Kathryn was having some difficulty with the web version. The "phocopying"
softwear when converting to html used Micro#$#$#$ active x technology which
may make it funky for some. I am including the text in this email as well
as an attachment if it gets snipped, but it should not be a problem for
most.
Nate
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MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 7(3), 227-242 Copyright ~ 2000
Self and Other in Bakhtin's Early Philosophical Essays: Prelude to a Theory
of Prose Consciousness
Deborah Hicks College of Education University of Cincinnati
The self is not a thing, a substrate, but the protagonist of a life's tale.
The conception of selves who can be individuated prior to their moral ends
is incoherent. We could not know if such a being was a human self, an angel,
or the Holy Spirit. (Benhabib, 1992, p. 162)
"We think we are tracing the nature of the thing, but we are only tracing
the frame throughwhich we view it." So writes Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) in
Philosophical Investigations about processes of social scientific inquiry.
We interpretively read social events through vari- oUS disciplinary lenses~
this is no less true of our readings of theorists. My purpose in this re-
flective essay is to read the work of Mikhail Bakhtin through an
interpretive lens that differssomewhat from the norm within contemporary
sociocultural and historical theories of psy- chology and education. My
essay hinges on the argument that, among sociocultural theorists. I-3akhtin'
s work has tended to be aligned with frameworks that focus more on social
systems of activity and discourse. Although Bakhtin's writings do address
shared genres of discourse andsocial action, his work also addresses another
aspect of living and learning. As they draw onmediated systems of social
action and discourse, individuals construct histories that are ethi-cally
particular and attuned to moral ends. Dialogue, as depicted by Bakhtin,
entails a form ofanswerability that is morally responsive to unique others
and particular relationships. Con-sidered outside of such moral ends, social
actions and discourses lose a crucial part of theirconcreteness-their
embeddedness in relationships constituted by thoughts, feelings, and
his-tories between unique individuals. l'he complex particulars of morally
imbued relationshipshave been oddly missing from theoretical discourses
about learning in social context. Con-sidered in their breadth. Balthtin's
writings offer a critical alternative: a theory of discourse.selthood, and
social action that draws heavily from moral philosophy and literature and
thatplaces high value on ethical particularity. His early philosophical
essays argue that discourseand action outside of morally imbued
relationships might be true of angels and spirits, but notof subjects
engaged in historical moments of living.In contrast, contemporary
sociocultural theorists in the fields of education and psychologyhave tended
to align Bakhtin's writings with an effort to argue for semiotic mediation
as a tool formeaningfi.il social action. Because Bakhtin's writings are so
explicit about topics like discourses, utterances, and dialogicity, they
provide a useful means of articulating how social practices aremediated by
discourse. Scholars like Jay Lemke (1995) argued that Bakhtin's theories,
like those of others who focus on discourse (e.g., Michel Foucault, Michael
Halliday), articulate an interme-diate level of connection between
face-to-face dialogue among speakers and wider social and his-torical
systems that create the possibilities for dialogue. Individualism within
sociocultural andactivity theory frameworks tends to be depicted in terms of
systems of action and discourse. Forinstance, as Lemke (1995) wrote:
"[Michael] Halliday's social theory of discourse suggests that our uses of
language are inseparable from the social functions, the social contexts of
actions and relationships in which language plays its part.Halliday suggests
that language be viewed as a social system of resources, a set of possible
kinds ofmeanings that can be made, and that we then examine which kinds of
meanings actually get made in the course of which human activities, by which
social participants. This is what is meant by seeing lan- guage as a social
semiotic, a resource to be deployed for social purposes. This view is
consistent with the key principles we have identified from Bakhtin. It makes
it possibleto identifr a number of the grounds on which a community may find
one utterance or text relevant for the meaning of another (that it is of the
same register, or the same genre; that it was constructed in the course of
the same kind of activity, etc.; cf. Lemkc, 1995). It also introduces an
intermediate notion be- tween the text or utterance and the social system:
The system of registers and genres in a community.Implicitly it shifts the
emphasis toward seeing the fundamental elements that define the community as
its system of activities or social practices, rather than viewing it
directly as a system of different types of individuals. (p. 27) "
Along similar lines, James Wertsch (1991) articulated different analytical
levels around whichBakhtin construed his theories of discourse: utterances,
voices, genres, social languages. At thecenter of such analytical constructs
is, Wertsch argued, dialogue. In the moment-to-moment con- struction of
meaningful action, participants draw on social languages and speech genres
to con-strue "common knowledge" (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). Speakers'
utterances are always dialogicin the sense that they are answerable to
others' words. Immediate, face-to-face dialogue is onlyone instantiation of
a larger truth, namely, that all discourses are responsive to social
contexts andthe textual systems that constitute them. Even an "individual"
utterance is multivoiced, because itdraws on existing genres of speech and
action and also responds to a social context that may in- clude concrete
others. Wertsch frequently drew on the work of Voloshinov (1973) and the
laterperiod writings of Bakhtin (e.g., 1981, 1986) as he described mediated
action in terms of voices inhistoricized, socially situated contact. After
analyzing a presidential campaign speech by GeorgeBush in terms of its
"ventriloquations" of social languages and genres (e.g., "Take a Message
toMichael ..."), Wertsch summarized his interpretive readings of Bakhtin:
"My purpose is not to provide a full interpretation of [George] Bush's
speech; rather it isto illustrate the kinds of issues illuminated by this
perspective. They are issues that have a great deal to say about the nature
of semiotic mediation. The major point I want to make is that Bakhtin's
approach to semiotic phenomena continually emphasizes the notion that
utterances and utterance meaning are inherently sit-uated in sociocultural
context. Because the production of any utterance involves the appropriation
of at least one social language and speech genre, and because these social
speech types are socioculturallysituated, the ensuing account assumes that
meaning is inextricably linked with historical, cultural, andinstitutional
setting. (p. 66)"
These convergent interpretive readings of Bakhtin bring out an important way
in whichBakhtin's writings can inform contemporary sociocultural theorizing.
