Perturbing Anticipation: Jazz,Effective-History,Dialogue,and the Nonrepresentational Movement of Hermeneutic Understanding

Introduction

What is the impact of a single note? Ostensibly sounding alone, it carries within an anticipatory potential—a simultaneous past within its future—an opening to the vibrations of the world’s rustlings, the known and not yet known, recollections and imaginations, its possibilities gaining momentum until the next note disrupts the effect, only to create a new effect, singular, yet never alone.

It is precisely because a note carries within itself an accumulation of performances that can neither be repeated, nor exhaust its potential for new performative accomplishments, that it, and other evocative manifestations, opens up “effective-history . . . as the ever-renewed interpretations of the phenomenon at stake” (Kögler, 2015, p. 313). Effective-history, according to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, denotes our condition as historical beings and the effects history has on our being, doing, and understanding (Wachterhauser, 1999). Gadamer uses the term “tradition” to articulate the anticipatory nature of our orientation to understanding. He explains,

The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. (Gadamer, 1989b, pp. 293-294)

Gadamer believes that a critical examination of the effect history has on our interpretations is necessary if we are to rewrite our future in ways that are beneficial to our being-together-with-others in the world. Part of this critical examination involves rehabilitating concepts such as tradition and aesthetic experience as important partners in understanding and decentering human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. It places emphasis on our ability to engage with the “other” in a way that “preserves the reality of alternative possibilities that are not our own” (Davey, 2006, p. 8).

Currently, qualitative researchers find themselves caught up in a flow of antihumanist, antimethodological, and antirepresentational discourse, all of which challenge well- (and not so well-) established qualitative research practices and the philosophical assumptions guiding them (see, for example, Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Ulmer, 2017; Vannini, 2015). At the same time, this discourse is not calling for an end to qualitative research, only a rethinking of which philosophical assumptions and concepts ought to guide it, and for what purposes. What is needed, therefore, is a way to consider our present situation in light of our pasts as well as our futures; a mode of thinking that works from the middle of a world in flux, preserving its complexity while seeking ways to articulate how humans might orient themselves to this flow as ethical partners in a world-becoming. In other words, a process ontology such as philosophical hermeneutics concerned with understanding the event of understanding itself and how we humans get taken up in its movement over and over again. More specifically, process ontologies focus on the constitutive movement of becoming-other, that is, what is revealed, overlooked, performed, integrated, discarded, and the like, in this movement, regardless of the perspectives of those involved (Davey, 2006).

For Gadamer, philosophy and the quest to understand are human pursuits ignited by deep and conflicting human issues. The current debate among post, critical, and “conventional” (St. Pierre, 2013) qualitative research is one such issue. As these perspectives take shape, they create their own anticipatory discourses, bringing with them expectations, boundaries, and practices that by their very nature exclude and reject those supposedly not suited to them. More than ever it seems, we must turn our concern to the effects of the discourses and concepts in our midst and to our abilities to establish new relationships to them in ways that deepen our understandings of the issues that divide us, while searching for and creating new formations of this understanding for ourselves and our world.

Because Gadamer’s hermeneutical enquiry into the being of understanding rehabilitated humanistic concepts such as tradition, experience, cooperation, and responsibility, among others, his philosophy has been largely rejected by many critical and poststructural scholars who have construed it as uncritical and conservative rather than critical and transformative (Davey, 2006). But what if this perception is not entirely justified? What if this traditional philosophical perspective already offers new ways to “reimagine new methodological possibilities” (Vagle, Thiel, & Hofsess, this special issue) for qualitative research? What if the unsettling called for by this special issue is already a core feature of the theory I have been asked to unsettle?

In this article, I hope to demonstrate that Gadamer’s ontological question about the mode of being of understanding opens up a hermeneutics of engagement that alters the flow of history itself. I argue that an understanding of this dynamic process is crucial to how qualitative researchers engage with the theories and methodologies that guide their work. As the field incorporates an ever-growing range of philosophical concepts from past as well as contemporary scholars, philosophical hermeneutics provides a way for scholars to understand that the work they do is not neutral and participates actively in the constitution and reconstitution of its past, present, and future.

