On bringing Mikhail Bakhtin intothe social sciences*

ANTHONY WALL

One exciting aspect of the continuing boom in Bakhtin Studies is theserious move, engaged in by many social thinkers, to move Bakhtin'sphilosophy of culture out from under the shadow of the Humanitiesdisciplines per se and into a broadly conceived set of questions belongingmore properly to the Social Sciences, or better yet, to the `HumanSciences'. Whereas it must be understood from the start that the socialside of Bakhtin's thinking is attracting ever increasing interest fromresearchers working in virtually every discipline in the Humanities andSocial Sciences spectrum, the following article will concentrate most ofits energy on exploring three speci®c publications in the Social Sciencesthat discuss Bakhtin in terms of his `social' thinking.That renewed interest in Bakhtin's `extra-humanistic disciplinarity'

would be arising, with greater and greater frequency, and at this particularpoint of time, is of course welcome news for those who have been inter-ested in the semiotic angle of his cultural thinking. To begin with, like`cultural studies', `semiotics' is a `discipline' that is deeply involved inquestions of what it means to participate in one particular `disciplinary'point of view as opposed to another. Moreover, both cultural studies andsemiotics are `non-disciplines' in the sense that they both have inter-disciplinarity at their very core. Although few humanists have everattempted for very long, or with very much success, to provide convincingarguments as to why Bakhtin should be kept exclusively for humanitiesdisciplines, it is particularly instructive at the present time to review someof the arguments being used to nudge Bakhtin toward the social sciences,arguments that are themselves steeped in clearly visible disciplinaryterritoriality. It is precisely these arguments, along with others, that will

*Marilia Amorim, Dialogisme et alteÂrite dans les sciences humaines. Paris: L'Harmattan,

1996. Beth Brait (ed.), Bakhtin, dialogismo e construc° aÄo do sentido. Campinas: Editora da

Universidade de Campinas, 1997. Michael Meyerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (eds.),

Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. London: Sage Publications, 1998.

Semiotica 133±1/4 (2001), 169±201 0037±1998/01/0133±0169# Walter de Gruyter

Review article

be examined in the following review article as the case is examined as towhy it would now seem desirable to transfer Bakhtin from the Humanitiesinto the Human Sciences fold.

I ®nd the very existence of some of these arguments both puzzlingand troubling. If, on the one hand, one wishes to argue that it is appro-priate at the present time to consider Bakhtin from other disciplinaryperspectives than those through which he has been considered up untilnow (using the argument that the issues explored by Bakhtin go wellbeyond the narrow purview of any one of those [humanistic] disciplineswith which he has hitherto been studied or understood), it is unpro-ductive Ð even contradictory Ð to claim, on the other hand, that thereis a more `appropriate' disciplinarity Ð that of the Social Sciences orsome other disciplinary con®guration Ð for studying him than that withwhich he has been explained up until now. Further, Bakhtin was himselfkeenly interested in broadly conceived issues of epistemology and in howdisciplinarity per se a�ects our ability to know either other people or theworld at large, a disciplinary in¯uence that exerts its power accordingto the tendency of forcing us to view things in one way as opposed toanother. Bakhtin goes to great lengths to distinguish between those waysof knowing that are based on texts or voices and those that are not (seeBakhtin 1986: 107). In this context, the term of `human sciences' wasconsciously used by the Russian cultural philosopher to designate thosedisciplinary con®gurations and purviews of the ®rst sort, i.e., the onesthat deal with voices, whereas the label of the `natural sciences' is reservedfor designating those disciplinary outlooks that do not ever need toconfront voices, or to worry about the potential ability of those voicesto answer back and to confound every and anything that had just been saidabout them. And even though it is clear in Bakhtin's mind, to a certainextent at least, what the di�erences are between these two broadlyconceived epistemological cultures, it is also clear for us that, in his ownpractice as hemoves from philosophy to biology or from physics to literaryanalysis, he does not harbor any belief in hard-set and impenetrableboundaries that would hermetically seal one broad disciplinary groupingo� from the other.

A Brazilian `Bakhtin' living in France

If the to-and-fro movement between the `human sciences' and the `naturalsciences' is already engaged in throughout Bakhtin's personal writingand research, it seems highly unlikely that, within the human sciences them-selves, a clear distinction between the humanities and the social sciences is

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even conceivable for Bakhtin. In their own particular ways, the threerecently published books on Bakhtin under review in the present article allexplore issues and problems associated with a currently discernible trendconsisting of examining Bakhtin almost exclusively from a Social Sciencesperspective. An interesting, as well as passionate, contribution in thisregard is Marilia Amorim's Dialogisme et alteÂrite dans les scienceshumaines, a book that looks in detail at the ways in which Bakhtin'stheories of culture can be adopted for interventionist methods of educationand pedagogy. Amorim is particularly interested, for example, in problemsrelated to the public instruction of immigrant groups and in ways, duringthe educational and research processes, of letting their voices be heard sothat the contributions they wish to express are valued. `Research in thehuman sciences', she writes, `consists in this intriguing movement entailedbywanting to be a host in the other's home country, a shift in the direction ofthe other that contains the claim to be able both to welcome and totranslate the other's otherness' (p. 158, my translation).1 Amorim relies inan innovative fashion on both Freud (1963 [1914]) and Benveniste (1966,1974), as she describes the importance of an `inversed you' (a tu inverseÂ, asshe writes in French) that, at one and the same time, both speaks in theplace of one's `object' of research and will always and inevitably say some-thing other than what that `object' wanted to say. Instead of representing apublic contest between an `I' and a `he/she', the pedagogical methods sheadvocates rely ona conceptionof the humanvoice that is construed in termsof the lateral movements a given researcher's voice creates in the veryutterance situation in which this researcher must function. For, above all,Amorim speaks of the dialogic situation of utterances not only as sheencounters them face to face along with others inhabiting the samepedagogical situation that she does, but also, and almost more importantlyfor her, in her role of writing about the pedagogical encounters which formthe basis of her `objects of study'. The voice of that other `you' is thereforenot only a dynamic force in the unfolding of any pedagogical situation; inaddition, that voice continues to exert its dynamism in the di�cultencounters that the researcher must engage in while reporting on what hasbeen discovered. There can never be perfect transposition of the subject'svoice into the words used by the researcher to express that subject's pointof view. It is this inherent di�culty in dealing with the impossibility ofan adequate dialogue between the subject and the writer of research thatmakes research in the area of the human sciences so interesting. `It isprecisely in those situations where we recognize the impossibility ofdialogue, those situations where we admit there will always be a lossof meaning in communication, that we are able to construct an object andto produce knowledge about human beings' (p. 22).2

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In other epistemological words, knowledge in the human sciences isconstituted out of the necessary and inevitable blockages of commu-nicative transparency. It is not as if we could wish these blockages awayor learn with time how to override them because, without this funda-mental loss of meaning as the voice moves from one human being towardthe next, there would quite simply be no possibility for human science atall. This is why the researcher in the human sciences not only in¯uencesthe subjects/objects of his or her cognitive enterprise, but is also a�ectedin return by the very enterprise of which he or she is supposed to be theultimate author and authority. The author is `altered' by that which isauthored, by the otherness that is contained in what needs to be authored.Amorim proposes to use the word `alteration' in a positive sense, not onein which someone purposely manipulates the results of one's researchfor the purposes of a greater cause, and certainly not one that the Frenchverb `alteÂrer' suggests, i.e., change for the worse. Rather Ð and this isthe central point of Amorim's dialogic framework Ð alteration must beunderstood in a productive sense, that is, the production of an alterity,a becoming-other that involves recognition, and not a wishing away, ofthe presence of otherness within oneself.

For Amorim's study, communication always and inevitably entailsimperfect translation, the incomplete passage between two universes,whether the latter `be two cultures or two theoretical systems' (p. 26):

If the universe of signs is the site where both the possibility and the impossibilityof encounters are played out, it is also within the sign that we are able to overseethe e�ects created by contacts between di�erent universes. Throughout history,

the gulfs separating universes have been crossed and signs have mutually trans-formed one another. Although in those places where earlier we saw just oneuniverse, we can now see another, there is also a permanent e�ect of illusion that

must be taken into account, one that forces us to ask: is this cultural acclimatiza-tion or appropriation? And since we are dealing with signs, we can only look in thedirection of the utterance act by asking whether these transformations are the

result of the other's in¯uence or rather of the other's power, in other words, whothe bene®ciary will be of this transformed cultural object. (p. 34)3

The questions posed by Amorim's study into the appropriate ways ofwriting about encounters with others naturally take on philosophical-anthropological dimensions. She deftly uses not only thinkers such asTzvetan Todorov (1982) who have used Bakhtin to move in just sucha direction, but she also turns in the direction of other important thinkerssuch as Claude Le vi-Strauss (1968), Francis A�ergan (1987), and VictorSegalen (1978 [1918]). Throughout Amorim's study, a central aspectof her enquiry is the emphasis she places, from several theoretical points

