Difference, Dialogue, and Development

A Bakhtinian World

Lakshmi Bandlamudi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317363804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Difference, Dialogue, and Development is an in-depth exploration of the collected works of Mikhail Bakhtin to find relevance of key concepts of dialogism for understanding various aspects of human development. Taking the reality of differences in the world as a given, Bandlamudi argues that such a reality necessitates dialogue, and actively responding to that necessity leads to development. The varied works of Bakhtin that span several decades passing through the most tumultuous period in Russian history, are brought under one banner of three D's – Difference, Dialogue and Development – and the composite features of the three D's emerge as leitmotifs in every chapter.

1
Introduction

Dialogue = Development

Life can be consciously comprehended only as an ongoing event, and not as Being qua a given. A life that has fallen away from answerability cannot have a philosophy: it is, in its very principle fortuitous and incapable of being rooted.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 1993, p. 56

This brief excerpt from Mikhail Bakhtin’s early writings on the philosophy of the act says so much about so many aspects of human development—what constitutes development, how development might be understood, and why certain modes of consciousness and being in the world qualify as comprehensive developmental achievement. At the same time, Bakhtin also cautions forcefully about the dangers of assuming development to be an individual affair. First and foremost, every domain of human activity within the overarching framework of life is given the dynamic thrust of movement, when Bakhtin insists that it be comprehended as an “ongoing event” and not as a given being. This living subject in a changing world is held accountable by what Bakhtin calls the “unity of answerability” to practically every entity in culture and history, including the self, and failure to fulfill this obligation of answering the other results in growth that happens to be a chance occurrence. More importantly, it becomes a rootless existence. From these few sentences in Bakhtin’s early works, we can extract the very essence of human development. But Bakhtin did not set out to theorize about human development.

For that matter, it is difficult to situate Bakhtin within the strict confines of academic disciplines. Although largely recognized as a literary theorist, Bakhtin pursued interests that went way beyond literary texts. In their authoritative biography, Clark and Holquist (1984) claim that Bakhtin really considered himself a philosophical anthropologist at heart, probing into the interconnections between texts, cultures, and histories. While his works that span several decades passing through the most tumultuous period in Russian history display incredible insights into the diversity of the world, he was not necessarily driven by a single question or an overriding concern. He was not out there to solve a philosophical riddle once and for all, nor was he an intellectual “hedgehog” digging deeper and deeper to discover some stable structures. Instead, in Bakhtin’s works, one finds a free, open-ended play of ideas going in multiple directions, expressed in a myriad of ways. This does not mean that there is no unity in the collection of his works. The unity is a “non-monologic” one—one that does not erase other voices. As Morson and Emerson (1990) point out, Bakhtin was interested in that kind of unity in which concepts or entities are connected loosely, not in a way that results in amorphousness, but the kind of connection that allows ample movement for the creative processes to emerge. If one theme unifies his works in their stages of development, in Bakhtin’s (1986) own words, it is the “internal open-endedness” of many of his ideas. In his “Notes made in 1970–71” toward the end of his life, he reflected on the seeming inconsistencies in his works and their potential for misunderstanding and says, “The unity of emerging (developing) idea. Hence a certain open-endedness of many of my ideas” (p. 155). It is very instructive for anyone interested in studying developmental processes—be it of an idea or an individual or any domain of human functioning—that Bakhtin sees open-endedness as a necessity. He further clarifies that it is “an open-endedness not of the thought itself but its expression and exposition” (p. 155). Bakhtin on top of that personalizes his methods in an almost confessional tone. “My love for variations and for diversity of terms for a single phenomenon. The multiplicity of focuses. Bringing distant things closer without indicating the intermediate links” (p. 155). In many ways this open-endedness, which in his view was the requirement for the development of an idea, in a paradoxical manner, was also an entry point for the misappropriation and misreading of his works. Those notes made toward the end of his life, although rather spotty, are profound to our concerns about development. If our focus is on the product of development and we see it as teleological and assume the path to be unidirectional, then we are left with a non-contradictory, single-voiced, and unified view of development, whereas when our concerns are with the processes of development, then we have to consider the unfinalized and unpredictable nature of developmental pathways.

