Dialogics is not an easy term to define, mainly because Bakhtin uses the word "in so many contexts and in such diverse senses that it often seems devoid of clear definition" (Morson and Emerson, Creation 49). But in a general sense, Bakhtin derives his term from the simple act of dialogue, the give-and- take exchange of language between two individuals. While such a definition may seem quite obvious, dialogics, as Bakhtin describes it in a variety of works, has radical implications when compared to traditional Western views of language. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist define dialogics perhaps best when describing the basic thrust of Bakhtin's philosophy:
Bakhtin's point is that I can mean what I say, but only indirectly, at a second remove, in words that I take and give back to the community according to the protocols it observes. My voice can mean, but only with others -- at times in chorus, but at the best of times in dialogue. ( Mikhail Bakhtin 12)Though Bakhtin would develop and refine this basic concept over the course of a lifetime, the origins of his ideas began with his voracious reading of Western philosophy while still quite young.
Born in the small Russian town of Orel in 1895, Bakhtin graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1918 with a degree in classics and philology. During the 1920s, he moved around to several towns in the Soviet Union, spending his days teaching and his nights debating philosophy, religion, and politics with friends, including Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. These late-night discussions of the Bakhtin Circle, fueled by strong tea and the synergy of close friends, eventually led the young Bakhtin to begin work on a major philosophical treatise in which he sought to "fuse the three great subjects of Western metaphysics -- epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics -- into a single theory of the deed" (Clark and Holquist 57). Fragments of this work were later translated into English as Art and Answerability.
Though Bakhtin never completed this project, the remaining fragments are important, because as Michael Holquist states, the material "is the precondition for his later work, insofar as it contains many, if not most, of the ideas he would spend the rest of his life exploring, revising, and even contradicting" ( Art and Answerability xvii). Bakhtin identified fairly early in life the issues of language and literature he wished to address, but he apparently lacked the intellectual maturity and discipline at this point to put them succinctly into writing.
Dealing for the most part with the aesthetic problems of literary creation, Art and Answerability touches on many aspects of literature and philosophy of language. The main essay, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," lays out specific problems involved in the relationship between an author and his characters, the latter of which Bakhtin refers to as the "hero." Here, Bakhtin explores various aspects of the author/hero relationship that foreshadow, without actually naming them, his later concepts of dialogics and polyphony. He talks in broad, sweeping terms about the relationship between two sets of consciousness and the "consummation" of consciousness in the author/hero relationship. Bakhtin feels that as we interact with others, our consciousness is transformed by this experience of "other," and we return into our isolated selves, where we "consummate" this "other" experience in terms of ourselves.
Bakhtin takes this somewhat simple concept and extrapolates it into several different levels of interaction between an author and his hero, a relationship he explores in much further depth in later works. While this early essay is diffuse, it is held together by this continual theme of "otherness" -- that we can know ourselves only through interaction with others:
It is only in the other human being, in fact, that a living, aesthetically (and ethically) convincing experience of human finitude is given to me, the experience of a human being as a delimited empirical object. The other is given to me entirely enclosed in a world that is external to me; he is given to me as a constituent in it that is totally delimited on all sides in space. (36)It is no small wonder that Bakhtin failed to complete this project, for it shows an intellect striving for olympian heights of almost unattainable understanding. These fragments, though, demonstrate clearly how Bakhtin sought to ground his ideas within the tradition of Western philosophy. Especially important for Bakhtin in these essays are the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism. Kant's entire body of work is extremely complex, but his main contribution to Western philosophy was his "transcendental" synthesis of two earlier schools of thought that had sought to explain the mind's relation to the world -- empiricism and rationalism.
Prior to Kant, most modern philosophy had been divided between Locke's belief that we can know the world only through our senses and Descartes' idea that logical inquiry was our sole path to a knowable reality. Kant's "breakthrough was to insist on the necessary interaction -- the dialogue -- between the two. He argued that thought is a synthesis of two sources of knowledge, sensibility and understanding" (Clark and Holquist 58).
