Toward an embodied account of double-voiced discourse: The critical role of imagery and affect in Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination

1 Introduction

In Bakhtin’s dialogic epistemology, addressivity operates as a double-voiced discourse even within the individual word. It amounts to our capacity to anticipate the comments of others since our discourse is intimately dependent on the discourse of others. In a dialogic existence, individuals must be able to fulfill the functions of both self and other. As the capacity to be both perceiver and perceived, addressivity is the condition that allows us to take in account “the apperceptive background of the addressee’s perception of my speech” (Bakhtin 1986: 95). This capacity is paramount to the literary imagination and the ability to mentally project consciousness in the novel. Take for example, the exchange between characters in Orhan Pamuk’s (2004) novel Snow, which effectively provides us with a literary illustration of the “field of answerability” (Morson 1986: 6) as the site of intersubjective understanding. As Pamuk’s poet protagonist Ka contemplates the consciousness of his longtime adversary and former schoolmate Muhtar a “potential dialogue” (Bakhtin 1981: 324) unfolds to demonstrate in true Bakhtinian fashion that “one’s own inner dialogue” is “the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee” (Volosinov 1973 [1929]: 86). Pamuk writes:

After he hung up the phone, the two men were silent, like two peeved children with nothing to say to each other, and as they sat there Ka imagined their discussing all the things that had happened to them during the twelve years since they’d last met.

First he imagined each describing what was on his mind: Now that we’ve both been forced into exile, without having managed to achieve much or succeed at anything, or even find happiness, we can at least agree that life’s been hard!

(Pamuk 2004: 53)

In this brief excerpt, we read how Ka dialogically authors a unified version of their joint existence. As readers, we do not find it difficult to negotiate the intersubjective life of Ka’s mind because like Ka, we, too, are not just conscious of having a consciousness, but that our consciousness is also conscious of the consciousness of others. But Pamuk’s novel also demonstrates that the apprehension and evaluation of intersubjective encounters demand that we move beyond a metalinguistic understanding of existence and recognize how the evocation of emotions and mental imagery allow us to cognitively engage with events remote in time and space. For example, Muhtar’s new found Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric as the head of the Prosperity Party evokes within Ka the sudden image of his first political encounters during their bourgeois days at the lycée. Twelve years earlier, both he and Muhtar would have found despicable the kind of tactics that would have one man denounce another as a police informer – tactics which Ka, in a surge of anger, felt certain his longtime acquaintance was now about to deploy. Here, Ka accesses sensory images not fully accounted for in subvocalized or inner dialogue to consciously evaluate his situation and judge his next move. In this article, I draw on Paivio’s (1986, 1991, 2007) dual coding theory supported by recent neuroscientific accounts of embodied mind and consciousness to argue that despite Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian emphasis on the body, dialogism does not fully acknowledge the critical role of the senses and direct sensorimotor experience in forming nonverbal imagery fundamental to an intersubjective existence. Moreover, in outlining the nature of the mind and the theorized role of mental imagery throughout western philosophy, I intend to demonstrate how Bakhtin’s adherence to Enlightenment aesthetics in Art and Answerability precludes a necessary appreciation of the biological basis for empathy as it emerges from the dynamic interrelation between self and other and as a pre-condition for understanding how one also exists as an other for the other.

A growing body of neurophysiological-neuropsychological evidence in support of embodied theories of cognition (Cree and McRae 2003; Lieberman 2002; Martin et al. 2000; Paivio 2007) and recent advances in neuroscience documented in Damasio (1999, 2003), Edelman (1992, 2004) and Changeux (in Changeux and Ricoeur 2000) continue to emphasize the perceptual origins of human thought and language to challenge Bakhtin’s contribution to the advancement of Enlightenment aesthetics and Kantian attempts at reconciling abstract reason with sensation in which “a priori conditions determine both the categories and synthesis of empirical consciousness” (Krasny et al. 2007: 239). Drawing primarily on Paivio’s dual coding theory, I contend that an understanding of the structure and function of imagery and affect provides an embodied and more comprehensive account of human thought in which language plays a significant but not an entirely exclusive role in order to demonstrate that Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse relies on the human capacity to actively access both verbal and non-verbal imagery. I begin with a historical review of mental imagery in western philosophy to situate Bakhtin’s dialogic epistemology. In addition to Paivio’s dual coding theory, I turn to the empirical thought in Dewey (1980 [1916], 1987 [1934]) and Mead (1934, 1964), and to Thompson’s (2007) phenomenological account of empathy to introduce an embodied account of how “[e]ach person’s inner world and thought has its stabilized social audience that comprises the environment in which reasons, motives, values, and so on are fashioned” (Volosinov 1973 [1929]: 86).

