Dialogue and the “miracle of language”: the early and late Bakhtin

1 Introduction

But the real miracle of language is to be found where someone – perhaps contrary to all prescriptions –succeeds in finding exactly the right word or discovers the perfect expression in the words of someone else. (Gadamer 2004: 137–138)

Structuralism has its roots in the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) work Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics], published posthumously in 1916. He formulated the idea that language is a system, a structure. A study of this structure could be done on the basis of two concepts: langue (language/the system) and parole (speech/how the system is used), but according to Saussure, only the former, that is, the system (in the sense of being a closed structure), could be the subject of linguistic studies (for a philosophical and historical overview of structuralism see; Cassirer 1945). However, Saussure never denied that language is a social phenomenon as well: “Language is communication minus speech” (Saussure 2015: 107; Sonesson 2015: 9–15). In other words, the “social nature of language is its inner qualities” and Saussure conceived “a science which studies the life of signs in social intercourse. This science would be a part of social psychology and therefore also of general psychology; I will call it semiology (from the Greek Sēmeion, ‘sign’)” (Saussure 2015: 39). The term semiotics is the more well-known term for what Saussure called semiology. The linguistic sign (the whole) consists of “content” (the signified) and “expression” (the signifier) and that the relationship between the two is arbitrary because the linguistic sign is defined as “the entire result of the association between expression and content” (Saussure 2015: 97). Thus, the sign is not based on similarity or any other “natural” connection with the object or phenomenon it signifies (Sonesson 2015:14).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Saussure_Signifie-Signifiant.png

Thus, the sign is “composed of expression and content, both of which are intralinguistic, and it is only the sign that in its turn can be connected to the objects that exist in our world of experience, the referents” (Sonesson 2015: 10).

The content of the sign points to the phenomenon or object that the sign stands for. Within the structure, it is “the relations between different sounds, grammatical categories and meanings that determine each other” (Sonesson 2015: 9). The structure is studied on the basis of a synchronous analysis, that is, what it looks like in the present. To study the structures from a development perspective, the structure needs to be analysed in relation to a previous structure (Sonesson 2015:10). Later in the 1950s and 1960s, Saussure’s structuralist linguistics became a source of inspiration for other disciplines, and well-known researchers such as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and other humanists of the so-called French structuralism, applied the structuralist principles to other source material (considered as systems) such as literature, art, myths, and music, to give a few examples. However, the notion of the stable atemporal structure was later disputed by post structuralist thinking (Miller 1998).

2 Poststructuralist critique

Post-structuralists such as the predecessor Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), a French psychoanalyst, dismantled the idea of fixed structures, an idea that was central to structuralism. He was inspired by another of the founding fathers of modern semiotics, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), whose work he had meet through the Russian structural linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), one of the Prague School’s leading figures (Rédei 2018). Lacan applied Peirce’s phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness in the elaboration of his three orders: the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Peirce’s categories define the way in which we can perceive phenomena in our ordinary world.

Peirce’s categories, Firstness, Secondess, Thirdness are denominations of three different steps and ways that we cognitively perceive the world outside ourselves, that is through: feeling/sensation (monadic), reaction/resistance (dyadic), practice/mediation (triadic). Thus, in some important respects Lacan’s symbolic order corresponds to what in semiotics is defined as “Triadic”, the level of signs (Thirdness). The communication in the symbolic order, according to Lacan, involved a subject and an Other (a triadic communication). Therefore, communication includes a “sender” that communicates with a “recipient” through a common language (Rédei 2018:112).

Through Peirce, Lacan was able to escape the closed and fixed structures of linguistic structuralism, since Peirce’s categories rest on phenomenological foundations, that is, a foundation where perception enters a dynamic interplay between subject and object. Lacan could also have met Peirce’s semiotics through Kristeva, who wrote about Peirce in an essay on the science of the text in the book Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969). With the aid of the concept of sémanalyse, Kristeva wants to develop and describe scientific semiotics applied to literary studies. We will return to another of Kristeva’s essays in a moment.