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of view, on the transformative powers, as well as on the dangers, inherentin all dialogically constituted encounters.There are, of course, other anthropological writers interested in Bakhtin

who deserve to bementioned here. One of these is Emily Schultz. I mentionEmily Schultz's Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin and LinguisticRelativity, a book that is complementary to Amorim's, because bothSchultz and Amorim independently point to a number of interestingconnections and di�erences between, on the one hand, the `Bakhtin'4 thathuman scientists are formulating with increasing frequency and, on theother, the purely humanist `Bakhtins'. What we have here are two sortsof `Bakhtins' that are oftentimes di�cult to compare point by point mainlybecause many of the possible points of comparison are peripheral. It seemsfair to say that works such as Schultz' and Amorim's show us the necessityof going beyond peripheral points of comparison even though, up untilrecently at least, such points have unfortunately provided the sole basis ofmost comparisons that have been available to those interested in develop-ing the methodological and epistemological possibilities of Bakhtin'sthinking. In turn, it is also instructive to juxtapose complementary visionsof Bakhtin, especially when both come from similar disciplinary pointsof view. A combination of Schultz and Amorim o�ers some interestingpoints of observation in this regard. Beginning with a thorough exam-ination in which the linguistic theories of Benjamin Whorf are seen toconverge in several key ways with those of Mikhail Bakhtin, parti-cularly in their commonly held conceptions of how languages shape ourconceptual worlds, Schultz goes on to show, in a thought-provokingway, how it is that the languages Bakhtin uses to do his thinking, whatSchultz refers to as his `artistic prose', must in the end be studied not onlyin terms of the ways in which it shapes Bakhtin's particular readingof Dostoevsky but also, and no doubt more importantly, in terms ofhow it in¯uences Bakhtin's own thinking about culture in general. Thatis, Bakhtin makes such a strong case for studying how the artistry ofDostoevsky's prose provides invaluable insights into what and how hethinks about grand philosophical questions in general that it is di�cultnot to adopt the same `artistic' approach for reading Bakhtin himself,i.e., to study the artistry of his own prose. Schultz writes:

Inparticular,wewill focuson that formofwriting inwhich, according toBakhtin, anauthor ismost free to exploit themultiple resources of grammar and genre in pursuitof his own ends, namely artistic (or novelistic) prose.While presenting sophisticatedviews about the ways language can be used, Bakhtin provides at the same time a

series of literary-critical tools which may be used to analyze what an actual author,such as Whorf (or Bakhtin himself ), is up to in a particular text. (1990: 26)

Mikhail Bakhtin 173

Like Amorim, Schultz is interested in translation, not only the inevitablyimperfect translation from the perspective of one's subjects to that ofone's own writing, but also in the ways that practitioners of social philos-ophy can relate to believers in hard-core empiricism, and how unilingualspeakers of one language can relate, through images for example, tounilingual speakers of another totally foreign language. There are variousways in which images in one language can be transmitted to speakers ofanother. One must not forget in this regard that languages not only conveyimages in what they say but that they also contain images because of thevery expressive means that they adopt. Through Schultz's reading ofWhorf done through the eyes of Bakhtin, we not only see many things thata strict theory of linguistic determinism can never see, but we also see whylanguages are never hopelessly cut o� from one another, even ones thatappear to be utterly di�erent in relation to one another. Schultz is keenlyaware of the problems awaiting attempts to translate from one languageor worldview to another: even though languages inhabit separate realms,as it were, it is not necessary, for their translation, to presuppose theclassical idea of a neutral context of usage or, even worse, the mystically-tainted notion of the superior God's eye view of meaning. For one thing,there can be no such neutral language on earth, and for supporting sucha claim, Amorim Ð here in total convergence with Schultz Ð quotesfrom Bakhtin's famous Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics: `When a mem-ber of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is not as a neutral wordof language, not as a word free from the aspirations and evaluationsof others, uninhabited by others' voices' (Bakhtin 1984: 202 quotedin Amorim, p. 97). For both Schultz and Amorim, translation results inself-awareness, the ability and willingness to recognize more than whatone was prepared to see before the encounter with the other: `Criticalself-consciousness and its chief product, a fully developed surplus ofvision, not just for a few, but for all Ð this is the kind of ``more'' whichWhorf kept trying to urge his readers to see' (Schultz 1990: 152). Byrecognizing the otherness of the other's discourse, one is much more likelyto understand something profound and moving from it Ð even at the riskof treating it as unalterably foreign Ð than if one simply imposes one'sown pre-established categories for understanding upon the languageof the other, while claiming at the same time to be objective. The majordi�erence between Schultz and Amorim, in their respective uses ofBakhtin for understanding intercultural translation and alteration, isthat, for Amorim, this dialogue of di�erences ®nds its ultimate impor-tance in the fact that di�erentiation is also part of what each one of usbecomes as the result of dialogue. Alteration is part of what it meansto live dialogically.

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Translation therefore `occurs' for Amorim more radically than it doesfor Schultz. In addition to the types of intra-psychic translation thatshe studies using psychoanalysis, Amorim is also interested in `alterity asalteration', a process that occurs at the level of the body, both in thebody as language and in language as a body. The bodily nature of thisalteration has to do, once again, with the utterance of alterity, with the factthat the representation of otherness is itself an occurrence or an event, onewhere the utterer, the utterance, the interlocutor, and all who come intocontact with the act itself are constantly displaced or moved. Amorimadopts the image of choreography to describe what she means with respectto the methodology she must adopt for her own writing. `[I]n a polyphonicapproach', she writes, `the word becomes a gesture, because of its relationalcharacter. Discursive space is reconstructed according to the relationshipbetween places' (p. 92).5 Part of this displacement has to do with theobservation that, in Bakhtinian terms, the production of an utterance isalso, and to varying degrees, the production of a quotation. `The possibilityof quotation is speci®c to humanity. Reporting, reproducing, recountingto some third party that which someone else told me but that I did notsee myself, this is an activity that structures my humanity' (p. 75).6 Thisis where Amorim sees a role for Bakhtin's carnival: as that semiotic set-ting where there is maximum visibility a�orded to the fact that discoursenot only involves at least two voices, but also two bodies. `Double-bodiedand not only double-voiced, the discourse of the carnival always refersto the body' (p. 116).7 As such, the processes that produce alterity andthat constantly appear in the form of dialogue and quotation are there-fore understood as the basis of a fundamental characteristic of humanmeaning-making. `There is no language without the presence of someoneelse to whom I can speak, and this other is someone who speaks and whoresponds, no language therefore without the possibility of saying whatsomeone else has said' (p. 76).8 Drawing on EÂ mile Benveniste (1966 and1974) and D-R. Dufour (1990), Amorim goes so far as to postulate thatthe discourses of the human sciences, even in their written form, must dojustice to the active presence of voices within their very texture. Whereasthe utterer of scienti®c discoursemust try to speak as an `I' who is not reallya `person' in this interactive sense Ð that is to say that there is notsupposed to be any `you' in scienti®c discourse Ð the writer of `humanscienti®c' prose is not allowed to make do without the `other' who is bothin front of the utterer and in the utterer.Studying in France, and writing and working in Rio de Janeiro, Marilia

Amorim represents, to a large extent, the cultural make-up of manyBrazilian intellectuals, both in the social sciences and the humanities,who are increasingly becoming interested in the ideas and work of

Mikhail Bakhtin 175

Mikhail Bakhtin. There are many other Brazilian Bakhtinians with asimilar intercultural background in theory. One of the most importantscholars in this group is Beth Brait whose work, virtually unknown outsideof Brazil, vibrates with the energy of a `Bakhtin Scholar' who knowsseveral intellectual traditions, including a largely French-languagetheoretical apparatus that is combined with a predominantly Brazilianfocus. In Anglo-Saxon terms, Brait is neither a `true' humanist nor a `real'social scientist: rather, she `truly' works within the `human sciences' in thebroadest and most positive sense of the term. Her methodology combinesdiscourse analysis, literary analysis, semiotics, and sociolinguistics; her®elds of study include, for example, the notion of characters (Brait 1985),the discursive functioning of irony (1996), cultural problems of orality(1991), and dialogue (1994). In many ways, Brait is one of many versatileBrazilian intellectuals such as Boris Schnaiderman (1982, 1983), CarlosAlberto Faraco (1980), Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros and Jose Luiz Fiorin(l994), CristovaÄ o Tezza (1996), Eduardo PenÄ uela CanÄ izal (1996, 1998),and many others who, in the space of the last ten years, have turnedBakhtin Ð not so long ago (in the early 1990s) considered to be a ®gurewho was `still largely unknown' in Brazil (Faraco 1996: 207) Ð intoa cultural icon of sorts whose centenary sparked a ¯urry of colloquia andpublications, and who now commands signi®cant coverage in journalpublications virtually every time that a new book on Bakhtin appearseither in Brazil or in other countries (see Tezza 1998 and Pompeu 1998).Brait herself organized one of these interdisciplinary conferences, inNovember 1995, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bakhtin'sbirth and she subsequently published a large volume, using revisedcontributions from that conference, in 1997. It is to parts of this volumeto which I now turn.

