I should know more about Bakhtin. As it happens I got to have a better understanding of his work while searching for interesting articles refering to the "Inquiry in the MOE" book in google scholar. I fell on the article
Cooren, F., & Sandler, S. (2014). Polyphony, ventriloquism, and constitution: In dialogue with Bakhtin. Communication Theory, 24(3), 225-244.
which I found very interesting. Francois Cooren was a mediator in the AIME project so I guess is a great person to comment on the similarities between Latour and Bakhtin (in a sense the voices of Bakhtin are very similar to the modes of Latour, it seems to me. As if the whole world is a big "discussion")
Through another way I fell on a very interesting exchange refering to Vigotsky and Bakhtin (much closer to education now) :
Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective.Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119.
and
Cornejo, C. (2012). Contrasting Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness. Culture & Psychology, 18(1), 109-120.
Bakhtin Vygotsky Latour. For all of them consciousness seems stepping in “from the outside”. Moreover they are all very sensitive to litterature.
In what follows I have put excerpts from these three articles. I think that they are interesting from the point of view of the discussion in AIME
Cooren, F., & Sandler, S. (2014). Polyphony, ventriloquism, and constitution: In dialogue with Bakhtin. Communication Theory, 24(3), 225-244.
“Advocating a communicative constitution of reality thus means not only that various aspects of reality speak to us (and through us, to each other, making of us both actors and passers), but that these acts of speaking or communicating are constitutive of these very aspects. In other words, communication participates in their modes of existence. For sure, if they speak to us, it is also because we know/learned how to make them say things, that is, we actively participate in this activity of ventriloquism. This relational/dialogical ontology, thus enjoins us, as analysts, to resist naive forms
of constructivism and realism.”
“In other words, we have to think dialogically or relationally, that is, we need to acknowledge that Jack and Harry are both passers and actors in this scene. Passers because multiple facets of their context express themselves through their turns of talk (in which case, these facets can be considered the ventriloquists and Jack and Harry the figures). Actors because Jack and Harry are not transparently conveying these facets, but are selecting what counts or matters and how it should count or matter (in which case, Jack and Harry can be considered the ventriloquists and the facets the figures). Claiming that communication is constitutive of reality thus amounts to noticing that the mode of existence of its figures includes the way they express themselves in this kind of situation. It is therefore a form of constructivist realism.”
“we believe that we do not necessarily need to take the human beings as the absolute startingpoint
inour analyses,but thatwe can, on the contrary, showtowhat extent humans are themselves led to recognizewhat should matter or count through their experiences and conversations.”
“Echoing Bakhtin, we want to leave open the possibility of eventfulness, creativity, and discovery (McNamee & Shotter, 2004), that is, the possibility of a world where things start to express and ventriloquize themselves even if they might not have counted or mattered to us before. It is therefore a world that (through its various incarnations and embodiments, i.e., its figures) also comes to speak to and for itself, a world, again, where humans are both actors and passers. If this world is indeed ours (because it preoccupies or even haunts us and our discussions), it is also because we belong to it, that is, we are its.”
Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective.Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119.
“For both Vygotsky and Bakhtin, human consciousness was the central issue of their investigation.”
“According to Vygotsky, in my interpretation of course, mutual understanding, along with successes in goal-directed activities, provides the objectivity of human consciousness. A fully developed person has high-level self-control, self-determination, and independence. People need each other to 1) achieve goals and 2) be fully understood. In the extreme, the perfectly developed person does not need other people at all”
"As a psychologist, Vygotsky viewed the individual as a container of self-contained higher mental functions."
"There is not a true meeting of two consciousnesses in Vygotsky’s developmental paradigm.”
"For Bakhtin, in my interpretation of course, a gap in the mutual understanding between people is a necessary condition for dialogic, humane communication, and for the entire human relationship."
"For dialogue to occur, the participants should not only expect to be surprised by each other (dialogic interaddressivity) but also have to share a focus on a common subject that is both interesting and problematic for all. The problematic aspect(s) of the common topic – a particular issue (i.e., subjectivity) – can be different for different participants. I call this second requirement interproblematicity."
"For my discussion here, the most important point that differentiates Vygotsky from Bakhtin is the mono-consciousness of Vygotsky’s approach to discourse."
"Vygotsky did not raise the issue of dialogic interaddressivity between I and me in inner
speech…. For Vygotsky, inner speech is a special type of mediation for better mastery of self-control"
"[for Bakhtin] Transparency and oneness of the consciousness preserves tasks and goals but
kills communication and relationship."
"The participants’ orientation of dialogic interaddressivity – expecting that each participant
contributes something new, interesting, and important – is necessary in dialogic pedagogy for deep learning as well as the participants’ ontological engagement in the joint problem."
Cornejo, C. (2012). Contrasting Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness. Culture & Psychology, 18(1), 109-120.
“Vygotsky’s approach is much more multifaceted than we usually think.”
“The Vygotskyan motto is rather ‘‘no consciousness without language’’… More than a tool, the word is a ‘‘microcosm of consciousness, related to consciousness as a living cell is related to an organism, as an atom is related to the cosmos’’.”
