" voices never truly form the Voice of the film, being mostly used as devices of legitimation whose random, conveniently given-as and taken-for-granted authority (Minh-Ha 1991:66).

As Weber drew on Dilthey to 'attempt to understand the "inner motives" of the acting individual' (Herva 1988:143-4),¹⁽¹⁵⁾ so we may draw on Bakhtin's work to understand a subject enmeshed in the weave of social and linguistic relations. Bakhtin's work on the dialogical nature of encounters and communication suggests that the limited experience and position of an observer seeking to understand a group or another person is a crucial aspect of communicative exchange which marks both the limits but also the possibility of communication. Rather than the sublation of difference celebrated by the Verstehen tradition, Bakhtin stresses the presence of difference:

Understanding cannot be understood as emotional empathy, or as the placing of oneself in another's place (the loss of one's own place). This is required only for the peripheral aspects of understanding. Understanding cannot be understood as translation from someone else's language into one's own language" (Bakhtin 1979:346 cited in and translated by Emerson 1986:37 note 3).

Understanding is a liminal phenomenon which takes place on the threshold of self and other, at the point of contact between embodied, subjects positioned in a material context. 'It is not the empathetic union of I and the other that characterizes responsibility but the absolute difference that summons the charity of nonindifference' (Patterson 1988:114). As such it neither encompasses neither the other person that one wishes to understand, nor does it exhaust one's own potential for further interpretation. There is always a 'supplement' which eludes the interpreter, hence the possibility of further interpretive efforts at understanding. The incompleteness and inadequacy of an interpretation renders it unstable. Its status as a boundary-phenomenon makes it multi-sided and contingent, for as the threshold and context of the relation between self and other, interpreter and respondent, shifts, so must the interpretation. Bakhtin's comment on trans-cultural understanding strikes at the heart of the social science problem we have been dealing with:

There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one's own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding it would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, or its own culture; and it forgets nothing (Bakhtin 1986b:6-7).

Dialogism as a Method of Difference

Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes the heteroglossia of urban life, the different and countervailing voices or points of view which continually problematize each other. Between different subjects, speaking from their own, different, points of view, dialogues come into existence. Generalized from this simple model, dialogical relationships are relationships between different judgements, positions or utterances. Bakhtin takes care to contrast this with dialectical opposition. Judgements may exist in relationships of negation, but they do not dispute with one another, only supply the logical basis and subject matter for disputation:

judgements must be embodied in order for a dialogical relationship between them or toward them to arise. Thus, as thesis and antithesis these two judgements can be united in a single utterance of a single subject, an utterance which expresses that subject's unified dialectical position on a given question. In that case no dialogical relationships arise. But if the two judgements are divided between two different utterances of two different subjects, then dialogical relationships arise between them.... (Bakhtin 1973:151).

Logical relationships of identity between two statements which are the same can become a dialogical relation of agreement or corroboration when they are expressed as two utterances, for example, two subjects in agreement (Bakhtin 1973:152). However, the statements remain those of the different subjects. Bakhtin's theory of semiosis (meaning) and understanding are always close to pragmatics, eschewing a universalizing stance which monologically privileges one particular understanding outside of the material contexts of its production and reception (Pechey 1990). In this critique Bakhtin predates the deconstruction of the dialectic as part of the logocentric system of European metaphysics by Derrida who argues, in the words of Dick Hebdige, that 'The empirical feeling of difference, in short hierarchy, is the essential motor of the concept, deeper and more effective than all thought about contradiction' (Derrida cited in Hebdige 1989:Ch.4).¹⁽¹⁶⁾

Dialogical understanding depends on this relation of difference, an 'outsidedness' of two subjects to each other which is necessary to any 'understanding' which will recognize their mutuality, beyond their mere alterity.

In the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly... A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths. Without one's own questions one cannot creatively understanding anything other... Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched (Bakhtin 1986b:7).

In this approach to interpretation, understanding is not the result of a merging of different viewpoints into a false unity but a syncretic and revisable product. Dialogical understanding interpretations and understandings are contextual, contingent, non-total and shared. Pechey notes that dialogism is 'a term which undermines as an active force all synthesizing and homogenizing projects whatever' (Pechey 1990:25). It is neither synthetic, but neither is it pluralistic. It is a common mistake made by critics and lamenters of the death of modernity (Hebdige 1989:201) to conflate dialogism with pluralism. In dialogism, forces enter into relations with other forces and are transformed but without necessarily loosing their identity in the process. A dialogical redrafting of Verstehen would thus poses practical questions of how,

To find one's own voice and to orient it among other voices, to combine it with some of them and to counterpose it to others, or to separate one's voice from another voice, with which it is inseparable... (Bakhtin 1973:201).