Bakhtin's work pro-vides a framework for describing how individual
instantiations of discourse are mediated bysocially shared textual practices
and ideologies. An individual utterance is construed out of,and in response
to, social discourses. However, it is part of the richness and breadth
ofBakhtin's writings that such theoretical insights, I argue, do not tell
the whole story. Dialogue entails a type of responsivity that is ethically
particular and answerable to uniquely felt and known others. There is,
especially in Bakhtin's early philosophical essays, a clear sense of
in-dividualism. Individual selves are shaped by and in response to concrete
others, particularlythose who are connected by relationships that entail
moral attunement, or "faithfulness"(ter 'nost). Individuals do appropriate
socially shared texts and practices as means of engag- ing meaningfully with
others. All meaningful human activity occurs in and through systemsof
discourse and action. At the same time, dialogue entails attunement to
particular others inways tied to morally imbued ends. Dialogue is embedded
in the histories of particular rela-tionships and their individuated forms
of response.I construct my arguments by tracing connections between Bakhtin'
s early essays on self-hood and ethical particularity and his essays on
novelistic discourses. I identity three themes,each linked to a particular
essay and yet each woven throughout Bakhtin's work. The essaysexplored are
two of Bakhtin's early texts, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993) and
"Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (Bakhtin, 1990), and his
later-period essay, "Discourse in theNovel" (1981). I derive three thematic
foci that serve as the basis for my essay: intonation, aes-thetic activity,
and discourse. I note the strong and vibrant connections between Bakhtin' s
ear-lier emphasis on intonation and personal addressivity and his later
emphasis on discourse. Mvessay begins with a discussion of Bakhtin's
earliest surviving essay (rescued from a damp basement and only partially
recovered). In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin described liv- ing
and knowing in ethical terms. His emphasis on the moral particularity of the
social act is anappropriate starting place for tracing connections between
his philosophy of moral relationship and his philosophy of discourse.
INTONATION
In the aftermath of the Soviet oppressions in postwar Prague, the novelist
Milan Kundera wrotea novel that embodied the ways in which such oppressive
regimes can distance individualsfrom the "heaviness" of moral commitment and
social belonging. A central character. Tomas,personifies the "unbearable
lightness of being" that occurs when social and political relationsare
purely instrumental means to a sometimes oppressive end. Tomas voices in the
context ofhis repeated seductions of women, "conquest time has been
drastically cut" (see Kundera,1984). The ironic tone of the author, conveyed
even in the novel's title, can be connected toBakhtin's early philosophical
writings about what it means to be an individuated self but at thesame time
live with the heaviness of personal commitments. The development of an
individu-ated self is the result, Bakhtin argued in his early essays, of a
series of commitments that aresubjective and particular to context. Like the
novelist Kundera, Bakhtin expressed a fear oftotalizing systems and their
associated moralities. Such systems of ethics and political beliefscan
distance individuals from the most meaningful things that ground everyday
social relation-ships: the particular forms of response formed in relation
to and with others.
At the heart of Bakhtin's early essays is a critique of modernist
objectifications of personal ex-perience, relationship, and knowledge. Still
in these early pieces of writing concerned with em- bodied individualism,
Bakhtin searched for a new "science of man" that could adequately capture
the fullness of living and knowing in a social world. Key to understanding
his early writings is thesense in which he viewed his efforts as a form of
moral philosophy (Bakhtin, 1993). Skeptical offields like psychology, which
he viewed as erroneously concerned with object-focused rationality, Bakhtin
(1993) searched in Toward a Philosophy of the Act for a theory depicting the
unique attributes of human relationships and understandings.What grounds his
essay Toward a Philosophy of the Act is not a focus on discourse (as would
be the case in his later work), but a focus on how individuals intonate acts
of living and knowingthrough the particularities of interpretation, feeling,
and moral valuing. Like a more contemporaryphilosopher, Charles Taylor
(e.g., Taylor, 1985), Bakhtin saw the uniqueness of human experi-ence,
including conscious awareness, as being rooted in how individuals "shade" or
intone acts ofliving with evaluative response. Bakhtin was concerned in his
early essays with the response of anactive agent to other embodied
individuals. The kind of philosophy that could best depict humanexperience,
he argued, is one that focuses on the lived moments in which an individual
engages in an answerable response----answerable in the sense that he or she
"owns" this response, and intonesit with both his or her own meanings and
those compelled by the other. Dialogue (although not as yet named as such)
was depicted as part of a practical philosophy that was lived by individuals
in response to others. Most important, this type of practical philosophy
could not be adequately de-picted by systems of ethics or rational
objectives. What was more interesting to Bakhtin were the ways in which
individuals construed contextual meanings and ethical responses in the
moments oftheir coming together. This lived moment of intonings and
responsive engagement was whatBakhtin described as the act or deed. What
seems crucial to distinguishing Bakhtin's early theorizing from contemporary
discus-sions of sociocultural learning is his focus on how individuals
respond (and learn) through a pro-cess of selective intonation. He depicted
acts of experience as meaningful only inasmuch as theyare felt, known, and
valued in unique ways. Bakhtin embraced the argument that experience oc-curs
within cultural, historical. and material contexts. He acknowledged the many
contributionsof historical materialism (Bakhtin, 1993) toward the
construction of a more situated philosophy ofpractical living. Bakhtin's
later writings on speech genres also articulate the ways in which
livedmoments are embedded in historically, culturally shaped genres of
discourse and action. These later writings in particular express the ways in
which individuated activity is part of a social col-lective, a nous that is
constituted by shared forms of life. In his essay Towards Philosophy of the
