DIALOGISM AND POLYPHONY
by Maurizio Lazzarato
translated by Alberto Toscano
Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the
most important and most original philosophers of the twentieth century. Due to
the Soviet repression that persecuted him from the end of the twenties onwards,
his work remains poorly known. Bakhtin is commonly classed as a literary critic
and linguist, but, as he himself affirmed: ‘I am a philosopher’. His work has
yet to be investigated from this angle.
Bakhtin only worked under
acceptable conditions between 1919 and 1929. Even during this short period,
however, he was not able to publish all that he wished to because of the
communist censorship. His collaborators, Medvedev and Volonisov, were murdered
in the midst of the Stalinist purges – the first in prison and the second in a
camp – whilst Bakhtin himself was spared on the grounds of his chronic illness
and sent into exile in Kazakhstan, from 1929 to 1936. We have thus lost, due to
the numerous changes in his places of exile, two ‘philosophical’ books of which
only a few dozen pages remain.
The work of what will later come
to be called the Bakhtin ‘circle’ was banned. It was only at the end of the
sixties that he was rehabilitated (together with Medvedev and Volonisov) and
his writings were once again made available. We can thus say that the Russian
revolution crushed this new image of thought which, in my view, was far more
faithful to the event of the revolution than the intellectual misery of
Leninism and Trotskyism – the only things we inherited from this great upheaval.
Bakhtin’s philosophy can still
speak to us because it poses the problem of the relationship between life and
culture, between life and art, a problem that traversed the entire beginning of
the century, and the twenties in particular. The solution given by Bakhtin to
this problem is markedly distinct from the solution of the ‘avant-gardes’.
According to Bakhtin, in order to
‘overcome’ the separation and opposition between art and life, between art and
culture, the elaboration of a ‘first philosophy’ is required: The philosophy of
event-being. Art and life cannot and must not tend towards identification, as
was the case with the Situationists, for example. But, in order that the
enriching, excessive and
productive difference between art and life be able to express
itself, it is necessary to possess a theory which, whilst maintaining the
irreducible differences between these two dimensions, articulates them in the
achievement of the event.
Bakhtin is interested in art and
in language, first and foremost for philosophical reasons. In the linguistic
act and in artistic creation we approach the achievement of the event. Through
language and art, we come to possess an image of the components (of expression)
and the participants of the event.
The speaker in the linguistic act
and the author in the aesthetic act find themselves in a relation of analogy.
Daily practical communication has
the character of an event; the most insignificant of verbal exchanges
participates in this continuous formation of the event. In this formative
process the life of the word is intense, even if different than the one it
enjoys within the work of art. The functions of the author, the material, the
hero and the spectator are all re-defined by the comprehension of action as
event. One can speak of a philosophy and an aesthetic of relation, but the
latter must be understood as an evental relation.
Event/Language/Sign
Bakhtin introduces a new
conception of being and world as event (and not as something that exists ready-made).
But this first philosophy implies a theory of language and of meaning, because
the event expresses itself through these two dimensions.
‘When studying man, we search for
and find signs everywhere and we try to grasp their meaning.’ [1]
The physical action of man must
be understood as an act, but the act itself cannot be comprehended outside of
the virtual sign that it expresses.
‘A thing, as long as it remains a
thing, can affect only other things; in order to affect a personality it must
reveal its semantic potential, become a word [or a sign], that is,
assimilate to a virtual verbal-semantic [or semiotic] context.’ [2]
The evental relation is therefore
a relation of meaning. But, unlike in linguistics or semiotics, action cannot
be constrained by and understood within language and the sign – as many
thinkers tried to do throughout the sixties and seventies (from his first
writings onwards, Bakhtin remained wholly outside of the logic of
structuralism). Bakhtin thereby introduces the problem of language and signs as
fundamental, anticipating what will come to be called the ‘linguistic turn’ in
philosophy (from Wittgenstein to Habermas). But, unlike the philosophy of
language, he denies that the true, the beautiful and the just can be elements of
language. Bakhtin substitutes the categories of the philosophy of language with
those of meaning and value: The meaning of what is said and the evaluation of
the speaker.