`Bakhtin' is alive and well and living in Brazil

Beth Brait's collection of essays, Bakhtin, dialogismo e construc° aÄo dosentido [Bakhtin, Dialogism and the Construction of Meaning], is dedicatedto Boris Schnaiderman, a scholar who is arguably the ®rst Brazilianintellectual to pursue Bakhtin's body of works in a systematic fashion(Schnaiderman 1982, 1983). Her 385-page volume contains contributionsfrom twenty-seven di�erent scholars whose disciplinary bases includeliterary studies, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, andtranslation studies. The contributions that lean towards the `socialsciences' side of the volume will provide the focus of the remarks thatfollow. In general, we can say that they all straddle the border between the

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humanities and the social sciences in ways that are both similar to, anddi�erent from, what we saw inMarilia Amorim's recent book. They re¯ectthe importance, found inmuch recent Brazilian work in the area of culturalsemiotics, that is attached to various aspects of the voice in oral culture justas they stress the epistemological work that the voice carries out, inBakhtin's thinking, in providing a watershed between the human sciencesand the natural sciences. This distinguishing feature of the voice was anaspect of Bakhtin's thought that Tzvetan Todorov stressed with muchforce in his widely read study (Todorov 1984: 17±22).This point about the importance of the voice in the text is taken up in

the contribution written by Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros (pp. 27±38)9

where the author stresses the connections between a ®rst fact that Bakhtinsees the text as the central object of the human sciences and a second factthat the text contains a voice that is silent. This complex silence givesperhaps the best reason for the dual conception of dialogism that weoften ®nd in Bakhtin's thinking: dialogue between human beings anddialogue between juxtaposed discourses, an ambiguous understanding thatalso explains why the voices that Bakhtin claims to hear everywhere areindeed nowhere to be heard in empirical reality. Both the object and themethod of the human sciences, as Bakhtin sees them, can thereby be said tobe dialogic in this ambiguous sense: `In the treatment he gives in his writingto the text as the object of the human sciences, Bakhtin is already pointingtoward two di�erent conceptions of the dialogical principle, to one ofdialogue as it occurs between interlocutors and to one of dialogue as itoccurs between discourses' (p. 28).10 Indeed, it would therefore seem thatthe very object of the human sciences is itself something that is subjectto the same ambiguous dialogical method that Bakhtin derives from hisown observations on that object. Indeed, Pessoa de Barros sees the sametype of impossible univocality as did Marilia Amorim: for the HumansSciences to be something at all, in order that they might be understood intheir epistemological speci®city, they have to recognize a basic contra-diction at their very heart, the fact that the subject of knowledge cannot beanything without becoming, at the same time, an object of knowledge,and it is in this viciously circular logic that the human sciences areborn. `The subject of knowledge provides an interpretative and compre-hensive act in face of the other subject instead of simply seeking to know anobject' (p. 29).11

A signi®cant part of these contradictions in both the material studiedby Bakhtin and in the methodologies he uses to do his investigationscan be found, according to Eni Puccinelli Orlandi (pp. 39±48),12 in the factthat the Russian philosopher works simultaneously with language,literature and societal structures (p. 40). Bringing several theses into

Mikhail Bakhtin 177

focus developed by FrancË oise Gadet and Michel Peà cheux (1981), Orlandiis interested in pursuing what Bakhtin's theories of discourse can tell usabout the material side of language. She therefore asks about the relation-ship between, on the one hand, language in general and, on the other,a particular language in a particular socio-political setting. The speci®crevolutionary setting in which the young Bakhtin himself lived andworkedas he theorized cultural languages in general led him to see how meaningscan be produced from non-meaning. What Orlandi does in relation toBakhtin is in e�ect what Amorim does in relation to her own work: shestates that it is not enough to think and write about cultural theorybecause, in addition, it is necessary to think and write about what it meansto think and write about cultural theory from within the particularstandpoint in culture that one occupies when writing. For Orlandi,following Peà cheux, there is a necessary metaphorical relationship betweena politically charged revolutionary atmosphere and popular forms ofcultural expression, just as there is a necessary relationship betweenpopular culture and the shapes a given cultural theory can take on since itis born in that same culture. The precise contours that Bakhtin's use ofpopular culture takes on in his work on Rabelais (Bakhtin 1968) aretherefore no coincidence, as popular forms of cultural expression formthe indispensable link between political life and cultural theory. Thisexplains why language, as the most obvious means of cultural expression,sometimes tries to pass as if it were itself the whole reality of which it is butone part. Patrick Dahlet (pp. 59±87)13 completes some of Orlandi'sproposals by turning more speci®cally to the relationships Bakhtinhimself establishes between verbal interaction and social interaction.Relying heavily on the work of Jacqueline Authier-Revuz (1994), who hasproduced some remarkably original work in reading Bakhtin froma psycho-sociolinguistic point of view, and on that of the eminent Frenchsociolinguist Antoine Culioli (1990), Dahlet starts from the principleaccording to which the sign, in a Bakhtinian framework, has to be seenas an instrument of action: `the sign is for action' (p. 59).14 Dahlet'sprinciple point of departure among Bakhtinian texts is Voloshinov's andBakhtin'sMarxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973), which he takescare to situate in the then contemporary philosophical context of neo-Kantian philosophy. The most important upshot that Dahlet sees forBakhtin's theory of the utterance is a new theory of subjectivity, a dynamicsubjectivity that emerges in and through linguistic (inter-)action: `inBakhtin's work, we encounter a description that oscillates betweena foundation for the discursive subject's discontinuity and the dislo-cation of its discursive surfaces, processes that occur under the e�ect ofpsycho-sociological factors' (p. 60).15 Dahlet searches for an operational

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de®nition of polyphony, one that is capable of dealing with the fact thatsubjectivity and interlocution are two inextricably intertwined dimensionsnot only of social reality but also of the ways speaking human beingsexperience that reality. In this context, a subject is not only constitutedby the force exerted by the other, but more precisely by themany e�orts thesubject will inevitably exert in order to create a sense of di�erence vis-aÁ -visthose powerful forms of subjectivity displayed by others.According to Beth Brait (pp. 91±104),16 Bakhtin is precisely the type

of cultural theoretician whose broad understanding of language is ableto cope with the multifarious dimensions of human communication insociety. It is well-known that `linguistic' terms such as `meaning' and`signi®cation' are at best highly ambiguous, and it is only in a rich theoryof human meaning that we are able to deal with the multiple dimensionsof this ambiguity. As a point of departure, all of the dimensions goinginto these ambiguities need to be taken into consideration in an ongoingattempt at explanation. Part of the richness of Bakhtin's point of view canbe seen in the fact that it leads us to study both real life and aestheticsituations, both philosophical-ethical issues and matters of everyday life,both `hard' theoretical issues in linguistics and `softer' aspects of literarythinking, but never does Bakhtin see any of these as separate from all theother realms, and, instead, he views them all as indispensable and equallyimportant dimensions Ð and this, despite their contradictory relation-ships vis-aÁ -vis one another in human language and communication. AsBrait writes:

The concept of language that emanates from the works of this Russian thinkercommits itself neither to a propensity for linguistics nor to one for literary theory,

but it is rather indicative of a vision of the world which, precisely because it seeksout the forms through which meaning is constructed and instituted, manifests itselfthrough the way it approaches linguistic/discursive issues, through its theory of

literature, its philosophy and its theology as a semiotics of culture which assemblesa vast combination of interrelated dimensions that have, as of yet, not all beendrawn out. (p. 92)17

It is precisely his strong appreciation of the untapped richness of somany domains of human meaning that, in turn, makes Bakhtin's ownwork so rich in and of itself. For Brait, then, Bakhtin's multiple attemptsto get close to how the heterogeneity of meaning can be represented con-stitute an important thread that runs through all his thinking. In thisperspective, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin 1993) can be seen asa fundamental text in which questions of philosophy and literary ana-lysis are inextricably intertwined. The intimate connections of this parti-cular early text with other Bakhtinian writings such as Problems of

Mikhail Bakhtin 179

Dostoevsky's Poetics (Bakhtin 1984), The Formal Method in LiteraryStudies (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978), or even Marxism and thePhilosophy of Language (VolosÏ inov and Bakhtin 1973) all suggest thatthe fundamental role that Toward a Philosophy of the Act plays inBakhtin's nascent thinking Ð especially as a starting point in whichquestions of language are dealt with in all their multidimensionalcomplexity Ð cannot be overstated. Similar points about the complexnature of Bakhtin's notion of meaning are brought up in Luiz FranciscoDias' article (pp. 105±113)18 and by Mo nica Graciela Zoppi-Fontana(pp. 115±127).19 Further, in this same context of Bakhtin's ideas oflanguage, one highly original contribution should be pointed out thatis useful for understanding irony in use from a Bakhtinian perspective(pp. 129±138). In her text, Maria Lõ lias Dias de Castro20 uses the richnessof Bakhtin's ideas on `language in use' to demonstrate the necessity oflinking society and language together in any adequate explanation oflanguage as discourse. This she does by concentrating on how a popularBrazilian journalist, Aparõ cio Torelly (known as Aporelly), both uses andmisuses Portuguese-language proverbs in order to create irony, relying ona series of discursive devices that Dias de Castro, in reference to Gre sillonand Maingueneau (1984), calls linguistic `highjacking'.

These articles are some of the more important ones among the twenty-seven pieces published in Brait's recent volume on Bakhtin. But it iscertainly not true to say that Brait's collection contains exclusively studiesthat deal with linguistic theory or with discourse analysis. Signi®cantly,there are a number of authoritative contributions in this volume thathail from other disciplines in the human sciences, ®elds of study suchas psychology and ethical philosophy. Of the latter, it is important topoint out Irene Machado's contribution on the body-sign in a theoryof ideology (pp. 141±158),21 Ve ronique Dahlet's study of the body-voicerelations in a conceptualization of intonation, voice, and rhythm(pp. 263±279),22 Helena Nagamine BrandaÄ o's study of writing and thepsychoanalytical consequences, for subjectivity, of multiplying and dyna-mizing points of reference (pp. 281±290),23 and Ina Camargo Costa'sprovocative discussion of the early Bakhtin's `neo-Kantian Marxism'(pp. 293±302),24 a piece which contains a stimulating discussion of someessential points made in Bakhtin's di�cult `The problem of content,material, and form in verbal art' (Bakhtin 1990: 257±325).