Act, however, Bakhtin (1993) critiqued even the more situated
historical-material theories for their lack of emphasis on what he described
as the oughtnev.v of lived experience. What helps to define practical living
and reasoning are the ethical shadings that create meaningful engagements
between individuals. Without a certain moral and emotional orientation
toward others, activity between persons would be little more than the
instrumentalist rationalities of scientific systemsand totalizing regimes:
"The active experiencing of an experience, the active thinking of a thought,
means not being absolutely indiffcrcnt to it, means an affirming of it in an
emotional-volitional manner. Actual act-performing thinking is an
emotional-volitional thinking, a thinking that :ntonales. and this
intonation permeates in an essential manner all moments ofa thought s
content. The emotional-volitional tone circumfuses the whole content sense
ofa thought in the actually perfo rmed act and relates it to the
once-occurrent Be- ing-as-eve~zt. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 34)
The sometimes difficult language of Bakhtin's essayist prose can obscure an
important critique of the existing theories of activity and conscious
awareness then prevalent and those that inform the work of educators and
psychologists today. Although not opposed to seeing human activity
ashistorically and culturally shaped practice, Bakhtin saw as fundamental
the way in which activityentails feeling and moral response that may, in
fact, alter existing systems of material activity.Without what he calls
emotional-volitional shadings, descriptions of activity become susceptibleto
objectification. They lose the sense in which social relationships are
unlike the more objective, determinate kinds of relations that constitute
the physical or scientific world. In social relation- ships, Bakhtin argued,
the responses of individuated subjects are flexible and answerable in
waysthat can embrace. resist, or redefine what is "given" historically or
culturally. Reasoning (cogni- tion) is most rational when it is sensitive in
a way that might be described as ethically particular,answerable to oneself
and to others. As Bakhtin (1993) wrote:
The actually performed act in its undivided wholeness is more than
rational-it is answerable. Ratio- nality is hut a moment of answerability
... like the glimmer of a lamp before the sun. (p. 29)
In Toward a Philosophy of the .Act, Bakhtin (1993) considered the special
kind of rationality that would characteri.'c individuals' engagement in
practical activity. His depiction of rationalityevoked what was later to
become a theory of prose consciousness, characterized not by one,
butmultiple centers of truth and value. As individuated persons come
together in an experiential mo-ment, each reflects particularistic value
centers. If this moment is one in which the individuals areresponsive
(answerable) to one another, an enriched experience is created. The
particularity of one value center enhances that of another; as Bakhtin
describes things, one value center (one mdi-viduated subject) envelops
another, enriching the other with an outside perspective. Truth is
there-fore never unitary, because there are always multiple possibilities
present with differing centers ofvalue and response. Such is the unique
rationality of social encounters, unique in their ethicalcomplex dv and
moral weight. Unlike what he later described as the tnonologism of
objectified ra- tionalities (such as the type of rationality one might posit
in mathematics or science), no single ex-planatory truth can fully capture
such moments of living. Rather, in what seems a forecasting of a later
polyphonic view of truth, acts of living are more rational because of the
many possible"faces" that constitute them (Bakhtin, 1993).Bakhtin (1993)
framed his essay To ward a Philosophy of the .~lct as a critique of Kantian
ethics, which he saw as overly concerned with universal and objectively
rational means of determiningwhat is right or good. Understanding how
Bakhtin construed ethics around the particularity of ev-eryday relationships
is crucial to understanding his later writings on discourse. If Bakhtin's
latertheories of prose consciousness are more decentered from individuated
persons, these still retainthe concern with concrete answerability that
defines his early essays. It is thus helpful to unpack what Bakhtin meant by
ethical response, and how this concept for him defined what it means to bean
individuated subject who intonates as he or she responds to
context.Responding, in Bakhtin's early essays, entails richly seeing.
Bakhtin contrasted the kind of seeing that might be characteristic of
scientific inquiry with artistic or aesthetic contemplation. In the special
case of aesthetic seeing. the artist (typically, for Bakhtin. the verbal
artist) forms a felt and valuational relation to the object of his or her
activity. Typically, this "object" is another hu-man being, a center of
value different from that of the contemplator (1993). Aesthetic
contempla-tion entails seeing this separate center of value as unique and
then forming a response to it from the special value position that is one's
own, This kind of seeing can entail strong feeling; mini-mally, it requires
more than an instrumental or objective response. The artist (writer) must,
asBakhtin wrote, "linger" over his or her subject, coming to know the
concrete particulars that areuniquely true of this subject. This artistic
work entails an element of compassion, even love. Richly seeing requires
that the contemplator immerse him or herself in the "heaviness" of a social
relationship that is more fully rational because it is imbued with the
ethical weight of feeling andvalue.
One could speak of objective aesthetic love as constituting the principle of
aesthetic seeing (except that"love" should not be understood in a passive
psychological sense). The valued manifoldness of Being as human (as
correlated with the human being) can present itself only to a loving
contemplation ... An indifferent or hostile reaction is always a reaction
that impoverishes and decomposes its object: it seeks to pass over the
object in all its manifoldness, to ignore it or to overcome it.
Lovelessness, indifference, will never be able to generate sufficient power
to slow down and linger intentlt over an object, to hold and sculpt every
detail and particular in it, however minute. Only love is capable of being
aesthetically productive; only in correlation with the loved is fullness of
the manifold possible. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 64)
In his descriptions of aesthetic contemplation, Bakhtin described the
substantial work that isrequired of an agent coming to know another agent.
