I saw a version of this MCA piece before it was published and think it
makes an important contribution to our understanding of Bakhtin. Deborah
argues, in part, that we need to take very seriously Bakhtin's earliest
work on morality to fully understand his dialogic approach. We need to have
her in on the discussion because she knows the important material better
than most of us.
Ellice Forman
University of Pittsburgh
--On Wednesday, February 07, 2001, 3:29 PM -0800 "Paul H.Dillon"
<illonph@pacbell.net> wrote:r
> On the basis of the abstracts posted so far, I think a discussion of
> Bakhtin might be quite interesting since his name has periodically
> surfaced, and in many ways he is responsible for the notion of
> co-constitution of the self through dialogue, a topic which has been
> commented on repeatedly on xmca. So I'd vote for:
>> Self and Other in Bakhtin1s Early Philosophical Essays:
>>
>> Prelude to a Theory of Prose Consciousness
>>
>> Deborah Hicks
>>
>> University of Cincinnati
>>
>> The self is not a thing, a substrate, but the protagonist of a life1s
>> 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. [Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self,
>> p. 162] "We think we are tracing the nature of the thing, but we are
>> only tracing the frame through which we view it." So writes Ludwig
>> Wittgenstein in "Philosophical Investigations," about processes of
>> social scientific inquiry. We interpretively read social events through
>> various disciplinary lenses; this is no less true of our readings of
>> theorists. My purpose in this reflective essay is to read the work of
>> Mikhail Bakhtin through an interpretive lens that differs somewhat from
>> the norm within contemporary sociocultural/historical theories of
>> psychology and education. My essay hinges on the argument that, among
>> sociocultural theorists, Bakhtin's work has tended to be aligned with
>> frameworks that focus more on social systems of activity and discourse.
>> Though Bakhtin's writings do address shared genres of discourse and
>> social action, his work also addresses another aspect of living and
>> learning. As they draw on mediated systems of social action and
>> discourse, individuals construct histories that are ethically
>> particular and attuned to moral ends. Dialogue, as depicted by Bakhtin,
>> entails a form of answerability that is morally responsive to unique
>> others and particular relationships. Considered outside of such moral
>> ends, social actions and discourses lose a crucial part of their
>> concreteness -- their embeddedness in relationships constituted by
>> thoughts, feelings, and histories between unique individuals. The
>> complex particulars of morally-imbued relationships have been oddly
>> missing from theoretical discourses about learning in social context.
>> Considered in their breadth, Bakhtin's writings offer a critical
>> alternative: A theory of discourse, selfhood, and social action that
>> draws heavily from moral philosophy and literature, and that places high
>> theoretical value on ethical particularity. His early philosophical
>> essays argue that discourse and action outside of morally imbued
>> relationships might be true of angels and spirits, but not of persons
>> engaged in historical moments of living.
>>
>
Ellice Ann Forman
Department of Psychology in Education
University of Pittsburgh
5C01 WWPH
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
(412) 648-7022
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