Inside dialogical realities: From an abstract‐systematic to a participatory‐wholistic understanding of communication

As participants in a ceaseless flow of speech entwined, dialogically‐structured, social activity, what matters to us are “once‐occurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin, 1993). Such events are meaningful to us from within that flow in terms of the further specification they give to it. Due to its internal structuring as an indivisible whole, all our traditional attempts to understand this flow and the events specifying it from the outside, in terms of abstract‐systematic frameworks of our own devising, are bound to fail. We need to set ourselves new goals in our research: that of critically refining and elaborating our already existing practices by intertwining into them reflective practices of a dialogical kind. The work of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and Goethe orients us toward the kind of practices required.