Reading :: Dialogism

Dialogism: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Science and Learning
By Wolff-Michael Roth

Wolff-Michael Roth has published an extraordinarily large number of books. I'm not sure how he does it, but I like to think he has a whole Warhol-style factory somewhere.

In any case, this book takes "a 38-minute conversation in one classroom" among three high school students attempting to finish a lab, and uses it to ground "an extended reflection on language, learning, language development, linguistic transformation, and the learning paradox" (p.ix). This conversation came from a research study Roth conducted in his own class "nearly 20 years ago" (p.xi) and previously published. Here, he rethinks the conversation from a Bakhtinian and CHAT perspective, using it to explore three learning paradoxes:

Specifically, I focus on three learning paradoxes insufficiently attended to in the learning sciences generally and in science education more specifically: (a) how learners can intend to learn what they do not know and which therefore cannot serve as the object of their intentions; (b) how persons can learn something new when their current understandings and therefore their grounds and means for learning are inconsistent (contradictory) with what they are supposed to learn; and (c) how the subject matter disciplines are both reproduced and transformed over time given that today's experts themselves have come to school yesterday uninstructed about science. (p.ix)

How can we answer these paradoxes? He continues: "The answers to these paradoxes can be found in an approach to language with a dialectical materialist foundation that Mikhail Bakhtin called dialogism" (p.ix). In contrast with constructivism, "we learn by participating in taking up positions in the world, and language specifically—and communication generally—is but and [sic] aspect of taking up positions in ways that are intelligible by and defensible to others" (p.x).

Roth goes on to argue that Bakhtin's approach to language "is the linguistic (structural) equivalent to Karl Marx's dialectic of value" (p.1) and thus offers a "materialist dialectical framework that allows us to understand how the learning paradox is overcome in praxis" (p.2). Here, dialogism is not simply dialogue: it is "the non-self-identical nature of the word specifically and of language in general" (p.26). He further argues that "Bakhtin constructs his approach to language on the model of Karl Marx's treatment of political economy in Capital" (p.39; he provides no citation for this assertion). Later, he equates dialogism with polysemy (p.78).

He contrasts dialogical and monological understandings: finalization—that is, proceeding to a final endpoint that stops the interaction—is monological, while "the essence of dialogism" is unfinalizability, in which two voices or evaluations continue to interrupt each other. Indeed, "Dialogism and emergence go together and are opposed to finalization" (p.175). And "Dialogism therefore inherently means open-endedness and impossibility of finalization" (p.211). Later, he concludes that "life itself is dialogical (life-flesh, birth-death, reproduction-transformation, etc.)" (p.261).

At this point, some of my readers may be scratching their heads. Did Bakhtin really base dialogism on Marx's dialectic of value? Is dialogism really based on dialectical materialism? Doesn't Bakhtin elsewhere contrast dialogics and dialectics, characterizing dialectics as monologic? (Yes, he does.) Recall that the authorship of some books from the Bakhtin Circle is disputed. Recall also that after Bakhtin saw members of his Circle disappear into the Gulag, and after he himself was sent into internal exile, he became much more circumspect about his thoughts, keeping them hidden in notebooks and publishing versions that would not get him disappeared. Thus it's not always clear what Bakhtin actually thought.

Roth tells us that he works from several translations. Among them:

I have a French and an English translation of Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, which in the English translation (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) is attributed to 'Valentin N. Volosinov', but in the French translation (Le marxisme et la philosophie du language) is attributed to 'Mikhail Bakhtine' with some editing help from 'V.N. Volochinov'. (p.xii)

Yes, the members of the Bakhtin Circle published four books between 1927-1929, including two by Voloshinov (1927, 1929), one by P.N. Medvedev (1928), and one by Bakhtin (1929). Voloshinov died  of tuberculosis in 1936 and Medvedev was shot in 1938. When Bakhtin's works were rediscovered by young scholars in the 1970s, they asked Bakhtin if he had written his collaborators' books, but the cagey survivor of the Stalinist era refused to give them a straight answer. But internal evidence suggests that MPL was not authored by Bakhtin, although it represents an attempt to apply his work within a dialectical framework. In any case, Bakhtin's thought on dialogue surely developed between the 1920s and the 1970s.

But is this quibble actually material? After all, we might replace "Bakhtin" with "the Bakhtin Circle" and still yield a dialogic analysis that is more centered on Voloshinov than Bakhtin—perhaps. On the other hand, how elastic is "dialectical materialism"? In 1929, perhaps Voloshinov could get by with characterizing it in terms of unfinalizability. But by 1938, the year Medvedev was shot, Stalin had published Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which did not characterize dialectics in a way reconcilable with dialogism. Stalin based his book on Engels' Dialectics of Nature, which was published in the USSR in 1925 and which similarly seems hard to reconcile with dialogism.

Granted, Marx seemed to be much more flexible in the way he understood dialectic (and he didn't actually define the term strictly, leaving an opening for Engels). So perhaps dialectical materialism could be interpreted more broadly and dialogically than Engels or Stalin interpreted it. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like a more specific, thoughtful discussion of dialectical materialism in this book so that we can see how dialectics and dialogics can be reconciled.

Nevertheless, Roth draws widely—not just on the Bakhtin Circle, but on others from Sausseure to Merleau-Ponty to Davidson—to interpret and analyze his students' talk, yielding an understanding of learning through taking up positions in the world. It's a worthwhile book, and I recommend it.