That work is different from objective under-standings formed outside of a
felt commitment. At one point in his essay, Bakhtin (1993) de-scribed the
relationship between two subjects as one of faithfulness (ver 'nost) to the
particularities of each. He compared this emotional-valuational stance as
similar to the love one finds among in-timates. At the same time, he
emphasized that such faithfulness (ver 'nost) is not a passive feeling, but
an active relationship or response. It is a type of seeing or understanding
that attempts to en-compass another individuated subject in a value system
that does not diminish him or her-or asBakhtin warned, "impoverish" or
"decompose" him or her. It is because of his strong focus on theheaviness of
social relations that Bakhtin construed his early essay Toward a Philosophy
of the Act (1993) as a project in moral philosophy. If his later work turned
its lens more to the social col- lective that is integral to selfhood, his
earlier essays suggested that social dialogue needs theweight of responsive
feeling and valuation.The more conceptual or intellectual rationality
depicted by theorists like Vygotsky. as rootedas this might be in the social
world of activity and discourse, would not be "compellent" enoughfor
Bakhtin. What some might refer to as subjective truths make social
experience for Bakhtinmore fully rational in the special ways true of human
sublects -especially those who live theirlives by acknowledging their unique
face and those of others. Bakhtin does not describe what oc-curs when
individuals create truths more like those of Tomas, such that other
individuals areobjectified. Although in different ways, his early essays are
as utopian as Vygotsky's beliefs thatconceptual, scientific literacies could
be liberatory for individuals and cultures. Bakhtin seemedto model his own
personal and theoretical utopia on an idealized view of artistic creation
and hu-man relationship. In addition, in his early essays, individuals are
only abstractly connected to a so- cial collective-the sensuous,
historicized, and material genres of discourse and action that later do
become part of a single prose consciousness. What Bakhtin's writing on acts
of experience do forcefully articulate is how such genres of discourse and
action acquire their power through the complex particulars of feeling,
valuation, and response.
AESTHETIC ACTIVITY
"Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," 1990, a second of Bakhtin's early
philosophical essays,focuses more explicitly on the I-Other relations
constitutive of the individuated self. This essayportrays artistic
relationships between novelistic authors and their fictional heroes or
heroines as ametaphor for I-Other relations in the lived world. Without
necessarily marking rhetorically whenhe is doing so, Bakhtin moved from
writing about artistic (i.e., novelistic) creative activity to writ-ing
about social relationships more generally. 'I'hroughout this lengthy essay,
he explored differentkinds of fictional texts, offering them as models for
self-other relationships. Like his later writingson the discourses of the
novel, this essay uses novelistic writing as a rhetorical means of
exploringhow self-other relations are constitutive of living and knowing as
an individuated subject. Al-though still concerned in this essay with
particular embodied subjects (i.e., particular authors andtheir heroes)-or
as Bakhtin put it, the world of "proper names"- social relationships are
exploredthrough the lens of rhetorical activity. This second philosophical
essay is thus slightly more ori-ented toward a theory of prose
consciousness.The other is completely essential to the individuated
formation ofthe self argued Bakhtin(l990) in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic
Activity." He wrote of an individual's "absolute need for the other, forthe
other's seeing. remembering, gathering, and unifying self-activity"
(Bakhtin, 1990, pp. 35-36). This is a need that is both
emotional-valuational as well as cognitive or intellectual. The formation of
self that occurs as a relationship between individuals is depicted again (as
in To wa rd a Philosophy of theAet. 1993) as a compassionate or loving one.
In "Author and I lero," Bakhtin described what could in contemporary
sociocultural theory be depicted as a kind of scaffolding that occurs
between a motherand her child. And yet, his way of depicting such a
relationship focuses on the emotional tone or shad- ing that enables or
"images forth" the child's individuality. Bakhtin's depiction of how
selfhood is constituted in and through social relationship differs along
this dimension of its focus on intonation ascentral to self-awareness.
As soon as a human being begins to experience himself from within, he at
once meets with acts of recogni- tion and love that come to him from
outside~ from his mother or from others who are close to him. The child
receives all initial determinations ofhimself and of his body from his
mother's lips and from the lips of those who arc close to him. It is from
their lips, in the emotional-volitional tones of their love, that the child
hears and begins to acknowledge his own proper name and the names of all the
features pertaining to his body and to his inner states and experiences. The
words of a loving human are the first and most authorita- tive words about
him; they are the words that for the first time determine his personality
from outside, the words that come to meet his indistinct inner sensation of
himselt~ giving it a form and a name which, for the first time, he finds
himself and becomes aware of himself a.s a something. (Bakhtin, 1990, pp.
49-50)
Bakhtin was acutely concerned even in these earlier philosophical essays
with the unique role of the spoken word in conscious awareness. And yet, for
Bakhtin, the word seems to embody not only a set of conceptual (i.e.,
intellectual) relations, but also relations of feeling and value. Important
to Bakhtin's (1990) theory of emerging selthood in "Author and Hero" is the
fact that themother (the other, the author) who imparts the word, later to
become the child's own, lives uniquely within her own value context. It is
the unique position that she occupies outside of the child's individuated
life that enables her, in Bakhtin's view, to provide a horizon that shapes
andmakes more meaningful the child's life. What gives form and meaning to
the learner's (child's) subjectivity is not language per se, but a certain
kind of language-filtered social relationship. Inthis second philosophical
essay, Bakhtin (1990) wrote about how the other (or author) actively works
toward creating the form of the subject of his or her creative activity.
Such activity is de- scribed here is one of sympathetic co-experiencing,
although it appears to be the directed responseof an agent toward another.
