Dialogic/Dialogism
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Defining Dialogism:
Statements in communication always imply a receiver of the statement, and statements we make are often responses to prior statements made by someone else. Wherever we start in examining cultural expression in any medium, we are looking at a moment in dialogue: what is said reflects back on and often quotes what was said before, and any statement also implies further statements, responses, interpretations. In short, what we say and mean, in any symbolic form, is part of an ongoing dialogue.
Dialogue, as an event that occurs between people is an abstract, intangible, relative force. Dialogue directs existence outside of the self into a relational dependence. By virtue of dialogue as an existential force, “neither individuals nor any other social entities are locked within their boundaries. They are extraterritorial, partially ‘located outside’ themselves.” (50, CP)
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Mikhail Bakhtin [1],
the famous Russian theorist and literary scholar, saw that literary texts were always dialogic in relation to readers and audiences, and that literary discourse proceeds only by referencing, quoting, assuming an other's speech or words. The reader/audience is therefore always already inscribed in the medium/message/text/visual sign. Discourses, texts, cultural message presuppose and embody a network of implicit references, gestures, and unmarked quotations from other works.
The in-between space of dialogue that Bakhtin favors is the space of newness, which is then necessarily hybrid, because it emerges out of interaction (whatever the scale: genres, cultures).
Bakhtin is also credited with first defining intertextual or structural dialogism (see Intertextuality). He saw literary discourse and individual literary texts as an intersection of multiple textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning; that is, as a dialogue among various texts, genres, and voices: the writer's, the character's, the historical cultural context, the readers'/audiences.
As Julia Kristeva[2] 
explained Bakhtin's breakthrough theory, each statement in a discourse, each expression in a text, is an intersection of words or texts where at least one other word or text can be read. Discourse thus can be described as having a horizontal axis, composed of the writer, characters (in a novel), and genre being written, and the vertical axis, composed of the text and its context in a larger universe of discourses, texts, meanings, values. Any text, therefore, is always at least double, presupposing, incorporating, and transforming an other voice, text, discourse. She writes,
Writer as well as 'scholar', Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic structure to structuralism is his conception of the 'literary word' as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.
(35, WDN)
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Political and Ideological Implications of Dialogic/Dialogism:
Dissatisfied with the mainstream theories of literature and structuralist linguistics, Bakhtin set out to formulate his own theories of creative discourse and language. Bakhtin called for “a radical revision of the fundamental philosophical conception of poetic discourse” (16, CP) that would stand up against hierarchical monologism (which he called "semiotic totalitarianism"). Bakhtin's conception of dialogic discourse represents a radical shift from structuralist linguistics in that it posits an animated, rather than static, language. Dialogic discourse goes beyond the category of Saussure’s "parole" because it is language with a trajectory; that is inter-active. Dialogic discourse reflects an anti-ideological, anti-hierarchical politics, which is implicit throughout Bakhtin’s work. Linked with the mundane, the everyday web of existence, rather than the top-down vision of history and existence (as dictated by hierarchical ideology), Bakhtinian dialogism calls for a creative, quantum history, seen from the perspective of a constituent rather than a monarch. Bakhtin’s formulation of language and creative discourse thus opens the door for understanding the expression of marginalized voices.
Bakhtin posited dialogic discourse as the voice of the marginal subjectivity, articulating itself within the monological/patriarchal/hierachical system by entering into dialogue with it. This is an empowering precursor to postmodern Lyotardian Performativity, which further asserts the heterarchical, or heterotopic (see Heterotopia) society. In her writings on Dialogism, Kristeva emphasizes this point:
The poetic word, polyvalent and multidetermined, adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified discourse and fully comes into being only in the margins of recognized culture.
(36, WDN)
The very word, Dia-logic, indicates more than just one logic at work. Bakhtinian dialogue is distinctly different from dialectics: where traditional dialectical methodology involves thesis and antithesis coming together into synthesis, dialogue is more open and flexible (and agile), and it does not pretend to have an end point: the point with dialogue is not fixed, because it lies within the dialogic practice itself. As a response to Marxist Dialectical Materialism, Dialogism (a la Bakhtin) separated from the production-consumption module into an emphasis on the perpetual dynamism of text and language.
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Dialogic/Dialogism and Visual Culture:
Bakhtin's seminal work, as discussed by Kristeva, opens up the door for textual analysis of visual culture by spatializing textuality, moving toward the visual field:
The word is spatialized, through the very notion of status, it functions in three dimensions (subject-addressee-context) as a set of dialogical, semic elements or as a set of ambivalent elements.
