It has been a long time since I've written to the list. I am still in 'new
administrator shock' ... sometime I'll write about the pathology of our
social technologies of organization ....
Meanwhile, I was happy to note that people are eager for a discussion of
Deborah Hicks' wonderful MCA article on reading the better known late
Bakhtin (dialogism, heteroglossia, intertextuality) through the very early
Bakhtin (answerability, re-accentuation, etc.).
I was quite impressed with Deborah's article, mainly for the links it made
for me to the moral dimensions of discourse, and indirectly for how it then
enabled me to cycle back to a theme that Mike raised here recently
regarding the physicality of speech-as-sound (in Goodwin's sonograms) and
more generally the bodily dimensions of communication, dialogue, etc. I
have not seen the Nishizaka article, which issue is it in?
Here is a bit of my initial response to Hicks/Bakhtin:
I am particularly impressed by the phenomenological take on B's view of
answerability, and also the more explicit moral dimensions. The notion of
answerability seems to be a key link to the later work. I connect his
'emotional-volitional shadings' (intonations, inflections, accentuations)
with some of the work of Roland Barthes (e.g. 'The Grain of the Voice' and
_The Pleasure of the Text_) and a whole more or less suppressed tradition
that takes speech as a more material and bodily phenomenon, and
communication as more frought with physicality, both with physical risk and
with the offer of physical comfort and tenderness (in fact, in Freudian
terms, more sensual/sexual as well as generally more embodied), so that the
interpersonal dimension is moral not just in an intellectual (axiological)
sense, but more fundamentally in the sense of physical trust.
Of course B. does not seem to be going particularly in this direction. His
concern in the early essays is more moral and poetic-esthetic in a view of
relationships as emotional rather than as also physical in other ways. But
emotional answerability as a form of moral responsibility is also a link to
still more bodily dimensions of interpersonal communication viewed not just
as the exchange of information or viewpoints, or even of abstract value
judgements, but as the medium within which personal relationship is forged
and conducted.
What is being addressed here is the very basic question of in what sense
all discourse, every speech act, is 'morally answerable' in the dual sense
that we are morally answerable for what we do interpersonally in the medium
of speech and that our speech invites a response in terms of its moral or
humane-relational meaning as well as in terms of its ideational content,
which prefigures Bakhtin's later pair of axiological-ideological. One
ground of moral answerability is bodily and physical: in the historical
human tradition, if I am close enough to hear you, I am close enough to be
physically vulnerable to your anger and physically receptive to your
comforting. For me moral answerability arises from our human vulnerability
to pain; co-presence always implicates these issues: threat/promise,
pain/pleasure. From the whispers of love to the screams of attack, from
soothing coo to painful shout, the sound qualities of speech belong in part
to this very basic system of meaning. The subtler effects of language, its
rhythms intonations accentuations extend the meaning possibilities that
grow out of the most basic moral answerability of all interpersonal
interaction.
B. is asking us to be sensitive to this, to read and hear language in the
context of how we support or intimidate one another, of the moral quality
of our stance toward our addressees. This is in many ways a profound shift
from the dominant view of the morality of language, which was almost
exclusively (in literary criticism of the 19th and early 20th centuries)
about the ideational content of the text: did we affirm moral views about
the world and human life. Bakhtin was asking about HOW we addressed one
another. You could affirm a moral principle in a fashion which was
aggressive and intimidating as a speech act. He was asking us to become
more aware and morally answerable for the tenor of our speech, for its
interpersonal effects. There is a pseudo-intellectual tradition, that might
be called 'adversarialism' which seeks to excuse verbal bullying by an
appeal to the truth or morality of propositional content. Bakhtin advances
our linguistic sophistication by insisting that moral answerability applies
on both counts: what is affirmed, AND how the affirmation affects humane
interpersonal relationships in the speech situation (and for written text,
more widely).
I am interested in both the emotional-bodily-material ground of social
communication and the social-moral-cultural-esthetic context of human
communicative acts. We need some sort of notion that is broader here than
just communication; what matters is clearly the enactment of relationships,
activity-as-humane at the individual, interpersonal, and cultural levels.
Hicks' analysis is wonderfully helpful in building bridges across these
too-separated levels, at the same time that it shows new directions for
theories that have already built Bakhtinian notions in.
In addition to, and maybe more obviously than Barthes, I wonder if about
the connections and relationships of this view of B. to theories such as
those of Althusser (interpellation), Goffman (footing), and obviously Vygotsky?
There is a lot of potential here for educational implications, particularly
for re-humanizing educational practice and trying to move it away from its
bureaucratic dead-end of impersonal curricula and professionally distant
teachers, to some place where it is recognized as necessary that teachers
and students have individual and consequential personal relationships in
order to scaffold learning, and where value issues again become legitimate
foci of teaching and learning. There was some discussion of this a year or
two ago on xmca in relation to the affective dimension of the zone of
proximal development and scaffolding. I raised some points then about
negative scaffolding, or destructive teaching, thinking at the time of
Bateson and schizophrenia, but Hicks also now raises these same points in
relation to Bakhtin.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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