From within a co-experienced life itself there is flO access to the
aesthetic value of what is outward in that same life [the body]. It is only
love [as an active approach to another human being] that unites an in-
nerlife[asubjectum ~r own object-directedness in living his life] as
experienced from outside with the value of the body as experienced from
outside and, in so doing, constitutes a unitary and unique humanbeing as an
aesthetic phenomenon. That is. only love unites one's own directednevs with
a direction and one~s own horizon with an environment. A whole, integral
human being is the product of the aes- thetic, creative point of view and of
that point of view alone. Cognition is indifferent to value and does not
provide us with a concrete unique human being, while the ethical subjectum
is in principle nonunitary.... A whole, integral human being presupposes an
aesthetically active subjectum situated outside him. (Bakhtin, 1990, pp.
2-83)
Such images of the bestowal of form and meaning do not deal with the ways in
which an agentcan envelop his or her subject in a destructive value context.
Particularly as children leave the inti-macy of home and family, the
determination of selthood from an outside position can be demean-ing or
damaging. Even within families such painful "bestowals" can occur. However,
Bakhtin'swork at least foregrounds the ways in which others create the
conditions for selfhood through theparticulars of their affective and
valuational response, or through what he called their "sympa-thetic
understanding" (1990). For Bakhtin, the active agent or author enriches the
self-activity ofthe subject or hero, in a fashion that could only occur
because he or she is external to it. In a waythat forecasts his writing on
novelistic discourse, Bakhtin described the aesthetic relationship ofthe
author and hero as the meeting of two consciousnesses. As he wrote, "what is
constitutive for such [aesthetic] events is the relationship of one
consciousness to another consciousness precisely as an other (Bakhtin. 1990,
p. 86).
There does seem to be the possibility, as this is expressed in "Author and
Hero," (Bakhtin,1990) for the merging of consciousnesses. Something like
intimacy is described in Bakhtin's(1990) depiction of the possibility of a
social chorus, in which the individual merges nearly com-pletely. In part,
this seems to be an acknowledgment that the meaningfulness of individual
lives isengendered by participation in such a group chorus. Writing of
ancient lyrical narrative forms inwhich there was typically a chorus,
Bakhtin noted the value of the social collective for the expres-sion of an
"I." "The voice can sing," he wrote, "only in a warm atmosphere, only in the
atmo-sphere of possible choral support, where solitariness of sound is in
principle excluded" (1990, p. 170, emphases in the original). He wrote about
two contexts in which individuals can temporarily lose a sense of their
unique agencies. One is the ease of carnivalesque social activity,
whichBakhtin described at length in his book-length study, Rahelais and His
World (1984). A second context is the case of pass iomd love, in which
tndividuals can sometimes lose the bound~trie~ of their unique sel~ e~. Such
moments of passional or carnivalesque acti~ ity serve a certain purpose,
that of allowing for a more seamless co-expeitencing. In a much later piece
of writing. Bakhtin (1986) wrotc about the special nature of speech. between
intimate partners, linking this kind of speech to what he calls fi~rniliar
literary styles (i.e.. Renaissance genres of parody and carnival). As he
wrote.
Intimate genres and styles are based on a maximum internal proximity of the
speaker and addressee (in extreme instances, as if the had merged). Intimate
speech is imbued with a deep confidence in the ad- dressee. in his sympathy,
in the sensitivity and goodwill of his respon~i'e understanding. In this
atmo-sphere of profound trust, the speaker reveals his internal depths. (p.
97)
At least in his early philosophical writings, however, the loss olself that
can occur when one merges with the chorus is something Bakhtin described as
in need of being transcended. like thespoken word that emerges from the
"grotesque" images of childbirth in one Renaissance scene in-volving a
stutterer (see Bakhtin, I 9X4. pp. 308-309), Bakhtin seenis to imbue
selthood with a transcendent or spiritual quality. In his book on
Renaissance literary genres (1984). he wrote ofthe ways in which the spoken
word is born: ".\ highy spiritual act is degraded and uncrowned by the
trarish.~r to the material bodily level ofchildhirth, realistically
represented. But thanks to degra- dation the ~ oid is renewed: one might say
reborn" (p. 309). The word aesthetic captures the way in which Bakhtin chose
to explore the constructive activity of an agent toward the subject oflus or
her attention. He wrote of the recipient of such attentions as being passive
or child-like in relation to the active agent, in a way mirroring what he
viewed as feminine passivity (1990). Bakhtin went so far as to compare the
author's consciousness with what he called epistemological conscious- ness,
the kind of intellectual activity he attributed to the natural sciences.