To show the relevance of philosophical hermeneutics as a mode of engagement in current and ongoing methodological debates, I first describe the historical nature of understanding and the way its movement opens up and perturbs its anticipatory claim on meaning-making. When qualitative researchers grapple with how to participate meaningfully in the transmission and transformation of their interpretive practices, they are, intentionally or unintentionally, continuing a conversation with the traditionary material that precedes them. Second, I demonstrate how Gadamer’s theory of aesthetic attentiveness deepens our understanding of the role of the “other” in furthering our ability to bring forth new forms and dimensions to re-occurring issues of importance to qualitative researchers without resorting to a relativistic notion of truth or to any one truth on the matter of interest. Finally, I argue that although current posthumanist and materialist discussions are effectively contributing to these discussions, philosophical hermeneutics helps us understand that our work as qualitative theorists is one of mediating the improvisational and new without overlooking or ignoring those forces and images that continue to exert their relentless influence in myriad ways. As Gadamer (1989b) states,

Things that change force themselves on our attention far more than those that remain the same. That is a general law of our intellectual life. Hence the perspectives that result from the experience of historical change are always in danger of being exaggerated because they forget what persists unseen. (pp. xxii-xxiii)

In this way, I argue that philosophical hermeneutics should be conceptualized as being more like jazz than narrative, dynamic and dialogical without being dualistic or divisive. In my conclusion, I argue that philosophical hermeneutics can further an orientation to the issues that continue to plague our practice in ways that extend the unsettling and critical role it has always already imagined for us, but for it to do so will require that we rethink “dialogue” not as a predefined form of interaction that we use to communicate with others, but as that which allows us to perturb tradition’s mediating effects. This will require, however, that we extend Gadamer’s theory in ways that he could not have possibly imagined, and perturb both what it is we think we have in common with others, and the “others” who comprise our dialogical partners.

The Anticipatory Movement of Understanding

When Gadamer wrote Truth and Method, he was deeply concerned with how the appropriation of the historical and human sciences by an objective and detached scientism misunderstood the historical nature of all experience and the way truth was imparted in understanding. Because there were “truths” in philosophy, art, and poetry, and these could not be verified or replicated in any consistent way and yet had significant effect, what made these “understandings” possible? By looking at the event of understanding in situations that seemed to require interpretation such as when interpreting an historical event or a work of art, he was seeking to better understand what these forms of engagement all had in common as a way to get at the mode of being of understanding itself (Gadamer, 1989b).

In his explication of what happens to understanding as it unfolds in different contexts, for different purposes, and across time, Gadamer provides a radical critique of the prevalent positions within the interpretive sciences. Specifically, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics joins other postmetaphysical thinkers in their critique of foundationalism and in their belief that knowledge of anything is always constrained by circumstance, and, as such, is always the result of something happening in the event of its happening (Davey, 2006). In doing so, Gadamer rearticulates transcendence “as the process of understanding” (Davey, 2006, p. xiii) where the being of anything is never fully graspable, and yet shows itself again and again to us “as an appearing, relative to us, through time” (Davey, 2006, p. xiii). In the next section, I further develop the role art plays in understanding this movement. What is important here is that, in his quest to answer the ontological question on the being of understanding, Gadamer rejects both an objectivist, detached view of understanding and a subjectivist, personal view. He concludes that although historical or artistic texts and artifacts lend themselves to multiple interpretations, this is not the result of an autonomous being standing over an object, or the object somehow imposing its meaning on the viewer. Rather, this is the effect of tradition itself, understood as that which mediates all acts of interpretation (Gadamer, 1989b).

Tradition, then, is effective-history and should be broadly conceived of as our modes of relating to “truth” within the difficulties of living (Davey, 2006). Tradition orients us in particular ways to the finitude of our lives in the midst of a living world unfolding but does not predetermine what kind of a life we should, or could, live. Gadamer (1989b) explains,

If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always already affected by history. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there—in fact, we miss the whole truth of the phenomenon—when we take its immediate appearance as the whole truth. (p. 300)

In other words, although we are thrown into a world already unfolding and not of our making, our experience as temporal beings creates a paradoxical situation: On one hand, we are handed down seemingly settled and transparent perspectives on important matters and events, whereas on the other, this handing-down is transmitted to us from a variety of historical times and in a diversity of forms, presenting a multiplicity of ways “tradition” is mediating these expressive and interpretive materials as “culture,” “art,” “philosophy,” “religion,” and the like. In this way, we come to understand ourselves as belonging “to the transmission of events in general” (Veith, 2015, p. 3), as well as to a “collective conversation of which we are inevitably a part because of our situatedness in the same world” (Veith, 2015, p. 95). Jerome Veith (2015) explains,

To be conscious of this constant transmission and our belong-ingness to it means to encounter history as an undetermined and ongoing source, rather than as a medium or a sealed container of past occurrences that merely have residual effects because of their erstwhile prominence or force. Thus, the consciousness of historical effect entails a twofold insight concerning historical truth itself: it is a recognition both of one’s own participation in the process of transmission and of the kind of meaning that results from this engagement. (p. 3)

Tradition, therefore, both shapes anticipation, in that, it provides a familiar ground of concepts and a language that gives direction to the interpretive encounter, but is itself open to perturbation from within the encounter itself because we only begin to question traditionary claims when they assert themselves “against our expectancies, thereby enabling us to understand it and ourselves differently” (Davey, 2006, p. 238). In this way, life and history make their claims on us as unfinished events (Gadamer, 1989b) out of which we have molded, and continue to mold, our understandings.

