Key Takeaways
1. Dialogism: Existence as Co-Being and Relational Consciousness
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.
A liminal philosophy. Dialogism is a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge that operates at the intersections of various disciplines, refusing to be confined to any single one. It is a "meditation on knowledge" that critiques "epistemologism"—the tendency to posit a unitary, unique consciousness that derives all determinateness from itself. Instead, dialogism asserts that the very capacity for consciousness is founded on otherness, making it inherently relational and multi-faceted.
Consciousness as otherness. In dialogism, consciousness is not a singular, isolated entity but a differential relationship between a center (the self) and all that is not that center (the other). This fundamental otherness is not a dialectical alienation destined for unifying identity, but a persistent, irreducible difference. This perspective challenges traditional notions of a self-sufficient subject, emphasizing that the self is always in relation, always dialogic.
Existence as co-being. Bakhtin defines existence as "the unique and unified event of being" (sobytie bytiya), where "sobytie" (event) etymologically implies "co-being" or shared being. This means reality is always experienced from a particular, unique position, yet this uniqueness is shared and interdependent. The world is a "vast congeries of contesting meanings," a heteroglossia where no single term can unify its diversifying energies, making simultaneity and separateness basic conditions of existence.
2. The Self is a Dialogic Relation, Not a Monadic Entity
It cannot be stressed enough that for him “self” is dialogic, a relation.
Self as a relation. For Bakhtin, the self is fundamentally a relation, not a self-sufficient construct, and this relation is one of simultaneity. This concept aligns with Einstein's relativity, where meaning arises from the relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space. Just as motion has meaning only in relation to another body, the self's meaning is derived from its dialogue with the other.
Cognitive time/space. The self and other exist as "relations between two coordinates," each differentiating the other within cognitive time/space.
- Self's perspective: Time is forever open and unfinished; space is always the center of perception, forming a horizon.
- Other's perspective: Time is perceived as closed and finished; space is a neutral environment, a homogenizing context.
This distinction is not a binarism but a necessary multiplicity in human perception, shaped by situation and relation.
Authoring the self. The self, being invisible to itself due to its constant openness, must appropriate the vision of others to perceive itself. "I author myself" by seeing myself as others might see me, using their categories to complete my unfinished self. This act of self-authorship is not free; it is a task (zadanie) using materials (values, narratives) provided by the other, demonstrating that the self is a multiple phenomenon of a center, a not-center, and the dynamic relation between them.
3. Language as the Medium of Social and Individual Meaning
“Language itself reveals the profound difference between these two planes.”
Language as a special dialogue. While dialogic relations manifest at all levels of existence, natural language holds a special place as a powerful means of meaning-making. Bakhtin's philosophy of language emphasizes its syntagmatic features, focusing on the sentence rather than the isolated sign, and highlighting the constant interplay of differences and simultaneities. He critiques Saussure for abandoning the "inner duality" of individual and social factors in language, retreating into the conceptual safety of either/or oppositions.
The social psyche. Bakhtin's "objective psychology" posits that the psyche is a social entity, existing "extraterritorially" within the organism. Experience, even inner experience, exists only in the "material of signs." This means there's no absolute qualitative difference between individual (inner) and social (outer) experience; rather, it's a continuum of intelligibility, where meaning is achieved through sign operations.
- Lowest level: Physiological stimuli (e.g., thirst) operate via signs, but their meaning is confined to the organism.
- Higher levels: Individual body signs gain significance for others through translation into shared sign systems (words).
Inner and outer speech. The relationship between inner and outer speech dramatizes the interconnectedness of individual and society. Pathologies like autism (over-determined inner speech) and totalitarian official discourse (over-investment in outer speech) illustrate the dangers of extreme monologism, where otherness is suppressed. Dialogism, by contrast, is intransigently pluralist, recognizing that the essential clash between ego and ego ideal plays out in the specific conflict between inner and outer speech, making the study of psychology inseparable from the study of language.
4. Utterance and Speech Genres: The Social Fabric of Communication
Any utterance—the finished, written utterance not excepted—makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances.
Utterance as a border phenomenon. The utterance (vyskazyvanie) is the fundamental unit of communication, always an answer to a preceding utterance and conditioned by a potential response from an other. It is a "border phenomenon," taking place between speakers and drenched in social factors, reflecting the "fated in-between-ness" of all communication. This means that the individuality of the speaker is always relative, shaped by collective norms.
Intonation and shared values. Intonation is the immediate interface between the said and the unsaid, stitching the repeatable linguistic elements to the unrepeatable social situation. It registers the other's presence, creating a "portrait in sound" of the addressee.
