Overview
Bakhtin’s rhetoric centers around his concept of dialogue, particularly in terms of its generative, social, and contextual qualities. By generative, we mean not only that dialogue is a source of invention, but it also generates genre and style. All rhetoric, or dialogue, happens in order to garner a response from an audience, and the nature of that audience depends on the social context in which the dialogue takes place.
For Bakhtin, dialogue is the on-going exchange of utterances that draws upon previously existing ideologies, reflects upon present ideologies and shapes future ideologies. He distinguishes between sentences and utterances by saying that words and sentences are made up of units of language, while utterances are units of speech communication (1235). In this way, sentences, or units of language (i.e. words) are not required in making a rhetorical exchange. He also calls these utterances “elements of a closely linked interaction—i.e. the genres of speech performance and human behavior and ideological creativity as determined by verbal interaction” (1222). In this way, dialogue and action take place within genres as dictated by and negotiated with social interaction. Utterances are described by Bahktin as unique units of speech--the meaning of each unit is dependent upon the context or theme that surrounds it. But also, Bahktin explains that these utterances are negotiated and responded to after the utterance has been finalized and received as a whole.
In connecting him with the other theorists, our group agreed upon the following three examples:
Making Meaning
Bakhtin resonates with Richards when Bahktin emphasizes how signs rely on context the socio-material world in which physical objects are imbued with ideological meaning. For example, Bakhtin uses the Soviet hammer and sickle insignia to demonstrate how two objects “devoid of any special meaning” can, in a specific context, “possess a purely ideological meaning” (1210-1211). Richards also agrees with the importance of context in creating meaning when he explains that “different types of contexts supply the meaning for a single utterance” (1286). Bakhtin emphasizes how the addressed or audience participates in shaping the meaning of an utterance. In this way, Bakhtin points out how the “exterior” (social milieu) influences shape meaning as opposed to Richards, who mostly focuses on the “interior influence” (i.e., individual’s consciousness).
In Burke, ambiguity is the resource for making meaning. But in Bahktin, there seems to be something different at play. He describes words as “neutral sign[s]” that each have individual meanings. And while those meanings are dependent on history and the social negotiation of them, they are still neutral in that their meanings aren’t crystallized until placed into an utterance. Within the utterance, individual meanings coalesce with one another to form its theme, which is inherently ideological.
Screens/Reality
Bakhtin says that “a sign does not simply exist as a reality—it reflects and refracts another reality” (1211). This relates to Burke’s idea of the terministic screen, or how our experiences are filtered through selections, reflections and deflections of reality (Burke 1341). He says, “… the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather to another” (Burke 1341). Bakhtin also says that signs are “ideological products”; without them, “there is no ideology” (1210). In this way, we can think of ideologies as Bakhtin as connecting to Burke’s screens. Furthermore, as signs and screens reflect reality, both theorists recognize the existence of a reality outside of a specific communicative context.
Superstructures
Bakhtin defines an ideological reality as “the immediate superstructure over the economic basis.” He also mentions that the “individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs” (1213). Here, dialogue is similar to Foucault’s discourse in that they are both utterances exchanged beneath an ideological superstructure. Though he does not discuss much about power source directly, the idea of a social edifice does point to the fact that a dialogue could contribute to a social hierarchy.
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