Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time

Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education

Craig Brandist, Michael Gardiner, E Jayne White, Carl Mika, Craig Brandist, Michael Gardiner, E Jayne White, Carl Mika, Craig Brandist, Michael E. Gardiner, E Jayne White, Carl Mika

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000082302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

This book takes the works of Mikhail Bakhtin as its inspiration in the contemplation of the potential of dialogic scholarship for philosophy of education. While Bakhtin's work has been widely received in educational studies in recent years, the academic literature does not sufficiently convey the sophistication of his cultural-historical works.

Selected works on the limits and perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin are presented in the book. In doing so, the contributors seek to interpret the work of the Bakhtin Circle in a complex contemporary world. Layering and drawing from the many ideas explored by the Circle during their collective lifetimes and those that influenced their work, each chapter offers a different dimension of thought concerning issues facing societies remote (or perhaps not so remote) from the world of post-revolutionary Russia.

In the post-2008 era, during which financial crises have morphed into global recession and which characterise growing social inequities, widespread political instabilities and further environmental decline and resource depletion, what is needed more than ever is a twenty-first century Bakhtin, one that is occupied with the distinct challenges our times present to all of us. The individual contributors to Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time aim to contribute to a revisioning and reassessment of Bakhtin, through a diverse series of engagements with both his legacy and future promise. In contemplating Bakhtin in the fullness of time, historical perspectives and contributions must be encountered in a contemporary understanding that will contribute to philosophy of education today.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Tawhiao’s Unstated Heteroglossia: Conversations with Bakhtin

CARL TE HIRA MIKA & SARAH-JANE TIAKIWAI

Abstract

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a language that is emotional, innately tied to a static mooring of pre-rational thought. Yet, in this paper we argue that a Maori metaphysics complicates the delineations between primordial and novelistic language. Indeed, there is in a Maori worldview the notion that a term contains to it both postcolonial and mythical traces at once. Thus each apparently primordial term is tinged with the realities of colonised experience, even if they seem concrete and self-referential. In this paper we address those multiple voices in light of Bakhtin’s philosophies on heteroglossia, and argue that the accusation of ‘myth’ in relation to Tawhiao’s sayings is possible yet does not accommodate the metaphysics founding the sayings. We speculate that there is a form of freedom in Tawhiao’s words that exists regardless of our interpretation but that calls to be unearthed through an open reading. Sir Robert Mahuta, prominent Tainui leader, is one who has already indicated the need for a heteroglossic reading of Tawhiao. We then move to a description of the Waikato-Tainui College for Research and Development as it attempts to carry out this heteroglossic reading of Maori political and metaphysical text and utterance.

Introduction

It will undoubtedly come as no surprise that there has thus far been very little dialogue between indigenous philosophy and Bakhtinian thought, for they do not instantly occur as mutually responsive. Their remarkably divergent metaphysics show themselves within their attitude towards utterances, for instance: Bakhtin tends to think of the poetic register as engaging with just one type of language, but for the Maori writer or reader, the one is never alone despite appearing to be. On the contrary, it is always attended at once by all other voices and is thus forever heteroglot. Central to this fundamental difference is what Maori think of as an active continuum of time within one event. A metaphysical collapse of events and entities within an utterance can be expressed in a number of ways for Maori, with the term ‘waa’ perhaps the most tantalising for that phenomenon. ‘Waa’ means space–time at once and still more fundamentally gestures towards the phenomenon of ‘always-already’. An adhesion between an object and its infinite potential with other objects takes place for the indigenous reader within text, even if they occurred at different times, resulting in an immediate multitude of voices at once. A piece of writing is hence forever attended by other entities that do not necessarily announce themselves, and one result is that the text should intervene heavily in any self-certainty of the reader’s. Here, a contrast with Bakhtin offers unexpected but exciting theoretical possibilities for the Maori reader, quite apart from those that are disclosed on a conventional reading of the page. To illustrate, we attend to one of the sayings of the second Maori King Tawhiao, The aim is to excavate for the potential of Tawhiao’s sayings beneath its poetic delivery, to unearth the very materiality of the entities that he refers to.