- Intonation "pumps energy from a life situation into verbal discourse."
- It endows "linguistically stable with living historical momentum and uniqueness."
The commonness of assumed basic value judgments forms the "canvas" upon which intonation embroiders meaning, demonstrating that discourse is not merely reflective but actively constitutive of a situation.
Speech genres as normative forms. Utterances are structured by "speech genres," obligatory forms that govern everyday speech communication. These genres are primary, preceding institutional forms, and they shape how we construct and interpret speech.
- Semantic exhaustiveness: How much elaboration is appropriate for a theme.
- Speech plan: What the speaker intends to accomplish.
- Typical generic forms of finalization: Habitual expressions available for a situation.
Learning to speak means learning to cast speech in these generic forms, anticipating volume and compositional structure, and foreseeing the end. This generic control, though varying in obviousness, is always present, demonstrating that communication is deeply embedded in social and cultural norms.
5. Novelness: A Revolution in Perceiving Otherness and Cultural History
The utter inadequacy of literary theory is exposed when it is forced to deal with the novel.
Literature as dialogic knowledge. For Bakhtin, literature is not merely a self-contained linguistic system but another form of communication and knowledge, deeply intertwined with dialogue. He argues that "literariness" or "novelness" is the study of any cultural activity that treats language as dialogic, challenging narrow literary historical approaches. The novel, in particular, is a marker for a revolution in human perception, capable of displaying the extraordinary variety of social languages.
Novelness vs. the novel. Bakhtin distinguishes between actual "novels" as a literary genre and "novelness" (romannost'), a characteristic feature not confined to novels but manifested by them in the highest degree. Rabelais and Dostoevsky are significant not just as novelists, but because they advance the work of novelness, which serves as an index of increasing awareness of otherness in human consciousness.
History as discovery of the other. Unlike Hegelian/Lukácsian views of history as the self's discovery of itself, Bakhtin's history of consciousness, as reflected in novelness, is the self's discovery of the other. It's a constant struggle between monologue and dialogue, not a unitary, upward progression.
- Epic consciousness: Characterized by myths of unity, where diversity is unrecognized or suppressed.
- Novelness: Breaks down myths of a single, unified language, revealing a world of ever-increasing difference.
This open-ended, non-teleological view of history, akin to Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development," positions literature as a "prosthesis of the mind," actively shaping cultural evolution by exploring and teaching the possibilities of authorship and otherness.
6. The Chronotope: Inseparable Time-Space-Value in Narrative
The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied.
Time-space-value nexus. The chronotope, a term borrowed from Einstein's theory of relativity, signifies the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature." It is not merely a narrative device but a fundamental category that combines time, space, and their inherent value judgments. This concept highlights that perception is never pure; it is always an evaluation of what is perceived, making time and space axiological.
Chronotopes in narrative. At a basic level, a chronotope defines the total matrix of a narrative's story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet). It reveals how the sequentiality of events is "deformed" or ordered in a mediated telling.
- Adventure chronotope: Characterized by "empty time" and "abstract space," where events lack causal connection and characters do not age or develop (e.g., Greek romances, formula fiction).
- Adventure novel of everyday life: Explores more "realistic" spaces and shows character development through a sequence of guilt, punishment, and redemption.
These examples demonstrate how chronotopes, while appearing as recurring formal features, are deeply intertwined with cultural and historical contexts.
Historical poetics and relativity. Bakhtin's "historical poetics" uses the chronotope to bridge the apparent contradiction between history (change, uniqueness) and poetics (stasis, recurrence). Just as Einstein repudiated absolute time and space, dialogism rejects a purely chronological sequence independent of interpretation. The chronotope insists that time and space are not transcendental but "forms of the most immediate reality," always situated and imbued with value, making them relative to the observer's specific cultural and historical context.
7. Authoring as Answerability: The Architectonics of Situated Judgment
Mathematical time and space guarantee a possible intellectual unity of possible judgments…but my actual involvement with them from my unique place gives flesh and blood, as it were, to their inescapably-necessary reality and the uniqueness of the value assigned to them.
Architectonics of relations. Architectonics, for Bakhtin, is the general study of how entities are put together and relate to each other, with aesthetics as a subset focused on "consummation" or shaping parts into relative wholes. It provides the conceptual framework for understanding relations between living subjects ("I" and "another") and how authors construct texts from their relation to heroes. The chronotope is central to this, as it combines time, space, and value, emphasizing their simultaneity and inseparability.
Human being as a deed. To be human is to be in a "situation," a unique place in the ongoing event of existence, compelling constant choices and judgments. This "non-alibi in existence" means every individual is intensely participatory and responsible for their responses.