Characteristic poststructuralism is that the study focuses on relations between parts and a “whole” where the whole is not delimited, thus, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblages,” it can thus be a question of dynamic relations between virtual potentials, bonds, movements, and moods organized in heterogeneous units that change over time (Deleuze and Gauttari 2011). But the critique of structuralism’s systemic studies, came from elsewhere and earlier than the critique put forward by the poststructuralists. The Russian philosopher of language and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin criticized structural linguistics as early as the 1920s, but it was not until Julia Kristeva introduced him in the essay “Le mot, le dialogue et le roman” in the book Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969) that he became known in the West. During this time, Kristeva was an active contributor to the French literary and philosophical journal Tel Quel (1960–1982), along with semioticians, literary scholars, and philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and not least the author, editor and founder of the magazine, Philippe Sollers, who was her husband from 1967 until his death in May 2023. Inspired by Bakhtin, she coined the concept of intertextuality, which has had a major impact in the human sciences since then (Kristeva 1969: 146). The concept emphasizes the necessity of studying texts in their context for them to be understood in their entirety, which is central to Bakhtin’s philosophy of the dialogic speech, that is, the relationship between the self and the other, where the latter takes on existential dimensions: it is through the dialogical word that we can see ourselves. Kristeva writes:

Bakhtin is one of the first to replace the static cutting of texts with a model in which the literary structure is not but in which it develops in relation to another structure. This dynamization of structuralism is only possible on the basis of a fundamental idea according to which the “literary word” is not a point (a fixed meaning), but a crossroads of textual surfaces, a dialogue between several scriptures: the author’s, the recipient’s (or character’s), the cultural context’s – present or past. (Kristeva 1969: 144)

Kristeva shows that by introducing the word into the textual analysis, the analysis approached the other and the context in which the text had arisen dialogically. Bakhtin writes: “All these object-worlds [social, political values, aesthetic values, ethical values, etc.] determine the values of the totally for the act-performer himself” (Bakhtin 1995: 138). The quotation illustrates the principle of how inner and outer speech shapes the speaking/writing “act-performer” – an idea that was also central to Bakhtin’s contemporary colleague in the “Bakhtin circle” Valentin Voloshinov’s book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986 [1929]). Bakhtin summarizes this dynamic between inner and outer speech in the concept of “hybridization” that he puts forward in the essay “Discourse in the novel” (2001 [1934]). In sum, it comes down to the idea that language is dialogical to its nature. How does Bakhtin’s philosophy of language manifest itself in this dialogue?

3 Bakhtin and dialogue

Bakhtin illustrates the idea of the dialogue between the self and the other with the aid of the concept of author and hero in his analyses in one of his early essays, “Author and hero in aesthetic activity” (ca. 1920–1923), more specifically he takes as his vantage point in Dostoyevsky’s works. The existence of a writer is the prerequisite for the existence of a hero. Perhaps this could be said more clearly: the hero is the other without whom the I/author could not be defined. The hero is the other in dialogue with which the I/author is defined: “Pure self-accounting – that is, addressing oneself axiologically only to oneself in solitariness – is impossible; […]” (Bakhtin 1995: 143). But as Kristeva points out, the language is dialogic even at the level of the dyad langue/parole. To put it another way, Bakhtin rejects the possibility of evaluating oneself on his own without the help of the other. In addition, this evaluation requires an aestheticization and therefore constitutes a raw material for artistic works. Kristeva summarizes the status of the word as follows: “a) horizontally: the word in the text belongs to both the author subject and the recipient, and b) vertically: the word in the text is oriented to the previous or synchronous literary corpus” (Kristeva 1969: 145).