In addition to open-endedness, Bakhtin had a deep fascination with differences—variations in tone, subtleties in voices, changes in time periods—in short, nothing else seemed to impress him as much as the varying shades in cultural landscapes and distinctive tones in individual voices. Perhaps few thinkers have celebrated the cornucopia of differences in the world as much as Bakhtin did. It is this fascination with variety that makes his works appealing to so many disciplines—from Slavic studies to literary criticism to anthropology to linguistics and, to a limited degree, to psychology. It may be that Bakhtin’s name is mentioned in the classrooms and corridors of every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, even if it is limited to some of his selected works, particularly his later works. It is not surprising, given that words like “plurality,” “diversity,” and “dialogue” have become fashionable even in popular discourses. Bakhtin’s appeal goes beyond disciplines—it has been absorbed by various schools of thought, often with competing ideologies, as Caryl Emerson, one of the foremost authorities on Bakhtin, observes:

Bakhtin offers something to every camp. Neo-humanists detect in him a liberal spirit and a patron saint of the new plurality and tolerantnost’; philosophers of religion have discovered a “vertical hierarchy” in his thought and a commitment to absolute values; Russian nationalists locate his roots in Orthodox spirituality.

(1997, p. 17)

Clearly, Bakhtin’s open-ended ideas invite various schools of thought to appropriate him as their own. His works are capacious enough to accommodate every angle in an idea, and every voice, however feeble, gets a fair hearing. This appeal to everyone also leaves Bakhtin in a deeply ironic situation; none understands him, at least in a comprehensive manner. He did not exactly start a “movement” or a “school of thought,” and neither did he come up with easy, analyzable tools, and, in the intellectual world, although prominent, as I. N. Fridman observes, “Bakhtin remains homeless and unattached” (cited by Caryl Emerson, 1997, in The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin). In fact, everything about Bakhtin is contentious—his intellectual roots, his personal life, his academic life (his doctoral dissertation on Rabelais caused furor then and continues to generate controversy to this day), and even his identity is in dispute, for there is considerable debate on whether Volosinov and Medvedev were separate individuals or if they were indeed Bakhtin. I draw attention to the complexities and the contradictions in Bakhtin’s works and the controversies about his works and his life, only to establish at the very outset the challenges in hearing those profound voices relevant to various aspects of human development in his incredibly insightful works that often seem repetitive and yet so highly nuanced. In giving a feel for the man, his style, and his mind, Caryl Emerson’s observations are revealing:

In place of God, Bakhtin deified the everyday interlocutor. A creature made neither for prayer nor parenting, he reigned in a world of philosophical conversations carried out over endless tea and cigarettes in small rooms in the dead of night. Bakhtin was a mezhdusoboinik (a “just-between-youand-me-nik”). For him, the intimate voice and the chamber space was all.

(1997, p. 5)

Given this characterization of Bakhtin’s world, one must then enter the chamber space with a preparation and willingness to listen, listen to the voices in the texts that Bakhtin is engaging with, listen to the conversations that Bakhtin has with those voices, and listen to Bakhtin’s voice while he is ruminating about the deep meanings of the text. In all his works, Bakhtin recommends the auditory over the visual—his preferred method to grasp the nuances of culture and text. Bakhtin asks us to fine-tune our ears not only to hear the contents of the voice but also the fluctuations in tone. For a thinker who insisted on the unsystematizability of culture and the unfinalizability of meaning-making ventures, it is only understandable that his works demand an unorthodox approach. It is with this not so clearly defined method that I approach his collected works, which despite their internal differences could be brought under one banner of three D’s—Difference, Dialogue, and Development. The composite features of these three D’s will emerge as leitmotifs in every chapter in this book.