For Gadamer, the indeterminacy of meaning prompts our continued participation in the movement of understanding and opens up a liminal space for understanding that is both constrained by the effects our historical situation has on our thinking and doing and infinitely open to new revelations as well as new arrangements. Gadamer (1976) takes inspiration from Hegel’s speculative logic, which asserts that the movement of thought toward absolute knowledge emanates from within “the inherent disquietude of the dialectical process” (p. 94). This dialectical process demonstrates that becoming could not be understood as that which transforms nothing into being, but that “the special characteristic of Becoming is that its content, a being which is not nothing, issues from this structure” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 90). Gadamer holds onto this idea but rejects Hegel’s transcendental idealism, which posits language as in the service of naming concepts. All concepts for Hegel, according to Gadamer (1976), are implicated in thought’s continued determination, and carry within themselves “the Absolute, which is spirit and which therefore reaches fulfillment in the concept of knowing which knows itself” (p. 13). For Gadamer, it is not thought that carries out this movement, but language. Thought does not move to conceive of itself through language, rather, it is “the language-ness of all thought . . . [which] convert[s] the concept back into the valid word” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 99). It is language that is speculative and becomes over and over in “the event of its being said” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 95). In this way, Gadamer rehabilitates Hegel’s dialectics as living dialogue not as a form of engagement that defines and determines thought, but as “an endeavor that continually modifies itself” (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 26), and within which our being, the being of the world, and understanding’s becoming find themselves continuously entangled.

Dialogue, then, is a form of immanent transcendence that engenders its own movement of becoming because the movement opened up by life’s questioning “always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 368). And, because questions always come from within the contingencies of the events of understanding themselves and come already pregnant with meaning, every encounter is a partial manifestation of an ongoing conversation and an opportunity to give it new shape. As such, dialogue brings into being articulations of meaning that both continue and transform the conversations we are already caught up in. It carries out

an ontology of the in-between that attempts to articulate what occurs within the process of understanding . . . [It] does not seek to analyze the perspectives of two negotiating subjects in order to discern the de facto differences between them. To the contrary, the process of encounter itself is regarded as an ontological power capable of generating differences in and between subjects. (Davey, 2006, p. 15)

This liminal space is not arbitrary, but is, instead, one that reveals the kinds of conversations—that is, the topics, people, and practices we “keep company with” (Etymonline.com, 2018)—and the form and direction taken by our questions and answers. Furthermore, although we may have conversations, Gadamer argues, a conversation, as an event of understanding, also has its own being, a movement that draws us into itself, opening up the inherent multiplicity of the thing in question and from which its understanding can be transformed anew.

It is precisely because our participation in the world cannot avoid affecting the flow of meaning that Gadamer speaks of historically effected consciousness as a consciousness that “knows that understanding is always in difficulty” (Davey, 2006, p. 163). This difficulty, however, is not something to overcome, but the very source of meaning’s multiplicity, depth, and resonance (Davey, 2006). Participating in understanding’s becoming, however, not only requires a willingness to question one’s own interpretation of the matter-at-hand, but it necessitates that we trust in the generative capacity of dialogue, as the coming-into-being of something much larger than ourselves but from which we craft our own understandings and ways of being with each other and the world.

In the next two sections, I hope to demonstrate how dialogue, not dialectics, becomes a model for aesthetic engagement that rejects both Enlightenment’s focus on knowledge and reason and Romanticism’s extreme subjectivism (Bowie, 2004). As aesthetic experience, this dialogical approach foregrounds the “subject” of the conversation as the “something” that leads the conversation, inciting participation while also retaining the immanent qualities brought about by the movement of becoming of the topic itself. Then, I argue that philosophical hermeneutics resembles jazz in its potential to disturb the presumed flow of time, revealing, concealing, repeating, and altering the limits and potential embedded in the traditions to come. What these sections reveal is that understanding anything requires that we acknowledge both the impossibility of ever coming to an absolute and agreed-upon meaning of that which we are seeking to understand, but neither should we dismiss its real and continued effects on our being. Understanding exerts itself in its becoming, and our engagement with it deepens our own capacities to grasp the limits and possibilities of our being as well as how it might participate in a world-becoming.

