Re: Bakhtin, answerability, and bodily speech

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 15 2001 - 20:13:16 PST


I also wanted to respond briefly to Michael's note on the dangers of the
Sender-Signal-Recipient metaphors for communication. I think most of us
would agree.

But I interpret Ana's gloss on Bakhtin more in the framework of a Peircean
triad than a transmissionary model. "The three-way relationship" is a
notion that requires some unpacking ... it does not mean, certainly in
Peircean semiotics, and I think also in Bakhtin, a reducible relationship,
a set of two-way relationships .... nor does it mean that the 'arguments'
of these relationships (the terms or nodes 'between which' our language
makes us say, there is a relationship) are autonomous, self-standing,
realia with inherent properties. A 'three-way relationship" can and here
does, I think, mean an irreducible relational way of imagining
communcation, in which no element has meaning outside of its relations --
and here actually its material interactions, the ways it comes to be
transformed into the others -- with the others.

As a very subtle literary critic ... a very good reader ..... Bakhtin in so
many places writes how the same sign comes to have different meanings
depending on how it is addressed by a speaker/writer who anticipates how it
will be re-accentuated by a reader/hearer, and how different are the
meanings for readers of the same word heard as voiced by different
imaginary/real speakers. Indeed he famously goes one further and considers
the complex possibilities when as authors we put words into the mouths of
our characters, addressed by the characters to other characters, but by us
as authors ventriloquating our characters to address readers. Readers who
are in the process while reading of becoming readers-who-have-read-this and
so not the same readers who had not read it (i.e. the "reader" is a
complex construction within the net of "author" and "text", each of which
is also a complex construction .... limitlessly). Literary analysis never
had any trouble with this relational-realism WITHIN the text (i.e. the
fictional characters and scenes); Bakhtin pulls it out into the speech
situation and then to the notion of authors and readers .... or at least we
read him today as suggesting this, maybe it is only his later readers like
Kristeva who really took the full step. Once one has gone that far it is
not so much further to the actant-network epistemology of Latour, or the
relational-realism of Bohr. (And don't doubt that scientific shifts toward
relationalism and literary-socialscientific ones were feeding off each
other throughout the 20th century!)

But what, to return to the main theme, are the MORAL and BODILY dimensions
of this triadic relationalism? Moral answerability has weight precisely to
the extent that other people are constituted in part by the words we
address to them, that their very Being and humanity is in part constructed
by the dialogues in which we engage them. (Who doubts this in the case of
infants and very young children? but some of us are less willing to admit
that this 'vulnerability' never ends, that our identities and humanity is
as much made all our lives by others as by ourselves .... it runs
especially counter to cultural norms of masculine autonomy.) And this is
not true just in some metaphorical and abstract sense ... it is also true
bodily .... because what is constructed in dialogue is not just meaning,
but feeling, and feeling is (meaning, too, but that's another matter) a
bodily process, a part of our physiological development. The un-loved, the
un-regarded come to be biologically different organisms. The screamed-at,
the coo-ed to are changed physiologically by their participation in the
dialogue in which we speak. The further step is to include in this view ALL
speech, all communication, even that which late modernist ideology idolizes
as dispassionate and purely rational-logical-propositional. There is no
communication that leaves our souls and bodies untouched. Dispassionateness
is itself a specific affective state, not the (impossible) absence of
affect. The dispassionately addressed are also affected by our speech. We
are also morally answerable for our dispassionateness, not excused from
answerability by it.

Deborah Hicks is about to publish an entire book on this intellectual
project. JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:14 PST