Who’s Mikhail.M Bakhtin ?
Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction…
Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin (1895–1975), the Russian literary critic, semiotician, and philosopher, is widely recognized as one of the central figures in social theory, and his influence has been felt in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, communications, rhetoric, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language.
A. Early Life: The Russian Revolution and the Bakhtin Circle
Born into an aristocratic family in Orel, Russia, at the end of the 19th century, Bakhtin came to champion those who were less fortunate than himself, always maintaining a sense of the broad scope of human life as he undertook his many theoretical projects. Coming of age at the time of the Russian Revolution, he attended the University of Saint Petersburg during the First World War, where he specialized in the study of classical literature and philosophy, while maintaining a lifelong interest in language and politics. During the 1920s, Bakhtin came into contact with fellow intellectuals Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev, now known collectively as the Bakhtin Circle, who were working as instructors for the People’s Educational Department in Vitebsk. In time, they came to share a deep commitment to the philosophy of language as a key to social interaction, human psychology, and larger political processes. Though some have credited the works published under Voloshinov’s name to Bakhtin as the sole author, it now appears that the influence may have been mutual. In contrast to the structural linguistics of the time, as exemplified by the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, Bakhtin and his colleagues maintained that language was first and foremost a product of social interaction. This sense of language was often lost when studying formal features such as phonology or syntax in isolation, following the model of examining the records of dead languages (like Latin) with no living speakers. In looking closely at the social foundations of language, Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 43 Bakhtin identified a short list of major philosophical principles that are now standard in the social sciences and humanities, including dialogism, voice, heteroglossia, ideology, speech genres, the utterance, polyphony, double-voiced discourse, intertextuality, the chronotope, and the carnival.including dialogism, voice, heteroglossia, ideology, speech genres, the utterance, polyphony, double-voiced discourse, intertextuality, the chronotope, and the carnival.
B. The Dialogic Principle (or Dialogism)
A central image that recurs throughout Bakhtin’s work is that of the simple act of engaging in faceto-face dialogue. Throughout his vast corpus of theoretical writings, this fundamental human context of communication was never far from view — an image that appears even in one of his first essays, “The Author as Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” originally written in the 1920s. By starting with this basic image of the face-to-face encounter, Bakhtin was able to confront the profound asymmetry of communication, given that each person in an exchange inherently sees things from a very different point of view, literally seeing what is behind the other person’s head or, more generally, what the other person may not even begin to see because it is beyond his or her direct experience. For Bakhtin, dialogue does not imply a conversation among equals but refers simply to the social nature of speaking, where one “aims” one’s word at an audience, even in situations where there are substantial differences in power — where one party refuses to listen. Thus, for Bakhtin, communication is a double-sided act and the audience holds as much power as the author when it comes to shaping the meaning of a text. In the Dialogic Imagination (1981), Bakhtin establishes a general case for a principle of dialogism, which captures the sense in which language emerges from the inherently social process of aiming one’s words at an audience. This principle applies even to cases of inner dialogue, where one responds to oneself while thinking or where the author gauges the potential reactions of some imagined audience, not yet present. As a general process, the dialogical principle can even be extended to more remote cases, such as the extended “dialogue” between authors writing at different times — a concept now known as intertextuality among Bakhtinian scholars such as Julia Kristeva.
C. The Place of Ideologies in Society
Another central idea for Bakhtin was the concept of ideology, which was inspired by the works of Karl Marx, particularly Marx’s emphasis on the false consciousness of the proletariat, who accepted a religious worldview that kept them from seeing the conditions of their oppression. From these political and religious roots, Bakhtin extended Marx’s concept of ideology to encompass any “system of ideas” that served as a basis for arriving at a shared understanding from scientists and their models to authors and their distinctive visions. In this way, Bakhtin observed, social interaction is necessarily charged with ideology, since a backdrop of common assumptions is a precondition for engaging in communication even if these views are challenged and refined in the course of an exchange. This image of ideologies entering into conflict sets the stage for one of the maxims of Bakhtinian studies the idea that dialog is unfinalizable, given that communication is fundamentally about the exchange of opposing points of view, which can never be fully resolved. Utterance, Voice, and Double-Voiced Discourse Staying close to the interactive source of discourse, the utterance occupied a place of central importance in social theory for Bakhtin as an instantiation of language use, or a given person’s word, as it is embedded in a particular context, including the submerged ideologies used by the actors to interpret those words. Thus, a simple color word like “black” or “white” can take on racial overtones and even incite a riot when uttered in an ideologically charged moment, such as a rally. A closely related concept is that of voice, or variable ability to be heard when communicating, based on the speaker’s relationship to the audience, including the actor’s power or lack thereof. Both concepts utterance and voice flow from the dialogical principle, given that the word is embedded in social interaction and charged with ideologies. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1983), Bakhtin introduces the concept of double-voiced discourse, where a person speaks through someone else’s words as an author imbues the speech of a character with intentions of his or her own.