Arguably, Bakhtin has contributed much to our understanding of what literature does and how it does it. Those of us drawn to literature’s potential for animating moral and ethical imagination through the ambiguous possibilities posed by the heteroglossic text find fertile ground in Bakhtin’s double-voiced utterance. Defined by its ambivalence in the sense of being of at least two minds, readers are invited to make decisions in the absence of rule. But while for Bakhtin, speech is a form of persuasion, a way of controlling others’ behavior or thinking through a “two-sided act... determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant (Volosinov 1973 [1929]: 86 emphasis in the original) the emphasis on dialogism over imagination largely ignores the question of the persuasive power of the senses that has plagued literary scholars since Plato first banished poets from his Republic. On this front, the pragmatists who, like Bakhtin, were undeniably concerned with self/other relations and explicating consciousness in the wake of post-Newtonian physics and Einstein’s relativity but even more so in response to Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, focused on imagination as “a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement” (Dewey 1980 [1916]: 245). According to Dewey (1987 [1934]: 276) “all conscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality.” Similarly, Sadoski (1992: 266) more recently defined imagination as the “normal, essentially human, mindful activity that we engage in from moment to moment” as “we manipulate parts of existing images into new combinations and/or when we enrich images with affective associations.”

In theories of embodied cognition, images refer to concrete representations of perceptual experiences stored in memory. As the material body moves through a concrete existence, patterns of response to external and somatosensory experiences are instantiated as part of our cognitive representations. Paivio’s (2007) dual-coding theory asserts that our mental representations retain some of the concrete qualities of the sensory experiences that formed them and therefore representational structures and processes have a sensory, “embodied” basis. While Bakhtin (1984: 202) rejects the idea of the word as a “material thing,” he is nevertheless ready to admit “the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered.” As Krasny and Sadoski (2008: 401) explain “[w]e experience and encode visual language in reading, but we also experience and encode nonverbal visual stimuli such as common objects and scenes from our daily life. Likewise, we experience and encode oral language in listening to speech, but we also experience and encode common environmental sounds that are not speech.” Our capacity to form mental connections between all these and form affect associations may account for what appears as the generative life of the word. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin (1984: 201) recognizes that the human capacity to “very sensitively catch” and evaluate the subtle nuances of expression depends on our attention to the qualia of experience. He critiqued Saussurean linguistics for its inability to account for the range of discursive possibilities conveyed through “the smallest shift in intonation, the slightest interruption of voices... [and] [a]ll those verbal sideward glances, reservations, loopholes, hints, [those] thrusts [that] do not slip past our ear, are not foreign to our own lips.” In other words, the subtle shades of Bakhtin’s “rich verbal palette” would remain mute were it not for the brain’s capacity to maintain mental representations of sensate data stored as memory.

2 The nature of the mind and mental imagery in Western philosophy

Much of Western philosophy has been characterized by efforts to reconcile the tension between abstract rationalism and concrete realism. For Plato, the mind was an immortal soul, the realm of all reason. The soul, however, inhabits a body that is tied to a sensory and therefore, unreliable world. Plato’s philosophy focused on the nature of rational thought. In his Myth of the Cave, Plato parabled the philosopher’s journey from living among the shadowy images of the world to experiencing the renewed clarity from the realm of true ideas. Through a series of dialogues, Plato argued that the world is shaped by ideas perceivable by the mind. For example, in Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates argued that piety cannot be defined by concrete pious actions but rather by the ideal form or essence that makes all pious actions pious. As Plato saw it, the job of the philosopher is to seek knowledge by employing reason to discern the ultimate forms or essences that underlie perceptible things.

Plato’s concern for prototypes led to a correspondence between degrees of knowledge and degrees of Being, that is to say, we can only come to know an act of piety insofar as it conforms to all the characteristics that together must be present for an act to be truly pious. Reality for Plato is located in eternal and immutable ideas that are directly present in the mind. Plato compared mental images generated through sensory perception to the impressions of a signet ring on a wax tablet. In his view, images were imperfect and insignificant copies of pure forms. He established a hierarchy of reality in which ideas are considered superior in their degree of Being to physical objects and physical objects as being superior to images. In poetry, as in all things, Plato was concerned with the ontology of the object – the degree to which the images evoked by the poem could approach the metaphysical reality of pure reason.

