Re: Bakhtin, answerability, and bodily speech

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 16 2001 - 19:37:32 PST


Ana raises some profound questions regarding how we are to insert a renewed
emphasis on moral answerability into our own theoretical discourses and
still avoid the worst (im-) moral excesss of hyper-individualism and
hyper-collectivism.

I personally do not interpret Bakhtinian 'moral answerability' in a purely
individualistic sense, though Bakhtin may well have had a somewhat more
individualistic perspective generally than I myself do. There is a ground
of moral answerability in our dialogic exchanges with a specific individual
or addressee insofar as we hold ourselves responsible for the pain we may
cause another by what we say, and accountable in some sense as well for the
comfort we may give another. This is a ground that does respect the
individual. But it need not also _privilege_ the individual as a moral unit
to the exclusion of all other. Even in two-person dialogue, what we are
answerable for is not just the effect on another, and the effect on
ourselves, but the effect on the _relationship_. This ground implies moral
considerability for an emergent unit that is not one human individual.
Moreover, insofar as (ontological-axiological) relationalism implies that
who and what we are is a function, in part, of the character and quality of
the human relationships in which we participate, human relationships are at
least equal in moral considerability to the individual humans who
constitute them/ are constituted by them.

If we take further steps of this kind, as Bakhtin is famous for having done
in his later work, and consider that there is an implicit and indirect
'dialogicality' in all discourse, then utterances (and writings) are in
this wider sense situated in the moral universe of a community, just as the
ideational meaning of utterances is situated semantically in the
intertextual universe of a community. You cannot utter a word that is ONLY
your own; it is always also a word of your community, entangled with the
discourses of that community (this much is pure Bakhtin). Axiologically,
extending, as Hicks proposes, the earlier Bakhtin's notions of the moral
consequentiality and answerability of utterances to the later Baktin's more
sociological view of discourse, I would conclude that the moral
answerability of our discourses is not just defined in relation to specific
individual interlocutors, but also to the ways in which they ventriloquate
and inflect prevailing moral values and morally signifying discourses in a
community, and the ways in which we morally co-constitute our community by
how we speak and what we say. I think it makes a great deal of sense to
have a notion of the moral tenor of the discourse of a community,
particularly of the public and 'official' discourse of a community: what it
is and is not acceptable to say in the mass media, in official discourse,
and in our private echoes of these discourses, about, for example, race,
sexual orientation, social justice, and so on. There are certainly very
important differences between the moral tenor of public/official discourse
and its norms in Nazi Germany and in Germany today, or on a lesser scale,
between the Austria of the 1970s and the Austria of today. Or of what was
sayable about race before 1950 and after 1970 in the USA (and elsewhere),
or about gay people before the AIDS crisis and after in many places. There
is perhaps even a broader characterization, something akin to a Zeitgeist,
about the general moral tenor of social discourse in different times and
places: those where casual cruelty or aggressively adversarial rhetoric is
almost unnoticed (except by its victims) because it is so naturalized, vs.
those where kindness and comfort and supportiveness are valued and not set
in artificial opposition to honesty or candor or truth-seeking.

Moral answerability always has a dual 'inflection': that utterances by
their moral character and their implications for a relationship or
community invite an answer 'in kind' or in complement or in some way that
specifically addresses their moral quality and effects, and that that we as
speakers are morally answerable for the effects on individuals,
relationships, and the community of what we say/write. In this second
sense, too, however, we can extend the notion to also include relationships
and communities as the 'authors' of what we say, just in the sense of the
later Bakhtin, that our speech is always to some degree an appropriation of
the discourses of our community; even our intimate speech is always partly
the product of the relationship we have to another, and we are never the
sole authors of even 'our own' utterances.

I believe that some such approach offers the possibility of a balanced
moral considerability that gives us our due as individuals and also gives
due moral standing to human relationships (I dislike the term 'dyads' in
this context), groups, families, clans, villages, communities on all
scales. As many of you know, I am 'green' enough as a Latourian, to include
nonhumans in the larger eco-social networks that constitute us as human in
a relational view of being. (Latour in fact has been writing recently about
just such issues: how to renew the moral considerability of our
participation in ecological systems in a different way than those which
depend on the modernist separation of the human-social from the
nonhuman-natural.)

By the time you all manage to slog your way through a message this long, I
hope that those who are trying to join us online for this discussion will
have succeeded in doing so!

JAY.

At 12:51 PM 2/16/2001 +0000, you wrote:
>Jay
>
>You conclude with:
> >It is certainly time to re-address issues of >moral answerability in
> our own
> discourse.
>
>I couldn't agree more.
>
>However, there seems to be a contradiction somewhere there. I see it as a
> problem of
>reconciling my understanding of "moral answerability" as a very
>"individualist"
> concept,
>and the current post-modern attempt to take agency out of an "individual" and
> ascribe it
>to systemic processes within much larger and much more complex units like:
> activity
>systems, societies, cultures...
>
>One of the most horrible effects of the 'anti-individualism' were gulags,
>racial
>persecuation, genocide, summary punishment itd. One can argue that these were
> effects of a
>very vulgarized version of Marxism. Nevertheless, these were the the
> consequences. If one
>cannot situate agency in an INDIVIDUAL, if one does not VALUE an individual,
> then on one
>hand one cannot talk about individual moral answerability, and on the other,
> destruction
>of individuals cannot be construed as a crime.
>
>Ana
>
>
>
>---------------------------------------------
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---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------



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