Meaning entertains a very close
relationship both with the sign and with language, since it is through them
that it expresses itself. But language and the sign do not contain meaning.
Meaning does not exist outside of the proposition that expresses it, but
between the one and the other there is a difference in kind.
The existence of meaning is not
that of words, but it is not that of things either. Is the world in which ‘we
live, act and create composed of matter and psychism’ – of words and things
(according to the famous title of one of Foucault’s books)? [3] As Bakhtin
asks: ‘What is the work of art composed of?’ And he responds: ‘Of words,
propositions, chapters, unless it is of pages, of paper.’
With meaning, we are confronted
with another – altogether specific – stratum of being, which Bakhtin calls
‘over-existence’ (and Deleuze calls ‘extra-being’). In this way Bakhtin returns
to an old philosophical tradition, that of the Stoics, for whom meaning is an
‘incorporeal’ action at the border between words and things, matter and mind.
‘Meaning cannot (and does not
wish to) change physical, material, and other phenomena; it cannot act as a
material force. And it does not need to do this: it itself is stronger than any
force, it changes the total contextual meaning of an event and reality without
changing its actual (existential) composition one iota; everything remains as
it was but it acquires a completely different contextual meaning (the semantic
transfiguration of existence).’ [4]
This event-world is not just the
world of being, of what is already given, of the ready-made. No object, no relation,
is ever simply already there, totally present. In the world of event-being, the
task – or the goal that must be attained – is always given as well. In
Bakhtin’s words: ‘One must, it is desirable’.
The specificity of the word
within the event stems from the fact that it participates fully in the event’s
achievement by breaking up what is given as ready-made.
‘Similarly, the living word, the
full word, does not know an object as something totally given: the mere fact
that I have begun speaking about it means that I have already assumed a certain
attitude toward it – not an indifferent attitude, but an interested-effective
attitude. And that is why the word does not merely designate an object as a
presenton- hand entity, but also expresses by its intonation my valuative
attitude toward the object, toward what is desirable in it, and, in doing so,
sets it in motion toward that which is yet-to-be-determined about it, turns it
into a constituent moment of the living, ongoing event.’ [5] In the event, meaning
is therefore expressed either by language or by the sign. But we can find the
meaning of a phenomenon only if we know the force that appropriates the
phenomenon by expressing itself within it. This force is that of will and
sensation, and expresses itself through the voice and its tonalities.
Meaning is therefore very closely
related to evaluation, to the ‘emotional-volitional tone’, to the responsible
affirmation of a world of value. [6] The history of a word or of a sign is the
history of emotionalvolitional forces, of evaluations that seize these forces
in order to express themselves through them.
Affirmation and Evaluation
For living consciousness,
existence presents itself as event; it is in the event that consciousness
orientates its activity.
But the orientation of thought
and action in event-being takes place through the ‘emotional-volitional tone’ –
through evaluation. Evaluation expresses a singular manner of evaluating, of
distributing the true and the false, the beautiful and the just.
These values in turn are not
determined in relation to language (qua system) but rather in relation
to reality, to the speaking subject, to other utterances, and, in particular,
to those utterances that posit them as values, as affirmations of the
true, the beautiful, the just. It is only through these evaluations that the
potentialities of language become realities.
For what reason are any two given
words put together? Linguistics only explains why they can be put one beside
the other. It is not possible to explain why they are effectively put together
if we remain within the limits of linguistic virtualities. Social evaluation
must intervene in order to transform a grammatical virtuality into a concrete
fact of the reality of language.
In linguistics, as in every
social science, there is no necessity but only an empty possibility, an
abstract convention.
This affirmation-evaluation
expresses itself in the tonality of the voice coming from the body and in the
tone coming from consciousness (the tonality of consciousness). Between words
and things and between the subject and the object Bakhtin does not simply
introduce the incorporeal of meaning, but also a pre-individual life of the
body and the brain.
