Voicing Relationships

A Dialogic Perspective

Leslie A. Baxter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412927857, 9781412927840
• eBook ISBN: 9781483342641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

One of the field?s most respected scholars advances a dialogic perspective on communication in personal and familial relationships, presenting the next iteration of relational dialectics theory (RDT).

"This is an excellent book and moves one of the major theories in the social sciences forward in very innovative ways. Indeed, this book extends beyond RDT by addressing limitations in the family, interpersonal, and personal relationships literature. I believe this book will prompt many discussions among theorists and researchers in those areas and has the potential to provide exciting new directions in the study of relationships." —Glen H. Stamp, Ball State University

"Leslie A. Baxter is offering up something here that is desperately needed and fills a big hole for those who adopt RDT as their theoretical framework. . . . I found the conceptual content of the book to be clear, compelling, and provoking. . . . The chapter on contrapuntal analysis is the only one of its kind." —Melissa Wood Alemán, James Madison University

Voicing Relationships presents a dialogic perspective on relating, inspired by the dialogism work of the Russian theorist of literature and culture, Mikhail Bakhtin. Written by Leslie A. Baxter, one of the theory?s originators, this groundbreaking book presents the next iteration of the theory, along with a methodological primer for contrapuntal analysis that includes guiding readers through a sample analysis.

Developing a rich palette of dialogic concepts useful in the study of interpersonal communication, the book?s central argument is that meaning making emerges from the clash of competing systems of meaning, or discourses. Relationship communication is embedded in culture, history, difference, and conceptions of the ideal. In addition, the book gives us a method by which to study communication dialogically—contrapuntal analysis.

Key Features

• Centers communication at the heart of relationships with an interdisciplinary focus on communication from fields such as psychology, social work, and sociology
• Offers an up-to-date distillation of two decades of relevant research to organize major findings and issues
• Moves scholars and students beyond simplistic uses of relational dialectics or using the dialectical pairs in overly-simplistic "cookie cutter" ways
• Provides scholars and students with guidance in using RDT to guide their own research

Intended Audience

Voicing Relationships is ideal for use in a wide range of courses, such as Interpersonal Communication; Family Studies; Couples, Marriage, and Family; and Counseling.

1

Introduction

Theories, I have come to appreciate, are like living organisms. Growing a theory is a process akin to raising a child. A theory gestates quietly in a scholar’s mind before it is birthed; it is presented to the world in the birth announcement of its formal articulation; it requires nurturance as it takes its initial steps into the scholarly conversation; and it ultimately establishes independence from the original scholar(s) who birthed it. Relational dialectics theory (RDT) was formally articulated in 1996 (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996), and I have been blessed to witness the use of the theory by many researchers of interpersonal and family communication (Baxter & Braithwaite, 2006b; Braithwaite & Baxter, 2008; Stamp, 2004). This book engages the RDT-informed research that has been published over the past decade and a half, embedding discussion of this work in an articulation of the next generation of RDT. A useful theory, after all, doesn’t live off of its past. Theories are not static things; to stay alive, a theory must continue to develop and evolve. This latest articulation of RDT (which we might call RDT 2.0, but which I shall refer to hereafter simply as RDT) draws upon a richer palette of concepts than the 1996 statement of the theory. Like upgrades in computer operating systems, you don’t need to be familiar with the 1996 statement of RDT to understand the current articulation; however, the endnote to this chapter highlights the main differences between RDT 2.0 and RDT 1.0 for the interested reader.¹

RDT is a theory of relational meaning making—that is, how the meanings surrounding individual and relationship identities are constructed through language use. It is inspired by the scholarly work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about culture, language, and literature from the 1920s into the 1970s and whose corpus of work has been labeled dialogism (Holquist, 2002). The core premise of dialogically grounded RDT is that meanings are wrought from the struggle of competing, often contradictory, discourses.

What’s a discourse? Stated simply, a discourse is a system of meaning—a set of propositions that cohere around a given object of meaning. Let me illustrate the concept of a discourse with a simple example outside the realm of relating, drawn from Baxter and Babbie (2004). Suppose you are interested in what an apple means. Part of its meaning is captured by describing its attributes—its color (red, yellow, green), its size and shape (round with a diameter of about 3–4 inches), its taste (sweet or tart), and so forth. But the meaning of an apple doesn’t stop here. Part of the meaning of an apple is its inclusion in the food group known as fruit. Part of the meaning of apple comes from understanding places where apples are grown, and in what seasons, and how they are grown and harvested. Part of the meaning of apple comes from understanding the various ways apples can be eaten—raw, cooked in an apple pie, and so forth. Part of what an apple means invokes beliefs about healthy eating (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”). In short, the meaning of apple is pretty complex, consisting of many different propositions that collectively form a coherent web of meaning—a discourse—of appleness. All meaning making is similarly complex; the meaning of any concept is embedded in a larger web of meaning—a system of integrated bits of meaning.

