#dramatism

The Bakhtin Reader: Social Heteroglossia, and Dramatism

    Never has a word been so out of my realm of understanding. What is heteroglossia? I found myself reading and re-reading so many times that it took me several hours to get through half of the reading, at which point I threw up my hands and decided to let the class discussion help me to bridge the gap because I👏 wasn’t👏 getting👏 it 👏     What I liked about learning of Bakhtin is that he was outcasted by his own community, even is own mentor wouldn’t speak to him, because of his diverted theories. It is my opinion that the character of a person has the potential to be drastically wisened if one has gone through some kind of tumultuous experience in life. So Bakhtin has earned my respect, at least through this narrowly-casted lens. As Bakhtin believes, “At both individual and social levels, productive vitality and creativity derive from a continuous dialogic struggle within and between discourses” (par 2). Hence, the conversation with myself that allowed me to make the former claim and his own, strained course of institutional shaming.     Like I said, before class discussion, I was lost as to what I should have been gaining from this, and knew that I would better understand once we, as a community, had a dialogue about it. First came discourse, then came epiphany. The reason I was having such a difficult time making meaningful comprehension of the text is because I didn’t understand the context. And therein lies the meaning of heteroglossia—I think. In the text’s words, “Bakhtin stresses that the force of centralization is indispensable to the life of language in guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding; without that core stability verbal discourse as a system of signs could not exist” (74). The way I interrupt this to the laymen, i.e., myself, is that language or utterances can only really have meaning based on the mutual understanding of said utterance, which I kind of equate to hearing a foreign language but not understanding it. The language itself has gobs of meaning, but to me, Finnish is literal gibberish. Another example would be when my student the other day said, “you just have to send full stop”. I know what those words mean separately, but together I had zero clue. From context, I think he meant, “go for it”, but I can’t be sure. Utterance itself is not meaning and language is bigger than the symbols.     I believe the concept of heteroglossia shares some “common ground” with Burke’s concept of common ground between speaker and audience. Burke believed that we think and perceive the world through language and that examining a person’s language gives you insight into who they are (Crane). This theory is dramatism—the world’s a stage—and you can determine a person’s motives by looking rhetorically at the language they choose. How Burke goes about this gets a bit confusing with the pentadic analysis, which involves examining rhetorical choices within the act, and not the act itself. If I sound confused, that’s because I am. However, once you spend some time practicing the technique, it begins to sink in. Burke is concerned with motive— as am I— compared to Aristotle, who was concerned with effect. And so to examine motive he offers the pentad: Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose. Figure these out and you can determine motive… but it’s never that simple. Or maybe it is and I just have a combative sense of the world that makes me question the “authoritative word”.