Theory for Education

Adapted from Theory for Religious Studies, by William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal

Greg Dimitriadis, George Kamberelis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135482077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Theory for Education provides a concise and clear introduction to key contemporary theorists, including their lives, major works and ideas. Written for the student in need of a quick introduction or for the scholar brushing up on details, this new volume in the theory4 series presents major thinkers whose work and ideas have shaped critical thinking in our time. Greg Dimitriadis and George Kamberelis underscore the particular relevance of these thinkers for the field of education - their work on education, how others in education have used them and possible future directions for teachers and researchers.

Theory for Education 's ease of use, clarity and comprehensive scope will be invaluable for those entering the field.

Adapted from Theory for Religious Studies, by William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal.

THE THEORISTS

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

Key Concepts

• actual language

• utterance

• unfinalizabilty

• dialogism

• heteroglossia

• addressivity

• voice

• genre

• social language

• carnival

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was born in Orel, Russia, south of Moscow, and grew up in Vilnius and Odessa, cosmopolitan border towns that offered an unusually heterogeneous mix of languages and cultures. He studied classics and philology at St. Petersburg University (later Petrograd University) and then moved to the country, first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk, where he taught high school. While there, he married Elena Aleksandrovna and became part of an intellectual circle that also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. He moved to Leningrad in 1924 and five years later was arrested for alleged participation in the underground Russian Orthodox Church. Because of his ill health resulting from a degenerative bone disease, Bakhtin’s initial sentence of ten years in a Siberian labor camp was reduced to six years of internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he worked as bookkeeper on a collective farm. For a full decade after his exile, he was unable to find stable employment; then, in 1945, he secured a position teaching Russian and world literature at Mordovia Pedagogical Institute in Saransk. After sixteen years of teaching, he retired from this position in 1961. In 1969 he moved to Moscow, where he remained until his death in 1975.

Bakhtin worked on many topics during more than a half-century of scholarship, notably epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and education. In all his work, however, there are abiding concerns with ethical responsibility, creativity, and the relations between the two. He was particularly interested in the relations between structure and agency, and between convention and invention.

Bakhtin’s experiences in Vilnius and Odessa exposed him to a rich and complex mix of different language groups, cultures, and classes. In fact, these experiences probably laid the foundation for his theories of dialogism and heteroglossia, discussed at length below. His reading in contemporary German philosophy and physics introduced him to the problem of unity amid difference that would persist throughout his work and influence its reception in both Russia and the West. Bakhtin resisted the Neo-Kantian emphasis on all-embracing unity: “The original Kantian concept of the heterogeneity of ends is much closer to Bakhtin’s work than the later Neo-Kantian lust for unity” (Holquist, 1990, p. 6). He was more receptive to Einstein’s revelation of a complex unity of differences, from which Bakhtin seems to have inferred that all meaning is relational, the result of a “dialogue” between and among bodies—physical, political, and conceptual (Holquist in Bakhtin, 1990, pp. 20–21). Finally, Bakhtin’s religious activities as an intellectual from the Russian Orthodox tradition disposed him to value sobornost, a deep investment in togetherness and community responsibility.

From his earliest writings, Bakhtin attacked “theoretism,” the reduction of human generativity to a priori theoretical systems (for example, Saussurean linguistics, Freudianism, Marxism, or Russian Formalism). Theoretism, he argued, impoverishes the truth of human life by reducing all of life’s phenomenological complexity and messiness to static universal laws and structures. Indeed, much of his work is devoted to demonstrating the fallacy of theoretism, either as an adequate philosophical anthropology or as an approach to human activity in a variety of settings.

Actively resisting theoretism as it had been applied to philosophical anthropologies, Bakhtin attended to the particularities (not the generalities) of everyday life. He claimed that such a stance mitigates the academic impulse toward universalizing experience within theories. Instead of being drawn to the grand or catastrophic events of human history—wars, disasters, revolutions, inaugurations—he was fascinated by the “prosaic” details of the lives of ordinary people, details that are in many ways most revealing of how self re-creation and social transformation take place on the ground rather than in history books. In this regard, his work is very much like that of Michel FOUCAULT.

