I’m currently reading the introduction to Robert Stam’s Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Parallax : Re-Visions of Culture and Society) for my dissertation. Stam does a good job of contextualizing Bakhtin’s writing in light of other major critics of the twentieth century, highlighting their similarities and differences. Here’s an interesting bit:
…Bakhtin foregrounds the human capacity to mutually “author” one another, the ability to dialogically intersect on the frontiers between selves. One becomes “oneself” not by shedding others to disinter an originary essence, but rather by revealing oneself to another, through another, with another’s help. (6)
And here is another:
Human beings are not simply born into language as a master code; they grow into it, and help shape it, as woman or man, worker or boss, peasant or landowner. Every apparently unified linguistic or social community is characterized by heteroglossia, whereby language becomes the space of confrontation of differently oriented social accents, as diverse “sociolinguistic consciousnesses” fight it out on the terrain of language. (8)
This second thought leads into the following, which reminds me of our current administration and the divided politics of contemporary America:
While the dominant class strives to make the sign “uniaccentual” and to endow it with an eternal, supraclass character, the oppressed, especially when they are conscious of their oppression, strive to deploy language for their own liberation. To speak of dialogue without speaking of power, in a Bakhtinian perspective, is to speak meaninglessly, in a void. (8)
This has me thinking about something that I haven’t figured out how to, as of yet, fully articulate. Something having to do with the blogosphere’s politics and blogging as subversive language.
Work Cited
Stam, Robert. “Introduction.” Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. (Parallax : Re-Visions of Culture and Society). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins U P, 1989. 1-25.
Leave a Reply