Effective-History as Repetition Without Representation

“If art moves, understanding moves,” writes Nicholas Davey (2013, p. 1) to introduce his book, Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer. He goes on to explain that for Gadamer, aesthetic contemplation does not place a viewer outside a work of art—or the world for that matter—but is a form of engaged participation “in the movement of a work’s constitutive elements” (Davey, 2013, p. 1). Art addresses us, Gadamer (1989b) argues, precisely because it is not a representation of something else, but presents itself as a historically effected gathering of unfinished questions and concerns of which we are a part. Gadamer (1989b) explains,

The experience of art should not be falsified by being turned into a possession of aesthetic culture, thus neutralizing its special claim. We will see that this involves a far-reaching hermeneutical consequence, for all encounters with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event. (p. 85)

Engaging with a work of art best describes the movement and challenge of historically effected interpretation because a work of art defies explanation while also continuously summoning us to engage with it as a meaningful partner to understanding. As Davey (2013) explains,

Substantive works, like significant symbols, have an opaque aspect. They demand interpretation, emphasising the dialogical relation between hermeneutics and aesthetic presentation, that is, the need to bring out the possibilities of meaning within a presentation. As we shall see, it is not the sheer multiplication of meaning per se that is at issue but the generation of unanticipated meanings capable of testing our presuppositions in unexpected ways. (p. 53)

What is it about art that challenges our presuppositions and calls us to engage with it over and over again? Gadamer believes that when we approach a work of art, we do not do so because we expect it to somehow reveal its meaning to us. Rather, something about the work itself causes us to pause, to take it in as an experience, to dwell in its presence. This something can be talked about as its expressiveness, performance, or manifestation of meaning, but what all of these point to is that art is a worthy dialogical partner, and we take note of it because it offers a unique perspective on the matter we now find ourselves contemplating. Art speaks to us and we listen without anticipation of closure on the topic. And, although there is an actual work of art in front of us, neither the work, nor our interpretation of the work, is meant to confirm or represent what it is, but always perform or anticipate more than what can be presented or grasped (Davey, 2013). Davey (2013) explains,

Seeking an image or likeness for a subject suggests a philosophical orientation different to that which regards a likeness as a re-presentation or duplication of an original. Mimesis is not imitatio for Gadamer but the creative anticipation of as yet unrealised possibilities within a perceived subject-matter, an image of a reality which is yet to be. (p. 123)

In this way, art does not stand for something else, as, for example, some ideal concept or theme that it merely transmits, as theorized by transcendental idealists (Gadamer, 1989b). Rather, art “has its own timeless necessity: folds of being itself, eroded lines, runes in which time come[s] to a standstill” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 91), and, thus, participates in the movement of understanding itself. The diversity and complexity of its presentation—whether linguistic, visual, musical, performative—and emanating from a variety of cultural and historical contexts compel us to learn, to seek out new possible configurations to our taken-for-granted ways of being and thinking. “Art,” Erin Manning (2016) states, “as a way of learning, acts as a bridge toward new processes, new pathways. To speak of a ‘way’ is to dwell on the process itself, on its manner of becoming” (p. 47).

Art has long played a critical, disruptive role in the world-becoming. Art brings to the surface an awareness that our way of being could be different. In this way, art becomes, for Gadamer, an ideal partner in opening an unfinished event and eliciting a productive hermeneutic experience. It does this by working as an “other” we can converse with about matters-of-concern. A partner that we never expect to fully understand but that we listen to and respect because of its unique perspective on things. We seek neither to appropriate its meaning, or impose on it our own, nor to dismiss it because it is too foreign or complex to understand fully.

Gadamer reconceptualizes aesthetic experience as “play” as a way to overcome a presumed distinction between a subject (viewer/listener) and an object (work of art/performance), which creates a false differentiation that hides the “dynamic ontology” (Nielsen, 2016) of art and viewer as active communicative partners in this generative process. Gadamer (1989b) explains,

The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. This is the point at which the mode of being of play becomes significant. For play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play. (p. 103)

By asserting the play of the subject matter—conceived of as a field “of linguistically housed meaning and association—rather than determined concepts” (Davey, 2013, p. 34)—in the interpretive encounter, Gadamer illustrates the way our means of expression maintain an irreducible plurality that is only limited by the capacity of the players, whether spectator or works of art, to help the subject matter speak again. Art asserts itself as a relevant partner in interpreting life’s complexities and we respond, opening ourselves up to it because of what “truths” about living and being the aesthetic experience might reveal. Truth shows itself not to be something measurable, replicable, totally graspable, or even the aim of the encounter. Rather, it is “a temporal happening which becomes manifest in the transmission of the work of art” (Bowie, 2004, p. 70).

For Gadamer, encountering a work of art is an event, a site of productive ambiguity, and a generative space that expresses “the play’s essential characteristics of continually becoming a new event” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 499). When we contemplate a work of art, we anticipate a meaningful engagement. The work brings out something more complex, something different for us to consider, and we, by virtue of our active engagement contribute “to bringing what is at play within the artwork into fuller being” (Davey, 2013, p. 48). As Cynthia Nielsen (2016) explains, “Thus, the original becomes more than it was; hence, its being has increased, and yet the two are integrally connected as both participate in presenting the same subject matter—yet a subject matter that itself is always in motion” (n.p.).

