A Word about a Word: Bahktin 1984

One understands why Kristeva could spend so much of her career unraveling Bahktin. He is anything but a purely transparent writer. Also, I feel a bit lost in that my familiarity with Dostoyevsky is fairly nonexistent; a shame for a former English literature major, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are several aspects to the ways Bahktin is unraveling the concepts of dialogicality and intertextuality here that are worth further unpacking.

I was most fascinated in this article by Bahktin’s use of the term “metalinguistics” to encapsulate what all of us sociolinguists would consider our every day work: the work of parole, of “languaging,” of words embedded in their contexts. The more I study sociolinguistics, the less I am certain that Saussure’s distinction between lange and parole is a useful one, for what is language without its situation? Even Labov’s original classification of language use in the attention to speech model seems to come unraveled when we think about the ways in which people may use different styles quite consciously; the “vernacular” does not always arise from the least attentive speech (c.f. current work by N. Schilling). All linguistics, I think, is truly “metalinguistics”—how language arises and contrasts with other parts of language is much of its meaning. I am reminded of Gordon’s discussions of frames and repetition; for the denotative meanings of, “I’d like to order Chinese food” or “superior” can’t unravel their meaning as they appear in the texts that Gordon examines.

As a longtime writer of fiction myself, I also found the discussion of dialogicality with regard to the author’s voice and the character’s to be an interesting one. One of the most difficult things one learns as a fiction writer is how to bury one’s voice within the voice of one’s characters—how to make them talk about the things you want them to talk about and do the things you want them to do without tipping your hand to the reader that this is what you are doing. In this sense, all fiction is laminated with the author’s voice, but in good fiction, the author’s voice is a hidden presence—the hand guiding invisible marionette strings from above the stage. In this sense I both agreed and disagreed with Bakhtin; although the author’s voice is certainly present, the extent to which it is engaged with and actively contrasting with that of the characters in the text I believe is less readily apparent than Bahktin seems to think.

Also interesting in this article was the discussion of the ways in which a narrator casts speech toward an absent interlocutor. The creation of this sort of anticipatory text is quite relevant to my own research, as I believe that part of internet discourse is concerned with what Bell refers to as referee design: speech directed with a third, absent party in mind. This is what seems to be happening in the passage Bahktin cites from Poor Folk, in what he refers to as the “sideways glance” of the text. This idea of a text which glances sideways, which frames itself outside the domain simply of interlocutors to also encompass probable reactions of a third party is, I think critical to understanding how people communicate on the internet—in a way, anything posted on a message board, even when posted in direct response to another’s text, is incorporating this “sideways glance” at the third parties who are also privy to that text by means of the message board on which it is situated.

Snatches of Other Texts: Fairclough 1992

"Intertextuality is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contract, ironically echo, and so forth. [Emphasis mine]"

Fairclough's definition of ITXTY is a very interesting one, because I think it explains a great deal of his approach to text and register and discourse and a number of other things which he describes. Most important in his article, I believe, is his vision of texts and discourse as being more parole than lange. I've always been drawn to the term "languaging," because it to me encompasses a lot of what language is--less something static which we can understand through rules and structure (although I'm sure many formal theoretical linguists would disagree with me on that one) but rather something which is shaped on the fly by the ways in which it interacts with other parts of language.

On the note of formal linguistics, however, it was interesting to note that Fairclough appropriated the language of formalism in describing loci of discourse in using the term "complementary distribution," for example, the "school" discourse and register is defined in part by the fact that it is in complementary distribution with the locations which are "non-school," such as home. The question then arises if these loci of discourse exist without the loci that they are defined in contrast to: can we understand "school" discourse without having home discourse and neighborhood discourse to describe it against?

It seems that a lot of meaning arises out of these sorts of juxtapositions--school discourse becomes school discourse precisely because of the discourses that it is not. As we attend to the "snatches" of text which are present in another text, it seems evident that it is not only the presence of these snatches but also in the way they are defined by what they are in contrast to which provide a great deal of their meaning. This, I think, is an important part of intertextuality itself--the ways in which the texts interact with one another and create meaning through their contrasts (or lack thereof).