Of the many original essays of this volume that do not exactly ®t neatlyinto the ®elds of linguistic theory or of discourse analysis, two contribu-tions written by accomplished psychologists stand out for a number ofreasons. I refer here to Maria Teresa de AssuncË aÄ o Freitas' powerfulcontribution entitled `In Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's texts: A possible

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dialogue' (pp. 311±330)25 as well as to Solange Jobim e Souza's no-less-stimulating `Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Polyphony, allegoryand the concept of truth in the discourse of contemporary science'(pp. 331±348).26 As these two texts constitute, in my opinion, the twomost exciting pieces found in Brait's Bakhtin volume, and since they bothare solid contributions to what, throughout this review, has been calledthe `human sciences', it is worthwhile discussing them in some detail here.In a contribution that, for many methodological reasons, is quite

di�erent in nature from the ground-breaking work done by JanetteFriedrich (1993) on Bakhtin and the psychological theories of ideology inhis time, Freitas builds on some of her own published work on Bakhtinin the ®eld of educational psychology (1994a, 1994b) in order to draw outmany of the most productive aspects of Bakhtin's notions of time.Beginning with a preliminary comparison between Bakhtin and WalterBenjamin, Freitas stresses the idea of time as eventness, as a spark fromthe past which, under the appropriate conditions, can be pro®tably ignitedfor use in the present. Using this ®rst comparison between Bakhtin andBenjamin, something more than one author has done in recent years (seefor example Crapanzano 1995: 137±150), Freitas moves to her mainconcern, that of learning how the di�erences and similarities betweenBakhtin and Vygotsky are informative for the contemporary reader. Themost productive aspect of Freitas' overarching comparison in this articlebetween Bakhtin and Vygotsky is that she manages to enter into deepdimensions of their respective theoretical principles, or even of theirtheoretical worldviews. This is not the common type of study on Bakhtinthat consists mainly of a comparative content-analysis of Bakhtin andx: `The possibility of these similarities [between Bakhtin and Vygotsky]is linked to two basic points: the dialectical method and their vision ofthe human sciences' (p. 314).27 Referring to the important psychologicalwork done by Solange Jobim e Souza (1994) in the ®eld of childpsychology, work that was also accomplished with the help of Bakhtin'stheories of subjectivity, Freitas stresses the interrelational foundations thatthe psychological notion of the subject must necessarily contain: `Thesubject is constituted by relations' (p. 316).28 It is this interrelationalfoundation that leads us to believe that, within this way of looking athuman subjectivity, there lies the potential of an entirely new epistemo-logical framework for the human sciences in general. Her explanationof the importance of subjective interrelationality goes as follows: `Thisnew perspective enables the construction of a theory of the humansciences that goes beyond the parameters of objective knowledge and ofneutrality that are speci®c to the exact sciences.' (p. 316).29 Basing partof her thinking on the Brazilian educational psychologist Sonia Kramer

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(1993), Freitas suggests that the most striking lesson that a methodologicaljuxtaposition of Bakhtin and Vygotsky gives us is that they point us in thedirection of `another way of doing science' (p. 317), `uma forma outra' thatof course implicates another way of knowing and stresses creative waysof apprehending the (social) world.

After all, both Bakhtin and Vygotsky had a thoroughly interdisci-plinary education. Their ways of restructuring our notions of subjectivityare intimately linked to their respective familiarity with the methods ofartistic creativity. Here, language is at the very heart of any such creativerestructuring, and a conceptual framework is born whereby `the signseen as a social product takes on a generative and organizing functionin psychological processes' (p. 318).30 A reading of Bakhtin's `Authorand hero in aesthetic activity' (1990: 4±256) as well as VolosÏ inov's andBakhtin's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is instructive in thisregard. In a way that is similar to A. Silvestri's and G. Blanck's com-parative reading of Bakhtin and Vygotsky (Silvestri and Blanck 1993),Freitas is attracted by the enabling possibilities that interrelational notionsof subjectivity entail. In such a framework, learning, for example, willalways imply the multiple ways in which the objective interactions at workin a given social environment are adapted by an individual for his or herown intrapsychological needs. Such an observation has, of course,enormous importance for educational psychology because here it is lessimportant to understand what precisely growing children can or cannot doon their own than it is to understand how well particular children are ableto interact with, and to learn from, others. The main di�erence that Freitassees between Bakhtin and Vygotsky has to do with the larger social scopewith which Bakhtin conceptualizes the interactive dimensions involvedin the socialization of individual children who make their way towardadult subjecthood. One sees, therefore, to what extent it is true to saythat the questions Freitas asks as a consequence of her own comparisonof Bakhtin and Vygotsky entail a perspective that takes in methodol-ogies coming from a number of human sciences disciplines. This is thefascinating aspect of her contrastive study.

Another accomplished pscyhologist interested both in Bakhtin and inthe links that can be forged with Walter Benjamin's psychological thoughtis Solange Jobim e Souza whose contrastive piece on Bakhtin andBenjamin is also included in Beth Brait's volume. In a captivating con-trapuntal juxtaposition of selected quotations from Bakhtin's andBenjamin's notations on methodology, Jobim e Souza wishes to drawout the epistemological implications that can be developed for thosetheories of subjectivity that are steeped in the problematics of time. The®rst lesson that Jobim e Souza draws is that the development of human

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subjectivity does not in any way follow any strict linear sequence in itsmovement through time. This she shows through a discussion of Bakhtin'sand Benjamin's descriptions of `truth', something they both see as beingconstructed in a peculiar temporal unfolding: `This progressive conquestof truth, as it occurs in the dialogue of ideas expanding in both space andtime, challenges the human sciences to construct a new understandingof themselves' (p. 332).31 Stated in psycho-semiotic terms, Jobim e Souzaconcludes that subjectivity and historicity must therefore be `re-signed'or even `re-signi®ed', a project that not only has to take Benjaminian`¯ashes' of time into detailed account but also one that allows for variousprocesses whereby small fragments are released from encompassing largercontexts. The central role that must be given to language in such a newand creative paradigm of truth is played out with particular cogency withrespect to an understanding of human subjectivity. The complexity ofhuman existence is such that it will always be greater than the ques-tions that any one academic discipline can ever hope to generate for itscomprehension. This unfathomable richness of the questions that mustbe asked accounts for the strong stylistic varieties that one ®nds inboth Bakhtin's and Benjamin's writing. In a sense, then, both writers arefollowing a parallel trajectory in their quest for understanding thetemporal qualities of truth: in Bakhtin's case it comes to an exploration ofdialogue, in Benjamin's case it is a matter of exploiting the resources of`authorized quotation'. Both are interested in seeing the ways in whichheterogeneous elements come together and constantly rub against oneanother in human existence. Jobim e Souza writes:

Our [two] authors give credence to the idea that the human sciences can andmust assume both a commitment and a responsibility for developing a new conceptof truth, thus preserving a worthy role for language, that of transmitting and

revealing the permanent tension that exists between cognition and truth in thesphere of human and social knowing. (p. 336)32

In this same context they also claim Ð stating here a point we saw atthe heart of the epistemological discussions proposed by MariliaAmorim Ð that the tension between knowledge and truth is somethingthat is absolutely necessary for the human sciences. A basic feature of thishuman truth is that it cannot be simply `taught', an observation whichof course complicates the issue as to whether or not truth in the humansciences can ever be `transmitted'. This impossibility derives in turn fromthe irreducible singularity of the living `objects' of the human sciences.In the case of Bakhtin and Benjamin, the methods of dialogue and

quotation are always `indirect' methods. They always imply what Diasde Castro calls linguistic `highjacking'. What we have here is a way of

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thinking that renounces all forms of perfect predictability in an e�ort toaccount for the necessary irregularities of all things human. Knowledgein the domain of the human sciences therefore cannot follow a straightand narrow path; like subjectivity, it grows creatively, often producingloops that allow the past to become a permanently mutating basis for thefuture. `If, for Bakhtin, truth can be found in the dialogic relationshipbetween texts, both written and spoken ones, in Benjamin's case truth isexpressed by actual objects, things, gestures, etc. All these are constitutedin the signs of a much wider historical and cultural situation' (p. 341).33

Every subject, like every thing, speaks through the traces it contains fromelsewhere. Both similar to and di�erent from what the American socialscientist Stanley Aronowitz terms as Bakhtin's belief in the overall unityof culture involving all disciplinary de®nitions of truth (Aronowitz1995: 126), here the particularity of the mode of knowing is not somuch in the text that the human sciences have, as their mission, to study,but rather in the individual make-up of the human scientist as a humansubject. In Jobim de Souza's thinking, as in Freitas', language must beconsidered as the vehicle of knowledge, and especially as a vehicle thathas an irreducibly double character as both a rational and a sensualphenomenon.