The anticipatory space of aesthetic experience enables the contemporaneousness of art to speak again, revealing its interpretive significance to ongoing, and new, issues we take to be meaningful (Nielsen, 2016). In engaging with what each generation considers meaningful, past understandings are renewed and transformed at the same time. Truth, or what is to be taken as significant, is neither the spectator’s subjective response, nor intended by the artist. Rather, it reveals the working of tradition on how we understand and what conditions—aesthetic, sociopolitical, linguistic, cultural, and the like—seem to be mediating our experience (Nielsen, 2016).

The effect of history on understanding as a continuous unfolding and refolding of past performances “to the situation of the present—is nothing less than an exercise in repetition” (Risser, 1997, p. 34). Repetition does not retrieve some meaning from the past as if it has been hidden or distorted and simply requires reinterpretation. Rather, it reclaims the possibilities of meaning inherent to it being brought into the present concern, or, another way of putting it, is that whatever it is that is being summoned from the past is still seen as having something to contribute to the issue we find ourselves both conversing with (Risser, 1997). In this way, every encounter with a work of art, or some other complex work, brings forth new insights without depleting the generative capacity of the work. Art performs its own being over and over in relation to understanding’s movement without needing to stabilize itself as something determined to fulfill this important role.

For Gadamer, dialogue as aesthetic engagement is a way of participating in the flow of meaning and understanding. It does not predefine the who or the what of the contributing other, only that the other as a genuine partner in dialogue must be allowed to become part of the conversation that it is shaping. “What is key is participation, participating in the movement of experience and reflection, for only through such participation can we become reflectively aware of what is performatively at play within our experience of art” (Davey, 2013, p. 6). Or, any other experience for that matter.

Because communities are formed around what is intelligible to us or sensible (Rancière, 2004), it becomes an ethical and political act to converse with others who might seemingly disagree, distort, misunderstand, or bring in irrelevant dimensions to the conversation. Dialogue, as a process where understanding’s becoming performs both taken-for-granted norms of meaning and engagement and opens up novel connections prompting new insights and directions, performs as a partner in the redefinition and redistribution of history’s effects on understanding. Although Gadamer has been criticized for his overly optimistic presentation of dialogue as a harmonious undertaking where partners agree to disagree as they work together to keep understanding productive, as I show in the next section, his focus on experience as a process that resists easy closure can be conceptualized as free jazz, where “difference dances with sameness in an ongoing interplay where neither takes the lead, but each tarries together in a community where moves and countermoves are reciprocally recognized, valued, and harmonized in the truest sense” (Nielsen, 2016, n.p.).

Dialogue as Jazz Improvisation

How can we invite the “other” into understanding’s dance? Gadamer draws on the root of the word “play” as originally meaning “dance” to denote the unending flow of signification we find ourselves caught up in. What is being performed is the “movement of life” itself (Risser, 1997, p. 34), a continuous movement that has no final goal, “rather, it renews itself in constant repetition” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 104). As such, philosophical hermeneutic’s performance of life’s repetition is like jazz. Just think of jazz’s relation to other tunes. Lorenzo Simpson (2001) explains,

The relationship of a jazz treatment to the original tune is more analogous to the relationship of an analytical cubist painting to its subject matter than it is to the relationship of a “detachable” decorative overlay to an unadorned structure. The jazz improvisation treats the original’s melodic and harmonic structure as raw material that it decomposes and reconfigures in novel and, if successful, meaningful ways. (p. 57)

This process not only creates a new piece of music but in doing so reconfigures those pieces from which fragments of tunes were lifted. Unlike a more traditional approach to playing a tune where each interpretation is considered one possible articulation of an original composition, jazz improvisation both disrupts this formulation and constructs a radically different consideration of time itself, one that unsettles our taken-for-granted orientation to anticipation.

Although talking about literature, Bruce Barnhart (2009) contrasts the structure of the novel—as embodying a proleptic anticipatory orientation—to that of jazz, which embodies a parabatic one. These are not only different compositional styles but alter the readers’ or listeners’ expectations. Where prolepsis organizes the past and the present to “a future given in advance . . . [treating] performances or utterances that do not clearly match this vision of the future . . . as meaningless aberrations,” jazz—as parabatic improvisation—interrupts this exclusionary rhetoric using “a motion that is not merely digressive but is a repetitively dissonant reorientation” (Barnhart, 2009, pp. 218-219, p. 221) of a possible, but unknown, future. In this way, past, present, and future are refolded onto themselves in an anticipatory movement where notes and fragments of tunes, are repeated, and, at the same time, have already become something else.

In other words, jazz musicians make full use of the traditionary residuals of effective-history and play skillfully with the anticipatory nature of aesthetic engagement as a way to perturb it from within. Just as each engagement with a work of art helps it become more than it was before, jazz improvisation reconfigures musical combinations in ways that alter one’s expectations of previously used notes or chords by bringing them into being alongside unexpected overlaps or changes in tonal structure or tempo. As improvisations make use of what is and create endless variations of what could be, the what is takes on new meanings, altering what it was, while also performing itself anew. In other words, jazz does not silence a note’s capability, nor does it disregard its past performances as outdated and irrelevant. Rather, it participates wholeheartedly in the note’s reconfiguration and transformation as it affects and is effected by the multiple others that perform alongside it.