Bakhtin resisted over-theorizing language, as linguistic structuralism (for example) seemed to do. Thus, a thorough understanding of Bakhtin’s take on language presupposes an understanding of the fundamental linguistic innovations developed by Ferdinand de SAUSSURE. In particular, we need to understand Saussure’s distinction between langue (language as a structured system that operates according to discernible rules) and parole (the specific utterances of individual speakers at particular historical moments). Saussure’s linguistics concentrates on langue and involves (a) distilling lexicons and fundamental grammatical rules, (b) comparing the structures of different languages, and (c) examining the implications of structural differences across languages. In contrast, Saussure considered parole, or the instantiations of language in the utterances of particular speakers at particular moments, to be too unpredictable, heterogeneous, and context-contingent to be relevant to understanding language as a system.

For Bakhtin, though, what is most interesting about language is the individual, temporally specific, highly context-dependent phenomenon of language-in-use. He viewed the fundamental Saussurean dichotomy between langue and parole as overly simplistic and incapable of describing the complex reality of actual language in use. Although languages often do undergo a centralizing pull toward unification, singularity, and systemic integrity, they are simultaneously drifting and being pulled toward multiple peripheries. Canons and codes are developed (most commonly by an elite group holding power), while elsewhere a wide variety of individual speakers are innovating and modifying the canons and codes through their improvisational acts of language use. These two sets of competing forces—centripetal (centralizing and unifying) and centrifugal (decentralizing and disunifying)—always operate simultaneously. For Bakhtin, then, studying only sanitized, unified languages systems severely limits and distorts the attempt truly to understand the nature and functions of language, and it misconstrues how language actually functions in human society and human life.

For Bakhtin, the utterance is the most important linguistic unit of analysis. Utterances are discernible chunks of language-in-use. They may be as short as a single word (for example, “Damn!”) or as long as a novel. Utterances may also be multiply embedded within other utterances, which is indeed the case with much social discourse and many written texts. This is true partly because utterances involve both the physical artifacts produced—either spoken or written language—and a host of extralinguistic forces that helped to shape them. Those extralinguistic forces derive both from the social world and from the thinking processes of individuals. As such, utterances are both social and individual.

The framing context of utterances includes both the author of the utterance (as speaker or writer) and the persons to whom the author responds and from whom the author expects a response. Utterances also come with histories of meaning potential. In most forms of actual language practice, utterances have been used before and are appropriated and redeployed for new purposes in new contexts. In other words, speakers/writers always use chunks of language they have heard in the past and reconfigure and reaccent them for their own purposes.

Utterances are also saturated with the ideologically charged valuations of the social worlds in which they occur. Whether implicitly or explicitly, speakers/writers always express evaluative attitudes toward the subjects or themes of their utterances, “subjective emotional evaluation(s) of the referentially semantic content” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 84). The referentially semantic content of the utterance captures its meaning and is accessible to traditional studies of language as system, such as linguistics (1986, pp. 84–86). The evaluative attitude captures the specific sense of the utterance and is discernible only in the context of “a particular actual reality and particular real conditions,” which are extralinguistic or metalinguistic (1986, pp. 85–86).

Throughout his life Bakhtin emphasized the concept of unfinalizability, or the impossibility of arriving at final conclusions for anything. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, for example, he wrote: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (1981, p. 166). Life is riddled with surpluses, remainders, loopholes, and anomalies that keep things unfinalizable and therefore always hold open the possibility of surprise, change, and transformation.

Dialogism is a kind of a formalization of Bakhtin’s insistence on unfinalizability, and it is his most central and most important theoretical construct. The central focus of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism is language. A secondary focus is the human subject as an unfinalizable complex of identities, desires, and voices. With respect to language, Bakhtin claimed that all discourses—literature, everyday talk, military commands, and so on—are dialogic, a complex amalgam of multiple voices. When someone speaks or writes, her words are not simply streaming forth from within herself as sole author and source. Rather, her discourse, like her identity, is essentially a coalescence of the many voices and languages that constitute her as a subject. Every subject is made up of multiple voices, past and present. The subject is thus a space of dialogue. One’s speech and writing issue forth from that dialogical space.