Self-awareness and sub- jectivity ate sometimes presented in abstract or
spiritual terms, using literary metaphors that can detract from the
real-life ways in which subjects mutually form one another. In spite of this
limitation, Bakhtin's (1990) discussion of social relationship in "Author
and Hero" does extend his discussion of acts of experience in Toward a
Philosophi' of the Act (1993). The former essay highlights the axiological
thstuietions between the emotional-voli- tional shadings of two social
participants. 1 he two do not completely merge but rather maintain at least
some degree of othemess in relation to one another. This degree of
otherness, for Bakhtin, actually enriches their individuated possibilities
for living and knowing. The relation- ship of an author to his or her
fictional characters is presented as a rhetorical lbcal point of ex-
ploration and discovery about self-other relations. The author's viewpoint
outside that of his or her characters is likened, for Bakhtin, to the
outsidedness of one individual in relation to an-other. Moreo\ ci, the
material being shaped into lieti~e form is likened to that of lived experi-
ence: the social world in all its complex vicissitudes. Creating a work of
verbal art for Bakhtin mirrors in these ways the work of creating ethical
social relationships. Such work entailsattunement (ver 'nost), even
compassion or love, and a unique gilt that is more meaningful be- cause it
arises from a dilliaent value (axiological) perspective (Bakhtin, 1990). The
construc- tion of an individual self is only possible because of such
relationships of otherness. In Bakhtin's later ~ ritings on novelistic
discourses, such otherness can be present in the discourse of a single
speaker, or even a single utterance. Ibis becomes a metaphor for a rich
individual consciousness. In his earlier essay, otherness is embodied in a
distinct person. That person's aesthetic response creates a subject who,
without him or her, would be formless and empty. AsBakhtin (1990) wrote in
his description of lyric literary form:
I seek and find myself in another's emotional-excited voice; I embody myself
in the voice of the other who sings of me; I ti rid in that voice an
authoritative approach to my own inner emotion or excitement; I sing of
myself through the lips of a possible loving soul. (p. 170)
DISCOURSE
To what extent are Bakhtin's early philosophical essays a prelude to his
later writings on prosaic consciousness, and to what extent do they differ
in theoretical emphasis? This is an important ques-tion to consider in light
of the fact that Bakhtin's essays on novelistic discourses have by and
largebeen the most widely cited among educators and psychologists. lt'
Bakhtin's later writings on prosediscourse are still heavily influenced by a
certain moral and aesthetic tone and theoretical empha-sis, this could be of
importance in considering how his work might inform contemporary studies in
education and psychology. Something could be lost if his writings on
discourse were to be inter-preted in the context of social-historical
theories that emphasize social systematicity over ethicalparticularity.
Clearly there is a strong shift in Bakhtin's writings on novelistic
discourse-from the earlier moral emphasis of his essays on self and other
(and lived moments of experience) to a muchgreater emphasis on verbal
representation. In some ways, his emphasis on the uniqueness of ver-bal art
in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1990) is more fully articulated
in his essay onnovelistic discourses. A theory of conscious activity that
Bakhtin earlier described as a moral phi- losophy gives way to a philosophy
of discourse. What is in focus is how self-other relationships are
constituted by social discourses, and especially how a certain discursive
hybridity character-izes the discourse of even a "single" speaker. Social
relationships are therefore theorized in "Dis-course in the Novel" (1981) as
discursive relationships. Responsive acts likewise become discursive
moments, or utterances. Perhaps partly due to the influence of his
colleague, V. N. Voloshinov, Bakhtin placed much more emphasis in this later
essay on sociolinguistic analysis.
As he wrote in "Discourse in the Novel," "Any stylistics capable of dealing
with the distinctive-ness of the novel as a genre must be a sociological
strlistics" (p. 300). At the same time, something like his earlier depiction
of intonation still exists (in his later essay) in the form of accents. If
not limited to the moral-aesthetic response of an individuated subject,
value-laden accents are still an integral part of how discourses achieve
their meaning and weight. The key shift seems to be thataccents are ,
'efracted: Although they might be voiced by a single author (or individual),
they are internally and externally in dialogue with others' voices. The
selfbecomes replete with othemess.Much has been written about how a theory
of dialogue is a central theme within Bakhtin's writ-ings on the novel, and
in his work more generally (e.g., Holquist, 1990; Morson & Emerson,
1990;Wertsch. 1991). The self-other relationships explored through the lens
of authorial activity (in"Author and Hero," 1990) are theorized (in
"Discourse in the Novel," 1981) as heteroglossic rela- tionships. Language,
being socially stratified to begin with, is in the case of novelistic
discourseplaced in dialogue with an authorial voice. The author does convey
his or her individuated inten- tions by shaping a text in certain ways and
accenting the words of others (e.g., the words of charac- ters, the typical
speech genres of a social group). However, his or her intentions are
refracted through their interplay with others' words. The different
discourses of authorial intent and so-cially stratified speech genres
mutually influence each other. As a result, a new kind of discourse results,
one that reflects the discursive hybridity and sociality that Bakhtin (much
more strongly than before) viewed as constitutive of individualism.
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its
incorporation), is another's speech in another's langua.i~e. serving to
express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes
a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the
same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct
intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of
the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two mean-ings and two
expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically
interrelated, they -as itwere-know about each other (just as two exchanges
in a dialogue know of each other and are struc- tured in this mutual
knowledge of each other); it is as if they actually hold a conversation with
each other. Double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized. (1981,
p. 324)
Evident in Bakhtin's many analyses of kinds of novelistic heteroglossia is
the sense that dialogue extends to the level of the single word, or even
single sound. Even a single word can reflect the ac- cents of both author
and character. Words can be "intoned" with irony, or with any number of sub-
tle shadings of authorial (although refracted) intent. Even so, a word
retains some degree of its pre-vious accentuations.What this means is that
individualism becomes somewhat decentered from the embodiedpersons depicted
in Bakhtin's earlier essays. In everyday social interchange, he argued, we
typically associate spoken discourses with the intentions of individual
speakers. However, thediscourse of the novel makes more opaque something
that is true even of such everyday speech----the hybrid and refracted nature
of discursive engagements. Discourses are not re-stricted to embodied
individuals; rather, characters and authors speak, as it were, through
so-cial discourses. The language of characters (or speaking persons)
achieves its meaning ingreat part because of its wider social significance,
its conveyance of certain social ideologies,or belief systems. This results
for Bakhtin in a richer, more complex kind of text, and ulti- mately in a
richer theory of the individual's conscious life. As he wrote about
characters' mdi- viduated discourses:
Individual character and individual fates-and the individual discourse that
is determined by these and only these-are in themselves of no concern for
the novel. The distinctive qualities of a character's dis-course always
strive for a certain social significance, a social breadth; such discourses
are always po-tential languages. Therefore, a character's discourse may also
be a factor stratifying language, intro- ducing heteroglossia into it.