Just as each aesthetic encounter is an event that exceeds interpretation because what is said, what is brought forth in every encounter is an open, collaborative process particular to that encounter, group improvisation is a dynamic process where the collective conversation takes precedence over any one player’s contribution. This requires a deep attentiveness to the creative potential in play, and a giving over of oneself to its happening. “As one can imagine, such sonic ‘happenings’ are risky and require not only intense, responsive listening among the players, but also high levels of trust, openness, and vulnerability” (Nielsen, 2016, n.p.).

Like jazz, life is not a sequence of events from which we can predict and control a future. It is a moving force that we are caught up in. Gadamer did not ask how is it that humans understand, but how does understanding happen? In this way, he argued for a kind of awareness for how our modes of expression and communication—linguistic, gestural, numerical, musical, visual, embodied, symbolic—not only give shape to understanding but also do so repeatedly, in different ways, in relation to the unique circumstances presented to them. Philosophical hermeneutic’s focus on becoming asserts a dynamic and ontological view of time and anticipation (Röck, 2019). Time is not something measurable that stands outside and over a changing world. Rather, time can be considered a “quality of change, of flow generated by the becoming of beings” (Röck, 2019, n.p.).

In her discussion of the anticipatory movement of time, Tina Röck (2019) draws on Bergson’s concept of “memory” to describe the ongoing, revisionary process between past, present, and future. She states,

For Bergson the past is “remembered” in the cumulative progression of duration. This remembrance is not a form of passive registration, but rather takes the form of an addition. With every new present that is added and thus integrated to the past, the past as a whole changes. (Röck, 2019, n.p.)

Gadamer (2007) engages with Aristotle’s notions of movement to make a similar point. He writes,

The Aristotelian terms that inquire into the being of movement—like dynamis, energeia, and entelechia—point to the side of the action in the process of being carried out and not to the ergon—the completed action . . . [In addition] Aristotle described energeia with the word for “at the same time” (hama) in order to point to the immanent temporality of its duration. In other words, this is not a one-after-another sequence but the at-the-same-timeness that the temporal structure of tarrying [with an artwork] possesses. It is not a doing of this and that, first this and then that; it is a whole that is present in the seeing, and in the considering that one is immersed in. (Gadamer, 2007, pp. 210-211)

Whether called “tradition” or “memory,” the emphasis here is on the constitutive nature of process over product; the way engagement in the present alters the past and future. This is why Röck (2019) concludes that our orientation to time, whether perceived as past, present, or future, must have an anticipatory dimension. Tradition, for Gadamer, provides a way to acknowledge the anticipatory effect of history on our thinking and doing, while also suggesting that we pay close attention to how we might participate meaningfully in its transmission and transformation. The point of hermeneutics is not to interpret any one aspect of this flow as if identification of the traditionary source or one’s standpoint toward it was possible, but to make the best use of the temporal “distance” inherent in all interpretive acts. “Original” works of art, historical events, philosophical treatises, musical or theatrical performances, and the like are not called on as partners because there is an authentic, final, or contingent interpretation to be found there, but because they create temporal openings that enact understanding’s difference—becomes difference.

Difference is given its respectful place alongside the “familiar” when our interpretive practices prevent it from being subsumed, ignored, taken over, ostracized, or redirected by approaches that view it as aberrant, atypical, or distorted, as if there was a true meaning or original from which to measure or compare difference. Rather, by positing interpretation as an unfinished event that we must participate in, Gadamer argues that the distance between ourselves and any final, or agreed-upon, interpretation of anything is our mode of being, our playing ground so to speak, and is not one that we can overcome, or should try to overcome. Experience, for him, is participation, and enacts a mode of play that mediates between the familiar and the foreign, the past and the future in a way that takes as its fundamental problem the constitutive being of this process. By positing the being of understanding, the being of play, the being of conversation, he is arguing for the need to attend to these beings seriously, to consider how they affect what they produce. His dialogical approach articulates the movement of understanding and a possible mode of participating in its formation, and although these two articulations could be thought about separately, our future may well depend on how well we are able to conceptualize them as being one and the same. As Gregory Keller (2011) states,

Dialogism is nothing one does specifically; it stands as the background for each and every act of communication, even of silence. Alfred North Whitehead (1929, 1933) describes the nature of the fundamental actuality in the universe—what he calls the “actual occasion”—in terms of its deep and unavoidable place as response to the past and as anticipation of the future. (p. 29)

It is for this reason that I believe jazz to be a better metaphor for philosophical hermeneutics than narrative. Although narrative can function in the same way as jazz, in general, its focus on action and a plot that moves from an identifiable beginning, through a middle, toward some form of resolution keeps us oriented to the future without considering how the future may fold back into the past and present, altering each in unpredictable ways. Jazz, however, asks us to work with others—as dialogic partners in life’s play—and accept the uncertainty of the outcome, the reality of not knowing the next note or the one after, only that deep listening to the movement of notes and participation is required for its ongoing production. The experience of jazz is one of transience, a state of becoming-together to create something meaningful for this occasion and time, and the experienced jazz player is one who understands that he or she “is master neither of time nor the future” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 351).