In De Anima, Aristotle (1968) described a world of sensation. Aristotle’s philosophy differs from Plato’s in a fundamental way. Where Plato conceived of a world that takes its shape in ideas, for Aristotle, ideas take their shape from the immediate physical world. Aristotle still concerned himself with forms but forms, he contended, are in the things themselves and are not innate ideas independent of any concrete experience. The five senses – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling – are the means through which we take in the world. Aristotle too, likened sense perception to a wax impression.

In general, with regard to all sense-perception we must take it that the sense is that which can receive perceptible forms without their matter, as wax receives the imprint of the ring without the iron or gold, and it takes the imprint which is of gold or bronze, but not qua gold or bronze.

(Aristotle 1968: 42–43)

To perceive of something is to incorporate its form into one’s mind, but Aristotle reminds us that images are not synonymous with the reality that inspired them.

Both Plato and Aristotle distinguished between perceiving and thinking, but where Plato maintained that knowledge is to be found in the discourse of reason, Aristotle (1968) claimed that thought requires sensibility as well. He distinguished imagination from perception and discursive thinking adding that perception is a necessary condition for imagination and similarly, imagination is a necessary condition for judgment. For Aristotle (1968: 52–53), it is not ideas but perception that holds reigning ontological status for “perception is always true and is found in all animals, whereas it is possible to think falsely.” Most notably, Aristotle maintained that there is no thought without an image.

Aristotle (1968: 53) conceived of imagination as a willful act of consciousness and unlike Plato, he held that the human mind is capable of discerning between ‘objective’ reality and images to yield varying emotional judgments.

For [imagining] is up to us when we wish (for it is possible to produce something before our eyes, as those do who set things out in mnemonic systems and form images of them); but believing is not up to us, for it must be either true or false. Moreover, when we believe that something is terrible or alarming we are immediately affected correspondingly, and similarly if it is something encouraging; but in the case of the imagination we are just as if we saw the terrible or encouraging things in a picture.

(Aristotle 1968: 53)

Aristotle contended that where perception always indicates a presence, imagination does not. How an image functions to make present an object that is not immediately present has long been the subject of philosophical speculation and is regarded as a central problem to be resolved within the emerging field of consciousness studies. Any discussion of the relationship between literature and life needs to entertain the ramifications of the idea that an image posits a nothingness, the perception of an object that is not there (Sartre 2004 [1940]).

Descartes’ declaration, Cogito, ergo sum (‘Je pense, donc je suis/I think, therefore I am’) solidified the Western philosophical belief in the separation of mind and body. Descartes argued that the occurrence of thought requires a thinker and there could be no greater intuitive certainty than the first-person formulation of the perception of oneself as a thinking being. For Descartes, not only is reason innate but also the existence of God as a perfect entity is self-evident to the thinking soul. The Enlightenment thinker posited a rationalist and dualist philosophy that focused on the relationship between mind and body.

Up until the seventeenth century, philosophers had not postulated any radical division between mind and matter. For Aristotle, the soul was pervasively present throughout the organism as its life principle and it was inconceivable to think of the soul being separate from the body. Even Plato could not explain how the mind influenced the body and conceded that the mind and body together share the same movement. Plato was however, convinced that what we grasp with our mind is more real than what we grasp with our senses. Descartes too, believed that the senses could not be trusted. He posited that the thinking “I” was more real than the anything in the material world. In his view, the mind is pure consciousness and not subject to the spatial or temporal conditions of matter. It was one of two forms of reality that Descartes referred to as res cogitans or thinking things. The other form of reality in Descartes’ dualist philosophy was res extensa or extended things, that is to say, matter in general. According to Descartes’ substance dualism, humans have both a mind and a body but thought is independent from matter and material processes. The body is more or less mechanistic – an automaton that operated according to natural laws.

Descartes’ Enlightenment philosophy was characterized by the pursuit of certainty. As the father of analytic geometry, Descartes believed that in the contemplation of natural phenomena, measurement and enumeration could ensure that nothing was left to chance. He therefore, sought mathematical proofs for philosophical truths. However, despite Descartes’ insistence on a mind independent of the body, we know from his writings that he recognized that mind and body do interact. In an attempt to account for how bodily needs and desires might affect thought, Descartes (1978) mistakenly designated the pineal gland as the locus where body and soul could communicate. Damasio (2003) suggests that Descartes may have wondered more about the embodiment of the mind but distorted his own thinking to deny any doubt of the existence of an immortal soul in response to the looming threat of the inquisition.