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 333)
This depiction leaves open the possibility that a character's discursive
activity can change things, introducing new and unexpected forms of response
and meaning. Even a shaping au-thor could be surprised by what his or her
characters do or say, and this would be much more true of everyday
relationships. However, Bakhtin also strongly asserted (in this passage)
that discourses are social consciousnesses that could be constitutive of
groups as well as individu- als. As he wrote in a later passage:
"Characteristic for the novel as a genre is not the image of man in his own
right, but a man who is precisely the image of a language" (Bakhtin, 1981,
p. 336).
The most ethically rich and unrestricted individual consciousness is, in
this later essay on nov-elistic discourse, one that is more prosaic (see
Morson & Emerson, 1990). Bakhtin describedprose consciousness as being
unique to the novel, in all its complex dialogicity. However, it is clear
that he extended this metaphor of discursive richness to both individuals
and societies. The telos of Bakhtin's theory of prose consciousness appears
to be a highly literary or novelistic (Morson & Emerson, 1990) individual or
social collective-a verbally articulate individual (or speaking collective)
whose possibilities for living are enhanced by having access to more than
onevalue system.The kind of prose that one finds in the discourse of the
novel becomes for Bakhtin a lens for re- constructing individualism,
situating the individual amid social dialogue that extends to the coreof
thinking, feeling, and acting. In that sense, there is an aura of radical
change and creativityabout his writings Ofl the novel. They both alter his
earlier work on acts of knowing and living and forecast more contemporary
poststructuralist studies of discourses, literacies, and identities. Atthe
same time, there remain significant traces of Bakhtin's earlier theory of
ethically particular re- sponse in his later essayist writing. Two strands
or themes that are continuous with those early philosophical essays are
important for understanding how Bakhtin's work might critically inform
contemporary sociocultural theorizing. One vestige of Bakhtin's earlier
philosophical work can be found in his emphasis on the accentuations that
constitute discourses. Speakers in everyday situations, and authors in
morehighly refined ones, engage with discourses spoken, and accented, by
other persons and social collectives. As Bakhtin (1981) wrote,
[T]here are no "neutral" words and forms-words and forms that belong to "no
one": language hasbeen completely taken over, shot through with intentions
and accents.... All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a
tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an
agegroup. the day and hour. (p. 293)
The individual author or speaker, he argued, speaks through a discourse that
is already laden with others' accents. Bakhtin's descriptions of
accentuation evoke his earlier descriptions of morally laden intonation. A
word or discourse is always uttered by a speaking person or collective; it
is from the beginning charged with the value contexts of its previous usage.
Part of the richness of prose discourse is that it stratifies those previous
meanings and accents, allowing for a more com-plex kind of value system to
emerge. In doing so, however, the particularity ofunique accents is notlost,
but complicated and enriched. Words become "populated" with more than one
intonationalsystem (Bakhtin, 1981).Socially stratified discourse genres,
viewed in some circles as shared forms of discourse and activity (i.e..
defined both linguistically and in terms of goal-directed activities), are
described in "Discourse in the Novel" (1981, p. 288) as accentual systems.
Part of their unity resides in the factthat speakers (writers) share common
values and points of view. They intone their utterances in particular ways
reflective of the values and beliefs common to them. This description both
drawsfrom and extends Bakhtin's earlier depiction of intonation. An
accentual system can reflect bothindividual and collective activity; it can
also be placed in internal dialogue even for an individualspeaker. No longer
restricted to the image of two embodied participants, accentual systems
canmore freely engage one another in a single text or utterance.
Nonetheless. Bakhtin emphasizedthat all such genres are fully intentional
and bear the weight of speakers' intentions and values:
What is important... is the intentional dimensions, that is, the denotative
and expressive dimension of the "shared" language's stratification. It is in
tact riot the neutral linguistic components of language being stratified and
differentiated, but rather a situation in which the intentional
possibilities of language are be- ing expropriated: these possibilities are
realized in specific directions, tilled with specific content, they arc made
concrete, particular, and are permeated with concrete value judgments; they
knit together with specific objects and with the belief systems of certain
genres of expression and points of view peculiar to particular professions.
Within these points of view, that is, for the speakers of the language
themselves.these generic languages and professional jargons are directly
intentional. (1981, p. 289)
As individuated speakers (or authors or characters) speak through social
discourses, they ac- centuate them in new and sometimes unexpected ways. The
moral agency of an individual was de-scribed in "Author and Hero in
Aesthetic Activity" (1990) as the loving contemplation andshaping of
another. As Bakhtin emphasized in that earlier essay, one agent "bestowed"
form andmeaning on another. In "Discourse and the Novel" (1981), agency is
depicted as accenting (inton- ing) others' words. Form and meaning are to
some extent already given in this later focus on dis- course; the agent's
task is to enrich the given with something new, creating an overall effect
ofrich dialogue. The individual becomes, in this later essay, the unique
wars in which one accents the words of others, and the ways in which one
orchestrates a resulting system of discourses. Selfand other are more
complex distinctions, because some degree of othemess always attaches
itselfto the words that one (however creatively) accents:
As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, language, for the individual
consciousness, lies on theborderline between oneself and the other. The word
in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the
speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he
appro-priates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive
intention. Prior to this moment of ap- propriation, the word does not exist
in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dic-
tionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other
people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's
intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's
own.... Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into
the private property of thespeaker's intentions: it is
populated-overpopulated-with the intentions ofothers. Expropriatingit,
forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and
complicated process. (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 293-294)
Although difficult and sometimes conflictual, this process of accenting
others' words ultimatelyleads to the kind of pluralistic consciousness that
Bakhtin viewed as the fe/os of individuals and so- cial groups. A rich
individual consciousness is a responsive one. Appropriating the discourses
ofothers entails a high degree of engagement and work.A second important
strand of connection with the moral emphasis of Bakhtin's early essays
centers on the richness of a particular kind of responsive engagement, or
what he came to describe as understanding. In "Discourse in the Novel,"
Bakhtin (1981) described understanding as a pro- cess much like that of the
artistic representation of another's words. Artistic representation,
espe-cially in artful novels, requires a much deeper kind of dialogic
involvement, sometimes to thepoint where two voices interanimate one another
in a single phrase. The individual who constructs dialogic understanding,
that is an understanding that deeply "penetrates" (p. 352) its subject or
ob- ject, creates another discourse that responds. Such responsive dialogue
entails an acute sense ofthe environment that calls forth a certain kind of
dialogue. It is not the case that any kind of responsive dialogue to another
's words constitutes understanding. Rather, Bakhtin argued for a re-sponse
that both acknowledges and then answers with a responsive discourse. Evoking
his earlierconcept of answerability, Bakhtin's depiction of dialogic
understanding likewise entails a closereading of concrete particulars. Such
particulars, however, need not be limited to concrete others-that is,
embodied others. They can be speaking voices heard and experienced from
historical contexts, from present or nonpresent others, and from social
collectives "speaking" through me- dia, text, and dramatic action. Bakhtin s
eemed to recognize that this type of response does not al- ways occur in
everyday social interactions. Still, he held prose discourse as an idealized
model forthe kind of dialogue that can happen in the everyday world.