Perturbing Tradition’s Mediating Effects

In the previous sections, I have argued that philosophical hermeneutics as a dialogical form of participation in life’s difficulties offers an improvisational, collaborative approach that orients its participants to engage in a critical reappropriation and transformation of the conditions affecting their abilities to become-together. This becoming-together is dialogical in its generative movement without being dialectical because it rejects a conception of the movement of understanding as a cumulative and progressive fusion of contradictory positions. Dialogue as jazz improvisation requires that those who participate embrace its unpredictable movement and transient existence, while also believing that participating in its production is somehow meaningful to the participants’—and existence’s—future.

Gadamer has been criticized for not having worked out how his dialogical model could be carried out in practice, among contentious parties who refuse to listen, let alone speak to one another (Dallmayr, 2009). And, it is indeed difficult to imagine that dialogue with others could be choreographed as jazz, where each speaker listens deeply to the emerging melody, continuously readjusting his or her expectations as he or she “participates in its non-repeatable event” (Nielsen, 2016, n.p.). Instead, this description more accurately describes the work of writers, scholars, and philosophers and the way an argument slowly takes shape as it works through seemingly incommensurable or incomprehensible ideas into something current and coherent. So, although others have drawn on Gadamer’s model for what it can contribute to intercultural dialogue (Dallmayr, 2009; Keller, 2011), I will focus primarily on what I believe it can offer to the ongoing conversations constituting the field of qualitative research.

Qualitative research as a practice that draws on multiple, often seemingly incommensurable traditions furthers philosophical discourses that question the role of human interpretation in meaning-making. Philosophical hermeneutics can be best understood, not as a theoretical perspective guiding research design, but as a process ontology within which our modes of inquiry participate in traditions’ transmissions in both recognizable and unrecognizable ways. History is not only repeatable, but its unpredictable, contingent and complex movement means that we are always “drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 484). In other words, from a philosophical hermeneutic perspective, humans do not create the world but neither are their actions and understandings without consequences. For this reason, Gadamer envisions human beings as philosophers who recognize their limits in the midst of existence, a humble human who would not presume to know best or that his or her perspective was better than another’s. A human who envisioned others as a jazz player would, as partners in a collective performance where his or her role is appreciated for how it helps make every note, even those she or he did not produce, or that seem dissonant, discordant even, sound as best as possible. An inquiring human who would attend to how “reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms—i.e., it is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 277). A human who understood himself or herself to not only be always in formation, but formed by and contributing to the form taken of others.

Philosophical hermeneutics, then, is a mode of engagement that is oriented toward a deeper recognition for how our modes of participation affect the process in which communities of life become so differentiated. It is a process of engagement that is particularly attuned to symbolic and performative articulations and rearticulations of the world’s meanings. For Gadamer, symbolic forms of expression and the world coexist in a dynamic relation. Brice Wachterhauser (1999) argues that Gadamer did not believe that language produces the world but neither did he believe it was unintelligible to us. “Rather, Gadamer argues . . . language and reality ‘belong together’ such that the former is ‘akin’ to the latter and as such well-suited to reflect the inexhaustibly rich intelligibility of reality itself” (p. 34). It is the uniquely speculative nature of language that when it “functions properly it reflects and enhances the reality of which it speaks” (Wachterhauser, 1999, p. 102). Language then, is not a barrier to interpretation but its only asset. Its inherent openness and mutability provides the potential for coming to understandings that at first seem impossible due to the lack of a common language or set of commensurable assumptions. Richard Bernstein (2010) explains,

Incommensurability sets the hermeneutical problem whether we are concerned with understanding a strange text, a tradition, or an alien people. The task of understanding requires imagination, learning how to listen and respond. We have to pay careful attention to differences, to be wary of glib forms of translation, to modify our prejudgments when they do not fit. (p. 388)

In other words, as researchers, we have to embrace the complexity and ambiguity inherent to understanding’s forms, seeking out new words, images, and concepts that transcend the limits of our perspectives. This is a creative and continuous process, and one Gadamer suggests requires intense immersion, a deep attentiveness to the way words, and other modes of expression, lead us simultaneously closer to some understanding while opening up new chasms along the way.