Based on this reasoning, Bakhtin points out that it is not possible to draw a dividing line between the autobiography and the biography because neither of these exists an “I-for-myself” relationship as an organizing factor for the form of the text (Bakhtin 1995: 151). Bakhtin’s philosophy not only enables the narration about another person’s life, but also about one’s own. The biography is the aesthetics of lived life, and he continues:

The author biography is that possible other by whom we are most likely to be possessed in lived life; the possible other who is with us when we look at ourselves in the mirror, when we dream of glory, when we make plans for our life; the possible other who has permeated our consciousness and who often guides our acts, our value judgements, and our vision of ourselves side by side with our own I-for-myself; the other in our consciousness with whom our external life can still be sufficiently active […]. (Bakhtin 1995: 152)

Moreover, there are two types of biographies: the adventurous and heroic and the social everyday biography (Bakhtin 155: 1995). The first one is based on the will to be heroic. The narration is characterized by the fact that the hero wants to be loved and to play a decisive role in the life of others. Moreover, the hero is governed by the will to live a rich life and to take part of all possibilities that life can offer. This orientation leads to a naïve individualism, according to Bakhtin since the hero appears to be unmediated and thus not distinguished from the world of the other. There is no friction, no contrast between the ego for itself and the other (Bakhtin 1995: 155–156). On glorification, as one of the cornerstones of the heroic biography, Bakhtin writes:

Striving for glory organizes the life of the naïve hero, and it is glory that also organizes the story of that life – its glorification. To strive for glory is to gain consciousness of oneself within the civilized mankind of history (or within a nation), it means to found and build one’s own life in the possible consciousness of this civilized mankind; to grow in and for others, and not in and for oneself; to assume a place in the proximate world of one’s contemporaries and descendants. […] In rendering others heroic, in establishing a pantheon of heroes, I seek to become a participant in such a pantheon, to place myself in it, and to be guided from within it by the longed-for future image of myself that was created in the likeness of others. (Bakhtin 1995: 155)

The second organizing principle of the hero biography is the desire to be loved. This is guided by the ego’s anticipatory view of itself in desired situations in which it is loved by the other. Finally, the third dominant principle that Bakhtin mentions is the “’fabular’ possibilities” (Bakhtin 1995: 158). This means that the evaluation of a rich life with many opportunities, with respect to the fables, not only organizes the life of the hero and his and her actions, but also the narration, that is, the progress of the story of the hero’s life, which is characterized by the fairy tale’s adventure form “the endless and thoughtless fabula of the pure form of adventure” (Bakhtin 1995: 159). This form, Bakhtin argues, is more like dreaming about one’s own life than reflecting on it.

As for the second type of biography, the social everyday biography, Bakhtin points to its features as being rooted in historical and cultural values, which in turn organize the hero and his or her life. The focus of these biographies is on social values, especially familiarity, that is, the importance of a good reputation among contemporaries is a key organizing principle. Unlike the hero biography, the emphasis in the narrative is on its descriptive aspects, which is dominated by a predilection for ordinary life: “(the point is not – to be in the world and to have significance in it, but – to be with the world, to observe it and to experience it again and again)” (Bakhtin 1995: 161).

Storytelling takes place on two levels represented by the narrator and the hero: “The narrator-hero” him- or herself, on the level from within, that is, how we “experience ourselves in the hero of our own fantasies and recollections” – sometimes the narrator-hero “draws closer to subiectum of confessional self-accounting” (Bakhtin 1995: 161–162). The usage of the Latin subjectum might, in this case, be best understood in the grammatical sense (as the subject of a sentence) rather than in the ontological one, although the distinction might not always be easy to maintain (see Graffi 2022). Nevertheless, an example of a confessional novel that Bakhtin (1973) refers to in this connection is Dostoevky’s Notes from the underground, written in first person (first published 1864). The narrator balances on the edge of narration, sometimes he enters the story as the biographical hero, and sometimes he tends to merge with the author who is the one who supports the form (Bakhtin 1995: 161–162). On the other level one finds the other “dramatis personae”, these may function as characters and sometimes also as types as these are conceived of by the narrator, that is, the “biographical hero proper” which is thus moved closer to the “author’s position” (Bakhtin 1995: 162). The narrator and the hero move along the same axis, Bakhtin continues, but the author can never be equated with the hero:

