Dialogue in the stream of life

Abstract

The paper considers dialogue from the point of view Wittgenstein has called ‘the stream of life’ and aims at describing analytically what happens in complex dialogues of performance. A short overview is given of approaches which use the term ‘communities’ to structure performance, e.g. ‘communities of practice’ or ‘speech communities’. Contrary to these approaches which are either oriented towards parts of the whole, such as speech, or address the whole only vaguely by terms of the social context, a genuinely holistic theory needs a solid constitutive basis which is considered to be the sequence of action and reaction in the complex whole of the action game. Language use means dialogic action. By analysing a complex authentic action game the methodology of such a holistic theory like the Mixed Game Model can be demonstrated in detail.