Hicks on Bakhtin

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 06:55:36 PST


In light of all, I've carefully read the Hicks article and though this is
quite long I feel it important to express.

What Hicks is trying to do in this essay: She writes that she will present
a view on Bakhtin that differs from the standard emphasis of scholars who
invoke Bakhtin's theories of discourse and dialogue insofar as it will focus
on Bakhtin's emphasis that "individuals construct histories that are
ethically particular and attuned to moral ends"; that "Dialogue [central as
the instantiation of discourse] entails a type of responsivity that is
ethically particular and answerable to uniquely felt and known others."
Hicks calls for us to raise considerations of individuals' "moral
attunement" to other individuals to a more prominent place than it occupies
at present.

In a sense we could say that Hicks is arguing that theories of sociocultural
learning should include a focus on the moral dimensions that is as strong
as the emphasis on mediating artefacts and texts; especially that texts not
be treated as inert artefacts but that they be recognized to have a moral
dimension that has a uniquely individual component. In the context of
activity theory, it seems to me that this would constitute an inversion of
Engestrom's classic triangle. Minimally it calls for giving equal
ontological priority to the "moral" dimensions that govern dialogue and
discourse within a community in place of an ontological emphasis on the
artefact/text/genre that mediates the individual or collective subject and
the object of the activity in which the artefact/text/genre occurs. On a
stronger interpretation it seems that Hicks might be arguing that without
taking into account the "moral attunement" and "ethical particularity" one
cannot account for the rationality of any discourse at all.

I don't think Hicks succeeds in her demonstration for two basic reasons.
The link between the key ideas of early and later Bakhtin is never
sufficiently established: the emphasis Bakhtin's early use of "moral
attunement" (ter'nost) is not successfully linked to his later use of
accentuating as the fundamental form that authoring in discourse assumes,
and there is a confusion, a blurring over of relationships between
individual self - individual other that appear to be the focus of Bakhtin's
early work and the relationship between individual self-generalized other
that plays the fundamental role in his later work.

There is one other problem that is never quite resolved to my satisfaction.
If the purpose of this theorizing is the development of a science of man as
a form of moral philosophy then it would appear that the theory does not
only attempt to account for what is but also what should be. Is Hicks
proposing a meta-model for conducting social-cultural inquiry? The
implications of this bear on the question of research praxis and discourse
within the community of people conducting social cultural research. This
seems to be the focus of Phil's post but her exact position is never made
explicit enough in the article for me to be quite sure what she is proposing
in this regard.

In the conclusion of her article Hicks makes the following statement: "If
Bakhtin's arguments in his early essays are tenable ones and, as I maintain
here, important to his later theory of prose consciousness, they illuminate
some previously neglected aspects of sociocultural learning." Hicks
locates the essence of Bakhtin's early position in "a clear sense of
individualism. Individuals are shaped by and in response to concrete
others, particularly those who are connected by relationships that entail
moral attunement, or 'faithfulness' (ter'nost." In later Bakhtin the
individual and the relationships between concrete individuals loses its
importance and throughout the article she repeatedly acknowledges this: the
later Bakhtin was more concerned with "the social collective that is
integral to selfhood"; that his later theories were decentered from
"individuated persons", and "that these later writings in particular express
the ways in which individuated activity is part of a social collective, a
nous that is constituted by shared forms of life." But she never attempts
to explain why Bakhtin made the shift or how he himself viewed his earlier
writings. Considering that he never attempted to publish them during his
lifetime, that complete versions were never found, that the posthumous
publications are fragmentary, and that he does not mention these earlier
writings in his later works one can surmise that he himself might not have
considered their content to be either important or in agreement with his own
later, more developed and mature thought.

Lacking any concrete indication from Bakhtin himselve, Hicks proposes to
demonstrate that the bridge between the early and the later writings is the
connection between "intonation" and " accenting". This is a vital
distinction and is situated precisely within the difference between an
individual whose very self consciousness is a product of social relations,
on one hand, and an apparently autonomous individual that "enters into"
social relations, that uses social relations as "resources", on the other
The hinge that allows her to relate "intonation" to "accenting" is
answerability. "If Bakhtin's later theories of prose consciousness are more
decenterred from individuated persons, these still retain the concern with
concrete answerability that defines his early essays."

In early Bakhtin the center of answerability as response to ethical
particularity is found in "aesthetic contemplation" -- this is extremely
important in relation to Bakhtin's position against Kant's moral system.
"Aesthetic contemplation 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;
minimally, it requires more than an instrumental or objective response." As
such the context of answerability in early Bakhtin, the who? one is
answerable to, is always another individual . But this is manifestly not the
case in later Bakhtin and Hicks herself is forced to admit this time and
again as in: "In Bakahtin's later writings on novelistic discourses, such
otherness can be present in the discourse of a single speaker, or even a
single utterance. This becomes a metaphor for rich individual
consciousness. In his earlier essay, otherness is embodied in a distinct
person." or "They can be speaking voices heard and experienced from
historical contexts, from present or nonpresent others, and from social
collectives 'speaking' through media, text, and dramatic action." The
change in Bakhtin's earlier and later work could thus be compared in some
sense to Cooley's vs. G.H. Meads discussion of the constitution of the self.
For the latter, the other is a "generalized other", one that is
instantiated, and indeed writers on Bakhtin use a very similar term when he
talks about the "individuation" of a genre.