Bahktin found welcome philosophical ground in Kant, who held that the rationalists were too extreme in their belief that reason was the sole basis of reality but also thought that the realists placed too much faith in sensory experience. Kant attempted to account for how the rational mind and sensuous experience together constitute the elements of our cognitive faculties. In this regard, he was the first to postulate a theory of mind based on how body and mind interact. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1990 [1781]) declared that knowledge begins in experience, then immediately qualified his position by insisting that sensuous experience merely provides the occasion for knowledge to occur. In his view, there are certain pre-existing or a priori conditions that determine the way we experience the world.

Kant distinguished between rational or higher-levels of human cognition and sub-rational or lower levels of human cognition. He named the higher levels of cognition verstand or understanding. To Kant, understanding represents the logical, discursive, proposition-forming faculty of the mind that produces concepts as output. Concepts are abstract semantic propositions that correspond to linguistic predicates and to a set of properties. Kant referred to lower levels of cognition as sinnlichkeit or sensibility. Sensibility has to do with the affective, perceptual, and imaginal faculty of the mind that produces intuitions as outputs. According to Kant (1990 [1781]: 102), concepts constitute the non-empirical or a priori form of every intuition generated by sensibility. He explains:

... the only manner in which objects can be given to us, is by the means of the modification of our sensibility.... This formal and pure condition of sensibility, to which the conception of the understanding is restricted in its employment, we shall name the schema of the conception of the understanding and the procedure of the understanding with these schemata we shall call the schematism of the pure understanding.

(Kant 1990 [1781]: 102)

A schema has as its aim the unity of sensibility and therefore is distinguishable from any single image. For example, in Kant’s (1990 [1781]:102) estimation “no triangle can ever be adequate to our conception of a triangle in general.” In other words, a schema purportedly synthesizes perceptual information into appropriate conceptualized form. It should be emphasized that in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, a priori conditions determine both conceptual categories and the synthesis of empirical consciousness but he was never fully able to account for how for how this was achieved. Kant’s transcendentalism, however, proved particularly inspirational for the romantics. The idea that the human mind possesses the faculties to unite idealism with imagination appealed to those interested in interpreting the natural and social world. Bakhtin was undoubtedly influenced by the neo-Kantian Marberg School in his early work but his relationship to Kantian and Neo-Kantian thought appears to have beena conflicted one. This is perhaps best documented in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, in which Bakhtin (1993), counters Kant’s occupation of the human subject and universal forms of subjectivity with an insistence to ground objective reality in the first person experience of the concrete and individual subject. Bakhtin’s rejection of Kantian transcendentalism in favor of the immediate reality of the object was influenced in no small part, by Henri Bergson’s (1911 [1896]) Matter and Memory. Bakhtin’s departure from Kant and the Marberg neo-Kantians in this respect represents a distinctive turn toward consolidating his views on the relation between mind and body. Later in in the article, I return to Bakhtin’s fascination with Matter and Memory to elaborate upon the limitations of Bergson’s theory in accounting for the empirical nature of knowledge and thought.

3 Mental imagery in twentieth-century psychology

The dominance of behaviorist psychology during the first half of the twentieth century served to devalue mental imagery as being worthy of study. In 1913, Watson launched the behaviorist movement in American psychology with a “manifesto” that refuted the existence of mental imagery and advanced what continues to be referred to as the “imageless thought controversy.” He denounced mental imagery as being unscientific and somewhat akin to “medieval” notions of immortality grounded in religious beliefs bordering on “old wives tales” (Watson 1930). While most behaviorists were not as vehement in their denial of the existence of mental imagery, the prevalence of the behaviorist view may have contributed to the inherent assumption in current computational or schema-based theories of cognition and reading comprehension (Kintsch 1988, 1998; Rumelhart and Ortony 1977; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) that abstract propositional representations are antecedent to the formation of images, if in fact the formation of images is accounted for at all.