Differences Necessitate Dialogue

In both popular and academic cultures, there has been a great deal of emphasis on similarities—in the former it is to achieve the ideal of unity and harmony in society with the motto being, “let us focus on what is common among all of us” to affirm our collective humanity, and in the academic world it is the call of “Universalism” that tries to search for the “deep truth”—the abstract points of similarities—while treating differences as trivial surface manifestations. Differences are seen as irrelevant and unimportant and considered a distraction that pulls one away from constructing an ideal society, or they are treated as interferences in our search for “truth” that is considered stable, rational, and objective. What is ignored in the ideal and rational world is the main focus for Bakhtin—the variations in the world. A merger of voices and an obliteration of identities to make a homogeneous whole, for Bakhtin, is epistemologically flawed, leading to false consciousness. To him, differences are an immediate reality that cannot be transcended, but they create the necessity for the other, making individuals truly interdependent. That’s what makes us social animals. Bakhtin (1990) asks, “What would I have to gain if another were to fuse with me?” It is the “other” with its distinct voice occupying a unique position in time and space that serves as a mirror to reflect and reveal the uniqueness of my voice and my special position in time and space. This distinction between self and other cannot be erased in an attempt to gain a roving perspective on reality, which, in Bakhtin’s view, is really a myth. Bakhtin insists that one needs the other only because each one gets only a partial glimpse of reality and hence needs the “other” to offer another perspective. For Bakhtin, heterogeneity cannot be subordinated to homogeneity and uniformity cannot be a sought-after ideal. Differences to him are not surface disturbances to be ignored in search of deep, stable structures; instead, they are rich, real, and necessary for developing not only the rudimentary cognitive functions but also the finer sensibilities to develop an aesthetic vision.

Bakhtin’s fascination with variety and plurality must not be construed as a kind of philosophical relativism. If anything, he probed into how “one” can become “many”—one word and its ability to convey a whole range of meanings when strung together with other words; one action or experience that takes on different meanings and significance in the course of life; one private thought that assumes different meanings when expressed for public consumption depending on the listeners. How can a “word” or an “utterance” have different meanings? For Bakhtin, the answer lies in the purpose and context of their usage and their contact with other words and utterances and who the interlocutor is at a given moment. Not only is the variety enjoyed by words, but also the absence of words—those pauses, occasional stammers, and stutters also enjoy the same privilege of variety in interpretation. Think about all the meanings that “silence” may assume—a necessity when deep thoughts are being churned, a screen while searching for the right word or phrase, an interval for mining the ore of ideas in order to resume their public display, a mask for ignorance, a sign of wisdom, a consent, or a snub, a form of tyranny or a strategy for defiance, a remedy for raging temper, an exercise to develop a steady mind, a symptom of dumbness, or an indication of a contemplative soul in search of its Creator. Silence may be a place for the exhausted word to retire, but the meaning of silence remains inexhaustible in an unfinalized form. It is this variety that fascinated Bakhtin and thus, to understand the meaning of words and utterances or actions, one needs to be extra sensitive to the social context, the historical climate, and the correspondence or the dis-correspondence between the speaker and the listener.

Thus, what we see here is Bakhtin’s emphasis on the plenitude of differences in the world—voices, customs, meanings, and so on are not merely meant for empty celebration, which so often is the case in our globalized existence, where every institution is keen on celebrating the multicultural world without grasping the philosophical depth of differences in the world and their loose interconnections. For Bakhtin, differences are an ontological reality and must be taken seriously in theorizing every branch of human activity, be it epistemology, ethics, or aesthetics. As diverse as Bakhtin’s writings are, they are built primarily on the fundamental reality of differences—the one in many and many in one—so that difference is not at the expense of unity. It is the difference that necessitates a dialogue.

Dialogue Leads to Development

Development as a theme or as a topic seldom appears in Bakhtin’s works; in fact, the very word is rarely used. But we can hear him hint at it in his celebration of Dostoevsky’s novels and Goethe’s works, or when he traces the life of a novelistic hero, or in his philosophical essays on architectonics—a study of how entities relate to each other—or in the nature of the relationship between the author and the hero that could create an aesthetic vision. In all these seemingly disparate bodies of works, Bakhtin does come across as a patron saint of dialogue, because in every topic he probed into he saw the versatility of dialogic relations—their ability to create innumerable potentialities, and their vitality in social relations without subordinating one voice to the other, and their unique capacity to mate the individual with the surrounding environment—all these findings clearly suggest an immense developmental potential in dialogic consciousness. But how, then, does one sift out some concepts of development from his works that did not set out to do that? Can we pull out some metaphors from his works to examine how the idea of development plays out in his thinking? The approach clearly has to be unconventional: one must simply accept Bakhtin’s invitation to enter his world to hear the voices of consciousness that he plays from the texts that he is engaging with, only to hear them slowly emerge from ordinary impressions of the world to artistic thinking to aesthetic vision. This movement is by no means linear; it is full of zigzags and coils. In Bakhtin’s early works on architectonics and the philosophy of the act, he makes a more than compelling case for what constitutes aesthetic vision, even while pointing out the factors that inhibit the achievement of this heightened consciousness. About differences and dialogue, Bakhtin had much to say, but only through a circuitous route can one link them to human development. One must be willing to look in the most unusual of places in Bakhtin’s world to find something precious to our concerns in developmental psychology.

