According to William McClellan, Bakhtin's appropriation into rhetorical theory during the late 1980s was a natural process, since Bakhtin's theory of dialogics, though it first took hold in literary criticism, shares many common attributes with the rhetorical tradition:
He employs the same communication model of speaker/utterance/listener, and he preserves, or rather, reinvents the conflation of speech and writing which occurred in the theory of the Middle Ages when rhetoric, a theory of oratory, was adapted to the study of texts. Both modeling schemes stress the persuasive aspect of discourse and emphasize the importance of the other, the listener, in its generation. Both frameworks are oriented toward contextuality: the practical, ideological environment in which discourse is conducted. Finally, rhetorical and dialogic theory have a materialist view of language. For both, the utterance is the ideological body of language. (235)McClellan believes that in developing his theory of dialogics, Bakhtin employs two basic concepts from traditional rhetoric: 1) personification, or the "ascription of agency to inanimate ideas and objects," such as in his concept of the "hero," and 2) polemic, or the "aggressive focusing upon another's word or utterance" (236).
Yet McClellan believes Bakhtin differs from the classical tradition of rhetoric in that he assigns much more active roles in shaping discourse to the listener and subject (243). Additionally, unlike earlier classical theories, which ultimately assume a system of absolute values, Bakhtin grounds his theory of rhetoric in the "concrete socio-historical context" of heteroglossia, which in turn lends itself to the analysis of a variety of texts, from novels to ethnographies (246). This flexibility that Bakhtin's ideas provide rhetorical theory allows for
specificity and thickness of the social in the analysis of an artistic work and the precision and sophistication of literary analysis in the reading of scientific ones. In the terrain of Bakhtin's work, these and other, heterogeneous discursive practices interact, form dialogic relationships and promise profound new insights. (McClellan 246)In addition to his recent incorporation into rhetorical theory, Bakhtin's deep and profound understanding of history throws the distant and recent past into confrontation, bringing us full circle back to the roots of all philosophical language in the West -- the Socratic sense of dialogue as a prime force in theoretical inquiry. The Platonic concept of absolute truth unveiled through logical contemplation may be dead, as Derrida and other poststructuralists have noted, but the sense of dialogue as a necessary first step in any philosophical quest lives through the influence of Bakhtin's emphasis on the dialogic principles first espoused by Socrates. Therefore, before discussing Bakhtin's influence in modern rhetorical theory, it is important to understand his relationship to the classical tradition of rhetoric.
In notes for his 1963 revision of the Dostoevsky book, Bakhtin wrote that the rudiments for "overcoming the monologic model of the world" could be found in the Socratic dialogues, which represented "the first step in the history of the new genre of the novel" (Problems 291-92). In fact, in several passages of the revised book, Bakhtin writes that the dialogic tradition which reached its pinnacle in Dostoevsky sprang directly from the Socratic dialogues, which he felt had begun "almost as a memoir genre" or a recollection of conversations with Socrates. However, the dialogues soon moved beyond the "limitations of history and memoir" (109), retaining only trace elements of the Socratic method of inquiry:
At the base of the genre lies the Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth, and the dialogic nature of human thinking about truth. The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. Socrates called himself a "pander": he brought people together and made them collide in quarrel, and as a result truth was born; with respect to this emerging truth Socrates called himself a 'midwife,' since he assisted at the birth . . . . (110)This Socratic emphasis on the dialogic nature of inquiry eventually weakened under Plato's influence, when it "degenerated completely into a question-and-answer form for training neophytes (catechism)" (110).
In another section of the Dostoevsky book, Bakhtin goes into a lengthy discussion of the "carnival" roots of the polyphonic novel, touching on a subject he expounds upon further in Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin felt the genre of Socratic dialogues grew out of:
Folk-carnival "debates" between life and death, darkness and light, winter and summer, etc., permeated with the pathos of change and the joyful relativity of all things, debates which did not permit thought to stop and congeal in a one-sided seriousness or in a stupid fetish for definition or singleness of meaning -- all this lay at the base of the original core of the genre. This distinguishes the Socratic dialogue from the purely rhetorical dialogue as well as from the tragic dialogue . . . . The Socratic discovery of the dialogic nature of thought, of truth itself, presumes a carnivalistic familiarization of relations among people who have entered into dialogue, it presumes a familiarizing of attitudes toward the object of thought itself, however lofty and important, and toward truth itself. (132)From these passages, we can see that Bakhtin was greatly influenced by Socrates in formulating his concept of dialogics. Bakhtin was aware of how the dialectic of Socrates differed from the philosophical system of Plato, and having studied classical literature extensively, he undoubtedly knew of the historical differences between Socrates and the Sophists.
Socrates lived during an age that experienced what classicist Eric Havelock has called "the crisis . . . in the history of human communication, when Greek orality transformed itself into Greek literacy" (The Muse 1). Prior to Socrates, education in Ancient Greece was characterized mainly by instruction in an oral, poetic tradition reaching back hundreds of years. Socrates' crime, for which he was tried and sentenced to death, was his proposal that "this education be professionalised, its context being no longer set by poetic tradition and by practice...but by dialectical examination of `ideas'" (Havelock, The Muse 5).
