These notes are the eleventh in a series of fifteen lecture for my class Culture and Communication. This develops a set of lectures on the most powerful critiques of structuralist thinking about cultural patterning and systematicity in interaction.

Required reading:

• Foucault, Michel "The order of discourse" in Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader.   Edited by R. Young, 51-78.   Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul..  [first published in 1981]
• Bakhtin, Mikhail "Discourse in the novel" in The dialogic imagination. Tr. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981 (259-65, 270-77, 288-94)

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The major controversy of the past 50 years:

Foucault (Bourdieu, Althusser, etc.) vs. Bakhtin (de Certeau, Rancière, Boon)

hegemony, power, and the critique of the present vs. hybridity, resistance, and the imagination of the future

1. Bakhtin (1895-1975) and heteroglossia
   1. Bakhtin is a complex figure with an extraordinary biography. He worked and published throughout the Soviet periot of Russian history, from the revolution, through the various forms of the Stalinist repressions, the war, and the comparative ideological relaxation following Kruschev. Throughout his life he remained in struggle against various orthodoxies and thereby kept a keen sense both of the power of these orthodoxies and the reality of intellectual or literary activities like his.
      1. struggle against formalism (sometimes in the name of marxism);

      For more on Bakhtin check the Bakhtin Centre maintained at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. For brief introductions to key concepts as they may be used in web-based pedagogy check Eyman's site.

      2. struggle against simple analysis of artistic production as reflective of social conditions (ideology, class, etc.);
      3. Argument for the power of the word ("utterance" in his vocabulary, "text" in contemporary vocabulary) in political action.
   2. Bakhtin is 'discovered': I will focus here on Bakhtin's "discovery" in the 60s and 70s by a variety of intellectuals and researchers. Since the 1980s at least he has taken a place at the core of the canon for those concerned with culture, communication, and the person (Holland et al. 1998)--as well as with philosophers, literary critics, and others in every branch of the humanities.   Initially, his work stood as an antidote to the simple readings of structuralism (Saussure or Lévi-Strauss). More recently, it has been used as an antidote against the excesses of "deconstructionism" (construed as a philosophical interpretation of structuralism that was moving in the direction of ideologiical nihilism). Bakhtin is claimed by what is various labelled as postmodern cultural studies. His reliance on Marxism (or, alternatively, Russian mysticism) might also make him useful for those wishing to move beyond postmodernism.
      1. Reaction against all forms of formalism (structuralism):
         1. Russian formalism: Propp and the European folktale: what have we learned when it has been demonstrated that all European folktales have the same form (and, a century later, that one can program computers to write "new" folktales that could "pass" as "traditional," or that one, like David Cope can "write" Mozart's (?) 42nd symphony 200 years after he died)?
         2. structural-functionalism and the theory that there is one best way to divide labor, that there is one best way to fit persons in particular positions within the social structure, that this person will be fully enculturated into this position and will accept this position--or go mad in ways that might be remediated by appropriate psychological intervention (given of course the best of all possible social worlds).
            1. while I am referring here to Parsonian structural-functionalism, this critique can apply to the more static forms of Marxism.
         3. Saussurian structuralism to the extent that it is related to Russian formalism and does not point at the consequences of what can be done with language.
         4. systemic structuralism when it is reduced to homeostatic processes through controlled feedback.
         5. philosophical structuralism when it reduces action in the world to a matter of language-based shadows (Derrida's philosophical interpretation of Lévi-Strauss's work and his discussion of grammatology: language refers to nothing except itself; thus no personal "self" but only linguistic constructions and certainly no  "I" or other form of meta-linguistic transcendence: there is nothing at the core)
            1. Note that Lévi-Strauss protested against that kind of interpretation and repeatedly stressed that all that is man-made eventually points at the human "esprit".
      2. Towards an emphasis on personal action ("agency") and/or "meaning" as arising in encounter with life and other texts. (In anthropology, the tradition associated with Geertz and his students belongs to this movement though the roots of symbolic anthropology in Weber and American pragmatism somewhat confuses the matter)
         1. literary critics and related social thinkers pointing at the life of cultural forms, and reading Bakhtin for inspiration.This started in the realm of "high" culture (Bakhtin wrote about Rabelais and Dostoyevski) attempting to re-present the alternatives to the voices of the center;
         2. a play with the idea that all (cultural) actions could be treated as "text" (or, in the most extreme version that action was "merely" text) and needed to be "interpreted" rather than "explained."
         3. a fascination with the "popular." (Bakhtin on carnival)
         4. a related fascination with contestation, controversy, resistance, etc. (see the discussion of gender).
         5. and more recently (de Certeau to Boon) to an emphasis on bricolage, continual construction of new cultural forms in what Boon talks about as "extra-vagant" explorations.
         6. Thus culture as play with history (process rather than product, 'what we do with..." rather than "what we are" in my vocabulary).
         7. A still somewhat inchoate (as far as I know) movement towards reincorporating text (utterances in dialogue) as action
2. Foucault (1926-1984): power through discourse
   1. From French structuralism to a concern with the methods through which a particular sovereign (state) exercises its power, that is control what a population ("its" people, as well as those other it might subjugate through conquest, colonization, etc.)
   2. A concern with central issues of our time
      1. sexuality
      2. knowledge
      3. medicine
      4. and, by implication, all matters of sovereign concern: schooling, development, etc.
3. Dialogical conversations about power and the imagination
   1. The success of Foucault for all those concerned with "power" and its consequences on the livelihood and experiences of the subjugated.
   2. The resistance to Foucault by those pointing out that the subjugated, while they may experience the subjubation and act in terms of it, are also continally at work subverting the modes of their subjugation. This can be observed even if the consequences of the resistance are erased by the hegemonic discourses within which they may be placed.