While this article does not dwell so much on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope but more sustainedly on his philosophies around heteroglossia, it is necessary to note at this early point that Bakhtin’s philosophies on the dual nature of the former—its ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (1981b, p. 84) as well as its ability to be ‘artistically expressed in literature’ (ibid.)—appear to chime well with a Maori view of the collapse of space and time. Despite that exciting potential of Bakhtin’s chronotope, however, Maori do hold steadfast to what is probably—for Bakhtin, at least—an excessively supernatural view of time and space. Any utterances along the lines of past and imperceptible voices being as active in text as the vocal one would undoubtedly be thought of as mythical. It would therefore be tempting for the Maori writer to forget Bakhtin due to that glaring difference in metaphysical thought, but we can concede to a very important idea of his and moreover utilise it to speculate on our notion of the utterance. His proposition that we wish to visit here is that poetic discourse is unhelpful: for him, it predisposes itself to political dominance and a certain lack of penetrability, where other ways of speaking cannot have access to a community. Our response in this article is that it is indeed undesirable if the utterance is read superficially as merely poetry without any other phenomenon innate to it. We argue, in synchronicity with Bakhtin’s opposition to the mythical nature of poetic discourse, that any reading of a Maori utterance that consigns it to the poetic doesn’t do justice to the multiple registers of every entity referred to in the text. Furthermore, in accordance with Bakhtin, we suggest that that one register can socially and politically dominate a community. We propose that Bakthin’s central disdain for poetic discourse needs to be kept in mind for the Maori reader of text: our argument here refers back to Tawhiao as much as Bakhtin because we aver that Tawhiao wanted the Maori recipient of his sayings to move beyond their self-evidence and towards a state of heteroglossia themselves. In both Tawhiao and Mahuta, who was pivotal in carrying out the wishes of Tawhiao much later by establishing the Waikato-Tainui College for Research and Development, lies the potential to consistently unearth the voices of the human and the so-called supernatural in any one utterance or text.

‘Mythical’ Text and Tawhiao

The second Maori King Tawhiao provided leadership for many of the iwi/tribes of New Zealand who aligned to the King Movement, and his resistance to various colonial impositions is well known among many Maori. He may well have been acutely aware of the arrival of a completely different metaphysics when he offered his sayings, but he assuredly did not concede to it. Given his attempts to repel colonisation in its physical form—notable among these are the land confiscations—it is much more probable that he deliberately embedded a number of layers of meaning and voices within what appears to be straightforward utterance. Well aware of the burgeoning impact of imperialism, and in some measure feeling responsible for buffering his people from it, he was in the vanguard of Maori strategists—among others such as Rua Kenana, Te Whiti, and Te Puea (Tāwhiao’s granddaughter)—who combined metaphysical intent with poetry to lift the morale of their people as well as explicitly answer back to colonisation. As Mahuta (1990b) points out:

The twenty-odd years Taawhiao and his followers spent in isolation provided them with ample time to meditate and speculate on their fate. It was during these fateful times that many of the ohaoha or tongi (sayings) attributed to him emerged. These sayings provided a philosophical and ideological base from which his followers attempted to seek salvation. (p. 12)

Interestingly, often the physical deeds of those counter-colonial tacticians, including Tawhiao, receive most attention, when in fact it is their ability to enshrine meaning within their everyday, more banal, actions that calls to be recognised. The discourse of physical heroism that seems to dominate much text may be due to the deference of the writer to rationalistic ideas of description, in which it is much harder to enunciate the full ontological given of an utterance or an action if only the grammar of conventional rational language is at one’s disposal. Very hard to describe, Tawhiao’s sayings are thus perhaps better left alone as perfectly clear, uncomplicated and delineable from anything prior or pending: they are poetic devices that inspire further rhythmic thought, and although we can only view them as poetic, we are still allowed to admit that they tell an important story in that register. If they are read in that (we soon argue, dim) light, then it appears King Tawhiao wants to be self-sufficient and authoritative, albeit with a musical beat.

That reading thus evinces a mythicality that keeps the reader stuck in Tawhiao’s self-sufficient prose. It cannot be denied that the objects to which he refers may indeed be interpreted as if they are pre-rational and indivisible from their language. One example of this poetic flavour to his speech, in which the terms appear to be self-referential, can be found in the following:

Maaku anoo e hanga i tooku nei whare. Ko te taahuhu e hiinau ko ngaa poupou he mahoe, patatee. Me whakatupu ki te hua o te rengarenga, me whakapakari ki te hua o te kawariki.

I shall build my own house, the ridgepole will be of hinau and the supporting posts of mahoe and patatee. Those who inhabit that house shall be raised on rengarenga and nurtured on kawariki. (Mahuta, 1990a, p. 16)

Highly metaphorical and poetic, the fragment appears to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a ‘language … [that] is under the power of images [which] fetter the free movement of its intentions’ (Bakhtin, 1981a, p. 369), and thus, to those unfamiliar with this time of upheaval, it is impregnable. In this sense of the mythical, as Bakhtin (and Cassirer (1953) also) would have it, the terms are inseparable from the objects to which they refer, and there is hence the ‘absolute domination of language by mythological thought’ (Brandist, 1997, p. 21). Reminiscent for Maori of the assumptions that certain influential individuals throughout colonisation have held about Maori thought and knowledge, Bakhtin’s and Cassirer’s valorisation of the ‘significative function’ is important for one very precise reason: to the indigenous reader, it replays a deeply embedded, but not necessarily shared, Western focus on rationalism.

