That language is an open, socially acquired system is what gives particular credence to Bakhtin's concept of the "superaddressee," which appears to be nothing but a human exaggeration of the limitless "dialogic context...[that] extends into the boundless past and the boundless future..." (Speech Genres 170). We learn our words from others, and we produce them back to others, and though the precise meaning of words may change due to our individual experiences along the way, we can never divorce our words from the dialogic context from which they came. As Bakhtin states in "Discourse in the Novel,"
Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined. (Dialogic Imagination 292)Derrida, for all his claims that he opposes rationalist, Cartesian views of language, appears to be operating under the belief that language is indeed a closed system from which we cannot escape, an idea vehemently contradicted by Bakhtin's dialogics.
During the past decade, deconstruction as an influential critical fad appears to have waned somewhat, though it can by no means be considered dead as a critical tool. Many of Derrida's ideas have been instrumental in helping us move beyond earlier rationalist ideas regarding language as a precise medium of communication, and as a result, deconstruction has had a tremendous impact, for better or worse, on all ensuing theoretical debates. As Stanley Fish recently noted, "Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead. It is everywhere" (Stephens 24). But if deconstruction is not dead, it does appear to have at least deconstructed, with its ideas being assimilated into other theoretical schools, at least as a point of reference.
A quick scan of most critical journals today will show that Bakhtin is slowly but steadily surpassing Derrida in terms of critical influence. Bakhtin's impact is also evident in the number of doctoral dissertations citing his works. A recent electronic search of the Dissertation Abstracts Online database shows a total of 461 entries matching the keyword "Bakhtin," compared to 341 such matches for "deconstruction" and 381 for "Derrida." It must be noted that not all of the dissertations deal exclusively with these subjects, but merely mention them in their abstracts. While this electronic search is not a firm indicator showing that Bakhtin has eclipsed deconstruction and Derrida as a point of reference in doctoral dissertations, it does suggest that Bakhtin's status as an often-cited critical theorist is rising in graduate schools across the country.
But there are inherent dangers in Bakhtin's increasing popularity. What are we in English studies to gain if the cult of Derrida is simply replaced by a cult of Bakhtin, free of any critical examination of his ideas? Recent interest in Bakhtin's works is similar to the adoring attitude taken by one of the Moscow graduate students instrumental in rescuing Bakhtin and his works from obscurity in the early 1960s. Vadim Kozhinov, in a memoir written 25 years later, recalls that during a pilgrimage to see the exiled Bakhtin in Saransk, one of his fellow graduate students dropped to his knees in front of Bakhtin and implored: "Mikhail Mikhailovich, tell us how to live so that we can become like you!" (qtd. in Emerson, "The Russians": 423).
Such adoration, then and now, promises to dilute the importance of Bakhtin's ideas in favor of a cult of personality. Bernard Bergonzi, while seeing promise in his theories, encourages tempered enthusiasm about Bakhtin, especially since most of his works have only recently been translated into English:
One must resist seeing Bakhtin as the US Cavalry, riding in to rescue a threatened humanism from howling poststructuralists.... It will take time for the implications of his work to be properly assimilated and understood; the process involves transposition from a cultural context that is more remote than the French. But the growing interest in it suggests that it offers both a possible way out of present impasses and a way forward. (128)More importantly, far too much emphasis has been placed on the biography of Bakhtin, who led a colorful, yet ascetic lifestyle, and on simple explication of his theories, while scant attention has been paid to what impact his thought might have on our own critical practices.
This is a growing trend that William Cain has observed in The Crisis in Criticism; Cain argues that instead of concentrating our critical debates on the theorists themselves, we should analyze how their theories can lead to a greater sense of reflective practice:
A major task for theory at the present time is to initiate and encourage the re-examination of English studies. We need to use and draw upon theory to specify the aims of work in English, the purposes of teaching the skills and values that we seek to transmit in pedagogy and research.... Theory should force us to undertake acts of self-scrutiny and justification and should enable us to say precisely what we do, why it is important, and what makes it cohere. (xiii)One such re-examination of English studies has been to question the position that literary criticism should play in counterpart to its emerging step-sister of rhetoric and composition studies. As Patricia Bizzell has noted, such divergent literary critics as Wayne Booth, E.D. Hirsch, Jonathan Culler, and Terry Eagleton have sought in rhetorical theory answers to many of the questions that have been the center of critical debates during the past three decades ("On the Possibility" 175-178).
In Literary Theory, for example, Eagleton calls rhetoric "probably the oldest form of `literary criticism' in the world" (205) and states that we should "recall literary criticism from certain fashionable, new-fangled ways of thinking it has been seduced by...and return it to the ancient paths which it has abandoned" (206). In a similar vein, Richard Lanham, a literary critic turned composition theorist, also sees a number of similarities between the two fields and believes "composition practice can redeem and enrich literary theory" (Literacy 121) and help return "literary studies...[to] the center of a humanist curriculum" (Literacy 114). Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes have also questioned the present division in English departments and see it as originating in our society's privileging of "consumption over production" (97). To bridge this gap, they prescribe new perceptions of both reading and writing:
The way out of our dilemma here is, first, to perceive reading not simply as consumption but as a productive activity, the making of meaning, in which one is guided by the text one reads, of course, but not simply manipulated by it; and, second, to perceive writing as an activity that is also guided and sustained by prior texts. The writer is always reading and the reader is always writing. (99)Such new perceptions of reading and writing sound very similar to Bakhtin's insistence on the dialogic nature of language, and how no utterance or text can be divorced from both past and future voices or texts.
For those schooled in the rhetorical tradition, the critical debates of the past three decades have come as no surprise, since they reflect similar disputes that arose during that period of history when orality and literacy first clashed in ancient Greece. During this period, polar opposition existed between the ideas of the Sophist rhetoricians prior to Socrates and the emerging system of thought set forth by Plato. But standing firmly as a bridge between these two opposing camps was the figure of Socrates, whom Bakhtin has hailed as the supreme model of a dialogic rhetorician. Just as Socrates served as a point of dialogue between the Sophists and Plato, so too does Bakhtin seem a transformative figure who helps point the way toward a unified theory of composition and literature in the present age.