[Xmca-l] Re: A new book: Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art: Bakhtin by and for Educators

[Ana Marjanovic-Shane]

Dear Greg and all,

Thanks a lot! What an interesting invitation to write directly on the notion of “ethical ontological dialogism.”  I know that by now you probably thought I was ignoring your question,  but in fact it took me a little time to write about it in a very short way. EOD (Ethical Ontological Dialogism) is an approach to human studies that is in many ways different from CHAT, so I am always anxious that it may sound very strange to the XMCA community, and I tried to be as clear as possible. But you will judge how successful I was in that.

My reply is probably very long for an email, it is an outline of a paper, references and all. So if you are not interested, stop right here. But if you are, I am really curious to hear your comments.

                What is “ethical ontological dialogism?”
To me Ethical Ontological Dialogism (EOD) means to be in a dialogue in which one relates to all participants of a pedagogical event (students, teachers) as “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 6, italics are in the original). This implies that people in dialogue take each other seriously, and with an awareness that “[c]onsciousnesses themselves cannot be equal to each other – only their rights—because consciousnesses are unique, immeasurable, unfinalizable and opaque both to oneself and to each other” (Matusov, 2018, p. 1478). This is true not only for the immediate participants in a pedagogical (and other) events, but is also true for the researcher who joins these dialogues with his/her heart and mind in a new, now scholarly, event of studying the original dialogic encounters.
But let me backtrack for a moment to provide some background for this claim (which I will repeat below).
In our book Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art: Bakhtin by and for Educators (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019), we attempt to transcend the main problem of positivism in the social sciences. Paradoxically, the positivist focus on the given (e.g. the positive) in its search for truth, is its greatest strength, and also its greatest limitation! This “given truth” which is assumed to exist in itself, outside of any human observation and knowledge, has to be reached in its “pure” form, uncontaminated by anyone’s subjectivity or ideological/religious dogma that could distort it. To achieve this, positivist science scrupulously follows methods that gradually lead to de-subjectification of the truth. Latour described science-in-action as a practice of cleaning out researchers’ statements about studied phenomenon from the researchers’ subjectivity through a special discursive practice in a scientific community (Latour, 1987).  However, it is exactly this practice of the modern positivist approach that effectively limits this approach and keeps it from reaching the very human core of people’s existence, i.e. their constant unique and authorial participation in dialogic meaning-making. Elsewhere my colleagues and I claimed that dialogism can and must transcend the pitfalls of positivism/modernism in approaching the study of human meaning-making (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Curtis, 2019). Positivist/modernist assumption about meaning-making is based on the concept of pattern recognition, i.e. the notion that meaning can be extracted from the self-contained, given patterns (cognitive, linguistic, communicational, etc.) (Gee, 2014; Kahneman, 2011; Linell, 2009, and others; Vygotsky, 1986, 2004; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). Positivism “tries to capture the ‘objective,’ the ‘given,’ ‘how things really are,’ the phenomenon as it is in its essence, independent of anyone’s subjectivity” (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, et al., 2019, p. E54).
                However, the humanness cannot be objectivized, because humanness means constantly creating and re-creating unique relationships with others by giving recognition to each other’s authorial subjectivities and taking responsibility for one’s own critically important voice in dialogue. This never-ending meaning-making that is a mark of people’s humanity, is NOT the given and cannot be studied as a given. It does not exist outside of the moment of its making nor outside of the particular human beings that make it. It cannot be “captured” as an object. Dialogic meaning-making can be only joined in the never-ending and unrestricted dialogue, in which “[t]ruth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (Morson, 2004).
                Furthermore, trying to capture the other’s humanity as an object, according to Bakhtin is not just a futile exercise! It is also deeply unethical! Let me use Bakhtin’s analysis of a small episode from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.

“… in Alyosha's conversation with Liza about Captain Snegirev, who had trampled underfoot the money offered him. Having told the story, Alyosha analyzes Snegirev's emotional state and, as it were, predetermines his further behavior by predicting that next time he would without fail take the money. To this Liza replies:

. . . Listen, Alexey Fyodorovich. Isn't there in all our analysis—I mean your analysis . . . no, better call it ours—aren't we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In deciding so certainly that he will take the money? [SS IX, 271-72; The Brothers Karamazov, Book Five, I]” (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999, p. 60).
                Bakhtin commented on this episode from Dostoyevskian novel that there is something deeply monological and unethical, full of contempt, when one takes a “position from above” towards the other and begins to calculate that other person, her/his desires, motives, thoughts, positions, plans… Bakhtin argued that Dostoyevsky was developing the implicit concept of what does it mean to have an ethical stance toward others though many of his characters across all of his novels and stories. Bakhtin claimed that the ultimate breach of ethics toward the other is to calculate, finalize, objectify, and predict the other, “…a living human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing cognitive process. In a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal [in dialogue with others], in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition” (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999, p. 58, italics in the otriginal).
                However, is the goal of social science to calculate, finalize, objectify, and predict people’s subjectivities?! Bakhtin described how a Dostoyevskian approach to life and to the others, runs against the very core of psychology as a science, from the day its emergence in the 19th century, which does exactly that: attempting to turn the other human being’s soul into a calculatable object,

Toward the psychology of his [Dostoevsky’s] day—as it was expressed in scientific and artistic literature, and as it was practiced in the law courts—Dostoevsky had no sympathy at all. He saw in it a degrading reification of a person's soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability, and of that peculiar indeterminacy and indefiniteness which in Dostoevsky constitute the main object of representation: for in fact Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminate—turning point for his soul (ibid, p. 61).
                Although Bakhtin described Dostoyevsky’s thoughts of more than 100 years ago, this ethical stance can be applied to the psychology of today, too, including sociocultural psychology, in my view. By definition, psychology is about objectivizing people, i.e. reducing them to predictable and calculatable, voiceless “categories” “mechanisms,” “processes,” “developmental stages,” “what is shaped by culture, institution, history,” etc. Contemporary psychology (from the times of Dostoyevsky and Bakhtin to our times today), and much of education, studies the cultural, institutional, biological, political, historical, psychological GIVEN. It deals with the objectifiable aspects of humans, attempting to reify them by effectively excluding their authorial voices from serious dialogues and talking about them and to them, but not addressing them and taking their voices into account. Bakhtin wrote,

The truth about a man in the mouths of others, not directed to him dialogically and therefore a secondhand truth, becomes a lie degrading and deadening him, if it touches upon his "holy of holies," that is, "the man in man." (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999, p. 59)
                When we talk to a child not with our sincere interest and curiosity about his/her unique experiences, joys, desires, sorrows, fears, hopes, dreams, aspirations, feelings, thoughts, but, rather to “package” her/his unique subjectivity into objective, calculatable and manipulatable categories-boxes (e.g. coding), we are not studying humanity – what makes us uniquely human. In the eyes of Russian contemporary educationalist Alexander Lobok, this means that we are actually outside of the world of deeply human subjective experience,

The problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the Universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. (Lobok, 2017, p. SIa:2).
                The main problem with conventional social sciences is that they study what is objective (positive, given) in humans. They study objective subjectivity. In itself there is nothing wrong with that when it is viewed as a study of human limitations rather than human essence and potential.  As a study of human limitations, conventional social sciences are very helpful. However, they are highly distortive, harmful, and, arguably, unethical when they claim to study the whole person. Genuine social science must address “the surplus of humanness” (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 37). “The surplus of humanness” is “a leftover” from the biologically, socially, culturally, historically, and psychologically given – the typical and general – in the human nature. It is about the human authorship of the ever-unique meaning-making (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, et al., 2019).
The concept of ethical ontological dialogism is aimed at addressing the described problem of objective subjectivity studied by conventional social sciences. Ontological dialogic pedagogy inspired by Bakhtin aspires to be a pedagogy of ethical ontological dialogism. As I stated at the start of this short outline, to me Ethical Ontological Dialogism (EOD) means to be in dialogue in which one relates to all participants of a pedagogical event (students, teachers) as “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 6, italics are in the original). People in genuine dialogue take each other seriously, and with an awareness that “[c]onsciousnesses themselves cannot be equal to each other – only their rights—because consciousnesses are unique, immeasurable, unfinalizable and opaque both to oneself and to each other” (Matusov, 2018, p. 1478). In genuine dialogue, participants expect to be surprised by the other, her/his unique ideas, views, desires, hopes, fears, etc.
                For me, ethical ontological dialogism is about authorial meaning-making where meaning emerges in the relationship “between genuinely interested questions and seriously provided answers”  (Matusov, 2018, p. 1478) where people in a dialogic encounter recognize each other as creatively and/or critically authoring their views and truths. In an authorial meaning-making encounter, participants address each other by making bids for their emerging ideas, points of view, questions, etc., and by seriously responding to these bids by recognizing their importance and providing their evaluations and questions (Matusov, 2019 in preparation; Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2017). Serious recognition of the other’s ideas establishes the existence the other’s creative and/or critical authorship (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2017), it gives it a life. Serious recognition of the other’s creative and/or critical ideas, opinions, desires, dreams, plans and questions is an expression of a genuine interest in the other’s voice and ideas. Such a genuine interest also opens a way to find new meanings in one’s own ideas and truths, recognize something about them that would otherwise stay invisible and unrecognized, or inspire completely new, transcendent meanings.
                Ethical ontological dialogism is rooted not only in the recognition of the authorship of the one’s own and others’ bids for meaning, but also in taking responsibility for one’s own views, ideas, desires, judgments and decisions that may result from them. Bakhtin’s motto “There is no alibi in being” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 40) expresses this dialogic responsibility, a responsibility that comes from being unique, unrepeatable, once-occurrent and irreplaceable human being, whose participation in dialogue is both acknowledged/recognized and indispensable. Bakhtin wrote,