The Anglo-American `Bakhtin' and his relations to the human sciences

These descriptions of two recent Brazilian publications on Bakhtin,one written in French and the other in Portuguese, set the stage fora discussion of an important English-language publication that alsodeals with many issues related to the thorny question of what is theappropriate, or most productive, disciplinary a�liation for a thinker ascomplicated as Mikhail Bakhtin. I have already brie¯y alluded to thecontributionwritten in this domain by StanleyAronowitz, a social scientistwho, afterMichael Gardiner's ground-breakingmonograph The Dialogicsof Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (1992), was earlyto sense the enormous di�culties in de®ning with any precision what itwas in Bakhtin's work that can make him both attractive and repulsiveto social scientists in search of new paradigms for apprehending theintricacies of human behavior. Gardiner is the co-editor, along withMichael Mayerfeld Bell, of a stimulating collection of essays written, forthe most part, by `unconventional' social scientists, researchers intent oncorrecting the perceived situation in Anglo-American academia where,for whatever reasons, `[d]isciplines like sociology, philosophy, politicalscience, and so forth have been slow to recognize the potential of Bakhtin's

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ideas' (p. 2). In many respects, Bell's and Gardiner's collection representsa highly useful anthology that raises a number of issues that are bothexplicitly and implicitly related to Bakhtin's (extra-)disciplinarity.Given the tenor of the two books just reviewed, it therefore becomes

interesting to look seriously at the question of whether or not there ispresently a dearth of social-scienti®c thinking on Bakhtin's work. Twopreliminary points are in order for the launching of such a discussion:(1) it is not clear, in the statement quoted above, where (i.e., in whatlanguage) such a shortage is apparent, and (2) it is unclear to what the`and so forth' at the end of Gardiner's and Bell's list of excluded disciplinesis supposed to refer exactly.On the ®rst point, it is both true and not true that there has been

little work published in English on Bakhtin that involves thinking donefrom the perspective of the social sciences. It is certainly the case thatthe ®rst twenty years or more of Bakhtin Studies were dominated byresearchers working in the Humanities (mainly in Russian Studies, EnglishStudies, and French Studies from the angle of literary criticism). But itis also true that the present landscape in English-language Bakhtin Studieshas changed radically in the past ®ve years or so. It has now reachedamaturity of sorts where, more andmore often, important pieces are beingpublished on Bakhtin by people outside the three `core' disciplines inliterary studies. To a certain extent, then, Bell's and Gardiner's collectionof essays is less, as they explicitly want it to be, a cure for the present woefulsituation of Bakhtin in the Social Sciences than it is a symptom of anincreasingly signi®cant movement in the ®eld of Bakhtin Studies: a healthyopening-up of the very disciplinary borders that a thinker such as Bakhtinwas himself wont to put into question on a sustained basis. For some timenow, this widening of the disciplinary horizons has been going on, and ata particularly healthy clip, not only in the `®eld' of feminist studies whereseveral signi®cant publications such as Dale Bauer's Feminism, Bakhtin,and theDialogic (Bauer 1991), themore recent book edited byKarenHorneand Helen Wussow (1994) and some important `contextualizing' work byPeter Hitchcock (1993) have already appeared, but also in a number ofother traditional `social sciences' disciplines such as geography (see Shields1991). Part of the sea change in the focus of international Bakhtin Studiesthat can be clearly observed in recent works published in English camewith a shift from the over-concentration, engaged in by literary scholars,on the concept of carnival to other Bakhtinian concepts Ð but eventhen, i.e., in relation to carnival, writers such as Peter Stallybrass andAllon White (in Stallybrass and White [1986] and White [1993]) had, evenbefore the advent of the `social scienti®c Bakhtin' that many are justnow recognizing, had signi®cantly and forcefully provided a highly useful

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model for moving even the carnivalistic Bakhtin out from the sole realmof literary studies and into that of a broader society-based inquiry. And,as was only too clear in the work of literary theorists such as Gary SaulMorson and Caryl Emerson (1990), the notion of carnival itself is a richenough concept to spawn a lot of controversial commentaries thatcan be useful for a reading of Bakhtin that is destined to consider`social scienti®c' questions.

My second point, or rather my second question, has to do with whatdisciplines the label `human sciences' is supposed to include, or perhaps(stated in a di�erent way) to exclude. It is in this context that a numberof provocative issues arise. For example, Bell's and Gardiner's volumeof fourteen texts contains mainly contributions written by sociologists,with several contributions delving into di�cult questions of philosophy,political theory, and psychology. Two other contributions are writtenby researchers working in literary studies. The `type' of `human sciences'contained in this volume contrasts sharply, in disciplinary terms, with themix of contributions contained in the recent volumes produced by BethBrait (1997), Amy Mandelker (1995), Caryl Emerson (1999), or Faraco,Tezza and de Castro (1996), all of which have just as strong claims asBell and Gardiner about having provided a sampling of Bakhtin Studiesthat is representative of the `human sciences' broadly conceived. Partof the disciplinary choices that Bell and Gardiner make are perfectlyunderstandable and they readily admit that their volume `is not com-prehensive, far from it' (p. 7). They do, however, state the following astheir aim in producing their volume:

The goal of the present collection is to provide a focal point for some of the diversenew scholarship that is beginning to emerge on Bakhtin from a wide range of

disciplines, and to extend the concept of `dialogue' from linguistic communicationin the narrow sense to a multiplicity of di�erent social, cultural, and ecologicalphenomena. It is our feeling that this volume will help to ful®l a pressing need

to resituate and foreground Bakhtinian problematics vis-aÁ-vis the current debateover the nature and direction of critical inquiry in the human sciences, and to extendhis ideas into new research domains. (p. 7)

That dialogue has hitherto been studied only in the `narrow' sense is clearlycontradicted by the existence of a collection of essays published some®ve years ago by Alfred Arteaga (1994), one that is dedicated to a widerange of social issues related to language and dialogue. The claim regardinga narrow linguistic focus further suggests that philosophy is among those`human sciences' that will allow us to study Bakhtin in a much widerway than has previously been the case. The question remains, of course,as to `which type' of philosophy Gardiner and Bell have in mind because,

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as they rightly point out, Russian-language philosophy has long beeninterested in Bakhtin. The whole issue of whether or not philosophyhas been one of those human scienti®c disciplines neglected by English-language scholarship is further complicated by the fact that none ofthe writers represented in this volume, which is explicitly dedicated toexpanding Bakhtin's human scienti®c base, would want to claim to bea professional philosopher. As Bell and Gardiner see it, the goal ofestablishing a clearly identi®able `human scienti®c Bakhtin' must ®rstand foremost include the desire to go beyond much of the `super®cialappropriation of Bakhtinian tropes or neologisms' (p. 7) that are toomuch a part of the `humanistic Bakhtin' they wish to correct. The desirethereby becomes one to move toward a more properly `human scienti®cBakhtin' through `serious philosophical engagement with his core ideasand a sustained re¯ection on their implications for contemporary theo-retical practice' (p. 7). One can also argue that, in working toward thislofty goal of ®nding the appropriate `human sciences' mix for BakhtinStudies, it is not always useful to ignore much of what has already beendone outside the particular band of disciplines in which one is interested.In other words, it would not be desirable, when re-inventing Bakhtin forthe purposes of the human sciences, to reinvent the entire Bakhtinianwheel all over again.Several contributions meet head on the ambitious goals announced

in the introductory text of this book. The opening contribution writtenby John Shotter and Michael Billig is an interesting text on a number ofissues related to social psychology. Their article entitled `A Bakhtinianpsychology: From out of the heads of individuals and into the dialoguesbetween them' (pp. 13±29) provides a well-informed discussion of what itmeans to move discussions of the mind from a perspective directed solelyat the arti®cially isolated individual toward one that stresses the ways inwhich people must be considered, psychologically speaking, `as livingbodies in a society with a culture and a history, rather than as isolatedinanimate mechanisms' (p. 13). Shotter's and Billig's perspective thusmoves into a discussion of the `little, ¯eeting details' that are intricatepieces, never to be minimized and never to be ignored, of what it means, inthe large picture puzzle of dynamic reality, to participate in the everydayworld as social creatures. The authors are thus much more interested instudying human acts as they unfold, moment by moment, than in viewing`humanity' as something that is the result of any number of ®xed mentalstates or structures. Shotter and Billig thus consider themselves to be`discursive and rhetorical psychologists' whose primary objective consistsin relocating those topics such as memory and attitudes that are`traditionally assumed to be hidden, ``inner'' processes occurring inside

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individuals, in the outward communicative activities occurring betweenthem, in just the way pre®gured by Bakhtin' (p. 17). The act of speakingis just one type of everyday action that is not adequately described asthe simple expression of something that is already in the head since itbelongs rather to a complex social rhetoric, one whereby what is explicitlysaid hides all that has not yet been said (`how the routines of sayingaccomplish routines of not-saying', [p. 21]) and where the temporalunfolding of behavior (p. 26) forms the basis for the unrepeatability ofany human individuality.

