BAKHTIN AND LANGUAGE THEORY: BEYOND A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY

Barry Alford

the essential tension is between "marxist" and "phenomenological" elements in Bakhtin that make a liberatory perspective on language and culture problematic. 445
The problem with the early attempts to read Bakhtin into poststructural and social-constructionist views of language and critical theory is that his constructions are too dynamic; that is, they do not fit the critical models used to appropriate his work. None of these approaches was able to see in Bakhtin a departure from the models already entrenched in critical practice. 446
Note to self: strong connection to Saussure’s work with semiotics – signifier and signified.
Particular targets of their analysis are deconstructive and poststructural models of language, which they refer to as this "terrible solipsism" that can be corrected only by realizing "that the fundamental feature or dynamic in all linguistically-based constructions of reality is, as Bohr suggested, the logical framework of complementarity. 448
Kafatos and Nadeu reinforce the earlier observation that attempts either to treat language as a unified field in which expression can be restricted and predicted or to pronounce all order dead on arrival because of poststructural pretensions both miss the point. A complementary model of language is more than another watered-down version of post modernism and more than another weak sense of social construction. A complementary model of language would try to identify the specific forces and agents of ordinary expression and to show how social construction takes place, not merely insist that it does. 448
That is, language constructs the dynamic allows both the individual and society to continually reorganize reconstitute their mutually dependent identities. 449
Maturana and Varela contend that all biological organisms generate, at both an ontogenic and phylogenic level, a self-ordering that defines them against a background or environment. They call this self-ordering "autopoiesis," and it creates both unity within the organism, including social organisms, and what they call "structural drift," which iterative break and dislocation between the organism and its environ ment. In this schema, life is the constant creation of and adaption to manageable states of disequilibrium, and language is the coordination of the recursive but unpredictable coming in and going out of sync our background/environment that both conserves and adapts guistic structure. The fact that each act of languaging both changes conserves the medium of the utterance is another sign of a complemen tary dynamic in which the parts change, within their structural tions, both themselves and their relationship to other parts. 449-450