Dialogism offers us the potential within a more sophisticated theory of semiosis to position Self and Other, researcher and respondent, seeing their relationship for what it is, an ethical one of mutuality in the making of meaning. Methodologically, the value of dialogism is that it allows this while making the difference of these viewpoints¾the 'outsidedness' of subjects to each other¾the central feature of a theory of social meaning practices. It thus coincides with Weber's original interest in the diversity of viewpoints and values, in response to which he developed his interpretive sociology.

Five Points in Conclusion

Regardless of good intentions, historical research and theoretical development, Verstehen is still parodied because of what I have called its "empathetic aspect". We have also seen Verstehen critiqued politically and ethically by cultural theorists. There, Verstehen represents only the enshrinement of a method of colonization of subaltern Others by privileged and usually white male social science investigators. Yet contained within recent theoretical arguments is an appeal to a dialogical model which holds the promise of renovating Verstehen outside of the assumptions of the possibility of synthesis, of a shared intersubjective horizon, or of anthropological commonalities which provided the basis for classical models Verstehen. Dialogism has been an unrecognised challenge to the current model of sociological Verstehen by problematising the status of the monadic, objectivising subject who conceives of himself (sic) independently of his milieu. A consideration of the dialogical challenge, leads us to five points which are presented as a careful summary, the brevity of which it is hoped will sharpen the challenge posed to the reader:

1 Verstehen is based on a logic of unity: it does not acknowledge the multiplicity of possible interpretations of culture. The tendency of Verstehen is to seek a univocal and monological interpretation. It is predicated on the possibility of, and directed toward a synthesis.

2 Verstehen is a pre-semiotic, romantic theory. Shared values are made the basis and guarantee of communication; understanding is neglected as a straightforward reception of communicated values and goals. In line with its internal logic of unity, Verstehen is¾in its ideal form¾directed towards a relation of identity between the researcher's and research subject's values. That is, the identification of Self with Other. 'Speaking-with' is transposed into 'speaking-as' that Other.

3 The 'empathetic aspect' of Verstehen is a flaw which silences the Other by masking the difference between Self (investigator) and Other (respondent). The difficulties of understanding, and the problematic character of, in particular, cross-cultural communication are elided. We thus pass over a central aspect of social interaction. We learn less about the Other while at the same time being 'authorized' by the Verstehen-method to speak-for the Other as interpreters whose voices are legitimated by social science, over the voices of Others who are thereby marginalized.

4 Verstehen silences the movement of the Self (of Dasein) by objectifying the position of Self with universal truth, so the fluid reality of Self is obscured. While we learn little about the Other, we loose self-knowledge in the process because Verstehen directs our critical attention elsewhere, away from the interaction and movement of 'voice'. At its worst, the legitimacy of the researcher's 'outsider' voice is thus obscured¾even to the researcher¾ushering in a crisis for interpretive research.

5 Dialogism offers us the potential within a more sophisticated theory of semiosis to position Self and Other, seeing their relationship for what it is, an ethical one of mutuality in the social construction of meaning.

Notes

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1. 1.1. For example, most uses of Foucault's work in the social sciences argue for the inexhaustibility of interpretation, including my own work (eg. Shields 1991), without going enquiring further.

2. 2.2. I will avoid recounting the debate on the correct translation of Weber's comments on the role of Verstehen in sociological theory and practice or even debating the in-any-case irretrievable philosophical intentions of Rickert. These debates are widely disseminated and discussed (Albrow 1990; Outhewaite 1975; ; Wax 1967; Abel 1948).

3. 3.3. The question of inter-personal Verstehen is more acute in the sociology of action and criminological problems of motive. Dilthey's development of Verstehen also at first emphasized inter-personal, intersubjective understanding (W. Dilthey Gesammelte Schriften Vol VII:85 (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner) cited in Outhewaite 1975:26). Simmel bases the social level of inter-cultural Verstehen on a homology to inter-subjective understanding: "The relation of one mind to another which we call understanding is a basic fact of human life. Insight into specifically historical understanding rests on insight into understanding in general' (Simmel 1957 cited in Outhewaite 1975:13).

4. 4.4. It might be argued that such a dismissal of this naive conception of verstehen is actually obscurantist. Is it a camouflaging manoeuvre which cloaks some more noble type of verstehen in philosophy "to difficult to be discussed amongst those present?" What would be hidden by this manoeuvre is precisely the voyeuristic and arrogant aspects of verstehen, especially in its more pretentious uses.

5. 5.5. This parallel's Foucault's demand that his arguments concern the status of the human sciences as "discourses" which produced their own "truth-effects" be assessed on the criterion of their intelligibility rather than the Aristotelian criterion of adequacy.