Though Kant was an important influence on Bakhtin, he seems to have been more fascinated during this time with the tenets of Marburg professor Hermann Cohen, who posited a radical interpretation of Kant's ideas. Cohen ignored Kant's transcendental synthesis and turned instead to a "militant idealism in which the realm of concepts, logic, is all and the external, material world is nothing" (Clark and Holquist 58). Though Bakhtin came to reject this nihilistic attitude reminiscent of today's deconstruction, he was intrigued with Cohen's insistence that conceptualization of the world is a never-ending process with no final conclusion.
Additionally, Bakhtin's early writings mirror Cohen's preoccupation late in life with attempting to reconcile his philosophical beliefs with a deepening faith in religion. Throughout "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," Bakhtin makes repeated references to how his concept of "otherness" is central to the Christian message, which stresses "we must relieve the other of any burdens and take them upon ourselves" (Art and Answerability 38). Bakhtin believed this Christian attitude toward the self and body differed widely from those of various ancient philosophies -- such as the Dionysian cults, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism -- and is derived from the example set by Christ of the Gospels:
In Christ we find a synthesis of unique depth, the synthesis of ethical solipsism . . . with ethical-aesthetic kindness toward the other. For the first time, there appeared an infinitely deepened I-for-myself -- not a cold I-for-myself, but one of boundless kindness toward the other; an I-for-myself that renders full justice to the other as such, disclosing and affirming the other's axiological distinctiveness in all its fullness. (56)Later in this essay, Bakhtin discusses how modern forms of autobiography are an extension of confessional pieces of writing and how an accounting of oneself is impossible without the existence of another. For Bakhtin, there is no writing about the self without an implied audience of higher authority: "[O]utside the bounds of trust in absolute otherness, self-consciousness and self-utterance are impossible . . . because trust in God is an immanent constitutive moment of pure self-consciousness and self- expression" (144).
What becomes clear in comparing these early essays with his later texts is that Bakhtin was trying to work his way through the philosophical tradition of his school years into a more mature philosophy of language and literature imbued with original thought. His next project, a revolutionary critique of Dostoevsky's work, shows a much more confident thinker striking out in bold, new directions while simultaneously seeking support for his ideas in the very roots of Western philosophy. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson have noted, these early essays "are very much the product of influences Bakhtin soon outgrew . . . and are in large part the expression of formulations he abandoned" (Creation 7).
Following the Russian Civil War, Bakhtin found himself in Leningrad, where he began work on perhaps the most lucid work of his career, Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Works. During this period, the Stalinist regime began tightening its grip on the Soviet intelligentsia, and in January 1929, Bakhtin was arrested and charged with, among other things, "corrupting the young" (Clark and Holquist 142). The Dostoevsky book was published in May of that year, while Bakhtin was still incarcerated. He was eventually released at the urging of friends in December 1929 and exiled to the eastern province of Kazakhstan (Clark and Holquist 143).
In his work on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin introduces his concept of "polyphony," whereby an author creates characters who are ideologically different from himself. In doing so, he also uses, for the first time, the term "dialogic" to describe his views on philosophy of language. Tolstoy, Bakhtin argues, is the prime example of a monologic author, whose characters, sooner or later, come around to his own views of literature, religion, and philosophy. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was the first author to achieve full creation of characters whose consciousnesses were distinctively different from his own. Bakhtin coined this achievement "polyphony," borrowing the term from a Soviet literary critic who in turn appropriated the phrase from music theory (Problems 20). [1] While Bakhtin did not originate this phrase, he took the basic principle much further in applying it to the whole of Dostoevsky's work.
Though most of this book analyzes particular passages of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin covers a wide range of issues in philosophy of language as well. Among these is the idea that language is indeed ambiguous, but whereas deconstruction would highlight this ambiguity as the inability of words to convey precise meaning, Bakhtin welcomes this vagueness of language as a means by which to create meaning dialogically. Indeed, in describing the nature of the polyphonic novel, Bakhtin sees the entire scope of human life as a dialogic process whereby we find meaning only through our interactions with others:
Dialogic relationships exist among all elements of novelistic structure; that is, they are juxtaposed contrapuntally. And this is so because dialogic relationships are a much broader phenomenon than mere rejoinders in a dialogue, laid out compositionally in the text; they are an almost universal phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life -- in general, everything that has meaning and significance. (40)Bakhtin believed that most of Western philosophy up until this time, especially the rationalist tradition, had viewed language and the perceived world in strictly monologic terms, which he says is "only one of the possible ways" of "perceiving cognition and truth" (81). In this rationalist, monologic tradition, anything that does not fit into a unified consciousness becomes suspect, and he includes here both "European utopianism" and "utopian socialism, with its faith in the omnipotence of the conviction" (82).
