Zone of Proximal Development: Dialogue, Otherness, and the "Third Voice"

10 May 10

Giorgio Bertini

In recent years many similarities, especially centering on the notion of dialogue, have been noted in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky. Although both attend to the dialogical character of speech and its role in the social constitution and

learning change

12 Mar 08

bloggingprof 2b

bakhtin pdp

The Conflict of Dialogues
Menippean Dialogue: Carnival, Misbehaved Children, and Other Horrors. To the continuing technical and epistemic interests of the forgoing dialogues an emancipatory interest may be added. When the first voice resists the changing status of the second voice, conflict and a deterioration of their relationship are ever present dangers. Levinson (1978) and Handel (1990) have described the breakdown in mentoring relationships among adults resulting from a questioning by the apprentice either of the mentor's source of authority (questioning the authority itself) or of the mentor's capacity to continue to interpret authority to the apprentice (the mentor's hypocrisy). Similarly, an adolescent's conflict with parents or adults in general may be of either of these two sorts. Either parents may seen as hypocritical, not in fact living up to their own standards, or, on the other hand, as (mis)guided by false standards. Questioning of the second voice may be associated with, resulting from, or leading to, the rejection of the third voice. One common consequence or symptom of this is one form or other of relativism in which all potential authorities are questioned, as a mark of an intellectual coming of age. The second voice now may turn from the skeptical but basically sincere questioning of the Socratic dialogue to the mocking and cynical questioning of what we will call the Menippean dialogue after the Menippean satire (Bakhtin, 1984a,b) considered and associated closely with the notion of carnival.
The route from the Socratic dialogue to the Menippean is fairly direct. Indeed, in his writings on the Socratic dialogues, Bakhtin emphasized the already satirical and unofficial aspects of Socrates. The Socratic dialogue introduces perplexity and so is on the way to becoming a war machine and Socrates himself, a nomad (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) or an undisciplined child (Misgeld and Jardine, 1989). There is always more than a mere suggestion of suspicion of the third voice in Socrates' querulousness and Bakhtin (1984b) very much stressed the hint of carnival in the Socratic dialogue. The Socratic dialogue is a kind of "discursive game" (Lyotard, 1984) that escapes the relatively tidy systematization of the Magistral dialogue. For Bakhtin the Socratic dialogue challenges the centripetal forces of the Magistral dialogue with its own centrifugal forces. As the Socratic dialogue evolves into a Menippean dialogue the linear, logistic function of the Magistral dialogue, merely disrupted by the Socratic dialogue, is thoroughly displaced by a discursive Borgesian "garden of forking paths" (Weissert, 1991) in the Menippean. Ultimately, the third voice may be mocked, authority turned on its head, flags burned, and leaders burned in effigy (at least). Voices multiply and become inverted, high and low change places in a full-fledged carnival. Both Bakhtin (1984a,b), and Frye (1957), emphasize the comedic, carnivalistic features of the Menippean genre, but it is a hard humor with an ever present threat of violence. As Kristeva (1980) notes, " the laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic, it is no more comic than tragic, it is both at once, one might say it is serious" (p. 66). The unruly class, the disenfranchised mob, and the raucous demonstration in which a politician's bad faith is parodied, are all threatening enough to those speaking in the first voice.
Socratic Dialogue: The Questioning Other.

Imagine a dialogue of two persons in which the statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense is not at all violated. The second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left by these words have a determining influence on all the present and visible words of the first speaker. We sense that this is a conversation, although only one person is speaking, and it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each present, uttered word responds and reacts with its every fiber to the invisible speaker, points to something outside itself, beyond its own limits, to the unspoken words of another person. (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 197).

