Telnet to pmcmoo.org Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace (#7699) [CS (the continuing saga) (#260) ]

Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace

The mix and clash of languages and perspectives within contemporary rhetorical communities is captured and elaborated in Bakhtin's concepts of "dialogism," "heteroglossia," and "the carnivalesque" (Hirschkop; Holquist 14-106; Kristeva). Bakhtin seeks to create a democratized language that would be "dialogic" and "heteroglot" in the sense that it would acknowledge within any given utterance a simultaneous exchange among multiple languages, intentions, and contexts and would recognize the numerous contexts--limited or local communities of belief and value--that make up the larger community or public sphere the existence of which is presupposed by such a view of language (Hirschkop 14-17). Dialogism reflects Bakhtin's belief that language is not unitary but complex and multiple (Hirschkop 6-12; Holquist 14-17, 40-42; Kristeva 67-72): "The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue" (Bakhtin, "Discourse" 276). Heteroglossia is the base condition for dialogism, the mix and clash of languages and perspectives--professional, generic, social--upon which such a view of language depends (Hirschkop 17-21; Holquist 69-70). In Bakhtin's "concrete heteroglot conception of the world," language has been "completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents" (Bakhtin, "Discourse" 293). As a result, "All words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour" (293). Heteroglossia ensures the dynamism inherent in all language, the tension between the centripetal forces that tend toward unity and the centrifugal forces that tend toward disunity: "Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward" (272).