To avoid the limits of objective science and the transcendental subjectivism of idealism, Gadamer argues that understanding is constituted and reconstituted through time and place. This allows him to go “beyond being” (Wachterhauser, 1999) and attend to being’s becoming. In doing so, he provides a radical approach that recognizes the “other,” not as something to be appropriated or subsumed into our own limited horizons, and neither as something so alien that communication is impossible. Rather, his “other” is best considered a variation of being’s becoming. Understanding, then, “in Gadamer’s ontological account of it, turns out to be nothing more than the unending process of discerning ‘the one in the many and the many in the one’” (Wachterhauser, 1999, p. 7). Wachterhauser goes on to explain that, for Gadamer, meaning-making is “like addition in that it is a process which combines eidetic units, each of which has a distinct meaning, the combination of which nevertheless creates a new meaning, not reducible to the individual units involved” (p. 73). As already noted, then, interpretation of anything can never reveal an original because all “originals” lose some aspect of their constitutional being when sought out as interpretive partners, while also having the capacity to perform different aspects of being within a multiplicity of interpretive experiences. It is in this way that language becomes a partner to understanding because it participates wholeheartedly in maintaining the plurality already present in understanding’s becoming.

An issue for qualitative researchers seeking ontological guidance from philosophical hermeneutics, and the one I conclude with, is not language but how tradition as a moving influence residing in and mediating the ongoing interpretations of historical texts or traditionary objects is conceptualized. As noted earlier, Gadamer does not think we can craft something out of nothing, while also believing that reproduction was impossible. Rather, “understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the history of its effects” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. xxviii). In other words, Gadamer leaves wide open how we are to account for these effects and for what purpose. It is here that Gadamer’s work has received a fair amount of criticism, first, for his concern with ontological questions of truth that appear to support a “metaphysics of presence” (Caputo, 1987, 1989), and second, for advancing traditions he valued in ways that implied a conservative agenda (Mendelson, 1979). This suggests that Gadamer may have been less interested in perturbing tradition then in how we might “grasp and express the past anew” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 49). From this perspective, a genuine hermeneutic experience is not that you have necessarily said something new but that you have helped tradition reveal and spread its effects in ways not yet conceived (Wachterhauser, 1999). In other words, for Gadamer, interpretation should give renewed life to the “history of effect” to better assess its effects on how life is lived and understood. It is a process ontology focused on tracing mechanisms of interpretation and the conditions that bring them about. John Caputo (1989) explains,

From this point of view, Gadamer’s thought has lost its nerve, for its precise concern is with presence, Anwesen, the manifold riches of the tradition, the stored up goods and ousia that the tradition has to deliver. Gadamer’s interest is in how the tradition can deliver the goods, how it can pass on its accumulated wealth, how it can be a living and self-renewing tradition, a good infinite. There is an unmistakable resistance to Heidegger’s step back out of the history of presence. Gadamer is always more interested in the gift of presence—the “present” which tradition makes to us—than in the giving itself, the es gibt. (pp. 261-262)

So, in the midst of postmodern and poststructural theories wishing to disrupt tradition’s authority, Gadamer is presenting arguments that suggest that perhaps we have not yet adequately understood its power and constituting effects. Rather than break with tradition as a matter of course, he advises, tradition’s effects must be critically and charitably assessed in the event of understanding itself, and this assessment must happen repeatedly because new insights will continuously emerge in light of new situations. It is by considering the effects of “what persists unseen” (Gadamer, 1989b, p. xxiii), that Gadamer believes each generation develops the interpretive experience required for attentive engagement with tradition’s actual and potential moving effects.

The current conversations in qualitative research provide an opportunity to continue to engage with the tension presented to us between the old and the new, and to consider the implications of history as something that keeps giving versus something out of which new directions are formed. My belief is that it is not an either-or situation. Dialogue, as I have argued, conceptualized as jazz improvisation, helps us continue the conversation as collaborative partners in understanding’s becoming. Arguments about which traditions should be invited as partners in the conversation and which ones should be buried forever are not just intellectual work, but provide an orchestra from which to sing new tunes. Too narrow a conceptualization of the players threatens the diversity inherent in the universe’s potential. A lack of effort in inviting new players into the conversation does the same. As Keller (2011) explains, “The precondition for intercultural dialogue and for living together into a common future—depends upon a previous or concomitant recognition of the dialogism of life” (p. 29).

Our conversations as dynamic process ontologies have effect. From a hermeneutical perspective, the philosophies we draw on to make sense of the issues that matter to us as well as the experience we gain by dwelling on these matters reveal as much about our limits as they do about possible ways to transcend these. They will never reveal who we are, or what the universe consists of, but they can foster awareness of how deeply entangled we are in understanding’s becoming. The question remains whether we will be able to decenter and perturb our individual anticipatory needs and assist with existence’s becoming, a becoming that will always exceed our understanding, and is very likely to exceed our very survival.