RDT’s core theoretical principle is that meaning in the moment is not simply the result of isolated, unitary discourses but instead is the result of the interplay of competing discourses. How do you know two or more discourses are in competition? Discourses are in competition when the meanings they advance negate one another in some way, more or less in a zero-sum manner. Thus, what an apple means in the moment when I walk into my kitchen and see one in the fruit bowl on my countertop is wrought from other discourses that might be circulating. For example, I might have just watched a TV program about the health dangers of pesticides used on apples, in which I was exposed to a discourse of healthy eating that excludes apples. I might have a memory flash of a recent conversation with a friend in which I was exposed to a discourse on the latest fad diet in which apples are believed bad for you. I might be attending to a discourse of gratification in which I talk myself into having earned a piece of cake instead of a less desirable apple as a snack for completing some task. According to RDT, what something means in the moment depends on the interplay of competing discourses that are circulating in that moment.

But let’s move to an example a bit closer to the domain of meanings of relevance to this volume—how relationships come to have meaning. Consider this excerpt from an exchange between two young adult males who told me that they had been the best of friends for the past five years. This excerpt comes from a much longer conversation in which they were asked to reflect jointly on their relationship while being tape-recorded:

B:	Of course you know your habits are different than mine. They don’t, they’re not a problem in our relationship, at all. I mean, I don’t know if a lot of people can say that about someone that they’re good, you know, that they’ve hung tight with for five years, you know, and I guess that’s the only reason why we have hung tight for five years is cuz we’re not hung up on the trivial. It’s not a problem for me.
A:	The one thing I guess we do is argue.
B:	Yes!
A:	About trivial things. But in a comedic way.
B:	Yeah.
A:	You know, in a nonthreatening [way].
B:	That’s a good way to put it.
A:	We get on each other’s case about, like you know, anything.
B:	That shirt you’re wearing. You look like a fruit!
A:	And then the voices start to raise and we’re a little louder, things start to, you know, rage. But that’s just, I think, a rare, rare, rare, thing among friends is that we argue for fun.
B:	With no repercussions. Yeah, with no repercussions.
A:	You can tell by the tone of the voice.
B:	And people see us doin’ that and have said, you know, humorous things to me like, “Oh my God! What happened last night, you and himwere in a huge fight.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
A:	Right.
B:	We were playing off each other. It’s a game. It’s like who can push each other farther, you know, without crossing that line.
A:	And the line is never even crossed. (Baxter, Foley, & Thatcher, 2008, IV#5)

This excerpt, like any conversational slice we could choose, is rich in dialogic overtones—competing discourses. The pair is involved in constructing their relationship communicatively. In this particular segment, the opening utterance says that the two are different in their habits. The friend concurs in this judgment, noting a bit later that they argue over their differences. The rest of the excerpt can be read as an attempt by these two friends to regulate and contain their differences—to minimize them, to trivialize them, to make light of them by attributing them to part of a humorous game. But why do the friends spend so much interactional effort in positioning their differences as nonproblematic? Why don’t they simply take note of their differences in habits and move on in the conversation to the next topic? A RDT-informed analysis might note that the discourse of friendship in mainstream American culture is built on a premise of similarity, not difference. The fact that these two friends have different habits and argue is an anomaly to themselves, and to others, as well, based on one of B’s later utterances. The only way for the friends to make sense of this discursive struggle—a cultural conception of friendship based on similarity against the discourse of their best friendship in which the proposition that they have differences features prominently—is to minimize those differences. Ironically, the two reconstruct their differences of habit into a similarity—a similarity of style in the ability they share to read each other’s intentions and to play the game. The two friends not only talk about their ability to take difference and argument lightly, but they perform it for themselves and perhaps for the benefit of me, the researcher-addressee who would be listening to the tape of their conversation. B appears to insult his friend’s taste in shirts, and his friend ignores the insult, thereby demonstrating their ability to trivialize their differences.

The conversation also deploys another element in the cultural discourse of friendship—the proposition that each relationship is somehow unique and private only to its two members. The friends appear to relish the fact that outsiders often misunderstand their arguments and incorrectly infer that something is wrong between them. This apparent satisfaction in outsiders’ misunderstanding adds to their construction of their friendship as “tight,” further offsetting the fact that they have different habits. Ironically, it is their realization of their differences—and how those are managed—that serves as the basis of uniqueness.

This short excerpt manifests two discourses, at a minimum, that are at play: (1) the cultural discourse of friendship in which similarity is expected and a given friendship is expected to demonstrate its unique and private nature and (2) the discourse of this particular A-B friendship in which difference is centered. The meaning that is made from the interanimation of these discourses is one that preserves the friendship’s meaning as tight. By the end of the conversation, this pair celebrates their differences, but in a manner that simultaneously constructs an overarching similarity in the two friends in their mutual joy at the way they position their differences as a game to be played. Later in the book, we will encounter the concept of a transformational hybrid—a way in which seemingly competing discourses are somehow merged through their interplay in a way that achieves a both/and hybrid meaning. These two friends have arguably enacted a hybrid in the way these discourses interanimate in this conversation.

