Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Rhetorical Theory 1b: Mikhail M. Bakhtin
A. Stalinist Monologue and Bakhtinian Dialogue
1. "[In the 1930s,] Soviet society was passing several milestones on
the route of progressive Stalinization, including the centralization
of all cultural institutions, the cult of personality, the heightened
power of the secret police, the chauvinism, and the purges. Such trends
necessarily alarmed someone of Bakhtin's basic assumptions and principles.
But the institutions of Stalinism were by no means all that troubled him.
He was most disturbed by what was happening to that key element in
his philosophy, language. The official language had become homogenized
and dominated all aspects of public life. Most literature and literary
scholarship were mere subfunctions of the official rhetoric and myths.
Official pronouncements were absolutely authoritative and final." (267)
2. "Thus, the rhetoric of Stalinism established a vertical ordering of
reality, which was simplified to a binary contrast between everything
ordinary and 'low,' on the one hand, and, on the other, everything
different, extraordinary, and 'high.' Stalinist epistemology was a crude
form of Neo-Platonism in which only the elect, specifically the leaders,
had access to the higher order of reality.
Bakhtin's response to Stalinism is organized around the
dichotomy common to all his earlier writings, the distinction between
official culture and the culture of the folk. In the case of Rabelais'
world, the official culture was that of the Roman Catholic Church and the
Holy Roman Empire, while the folk culture was that of the lower orders in
the carnival and marketplace. The function of folk culture is not just
to debunk authority figures and received notions, as a healthy antidote
to the dullness and dryness of official culture. Folk humor amounts to
considerably more than mere playful irreverence, for the folk assume
willy-nilly the role of a bulwark against repression. The peculiarity
of carnival laughter is its 'indissoluble and essential relation to
freedom.'" (308)
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1984), 267, 308.
3. "The Dostoevsky book also seems to have an implicit political agenda,
which is anti-Marxist. Obviously, in the Soviet context such a view
could not be expressed directly. But Bakhtin comes remarkably close to
doing so in his lengthy attacks on 'dialectics' (in the Soviet Union,
as every schoolchild knows, Marxism-Leninism is officially identified
with dialectical materialism) . . . . Bakhtin also
explicitly criticizes Hegelianism and utopianism, which are indeed
permissible targets in the Soviet Union; but together with his critiques
of dialectics, these passages triangulate the unnamed opponent, Marxism,
to which we may draw 'dotted lines.'" (267)
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 267.
4. "The unified, dialectically evolving spirit, understood in Hegelian
terms, can give rise to nothing but a philosophical monologue. And the
soil of monistic idealism is the least likely place for a plurality of
unmerged consciousnesses to blossom. In this sense the unified evolving
spirit, even as an image, is organically alien to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's
world is profoundly pluralistic . . . ,
while the image of a unified spirit is deeply alien to him." (26-27)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,
ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 26-27.
5. "Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices
(the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and
individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments
from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract
consciousness—and that's how you get dialectics." (147)
M[ikhail]M. Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71," in Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
trans. Vern W. McGee, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 8
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 147.
B. Bakhtin on Rhetoric, Utterance, Heteroglossia
1. "In rhetoric there is the unconditionally innocent and the
unconditionally guilty; there is complete victory and destruction of the
opponent. In dialogue the destruction of the opponent also destroys that
very dialogic sphere where the word lives." (150)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71," in Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
trans. Vern W. McGee, University of Texas Press Slavic Series,
no. 8. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 150.
2. "Rhetorical genres ['the rhetoric of the courts,' 'political rhetoric,'
'publicist discourse'] possess the most varied forms for transmitting
another's speech, and for the most part these are intensely dialogized
forms . . . . [But] in most cases the
double-voicedness of rhetoric is abstract and thus lends itself to formal,
purely logical analysis of the ideas that are parceled out in voices,
an analysis that then exhausts it." (353-54)
3. "Rhetorical genres possess the most varied forms for transmitting
another's speech, and for the most part these are intensely dialogized
forms." (354)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series,
No. 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 353-54.
4. "The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech
communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects,
that is, a change of speakers." (71)
5. "The sentence itself is not correlated directly or personally with
the extraverbal context of reality (situation, setting, pre-history) or
with the utterances of other speakers; this takes place only indirectly,
through its entire surrounding context, that is, through the utterance
as a whole." (73-74)
6. "Any utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication." (84)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres," in Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
trans. Vern W. McGee, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 8
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 71, 73-74, 84.
7. "'Life is good.' 'Life is good.'" (183)
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and
trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 183.