The attempt to force an individual other into the framework of later Bakhtin
leads Hicks to take some curious positions. She speaks of an "individual
who achieves dialogic understanding" which assumes a structure of
intersubjective understanding that has not yet been established. When
discussing heteroglossia she makes the statement that the author and the
character have distinct discourses that "have access to each other". The
implication she appears to want to draw is that the author's character
"writes" the author in a way similar to the author's writing the character.
This is patently absurd even if it be granted that the character often
escapes the author's initial intentions, begins to develop on its own, as
something that the author isn't "creating" as much as describing; a commonly
reported process in which the novelistic character "comes to life". So too
in "everyday life" real individuals escape the frameworks of what they might
have considered to be the course of their lives as they understood them --
who or what is "authoring" the individuals in this case? From the
perspective advanced in Hick's interpretation it would have to be another
individual, yet descriptions of such life changes often reveal individuals
responding to no individuals at all but to complexes of events and persons
who might or might not be personally known to the individuals. This
commonly occurs in the process of mass social movements and revolutions,
periods of social transformation that seem to have no locus in any of the
individuals involved. Movements that generate genres and moral (even legal)
codes but that have no individual authors only multiple participants in a
social process of collective authoring in which the I-Thou relationship is
subordinated as people break the mold of life patterns that had guided them
previously. Later Bakhtin's writings require no "forcing" to be amenable to
such interpretation while Hicks entire essay struggles to force the social
subject we can see through his lens back into the restrictive box of
abstract individuality.

Morality involves decision and answerability--this is undoubtedly true but
are the structures within which we attain to selfhood those which can
ultimately be understood on the basis of the interaction of individuals
considered as subjects in their own right or must we understand that the
genres that define answerability reflect collective subjects that we as
individuals instantiate. Granting that the ultimately dyadic framework
exists for the Bakhtin of "Toward a Philosophy of the Act", I believe later
Bakhtin would say "depends what you mean by instantiate." and here we come
to the question of accents and what their relationship is to the larger
structure in which we encounter all discourse. This for me is the most
important problem that Bakhtin both brings to prominence and provides tools
for thinking about.

Interestingly the problem implicit in the need to correlate the
particularity of aesthetic judgement to the objective existence of genres
that individuals instantiate is similar to that of Umberto Eco semiotics.
According to Tarja Knuuttila (1999) the fundamental problem of Eco's
semiotic theory is how and why the fruits of individual production that link
the fundamentally self-enclosed world of semiosis ever becomes
conventionalized. Eco uses the metaphor of artistic production to
illustrate thje basic act of producing meaning but most data-to-day
production and use of meaning is conventional. Alternately, this is the
problem of how individual performances come out of collective knowledge.
Knuutila concludes that Eco's semiotics ultimately fails because he "loses
sight of the social production process, or activities through which the
artifacts within which [meanings] are created . .

I don't think Bakhtin can be accused of a similar failing although Hicks'
interpretation of him can. Bakhtin describes "primary" and "secondary"
speech genres. The primary genres are most clearly related to what we could
call categories of activity systems; e.g., the professions. In "The Problem
of Speech Genres" Bakhtin states that "all real and integral understanding
is actively responsive". But "Any speaker is himself a respondent to a
greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one
who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not
only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the
existence of preceeding utterances--his own and others'--with which his
given utterances enters into one or another kind of relation (builds on
them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes that they are already known
to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized
chain of other utterances." Bakhtin considered that "the stable generic
forms of the utterance" are the most important aspect of speech genres.
The speaker's "speech will" -- that is the domain within which accentuation
is at all possible -- consists "primarily in the choice of a particular
speech genre" which in turn in determined by a number of factors of which
"the personal composition of the participants" is but one. "And when the
speaker's speech plan with all its individuality and subjectivity is appleid
and adapted to a chose genre, it is shaped and developed within a certain
generic form. Such genres exist above all in the great and multifarious
sphere of everyday oral communciation, including the most familiar and most
intimate". Bakhtin states most clearly: " . . . to use a genre freely and
creatively is not the same as to create a genre fromn the beginning; genres
must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely." Accenting is
directly related to the selection of genre, not to intonation (see "The
Dialogical Imagination", p.5).

Intonation, which according to Hicks plays such a vital and central role in
the early work, appears in a less important role in "The Problem of Speech
Genres" where it is no more, no less, than "One of the means of expressing
the speaker's emotianally evaluative attitude toward the subject of his
speech." In "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language" we find " The most
obvious, but, at the same time, the most superficial aspect of social value
judgement incorportated in the word is that which is conveyed with the help
of expressive intonation." This is important since it implies that the true
moral directedness, the true values expressed, are not found in the
intonation given to a specific genre, but rather in the genre chosen itself.
Volosinov/Bakhtin points out that "If language, as a system of forms is
completely independent of creative impulses or activities on the part of the
individual, then it follows that language is the product of collective
creativity, that it is a social entity and therefore, like all social
institutions, is normative for each separate individual." Another
implication of this being of course that the genres we select to use carry
their own normative, objective morality that reflects the social processes
to which they correspond. Intonation within a genre being like wind waves
over a deep ocean current.

In conclusion, althought I think Bakhtin certainly provides important
elements for CHAT in particular and socio-cultural theory in general, I
don't think that Hicks has provided a viable interpretation for advancing
the development of Bakhtinian directions within that theory.

Paul H. Dillon



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