6. 6.6. Weber, followed Rickert's (1962) notion of 'value relation' (see Bryant 1985: 70-78). While this is not simply to endorse Burger's argument that Rickert is the central influence (Burger 1976; contrast Runciman 1972) it is to assert Rickert's importance, following Bryant (1985). Weber argued that the selection of valid interpretive frameworks could only be based on both the researcher's own values and values relevant to the subjects whose social actions were being interpreted. A researcher could only form interpretations based on his own values, but needed to find an interpretation which gave the diversity of social material an ordering interpretation which was a schema of values, goals and means which the subject could plausibly have adopted. Value-relevance, not value-judgements are the key for Weber. Furthermore, to be considered 'objective', the researcher's own value-based interpretation had to pass the test of values accepted by his own community (for this reason, Weber strictly separated social science research and the production of normative facts and laws). This 'theoretical relation to values' is taken as an empirical matter. Again, while Weber did champion a vision of a world of competing values, he took for granted the question of whether or not remote, historical or foreign values and motives could be recovered (Rickert shared this position, which Dilthey made his central problem - see Bruun 1972:91)

7. 7.7. However, these objections to verstehen have always been suppressed in support of the support a naive "verstehen-in-the-service-of-hypotheses" gave to empirical research whose methods were guarded from scrutiny along similar lines as verstehen has been. This has ensured the security and pre-eminence of empiricistic and nomenalist approaches to data gathering and theory testing in North American sociology.

8. 8.8. Outhewaite argues that it was under the influence of Hegel's concept of objective mind or spirit that Dilthey shifted from the 'empathetic penetration...of...people's mental processes to the hermeneutic interpretation of cultural products and conceptual structures' (Outhewaite 1975:26).

9. 9.9. One possible response - made by Lefebvre (1946), for example - to this critique is that of course a dialectical synthesis does not imply a negation of difference but rather the transubstantiation of thesis and antithesis into a new synthesis. This critique could also be answered by abandoning the unity of dialectical synthesis for the postmodern position (inspired by the physicist Lupasco) that opposites may coexist in a complex whole in a harmonic "unicity" (Maffesoli 1981; see Shields forthcoming 1994). I hope to explore this in a forthcoming study: Times and Places: A Sociology of Space.

10. 0.10. Following Ivan Oliver's lengthy and in-depth analysis the re-living of Other's experiences is either balanced or rejected by most of the proponents of Verstehen. Weber in particular attempts to strike a balance which will bring both objective institutional structures and the empirically-verifiable understanding of agents into central places in sociological analysis. Oliver further shows that the rejection of the purely subjectivist position is shared by more recent proponents of interpretive approaches such as Evans-Pritchard (1965) and Schutz (1972).

11. 1.11. The extent of the authorship of other members of what has retrospectively come to be called "The Bakhtin Circle" remains undecided. They may be pseudonyms (Holquist 1991) or actual/imagined addressees of Bakhtin's texts who, as participants in a dialogue, are thus co-authors (Todorov 1984). Bakhtin's 'disputed texts' are thus a jigsaw puzzle of unsystematized contributions with an ambiguous authorship (Hermann 1989:11).

12. 2.12. This teleological weakness of is true of all dialectical schemes, especially if the terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis are reified into fixed identities, as in simpler marxist approaches. My point here is not to bash dialectical materialism but to argue, in line with Henri Lefebvre's seminal critique of Stalinism Logique formelle, logique dialectique (1946) that the fixity of identity which is the foundation of formal logic must be avoided if the spirit of both marxian and hegelian logic is to be upheld. In this, the stress is on transformation and progression - hardly the fixed categories of, for example, a Kantian approach.

13. 3.13. With Michel Maffesoli (1991), one might propose a veritable dramatis personae of characteristics (see Shields 1992). For example, the subjectivity of this postmodern "persona" is not a voluntaristic creation which can simply be transformed to "map on to" and "identify with" a foreign subject to achieve communication. Rather it is a specific articulation of socio-cultural resources, predefined social opportunities and imposed limits.

14. 4.14. Ethnographer's attention has been drawn to the political issue of interpretation - questions of "who gets to speak?" - while sociologists have contented themselves with the philosophical questions - "how to understand speech?". Feminist sociology has been the exception, drawing attention to the gendered presumptions of social theory (for an introduction see Game 1991).

15. 5.15. Ferguson (1990) refers to this self-engrossed turn-of-the century model of subjectivity as the 'cosmos within' which corresponds to the discovery of the relativistic cosmos of physics by Mach, Einstein and so on. As opposed to this 'depth model', the dominant mode of contemporary North American subjectivity seems better understood by a 'model of surfaces' where their 'truth' is expressed in their appearances or perhaps better their 'thresholds' with their context without recourse to realist forces below the surface. Bakhtin/Voloshinov's formulation is of this non-Freudian subject is: 'the subjective psyche is localized somewhe between the organism and the outside world, somewhere on the border between these two spheres of reality' (Voloshinov 1986:29).

16. 6.16. Gianni Vattimo develops Heidegger's notion of the "round dance" to offer a similar hermeneutic critique of dialectical synthesis, pointing to the many situations as well as logical cases where synthesis does not occur but rather a permanent tension between opposed elements is central to their relationship and its form (Vattimo 1990:84).