For Cassirer, mythical thinking is an evolutionary step in the direction of scientific law. In his own particular control of mythical thought, Cassirer argued in his eponymous work that the philosophy of symbolic forms was concerned in the first instance with the fact that ‘primitive’ peoples cling to the emotion that comes with the object that is not reflected on, and they hence cannot distance themselves from the world of appearances (Friedman, 2011). This latter tendency of thought is, on its own, unproductive, but it is an auxiliary one for that which follows. The next step engages with the ability to bring an object to a standstill within the categories proposed by Kant, by which the real object is conceived as distinctive from its presentation. This stage still does not reach the ultimate of scientific inquiry into an object, though, and it is at this following, third dialectical point that humanity is able to represent the object without the restraints of ‘sensible intuition’ and as adhering to ‘the relational-functional concept of universal law’ (ibid., n.p.). Monoglot speech for Bakhtin clearly accompanies the first stage of poetic mythology, and is opposed to heteroglossia. With that primitivism of thought, one language over all others is preferred (Ivanov, 1999). Bakhtin here refers to the ‘folk-culture’ of the Middle Ages, where the church’s authoritative discourse, characterised by what Bakhtin calls centripetal force, sets out to maintain its ongoing influence. As with Cassirer, Bakhtin sees that a community that does not differentiate between language and the phenomenon being talked about is one that is rendered impotent. The unitary language of authority is one that resides in that first, primal conception.

One can immediately see the repercussions of a Cassirerean/Baktinian reading for Tawhiao’s fragment. The mythical interpretation of Tawhiao would suggest that he is dealing entirely with the world of the object as total, and is confronted by the emotional entity that is the world. A lack of distance, discernible through this reading of Tawhiao’s proverb, prevents Tawhiao from fully divorcing himself from the dichotomies in which the object is, as such, ‘there’ and not arrangeable into some rational perspective. The fragment potentially reveals that the self cannot stop escape speculating on the thing-in-itself, or, worse still, acknowledging its continual and material influence. This esoteric way of talking comes forward most obviously in his listing of the elements of the house as well as in his mention of the house itself. In synchronicity with the meaning of Bakhtin’s critique of mythology and poetry, Maori metaphysics catches the self in a constant reformation of primordiality, in which the perceiver is not able to escape the real object, and forever remains tied to the object without distance. We may indeed, in line with a strict approach to Bakhtin’s notion of myth, think in this immediate way that Tawhiao’s utterances are particularly in need of some sort of ‘destruction of any absolute bonding of ideological meaning to language, which is the defining factor of mythological and magical thought’ (Bakhtin, 1981a, p. 369).

The Metaphysical Heteroglossia of Tawhiao

The Chaotic ‘Always-Already’: Waa

A more expansive reading of Maori approaches to text, though, undermines the rationale for that dismissal of Tawhiao’s saying, but a discussion on one of the metaphysical tenets of Maori thought is necessary to move beyond a view that he is speaking mythically. One term, ‘waa’, is best known for its encapsulation of both space and time (Mika, 2015). Even where it is not explicated, the phenomenon manifests inherently. Certain of Baktin’s terms, such as ‘chronotope’, are similarly not described by any particular rules but and nevertheless influential as a basis for literature (Scholz, 1998). Interestingly, for the Maori Bakhtinian, Basso offers some brief but striking observations on the time–space phenomenon of Apache narratives, in conjunction with the chronotope. Bakhtin’s chronotope, according to Basso, is brought to life in stories about ‘place’—or, more concretely, about specific locations and landmarks. Time and space converge on these terrains to the extent that (and here he quotes Bakhtin) ‘time takes on flesh and becomes visible … likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time and history’ (Basso, 1996, p. 62). Chronotopes in Basso’s explanation do more than abstractly symbolise the community; they actively give form to the state of being of its participants, immersing them in the landscape and in a set of events that are at once brought to the fore within the territory of the tribal members. Basso notes in this light that ‘[t]he Apache landscape is full of named locations where time and space have fused and where, through the agency of historical tales, their intersection is “made visible for human contemplation”’ (ibid.). There is hence a twofold phenomenon at work for Basso: the primordial notion of time and space, and then humanity’s ability to speculate on the landscape of that initial fusion.

For Maori, the self is also tied to time and space, with the latter manifesting continuously within the self. Similar to Kant’s ideas on a priori time and space, waa is inescapable for the Maori self; the writer, unaware of space and time as he or she might be, is caught up within its invisible template. The difference from Kant for the Maori th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Bakhtin in the fullness of time: Bakhtinian theory and the process of social education
• 1 Tawhiao’s Unstated Heteroglossia: Conversations with Bakhtin
• 2 Bakhtinian Bildung and the Educational Process: Some Historical Considerations
• 3 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque
• 4 Bakhtin and the ‘general intellect’
• 5 Dialogic Ruptures: An Ethical Imperative
• 6 Bakhtin and the Russian Avant Garde in Vitebsk: Creative understanding and the collective dialogue
• 7 Bakhtin and Freire: Dialogue, dialectic and boundary learning
• 8 Bakhtinian Dialogic and Vygotskian Dialectic: Compatabilities and contradictions in the classroom?
• 9 ‘Are You ‘Avin a Laff?’: A pedagogical response to Bakhtinian carnivalesque in early childhood education
• Index