Their axiological contexts are the same in kind: The bearer of the unity of lived life – the hero – and the bearer of the unity of form – the author – belong to one and the same axiological world. (Bakhtin 1995: 164)

However, it is important to add that Bakhtin underlines that the author does not need to overcome the resistance in the hero’s search for meaning in life, in contrast to the hero that is dependent on the author as his or her other. This is important because it shows the strict difference between the two categories in a text, that is, the hero and the author can never be one and the same person. Sonesson has pointed out that Bakhtin sometimes tends to tackle author and hero in the same way as ego and alter as defined in cultural semiotics, the latter pair defining two persons who can enter a dialogue with each other where both can answer back (Sonesson 2000), in that sense dialogism also draws closer to the psychotherapeutic practice. In pure artistic works, on the other hand, the narrator takes the position of having the overall perspective. The precondition is the author’s critical perspective on the hero which enables a completion of the hero. Thus, a dividing line between author, narrator, and hero is necessary. Bakhtin writes:

Every line written, every step taken by the narrator, will strive, in that case, to utilize the narrator’s fundamental and essential excess of seeing, for the hero is in need of a transgredient justification; the author’s gaze and self-activity will encompass and shape essentially what constitutes in principle the hero’s limits with respect to meaning at the point where the hero’s life is turned outside itself; and thus, a demarcation in principle will be set between the hero and the author. (Bakhtin 1995: 166)

Bakhtin argues, however, that empathy is paramount to biography and constitutes its character. If we connect Bakhtin’s theory of the essence of biography to cultural semiotics, we can extract important socio-cultural conceptions in the past, that is, we can make biography dialogical with its context. This line of thought is supported by Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s heroes:

No, the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view in relation to the world and in relation to the hero himself, as the semantic and judgement-passing position of a man in relation to himself and to surrounding reality. For Dostoevsky the important thing is not how the hero appears to the world, but most importantly, how the world appears to the hero and how the hero appears to himself. (Bakhtin 1973: 38)

Sonesson (2000) as Bakhtin (1973) underlines the importance of distinguishing the author from the hero, in the sense that the former has an external autonomous position in relation to the hero and is prerequisite for the other, that is, the hero. Moreover, Dostoevsky’s heroes are unfinalized in the sense that nobody from the outside can finalize the inner processes making up self-awareness: “His heroes would remain inwardly unfinalized, because the self-consciousness cannot, after all, be finalized from without”, this is also true for the author (Bakhtin 1973: 60). However, for Dostoevsky, the hero is a person of an idea and ideas are shaped in dialogue with voices of others, hence the polyphonic principle of the construction.

If we take a closer look at one of Bakhtin’s later texts, it seems that Bakhtin’s theories on a general level do not contradict such an understanding. Moreover, we will be provided with some further insights into his philosophy of the dialogical word.

4 The Late Bakhtin

Above I have discussed one of Bakhtin’s earlier texts about author and hero, and below I’ll discuss one of his later texts, that discusses his philosophy of the dialogic speech more explicitly, with the title “The problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences” (first published 1979) from the book Speech genres and other late essays (1986). Bakhtin explains his concept of texts, he writes:

Two aspects that define the text as an utterance: its plan (intention) and the realization of this plan. The dynamic interrelations of these aspects, their struggle, which determine the nature of the text. Their divergence can reveal a great deal. (Bakhtin 1986: 104)

A text is defined as something unique that reflects all the texts from a particular sphere.

All ideas that exist in a certain sphere are thus present in an utterance. Another type of text that Bakhtin emphasizes is the second pole (the first pole is language in the broad sense as a system, that is, the non-unique and the repeatable) which is associated with authorship. The author’s work is realized through the language system, and thus entirely through a context. Intertextuality (the dialogic) as a concept of analysis is mentioned in this context. The relationship of the text to other historical texts is specified as a particular problem. Every reading of a text is conducted in a new and unique way, which is why the meaning of a text can never be regarded as once and for all given. This is why translations of texts are difficult: “But the text (as a system of means) can never be completely translated, for there is no potential single text of texts” (Bakhtin 1986: 106).