- Ukhtomsky's "dominant": The physiological mechanism that selects the most responsible response from many possibilities.
- Consciousness: Experienced as infinite from within, but objectively finite (born, dies) from an external perspective.
This dual perception of self (open, unfinished) and other (consummated, completed) is a core aspect of the architectonics of responsibility.
Language and responsibility. Language is the medium through which the body becomes consciousness, enriching aboriginal signals with signs. Our entry into language is an entrance into a "heteroglot conglomerate" of economic, political, and historical forces, each speaking its own language. This unique "address" in existence requires us to be "answerable" for that site, making our use of language a form of "signing our name." The linguistic sign itself, with its simultaneous static (formal) and dynamic (semantic) aspects, mirrors the self's division between abstract, normative categories (the other) and specific, open categories (the self), structuring our responses from the site where subjectivity is addressed.
8. The Grotesque Body and Intertextuality: Challenging Monologic Wholeness
The body is, if you will, intercorporeal in much the same way as the novel is intertextual.
Carnival and otherness. Carnival, like the novel, is a key obsession for Bakhtin because it displays otherness, making familiar relations strange and highlighting the constructed nature of social roles. It is both a specific historical institution (Mardi Gras) and an immaterial force embodying relations. This concept is deeply linked to the "grotesque body," which is "never finished, never completed," constantly becoming and interacting with the world through acts like eating, drinking, and copulation.
Novel as intertextual body. The novel is the "great book of life" because it celebrates the grotesque body of the world, militating against monadism—the illusion of closed-off bodies or isolated psyches. It is overwhelmingly intertextual, constantly referring to other works and displaying a vast variety of discourses.
- Internal intertextuality: References to other texts within a specific individual text.
- External intertextuality: The social organization of relations between texts within specific reading conditions.
This manifold dependence on intertextuality for its very existence is the novel's essence, making it a plurality of relations rather than a cacophony of voices.
Frankenstein: A parable of intertextuality. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein serves as a powerful example of novelness, dramatizing the paradox of originality and the inevitability of otherness.
- Dual title: "Frankenstein" (unique proper name) vs. "The Modern Prometheus" (indebted to another text).
- Creator/creature complicity: Both claim unexampled aloneness, yet are intimately connected and made of "other books" (Volney, Milton, Plutarch, Goethe).
- Monster's Bildung: His quest to "become linked to the chain of existence and events" is a narrative problem, a search for a pre-existing story to define himself.
The novel's layered narrative (Walton's letters, Frankenstein's tale, monster's tale) and mix of genres (letters, diaries, oral tales) embody the "monstrosity of novelness itself," where identity is always incomplete and ineluctably other.
9. Stereotypes and the Politics of Perception: The Inevitability of Otherness
The strength and at the same time the limitations of such basic [categories as we have discussed above] become apparent when [they are seen] as conditioned by specific historical destinies…. These categories arose from and were shaped by the historically aktuell forces at work in the verbal-ideological evolution of specific social groups…. These forces are the forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world.
Stereotypes as linguistic necessity. Stereotypes are not merely social prejudices but a fundamental function of the linguistic sign itself, preceding any particular subject or experience. The sign's synergistic nature—a constant struggle between static, repeatable forms and dynamic, open semantics—requires categories that can fix meaning. Stereotypes provide these fixed, generalized categories, allowing subjects to process experience through the "closed" category of the other.
Historical specificity of stereotypes. While the universality of stereotypes is imposed by language, their specific content derives from history. Different times and places particularize these general conditions into distinct stereotypes. A historical poetics, therefore, examines how these universal linguistic necessities manifest in specific cultural and historical contexts, shaping both literature and perception.
The Great Gatsby: A study in stereotyping. Fitzgerald's novel exemplifies how stereotypes operate at both individual and social levels.
- Oxymoronic narrative: The text is governed by incongruity, from Nick's epigrams to the title itself ("The Great Gatsby").
- Gatsby's self-stereotyping: His transformation from James Gatz to "Jay Gatsby" (often in quotation marks) is an attempt to fix his identity within a stereotype—the self-made man, the quest romance hero.
- American Neoplatonism: Gatsby's belief that "you cannot repeat the past" is an American variant of denying time and seeking an absolute, unchanging identity, a "biography that will be free of changes."
This linguistic double bind—the simultaneous need for stasis (shared structure) and change (unique meanings)—is figured in the novel's temporal dimension, where history is stereotyped into localized versions of the American dream, constantly confronting the otherness of a generalized past.
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