Notice that my brief analysis of this conversational excerpt focused on the interplay of competing discourses. I analyzed these utterances not as representations of the speakers’ inner thoughts, motivations, and needs. Instead, I interrogated the utterances for the underlying systems of meaning—the discourses—that were animating the meaning that was constructed of the friends’ relationship. Bakhtin (1981d) used the term voice to refer to any discourse (i.e., perspective, ideology, standpoint, or system of meaning) that was circulating in language use. The title of the book centers this concept and casts it in verb form to suggest that relationships achieve meaning through the active interplay of multiple, competing discourses, or voices. These discourses are given voice by speakers’ utterances, but the focus is not on the individuals, per se, who speak them but on the discourses themselves and how they interanimate in talk. Thus, the book offers a theoretical understanding of how relationships (and individual identities in relationships) are constituted in communicative messages.

EVALUATING RDT AS A THEORY

One of my foremost goals in writing this book is to better position scholars with guidelines for evaluating RDT as a theory, as well as evaluating RDT-based research. In particular, I have concerns with three important misunderstandings about RDT, which I hope to address over the course of the book. First, a number of scholars appear to ignore differences among various dialectical theories, collapsing them together as if they were a unitary dialectical perspective (e.g., Sabourin, 2006; Segrin & Flora, 2005). As addressed elsewhere (Baxter & Braithwaite, 2006c; Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Montgomery & Baxter, 1998), RDT is but one of several theories that holds membership in a broader dialectical family, and differences are substantial from one dialectical theory to another. RDT is unique in its explicit grounding in Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. I will not elaborate on other dialectical theories in this book, because that has already been done elsewhere (e.g., Baxter & Braithwaite).

Second, a number of scholars have chosen to describe RDT as a model (e.g., Honeycutt & Cantrill, 2001) or perspective (e.g., Berger, 2005) rather than referring to it as a theory. The implication in these alternative labels is that RDT somehow falls short of theory status. Baxter & Montgomery (1996) readily admitted that RDT is not a postpositivist theory; that is, it is not a formal axiomatic theory of propositions and theorems designed to predict and causally explain an objective world. But they argued, it is still a theory. Turner (1986) wrote that “theory is a mental activity. …It is a process of developing ideas that can allow us to explain how and why events occur” (p. 4). Regardless of variations in types of theory, Turner further argued that theories have in common several basic building blocks: concepts, statements, and formats (p. 5). Concepts refer to abstract definitions of phenomena—features about the communicative world for communication theories—that are deemed important in the theory. The next chapter details the important root concepts in Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, and in RDT as well, given its status as an appropriation of dialogism to interpersonal and family communication. Theoretical statements, and their grouping together into a theoretical format, provide a theory’s claims about how concepts work. Taken together, a communication theory’s web of theoretical statements—its format—helps us explain the communicative social world, or that subset of it targeted for theoretical understanding. Turner presented several different kinds of theoretical statements and formats, of which his articulation of the descriptive/ sensitizing analytic scheme probably comes closest to capturing Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and, in turn, RDT. Descriptive/sensitizing schemes can be understood as

loosely assembled congeries of concepts intended only to sensitize and orient researchers to certain critical processes.… [They] are typically more skeptical about the timeless quality of social affairs [than are positivistic schemes]. Instead, they argue that concepts and their linkages must always be provisional and sensitizing because the nature of human activity is to change those very arrangements denoted by the organization of concepts into theoretical statements. Hence, except for certain very general conceptual categories, the scheme must be flexible and capable of being revised as circumstances in the empirical world change. At best, then, explanation is simply rendering an interpretation of events by seeing them as an instance or example of the provisional and sensitizing concepts in the scheme. (p. 11)

RDT, and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism more generally, is a descriptive/sensitizing theory. Its format consists of a set of basic concepts and theoretical principles that can be brought to bear in analyzing communicative life.

Third, RDT is often critiqued because it is regarded as too descriptive with an inability to predict and causally explain communicative phenomena (e.g., Miller, 2005). This criticism reflects a basic misunderstanding about theory. Theories come in different stripes and are designed to perform different work. The goal of RDT, and Bakhtin’s dialogism more generally, is not prediction and causal explanation, as is the case with positivistic theory. Rather, its goal is to function as a heuristic device to render the communicative social world intelligible. The criterion to ask of such a theory is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Mikhail Bakhtin, Dialogism, and RDT
• Chapter 3: Discursive Struggles of Culture
• Chapter 4: Discursive Struggles of Relational History, Otherness, and Normative Evaluation
• Chapter 5: Centripetal–Centrifugal Struggle
• Chapter 6: Doing Contrapuntal Analysis
• References
• Index
• About the Author