What is Dialectical Storytelling Praxis?

By David M. Boje, Ph.D.

May 16 2016

I take a Hegelian approach to Dialectical Storytelling Praxis.

In Dialectical Storytelling Practice a program of learning and practice is necessary not only for competence or skill in dialectic storytelling, but to achieve an ethical life it is necessary to intervene, to become part of transforming the social and economic by engaging in political action.

“a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence’ (Hegel, G W F. “Phenomenology of Spirit: #67).

Dialectical Storytelling Praxis is a program of learning and practice, as Paulo Freire says, in Pedegogy of the Oppressed, is directed at the structures to be transformed or as Hannah Arendt argues, an active life engaged in everyday political action.

Dialogical Storytelling Praxis involves scepticism, not being a bystander to conventions of morality, and engaging in answerability for counter-reasonings:

“Even his pure scepticism is a thesis for which doubtful arguments are adduced, and he must in practice rely on the deliverances of the senses and the conventions of morality. The sceptical self-consciousness is in fact deeply self-contradictory, and its reasonings and counter-reasonings are like the arguments of children concerned to contradict one another and always to have the last word” (Hegel: # 205).

In  Dialectical Storytelling Praxis, the reciprocal of individuality, is in the “dissolution of its being-for-self” and the “negation of itself” and entering the “unityt of being-for-another” or the universal of community:

“There is nothing here which would not be reciprocal, nothing in relation to which the independence of the individual would not, in the dissolution of its being-for-self in the negation of itself, give itself its positive significance of being for itself. This unity of being-for-another or making oneself a Thing, and of being-for-self, this universal” (Hegel, G W F. “Phenomenology of Spirit: # 351).

Bakhtin (see Boje, 2008, 2014) calls this the ethics of answerability, to not be a by stander, but rather to intervene in the once-occurrent event-ness of Being. As such, Dialecital Storytelling Praxis is more than epistemic observing consciousness, the dialectic storytelling praxis is actualized in getting involved, by acts of intervention and participation.