Polyphony is a key characteristic of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. In this regard, he identified two kinds of discourse: monologic and dialogic discourse. As the word implies, monologic discourse embodies a single voice. It is one with itself and allows for no contradiction, no counter-voice, like a declaration from a pope or president. It is presented as though it is the final word, impossible as that may be. Dialogic discourse, in contrast, emerges in the midst of several unmerged voices. It is an undirected intersection of voices manifesting a “plurality of consciousnesses” that do not all join together in one monologic voice. It cannot be systemized or finalized. Dialogic discourse manifests the particularity and uniqueness of speech event itself. It is not the unity of a system but the unity of a dynamic event, a dialogue that involves struggle and contradiction. Dialogic discourse is discourse that contains a deliberate reference to someone else’s words but also inserts “a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has, and which retains, an intention of its own” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 189).

Another key characteristic of dialogism is heteroglossia. This is a broader concept than polyphony. It is a complex mixture of languages and world views that is always (except in some abstracted ideal conditions) dialogized, as each language is viewed from the perspective of the others. This dialogization of languages, or dialogized heteroglossia, creates a complex unity, for whatever meaning language has resides neither in the intention of the author nor in the text but in a space where the semantic histories of both collide or intersect. “For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 293). This complex content of any utterance is not merely a mixture, however, but a dialogized heteroglossia, a viewing of the utterance from the perspectives of others (1986, pp. 295–296).

In this matrix of dialogicality, the specific contexts in which utterances are produced, distributed, and consumed are influenced by at least four levels of intentionality: (a) the intentionality of the historical moment, (b) the intentionality of the social and cultural frames at work, (c) the intentionality of the culture in which the utterance is produced, and (d) the intentionality of the individual speaker(s) and audience(s) involved. Thus, concrete heteroglossic speech events propel language toward multiplicity—not in the poststructural sense that they disconnect the signifier from the signified, but in the sense that they constantly proliferate different ways of speaking, different rhetorical strategies, different vocabularies, and different meaning potentials.

Bakhtin refined his notion of an utterance by developing the concept of addressivity, which he defined as “the quality of turning to someone” (1986, p. 99). Addressivity is this act of turning (and of being turned to) that defines the dialogic utterance. It requires addressees who participate together in the creation of the meaning of any utterance. Bakhtin also noted that the addressor takes “into account possible responsive reactions” of the addressee (1986, p. 94) when constructing an utterance. This means that the addressor anticipates the responses of the audience. Addressivity, then, marks a highly charged recursive relationship between interlocutors. The author/speaker is never free from the audience in this model of understanding because “anticipation” is an essential mechanism by which the social situation establishes the basic structure of the utterance.

Because heteroglossia involves the interanimation of voices, social languages, and genres, each of these constructs merits discussion. Bakhtin (1981, 1984) developed an interesting model of voice that simultaneously involves multiple dimensions. For Bakhtin, voice is a packet of discourse replete with an ideology. It is the verbal-ideological perspective expressed within a particular utterance. Voice “is the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A voice always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones” (1981, p. 434). The speaking consciousness referred to here is quite different from the notion of an individual author in that it always belongs simultaneously to a speech community and to an individual speaker. Importantly, the semantic intention of any voice is always transformed in some way each time it is used by a new speaker or writer. It is thus always “double-voiced” or, perhaps more accurately, “multiple-voiced.” Finally, because texts are usually composed of multiple utterances, they usually embody multiple voices or ideological perspectives, which enter into various relationships of support, indifference, or competition.

Bakhtin argued that even the expert novelist’s voice is never unitary, except in the historical sense of its control and exploration of voices that are borrowed from a variety of discursive communities and allowed (or encouraged) to intermingle in the novel. Thus, Bakhtin viewed the individual author not as an inherent subjectivity but as a complex dialogic construction that involves knowledge of a variety of discourse communities, the appropriation of a variety of discursive practices, and the active orchestration and transformation of a symphony of voices.

Bakhtin (1973, 1986) emphasized that among the concrete forces that shape individ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PREDECESSORS
• THE THEORISTS