When reading this essay I had a really hard time understanding it as a whole, but instead I think there are various ideas that are very important and thought-provoking. First there is an attempt to define language, I found it very interesting that he mentions: “We are talking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion”( 271). This definition is accurate because of the cultural weight you find in language. As time passes words and phrases obtain different meanings because they are connected to certain events and cultural phenomena’s. That is why I believe language is always changing and evolving, and why even though there are attempts to define language in terms of grammatical laws, this is impossible, since these are also affected by their environment. In the essay Bakhtin brings out time and again the idea of heteroglossia which is defined as “The coexistence of district varieties with in a single language” That is having a variety of difference in one single language, Bakhtin mentions that in a moment in time “each generation at each social level has its own language, moreover every age group has a matter of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system”(290) So we can see how diverse a language can be.
Bakhtin later incorporates this heteroglossia into writing a novel and he talks about the “double voice” which he defines as two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions”( 324). Here the double voice is that of the character in a novel and what the author is saying.
Bakhtin also compares and contrast scientific discourse with discourse in humanities he mentions that in science discourse is just a “operational necessity, and does not affect the subject matter itself of the science…Acquiring knowledge here is not connected with receiving and interpreting words”( 351). He compares this scientific discourse to humanities where you need to transmit and interpret words, there is work involved where you need to reach deeply to understand and interpret the real meaning of the word.
Reading this essay really makes me think about the importance of language outside of just communicating. Language helps us in almost every cognitive function; for instance without language we have no memories and without memory we have no essence as a person.
Bakhtin makes me think a lot about discourse and language as well, he made this analysis all-sidedly. Since the form of language, styles and stylistics of genres are all come from social phenomena, a profound artistic and ideological penetration into the dialogic interrelationship in the novel is a necessity. Dialogues exist in utterances, then it comes to interaction. Then, as what you said, language is always changing and evolving, I totally agree. Language is in a continual flux with its own ideology and it’s unended as well.
Great photo! (He seems pretty intense.)
“Bakhtin also compares and contrasts scientific discourse with discourse in humanities he mentions that in science discourse is just a “operational necessity, and does not affect the subject matter itself of the science…Acquiring knowledge here is not connected with receiving and interpreting words”( 351). He compares this scientific discourse to humanities where you need to transmit and interpret words, there is work involved where you need to reach deeply to understand and interpret the real meaning of the word.”
Good point (by Bakhtin, and you for highlighting it). Scientific discourse is in some ways necessarily dialogical (all discourse is), but the tendency is to reduce the explicit markers of that dialogical dimension. For example, when Saussure talks about diachrony and synchrony, we know he is motivated to oppose historical philology of his time, and therefore his discourse is dialogical — he says so explicitly. However, we only hear his voice; there is the information of philology, but not the voice — no representation of a philologist that might take over the speakers role. In scientific discourse there is only one speaker *in the text*: the truth. On the other hand, between scientific texts there is that dialogical character. Saussure and the philologists are saying different things and they influence each other — they just don’t ever appear in the other’s text.
There is a good reason for that flattening of discourse in scientific language: it is clearer and therefore it can afford greater throughput of information.
The “real meaning” for Bakhtin is however what is beyond the flow of information: in science, it is the tension of its evolution, which cannot be conveyed by the scientist who has discovered “the truth” and thus marked a pause in science’s evolution.
I would like to start with the las point you mention. The importance of studying the language. One of the main issues of text like this is precisely to make a process of “defamiliarization” (using Shklovsky’s word) with languauge. Then, we realize that language has his own complexity and, in some way, life and history. That’s why the concept of Heteroslossia is very important. When we make the link between language and history (as a dialogic relation) we realize that language is nothing more than a historic, social and contextual situation that exists only in the unicity of one single time.