“The sense [in Vygotsky] is a dynamic, fluid, complex and unstable wholeness. It is, in brief, the phenomenologically experienced meaning, in contrast to the abstract, clear-cut and literal meaning
of scientific linguistics…. The temporality, vividness and dynamicity of human consciousness come into focus, rendering static concepts useless. By putting the socially determined meaning within the conscious experience, Vygotsky is subordinating objective meaning to subjective meaning. That is, he is doing exactly the reverse of what he proposed previously”
“While in Matusov’s view Vygotsky sustains a monological conception, Bakhtin promotes a dialogical one. Understood dialogically, consciousness emerges in the permanent gap between voices; every position in the inner speech of a person is an answer to the previous voice as the motive for
a new position. There is no way to fill such a gap: its presence is precisely the source of the dynamicity of consciousness. For Bakhtin, thinking is ontologically dialogical; for Vygotsky, in Matusov’s interpretation, thinking is instrumentally dialogical."
“Bakhtin’s theory is not about persons; it is about the development of ideas. Regarding that this development cannot take place outside the materiality of language, the ideas are embodied in a material human voice.”
“Bakhtin is trying to capture the socio-semiotic concatenation of ideas materialized in words and signs—in his case, in living voices. This kind of semiosis exceeds by far the limits of the individual mind or consciousness. The voiceideas happen to live in dialogical interchanges—including the inner speech of human consciousness. Dialogue, according to Bakhtin, draw into the minds of persons. Therefore, a ‘‘voice’’ does not correspond to a ‘‘person.’’ Voices are the embodiment of socially available ideas, something quite different from the beings we call people: ‘‘As such, they [all the languages of heteroglossia] encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people—first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels’’ (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 292).”
“Distinguishing between persons and voices is not merely an academic exercise of conceptual precision; the differentiation helps to clarify the very unit of analysis in Bakhtin’s theory…. By contrast, when the voice displays the role of basic unit of analysis, personal agency and subjective selfhood are dispensable—if not simply epiphenomena…. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin wrote that voices-ideas have meaning, that they are living expressions of themes, and that they can be drawn
into human minds.”
“He ]Bakhtin] perceived that Dostoevsky produced not only a perspicuous and highly sensitive
description of inter-human dialogue, but also unknowingly offered a subtle model of human consciousness. Due to this transposition, we owe Bakhtin fine insights about the nuances of inner speech. … that every inner language usage entails the adoption of a position to a previous (internal) interpellation; that verbal thinking is not the neutral manipulation of static information units, but rather the creation of living utterances; that every utterances shows a myriad of meaning aspects depending on the voices that resound in it; that in human conscious experience many voices permanently coexist; that not all of the voices of inner speech are logically consistent. Like the characters of the Dostoevky’s novels, who deploy their personal features by way of encountering others and entering into dialogues with them, the inner speech of persons involves a multiplicity of social voices. Each voice addresses the other, requesting with this position another answer, and so on in an endless process.”
“It is important to note that Bakhtin does not directly address consciousness, but rather voices in the consciousness. … But it is less adequate when we ask how language is lived from the perspective of the thinking person. Consciousness is not synonymous of language—either monological or dialogical. Dialogism may be an essential dimension of it, but it is not the unique dimension. Nor is consciousness the same as a collection of voices. Then consciousness is purely linguistic or dialogic only when you are observing it from the outside. Bakhtin’s concept of voice is a description from a viewpoint external to my own; it is a portrayal of my voice, not my voice. At this point we arrive to the general conclusion that Bakhtin creates a sociological theory of consciousness, not a psychological one”
“He adopts a sort of third-person perspective with respect to meaningful constructions that characterize a variety of hermeneutic approaches. It may be the case that the internal dialogue is composed of concatenated interactions ‘‘filled with struggle.’’ But from this description it does not
follow that the person lives an internal struggle as such. If a person is in fact adopting this or that voice, usually she does not experience this social voice as an alien entity.”
“The very connection between the social, external voice and the self is what is conspicuously absent in Bakhtin’s model. Vygotsky filled this void with his concept of ‘‘internalization.’’”
“For him,[Vygotsky] internalized social relations configure tools for the ulterior subjectivity. Signs are also social in origin, but became part of the self. The social language becomes my language, allowing my own expressiveness. Bakhtin’s theory lacks an equivalent concept to bridge the social voices with personal selfhood. In his model, this question does not even exist, precisely because selfhood is not the kind of dimension that can be inquired about in discursive or sociological terms”
“Vygotsky and Bakhtin… differ in how much freedom they admit the person has.”
“Here, linguistic tools are ‘‘stones in the edifice of sense,’’ ‘‘potentialities’’ of real speech. As argued above, this sensitivity situates Vygotsky right in the phenomenological spirit, where language ‘‘lives for and by this constant aspiration to say the inexpressible, to capture the elusive’’ (De Leo, 2009, p. 180). Conversely, in Bakhtin the inexpressible cannot exist since every idea is a voice-idea. What is
thinkable has to be linguistically constituted. As a dialogue deploys appealing new voices to get involved in it, it is by definition an unfinished process. Transposing this feature to the person, the unfinalizability of the individual self follows. But note again that it is the dialogue that strives for its completion, not the person. There is no such a thing as a personal Self attempting to reach a complete and definitive position.”
“Although one is more psychologist and the other more sociologist, they have common beliefs with respect to the social constitution of the mind, the objective nature of language, and the materiality of ideas by means of the latter.”
