ABSTRACT
I count my relationship with John Shotter – as a friend and dialogic companion – as one of the greatest fortunes of my career. The scholarly dialogues in which we have engaged are echoed – directly or indirectly – in almost all my writings of the past forty years. To be sure, we have not always agreed; but these tensions were ever the catalysts for lively conversation. In what follows I wish to touch on some of the significant chapters in our journeying together. My hope is to accomplish several goals at once. At the outset, this may enable the reader to appreciate the profundity of Shotter’s work, and the ways it has entered into the larger intellectual movements of the times. At the same time, I wish to tell a more personal story, one that may furnish some insight into our own particular dialogues, the affinities, and the deviations. Finally, the attempt is to instantiate the relational conceptions that have so pervaded the dialogues in which we have engaged. In this register, this is not a story about John, or about me, but a relationship.