   These developments are somewhat contradictory (dialogical?!) and can be explored by dealing carefully with what might appear as tensions in Discourse in the novel. The two major emphases on:

   1. a unitary language, centripetal forces, unification.
   2. the concomitant heteroglossia
      1. produced by centrifugal forces,
      2. and leading to disunification (internal difference)

   In other words a human group at work together ("every single utterance" p. 272) implies

   1. a common language that is always already there.
   2. a continual movement away from commonality/

   It also implies, from the point of view of the individual speaker:

   1. always using borrowed words (rhetorical forms, etc.)
      1. no "creation" possible
   2. never saying what is expected
   3. always being placed within the whole "novel" (i.e. "society as text")

4. Evolution on Bakhtin
   1. Writing America (the discourses of power in the United States) vs. reading America and acting on it
      1. "society (culture) as text": interpretations without end
      2. irony (carnival) rather than action;
      3. society as dialogue: structured divisions
      4. popular culture and resistance;
      5. bricolage, extra-vagance, and other forms of construction
         1. alphabets and abecedarios: wild transcriptions (Kalmar 2001
      6. distinguishing education (figuring it what to know) and schooling (being told what to know)
   2. Dialectics, dialogism, and conversation
      1. a classic problem in the theory of history (and thus of knowledge): from facts and causes to statements that respond to each other and produce new statements (meanings and consequences)
      2. Some of the most classical debates start with Hegel and develop in Marx in the search for what moves "macro-" history (e.g. capitalism, globalization, etc.)
      3. American pragmatism (Pearce, Dewey, G. H. Mead) develops in a different direction that appears more suited to psychological concerns (including semiosis) than to matters of political economy.
      4. The concerns of conversational analysis, though starting in linguistics, reveal themselves to be quite compatible with pragmatist concerns with the production of meaning. I have argued that Sacks, etc., have given empirical evidence for what appeared as extremely abstract theorizing.
      5. The question that has been opened is the relation of pragmatism to dialogism and indeed dialectic interpretations of history: Is it possible to conduct the kind of research that might provide a more concrete foundation to the sense that history does not proceed through causes and effects but rather through open sequences of statements (actions) that respond to earlier ones but may also transform the conversation:
         1. educational policy (e.g. NCLB): a governmental mandate must necessarily transform conditions for future action in schools and thereby transform that which may have justified the policy in the first place
         2. gender and the consequences of feminism or gay/lesbian activism.
   3. History, historicity, and temporality: a frontier to explore