According to Havelock, Socratic dialectic stemmed directly from this conflict between the older oral tradition and the new literacy offered by the Greek alphabet. The Greeks used different words for these two distinct forms of human communication -- epos, which characterized orally preserved forms of speech and poetic tradition, and logos, which referred to "discourse both as spoken and as written . . . and also to the mental operation (the reasoning power) required to produce it . . ." (Havelock, The Muse 113). This new concept of logos eventually formed the foundation of all subsequent Western moral philosophy by giving rise to the concept of the psyche, since "the inscribed language and thought and the person who spoke it became separated from each other, leading to a new focus on the personality of the speaker" (Havelock, The Muse 120).
One of the first groups of philosophers to challenge this early poetic tradition were the Sophists. Our modern understanding of these philosophers has been distorted by the fact that Plato's condemnation of their ideas "contributed to the loss of Sophistic texts and neglect of the remaining fragments" (Bizzell and Herzberg 22). Though few of their works have survived, the extant texts suggest the Sophists pondered many of the same issues prevalent in today's debates about philosophy of language.
Prior to the Sophists, Greek philosophy in the fifth century B.C. was characterized by a burgeoning interest in the natural world, as philosophers sought to "replace the mythical idea of a degeneration from a primeval perfection" with "physical theories of the evolution of life from inanimate matter" (Guthrie, The Sophists 60-61). This increasing concern with the natural world led to an examination of the connection between physical reality and language, between physis and nomos. According to W. K. C. Guthrie, the most influential strand of Presocratic philosophy was the extreme monism of Parmenides and his followers, who rejected the empirical senses and placed faith entirely in a unified absolute beyond the natural world. This philosophy "inspired a violent reaction in the empirical and practical minds of the Sophists, who opposed it in the name of common sense" (Guthrie, The Sophists 47).
The Sophists undoubtedly came to repudiate the views of Parmenides and others through their contact with cultures outside the Greek peninsula. This contact "made it increasingly obvious that customs and standards of behaviour which had earlier been accepted as absolute and universal, and of divine institution, were in fact local and relative" (Guthrie, The Sophists 16). However, Guthrie believes other elements also led to the Sophistic movement and its rejection of earlier tradition, such as the advent of Athenian democracy (19) and the growth of atheism and agnosticism (23).
But regardless of what spawned the Sophistic movement, most of the Sophists were characterized by an extreme skepticism and a belief in linguistic relativity, which in turn caused them to endorse rhetoric as the only means by which to shape the course of human affairs. In doing so, they challenged the earlier monism of Parmenides and other Eleatic philosophers and "abandoned the idea of a permanent reality behind appearances, in favour of an extreme phenomenalism, relativism and subjectivism" (Guthrie, The Sophists 47). The Sophists were often paid handsomely for their services by wealthy Athenians, who found their rhetorical instruction helpful in arguing their cases before the Assembly and courts of law.
Perhaps the most famous of the ancient Sophists was Protagoras of Abdera, whose subjective philosophy is best exemplified by his saying: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not" (Guthrie, The Sophists 171). Protagoras was famous for his school of rhetorical instruction, in which he trained his pupils to argue both sides of an argument, but underlying this instruction was his belief that "[t]ruth was individual and temporary, not universal and lasting, for the truth for any man was simply what he could be persuaded of . . ." (The Sophists 51).
Another of the well-known early Sophists was Gorgias, whose philosophy is best summarized in the fragments of his treatise On Nature or the Non-existent. As Guthrie notes, Gorgias set out in this text to refute Presocratic monism by arguing three main points: "(a) that nothing exists, (b) that even if it does it is incomprehensible to man, (c) that, even if it is comprehensible to anyone, it is not communicable to anyone else" (The Sophists 193).
During the past decade, there have been several attempts to resurrect the Sophistic tradition as a model for modern rhetorical theory. [1] Thomas Kent, for one, has noticed striking similarities between the Sophists and deconstruction, the former of whom "understood that we are prisoners of language" and "that we can find our way in the world only by following the labyrinthian twists and turns of language" ("Paralogic" 35). Kent argues that the Sophistic tradition can be used, along with poststructuralist thought, to forge a "paralogic rhetoric" in which we are "forced to reconsider a history of rhetoric grounded in the commonplace notion that rhetoric springs fully formed from the brain of Aristotle . . ." (39). In doing so, he invokes Bakhtin as support, but he fails to take into account the distinctions between Bakhtin and deconstruction, as well as those between the Sophists and Socrates, the latter of whom Bakhtin considered the founding father of dialogics.
While the Platonic dialogues contain most of our information about Socrates, we can, as Bakhtin did, sense Socrates' underlying concept of dialectic that was somewhat disfigured by the monologic transcriptions of Plato, who went well beyond Socrates in positing a theory of absolute knowledge. According to Havelock, Socrates stands at the crossroads between the Sophistic and Platonic traditions, embracing a somewhat paradoxical view that Bakhtin would find appealing more than two thousand years later:
On the one hand he clung to traditional orality -- the uttered word only as heard. On the other, he brusquely turned away from its expression in rhythmic poetry or casual conversation and substituted a truly radical style, of inviting the expression of a traditional oral statement from an interlocutor and then subjecting its terms, its meaning, to a drastic interrogation. The process required a coincidental partnership of two or more people; whereas a text did not. ("The Orality" 77-78)Jay Farness also shares this paradoxical view of Socrates and argues that while Socrates condemns writing in the Platonic dialogues, "specifically its distance from conversation and the dialogical situation of embodied language," there is still much "that is disconcertingly writerly about the language style of this master of face-to-face discourse" (47).