In the discussion of the author, Bakhtin (1995) says that the narrator is separated from an “I”, that is, om the biographical hero. However, they are both defined in terms of their relationship to the author as a person (Sonesson 2000). This may possibly be related to the introduction of the concept of indirect speech, which is the result of the author’s work with handling the language at the same time as he or she stands outside of it. Another of Bakhtin’s distinctions is of importance here, the one between explanation and understanding.

Bakhtin argues that in explanation of the other only one subject, one consciousness is required in contrast to the understanding of the other which demands two subjects. Only the latter is dialogic to its nature. In that sense Bakhtin answers the questions raised earlier in connection to the discussion of the biography, namely that an ego (an I) can only understand the other within his or her socio-cultural contexts, which is the essence of a cultural semiotic approach to texts (Rédei 2007; Sonesson 2000). Bakhtin writes:

The ‘inductive’ approach, which is assumed to be inherent in realism, is, in essence, a reifying causal explanation of man. The voices (in the sense of reified social types) are thus simply transformed into signs of things (or symptoms of processes); it is no longer possible to respond to them, one can no longer polemicize with them, and dialogic relations with such voices fade away. (Bakhtin 1986: 112)

These words correspond with the limitations that Bakhtin brings up in connection with the biography, that is, none of these genres are sufficiently dialogic to be able to maintain a distinct dividing line between the author and the hero. Novels within the field of Naturalism, like the biography, seems to fall under the category of being explanatory, as opposed to the dialogical act of understanding the novel. The monologue word is not addressed to anyone, has no recipients, and does not expect any answers. However, Bakhtin argues that there are monologue texts of varying degrees, but there cannot be monological works in the absolute sense.

The dividing line between the author and the hero is not of a definitive nature, but the image of the author is present in the characters but is not the same. Thus, in a character there are distinctive images of both the character and the author, but these two cannot be one and the same. As I understand Bakhtin’s line of thought presented in his text about Dostoevsky’s poetics, this is a reference to the “Socratic dialogues” and the introduction of the ideological hero: to test an idea is at the same to test the person having this idea – hence, the concept of an image of an idea (Bakhtin 1973: 92). Going back to the discussion about the author and hero in biographical texts, it is on this point, then, that Bakhtin criticizes linguistics. He argues that linguistics only studies the elements of the language system but ignores extra-linguistic relations in utterances. Every utterance, Bakhtin argues, is related to both context and speaker/author, the dialogic speech is embodied (Bakhtin 1973).

Bakhtin points out that meaning can only arise with the help of signs, or rather meaning is signs. The relationship to meaning is always dialogical, just like understanding, as we have seen. In contrast to signs, there is the thing, to which, in its pure form, no dialogical relation can be established.

The unique nature of dialogic relations. The problem of the inner dialogism. The seams of the boundaries between utterances. The problem of the double-voiced word. Understanding as dialogue. Here we are approaching the frontier of the philosophy of language and of thinking in the human sciences in general, virgin land. (Bakhtin 1986: 119)

The dialogue according to Bakhtin involves three parties: an “I”, a “Thou” and a “Third” (the superaddresse).

Any utterance always has an addressee (of various sorts, with varying degrees of proximity, concreteness, awareness, and so forth), whose responsive understanding the author of the speech works, seeks and surpasses. This is the second party (again not in the arithmetical sense). But in addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time (the loophole addressee). In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth) (Bakhtin 1986: 126).

Now, can Bakhtin’s philosophy of the other and the dialogical word be analogous to the dialogue going on between the client and the existential psychotherapist? I believe it can: Dialogical relationships (including the dialogical relationships of the speaker to his own word) are a matter for metalinguistics (Bakhtin 1973: 151).