That a dialogicality of this sort may be predicated of intramental functioning follows, according to Wertsch, from Vygotsky's ideas concerning "the ways in which the dialogic organization of speech on the intermental plane is mastered, thereby shaping the intramental plane of functioning" (Wertsch, 1991, p. 86). Wertsch and Stone (1985) argue that the dialogical structure of external transactions is retained in the realm of egocentric and inner speech, albeit implicitly, as the Bakhtinian term "hidden dialogicality" suggests. Although in such speech only one person is actually speaking, the effect of the invisible other's presence, of her unspoken words, can still be sensed in the speaker's utterances. Wertsch (1991) offers an ethnographic analysis of a series of three interchanges between a two-and-a-half-year-old child and her mother during a puzzle-copying task to illustrate the hidden dialogicality of intramental functioning. Briefly, Wertsch was interested in the degree to which, over the course of the problem-solving session, the child came to internalize her mother's directives and questions and, consequently, to perform the task in the absence her mother's explicit regulative utterances. While the first two episodes were characterized by the presence of overt, external mother-child dialogue in which the mother responded to the child's question about the proper placement of a puzzle piece by directing the child's attention to the model puzzle, a move that, in turn, led to the child's consultation of the model. By the third episode the child was consulting the model independently of her mother's explicit directives. In the first two episodes, the child's consultation of the model represented a rejoinder first to the explicit and then to the implicit utterance of the mother. The self-guiding utterance of the child is taken to be a response to the "invisible presence" of the mother's utterance. By the last episode in this series "the child's egocentric and inner speech (intramental plane) guided this process" (Wertsch, 1991, p. 88). As Wertsch remarks, in the third episode "the child did not produce a fully expanded question about where a piece should go . . . and more important, when she looked at the model puzzle . . . it was not in response to an adult's directive in overt social dialogue. She did not rely on the adult to provide a regulative utterance but presupposed the utterance that would have occurred on the intermental plane and responded in egocentric and inner dialogue" (p. 89). The microgenetic change of particular importance here is the increasing degree of hidden dialogicality embodied in the child's speech over the course of the mother-child interaction. By the final episode the mother's directive questions were partially presupposed in the child's egocentric speech and entirely presupposed, later on in the interaction, in inner speech. In other words, the question and answer structure that characterized the external social dialogue between mother and child, that is, their dialogue on the intermental plane, was now taken to be a feature of the child's intramental functioning.

Bakhtin: The Dialogical Nature of Utterance

For Bakhtin, dialogue constitutes a key conceptual pivot in all his writings that becomes even more explicit in those works that followed his linguistic turn.

The dialogic nature of consciousness, the dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 293)

For Bakhtin, the situated act of dialogic discourse, the utterance, is where the being of language resides. "The entire life of language, in any area of its use . . . is permeated with dialogic relationships" (1984b, p. 183). The utterance is neither a simple output of a system on the one hand, as in the tradition of Saussure's langue, nor simply a matter of free individual instantiations of language (parole) on the other. Rather, the notion of utterance emphasizes the historical event of speaking. There are, moreover, a number of features associated with the utterance that reflect this historicity and serve to distinguish it from conventional linguistic units (such as word, proposition, sentence, etc.). Here we consider two closely related aspects that mark the sociality or dialogicality of the utterance for Bakhtin: 1) the relation of each utterance to preceding utterances; and 2) the addressivity of the utterance, that is, its orientation to the other, and in particular, to the other's responsive understanding.

An utterance is constrained by a dialogical relation with other utterances handed down through a tradition of discourse. Moreover, each utterance responds to utterances that have come before it, such that it "refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91). Our utterances are thereby inhabited by the voices of others. An utterance, however, not only reaches backwards to preceding utterances in the chain of speech communion, but also speaks to future possible utterances. This is because "from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 94). Bakhtin is referring the utterance's "quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity" (p. 95). We construct our utterance in anticipation of the other's active responsive understanding. The other constitutes not a passive listener, nor a receiver of a ready-made message and whose communicative task is one of decoding, but rather as a co-participant simultaneously creating and created by the utterance in the event that is the utterance, and a factor in its content, structure, and style. Moreover, this addressee will vary depending on the sphere of human activity in which the utterance is situated.

This addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, likeminded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower, higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can also be an indefinite, unconcretized other. . . . (1986, p. 95)

Thus, the quality and productivity of dialogue depend upon many aspects of the other and of the relationship between the utterance and the other.

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