The Heteroglossic Moment

A fragment from today's disserting:

In the midst of this maelstrom of multiplicities, the co-authored self and other emerge. Facing one another in the dialogic encounter, the space of communicative praxis, speaking and acting subjects orient themselves for and toward the other. Grounded in their social knowledge and interpretive understandings, active rhetorical agents accomplish and perform the articulation of varied perspectives, the negotiation of ever-changing meanings, and the co-constitution of malleable subject positions. For Schrag (1986), this intentional and overt accomplishing with the other through discourse and action is an "indelible feature of the creation and preservation of meaning . . ." and implicative of communicative rhetoric (p. 180).

As Schrag (1992) argues in The resources of rationality: A response to the postmodern challenge Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia proves useful in understanding the creation and preservation of meaning in the encounter of self and other. Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, always situated within the dialogic interaction, refers to the moment of convergence between conflicting discourses and social meanings. Describing this moment Bakhtin (1981) explains, "At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word . . . , but also . . . into languages that socio-ideological: languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations and so forth” (p. 272). Central to the multiple voices and ideologies always at work in the realm of heteroglossia are the "centripetal and centrifugal functions and forces of discourse . . ." (Schrag, 1992, p. 84). Bakhtin describes centripetal and centrifugal forces as the dialogic interplay of the "processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification . . ." (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). Building on Bakhtin, Schrag (1992) characterizes centripetal forces as harmonizing, unifying, and homogenizing tensions of discursive and non-discursive interplay; centrifugal forces, on the other hand, are the discordant, inconsistent, and heterogenous elements at play in the heteroglossic moment. The vigorous interplay of centripetal and centrifugal tensions gives rise to a living, active, and dynamic portrait of human interaction as meaning-making event and site of the rhetorical negotiation of self, other, and cultural ideologies.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Schrag, C. O. (1992). The resources of rationality: A response to the postmodern challenge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.