8. "Bakhtin used the term dialogue in at least three distinct
senses . . . . In Chapter One, we discussed dialogue
as a global concept, as a view of truth and the world; we think of this
as the third sense of dialogue. At present we are concerned with what
we call the first sense of dialogue, according to which every
utterance is by definition dialogic. Later in the present chapter, we
will consider the second sense of dialogue, which allows some utterances
to be dialogic and some to be nondialogic (or monologic)." (130-31)
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 130-31.
9. "This active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia
determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less
a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralizing system of a
unifying language.
Every utterance participates in the 'unitary language'
(in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes
of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying
forces)." (272)
10. "The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a
particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot
fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by
socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an
utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social
dialogue." (276)
11. "The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented
toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it
and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in
an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time
determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and
in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any
living dialogue." (280)
12. "Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is
heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past,
between differing epochs of the past, between different
socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools,
circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These 'languages' of
heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new
socially typifying 'languages.'" (291)
13. "For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an
abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world. All words have the 'taste' of a profession, a
genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a
generation, an age group, the day and hour." (293)
14. "Thus an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center,
naively immersed in an unmoving and for him [or her] unshakable world,
nevertheless lived in several language systems: he [or she] prayed to
God in one language [Church Slavonic], sang songs in another, spoke to
his [or her] family in a third and, when he [or she] began to dictate
petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he [or she] tried
speaking yet a fourth language [the official-literate language, 'paper'
language]. All these are different languages, even from the
point of view of abstract socio-dialectological
markers . . . . As soon as a critical interanimation
of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon
as it became clear that these were not only various different languages
but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems
and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these
languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and
quiet with one another—then the inviolability and predetermined
quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively
choosing one's orientation among them began." (295-96)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 1
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272, 276, 280, 291, 293,
295-96.
15. "The concept of 'dialogized heteroglossia' is often confused with
the concept of heteroglossia, so it would be helpful to explore just
what Bakhtln means when he says that languages may be dialogized. He
clarifies his point by asking us to consider a hypothetical person,
who probably could not exist: an illiterate peasant, for whom languages
are not dialogized. We may imagine that this peasant uses several
languages—prays to God in one, sings songs in another, speaks
to his family in a third, and, when he needs to dictate petitions to
the authorities, employs a scribe to write in a 'paper' language. Our
hypothetical peasant employs each language at the appropriate time;
his various languages are, as it were, automatically activated by these
different contexts, and he does not dispute the adequacy of each language
to its topic and task.
By contrast, we may also imagine that another peasant
is capable of regarding 'one language (and the verbal world corresponding
to it) through the eyes of another language.' He may try to approach
the language of everyday life through the language of prayer and song,
or the reverse. When this happens, the value systems and worldviews in
these languages come to interact; they 'interanimate' each other as they
enter into dialogue. To the extent that this happens, it becomes more
difficult to take for granted the value system of a given language. Those
values may still be felt to be right and the language may still seem
adequate to its topic, but not indisputably so, because they have been,
however cautiously, disputed.
In fact, this dialogizing of languages is always
going on, and so when words attract tones and meanings from the
languages of heteroglossia, they are often attracting already dialogized
meanings. Having participated in more than one value system, these words
become dialogized, disputed, and reaccented in yet another way as they
encounter yet another." (143)
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 143.
C. Bakhtin on Authoritative and Internally Persuasive Discourse
1. "The tendency to assimilate others' discourse takes on an even deeper
and more basic significance in an individual's ideological becoming, in
the most fundamental sense. Another's discourse performs here as no longer
as information, directions, rules, models and so forth—but strives
rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations
with the world, the very basis of our behavior; it performs here
as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive
discourse." (342)
2. "Both the authority of discourse and its internal persuasiveness
may be united in a single word—one that is simultaneously
authoritative and internally persuasive—despite the profound
differences between these two categories of alien discourse. But
such unity is rarely a given—it happens more frequently that an
individual's becoming, an ideological process, is characterized precisely
by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative
word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of
teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other
internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by
no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society
(not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not
even in the legal code. The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of
these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine
the history of an individual ideological consciousness." (342)
3. "When someone else's ideological discourse is internally persuasive
for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open
up. Such discourse is of decisive significance in the evolution of an
individual consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological
life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from
which it cannot initially separate itself; the process of distinguishing
between one's own and another's discourse, between one's own and another's
thought, is activated rather late in development. When thought begins
to work in an independent, experimenting and discriminating way, what
first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse
and authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a rejection of those
congeries of discourses that do not matter to us, that do not touch us."