The Ego and the Other
In order to grasp the
significance of this theory of the event, we must take into consideration what
Bakhtin calls the ‘architectonic principle of the real world of action’: The
relationship between ‘myself and the other’. Right away, we must note that this
relation is not that of the subject/object within theories of knowledge (Kant),
of Hegelian dialectics (a relation that has haunted the human sciences as well
as Marxism), or even that of a simple intersubjectivity that limits itself to
making constituted subjects interact with one another. For Marx, Capital is
indeed a relation and not a thing, but it is a relation that is not expressive.
The limit of all those theories which think relation under the subject/object
form is the fact that they do not contain a theory of expression.
In the ego/other relationship,
the second term expresses the existence of ‘possibles’ for the first; it
thereby structures the world of perception, affection, thought and objectivity.
The ego is the development or explication of the possibles that the ‘other’
envelops within its existence, the process of their realization in the actual.
‘Only the other makes possible the joy that I will experience in encountering
him, the sadness in leaving him, the pain that I would suffer in losing him.
All emotional-volitional values are only possible in relation to an other. They
give the life of the other an evental weight that my own life does not have.
This signifying eventality is not accorded to my own life: my life is what the
other’s existence envelops in time.’
The relation between myself and
the other is a relation between possible worlds, between two ‘others’ who have
affirmed – from their emotional-volitional point of view – a different world.
There is a difference in
principle between myself and the other, but this difference is neither of a
logical order, as in Hegelian dialectics, nor of a psychological one. Rather,
it is a difference of an evental order. The relation between myself and
the other is established on the plane of values and it is affirmed from an
emotional-volitional perspective. It is this relation which is productive,
enriching, excessive.
With the definition of the event
in terms of relations between possible worlds we enter into a Leibnizian
universe in which the ego and the other are configured as monads (‘singular
centres’, as Bakhtin calls them) that express ‘all possible being and all
possible meaning’ in accordance with singular points of view. But, unlike for
Leibniz, here the monads – the different possible worlds – are not closed.
Therefore, they are not co-ordinated amongst each other by ‘pre-established’
harmonies. In the philosophy of the event, possible worlds and monads
communicate with each other: We pass from divine harmony to ‘polyphonic’
composition, according to another musical metaphor dear to Bakhtin.
In this evental relation we find
the singularity of the affirmation and the expression of the ego, at the same
time as we encounter the impossibility of defining oneself independently of the
other(s). This evental relation to the other is constitutive of the ego. The
latter is not identity, unity, but rather difference, alterity. It is only in
this universe of monads and their virtuality that the Rimbaud’s words can
resonate: ‘I is an other’.
In order for my lived experience
– my internal flesh – to become my own object, I must surpass the limits of the
value-context wherein my lived experience effectuates itself: ‘I must become
the other of myself’.
The limits between what is proper
to me and what belongs to another are difficult to define. It is at the border
between the ego and the other that individuation takes place. This is of
particular importance for the definition of the author (of the utterance and
the work).
Dialogism and the Author
On the basis of this theory of
the event, Bakhtin establishes a difference in kind between language (or
grammar) and enunciation, between the proposition and the utterance. He
extracts a new sphere of being, unknown to linguistics and to the philosophy of
language, which he calls ‘dialogical’ – the sphere of questions and responses.
Within this sphere, relations are relations of meaning that express themselves
through language and signs but they are not, as we know, reducible to these two
dimensions.
The dialogical relation is a
specific relation that does not fall under a logical, linguistic, or
psychological system. Dialogical relations presuppose a language (or a
semiotic) but in the system of language (or in the system of signs) they do not
exist.
‘They constitute a special type
of semantic relations, whose members can be only complete utterances (either
regarded as complete or potentially complete), behind which stand (and in which
are expressed) real or potentially real speech subjects, authors of the
given utterances.’ [7]
Only in the dialogical sphere can
there be affirmation – the emotional-volitional tonality that transforms the
empty possibility of language or the sign into an affirmation of meaning. Only
in the dialogical sphere do the forms and possibilities of language become
concretely real. Ordinary language functions and actualizes itself only in this
sphere, the sphere of utterance.