Two other contributions that merit mention from the very outset areCourtney Bender's interesting contribution on `Bakhtinian perspectiveson ``everyday life'' sociology' (pp. 181±195) and Barry Sandywell's `Theshock of the old: Mikhail Bakhtin's contribution to the theory of time andalterity' (pp. 196±213). Using Bakhtin's Toward a Philosophy of the Act(1993) as her point of departure, Courtney is able, ®rst, to set o� thephilosophical vision outlined in Bakhtin's early text against similar ideasformulated in early twentieth century European philosophy by neo-Kantians and by Bergson. The central criticism levelled by Bakhtinagainst such conceptualizations of the individual in the everyday worldis that they `strip individuals of their unique positions within everydaylife, making them ``pretenders'' who speak with alibis rather than fromtheir own unique, responsible positions' (p. 181). However, Courtney'smain comparisons between Bakhtin and other thinkers on the everydayinvolve less such thinkers who were Bakhtin's contemporaries than theyinvolve our own contemporaries, in the persons of Alfred Schutz, GeorgeHerbert Mead, Thomas Luckmann, and Peter Berger. Bakhtin is therebycontrasted with pragmatic, phenomenologist, and interactionist theoriza-tions of the everyday, conceptualizations that fall short of Bakhtin'sdemands for a way of thinking that will not fall prey to the temptation toconstruct a `schizophrenic self who shuttles back and forth betweenmeaningful thoughts and non-meaningful acts' (p. 184). Explicitly quotingseveral times from Toward a Philosophy of the Act and relying on Morsonand Emerson (1990) for a number of her observations, Courtney sketchesout what Bakhtin's theory of the everyday looks like given his `career-longdisdain of institutions' (p. 189) and the fact that he `concentrates solelyon individuals making meaning and existing without alibis or roles thattake over their unique positions' (p. 189). Courtney sees an individualiststance in Bakhtin which helps us to account for his strong criticism `ofthe separation of theoretical thinking and everyday action' (p. 191).

One need not agree with this individualistic reading of Towarda Philosophy of the Act in order to appreciate the clarity of thought andthe useful ways of contrasting Bakhtin's ways of seeing everyday life

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with several currents of thinking that continue to exert a strong in¯uencein sociological circles. In many respects, Courtney's piece demonstratesa number of intellectual qualities that are most desirable of any `Bakhtin'of the Human Sciences: the ability to engage critically with contemporarycurrents of thinking and to show how Bakhtin's thinking can be saidto enter into a dialogue of great time with contemporary thinkers. Anotherinteresting contribution in Bell's and Gardiner's volume that is able tohold out a similar promise is Barry Sandywell's piece on time and theeveryday (pp. 196±213). Sandywell is interested in pursuing what he callsthe notion of `heterology' or an `ethics of alterity', something he pro-poses to do by taking into account Bakhtin's thinking on speech genresand by inserting the latter into a `chronotopic organization of meaning'(p. 196). In other words, what Sandywell proposes is an `ethical visionof heteroglossia' (p. 197) if, by the latter phrase, we understand `the ideathat every culture exhibits the material and temporal traces of another'sspeech in another's language' (p. 197). Human existence can thus beconceptualized as a constantly di�cult navigation between di�erentfragments and temporalities created by self-other relationships unfoldingin time and space. In a fashion that is similar to what we earlier saw inMarilia Amorim's use of Bakhtin, alterity is seen as a productive concept.Sandywell, however, stresses a dimension of alterity that is much lesspart of Amorim's viewpoint: the temporal dimension of alterity. The rolethat temporality plays in the unfolding of creative processes is absolutelyessential: `without temporality, no alterity; without alterity, no di�erence;without di�erence, no meaning; without meaning, no world' (p. 199).Interpretation and meaning-making in the everyday, as everywhere else,necessarily involve `agonistic processes' where each and every `form ofexchange between self and other presupposes heteroglossial time as itsconcrete medium' (p. 199). Human acts of meaning-making thus entailencounters between competing temporalities: those of the presentlyunfolding utterance, those of the acts against which the presentlyunfolding act must be projected, those of the interpreters who will appearin the future. Sandywell explains that Bakhtin provides a frameworkof understanding `[w]here ``coming-to-be'' (stanovlenie) takes precedenceover ``being'' (bytie)' and furthermore where `the category of timebecomes a placeholder for acts of possible interpretation, a ®eld of trans-formations in which the world is made to signify in di�erent ways' (p. 200).In other words, no temporality of the lived world, neither present, pastnor future, is a passive receptacle where pre-established signi®cationscan simply be projected. Even the past becomes a virtual storehouse ofvirtually realizable meaning acts, since `each strong act of interpretiverevision re¯exively alters the past and changes the conditions for

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further interpretation' (p. 201). Bakhtin's notion of time is, accordingto Sandywell, `a dialogically mediated construction that is inseparablefrom a society's general communicative and interactional strategies'(p. 205). Demonstrating critical familiarity with a number of texts writtenon Bakhtin, especially in relation to problems of time and space, Sandywellprovides a most useful conceptualization of how the unfolding of timein Bakhtin's thinking must be brought into careful connections with hisconceptualization of dialogue, thus giving us a number of importantinsights into how Bakhtin conceptualizes the very possibility of humancreativity in the everyday world.

Sandywell and Bender are relative newcomers in the `®eld' of BakhtinStudies. Their studies provide excellent examples of the fruitful exchangesthat are now emerging as researchers from the social sciences add theirvoices to the work that has been done elsewhere and otherwise concerningsome of the most fundamental notions of Bakhtin's overall thinking.Shotter and particularly Billig, on the other hand, are not exactlynewcomers as they have been vigorously pursuing their line of thinkingon Bakhtin for a number of years, and in a number of publications, bothin journals and in books, ever since, at least, the late eighties and earlynineties. Their use of Bakhtin, which can be found throughout theirpublished work, is evident in such works as Shotter (1992) and Billig(1991, 1997) and can not really be described as `new and emerging'. Theirapproach to issues a�ecting psychology is both stunningly adventure-some and disconcerting. It is stunning in its cogent introduction ofa number of fundamental Bakhtinian ideas to social psychology; it isdisconcerting in the ways it seems to ignore what has been done elsewherein Bakhtinian psychology, not even mentioning works written in otherlanguages such as Fernandez-Zoila (1981, 1982a, 1982b), Friedrich (1993),Silvestri and Blanck (1993) and Jobim e Souza (1994) and also failingto take into account existing English-language work that deals withBakhtin and psychology in general (Dore 1989, 1990) or with Bakhtinand Vygotsky (such as Emerson 1983; Wertsch 1991), while virtuallyignoring the Freudianism book published under VolosÏ inov's name (1976).These failures to deal with already existing works that are directlyrelated to their study is part of what I refer to above as reinventing theBakhtinian wheel.

This criticism, peripheral in the case of Shotter and Billig, is notintended to suggest that there is not very much original scholarshippublished in the impressive volume produced by Bell and Gardiner orthat there are not really very many new ideas to emerge in the `humanscienti®c Bakhtin' that they are rightfully advocating. Not only are therea number of texts containing a wealth of information about the social

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side of many of Bakhtin's frequently commentated notions such as thecarnival (this is the principal merit of the richly documented articleon the carnivalesque written by Hwa Jol Jung [pp. 95±111]) but thereare also contributions, such as the piece on Kant by Greg Nielsen(pp. 214±230) that discuss ideas in the Bakhtinian corpus that are truly notvery well known by most readers of Bakhtin. The point made here hasto do with the existence of contributions that purport to create a `HumanScienti®c Bakhtin' from scratch and that thereby fail to engage withearlier work, often published by people working in other `humanistic'disciplines, that deals with the exact same sorts of central theoreticalissues. These are the types of contributions that detract from theoverall high quality of Bell's and Gardiner's collection of essays, a highlevel of scholarship that is apparent despite some editorial problemshaving to do with poor transcriptions of quotations and titles,a frustratingly incomplete index, and inconsistency in the actual editionsof Bakhtin's works referred to throughout the volume. One example ofthis type of work that detracts from the overall quality consists incomparing Pierre Bourdieu and Bakhtin (pp. 163±180) but at the sametime ignoring virtually everything that has been written on Bakhtin,including those precise works such as Jeremy Lane's (available since 1995in synopsis form in Makhlin 1995: 91±96 and printed in its full version in1997 in Adlam, Falconer, Makhlin, and Renfrew 1997: 329±346), andthat very Bourdieusian text, Ce que parler veut dire (1982), that is onlypartially translated in Bourdieu, Thompson, and Raymond (1991), inwhich there is a sustained discussion on Bourdieu's part of Bakhtin'sprinciple notions of language, power and ideology. In fact, the texton Bakhtin and Bourdieu does not discuss a single text authored byBourdieu that was translated into English after 1991 nor does it men-tion any of the important work, in French or in English, written onBourdieu since that time, thus sidestepping most of the fundamentalissues brought forward in such basic works as Jenkins (1992) or Calhoun,Lipuma, and Postone (1993), and much of which can be readily seen in amore recent text such as Shusterman (1999). The central problem of sucha situation in which contributions on Bakhtin in the Human Sciencesappear ready to redo Bakhtin from scratch consists precisely in this: theycontradict what Michael Mayerfeld Bell would want dialogic studiesof culture to do, i.e., to follow the principle according to which `itis considerate to consider what others have to say, as well as betterscholarship' (p. 57).Despite assurances to the contrary, this volume provides some new

examples of what Bell and Gardiner derogatively refer to as the `addBakhtin and mix mentality that sometimes prevails in the existing

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academic milieu' (p. 7). Besides the `Bakhtin and Bourdieu' mix alreadymentioned, there is also a `Bakhtin andMannheim' piece whose usefulnesswill be mainly for readers who already know Mannheim but do not knowBakhtin, whereas most of the readers of Bell andGardiner's volume wouldpresumably be people who already know Bakhtin but do not knowMannheim. This type of comparison contrasts starkly with the type ofcontrastive study of Bakhtin and Vygotsky engaged in by Maria Teresade AssuncË aÄ o Freitas, as discussed above. The main point of di�erence liesin the divergent strategies employed by the respective authors. WhereasFreitas was interested in drawing out the methodological lessons that canbe attained by contrasting two similar-minded thinkers dealing with innerspeech, the Mannheim-Bakhtin comparison is not self-evident in and ofitself andmuch time has to be spent just in justifying the `selective' compar-ison that is about to be made. Part of the problem seems to be related to themethodology of comparisons: whereas Freitas' and Jobim e Souza's com-parative studies are methodologically innovative, the Mannheim-Bakhtinstudy does not seem to have examined the many di�erent types ofcomparisons that already exist between Bakhtin and some other thinker,a task that is necessary in order to avoid the danger of super®ciality inrelation both to Bakhtin and to the other signi®cant writer.

