Since the discussion of Hicks' article depends a fair bit on having some
sense of Bakhtin's argument in _K filosofia postupka_, translated in
English as 'Towards a philosophy of the act', I thought that for those who
will read Hicks but not Bakhtin, I'd give a sort of overview of my own
reading of Philosophy of the Act (PA).
First, it's short, a bare 75 printed pages. It's also from a manuscript
that was in partly illegible shape. It has a companion piece from the same
period of B's work, translated as Art and Answerability (much longer, more
literary and less philosophical). PA is also incomplete; it consists of a
long philosophical introduction and part 1 of 4 projected parts that
develop the philosophical themes with literary examples.
The first three-fourths is mainly philosophical, and this discourse is very
much in the register of high German metaphysics of the late 19th and early
20th c. (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger ....). B does go back as far as Kant.
There is a lot of stuff about Being. This is the tradition that Anglo-Saxon
philosophy rebelled against, esp. in the early 20th century, dropping
metaphysics (Being, the nature of reality) for epistemology (how we can
know reality). I imagine a lot of people on this list would find much of it
tedious and pointless, but that is mostly a matter of the style. One has to
sift for the nuggets. B was writing for people who were used to those forms
of discourse, respected and admired them; we late moderns are pressed for
time, we want the gist. So here it is, at least as I see it, in relation to
more contemporary concerns. B was writing this manuscript in the early
1920s; his classic work is about a dozen years later. He learned a lot in
between. He is much better as a literary theorist than as a philosopher,
but it really seems that most of his philosophical and what we would today
call theoretical ideas came from literary insights.
Here is the basic philosophical problem to which moral answerability is the
key, for B, to the solution. He is impressed by Husserlian phenomenology:
there is a uniqueness and particularity, a historical-materiality, an
embodiedness and situatedness about each act in our lives, each
event-moment, the ongoing conscious process of activity-as-we're-doing it
and experiencing doing it ... which cannot be logically linked to
theoretical conceptual models and explanations about the world or human
life. There is a necessary disconnect between the world of doing/Being and
the world of cultural-theoretical conceptions about doing/Being. We always
wind up using the latter to make sense of the former, but the reality of
the phenomenological Act overflows and cannot be comprehended within
discourse, logic, rationality, theory, or any set of propositions about
content-truth. (I agree; I think of this as the dialectic of semiotic and
phenomenological approaches, each being the antidote to the excesses of the
other. The phenomenological root here allows Hicks to make the connections
to feminist and other postmodern discourses.) Most of the philosophical
tradition that B critiques in the essay has tried, unsuccessfully in his
view, to find a bridge between unique lived experience/action and
conceptual-theoretical-propositional discourse. B. goes through and notes
the flaws in all the attempts.
So what _does_ connect the act to discursive philosophy or science or art?
lived experience to culture? The first clue comes when he analyzes
aesthetic seeing or experiencing as moments of empathizing -- losing
oneself in the work or the other -- in dialectical dynamism (my terms, not
his) with moments of objectification -- stepping back and conceptualizing
one's own experiencing. This comes while he is deconstructing efforts at
aesthetic theories of the link between experience and culture. He also goes
after ethical theories, showing that their penchant for universalizing
principles, whether of moral content or purely formal dicta (like Kant's
categorical imperative), leads them back into the same trap: they
theoreticize and abstract away from the phenomenological, unique lived
moment so much that they can't get back again.
The direction of his solution comes first from the ethical analysis. Moral
answerability is not a matter of acts being right or wrong according to
some abstract principle, but arises in their unique situatedness as part of
how we feel about what we are doing as we do it. A sort of "situation
ethics" from a phenomenological stance. There is an "emotional-volitional
moment", which is one aspect of every actual act. The three aspects of the
answerability of every act are: its theoretical validity, its historical
factuality, and its emotional-volitional tone. One might call this B's
generalization of the notion of 'truth'; we are answerable for our actions
in terms of whether they make sense discursively (are culturally
meaningful), are materially efficient (can happen factually), and in terms
of the values and desires that we feel in performing them. It is this last
element that is radically new in a philosophy of action, especially when
you realize that he is not talking about whether an act is right or wrong,
but whether we feel right or wrong in doing it.
There is no doubt that at this early stage of his work, B is still taking a
very classically modernist-individualist view of the act and the agent.
There are only a few places where you can begin to see him evolving toward
notions of dialogism and reciprocity, toward his later notion that we are
made as agents in larger networks of sociality, and that our meanings and
acts and their moral value emerge from these larger webs as much as from us
as individuals. Cross-reading the earlier and the later B. with just this
in mind is the great idea at the heart of Deborah Hicks' essay.