Bakhtin saw dialogic relations as both a feature of fundamental awareness of self and other in society and as a mark of exceptionally creative thinking. It is only through the encounter with the other that one comes to recognize oneself in full depth—one’s position in the world, the unwritten script that culture has provided to conduct oneself in the world, and the unseen history one has inherited, and this heightened awareness is not possible unless one is face to face with the other (Bakhtin, 1986; RQNM). The revelation that occurs during this encounter may have a different impact on individuals. In one case, the individual could feel exposed because the invisible aspects of self and culture are revealed and might even feel threatened by the other, and hence the individual begins to cope with this anxiety by constructing a very rigid view of culture. The individual may construct “imaginary homelands” and unambiguous cultural practices or use culture as an excuse for all his or her actions. In short, the forces of culture and history, which by their very nature are dynamic and changing, are treated as rigid and frozen by individuals, which results in a monologic view of themselves and their surrounding world. In Bakhtin’s view, it would be pernicious to claim that you are the way you are because your culture and history have showcased you in a certain fashion. Bakhtin was not a cultural determinist. But what impressed him was that the revelation that occurs during the dialogic encounter has the potential to produce a deeper understanding of self, operating in an ever-changing cultural and historical process. This awareness creates a unique opportunity for the self to be creative in picking and choosing aspects of culture and history. This allows individuals to release themselves from the trappings of culture and history. The individual is neither disembodied from the cultural soil nor is lost in the cultural flux. Likewise, he or she feels neither uprooted from history nor burdened by the errors of the past. Herein lays the potential for growth and development in dialogic relations.

Narratives on Development and Tales about Children

The central trope in the narratives about growth and development is that the movement is systematic, sequential, linear, and unidirectional, and, in order to trace this trajectory—assumed to be universal—we write stories about where we came from or what we started out with and how far we have come. We designate “the child”—not actual children living in a specific culture at a unique historic moment—but “the child” the “epistemic child”—as the principal character and construct the plot around various domains of development—cognitive, emotional, social, and so forth. The core assumption in the vast majority of developmental narratives is that all of humanity proceeds in the same direction and differences are only in the ranking. Thus, developmental psychologists tell us stories, grand stories, about children, with claims of scientific verifiability. That being so, we take “the child” as a starting point to trace our own history, our developmental pathway, ignoring the fact that childhood itself has had a very long history in presenting different images of childhood. Throughout history the image of the “child” has never been stable: it changed from a “miniature adult” during medieval times to an absolute nothingness—a tabula rasa in the hands of John Locke, only to be shaped by the world. The world has a tendency to put you in shackles, says romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, and as a challenge to the Lockean subject, he created Emile as an emblem of a child born free, and who is naturally self-sufficient and curious and bound to develop according to nature’s plan and timetable. While Rousseau created a fictional character to impress upon the world the natural path of development, the psychologists of the twentieth century claimed to have discovered the “laws of development” in their children. Jean Piaget told us the story of the epistemic child, citing detailed observations he made with his children’s behavior. He told us that the world is wide open for this ever-inquisitive child to explore, only to construct the laws governing the world in his mind. This heroic epistemic child of Piaget is forever laboring at the construction site called “the mind,” facing challenges from the world t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Dialogue = Development
• 2 The Novel and the Hero: Developmental Narrative and the Developing Subject
• 3 Creative Living and Aesthetic Vision: Cultivating Finer Sensibilities
• 4 Carnivalization of Consciousness: A Catalyst for Development
• 5 Authoring the Self—Answering the Other: Epistemological Necessities and Ethical Obligations
• 6 Dialogic Method for Human Sciences: Between the Message Giver—Message—Messenger—and Message Receiver
• 7 Differences as the Will to Power and Freedom to Choose
• References
• Index