(345)
4. Internally persuasive discourse—as opposed to one that
is externally authoritative—is, as it is affirmed through
assimilation, tightly interwoven with 'one's own word.' In the everyday
rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours
and half-someone else's . . . . More than that,
it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other
internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just
such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available
verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and
values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is
not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that
dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to
mean." (345-46)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 1
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342, 345-46).
D. Bakhtin on Cultural Diversity
1. "A dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or
mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they
are mutually enriched." (7)
M[ikhail]M. Bakhtin, "Response to a Question from the Novy Mir
Editorial Staff," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee, University of
Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 8 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986), 7.
2. "What is the relationship between culturology and transculture? I
call culturology the discipline that investigates the diversity of
cultures and their common underlying principles. Transculture, however,
is not just a field of knowledge; rather, it is a mode of being at the
crossroads of cultures. A transcultural personality naturally seeks to
free his or her native culture—be it Russian, Soviet, or any
other—from self-definition and
fetishism . . . . A culturologist is a
'universalist,' participating in a diversity of cultures. This
presupposes some emotional openness and a scope of knowledge that can
free a person from the limitations imposed by any particular cultural
heritage. Transculture offers, moreover, a mentality capable of
therapeutically benefiting those possessed by manias, phobias, and
obsessions attendant upon their belonging to a specific cultural
group." (296-97)
3. "In the United States, the traditional emphasis
that is placed on the rights and dignity of individuals naturally
produces recognition of a variety of cultures proceeding from different
nationalities, races, genders, ages, and so forth. Since the individual
is the ultimate minority, it is logical that the individualistic and
pluralistic tendencies in America support a multiplicity of separate
and distinct minority cultures.
On the other hand, the Russian philosophical
tradition places a premium on wholeness, which has played a number of
cruel tricks on the events of Russian history and spawned a political
totalitarianism that ironically tried to envelop all of life into a
single ideological principle. This consequence determined the specific
boundaries of Soviet transculture in its attempt to attain a free
multidimensional totality opposed to totalitarianism. Thus, the notion
of transculture differs from American ideas with their acceptance of
many separate and distinct cultures that may exist side by side without
taking the slightest interest in one another." (301)
Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism
and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar,
Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995), 296-97, 301.
E. Julia Kristeva on Intertextuality
1. Intertextuality. "Horizontal axis (subject-addressee) and vertical
axis (text-context) coincide, bringing to light an important fact: each
word (text) is an intersection of word (texts) where at least one other
word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin's work, these two axes, which he
calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly
distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigor is in fact an
insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and
transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality
replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at
least double." (66)
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice
Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980), 66.
2. Transposition. "To these we must add a third 'process'—the
passage from one sign system to another. To be sure, this process
comes about through a combination of displacement and condensation,
but this does not account for its total operation. It also involves
an altering of the thetic [from the Greek thetos, 'placed']
position—the destruction of the old position and the
formation of a new one. The new signifying system may be produced with
the same signifying material; in language, for example, the passage may
be made from narrative to text. Or it may be borrowed from different
signifying materials: the transposition from a carnival scene to the
written text, for instance. In this connection we examined the formation
of a specific signifying system—the novel—as the result of
a redistribution of several different sign systems: carnival, courtly
poetry, scholastic discourse. The term inter-textuality denotes
this transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another;
but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of
'study of sources,' we prefer the term transposition because it
specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands
a new articulation of the thetic —of enunciative and denotative
positionality. If one grants that every signifying practice is a field
of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality),
one then understands that its 'place' of enunciation and its denoted
'object' are never single, complete, and identical to themselves,
but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way
polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence—an
adherence to different sign systems." (59-60)
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret
Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 59-60.
3. "For Bakhtin, 'language for the individual consciousness, lies on
the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language
is half someone else's.' The word becomes one's own through an act of
'appropriation,' which means that it is never wholly one's own, is always
already permeated with traces of other words, other uses. This vision of
language is what Kristeva highlights in her new term, intertextuality,
and it brings us back to the issues of double-voiced discourse and speech
genres, an area which in essays such as 'Discourse in the Novel' is given
a new definition through the concept of heteroglossia. Given
that hetero stems from the Greek word meaning 'other' and that
glot stems from the Greek for 'tongue' or 'voice,' we can define
heteroglossia as language's ability to contain within it many
voices, one's own and other voices." (28-29)
Graham Allen, Intertextuality. New Critical Idiom (London:
Routledge, 2000), 28-29.
4. Illustration: Introducing the Book
BoreMe: http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2007/introducing-the-book-p1.php
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ (Please search Introducing the Book.)
Latest Update: 2011-09-04
