Bakhtin & Others- Katie & David

For Bakhtin, language and rhetoric are essentially social. Like Weaver, Bakhtin sees language use as inescapably ideological (1211). However, while the use of language is ideological, he insists over and over that language itself is a neutral vehicle—perhaps a resource to be drawn upon (1213).

The idea of genre did not originate with Bakhtin, and in fact appears as early as Aristotle, who divided rhetoric into deliberate, forensic, and epideictic genres according to the tenses: future, past, and present, respectively. Bakhtin’s approach to genre, however, is more granular: he sees genre as “relatively stable types of…utterances” (1227).  Moreover, genre is linked to style in that genres allow and require certain kinds of language (1229). 

Bakhtin departs from Aristotle in seeing language as essentially dialogical. He even states that “there is no such thing as thinking outside of orientation toward possible expression” (1218). Moreover, instead of viewing rhetoric as a speaker’s address to a relatively passive audience, Bakhtin insists that all “listeners” are in fact speakers—even if they are not speaking the same moment, they are reacting, evaluating, formulating a response (1233). It is difficult, then, to draw a hard distinction between rhetor and audience. Everyone is rhetor; everyone is audience.

The approach to language here picks up Foucault, Gates, and Richards. Like Foucault, Bakhtin sees discourse as always responsive to a historical flow of other discourse (see Foucault’s nervousness about “entering the discourse” on p. 1460).  Like Gates (actually, informing Gates), he allows for the possible for verbal re-appropriation, where a word can mean what dictionary says it means, what it means to another person, and what it means to me (see Bahktin p. 1244, and Gates p. 1555-1556).  Like Richards, he finds meaning to be contextual, but seems less concerned by the words surrounding a given unit of discourse (Richards p. 1294)), but is more concerned with the context as the real-world situation in which utterance occurs (1243).

This idea that dictionary meaning, meaning making by others, and meaning making by the individual captures essentially what Bakhtin means by heteroglossia. The Russian word for heteroglossia, pronounced “Raz-no-rech-nost” literally means different dialects, or polyphonic, made up of different voices even if with the same language. The social context of language, as David mentions earlier, is an essential tie to the idea of heteroglossia, and how the word or utterance that Bakhtin speaks to plays off cultural or social movements, meaning different things at different times. Words are embedded in the social world (channeling Richards), and need the audience and rhetor to make meaning out of the empty vehicle that makes up the letters and sounds of the word itself, or what Bakhtin calls “A stable system of normatively identical forms...merely a scientific abstraction.” (pg. 1223).

The idea of primary and secondary utterances really reminded me of Foucault and how Foucault speaks to the idea that while objects (language) remains constant in form, the “surfaces on which they appear” allows the audience and rhetor to delineate and analyze their meaning. One sentence said at one point in time to a specific audience may carry different meaning and power said, even if the same way, to a different audience at a different time. Bakhtin makes a similar point when speaking about primary and secondary utterances, where he says that the primary utterance, or the first time something is said, can be used a second time, but because it is out of context and with a different audience, may not be perceived the same way. However, Bakhtin makes it clear that while utterances work in this fashion and have a social context and a rhetor that is already aware of audience, words do not work this way. David mentions earlier the “real-world” concept of the utterance, which also, as he mentions, speaks to Richards as well.