the dialogic imagination by mikhail bakhtin

For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. “As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no 'neutral' words and forms - words and forms that can belong to 'no one' language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. As a result of this severance from the producing life of the whole and from the collective struggle with nature, their real links with the life of nature are weakened-if not severed altogether.” Food, drink, copulation and so forth lose their ancient 'pathos' (their link, their unity with the laboring life of the social whole) they become a petty private matter they seem to exhaust all their significance within the boundaries of individual life.

The ancient motifs that had passed into the individual life-narratives here undergo a specific kind of degeneration. Here the individual sequence takes on its specific private character and what is held in common becomes maximally abstract. The process of separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its highest point when financial relations develop in slaveholding society, and under capitalism. Within the boundaries of individual life-series, an interior aspect makes itself apparent.

The course of individual lives, of groups, and of the sociopolitical whole do not fuse together, they are dispersed, there are gaps they are measured by different scales of value each of these series has its own logic of development, its own narratives,Įach makes use of and reinterprets the ancient motifs in its own way. But nevertheless they are separate, even here. Thus in the early stages of slaveholding society and in feudal society, individual life-sequences are still rather tightly interwoven with the common life of the most immediate social group. “Society itself falls apart into class and intraclass groups individual life-sequences are directly linked with these and together both individual life and subgroups are opposed to the whole.

The dialogic imagination by mikhail bakhtin