Though Bakhtin believed Dostoevsky was the first artist to break free of this monologic tradition, he does find some polyphonic elements in other artists, such as Shakespeare and Balzac (33). Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as primarily an artist of the "idea" in that his characters represented ideological positions that reacted with one another in interdependent relationships that Bakhtin believed were a reflection of all human thought:
The idea lives not in one person's isolated individual consciousness -- if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice- consciousness the idea is born and lives. (88)For Bakhtin, true thought is not to be found in the isolated minds of individuals, but at that point of dialogic contact between people engaged in discourse.
Though Bakhtin mentions Socrates as a primary influence in his thinking, his concept of dialogics as espoused in this and later works also owes some debt to Martin Buber and other thinkers who formulated a dialogical philosophy prior to Bakhtin. [2] We know that Bakhtin was introduced to Buber's early work in his teen years (Clark and Holquist 27), and as some critics have noted, there are striking similarities between Bakhtin's concept of dialogics and Buber's philosophy as outlined in his 1923 book I and Thou. In this work, Buber sought to outline an "ontology of the between" in which individual consciousness can only be understood within the context of our relationships with others, not independent of them (Theunissen 271-272).
While no one has suggested that Bakhtin "copied" his dialogics straight from the pages of Buber's I and Thou, he seems to have been at least influenced by Buber's earlier works and a number of other philosophers who were thinking along the same lines. Nina Perlina reminds us that Bakhtin and Buber "belonged to the same cultural epoch" (26) and probably arrived at their conclusions simultaneously through their common fascination with Cohen's philosophy and their interest in Goethe, Christ, and Socrates (22). And even though he built his concept of dialogics on the shoulders of other philosophers, Bakhtin seems to have been the first thinker to apply this general concept widely to the fields of language and literature.
In latter sections of the Dostoevsky book, Bakhtin introduces another concept known as "metalinguistics," which is one of his few neologisms that he bothers to define concretely, a tendency some critics suggest has led to varying interpretations of his thought. Bakhtin was highly critical of the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as outlined in his Course in General Linguistics . In this set of lecture notes first published in 1915, Saussure introduced a revolutionary dichotomy between the systematic structure of language (langue ) and its everyday use in speech and writing (parole ); each word or sign was seen as a two-sided coin containing both a signifier, such as the marks on a page or an uttered sound, and a signified, or the concept behind the word (Selden 52).
Bakhtin was critical of Saussurean linguistics for its limited analysis of language in action and prescribes instead a metalinguistics that studies "the word not in a system of language...but precisely within the sphere of dialogic interaction itself, that is, in that sphere where discourse lives an authentic life" (202). As the basis for this concept, Bakhtin draws once again on the dialogic nature of the verbal and written word, which is "not a material thing but rather the eternally mobile, eternally fickle medium of dialogic interaction" (202).
For Bakhtin, Saussurean linguistics totally ignores the dialogic nature of language and strips it from its living context. It fails to take into account the various nuances of the "verbal palette" -- the "smallest shift in intonation, the slightest interruption of voices" and all the "verbal sideward glances, reservations, loopholes, hints, [and] thrusts [that] do not slip past our ear, are not foreign to our own lips" (201). In doing so, Saussurean linguistics constructs a systematic framework of language that is insufficient for the study of "prose discourse" and is "even too confining for poetry" (202).
However, it must be noted that Bakhtin based his criticism of Saussure on an early edition of Course in General Linguistics and various Russian interpretations of this particular text, both of which provided an incomplete view of Saussure's overall ideas on linguistics.[3] And while Bakhtin criticizes linguistics as a limited science, he does not really provide an alternative, other than to suggest we somehow study all these nuances of language. Rhetoric addresses some of his concerns, but Bakhtin never specifically mentions rhetoric in this context, and though he clearly defines what he means by metalinguistics, he does not tell us how to create such a field of study until much later in his career.