The Western emergence of Vygotsky’s (1962, 1978) writings in the latter half of the twentieth century explicitly recognized self/other relations in cognitive development and gave rise to social constructivist theory with its emphasis on cultural and social interaction and thought as covert “inner speech” (Clay and Cazden 1990; Moll 1990). At first glance, Vygotsky’s (1978) contention that everything within the individual’s conceptual horizon appears first on the inter-psychological plane before it appears on the intra-psychological plane appears to be fairly consistent with the conceptualization of thought as the imaginative reconfiguration of our former perceptual experience. However, the notion that mental representations are largely restricted to inner speech may have directly or indirectly served to minimize attention paid to the critical role of imagination and the formation of nonverbal mental imagery in human thought.

4 A dual coding approach to mental representations

Dual coding theory is a reaction to the singular and dominant view in psychology up until the 1960s that mental representations used in cognition were primarily verbal or linguistic (Paivio 1986, 1991, 2007). The theory attempts to account for the empirical nature of knowledge and thought through the presentation of a set of assumptions and hypotheses relating to the structure and function of mental imagery. Its emphasis on perceptual, motor, and affective experience as the developmental origin of internal mental representations is compatible with recent neurobiological evidence describing the evolution of mind and consciousness. Dual coding theory rejects the rationalism adopted by computational theories of cognition that rely on formulating general truths through logical reasoning alone. Instead, dual coding theory favors an empirical approach to studying mental phenomena such as language relying on observable behavior to formulate assumptions and hypotheses. A dual coding approach to understanding mental representations is a thoroughly embodied theory of cognition.

Recalling the mental sense impression in Aristotle’s realism, Sadoski and Paivio (2013) assert that our mental representations retain some of the concrete qualities of external experiences. They maintain mental representation is organized into two separate coding systems, one system to deal with the representation of nonverbal objects and events and the other to deal with language. The basic nonverbal and verbal representational units are referred to as imagens and logogens. Both systems are organized hierarchically but not similarly. The verbal system is ordered sequentially whereas the nonverbal system is ordered nonsequentially. For example, morphemes occur in sequential patterns that adhere to associative constraints (e.g., prefix+root+suffix) whereas nonverbal representations often appear in compound images and represent episodes holistically. Sadoski and Paivio indicate that there is some empirical evidence to suggest that logogens are word-like images while imagens are object or scene-like. It is important to note that to fully understand the empirical nature of dual coding theory one must recognize that mental imagery is not limited to visual images or the “movie in the mind” metaphor but includes mental representations associated with all sensory modalities – the visual, auditory, haptic, gustatory, and olfactory. While mental encodings result in concrete imagery, they can still handle abstract information in the form of language symbols, charts, or diagrams.

The possibility for verbal representations is present in visual, auditory, and haptic modalities. For example, a visual verbal encoding might be the mental representation of the letter “p” or the entire word “pipe” whereas an auditory verbal encoding might be the phoneme /p/ or the pronunciation /paip/. Visual logogens include that body of familiar written units with consistent features such as letters, numbers, or punctuation marks, common subword combinations of letters, whole words, and often familiar phrases as in popular advertising logos or expressions.

Imagens or nonverbal representations are often embedded in other imagens in a hierarchical arrangement of associations and are said to be contextualized. For example, one can imagine a book, lying open on a glass-topped coffee table, on a blue rug, in front of a sofa, in a sun-filled living room, and so forth. Similarly, according to Damasio’s (2003: 57) neurobiological account of mind and consciousness, a phrase such as breakfast at a roadside diner may act as an “emotionally competent stimulus,” which he describes as “a certain object or situation actually present or recalled from memory.” In this case, the phrase may trigger concrete images of a steaming cup of coffee, set upon a white paper placemat, atop a shiny yellow arborite tabletop, flanked by red vinyl seating. The aroma of fresh coffee mingles with the sound and smell of sizzling bacon and the noises of the comings and goings of waitresses and customers. The images and language evoked by the original phrase can produce an elaborate mental model of its meaning. Affective responses might occur as well. Thought is a process of continually activating verbal and nonverbal representations and making representational, referential, and associative connections between them. The capacity to make connections between and within non-verbal and verbal modalities affords readers the ability to mentally construct embedded images replete with affective associations in which individual experience guides them in the evaluation of social overtones and the apprehension of atmosphere. Given that imagery derives from the vast richness of human experience, the possible connections are endless and defy systematization.