Ironically enough, at the very moment that this new volume purportsto move Bakhtin from the strict con®nes of the Humanities into thebroader disciplinary possibilities of the Human Sciences, or at least intothe particular part of the `Human Sciences' represented in this volume, twoof the most original pieces of work published in this book are writtenby researchers working in English literature departments, i.e., from oneof those core humanistic disciplines that were supposed to have cordonedo� `Bakhtin' from the `real' issues in the ®rst place. One of these piecesis Peter Hitchcock's `The grotesque of the body electric' (pp. 78±94).The other is Michael Bernard-Donals' `Knowing the subaltern: Bakhtin,carnival and the other voice of the human sciences' (pp. 112±127). Neitherof these authors can be said to be `new and emerging' and both are authorsof signi®cant books on Bakhtin.

In his contribution, Hitchcock explores the problematic issues ofboundaries, not in relation to disciplinarity as we have been doing here,but in terms of the relation of the human body to itself. Re¯ectingon what must have been both the meaning and the pain for Bakhtin inthe loss of his leg, Hitchcock suggests that losing a leg in physicalterms also allowed for a number of gains in intellectual terms: it allowedBakhtin in particular to gain hyper-sensitivity to the issue of where anindividual's body actually `ends' (it is impossible to ignore the pain ofone's phantom limb) and provided him, in real-life terms, with the vital

192 A. Wall

resource without which much of what he thought and wrote wouldhave never come to be: time. `Bakhtin, a consummate theorist of thebody', Hitchcock writes, `begins with the unconsummated nature of hisown tissue, a body that for most of his life painfully reminded him ofits ¯eshly imperfections' (p. 78). Using crutches or a stick for the rest ofhis life after the amputation of his right leg, Bakhtin is led, in Hitchcock'sthinking, to a way of understanding individuality that stresses prosthesisand images of incompleteness. In the contemporary context, this aspectof Bakhtin's thinking is useful for re¯ecting on the social meaning ofour current fascination with arti®cial body parts and cyborgs. Just asthe melancholia of loss can be read in Bakhtin's life trajectory as anultimately productive episode, one that turns incompleteness intoproductive re¯ections on the ways in which the individual body is insertedinto the social world of politics and human interaction, so too cancontemporary ®xations on the cyborg, as symptoms of a deep-lyingincompleteness, become the launching site for an understanding ofthe multifarious ways in which forms of hybridity can be enlisted inprojects that purport to undo unnecessary or restrictive boundaries. HereHitchcock refers extensively to Donna Haraway (1991): `For Bakhtin, asfor Haraway, the body does not end with the skin. The cyborg existsin Bakhtin to the extent that becoming is the very ground of augmenta-tion and reconstruction' (p. 84). The body does its work of becoming ina grotesque framework: it `constantly contradicts the pretensions andideologies of perfection in its defecation, sneezing, farting, belching, andbleeding' (p. 85). As such, and through its constant display of its ownimperfections, the grotesque body can be understood, in semiotic terms,not as a pure negativity, but rather as a `warning about any systemof thought that renders the body either abstract or easily perfectible'(p. 85). Such admonitions allow Hitchcock to claim that one of the moststriking aspects of Bakhtin's work on Rabelais (Bakhtin 1968) is not somuch the notion of the carnival itself, as has most often been the casein readings of Bakhtin's work, but rather the ways in which the intellectualwork accomplished in this study draw our attention to the very materialand bodily conditions under which the Rabelais study came to be in the®rst place: in the context of an incomplete body struggling to survive andto be recognized. `The dismembered body in pain is the mise-en-sceÁneof a social paroxysm about what counts as equally human' (p. 90).The body in pain is an irreducibly unique body, one that, in the face ofdesires for perfect reproduction and serial e�ciency, o�er the antidoteof di�erence and disjunction.Michael Bernard-Donals' text on the impossible voices of politically

dominated others o�ers us another productive reading of how Bakhtin's

Mikhail Bakhtin 193

cultural-philosophical ideas can draw out interesting possibilities forformulating contestatory or critical modes of social thinking. Beginningwith a reading of Mario Vargas-Llosa's The Storyteller (1989), anddrawing heavily upon Gayatri Spivak's (1994) work on the `subaltern',Bernard-Donals provides an informative Bakhtinian explanation ofwhat it would mean to write that which literally, because of the silenceimposed by marginalization, cannot ever be written. This `impossiblecontradiction' pointed out by Bernard-Donals forms the crux of theRabelais book (Bakhtin 1968), as Bakhtin performs the contradictionsof expressing marginality in ways that are di�erent from, but at thesame time similar to, the problematics, discussed by Spivak, of givingvoices to whose who by de®nitiation can have no voice. In Bernard-Donal's reading of the Rabelais book, the importance of carnival is thatit allows us to `imagine', and thereby to understand, what semiotic forms`excess' can assume. `Carnival acts as a wedge that potentially opens upa space in which we are apt to catch a glimpse of excess' (p. 118).Following a line of explanation parallel to Shotter and Billig, Bernard-Donals believes that everyday meanings in our lives not only include`what we speak and name, but also what we cannot speak (or refuseto speak)' (p. 118). A signi®cant part of the carnival's excess is preciselyits physical mise-en-sceÁ ne of that which cannot be said explicitly,performative enactments that ®t disruptively into everyday practicesof meaning-making and create the conditions for a signi®cant semioticawakening. Laughter is just one of the semiotic-cultural forms that excesscan assume in such a setting. Excess is the force that erupts in a way thatis similar, in terms of Walter Benjamin's conception of history, to theeruptions of other times, in our presently unfolding time; it is a force thatallows us to gain at least a glimpse of the stultifying powers of forgettingthat lead us to ignore the material conditions that perform the textsby which we see our own identities. Bernard-Donals expresses his readingof carnival as follows:

If we put this back into the terms of writing on carnival (or on authorship, oron parody), the location or point of origin is the moment of impossibility of

speech. It is the location in time and space at which the speaker recognizes thatshe cannot predict or understand the voice of the other, and that, paradoxically,she cannot see herself as the other does. At that moment she misspeaks, says

the wrong thing, says what she does not mean and thereby produces a word, ane�ect, that disturbs the context of the situation while at the same time(re)constructs it. If we push this far enough, every utterance, every word, is

potentially parodic because every utterance is directed at what we think ourinterlocutor Ð or what we ourselves, if we were able to say our name, our`I' Ð might say. (p. 122)

194 A. Wall

This is why there is a certain fragility at the heart of what we claim to be, anun-centered `I' that wants to be something, but tends to forget an essentialpart of itself in the very movement of trying to give expression to itself.In this sense, there are unspoken parts of our own and of the other's world,parts that we share in common. These are aspects whose commonalityconsists in the fact that both can never be spoken for in all their fullness.The inclusion of the articles by Hitchcock and Bernard-Donals in this

collection smartly assembled by Bell and Gardiner points, I believe, totwo interesting facts as far as the issue of Bakhtin in the Human Sciencesis concerned. First, it would seem to indicate that the notion of HumanSciences is a lot trickier than one might imagine when one sets out `to enlistBakhtinian ideas for the project of developing genuinely post-Cartesianhuman sciences' (p. 7). The Human Sciences are much more than anysubset of academic disciplines that we might wish to place in them but theyare also much less than a totalizing set of questions, forced as they areto adopt a certain humility in the face of their necessary incompleteness(Bouveresse 1998: 64). The general di�culty of understanding in any ®xedfashion that which should be (and that which should not be) properlyincluded in the Human Sciences is complicated by the cultural-linguisticfact that the term `Human Sciences' is rather foreign to the Anglo-Saxonacademic environment. The second observation that I draw from thedisciplinary mix included in Bell's and Gardiner's volume on Bakhtin inthe Human Sciences is that it is not exactly productive to adopt an exclu-sionary stance in our ways of developing a wide enough spectrum ofdisciplinary con®gurations in order to read Bakhtin as being part of theHuman Sciences. That is to say, it is not productive to cut the Humanitieso� from the Social Sciences or to cut the Social Sciences o� from theHumanities. The interdisciplinary mixes of other recent Bakhtin collec-tions show that the `literary' side of Bakhtin is just as powerful as his`social' side, and that neither of these `sides' can be fruitfully understoodin isolation from one another. It is not as if the `literary' side of Bakhtinconstituted something `to be overcome', as it were, not something thatwas merely an illusion accruing from a one-sided reading of Bakhtin ascompared to a much more complete `Bakhtin' o�ered by other disciplines.The frequency of interdisciplinary interventions in the ®eld of BakhtinStudies on an international scale, volumes ranging from Luzatti, Beaccoet al.'s collection entitled LeDialogique (1997), to Caryl Emerson'sCriticalEssays on Mikhail Bakhtin (1999) and, including such texts as Faraco,Tezza, and de Castro's DiaÂlogos com Bakhtin (1996), Ramo n Alvaradoand Lauro Zavala's Voces en el umbral (1997), and the special issue ofthe Montreal journal Recherches seÂmiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry (1998) on`Bakhtin and the future of signs', are all instructive in this regard, just