‘Thus, emotion, evaluation, and
expression are foreign to the word of language and are born only in the process
of its live usage in a concrete utterance.’ [8]
Dialogical relationships are also
possible under other signifying relations (not only verbal ones). It suffices
that these phenomena be expressed in a semiotic material. In order to become
dialogical, logical and semantic relations must embody themselves, must enter
into another sphere of being; they must become words (i.e. utterances) and have
an author, the creator of the utterance in which his or her own valuations are
expressed.
An author of the utterance is
therefore necessary, a singularity embodying the empty possibility of language,
of knowledge and of psychological processes so as to affirm their necessity.
But what sort of author are we dealing with? Certainly not the author that
functions as the ontological support of the rights of intellectual property. On
the one hand, the author’s rights over the word are limited, since, as we know,
he or she is confronted with the other (with the word of the other). On the
other hand, the author is not already there, he or she is constituted in and by
the event, in relation to his or her own specific difference vis-à-vis the
other.
The other is simultaneously
different from and immanent to me.
The Word of the Self and the Word
of the Other
Bakhtin translates the evental
relation between myself and the other into a theory of enunciation, conceived
as the evental relation between the words of the self and the words of the
other. The author (the speaker) is constituted and operates at the border, at
the limit between the singular (ego) and the multiplicity of others. This
relationship does not simply hold between individual and collective, since the
individual only exists as a relation immanent to the other, and the collective
– being composed of singularities – is not an abstract entity (such as human
being, man, community, society, and so on). It is on this border that creation
is possible, because creation takes place ‘outside the subject’, outside of me,
in the evental relation with the other, with the words of the other.
The author (the speaker) of the
utterance is not a mythical Adam who speaks for the first time. The author
lives in a world in which the word exists in three guises: as the neutral word
of language which belongs to no one, as the word of the other belonging to
others, and as a word of the self that the self has appropriated – forced to
become its own word – by means of the capture of a foreign word.
But the word in the dialogical
relation is never a neutral word of language, empty of intentions and
uninhabited by the voice of the other. The author receives the word of the
other (beginning at infancy, when it is receved from the mother) filled with
the intonations – the emotional- volitional affirmations – of others. My own
expressivity finds each and every word already inhabited. To speak is to enter
into a dialogical relationship with the other’s words, a relationship that is
also one of appropriation. This relationship has to do, first and foremost, not
with the meaning of words, but with the other’s expressions, intonations and
voices. To whom does the word belong? To me, to others, to no one? Can one be
the owner of the word in the same way that one is the owner of a thing?
‘The word (or in general any
sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located
outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word
cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own
inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those
whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have
their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one).’ [9]
The border between myself and the
other can genuinely be regarded as passing through my own words. In my words, all
of the utterances which appropriated them during the course of their respective
histories can be heard resonating. Not only do the voices of the past resonate,
but all the future voices as well, all the voices that will come to speak these
words. The other is not present merely in words which have already been
uttered, but is also an immanent and constitutive element of every utterance to
come.
The listener is an internal
participant of the act of linguistic creation. The others, those for whom my
thought becomes – for the first time – a real thought, are not passive
listeners; they are active participants in verbal exchange. Others are
co-creators. It is for this reason that verbal exchange cannot be understood as
a transmission of information or as a communication ruled by a code. Modern
theories of information and communication fail precisely because they do not
manage to grasp verbal and communicational exchange as event.
According to Bakhtin there is no
ready-made information. Information is created in the very process of
communication. Information also cannot be understood as being transmitted from
one human being to another; instead, it is constructed in the process of
evental interaction as an ‘ideological bridge’. At base, semiotics proceeds in the
same fashion. As Bakhtin says: ‘In the living word the message is created for
the first time in the process of communication and there is, in fact, no code.’