5 Embodied theories of mind and consciousness

The profound influence of Cartesian dualism in western philosophy and psychology cannot be underestimated. In opposition, proponents of an embodied mind and consciousness posit that the nature of the mind is shaped by the body in interaction with its environment. Philosophers, cognitive scientists, linguists, and artificial intelligence researchers take various approaches to studying embodiment and are unlikely to arrive at similar conclusions. The ideas advanced in this article are largely grounded in a neuropsychological approach that draws from experimental psychology and the idea that the construction of neural patterns is both dependent upon the genetic makeup of the brain and body and epigenetic events, that is to say, events that occur contingent upon certain previous events having taken place. For example, I maintain that the ability to represent and think in images was likely a necessary step in the evolution of human language. A neuropsychological standpoint rejects the idea of human cognition as merely computational – the “manipulation of symbols according to a definite procedure” (Edelman 1992: 13) conceived of as independent of the nervous system. Nor does it uphold cognitivism’s support of an inborn language acquisition device comprising rules for syntax and constituting a universal grammar (Chomsky 1957). Existentialist philosophers and pragmatists with their emphasis on being in experience have proposed philosophies consistent with many of the ideas in theories of embodied mind and consciousness. Embodied perspectives on mind and consciousness differ from Bakhtin’s conceptualization of a dialogic consciousness in three fundamental ways.

First, consciousness is not theorized to be a post-language phenomenon. Damasio (1999: 168–169) contends: “We become conscious... when our organisms internally construct and internally exhibit a specific kind of wordless knowledge [that is to say, an image] – that our organism has been changed by an object – and when such knowledge occurs along with the salient internal exhibit of an object.” The first function of the image, therefore, is to account for the organism-object relationship to inform the organism what is happening. Images and not language is the bedrock of consciousness.

Second, while there is no denying that language has evolved as an instrument that shapes and orders our existence (Bronowski 1978), it is nevertheless, not essential to the imagined completion of an act. Consider Paivio’s (1991) recounting of the experience of Simonides, a Greek poet who lived around 500 B.C. to illustrate how orderly arrangements and images of things in their place serve as an aid to memory. Simonides was summoned from a banquet while he was reciting a lyric poem to the guests. When he returned, the roof of the banquet hall had collapsed, crushing the guests beyond recognition. Simonides was able to identify the dead by consciously reconstructing the orderly arrangement of guests through images of localities or places. Simonides’ spatial reconstruction from images instantiated in memory served as the inspiration for his verbal account. His technique soon became popular among public speakers who found carrying around written speeches too cumbersome thus giving us the expression “In the first place” as a mnemonic framework.

And finally, embodied theories of mind and consciousness find favor in the idea that language evolved in the service of imagery. According to Langer (1957), symbol making began with human attempts to represent the aesthetic sense of the object or event. As Langer explains, language probably evolved from expressive voice-play associated with ritual gestures and dances. Eventually certain syllables became associated with certain actions pantomiming events that held ritual importance such as death or triumph. Rhythmic groups of syllables eventually came to be connected with particular actions or individuals. Language began as an expressive act and through long habit, fixed associations eventually led to the denotative function of language. Langer (1957, 1962) advances the idea that language evolved in the service of mental imagery to provide us with the means to name, fixate, and conceive objects (and not, as we so often believe, in the service of communication). Nevertheless, embodied theories of mind and consciousness recognize that language significantly enhances the imaginative capacity to retain objects and their relations when not immediately present and I argue that it is precisely this capacity that makes double-voiced discourse possible. Accounting for Bakhtin’s internalized dialogue might benefit from drawing an important parallel between Langer’s evolutionary account and George Herbert Mead’s (1934: 154) “generalized other.”

In both Mead’s account of the imagined formation of the “generalized other” and Langer’s evolutionary account of language, the lived through experience of playing a succession of roles leads to the development of a socially shared system of gestures that lead to an abstract set of rules. Continued and varied experience shapes our understanding of the interrelationship of these roles that combine to form an image of the generalized other defined as “[t]he organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self” (Mead 1934: 154). As Holquist (1990) suggests, Bakhtin would likely find common ground in Mead’s (1964: 312–314) assertion that “in the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self,” and that “out of this process thought arises, i.e., conversation with one’s self, in the role of the specific other and then in the role of the generalized other.” But what is seldom considered when comparing Bakhtinian dialogism with Mead’s social psychology is the pragmatist emphasis on reciprocity and human agency. Notably, the development of Mead’s social consciousness originates not with language but, first and foremost, in our direct interactions with the world. Participation of this kind requires an intentionality to imaginatively transform the lived experience into the emergence of the mind and self. If as Mead (1964:312) contends “in the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self,” then I suggest that the requisite intentionality assumes an empathetic identification with the other.

