Thoughts on Bakhtin by Logan and Andrew

Bakhtin distances himself and his theories from the psycholinguists – who focus on the sentence – and points, instead, to the utterance, which emphasizes context, situation, and response. Thereby, he turns our attention to the sign and its constitutive functions and possibilities. This approach to semiotic systems changes the scope and focus of rhetoric from language and persuasion to signs and their socio-ideological positions. He moves us to the sign to show how the material/physical world can impact the consciousness. It is because of this that, for Bakhtin, signs participate in the construction of reality. He states, “a sign does not simply exist as a part of reality – it reflects and refracts another reality” (1211). Additionally, signs are, for Bakhtin, not only material phenomena.

They also participate in a network of interactions: “signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another…Consciousness becomes consciousness…only in the process of social interaction” (1213). For Bakhtin, it seems, even individuality is social, “nothing but the expression of a particular person’s basic, firmly grounded, and consistent line of social orientation” (1220). Furthermore, Bakhtin argues that “the organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside—in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” (1220). Bakhtin continues to question individual subjectivism through the lens of parole (the individual utterane) and langue (the larger language system). Meaning and individuality, for Bakhtin, are a process dependent on social interaction. Through those interactions, language is generative: “social intercourse is generated; in it verbal communication and interaction are generated; and in the latter, forms of speech performances are generated; finally, this generative process is reflected in the change of language forms” (1222). For Bakhtin, language is social and consciousness is borne from utterance. Signs cannot take on any meaning for Bahktin outside of “interindividual territory” (1212), so in making meaning, Bakhtin would perhaps argue that every speech act is a rhetorical act. He writes that, “A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another” (1215).

    Other scholars of rhetoric before Bakhtin have paid attention to persuasion (Aristotle), Truth (Plato, Weaver to an extent), ambiguity (Richards), human motivation (Burke), and language as a system that can be negotiated and subverted (Gates, Holmes). We see a direct connection in Bakhtin to Bitzer and the rhetorical situation: “The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine – and determine from within, so to speak – the structure of an utterance” (1215). The situation invites and constrains the utterance itself, making this understanding of rhetoric contextual and situational.

    In terms of what we’ve read for this semester, we see him being very similar to Gates, Bitzer, and Foucault the most, because of the way he pays attention to the context in which a performance participates (and its constitutive function), how he sees language as a semiotic system, and because he changes the unit of analysis for the study of rhetoric. We also see a connection with Burke’s terministic screens in that to Bakhtin, each sign “...reflects and refracts another reality,” and it may “distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth” (1211). Bakhtin’s view of the domains of ideology and signs coinciding seems to suggest the same sorts of selection, reflection and deflection as Burke’s terministic screens (because what, after all, is a terministic screen but an ideological lens?). Bakhtin’s speech genres—the “peculiarities of generic subcategories” (1229)—are reminiscent of Aristotle’s topoi, which emphasize the commonplaces from which arguments can be built. Bakhtin’s genre functions in a similar way – it formulates a starting place for an utterance and gives it a context in which it can participate. And Bakhtin’s discussion of style as “inseparably linked to particular thematic unities and—what is especially important—to particular compositional unities” (1230) returns Ramus’s insistence that rhetoric is style and delivery (as separate from dialectic). Ramus defined rhetoric partially as the study and employment of effective tropes, which seems to be what Bakhtin means by “particular thematic unities.”