B. interprets his triad for language (for which he typically uses a term
translated as 'the word', but meaning something more like
language/utterance, but without the limiting connotation of only spoken
language that the latter has in English). He says that the 'entire fullness
... of the living word ...' consists in three 'aspects ... the
sense/content [ideational meaning], the palpable-expressive [materiality of
language], and the emotional-volitional intonation [feeling/values-moral
answerability in tone or inflection of how we say something, but he means
much more than 'intonation' in the narrow linguistic sense, more
metaphorical here]'. And now he's got a bridge or connection: both the
discursive and the actional share this emotional-volitional aspect or 'moment'.
He elaborates that for language, when we speak, we always take an
'interested-effective attitude', i.e. by the mere fact of talking about
something we have shown an interest in it, and we can't speak without being
somehow involved with what we are talking about. (This is very close in
fact to my own semiotic generalization, based on Halliday, that there is
always an evaluative orientation to every meaningful act, including every
discursive form or utterance. I am often amazed at how B anticipated rather
leading edge ideas inherent in our current thinking; no wonder he is so
popular now! My version has a Presentational (sense), an Orientational
(value) and an Organizational (structure) aspect. Of course I cheerfully
admit that my own emphasis on the Orientational was influenced as much by
B's own later view of ideational-axiological meaning in heteroglossia as by
Halliday's interpersonal-attitudinal aspect of meaning. But the later work
did not make the phenomenological connection, as the early B does here.)
B then makes clear that so far as either the act or the utterance/discourse
goes, the emotional-volitional tone applies to the whole thing as it
happens, not to any part of it, and not to its own discursive
(meta-discursive) representations. This keeps the phenomenological
connection and avoids the pitfalls of other more abstract approaches.
There is then another long section of philsophical argumentation, which
culminates (for me) in two wonderful insights. One of these (p.54) is the
one that pre-figures dialogism and relationalism for human identity: that
in actions toward others, including speech to others, there are the
intertwined moments of 'I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and
I-for-the-other'. The second is his analysis of how modernist philosophy
and culture has too radically separated the objective world of science from
the subjective world of experience. What he particularly points to is that
the modernist notion of 'brute experience' has been stripped of all
'ideality', i.e. of all its mindfulness or meaning-making-ness, its
cultural-discursive elements, particularly of its emotional-volitional
tone. We have forgotten that raw experience is not empty of meaningfulness
and feeling. Indeed there is no 'raw' or 'brute' experience. We come here
of course to a major postmodern debate: how separable are experiencing and
semiotic meaning-making. B does not really address this, but rather the new
point he is making: the emotional-volitional tone is NOT separable.
He then begins part 1 of his further project: to develop a philosophy in
which we can articulate the fusion of the lived act and cultural discourses
about life at the point of their closest and most intimate connection or
identity, the emotional-volitional tone.
He takes as his first jumping off point 'the world of art' , by which,
despite his preference for metaphors of vision, he mostly means literary
art. This is where he thinks the connection he has identified betweent the
two worlds (lived and cultural) is tightest. We then get two articulations
of his basic point. The first basically says that to understand something
well enough to present it in art, you have to be really in love with it.
You have to be so engaged with it in terms of the emotional-volitional
dimensions of your experiencing it, that this carries over seamlessly into
the emotional-volitional tone of your writing about it. I am try to
over-articulate his argument here, it's really a lot smoother than it
seems, though perhaps also takes a lot for granted. After all he was
planning three more sections to spell all this out, that we don't have. He
also, as Hicks emphasizes, brings back the notion, partly as metaphor,
partly with literal intent, that moral answerability in discourse must also
be grounded in this 'intense as a lover' engagement with the Other. I don't
think he meant that one had to model engagement on romantic love; he meant
that one has to have that degree of 'attentiveness' to the responses of the
other, and also that degree of unselfishness in the engagement. And there
are clearly some Christian moments in B's discourse on this as well.
What I find particularly interesting, and which supports some of my own
ruminations on moral vs. sociopathic discourse here, is his complementary
comments at this point on hostile discourse:
" ... a hostile reaction is always one that impoverishes and decomposes its
object ... it seeks to pass over the object in all its manifoldness, to
ignore it or to overcome it. "
The second and final articulation comes through an analysis of a short poem
by Pushkin. This is also the next place where we get a scent of things to
come as B. analyzes the value orientations of the text as they integrate
those of the two protagonists in the poem, each one becoming ensnared in
the other, being enhanced and multiplied by the other.
Bakhtin may have wanted to write a lot more. But I don't. 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>
---------------------------
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