6 Empathy

Thompson (2007) defines empathy as “an evolved biological capacity of the human species” emerging from the dynamic interrelation of self and other. Empathy is used to describe four types of interrelated affective and cognitive processes:

1. The passive or involuntary coupling or pairing of my living body with your living body in perception and action. (This is what we commonly refer to as a sympathetic reaction.)

2. The imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place. (This is what we in reading, have typically referred to as empathetic identification/gain.)

3. The understanding of you as an other to me, and of me as an other to you.

4. The moral perception of you as a person.

Embodied cognition holds that the active manipulation of existing images is fundamental to the imaginative projection of events and empathetic identification (Krasny 2007). It allows us to internalize a situation according to past experiences and act in the present in anticipation of future possibilities. Empathy depends on our capacity to form the necessary images of the other and affectively project upon those images, common traits and experiences that promote feelings of interiority, that is to say, the feelings that suggest that this other (whether living or literary) is in possession of a sense of self equal to that of our own self. From a phenomenological perspective, Thompson (2007: 386) theorizes empathy to be a form of intentionality in face-to-face intersubjective encounters directed toward the other’s experience. It allows us to gain an awareness of another human being “whose bodily gestures and actions are expressive of his or her experience or states of mind.” This capacity to interpret the other’s state of mind in the reciprocal relation between self and other, speaker and addressee is what accounts for the anticipatory movement in Bakhtinian addressivity. Neurological studies suggest that the right somatosensory cortices are dominant with regard to the human capacity for empathy (Damasio 2003). In fact, damage to this region of the brain is consistently associated with defects in emotion and feeling. While language and speech may remain intact, communication is nonetheless difficult for those persons who cannot empathetically fulfill the functions of self and other to sustain dialogue. It should be noted empathy may produce feelings of pity and compassion but should not be reduced to these. Thompson (2007: 391) describes empathy as an “experiential grasp of an intersubjective space” adding without empathetic openness to others one could not grasp how one also exists as an other for the other. Returning to the dialogic exchange in Pamuk’s novel, at some level, Ka is conscious that Muhtar, too, is likely appraising his state of mind in determining the direction of their tense encounter. This recognition that one can be the intentional object of the other’s gaze is what is known as reiterated empathy and it creates the conditions that allow for the evaluation of social overtones implicit in Bakhtin’s dialogic utterance.

Consistent with the Bakhtinian (1990) notion of “outsidedness” in the aesthetic production of the hero, a phenomenological perspective on the act of writing suggests that authors/narrators remain empathetically open yet apart for they must be able to fulfill the functions of self and other in shaping the hero’s consciousness. Moreover, the author must engage in these mindreading practices in imaginative anticipation of her audience’s responses. For example, in penning his novel, Pamuk is no doubt aware that, like his fictional poet, his readers have likely experienced a wave of resentment when faced with a longstanding rival or at the very least know what it is like to negotiate an awkward silence and feel compelled to make conversation with someone with whom they have nothing to say. Crafting the pragmatic effects of the text to project social overtones requires that the author be able to evoke the particular images and accompanying emotions that will empathetically engage the reader. Authors may create non-existent worlds but achieving the reader’s suspension of disbelief rests on their ability to do so with materials found in existence.