I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else. In the given once-occurrent point where I am now located, no one else has ever been located in the once-occurrent time and once-occurrent space of once-occurrent Being. […]. That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 40)
                Ethical ontological dialogism is about recognizing the uniqueness of the participants and of each moment of dialogic meaning-making. Moreover, it recognizes the responsibility of dialogic partners to be answerable for their unique, unrepeatable and irreplaceable dialogic offers, recognitions, evaluations and judgments. For me, ethical ontological dialogism is an approach to life, to educational practice, and to the study of human meaning-making in general, including education, psychology, sociology and other human sciences.

What do you think?

Ana
References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1991). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Liapunov & M. Holquist, Trans. 1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (Vol. 8). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M. M., & Emerson, C. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (Vol. 8). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis : theory and method (Fourth edition. ed.). New York: Routledge.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically : interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Pub.

Lobok, A. (2017). The Cartography of Inner Childhood: Fragments from the book. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 5, SIa: 1-42.

Matusov, E. (2018). Ethic authorial dialogism as a candidate for post-postmodernism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50 (14), 1478–1479. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461367

Matusov, E. (2019 in preparation). Students and teachers as authors in a Bakhtinian critical dialogue.

Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2017). Dialogic authorial approach to creativity in education: Transforming a deadly homework into a creative activity. In V. Glaveanu (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research (pp. 307-325): Palgrave.

Matusov, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., & Gradovski, M. (2019). Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research art: Bakhtin by and for Educators: Palgrave Macmillan US.

Matusov, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., Kullenberg, T., & Curtis, K. (2019). Dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy (and beyond). Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 7, E20-E62. doi:10.5195/dpj.2019.272

Morson, G. S. (2004). The process of ideological becoming. In A. F. Ball & S. W. Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 317-331). Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. lxi, 287 p.

Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and Eastern European Psychology, 42(1), 7 - 97.

Vygotsky, L. S., & Luria, A. R. (1994). Tool and Symbol in Child Development. In R. Van Der Veer & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky Reader (pp. 73-98). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.



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Ana Marjanovic-Shane
Phone: 267-334-2905
Email: anamshane@gmail.com


From: "xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu" <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2019 at 12:37 PM
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: A new book: Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art: Bakhtin by and for Educators

Ana,
This looks lovely. I wonder if you might have a few moments to explain to us the notion of "ethical ontological dialogism"? I'm sure it would take an entire book to properly explain (hence, well, this book), but it would be nice if you might be able to offer a few paragraphs, or maybe even just a few sentences?
-greg

On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 9:42 AM Ana Marjanovic-Shane <anamshane@gmail.com<mailto:anamshane@gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear friends,

I am excited to announce that we published a new book: Eugene Matusov, Ana Marjanovic-Shane and Mikhail Gradovski, Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art: Bakhtin by and for Educators, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

“This book presents voices of educators describing their pedagogical practices inspired by the ethical ontological dialogism of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. It is a book of educational practitioners, by educational practitioners, and primarily for educational practitioners. The authors provide a dialogic analysis of teaching events in Bakhtin-inspired classrooms and emerging issues, including: prevailing educational relationships of power, desires to create a so-called educational vortex in which all students can experience ontological engagement, and struggles of innovative pedagogy in conventional educational institutions. Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, and Gradovski define a dialogic research art, in which the original pedagogical dialogues are approached through continuing dialogues about the original issues, and where the researchers enter into them with their mind and heart.” (Palgrave - https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137580566)
What do you think?

Ana

--
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
Phone: 267-334-2905
Email: anamshane@gmail.com<mailto:anamshane@gmail.com>



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Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu<http://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu>
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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