5 Conclusions: the philosophy of dialogue and existential semiotic psychotherapy

We do not address inquiries to nature and she does not answer us. When studying man, we search for and find signs everywhere and we try to grasp their meaning. (Bakhtin 1986: 114)

Bakhtin’s philosophy of the dialogic speech can be helpful in psychotherapeutic work, in the sense that it can on a metalevel give important insights into ways of narration, which is what the “talking cure” is all about. As Bakhtin (1973) states, the object of study for metalinguistics is the dialogical word, the double-voiced word. The dialogical word is also the location for the conflict between two words, the location for the hidden polemic (Bakhtin 1973): “Therefore the orientation of the word and the various means of reacting to it are, perhaps, the most essential problems of the metalinguistic study of every kind of word, including the artistic” (Bakhtin 1973: 167). And to this, I believe we could add the therapeutic.

In this sense the existential psychotherapist is doing metalinguistics, that is, to enter into dialogue with the client with the only purpose of sorting out his or her dialogue with his- or herself, with the other (often near and dear ones in a now and then) and with the superaddressee (the other in a higher realm of existence representing the innermost values, for instance, the future, God, the nation etcetera). Remembering Gadamer, the utmost wish of the existential semiotic psychotherapist is to be allowed to enter a dialogue with the client and to help by being the one who finds “the exactly the right word or discovers the perfect expression in the words of someone else” (Gadamer 2004: 137–138).

On an ethical level Bakhtin’s philosophy is crucial: there can be no therapeutic work without mutual feelings of empathy and at the bottom of it a belief in the dialogue as means of healing – at least from the point of view of existential psychotherapy where the therapist takes the position of a fellow human being in dialogue with a client about what is at stake in human existence, for the individual and for all of us. However, in therapeutic work the dialogue is always between an I and an other (that is, between ego and alter, Sonesson 2016). The former is the client, the author of his or her biographical narrative and the psychotherapist the recipient, the one who has the position of the excess of seeing in the therapeutic setting, and thus, becomes the existential other, or rather alter to side with the terminology of cultural semiotics (Sonesson 2016). Thus, according to Bakhtin, introspection is impossible as a source of self-evaluation; for that, I need the existential other. In addition, this evaluation requires an aestheticization and therefore also constitutes a raw material for artistic works. The attention put to the dialogical word, the essence of psychotherapy was brilliantly expressed by Bakhtin in connection with the works of Dostoevsky: “Dostoevsky’s works consist of a word about a word and addressed to a word. […] As a result of this meeting, new aspects and new functions of the word are revealed and come to the fore” (Bakhtin 1973: 211). Thus, the polyphonic (dialogic) way of thinking has also something to say about the human being, about our consciousness and about our “existence” (Bakhtin 1973: 228).

To continue this line of inquiry, there are important insights also in the details of Bakhtin’s analyses of the different types of biographies: the one representing dreams about one’s life (the hero biography) and the social everyday biography representing what the subjects find the most valuable in the world, the “predilection for ordinary life” (Bakhtin 1995: 161). These two types of biographies on a metalevel might function as types, and as such can be of help to the existential semiotic psychotherapist in sorting out the dialogic dimensions in the narratives presented by the clients seeking help to come to grips with the way they are leading their lives and how it impacts their sense of meaning in life. Another detail for the psychotherapist worth paying attention to is the relationship between the “narrator” and the “hero” in the narratives presented by the clients. Is the relationship very close as in the confessional self-accounting or is it more distant? This could serve as an important source to understand how we experience ourselves from within and how this experience is represented in the descriptions of the hero of our narratives. However, no narrative/text/structure is fixed, every reading or listening is new – thus, meaning is always in the process of becoming. Bakhtin again:

No, the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view in relation to the world and in relation to the hero himself, as the semantic and judgement-passing position of a man in relation to himself and to surrounding reality. For Dostoevsky the important thing is not how the hero appears to the world, but most importantly, how the world appears to the hero and how the hero appears to himself. (Bakhtin 1973: 38)

The conclusive quotation from Bakhtin captures the essence of the work in existential psychotherapy.