The New Image of Thought
We are confronted here with a new
image of thought, since ‘thought is not what you think it is’ (Nietzsche).
Thought is an activity that expresses itself in an assemblage of evental
relations between the body, the incorporeal, the brain and the other (qua envelope
of possibles). We have seen how the utterance and constitution of the ego takes
place at the border between the self’s words and the words of the other.
Thought is constituted in the same fashion, since the relationship between the
word and thought is an extremely close one. In this new image of thought the
idea is not a subjective and psychological-individual formation with a
permanent residence in the human skull: ‘It is inter-individual and
intersubjective, and its sphere of being is not individual consciousness, but
the relation of meaning. The idea is a living fact that creates its own border
in the dialogical encounter between two or more consciousnesses.’
Thought clears its own path
through a labyrinth of words and gestures originating in others. The entire
material of real thought is set out before us as a series of orientations or
evaluations. The path of an embodied thought does not go from one thought to
another, but from one orientation to another. Thinking means installing oneself
within a dialogical relation, experimenting new orientations-evaluations by combining
them with each other.
To put it in a paradoxical way:
One does not think about thoughts, but about points of view, expressions,
voices.
And, just like with words, the
problem of the ‘rights’ of all those who participate in the event of thought
poses itself. Who does the idea belong to?
Polyphony
According to Bakhtin, art grasped
this paradigm shift – the ‘first philosophy of event-being’ and the new image
of thought, action and subjectivity that it implies – long before other
disciplines. For Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky’s work is the one that translates
dialogism, the relation with the other, and the plurality and multiplicity of
words into a specific aesthetic: Polyphony.
Dostoyevsky is the first artist
to ‘dialogise’ everything that he encounters, forcing both object and subject
to undergo radical transformations, and entering into a dialogue of the senses
with them. Dostoyevsky would thus be at the origin of a ‘Copernican revolution’
in art, since in his work the author no longer holds any primacy in relation
either to the characters or to the contemplators-spectators.
Dostoyevsky considers both
characters and contemplators-spectators in the second person singular; all of
them participate, with the same rights, in the unpredictable creation of the
event.
The work of art can enter into
the event that constitutes our world and our existence if it defines itself as
event, if it assumes a dialogical form: Polyphony.
The author is the one who makes
the work live as event, in the midst of a world that is itself understood as
event.
We can thus say that the work of
art is a living and signifying aesthetic event, situated in turn within that
singular event which is existence; the work of art is not a thing, it is not a
purely theoretical object of cognition bereft of the meaning of eventality and
the weight of values.
The work of art is neither a
thing nor a psychological product, but rather an action exerted upon the
relations of the senses. The work of art is a relational event.
The artist must confront the
dialogical sphere because it is the sphere of the relations, questions and
responses that concern meaning, because it is here that the confrontation takes
place between evaluations, between different affirmations of the true, the
beautiful and the just. It is here that the artist finds the resistances that
push him or her to create.
The artist must surmount the
‘purely literary’ resistance offered by the old artistic forms, because at the
basis of the creative act ‘there is the determining function of artistic struggle
with the ethical and cognitive aim of life and its signifying tenacity; this is
the point of highest tension for the creative act (the rest are only means)…’
In the work we must be sensitive both to the resistance of the world’s evental
reality and to the creative act which is itself also an event, since the
passage from the possible to the embodiment of meaning is not a simple
realization. It is the production of something new.
The Paternity of Bakhtin’s Works
The concepts of polyphony and
dialogism can help us to resolve a curious problem in this man’s troubled life:
the paternity of a number of works originating in Bakhtin’s circle. In the
thirties, three books and several articles were published under the signature
of Bakhtin’s three collaborators: Medvedev (a critic), Volonisov (a
philosopher) and Kanaev (a biologist). For practically forty years, nothing
more will be heard either of Bakhtin’s works or of those of his collaborators,
swallowed up by the Stalinist purges. For all those years, socialist realism
alone had right of place in the Soviet arts.