Mikhail Bakhtin 195

as the Beth Brait collection under review here. It would be a shame ifthe Social Scientists did not `want' to read the Humanist material simplybecause it was humanist stu�, just as it is not acceptable for Humaniststo refuse to read Social Scienti®c material simply because it comes fromthe Social Sciences. Even a predominantly humanist collection such asCatherine Depretto's recent collection (1997) has things to o�er to thehuman scientist just as Bell's and Gardiner's predominantly SocialScienti®c Bakhtin has much to o�er to the humanist. The splitting o� ofthe human sciences into the humanities and the social sciences, perpetuatedin the name of widening the spectrum of disciplines in Bakhtin Studies toinclude other hitherto underrepresented ones, can unfortunately reinforcea condition that I once referred to as `chatter', one in which no one ina given disciplinary environment seems to want to know `what all the otherpeople are talking about' when they are talking about their own particular`Bakhtin' to the exclusion of other `Bakhtins'; it can result in an unde-sirable situation where `the Bakhtins we are producing are growingfurther and further apart' (Wall 1998: 198). In the context of the justi®ableneed to look at the rich social thinking that is both explicitly and implicitlypresent in Bakhtin's writing, it is problematic to claim that humanistpublications on Bakhtin have nothing `social' about them, or nothinguseful to say about Bakhtin's social thinking. That Humanistic studies canusefully contribute to a study of the social `Bakhtin' is a fact that is easilyattested by such humanist authors as Andre Belleau (1990), Jean Peytard(1995), or by the recent contribution to Bakhtin Studies written byMaroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed (1998).

Whatever or whoever the `Bakhtin' is that is the `®ttest' for the widestpossible spectrum of human scienti®c disciplines, this `Bakhtin' has to beone that does not deploy strategies of exclusion in the name of wideningthe legitimate disciplinary breadth of the research wemight wish to employwhile doing our work in the name of Bakhtin.

Notes

1. `la recherche en sciences humaines consiste en ce curieux mouvement de vouloir eÃtre hoÃte

dans le pays de l'autre. De placement vers l'autre qui contient la pre tention de pouvoir

accueillir et traduire son alte rite '.

2. `C'est pre cise ment laÁ ouÁ l'impossibilite de dialogue est reconnue, laÁ ouÁ on admet qu'il y

aura toujours une perte de sens dans la communication que se construit un objet et qu'un

savoir sur l'humain peut se produire'.

3. `Si l'univers des signes est le lieu ouÁ se joue la possibilite et l'impossibilite de la rencontre,

c'est aussi dans le signe qu'on peut ve ri®er les e�ets de contact entre di�e rents univers.

Au long de l'histoire, l'abõÃme se franchit et les signes se transforment re ciproquement.

196 A. Wall

LaÁ ouÁ il y avait l'un, on verra l'autre, mais un e�et permanent de trompe-l'oeil posera

toujours la question: acculturation ou appropriation? Et puisqu'il s'agit de signes, la

question ne pourra se chercher que du coà te de l'e nonciation: dans le fait de subir une

transformation par l'in¯uence ou la force de l'autre, aÁ qui s'adresse l'objet culturel

transforme ?'

4. I shall sometimes be putting quotation marks around Bakhtin's name to indicate the

di�erence between the theoretical author whom many humanist and social scientists are

discussing and the mythical character who is sometimes created in these discussions. On

this point, and other related issues, see Peter Hitchcock (1998).

5. `dans une approche polyphonique _ le mot devient geste e tant donne son caracteÁ re

relationnel et l'espace est reconstruit en fonction du rapport de places'.

6. `la possibilite de la citation est propre aÁ l'humain. Rapporter, reproduire, raconter aÁ un

troisieÁ me, ce qu'onm'a dit et ce quemoi-meà me je n'ai pas vu est une activite structurante

de mon humanite '.

7. `Bicorporel etpas seulementbivocal, le discours carnavalesquerenvoie toujoursaucorps'.

8. `Il n'y a pas de langage sans qu'il y ait un autre aÁ qui je parle, qui est lui-meà me parlant/

re pondant et sans la possibilite de parler de ce qu'un autre a dit.'

9. `ContribuicË oÄ es de Bakhtin aÁ s teorias do discurso' [Bakhtin's contributions to theories

of discourse].

10. `Ao tratar, em seus escritos, do texto como objeto das cieà ncias humanas, Bakhtin aponta

ja as duas diferentes concepcË oÄ es do princõ pio dialo gico, a do dia logo entre interlocutores

e a do dia logo entre discursos _'

11. `O sujeito da cognicË aÄ o procura interpretar ou compreender o outro sujeito em lugar de

buscar apenas conhecer um objeto'.

12. `M. Bakhtin em M. Peà cheux: no risco do conteudismo'. [M. Bakhtin in M Peà cheux: On

the risk of fetishizing contents].

13. `DialogizacË aÄ o enunciativa e paisagens do sujeito' [Dialogism in the utterance and

landscapes of the subject].

14. `o signo e para agir'.

15. `nos confrontamos em Bakhtin com uma descricË aÄ o que oscila entre um enraizamento da

descontinuidade do sujeito no discurso e seu deslocamento das superfõÂ cies discursivas

sob o efeito de determinacË oÄ es psico-sociolo gicas'.

16. `Bakhtin e a natureza constitutivamente dialo gica da linguagem' [Bakhtin and the

fundamentally dialogical nature of language].

17. `O conceito da linguagem que emana dos trabalhos desse pensador russo esta com-

prometido naÄ o com uma tendeà ncia linguÈ õ stica ou uma teoria litera ria, mas com uma

visaÄ o de mundo que, justamente na busca das formas de construcË aÄ o e instauracË aÄ o do

sentido, resvela pela abordagem linguÈ õÂ stico/discursiva, pela teoria da literatura, pela

®loso®a, pela teologia, por uma semio tica da cultura, por umconjunto de dimensoÄ es

entretecidas e ainda naÄ o inteiramente decifradas'.

18. `Signi®cacË aÄ o e forma linguÈ õÂ stica na visaÄ o de Bakhtin' [Meaning and form in Bakhtin's

vision'].

19. `O outro da personagem: enunciacË aÄ o, exterioridade e discurso' [The other of the

character: Utterance, the outside, and discourse].

20. `A dialogia e os efeitos de sentido iroà nicos' [Dialogicity and the semantic e�ects of irony'].

21. `Os geà neros e o corpo do acabamento este tico' [Genres and the body of aesthetic

®nalization].

22. `A entonacË aÄ o no dialogismo bakhtiniano' [Intonation in Bakhtin's dialogism]. As is

known, the corporeal issues related to intonation have only recently been investigated.

On this topic see especially Stefania Sini (1998) and Pierrette Malcuzynski (1998).

Mikhail Bakhtin 197

23. `Escritura, leitura, dialogicidade' [Writing, reading, dialogicity].

24. `O marxismo neo-kantiano do primeiro Bakhtin' [The early Bakhtin's neo-Kantian

Marxism].

25. `Nos textos de Bakhtin e Vygotsky: um encontro possõÂ vel'.

26. `Mikhail Bakhtin e Walter Benjamin: polifonia, alegoria e o conceito de verdade no

discurso da cieà ncia contemporaà nea'.

27. `A possibilidade dessas semelhancË as esta ligada a dois pontos ba sicos: ome todo diale tico

e a sua visaÄ o de cieà ncias humanas'.

28. `O sujeito se constitui na relacË aÄ o'.

29. `Essa nova perspectiva possibilita a constituicË aÄ o de uma teoria das cieà ncias humanas

para ale m do conhecimento objectivo e da neutralidade pro prios dos modelos das

cieà ncias exatas'.

30. `o signo comoumproduto social tem uma funcË aÄ o geradora e organizadora dos processos

psicolo gicos'.

31. `Esta conquista progresiva da verdade, atrave s do dia logo das ide ias que se expandemno

espacË o e no tempo, desa®a as cieà ncias humanas a construir uma outra compreensaÄ o de si

pro pria'.

32. `nossos autores acreditam que as cieà ncias humanas podem e devem assumir o com-

promissoe a responsabilidade comumoutro conceitode verdade, resgatandoadignidade

da linguagem para transitar e revelar a tensaÄ o permanente entre conhecimento e verdade

na esfera do saber humano e social'.

33. `se para Bakhtin a verdade pode ser encontrada na relacË aÄ o dialo gica entre textos,

escritos ou falados, em Banjamin a verdade se expressa nos pro prios objetos, coisas,

gestos, etc., e tudo isto se constitui em signos de uma situacË aÄ o histo rica e cultural

mais ampla'.

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Anthony Wall (b. 1956) is Professor and Head of the Department of French, Italian,

and Spanish at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada pawall@ucalgary.cao. His

research interests include theories of metaphor, images, and dialogic criticism. His major

publications include Superposer: Essais sur les meÂtalangages litteÂraires (1996), the translation

of Renate Lachmann'sLiterature andMemory (withRoy Sellars, 1997), andMikhail Bakhtine

et l'avenir des signes/Mikhail Bakhtin and the Future of Signs (ed., 1998).

Mikhail Bakhtin 201