Existence as Dialogue: Relativity theory and Dialogism
Existence as Dialogue: Relativity theory and Dialogism
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Mikhail Bakhtin made important contributions to several different areas of thought, each with its own history, its own language, and its own shared assumptions. As a result, literary scholars have perceived him as doing one sort of thing, linguists another, and anthropologists yet another.
We lack a comprehensive term that is able to encompass Bakhtin’s activity in all its variety, a shortcoming he himself remarked when as an old man he sought to bring together the various strands of his life’s work.
At that time he wrote: our analysis must be called philosophical mainly because of what it is not: it is not a linguistic, philological, literary or any other particular kind of analysis….
On the other hand, a positive feature of our study is this: [it moves] in spheres that are liminal, i.e.,
on the borders of all the aforementioned disciplines, at their junctures and points of intersection. (Estetika, p. 281)1 But if we accept even so privative a sense of “philosophy” as a way to describe the sort of thing Bakhtin does, the question remains: what kind of philosophy is it?
DIALOGISM AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY Stated at the highest level of (quite hair-raising) abstraction, what can only uneasily be called “Bakhtin’s philosophy” is a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge; more particularly, it is one of several modern epistemologies that seek to grasp human behavior through the use humans make of language.
Bakhtin’s distinctive place among these is specified by the dialogic concept of language he proposes as fundamental.
For this reason, the term used in this book to refer to the interconnected set of concerns that dominate Bakhtin’s thinking is “dialogism,” a term, I hasten to add, never used by Bakhtin himself.
There can be no theoretical excuse for spawning yet another “ism,” but the history of Bakhtin’s reception seems to suggest that if we are to continue to think about his work in a way that is useful, some synthetic means must be found for categorizing the different ways he meditated on dialogue.
That is, some way must be found to conceive his varied activity as a unity, without losing sight of the dynamic heterogeneity of his achievement. Before looking at any of Bakhtin’s particular works, it will be useful to have some sense of the ideas that permeate them all.
This chapter will seek, then, to lay out in a general way some of the ideas considered by Bakhtin at the beginning of his career, and which—
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