Selfliood and otherness, reconceptualized as discursive relationships,
nonetheless retain con- nections to the ethical specificity of persons in
relationship. Discourses entail accentuation; theyreflect the intonations of
particular persons or social groups and the special accentuation of an in-
dividual speaker or writer. Although individuated accents are refracted in
any discursive moment, they nonetheless retain some degree of agency and
intentionality. Agency entails the ability totake the words of others and
accent them in one's unique ways. Moreover, response entails theability to
read the particulars of a situation and its discourses and engage with those
particulars inethically specific ways. Understanding requires another
discourse that responds; this is the epit-ome of social relationship.
Without the uniquely specified discursive location of an author(speaker),
engaged in responsive dialogue with the words of others, understanding could
not occur. Such responsive dialogue is part of the overall richness of prose
consciousness.
CONCLUSION
Sociocultural theorizing in education and psychology construes itself as an
interdisciplinary field of inquiry, following in the pioneering footsteps of
Lev Vygotsky. Questions and methods frompsychology, linguistics,
anthropology, sociology, and education are brought to bear on concep-tions
of learning and instruction. Nonetheless, analytical lenses that might draw
from the realm ofmoral philosophy or the literary arts are oddly missing
from our normative discourses. This isironic given even Vygotsky's
willingness to consider the value of artistic and literary models.
Suchabsences are even more striking in the case of appropriations of Bakhtin
's work, given Bakhtin's fascination with both literature and moral
philosophy. I would argue that contemporary Cultural Historical Activity
Theory (ChAT), as eclectic as it might be, is still constituted by the
methods and theories of social scientific inquiry. As such, its overwhelming
allegiance is to descriptions ofsystems of activity. The particularity that
one might find, for instance, in a novel, is therefore sim-ply not part of
the domain of inquiry.Part of the richness of Bakhtin's potential
contributions to contemporary sociocultural theoryis his crossing of
boundaries between the literary ai-ts. philosophy, and the social sciences.
Hisearly philosophical essays suggest that a concern with morally imbued
experience was central tohis overall purpose. "A philosophy of life,"
Bakhtin (1993) wrote in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, "can only be a moral
philosophy" (p. 56). This early moral emphasis tends to be lost in con-
temporary appropriations of his work-and to great disadvantage. For a key
argument can be lost:that any moment of living is socially and discursively
constituted in ways that are both ethicallyparticular and reflective of
social and institutional genres. Moral ends and narrative histories
areconstituted by social, discursive practices that entail the specificity
of relations of feeling, embodiment, and moral attunement. The narrative
histories of persons and their concrete forms ofanswerability are central to
a theory of knowledge. Such particulars can easily be lost if theoristsfocus
their interpretive readings less on concrete histories and narratives and
more on generalizeddescriptions of activity settings and the mediational
means that constitute them. It is no accidentthat Bakhtin turned his
analytical lens to the discourse of the novel. There might be value in
allow-ing similar discursive hybridity in the theories that define
contemporary research in education andpsychology.IfBakhtin's arguments in
his early essays are tenable ones and, as I maintain here, important tohis
later theory of prose consciousness, they illuminate some previously
neglected aspects ofsociocultural learning. Discourses, he might contend,
bear the heaviness of intonation and con-crete answerability. Genuine
understanding would be impossible outside of such morally imbuedcommitments.
Part of what enables meaningful existence are ethically particular forms of
re-sponse-including response to concrete, embodied others. Such response is
partly shaped by anattentiveness, a willingness, to be moved to action by
the particulars of feeling and valuing. A dif-ferent view of social
relationship might, for Bakhtin at least, be unbearably light as a theory of
dis-courses and conscious seithood. As he writes in Toward a Philosop&v of
the Act, 1993, "life can be consciously comprehended only in concrete
answerability.... A life that has fallen away fromanswerability cannot have
a philosophy; it is, in its very principle, fortuitous and incapable of
be-ing rooted." (p. 56)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Bill Penuel for his comments on an earlier version of this essay,
along with the Mind, Cul- ture, andActivity reviewers for their helpful
critiques. My deepest gratitude goes to Caryl Emerson for pointing me in the
direction of Bakhtin's early philosophical essays.
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