From the middle of the sixties
onwards, with the new edition of his book on Dostoyevsky, interest was
rekindled in Bakhtin (the only surviving member of his circle) and his works.
Increasingly insistent rumours circulated according to which even the works
signed by Medvedev, Volonisov and Kanaev should really be attributed to Bakhtin
himself. The latter, when directly interrogated, always allowed doubt to hover
over this question: sometimes claiming paternity, other times attributing the
works to his collaborators. We do, however, have some written accounts by
Kanaev recognizing that, even though the article on vitalism bears his
signature, it is really Bakhtin’s. Moreover, we have the testimony of Bakhtin’s
wife, claiming that she made fair copies of most of the books in question. In
any case, even though requests were officially made by the VAAP (the Soviet
agency for the protection of the rights of the author) he never tried to claim
legal paternity of these works. Different reasons have been put forward to
explain this imbroglio: the fact that the communist censorship of the time
forced Bakhtin to proceed hidden behind masks; the sometimes openly Marxist
character of the theses advanced in these books; the claim that Bakhtin, in so
doing, would have done a favour for his collaborators, who had aided the
publication of the book on Dostoyevsky, which he held particularly dear.
Although all of these contradictory justifications contain a kernel of truth, I
think we can begin to explain this strange matter of signatures through
Bakhtin’s own theory of enunciation and of dialogism (polyphony). From the
point of view of his theory of enunciation, an entire book and a single word
have the same status: they are both utterances. For Bakhtin, a single word is
already a ‘public place’ in which different evaluations, points of view, and
voices confront one another: ‘Each word presents itself as a miniature arena in
which social accents with contradictory orientations both intersect and
struggle’ (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language).
From the polyphonic composition
of these different accents a new meaning is born. The books in question can
therefore be understood as an arena, a public place, in which different orientations
of thought confront one another: the voice of Bakhtin and his theory of the
event, those of Medevedev and Volonisov, more Marxist in their concern with the
public, social and collective nature of language, as well as the voices of
those past and contemporary authors to which Bakhtin and his circle address
themselves and with which they enter into dialogue. All of them have rights
over ‘ideas’ and all participate in their constitution. For Bakhtin, thought is
forged in a dialogue/confrontation that takes place between this multiplicity
of voices, of points of view, of conceptions of the world. Instead of
subjecting – like the Marxists – artistic and theoretical production to
authority (Marx, Lenin, etc.), Bakhtin thinks that, with capitalism, we find
ourselves in a new situation: ‘Not only men and their actions, but ideas
themselves were wrenched away from their closed hierarchical grids and
established a familiar contact within an absolute dialogue (which nothing
limits).’ This absolute dialogue without limits is also the condition
presupposed by the production of Bakhtin’s own works. The author has lost the
authority of which he or she was the bearer in previous epochs and which is
still conserved in the eymology of the word.
An author is indeed necessary,
but this author has cut a path through the throng composed of the voices of
others, and it individualizes itself at the border between the ego and the
other. This enunciative singularity is always precarious, unstable, and open to
an interminable process, since the author is but one link in the production of
meaning.
A signature of the work is indeed
needed, but this signature is not the mark of the subject, of the sovereign
individual who legitimates the property of these works, but an operation of
singularisation that affects a multiplicity of voices. Singularity and
multiplicity, instead of the opposition of individual and collective.
NOTES
[1] M.M. Bakhtin, Speech
Genres & Other Late Essays , trans. by Vern W. McGee, ed. by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1986),
p. 114.
[2] Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays , p. 164 [translation modified, words in brackets are the
author’s].
[3] Les mots et les choses –
Words and Things – is the original French title of Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things.
[4] Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays, p. 165.
[5] M.M. Bakhtin, Toward a
Philosophy of the Act , trans. by Vadim Liupanov, ed. by Vadim Liupanov and
Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), pp. 32-33.
[6] Toward a Philosophy of the
Act, p. 33.
[7] Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays, p. 124.
[8] Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays, p. 87.
[9] Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays, pp. 121-122.