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Discrepant punctuation

Quotes

"To an outside observer, a series of communications can be viewed as an uninterrupted sequence of interchanges. However the participants in the interaction always introduce what, following Whorf (1956), Bateson and Jackson have termed the 'punctuation of the sequence of events.' They state:

The stimulus-response psychologist typically confines his attention to sequences of interchange so short that it is possible to label one item of input as 'stimulus' and another item as 'reinforcement' while labelling what the subject dos between these two events as 'response'. (...) In contrast, the sequences of interchange (...) are very much longer and therefore ahve the characteristics that every item in the sequence is simultaneously stimulus, response, and refinforcement. A given item of A's behavior is a stimulus insofar as it is followed b an item contributed by B and that by another item contributed by A. But insofer as A's item is sanwiched between two items contributed by B, it is a response. Similarly A's item is a reinforcement insofar as it follows an item contributed by B. The ongoing interchanges, then, which we are here discussing, constitute a chain of overlapping triadic links, each of which is comparable to a stimulus-response-reinforcement sequence. We can take any triad of our interchange and see it as a single trial in a stimulus response learning experiment.
If we look at the conventional learning experiments from this point of view, we observe at once that repeated trials amount to a differentiation of relationship between the two organisms concerned - the experimenter and his subject. The sequence of trials is so punctuated that it is always the experimenter who seems to provide the 'stimuli' and the 'reinforcements', while the subject provides the 'responses'. These words are here deliberately put in quotation marks because the role definitions are in fact only created by the willingness of the organisms to accept the system of punctuation. The 'reality' of the role definitions is only of the same order as the reality of a bat on a Rorschach card - a more or less over-determined creation of the perceptive process. The rat who said 'I ahve got my experimenter trained. Each time I press the lever he gives me food" was declining to accept the punctuation of the sequence which the experimenter was seeking to impose.
It is still true, however, that in a long sequence of interchange, the organisms concerned - especially if these be people - will in fact punctuate the sequence so that it will appear that one or the other has initiative, dominance, dependency or the like. Taht is, they will set up between them patterns of interchange (about which they may or may not be in agreement) and these patterns will in fact be rules of contingency regarding the exchange of refinforcements. While rats are too nice to re-label, some psychiatric patients are not, and provide psychological trauma for the therapist! (Bateson & Jackson, 1964, pp. 273-74).

It is not the issue here whether punctuation of communicational sequence is, in general, good or bad, as it should be immediately obvious that punctuation organizes' behavioral events and is therefore vital to ongoing interactions. Culturally, we share many conventions of punctuation which, while no more or less accurate than other views of the same events, serve to organize common and important interactional sequences. For example, we call a person in a group behaving in one way the 'leader' and another the 'follower', although on reflection it is difficult to say which comes first or where one would be without the other.

2.42

Disagreement about how to punctuate the sequence of events is at the root of countless relationship struggles. Suppose a couple have a marital problem to which he contributes passive withdrawal, while her 50 per cent is nagging criticism. In explaining their frustrations, the husband will state that withdrawal is his only defense against' her nagging, while she will label this explanation a gross and willful distortion of what 'really' happens in their marriage: namely, that she is critical of him because of his passivity. Stripped of all ephemeral and fortuitous elements, their fights consist in a monotonous exchange of the messages "I withdraw because you nag" and "I nag because you withdraw." (...) It can be seen that the husband only perceives triads 2-3-4, 4-5-6, 6-7-8, etc., where his behavior (solid arrows) is 'merely' a response to her behavior (the broken arrows). With her it is exactly the other way around; she punctuates the sequence of events into the triads 1-2-3, 3-4-5, 5-6-7, etc., and sees herself as only reacting to, but not determining, her husband's behavior. In conjoint psychotherapy with couples one is frequently struck by the intensity of what in traditional psychotherapy would be referred to as 'reality distortion' on the part of both parties. It is often hard to believe that two individuals could have such divergent views on many elements of joint experience. And yet the problem lies primarily in an area already frequently mentioned: their inability to metacommunicate about their respective patterning of their interaction. This interaction is of an oscillatory yes-no-yes-no-yes nature which theoretically can go on ad infinitum and almost invariably is accompanied, as we shall see later, by the typical charges of badness or madness.

International relations, too, are rife with analogous patterns of interaction; take for instance C.E.M. Joad's analysis of arms races:

... if, as they maintain, the best way to preserve peace is to prepare war, it is not altogether clear why all nations should regard the armaments of other nations as a menace to peace. However, they do so regard them, and are accordingly stimulated to increase their armaments to overtop the armaments by which they conceive themselves to be threatened.... These increased arms being in their turn regarded as a menace by nation A whose allegedly defensive armaments ahve provoked them, are used by nation A as a pretext for accumulating yet greater armaments where -with to defend itself against the menace. Yet these greater armaments are in turn interpreted by neighbouring nations as constitutiting a menace to themselves and so on .... (Joad, 1939, p. 69).

Bibliography

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