From: "Nate" To: "Kathryn Alexander" Subject: TEXT FILE Date: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:53 PM #$##$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$##$$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$# 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 seemed 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. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Hoiquist (Ed.). The dialogic imagination. Four essayc by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson & M. Hoiquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, ~vl. M.(1984). Rabelais and his wor/d(H. lswolsky. Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, M. M.(1986). Speech genres and other late essays(V. W. McGee,Trans.: C. Emerson & NI. Hoiquist, Eds.). Aus- tin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays by M. M. Bakhtin (V. Liapunov, Trans.; NI. Hoiquist & V. Liapunov, Eds.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M.(1993). Towardaphilosophyoftheaci(V. Liapunov. Trans., V. l.iapunov & M. 1-loiquist, Eds.). Austin: University of Texas Press.Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the seir Gender, community, and poslmodernisrn in contemporary ethics. New York: Routledge.Edwards, D., & Mercer, N. (1987). common knowledge. London: Menthuen, Hoiquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. New York: Routledge. Kundera, M. (1984). The unbearable lightness of being(M. H. Heim, Trans.). New York: Faber & Faber. Lemke, J. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. London: Taylor & Francis. Morson,G. S., & Emerson, C.(1990). MikhailBakhtin: creation ofaprosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language (Philosophical Papers I). New York: Cambridge University Press.