(37, WDN)
Later in the same essay, Kristeva predicts that one day texts will be talked about as if they wre paintings. By taking textual analysis to the spatial/visual dimension, Bakhtin's theory of Dialogism engages with and is prescient of the increasingly visually powerful dimensions of culture and ideology. See Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, where he delves into spectacular ideology. Also see Replication and Simulacra / Simulation
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Examples of Dialogic/Dialogism:
Theory
Feminist Theory: “The ‘dialogic imagination’ describes some of the most radical — and necessary — moments within feminist thinking.” (242, FBD)
In an essay entitled Irigarayan Dialogism: Play and Powerplay, Gail Schwab speaks of women’s writing as “a textual strategy.” (65, FBD) She cites Bauer, from his Feminist Dialogics, describing the feminist struggle for expression and setting forth the challenge to dialogize by refashioning and rearticulating patriarchal discourse: “Because we all internalize the authoritative voice of patriarchy, we must struggle to refashion inherited social discourses into words which rearticulate intentions other than normative or disciplinary ones.” (67, FBD) Diane Herndl, in her essay The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic, writes, “A central question for feminist criticism has been what happens to language if it is used ‘other-wise.’” (10, FBD) Positing the place of woman as the place of the silenced other, Herndl presents female discourse as a subversive dialogism, “a usurped language.” (10, FBD) Assuming the impossibility of “a truly ‘feminine’ language; using language at all means to work within a system whose terms are masculine.” (17, FBD)
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Culture
Take for instance a quotation from Week 9's readings (Midori Matsui on Japanese art): "Nothing that grows in Japan is purely native. Everything is a reaction to and a modification of a received foreign culture. For centuries the major influence was China, since the late 19th century it has been the west." [3] Thus, Japanese culture is described as explicitly dialogically formed. One could argue that all cultures are dialogically formed, and this concept is not all that far from Levy-Strauss' concept of Bricolage, which speaks to a similar action with respect to anthropology.
Visual Art
(1)
Street art [4](see Week 7) is a particularly dialogic art form, in the theoretical sense. By placing their art in the streets and public areas, as opposed to placing them inside institutionally sanctioned structures such as a gallery, street artists are performing a complex, transgressive dialogue about marginality and artistic expression. By exposing themselves to possible legal apprehension (which impels them to remain anonymous in many situations) and by exposing their art to the elements, street artists demonstrate a more truly intertextual and dialogic attitude toward creativity and art in general: (i) often street art interacts with the surface/environment, take for example the work of Mark Jenkins;(ii) authorship and the work itself are vulnerable and the street art "author" reliquishes control over his/her work as soon as it is put out there, yielding to what/whoever may interact with and affect it subsequently in a dialogic fashion, be it wear and tear from the weather or an incremental contribution by another artist or complete painting-over.
(2)
The stunning, permanently fleeting works of Gordon Matta-Clark [5] offer an interpretation and perspective on dialogism in practice-- his carving up of old structures (usually set for demolition), allowing light into and exposing normally private spaces to the elements and to the streets expresses a powerfully transgressive dialogism, generating newness through the collapsing or carving open of solid boundaries (walls). One could argue that the dialogue of inner and outer spaces is one of the pivotal tropes of his work. (See my final Project: Dora)(Also See: [6])
Image from "Splitting" (1974)
Photo Montage of "Conical Intersect" (1975)
Verbal/Narrative Art
Innovative contemporary movements in experimental poetry reflect and embody a playful representation and powerful embodiment of subversive dialogism in language and text. Language poets in particular reveal a practice of creative discourse that adapts to our cultural challenge, addressing the inherent multiplicity of language.
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Shelley Jackson[7] [8] has a hypertext "novel" called "Patchwork Girl," which is an excellent case study in dialogic discourse as a creative discourse. Jackson collides (dialogizes with each other) multiple texts, inc luding Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus," and Frank L. Baum's "The Patchwork Girl of OZ," among others. Excerpts are patchworked with each other to create a literally inter-textual narrative. The text is allegorical for the body of the patchwork girl, which is composed of the dead body parts of other people (each body part has a narrative according to its first "owner"). Jackson creates a "new" text and a "new" body by dynamically dialogizing different texts and concepts, compellingly taking Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic life of the unit of the word word to the larger scope of a female body and a hypertextual novel.
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References/Sources:
CCTP 725 Syllabus and Discussion, Spring 2007.
Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought. New York, NY: Routledge. 1995.
[CP]
Emerson, Caryl, and Gary Saul Morson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1990.
Jackson, Shelley. "Patchwork Girl." Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. 1995.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1980.
[WDN]
Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." From Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986.
[FBD] Bauer, Dale M., and Susan Jaret McKinstry, eds. Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 1991.
[TD]Danylevich, Theodora. "Bakhtin, Dialogic Style, and Marginal Voices: Towards a Politically Heterarchical Creative Discourse." (unpublished).
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