7 Conclusion

The centrality of the body in Bakhtin’s (1981: 324) writings compels a “potential dialogue” whereby the metaphysical assumptions of Bakhtin’s dialogic epistemology come face to face with the idea in embodied theories of mind and consciousness that thought does not function without a physical basis. The idea, of course, was not foreign to Bakhtin. As Holquist (1990: 165) points out, for Bakhtin, “[t]he human subject before it is anything else, is a body.” From his Neo-Kantian perspective, Bakhtin was intensely interested in how mind relates to body but distinguished himself from other neo-Kantians in his attempt to move away from Kant’s transcendent form of the object by leaning toward the immediate reality of the object. Perhaps most influential on Bakhtin’s ideas regarding the relation between mind and body was Henri Bergson’s (1911 [1896]) Matter and Memory in which Bergson (1911 [1896]: 5) maintains that the body is at the center of an action but “it cannot give birth to a representation” and therefore necessitating some form of mental activity to shape the world of experience into coherent images. This I believe may have led Bakhtin to language as an organizing principle. But the idea that the inner body communicates with the outer body in some linguistic way is untenable beyond mere metaphor. This is the function of neural pathways that make possible the internal deployment of recalled knowledge in different sensory systems and the subsequent abilities to manipulate that knowledge. Consciousness that extends beyond the here and now of perception to give the individual an elaborate sense of self relies on the ability of holding in mind multiple neural patterns over substantial periods of time (Damasio 1999). The word does not as Bakhtin (1984: 202) contends, travel “its own path” or at any time struggle to “free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered.” The body does. The word does not orient itself or extend sideward glances. But the body does. It is not language that never forgets but the body that never forgets. While Bakhtin dispenses with Kant’s a priori conditions that determine both conceptual categories and the synthesis of empirical consciousness (or perception), I argue that to invest in the idea that consciousness rests in the heteroglossic dialogic life of the word is to approach another kind of propositional transcendence. Furthermore, the persistent reference to the relation of mind and body in Bakhtin serves to underscore rather than mend the Cartesian split. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, for example, Bakhtin (1984: 290) appears to have cast consciousness in an ideal and disembodied light whereby “the internal uniqueness of consciousness does not contradict materialism” inferring as Plato did that the mind and body interact and together share the same movement but that thought is independent from matter and material process. The embodied thesis prefers, of course, mind in body as opposed to mind and body but even this need for qualification speaks to the pervasive influence of Cartesian substance dualism.

Despite my attempt to move beyond logos and reconcile what I perceive as a nagging incommensurability between Bakhtin’s dialogic consciousness and his celebrated emphasis on the body, I continue to read Bakhtin as a prophetic and hopeful thinker. Bakhtin’s (1990: 189) analysis of the relationship between author and hero and his articulation of “transgredient consummation” in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” prefigure the current critical attention to crafting consciousness in the novel Nevertheless, in doing so, I contend that his restricted view of consciousness forces Bakhtin (1990: 195) to employ verbal gymnastics to surmount “language in its linguistic determinateness.” Language alone, he recognizes, is insufficient in aesthetic activity where words are secondary to the primacy of the author/artist’s “relationship to context i.e., to the immediate giveness of a lived life and the world of that life.” In what follows, Bakhtin (1990: 195) anticipates the primary function of the image to map object-organism relationships in Damasio’s neurobiological account and puts us in mind of Paivio’s dual coding model of representations which regard imagery and language as two separate but connected codes.

The artist’s relationship to an object is an immediate relationship to it as a constituent of the event of the world and this thereupon determines (not in the sense of chronological order... but in that of an axiological hierarchy) his relationship to the object-referring signification of worlds as constituents of a purely verbal context.

(Bakhtin 1990: 195)

Here, language remains in the service of the artist’s qualitative and value-laden relationship to an object insofar as it determines the author/artist’s use of “phonetic features (the acoustic image), emotional features, pictorial features, and so on.”

In outlining an embodied alternative whereby the sustained connection between verbal and nonverbal imagery accounts for both knowledge of language and knowledge of the world, it has not been my intention to superimpose theories ideologically, methodologically, and historically removed from Bakhtin’s dialogism. I do maintain, however, that knowledge of the structure and function of imagery and affect can provide a richer embodied basis for understanding how we are able to sustain double-voiced discourse and how achieving consciousness in the novel for both author and reader depends on the active manipulation of existing images into new combinations and enriching these images with affective associations. Recent developments in neuroscience and neuropsychology continue to provide new insights into human consciousness that was once regarded as “an entirely private, first-person phenomenon” (Damasio 1999: 12). As such, it has been relatively absent from scientific third-person discourse and left to philosophical introspection. For those who fear that attempts to connect neuronal and mental events are an attempt to quantify existence, Nobel-prize winning biologist Gerald Edelman (1992) offers a statistic that even Bakhtin would have been able to live with. Attesting to the unquantifiability of the brain’s potential for diversity and variability as indicated by the sheer number of possible synaptic connections, Edelman notes: “Each nerve cell receives connections from other nerve cells at sites called synapses... [T]here are about one million billion connections in the cortical sheet. If you were to count them one connection (or synapse) per second you would finish counting some thirty-two million years after you began” (1992: 17).

Furthermore, Edelman (1992: 224) adds, “[t]he brain and the nervous system cannot be considered in isolation from the states of the world and social interactions... [S]uch states, both environmental and social, are indeterminate, and...,” as Bakhtin would herald, “open-ended.”