Why I Love Reading Bakhtin

I realised the other day that of all the authors I read at university the one who has stayed with me the most is one who was not on any syllabus. That author is now a star everywhere in academic circles; but I discovered Mikhail Bakhtin by chance, aside from the academic world. And it changed my life.

I first discovered the work of Bakhtin through 'The Dialogic Imagination' when I was at university in the mid 1980s. Bakhtin's work was at that time not widely available in English. I can't remember him being mentioned once in lectures in the Cambridge English Faculty, then a maimed dragon chasing its tail about questions like 'What is Literature?', lumbering its way to the great wide ocean of words like 'discourse'.

Reading Bakhtin, off the syllabus, provided me with my best education.

The Cambridge University Library had one copy of the book I loved. I must have borrowed it a dozen times, layering it with notes and annotations and questions. A fellow reader was doing the same thing. We would comment on the same passages. After a while I found myself reading and responding not just to the Bakhtinian text, but to this other, unknown interlocutor and the improvisatory text that we were together weaving amidst Bakhtin's own. I always hoped I would meet this person, this co-reader.

Now, when I have my 'own' Bakhtin and have no need to go to the library, I still feel that sense of improvisation when I read Bakhtin's words, working on a borrowed text that is shared space, living in a world of other's words, a world resounding with many voices, including my own from the past.

Discovering Bakhtin like this was a dialogic experience, one that placed my reading in a world decidedly outside that of the 'English Literature' course I was following. I don't think I ever put Bakhtin in an essay as that world of ideas I discovered seemed already remote from academic work, or maybe resistant to it.

It's a world I have not stopped exploring since. A world both rooted and wandering, both companionable and homeless. But above all a passionate world, where it's possible to love ideas and be an artist of them.

'The Dialogic Imagination', 'Speech Genres' and other books have accompanied me in my travels and migrations. I measure and evaluate a bit of my life through readings of Bakhtin - on beaches, in gardens, in hotel rooms, in Amsterdam cafes, in Parisian parks, on the London underground. Once I nearly left Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky in a taxi. More than once I spilt red wine on 'Rabelais and His World'. And when flying, I always take my copy of Bakhtin in hand luggage for fear that it may end up in a lost suitcase. Now my daughters even recognise the books when we travel. It's that Russian guy again!

A few years ago I started my second copy of 'Speech Genres' after the first one became so interleaved with my notes that I could no longer read the 'original' words.

What is the love of reading Bakhtin? For me it is not a comforting thing, nor is it about escape. It is a challenge, it is a juggling of many perspectives, and it is a stretching of the mind outside the bounds of its normal assumptions. It is about friendship, but also about estrangement. It is a familiar place, but always renewed. It is sometimes an exasperation; but it is never boring.

I feel a kind of resistance when I read anything by Bakhtin. That just reading him is about resisting, swimming against the current of habitual thought, the current of words we habitually use to discuss 'language', 'writing', 'texts'. I mean words like 'expression' and 'skill' and even 'communication'.

Reading Bakhtin resists, but also blows fresh air through the institution of these words. The more I read Bakhtin the more wary I become of these words. We rely on them too much, I think. They seem to languish in what he called 'the dungeon of a single context'.

More than once, reading Bakhtin, I have had that awesome feeling that Montaigne had about books and had inscribed above his library: Que sais je? In Bakhtinian thought lies something that shakes the foundations of my everyday thinking, something mysterious that has me listening at the edge of myself.

So Bakhtin's a great read. But not so good when you are trying to sleep.

What is it about Bakhtin?

Let me revisit once again one of those Bakhtinian moments that has kept me awake and alert:

Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of 'our-own-ness', varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate.

These words, it always seems to me, go right to the heart of Bakhtin's dialogic theory of language. They enact a theoretical position mid-way between social and individual concerns, but without resorting to a binary opposition between 'the social' and 'the individual'. They neither hold out the promise of a unifying system, nor point up an endless antagonism between self and society.

Bakhtin's work suggests to me: my utterance is never fully 'my own'. It is always, to some extent, 'double-voiced'. It is expressive, but never in isolation from social forces, from otherness, from what Bakhtin elsewhere calls addressivity. Those 'forces', however, do not necessarily come at me in batallions. They do not always appear like hard-edged edifices I must climb, or as secret codes I must master, and never as anything as clear-cut as 'structures'.

Those 'forces' of the social approach me not as whole structures, but in fragments - in the words and phrases of other people. They may enter me, circulate around me, become part of me, as words and phrases. I may struggle with them, accepting some - but always re-accentuating them too - and resisting others. And my words in turn will have traces, echoes, provenances.

I look for words. But it is also true that words look for me.

Bakhtin's vision does not set 'the social' against 'the individual' like a permanent stand-off or a dialectical step to a higher unity. The one is always involved dialogically - not dialectically - in the other. Consequently, I choose words; but words also settle in me, dispose me and position me in certain ways.

So this quality of 'double-voice' does not mean a loss of self. It is not an accommodation of personal meanings to social conventions, a smothering of intention in code. It means that my voice, my authorship, my words, emerge and become possible through the social affordances of discourse.

Such conditions - the conditions of discourse which I inhabit - do not determine me. I also act. I assimilate, rework, re-accentuate. My words are always, in some measure, a response.

I live in a world of others' words.

This perspective is threatening only to those who adhere to a raw, unmediated subject, or those who think that a text can be made permanently to stand alone in the world.

Nobody owns language or the conditions in which language is produced. At the same time, every utterance is unique in its space and time and its personal accentuations, its relational work as an utterance.

This is not to say that just anyone can be free with language at any time. If only this were true!My freedom should mean a freedom to re-accentuate, to transform and remake inherited discourses, including those which hold power over me, initially taking over other people's words by repeating them, and then introducing my own notes, my own accents. It is a freedom to answer as much as a freedom to speak.

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

Education, in my view, must be based primarily on 'moments of appropriation'. Dialogue must be its key process.

My own work is dedicated to understanding the textual processes of appropriation-as-dialogue. I am interested in how writers, when picking up new genres in new conditions, learn to take the word in its already signifying contexts, and make it their own in new contexts. I study how we convert the otherness of discourse from something forbidding or mysterious into something we can answer and work with, transforming it from a monolithic imposition into a dialogic resource. This means looking at how social resources such as genres contain invitational features in their living histories. And how the word - once taken, once renewed - continues to be double-voiced, continues to bear the constitutive traces of 'otherness' alongside 'my own-ness', and in turn becomes a resource for new appropriations.

Of course, such a process is never as smooth as hopeful educational metaphors ('growth', 'skills', 'targets') might make it sound.

Words do not always come easily:

And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property; many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

Nobody owns language. Instead, we rent it out for a long period of time. Some people seem to get off rent-free when it comes to the languages of power and influence. Words pass in and out of them easily. Fluency comes - it seems - naturally. Others (and I include myself in this group) pay a rent. Words come, but only after long struggle. It would seem that many pay, but get very little back. Words continue to escape, or they stay with us but 'sound foreign in the mouth', or are forever overshadowed by the contexts of authority from which they were taken.

And then there are the millions who sleep, as it were, on the streets, hovering on the edges of the languages of power, but still subject to them.

Reading Bakhtin is a kind of love. Revisiting Bakhtin always brings me, like this, out of myself.